Monster Monday: Children of Stone

Few claim to have witnessed one of the Children of Stone in person, and those that have rarely know them by  that name.  They are rare creatures, and in the Dark Country they are most commonly found in the various ruins left by the Sword Brothers.  How they came to be there, none can say.

They appear as stunted, vaguely humanoid figures with a passing resemblance to an overgrown baby.  Their heads are universally misshapen, and their features roil and contort to make new, hideous faces that most find difficult to look at.  Their bloated form is composed of a bizarre mixture of broken stones, burning cinders, and smoke that all somehow clings together to give this terrible entity the appearance of solidity.  The dim light they cast and their horrid wails can be seen and heard long before the creatures themselves are upon you.

Their precise nature is somewhat of a mystery.  Since their bodies disintegrate into ash upon death, none have been able to study them for any length of time. Their manner of procreation is the subject of much controversy and speculation.  Some have postulated that they are physical manifestation of the psychic trauma created during the events that cause edifices to become ruins.  Others claim that they are demons summoned by terrible diabolists to do their bidding, but since no one has every seen them directly in the employ of such a magician this hypothesis seems unlikely.  The most popular, in the most literal sense of the word, theory is that these mewling creatures are the result of too much old stone being too close to too much fire.  The mixing of the two substances in large quantities, such as often happens when old churches or castles burn down, creates them in the way meat creates maggots.

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This is the first in what I hope to be the resurrection of my Monster Monday articles, as I discussed in an earlier post.

The Children of Stone is an idea I've been throwing around since the very early days of 4e, when I ran a mediocre Wilderlands game using that system and the map of the Elphand Lands.  Originally, they looked a bit more like silicon breast implants that had been crudely molded into babies, but I decided to change them when I saw this image.  They've cropped up in a couple of campaigns since then, and I rolled some of my background for them into my version of the Mite when I ran the Labyrinth Lord version of the Dark Country. While I thought Mites added quite a bit fun to the game, it was mostly in the form of comedy.  These guys, I think, are a bit creepier.

Only two ConstantCon expeditions have bumped into them, and both of those expeditions lost a hireling as a result.