#ushemoi

"Star Spawn Mangler” © Wizards of the Coast, by Christopher Burdett. Accessed at the artist’s blog here

[Hey! New art! Getting Christopher Burdett to illustrate some of the starspawn for Monsters of the Multiverse was a good idea. He’s so good at textures. Previous editions of this monster used daggers, but I think switching to claws was a good idea. Makes the seer and its staff feel special, as opposed to, “yeah, some use weapons, and some don’t”.]

Foulspawn Mangler CR 8 CE Aberration This creature is vaguely humanoid, with an elongated torso. It has six clawed arms, and multiple smaller appendages like the legs of a centipede that twitch and thrash along its sides. Its face is twisted, with a pointed skull and misshapen features.

Foulspawn manglers are fast and stealthy killers. Their epithet derives from their habit of playing with their victims, leaving completely mutilated corpses in their wake. They are more treasure oriented than other foulspawn, and make sure to look for shiny or otherwise interesting objects on the creatures they murder. They refer to themselves as hadremoi in the Aklo language. Manglers grow and shed arms the way some creatures grow and shed teeth—the largest pair of arms sits the closest to the head, and over time falls off and the next set grows larger. A set of appendages near the hips becomes the next set of arms, and the cycle continued.

Foulspawn manglers are mobile combatants, skittering down walls or out of cracks and crevices to ambush prey. When attacking from ambush, a foulspawn mangler can damage the psyche as well as the flesh, and those that escape a hadremoi attack suffer from nightmares and delusions for days afterwards. They stay moving throughout the combat, and can even make full attacks on the move, although doing so tires them out. Foulspawn manglers have a sense of self-preservation, and will flee from a losing fight, although they maintain a grudge and may track down creatures who best them for a rematch under more favorable circumstances.

Image by Mike Sass, © (?) Wizards of the Coast. Accessed at the artist’s website here

[Much like the sorrowsworn before them, this is a monster family with a weird and shifting pedigree. So much so, in fact, that they have a different name every time they appear! This family of monsters first appeared in 3.5′s Monster Manual V as the ushemoi, subterranean aberrations whose gimmick was hyperspeed Lamarckian evolution. They get tougher the longer you fight them, you see; some of them gain attack bonus and AC the more damage they take, others gain better spellcasting the more spells they cast. This was, clearly, a lot of paperwork for a GM, and so that gimmick was dropped when they reappeared in 4e’s core Monster Manual as the foulspawn. There were five foulspawn, as opposed to only four ushemoi, because there was one for each of the main monster “roles” in the 4e system (controller, brute, soldier, skirmisher, artillery) and they were designed to be used together in encounter building. Their appearances were tweaked slightly, but the foulspawn are clearly built on top of the ushemoi. In Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, they became “starspawn” instead of “foulspawn”, and the abilities of the brute and the soldier were collapsed back into one creature. And they didn’t get illustrations! The only starspawn that gets a picture is the “larva mage”, which is the D&D 5e version of the Worm that Walks. Some of the unused illustrations (like the one above) have made it to the internet, as well as some of the new pictures they’re getting in Monsters of the Multiverse.

So I had a lot of decisions to make with these entries. Which version of the ushemoi/foulspawn/starspawn to use as my base? Which name to give them? What pictures to use? I’m sticking to the 4e foulspawn designation, but giving them ushemoi as an endonym, and the ushemoi species names as type endonyms (although the lashemoi is the least like the grue it eventually became). My base is the 5e statistics, but I am incorporating more of their 4e abilities, because 5e monsters tend to be a little boring mechanically. And I’m making them natives of Aucturn because it seems like a logical place in the Pathfinder setting for them to live. @thecreaturechronicle​ placed them there as well, as the spawn of the daelkyr, but I’ve made them more “natural” lifeforms from that unnatural world.]

Foulspawn (Ushemoi) The planet Aucturn slumbers. Believed by the maddest sages to be the embryonic form of an Outer God, that mysterious world nevertheless has characteristics of life. And like large organisms the multiverse over, smaller things live on it, surviving on its excretions and relying on it for shelter. These commensal creatures are the foulspawn.

Foulspawn are vaguely humanoid creatures with warped bodies and even more warped psyches. They are spawned in pits where secretions of Aucturn mingle with organic debris, and the larger the wound, the more fecund it is in foulspawn. They call themselves the ushemoi when speaking in Aklo. Foulspawn can be found carrying out strange, destructive missions on multiple worlds, presumably in some way serving the needs of their home planet. As Aucturn is the site of a careful détente between the servitors of the Great Old Ones and the Dominion of the Black, ushemoi may be found among either of these forces, although they are not slavishly loyal to either.

Foulspawn is a subtype of aberration with the following racial abilities: Madness (Ex) Foulspawn use their Charisma modifier on Will saves instead of their Wisdom modifier, and are immune to insanity and confusion effects. Only a miracle or wish can remove a foulspawn's madness. If this occurs, the foulspawn gains 6 points of Wisdom and loses 6 points of Charisma. No breath (Ex) as the universal monster ability. Telepathy 60 ft.

Foulspawn Grue CR 3 NE Aberration This small humanoid creature has stooped posture and wrinkled skin, from which black bristles protrude at irregular intervals. Its hands and feet end in sharp, cracked nails. It has no nose and a fanged maw.

Grues are among the weakest and most numerous of the foulspawn. The bristles that grow off of their bodies are filamentous structures more akin to the contents of a blackhead than anything else, and foulspawn grues spend much of their idle time picking and squeezing at them. Foulspawn grues are fidgety and twitchy in general, and often giggle nervously. They are called “lashemoi” in Aklo.

Foulspawn grues prefer to attack from ambush or alongside larger, more powerful foulspawn. Their madness is contagious, and creatures standing too close to a foulspawn grue suffer from flashes of color, emotional surges and other minor hallucinations. They usually target the weakest seeming individuals, and enjoy drawing out their assaults into extended torment sessions rather than finishing off any one victim. This also helps to spread their maddening bite, which causes more potent confusion. One side effect of the maddening bite is to make its victims target the grue that bit them above other targets, which allows more powerful foulspawn to take advantage of the distraction.

Image by Christopher Burdett, © Wizards of the Coast. Accessed at the artist’s blog here

[The arkamoi was the second weakest of the ushemoi originally, at a CR 4. The star spawn seer, on the other hand, is the second strongest of the 5e star spawn, at a CR 13. Something something assumption that spellcasting is stronger than martial abilities. My mechanics hew pretty close to the 5e version, but I gave it the foul insights of the 4e version. I wanted to justify calling it a seer, you know?]

Foulspawn Seer CR 12 CE Aberration This creature is swollen and misshapen, as if it were a tumor sculpted into a humanoid form. Its face is piggish, with an upturned nose and beady eyes. Its skin texture is filled with whorls and loops of tissue, like the surface of a brain, although tentacles and antennae grow from it at irregular intervals. It carries a staff made of bone and sinew in its clawed, webbed hands.

Foulspawn seers are more powerful and vastly more intelligent than most other foulspawn. They are the masterminds of the ushemoi, maintaining spawning pits on Aucturn and leading missions of madness and destruction on other planets. They can teleport between worlds, and given a few days, a handful of foulspawn seers can deliver an entire army of foulspawn to a new location. The tentacles that grow from their body are sensory organs that can feel vibrations, pick up scents, and detect subtler stimuli. Foulspawn seers are called arkamoi in Aklo.

A foulspawn seer uses its mastery of cosmic forces in combat. Their comet staffs are charged with the force of high gravity and phenomenal velocity, and can deal force damage at both melee range and at a distance. They can teleport at will, and often use this ability to trade places with their minions in order to let them absorb blows—a wise fighter of foulspawn will kill the rest of the envoy before dealing with the seer, or otherwise curtail their ability to teleport. A foulspawn seer can even use teleportation offensively, creating a miniature wormhole that transports and crushes foes simultaneously. Other foulspawn fight better with a seer in their ranks, its mad insights feeding into their minds telepathically.

“Foulspawn” by Dave Allsop, © Wizards of the Coast

[Is there a hulk in the house? As I mentioned previously, the foulspawn didn’t get art in 5e when they were initially converted into starspawn. Some unused art has been posted, and some of the art that’s set to appear in Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse has already made it online before that book’s “official” release date in May, but the starspawn hulk is not among them. So I’m using the 4e pic, which like much of the art in 4e’s Monster Manual is a group shot. Notice the berserker in front, some of the abilities of which I am moving onto the hulk. I like this image; it makes me think that I’ve wandered into a particularly bad neighborhood in Halloween Town.]

Foulspawn Hulk CR 10 NE Aberration This giant humanoid is apparently skinless, its body a seething mass of muscle and tendons. It has no nose and far too many teeth, and does not seem to blink.

Foulspawn hulks are the largest and strongest of the common foulspawn. In Aklo, they are known as turlemoi. Hulks act as brute force and bodyguards for ushemoi incursions, and are fanatically devoted to the foulspawn seers under their care. They are favorably disposed to other foulspawn primarily from a culinary perspective. Without a fowlspawn seer to rein them in, a hulk will happily eat its fellows. Under guidance from a seer, the hulks limit themselves to scavenging carcasses, and help clean up sites of battles and make evidence of the foulspawn difficult to find.

A foulspawn hulk can disrupt tactics with its mere presence. Creatures fighting in melee near a turlemoi start attacking unintended targets. Otherwise, a foulspawn hulk is too dim to have much tactical acumen besides “hit the biggest enemy the hardest”.  They prefer to fight in melee, but pitch boulders at foes that keep their distance. Opponents trying to turn a foulspawn hulk’s strength to their advantage are in for a rude surprise. Any attempt to charm or control a foulspawn hulk creates a deadly psychic feedback between the hulk and the caster.