Yellowbelly (Wermspittle)

Blind, snuffling, flabby beasts--they reek of rancid cheese. Disturbingly agile and equipped with suckers at the tips of their boneless fingers, these creatures have captured many who foolishly thought that they might have run far enough, fast enough, and then turned around only to find themselves face-to-face with a Yellowbelly.

Curwen and Kirowan's Yellow Book (Annual, 1172.)

---

Yellowbelly
No. Enc.: 4d6
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120' (40') [Also can Climb at normal Move rate due to suckers]
Armor Class: 7 (as Studded Leather)
Hit Dice: 2 (advance as Thieves or Spell-casters, but never Clerics)
Attacks: 1 (weapon or bite)
Damage: 1d4+1 (gutting-knife), or 1d4 with a 30% chance to Gore with tusks for additional 1d6.
Save: T2 (or by Level)
Morale: 8 (Suffer -2 penalty when exposed to rich perfumes or other strong scents)

Special: Blind. Navigate entirely by Smell, Taste, Touch and Hearing.

Vicious whuffling and wheezing creatures with an insatiable hunger for fresh meat, Yellowbellies hop and jostle about in darksome places, clamber and cavort wildly in broken spaces and it only takes the merest whiff of blood to set them off on another of their fearsome chases.

Warty, swarthy humanoids with three nostrils, two modestly curving tusks and three overly-flexible tubular fingers or toes on each limb ending in suckers...the Yellowbelly is a strange beast indeed. Though many older texts confidently assert that these creatures were manufactured as some sort of homunculi, we now know that this is incorrect. The Yellowbellies have been traced back to the ancient ruins of no fewer than three dead cities behind the Yellow Veil, and while they probably are not native to those places, these are the first points of contact with their kind that have been reliably reported or recorded.

---

Feed them little cakes made with a pinch of lint and some black-peel mixed with a good amount of arsenic and the Yellowbellies will be too busy suffering from sour stomachs to chase you for long enough to get far, far away...if you don't dawdle or linger to watch...

Every Good Child's Guide to Bad Things

Yellow Brick Roads

"It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour."

Charles Dickens

---

Yellow bricks do not seem all that threatening, except perhaps in the midst of a riot when someone might lob one through a window or something, yet the yellow brick roads leading to and from the Jumbles, the Barrier Woods, the White Orchard, the Inner Ramparts, and especially the Eastern Rampart are a lingering source of dread and an ever-present reminder of the implacable, ever encroaching, inhumanly patient things that rule over the ruins of more than one Adjacent World.

After the bombs stopped falling and people got on with the hard work of surviving and re-building things no one gave much thought to the yellow bricks they dug out of the wreckage and ruins. Even fractured, chipped and half-broken bricks were put to use in reconstructing hearths, homes tenement walls and market stalls. No one realized that the bricks were infected, no one would have cared that all the roads paved with these bricks led back to centers of pestilence, hotbeds of disease and infection. By the time anyone started to ask questions about something as commonplace and ordinary as bricks and the old roads originally built from them, it was well past the point of doing anything about it.

The old roads had been there before even the Three Camps were first established on the plateau where Wermspittle was in time founded. The yellow brick roads were older than the mounds where the rocks are cut with spirals of Aklo. Only the Blue Walls deep below are older, according to the descendants of the Etrurian outcasts who interred their honored dead and kept the Mystery Rites of their people in the outer caves. A few academics quibbled over increasingly esoteric and rarefied theories as to who built the roads and why, but for the most part people just took them for granted.

Crude, rectangular blocks of some dense, yet porous and highly durable unglazed ceramic; the old yellow bricks had endured millennia of exposure to the elements and to the ravages of all out war. It was only natural that the survivors put the bricks dislodged and torn loose by the bombs and artillery barrages to work patching their walls and shops and homes.

It wasn't until after the rebuilding effort was well underway that something terrible happened at the Eastern Section of the Inner Ramparts. The Guardhouse is surrounded by blazing pyres and quarantined under penalty of death. The survivors have all been issued flame-throwers and a small group of Puritans have been welcomed to assist with the constant burning of whatever has infected the lower levels of the all-but-abandoned Guardhouse.

Commandant Zulmer has sent scouts along the winding, twisting lengths of the various branches and by-ways of the old yellow brick roads. The way leading into Wermspittle from the Eastern Keep has been closed to all civilian traffic, unless they are transporting loads of 20 gallon glass jars of acid back toward the Guardhouse. All through the city yellow bricks are beginning to soften and to seep a sweet-smelling fluid with the unmistakable aftertaste of corruption and decay...and people exposed to the fluid began to chuckle until their mouths bled, their faces contorted in a hideous rictus that was somewhere between a scream and a smile. The lucky ones died well before their bodies blossomed into wet fronds of long dormant fungi...

---

Inspiration: The Yellow Peril by M. P. Shiel provided a meaningful (if slightly sordid) detour through some troubling history that was actually more than a little pertinent to this stuff, even if it isn't necessarily immediately obvious; Mister Sardonicus and The Man Who Laughs both contributed a little to the proceedings; Mr. Lovecraft's The Shunned House; Ambrose Bierce's An Inhabitant of Carcosa; Mr. Chambers' The King in Yellow,..and of course L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...as well as a certain song from 1973. And Yes, there is a definite, distinct connection between the Yellow Brick Roads and the Sickly Yellow Phantoms and Yellow Kids...as well as the Inner Ramparts.

Yellow Creepers (Red Bestiary/Wermspittle)

Yellow Creepers
No. Enc.: 1
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 90' (30')
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 2+2 (can advance)
Attacks: 1 (Touch, Gaze or Weapon)
Damage: 1d4+Memory Loss, Special or by Weapon
Save: MU3
Morale: 11

Special: Immune to Charm, Sleep or Emotion-Manipulating effects (includes Fear). Blood causes Confusion, even if scabbed over and dried-out. Those coming into contact with the yellow-ichor must roll a Save (at +1 bonus, as it is not very potent as is). Each successful Touch attack requires the victim to Save or lose 1d4 spells for one day. Their Gaze causes Fear in any who fail to Save at -1 penalty (it is exceptionally disturbing). Yellow Creepers ignore gravity so long as they have a surface upon which to cling. It is not uncommon for them to attack from the ceiling. They can Move Silently (80%) and Hide in Shadows (70%).

Victims of one or another form of Yellow Wallpaper, these shambling and scurrying travesties who were once human beings have been reduced to strange, aberrant wrecks of their former selves. They are emotionless, incredibly repellent (-6 Char Reaction Roll), resembling waddling fungal growths that retain a somewhat humanoid shape and appearance. They never sleep. Never dream. They also no longer speak coherently, but instead mutter and mumble in a disjointed and irrational patois that fills all who hear it with a deep sense of revulsion. Their touch has been known to ruin spell-books and grimoires, smearing the inscribed spells into dangerous gibberish and streaking the pages with a toxic yellow stain.

Former Clerics and some few others that have been reduced to this unwholesome state lose all spells, but sometimes they retain the ability to smear a vile sign or disgusting symbol with their filthy fingers. It is not a pretty sight to see, by any means.

• Vile Sign: Save or incapacitated by nausea for 1d4 Turns.
• Disgusting Symbol: Save or be incapacitated by dysentery for 1d4 Turns.
• Revolting Smear: Save or experience intense and irresistible need to leave the area immediately. Effect persists for 1d4 Turns.
• Yellow Splotch: Causes one spell (either memorized or in a book) to be reduced to gibberish, if the victim fails their Save. The mangled spell in memory can be relinquished and re-memorized another time. Those spells contained within a spell-book affected by this splotch are garbled and are now randomized in their effect(s), most of which will be negative.

There are rumored to be other signs and symbols available to certain of these beings.