Runequest Thursday #90 - Blood Wurm of the Savage North!
Gonna be traveling tomorrow to Comicpalooza 2016 in Houston to run games all weekend in the Skirmisher Game Pavilion there, so I thought I should post my Runequest Thursday on advance.
If you are going to the Con, be sure to stop by and play a game or two. I will be running Ragnarok - the Game of Viking Apocalyptic battle!, as well as Knights-Marshal of the Commonwealth using the BASH Sci Fi system, and BASH Fantasy: Swords of Kos, using (at least in part) the recently published Men and Monsters of the Aegean!
That's just me.
I know that Allison and Todd Markello will be running their very own Cards & Quests RPG, which is awesome! I also know that there will be some 5th Edition D&D going on too, but I don't have much in the way of specifics on that. And there will, as always, be the floor game of Little Orc Wars, which takes up about 1000 square feet of the Game Pavilion and is always popular.
Now, on to today's post - The Blood Wurm! These are for the Savage North game that I am co-GMing with my wife, Penny.
Art is by the incredible Kaijuverse.
Bloodwurms spontaneously generate in places long associated with Blood Sorcery and Sacrifice to dark gods. In the Savage North Setting, these are the Blood Gods, rivals to the deities of humanity. The Blood Gods seek a return to their ancient domination of the world, amid the widespread famine, pestilence and slaughter of mankind, and the supremacy of the Blood Gods’ most loyal servants – The serpentfolk.
Blood Sorcery may have created the first blood wurm, or it might have been the literal offspring of some degenerate serpentfolk. Blood wurms exist as extra-dimensional creatures that travel across time and space to areas of interest. There, as long as the supply of Blood and Sorcery is continual, they reside, feeding and growing, and spawning more of their kind. They also act as protectors of the site of sacrifice, jealously guarding their food supply.
Blood wurms can burrow slowly, and use this ability to create lairs, and sometimes networks of blood-slick wormcrawls in which they secret valuables left on dark altars or from the corpses of the sacrificed – the better to prey on any who hope to enrich themselves by looting such an altar. When they inhabit caves or caverns, they sometimes hand by the tail from the cave roof, hiding in the shadows until they sense the approach of prey. They perceive through a series of glowing organs on the head and tail that, though not as visually acute, can perceive across dimensional boundaries, in total darkness, etc. Thus, blood wurms will often attack anything that moves, and even their sorcerous masters must beware of their mistaken attentions.
