Chương 13: Bonus Entry - Bestiary — Lizard Miniman

Bestiary Entry — Lizard Miniman Isekai'd Too Late — First appearance: Book 1, Chapter 12 ("A Week of Progress"), Thornwood intermediate zone LIZARD MINIMAN Tiny humanoid (reptilian), unaligned Armor Class 13 (natural scale + Dex) Hit Points 5 (2d4) Speed 30 ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 6 (−2) 15 (+2) 11 (+0) 7 (−2) 12 (+1) 6 (−2) Skills Perception +3, Stealth +4 Senses passive Perception 13 Languages — (communicates by hiss, click, and posture) Challenge 1/8 (25 XP) · Proficiency Bonus +2 Pack Tactics.

The miniman has advantage on an attack roll against a creature if at least one of its allies is within 5 ft. of the creature and the ally isn't incapacitated. Undergrowth Stalker. The miniman has advantage on Stealth checks made in undergrowth, and it can take the Hide action when lightly obscured by foliage. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Cold-Blooded.

While in an area of nonmagical cold, or during the cold hours before its environment has warmed, the miniman's speed is halved and it has disadvantage on attack rolls. A warm environment or several minutes of sunlight ends the effect. Cornered Prey. The first time an ally the miniman can see is reduced to 0 hit points, the miniman freezes in fear: attack rolls against it have advantage until the end of its next turn.

On its following turn it rallies, attacking with the reckless commitment of something with nothing left to lose. Actions Stone Spear. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft. or range 10/30 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4 + 2) piercing damage. Ecology & Behavior What it is. A distinct species — not a shrunken lizardfolk, not the young of anything larger. What you see hatched at that size and will die at that size.

It stands roughly knee-high to a grown human, green-scaled, bipedal, built low and fast for the undergrowth. Diet. Opportunistic carnivore. It runs down insects, small vermin, hatchlings, and anything softer and slower than itself, and it will strip carrion without hesitation. A pack's willingness to swarm something the size of Max isn't courage — it's a predator's arithmetic. Slow plus inattentive reads as easy and large, and large means a lot of meat.

They are very bad at that arithmetic when the large slow thing is undead. Instinct, not culture. The miniman has no society to speak of. No hierarchy, no leader, no names for itself or anything else, no learning passed hatchling to hatchling. Everything it does, it does the way a spider spins — the whole repertoire is inherited and complete on day one: The spear. A miniman jams a stone shard onto a stick because the drive to do so is built in, the same way a bird builds a nest it was never shown.

The spears are crude because instinct has no craftsman behind it to improve them. There is no forge, no trade, no decoration, no variation worth calling style. The pack. The "instinctive coordination of pack hunters" is exactly that — instinct. There's no plan, no signal-caller, no alpha barking orders. Four of them fan out because four of them all run the same hardwired program at once, and the program happens to look like teamwork. Reproduction & the guild's stock.

Egg-layers with no parental instinct at all — a miniman buries its clutch in warm, rotted undergrowth and walks away, and that indifference is exactly what makes the species farmable. The guild collects the abandoned eggs, incubates and rears them at the guild center, and releases grown minimen back into the Thornwood to keep the training population up.

They are, in the plainest terms, stock: bred to be found and killed by adventurers who need something that walks upright and fights back but won't cost anything real to lose. Nothing in the miniman's behavior treats an individual life — its own or a packmate's — as worth much, and the guild's ledger agrees. Cold-blooded. Ectothermic, and it shows. Minimen are sluggish in the cold morning and go still and hidden through the cold of night; the pack that finds you does so once the day has warmed.

They are creatures of daylight and the middle of the afternoon, not ambushers in the dark. Habitat. The wilder, denser growth past the beginner clearing — the Thornwood's intermediate zone, in the thorn and bramble and low tangle where a knee-high hunter has cover and a big one doesn't. They're there because the guild puts them there, seeded into the same managed band as the twig blights, vine blights, and stream frogs to give new adventurers a graduated ladder of things to kill.

Whether any truly wild population exists outside the training grounds is an open question the guild has little reason to ask.