| Class: | Beast |
| Hab: | Any terrain with adequate prey; above ground or undersea |
| Fre: | Ubiquitous to extremely rare, by setting |
| Num: | 10-1,000; scattered hills or close-packed mountain ranges |
| Lair: | 100%; sessile |
| Size: | 1 to 20 miles across, 100 - 10,00 feet high |
| Move: | Young: 10 mph, mature: sessile |
| Def: | Stone armor tens or hundred of feet thick + allied interior "tenants" |
| Att: | Silk-spit, wide-reaching claws, short-range maws, possibly others |
| Int: | Negligible? (assumed) |
| Spec: | Are living hills and mountains |
| Posns: | Incidental; interior may be richly furnished |
These barnacle-like creatures are the size of hills or even mountains. Each is uniquely adapted to its situation, whether posing as outcropping of a great desert mountain range or forming the very mountains of a forest-cloaked range, set above a krill-rich arctic coast or below in the marine depths. There is as much adventure to be had within these vast beasts as upon their surfaces; SEE Flesh Environments.
From fissures and craters, the vast barnacles shoot strands of sticky silk to ensnare anything that comes within a mile, whether approaching on the ground or flying through the air. As prey is drawn close, reticulated arthropod limbs, terminating in catching claws or baleen-fringed booms sweep the prey in to chasm-maws lined with tentacles and teeth.
The shells, like stone plates hundreds of feet thick, seem designed to repel the predations of some massive starfish or toothed worm.
The brave or foolhardy, bent upon penetrating the secrets of these vast creatures, are advised to approach from underground; however torturously twisted the tunnels, however monster-infested, that is surely safer than a direct approach.
Young barnacle hills may live in migratory herds of 10-1000 individuals, traveling back and forth across a plain. The adults are too heavy to move, and soon merge with the geology of their chosen site. Adults may incorporate themselves in to a , Vermiculated Mountain Reef Coral, which SEE.
The sessile giants require surprisingly little food. Sages speculate that the adults may actually derive most of their energy from symbiotic geothermal microbes in their plastron belly plates, which sink down in to the magma layers of the earth.
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