By popular demand, lets dive into the earth, deep into the earth, the elemental plane of earth to be exact, an environment that is probably the most and least understood, I mean, we know its an infinite plane of three dimensional rock, all kinds of minerals, ores, crystals and rock and earth types, its the dream of every Moradin loving dwarf in existence to one day find some portal to a chasm of endless jewels just clusted to every surface like the richest geode in the universe, to find molten rivers of pure gold and mountains filled with the silver steel of Mithril.
I have talked about Earth elementals before, how they are energy beings, like spirits made up of units of spirit, collective organisms that feed on each other and can grow into a collective, becoming more powerful, more able to hold together and manipulate raw elemental earth in the shape of their elemental forms when outside of a pure rocky environment, and the more that accumulate the more intelligent and individual the elemental becomes.. well, thats just one form of life within the elemental plane, there are many others, and today, we are going to learn all there is to know about a rarely appearing creature called the Khargra, appearing for the first time in the pages of the 1981 Fiend Folio, created by The Lawrence Schick with an illustration by Erol Otus. Lawrence Schick is the co-author of the original Star Frontiers and has written many other games over his career, he created White Plume Mountain, ranked the 9th greatest Dungeons and Dragons adventure of all time and was the head of TSR that hired Tom Moldcay, so you can thank him for the Red Box D&D Basic set, oh and you may know him recently since he is the Princple Narrative Designer for Baldur's Gate three.. ok, so, THAT Lawrence Schick, an absolute legend, RPG Hall of fame, godfather of the hobby, total badass, he basically created online roleplaying games and his accomplishments and influence are far beyond the scope of this little video.
His creation of the Khargra, the Earth Fish or Rock Piranha if you like, is a window into a whole other strata of life forms existing in the elemental planes and very rarely encountered on other planes and planets within the Prime Material Plane. So lets dive into the ecology of these mysterious and freaky looking critters, settle back, grab yourself a tasty beverage, its time to get deeply nerdy.
The Khargra recently got an update and is included not only in Pathfinder lore, but also 5th edition, thanks to 'Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio Volume 1: Monsters Malevolent and Benign', saves me a little work converting it (you would think), but we will take a look at that one in a moment.
While they do match many of the physical characteristics of other rock eating creatures from the Elemental plane, such as the Xorn and the Xaren, they are not the same species, some scholars assert the Khargra are the juvenile life stage of these creatures, that's not true.
Each Khargra is the shape of a tube, basically the look like a jet engine crossed with a fish, 3 to 4 feet (up to 1.2 meters) in length, tapering somewhat towards the rear, and covered in large, closely interlocked iron, platinum and other trace mineral alloy metallic scales. The intake mouth is a full foot in diameter, and lined with sharp exotic metal alloy teeth with a curve, being able to shut like an aperture. Three metal fins, large and weirdly flexible, formed of the same sort of alloy as the scales, extend equidistantly from one another like a rocket. Similarly, three conical sheaths containing arms are tucked between the fins. Small eyes bulge out from either side of the top fin. The clawed arms, when fully extended, stretch out to 3 feet (0.91 meters) from the creatures body and are mainly used to latch onto things they are feeding on, and are part of the mating behavior, latching on to each other even while speeding through their native environment. That environment is rock, basically, but encompasses the incredible variety of strata, molten flows and extremely high pressure or density zones of the elemental plane of earth and the quazi-elemental plane of Minerals. They weigh around 300 pounds or 140 kilograms, most of which is their outer layer of metallic fins and scales.
The Khargra's constantly working maw is opens and closes like an iris, the closest equivalent I can think of is the tiny rotifers found in fresh water on Toril. The maw draws in earth, absorbing the required elements and ejecting the rest out the back, hurling the creature forward so they seem to fly through solid ground at a speed of 30 to 35 feet per round, this speed also allows them to shoot out of the ground and sail for 10 feet through the air before landing, a tactic they will use to pounce on a food source or escape a predator chasing after them in their solid world.
Their feeding changes the consistency of the rock to a softer gravel behind them and its possible for a skilled individual to identify and track them this way, if they have the means to follow them. This can, in some cases, be damaging to structures that rely heavily on their strength, such as fortifications, but it would take some bad (or good) luck for the Khargra to cause really significant damage or a catastrophic collapse all at once, they don't do that sort of damage with ill intent, they are naturally quite neutral creatures with a low intelligence and just follow instinctual behavior. So, don't fill your castle walls with gold and stuff, that would be my advice, and don't build such structures in the migratory path of the Khargra schools.
So, yes, they are migratory, they have an interesting life cycle, they almost always travel in small schools, there will be a larger one, I'm not sure if its a male or female, in fact, we don't know how their genders work at all, they have none, they might have three or be like the cuttlefish, with different types of males, they are rarely found outside the planes of earth and mineral so study is difficult indeed, normally the only reason they will travel to the prime material plane is if they are attracted to very large or pure source of some metal, particularly platinum, so, rarely, very rarely. The kargra life cycle has them hatch from a beautiful golf ball sized egg within a convection complex within the plane of earth where they grow to maturity over the course of decades, then they will group together and make their way to the quasiplane of Mineral where it seems they just eat themselves to death in absolute ecstacy, there is really no other way to explain it, they travel to their own version of heaven and perish there, transformed into bloated geodes of spectacularly rare and refined minerals that simply explode, or implode really. Unlike salmon, they are not returning to their spawning ground, its more like, they finally answer the call, having produced many new generations of their kind, they retire to their ultimate reward and final doom. Rarely an individual will break away from the school and venture for great distances and often to strange places, nobody knows why, but they tend to be the largest of their kind. Rogues I guess you could call them, I have no idea how old they can get, but they don't usually grow much larger than 4 feet long.
All Khargra feed on high-grade ores. But like most animals, If presented with the opportunity for a rich and easy meal, they won't hesitate to exploit it. Unfortunately, this means folks venturing around wearing metal suits of armor, weapons, refined steel, alloys, pure gemstones, enchanted wondrous constructs and even coins and trade bars or ingots are just a walking buffet table to the Khargra, they have no interest in eating organic material or living creatures though, its just incidental that their feeding can cause tremendous harm to folks who don't know you can just throw coins and shields and swords and stuff at them and the Khargra will just leave them alone completely, slurping and grinding up these substances with terrifying ease.
Inside the Khargra the metals and minerals will be ground up in its gullet catchment pockets, so a dead Khargra will always have up to 600 gold coins worth of valuable minerals inside it that is not that difficult to retrieve. In non-murder hobo terms, thats around 100 pounds or 45 kilograms of digested material, half of which will be mostly valuable nuggets of iron and other common metals, but 10% will be nuggets of silver, gold or platinum. Those who know the deep lore will harvest the fins of the Khargra as Dwarven smiths can use them in the construction of fine magical weapons, allowing them to hold a very keen and durable edge. The body scales can be used to directly fashion scaled armor and the teeth make excellent arrowheads or spear points.
Approaching Khargra do create vibrations through solid ground, beings with tremorsense, Dwarves with stonecunning and many Underdark species will be able to sense this faintly as the creatures switch direction as they suddenly sense food close by, all khargra can scent the location of ferrous metal within 30 feet of their location at all times, probably by generating their own magnetic field. The prime material plane is not as rich in minerals and they are almost always very hungry when found outside the inner planes, many will starve to death, sadly. They will fly out of the earth or solid rock and extend their claws to latch onto metallic objects and bite with their formidable maw, inflicting .. wow.. ok, 5th edition has seriously nerfed this down to a mere 1d4+1 points of piercing damage, seriously for a one foot wide maw full of sharp metallic teeth used to tear through solid stone? Are they deluded? No, no.. They can eat up to five pounds of metal per melee round, the bite does 3d6 points of piercing damage, not 1d4+1, that's ridiculous, they are flying wood chippers of armor and weapons, that's the whole point.. another error is they don't take damage from remaining inside solid earth and rock, its their native environment!
Bill, Bart, Mike, what were you smoking, stay out of the long bottom leaf when you are updating the monsters please.
The limitation of this formidable bite attack is that the Khargra is literally like a fish out of water outside of the earth, they can only move toward a target by dragging itself along with their retractable arms, and while the arms do no damage themselves, if they lash out and strike a target, they can latch on and haul the maw toward the target to take that formidable bite, so they basically have to hit you twice, but, once they latch on, they are very difficult to remove unless they have eaten all the metal on the target, or been killed, and if you do strike at them with a metal weapon, they will try to eat it. OK so just to be very clear, when they leap out of the solid earth or rock, they are out of phase, at a molecular level and it takes them a full combat round to phase into solid form in order to even make a bite attack, and they have to score a grappling hit with a retractable arm first in order to do so. If you hit them with a metal weapon they get to make a bite attack, once per round, against that weapon, and if they score a 16 or higher to hit it, they will bite a big chunk off it, only if it is metal, if it is magical, you add a point to that for every level of enchantment, so, 17 if enchanted, 18 if its a +2 weapon or armor, 19 if it is +3, artifacts and non-metallic weapons will not be eaten. Its like, try and attack me with some fried strips of delicious bacon, I dare you.
They are immune to fire, cold and poison, a heat metal spell will do full damage though and if you hit them with an old school spell like phase door or similar while they are shifting their molecular structure prior to or after phasing into solid rock or earth, they will be instantly killed and remain in a solid state, I dare say petrification would have a similar lethal effect.
The 5th edition lore also says they don't like eating gold, again, not true, 90% of their diet is iron, but 10% is made up of Platinum, gold or other, rarer metals and ores, there is no mention of copper or other specific metals and no mention of indigestion caused by gems or organic material, they just don't eat living or organic things if they can help it, much like I don't prefer to eat styrofoam.
Khargra's dark eyes can see in total darkness as well as through earth and stone, obviously they don't rely on photons to do so, they probably generate the magnetic fields somehow
Despite their very low intelligence, Khargra can speak the Terran language of elemental earth creatures and a number of azer, dwarven, and duergar clans are known to have trained khargras over the course of years for the purpose for couriering messages, having them learn the direction to underground strongholds and outposts. They accomplished this by sprinkling iron dust upon scrolls or other organic items bearing a message, than sending the khargra to the destination. Once a destination was reached, they would cough up the item-bearing message. Dragons absolutely loathe Khargra as the damn things will just eat a dragon's hoard of precious metals like a shark feeding frenzy and dragons will try to kill them on sight, much like the Dao genies.
On the Elemental Plane of Earth they were known to be hunted by chaggrin, pech, and stone giants. however, they do have their fans; Khargra are a favored by the gnome deities Callarduran Smoothhands, Flandal Steelskin, and Urdlen. They are also much loved by the earth deity Grumbar.
And there you have it my friends, the mysterious and weird little Earth Fish, bane of the armored knight, the Khargra, as always, thanks for listening and I will be back with more for you, very soon
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