Rellixar - The Flail Snail

Role in Its Society:

Rellixar is an itinerant oddity of the Underdark—a great, lumbering flail snail whose slow migrations carve glittering paths through some of the filthiest and most fungus-choked caverns.

To most denizens below, Rellixar is:

• A walking omen: its arrival in a warren foretells a season of strange lights, shattered illusions, and disrupted magic.
• A mobile resource: duergar and deep gnomes covet the hardened glass of its mucus trail and the prismatic plates of its shell, useful for exotic shields, lenses, or alchemical focuses.
• A hazardous curiosity: drow mages and would-be shell-hunters often underestimate how its shimmering shell warps and deflects spells.

Rellixar follows no master and recognizes no borders. It simply crawls, eats, and occasionally pulverizes whatever strikes it as a threat. Its slow passage has cleansed waste-choked sumps, melted toxic filth into inert glass, and turned troglodyte middens into glittering, razor-edged mosaics.

Some myconid circles and odd Underdark cults quietly revere Rellixar as a pilgrim of the deep, a creature that transforms corruption into beauty—albeit lethally.

Appearance Description:

Rellixar is a massive snail the size of a wagon, its soft body a rippling mass of iridescent, blue-green flesh that glistens with viscous slime. The flesh is translucent in places, showing faint veins of darker pigment pulsing slowly as it moves.

Its shell is the true spectacle: a towering, spiraled structure of prismatic mineral plates, each segment shifting in color from deep sapphire to molten gold to amethyst when light strikes it. Cracks and chips along the rim bear scorch marks, acid scars, and weapon gouges from past attacks. Sometimes faint, shifting bands of color ripple across the shell like a slow aurora—residual magic refracting through dense crystal layers.

From the front of its body sprout several long, muscular eyestalks and flail tentacles. The eyestalks end in glossy, gem-like orbs that twitch and swivel, tasting light and motion rather than simply seeing. The flail tentacles terminate in heavy, mace-like knobs of ridged chitin, each patterned with faint, swirling colors. When they swing, they whistle through the air with bone-cracking force.

Wherever Rellixar crawls, it leaves behind a thick mucus trail that quickly cools and hardens into a translucent, glassy crust. Under torchlight or bioluminescence, this trail shimmers with trapped colors and distorted reflections, turning even a midden-cavern into a maze of slippery crystal sheets and sharp edges.

Backstory:

Rellixar once lived far from the Underdark’s crowded warrens, in a quiet, mineral-rich hollow barely touched by sentient hands. There, it spent decades slowly grazing on rare lichens and mineral deposits, its shell accumulating layer after layer of prismatic crystal.

Everything changed when a band of deep gnome prospectors discovered its secluded grotto. To them, Rellixar’s shell was a walking fortune. Their attempt to trap it with nets, pitons, and lightning exploded—literally—when their spells refracted off the shell, ricocheted through the chamber, and set off a chain reaction of magical mishaps. The grotto collapsed in a storm of light and stone.

Rellixar survived, but the blast had strange effects:

• The shell’s crystalline structure became even more complex, humming faintly with stored magical interference.
• Its mucus began to react more aggressively with corruption—alchemical runoff, necrotic slime, and magically tainted ooze.
• It developed rudimentary instinctive reactions to magic, curling or shifting its shell when spells struck, as if “remembering” the catastrophe.

Driven from its old home, Rellixar began to migrate, following veins of lichen, mineral-rich walls, and the subtle “flavor” of corrupted stone and sludge. Along the way, it crawled through troglodyte warrens, myconid groves, and forgotten shrines, leaving behind hardened glass trails and shattered magical experiments.

Now, its path is half legend, half hazard map. Some Underdark dwellers speak of it with reverence, others with exasperation—but all agree on one thing: when you see prismatic glass on the floor, move carefully and do not hurl your biggest spell at the snail wearing the rainbow fortress.