Monday, February 10, 2020

The Moss-Eyed Acephalus for Troika!

Back here, I introduced the moss-eyed acephalus, a kind of sfnal take on my favourite mythological creature. I figured that it would feel right at home among the million spheres of the hump-backed sky, so here we go:

Moss-Eyed Acephalus
Your brain - situated firmly in your chest cavity and not, like with many other species, in some bony upper protuberance - is being fed impressions of light and dark, movement and stillness, by the symbiotic lichen that grow around your nipples. Your double-tongued belly-mouth leads directly into the complexities of a digestive system that recognizes and transforms all kinds of substances. You're three-fingered hands are crafty, and your extended family will always help you out, until it won't. Everyone else, they think you're just not from here, and, while useful, never to be trusted. They're not quite wrong, at least about the first part, as proven by the garden chest you have to carry with you wherever you go to inhale the spore-laden scent of your ancestor's home from it. Even though you might have spent your life among humans, you still have trouble figuring out concepts like "male" and "female". Procreation, to your kind is a festive social act, and the whole neighbourhood is invited when a family feels that it is time to sire a litter.

Alchemists make you of you as a cheap and universal analyzer, and dukes, kings and even emperors value you as a re-usable food taster. They just tend to forget that what you can neutralize, you can also create.



Possessions:
A bag of dried eye-lichen spores (to re-seed your eyes, should they get hurt)
Garden Chest, about the size of a shoe-box, containing rich, smelly earth and a thicket of mosses and fungi.
Bag of tools
Knife
1d6 empty vials
Short trousers (too tight)
Obviously, no shirt


Advanced Skills:
4 Poison
2 Healing
2 Craftsmanship
2 Language -  Acephalic
1 Knife Fighting
1 Sneak


You are not immune to poison, but when you ingest some, you can make a roll of your Poison skill to transform it into something harmless. If the roll fails, the poison takes effect. You can also use your Poison skill in adventure time (not just in downtime) to create a poison directly from your digestive system. However, that will cost you 1d6 Stamina on a success and 2d6 on a failure (the latter meaning that you created something harmful to yourself).

You have to inhale the spore-laden air from your garden chest several times a day and consume a few leafs and tubers from it to nurish you; failing to do that, you lose 1 point of Stamina that can't be regained until you get to breathe a bit of proper garden-chest air and eat a morsel of proper Acephali food.
You are totally color-blind and perceive everything in shades of light and dark.

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