Cheese Monster

This grotesque creature looks across between a large slug and a three-legged toad. Its disproportionately large maw is lined with innumerable needle-like teeth.

ECOLOGY

Environment Dairy herd pastures and surrounding environs, or the vicinity of social mammals during nursing. Dairies where cheese or butter are made and stored.
Organization solitary, pair, or nest (3-10)
Treasure incidental

The cheese monster’s most prominent feature is its maw; a rictal mouth broader than its body and lined with hundreds of tiny, needle-sharp teeth. Lacking a jawbone the entire circumference of the maw may flex and bend, shaping the cheese monster’s mouth around any shape so it may bite and grind from all directions. Above this maw are two tiny eyes set wide either side a protruding snout, deep red at the tip.

The broad head narrows quickly to a flexible neck that funnels food into a hairless and much smaller body. Its shoulders are relatively muscular, for so small a frame, as its two forelegs are its most powerful limbs, clawed so the cheese monster may climb more easily. The body narrows still further toward the single rear leg, short and clawed. Set above the leg a tail extends, equal in length to the cheese monster’s whole body. Its tip bears a stinger resembling that of a scorpion, able to quickly inject its stunning venom into unfortunate creatures that may then be subject to the cheese monster’s eager, mercifully thick-lipped suckling.

When not feeding, or seeking to feed, the cheese monster may be found in its nest. Though nests may be home to whole families of cheese monsters in the vicinity of a regular supply of milk products, a solitary cheese monster will gladly nestle among any appropriate material after a meal or in the hope of one to come. So it is that one or two cheese monsters are occasionally found in the kit of an adventurer, sleeping soundly after gobbling whatever cheese was found therein.