Gossamer

Gossamers are the void's answer to jellyfish, gliding in shoals among asteroid belts and the drifting wreckage of space sargassos, and only now and then into open space. Their bodies ripple with color that signals mood. A calm shoal glows in cool greens, blues and purples flecked with bright yellow and orange; when threatened, waves of red and amber spread outward from the point of contact, leading some sages to suspect a shared group mind.

Standard gossamers have stinging tentacles that ooze a sickening paralytic venom, resisted with a save vs. poison. They go after prey smaller than themselves only, and a shoal veers away from anything bigger than 1 foot. Larger beings are stung only by accident, as when a shoal bumps a ship or a careless sailor handles a dead one lying on deck.

The gossamer noble is really a colony of specialized organisms, 10d10 feet across, with huge sail-like sacs that drive it at starship speeds. Clouds and bright, lightning-like flashes swirl inside its translucent, pearl-like bulk. Beneath it trail hundreds of spiked tentacles, 50 to 500 feet long, trail beneath it, and it uses 1d20 of them in a fight. Each spike deals 1d2 damage to bare flesh, forces a save vs. paralyzation at -4, and its digestive enzymes add 1d6 damage per round. Nobles are solitary, highly dangerous hunters of void creatures, including small starships.

Ordinary gossamers scavenge leftovers, clearing away organic debris. A gossamer's body is mostly empty space held together only by weightlessness; in a gravity plane it collapses and dies, and air liquefies it. A dead one slumps within 1d3 minutes into a reeking, gooey pool of the stinging enzymes, which stays dangerous until it evaporates after one turn. Nobles are the natural prey and enemies of the gammaroids.