Lifeforms · Fauna · Underground
Wumpus
This ferocious creature has plagued adventurers that enter it's cave for hundreds of years. No one knows what it gaurds in it's lair, but rumors of vast wealth continue to draw adventurers to it.
Appearance:
A model of the effeciancy of nature, the wumpus is really rather small, around the size of a large racoon or a young pig. It's racoon-like face has oversized ears to better hear in the near perfect dark of the caves and it's eyes are enlarged as well, to collect what light there is.
The body of the wumpus is badger-like with short, stumpy legs ending in raptor claws. It is covered with long, dense, light grey fur sprinkled with black posionous quills jutting out all around. It's tail is quite long, slightly exceeding it's body length, and is ringed with black and light grey band of fur. The tail is devoid of posionous quills untill the tip, which has a dense ball of quills surrounding it and is the wumpus' primary form of attack.
Background:
No one is precisly sure of what, if anything, resides in the wumpus' lair. It was discovered by a band of adventurers who were drivin into the cave system by a storm. Half the group died in a matter of moments before the rest of the party fled on horseback into the storm. Rumors began to surface that either a wizard or an underground race set it there to gaurd a treasure or source of power. Many treasure hunters and explorers continue to search the caves of the wumpus, but always return empty handed.
The wumpus hunts by listening for sounds. It spends most of it's time in a light sleep, listening for noise while it conserves it's energy. When it hears noise, it begins to move through its cave system at random, as the walls distort the direction of any noise.
When it finds the source of the noise, it attacks by charging the prey and whipping it's tail. It's body and tail are covered in poisionous quills each almost two feet in length. If somehow cornered, the wumpus can flick it's tail and shake 1d6 quills loose in a general direction. It's aim and eyesight are not the best, so it's quill's deadly posion make up in effect what it lacks in precision.
Roleplaying Notes:
The wumpus is quite smelly and can be smelt and tracked up to two caves away from it's current location.
The wumpus' posion is deadly. NPC's die, no saving throw. PC's may live, but the posion is likely to kill them outright. If the PC's manage to survive the posion, it's effects do not linger and complete recovery is quite possible.
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Links to this article 1
- An ecological dungeon manfred linked by MoonHunter
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This is actually one of Agar's Posts.
Is it unique and immortal? Or are there many of them?
I was just wondering how this got switched. As moonhunter said, this is one of mine. A glitch of the switch I'm guessing. We'd appreciate it if this could be corrected at some point. :D
I remember coding and playing Hunt the Wumpus from a book onto my apple IIe when I was a kid. I like the write up you did - a very good (and imaginative) conversion of the old beast.
This is an odd one. The Wumpus seems to have a fair amount of folklore attached to it.