Mumblers

Mumblers are enemies that can be encountered in Fear & Hunger. There are a total of 5 mumblers in the game, encountered exclusively in the Thicket.

Location & Behaviour
Mumblers can be found patrolling on both levels of the Thicket, although there are none in the Cockroach king's lair or the path leading to it.

A mumbler's attacks will attack the Mind and completely ignore the body. Each of their arms will use the Shivering touch move (9-10 Mind damage). The head will use Soul binding 33% of the time, which will reduce the maximum Mind stat of its target to 50.

The mumbler will die if the head is removed, but this is ill-advised; severing the head will cause it to explode, dealing 8-12 damage to and poisoning a single enemy.

A soul stone can be used on a mumbler to get a Lesser soul. They have no belongings and cannot be skinned, and using the Devour skill on their corpse will poison the player in addition to feeding them.

Strategy
The torso of a mumbler has 700HP, meaning that they can be defeated at the end of the first turn if the player can deal 175HP of damage. This can be problematic, given the potential for the mumbler to use a Soul bind attack.

There are generally three ways to approach this encounter: It is a bad idea to use auto-attacking party members when fighting a mumbler, because they may attack the head and cause it to explode.
 * Wait until your party is powerful enough to reliably deal 700 damage to the torso in a single turn to kill the mumbler before it can attack. The Thicket area can be approached after the player has already travelled through the rest of the dungeon and acquired powerful allies and equipment.
 * Accept the possibility of being affected by Soul bind and attack the chest, with allies attacking the chest if it will help you reach 175 damage faster, or the arms to avoid Mind damage otherwise. Mind is one of the easiest stats to restore, with intoxicants being one of the few things in abundance in the dungeon. Soul bind can seriously hurt one's ability to use magic, but a focus on melee combat can make this less of an issue.
 * Don't. Fighting this enemy is an unnecessary risk and does almost nothing for the player, and the mumbler walks slowly enough to be avoided easily.

Trivia

 * The New Gods in The Grand Hall comment that the creatures are "fully erect despite being left untouched for decades"