Saturday, April 7, 2018

Three Beasts of the Public Domain

This was actually PKD's first published story.

Wub
HD: 4
Appearance: A flabby, blobby grey thing with big, sad eyes. Reminiscent of waterbear, mole rat, pig.
Wants: Food, lots of it. Discussions of art and philosophy. An easy and peaceful life of pleasure.
Armor: None
Move: Minimal
Morale: 12
Damage: 0
Number Appearing: 1

A single wub contains enough meat for 150 rations. It is delicious and its meat lasts twice as long as normal rations before spoiling. There are several catches attached to this:
  1. The wub is both sapient and psychic.
  2. The wub will latch on to one or more of its more benevolent captors and strike up conversations of its favored topics, usually philosophy, art, and comparative mythology.
  3. The wub will beg for its life in a piteous and fatalist-melancholic manner to anyone intending to eat it.
  4. The wub is not actually the creature seen, but the psychic presence inhabiting it.
  5. The killer of the wub will become the new host for the wub, and will in a short amount of time devote itself to the lazy life of indolence that wubs favor.
  6. Currently unproven: the wub wants to be eaten for this very purpose.
Resisting wub influence requires a daily WIS save. It may potentially be cast out through exorcism or a Remove Curse spell.


W.W. Denslow

Kalidah
HD:5
Appearance: A tiger's head on a bear's body.
Wants: To hunt, to protect its territory, to scare the shit out of people
Armor: As chain (thick fur and insulating fat)
Move: Normal
Morale: 8
Damage: 1d10 claw or bite
Number Appearing: 1-2

Most terrible and terrifying hunters along the Yellow Brick Road. Being the biggest and the scariest, they are remarkably unaccustomed to anyone standing up to them, and so their wills might fail them if their target stands up to them.

Wayne Douglas Barlowe

Swine-Thing
HD: 2
Appearance: Pale and hairless pig-faced humanoid.
Wants: To eat human flesh, to gain entry into the House
Armor: None
Move: Normal x1.5
Morale: 6
Damage: 1d4 claw
Number Appearing: 3-18


The swine-things emerge from beneath the earth and dusk and flee at dawn. While neither particularly intelligent nor possessing of tools, they use their own numbers and the isolation of their victims as their effective methods of attack. In one account of their hunts, it is implied that they are extensions of a greater being from beyond the universe: appendages of some cosmic god. This is unproven.

1 comment:

  1. Stories are "Beyond Lies the Wub" by Philip K Dick, "The Wizard of Oz" by Frank Baum, and "House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgeson.

    This might be a repeated column in the future as I continue my Librivox delves.

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