Buy me a coffeeGreog, the Broken Slave of the Mi-Go
Built to obey, shaped to endure, and left with just enough mind to suffer the work it was made for.
The greog is a thing that should not exist, not because it is impossible, but because too much intellect and too much cruelty had to cooperate to make it. Fashioned by the mi-go through surgical violation, alchemical reshaping, and cold anatomical experiment, it was created as labor, enforcement, transport, and living tool. A greog is not a natural people, nor a beast that found its own place in the world. It is a manufactured answer to the problems of toil, punishment, excavation, and war. The horror lies in the fact that the answer can still think, dimly, painfully, and never quite enough to escape what it has become.
Appearance
A greog resembles some blasphemous union of ogre, insect, and mutilated man. Its body is thick-limbed, deep-chested, and heavily built through the shoulders, with the look of a frame assembled to bear burdens rather than live naturally within its own shape. Flesh is interrupted by chitinous plates, ridged growths, reinforced joints, and alien intrusions that seem grafted rather than born. Nothing about it feels wholly grown. Everything feels altered, cut, braced, and forced into utility.
Its face is often the most disturbing part. It is neither wholly bestial nor wholly insectile, and never truly vacant. There is enough expression in it to suggest fear, obedience, pain, or baffled recognition. Those traces of inward life are not comforting. They are what make the creature so hard to forget.
Nature and Purpose
Greogs are made for use. They haul, guard, excavate, drag, carry, restrain, and break whatever resists them. They are built to endure pain, deprivation, confusion, and brutal discipline. Many are set to labor in mines, corpse pits, fungus-choked caverns, alien workshops, and hidden strongholds where lesser servants would die or rebel too quickly. Others act as attendants to more delicate horrors, moving specimens, lifting bodies, operating crude mechanisms, or standing motionless at their post until ordered to kill.
What makes the greog more troubling than a mere brute is the sense that something remains trapped inside it. A beast may be hunted. A demon may be hated. A construct may be smashed. A greog leaves a worse impression: not mindlessness, but a mind reduced. Some hesitate at strange moments. Some react to names, tools, songs, or fragments of speech as if something old and damaged still stirs within them. What survives is not identity restored, but identity ruined.
Combat
In battle, a greog fights with the direct brutality of something designed around command, punishment, and forced submission. It closes hard, uses its weight well, and relies on resilience rather than speed. Many seize and pin their enemies, crush them under sheer strength, or batter them down with repetitive, workmanlike violence. Even its attacks can feel industrial, as if the same body built for hauling chains and lifting stone has simply been turned against living flesh.
Some are armed with the implements of labor reshaped into weapons: hooks, bars, mauls, restraint poles, dragging chains, or crude cleavers better suited to butchery than war. Others need no weapon at all. A greog’s whole body has been made to overpower resistance, and it fights with the grim efficiency of something taught that pain is merely part of the task.
Habitat
Greogs are rarely found in healthy wilderness or ordinary society. They belong to places of intrusion and violation: hidden vaults, mi-go redoubts, crater shrines, plague trenches, fungus-infested caverns, forgotten quarries, and remote compounds where alien industry has pressed itself into mortal flesh. Wherever they are encountered, they suggest a larger structure behind them: overseers, laboratories, stockpiles of bodies, and methods still being practiced out of sight.
A lone greog is often more unsettling than one found at its post. It may be an escaped labor-creature, a failed specimen, a maddened survivor of some ruined enclave, or a servant still obeying commands long after its masters are dead. Such creatures wander with no true freedom in them, carrying old disciplines like buried nails in the mind.
Lore
Some sages and occult anatomists regard the greog as proof of a terrible principle: that personhood can be reduced, edited, and repurposed without being fully destroyed. That is one reason the mi-go inspire such lasting dread in those who understand them. Devils corrupt, necromancers profane, and sorcerers transform, but the mi-go refine cruelty into method. The greog is not merely one monster among many. It is evidence of a process.
For that reason, a greog is most effective in play not as an isolated brute, but as part of a wider wrongness. One may be memorable. A rank of them laboring under alien oversight, or standing guard outside a chamber filled with surgical apparatus and stolen bodies, is far worse. The true horror comes when the players understand that these things were made, that they were made deliberately, and that more could be made again.
The Horror of the Greog
A greog is dangerous in two ways. First, it is physically formidable: strong, durable, relentless at close quarters, and difficult to stop cleanly. Second, and more importantly, it carries an atmosphere of violation wherever it appears. It implies hidden masters, fleshcraft, abduction, and techniques that should never have entered the world at all.
Even when slain, a greog rarely leaves the feeling of victory behind. It leaves the sense that something was done here that cannot be forgiven, and perhaps cannot be undone.
Greog 5.5
Greog, Pathfinder
Greog
Large aberration, typically neutral evil
Armor Class 15 (natural armor)
Hit Points 114 (12d10 + 48)
Speed 30 ft.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 (+5) | 10 (+0) | 18 (+4) | 6 (-2) | 11 (+0) | 7 (-2) |
Saving Throws Str +8, Con +7
Skills Athletics +8, Perception +3
Damage Resistances poison
Condition Immunities frightened
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 13
Languages understands Undercommon and Deep Speech but can’t speak
Challenge 6 (2,300 XP)
Proficiency Bonus +3
Traits
Brutal Frame. The greog counts as one size larger when determining its carrying capacity and the weight it can push, drag, or lift.
Engineered Endurance. The greog has advantage on saving throws against exhaustion and against any effect that would reduce its speed or forcibly move it.
Residual Mind. When a creature the greog can hear within 30 feet speaks its name, offers mercy, or otherwise forces it to confront fragments of its former self, the greog must succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or be unable to take reactions until the start of its next turn. Once this trait has been triggered, it cannot be triggered again until the start of the greog’s next turn.
Actions
Multiattack. The greog makes two attacks: two Slam attacks, or one Slam attack and one Hook attack.
Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 14 (2d8 + 5) bludgeoning damage.
Hook. Melee Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 12 (2d6 + 5) piercing damage. If the target is Large or smaller, it must succeed on a DC 16 Strength saving throw or be grappled (escape DC 16).
Dragging Chain. Melee Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d4 + 6) slashing damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 16 Strength saving throw or be pulled up to 10 feet straight toward the greog.
Crushing Restraint. The greog crushes one creature grappled by it. The target takes 18 (3d8 + 5) bludgeoning damage, and the grapple ends unless the greog chooses to maintain it.
Reactions
Punish Resistance. When a creature within 5 feet of the greog fails an attempt to escape its grapple, the greog makes one Slam attack against that creature.
Combat
Greogs are built to close, seize, and overpower. They fight with the grim efficiency of things made for labor and punishment rather than war. A greog presses into melee, batters prey off balance, then uses hook or chain to drag victims into its reach and pin them there. They are most effective in confined places such as mines, caverns, laboratories, holding pits, and workshops where escape is difficult and their brute strength can dominate the space.
Treasure
Greogs rarely carry treasure as personal possessions, but they are often equipped with work gear, restraint tools, and salvage from the places where they serve.
Typical Treasure
- 2d6 × 10 gp in crude metal scrip, workshop tokens, or salvageable alloy scraps
- a heavy restraint chain worth 25 gp
- an iron hauling hook, reinforced cleaver, or brutal labor tool worth 15 gp
- fungal resin, surgical preservatives, or alchemical fluids worth 20 gp to an appropriate buyer
Worksite Treasure
If encountered in a mi-go workshop, excavation site, or holding complex, add:
- 3d6 × 25 gp in refined minerals, surgical metals, and stored supplies
- 1d4 cages, shackles, specimen jars, or alien instruments worth 50 gp each
- a 25% chance of a mi-go control rod, discipline collar, or other unsettling laboratory device worth 75–150 gp as evidence, occult salvage, or research material
Greog
This creature appears as a beetle-like humanoid, with long arms ending in pincer-like claws and enormous eyes staring out over fleshy flaps where its mouth should be. Its head appears grotesquely swollen; a giant brain erupts from its split skull.
Taken from the Creature Codex
Greogs are an artificial slave race created by the mi-go, a fusion of insectoid and humanoid manufactured using alchemy and surgery. The root stock of the greogs is the og, a savage, barely sapient race of insect-like humanoids. In order to create a greog, the mi-go remove the brain from an og and replace it surgically with a specially treated humanoid brain, often one that has already yielded whatever knowledge the mi-go seek.
This chimera combines the strength and power of the og with a more intelligent and docile mind, capable of more readily taking instructions. Despite appearances, the exposed brain of a greog is in fact encased in a thick membrane and is not especially more vulnerable to attack than any other part of the creature.
Although the great strength of the greogs lends itself naturally to brute-force tasks such as construction and mining, the dwellers in darkness often instruct their slaves in more refined work such as textiles, weapon-smithing and even cuisine. Being an artificial construct, greogs have no culture to speak of, but are naturally drawn towards violence against all creatures that are not mi-go or their slaves.
Greogs are so dependent on their mi-go masters that they are incapable of breeding without assistance; greog eggs would hatch into normal ogs if untreated, but the mi-go are capable of surgically altering them as embryos. So modified, greog eggs can survive for extended periods of time and in exceedingly harsh conditions, making them ideal for transport in the icy void between planets. In this fashion, mi-go seeking out a new planet can quickly call into being an army of slaves.
Ogs
Ogs, the creature from which greogs are created through vivisection, are uncommon in their wild state but not completely extinct. In the wild, ogs form small clans and live nomadic predatory lifestyles, avoiding the attention of more advanced creatures. An og uses the statistics for a greog with the following exceptions: an og is a monstrous humanoid, with the changes to base attack bonus, base saves and Hit Dice that entails. Ogs lack the weak-willed vulnerability. An og’s mental ability scores are Int 4, Wis 13, Cha 6 and it is typically of neutral alignment. An og has a CR of 5.
Greog CR 4
XP 1,200
LE Medium aberration
Init +1; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +11
Defense
AC 16, touch 11, flat-footed 15 (+1 Dex, +5 natural)
hp 45 (6d8+18), fast healing 1
Fort +7, Ref +3, Will +0
Immune cold, fear
Vulnerable weak-willed
Offense
Speed 30 ft.
Melee 2 claws +7 (1d6+3) or Large greatclub +7 (2d8+4)
Special Attacks rend (2 claws, 1d6+4)
Statistics
Str 17, Dex 13, Con 16, Int 9, Wis6, Cha 6
Base Atk +4; CMB +7 (+9 bull’s rush); CMD 18 (20 against bull’s rush)
Feats Great Fortitude, Improved Bull’s Rush, Power Attack
Skills Craft (any two) +5, Perception +11; Racial Modifiers +4 Perception
SQ powerful frame
Ecology
Environment any land or underground
Organization solitary, pair, patrol (3-6), honor guard (4-8 plus 1-6 mi-go) or mob (12-36)
Treasure incidental
Special Abilities
- Powerful Frame (Ex) A greog is treated as being one size category larger for the purposes of lifting and carrying objects and wielding weapons.
- Weak-Willed (Ex) A greog has no good saves. In addition, greogs are always treated as if they were humanoids for the purposes of enchantment spells and effects.