BONUS MONSTER 09:

Urticating Bloodhexer
WELTDOWN

CLASS: BIOCONSTRUCT

Free, additional supplementary monsters for the Mortasheen Tabletop RPG Core Rulebook, created by Jonathan Wojcik, additional writing and all gameplay stats by Bonnie Saucier. For use with the gameplay system by Morgan Mullins!

Description:
This monster's head has no obvious facial features, but resembles a symmetrical collection of lumps, knobs and antler-like shapes completely coated in different shades of red fuzz with many thicker, rigid white bristles and rows of brighter yellow spots. Its hairless, rubbery looking lower body is more like the foot of a snail or the stem of a sea anemone, with one pair of stubby, tapering arms.

BIOLOGY:
This soft-bodied, slow-moving invertebrate consumes exclusively minerals and ferrous metals, grazing on stone, architecture or machinery with the ring of diamond-like teeth under its muscular foot. Most of what it consumes is broken down by its specialized gut biome, while waste materials are channeled to its sponge-like cranium to form a dense coat of fine, feather-like crystals. Its lower body is highly elastic, and it can retract snail-like into its cranium or stretch several times its natural length to swing its fuzzy horns into attackers.

  Physical contact with the Weltdown's brittle coat immediately triggers a burning, pustulated rash as thousands of crystalline microfragments and hollow needles break away in soft tissues, introducing a biometallic venom compound loaded with complex, virus-like iron nanopackets that attack surrounding cells. Symptoms of severe iron poisoning and histamine overload manifest within minutes, beginning with severe nausea and increasing confusion. Bruising spreads rapidly through the body and organ function diminishes as tissues begin to hemhorrage, with muscle tremors steadily escalating into seizure and finally coma. Partially biometallic monsters, especially Biomecha, may instead find the venom invigorating and even assimilate the excess iron content to bolster their own structures.

  The head of a Weltdown grows continuously with age and diet. Over time, an elder specimen may be weighed down to immobility by its many branching horns, but finds the sensation of this to be comforting. The original monster enters a permanent state of blissful slumber, and its branches continue to slowly grow as they strain minerals from the atmosphere and substrate. Small, round nodules periodically break free, and form into juvenile Weltdown after roughly a year.

  A Weltdown with insufficient iron intake is paler and significantly less toxic, but its particles are no less painful.

BEHAVIOR:
The Weltdown was engineered predominantly to protect precious cultures of edible flora in the toxic black dunes of the Smogsands, where the monster can freely extract nutrients from the terrain itself and blend in with the desert's many crimson cacti. Feral populations have also naturalized to the Rustfen, where they may simply float from their heads and filter iron from the sludge.

  A Weltdown typically dislikes being touched in any context, even if not especially to defend itself, being equally agitated whenever it has to "dishevel" its coat. While naturally immune to its own venom and protected from its finer particles by thick, slimy skin, it is careful not to touch its more substantial needles. Its body quickly coats its own "splinters" in mucosal resin, but it finds the presence of these elongated pearls to be annoying and disgusting, popping them from its skin only in private.

Concept Notes:

Like the Brainslark, this is another concept I had for a very long time and only finalized just too late to fit into the book. I always loved the various species of cute, furry caterpillar whose cute furriness actually packs some sort of horrible venom, and while Mortasheen's canon has a couple of stinging caterpillar Arthropoids, I wanted to apply the same principle to a more original monster, rather than a take on a real animal. I went through dozens of wildly different design ideas for a "hairy stinger" bioconstruct, and I'll probably use most of the rejects as different monsters some day. Here are just a couple of them:

GAMEPLAY BLOCK:

Weltdown's sting is now one of the longest attacks written for any monster in the book or otherwise, but technically only has three distinct blocks [anything in these brackets.] The second and third blocks are [DISCRIMINATE] effects, which give abilities special qualifiers, and the first one just has a whole bunch of additional [DISCRIMINATE] effects chained together into it. We don't do that kind of thing all the time, honest!