Father/Daughter Bestiary - Four Leaf Loather

A Monstrous New Year

Every year I've done some kind of special year end/year beginning blog post.  This year, to celebrate all of the delightful gaming that I've shared with my friends and family, I wanted to kick off a new project:  the Father/Daughter bestiary!  My eldest kiddo +Carina W. has been sharing her art on G+, and even has a few commissioned pieces under her belt or in the works.  What better way to merge her love of art and my love of tabletop role-playing than to come up with a joint project.

We actually made a game of the creation.  

I gave Carrie the idea for a new creature called a Four Leaf Loather.  Essentially, I wanted some kind of plant that grew out of the body of an especially unlucky soul in Dungeon Crawl Classics.  Each face needed to be somewhat different.  Carrie has been playing around with some "random" coloring, creating drawings with three different types of writing utensils chosen by someone else calling out numbers.  To change things up, we assigned three different dice to the writing utensils

• D8:  Micron Pens
• D10:  Metallic Markers 
• D24:  Brush Pens

For this exercise, each head of the Four Leaf Loather would be drawn with a different set of utensils, randomly determined.  That horrific monstrosity at the top of this page is the wickedly weird result!  

Although native to DCCRPG, they should work for just about any OSR game or D&D with a little tweaking.  

Here are the stats.  

Four Leaf Loather:  Init +4; Atk bites +3 melee (1d6); AC 12; HD 8d6; MV none, it's a plant... duh; Act 1d20 for 1 bite or 4d16 for 4 bites; SP random mouth affect (see below); SV Fort +5, Ref -2, Will +0; AL C.

Four Leaf Loathers are the result of four particularly unlucky souls falling victim to some calamity at the same time [when a player loses all four 0-level characters at once.]  If this event happens to occur outdoors, and if the right amount of blood is spilled on a patch of grass, there is a chance that some of the regular clovers on the ground will soak up all that unluckiness, and infest the corpses.  At some point 1d5 months after this event, a full-grown, 4 to 6 foot tall Four Leaf Loather takes form.

The Four Leaf Loather can attack in one of two ways.  They can bite adjacent creatures with all four mouths at once, or one of the heads can spew random liquid in a 30 foot long stream.  Anyone standing in the way must make a DC 15 Reflex save or suffer one of the following effects:

[Roll on a d4]

1. Acidic vomit:  3d6 damage.
2. Slippery saliva:  fall prone, requiring a DC 18 Agility check to get back up.
3. Revolting sludge:  lose one's cookies at the stench, becoming stunned for 1d3 rounds.  All onlookers must make a DC 12 Will save or suffer the same effect.  Just gross.  
4. Unlucky spittle:  lose 1d3 points of luck.

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We hope that you've had a wonderful New Year and that you have lots of tabletop gaming scheduled in 2017.  Perhaps we'll see you at one of our tables!