In Legacy of Fire - The Final Wish (p. 49) there are these 3 lines: «the crab-like, many-headed Gray-Stag-Devourer which terrorized the Crown of the World in the lands later claimed by the Witch Queen of Irrisen».
Have you got any idea or suggestion on what this supposed spawn of Rovagug was and how it looked like? Are there more info in other books? Should I read its name as [Gray Stag] Devourer (what's a gray stag?) or [Gray] Stag Devourer? I think the second-one but I'm not anglophone, so...
I'm gm-ing "The Hungry Storm" (Jade Regent AP), although highly customised, and I'd like to make a detour to the Nameless Spires, where the PCs should find the corpse / nest of this creature, but I didn't find any canon material except for those lines.
Thanks for advice :)
The entry for Erastil's Herald, the Grim White Stag, indicates that the Grim White Stag actually fought the thing, leading it on a running battle away from mortal communities.
However, there's no real description of the Gray-Stag-Devourer.
As a spawn of Rovagug, odds are very good it's merely dormant rather than actually dead.
If you want to run the thing temporarily waking up and the party having to beat the crap out of it, I'd start from a hydra stat block and advance it up to a CR 10ish colossal creature with Spawn properties (though with reduced DR!), to reflect the thing being in a severely weakened state.
Perhaps the party would find its massive corpse pinned to the side of a canyon by a pair of mind-bogglingly huge antlers. The Grim White Stag is a colossal creature in its own right, and it can shed its antlers for interesting results.
Perhaps the party's presence - fresh meat and blood, after so long! - stirs the dormant monstrosity back to life, but the party can see the antlers start burning with holy fire as the ancient seal starts trying to reassert itself. The party must then subdue the beast before it recovers enough strength to tear free.
How does that sound?
Thank you very much! I completely missed the Stag entry in Kingmaker!
My first idea was that the Gray-Stag-Devourer is (was) not a spawn of Rovagug, but a sort of drone / robot (Numeria-style), released from the Nameless Spires due to a malfunctioning and roaming to catch DNA samples. Gray for it's made of steel, stag due to a radar / missle-thing on its top, and devourer because it swallow plants, animals and rocks to analyze them (mechanically similar to a Canoptek spyder of Warhammer 40k, with some improvements to be more crab-like and able to grab objects and peoples...) All this thanks to what I read in "The Hungry Storm" where in a sealed room inside the Storm Tower there are a few small scorpion-like creatures, working on a hi-tech device.
So: small crystal scorpions > colossal mecha-spider-crab :D
Nevertheless, I find your idea a better one!
Be the beast mechanical or natural, the Grim White Stag fought against this thing because it was a mindless distruction-machine, so no problem here. If the Devourer is (was) a bloody hydra-like creatures as you suggest, the sense of wonder may be greater: inside futuristic ruins, filled with off-line robots, acid miasma and exagonal buildings, a primordial beast stands in reverie, wounded and stag-gered ages ago by a cunning demigod. The cold of the Crown could have had an important part in confining it.
Hard work on monster building this week-end XD
Thansk again :)