Category: The Dungeon World Tavern: New Monsters

Shrieking Barker :

(See my undead foliage Front for setting details)

Townsfolk (and the occasional unaware adventurer) who foolishly wander into the Forest Blight take Barkers for Ents at first.  Smallish Ents, only about three spans tall, well into their Fall or Winter season.  No Ent makes the noise a Barker does.

They lack throats, or lungs, or vocal cords.  When they move, and a shambling awkward gait is their eternal lot, the shards of bark from which they’re made rub, and crack, and shriek the way ice does just before giving way. 

Their cores have been removed, leaving only the (undead) sheath of (un)living bark that used to be a young tree.  They’ll ignore non-plant persons in favor of traveling onwards to find new places to infect.

Shrieking Barker : 8 hp, 2 armor, 1d6+2 damage, solo or clustered-but-independent

Instincts : Spread contamination, Defend itself

Special Abilities:

A ‘slain’ Barker is no longer a physical, clobbering threat to non-plant life, but its remains continue to display all the characteristics of contaminated plant unlife.

Any hit to (or from) a Barker exposes everything ‘reach’ or closer to the effects of the contamination.

Piercing weapons travel straight through the target, dealing only one point of damage.  They are highly vulnerable to flame.

As a Front component, the Barkers cross roads, follow pollen, and will attempt to avoid fire, granting the Blight more mobility than it would have without them.  There aren’t many of them, but if ignored they’ll trump the ‘mankind beats the Blight with fire and ditches’ stage of the Grim Portents and allow the Blight to take the whole continent.

There’s a four-fold reason for a GM to incorporate these into a game featuring the Blight.  Bonus points to anyone who wants to guess them.

The Faller (8 HP, 2d6 damage [when possessing], invincible, immortal, possessing)

Instincts : To ruin, To murder, To rule

Fallers have no corporeal body.  When they fall from the sky, most are destroyed or cursed to a mundane existence within an inanimate object.  Some are able to steer their essence into a living creature, though, and gain agency by denying their host theirs. 

A party will most likely encounter a Faller in the form of a wild animal who has become legend within a community for its viciousness, cunning, and wily evasion.  (Source material to consider : Ghost in the Darkness, any werewolf story that focuses on the villagers)  Occasionally a rash of murders in a city might be attributable to a Faller.   These are particularly dangerous times, as finding and serving justice to the murderer will only delay the Faller until he finds a new host.  Usually the guard or dangerous would-be-victim who would stop them, sometimes a gravedigger or priest who tends to the body.

When the body a Faller resides in dies, the Faller may transfer itself into any creature or person who touches the corpse.  There is no visible element to the transfer, although the new host of all but the most experienced Fallers usually loses any accent or vocal affectations and develops a new gait.

Custom moves :

Possessed:

When you have a Faller inside you and make camp or rest, roll + CHA. 

On a 10+ you drive the thing back and it holds no sway over you for now.  Take + 1 forward to your next test against the Faller.

On a 7-9, the Faller (through the GM) will tell you to do something horrible sometime in the next day or so.  If you do it, take XP.

On a miss, at some point in the next day or so you will blank out and come to having just done something atrocious.  Take XP.