Mu Spore (Basic Lore)
Mu Spore (Legend; CR 21) |
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Neutral - Colossal - Plant | |
This creature possesses the Legend role, and therefore counts as 5 monsters for purposes of encounter size, XP award, and treasure.Mu Spores are strange vegetal behemoths, eerie and terrible, known as much for their horrible rampages as they are for their eldritch wisdom. Mu Spores are truly huge, the size of a large house, at least, a vaguely spherical bulk of knotted roots, trunks, seething plasms of greens and yellows, all covered with knots, lumps, scars, eyes, and tentacles. So, so, many tentacles.
Mu spores have a 'bottom side' which is smoother and has fewer tentacles, but which has the property of producing a dim glow over a vast distance, many miles at the least. Even worse, the vile things float in the air as easily as they roll around on the ground, and possess a horrible mobility for a thing so large and awful. If you can persuade one to talk, they commonly settle on this glowing lower surface, ending the light, and will arrange their protuberances and tentacles into a surprisingly good facsimile of a humanoid face to gossip and bargain. The Green favors these awful things, but how they arose, or why, is a mystery. Many sages and magicians speculate that Mu Spores are the byproduct of horrendous magical experimentation, like the owlbears. If that is the case, the attention of the Green has grown these things beyond all reckoning. Mu Spores tend to be found in two ways. Most commonly, the mightiest of adventurers, far, far beneath the Earth, deep in the lowest pits of the Unterwelt, will come across a vast cavern lit by the light of one or several pale moons, casting a lambent glow over a scene of eerie beauty. Of course, so far below the nourishing vault of the heavens, that is no moon, but a vast Mu Spore, drifting in the air, enveloped in a torpor. In this state, it is said to be possible to approach the behemoth, and with care and gifts, sometimes persuade them to part with knowledge, or some of their valuable fruiting bodies, or tentacles, or cast-off eyes. Usually, however, waking a Mu Spore will prompt it to a terrible rage, and the monster will attack with power unrelenting. Their tentacles crush and throw, they emit awful hails of digging spores, they wounds they inflict often grow awful...infestations, and worst of all, their terrible Glow saps and erodes all things not plant. A raging Mu Spore is dangerous, indeed. This leads to the second way Mu Spores can be encountered, namely, one that is awake, enraged, and rampaging. Such rampages are mind-boggling in their power, and a rampaging spore that reaches the surface and nears civilization is a deadly threat, one that must be stopped by any means required. All true heroes, if they are mighty enough, will drop whatever they are doing to help stop a Mu Spore. |