Friday, October 16, 2015

31 Nights of Halloween: Graboids for the Cypher System

I used one these tonight in a one shot for the Strange!

First introduced in the 1990 film Tremors, Graboids are depicted as subterranean animals, superficially resembling gigantic worms or grubs, with long cylindrical bodies. When fully grown, a Graboid will be up to 30 feet (9.1 m) long, and 6 feet (1.8 m) across at the widest point, and weigh 10-20 tons. Graboids have no eyes; they do not need them, due to living underground. Their heads consist of a massive black armored beak, which is used to push aside the dirt whilst digging. The beak opens like a grotesque flower; it consists of a wide upper jaw, a thinner lower jaw, and a pair of hooked mandibles, one on each side. Whether or not they have a skeleton is unclear, but a faux scientific document written by the SyFy channel hypothesizes they have a semi-rigid internal structure, similar to the cuttlebone of cuttlefish.

Graboids have three long powerful snake-like tentacles, which are prehensile and can reach at least 10 feet (3.0 m). Each of these tentacles (which have been loosely compared to functioning like the creature's tongue) terminates in a toothed mouth of its own. It is unclear if they bite off and swallow food on their own, or if they are simply used to get a better grip on prey so it can be dragged into the creature's jaws. Normally kept retracted in the Graboid's throat, these tentacles were initially mistaken for the whole creatures, causing the characters in the first Tremors film to underestimate the size of their underground opponents. The Graboid's common name is derived from these prehensile tentacles, which 'grab' prey and pull it back down the Graboid's hungry gullet. At times, these tentacles appear to be semi-autonomous, hissing and writhing like snakes. Food is typically swallowed whole, though early in the first film, they are shown to be capable of dismembering and decapitating prey.

A Graboid's hide is thick and leathery, with a rough, pebbly texture, that gives them a reptilian appearance (although they are not reptiles). This makes them very hard to kill with anything short of saturation bombing or large-bore rounds. Graboids are immensely strong, able to topple over mobile homes, tow heavy objects such as a pickup truck without slowing down, smash through brick walls, and pull a station wagon underground. Encircling their bodies are short spikes that all move in unison to push the Graboid through the dirt, similar to the setae of an earthworm. They can burrow faster than a human can run.






GRABOID (STAGE 1) 7 (21)


Motive: To eat
Environment: Underground
Health: 21
Damage Inflicted: 7
Armor: 3
Movement: Long
Modifications: Ambush 8, Might defense 8, 
Perception 9 
Combat: They burrow under the ground before ambushing their prey.
Tentacles: They may try to grab any creature within Immediate range.
Pull Underground: As an action, they may move one creature they have grabbed with their tentacles 1d3 steps down the damage track.
Chomp: They inflict 5 damage that ignores armor to one creature in Immediate range.
Use: The characters are investigating a farm where all the livestock and workers have disappeared.
Loot: A dead graboid has cyphers.


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