The Strange Bestiary
Though rare enough to be counted on one hand, there exist a few vast lakes of a mysterious opaque substance leaked from a long-vanished biotech lab. The material sloshing in these pools is too thick to be water, too fluid to be tar. The lakes exude a palpable chill, and visitors feel their skin prickle, hairs standing on end as if in the presence of an energy field. Most people find the experience too disturbing to endure for long, but those who persevere discover that the pools are something more: they're alive and filled with malevolence for all living things.
A mytocytic pool is a sentient lake of corrupted genetic material, a great quantity of substance able to form twisted parodies of life from its mass, which it occasionally releases into the wild. For example, it was from the murky depths of a mytocytic pool that the polymous emerged, and other horrors as well.
Motive: Territory, colonization of other recursions
Environment (Ruk | Weird Science): In a depression somewhere in the Periphery
Health: 120
Damage Inflicted: Major wound (10 points)
Movement: Immediate
Modifications: Speed defense as level 3 due to size and nature.
Combat: A mytocytic pool can use an action to intensify the energy field it always emits to affect all organic creatures other than itself within long range. A target must make a successful Might defense roll or take 10 points of damage.
As part of the pool's action, at the cost of 5 points of health, it can give birth to a darkness spawn. The spawn rises from the murky waters and moves a short distance from its parent. A spawn can have any appearance, but it usually looks hideous and lacks an important physical feature. It might be blind, missing limbs, lacking skin, or something else. Wracked with pain, the spawn screeches and howls until killed.
A mytocytic pool can form a pseudopod to physically attack a creature within long range. Those that are struck take damage and must also succeed on a Might defense roll. On a failure, the fluid spreads across the victim's body, seeking to assimilate his material, inflicting an additional moderate wound (5 points) (ignores Armor) in the process.
Interaction: A mytocytic pool is always interested in information about its current recursion and neighboring recursions. When it needs to communicate, it fashions a shuddering spawn to serve as its mouthpiece and speaks through it in an eloquent manner. Most pools are old, making them a veritable font of information for those who show the proper deference and respect. Use: The PCs need to identify an artifact or track down a legend about Ruk. If they make an offering to an odd, dark lake in a cracked vault of the Veritex, they might gain the information they seek.
Loot: There's bound to be an artifact or two in the mytocytic pool, along with 2d6 + 3 cyphers.
GM Intrusion: The mytocytic pool spits out a couple of polymous, which attack the character.