These Tribals and their stories, just today I heard one about a toad big enough to eat your leg. Preposterous I said, but they held that the story was the utmost truth.
-Journal Entry of Gima (Explorer and Naturalist)
These beasts look very much like your common garden toad, minus one very important fact, they're roughly the size of a large dog. Living in the bogs of the Hyrizi Jungle, they prey on anything that is both small enough to fit into their large mouths and stupid enough to come near them.
They're not fast creatures by any definition of the word and rely entirely upon their camouflage to get the jump on potential food. One part of this camouflage is their burrows, not much more than a hole in the ground that they can fit the entirety of their body in, which they wait in until something comes within striking range. They then bound out, using their powerful hind legs to propel themselves toward their food.
Now, while the meat of the toads and tadpoles is grisly and nearly tasteless, their eggs are viewed as a delicacy in many parts of the world. It is said that those eggs taste of heaven and will keep one going even to the gates of the Abyss. Of course, finding the fist-sized eggs isn't that easy, the toads will often hide them in thick rushes on the edge of fetid pools, but the reward is worth it, and the local villages will often fight over the most fetid and vile pools, for the chance to get as many of the eggs as possible Go to Comment
A vaguely humanoid shape of moxious green rises up from the water before you, seeming to pull the algae and slime from the surface to sonstitue its form. As the head forms, it turns toward you, the jellified jaws opning to spill forth a false tounge of ooze and putrid flesh.
Formed from bodies left to putrefy within muddy graves and stagant waters, skuz number among the most disgusting of all undead. Consisting of equal parts stagnant water, rotting vegetation, and liquefied corpse, skuz are consumed by a blind need for vengeance, seekin to inflict their horrible demise upon all living creatures. Making their home amid swamps, sewers, and stagnant areas of ronds and rivers, they awair live prey to drag into their revolting pools. Preferring solitary existences, multiple skuz rarely linger together, with newly created spawn oozing away to pollute their own territories.
In the Forgotten Realms, skuz are most common in the Swamp of Akhlaur, the Wast Swamp, the Farsea Marshes, the River Umber, and a few locations along the coast of the Easting Reach. Rumor has it that, several times a year, the remains of the dead god Moandr exudes one or more powerful skuz, pssibly the forms of long-dead victims slowly excreted by the profane corpse's decay.
Crocs on mainstreet
Or any other large semi-aquatic animal swimming in the flooded roads.
Gravediggers
Dozus 11:07 pm: Here's a subplot: the expansion of the bog is invading the local temple's cemetary. The priests ask you to move the remains to a safer location, wherein they uncover...
Fungus
A local fungus explodes if hit or fallen upon. If any conflict takes place between intelligent foes, both sides will use it to their advantage.
Talking bamboo
"Quite near there happened to be a mound of earth, at the highest part of which were gowing thickets of cornel and a dense cluster of spiky myrtle-stems. I went up there and tried to wrench the green growth from the ground to provide a leafy covering for our altar. There I was confronted by a horrible and astonishing miracle. For, from the first bush which I tried to break off... blood oozed in dark drops, fouling the earth with its spots... A piteous moan came from the base of the mound and I heard a human voice answering me: 'Why, Aeneas, must you rend a poor sufferer? I am buried here... for I am Polydorus. Here death overpowered me in a crop of piercing iron pointed spears. And so a crop of resembling javelins has grown over me..."Go to Comment
The Trolls once had a great Empire, streching miles and leagues under the earth, but in time, as Great Underground Empires are wont to do; they struck upon a chamber that should have been better left unfound. Now, ages and aeons later, they are constantly filling in the deepest of their tunnels so that no man-kin, nor anything else, could find what they found and unleash it upon an unexpecting world. Go to Comment
Like everyone has said before me, very interesting, either as a one off session, or something your group uses on an infrequent basis to break from the monotomy of hack and slash/dungeon crawling. Go to Comment
Lifeforms (Fauna) (Swamp)