Drik

''This creature is a monstrous lizard with a great horned and ridged shell over thirty feet across. Its limbs and head, scaled with dull violet hide, protrude from beneath the shell in a fashion similar to a tortoise, and enormous tusks jut from its slavering jaws. The creature's small eyes are dead black and its talons are seemingly cut from jagged, stained ivory.''

Tactics
The drik takes a simple approach to conflict: rend, chew and swallow whatever gets in the way of more leisurely activity. Despite their lumbering nature, they are surprisingly fast when it comes to actual combat. Their necks are strong and nimble and a drik can lunge forward to devour a foe with but a moment‘s notice.

A drik is also able to attack with its claws, but the beast‘s immense weight means that it must balance itself on at least three of its legs at all times and so may only attack with a single claw at once.

Description
The drik is a gargantuan herd lizard once common in the northern Tyr region. It broad, horned shell and great Strength have made it a favorite beast of war with the lords of Urik and Raam for many ages, and the drik herds are far thinner now as a result. A quadruped, each of the drik‘s four claws ends in four wicked talons, capable of tearing through steel.

Low and lumbering, the drik is born without its shell, but as it grows, it secretes a resin that combines with bony residues to form an ever-growing carapace. It is this carapace that makes the creature so valued, as it can be remodeled and fashioned to form a well-defended platform ideal for waging siege warfare.

Driks are used as weapon platforms, living rams, heavy assault forces and (rarely) beasts of burden. Hamanu, sorcerer-king of Urik, is known for having devised a foul method of altering driks while they are still in the egg. The resulting mutation is born with cunning intelligence, speed and Strength and possesses a natural aptitude for defiler magic. Known as high driks, these fiends are further detailed hereafter.

The adult drik is 35 feet across or more, weighing in over 6 tons. Driks reach maturity in two years and can live as many as 30.

Society
Wild driks live in small familial herds, each led by an adult female. Other adult females are seen as rivals – the resulting struggles for dominance are truly a sight to behold. The herd grazes on desert shrubs but will also eat whatever smaller, more mobile prey is unfortunate enough to come close enough to their crushing jaws. In the northern Tyr region, female driks lay their eggs every three years in the Black Waters oasis. This oasis is at the heart of the ancestral drik ranges and the lumbering lizards are the only known creatures that regularly drink from those poisoned waters and survive.

Their territorial nature, however, makes drik easy to track and capture. As their numbers dwindle, with still no drik yet successfully bred in captivity, the acquisition of new eggs becomes more challenging each season. In addition to this, driks become extremely agitated in captivity and require constant psionic handling. Consequently, casualties amongst drik handlers are very high. Driks communicate with one another using a series of grunts and bellows. More intelligent creatures are forced to use psionics in order to communicate with them.

Drik War Machines
As noted above, the chief use of the drik is as a weapon of war. Besides the more obvious applications of the lizard‘s size and Strength, the drik‘s carapace also possesses certain characteristics that make it ideally suited to retooling for martial purposes.

Because it is formed chiefly from secreted resin, the shell of a drik can be remolded under the influence of heat. Siege weaponry of all kinds can then be mounted onto the creature‘s back, protected by horned walls of shell. Command posts and small siege towers are not uncommon and the engineers of Raam have perfected a method of molding the shape of a growing drik‘s shell using wooden strictures and frames, but this method only has a one in three survival rate.