The Ungulix!

What are these posts even? They started out as Scrap doing reasonably sensible hooks and have decayed into me just ranting about the monster in question...

Abhorrer & Aeskithetes

Anemone Men & Ants Of Neutrality

Atrocious Crows & Azul

Bedlam Birds & The Blathering Bird

Boa Boy & Boa Constructor

Brainstormer & Capitualtors

Colour Monster & Corbeau

Crimson Contrarodron & Cryptospider

Curselings and Discretion Bugs

Vore Bull & Vitillary

Whirlwind Wurm!

Wound Whisp

Xaxavraznazak

Yam-Man

Zen Beast

Zug-Zug

Never mind, whatever I am doing, I shall do. let us move on to... the;

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What qualities are mentioned in their description;

- No-one believes they are real, (only the writer of the text, Juglangsing Leptoblast, believes in them).

- There is no record of them anywhere.

- They are compressible winding creatures, tractomorphic, about a wolfhounds size in strength.

- Like a big lizard plus a rabid dog.

- Sharp spines, but these also bend.

- They have clawed feet - these extend and rasp when hungry, they also grasp the ground to keep the Ungulix attached.

- The Ungulix has a maddening crazed head, its eyes are oddly coloured pearls.

- They are coloured like a diseased dirty dove.

- Their presence brings a ruined air blotchiness or spattering of space, with inversions of light/

- THEY COME FROM BELOW. Specifically, from under beds and wardrobes, bookcases, things like that. Reading into it, it seems like there needs to be at least some space for them to come from, its not clear they could come from beneath a carpet or a dropped sheet of paper. And the thing they are coming below seems to need to be some kind of discreet object, or at least not something utterly huge, amorphous or super-small.

- They exist under inverted gravity, their up is our down etc. If they fall up into the sky they disappear.

- They come when you are drunk (or perhaps otherwise disordered).

- "imagine secret wolves"

- If they miss you once, they come back.

Whatever reality powers they have, they know when and how to attack only those who will not be believed, (maybe this is a quantum entanglement attention thing). They need prey, and they can go anywhere, so long as they come "from below".

so the qualities they need to "find" are

1. Prey, (preferably human it seems though who knows)

2. Plenty of accessible 'below spaces'.

3. A roof or something to stop them falling into the sky.

4. A "lack of attention". This could mean drink or drugs or witlessness

could it mean sleep, this is a difficult question. Maybe they need some specific brain activity - so if you fall dead asleep, into REM sleep, they can't do anything, they need you in the "in-between" world.

5. A clear fate line. As they are outside time and space, maybe they can only enter timelines or fate lines, strands of causality where they can be certain they are never confirmed to exist... (Yet if they can perceive timelines from the outside its clearly not well enough to be certain they will catch their prey, unless they are playing very five-dimensional chess every time they hunt.

BEARING THIS IN MIND

- Taming the Ungluix

What properties might a captured, tamed ungulix have? Could they even be tamed in any way which make sense to us? Trapped in a glass sphere perhaps? If they can't be known to exist what does a "Tame Ungluix" even mean? An imaginary hunting dog "owned" by a half-mad drunk who wanders the roads, and no-one has ever seen his "dog" but anyone who messes with him tends to go missing.

- The Parts of the Ungulix

What if you get a tooth, some bones, those strange eyes - they are wonderous things. By their very nature the world cannot accept that they are pieces of 'The Ungluix' because the Ungluix cannot be known to certainly exist) - so perhaps they are permanent zeros in the world, JOKERS IN THE PACK, and if you get your hands on some you can almost force them to be what you need, so long as it makes sense. I'm imagining here something like a PT Barnum Exhibit, but its actually from a real impossible interdimensional predator but it seems to be almost anything, or everything else, including a ginned-up fake, but perhaps whatever you can persuade people it is.

- Those being Hunted by the Ungulix

What could be done with someone being hunted by the Unglulix? The only way to save them is to get them off the sauce - or drug they are on, or heal their mind, in which case they may well decide that they were imagining the Ungluix all along.

People don't believe the Unglulix is real. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't know about the Ungulix at all. Perhaps the culture has adapted and regurgitated the Unglulix concept, the idea of them was immediately absorbed from Leptoblast and turned into a 'meme', being - the Unglix is the monster that old drunks think they are being hunted by when they fall over or go into rages - like a version of 'pink elephants', so that if someone turns up and says they encountered the Ungulix, well its ridiculous, sad and a little pitiful and look at the mess they made of their walls.

There are a range of ways the PCs might encounter them;

> They guard an old drunk, but stay aware, they never encounter the Unglix themselves but hear the sounds of crashing and banging and see the old fool running from the house - very sad!

> They are guarding an old drunk but they do *not* stay aware, they get drunk or high and... THE UNGULIX ATTACK! a battle is on and if the old fool gets dragged away then the PCs have to answer for it, all they can say is that the Unglix took them, so they are arraigned for murder and conspiracy. (Also they themselves are not really sure what really happened. Strange wolves? Bandits wearing masks?

> The PCs are hired to protect an old drunk but get them off the sauce and behold - the Unglix is gone.

> The very sad and horrible idea of the Ungulix hunting old people with dementia - is there even a way to permanently defeat or ward against it? 

> Can you get real wasted and follow the Unglix into the topsy turvy world - I mean that sounds utterly reasonable to me, maybe you can make some kind of drunk bargain with the Unglulix toothed goddess 

- The Wards of the Ungulix

Lets say that, like sharks, getting bits and pieces of the Ungulix can ward against them, they don't want t go too near the bodies of their own kin. Of course no-one really knows what these strange doodads are and they seem like the leavings of a carnival curio cabinet or the back room of a shop that sells incense. But the effect is good, fill your house with bonkers curious and mad taxidermy and the Ungulix will stay away.

Building models or fetishes of them - and leaving them upside down in the ceiling or under furniture - if the Ungluix sees another Ungluix from a different pack it will assume they are already hunting here. 

- Treasures of the Ungulix

- The knobbly scaled skin. Make leather of this and you won't be see, and if you are see, you won't be believed. Write your conspiracy theory on this and you will be believed, at least from those who read it from your own hand.

- The funky teeth. A necklace of these delirious fangs would be good protection from Witches and madmen. You won't lose your head in dreams or astral projections and your memories cannot be read.

- The terrible eyes. Children using these as marbles will give correct divinations, but only if the questions are phrased in terms that make sense to the childs world-view. Children lose interest quickly and once given an Ungulix eye cannot be repossessed. If one rolls a bunch of Ungulix eyes down stairs they continue past the lowest floor and if you chase them you can gain access to the "other floors".

- The warped spines. More like most of its bendy skeleton. Baffle audiences! Use it as an 'Oddity Hook' - a pseudo-grapple that gives you access to unlikely spaces. Use it to escape those guards chasing you! Where will you end up? Anywhere in the Multiverse! It’s worth a try maybe?

- Post-Ungulix Comedown

Even after you have an adventure with the Ungulix you are so fucked up from it that you can't really decide if it was real or not - was that a drunken dream you had, were you all wandering around wasted and not really knowing what you were doing? 

An ungulix adventure should be like strange violent dream, things should fade into each other, you don't quite know how you got places - rapid scene changes, things cutting out in the middle, not saying or doing quite what you intend the way you intend it - roll a fumble - scene change! roll a crit? flashback?

- Ungulix City

A place where everywhere is nowhere, where the Ungulix live and eat people with knives and forks, here they are fine fine gentlemen and we are beasts who crawl upon the walls. Why would you go there and can anyone ever get back?