D8 Products from a Childhood

Fluff? On this blog? What can I say - I'm a fluffer: 

1. Osseo-Crunch: Originally "osseous composite digestible material no. 3", developed by the government of the United Kingdom in the 1930s in a public-private partnership with a consumer packaged goods company. It was meant to be an emergency ration additive in case Germany used biological warfare to attack the cow population of England & so on, and to provide a useful alternative disposal method for corpses.

As that worst-case scenario was never realized, its patent languished out of use for decades, until an American company purchased it in the 2010s. That company repurposed it for a breakfast cereal marketed towards demographics with higher levels of lactose intolerance, with the cereal's mascot Henry "Hahaha" Hyena promising that it's "the only cereal that doesn't need milk, because it's made of bones, and there's more than enough calcium in the bones!".

Osseo-Crunch tastes terrible, has a chalky texture, and only freaks eat cereal with water, so it didn't have a long production run. However, it is incredibly shelf-stable so you can still find it some places, and unopened boxes of it with real Henry "Hahaha" Hyena figurines inside have become something of a collector's item.

2. Camp Cambrian: A movie franchise, the premise of which is that a science camp where campers can learn about biology and the origins of life gets caught in a temporal anomaly, flinging groups of campers across wildly-accelerated stretches of time, during which their experiments evolved into whole ecosystems - some reminiscent of real periods in the Earth's history, some not so much - while the groups of campers have to learn to understand their new environments and their creatures and either find a way out or leave something behind to help the next group do so that'll last over the eons. For example, Camp Cambrian 2 ends with that movie's group planting the bones of their fallen comrades into conditions ideal for fossilization to spell out a message.

3. Croaka-Cola: Fun factoid - the original Croaka-Cola recipe included some hallucinogenic slime exuded by a species of toad. Croaka-Cola is a brand defined by meteoric rises and falls - its "Sippin' It Bayou-Style" campaign made the beverage an international hit, however a few years after its release of the alkekengi flavour in partnership with Cricket Murmur's catastrophic "low voices / heavy air" tour poisoned it for many.

4. Phobophobiatch Beer: Specially brewed to not cause "hangxiety" - the anxiety experienced during a hangover. It achieves this by reversing some of the usual brain chemistry of alcohol - rather than increasing levels of GABA and decreasing levels of glutamate, Phobophobiatch does the opposite. Drinking Phobophobiatch makes you scared, but during the hangover while the brain attempts to adjust its chemistry back to normal you experience calm and confidence.

It tastes terrible, but has seen some success among alcoholics who "zebra drink" it, alternating it with regular beers to even out the hangxiety, among horror buffs who get drunk on it to amp up already-scary experiences, and as a recommended part of some nootropic stacks - binged the night before an important day.

5. The Misadventures of Harold Hickorytail: A series of books marketed towards children, illustrated with dreamy water-colours. The books were intended to give a child-friendly education on touchy topics such as adultery, divorce, split custody, parental alienation, and suchlike, all through the lens of the life of their titular protagonist, Harold Hickorytail - a very slutty mouse.

There was a bizarre and poorly-received movie adaption of the Misadventures of Harold Hickorytail that, after many producers stuck their fingers in its pie, was edited into a stop-motion slasher movie wherein the characters getting killed off were all mice, and the killer was a cat. The Harold Hickorytail movie is considered a "so bad it's good that it's so bad" product of the VOID lockdowns.

6. Laugh Caf Gigglepuffs: Branded product of the Laugh Caf comedy club - oven-baked cheesy puff-snacks injected with nitrous oxide, causing compulsive laughter in those who consume them. Like Croaka-Cola, the Laugh Caf had its own PR disaster related to Cricket Murmur - not through Gigglepuffs, but through the Laugh Caf Podcast. The podcast ran an interview with the survivor of a Cricket Murmur show that was decried as "insensitive" and "deeply irresponsible", with the interviewer at one point bringing out a 3D-printed figurine of a raincoat-clad Cricket Murmur member. Several sightings and disappearances have been linked to the interview episode, which has since been scrubbed from all official Laugh Caf Podcast viewing platforms.

7. Rou-Lad: "Pack it thick, pour it hot - Rou-Lad, it's for the boys" goes the now-infamous commercial. It's turkey roulade in a can. It's for the boys. What more do you really need to know.

8. Mane Man: A romantic sit-com revolving around the antics of a human man, Victor, and an anthropomorphic maned wolf woman named Jackson. Much of the comedy in the earlier seasons revolves around Victor ironically losing every bet and contest he ever enters into, and Jackson's crossdressing, which causes Victor to misunderstand Jackson's gender identity repeatedly and become confused about his own sexuality.

Towards the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors: Gwargotch

He is the Red Elephant, the Trumpet of the Apocalypse, He-Who-Tramples-Kings-Like-Grapes.

His legs are as the roots of mountains, his flanks are ochre cliffs. His trunk is the serpent that encircles the world, his eyes are setting suns. 

Evil winds and eaters of corpses and foul spirits attend him. His attendants have lulled him into luxurious stupour - he lends his ear to flattery, his mouth to delicacies, his attentions to tortures and indolent schemes. Yet his wrath and his power remain. He remains the beginning of the end of everything.

He is

Gwargotch

HD: 15 AC: 16, normal missiles cannot harm him ATK: 3d6 stomp and Fling or 2d6 tusk swipe (can hit all in melee range) or Trample, plus So Speaks Gwargotch SAV: 15 MOV: As giant elephant INT: As old and wise and vice-ridden man ML: 9
No. Appearing: 1, and only one

Fling: Gwargotch makes a grapple attempt against a target with his trunk, and if successful flings them to the horizon. If you are not incredibly tough and do not have a means of arresting or slowing your velocity, you will die.

Trample: All in the path of Gwargotch's stride must save or die. Riding a mount gives advantage on this save.

So Speaks Gwargotch: Every sentence that the Red Elephant speaks deals 1 damage to mortals within earshot, as their ears bleed and their ribs rattle their organs to jelly. Gwargotch speaks sparingly, as he prefers to kill by more entertaining means. Should he ever trumpet with full force it will signal the end of the world - something he also wants to avoid.

Towards the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors: Lava Children

Giggling lambent fetal grotesques, crawled out from the earth's molten aqua amnii. Creatures at perpetual play - and everything's a toy. Art confounds them, so they deface it.

Innocently pitiless, they crave novelties and covet precious metals and other glittering things.

Apart from humanity they play rough and tumble. Where we and them have made contact they play house, play doctor, play laws and temples and trade.

They are

Lava Children

HD: 3 AC: 10 plus Immune to Metal ATK: 1d4 burning slap, or 1d6 Burning Hug, or Shrappy-Clappy SAV: 7 MOV: as human INT: as frivolous dopamine chaser ML: 6
No. Appearing: 2d6

Immune to Metal: Metal does not interact with lava children. It is intangible to them, and they to it. 

Burning Hug: The touch of a lava child is hot enough to ignite flammable materials on contact - this applies to their burning slap as well. A burning hug attack requires a grapple check from the lava child - they have a strength of 12. Each additional lava child hugging you increases the effective strength you need to beat to escape by +2.

Shrappy-Clappy: A device with dozens of names, each dumber than the last. 1-in-6 chance that a "civilized" lava child will be wearing one - a harness that suspends cavitous metal within their bodies until it heats up and explodes. At the start of combat they will drop the metal within themselves, and 1d6 rounds later it will detonate for 2d6 damage in a 15 foot radius, save for half. Striking the lava child wearing the harness with metal at -2 to hit will knock the device out of their body and prevent its detonation.

Water deals damage to lava children as an equivalent amount of acid.

Towards the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors: Carnlevares

Loping, leaping ambiguities in shape - clad in coats of woven straw, they go about sometimes on two feet, and sometimes on four - sometimes seeming ursine in form, sometimes leonine, or procyonid. They putrefy into stinking jelly immediately upon death - none living have seen their true appearance under their concealing coats.

In lands where these beasts are not known except by stories from afar and caricatures in bestiaries, costumes are made in imitation of their coats, and men wear them and go about from house to house, demanding meat and alcohol.

They carve their lairs out from clay and stone with their claws, and ferment the meat of their prey within, hibernating while the viands blossom into corruption. Their young are bold and indiscriminate in their feeding, their old become picky cowards who take only choice organs - and become named by their taste (Liver-Eater, Tongue-Biter, He-Who-Gnaws-Off-Buttocks). The decadent and depraved treasure their straw-wrapped packages of fermented meat, eating them with cloths covering their faces to hide themselves from the ghoul-curse of cannibalism in case the meat came from people.

They are

Carnlevares

Young:
HD: 3 AC: 12 ATK: Drop, or claw 1d3 and bite 1d6, plus Dream-Walker SAV: 8 MOV: Run and climb as bears INT: As dumb beast ML: 9
No. Appearing: 1d3

Old:
HD: 6 AC: 14 ATK: Drop, or claw 1d6 and bite 1d10, plus Dream-Walker  SAV: 10 MOV: Run and climb as bears INT: As clever beast ML: 5
No. Appearing: 1, or 1 and 1d3 young harried ahead of it to wear down prey

Drop: Carnlevares prefer to attack by dropping from a great height onto their prey. On a successful attack roll they deal all the fall damage they would have taken to their target - target can save for half. On a failed attack roll they take half the fall damage another creature would have taken - and can save to take none. A carnlevare can move horizontally half as far as they drop vertically. Anything a carnlevare climbs can support its weight. On a 3-in-6 chance per encounter, carnlevares have smelled you coming and have climbed any available heights to drop on you.

Dream-Walker: Those who sleep within the territory of a carnlevare gain no rest, and suffer terrible nightmares of being crushed by immense weight, of rotting in the dark. For young carnlevares this effect covers the hex their lair is in. For old carnlevares this effect covers the hex their lair is in and all neighbouring hexes. Any preventatives against nightmares also work against this effect.

Slush Pile 16

Previously:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10

Slush Pile 11

Slush Pile 12

Slush Pile 13

Slush Pile 14

 

Slush Pile 15

Crime Scene: The top of a woman's head has been removed with surgical precision, along with the Wernicke's area of her brain. Her body has toppled out of the chair she was sat in when the procedure was performed - no sign of restraints used. The woman's cats lap at her blood and the spilled remains of her brain.

An entity that appears as someone's corpse - they don't have to be dead - and can move when nobody's looking at it. The entity "attacks" via inspiring paranoia in groups.

Ecumenopolis with "municipal tectonic" system, allowing for the rearrangement of neighbourhoods and sub-cities according to prestige or novelty or whatever other criteria

Executioners had a reputation for drunkenness - the popularity of hanging as a method of execution is partially due to it being something even someone severely drunk could do

Attempt to reconstruct genome of newly-discovered homo sapiens sub-species instead results in prebirth of terrible future strain of humanity
-on the other hand they also made a real clamato

A building that's a digestive system - it doesn't eat people. It eats something that's not a person, then swallows people to use like a gastrolith to break down that something (but more often the people are broken first).

A coastal resort town where there's a high rate of mysterious disappearances - and reappearances. Those who reappear are subtly changed, amnesiac, and report seeing strange lights out at sea before they disappeared.

A new sort of submarine, unmanned, deploys swarms of UAV drones for deniable terror attacks on near-coastal targets.

A scenario that's kind of like Pathologic and kind of like the part of the trolley problem that nobody remembers because they're stupid - the party is doctors dispatched to a town that's under quarantine due to a disease - the only way to cure the disease is by lethally extracting organs from one infected and transplanting them into others (ignore compatibility issues & so on... because the disease makes that a non-issue or somesuch), this cures the others because they reach a critical mass of key anti-bodies or somesuch... disease is 100% fatal if not cured in this way - game would revolve around preventing total anarchy & deciding who you're willing and able to sacrifice and who you want to save, of course the people most deserving of having their organs harvested to save others are also often the ones most capable of violence & enmeshed in the town's power structures

X-Files uses hypnosis session tapes a lot - those are neat
-X-Files-esque game set during immediate post-revolutionary period - all the nasty stuff the government was covering up is coming out, and you play commissars granted extraordinary powers to clean up the messes
-an immense amount of energy released by near-death experiences - enough to rewrite personalities, and thereafter disable any watch the near-dead wears
-creatures bound within the ring of a tree - released when the tree is logged - eco-terrorists are a quaint idea

animal men domesticated by intelligent machines - the factory farm of the manimal slaughterhouse

Dungeon origin: A king who filled his halls with impossible things until reality forgot that those things were impossible, and the king's people forgot they themselves existed

A house full of so much dust and must and mold and crust that these things coalesce into the shapes of the people who left them behind and ape their habits

Something creepy about standing in a random spot and then your phone starts recharging itself without being plugged in
-urban legend says if you text a certain number in this spot you can talk to God
-other stories say you can tell where the spot is because birds commit suicide at its boundary, flying straight into the ground

Investigation into identity of serial killer thrown off because apparent time of death of victims off wildly from suspects' schedules, encounters with them, etc. - this is because secretly none of the victims were baseline humans, and so have abnormally high body temp and so on that throw off determining their time of death

A daily crossword puzzle that predicts the future

A place with trees that turn a different colour than red in the fall
-it's because of what they sprayed over the woods to kill Bigfoots, you see...

Ghosts can't live where it's too hot, due to their water-crystalline nature
-nasty bluish wizard carried about on bed by horrible goblins, smoking opium billowingly, able to manifest chimerical beasts from his own nightmares

An arctic ice core sample, and the historical information revealed therein - good macguffin or clue - perhaps also contains ancient virus, or substrate of anomalous meteor - perhaps also must be kept at extremely low temperature, limiting its potential hiding location to, say, a new high-end data center in town
-vents, you never see people crawling through vents anymore
--addictive food additives introduced by nefarious sorts to enwiden the population so their evil lairs can't be infiltrated by vent-crawling protagonists

Mari lwyd and other such hoodening beasts are (or are inspired by, if you're lame) the spirits of domestic animals who died over the year, returned to take their due from Man with his own cultured cunning

The legendary fighting cricket, who fought his way up weight classes until he defeated a rooster - this guy is treasure, you find him in a tiny yet luxurious stasis-cage alongside his many cricket-concubines

The Temagami Magnetic Anomaly
-The Numbers' Stationed
-Tempus Fugitives

On Saint Martina of Rome: "One of the writers claimed that when she was beheaded, her body bled milk, a tale that led to her patronage of nursing mothers."

There's a place where the banks and the big box stores pulled everything out that they could and then the meth-heads pulled out everything else and then because everything was already gone things we don't have names for came and took what couldn't be taken and now the potholes are bottomless and lead down to nowhere and you can push people through a building like it's a stack of cardboard boxes and there's people who don't starve but they're always hungry because there's just a missing column where their guts should be and there's another guy whose arms are missing but if you stand too close you get tickle-tickle-tickled and there should be laws written down and a court and a judge but those are gone too so there's nobody to tell you the laws that still are and everybody will punish you if you break them

A guy who wears the snapped-off tine of a crown through his nose
-him and all his buddies do this because they assassinated a king and made off with the bulk (really the least-bulk highest-value) of that king's treasure and then turned on each other and are all hiding in various dungeons and hideaways living in dereliction on top of tremendous riches because they're paranoid the others are out to get them and they're right and also very talented murderers and thieves

Just give the GLOO gun as a magic item
-just give the Obra Dinn watch as a magic item
-just give the talking heart from Dishonored as a magic item
-just give a scroll that begins the taming ritual for Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga
-just give the Lone Gunmen as allied contacts

Assortia:
-A contagious accent - overlays reality with the bizarre fictional township it “originated” from as it spreads
-Cursed/living thermostat, preys on people by unnaturally adjusting the temperature in rooms/homes
-Axe of Theseus, alternates between being a rotting handle/rusting blade, plunged into material to reform itself based on what it’s plunged into
-Therapist who collects his clients' phobias in a box as malign spirits
-Giant with guillotines for eyelids, has to wind them open but when they blink they sever a piece of whatever they were looking at
-Washed-up former action hero who worships his own past self and hopes to ascend to godhood
-Bottled moon
-Guy with a mermaid stuck in the ocean of his eye, can weep out a flood of voracious baby mermaids
-Guy with a head that's a giant tick, with a brain floating in the blood bloating its abdomen
-An abusive weightloss camp where sloughed-off lumps of flesh are harvested from the campers
-Dolls made of discarded prostheses, infused with the negative energy of their former wearers
-Kludge-afterlife holding comatose souls of those caught in a ritualistic bus crash, on life support at a hospital - in the hospital's basement is a realm of jittering ECG machine lines, beginning to leak its captured souls
-Boombox that blasts pretty literal earworms, with effects spilling out of the ears of its listeners
-Guy paddling a church-bell down a river like a coracle
-The Gordian Not - untangles things and people
-Argleton/Paper Town - google maps image seam-blended half-cat
-Thumb drive with something living in it like a hermit crab
-Guilty Party - cursed board game, appears to groups with dirty laundry in isolated locations (vacation cabins, etc.), bringing secrets to light and turning them against each other - taking too long during your turn will land you in the Pear-ade of Agonies - Court of Apple-eals - The Punch-Down Bowl - The Confess-ction Booth - Bloody Ban-nana

From Ghost Fixers: The areas of people's subjective spaces contradicted by social consensus reality are subducted by it, coalescing into what some call "the abstract dimension"
-From me, semiurge: It's possible that tectonic-analogue events in this "abstract dimension" are responsible for experiences of the mandala effect

Project Iceworm
-Marie Byrd Land

Near-future setting detail: Climate change greatly increases the rate of fafrotskies
-Degradation of transport infrastructure, increase in automobile costs, legislation against human drivers leads to rise of "sled dog" subculture who grappel on to automated vehicles while riding skateboards, carts, etc., detaching and hiding in the woods for the next vehicle when the drones come to pry them off

Monster: A police composite drawing who came to life, now taking parts from people to composite himself a fleshly body

Planet with life that never underwent its own great oxidation event - coated in slow, simple life that's developed emergent complexity - towering stromatolites in tiger-stripe bands of opacity and translucency channeling light and heat across the super-organisms

A bower bird-empire, collecting beautiful tribute and a pseudo-harem of non-concubines picked for their aesthetic complementaries, instinct masquerading as civilization

Should have more generators in dungeons... heavy, volatile fuel you have to haul between generators, choosing which systems you want powered for how long... open the shortcut door, or keep the lights on?

Bard mechanic - learn new musical styles, dances, and suchlike that work like the GLOGy languages that let you talk to stones, or be unable to lie, or what have you - incentive for friendly (or at least transactional) contact with new cultures, itinerant circuses of murder-clowns, etc.

The dominant flora of this planet is in fact a sort of holometabolous organism, derived into an elongated, colonial chrysalis stage - sub-organisms within the shared chrysalis remaining liquid in form, shifting form and position within as needed

A death-cult of Hollywood stunt-men who get themselves killed in extravagant and symbolic ways as a sacrifice to the object of their worship

Humanoid giant mechs channeling the image of God to power theo-weaponry

Illusion and divination stem from the same original school of magic - the seeing of images in fire and water, guts and cracked shells - really the creation of images in these media - splitting based on the truth or falsity of these images, and later based on false images becoming true, true images making themselves false
-identical twins are potent components for both divination and illusion magic

UFOs coming out of the ocean during the Biden regime was actually fomorians returning in response to an Irishman becoming king of Hybrasil

An experimental nuclear-powered jet developed during the Cold War breached the sound barrier by far too much - becoming sound itself, an echoing, booming song of speed

A videographic realm, a desert with grains of camera footage swirling into various surveillance scenes - what's seen can see you back - beware of scenes of armed robbery

The bones of the earth made into broth

A murder mystery in an apartment building full of eccentric characters that's been sealed due to quarantine - kind of like [REC] but no zombies because I am not fond of zombies - who's hoarding food in their apartments? Who's willing to cooperate with investigators who aren't cops? There will likely be more murders in the days to follow

Ysgard is made up of islands floating on elements, like Earth's mantle but much smaller and more energetic, and like some are lightning and make fulguritic lightning volcanos and what have you - this is also reflected in their minerology

Aesthetic of Carceri: Contrast, contradiction - on the one hand regimentation, discipline, masks, uniforms, suppression of individuality - on the other hand distinctive wearing, grinding, compression, into hunchbacks and oil and diamonds and shale-flat slitherings, voraciousness - unique among all outsiders the demodands need to eat, and what they eat is extra-dimensionally excreted into the lower layers of the prison-spheres
-anti-production - schools with books that suck the knowledge from your mind, mines that put minerals back into the earth
-those scholars who reject the planar hypothesis place Carceri as a burl on the central pillar of the earth, deep enough that a dangled prisoner can be dipped headfirst into primordial chaos

A monster like the matagot, which follows a party and demands the first portion of each meal (a ration from each party member)
-the calabrius is a bird which takes illness from the sick and disperses it - in medieval bestiarity this dispersion is into the sun, where it burns up, but what if it dispersed the disease into the countryside
-Alien-type monster that takes its prey alive and cocoons them in a lair/hive

Coral cathedral, worship sea spawn master, wizard in belltower believes all civilizations created by sea spawn conspiracy
-lacedons from maturing sea spawn hosts

Much ink and blood has been spilled because of the human lust for gold. Less known is the equally-strong lust of raccoons for teeth.
-the nobility of this land mix ink into their blood - the colour becomes a very dark red - and write their titles and deeds and treaties in their inky blood - the writing and their reality are tied: so long as the documents exist, a noble will not be dispossessed of their land for long - their lost wealth will return, the uprising peasants will be crushed - burn the documents, however, and the ruin of their associated nobles will follow

"Pride was a knight on a lion, Envy a monk on a dog, Sloth a peasant on a donkey, Avarice a merchant on a badger, Gluttony a youth on a wolf, Ire a woman on a boar, and Luxury (instead of the standard Lechery) a woman on a goat."

Names: Soldeva, Viraloon, Zecho, Pirralene, Lowch, Metton, Peygon, Ashumarit

Word Corner:
-Cicerone: A guide who gives information about antiquities and places of interest to sightseers
-Chyron: Text in the lower third of a tv news screen
-Latrodectism: Illness caused by the bite of black widows & related species - symptoms include pain, muscle rigidity, vomiting, and sweating
-Verilent: Contagiously truthful
-Repechage: French, literally "fishing out" or "rescuing" - a practice in series competitions that allows participants who failed to meet qualifying standards by a small margin to continue to the next round
-Diluent: Substance used to dilute something, acting to cause dilution
-Raubbauwirtschaft: An economy of attrtition
-Peytral: Piece of armor used to protect the breast of a horse
-Chloasma: Temporary large brown patches forming on skin, caused by hormonal changes
-Quondam: Former, sometime
-Afflatus: Divine creative impulse or inspiration
-Apothegm: Concise saying, maxim, aphorism - not to be confused with apothem
-Apothem: Line from the center of a regular polygon at right angles to any of its sides
-Lacustrine: Related to or associated with lakes
-Intaglio: An engraved gem-stone
-Aborning: While being born or produced
-Incipit: The opening words of a text, manuscript, book, or chanted liturgy

Towards the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors: Konopenas

Giants with faces like dogs, tusks like boars, manes like horses, breath that smokes and steams and swirls with sparks from the fire in their throats - a monstrous people from over the edge of the known world.

In olden days they threatened to overrun the lands claimed by humanity, and were beaten back by the great Dulkharnein, who bound their might into green glass tokens.

The ones you encounter nowadays in these parts are exiles, escapees, from an empire beyond where there be dragons on maps. They love wine and boasting contests, respect bravado and feats of power. They are outlaws to their own kind and to ours - ruthless, hungry, contemptuous of the weak.

They are

Konopenas

HD: 4 AC: 15 ATK: 1d10 sword, mace, or monstrously-strong kick, or Fire Breath  SAV: 8 MOV: As giant INT: As barbarian ML: 8
No. Appearing: 1d8

Fire Breath: Once a day, a konopena can vomit a gout of flame from their burning heart, dealing 2d4 damage to everything in a 15' cone - save for half. The exterior of a konopena is not proof against fire, and they take damage from it normally - therefore they are cautious not to use their fire breath where it may burn back in their direction (unless, of course, they are drunk - a 2-in-6 chance).

If struck a critical blow by a piercing weapon their burning heart is punctured and they explode, dealing 2d6 damage to everything within 10 feet - save for half.

Green Glass Token: Every konopena carries a green glass token of an abstract, fulguritic shape - if they are separated from this token their stats become the same as an old man, and they lose all abilities. A konopena will say anything to get their token back.

Towards the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors: Rock Baboons

You can hear them, across the hills and through the crags. Howling, barking, screeching, curses whose hatred cuts across language - the worst of the noises of dog and ape and man. Who they do not kill they take, and across the hills and through the crags the pleading fades, replaced by grunting and screaming.

They are not beasts. They do not fear your fire. They do not fear your voice or your weapons.

They are not men. They will take your fire and your weapons and your mind, and they will pen you and butcher you. They are

Rock Baboons

HD: 2 AC: 14 ATK: 1d6 bite and maul, or as weapon, or Stupefying Scream SAV: 7 MOV: as pissed-off chimpanzee INT: As reaction roll ML: 7
No. Appearing: 2d6 - at INT of 8 and above will be herding 2d6 stupefied humans

The reaction roll of a group of rock baboons is their current intelligence. The lower it is, the hungrier and more impulsive they'll be - higher, and they'll be open to trade and make deals, but they'll be trickier too. They will only be wielding weapons on a roll of 6 and above.

Stupefying Scream: Save or take 1d6 INT damage. The screaming rock baboon gains the same amount of INT for a week. Saving against a scream protects you from the screams of other rock baboons for a day. One of the most awful and annoying sounds you've ever heard - hearing it gives a feeling like you've just been concussed while having a bad hangover. Having your ears stopped up or suchlike while moving through rock baboon territory gives you advantage on the save against their screams, but also allows them to surprise on a 3-in-6.