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Rolling Scrapyard

March 6th, 2017

Alex Riggs

Exotic Encounters Archive

Today’s Exotic Encounter is destined to go straight to the garbage heap… because it more or less is a garbage heap. Meet the rolling scrapyard, a high-CR ooze that, in many ways, isn’t really much of an ooze at all.

 

Rolling Scrapyard

With a terrible screech of groaning and tortured metal, a massive pile of debris and rubbish rises up like a tidal wave of trash, thin strands of transparent mucus barely visible between the constituent parts.

ROLLING SCRAPYARD                 CR 18
XP 153,600
N Colossal ooze
Init –1; Senses blindsight 60 ft.; Perception +1

DEFENSE

AC 26, touch 1, flat-footed 26 (–1 Dex, +25 natural, –8 size)
hp 294 (28d8+168)
Fort +15, Ref +8, Will +10
DR 10/adamantine; Immune ooze traits; Resist acid 10, cold 10, electricity 10

OFFENSE

Speed 40 ft.
Melee 4 slams +29 (4d8+16)
Ranged 6 scrap shots +12 (4d8+16)
Special Attacks engulf, scrapyard shell, strip gear

STATISTICS

Str 43, Dex 8, Con 22, Int —, Wis 13, Cha 8
Base Atk +21; CMB +45; CMD 54
Skills Disguise –1 (+19 to pose as a mundane scrap heap); Racial Modifiers +20 Disguise to pose as a mundane scrap heap)

ECOLOGY

Environment any urban or underground
Organization solitary
Treasure double

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Engulf (Ex): Although it moves slowly, a rolling scrapyard can simply engulf Gargantuan or smaller creatures in its path as a standard action. The rolling scrapyard merely has to move over the opponents, affecting as many as it can cover. Opponents can make attacks of opportunity against the rolling scrapyard, but if they do so they are not entitled to a saving throw. Those who do not attempt attacks of opportunity can attempt a DC 32 Reflex save to avoid being engulfed—on a success, they are pushed back or aside (opponent’s choice) as the rolling scrapyard moves forward. Engulfed creatures are subject to the rolling scrapyard’s scrapyard shell ability, gain the pinned condition, are in danger of suffocating, and suffer 4d6 points of bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage each round as they are crushed and cut by the various junk comprising the rolling scrapyard’s body. Such creatures remain trapped within the rolling scrapyard’s body until they are able to escape the pin. The saving throw DC is Strength-based, and includes a –8 racial penalty due to the rolling scrapyard’s scrapyard shell.

Scrap Shot (Ex): As a standard action, a rolling scrapyard can expel six clusters of junk and scrap from deep within its body, held together with a sticky slime. Treat these as ranged natural attacks with a range increment of 30 feet and a maximum range of 300 feet.

Scrapyard Shell (Ex): A rolling scrapyard builds a massive shell of scrap metal and other refuse around itself, which it uses as both a defense mechanism and a weapon. Any creature that is engulfed by the rolling scrapyard or hit by one of its attacks is exposed to the rusty metal, garbage, and worse that comprise this shell, and is affected by one of the following, determined at random:

Entangling Rubbish: The creature gets entangled in loose garbage, gaining the entangled condition for 1 minute.

Found Treasure: A single piece of adventuring gear, or a weapon, armor, or shield, is dislodged from the rolling scrapyard and lands in the creature’s square. There is a 10% chance that this item is magical in some way.

Rusty Wound: The creature gets cut by rusty metal, which inflicts an additional 1d2 points of piercing damage, and the creature is exposed to tetanus.

Tetanus: injury; save Fortitude DC 18; onset 3d8 days; frequency 1/day; effect 1d4 Dex damage and the creature suffers a 50% spell failure chance on all spells with verbal components for the next 24 hours. Additionally, whenever a creature suffering from the disease fails a saving throw by 5 or more or is the subject of a critical hit, he must succeed on a Fortitude save or be paralyzed with muscle spasms for 1d4 rounds.

Stinking Refuse: The creature is smothered in some filthy, unpleasant material, and must succeed on a DC 24 Fortitude save or be nauseated for 1 round and sickened for 1 minute thereafter.

Additionally, a rolling scrapyard’s scrapyard shell provides it a variety of benefits. If all of the items comprising its shell are somehow removed, it loses its damage reduction, natural armor bonus to AC, loses its scrap shot natural attack, and has the damage dice of its slam attacks reduced by 2d8.

Strip Gear (Ex): Each round that a creature is engulfed by a rolling scrapyard, the rolling scrapyard attempts to strip away 1d3 items from it, adding them to its scrapyard shell. Items are affected in the order presented in Table: Items Affected by Magical Attacks, as found in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook. The rolling scrapyard makes a Disarm or Steal combat maneuver check against each item. This is a free action that does not provoke attacks of opportunity. Items disarmed or stolen in this way are subsumed into the creature’s scrapyard shell, and cannot be retrieved unless the rolling scrapyard is slain (at which point it takes 1d10 minutes of sorting through the refuse to find them).

 

Ecology

Although not strictly intelligent, these oozes have cunningly adapted themselves to civilization, using the trash and refuse of humans and other intelligent creatures—especially scrap metal—to form protective shells that not only provide armor for their soft, mucus-like bodies, but also allow them to conceal themselves and ambush prey, crushing them in a mountain of stinking garbage. The ooze forms a sort of nucleus at the center of the shell of garbage, with thin tendrils of sticky slime spread throughout its shell to give it full control over the metallic extensions to its body.