Sower

At a glance: Rot-Infested Flesh Host elite · the infester — converts the fresh dead and downed into feral swarm mid-fight · barely fights, harvests · counter is starvation: deny it bodies (CANON §6) · keeps seeding even when severed and feral · appears in Scourge-Survivors / Deadlane / Perdition.

Every other unit on a front is something the Scourge already made. A Sower is the Scourge making more. It is the single body on the field that performs the act every locked fact rests on — a host-dependent parasite that wears whatever it infects (CANON §1), shown not as a finished monster but as the moment of taking. Where a Cairn stacks dry, spent bone into a wall, a Sower wants the soft dead: the Warden who fell ten seconds ago, the gut-shot survivor still crawling, the body whose warmth is the only thing the parasite needs. It crouches over them, drives a seed-quill home, and what gets back up is feral swarm wearing a face the line knew by name.

This is the horror CANON keeps sharpest made into a behaviour: you cannot negotiate with need. The Sower has no malice and no plan — it is not desecrating your dead to spite you, it simply cannot tell the difference between a corpse and a resource, because for the parasite there is none (CANON §1). It is the locust math of CANON §2 closing its loop in real time: the war eats biomass, and the Sower turns the war’s leavings straight back into more mouths. A holdout learns fast that the worst place to lose someone is in a Sower’s reach, and that the cruelest thing the Scourge does is also the most efficient — it makes you fight your own dead before they’ve cooled.

Behaviour

• A harvester, not a fighter. It trails the wave, never leads it, and ignores live, upright threats almost entirely — it moves toward bodies: the freshly killed, the downed, the dying. Its whole tropism is the harvest behind the fight, not the fight itself.
• Conversion is its only real attack. Reaching a viable host, it pins the body and drives a seed-quill in; after a short, interruptible channel the corpse spasms and rises as a fresh feral Ripper — blind, dumb, instinct-only (CANON §6), thrown straight back into the line. A Sower left alone in a kill-zone refills the wave it walks behind from the wave you just dropped.
• Bodies are the resource — so deny it bodies. It is the Scourge’s reproduction shown as a unit, and therefore the starvation weakness (CANON §6) made literal: burn or break a corpse before the quill lands and the Sower has nothing to take; clear the field and it starves with the rest of the horde.
• It seeds even severed. Cut the local Chorister or Cantor and the Sower drops feral with everything else — and keeps converting anyway, blind and uncoordinated, because seeding isn’t a tactic it was told to run, it’s the one thing the parasite does with or without the Choir. The purest image in the bestiary of need with no off-switch (CANON §1).
• Barely defends itself. Its only direct threat is a close-range spray of the same seed-fluid that briefly blinds and corrodes — enough to buy a step back to the next body. It survives by being screened by the swarm it replenishes, not by fighting.
• Self-preserving, like the relays. The hive spends Rippers to keep a Sower working a field it would never otherwise burn, because a live Sower turns your kills into its reinforcements; it pulls one out of a losing fight the way it never would a charger.
• Killing a Sower does not kill the Scourge (CANON §2). The Choir persists and grows another; you have only stopped this field from being turned against you, this time.

Gameplay Read

• A tempo target and a moral one — not a damage threat but a force-multiplier on the dead. The skill check is triage under fire: do you push the swarm, or peel off to deny the Sower the bodies it’s about to draft? Ignore it and the encounter never drains, because your kills become its spawns.
• Telegraph: it reads as wrong on sight — upright but wretched, hands-first, moving against the wave’s flow toward the fallen instead of with it toward you. The seed-quill arm and the wet ovipositor-sac at its belly are the obvious “shoot here,” brightest mid-channel.
• Readable conversion: a crouched channel over a body with a rising toxic-green glow at the quill, a clear beat where the kill is interruptible — drop the Sower or destroy the corpse before the glow peaks and the host stays dead; miss the window and it stands back up as feral swarm.
• Counter-play has a cost: chasing the Sower pulls you off the line and into the harvest-ground behind the wave, exactly where your own dead are; the Pyre answer — burn the bodies so nothing can take them — denies the Sower but spends time, ammo, and the ground itself.

Visual Motifs

• A hunched, hands-first Rot-Infested Flesh Host — humanoid stock split open by parasite growth, ruined armour and a half-recognisable face still on it, built to kneel and work over a body rather than stand and fight. The most human-shaped horror on the field, which is the point.
• A long bone seed-quill grown from one forearm — a hollow ovipositor-lance, wet at the tip, that drives into a host; the opposite hand a cluster of grasping, sorting tendrils for pinning the body.
• A swollen, semi-transparent brood-sac slung at the belly, packed with toxic-green seed visibly draining down the quill arm with each conversion — the resource, and the obvious weak point, brightest when it’s seeding.
• Rupture seams weeping seed-fluid; tendrils trailing from the sac to whatever it last touched, threading the harvest behind it into the swarm ahead.
• Around a worked field: the half-turned — bodies in mid-conversion, seam-split and glowing at the quill-wound, the threat you can see being made.

Sprite Brief

• Views: front, side, back.
• Silhouette must read as upright, hunched, hands-first, and wretched — instantly distinct from the low charging Render, the wide Rot-Engine, and the tall mast-like Chorister; it should read as “wrong-human,” not “soldier.”
• The brood-sac and seed-quill are the focal points: the “where do I shoot” answer is the glowing sac at the belly and the wet quill-tip, brightest mid-conversion.
• Seeding state: a crouched-over-a-body variant, quill driven home, sac and quill flared blood-hot-to-toxic — the interruptible channel made readable.
• Back view: the brood-sac’s anchor and the trailing tendrils — the most consumed, softest mass, the reward for flanking before it can seed again.
• Must stay readable in both Deadlane’s lane-top camera and Scourge-Survivors’s close FPS framing.

Prompt Seed

Scourge infester elite, hunched hands-first rot-infested flesh host, humanoid stock split open by parasite growth with a half-recognisable ruined face, long hollow bone seed-quill ovipositor grown from one forearm wet at the tip, opposite hand a cluster of grasping tendrils, swollen semi-transparent toxic-green brood-sac slung at the belly draining down the quill arm, crouched over a fresh body driving the quill home, rupture seams weeping seed-fluid, half-turned corpses glowing at the quill-wound nearby, blood and rust and gunmetal, DOOM-like heavy shadows, no neon.

Appears In

• Scourge-Survivors — the unit that makes a breach-room (Perdition) refuse to empty: while a Sower works the floor, the lone Pyre Purger’s kills get back up as feral swarm behind them, so the correct play is to hunt the Sower or burn the dead, not to out-shoot a room that reloads itself from your own casualties.
• Deadlane — trails the wave into the kill-zone in front of a Warden line and drafts the fallen — Scourge and defenders alike — into fresh feral Rippers mid-push; a Warden who lets a Sower reach the bodies piling at the wall finds the wave refilling from the inside, so it becomes a priority kill the moment it’s flagged.
• The-Listeners — proof, in flesh, of the heresy’s whole thesis (CANON §8): a Sower is the Scourge running its one imperative — take a host, make more — with no plan, no hate, and no off-switch, severed or connected alike. The Listeners point to it and argue you do not reason with that; you redirect it. Pyre and Warden alike answer the same way they answer the parasite — with fire.