[Cosmos] Monsters - The Dredge (Patreon)

The team of soldiers cautiously advance deeper into the wreckage. Their captain had only instructed to investigate the mysterious "meteor," but nothing could have prepared them for what's inside. The last thing they saw was the gaping maws of parasite as it overwhelmed them with darkness.

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I knew I had to create a parasitic monster because they're so common in cosmic sci-fi. I almost didn't make this because of how much work went into the Behemoth and the subclasses, but it was too good to resist. One of my favorite games is Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop, which features a horde of different alien-type enemies that your team of marines must fight through. I combined this concept with the Flood from the Halo series, and created the Dredge.

The Dredge name was hard to come up with, but turned out to be very appropriate (Dredge means to clean, as in "clean the universe of life"). It's a sidestep from the Flood name, and also sounds a lot like "dread."

The monsters are basically variations of the Alien Swarm enemies. The Dredge bulwark is analogous to the Shieldbug. Together, each type of Dredge work together to create very challenging encounters for your players. They could encounter them in a wrecked starship or on a different planet; if your setting is traditional fantasy, they could simply be survivors of an alien starfall.

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