Erdland

The erdland is the heavyweight relative of the scale-runner: a featherless, flightless bird armored in red-to-gray scales, standing close to 15 feet tall and weighing as much as 2,000 pounds. Its legs are thick columns ending in four-clawed feet. Apart from sheer size and a lack of speed it looks almost exactly like its smaller kin, and handlers value it for stamina rather than pace, using it as a mount and a caravan puller on the desert trade roads.

Erdlands seldom start fights, but they defend themselves capably, pecking twice a round with a heavy, wedge-shaped beak for 1d8 each. Their scaly backs and flanks give AC 7, while the softer belly is only AC 9.

Normally an erdland has no psionics at all. After eating esperweed, a plant it loves, it gains telepathic powers: the science domination plus contact, psionic crush, mind blank, life detection and conceal thoughts as devotions, but only for a single turn. Just 5% of erdlands met in the wild are under this effect.

Herds of 10 to 30, smaller than scale-runner flocks, live among the scrubby lowlands of the city-state heartlands, sheltering under the bigger bushes and trees where the plains meet the foothills of a nearby mountain range. They eat whatever is easiest: mostly plants, carrion when they find it, and occasionally prey they hunt down with surprising skill.

A laying erdland digs three or four egg wells within a circle about 30 feet across and buries eggs up to 3 feet wide in them; the sun bakes the muddy walls hot and damp, incubating the clutch. Anything that approaches a well, human or beast, is attacked furiously.

Erdlands offer little in the way of weapon materials or spell components. Their value is meat: a typical bird yields some 700 pounds, and savage halfling tribes of the jungles hunt them for it. An egg is less tasty than a scale-runner's but can feed three adult humans or demihumans.