"By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water."
Valg-Sindil
No. Enc.: 1d6 (6d12)
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 40' (120') [levitation]
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 1d4 hit points, take half damage from fire.
Attacks: 1 (tail-sting) [limit 3 attacks per day]
Damage: 1d2+Poison (1d4 damage, Save or suffer 50% reduction to Movement and lose all DEX benefits for 1d4 days: Save only applies to Move/DEX effects NOT damage.)
Save: F4
Morale: 11 (nearly fearless)
Special: Most encounters (75%) with the Valg-Sindil are with slime-poisoned water-sources.
No. Enc.: 1d6 (6d12)
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 40' (120') [levitation]
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 1d4 hit points, take half damage from fire.
Attacks: 1 (tail-sting) [limit 3 attacks per day]
Damage: 1d2+Poison (1d4 damage, Save or suffer 50% reduction to Movement and lose all DEX benefits for 1d4 days: Save only applies to Move/DEX effects NOT damage.)
Save: F4
Morale: 11 (nearly fearless)
Special: Most encounters (75%) with the Valg-Sindil are with slime-poisoned water-sources.
These blind, wriggling things with vestigial flippers, writhing palps and venomous spines inhabit damp, dark places and especially love infesting wells and cisterns where they secrete their eggs and introduce their noxious, toxic slime into the water. The slime is non-flammable, but often contaminates water sources, allowing these pests to affect scores of people who've never seen or encountered them.
The toxic slime of the Valg-Sindil persists for 2d4 days after being excreted into a water supply.
A simple Neutralize Poison spell will eliminate the slime's toxicity in the case of a water-source, but will not get rid of the slime itself, which will act to attract more of the nasty little creatures with its scent unless someone actually goes down there and physically scoops up the stuff and disposes of it appropriately, usually by boiling it down into an inert sludge or selling it off to various distillers or alchemists who use the stuff for the basis of various experiments or processes of no real commercial value. Or so they claim...
Foragers and Scavenger-crews are constantly warned about minor nuisances such as the Valg-Sindil since there doesn't need to be a direct confrontation for the vile pests to play havoc with a group of green recruits or for one mistake to cost a veteran dearly. No one wants to be dealing with toxic slime when their canteens are empty.
Some members of the Sewer Militia started their careers scraping Valg-slime from cistern walls or shoveling the gunk out of wells after the adults drove off the nasty things...usually.
Valg-eggs can be preserved in vinegar and are something of a delicacy in the Winter months, despite the very minor after-effects (50% reduction to Move, No DEX Benefits, for 1d4 hours).
Various tribes (Abhuman and otherwise) have been known to use the slime in trapping prey or against enemies by coating their darts, javelins or arrows in the stuff.
Some members of the Sewer Militia started their careers scraping Valg-slime from cistern walls or shoveling the gunk out of wells after the adults drove off the nasty things...usually.
Valg-eggs can be preserved in vinegar and are something of a delicacy in the Winter months, despite the very minor after-effects (50% reduction to Move, No DEX Benefits, for 1d4 hours).
Various tribes (Abhuman and otherwise) have been known to use the slime in trapping prey or against enemies by coating their darts, javelins or arrows in the stuff.
I like these pests. An easy way to poison the well of someone you don't like much, I suppose...
ReplyDeleteThey're icksome pests alright. People may indeed get the idea to introduce a few specimens into a frenemies' water-supply...but that would necessitate some poor kid going down into an already infested well-shaft or cistern and mucking about with a shovel in the damp, damp confined space in order to gather-up a few eggs...or they might attempt to capture some of the free-flying creatures...but that would be more difficult, demanding and dangerous. Since there are no instruction books for collecting Valg-Sindril yet, there might be a market for such a publication, let alone any techniques that have been field-tested and that work.
DeleteOtherwise, it usually serves well enough to just buy a green ingot from a suitably disreputable vendor of such novelty commodities and let the thing dissolve into a patch of Valg-Slime wherever it may fall, totally by accident, of course.
Oh...and any young recruit who in the course of their preliminary scrubbing duties fails to surrender any Valg-eggs they discover in the course of their training for the Sewer Militia are subject to some rather harsh penalties. No one knows what the Sewer Militia do with such things, but not turning them over to one's immediate supervisors can demolish a career and prove very painful if not fatal. The Senior Instructors for the Sewer Militia are not prone to forgiveness. Pranksters rarely make it out of training. those that do survive often get transferred (exchanged) to other operations, ministries or departments, or they get sent on suitably amusing missions with very, very low expectation of survivability...
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