Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at The Grinning Frog.
It might not be our celebration, but a festival where you are grateful for the things in your life is something that I think everyone in the world can get behind. I, and the whole team, are extremely grateful for all our customers and web site visitors.
We present this free space creature as a gift for all of you.
It is in the format for use in our solo play sci-fi rpg Starship Scavengers but should be easy to adapt to Traveller, Starfinder etc.
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When human travellers landed on the arid world of Tyx, a world governed by the sentient insect mantid species, they found something that was first thought of as a free meal - the Qtxx (as the mantids tried to translate it to the humans). Those first human travellers knew better, of course, it was nothing more or less than a space turkey, which in no short order became known as a gobblenaut.
What they did not realise at the time was that the harmless-looking creature had a trick up its sleeve, or rather down its throat; the creature has the ability to bring up burning bile from its stomach and vomit this out as a short-range attack. On impact, this attack causes harm and continues to burn for a short time afterwards.
In itself, it is not too much of a hazard for a shielded spacefarer, but when the gobblenauts can blend into their natural landscape and tend to occur in fairly large groups, a single hunter needs to be wary.
Occurring only on Tyx and Tyx Prime, gobblenaut meat has become something of a gourmet food and is in high demand on several human planets during annual arrival anniversaries, which celebrate humans settling on those worlds.
There has been little success in breeding the creatures off-world, and as they will not breed in captivity, the only means of acquiring their meat on their home planets is from hunting. As such, genuine gobblenaut meat is relatively valuable.
There are synthetic substitutes of course but naturally, such alternatives are not considered as good as the real thing.
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Game Suggestions
We had the mini-adventure Ten Days on the Tarquin Plains in Frontier Gazette Issue 2 and the gobblenauts might make a fun substitute for the vulrocs or deer bots.
A walk through an arid valley might see a character disturb and be attacked by one or more flocks of gobblenauts (see below for sample map).
A hunting trip for their food.
A means of spicing up a hunting trip would be to have something such as the lunar lizard (from the Moon Crash adventure) also be hunting the birds for food, but why have gooblenaut when you can have astronaut?
PDF Download
You are welcome to download the PDF of this article, with sample arid map below:
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