The Grinder is a Level 4 Treasure of the Redcaps.
Overview[]
Grinders looks like, unsurprisingly, old hand-cranked sausage grinders of the sort rarely seen any more. They're all of two feet tall and generally made of some sort of vaguely bronze-colored metal. All of them are spotted, pitted, and stained, as though they have seen hard use in butcher shops and slaughter houses. Most make some annoying squeak when the handle is turned and all have the unpleasant stench of old meat, dried blood, and less identifiable things.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on whom you ask) there's more to a Grinder than just the smell. It is, after all, a sort of sausage grinder. The difference is that while a normal grinder generally has its intake restricted to various meat scraps, a redcap Grinder will take almost anything at all, no matter how big or how small. Whatever the object is made of, the Grinder will swallow it down and spit out a vaguely edible, reddish-gray paste.
Did I say just about anything? I did. Metal? No problem. Dead bodies? Easy as pie. An elephant? It might take a while, but down it goes. Whatever goes in, the same filling-but-not-very tasty paste comes out. Of course, the size of the object tossed in and the raw materials it's made of impact how long it takes to grind down but, in the end, if the redcap with the crank is willing to work at it, the treasure can dispose of pretty much anything imaginable.
There are only two things the Grinder won't take. First, any sort of Treasure, much to the annoyance of certain redcaps who'd love to chew up every magical doodad they can get their hands on. The Grinder recognizes this sort of thing, even if disguised (One enterprising chap made his victim swallow a treasure then tried to grind up the corpse, but to no avail) or hidden.
Second: a redcap's tooth. The moment one hits the Grinder's blades, the entire construction falls to pieces with a thunderous boom. This may explain why there are so few of the things as courts are full of plucky young heroes who made great sacrifices to drop a redcap's tooth into a Grinder. Of course, the fact that the tooth wrecks the whole thing doesn't do the rest of the redcap any good if they go in feet first.
Thankfully there are only a handful of this sort of device in existence. Redcaps who get their hands on a Grinder tend to put them to work with a will and the consequences of such are messy and unpleasant.
System[]
The exact length of time it takes to grind a given item is up to Storyteller discretion. There's no way to put together an exhaustive list of everything from automobiles to zebras. There are some guidelines, though. Anything the consistency of animal or plant tissue, alive or dead, takes about a minute for every five pounds. The weight conversion from materials to sausage filler is about 3 to 1. Why this is, no one knows, but the end result is that a Grinder takes half an hour to turn a 150 pound corpse into 50 pounds of sausage filler.
Keep in mind that feeding something into a Grinder is not the same thing as keeping it fed in. Anything alive is going to do its best to escape and that means a lot of thrashing. A Grinder does one level of Aggravated damage every turn a living being is fed into it without escaping.
One other factor can increase the time it takes: hardness. The harder an object, the longer is takes to break down.
| Material | Time |
|---|---|
| Wood | 1.5 x normal |
| Soft Metal | 1.5 x normal |
| Bone | 2 x normal |
| Stone | 3 x normal |
| Hard Metal | 5 x normal |
References[]
- CTD. Kithbook: Redcaps, pp. 84-85.