BONUS MONSTER 20:

Adamantine Bloodkeep
GREEF

CLASS: Vampire (Desiccator)

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!

"Following the source of the infernal dirge, we ascended the spiraling halls of the uncanny citadel long into the night...but when at last we reached the inner sanctum, we were greeted by neither the throne nor the tyrant to depose from it. There was but a vast, empty cavity of that same unwholesome, rust-caked stone, if indeed it was stone at all, and as the chittering darkness overhead began to stir... one could swear the morose droning of that blasted music had taken on the measure of derisive laughter."
-Dictionairre Vampirida, Author Unknown

Description:
This monster resembles a towering "castle" of heavily branching coral. Its central column swells halfway up its length with a gaping, cavelike opening, lined with jagged stalactite-like growths. A thin jagged branch sprouts straight up in front of the "cave," visually dividing it like a pair of eye sockets. Irregular, dark gaps under the main orifice evoke a ghoulish, rotten "mouth."

BIOLOGY:
Having evolved from a hard coral, this Vampire is technically a colony of several thousand tiny, soft-bodied polyps. An internal network of stunted constructor polyps are dedicated exclusively to building and maintaining the colony's skeleton, while the flapping, leathery feeding polyps lining its central cavity are capable of disconnecting from the network to hunt remotely, their cnidoblasts modified for blood withdrawal rather than venom injection. Iron from collected blood is utilized by constructor polyps to reinforce the outer layers of the skeleton, giving the colony its oxidized appearance, and excess moisture is excreted from the rootlike foundational branches, converting the surrounding terrain into a pit of sludge.

  A Greef's polyps are connected by constant telecerebral waves across any distance, behaving as a single brain with the central "fortress" as its hub. The iron-laced structure incidentally functions similarly to a radio tower, and the Greef can easily listen in on hundreds of psigital communications at a time across vast distances. Its own steady broadcast is accompanied by audible "speech" in its own musical language, reminiscent of a pipe organ.

  Living fragments of a Greef's skeleton can maintain their mental connection to one another and to individual feeding polyps for many miles, but a fragment taken too far beyond its "servitor zone" will slowly begin to develop an independent consciousness. An architectural mastermind by nature, the monster often cultivates its "frags" into such specialized secondary structures as lookout towers, guest quarters, storage vaults and more. It may even grow calcerous statuary or other art pieces, and some have been known to equip vassals with living weaponry or armaments that house additional feeding polyps. It is sometimes fed upon by metal-eating biota, and Weltdown are an especially troublesome pest for its polyps to contend with.

BEHAVIOR:
The Greef is a relatively recent emergence among invertebrate Vampires, and more readily socializes with equally "modern" chordate-derived Vampires. As a desiccator, it adapts well to desert environments, but its towering, hollow skeleton naturally keeps its polyps comfortably dry even with its lower reaches submerged in muck, and it is equally likely to inhabit shallow lagoons, sandy beaches or briny mud flats.

   It tends to consider itself to be both a collection of many individuals and a single monarch "ruling" over them, making no distinction between the two concepts. It extends this confused sense of self to every living thing in its domain, categorizing its thralls, symbiotes and even independent allies as abstract extensions of its mind. It is highly possessive and protective of this extended community, and should any outsider bring undue harm to its "subjects," it may leave their exsanguinated remains impaled on its branches as a warning to all potential invaders.

  The most well known Greef is known to others only as The Rook, the youngest of the Vampiric Underlords at only a little over a thousand years of age. The colony's sprawling branches have ovetaken miles of Mortasheen city's Undersluck, and it engages with local metahumans far more readily than the older, more reclusive Underlords of the deep ocean. It displays an active interest in understanding the lost history of its world, especially the great pre-Mortasheen vampire wars, but does not evidently get along well with its elders, who are said to deride its behavior as "more scientist than Vampire."

  A curious habit of nearly all known Greef is an obsession with formality. A Greef feels obligated to permit entry to any being, friend or foe, if they are courteous enough to ask first.

Concept Notes:

An entire coral colony as a vampire is a concept I've actually considered for almost as long as Mortasheen has had its Vampire class at all, and I probably have some sketches of it that go back over twenty years. I knew it needed to actually look like some kind of Spooky Castle, with its polyps acting as a swarm of bats, but I also wanted the castle to evoke a creepy face without straying too far from the look of just some horribly mutated coral. This was probably what I got hung up on a hundred times over the years, until I finally sketched what you see here mere months ago. In fact, you may notice that the illustration today is an actual sketch on paper that I colorized, rather than drawing over it digitally. I'm going to be doing this for a few monsters to come, since it saves me a fair bit of time and it still looks fine.

I'm just really really satisfied with the "face" on this. It feels just ambiguous enough that the coral isn't too anthropomorphised for my taste, and more believably like any semblance of a scary face is accidental. Maybe you don't even see the big central opening as an eye area like I do, but as a big toothy mouth, which is also perfectly acceptable. No two Greef would be perfectly identical, of course, but they would all roughly share the same basic structure and a similar arrangement of orifices with varying proportions and "expressions." Many real corals are more chaotic than that, but there are also a lot of strangely symmetrical ones, too.

The Rook is entirely a concept Bonnie developed for playtest campaigns, and will probably be explored further in the future with its own special rules, since the game system allows building structures or "lairs" to be made from the same ability blocks as monsters anyway! Bonnie has also helped flesh out a lot of the lore for the monsters this month, and we both came up with so many little vampire gags to work into this one.

Someday, we'll also have to do a soft coral, but those come in so many bizarre forms, I can't even begin to decide how I'd narrow them down or consolidate them just yet.