My first appearance on Glowburn Podcast, before I was added to the show as a co-host, I detailed the Claws/Screamers from the Philip K. Dick story "Second Variety" and the movie screamers for the Mutagenesis segment of the show. Below are the slight cleaned up show notes from that appearance.
Claws
So there’s this Peter Weller movie called Screamers based on a Philip k Dick story called Second variety. The story is great, and the movie was pretty good. Both have stuck with me since High School.
In the movie the screamers are more like little burrowing creatures in design, in the story they are whirling balls of doom. Either way they are self replicating robots that were made to win a war. They hunt people based on their heart beat. These are the type 1s.
The kicker is that the self autonomous factories that churn out these killer robots started to design new and better types: claws that look like us.
Type 1 Claw
Init +5; Atk claw +4 melee (1d5); AC 14; HD 2d6; HP 8; MV 30’; Act 1d20; SP Straight for the Heart, immune to mind control; SV Fort +2, Ref +3, Will +1.
Straight for the Heart: On an attack roll of 20 instead of rolling for a critical hit the Claw has attacked the target’s heart. In addition to normal damage this attack deals 1d10 damage direct to the targets Stamina as the heart is systematically destroyed.