A huge, (usually) yellow-green slug nearly 1 foot in length with an absolutely voracious appetite.
The voracious slug is a creature that results from a normal garden slug having a diet nearly exclusively of the remains of enchanted plant material. The magical diet infuses the slug with its power, increasing it’s size and providing odd magical effects. They are capable of eating their own weight in organic material daily.
The slugs are generally inoffensive - one can kill them easily. To someone unconscious or paralyzed, they are a deadly threat as they will attempt to devour such victims.
Another factor are strange magical mutations they have acquired as a result of their diet. Some of these render individual slugs more dangerous, or simply strange. One can generate their abilities on the accompanying table, or create your own.
1 - Slug’s mucus is poisonous, with highly variable contact poison effect.
2 - Slug flickers in and out of invisibility.
3 - Has chameleon ability.
4 - Explodes if slain.
5 - Dissolves into ooze (temporarily) if attacked. Will reform later.
6 - Can spit mucus up to 10’ away. Might be poisonous, caustic, nausea-inducing, or extremely sticky.
7 - Has the ability to transform into a swarm of tiny slugs if disturbed.
8 - Has electric shock touch. Slime trail will conduct this charge.
9 - Sprouts dragonfly wings and flies.
10 - When threatened, enlarges to 10’ in length. Woah!
11 - Randomly shifts form when excited to different small-sized creatures.
12 - Can teleport short distances.
13 - Can engulf objects twice it’s size (Familiars watch out!)
14 - Splits into two smaller slugs if damaged. New slugs retain this ability.
15 - Mucus is acidic. Leaves smoking slime trail.
16 - Bursts into a mass of mucus if slain. Mucus is poisonous, caustic, nausea-inducing, or extremely sticky.
17 - Capable of speech, but dreadfully stupid.
18 - Capable of speech and sounds very intelligent. However it is as stupid as normal slugs and its words are polysyllablic word salad.
19 - Slug moves much faster then normal
20 - Roll twice on this table.
As an odd, magical creature, they are rarely encountered. Depending on magical properties, they could have a variety of uses. If they were to escape the magical gardens that spawned them, their offspring would not possess the magic attributes of their parents, due to the dependance on the magic foliage.
The slugs themselves are not very palatable as food, but their corpses retain sufficient magical energy to serve as minor manna batteries. This effect is short lived and dead slugs lose this residual enchantment after a couple of days.
Being the results of exposure to a diet of magical plant matter, these creatures should be rather rare. Similar occurances could happen at other sources of magic - chaos rifts, powerful artifacts or the like. The presence of these critters may be used as a sign that something interesting is nearby.
They could make a rather odd familiar for a mage, one which was okay with mucus.
The slugs could be ‘farmed’ and harvested for use as manna batteries, though the magic required to sustain the plants themselves would require enough magic to make the exercise inefficent. Perhaps at the site of a natural Chaos rift…
For reference, I HATE slugs…