Slug Temple

     A hot and humid world, Slug Temple is mostly white from orbit, with small patches of blue and green peeking out from the swirling clouds. There is a pattern in the chaos, a rhythm to the scudding whorls. If you unfocus your eyes, you can see the fractal lattice wrapping around the world. Five “knots” in the lacework mark the locations of the megaliths.

    The Megaliths are five gargantuan stone monuments. Though they differ in configuration they each consist of five slabs. It’s clear that they serve as some sort of nexus or control point for the biological systems the Soft Bodies built into this world. They play a critical role in the rebirth cycle for the planetary guardian kaiju.

    Slug Temple has a thriving population of kaiju who live under the five guardian Kaiju, the largest kaiju on the planet. They are effectively immortal.  If they are killed they reform out of planetary biomass at their respective monolith. They live for a hundred years before dying and being reborn. Their rebirth schedules are staggered so that one kaiju is dying every 20 years. 

    There is a large land mass on the planet’s north pole. It is flat, cold and boggy. During the planetary winters it can drop to below freezing, a rarity on a planet as hot as Slug Temple. It is a land of rain and fog. What little dry land there is is covered in lush beds of moss. The Megalith is called the hut. Three slabs form walls while the other two form the floor and ceiling.

    The guardian kaiju of the North Pole is Fog Swimmer Quzork, a massive storm ribbon that shrouds itself with a thick fog bank. Despite being the closest guardian to Mount Snarb, relatively little is known about it. There is a tradition on Mount Snarb to credit it for any unresolved disappearances.

    Mount Snarb is a weathered, bald dome sticking out of the morass. It is home to the only permanent settlement on the planet. It was  founded by orthodox Kaijuists as a home base for their pilgrimages by Horace “Grubo” Snarb, who was the sole survivor of an earlier Kaijuist colony. With less than five hundred full-time residents, Mount Snarb is truly the outskirts of galactic civilization. The only major industry is ecotourism and trophy hunting. 

    The Spire Sea is a shallow tropical sea noted for the coral pillars that grow out of the water. The sea here reaches above the surface, with many lifeforms crossing back and forth over the boundary.The piscenoids have fins like wings and the jellies have hydrogen bladders. The megalith is the Table. Four slabs form the legs and one is the top.

    The Spire Sea is the domain of Spire Tyrant Klarklaka, a shelled leviathan that uses it’s muscular tentacle arms to swing it’s bulk over the Spire Sea. It hunts with an array of organic harpons.

    Like many Soft Body worlds, there is a massive subterranean ecosystem underpinning the surface biomes. The secret heart of Slug Temple crawls through every cave and aquifer, a throng of life in a lightness world. The center of that world is the megalith called the Fins. The five slabs are arranged parallel to each other in a huge lake chamber. 

    Normally the underground is full of strange calls and bioluminescent displays but everything goes silent and dark when Luminous Majesty Intragoner approaches. It is a massive slug with dozens of luminous eyes. It hunts with its stupefying psychic gaze, paralyzing anything the eyes focus on, then it simply swallows prey whole. 

    Deep Fire Ridge is a volcanic hotspot on the ocean floor, host to an ecosystem based on titanic chemosynthetic snails. The Ring Megalith has its five slabs arranged in a circle. The Guardian is Deep Fire Dweller Sek’Ron’Teth. It is a slug covered in overlapping bio-alloy scale plates. It attacks with a fierce ambient heat aura that can melt steel.

    The Cloud Biters are a rough and broken mountain range. High altitude cloud jungles cling to the peaks and ridges, a strange high world of green and white. The Star Megalith here is a central slab surrounded by four slabs serving as rays. This is the territory of Verdant Drifter Meklurga. Kept aloft by some unknown force emanating from its shell, the Verdant Drifter looks like a floating mountain, all covered in jungle. Long feeding tentacles caress the canopy, searching for food.

Organisms

Omen Shells - kaiju sized snails with intricate fractal whorl patterns on their shells. They spend most of their time hidden under water, feeding on slime and algae. When they gather it is the first sign that a guardian kaiju is about to die. If threatened, they defend themselves with a sticky bolus of thick mucus. They also have the ability to psionically catalyse lightning strikes when there is a strong enough atmospheric charge, which is most of the time in Slug Temple’s thick atmosphere.

Threnody Singers - Winged flying slug the size of an adult human. They congregate around coming deaths to sing their eerie song before feeding on the new carrion. The size of the flock depends on the size of the death: a couple for something human sized, dozens for a kaiju and thousands for a greater kaiju.

Storm Ribbon - A flying kaiju unique to Slug Temple. Creates its own personal electrical storm wherever it flies.  

Trade goods

Megalith Biofilm - A special microbial community that only grows on the megaliths. It is thought to have some connection to the rebirth of the guardian kaiju but its hard to study, as it decays immediately after being removed. It can be kept alive on a fragment of the megalith, but damaging the megalith releases a viral attack pheromone marker that incites all life, even the guardian kaiju to attack.

Guardian Kaiju Remains - The bio alloys and high performance chemistry of the guardian kaijus make them valuable to genetic engineers. Pieces of the guardians also have religious significance to the kaiju church. Harvesting pieces of dead guardians isn’t easy, because the death of such a creature triggers a massive feeding frenzy.