From the Vats and Animatter Organisms

Gavin Norman, the man behind Necrotic Gnome Productions, released today From the Vats, a supplement for The Complete Vivimancer. It has a trio of adventures, one that is more than 20 pages long, some nifty spells, magic items and a few monsters. My contribution is a handful of the monsters and clothlife under the magic items section.

Clothlife really isn't a magic item, it is just the first example I thought of for animatter organisms, creatures with non-standard biology created by the Spark of Life spell from The Complete Vivimancer. Being truly alive, animatter critters have animal-like behavior, must consume some sort of food, reproduce and can, if the setting allows, evolve.

Two other such creatures that I came up with after the submission deadline are ironlife (cauldrons) and bricklife. Ironlife has one typical advantage one sees in this form of creature- its diet dictates its mass. If an ironlife cauldron consumes some steel, part of its body gains that additional strength. Bricklife is different as it has two vital components to its diet- clay and combustibles. The latter burn within it to harden the clay into more brick material. As there isn't much difference between the types of clay (for this purpose), bricklife creatures are more or less identical in terms of composition.

As for the rest of From the Vats, I find the long adventure very useful. It is a location, inhabitants and a timeline of what happens if the place is explored but not cleaned out of all of the critters or if it has been and who might move in. In the spells, there are some rather gruesome ones (using cells from the caster to grow worker things, partially transforming people into plants and growing short lived tiny clones). And among the creatures, there is a construct that should make most hardened adventurers shudder when they discover how it was created... All in all, an excellent OSR product.

You can find the file for free here:  http://www.rpgnow.com/product/151451/From-the-Vats