Bull Stuart,  with Tom Calver,  Van Hallam,  Pip Rippon,  Ward Moorhouse  

Hellsborough & The Dark Peak

Paranoid Adventure in the Rapacious Blood-Soaked Parallel World of Sheffield, S6

Today in The Dark Peak:  79.spit-hoverwing.11.9  

Ratterstar



Most made hold a shape for about as long as it takes to notice them and no longer, but there is one shape they keep coming back to often enough that people round the scrap yards have given it a name rather than a shrug. A ratterstar is what you get when whatever's animating the offcuts settles into something built along the lines of a gnawmard, and then keeps adding legs it didn't strictly need. Four is common. I've counted seven on one, once, and did not stay to count again.

It moves like a gnawmard that's forgotten how many legs a gnawmard is meant to have, which is to say fast, low, and in a direction you weren't expecting. Startle one, or leave one sat still too long, and the legs splay out flat in a rough star, which I assume is either a threat display or the closest thing a ratterstar has to going rigid with fright. Either way it's the reason for the name, and the reason nobody's ever mistaken one for an actual gnawmard twice.

What a ratterstar is built from, once you look past the shape, is the part of the entry I'd rather not write and can't honestly skip. Small bones. Sinew. A tooth or two, not always matched to each other. Scraps of hide, stitched or grown together by the same animating trick that gets any made up and moving, just working here on different offcuts than the wood-and-paper kind. I don't know where the parts come from before the made gets to them, and every scrap trader I've asked has found a reason to change the subject.

Middens and scrap yards have taken to half-tolerating them for it anyway, because a ratterstar roots through rubbish for the same reason a gnawmard would, and it takes care of some things you'd rather not find in there yourself. Nobody's tamed one. Nobody's fed one on purpose either, as far as I can tell, and the arrangement seems to work better for everyone the less anybody thinks about it directly.

Field note: if something gnawmard-shaped goes still and starts spreading its legs into a star, back off rather than reach for it. That's not a threat you want to test the meaning of.

Type Hungry
HP 2

Sign-up to see the Foked Stat blocks

Scerm book one, available free in epub format COMING SOON
Foked core rules and scenario 1 - Three Murkneets Dark NEW
A Life in Death, Solo RPG Game Book - available free when you sign up NEW
Civic Unrest book one, available free in epub format COMING SOON
Hellsborough Chronicles, Book 1: The Dark Peak, final version chapters 1 - 7 in epub and online
Pip Rippon's Curated Guide to Hellsborough and The Dark Peak in epub and online
Junkyard Speedball ebook in epub and online
The Legend of Loxley Bottom in epub