1.I

In the following duties to see to the health and safety of one’s charges, not all troubles or trials will be of the star-born gods.

Sometimes danger to your congregation’s life and limb will rise from the deep as earth-sent beasts which are sometimes known as Lair Spawn.

While a star-touched beast can be taken as an omen and treated with such via the provinces of gods and thus sent away by them, the vulgar beasts which boil up from underways and otherwise emerge from the deep and unlit places of the world have no such reasoning to be had.

It is often best to leave the smaller and more common of beasts to village guard and experienced hunters, but when terrible omens rise from below greater force of arms is needed.

When at all possible if there is witness of any beast of unusually great size, peculiar manners or misnumbering of limbs it is best to seek out a knight or lord’s intervention immediately to call for a quest that the beasts be undone using experienced and trained martial prowess.

Check with the portents to determine if it is in fact an act of the heavens, but sending word as soon as possible is vital.

If the danger is imminent, the lord absent and knights yet unavailable, only then are active measures at all to be undertaken by common folk. Expect in all but the best cases that there will be lives lost in the attempt.

It is of foremost importance to understand that the misshapen beasts are, for all their fearsomeness, still just base animals, Albeit ones of prodigious and unnatural abilities. Where star-touched may be gifted with a terrible reasoning or oracular powers and senses by the heaven’s contact and should never be underestimated, it is generally safe to consider the vulgar so called lair spawn to have minds as much as their unaltered forms.

Seek out the woodsman experienced in dealings with that which shares most similarity with their form to consider action and surmise their dealings.

A stag whose horns dwarf an oak tree and stands taller than a house will on the balance behave much as an overlarge stag does.

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A serpent that glides in the air and spits fire otherwise natural flame bereft any further changing by the stars, is a creature that can be sent off frightened by noise and bluster and mostly wishes for warm rocks to laze about sinfully upon.

A wolf the size of a Knight’s charger with metal for fur, while clever and all hungering as its smaller kin, is still just a wolf though so prodigious and dangerous to man it has become.

Make use of one’s own star-blessed reasoning and gifts and lay snares and traps whenever possible. Or if a means of driving the ominous beast is known by hunters, make use of it.

The best solution in most cases varies with the particular animal that has been accursed by the deep places.

In the event of a horned rabbit the size of an ox, the fundamental truth of its meek nature can be used to drive it from the fields and crops. The baying of dogs can even be used to drive it to flight and panic. Its greatest danger to man is that of the desolation and famine brought by its appetite.

Simple wood craft hunters can suffice in slaying such a beast, although word of it still must be sent to knights and lord for where there has been one accursed beast there is undoubtedly more, and even the most tame and easily wrangled of these monsters can prove perilous if in sufficient number.

That is the other vital knowledge of these creatures.

There is never only one of them.

Whatever their nature, be assured that where one is witnessed there are others, whether they are close or far, immediately present or far into next year there will be more.

Always call for aid even if the first sighting is promptly dealt with.

The curse of these beasts upon the land are almost never vanquished with the first.

A simple toad that can comfortably sit in your hand and belches a candle flame worth of fire at night might be innocuous as one, but when there is a plague of them it can bring ruination.

-On Beasts of Note by Brother Ordelain, naturalist and Monk of the Hrothfield Monastery in middle Egelheimvin.