Spirril

Spirrils are animate plant-like creatures that entangle their prey with their coils.

Background

A spirril is an animate piece of coiling, fibrous plant matter that can grow 100 ft. or more in length. Green and red serrated leaves grow in great spike-like tufts along its body, as do occasional smaller globular white fruits.

Spirrils can survive in air or underwater with equal facility. In air-filled pockets (or on the surface), they can slither across or up any surface, somehow adhering even to completely smooth walls or ceilings. In water, spirrils undulate like sea snakes, homing in on prey. In any environment, spirrils can squeeze through tiny apertures no more than a few inches in diameter, which allows them to hide in almost any terrain.

Abilities and Traits

Motive:

Hungers for flesh

Environment:

Usually underwater, near water, or in a humid environment

Health:

30

Damage Inflicted:

7 points

Movement:

Short; long when swimming

Modifications:

Speed defense as level 5 due to size; perception tasks as level 4.

Combat:

Spirrils can grab prey and encase it in coils of tightening vine. To do so, a spirril makes up to two vine attacks as a single action (with a vine end or a loop or two within its body). Anyone struck by an attack takes 7 points of damage and must succeed on a second Speed defense roll or be enveloped by the spirril's mass of coils. A victim at the center of the tightening coil suffers 7 additional points of damage each round. He can attempt to struggle free with a successful Might-based task, or attack from inside with nothing larger than a light weapon.

A spirril's fruit contains different concentrations of spores. Some serve the plant for reproduction, and others are fore defense. A spirril can hurl a spore fruit up to a long distance away, where it explodes in an immediate radius and the acidic spores inflict 7 points of damage. Some spirrils can hurl spore fruit that inflicts intellect damage (ignores Armor).

Interaction:

Spirrils usually act like simple predators, but they can show a cunning in hunting prey that requires extensive planning and the ability to predict how prey might think. Explorers with the ability to speak with plants or fungi find that spirrils possess a form of intelligence, but even so, it's hard to convince them that humans and other animals are anything more than compost that hasn't stopped moving yet.

Use:

A seaside community wakes one morning to find a particularly thick tide of seaweed has washed shore. When villagers go to clean it up, the "seaweed" animates and drowns those trying to gather it. Now the animate vine lengths have besieged the town.

Miscellaneous

Spirrils are active most of the year, but they require twenty days every year in which they lie fallow and defenseless while undergoing a life-sustaining renewal process. During this period, they must hide away or risk becoming sustenance for other creatures.