BONUS MONSTER 04:

Grotesquivorous Borehead
UNDLER

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

Description:
This monster is shaped a little like a cross between a whale, a lizard and a rhinoceros, its bulky teardrop-shaped body covered in overlapping leathery plates. Its forearms resemble large, blunt mole-like claws, and its tail is twisted like a rope before culminating in a small leathery spade. It has a narrow, tired red eyes near the corners of a small, beaklike mouth below a massive, two-tiered spiky "drill" of bony looking material. On the sides of its head are large, roughly rectangular patches of colorful red and blue muscle tissue, and above each of these patches is a small, circular membranous pit.

BIOLOGY:
This heavy duty excavation and demolition monster feeds on both organic and inorganic matter as it tunnels through Mortasheen's architecture and inhales a steady stream of crushed detritus. Its drilling mechanism is technically a pair of gigantic, nested teeth that grow out through the roof of its mouth and erupt from the top of its skull. This apparatus can be detached from the nervous system and whirled in its socket via the rippling action of several thousand smaller, cog-like internalized molars as the rest of the body vibrates at intense frequency, grinding and pulverizing anything in its path. More stubborn obstacles are pulled apart by its retractable, shovel-like forearms, and its corkscrewed tail can be used to quickly burrow backwards through its own path of rubble. Its bone, enamel and keratin are reinforced by an intermeshed carbon and silicon alloy lattice synthesized from its mineral-rich diet, significantly exceeding the hardness of diamond. Microparticles of boron, quartz and mica reinforce its thick flesh, and its outermost skin surface is finely coated in shark-like abrasive nanoscales.

  Beneath each of the Undler's upper tympanic membranes are multiple, nested cochlea laced with magnetite, which the creature can individually adjust to "hear" electromagnetic waves at varying frequencies. This system gives the Undler a sense of direction, position and depth precise enough that it is technically capable of retracing its steps back to the precise coordinates of its earliest conscious memory.

  Male and female Undler gauge one another's attractiveness by the vibrant coloration of their cranial muscles, visible through a thin but sturdy window of transparent cuticle. During courtship, they gauge the hardness of one another's drills by grinding them together for tens of hours at a time, preferring an equally matched partner to ensure equally durable offspring. The mating process itself takes days or weeks, much of which is spent drifting in and out of sleep, and a clutch of boulder-like eggs are laid up to nineteen months later. Usually mating for life, both parents contribute equally to the care and protection of their toothless, soft-bodied calves, feeding them on a pre-digested silt slurry as they slowly build their cuticle. A calf begins feeding itself on rubble by five years of age, following its parents as they tunnel, and its own drill finally begins to emerge at ten years.

BEHAVIOR:
Undler in Mortasheen city generally scavenge on inert or "dead" structural materials, but find bioconcrete exceptionally appetizing, especially the "gargoyles" Mortasheen grows in response to structural damage. Craving these growths at their freshest, feral Undler will ignore older grotesqueries to "farm" their own with controlled damage to younger architecture.

  An Undler reacts to most sources of irritation by simply trudging forward, whirling its drill until the irritant has been obliterated or moved out of the way.

Concept Notes:

Most of the monsters this month will be entirely new, but Undler is taken from the scrap monsters I put up many years ago, and it's a personal favorite of someone who happened to be a tremendous help in editing the rulebook, so we decided to hurry up and bring Undler into the game as a surprise thank-you :)

Undler was most inspired by the look and feel of Ultraman and Gamera kaiju, along with the bulettes from Dungeons and Dragons, a mole rat, and a narwhal.