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The Ktthjj

The Ktthjj in this story are somewhat like large undead magical leeches made of dreams, decay and old magic.  They walk on legs, like men or spiders or crabs, but are creatures of strong chaos.  When they find sources of strong magic (e.g. the world tree, etc.) they can and often do form into clusters, leeching the magic and projecting a dreamself.  They leech mana and blood (magic points and hit points) in combat (but it is leeching, not tapping) when they melee.  They often have poison clouds about them.

They tend to breed with stoorwyrms and other greater chaos creatures.  Men seeking to become Kar Manta sometimes become Ktthjj instead if they have strong enough ties to the dream realms.  Ktthjj generally have undead dreaming forms to go with their material realm forms, and generally dragonish sorts of things (except for the Ktthjj/Snake and Ktthjj/Lizard who tend to have Multilegged Giant forms instead).

Runes would be Undeath and Dream.

In Diablo LOD terms, fighting a cluster would be like fighting Baal, except that the clones would spun off more often and would be limited in number to the number of Ktthjj in the cluster (often seven to twelve).  Each clone would have three random powers or attributes (two "boss" ones [e.g. fire enchanted, or multishot, or lightning enchanted, etc.] and one attack, such as the river of fire or lightning breath of Diablo, the poison burst of Andariel, the cold wave of Baal, etc.). Clones (images, avatars, expressions) tend to be smaller than cluster that is spinning them off until the cluster has spun off a clone for each member (it will shrink a little each time).

For related creatures in a different background, see http://adrr.com/hero/norns/14.htm.  While Ktthjj is a name for a group, it is also the name of the species at the heart of the group.  The species has the following major groups:

• Man/Ktthjj (Ktthjj based on the manshape, leeches that walk like men).
• Spider/Ktthjj
• Crab/Ktthjj
• Lizard/Ktthjj
• Snake/Ktthjj (this type does not walk "like a man" to use the phrase from stories, but can often fly and is often aquatic).

The groups do not generally segregate themselves.

In the earlier story, the Ktthjj involved are of the first two types and their infusion's starting point is Starstrands as retainers of the Kar Manta's Master.

To visualize them, think of leeches, men and spiders.  If you crossed a leech with Andarial or Baal from Diablo LOD, you would get a good model for the ones that were infused through Starstrands and into this story.

They show up again too.

A brood mass is a breeding mass.  Sometimes it is nascent Ktthjj, sometimes just magical chaos stuff.  Generally, a group given a brood mass as a source of chaos driven power will be corrupted over time (not corrupted to evil or chaos -- they've already got to be there before they would accept a brood mass, but corrupted as in subverted and dominated by the Ktthjj who are masters of assimilation and absorption). Regardless, it is a strong source of chaos and of chaos tainted protoplasm. Encountering one is always a warning sign.