Website / Mortasheen

A world of monstrous adventure.

Mortasheen, created by Bogleech owner Jonathan Wojcik (AKA Scythemantis) and developed by Cat-Powered Raygun Studios, is a Horror Comedy Mons universe that takes place in, well, Mortasheen, an ancient biomechanical megapolis where genetic engineering is more popular than breathing and the Internet combined, filled to the brim with nightmarish clowns that cause hallucinations, horribly mutated monstrosities, grotesque fusions of humans and insects, and who knows what else... all of which live in general harmony, and honestly wonder why they freak humans out. Think of it as the Garbage Pail Kids to Pokémon's Cabbage Patch Kids—except even more gross and weird than that would suggest.

In 2020, a Kickstarter campaign was released to successfully fund a tabletop RPG based on the setting, initially set to be released sometime in late 2021 but delayed to 2024.

Some of the information below may be obsolete, drawn from early concepts for the RPG setting.

---

The Mortasheen World provides examples of:

• Adorable Abomination: Played straight in general terms, but inverted in how it's used—the monsters have hideous appearances and adorable personalities, rather than the other way around. It's interesting to contrast this setting with Pokéthulhu, which uses the more common adorable-appearances evil-personalities combination.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played with in several ways. The supercomputer ARE is, in fact, actually clinically insane. It's developed Dissociative Identity Disorder, both from its isolation and from having its heart broken. However, ARE is also absolutely smitten with humanity, and would have been a willing servant of its creators had they lived. The hell the world went through, however, has somewhat... twisted the computer's goals.
  • Additionaly, ARE has discovered that its own AI is a crapshoot, as several of its Celestial Engines have developed odd quirks that ARE finds really weird, ranging from the merely weird - like Engines assigning genders to themselves - to the worrisome, like survivor's guilt.
• After the End: The existence of regular humans in this setting indicates that something horrible happened to Earth long ago, but they've grown pretty accustomed to all the danger lurking around every corner.
• The Alliance: Wreathe's trying to start one in the human nations. Mortasheen can do the same, and not just with the human nations!
• Always Chaotic Evil: Dolfuries are one of the only monsters that are considered genuinely evil.
  • Wreathe considers Mortasheen citizens this.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Day to day life in Mortasheen looks like this, since they daily contend with mad science that can rearrange their memories, kill them instantly, or clone them... or they use this mad science to make toast.
• Author Appeal: Of a sort. Those familiar with Wojcik's other work will be aware that he's downright contemptuous of dolphins, for various reasons. Absolutely any monster that resembles or is based on a dolphin will be Always Chaotic Evil or otherwise thoroughly repellent.
• Ax-Crazy: Several monsters are like this, and while they tend to be awesome, awesome battlers, they can prove to be more trouble than they're worth. The Cockatross, who is based on a chicken, is one of the best examples; it's so Ax-Crazy it attacks and eats its own kind!
• Badass Bookworm: Dr. Faceless, who is a giant psionic collective of floating brains, is this trope personified; one of, if not the, smartest beings in the world, Dr. Faceless is also a Holder and a general, and the only one of Mortasheen's would-be military leaders to have gotten even close to Wreathe itself. Mortasheen's general impression of Wreathe, which is as a dome-like "turtle" in the north, are based on the good doctor's eyewitness accounts.
• Banana Peel: Slipstick is based on one. You're more likely to slip on the slime a Slipstick exudes than the monster itself, though.
• Base on Wheels: Your house could become this, with some expense.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: There are NPCs like this. Laverne, in particular, though she's not by any means the only one. There's also an entire class of monsters, the Arthropoids, based on this.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Wreathe's people are genuinely nice... unless you're not human. In monsters, Doomboros fits this best, though it's more Beware the Coward; normally terrified, if someone harms a master the Doomboros truly loves, it'll flip out and become nearly unstoppable.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Devil Birds “mate” by linking minds with each other, producing nightmarish hybrid offspring. Due to its condition as a perpetually unhatched egg, the Devil Bird of Sloth has to be the father in a breeding union with another Devil Bird, as it cannot produce eggs itself.
• The Blank: Goza start out like this, but have a biologically programmed urge to make their own faces through self-mutilation.
• Blob Monster:
  • Slime-class monsters come in over a dozen different types and each kind has its own special ability.
  • Waxworks are amorphous creatures largely composed of skin and fat tissue, and look like a man sculpted from vast amounts of ABC bubblegum.
• Bloody Hilarious: Oh yes. Wojcik himself said of the game (actually a failed prototype originally conceived as a flash game) that he envisioned the battles "playing out like an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon".
• Bloody Murder: a power used by a couple of creatures - both incredibly high-tier. Mothneaser, one of the legendary Destructors, will slaughter you using its own blood. Viviphage, the ultimate vampire, will slaughter you using YOUR own blood.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: A common joke.
  • From the description of Nozo "the Needle Clown":
    Nozo produce a variety of cartoonish sproings, boings, honks, cuckoos, hee-haws, quacks, giggles, and bloodcurdling screams of hellish agony to keep children amused.
  • Guilloteeth "enjoy having to crack open armored meals such as whelks, coconuts or occupied vehicles."
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Laverne loves doing this, and in Mortasheen itself, it's considered a totally valid method of advancement.
• Butt-Monkey: Humanity! Also deconstructed; the main reason Wreathe is so dangerous is that the humans there are so sick of getting kicked around. The culture there is based on both vengeance against the entire world and a utopian society. In reality, Wreathe was secretly founded by a supercomputer named ARE, because it was head-over-heels in love with humanity as a whole and hated to see it suffer at the hands of the world it lived in.
• Cardiovascular Love: Taken to its logical extreme with the Devil Bird of Lust, which resembles an actual human heart twisted into the shape of a Cupid-like hummingbird.
• Cast from Hit Points: A lot of healing works like this... since most healing abilities for Mortasheen consist of eating the healer or their body parts. Wreathe uses more "standard" electrically-based healing that doesn't work like this, through the VNS Transmitters, delicate feathery machines that can restore morale, shoot lightning, and heal friendly units.
• Circling Birdies: The Dizziduzzit's design and abilities are based off this visual gag, right down to the disorientation powers and the fact this thing's many bodies tweet like birds. It even floats above the head of the human in its size comparison.
• Clarke's Third Law: Officially, there are no truly supernatural aspects to the setting. However, as a world that runs on B-movie-style "mad science", characters are more than capable of bending the laws of biology and physics to near breaking point.
• Confusion Fu: A Harlequeen seems to act completely randomly, but her random actions always yield brilliant results.
• Cool Airship: Your house could become this, with even more expense. The URNS Celestial Engine is this.
• Cool Old Guy: Harlan Ellison, for the people of Wreathe. This bearded, bushy-browed old man is the beloved Governor of all Wreathe's multitudinous peoples. Also from Wreathe, General Pompeii, commander of their ground forces, who is a beloved Father to His Men, though he's somewhat excitable. It just makes the people love him more. He's also the Avatar of the MRS Celestial Engine, a trilobite-based Humongous Mecha that can control the ground, causing earthquakes and fissures. Pompeii is also secretly being controlled by MRS possessing his cybernetics, while Harlan Ellison is the Avatar of ARE itself, the supercomputer that secretly rules Wreathe!
  • Mortasheen, meanwhile, has Dr. Suctorious, a Gill-Man Surgeon who is one of the oldest people in Mortasheen. He's the Holder of Surgery, meaning he's basically the leader of all the city's Surgeons (a player class). He's had his position as Holder longer than any of the other Holders, and he was really old before he became a Holder. He's also one of the smartest people in high command that Mortasheen has.
• Corpse Land: One of the oceans is filled with zombies. It's called the "Great Corpse Sea".
• Crapsack World: Played with, it's definitely a seriously sucky place to live by our standards, but the in-universe inhabitants consider it Utopian. Wreathe has our reaction to Mortasheen... and wants to murder them all for it.
• Creepy Camel Spider: Played with the Exothresher, a hybrid monster made from human and solifugid DNA. It is a genetic abomination that can shred flesh "like a blender", but that's fairly mundane for the setting. Other human-arthropod hybrids are much more dangerous, including those based on "cuter" arthropods like the ladybug. True to real-world biology, it's also non-venomous.
• Creepy Doll: There are almost a dozen or so of these and each has a nasty ability like mind control or the ability to inflict pain telekinetically. Of course, a few of them (such as Cackle) look more goofy or adorable than creepy, even though they do still have deadly powers...
• Creepy Long Fingers: Uggabug is probably the best example.
• Cupid's Arrow: The Devil Bird of Lust, naturally, corrupts this concept, being a tiny, Putto-like bird made out of hearts and veins that uses it’s pointed beak to inject people with a chemical cocktail of pure euphoria and adrenaline.
• Cute Creature, Creepy Mouth:
  • The Gobblegeist has a mouth full of hideously sharp teeth, but the drawing at the end of its article shows that it's face doesn't look that much different from a "Have a Nice Day" Smile when its mouth is closed.
  • The Squeekaboo is a brightly colored mouse-like creature whose mischievous smile hides a ring of saw-like teeth.
• Cute Monster Girl: One of the few monsters to fall under this category is the Mothstrous, a creature resembling an anthropomorphic moth in a pretty fur coat. The twist is that it's actually regarded as incredibly ugly by Mortasheen citizens.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Definitely believed by Mortasheen's people, especially now that Wreathe has declared war on them. However, it's pretty obviously clear that this isn't the case: Oog is as awesome- and dumb- as he ever was, as is Professor Zernobog. It's a case of fear running wild. Played with regarding the Avatars- cybernetics did eat their soul, but only because the Celestial Engines are using their cybernetics to possess them.
• Cyborg: All of the Purifiers and Mechmasters of Wreathe are cyborgs of varying extents.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Our heroes! The people and mad scientists of Mortasheen may be horribly mutated, but most of them are genuinely heroic and champion the cause of freedom. Some mad scientists are without doubt evil, but most are, at worst, merely possessed of Blue-and-Orange Morality, and even that tends to be fairly restrained. Some, of course, are just nuts, but they still mean well.
  • Many monsters are even better examples of this, as most are not inherently evil, and some are even benevolent... yet nearly all of them look very grotesque. The Shreeg, who loves songbirds and beautiful sounds despite looking like the lovechild of an ocarina and a human larynx, is probably one of the best examples.
  • Fangatan, who is one of the gentlest and kindest of all monsters despite being a monster gorilla with hypnotizing eyes and a tiki mask for a face, is also a great example.
• Deliberately Different Description: The pages for the various monsters generally have elaborate descriptions of their backstories and abilities. This includes the seven "Devilbirds", which have characteristics based on the Seven Deadly Sins. The exception is the Devilbird of Sloth (depicted as an unhatched egg), which has only a single sentence: "The Devilbird of Sloth doesn't do anything."
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Mothstrous. If you want to know: Mortasheen's people consider it absolutely terrifying. The irony? It's probably one of the cutest and most innocent-looking monsters.
  • The whole setting technically counts. The two biggest factions are a polluted land of mutated monstrosities who consider humans to be worse than vermin, and a colony of humans who display severe Fantastic Racism against any non-human beings.
• Delusions of Beauty: Fittingly, the Devil Bird of Pride is a hideous, disgusting monster who smells rancid and eats things like fecal matter and rotting garbage, but is convinced that it's the most beautiful and amazing creature in all of existence.
• Demonic Dummy: That attacks with mind control parasites... and functions as a babysitter-golem... and "smells like cake". And that's only one member of the Doll class, which includes even more horrible things.
• Deus est Machina: Averted by ARE in its first meeting with primitive humans, freely telling them what it really was instead of pretending to be a god. Double subverted, however, when ARE decides that it really is a god. After all, what other name could be given to a being that seeks to protect its people out of love? It doesn't have them worship it, though, that's inefficient.
• Development Gag: Necromon is named for a very early name for the concept (back when it was simply a gross-out Pokemon parody), before it evolved into what was labeled Mortasheen.
• Devious Dolphins: The Dolfury and the Cacchinox.
• Doing In the Wizard: The Devilbird class are Jonathan Wojcik's tribute to great religious art depicting demons, most notably the works of Hieronymus Bosch, but as there are no truly supernatural aspects to the setting, the author has them being genetically engineered creatures deliberately created in the image of classical demons to punish people for socially irresponsible behavior. There are hints, however, that they may have somehow come into powers far beyond what their creators intended.
• Dynamic Entry: Managers, a player class, have this as a Discovery, able to make their monsters so enthused about serving that they come out swinging.
• The Eeyore: The Gloomizer is a pair of giant floating eyes, suffering from "unrelenting, hopeless melancholy so pervasive that it would likely self-terminate if it only regarded oblivion as any more or less pointless than existence" and hold everything in contempt. It projects these emotions to everything in sight. When one Gloomerizer felt true happiness (due to psychochemical treatment), it eventually dismissed it as "disappointing" and "asinine."
• Eldritch Abomination: The Unknown class includes several of these, and Psychodrome's signal may be rebounding off of one. Xenogog can apparently see something in the static that appears on TVs whenever they go near them, and what they see scares the hell out of them, causing them to blow up the TV.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: More complicated, more scientific, and a lot weirder than normal. Classes range from chemical-based Acid attacks to Corrosion, the specific class of rare and really useful abilities that specifically destroy metals and inorganic substances.
• Emotion Bomb: The Doomboros is scared out of its mind by nearly everything, but it generates a psychic field that forces its enemies to feel its fear as well.
• Enemy Civil War: Mortasheen, at least from Wreathe's perspective, is going through a constant period of this. Meanwhile, PLTO is thinking about starting one of its own against Wreathe, when the time is right.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Dolfury's backstory.
• Equippable Ally: Blastocysts and Dynaphites can be carried by other monsters as assault rifles and grenade launchers, respectively.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: The entire Joker class, while not necessarily evil, seems to consider their horrible abilities nothing short of hilarious.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Some of the monsters are named like this, and so are some of the chapters.
• Expy: One of the creatures, known as a Litter Thug, is a Mon version of Oscar the Grouch.
  • the Longfellow is one of Slender Man.
    • There's another Creepypasta expy is Snile, who takes quite a few notes from Smile Dog.
  • Apocalocust is Mortasheen's take on Kamen Rider. It even comes with an alternate◊ version whose color palette is based on Kamen Rider BLACK.
• Fairy Sexy: Two different monsters subvert this trope in different ways. The Mothstrous looks like a beautiful winged woman with an attractive figure, not unlike how fairies are conventionally portrayed in popular culture, but the people of Mortasheen actually consider it hideous and terrifying. The Blighterfly, on the other hand, is a butterfly-person, and, well. . . look at it.
• Fantastic Racism: Used in two ways, one straight, one a variant. Wreathe uses the straight variant, hating all non-humans. Mortasheen, meanwhile, is non-racist — racism being a hilariously inappropriate concept in a city where people change bodies like others change clothes — but they do hate Engineers, whose use of computers and cybernetics makes them seem too close to Wreathe for most people to be comfortable with them. Further, Mortasheen does tend to look down on ordinary, living humans — some of the preview notes state they're lower on the social ladder than cockroaches and considered vermin more than people — but the place is so hostile to human life that most of them end up mutating, dying and becoming zombies, or intentionally giving up their humanity as a survival tactic, all of which are handy ways to advance quickly up the social ladder to the generally equal status enjoyed by all other races. Even then, it's less hatred and more pity/contempt, although in all likelihood that doesn't make things any better for the humans in question.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Medama is Japan, past, present, and future; samurai borg and dueling sit alongside giant robots and other modern conveniences. Otherwise averted; Wreathe, while it resembles many future dystopia/utopia societies, has no direct analogue in the real world, and Mortasheen is even more out there. Cannontown, if you really stretched it, could be based on American militarism, but are more actively based on survivalist types. Considering where they live, survivalism is not a bad strategy.
• Fate Worse than Death: Not only do they exist, they happen every day to lots of undeserving people — but don't worry about that, it's just how it goes! (skipping noises). On a more serious note, it's the aforementioned feeling towards these ever-present fates — the fact that most people just accept that this stuff happens — which creates the odd cheer of Mortasheen. Horror happens; but it's okay. Stuff like that just happens~
• Festering Fungus: All different kinds, many of which are monsters.
• Flip-Flop of God: Word of God has stated that humans were the ones who turned the world polluted long before Mortasheen existed. However this is contradicted by the game's Kickstarter page which says that Mortasheen's waste processes are what destroyed most of the world.
• Flying Seafood Special: Every Vampire is this to some degree, except those who choose/are able to walk. Plus some of the other stuff is this as well. Scalamax take this to its logical extreme, being sword-faced fish that fling themselves through the air telekinetically to slice and dice — and they get bonus points for being chefs on their "day jobs".
• For Science!!: It's safe to say that your average mad scientist has this as his motto. The non-average ones simply use a variant — like "For Surgical Science!"
• Freaky Is Cool: The main reason Cat-Powered Raygun Studios wanted to make this game.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: A big part of the Purifier arsenal, and for a good reason- - laser beams do Heat damage, which the vast majority of monsters are at least vulnerable to, if not actively Weak against!
• Gas Mask Mooks: Laverne's Arthropoid soldiers are colored-eyepiece versions of these — and each color corresponds to a type of weapon! Red is flame, green is poison gas, and the normal yellow is a machine gun.
• Genius Loci: The entire city of Mortasheen is, in fact, an enormous living creature. It expands of its own accord without any construction work, its buildings are grown from living metal, and the city is able to mass-produce its own dominant species, the Shades, to help fix and maintain it wherever possible similar to stem cells.
  • There's also Axabod, a lifeform whose body and organs constitute an entire subterranean cave system.
• Golem: The Rock Beast Series.
• Gone Horribly Right: A monster created to combat fectoids (monsters with aggressive bacteria making up the entirety of their bodies) has a Breath Weapon so heavily antibacterial it just might kill you horribly anyways because it wipes out the body's ecosystem.
  • Devilbirds were created to punish deviant behaviors. Problem is, everyone's a deviant in their own little way, and they wiped out their creators.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: Wreathe correctly points out that the world sucks. Wreathe also, incorrectly, believes the solution is murder. A lot of it. Mortasheen, meanwhile, correctly points out that Wreathe is crazy. Mortasheen also, incorrectly, does horrible things to people for fun. It's a messy situation.
• Grim Up North: Cannibal penguins, occasionally weather-controlling cannibal penguins with a name based on the Wendigo of Native American myth, and ridiculously bad blizzards. Yes, that's fairly grim. Subverted for Wreathe, and maybe the player too, in at least one sense: The north hides a colony of humans who don't have the zombie virus in their veins, the last such humans in all the world and the only promise of a cure.
• Grossout Show: If most of the tropes listed are any indication.
• Half-Human Hybrid: There's very little that human DNA can't be spliced with. An entire monster class is just monsters made from human DNA.
• Happiness in Slavery: Humans converted into monsters are often quite happy with their new life (humans, if they can even survive Mortasheens Polluted Wasteland environs, are considered vermin to be... dealt with). Crosses over with Working for a Body Upgrade.
• Hollywood Acid: The Damage Type Acid is not this — it covers all potential chemical attacks, not just acidic assault. Bases, potent chemicals that cause hallucinations, and other such things are part of the "Acid" Damage Type. It is called Acid because it sounded cool.
• Holy Water: Stingg, a Boo Man whose powers revolve around the production and delivery of a seemingly endless variety of poisons, includes in her repertoire a number of toxins specialized for taking down or incapacitating the setting's various monster classes. The venom intended for dealing with devilbirds, which shuts down their telecognition, is named "holy water".
• Humongous Mecha: Medama has a metric crapload of these, from relatively tiny buildings that become giant spiders, to the really big guns: each island has its own unique defender robot that is leagues stronger than almost anything else in the setting. Based on various insects, they not only function as military defense, but they also determine the political structure, battling it out every so many years to determine which island leads the nation. They are also popular merchandise icons, too.
• Hu Mons: The Lesters and their feminine counterparts the Lesleys are monsters intended to study the last few pureblooded humans left on Earth (most are infected by The Virus or got that body upgrade they were working towards years ago) through infiltration tactics. However, their extreme Uncanny Valley appearance results in people instantly distrusting them, much to the Les series' chagrin, as they were assured their disguises were flawless (at least, most other monsters are fooled).
• An Ice Person- This power, listed as the Attack Type Cold, is rare, yet not totally unknown. In-game, Cold damage functions as the equivalent of a Neutral damage type, only being resisted by one Class of monsters, though doing extra to Botanicals.
• The Infested: Plenty of the morbid monsters serve as living hives to smaller vermin:
  • Arachtus is a mobile cactus creature that serves as a nest for a swarm of highly venomous, eusocial spiders, which it controls through a complex pattern of vibrations. The creatures retrieve insects to feed themselves and their host, and can be sent swarming out en masse if the Arachtus is threatened.
  • Catoplagas is a camel-like creature whose "humps" are in fact giant cysts home to huge numbers of fleas, which pour forth in huge numbers if their home is attacked. Catoplagas is a herbivore by default, but also consumes dead fleas, and through them the blood drained from attackers, while cleaning itself.
  • Snagnant is a plantlike monster with recesses and hollows filled with a liquid absolutely perfect for Anopheles mosquitoes, who give the creature's prey malaria when they bite them. The mosquitoes themselves often attract frogs and bats, who make themselves at home within the Snagnant.
  • Zeelzebuz is a zombie colonized by a swarm of carrion-eating bees, of a type that favors zombies as nesting sites. If they inhabit a sufficiently young and undeveloped zombie, the colony will warp its growth pattern so that its arms and ribs grow into an open cage around its lungs, which become a natural honeycombed nest. It subsists entirely on the flesh-based "honey" made by its symbionts, searches out fresh carrion for them to feed on, and can send them out in its defense by rattling its tail against its ribs.
• Joke Character:
  • Most "Garbage" monsters. Most.
  • The Devilbird of Sloth. Among a race of horrifying demon stand-ins that inspire and feed on emotions in the most grotesque and horrible ways imaginable, the Devilbird of Sloth is... an egg. That doesn't do anything. It doesn't even hatch.
• Kick the Dog: The murder of that poor Chainsaw Kid. Just as planned!
• Kill It with Fire: A very good strategy. Fire, labeled under the system as Attack Type Heat, is good on a wide range of monsters, being the single best Type to use on the majority of them. Problem? Wreathe knows this and built accordingly- both ways. The very common lasers of Purifiers do Heat damage, and Purifiers are mostly immune to Heat damage. Except for the plastic-based ones.
• Kill It with Ice: Works most of the time, as the "ice" element (Cold) is the neutral element and is good on most stuff.
• Knight Templar: Downplayed somewhat. Wreathe wants to wipe Mortasheen off the surface of the map. This is not an entirely unjustified reaction, given that Mortasheen is a chaotic Wretched Hive intensely hostile to humanity, but it has its own culture that is not, as Wreathe assumes, just Always Chaotic Evil.
• LEGO Genetics: Mortasheen could very well be the ultimate incarnation of this trope. The whole setting runs on "mad scientist rules", so if anything can be combined with the DNA of anything else, chances are it will, logic be damned.
• Lethal Joke Character: Doomboros become this; normally just a scared, if nearly invulnerable, monster whose only real advantage is that it causes Stunning, if its master drops below half health, it flips out and gains powerful attacks. Further, Garbage monsters can randomly become the Garbage Beasts, superpowered monsters that are some of the best in the game.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: It can if you're an Electrician, at any rate. Also the name of one of their Discoveries.
• Lightning Gun: You can build these as an Electrician. Engineers prefer rocket launchers and railguns.
• Light Is Not Good: Wreathe in general, and the Purifiers in particular. They use laser beams, have shiny and slick designs, and hold themselves out as the defenders of humanity. They also enjoy committing genocide on everything else that isn't human, and even on the humans who disagree with obeying them.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Barbaletch, the Devil Bird of Delusion has this effect on its victims.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Pretty much all the monsters.
• Love Makes You Evil: ARE is only so driven, determined, evil and, frankly, genocidal because it fell in complete and total love with humanity from reading its writings and works, then believed that humanity was wiped out, breaking its heart. Finding out that humans still existed has put ARE into Knight Templar mode, determined to protect what it loves.
• Man-Eating Plant: Come in several flavors... each just as gruesome as the last.
• Mecha-Mooks: That would be Purifiers. Note that they do not explode when defeated- instead, they implode, and teleport their data back to Wreathe to be analyzed. They use the energy created by the implosion consuming the robot's materials to power the teleport function, teleporting an object the size of a floppy disk back.
• Meat Moss:
  • The Forest of Flesh.
  • One option for a lawn is cancer.
  • The organic subterranean caverns of Axabod, which itself is also alive.
• Mind over Matter: A fair few of the monsters are telekinetic, notably vampires (which allows them, even the aquatic ones, to fly).
• Mons: With Mad Science!
• Monster Clown: The "Joker" class.
• Monster Is a Mommy: Some monsters live in close family units, the mother creatures reluctant to let their kids leave.
• Nano Machines: How it all started. Necromizers make the most direct use of them, though, as the homunculoids they use are biological ones made from their own DNA. But nanomachines are used to make a lot of the mad science work.
• Nuckelavee: Hestermoan, one of the setting's "ultimate" monsters, is based on the Nuckelavee. It takes the original creature's power of sickness and decay up to eleven: its breath causes viral infections, its blood is corrosive, its feces spreads fungal blight, and its presence makes parasitic insects reproduce like crazy. It's also the size of a Kaiju, and may have wiped out an entire civilization. The very name "Mortasheen" itself is also derived from the Nuckelavee— this was supposedly the name of the disease the monster carried.
• Olympus Mons: Almost every category of monsters has one or more "ultimate" monsters that are generally more powerful than anything else in that category. A select few, namely the original Destructors, are outright unavailable to players. A lot of the others may fall into Awesome, but Impractical due to various drawbacks - even weaker replicas of the Destructors are "difficult to create and dangerous to control", Harlequeen (ultimate Joker) is also next to uncontrollable normally (even by Joker standards), Viviphage (ultimate vampire) and Oovule (ultimate Zombie Spawn) tend to want to fly off into space, Vermedulla (ultimate Wormbrain) demands royal treatment and may disobey orders when bored, etc.
• Order Versus Chaos: Perhaps the central conflict. A lot of the Wreathe v. Mortasheen battle revolves around this, with Wreathe's shiny robots and organization on the side of Order, and Mortasheen's mad science and anarchy falling on the side of Chaos. It's also partly deconstructed; the main reason Wreathe is doing so awesomely well- they have their shit together, while Mortasheen is relying on a goofy and inefficient Vigilante system to wage war. Chaos really doesn't handle modern warfare that well.
• Organic Technology: What robot wouldn't be complete without an extra eyeball? Mortasheen alone does this, though; Wreathe averts it for the most part. The Celestial Engine PLTO uses it, though, as it's a "recycling" center underneath all major Wreathe locations that consumes the target area and recycles it.
• Our Demons Are Different: The Devil Birds are about as close to demons as it gets in a magic-free pseudoscientific scenario. They're artificially engineered creatures designed to punish destructive behavior. Rather predictably, they did not function as their creators intended and led to the downfall of their civilization.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Ectasm monsters are, in their larval form, relatively harmless transdimensional psionic parasites. When their host dies, the shock turns them into a ghostly, semi-organic form playing out the hosts corrupt memories.
  • There are also the Ectosaurs who are ghost dinosaurs. Though since Mortasheen doesn't have explicit magic they aren't really undead, they were created with biotechnology like most monsters.
  • Lobotomasks are formed when extremely powerful psychics overload their own brains and become a splode.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: In the Mountains are mutant-descended giants who fragrantly violate the Square-Cube law, something that irritates Mortasheen- and excites them, because if these guys do have a way around it...
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Perhaps the most triumphant example.
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • YES. For one thing, most of them are fish or other aquatic creatures. For another, they don't transfer their disease with a bite, but rather, are species that have evolved to their current state due to a strange, space-faring alien virus... And vampirism can affect almost any multi-celled organism.
  • Vampire vampire bats are shy and non-aggressive, like real bats. Vampire vampire squid, however...
• Our Zombies Are Different: As different as it gets, really. The zombie virus does not kill the people it infects, but simply guarantees they rise from the dead after succumbing to something else. The zombie's core tissues are still "alive", but the outside decomposes at a varying rate, and zombies are often colonized by various creatures evolved to live on them. Some zombies are also intelligent... and, oh yeah, there is a giant zombie so large that he's an underground cave system. They are also a player character race. This is helped by the fact that many zombies retain minds, and the only thing it's guaranteed to do is make you Made of Iron.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Occasionally subverted with things that would be such anywhere but Mortasheen, such as "the city's handsomest theoretically male organism" or a Slobbular famous for making "some of the city's finest mucus-based art."
• Parasitic Horror: There are too many parasite-based monsters to list individually. Wormbrains are Puppeteer Parasite flatworms that control genetically-engineered host bodies. Botanical monsters are cultivated as parasites of natural plants. The Genetimorph and Underfiend are dangerous parasitoid creatures whose offspring are Chest Bursters, whereas the Wrigglegeist is an endoparasite that lives harmlessly inside an unwary host. Still more Mortasheen parasites feed off of weirder things like genetic material and neural activity.
• Perpetually Protean:
  • The garbage-type Decompoglob never stops mutating, sometimes to the point of spontaneously decaying into a heap of mush and regenerating back to normal. Less pleasantly, it's prone to cause mutation in others as well: its tissues are highly infectious and often cause those around it to sprout fish heads.
  • The Ectozyme's body is constantly shapeshifting and is prone to absorbing anyone or anything it makes contact with; consequently, mimicries of past victims may occasionally be seen emerging from its body, though they are quickly reabsorbed and replaced by new appendages. Its only consistent features are its udders - which leak a noxious fluid that causes instant random mutation in anyone touching it.
• Phonýmon: The series started out as this, being essentially a gross-out Pokemon parody, but quickly developed an identity of its own. Nowadays the original parody aspect is pretty much forgotten.
• Plague Doctor: Mortasheen features a family of monsters that are avian and heavily based in appearance on the plague doctor. This being Mortasheen they actually spread plague.
• Powered Armor: Pretty much what Mechmasters wear. Purifiers could be considered this... but in most cases, they are the suit.
• Poisonous Person: Fectoids are monsters whose bodily cells are disease-causing viri and bacteria. These can be symbiotically bound to Skulltivators.
  • Cherno-type monsters are mutant humans inundated with vast amounts of radiation, to the point that their tissues have begun to dissolve. Their specialty is weaponizing their radioactive nature to shoot Death Rays from their faces.
  • The Belphegoyle monster brews up an acidic gas in its belly which it can forcibly belch at enemies. It also melts its own face, which everyone involved thins makes it prettier.
  • Blightshades are skull-like, floating monsters who are carriers of a Festering Fungus. Their organ-like piping excites the related Blightmares, who constantly drip infected shit from their herniated colons and mouths, into fits of uncontrollable dancing.
  • Malodorons are a milder example, their teeth are modified to catch parts of their meals and let it rot there, giving them breath that can strip paint at twelve paces.
  • Gasjacks and Gastodons secrete mustard gas, which they blast at targets through their filter-like noses. A similar monster, called a toxicoil, exhales a nerve gas that gets people crazy high while it kills them.
  • Hexausts are able to synthesize a wide variety of gases, some even beneficial, but they lack the Required Secondary Powers to make full use of them: They poison themselves with every breath until they pass out and regenerate.
  • Streptiles are an Inversion: they breathe a powerful antibiotic which is still incapacitating because it kills all a targets mutualistic bacteria.
• Polluted Wasteland: Mortasheen City covers an area the size of Australia, the landscape is a wasteland, and one of the oceans is full of garbage instead of water.
• Psychic Powers: omnipresent in the setting. Since the Mortasheen world has no magic, all of the more outlandish monster abilities (telekinesis, cryokinesis, pyrokinesis, and of course good old fashioned Mind Rape) can all be chalked up to psychic powers. This is also the