BONUS MONSTER 14:

Decomposing Demishade
GARUMSCARUM

CLASS: DEMISHADE

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!

Today's monster entirely designed and mostly written by Bonnie!

Description:
This monster somewhat resembles an eyeless, mouthless whale carcass, flipped over so its grooved "underbelly" is on its back. Two glowing eyes gaze from an opening like an enlarged blowhole, its flippers hang like sleeved arms and it shuffles on two additional flipper-like legs. The entire monster appears bloated, heavily decayed and ghostly pale.

BIOLOGY:
This Demishade appears to have arisen in response to the first incursion of Stinkfish Wormbrains such as Junjo or Sourtrout from Mortasheen's polluted coast, compelling the city to take renewed interest in its interaction with the sea. Heavily incorporating Stinkfish biology, the Garumscarum is well adapted to amphibious activity and interaction with marine monsters. It cultivates the same toxic miasma as its Wormbrain counterparts by collecting and fermenting miscellaneous giblets, especially seafood, in a crop that constitutes a solid third of its weight. The monster's precious gases are retained with an airlock-like configuration of multiple sphincters, and its crystoform is kept safely out of reach near the top of the ballooning coelem in which it retains fumes. Maintaining the collagen of its organic hide requires a greater protein intake than the average demishade, which it typically accomplishes simply by feeding on scraps of fermented food from its own crop, but it may also extrude its blowhole-like feeding pore to engulf an adversary into its coelem. This adversary will typically faint and subsequently suffocate in the sheer brain-hemorrhaging sensory overload of the concentrated gases within it, and the Demishade will ferry the carcass to its crop once it has digested its fill.

The Garumscarum also makes an excellent larder, refining scrap biomass into deliciously fermented seafood, and in good condition it is airtight enough to release its bounties without harming its allies, though not enough to always avoid unwanted attention from wild scavengers attracted by the stench of decaying fish.

BEHAVIOR:
The Garumscarum is particularly adept at communicating with true Stinkfish, which seem to have an innate curiosity towards this imitator. It is compelled to intercept spikes in Stinkfish activity, evaluate their threat level to the balance of city ecology and redirect their behavior towards some more productive outlet. Too buoyant to submerge itself, it will often drift face-down on the sea's surface and direct a fleet of Stinkfish to survey the depths.

Though its odor can be off-putting even to most monsters, the Garumscarum is an outgoing and jovial creature that enjoys meeting new faces almost as much as it enjoys the smell of salty sea air.

Concept Notes by Bonnie:

Garumscarum was originally dreamed up as a monster that my character had memories of in one of the major Mortasheen playtests, something she was going to attempt to bootleg from memory alone because she wanted to tame and familiarize a much more dangerous Sourtrout that was out of her creation range. The way I always saw Demishades was that their deal was that they sort of "almost but not quite "got" the aesthetics of the class they mimic, so in making one that's built to specifically mollify Stinkfish, it was fairly intuitive to end up with "bloated dead whale", and I took a bit of design inspo from the recent Cetitan, but I feel it's different enough not to be any sort of ripoff or even homage.

Demishades have reign to have a lot of unusual block combos because they're meant to jumpstart a scientist's career, so I gave this [COUNTER] and [DETONATE] because they were toys my scientist had access to and that a hypothetical scientist just starting the game would enjoy having in their toybox. Making it enormous is risky for a starter Demishade, but it only felt right that a walking dead whale be at LEAST as big as an elephant.