Terrashot

Terrashot, AKA Gumberoo

Origin: American Folklore

Description

A Terrashot is a creature about 6-8 feet (1.8 - 2.4 meters) long, a little larger than a bear, with a tough, glossy-black, tub- or casket-shaped shell that nothing can pierce, that lives nocturnally in the cool, dark, and moist mountain caverns, increasing in numbers there by emerging at night to graze in the mountain meadows and parks outside their caves and burrows until, taken by some strange impulse, it migrates as a group, walking on wobbly, stumpy, awkward legs down into the forest hills and valleys below, sometimes far out in the the prairies and meadows beyond, one beast followed by another. The strange beast (the Funeral Mountain Terrashot variety) was first reported by some Mormon emigrants to the California/Nevada desert, who observed a peculiar procession of the bests entering the desert from a certain mountain range afterward named the Funeral Mountains, walking by night and by in a single-file line toward their doom in the higher pressure and warmer temperatures of the foothills, woodlands, prairies, and deserts below. Eventually they fall over one by one as they trudge on night and day on their pilgrimage, and explode due to the heat of direct sunlight, leaving deep, grave-shaped holes in the earth. Travelers in the woods and forests in can sometimes hear the loud reports of exploding Terrashots, sounding much like the blasts of hunting shotguns outside of hunting season, or exploding moonshine stills where no stills out to be found, and travelers through the woods sometimes come across the yawning, grave-shaped holes and toppled, splintered trees left over from exploding Terrashots; wise travelers will avoid the woods and hills where such explosions are known to be heard. The beasts make fierce opponents if cornered or attacked, protected by their tough shells, and are best avoided, as a Terrashot can only be successfully attacked with fire, and the explosion of a dying Terrashot can be quite dangerous, while leaving little of benefit to a hunter behind.

Keeper Notes

• Something about the period Mormon description of the strange, silent procession of these creatures down from the Funeral Mountains, exploding in the desert heat, seems kind of cool. I've embellished the story a little to expand its range into the temperate hills and woodlands East of Nevada, by suggesting it lives in the cool, damp caverns - perhaps the caverns that open upon Deep Dendo or the abysses of the Hollow Earth; I might suggest these are prehistoric animals of some sort (the stumpy legs and roughly coffin-shaped body almost suggest a small Ankylosaurus) which once crept across frigid Hyperborea, and now somehow survive in the caverns long after they ought to have gone extinct - I wonder where they are trying to migrate to, and what an intrepid investigator might discover should he/she track the Terrashot back to whatever mountain hole it crept out of, or somehow tracked survivors down into whatever lightless crevasse it is trying to migrate to?

Associated Mythos Elements

• setting: Folk Mythos