The Immortal Naturalist's Guide to Cryptic Creatures: The Terror of Farport

This post is part of the Immortal Naturalist's Guide series. The explanation for that series can be found in this post.

    In the city of Farport, there is a statue of a terrible creature, fifteen feet tall with tusks, horns, and claws, which the locals call the Terror of Farport. The statue exists to remind people of an event that most of the world still writes off as a mass delusion. If one believes the people of Farport, and I do, a beast emerged from Bluesalt Marsh to the west of the city several decades ago and went on a rampage. This rampage wasn't very deadly or damaging, but resulted in every single piece of food in Farport being eaten by the beast. Because of this, the statue that stands in the city today is an almost perfect recreation of the beast based on many eyewitness accounts. Unfortunately, the Terror's eating spree resulted in many people starving to death as there was simply no more food around. Since the beast's trip to Farport, it has never returned and seems to show no interest in returning for some time. Apparently, the beast only eats once every hundred years, and that one meal can make an entire city go hungry. The rest of the Terror's time is spent wandering the Bluesalt Marsh collecting feathers.

    While the beast's bizarre metabolism is certainly the result of magic, so is what it does with the feathers it collects. Plucking feathers from living birds in the marsh, the Terror of Farport takes them back to its nest in the middle of the marsh where it weaves the feathers into ropes with the ability to move and attack anyone who injures the creature. While the lengths of rope do not move at all except to defend the Terror, the creature itself seems to be quite forgetful and frequently leaves all of its magical rope in its nest. While this constitutes a weakness for the beast, its biggest weakness by far is the fact that it is terrified of its own appearance. Today, Farport always has plenty of mirrors on hand at the city gates to ward off another rampage from the Terror.

    One of the bright sides of the Terror of Farport frequently being away from its lair and frequently leaving all of its magic rope behind, is that it is quite easy to go into the nest and steal as much rope as one can carry. The magical ropes change loyalties with relative ease, lending their defensive capabilities to the last person to wear a given piece of rope. Whoever injures the owner of a piece of magic rope will find the rope slithering after them, restraining them, and trying to strangle them until they die, or the owner calls off the rope. Either way, these ropes offer an interesting, beautiful, and discrete method of self defense. If the Terror of Farport happens to return home while one is robbing it, however, it will most certainly attack, using its natural weapons to their full extent. Additionally, anyone who attacks the beast, even in self defense, is going to be mobbed by all of the feather ropes in the area, making retreat the safest option if the Terror spots someone stealing its ropes.