In my first glance at the fantastic Symbaroum RPG, I stumbled across this week’s Monster of the Week – the Blight Born Elk.

Symbaroum is a game I’ve never ran or played yet, but I feel it offers something quite unique in it’s Corruption mechanics. The Blight Born Elk is one of several abominations that are corrupted by other forces. What? Well… that’s yet to be decided.

• Talk about what’s in the book under ABominations.
• Talk about what’s in the book under Blight Born.
• Provide it’s stat blocks and what an uninitiated reader thinks.

The Blight Born

There are multiple creatures that can be affected by Blight – including people, boars and other creatures, but the elk particularly stood out to me for this week’s monster of the week.

Symbaroum contains a dark setting where corruption threatens to poison the world or your characters – and some of this manifests by corrupting creatures and people of the world. Blight Born Elks are one of these corruptions which have a dark, brownish black or decaying hide which seek to spread their disease to everything they can.

For context, let me explain what Blight is and how it presents itself in the dark world of Symbaroum.

In the pages of the book Hordes of the Eternal Night (a tome inside Symbaroum) vivid depictions of the bodily changes brought about by corruption can be found which describes symptoms such as extreme dehydration, oozing blisters, bodily growths outgrowths and other mutations. These are brought about when moment when a person or creature falls to the corruption of the Blight, which all academics in the world of Symbaroum agree that when it takes hold, the disease iforces it’s victims to undergo these terrifying transformations.

But the physical changes are just the beginning. The personality and temperament of those infected by corruption undergoes a complete transformation, giving way to destructive behaviors like envy, anger, hunger, hubris, and hatred. In the wilds, blight-born animals and beasts roam alone, killing everything in their path and spreading the corruption through bites and scratches. Meanwhile, human abominations who manage to retain some of their intellectual capacity hide in populated areas, using infected persons as guards and couriers. Over time, they surround themselves with a whole court of cultists who obey their every command.

That’s at least MY understanding of it! 🙂

The stats

While I’m not 100% familiar with what all the stat block means, there are a few mechanical pieces that echo some other systems (notably Warhammer 40K: Wrath and Glory which uses a corruption mechanic – for the emperor!) that I can draw from. At the baseline, the creature has seemingly normal stats, but the Blight Borne Elk’s Antlers have +1d4 temporary corruption – which will be inflicted on NPC or PCs when they are hit by them. Corruption can be a crippling affliction that can only really be purged through purification – which could be by inflicting your corruption on small critters or other more dramatic means…

One piece of the stat block in Symbaroum that I really like is the Tactics section – which can give a lot of flavour for you when running a creature as the GM. The Blight Born Elk has NO tactics, however when the scent of a living creature is detected, the monster goes into a bestial frenzy. Frothing at the mouth, bulging eyes, and a feral desire to attack the living. Through this, it can spread it’s corruption to more people.

Even with the tactics section alone, it’s easy to place this diseased Elk in a horror themed scenario – imagine a valley full of Blight Born creatures that seem dead, but once PCs enter, they frenzy. Dealing 1D4 corruption with the antlers can quickly begin to bleed into permanent corruption for your players, which is where their abilities can be inhibited by.

More than the mechanical effects of Blight Born Elk aren’t as familiar to me (until we at least run some games!), the concept of corruption in this way is very appealing to our style of play and warrants the Blight Born Elk a spot on our Monster of the Week!

That’s it for this week! Thanks for stopping by and let us know what you think 🙂

-KJ