Toadling By Imperator-Zor Watch

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Long ago, some mages unlocked the secrets of life. They snooted out that living things are colonies of cells and that inside those cells are squirmy spirals that told those cells what to do and how to put themselves together. With some practice they began working on things to do with this, messing about plants and animals and then having the brilliant idea of plying their craft onto people to make them better. They might have changed the world had they gone about things in a more sensible, open and cautious manner, but instead of that they began abducting the test subjects and fiddling with there genes to see what happened with only a few vague guidelines on what they were doing. They burned most of the results of their misdeeds to conceal them from those uniformed masses without vision of what the future could hold, at least until a freak thunderstom rained on their parade and blew apart the pyre. Their story by in large ended after that, though some of their legacy lived on in the form of a few strange varieties of fruit and root vegetables, a couple unusual types of rats and the Toadlings.



Toadlings are amphibious humanoids derrived mostly from frogs, toads and salamanders with a bit of flying fox thrown for good measure. They are about a meter tall, weigh 30kg on average and have lumpy mucusy skin, pointed ears and a mouth full of needle sharp teeth. They have a modicum of intelligence, but are still hardly bright. They like eating meat, particularly fish, but are omnivorous and not picky at all. This is for the best as they are not particularly quick on their short legs and have a hard time chasing down prey. Fortunately they are cold blooded, which means that they don't need that much food, though it limits their range to the tropical and sub tropical latitudes and even then dryness can also be an issue for them. They live in bands of up to three hundred adults. Occasionally they'll trade thing that they acquire for the products of human, elvish, dwarven or orcish civilization, but they also steal said things as well. Toadlings are often culled by humans in said areas when they become problematic. Toadlings at best have a few stolen shortswords, hatchets and scraps of armor and mostly make do with clubs, crude spears and thrown rocks. Unless a lone soldier gets mobbed by several dozen Toadlings they are not much threat. The fact that Toadling Bile is a useful component in several potions provides more incentive to hunt them down.



The biggest evolutionary advantage of toadlings is breeding. They lay hundreds of eggs every year, which hatch into tadpoles that in a years time emerge as froglike things that grow into adults over the next four years. Once they reach the age of ten, they are subjected to the "rule of ten", in that each year even if they have all the food they can eat and don't get killed by hyenas or humans or what have you they have a one in ten chance of dying from some internal failure every year from that point on. Few Toadlings reach twenty and only a few of legend reach thirty.

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