BONUS MONSTER 03:

Esophageal Skeletonizer
GAZZIRD

Free supplementary monsters for the Mortasheen Tabletop RPG Core RulebookCreated by Jonathan Wojcik
Stats and additional writing assistance by Bonnie Saucier

Description:
Shaped roughly like an acorn, this monster has a fleshy "cap" with two narrow, pupil-less pale eyes on one side and a stem-like nub on top. The cap gapes open vertically into a set of toothless lips, and a cinched looking bag of translucent tissue bulges out of it. A row of hair-like cilia enricle the bag mid-way down.

BIOLOGY:
Most of this balloonlike monster's total mass is split between its membranous, externalized stomach sac and its leathery cranium, the latter dominated by a swollen, hollow brain that doubles as its floatation bladder. A tiny, wriggling knob of flesh represents the vestiges of what would have been the rest of its body, housing little more than a crude secondary sensory system and spore channel.

Steering itself through the air via controlled belches of excess gas, the Gazzird follows movement, sound or other stimuli until it happens upon something it deems appetizing. Craving generous proportions of organic material at once, its stomach can expand several times in volume to engulf food items significantly exceeding its own size in a single gulp. Live prey is quickly asphyxiated as the filmy membrane retracts and seals tight to airways, their dying tissues softened by enzyme activity to be scoured by multiple rings of petal-like radulae. In no time, all that may remain of a Gazzird's meal is a compacted ball of inedible materials such as bone, keratin or synthetic clothing the creature discards in its path.

An older Gazzird may shed spores as it floats, but few will survive long enough to germinate.

BEHAVIOR:
The Gazzird is a biological weapon engineered strictly to devour as many other creatures as possible, as quickly as possible. It cares about little other than pursuing its next "snack," easily misjudging its own capacity and occasionally gorging itself to the point of rupture. It has particular difficulty resisting the urge to taste something it hasn't previously encountered, regardless of potential danger, and a Gazzird well aware of something's inedibility or toxicity may find the urge all the more maddening. A Gazzird that recovers from such a mistake will not necessarily give up trying.

Gazzird are sometimes followed - from a safe distance - by scavenging monsters who find their discarded leftovers to be exceptionally delicious. Some Gazzird have been known to catch on to this behavior, quietly circling back around to their last "pellet" to ambush fresh prey.

Concept Notes:

Big Eating is always a fun gimmick; it's why people love Kirby, and Yoshi, and Snorlax a host of other goofy mascot creatures. It crops up in nature, too, like the black swallower or the pelican eel or basically every kind of frog, but one of my favorite examples is a funny little single-celled protozoan called Didinium, which you can watch a nice video about.

Didinium is nothing but an egg shape with a pointy nose and a couple of hairy fringes, but it can stretch that pointy nose into a big, vacuous maw and wolf down other protozoa with such ravenous efficiency, it's been said that a sample of one didinium and several hundred other microbial specimens can transform overnight into a sample of only fat, happy didinium, since they also multiply almost as fast as they feed, though they're also prone to eating so fast that they just up and explode. I love the idea of this goofy looking little nugget that will straight up inhale a bigger guy to death, so I had to recreate that as a monster eventually. Gazzird's design came out looking deeply unpleasant, reminiscent of maybe a dozen unwholesome things at once, but I think that adds more humor to it; more "what the hell is that now?" factor before the hapless interloper is reduced off-screen to just a skeleton and some pants.

You can also imagine the same art flipped around, which kind of gives it a cuter and more mischievous "face" with its stomach as the "top of its head." There's no wrong way to interpret it, really; its anatomy already throws out any sense of up or down.

GAMEPLAY BLOCK:

The "upscale" block attached to the "engulf" block is what allows Gazzird to swallow things larger than itself; a block normally costs a single point towards a monster's total limit, but some blocks have effects that can be boosted by additional points. +5 to Engulf means that this tiny monster can swallow things up to 5 categories larger, which means Gazzird can eat anything other than the absolute largest kaiju-scale monsters in the setting.