#ijotober

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Ijotober Day 2: Gargoyle

This bulldog-headed gargoyle atop the palace complex's main gatehouse in Dowha serves two functions: reinforcing the ridgeline of the roof, as well as warning the palace of intruders. When armed, the arcanically animated stone dog faces act as alarms, barking and howling when unauthorized individuals attempt to enter the complex.

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Ijotober Day 1: Kobold

Bola, the East-Shelf community's Kobold, spends most of his days sitting and waiting. He's been tracking the movements of a juvenile antlered dragon for the past several weeks, and has been sat motionless outside its lair for almost a day. Unwilling to venture into the dragon's cave, he waits patiently for it to emerge so he can finally take it down and bring it home to the community.

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Ijotober Day 8: Roper

This harrowing kapnograph was taken by a documentarian accompanying a dwarven survey team on an expedition. It shows the surveyors and their loyal hellhound being ambushed by a Roper, a subterranean creature that mimics stalagmites to hide from unsuspecting prey before dragging them into its toothy maw using tendrils it keeps hidden in hidden tunnels it bores in the ground. Thanks to the quick thinking of the survey team, they were able to keep the roper distracted for long enough to safely flee, with the only casualties suffered being the loss of some of the teams's equipment and most of their rations.

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Ijotober Day 7: Hellhound

The underdark is full of pockets and tunnels and caverns ripe for explorarion, excavation and mining that the beetle-city of Hollowrock often can't reach. To study these areas, their structural integrity and their material potential, teams of Surveyors are sent out to perform calculations and measurements. The underdark is a place frought with many dangers, however, and so these survey teams are usually accompanied by one or two Hellhounds; large, ferocious, fire-breathing beasts specially bred by Hollowrock's genetic wizards as guard dogs of sorts. Despite their imposing size and bloodthirsty nature, Hellhounds are often treated not only as guards, but loyal companions, and even as family by survey teams.

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Ijotober Day 6: Stirge

Stirges are fey-tech constructs, spawned en masse in mysterious automated factories that litter the dark corners of Lucidia. Its unknown who originally designed them, or for what purpose, but to most they're seen as dangerous, self-replicating pests, large mechanical mosquitoes to avoid at all costs. Others, like the Butcher gang however, see them as tools, to be captured, rewired and used as weapons in the Material plane. Since the closing of the fairy portals, many of the rewired stirges still remain in Ijo without their operators to give them direction, so it isn't uncommon to now find stirge nests, strange, blood-clot-like structures hanging in dark corners of densely populated areas. Without the fey-tech ressources they would normally require to self-replicate, the stirges spawned in Ijo are often constructed of scrap parts and stolen organs.

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Ijotober Day 5: Treant

At the very edge of the copse, the one they call Bitterroot slumbers. In ages past, when Elvick blood spilled by Elvick hands flooded the forests, Bitterroot and his kin first awakened. Animated by the undying souls of slaughtered elves, they walked on limbs made of roots, defending their forests with whip-like branches and razor-sharp leaves, rendering the woods hostile to any who dared defile them. And when the warring elves, driven from their homes by the very trees they lived in, were forced to cease their fighting and make peace with one another, a new compact was demanded by the guardians of the forests. And when the united elves and the forests finally made peace, Bitterroot and his kin could finally rest. He spends his days now in motionless placidity, allowing the soil to reclaim his roots and the animals to reclaim his body. He and his kin have not forgotten the crimes of the elves or the compact they made, and when the elves inevitably break it, they will be ready to defend the forests once again. But for now, in this time of relative peace, at the very edge of the copse, the one they call Bitterroot slumbers.

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Ijotober Day 4: Goblin

Eggdrop Von Soup, the Green Team's resident artificer, stirs ingredients into a fragrant broth while their teammate Toothpick lounges about nearby with Miso, Eggdrop's teacup construct, perched on her knee.

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Ijotober Day 3: Black Pudding

We all knew from the start that there was something wrong with this new experiment. But then, Solvek seemed convinced that this time it would be stable, that the proteolytes and carnophagic acids would cancel eachother out, that this time, we'd finally have made a viable potion base from that accursed blood-pit's fluids. And frankly, his enthusiasm and certainty was so infectuous it was hard for us all not to be convinced as well. But our excitement blinded us to the obvious flaws in the formula, and we ignored the corrosive and volatile nature of the thing, right until it pitted a hole into one of the pipes, leaked out onto the distillation chamber's floor and swallowed whole an unsuspecting lab technician. Then we couldn't ignore it any longer. Solvek wasn't as distraught by all this as I expected though. He doesn't see this as a failure at all. In fact, he's already got new plans for this carnivorous black pudding of his. I just hope something useful comes of this. I'd hate for that poor lab tech to have died for nothing.