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Nighstalkers of Varchep


Manu

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1 hour ago, Manu said:

what are they? Uz? Or some other horror that dwells in the region?

Nightstalkers appear in the RQ3 Bestiary.  They live in the jungles of Pamaltela and appear like tall, giant humanoids.  (They had STR 12D6, SIZ 6D6)

"Nightstalkers are incredibly thin and tall. All four limbs end in human-like hands. Despite their gangling appearance, nightstalkers are extremely strong, and wiry muscles lie like bundles beneath their skin. Their heads, ugly and mask-like, dangle on long wrinkled necks. Their skin is pasty grey, and a shock of shaggy black hair adorns their skulls. A mane-like band of this hair runs up the back of the neck and down their spines. Nightstalkers kill by picking up their prey and slamming it against nearby rocks or ground."

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1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

Nightstalkers appear in the RQ3 Bestiary. 

I always liked the "throwaway" reference on the Trollpak skull spread where a diversity of exotic darkness creatures including nightstalkers (hoons, nightriders, frights) emerge after the midget slasher lost its man rune back in the terminal green age.

Looking at it again, the specific absence of "bearded" troll skulls in the temples of the "beard" god is ominous, especially because their closest surviving relatives are the chaos-tinged cave trolls. We don't know a lot about the romal races but then again, we don't know a lot about the secret history of the Lhan/Than (Atyar) complex either. Maybe there was a "bearded" skull that went missing somewhere on the fringe of antigod country. Who collects skulls anyhow? A grand and terrible adventure of the mind awaits for sages willing to go all the way.

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Being a huge Bruce Chatwin fan I wonder if the midget slasher wasn't also a type of prehistoric superpredator ranging across both the Pamaltelan and Pelorian veldts: terrifying in its voracity and sadism, picking the weakest members out of the clan and harrying them for days until our ancestors' cousins died of blood loss, exhaustion, fear. The slashers gave up their man rune and became something like sakkars in Peloria. In Pamaltela they changed in different ways. On earth we would say dinofelis, the devil in the dark.

Speaking of which, I also want to know who the dirt devils are! Something ancestrally like a rock eater, maybe.

Edited by scott-martin
typo
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1 hour ago, metcalph said:

my trouble with the RQ3 bestiary description is that Trollpak says that the Nightstalkers have lost the Man Rune whereas they are rather humanoid looking.  At least the Hoons and the Nightriders were significantly divergent.

Being humanoid can only be part of Man-rune access, surely? Cf. Herdmen.

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