My second post on Monstrous, this time it's the Bugs.
As per last time I am going to use one of the guilds of Ravnica for inspiration, the text in italics is from the book and text in bold is my own writing.
Oh yeah for some reason I can't add images, hopefully some time in the future I can add the images I want. Edit I got images to work by using a different computer!
And one last thing, yes I did change the background, got bored of the old one.
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| Insectile Aberration by: Nils Hamm |
Bug - Dimir - Little Ears
The Great Work
The Little Ears toils endlessly on the Great Work, an ultimately pointless project that will never truly be complete.
Though Little Ears find people as disgusting and irrational as people find them, they do see a certain value in non-Little Ear folk. The Little Ears build and maintain the Molted Markets to trade with mortal folk for the materials they believe will help in the completion of the Great Work.
The Little Ear's grand and absurd goal is the construction of all the information on Daurdec Volbamzu, a task that may be aided by the non-Little Ear folk's information on all people, especially Daurdec Volbamzu (though they almost never ask directly for him).
Loathed
Common folk despise the Little Ear, finding its form disgusting and its methods of work unsavory. The Little Ear has 4 large legs and too many smaller ones, a segmented body, and expressionless, alien eyes. In addition, the Little Ear has a disturbingly human mouth, a centipede like tail, and a massive pincer on their tail.
When common folk come into close contact with the Little Ear and every hour they spend in close contact thereafter, they must choose 1 of the following symptoms that they have not chosen before:
- Nausea. They can't eat or drink for a day. They are constantly at risk of vomiting.
- Aversion. They can't touch the Little Ear or anything made by the Little Ear.
- Unsteadiness. They can't properly focus and they lose some eye-hand coordination.
- Antipathy. Forevermore, whenever they are in close contact with a Little Ear, they experience nausea, aversion, and unsteadiness.
As long as they haven't chosen antipathy, the symptoms and the options reset after they have spent a full day away from the Little Ear.
Molted Market
The Little Ear helps maintain a Market where their kind trade their masterful wares for goods and services from non-Little Ear folk that might be useful in the completion of the Great Work.
The Market specializes in information on anyone you can think of, unmatched in level of disturbing detail and knowledge of intimate secrets.
The twisted tunnels and hives of the Little Ears reflect the mazelike structure of their tedious bureaucracy. To enter the Molted Market, the heroes must find the hidden entrance right underneath their own house navigate through seemingly endless corridors, notes scrawled on the walls, and get administrative approval from the one that wears a necklace of preserved humanoid eyeballs.
Although some weirdos seek out goods made by Little Ear, an average person who discovers that an item given to them by the heroes was made by a Little Ear will destroy the item and seek heavy compensation. If they don't get it, they will spread the word that the heroes deal with Little Ears.
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| By Artistnamedniz |
The name is a euphemism, of course, people hate and are terrified of the Little Ears that lurk beneath their floors and listen to every word they say. Sometimes they whisper to children, convince them to ask benign questions of their parents. If you can find one of their holes that they have dug into your home and make it deep within the depths of their hive and act in the right way you can manage to acquire any detail on anyone, no matter how private. Nobody can tell you this but don't mention Daurdec Volbamzu to them, then you won't be seen again.
But why do they do it? Why do they collect information on the lives of entire kingdoms? Nobody knows, but if someone were to go to the deepest parts of their hives where the notes pile up and threaten to crush you they would find the truth. Little Ears are trying to learn as much as they can about Daurdec Volbamzu, who by all appearances is a normal person but he has a secret: he is immortal and has lived many lifetimes at this point. Daurdec has no idea the Little Ears want to learn about him. Little Ears are paranoid and so to throw off suspicion they learn as much as they can about everyone, even those several kingdoms away.
Nobody knows why they have human mouths or how they learned or tongue so fluently or how to mimic voices so well, but there will always be rumors, here are d6 of them
1 They were people once, they lost their old flesh now only bone remains, if you killed one you would find a full human skeleton
2 They stole them, one at a time, digging under old graveyards so that we don't even notice the missing bodies
3 They are slowly evolving into people, why else would they try and learn so much about us?
4 The Devil made them to torment us, human mouths to spout temptation and blaspheme
5 Wizards, who else would make that
6 This is just what happens when bugs get too clever for their own good
Out of all of the monsters in the book I find the Bugs to be the weirdest, I just don't get them. They seem to be an attempt to make your basic giant spider type enemies more interesting but it goes in a weird direction with the whole bureaucracy and The Great Work, it also feels like it has a lot more concepts thrown into it than a lot of the other entries making it feel a bit bloated and scattered. I still think it is quite well written and the monster it made this time is quite unique.
