Numenera Creatures: Kreel

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for a creature in upcoming Numenera campaign. My players are advised to stay away.

One of the players in my upcoming Numenera campaign is a Tough Glaive Who Controls Beasts. Instead of forcing the player to take of the creatures from the bestiary of the Numenera corebook, I allowed him to flex his creative muscles and give me a description of a creature he envisioned for his character. The Ninth World being a weird place filled with many creatures created by past civilizations, this was only fitting. According to the corebook, the creature starts as at level 2 and progresses from there, and since it exists in the world, there are more like it. So, level 2 is a good baseline for this creature. Below I present this new beast in Numenera format.

KREEL (LEVEL 2)

A kreel is a writhing mass, the size of a human head, of yellow-orange tentacles with purple tips. This mass envelops a minuscule body with a toothed orifice that serves as mouth. They slight shift coloration from deep red to bright yellow, perhaps a form of communication with other kreel. They move silently, gliding through the air in short bursts.

Kreel are rarely seen in nature. Scholars debate their exact nature but it is commonly agreed they are an animal / plant hybrid with a diet of small animals, complemented by some sort of photosynthetic process.

Motive: Breed and protection.

Environment: Found only in deep underground caves or the giant mushroom forests of Drej and Orrimare.

Health: 6

Damage Inflicted: 2 points

Movement: Short

Modifications: Moves silently as level 5.

Combat: Mostly found in colonies, kreel flee if alone unless cornered. They attack the exposed skin of the opponent, trying to wrap their tentacles around an arm, leg or even head. Then, the creatures releases a small, stinging poison, while biting with its mouth.

Interaction: With an animal level of intelligence and no means of communication, a kreel is very difficult to interact with. They are aggressive and territorial. More often than not, they attack whomever comes into contact with them. Even someone capable of handling animals will find it next to impossible to interact with one.

Use: The PCs wander into a colony of kreel while exploring. Someone hires the PCs to capture a kreel alive to breed as a pet or curiosity for some bored noble. The acid in their tentacles can be extracted and processed into a poison with alchemy (inflicts 1 additional point of damage).

Loot: None, although kreel flesh is a delicacy in The Steadfast and can earn the PCs good shin.

GM intrusion: The acid of a kreel is stronger than normal. The PC suffers wracking pain and muscle spasms loosing an action. A kreel is larger than normal. It has 8 points of health and inflicts 3 points of damage.

Final Note: In my campaign world, no one can tame kreel except the PC (who helped me create it) using an tattoo-like implant on his forehead that glows when he sends impulses to his kreel in a higher frequency range than the normal human ear can pick.

Creature Spotlight: Carrion Crawler

I have a special fondness for this creature. As it happens, back in the winter of 1988, when I bought the red D&D box, I ran the scenario from the DM book, the one that takes place in Castle Gygar. It turned out the carrion crawler was the first creature the group faced when approaching the castle. Invariably, the creature killed every group in combat since the odds of it striking at least once with one of its eight attacks and the victim failing a saving throw are quite high. I don't remember how I ran the combat or if I was doing it wrong, but the players kept rolling characters and kept bumping into that carrion crawler from hell and kept dying.

I even inflicted the same deaths on a second group I managed to recruit during the following summer vacations. It was the same story all over again: roll characters, approach the castle, fight creature, and die. Rinse and repeat. After a while, nobody ever tried to create fully realized characters. They first wanted to see if they could survive the damn creature before investing on their personas. Amusingly, nobody ever considered avoiding the creature and go straight to the castle. We were young and still learning the game.

As a DM, I was bad. In my defense, I was learning the game, too. I had no one to teach it to me not even other players. This was Portugal in the 80s when roleplaying games were a thing almost unheard of. I get the feeling that it was much the same situation for a bunch of people, 15 years earlier when trying to learn how to play D&D. My only contact in the weeks I was reading the game were a group of players playing demos of the game in a local store, and they were as bad as I was.

Ironically, when I returned to D&D a few of months back, I used the red box again, though I switch to the Moldvay version a session later. And the players also faced the carrion crawler in its hole but this time, they managed to kill it. Today, I am a much better DM as my players are better players, although these are not the same players I started playing with 24 years ago. The carrion crawler will always stick in my mind as an initiation ritual of sorts for my players. Hopefully, the next time I start a campaign, I'll use a different creature... or maybe not.

Creature Spotlight: Portuguese Man O' War

I came across this one while skimming the Monsters Manual: the Portuguese Man O' War. This made me all fuzzy inside because, frankly, I wasn't expecting it. In 800 years, almost 900 years, of history, Portugal left an indelible mark in the world's history. Portuguese influence is felt or seen in every corner of the world: from the introduction of advanced fire weapons in Japan to the many Portuguese-speaking cultures of Africa and South America. We developed the first metal astrolabe in Western Europe and Ferdinand Magellan initiated the first circumnavigation of Earth and his name was given to the Magellanic Clouds. At the height of Portuguese power on the seas, our navigators crossed every ocean on the planet and even faced terrible beasts with the help of the gods of Olympus in the immortal epic The Lusiads.

The Portuguese Man O' War is based on the creature of the same name, a jellyfish-like creature with poisonous tentacles. According to some sources, it takes its name from the floats that resemble the morion helmets of Portuguese soldiers of the 15th and 16th century. The appropriation of this creature by Gygax is interesting in that he never bothered to change the name to a more "fantasy-like" name.  This would be consistent with the fact that initially, Gygax adapted real elements to his home campaign of Greyhawk. In the early days, even the Greyhawk map was simply Earth with the numbers filed off. It would be interesting to speculate why the name was left unchanged because the name itself anchors the creature in a real world culture, perhaps even breaking a bit the immersion.  Nevertheless, on a pure historical point of view, this is a reminder that the Portuguese culture is deeply interwoven in multiple levels with other cultures, even if only in the most subtle and minute ways.

Are Kobolds... Dogs?

One odd thing I noticed, that was already discussed at length in several forums, is that kobolds are depicted as dog-like creatures of small stature in the B/X rules. This same description is carried to the Mentzer basic set. However, the Monster Manual published in 1977 is somewhat different. Here's the complete description:

"The hide of kobolds runs from very dark rusty brown to a rusty black. They have no hair. Their eyes are reddish and their small horns are tan to white."

This suggests a demonic imagery of sorts. I don't know if this was intentional or the result of some other editorial decision, but it further set apart the two game lines: D&D and AD&D, although, truth be told, the Monster Manual is completely compatible with the former rules.

Creature Spotlight: The Mind Flayer

Their first appearance in issue 1 of Strategic Review (1975) is little more than a physical description with accompanying powers, but the imagery is powerfully influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos. This is what makes this creature so appealing to me. Gygax revealed in an interview that he was influenced by the cover of Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath, which shows a Cthonian bursting from underground. I could never shake off the impression that Cthulhu played a big part in its creation, even if unconsciously. The mind flayer's head is suspiciously similar to that Lovecraftian creature.

Given my love for Lovecraft's stories, it's no small wonder, then, that this creature should resonate so powerfully with me. In the AD&D Monster Manual 1st ed., Gygax expands on the creatures and there's a hint of ecology but with lots of room for adaptation and improvement. I always envision mind flayers as a sort of pre-historic creature that dwells in impossibly ancient ruins and underground, whose empire existed long ago but is no more. They scheme and weave plots to corrupt the surface races much like Robert E. Howard's serpent people. It's almost as easy to make them an extra-dimensional race or people from the stars that were trapped in the fantasy world wherein the adventures live.

What is your favorite D&D / AD&D creature and why? It can be a description, its powers or even its name. How did you use them in your campaigns? Where they a major plot element or just another foe to be vanquished?