Shore Stalker

"They appeared one morning without warning, a thin forest of spongy growths sprouted up along the shore. Danel waded out to investigate. I still hear his screams in my dreams."

- Danel's widow



Shore Stalkers are strange, tree-like creatures that infest shorelines in groves.

Background
Shore stalkers look like natural - if weird - growths along the shoreline. However, they seem to appear only when on one is watching. One day, an area of water is open; the next, a thin grove of shore stalkers is growing there, as if they'd been planted there for years. But shore stalkers aren't mere plants; they can command constituents of the physical world with frightening mastery. Possibly hailing from deep below the sea, their appearance always seems a mystery. Understanding their motives has eluded everyone who's tried to either communicate with or study them.

Motive:
Inexplicable

Environment:
Shallow seawater in groves of four to ten

Health:
23

Damage Inflicted:
5 points

Movement:
Immobile (but able to teleport an indeterminate distance once every ten hours)

Modifications:
Defends as level 1 while rooted.

Combat:
A shore stalker isn't insubstantial, but its substance is a solid gel-like material hardly more substantial than air. Successful attacks only inflict 1 point of damage, unless the attack is pure force or paradimensional in nature.

A shore stalker can acidify its tissues to defend itself or attack. When it attacks, a shore stalker emits a flurry of wedge-shaped darts from its canopy, targeting up to three creatures within short range as a single action. An acidic wedge inflicts 5 points of damage for three rounds. The same damage affects a creature that touches a shore stalker.

Alternatively, a shore stalker can suffuse its gel-like body with more helpful substances, which means sometimes it can restore health, cure disease or poison, and make other positive changes in a biological creature. How to implore a shore stalker to act benignly rather than attacking is a trick that most people despair of understanding; they believe that a grove's reaction is random.

Interaction:
These gel-based creatures are intelligent. When not attacking, they can communicate via touch by inserting thin gel tendrils into an interlocutor's skull (which inflicts 1 point of damage). A shore stalker asks a boon of anyone who attempts to communicate with it. If a cypher, oddity, or artifact is provided, the shore stalker and those in its grove are less likely to react negatively. Such gifts are absorbed into the shore stalker's body.

Use:
A shore stalker encounter has the possibility of turning into combat, but the PCs have the opportunity to turn it into an interaction-based encounter if they're cautious when investigating the appearance of the strange "trees" out along the water.

Loot:
The decomposing body of a shore stalker might contain one or two cyphers and an oddity.

Miscellaneous
A shore stalker can be convinced to serve as a messenger, teleporting to find a target described by a PC. The stalker finds the recipient using an inner connection to the datasphere to narrow down possibilities; however, the better the description, the more likely it will give the message to the correct recipient.