Campaign Notebook

Creatures

The players will encounter any number of strange creatures throughout the course of their adventures. This page will serve as a quick reference to what the parties have learned about them.

Aberrant Horror

Medium Aberration
CR 3
(custom creature)

These aberrant horrors are created by casting the spell Greater Aberrate on a humanoid creature (the base creature). The subject creature's arms mutate into long barbed tentacles capable of striking at a 10-foot distance. The head takes on a bulbous appearance with oversized eyes and a gaping maw.

What little consciousness is left to the transformed victim is driven by rage. Aberrants seek to destroy normal humanoids out of resentment for what they have become. They do retain enough sense of self-preservation to flee if faced with overpowering force though many, not realizing the change is temporary, seek death to end their torment.

In melee the aberrant attacks with its two tentacles. Each has a reach of 10 feet and is capable of grappling an opponent.

Improved grab: On a successful tentacle hit, the creature can start a grapple as a free action (+8 grapple modifier). A successful grapple check means that the victim is held; on each successive round the creature can constrict automatically for 2d4 points of damage.

Strangulation: If the creature wins a grapple check by 5 or more, its tentacle wraps around the victim's throat and cuts off the victim's air supply. Each round the victim must make a Constitution check or fall unconscious. The DC for the check is 10 for the first round and increases each round by 1. Once a victim fails a check they become unconscious; on the next round they drop to -1 hit points, and on the following round the victim suffocates and dies if s/he has not been released.

These horrors were first encountered by Group 1 when magically poisoned food turned patients at the House of Healing into aberrant horrors (Bad Medicine).

Half-Illithid Sahuagin

(A slight bending of the rules from Fiend Folio for the half-illithid template)

Created by a coven of mind flayers as part of an as-yet-unclear bargain, these horrific creatures are the foot soldiers in an undersea army that is engaged in slaughtering as many of the free aquatic races as possible.

First discovered by Group Two terrorizing the Tumari coast (The Enemy of My Enemy) and then also encountered at the ruins of Aria Seastar's home colony (You Can't Go Home Again), these creatures appear sahuagin for the most part but have the trademark four-tentacled squidlike head of a mind flayer. They bear the aberration type, which makes them immune to the special powers of the Arm of Telomir and to the racial hatred of darfellans and gains them several of the classic mind flayer abilities: a mind blast attack that can stun those who fail the Will save; four tentacle attacks as a natural weapon; improved grab, allowing the creature to easily attach additional tentacles after a successful attack; and the horrifying ability to extrace a living creature's brain and eat it.

They retain many of the base abilities of sahuagin, such as a good swim speed, natural armor, and rake attack, but not the blood frenzy ability. Half-illithid sahuagin understand the sahuagin tongue but lack physical mouths so they cannot speak -- they communicate telepathically.

Sahaugin

(Monster Manual, p 217)

Sahaugin are monstrous aquatic humanoids that inhabit coastal waters. They are strictly salt water creatures and are weakened by exposure to fresh water. They are generally lawful evil and organize into tribes.

Sahaugin are deadly enemies of both the darfellans and the aquatic elves. The darfellan race has been hunted nearly to extinction by sahaugin raiders, and as a result darfellans harbor a furious racial hatred that gives them an attack and damage bonus when fighting against sahaugin.

About one in 200 sahaugin is born a mutant with four arms instead of two. These mutants tend to rise to positions of leadership.

When sahaugin exist in close proximity with aquatic elves, about one in 100 sahaugin is born a mutant that is physically indistinguishable from an aquatic elf. These mutants are called meranti and often serve as spies and saboteurs in the aquatic elf communities.

Sea Kith

Sea kith are an amphibious variant of the goblin race. They are a custom race invented for Marhaven, and are therefore not found in any of the standard texts.

Sea kith look very much like goblins but are lighter in color and have webbed hands and feet. They have the same general personalities and statistics as a standard goblin (Monster Manual page 133) except as follows:

• Type: Small Humanoid (Goblinoid, Aquatic)
• Speed: land 20 feet; swim 30 feet;
• Attack: Short spear +3 melee (1d4) or dagger +3 melee (1d3) or bite +1 melee (1d3)
• Full attack: As attack
• Special Qualities: Amphibious (able to breathe air and water; +8 racial bonus to Swim checks; can always take 10 on a Swim check, even if under stress or hurried; can use the Run action while swimming)
• Languages: Goblin, Aquan, Common
• Alignment: Almost always chaotic evil or neutral evil
• Challenge Rating: 1/2

Sea kith are vagabonds with little in the way of organized societies. Larger groups often ally themselves with seawolves the way land-based goblins do with wargs. They are often found in or near shipping lanes, where they use their stealth abilities to sneak aboard slow-moving or anchored ships and steal whatever they can find that is portable and valuable.

Tsochar

(Lords of Madness, p 121)

Also known as the Wearers of the Flesh, the tsochari are a race of highly intelligent aberrations whose signature feature is their ability to inhabit the body of nearly any other creature with a constitution. Tsochari can either kill the host and inhabit the body or leave the host alive as it chooses. Either way, the tsochar feeds off the blood and tissues of the host, causing Constitution damage on a daily basis.

Tsochari communicate telepathically and are often known to control a living host through telepathic threat -- the host complies with the tsochar's wishes or experiences indescribable agony, which the tsochar can inflict at will without doing any damage to itself.

A person carrying a tsochar is not easy to spot, but may be identifiable by the telltale signs of steady constitution damage. Such a person needs a steady supply of ability-restoring magic in order to remain functional for very long.

(Picture from Lords of Madness, (c) Copyright 2005 by Wizards of the Coast)

Were Eel

(Custom; taken from an old Dungeon magazine adventure)

Among the more vicious and bloodthirsty of the shape-changers, were-eels are amphibious creatures with an insatiable hunger for flesh.

Were eels may be encountered in one of three forms:

1. Human form -- in this form the were eel has the characteristics and abilities of its original human self (or, in the case of a natural were eel, of its class levels).
2. Hybrid form -- in this form the were eel has a long, black, oily body with thin, clawed arms and legs. It is able to wield weapons as a humanoid but cannot wear armor. It has a natural bite attack (+8, damage d8+2) that can transmit lycanthrope to the victim, who becomes a were-eel on the next full moon unless cured.
3. Dire eel form -- in this form the were eel has all of the characteristics of a dire eel (Stormwrack) and its bite transmits lycanthrope.

In all of its forms the were eel has scent, darkvision, and damage reduction 10/silver. Its hybrid form has a land speed of 30 and a swim speed of 40; the dire eel form has a swim speed only.