#moth beast

Ancardia's Greatest Monstrosities--The Lutin

Classification: Monstrosity (arthropod)

Habitat: Spotted invading homes, farms, and storage buildings throughout Ancardia’s urban zones. It is unknown exactly what its natural living conditions are.

            This bizarre and often visually disturbing monstrous animal species was thought to be originally created by a mage and artificer duo’s horribly mismanaged silk moth breeding experiment—though it may have indeed been a much more pesky species of moth they ended up altering with their technology and magic due to the lutin’s tremendously destructive habits. Lutins are a tough, wingless insectoid creature with anywhere between two and eight uncomfortably human-like legs. Resembling a dog-sized moth, the lutin is fast and ravenous, and well-equipped to survive in urban environments all over the world. It gains its reputation as a nuisance animal by its diet of any and all natural fiber—and it is not beyond a lutin to enter open windows and climb up washbasin drains in order to raid the interior of houses and other buildings for their wool, cotton, and linen wares. Lutin have also been known to sneak into bedrooms and stables in order to eat the hair off of the occupants’ heads in the night, which has led to a particularly nasty reputation for these beasts.

            Lutins are, for better or worse, a worldwide phenomenon since at least the 5th Age. If kept out of homes and warehouses, they mostly scavenge along gutters, streetsides, and rooftops for discarded bits of paper, twine, and rotten fabric and generally are clean, inoffensive, and do not harbor many, if any, parasites or pathogens. They are usually an average of 20 pounds and stand about .25 meters high at the shoulders, and live an average of 5 or 6 years if not culled by pest hunters and farmers or taken by various predators. While their mutant morphology puts off most humanoids from hunting them (even Dark Elves, who ordinarily consider insect meat to be quite standard), large jackals and coyotes in urban borders as well as several large birds of prey are unbothered and help control the burgeoning populations. In the Underground, various large spider species, Dire Solifuges, and large centipedes are all known to predate on lutins, often on purpose in the case of domesticated Silky Crown Centipedes or Drakotsadr.

            Lutins lay egg masses in sheltered areas in the middle of spring season (or in the winter, if Underground) which hatch within a few weeks into fully-formed, tiny versions of the adults though usually with more legs than their eventual adult form. Throughout the two-month period of growing, most lutins will leave one or more legs as they grow from a mouse-like size to adulthood. Once fully-grown, lutins must be at least a year of age in order to begin breeding themselves, though over half of young lutins do not live quite that long as they tend to cause obvious outbreaks which are strictly retaliated against.

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Adoptable Monster Sold Out