Pinebore
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 huge, armored beetle that strips whole pine trees bare and keeps the taiga from choking on itself. Made for Tir Hathar; see The Northern Reaches.
What it is. A beetle the size of an ox, with a heavy, ridged shell and jaws made for stripping bark and needles from an entire pine. It is a fantastic, scaled-up version of what bark beetles really do: thin the forest, manage it, and keep it from choking on its own growth. It survives the cold the way real beetles do, with antifreeze in its blood, and it shuts down for the deepest part of winter.
In the web. It competes with the Wooly Mammoth for bark at the treeline, and it is prey for the Winter Wolf.
Stats¶
First draft, built from WWN's baseline stat lines.
| HD | AC | Atk | Dmg | Shock | Move | ML | Inst | Skill | Save | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pinebore | 6 | 18 | +6 | 2d6 | — | 20' | 7 | 4 | +1 | 12+ |
- Shell. As its Main Action it can hunker down, gaining +4 AC until it moves again. It can't attack while hunkered.
- Feller. A pinebore working a tree can bring it down. Anyone under a falling pine makes an Evasion save or takes 3d6 damage.
- Winter shutdown. In the deepest cold it goes dormant. A dormant pinebore can't act, but its shell still protects it.
- Cold-built. Immune to ordinary cold.
Still open: playtesting the numbers, and what, if anything, people make from the shells.