Daniel Sell
patreon
Organistle
🕑 Added 2024-03-03 20:26:20 +0000 UTC[I've spent the last month doing Kickstarter stuff. This guy has been looking at me funny so long, so I dedicated the weekend to figuring him out. I'll have more time for writing in the period between kickstarter ending and post beginning, so there should be a fair few more soon. More than the others, this is rough but it's got all the points down I wanted in there. I'll catch it in the edit. Once we have a couple more of these I'll collect them in a nice PDF for convenience.]
Skill 4
Stamina 9
Initiative 1
Armour 3 (huge shell)
Damage as Small Beast (floppy cartilaginous claws)
Mien:
1. Blowing bubbles
2. Walking slowly
3. Adjusting their shell
4. Climbing over a building rather than walking around it
5. Blocking the way
6. Dying in the sunshine
If you find yourself loitering against a wall and are suddenly doused in dishwater from a near window to the signal of ‘go on my son!’, don’t take offence, it’s just their way by the seaside. There’s no hint of cruelty, they would drench a drunken local sailor as soon as you sleepy gadabouts, it’s just tradition. You see, every few years the coastal streets are plagued with organistles, driven from their waters by conjunctions of heat and tides that a few experts are paid very well to see coming. The creatures hobble up the beaches shoulder to shoulder, heads down and blowing bubbles, bent under shells the size of armchairs. They crawl up the beaches, up the rampways until they are packed solid or driven off them by angry fishermen trying to get by, and then they climb the walls like huge garden snails. The sun bakes them as they go. Slow moving to start and slower as they dry, before even a couple of miles they have to retreat into their shells to hold in the moisture. This could be in the middle of a street, halfway up a wall, on somebody’s roof, no matter where they retreat into their shells they stick on hard and don’t come off. The locals all gather what liquid they can and toss it on the organistles while they’re still blowing bubbles in the hopes they collapse somewhere further away and not their problem. Inevitably they all dry out, and never reach whatever destination they all agreed on when they left their waters, and the local council has to send out the dustmen with prybars and hammers to clear the roads of these huge barnacles. Ones which die in less obtrusive positions are often left there, eventually being incorporated into new buildings to give the seaside resorts of Troika their characteristic prickly charm.
## Violence
Organistles do not attack anything, as such. They might clamber and crawl over someone if they're in their way but violence doesn’t register in their single track minds. If attacked they will retreat into their shells and stay there blowing bubbles from underneath and through any wounds you might inflict upon them.
## Ecology
Organistles live in primordial Troikan waters. Though deep-water dwellers, naturalists are certain they are natives of this city and not the deeper Anti-Troika beneath, however their relationship with the Undines is murky. The path they take on their doomed pilgrimage is different every time, but they all that take it agree on the direction and route. Once they dry out and adhere to the pavement or in the side of a building there’s no non-destructive way of removing them. Enough Organistles stuck to a poorly maintained wall can easily bring it tumbling down.
## Lair
in their native habitat of the Troikan coast they collect in great reefs of their kind. They never move if they can help it and get all the nutrition they need through the tubes in their shells. Over years they may amass so many of the living and the dead of their kind that it becomes a shipping hazard. Whole lighthouses are built to warn ships of large collections of organistles.
## Special
There is a cottage industry of retired fishgutters crafting organistle shells into foot powered table organs. They can remove the shells from walls without breaking them or the surface they’re dug into with a special high pressure air pump and corks applied to the chimneys of the shell. The method is simple (and grisly) but knowing which tubes to plug or pump is an artform passed from parent to child along the coast.
Comments
Kirsten McEvoy
As someone who lives on a seaside resort, I love them!
