The Campaign Builder's Guild

The contest is over and it's time to finally decide who the winner will be. We'll have one week for everyone to have a chance to make their choices. Due to the high quality of all the entries (and to the fact that people who entered are allowed to vote for themselves) you may pick up to two entries that you like the best. Voters should consider how well written an entry is, how well the creature fits its setting, how creative it is, and anything else that makes it stand out (perhaps it's just so awesome that you had to vote for it). The winner of the contest will get to pick our new user titles. May the best creature win.

Update: The contest is over, congratulations to Steerpike and his excellent Industriophage entry. Second place goes to Sparkletwist and her wonderfully designed Order-Spider. All of the entries were well done and it was hard to pick a winner for this one. Thanks go to everyone who tossed in an entry.

Quote from: Ghostman
[ic=Yad-yad]
Setting: Mare Eternus by Nomadic

The yad-yad are a species of small bipedal vertebrates native to the Outssi Drift of the Expanse. Small numbers of them have been brought to other worlds by travelers of as stowaways in submersibles, but their range still remains largely confined to their original habitats. They have been named for the distinctive, repetitive "yad yad yad..." sounds that they emit.

A fully grown yad-yad is about the size of a large rat. Standing on a pair of long, spindly legs, it is a very fast runner and capable of leaping great distances. The creature's body is roughly spherical, and is covered in a shallow but very dense fluff of tiny feathers, with coloration that varies from steely gray to bluish. The head vaguely resembles that of a toad, with a large wide mouth and bulbous round eyes. The jaws are lined with several rows of needle-sharp teeth, with new ones constantly growing to replace those that are lost. There is no discernible neck, and a pair of small stub-like horns jut from the brow. The feet of a yad-yad bear sharp claws, and are highly dexterous, making up for it's lack of forelimbs. A long tail, easily twice the length of the plump body, enables the creature to maintain it's balance whilst running or when standing on one leg.

The yad-yad are carnivorous and predatory, feeding on just about any fauna smaller than themselves. Females birth live tadpoles into a suitable freshwater pond, and continue to protect and feed them by regurgitated food until they have developed functional legs and fluff. A fairly intelligent species, yad-yads grown in the wilds and captured cannot be tamed, but tadpoles have been successfully bred in aquariums and then raised as pets. Such domesticated yad-yads are generally kept for company and pest control, although some breeds have been deliberately bred for aggression - whilst these creatures are not that menacing individually, a large pack can be enough to deter thieves.
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Quote from: Weave
[ic=Entrops]

Seting: Asura by Sparkletwist

Slender, serpentine horrors birthed from the fragmented shards of the shattered universe of Chaos, Entrops were pieces left on the fringes of the far, darkened corners of space. Spurned from their great god (themselves perhaps the pieces of Chaos, animate from the shards of his shattered mind, or what could be called one at the time), the chaos-born creatures contort and twist through space, never fully in one dimension at one time. Entrops display an array of erratic colors that flicker across their bodies as they move, bear wicked, violently sharp teeth, a long, slender mouth, and three wide, lidless eyes that transfix themselves on prey as they stagger through dimensional folds to reach them. At one moment, the Entrop might be far off in the distance, appearing to move slowly, almost struggling as it does so; in the next moment it might close the gap in a split second, falling into a dimensional fold as it erratically jumps forward through space and time. Lastly is their size: Entrops can appear very long, other times they are much shorter, though the tail of their body always frays into nothingness.

To the Asuras, the Entrops are greatly feared creatures, not only because they echo of a time of great upheaval and bedlam, but because their chaotic nature makes them unpredictably savage and difficult to destroy. It is rumored that they might be what became of the Demons and Succubi that remained loyal to Chaos even in his death throes, and the very act of seeing their god shattered before them drove them insane. Regardless their origins, their presence is an abomination to the natural order, and their enduring existence only further hinders their removal. One thing is certain, however: more of them are coming. Drifting in from the corners of far space, consuming anything that crosses their path, driven by an unknown purpose or lured by an ancient instinct, Entrops plague the three inner planets with the chaos they so freed themselves from eons ago.[/ic]

Quote from: Nomadic
[ic=Kroakit]
Setting: Fractal Galaxy by Omegalimit

The bane of modern engineering, Kroakits are small hardy creatures with a diet consisting of earth and metal. Each Kroakit is a small lizard-like creature roughly two feet in length and sporting 3 pairs of legs. Each of these legs is tipped with incredibly hard digging claws which allow it to burrow through dense earth or even break up solid rock. The Kroakit is covered in incredibly dense skin which secretes a corrosive liquid. The Kroakit uses this liquid to break down its preferred meal of stone and metal which it then devours with its lamprey-like mouth. It has no eyes, instead sensing the world around it with an acute sense of smell and touch which it uses to track down a meal. Kroakit are largely non-aggressive unless attacked (in which case they can spray their attacker with corrosive digestive enzymes from the glands in their skin) and prefer to burrow to safety when confronted with danger. The problem that modern builders and starship captains have with them comes with their voracious appetite for metals. If left to their own devices a group of Kroakits can burrow holes through the supports of a building or even through the armored hull of a starship. It is a constant battle on worlds with Kroakit infestations to keep them from devouring the local infrastructure.

Originating on one particular world in the Hilbert Sector, Kroakits have since spread. Their hardiness allowing them to survive for periods in the hard vacuum of space and their small size making them difficult to detect, many have slipped onto ships unnoticed and stowed away to far flung worlds. Customs officials, especially in the Hilbert Sector have become much more strict about making sure there are no Kroakits onboard a vessel and a variety of measures for stopping their spread have been put in place. Unfortunately due to the reality of piracy and smuggling, not every ship goes through customs and even for those who do the Kroakit resistance to radiation and many poisons makes extreme measures like irradiation largely useless. On worlds they already inhabit dealing with Kroakit is largely a matter of controlling populations and placing barriers to keep them at bay. Electricity serves as a mild deterrent and certain alloys of metal taste and smell bad to them but the most useful methods simply involve tracking them down and capturing or killing them. On planets infested with Kroakit colonies a person can make an active living as a Kroakit exterminator.
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Quote from: Steerpike
[ic=Industriophage]Setting: Gloria by Light Dragon

The dreaded Industriophages, also called "Ambition-Vampires," flock to Gloria City, Tikal, Malebroge, and all other centers of opportunity.  None are found in the Socialist lands: some say the climes are simply too cold, others that there is not enough food for the Industriophages to survive, due to the notorious lack of personal (self-interested) ambition found there.  The Socialists themselves believe that Industriophages are the manifestations of greed, creatures which creep out from "between the cracks" of free-market societies, spawned in the abyss twixt rich and poor – thus they only afflict societies with considerable socioeconomic inequalities.  Physically, Industriophages appear as well-dressed businessmen or -women garbed in whatever costume is appropriate to their region.  They are betrayed by their shark-toothed grins (with several rows of teeth), their barking, wolfish laughter, the way that they lick their lips in the presence of wealth, and by their eyes, which they usually keep covered by dark spectacles or shadowed hoods – for instead of pupils Industriophages have tiny little mouths ringed with teeth.  Ambition-Vampires can smell currency and status symbols, somehow scenting the rank perfume of fetishized commodities.  Those in particularly sumptuous locations – an expensive house, for example – become visibly excited, and their stomachs grumble audibly.

Industriophages enjoy the chase.  Their typical plan of attack is to approach potential prey with some sort of lucrative business opportunity, financial scheme, or similar proposition.  Once they have lured their victim into a private area to discuss the details, they continue to enthrall their chosen food-source with promises of success.  They refer to this process as "seasoning."  Once their prey is suitably basted in the juices of acquisitiveness, the Industriophage will remove its dark glasses or lift up its hood and dilate its pupils while establishing eye-contact.  The miniature maws open hungrily, and out of the mind of the Ambition-Vampire's victim flows an ethereal energy, through the eyes and the air and into the eyes of the Industriophage.  The victim, at this point, typically lapses into unconsciousness to dream sweet dreams of utter contentment.  They generally awake lying in alleyways or even in their own homes.  If they remember being attacked, they do not speak of it.

The victims of Industriophages are the happiest people in existence, in a tranquil, demented sort of way.  They are utterly and completely content, apparently without a care in the entire world.  While they continue to go to work, care for their bodies, and otherwise live life (except in particularly extreme cases, where they lapse into total catatonic apathy), they always do the absolute minimum amount of work required to get by.  They never start new business or innovate, never apply for promotions, never try to change their lifestyles or move up in the world.  Even the impoverished seem totally unbothered by their circumstances, simply shrugging their shoulders at their lot in life and going about their daily routines.  As for the Industriophage, it has slipped back to its nest, usually a subterranean lair or an office in a disused building, typically decorated with various corporate artefacts and expensive oddments taken as trophies from its victims – business cards in particular are a favourite.  These the creature obsessively smells and caresses, before emerging from its den to hunt once more.[/ic]

Quote from: Light Dragon
[ic=Alge]
The Alge, crawling chaos from the murky depths of bogs and watery streams, terrorize the Clockwork Jungle with their network of insidious decay. While decay means rebirth for a forest that absorbs and reforms the energy of detritus, there can be no rebirth where the Alge reside. The Alge bear a shrewd sentience and can become temporary allies, but their insidious nature is most untrustworthy and many an erstwhile Umbril ally has found itself staked to the ground and swamped by foliage as it rots.

The plantlike Alge are a type of dessicating mold that breaks down matter and replaces it with noxious fumes. Fumes are the Alges' reproductive puffs; their expulsion into the environment harms all sentient species, except the spore-based Umbril, by filling their lungs with noxious neurotoxins. An Alge forms in a mucky stringy strain of kelplike seaweed that flop and form into figures between half a foot tall to as towering as a ten-foot vine. An individual Alge is weak and can be burned or hacked into pieces--but be warned, an Alge must be serrated into innumerable picayune portions before it is eliminated--otherwise a cutting can be replanted. Although cuttings may bear unique personalities, they would still exist.

Alge spread across the bogs and moors, advancing their base agenda- to reproduce, to infiltrate, and to expand water's reach. Their system of recordation is laborious. They acquire stones and wood, and push water to form grooves to record information. Their society values clean stones and wood, because a clean surface may be easily written upon and deciphered. They expend great efforts to acquire their writing tools and they have been known to withhold their noxious fumes to trade with Iskites, Gheen, or Tahro to acquire the valued flat surfaces.

Alge are especially common in the Wash, but they avoid areas where the water flows too freely and they have been known to create dams. Alge also tend to gravitate towards areas where excrement and total dissolved solids are high in waterways, so that they may better absorb nutrients.

Several Iskite scholars argue that the Alge and the Saffron Moss are one and the same since they both corrupt the land... but the Alge have a developed society with a vibrant culture that understands agriculture (husbandry of cellular growth and rivers), astronomical divinations (on the movements of celestial bodies to predict tides) and hierarchical disputes (based on strategies to take to optimize the future development of their lineages and the allotment of limited territory), whereas the Saffron Moss only brings destruction. The Moss may be one entity, but the Alge are highly individualistic, at least according to Umbril translators who have been able to decipher the genetic instructions in the Alge's expelled spores. Finally, and more important- the Alge oppose the Saffron Moss. The Alge grow in the water and on the water, the Moss seeks to overwhelm liquids and absorb the water!

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For Polycarp!'s setting.
Note: not Algae, but Alge. :p
These were intended to inhabit what appeared to be an under-inhabited portion of the Jungle- the watery portions. They also were intended to be difficult allies against the Saffron Moss and to be a potential, but rare PC race.

Quote from: Numinous
[ic=The Chrysoprase Killer]
Setting: Over Under (http://www.thecbg.org/index.php/topic,208565.0.html) by Sarisa.

   The Chrysoprase killer is the shadow in the corner of your eye, the half-heard footstep in a lonely alley, or the whisper on the wind on a tempting ledge.  The killer is addiction given shape, and man without matter.  The killer is death in the towers.

   Chrysoprase nectar is an incredibly addictive drug, capable of producing vibrant visions and abyssal terrors in the mind of those who use it.  It is also incredibly expensive, capable of bringing even the richest heir to ruin if he develops too much of a taste for the waking dreams it provides.  So, when the purse and the bottle are empty, something must give to keep the nectar flowing.  So, the desperate drunk begs and pleads, sells his sons, daughters, and even his tower for a pittance just for one last drink.  When one this addicted dies, they refuse to pass through the veil, as the strength of their need binds their soul to the city, for even the hope of another drop of the nectar.

   Of course, ghosts don't have jobs or fortunes, so they must work to pay for their vice like any other.  Bereft of body and nearly invisible except as a wisp of jade smoke in an errant sunbeam, the Chrysprase killer most often works as a spy and assassin, employed by the richest in their court intrigues to learn the plots of their enemies or to trip them on the perilous walks of the city that sways.  The killers are exceptionally adept at inspiring paranoia, madness, and suicide in the mentally unstable.  The constant whispers of discouragement, dredging up regrets and sins once forgotten can drive even the lord who has anything into leaping from his terrace into the fog below.[/ic]

Quote from: The Horse
[ic=Noisome Forests]

It is often the case that the dark parts of the ocean of Mare Eternus are ignored and forgotten, left alone to grow stagnant and fester when the currents of the water drastically change. Some of the ecosystems that grow in these regions - such as the massive kelp forests - suffocate and die in these cold, still waters. Sometimes, however, they are born again. Travelers on the edges of the Expanse sometimes speak of foul clouds of sickly yellow water that suffocate the gills and corrode vessels and equipment. In addition, throug the murky, putrid water they say they can see a massive, indistinct shape far in the distance, dark and innately hostile, drifting through (or with) this poisoned flow - the noisome forest.

A noisome forest is a venomous thing, a half-creature made of the rotting remains of kelp forests by powers unknown. Secreting a kind of mucus that is hazardous to almost everything in the sea, the noisome forest is a gargantuan mass of plant matter and captured husks of debris, concentrated at the center of thousands of massive dead kelp stalks. These arms stretch out over huge distances, obscuring the water around them and strangling anything that comes too close. Some say that noisome forests, though mindless, seek out settlements and large living ecosystems to stifle them, first latching its kelp arms onto the target in question and then engulfing it entirely within the dark, vile body at the heart of the rotting, poisonous cloud.[/ic]

Quote from: sparkletwist
[ic=Order-Spider]
Setting: Opus by Weave

The intricate web of the Order-Spiders are not spun merely of gossamer strands, but rather of the very threads of destiny. In their webs many things are caught, but most are irrelevant; set free, ignored, or casually consumed according to an unknown whim. The true prey of the Order-Spider is the Inkmoth itself, for the creature mainly subsists on the greatest power in all the lands, Ink itself. It is from this potent foodstuff that the Spider derives its power to weave reality.

Anywhere the touch of the Author has not yet reached, an Order-Spider might call it home, acting as its own Author for its own little realm. By the power of the Ink it consumes, it weaves its webs that tame the Faerie wilds to its own ends, establishing small outposts of coherence in the madness. The large, sleek, black creatures lurk in the darkest reaches of the Umberwood and all throughout the Faerie Realm, although there have also been rare sightings of them within the confines of the Great Walls, particularly in the wilder portions of the Gowerlands. In the time before the Author, the Order-Spiders' realms were perhaps one of the few sanctuaries for the human populations seeking to free themselves of Fae mischief, but they were not altogether inviting ones. Order-Spiders are not intelligent, not in the truest sense, but they have a definite cunning, and also definite aesthetic preferences. Twisted and primal in their own way, filled with smaller spiders, webs, and other arachnoid imagery, the home of an Order-Spider can be no less disorienting and disturbing than Fae madness.

Although the coming of the Author means that its role as provider of (relative) sanctuary is no longer needed by most humans, brave explorers still seek it out. The fibers of its webs are, after all, infused with the power of Ink itself, and this is a power not to be taken lightly. Neglected and abandoned webs are harvested, for their silk can be made into a paper second only to Boggart Parchment in its capacity for enhancing magical ability. Order-Spiders typically ignore visitors that are not Inkmoths, but they are territorial, and if the destruction of webs is seen to interfere with its hunting, it will attack the interlopers. The Fae, on the other hand, find the Order-Spider to be an utter blight on their lands, and they seek out and destroy the creatures whenever possible. Some clever Fae have tried to use human arachnophobia in an attempt to get humans to assist them in wiping out their menace, but, so far, most humans realize the Order-Spider is much more friend than foe to man.
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Quote from: Sarisa
[ic=Garblebad]

From The Listening Dark (http://www.thecbg.org/index.php/topic,209480.0.html) by Wensleydale

The GarbleBad is a horrifying predator of the Lower Caverns. It eats tribesman and ghoul alike and cultists of the Mouth Below revere it as a lesser kin of their strange god.  They are thought to be aberrations left over from a time of prehistory-or extra-planar creatures colonizing this plane. 

Garblebads are known to reach enormous weights, several thousand pounds is not uncommon; but lesser garbles are also known to exist, and from time to time are 'domesticated' by tribes to guard valuable treasure troves or simply dispose of 'unwanted things/people'.

GarbleBads have a roughly cylindrical body shape-but even this is abnormal as it constantly shifts appendages and inner physiological systems to suit whatever cavern it inhabits. The 'mouth' is located roughly at one end of the cylinder. The creatures are predominantly mouth and digestive system-roughly 2/3 of its body is dedicated to digestion and all the processes involved. It has incredibly strong stomach acids that render anything eaten a slimy goo in a matter of minutes. It is perhaps because of this strong stomach acid that a GarbleBad has such an insatiable appetite-its body breaks down and defecates anything eaten so fast that it has little time to absorb nutrients.

When slaying a garble-adventurers should be wary as the corrosive stomach acids continue to function and can cause horrible burns and even death.

It is believed that a garblebads do not have eyes but instead rely upon vibration to sense movement. They do however have two 'feeler' tentacles that thrust out from inside a skin fold inside of it's mouth. These can be used to snag any nearby creatures that look but do not enter it's mouth. Movement is slow and energy-consuming. They use their natural slime to create less friction in tunnels and slowly ungulate their formless bodies around. A garble would prefer to inhabit a single cavern for decades rather than be forced to move.

Hunting Habits:
A Garblebad will choose a cavern and position it's mouth at the entrance (with its body to the rear). If the cave has two entrances the garblebad will usually pick the smaller entrance to position its rear end at. It rescinds its stony teeth into its gums and becomes absolutely still-in the darkness a Garblebad's mouth becomes just another cave entrance-and in this position it waits until some unsuspecting creature enters into it's jaws.
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