Formless Sea Bestiary

Mycondids: Roughly looking like a cross between a squid and a mushroom, Mycondids are by far the most peaceful of the intelligent creatures in the Formless Sea. They have a single large black eye as well as a beak in the center of their stalk. They have six large tentacles lined with suction cups that hang down from their gills that allow the Mycondids to grasp objects. Two of these tentacles are longer than the others and have paralytic poison in their tips. They have large wide caps that can expand greatly in volume along with a very elaborate external gill system more common to amphibians than fungus. The caps and gills are the source of the Mycondids two most amazing abilities; its levitation and its musicality.

By capturing and filtering various gases Mycondids are able to float a few inches above the ground, an ability that allows them to glide above the muck of the Formless Sea. While not fast creatures Mycondids are can expel their captures gasses to give them a rapid burst of speed. They can also expel their gasses to make music and sing. The sounds that Mycondeid produces sounds like crystals ringing and they most commonly have a range of about sixteen octaves, the top four of which are above the level which human ears and perceive. It is in these octaves that the Mycondids communicate with one another. Even more amazing is that because of their unique vocal systems they can speak in multiple voices at the same time. Their voice when speaking to humanoids has been described as being choir like, as if multiple people are talking at once.

is fungaloid insensitive?

Fungaloids: These creatures look roughly like a cross between a man and a mushroom. They have a set of arms and legs which are made of wrapped and knotted mycelia. Their stalks are thick and their caps are stubby in comparison to other mushrooms. They have a savage intelligence, somewhere between pack animals and man. They have no verbal communication, rather they communicated by small clouds of psychoactive spores. They are broken up into colonies, each lead by an immobile mold like queen. They eat anything dead, standing immobile over the corpse, their tendrils wrapped all over it. On a clear day if one looks out from the tops of the Ubershrooms they often see whole Fungaloid colonies on the move, their queens held high above their caps marching to the next corpse fall.

if it aint broke

Oozes: Oozes are a catch all term that encompasses a number of different creatures as the difference between oozes, jellies, puddings, or slime is mostly semantic. They are blind, quiet, slimy, semi opaque, and dissolve stuff. Most are just globular nuances but a few breeds are of particular note. Splitter Slimes, that divide when hit. Helmet Jelly, who eat hair and have a metal shell. Walking Lawns, vast green mats that start to digest anything that stops moving on top it. Arcane Slimes, who are attracted to magic and occasionally fart spells out. Yolks, a parasitic ooze that feeds on other oozes from the inside. Androgynous Blobs, who are attracted to large amounts of estrogen and testosterone. Flesh Clouds, who can be best described as flying cysts. Violet Molds, who perch from the bottoms of large mushrooms, emit powerful strobes to color to stun prey. Blue Slimes, which are harmless, safe to drink and serve as one of the best sources of fresh water in the Formless Sea (some settlements even herd them). Sparky Puddings, electrically charged blue spheres attracted to metal.

this is a bad movie if it is anything like the trailer

Hogs: Pigs, imported by the first settlers to the Formless Sea as a foodstuff, have now become an invasive species. The Formless Sea is a literal hog heaven, an unending mud wallow filled with truffles, chewy oozes, and sweet green goblin flesh. Gone feral, the hogs of The Formless Sea are massive tusked creatures, with thick hides and bad temperament. The Goblins have adapted well to the new creatures, using them for food, mounts, beasts of burden, and population control.

there were always a ton of these things in the creeks where i grew up

Sludge Strider: This large water bug like creature can be seen skimming across the sludge of the Formless Sea. They are mostly docile, unless you approach one of the nests, and eat the caps of the mushes that grow in abundance. Some have been tamed by the settlers of this sea to be used as transportation and as beasts of burden.

Skum Dogs: A friendly teardrop shaped ooze, they come in a variety of colors, most commonly blue or green. These slimes have a rough dog like intelligence and demeanor. A single antenna with a ball like sensing organ on top protrudes from the bodies and they emit a faint glow that changes with their emotions. To many of the settlers here they serve as watchdog, companion, and garbage disposal. 

this is p close

Sluggernaughts: Goblins, like monkeys, if given enough time and resources produce masterworks. Sluggernaughts are those masterworks. With a scavenged iron shell, bristling with firearms, and a function still-engine Sluggernaughts are up gunned and up armored oozes that might be best thought of as Ships-of-the-Slime. Goblins might be a nuance, but Sluggernaughts are a threat to all but the most power of fortifications and ships. They are thankfully slow and hard to control, like a bucking bronco going at quarter speed.

Gummy Snakes: Not actually snakes but oozes, gummy snakes look like large bright colored worms. Their ‘skin’ is much thicker than an oozes and they can only consume things that go into their ‘mouth’, a large gap in their thick skin. Most Gummy Snakes are about a foot long, but can grow up to thirty.

Goblins In-Depth

its rare that i find exactly what i want but thanks malfoux

Goblins, by nature, are a wild and chaotic bunch and are just as likely to be running into trouble as they are as running away from it.  Goblins gravitate to acts of stupidity like moths to a flame and most goblins last words are “HEY Y’ALL WATCH THIS” or some deviation thereof.  They seem to lack a concept of property beyond ‘mine’ and ‘soon-to-be-mine.’   Often squabbling, fights, even over little trinkets can lead to a gunfight.  Goblins are pint-sized horrors with an unhealthy fascination with hogs, hooch, and hand cannons.

Physically goblins are squat, bright green creatures not much bigger than a human child.  They are wiry and thin and seem to always been twitching or fidgeting when not napping or inebriated.  Their large eyes are oversized for their small faces and their ears are long, pointed, and often have whole chunks bitten off.  Their smiles are rife with gaps and mismatched teeth, with the occasional false gold tooth.  The most distinctive feather about the goblins however is their apparent lack of a nose - presumably an advantage in the fetid swamps.

They speak a chittering mock of common and sound like a drunk even the few hours of the day when they aren’t.  Their clothes are raggedy and patched, often mud caked blue overalls or just shorts with rudimentary camouflage (or are just dirty to the point that the overlapping stains look like camouflage) and pig-leather boots.  They wear an eclectic menagerie of hats, all of which are studded with things like fishing lures, coins, hunting trophies, good luck charms, ammo, and anything else shiny that has caught the goblin’s eye.   Always close to each goblin is his hooch jug, often clay or glass, marked with the universal symbol for alcohol, the triple ‘x,’ and his gun, less a firearm and more of a tube filled with explosives that is hopefully pointed the right way.

Goblin society is a dark childlike mockery of human society.  They have small shanty huts made from driftwood, broken crates, pig leather, and what other scrap they can grab out of the muck.  They play music, mostly banjo, harmonica, or ‘bucket with strings’.  They have farms and grow strange stumpy looking corn (actually a mushroom) for their liquor mash and fatten hogs on slop.  Goblin villages are all based around a still, a chugging cranking ramshackle device covered in knobs and levers with long spiraling lengths of copper that extrude clear liquor the goblins refer to as ‘shine’.  The highest station in society that a goblin can ascent to is that of brew master; as he who runs the stills runs the village.

The central lynchpin of goblin society is that of its clear homemade liquor.  This liquor goes by a number of names; hooch, shine, whiskey, firewater, and most appropriately ‘trouble.’  The brewing process it not difficult, the organic nature of the Formless Sea and the sheer amount of fungus and molds that exist within it means that distilling consists mostly of throwing things in a bucket and waiting.  Goblins will do just about anything for just a taste of shine.  Many tides of battle have turned in favor of the goblins with just the idea that the boss might up the daily ration if they win.  The quality of this brew is questionable and bad batches have been known to drive goblins blind, insane, or both.

Goblins have an understanding with their hogs, this is not to say that the relationship is one where the goblin sits firmly on top.  Rather the hogs and the goblins are relatively equal in standing.  The two in fact keep each other in check and without this balance either the hogs or the goblins population would bloom to unstable levels.  Only by aping humans have the goblins learned domestication, and have begun to have the upper hand in the hog/goblin dynamic.  The domesticated hogs the goblins use for just about everything; from a food source, to a beast of burden, to mounts, and to even to a rather efficient corpse and trash removal system.

Goblins seem to have been born with an innate understanding of their simple machinery as well.  Any goblin can operate a gun almost straight out of the womb.  Most tinker with their guns adding all sorts of ‘gubbins;’ sights made from old telescopes and old bottles; bayonets from jagged pieces of scrap metal; and extra barrels, some of which even shoot!  The more inventive goblins have made their own guns from the ground up and these ‘gun nutz’ pack enough firepower to put a gun line to shame.  Goblins have nefariously poor aim and the kickback from their supped up guns often sends their tiny green bodies flying with a misfire.  In addition to firearms goblins can, with enough trial and error tinkering, make a still from any pile of scrap they find.  Not all goblins are as technically skilled as the others; some are born with ‘da spark’ and have the ability to build all sorts of half-mad and full-mad inventions.

An individual goblin is not much of a threat.  They can’t hit the broad side of a barn and are more likely to scurry under a stump than take on anything equal or larger to them.  Some of the more friendly, or dumb, goblins may be open for trade but would much rather steal or bully what they want out of their target.  Unlike other more ‘savage’ creatures goblins see outsides not as an immediate threat but as something they can copy and learn from.  The goblin fascination with hats came with early interactions with ship captains; seeing that the captains wore the hats and were in charge, therefore if they wanted to be in charge, they to needed to wear a hat.

The Formless Sea

this + ALOT of mud

At a distance one could mistake the Formless Sea as a vast plain of savanna with copses of strange trees, but the smell gives it away.  The air here reeks like stale beer, mildew, and a low tide on a hot humid night.  The 'water' in here is more like a thick brown organic soup than an open ocean.  This soup is a churning, undulating mass, a slurry sea of a semisolid sandy sludge.  It gurgles and bubbles in places making sounds more fitting to a digestive problem than to a geographic feature.  Most is thin enough to sail through however in some places hardened masses have solidified and formed temporary islands.  Temporary is the key word here, and with a few exceptions these islands rarely last more than a few months until they break apart and fall back into the mass.

In addition to the clods of earth that pass as islands in this sea large mats of fungus and mold grow on the muck.  In fact, no flora outside of fungus and mold seem to grow in this sea.  Thick yellow clouds of fungal spores lay thick and lazy just above the mucky surface of this sea.  These clouds sometimes settle and great agglomerations of mushrooms and strange molds spawn where they fall.  These islands, known as spore falls, are more of a green spongy mass than terra firma.  Fungus and mold grows and knots upon one another until little islands form that covered is strange vegetation that reek of wild fermentation.  The valleys and divots in these islands make for narrow waterways and quaggy paths choked with green and purple fungal blooms.  When pressed the ground yields slightly and excretes a thin orange liquid that looks like clay rich river water.

These spore falls are thick with ‘vegetation.’  Great bulbous gardens of mushrooms that bear strange fruits common only to this sea spring up in the spore falls.  As do thick ropy stands of mycelium that bob in sync with the winds and the tides.  Parasitic mosses hang from large nets from tree-like mushrooms that sloop like drunks.  Many these blooms are poisonous, but a few are edible and some have valuable medicinal and alchemical effects.

some get you high, some kill you, some get you high THEN kill you

Some of the mushrooms grow tall and strong, their stalks becoming hard as oaks.  If they are left to grow unmolested these mushrooms will keep growing indefinitely.  These mushrooms can grow vast, hundreds of meters tall and some with caps of over a kilometer in diameter.  These are known as Ubershrooms they are by the largest objects in this sea.

There is a suppressing amount of animal life in this Sea.  Insects are common here and can grow to massive proportions, Sludge Striders being a prime example.  Oozes too are common, and run the gamut from simple amoebic like creatures, to globs with an animal like intelligence, to a few that are even sentient and can speak.  There are even two types of fungus people, the savage Fungaloids and the more intelligent and docile Mycondids.  Imported from other seas, hogs have exploded in population growing fat and feral.  The most dangerous inhabitants of this sea however are the vile inbred goblins.

Life in this sea is not easy and most people would consider living here a punishment.  Only a small number of hardy human settlements exist on the Ubershrooms as well as a few hermits and isolated communities that live out in the swamps.  Food from outside this sea rots extremely fast once exposed to the air.  It’s rare for one to be able to finish more than a few mouthfuls of imported food before creeping mold fuzzes it over.  Open bottles of wine will turn to vinegar in a matter of hours.  Even the hardy staples of sailors are not immune, hard tack and fatback soon turn to moist slop.  The air here is way too thick with fungal spores to be comfortable.  Great green-yellow gales can whip up, blanketing whole areas like a foux blizzard.  Even the muddy water of the sea is awful; it manages to be both sticky and slick at the same time and great globs of it gets everywhere; in your boots, in your clothes, in your hair, in your eyes, and in your very soul.

There are however, very good reasons to reside in this sea.  The material that the Ubershrooms are made out of is similar to a hardwood, but is very light in comparison to those harvested from trees.  If treated properly this shroomwood is an excellent building material.  Many of the mushrooms and molds here are edible and as export some worth their literal weight in gold.  Legends abound of foragers that have located truffles the size of kegs, truffles that allow them to retire to pleasure palaces in faraway seas.  Many of the mushrooms can be fermented into powerful liquor or into a more subtle wine.  While having its one rather ‘unique’ taste this mushroom wine is nearly immune to spoiling and is great for long voyages, even if it tastes like whiskey and gravy got into and fight and whiskey lost.