Fungal Creeper, Plot Ideas, and Hiatus
Fungal Creeper
Number Appearing: 1-5
Enviroment: Any non-aquatic.
Difficulty Class: I (equal to an unarmed human peasant) to III (equal to a highly trained, well armed human)
The Fungal Creeper, as its name suggests, is a type of fungus. It is a rough mound shape about the size of a large bush. Its exterior is mossy and soft. On the top of its body a fungal creeper has a head-like lump and two discoloured splotches. These are meant to look like a head and eyes to discourage predators. Two formless appendages protrude from the fungal creeper’s body. These are not true limbs, but rather pseudopods.
The fungal creeper moves by pulling its body along the ground with these pseudopods. Fungal creepers slick the underside of their body with water or the bodily fluids of creatures that they kill when in difficult terrain for easier movement.
Fungal creepers feed on dead and decaying matter, but unlike other, more passive fungus, they are aggressive enough to kill animals and humanoids in order to feed. A fungal creeper will attack anything smaller than itself that it can catch. This makes most of these creatures harmless to humans that are much to large to be a likely meal. However, fungal creepers grow for as long as they feed regularly. Thus, if one had a steady supply of food and was not eaten then it could grow as large as a house.
The main predators of fungal creepers are herbivores. Anything that the fungal creeper does not attack can easily approach and begin feeding. Fungal creepers can survive having up to seventy-five percent of their body mass consumed. It will regrow as they feed.
Fungal creepers reproduce through the use of spores. Oddly enough, these spores are placed in vegetation and not the meat that the creepers feed on. They latch onto living plants and begin to leech out nutrients that the roots bring up from the soil. This parasitic life lasts for several weeks as the creeper spore grows like a tumor on the plant. Eventually, the host dies and the spore drops to the ground and begins the search for meat to devour.
Plot Ideas
Mule Willow: A grove of these creatures has appeared overnight near a small town. Children have started to disappear.
Belch Slugs: A local alchemist requires some of the slime that these creatures secrete. He will pay anyone that will retreive some for him.
Befouling Thing: One of these creatures comes into an area and begins feeding. If it is not dealt with quickly it will ruin all the land aorund it and more will spawn.
Drooling Skin: A graveyard in town is being robbed by a drooling skin searching for bones to add to its collection.
Or: A local has gone missing. She has been killed by a drooling skin and only her skin remains in the back alley where it happened.
Fungal Creeper: An infestation of these creatures is sweepign over a recent battlefield. The families of the dead want to bury their kin whole, and wonder where the swarm will move next for feed.
I’m going out-of-state and away-from-the-internet for work this summer. So this is the last post before a six week break. I’ll be back the second week of July with more material and maybe a few more monsters. See you then!
D12 Needs Love, Too 