Worldscar · Bestiary
Where the corruption took root first. Beneath the green, the grove remembers what it was, and grieves it — beasts run feral and the old spirits will not lie still.
16 creatures catalogued
It was somebody's dog, once.
Thorn has grown up through its hide until the two cannot be told apart, and it comes at a dead run with its head down. Whatever it used to be answers to nothing now — but like everything in the undergrowth, it breaks and bolts from an open flame.
The grove exhales, and something steps out.
Neither plant nor ghost, it rises out of the leaf-rot where the spores hang thickest, and a blade finds nothing solid to bite. Only a hex spoken into the mould unpicks whatever is holding it together.
Small, starving, and never alone.
The grove's hunger wears a hundred small bodies, chittering up out of the bracken in packs too quick to mourn. Fire scatters them — a torch to the underbrush is worth more than any blade.
The saplings move when you aren't looking.
Barely knee-high and never fewer than a dozen, they dart in at the ankles and are gone before you finish the swing. Fire is the only answer that reaches all of them at once.
The first to charge, the first to fall.
Runts of the warren, flung forward to blunt a Warden's blade. They die easily — but a careless swing only invites the pack, and the pack does not tire.
It runs the deer-paths wearing a stag's crown.
Too tall in the leg and too quiet by half, it stoops through the birches and lowers its rack at whatever is on the trail. Set light to the bracken and it will not follow you through the smoke.
The deadfall stood up and remembered a grudge.
A century of fallen timber packed into a body, it swings limbs the width of your chest and shrugs off honest steel. Rot sinks into it and does nothing — but old wood burns, and a hex undoes the knot that binds it.
Grown bold on the bones of the careless.
A goblin that has lived long enough to feed well, thicker of hide and meaner of eye. It drives the smaller ones ahead of it and feasts on whatever they drag down.
Beautiful, and entirely without mercy.
She blooms pale at the treeline and sings the grove's grief at whoever comes close, and blades pass through the petals like mist. Answer her with a hex, or with the dark she stepped out of.
A boulder that learned to be hungry.
Green to the shoulders and slow as weather, it lets you hit it as long as you like and then hits back once. Steel is wasted on that hide — hex it, or let the shadow take its legs out from under it.
It grew into the hedge, and the hedge grew into it.
Long-armed and lank, it hauls itself through briar that would flay anything else and closes the distance in three strides. Blades snag in the tangle of it; the arcane goes where steel cannot.
Every wound it takes puts out new thorns.
The grove has been repairing this one for a long time, stitching it back together out of briar and spite until nothing sharp matters any more. Do not try to out-hit it — unmake it with a hex, or drown it in shadow.
It wears a crown of antlers it did not grow.
Every warren bends to the largest skull, and this one clubbed its way to the front. It bellows the pack into a frenzy; cut the chant short and the rest lose their nerve, for steel alone barely troubles its hide.
The grove's oldest wound, walking.
When the corruption first took root it seized the largest thing it could find, and Bramblewrath has been growing around that rot ever since. Mountainous and slow, it shrugs off any blade; only a hex spoken into its hollow heart will bring the timber down.
It remembers the forest before the scar.
The last of the great wakeful trees, the Elder Treant stands rooted in grief at the heart of the grove. Axes only anger it — but the spirit bound in its rings is bared to the arcane.
It has kept this grove since before the scar.
The Warden was set here to watch the wood and never released from the duty, and now it guards a forest that died around it. Steel finds only rot and memory — bring the arcane, and the shadow it has stood in for a hundred years.