Cilops

Cilops resemble giant centipedes more than 15 feet long, with flat, segmented bodies sheathed in hard plates and hooked legs that carry them up walls and across nearly any surface. The oval head carries one big compound eye above a triple set of pincer jaws, flanked by two grasping antennae 3 to 5 feet long. Their coloring blends with their home ground: those of the salt flats run from a chalky bluish white to steely gray, while badlands cilops range from rusty orange to dark brown.

A cilops never seems to sleep and will follow prey for weeks without a pause. It normally tracks by scent, treat this as tracking proficiency at +2. Its object reading lets it touch an item and link it to a particular person, and if the scent trail fades it falls back on an ability like sensitivity to psychic impressions, picking up the psychic traces its quarry left behind. Danger sense usually keeps it from being surprised or ambushed.

In a fight it lashes with its antennae; a target struck must save vs. paralysis or be stunned for 1 turn by the jolt to the nervous system. Its bite, listed as one attack, is really three snaps of its jaw pairs at a single target. If the first pair connects, the other two hit automatically for 3d6 total. If the first misses, the second pair may try, and on a hit the third follows automatically for 2d6 total. If both miss, the last pair gets one try for 1d6. It keeps attacking one foe until that foe is out of the fight before turning to anyone else.

Clairsentience: danger sense as a devotion, with object reading and sensitivity to psychic impressions as sciences. Telepathy: no sciences, and the devotions mind blank and life detection. Life detection is a special ability that costs nothing to use.

Cilops have no lairs or regular nests and wander constantly in search of food, sometimes in small packs with no obvious leader. Templars of every city-state prize them as trackers. They have never been bred in captivity, so they must be caught wild, and templars prefer to hunt them on the salt flats, where they are easier to see. A captured cilops grows used to its handler and can be set on a person's trail given fresh tracks or something the target has handled. Handlers have even set them on the trail of other cilops.

The salt flats of the desert world are their native ground, and their astonishing tracking evolved to find food in that barren place. Their coloring helps them hide from predators, but flying hunters are a special threat, and their poor depth perception makes them depend on life detection and danger sense for warning.

Once on a trail, a cilops sticks to it even when easier or tastier prey crosses its path, fixing on one target for up to a week before choosing a new one. It eats nearly anything that moves, preferring live prey, and needs one dwarf-sized meal a week.