Grioth Scout

The first grioths encountered on a new world are scouts. Typically traveling the vastness of space via one-way portals from their home worlds, grioth scouts never expect to see their homes again, as grioth leadership ensures true devotion to the colonization effort by stranding them on new worlds.

Planets that drift out of orbit from their stars grow cold and lifeless as they float through the Dark Tapestry. Such dead worlds are coveted by the horrific creatures known as grioths, who endure the awful cold on these wandering worlds and convert them into planetary temples devoted to the dark gods of the Elder Mythos. From these bastions of frozen darkness, grioths seek out warm, living worlds to tear away from their respective suns through forbidden rituals, a process that often takes numerous generations.

A single cultist typically leads a grioth scouting party, and the group seeks out a disused or forgotten location on the fringe of rural settlements as their initial invasion point. Over several generations, a grioth settlement grows powerful and conquers the surrounding cultures, and eventually, powerful grioths descend from the stars to begin the next stage of planetary conquest.

Grioths speak a language composed of trills and clicks. While capable of speaking other languages, they do so in dry, raspy voices. As grioths have wings, wriggling tails, and four-eyed, bat-like visages, many cultures mistakenly associate them with the evil Outer Planes, but they very much belong to this reality.