#deep stalker

Beastiary Tarot Cards from Dragon Age: The Veilguard

The Deep Roads

My contribution to the Dragon Age Annual charity project!  It was awesome to be a part of such a neat project with so many great artists and authors.

Linktr.ee

“Deep Stalker Hunter” © Kenzer and Co., by Anthony Carpenter

[The deep stalker family first appeared in Dangerous Denizens before being converted from D&D 3.5 to Hackmaster 5e in Hacklopedia of Beasts 2. Eusocial insect monsters, with a queen and workers, are common enough, but a eusocial gill man? That’s new to me. Both of the “official” versions have three stat blocks, one each for drones, hunters and queens. But the drones are just smaller, weaker versions of the hunters, which Pathfinder handles with templates. And previously the queen might as well not have had a stat block, having no attacks or even movement ability. So I gave the queen some means to defend herself. Her signature abilities, “attack order” and “defense order”, borrow their names from the Pokemon Vespiquen.]

Deep Stalker Hunter CR 3 LN Monstrous Humanoid This creature resembles a scaly, dog-faced humanoid, taller than a man but hunched over. Its arms are longer than its legs, and all of its appendages end in clawed, webbed digits.

Deep Stalker Queen CR 7 LN Monstrous Humanoid This bloated creature is roughly humanoid, but its clawed, finned arms and legs are dwarfed by its massive abdomen. Its head is doglike and filled with sharp teeth.

Deep stalkers are aquatic creatures with a eusocial organization. Deep stalkers come in three varieties. Males, called drones, are man-sized and fertile, acting to defend the queen and fertilize her eggs. Treat a deep stalker drone as a deep stalker hunter with the degenerate simple template. Deep stalker hunters are sterile females and the form most commonly seen by landlubbers. They hunt for whales to feed the colony, and in their pursuit may come to the surface and even attack ships. The fertile female form, the queen, is the least common—each hive has only a single adult queen, who spends her life laying eggs. Young queens swim to find a new home in swarms, escorted by a subset of her siblings that form the core of her new hive.

Deep stalkers of all kind have eyes sensitive to very low amounts of light and electrosensory organs on the back of their heads. Although the senses of deep stalkers are keen, they are uncomfortable in bright light and electrical attacks are especially damaging to them. Deep stalker hunters tackle prey larger than themselves, working in packs to latch onto whales and chew holes in their flesh. Once the animal is slain, the hunters drag it back to their hive, gorging themselves on the fat and leaving the muscles for the drones and queen to eat and using the bones as construction materials. Ships are also likely targets—deep stalkers have learned that a ship doesn’t fight back as the deep stalkers chew holes in it, and the sailors within make good prey for their drones.

Deep stalker queens are slow, paddling around with their stunted limbs. They are completely incapable of moving on land and are rarely if ever found on the surface. Deep stalker queens can defend themselves with their massive, predatory jaws, but prefer to use their drones and hunters to fight for them. All deep stalkers within the hive fight far more fiercely in the vicinity of their queen, and will gladly sacrifice their life for her. A deep stalker queen will usually flee if injured, hoping to be able to start a new colony elsewhere.

A deep stalker hive is typically found on the bottom of an abyssal plain. Their hives are often the only structure for miles around, as they build barricades and overhangs out of whale bones, sodden timber and the occasional rock. Because of this increased structure, these hives often attract detritivores and scavengers, and these act as supplemental prey for the deep stalkers during lean times.

Individual deep stalker drones and hunters have short lifespans, rarely living past ten years. Queens can be ancient, surviving for more than a century surrounded by multiple generations of their offspring.