Gutrim Sporewarden

Gutrim Sporewardens are the product of grim tavern tales and the slow cruelty of fungal ecology in deep mountain caverns. Miners and prospectors tell of dwarf burial chambers in the basalt ridges of Thrainholde where a bitter, soil-bound fungus—called mykherte by local sages—took root in the bodies of those who died underground; in time the fungus reanimated the husks, binding them into hunger-driven sentinels that lash out to spread their spores. The cultlike rotwrights of the Rotwright Covenant took samples from such husks to breed controlled, weaponized spore-soldiers, but even their labs could not tame the corpse's death burst. Scholars such as Magister Velos of the Stoneleaf Archive have catalogued Gutrim Sporewardens as ecological scavengers: they lair in collapsed tunnels and ruined sanctums where humidity and darkness feed their fungi. They are drawn to fresh corpses and to places where dwarven rites disturb old graves. Folktales warn that a Gutrim may be mistaken for a sleeping comrade; its uncanny limb extension and the inevitable spore eruption have ended more expeditions than goblins or liches. The Knights of Blackbarrow once sealed a shrine infested by a horde of these husks — the tale is still used to teach new recruits to keep distance from fallen bodies.

A dwarven corpse bloated into a vaguely humanoid shape, roughly human-sized but squat and heavy. The skin has a grey-green pallor mottled with white and pink fungal growths: clustered shelf-fungi along the ribs, lacy mycelial lace across the shoulders, and thin, vein-like black rhizoids trailing down the arms. From splits in the joints sprout pale tendrils of fungal tissue that look like cords of muscle, allowing the forearms to telescope and curve like a golem's grappling hooks. The face is half-hidden by a cap-like mushroom that has curled into a hood over a single milky, sightless eye; the beard is interwoven with spore sacs that tremble whenever the creature breathes. Textures: rubbery, wet flesh; brittle chitin-like scales on the knuckles where spores gather; damp, velvety mushroom caps with faint bioluminescent freckles. Scale: stands about 4 feet tall at the shoulder, bulk like a dwarf warrior; shown beside a human (6 ft) the Sporewarden is squat but broad. It often lurks in low tunnels, propped against collapsed masonry or a coffin lid broken open to feed.