The Strange Bestiary
The arachnoid cog mites infest the Machine God's bowels like vermin. They boil up from the depths with each tremor, agitated by the disturbance, and flow like water through the passages and chambers.
A cog mite resembles a crab made from silicon, metal, and bits of circuitry. Its body is 2 feet (0.6 m) in diameter, and it stands about 1 foot (0.3 m) tall. It scuttles about on six legs, the feet magnetized so it can crawl up walls and across ceilings. It has one large claw and a smaller claw. A single purple eye dominates the center of its body. The eye emits a purple beam of light that it uses to scan the environment or attack.
Scavengers, cog mites pick through the detritus of the recursion to harvest technological scraps, which they feed on or use to fashion more of their kind.
In large groups, six cog mites can focus their attacks against one target to make a single attack roll as a level 4 creature, inflicting a moderate wound (4 points).
The more cog mites there are, the more cunning they become until they develop a hive mind, allowing them to act as a group organism. Large nests of cog mites sometimes develop a sense of identity and may communicate with intruders telepathically.
Motive: Defense, harvest materials to create new cog mites
Environment (Graveyard of the Machine God | Weird Science or Psionics): Anywhere in groups of up to twenty, outside of places inhabited by the sacrosanct
Health: 12
Damage Inflicted: Minor wound (2 points)
Armor: 2
Movement: Short
Modifications: All tasks related to balancing and climbing as level 4; Speed defense as level 4 due to size.
Combat: A cog mite attacks with its large claw so it can grab a creature and hold the victim in place. A victim damaged by the claw must also make a Might defense roll, or it is held fast and cannot move until it escapes or the cog mite dies. For a grabbed victim, the difficulty of all attack and defense rolls is increased by two steps.
Once the cog mite gets a grip on a creature, it focuses the light generated by its eye into a cutting torch that automatically inflicts a minor wound (2 points) (ignores Armor) each round. Alternatively, it can use its smaller claw to snip its victim's body, automatically inflicting 3 points of damage.
Interaction: Individual cog mites behave as their programming dictates. They have little independent will and function more or less as machines.
Use: When a swarm of cog mites floods into the chambers of the sacrosanct, the mites steal a prized artifact and drag it off into the depths of the Machine God.
Loot: About one in six cog mites carries a cypher, something it salvaged but did not yet use to create the next generation of cog mites.
GM Intrusion: The attack from a cog mite's laser eye reduces the value of the target's Armor (if any) by 1 until it's repaired.
GM Intrusion: A character damaged by a cog mite must immediately make a Might defense roll to resist the nanovirus infestation.