[Index]
Numenera Destiny
Clever hands (two more than a human's normal complement) and dozens of extra eyes give shinspinners a natural dexterity and eye for detail that even the most accomplished wright might be jealous of, even though shinspinners are only 2 feet (60 cm) tall. In truth, shinspinners are little more than vermin, albeit dangerously intuitive ones. A lone shinspinner isn't much of an issue, but where there is one, there is probably an entire colony infesting floors or walls of a structure or ruin.
Shinspinners are able to draw on some internal cache of knowledge that gives them the ability to modify, and in some cases improve, numenera devices that they encounter. They usually incorporate such items into their warren-like colonies to improve defense and otherwise reinforce it, even if doing so eventually compromises or ruins the structure or installation that hey infest.
Motive: Defense; tinker with the numenera
Environment: Ruins or complex structures, either in groups of six to ten or in colonies of fifty or more
Health: 6
Damage Inflicted: Minor wound (2 points)
Movement: Short
Modifications: Tasks related to crafting as level 5
Combat: Alone, shinspinners are hardly threatening; however, a group of four is dangerous, and a colony is something else again. When four or more shinspinners attack a single foe, they act as a single level 4 creature. A target hit by such a group takes 5 points of damage from the flurry of claws and bites and is subject to having a cypher or artifact plucked from their person by inquisitive hands.
But the true problems arise when explorers attempt to worm their way into a shinspinner colony, either to explore it or to clear it out. Shinspinner colonies are rife with level 5 traps, ranging from simple deadfalls to complex, movement-triggered force-field cages and disintegration beams. In addition, at least one group of shinspinners in any colony spends all its time tinkering with a stolen weapon artifact—usually some kind of ray or missile emitter that only a group of shinspinners can make work. Such an attack is made as if by a single level 5 creature and inflicts 8 points of damage in an area an immediate distance in diameter.
Interaction: Shinspinners are clever and in possession of unnatural knowledge that hey can use in very specific circumstances. Otherwise, they interact with other creatures like vermin would.
Use: The PCs must determine why the newly finished installation is working far better than it should on some days and not at all on other days—and why a strange chittering is sometimes heard coming from inside.
Loot: A shinspinner colony can be salvaged for several cyphers, an artifact or two, and about ten random iotum from the Iotum Result Table.
GM Intrusion: The character attempting to activate a cypher or artifact instead plucks out a miniature shinspinner and the remains of the object, which the creature has been secretly taking apart.