Silt Spawn

Nobody looking at a silt spawn would guess what it becomes. The young of the great tentacled silt horror are flat and streamlined rather than bulbous, with stubby tentacles and a toothy mouth. Their colors are a random jumble at birth; the hue that marks an adult's breed settles in only with maturity. A spawn keeps this sleek shape until it reaches about 10 feet in length, then begins swelling into a true horror.

A clutch sizes up a target's strength, then mobs one victim, hoping to pull it under where all can feed. Their tentacles are still too weak to grapple, so the bite is their only weapon.

They glide through silt almost silently, giving opponents a -2 penalty on surprise rolls, and if a victim is surprised every spawn gets a free attack on it in the first round.

Their signature move is the drag. When more than two spawn bite the same character in one round, the victim must pass a Strength check or be hauled down 1 foot per spawn that bit; three bites mean three feet. Anyone fighting from a reef, ledge or shoal can be pulled right off it to a dusty, suffocating end.

Draxia weed, which grows on the silt sea islands, is the traveler's defense. Its juice smeared on the skin keeps every spawn at least 10 feet away for two hours. Adult horrors merely find the smell irritating and attack anyway; in fact there is a 60% chance an adult ignores all other targets to go after whoever reeks of it.

Spawn shelter in sunken ruins and rocky pockets under the silt where big predators cannot follow, rising quietly to ambush when prey passes overhead. Adults are loners, but spawn form clutches of 2-12 that share the same endless hunger and actually cooperate. The ambush habits learned there serve them later, when long tentacles take the place of clutchmates.

A pregnant horror lingers by buried ruins and reefs to give birth, and its newborns bolt for cover at once, because the parent will eat its own young as eagerly as anything else. Once the survivors are hidden, the adult drifts off toward deeper silt. Occasionally two or more horrors give birth in one place at about the same time, and their broods seek each other out to form a single huge clutch. That bond fades as they grow more independent.

When a spawn outgrows the shallows it heads into the deep silt as an adult. Horrors of different colors do hunt each other, but silt priests say clutchmates never do, even across breeds, perhaps because of some scent from their nursery.

Unlike their parents, spawn taste good. Island giants avoid adult horrors unless starving yet hunt spawn as a delicacy, which may be why the young are so much faster; flexing their bodies and paddling with short tentacles, they swim through silt like eels. After scooping out the meat, giants turn the hide into waterproof sacks and water bags.