A Year & A Day: Nuckalavee
Changeling: the Dreaming
Homebrew Rules
Character Creation Guide Download: Nuckalavee.pdf
Quoth the Nuckalavee:
“You seem to be out of your comfort zone, dirt-walker. Good. I don’t want you too comfortable.”
Kith Excerpt:
The Nuckalavee are born from the same Celtic dreams of drowning and murder as the Kelpies, Murdhuacha, Nak, other murderous Fae of the Deep. History has remembered their horrendous body and visage in any number of grotesqueries, but the modern Outworlds (Keltica of Divers Lands) sees them as fleshless centaur-like monster with bulging muscles shot through with black veins and yellow ichor. They are they easily one of the most hideous of all Kithain. They are also on the most physically powerful of all the United Kingdom’s indigenous Fae and possess unparalleled stamina on land. When in the water they are nigh invincible.
Yet despite their strength, they are somewhat encumbered by their Fae seeming. Due to their equine back-side, they have strange form of the Slipped Seeming Flaw, where they cannot walk about like others. In modern times, with modern Miens, they can mask this flaw with wheel-chairs, crutches, and the like- all of which can belay their natural speed. Wonderful stuff to catch their meals unawares.
Fortunately, they are rather solitary monsters, and they never seem to join other motleys. Occasionally they may ally themselves with a group of Kelpies, Unseelie Selkies, Murdhuacha, or even the odd Sea Hag, but this is rare. For the most part they are content to satiate that hunger for spoiled and rotten meat. It is all too easy for one of these creatures to leave one of their victims spoiling or pickling in the dark briny caverns of their undersea home.
Rarely demonstrating any concern at all for either mortal or Fae Trappings, outside their own hungers, the Nuckalavee are content to ply their trades in solitude. In this however, they have earned a most deserved ill reputation as Bounty-Hunter, Undersea-Guide, or Monster-Slayer for those who can meet their price (usually in the form of meat). There are few other Kithain who can boast slaying Sea-Serpents for food. Most, however, Seelie or Unseelie alike, treat the Nuckalavee as a last resort if all other options fail. Even the Shadow Court and the worst of Other Thallain tread lightly around the rocky coasts for fear of breaching their territory. That is just how the Nuckalavee like it.
Flavor
“No one can count the terrors that the earth spawns, catastrophic, gruesome, and the vast arms of the sea swarm with brute monsters bent on harm.” — Aeschylus
