Carcass Crab
GM's Eyes Only
Spoilers. This page is written for the GM, and players who read on will learn things their characters don't know.
A giant crab that armors itself with the dead and the weapons they carried. Source: Eberron Campaign Setting, p. 277.
What it is. A crab the size of a wagon, with eight legs, two massive claws, and four stalked eyes. At rest it looks like a mound of corpses and abandoned armor. It glues battlefield wreckage to its shell (plate, shields, broken weapons, whole bodies), and the junk serves as armor. A barb in its tail injects a venom that leaves its prey clumsy and slow.
In Tir Hathar. A scavenger of the old Long War battlefields, warped by the magic still soaking the ground there.
Stats¶
First draft, built from WWN's baseline stat lines.
| HD | AC | Atk | Dmg | Shock | Move | ML | Inst | Skill | Save | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carcass Crab | 8 | 18 | +9 x2 | 2d6+2 | 3/15 | 30' | 9 | 5 | +1 | 11+ |
- Grab and bite. When a claw hits a human-sized or smaller target, the crab can hold it. Breaking free takes a Main Action and a Str/Exert check against difficulty 10. At the start of its turn, it bites whatever it's holding for 1d6+2.
- Tail barb. A ranged attack out to 30 feet: +7, 1d4. The target makes a Physical save or takes -1 to hit and to Dex checks for the rest of the scene, stacking up to -3.
- Heap of the dead. Motionless, it passes for a pile of corpses: +3 to stealth.
- Spoils. Its shell carries whatever the dead carried. Picking over a dead carcass crab turns up armor, weapons, and sometimes something worth a great deal more.
Still open: playtesting the numbers, and which battlefields have them. Suggested, not settled: they may also live along warm coasts, as some do in Eberron.