Veins of the Earth (VotE henceforth) is an old-school take on the Underdark, published in 2017 by Patrick Stuart. Work on a remastered version is currently underway. Stuart's fictional worlds are sharply realized and evocative, but I have found it difficult to bring those worlds to the table, precisely because they are so unique and sometimes difficult to fit into a game that is not built around them.
I have used bits and pieces of VotE in the past, but never incorporated all of its tools into my games. The vibe is pretty dark, bordering on survival horror, like the movie The Descent extrapolated out into a whole underground world. So I have struggled to add a lot of VotE's best elements to my dungeon fantasy games.
But VotE is not just a dungeon fantasy bestiary. The horror? The cold logic of its world? The sense of deep time? Could that work in another system that I've been running lately? A system like Mothership?
To illustrate, I have randomly chosen a few VotE monsters and described how they could appear in a Mothership game. Suggested stat blocks refer to Unconfirmed Contact Reports (UCR), the Mothership bestiary.
Fossil Vampire
Entombed, ancient vampires, gone mad from confinement, hungry for blood they can no longer digest. This one needs essentially no tailoring. VotE’s description of an actual strata of buried vampire paleo-horror is a ready-made Mothership scenario.
You could have it take place on a dry desert planet, and model the fossil vampires as thirsty not just for blood, but for any source of moisture, desiccating their victims into husks. Perhaps the planet has an irregular day/night cycle, due to axial tilt, a binary star system, or some other stellar effect. If the characters can figure out how the day/night cycle works, they can use that against the vampires.
For swarms of fossil vampires, exploding out of an exposed seam of vampire sediment, use the UCR’s generic swarm stat block. If any crew member is overwhelmed three-to-one or more by these creatures, they are dehydrated (disadvantage on all rolls, per the food & water rules in the Player’s Survival Guide (p. 32.5). Any successive hit from a swarm of vampires to an already-dehydrated character is an automatic wound.
For a different style of vampire scenario, use the generic hunter stat block (or the stats for the Belladonnas) and deploy it in a classic Alien “it is loose on the ship” scenario. Same dehydration ability. It will also “drink” ship water supplies, liquid fuel, pseudomilk, and any other liquid it can find.
Stormsheep
Glassy, conductive things, spiky like sea urchins, moving by instinct, seeking electricity and conductive metals. Once again, here is a monster that can be dropped into a Mothership game with almost no tailoring.
Imagine a routine ore transport job. The ore is mostly lead, but there are chunks of copper mixed in with the lead, and dormant stormsheep are sleeping within the copper. Agitated by the electrical field of the crew’s ship during a warp jump, the stormsheep awaken and begin to escape their leaden prison.
The crew becomes aware of them at first due to minor electrical malfunctions. This can play out like a Star Trek episode, where something that initially appears to be a mundane ship maintenance issue hints at a bigger problem. This kind of scenario can organically engage first the teamsters, then the scientists and androids, and finally the marines, as the problem matriculates from annoyance to mystery to danger.
Stormsheep can interact catastrophically with the electrical field of the brain. Body save or brain damage (disadvantage at one randomly chosen skill). Advanced anti-epilepsy implants can fix this condition, but they’re not cheap. The stormsheep are also harmed by this contact, as human thoughts stagger and madden them. So stormsheep as a threat present a different look than the typical monster that just wants to consume the crew; the encounter is mutually disastrous for the crew and the stormsheep.
Perhaps the stormsheep can be lured out of the ship with a uniquely conductive metal or a similarly ingenuous plan. But the simplest way to deal with it – not the most ethical, but the most direct – is to throw people at it until the conflicting memories of their fried synapses scramble the stormsheep until they can be safely jettisoned.
Silichominids
I want to quote from this VotE entry to really drive home how much industrial language and modern imagery is baked into what is ostensibly a fantasy bestiary. A silichominid has “the smell of plastic landfills”; an “atom-reactor hatewail”; flesh “woven from beryllium and aluminum." These are silicon-based creatures wearing “exo-suits” to explore what they perceive as a hostile environment.
While the stormsheep are dangerous because they don’t realize electricity from human neurons is not OK to eat, the silichominids are dangerous because carbon-based life is a complete mystery to them. VotE says “Imagine sheltered first-world tourists wandering around a refugee camp.” Their touch burns. Everything that is natural and good to them is toxic and deadly to humans. The opposite is true, and if their suits are ruptured, it is like a small dirty nuke going off. Think about all the sci-fi stories that involve humans harming or destroying alien life due to various anthropocentric assumptions, then turn those around. When the Silichominids show up, the crew is on the receiving end of a Stanisław Lem story.
Use the brute stat block from UCR, with an extra 4d10 damage at close range from the explosion if its suit is ruptured.
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