Void Kraken

Void krakens pass through three stages: drifting spores, a barnacle-like juvenile, and the adult, a gigantic squid-shaped terror of the shipping lanes that can be longer than most ships. One thick central tentacle juts from the front of its tubular body, ringed at the base by smaller ones.

Adults are vicious, assaulting anything that drifts too near. The central tentacle crushes objects even larger than huge, for 3-30 damage to creatures or 1-3 hull points to vessels; on an attack roll of 18 or more it has wrapped around the target and crushes automatically each later round. Even without crushing, it deals up to 3-18 in a fight.

Twelve thin, snakelike sentry tentacles guard the main shaft. Their tips carry a venom: anyone struck saves vs. poison or is paralyzed for 3-30 rounds. All tentacles may attack at once, though no more than two engage a man-sized foe.

Typically it seizes a vessel and grinds it apart with the great limb as the sentries deal with crew and defenders. Only when every attacker is paralyzed or dead does it feed, crushing the helpless survivors over several days before sleeping for months and moving on.

Adults are solitary and attack each other like any other prey. They are immune to their own and their young's venom and will wreck and devour a ship carrying their own offspring without hesitation.

The kraken begins as harmless spores, killable by a spell as simple as cure disease, drifting through the void like dandelion seeds. A starship can sail through a spore cloud without its crew noticing; only when spores root in the hull do they become visible.

Spores take root in any solid surface, from asteroids to hulls to large living creatures. The base widens and bores in while the outside hardens into a barnacle-like shell, with the central tentacle coiled in a hole at its peak. Disturbed, it lashes out at random; dormant, it stays tucked inside. These immature krakens need no air and actually prefer stale envelopes to fresh, plant-renewed ones, but they need a surface to feed on, and can also absorb nutrients from corpses the colony kills.

Once they have leached roughly 2 hull points' worth from their host, roughly two months, they detach and float off, the base closing and sentry tentacles sprouting. Living on stored energy, each grows to adult size and goes hunting, and groups of young often devour one another until only one survives. Adults grow throughout life, feeding on ships almost by accident, since they really hunt void whales, radiant dragons and similar giants.

Rumors in several crystal shells describe a minor race of human savages who tame void krakens with alchemical mixtures. They trade the mixtures to void merchants for life-draining starship helms, which they hook up to the fairly mindless beasts, and these helm-driven krakens have suddenly made them a serious menace to shipping, often against other pirates.