#monster folder

[lex1nat0r]

Astral Spiders

(CW: arachnids, webs, body horror)

Monster concept for OSR-type games, including a stab at statting them up.

Arachnids that drift down from the stars on glimmering webs. Their colors range from black to blue to purple and where a spider's eight eyes would be are humanoid faces with hollow eye sockets and open, toothless mouths. All astral spiders can focus a terrible heat through these empty orifices, causing them to glow with an orange light. The heat ray from a small juvenile can immediately cause painful heat blisters while adults can cause lethal burns. It is not known how astral spiders perceive the world or even if they can see like humans can. Juvenile astral spiders are the size of large dogs, adults the size of humans, the more mature starcallers are the size of warhorses, and legends persist of starspinners the size of dragons.

All astral spiders have strangely knobbed backs, the bumps and ridges of their dorsal carapace becoming a multitude of humanoid arms and six-fingered hands when an astral spider has undergone enough molts to become a starcaller. When sufficiently angered, a starcaller or starspinner can wave their arms in arcane motions to bring malign stars overhead to curse the object of their ire. This curse can of course be undone by another starcaller or starspinner.

After its first few molts an astral spider is able to start spinning a web by producing an unknown crystalline substance. The spider will bring this web with it, adding to it over its lifetime and perhaps using it to glide to other worlds on strange currents. Aside from the inherent material value of the glittering web, each one is an unerring star chart and any scholar with an interest in the heavens will pay handsomely for one.

It is possible for an astral spider to be immediately hostile on encountering a person or group - angered, perhaps, by what it sees in their star-graven fate. It is advisable in this case to attempt to convince the spider that you were born under a different sign, or - much more difficult - persuade it that its interpretation of the stars is wrong. Sometimes astral spiders will seek to aid strangers, having read a pleasing fate in their stars.

More likely, on meeting any travelers an astral spider will accost them with questions about their birth-signs in voices echoing from their eye-mouths in eight different languages. Astral spiders have been known to get irate at people ignorant of the stars of their birth and any omens attending it. It is recommended that anyone likely to encounter an astral spider be up to date on their horoscope.

What happens when an astral spider's web-chart shows a star that cannot be found in the sky?

What happens when an astral spider determines that certain people born under certain signs are vital to its own plans?

What happens when an astral spider attempts to rebel against the stars themselves?

Age: Juvenile/Adult/Starcaller/Starspinner

AC 13/13/13/15

HD 4 (S)/8 (M)/16 (L)/24 (L)

Mv 40'/40'/50'/60'

Atk 2 claws (1d6/1d6) + heat ray (2d4)/2 claws (1d6/1d6) + heat ray (2d6)/2 claws (1d8/1d8) + heat ray (3d6) + curse/2 claws (1d10/1d10) + heat ray (4d6) + curse

Sv 11+/8+/6+/4+

ML 9/7/6/6

Heat ray: Takes action, save vs. breath for half

Curse: Takes action. Target saves vs wands -2, or if in combat the target is automatically afflicted with a curse of severity related to how much hp damage the spider(s) have inflicted during the scene (e.g. reduce max HP by amount of damage, malus to all saves based on % of total hp lost, etc.)

If adapted for MÖRK BORG, a starspinner can cause a Misery but the world will end before they can finish studying its effects and cause a second.

[lex1nat0r]

The gang's all here!

[lex1nat0r]

xenomorphs.txt

So you see in the first movie the xenomorph has a rounded head, versus the ridged head of the xenomorphs from the second movie. Also the first movie's xenomorph, called the Big Chap colloquially or Kane's Son if you want to be poetic, has a humanoid skull visible in the transparent dome in the front of its head but it's never filmed in such a way that you can get a good look at it during the actual movie. Now, I'm not saying one design is strictly worse or better than the other, and I think it's valid that for the second move they changed the smooth head to something more conventionally menacing and faceless to emphasize the overwhelming horde of monsters that the second move builds them up to. And of course the second move famously adds the alien queen laying all the eggs, likening the aliens to ants or termites. Something that kind of bugs me is that later Alien media follows on from that, making the xenomorphs mostly menacing in giant hordes but the problem is that there's at best a one-to-one relationship between the xenomorphs' prey population and the number of xenomorphs that actually show up, each alien needs its own host, and for me that takes away from the suspension of disbelief of how you can have these giant swarms of xenomorphs. Sure you can say the same thing about zombies, but the zombie bite to zombie process is a lot easier than having to subdue something, bring it to a facehugger, and wait for that gestation to complete.

The thing is, in the director's cut of the first movie there's a scene where Ripley comes across the captured crewmembers webbed onto a bulkhead and - and this isn't, like, explained or made obvious in the film - these cremembers are being grotesquely turned into eggs, meaning that the creature has a way to reproduce on its own without a queen. Don't get me wrong, I like the queen thing fine and clearly a lot of other people do too, but that wasn't the only direction the sequel could have gone and I think there's value in exploring how a second movie would have gone building on the alien in a different way than making it part of a hive society. In my experience, the alien is the most horrific movie monster - its whole life cycle is horrific from beginning to end - with the only other thing coming close being the titular thing from The Thing but the problem - and the thing that makes the film so fantastic, don't get me wrong! - is the thing doesn't have a set shape. Which is great for the film! But it's hard to really build off that, really expand the thing universe meaningfully. There's The Things short story which is a great view into the possible psychology of the thing but that aside there isn't enough to really expand on it for me you know. But with the xenomorph you've got these iconic design elements - the elongated skull, the inner mouth, the tail - that you can transpose onto basically any other design and have something recognizably related to a xenomorph. Much like the in-universe creatures, the xenomorph's advantage is its adaptability - the adaptability of the design of the creature itself - and this allows it to perpetuate itself in pop culture. So the xenomorph has this recognizable visual language that allows it to be a distinct movie monster that the thing lacks - it's difficult to distinguish one horrible mass of flesh from another, you know? - which is my problem here. I want more of that kind of horrific space monster and I think limiting xenomorphs to just being spawned from eggs laid by a queen gets in the way of that. I'd like to see more of people going back to the first movie and extrapolating more about the creatures just from what we're shown there. And of course the best outcome would be a slew of wholly new space monsters, each uniquely horrifying to the same extent - at least the same extent! - as the xenomorph.

[lex1nat0r]

MUSHROOM WITH TEETH

[lex1nat0r]

I’m glad they’re not afraid to make Catchick monstrous at times

[lex1nat0r]

Labyrinth of Refrain starting off strong with this melty, rocky, carrion-eating boy. Hopefully the rest of the monsters at least live up to this standard.

CHARM POINT: That delightfully weird mouth BONUS: The horns

[lex1nat0r]

Some of the best-looking UFOs I’ve ever seen.

[lex1nat0r]