Whomper

Comments from the Finger: This is your weekly reminder to go check out the Book of Extinction on Kickstarter! There’s only about a week left to check out extinct animals like the Heath Hen in D&D!

Also, we’re releasing this in collaboration with Nations and Cannons, a D&D supplement set in the Revolutionary War! It’s one of the most daring experiments with roleplaying games I’ve ever read, and it belongs on your gaming shelf alongside the Book of Extinction! Go check it out on Kickstarter!

Heath Hen

Tympanuchus cupido cupido

The boisterous heath hen was ubiquitious among the Pilgrims and other early North American colonists. Its extinction sparked one of the first conservation movements in American history—a movement that continues to this day.
At the time of European settlement of the American Northeast, heath hens were abundant across the Eastern Seaboard. More closely related to grouse than chicken, the bird was named for the heath family of plants. These low grasses and shrubs like cranberry, huckleberry, and rhododendron shared the hen’s habitat in the understory of pine forests, or “pine barrens.” It was an ecosystem kept clear and open by regular fires the heath alone could survive.
Heath hens were famous for the way they courted their mates. Around sunrise, whole colonies of birds would gather at ancestral mating grounds, called leks, as the males put on a spectacular performance. They would stamp, scratch, bow, jump, and turn half circles in the air. The pinnae feathers on their neck would stand out like horns as the birds inflated the bright orange gular sacs beneath. The sound they made was like the “subdued and distant echo of many medium-pitched steam whistles,” wrote Edward Howe Forbush, state ornithologist of Massachusetts. They could be heard more than a mile away.
The heath hen still thrived when its pine barrens and plains were turned into farmland, which were similar enough to its original ecosystem in terms of nesting sites and food. The birds were even seen on Boston Common, the center of the city, in its early days. But as New England urbanized during the Industrial Revolution, overhunting and habitat loss completely extirpated the heath hen from the mainland. By 1870, the last colony of heath hens lived on a strip of fire-swept heath called the Great Prairie on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
The colony became the subject of one of America’s earliest conservation movements. In 1908, the Massachusetts commonwealth acquired 600 acres of the old Great Prairie and appointed a warden to manage the population of birds there and protect them from poachers. Over the next 20 years, the colony’s numbers varied up and down until disease, inbreeding, and infertility ran their course. By 1928, there was only one bird left, a male nicknamed “Booming Ben.” For a time, he was the most protected bird in the world. On March 11, 1932, Booming Ben visited the empty lekking ground on Martha’s Vineyard to call for a mate that would never come. He didn’t return the next day, or the next, and the following year he did not appear at all.
Booming Ben left a legacy of conservation in the United States. His former lekking ground, the Great Prairie reserve on Martha’s Vineyard, has grown to become the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest, 5,168 acres of permanently undeveloped land protecting the island’s only freshwater aquifer. Organizations like BiodiversityWorks, the Village and Wilderness Project, and Martha’s Vineyard Vision Fellowship are working on sustainable ways to “undevelop” land in the Northeast and create linked natural habitats alongside affordable housing. Restoration and rewilding projects like these owe much to the lonely love bird of the Great Plains.

Inspired by the Heath Hen

Deceptively mighty for its size, the whomper is a bird that has captured the thunderous power of prairie storms. Hunters that see the feathers of this bird’s neck standing straight up are advised to take cover immediately, for a cacophonous call is sure to follow.
Love Bird. Because of their spectacular mating displays, whompers are thought to be a creation of a demigod of love. Worshippers of this domain revere the bird as a symbol of Love’s power or as an avatar of the demigod itself. Some temples go so far as to keep colonies of the birds on the grounds and teach imitations of their mating dance to worshippers.
Thunder Bird. Channeling the elemental power of air through the glowing orange sacs on their neck, whompers create a thunderous noise like a dragon’s roar. They perform elaborate dances to match this call: jumping, scratching, and bobbing.
When threatened, whompers can use this call as a weapon, generating a concussive force strong enough to knock humans unconscious.

Whomper

Tiny monstrosity, unaligned

Armor Class 12
Hit Points 32 (6d6 + 12)
Speed 40 ft.

STR: 3 (-4) | DEX: 15 (+2) | CON: 15 (+2)
INT: 2 (-4) | WIS: 13 (+1) | CHA: 17 (+3)

Saving Throws Con +4
Skills Acrobatics +4, Performance +5
Damage Resistances fire, thunder
Senses passive Perception 11
Languages —
Challenge 1 (200 XP)

Innate Spellcasting. The whomper’s innate spellcasting ability is Charisma (spell save DC 13). It can innately cast the following spells, requiring no somatic or material components:

At will: shield, thunderwave
1/day: shatter

Thunderous Rebuke. A creature that hits the whomper with a melee attack while within 5 feet of it takes 5 (1d10) thunder damage.