Vodnik

## The Vodnik (Parasite)

### Overview

The beast is humanoid in appearance, and is not to be mistaken with a zombie. Vodniks lurk around coastal towns and villages with deep lakes or rivers, they are revived bodies of men or women that have met their demise by drowning, what makes a Vodnik is actually the parasites that lurk in the water, they use the body as a host and grow. Their hair is slimy and green, as is the ends of their arms and legs, they leave trails similar to a snail’s and make gurgled howls when it is a full moon, they possess a toxin which sedates their prey, which they then drag into the water to feast upon.

Excerpt from a text on marine creatures:

> "These are scoundrels who ended their wicked lives in the water. Drowned alive or thrown into deep watery ravines, they turn into vengeful creatures which stalk the inhabitants of fishing settlements, dragging unsuspecting bathers off into the depths."
>
>

The Vodnik is slow and weak, but in the water, the creature is at its best. It can swim at unbelievable speeds and hear the faintest of footsteps on the land, the beast also possesses a sedative in its saliva, which it uses to drown the prey. The Vodnik also possesses the ability to ignore bad injuries, one could cut off all its limbs and it would still try and attack its prey, it also doesn’t weaken when it bleeds, is poisoned or tossed off cliffs. The Vodnik, as agile and aware as it may be, is completely blind, it relies completely on feeling, smell and its hearing. The Vodnik is quite scrawny, like a decomposing corpse, though it possesses abnormally large claws and teeth like knives, which it has several sets of. Upon death, the Vodnik does something very odd, it hacks up its insides and the parasites that lived within crawl back into the water to find another host corpse, and create another Vodnik.

### Habitat

Deep lakes, Rivers, the Coastal Sea and Ponds.

### Notes for ET

The Vodnik is the hipster version of a zombie on lotc. If wishing to play one, an ET is advised to obsurb areas of recent conflict (be it skirmish, raid, war, etc) around water and plant events accordingly along the coast. As mentioned above, the creature is pretty much a tank in terms of taking damage, with one creature serving as plenty a challenge for one fully equipped warrior, provided it gets a bite in. Baring the fact the creature is blind, it can have its limbs severed, arrows pumped into its chest, and still live to groan about it.

Encounters with this creature are made more difficult by, well adding more creatures. The more vodniks the most the player is forced to maneuver and consider his or her location. The maximum number of vodniks in an area often times will cap around 10, assuming the parasites within them have had time to swim around from corpse to corpse.

On the topic of parasites, a possible chain event involving these creatures may begin with a water supply becoming tainted by dead vodnik parasites, upon further investigation there may be a dam of the writing creatures (The zombies) festering upstream from a recent war or conflict. This also opens up the possibility of pve events, allowing ET to represent the vodniks as garden variety zombies, whilst the parasites as silverfish.

Loot on these creatures is completly subjective to the encounter difficulty, but keep in mind that these creatures are based upon the idea that they've been rotting in the water for however many days, valuables being washed downstream.