Grunters
No. Enc.: 3d4 (3d4x10)
Alignment: Whatever gets them paid
Movement: 90' (30')
Armor Class: 4
Hit Dice: 3*
Attacks: 1 (trample or weapon)
Damage: 1d6 or by weapon
Save: F3+
Morale: 11 while directly supervised, otherwise 6
Grunters are heavily-built, low to the ground and prefer to go around as heavily armored as possible. They invest most of their ill-gotten loot in their armor, upgrading it, customizing it, decorating it. Their sense of style is atrocious, stunted and fairly sophomoric, usually tended towards the usual spiky-bits, dangly-skulls, and crude tassels made from the skins of their victims.
Matriarchal creatures, Grunters serve their War Sows with fanatical devotion. They also eat the young of their rivals, their friends, even their own, as some sort of weird cannibalistic urge few of them can resist.
Any disease they can survive for more than three days becomes unable to affect them any longer, but they persist in transmitting it as a plague vector for the next 1d100 days.
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Neat image and a great write-up. Porcinomorphs indeed.
ReplyDeleteHi John, glad you liked the image. That was a fun experiment--I've been trying out a few new techniques and such as part of the Art Every Day thing. The Grunters are what you get when you combine Hodgsonian Pig Things (from House on the Borderlands) with a few survivors from Moreau's Island Non-Paradise and then let them wander loose and unattended in a particularly hostile environment...the parasites these folks carry around are enough to wipe out whole villages in and of themselves...and there are those who study such matters, like Gnosiomandus, who suspect that these creatures escaped from facilities where their brains and organs were harvested by machines, possibly for use in exotic weapons systems...
DeleteI says a lot in a small space, and offers much more, especially with the glimpse of a society and that transmission. The reply to John also adds a whole well of intrigue. Neat indeed.
ReplyDeleteI like to make it worthwhile to read the comments, so there tends to be a lot of stuff that won't get revealed about a particular monster or alien or whatever if no one asks or pokes around a bit. I also like to keep things open so that other people can take the core concept and run with it, like how Needles has been bouncing the Mucoids back and forth, taking things from Mr. Well's seed-kernel of an idea and building them out into something fun and interesting.
DeleteThe Grunters have quite a twisted pedigree. A fact that I intend to explore in more detail as I wrap-up work on a few more pieces that all fit together, including my take on the Swine-thing(s)...
I agree with Porky that in your reply to my comment you really dropped some serious Election Day science. I suspected that Hodgson was an influence. It is interesting how there is a whole subterranean Dalek Slave pig-man thing going on these days also with Doctor Who. I thought the depression era Manhattan episodes were quite good. This write up is better.
ReplyDeleteHodgson is a big influence on several of our projects, his Nightland and the Carnacki stories are incredible. Flawed, yes, but quite worth reading.
DeleteWe don't have cable-tv, so no Doctor Who for us...unless these episodes are available on DVD at the library. We still need to watch the Eccleston era episodes...so we're a bit behind. And we skipped most of what followed Davidson's tenure. Guess we should do a few marathons...with cold weather coming in that might not be so bad an idea...
I thought that Daleks evolved/degenerated from Kaleds and/or Thals...or did that get retconned? don't they also have Dalek-troopers of some sort? People cyborgized to serve as conscripted infantry on the Dalek's behalf?
Daleks with Piggy-People servitors sounds like a lot of fun. Pig-folk are everywhere. The Gamorrean guards have just entered into the service of Disney...so who knows where snoutly-types will show up next?
IIRC, at the time the Empire State Building was being completed, the Daleks had captured and converted a number of men in a Manhattan Hooverville to become their porcinomorph servitors. There were a couple of hybridization stratagems in that episode. The even-more recent episode "Asylum of the Daleks" also revealed that the Daleks sometimes convert humans to Dalek form.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I had not considered any sort of connection to the Daleks, but maybe there is something to explore here...
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