#krajen

[oldschoolfrp]

Adventures in the Flow (Steve Schwartz for “Flowfire” -- nine Spelljammer encounters by Steven Kurtz, Dungeon 39, January/February 1992)

[flailsnails]

Spelljammer Monsters:  Krajen

The krajen first appeared in the Lorebook of the Void.  It is a large creature of low intelligence, which only incidentally attacks starships.  Its regular prey are kindori, radiant dragons, and other large spaceborne creatures, but it cannot really tell the difference between an animal and a ship.

Its first life stage is microscopic; it floats through Wildspace as a spore, in the company of thousands or tens of thousands of its siblings.  When it comes to rest on something solid, such as an asteroid, a large creature, or a starship, it roots and metamorphoses into its second stage.  Now resembling a barnacle, it is visible to the naked eye and has a tough, outer shell.  It does have a tentacle it can defend itself with, which does a token 1d3 points of damage but carries a paralytic venom.  It is otherwise sessile.  It occupies its time with devouring part of the surface it is planted on.

After about two months, it has absorbed enough energy to complete its final metamorphosis.  It detaches from its surface and drifts away, transforming into an adult krajen over an unspecified period.  The adult krajen keeps growing as long as it can live, although the typical one detailed in the Lorebook is 40 feet long.  It has one large, central tentacle surrounded by a dozen smaller tentacles.  It uses the large one to crush the life out of its prey, while the smaller tentacles are for defense.  The smaller tentacles carry the paralytic poison, while the large one doesn’t.  Once the life is crushed from its prey, the krajen devours the remains over a period of a few days to a week, then takes a big nap.

At some point, it makes new krajen.

The entry speaks tantalizingly of a group of humans who have traded with the mercane for lifejammer helms, made a fleet of krajen raiders with them, and become the terror of the spaceways, but no further mention of them has been made in any official source that I know of.