Cerastes

The cerastes is a three-foot long, slime-coated, mottled green and yellow serpent with an amphibian, protoplasmic cast. Its head is dominated by four scything, dagger-long tusks ringing a lamprey-like mouth. Tiny black eyes glisten with ophidian malice.

Foul-tempered and territorial, the cerastes attacks anything that nears its fetid lair, lashing out to rend with its terrible maw. It then sucks the fluids from the stunned or dying victim, draining it to a husk with incredible rapidity. Cerastes who happen to capture large prey have been known to swell themselves to bursting in feeding.

Though they prefer fresh-water marshes and swamps, cerastes have been encountered in forests and wastes. They do not tolerate extreme cold or salt water well, so are seldom found far north or near the shoreline. In winter, a cerastes collapses its lair around itself and freezes in the earth until the thaw.

In the wild the serpents roll in detritus, which sticks to the tacky mucus coating their bodies

Ouroboros Disciples

The Ouroboros Disciples believe that Thaia-thaan'ag is not exempt from its own principles. The sect works to undermine the cult's activities from within, plying the fear and paranoia of the worshipers against themselves and sabotaging their breeding temples. The members' motivations are varied: some seeks a paradoxical dissolution of dissolution, others cannot resist the urge to sow chaos in all forms, others believe the cult has failed in its current incarnation and must be purged.

The Disciples should not be confused with a heroic underground. They are as maddened and nihilistic as the rest of the Thaia-thaan'ag, and those who discover their existence and seek to manage their activities would do well to remember this. However, more than once an atrocity has been averted by discovering and empowering a sect member.

It is extremely rare to find more than a single Ouroboros Disciple within a cell of Thaia-thaan'ag cultists.

Thaia-thaan'ag

Only madmen and nihilists become members of Thaia-thaan'ag, which seeks to complete the apocalypse it believes was set in motion centuries ago. Its members revere a spiral-symbol of entropy, which they posit has manifested as serpentine gods of destruction through history.

The Thaia-thaan'ag are responsible for the creation and proliferation of the thaaskith. When the cultists raid, they carry fire, which destroys and purifies as it provides the warmth their slithering nightmares need to be their most terrible.

According to the cult, the calamitous force that writhes behind the universe has pressed on humanity's minds since before the first murder - an ancient thing indeed. We have interpreted it many ways:

  • Apep - The ancient Egyptians knew a force opposed order and sought to swallow the sun.
  • Tiamat - Babylonia revered both the obliterating inevitability of chaos and its maddened generative properties.
  • Cthulhu - A comparatively modern manifestation of the thing which breaks stars in

Medusa

Medusa are Thaia-thaan'ag cult leaders whose bodies are hosts to a nest of symbiotic amphisbaena. Their neck, shoulders, back, and head are grotesquely swollen and writhe continuously beneath the skin. At the base of the skull a spray of snaking bodies break through - this eruption weeps a viscous pus the flailing heads not chained with others of their ilk constantly lick away.

The narcotic venom sluicing through their bodies imbues medusas with visions of nascent godhood and a remarkable resistance to injury or persuasion. Linked to their slaves along serpentine coils they pursue the contradictory goals of increasing their own glory and the destruction of all life surrounding them. If threats or promises prove insufficient to deter a threat, a medusa is willing to tear into its own undulating flesh, producing fistfuls of angry, toxic amphisbaena.

Villagers tell tales of the mother and master of medusas, Aiatar.

Fargone

Fargone is a collective term for creatures which clearly used to be human but have been warped in body and mind into something vastly, horrifically otherwise. Some have bred for centuries in the dismal and toxic backwoods and wastes unclaimed by man, others were human magicians within their lifetime who became lost in their own power.

Tallow

A tallow can barely hold a humanoid form. Its features constantly melt and reform like hot wax, and not even its bones and innards are stable.

Tallows move with a rolling, sloshing gait, can squeeze through tiny cracks, and are extremely resistant to damage. They live in desolate forests or garbage-strewn areas of cities. Tallows cannot chew, so seek soft or liquid nourishment. A tallow can subsist on tree sap, old fruit, and sun-soft carrion, but they prefer hot blood and viscera and attack such food straightforwardly when it presents itself.

The sick lands to the east of Jorvik seem to spawn an unusual number of tallows, but no single origin has ever been identified.

Viscerid

Secreted among the savage garoulin are the viscerids, hulking monstrosities of decaying flesh and diseased intellect. They must constantly replace their own rotting flesh with living tissue in order to survive, and although the garoulin willingly give themselves to their masters, the viscerids vastly prefer human prey. Still, for all their bulk and horrific appetites, the creatures are known to be uncanny strategists and schemers.

Each nation feels the threat of the viscerid lurking far beyond it borders in the deep wilderness. There are thought to only be a few dozen of these creatures in existence, and little is known of their society or history.

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