Morkid

What — A half-beast, half-plant ambush predator: mostly furry, semi-bipedal in a gorilla's stance, with a mouth that opens side to side on hundreds of small Venus-flytrap feeler-fangs and fills with digestive acid when it is hungry. The GM's name for it is a joke about an orchid with a big mouth; the table's is "a furry gorilla flytrap." One had denned in the abandoned north tunnel of The Foredweller Research Facility and dropped on the party from the ceiling as they stepped out (Session 55).

Threat — On paper, serious: Foundry itself popped a warning that the encounter's CR was off and did not recommend running it. In practice, nothing. It did not land a single attack across the whole fight, missing Fenric eight consecutive times on its opening multiattack alone, and inflicted zero damage on the party. The GM's assessment: "this thing seems like it would have been really scary if you guys were level 6 instead of 8."

Observed abilities

• Multiattack (punches) — a gorilla's melee, two or three swings a round. Never connected.
• Grabbing tongue — the reason for the flytrap mouth: it drags prey in to be chewed and dissolved. Never used in play, but the harvested organ is unmistakably built for it.
• Digestive acid — pools in the mouth when hungry; pours out of the tongue on death and sizzles into the dirt.
• Bonus actions gated on a kill — all of its bonus actions required it to have already eaten somebody (the listed one is Chew), so none were ever available.
• Spell slots, never spent — it had them. Fenric's magic-destruction on a hit stripped a 2nd-level slot, the lowest it had: "it's a 2nd level because it doesn't have any 1sts." It never cast anything, and by its last turn it had no slots and no reaction left — which is why it fell back on the scepter.
• Use an Item: the ant scepter — with no reaction and no spell slots left it took the Use an Item action with a small scepter that had plainly belonged to a wizard, pointed it at a rock wall and then at a target, and sprayed a cone of rat-sized, blue-glowing ants. Explicitly not a spell (it survived a Counterspell threat as an item effect) and the ants are real, not conjured — beguiled out of the stone Pied Piper style, and still there after it died. Five swarm attacks, all misses.

Resistances / immunities / weaknesses — None observed; nothing the party threw at it was resisted, and Magra's Close Quarters shot stripped its reaction at 5 feet without difficulty. It has "not the tank of the skeleton" — two of its own turns and it was dead. Its plant half is what makes the tongue graftable.

Tactics & behavior — A ceiling ambusher that drops on the first creature through a door. It switches targets when a blow is turned aside — Shielded off Silithane, it narrowed its eyes and went straight back to Fenric — and it does not read ranged attackers as different from melee ones: on its move it pushed forward to stand next to as many bodies as possible, "hungry to get as close to as many people as it can." It does not back down (a Nature check came close to establishing that as a species trait). It hoards: its den held polearms, glaives, halberds and plain long sticks, all chewed and acid-ruined — whether for nesting, defence or magpie instinct is unknown. Its normal prey at the mouth of that cave would be "commoners that are digging for rocks, or a really opportunistic bear that didn't have anywhere to hibernate."

Habitat — Not native to the dig. Dr. Xiao Li is certain there was nothing like it in the north tunnel when her team cut it, because they cut it themselves; the tunnel then sat empty for a year or two. "I think things like to hole up in caves." Her prediction before the party opened the door — that a cave that large would attract something wanting a den that large — was right within one step.

Disposition to the party — Hostile, hungry, and hopelessly outmatched.

Status — Dead. Killed by Magra with the last bolt needed, at the mouth of the north tunnel (Session 55). Harvested: the tongue (~5 lbs, cut where the gorilla's flesh meets the plant), which stays alive and grabbing after death — "this is like plant business" — and can be grafted onto a weapon, subject to what it is being attached to. The ant scepter went to Silithane.

SUMMARY: Gorilla-flytrap ambusher from the north tunnel; hoards polearms, sprays real ants from a wizard's scepter, hit nobody, died in two rounds.