Riftshear - The Bulette

Role in Its Society:

Riftshear is the uncontested apex predator of a scarred stretch of earth where surface and Underdark keep colliding—collapsed dwarven roads, sinkholes, and broken badlands riddled with forgotten mine shafts. To the creatures that live above and below, he isn’t just a monster; he’s a natural disaster with teeth.

Surface folk—farmers, caravan masters, rangers—tell stories of a “landshark” that can feel hoofbeats a mile away. Dwarves and deep delvers know a different legend: the tunnel-breaker, the thing that turns solid stone to treacherous rubble and swallows whole wagons from beneath.

Riftshear doesn’t serve anyone, but every faction plans around him. Dwarven engineers design detours, duergar patrols use his territory as a border, and even Underdark raiders think twice before massing heavy troops on the cracked plains above. A few ruthless warlords quietly try to weaponize him—staging battles on his hunting grounds or driving enemies over his favorite ridges and fault lines.

Appearance Description:

Riftshear is enormous even for a bulette, a plated juggernaut of earth and hunger. His back and flanks are shielded by overlapping plates of slate-grey armor, each one ridged and scarred like broken shale. Between the plates, tough, pebble-textured flesh shows in bands of dark brown and ochre.

A serrated dorsal fin runs down his spine, jagged as a row of broken swords. When he swims just beneath the surface, that fin cuts through soil like the cutwater of a ship, sending ripples through loose stones and clods of dirt.

His head is a wedge of muscle and metal, with a blunt, shovel-like snout and a mouth full of triangular, stone-chipped teeth. Small, deep-set eyes are half-hidden beneath bony ridges, glinting like chips of obsidian. Old iron spikes, arrowheads, and even a bent dwarven nail are embedded in his plates—hurled at him long ago and simply swallowed into his armor as he grew.

When he leaps, all that mass leaves the earth in a terrifying, slow-motion arc, plates flexing, claws extended—a stone avalanche with a bite.

Backstory:

Riftshear hatched in a shallow burrow near a dwarven trade road, one of several bulette pups left to fend for themselves. Two of his clutchmates quickly learned to hunt in the loose soil of the surrounding hills. Riftshear dug downward instead—drawn by the deeper vibrations of picks, carts, and underground rivers.

He grew up in the cracks between worlds: collapsed mine galleries, forgotten smugglers’ tunnels, and seismic faults where the earth never fully settled. When a dwarven caravan collapsed into a sinkhole after a minor quake, Riftshear got his first taste of a full wagon’s worth of meat and metal. He learned that some places on the map always drew footsteps back, no matter how many died there.

As mines were abandoned and roads shifted, Riftshear followed the thrum of traffic. Battles fought on his ground ended abruptly when he surged up beneath massed infantry. A duergar warband tried to tame him once, spiking his plates with chains and using him as a living battering ram to collapse enemy tunnels. It worked—until the enemy lines broke and Riftshear, maddened by noise and blood, turned on friend and foe alike.

He survived, scarred and stronger, now bearing a few rusted remnants of that failed harness fused into his armor. Since then, Riftshear has ruled the faultline between surface trail and Underdark access, hunting anything that shakes his ground with enough weight to be worth the leap.