Welcome to the Dog Days of Podcasting, 2022 season. This year we’re taking part by creating 30 NPCs to use with table top gaming, writing projects, or other creative endeavors. These NPCs are system agnostic, but may include minor suggestions for how to run the characters with a party of adventures and explorers. They are written with a specific genre in mind, but will include notation for how to use them within at least two other realms.
That said, let’s get started.
Today, we’re visiting The Living Blockade, an NPC designed for Fantasy campaigns.
The Living Blockade
XVI
The rumbling rattles the walls again. Someone yelps as the surface they leaned against slides away, revealing a passage to the next room, and a surprised fanged and clawed thing. The creature coils itself to leap at the party when the wall bends in towards it, snapping it up in a maw of brick and mortar. The party pulls back, suddenly aware of the different sections of the chamber’s edge that are moving as the stonework thing drags its meal away. Another deep rumble, and then the next surprise lands in the party’s lap.
The wall apologies.
It is a hunter of dark places. Serpent like, long, flat, and camouflaged. The Living Blockade grows in dark places like crypts, cellars, dungeons, burial chambers, any place where it can grow to resemble masonry or carved earth. Any place where dark things congregate under the earth. This one has grown quite large, enough that it has made this once open dungeon a labyrinth of isolated rooms. And navigating this place is going to take delicate negotiation with the creature that is the walls.
The Living Blockade is a sentient creature, and while its own survival is paramount, it is not without compassion and understanding the wants and needs of others. It seeks food and the lure of creatures to its dungeonesque web. Killing commoners and adventurers? This draws trouble and not more food. Beyond that, some may seek to propagate their species, although rare as it brings competition. For a promise of bringing their young far, far away from their parental creature the blockade may aid parties to their chosen path within their hunting grounds.
In fantasy, they’re a living snake of stone and earth that has made the walls of this crypt their home, their shell, and their hunting ground.
In deep space, they’re a station that has gain contro l of their own vast body and may manipulate parties to help with some function or antagonist deep within their hull.
In ages of legend, they’re the great hive of stone that has taken over the city’s sewers and hunts the dark places while the world above slumbers.
A place as an ally or a foe. A creature so vast yet hidden. The Living Blockade is a puzzle NPC whose mood shifts as the party slides through their territory. A thing’s whose hunger will overcome all other desires, whose maw is getting ever closer.
The audio portion of this episode is shared on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Sounds and music are provided by Syrinscape’s Dungeon Depths Soundset. Please see the website for individual song and sound usage. The text for this episode is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Have a good time with the character, and let me know if you use them for something.
Until tomorrow.