Buy me a coffeeMoit of Shub-Niggurath
[This content was created by Paizo Publishing LLC for the Pathfinder rules but is not from the Pathfinder RPG product line.]
It is said that the Black Goat of the Woods has a thousand young, and while this may be true, only a handful of these offspring have been reported and identified by those few fortunate enough to have witnessed an incarnation of Shub-Niggurath’s essence and lived. One such manifestation of Shub-Niggurath’s offspring are her moits (pronounced ‘motes’), or seeds. These are larval creatures deposited upon the Material Plane with the intent to spread her influence to that realm. They have two distinct life stages: the spawning canker and the slugspawn.
Reproductive Rampage
Moits of Shub-Niggurath, in both their spawning canker and slugspawn forms, exist for a single reason: to propagate their fouls species as their unknowable brood mother desires. Theirs are not the ways of obsessed cultists or otherworldly masterminds. Rather, they are akin to living diseases, massive viruses that infiltrate, infest, and overwhelm, desiring nothing more than to spread their kind and pave the way for a new, larger generation that might spawn in the name of the Goat with a Thousand Young, their very existence being an unholy prayer to her power.
Moits lack agendas beyond spawning. In their alien philosophies, infesting a victim, growing into a spawning canker, and then ‘ascending’ is the ultimate glory. While slugspawn have only an instinctual impression of their role in the greater cycle, spawning cankers are true fanatics, obsessed with propagation. While they avoid competing with others of their kind, if resources are limited, each spawning canker seeks to assure that it can spawn. The moits have no interest in rationing humanoid hosts to assure their allies or spawn have the means to reproduce. Instead, they care only for the moment and the immediate potential to spawn. Thus, whole regions might be wiped clean by the infectious invasion of these moits, which grow all the more desperate as hosts and, by extension, opportunities to fulfill their lives’ only purpose diminish.
Section 15: Copyright Notice – Pathfinder Adventure Path #46: Wake of the Watcher
Pathfinder Adventure Path #46: Wake of the Watcher. © 2011, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Author: Greg A. Vaughan.