Miscellaneous

Shadow drakes are mischievous and greedy. They often use their whiplike tails as third limbs, grasping small objects or even using their tails to work locks or swipe small objects they desire. Because they are so small and fast, they are master thieves and pickpockets. Unlike most drakes and dragonkin, shadow drakes like to haunt the fringes of civilization, often making lairs in abandoned buildings, forgotten attics, or unused bell towers, and stashing their tiny treasure hoards there. A shadow drake can be chosen as a familiar by a 7th-level evil spellcaster who has the Improved Familiar feat. Young shadow drakes are almost pure black and have lustrous hides. As they age, their scales lose this luster and turn dull gray. Much like their larger dragon cousins, shadow drakes are long-lived, and can reach 150 to 200 years in age.

Taxidermic creatures are the work of obsessed individuals seeking to use their alchemical or occult talents to preserve and reanimate lifeless beings. The abilities of taxidermic creatures often pale in comparison to those of their living counterparts, as they are bereft of intelligence or an animate life force to guide them. Instead, taxidermic creatures possess a rudimentary form of instinct, though they are still able to follow basic instructions from their creators.  Less refined than the magic used to animate undead, golems, and other constructs, the creation of a taxidermic creature is at best an inaccurate science. There is no one method of crafting a taxidermic creature, so each result is different. Every creature crafted in such a manner is prone to inherent defects based on the materials used or shortcuts taken during the process, and may or may not be able to obey its creators commands in a satisfactory manner. Because of taxidermic creatures’ limited mental faculties, their creators must be extremely careful and literal when commanding them.  Left unattended, taxidermic creatures stand in place, having no need to drink, eat, or sleep. Unless given specific commands, the actions of these creatures are unpredictable. Each taxidermic creature behaves differently, depending on the quirks of its individual construction. Some taxidermic creatures move and act like prowling animals, while others move with the rigidity and unerring purpose of animated objects. Some twisted taxidermists have gone so far as to create taxidermic humanoids, aberrations, and even fey.

Mimics are thought to be the result of an alchemist’s attempt to grant life to an inanimate object through the application of an eldritch reagent, the recipe for which is long lost. Over time, these strange but clever creatures have learned the ability to transform themselves into simulacra of man-made objects, particularly in locations that have infrequent traff ic by small numbers of creatures, thus increasing their odds of successfully attacking their victims. Though mimics are not inherently evil, some sages believe that mimics attack humans and other intelligent creatures for sport rather than merely for sustenance. The desire to completely fool others is thought to be a part of their being, and their surprise attacks against others are a culmination of those desires. A typical mimic has a volume of 150 cubic feet (5 feet by 5 feet by 6 feet) and weighs about 900 pounds. Legends and tales speak of mimics of much greater sizes, with the ability to assume the form of houses, ships, or entire dungeon complexes that they festoon with treasure (both real and false) to lure unsuspecting food within.

Half-dragons are only rarely the result of dragons mating with other creatures—most are the result of strange magical experiments. In most cases, a successful creation breeds true with others of its kind, as with the dreaded dracolisk.

While individually not much of a threat, these low-level fighters turn into a serious menace to travelers on remote roads when they work together as a troop.

A broken soul is torment and pain made manifest. Tortured to the extremes of both physical and mental endurance, and then taken beyond those barriers, a broken soul gains extraordinary reserves of fortitude and resilience as well as the ability to inflict a measure of its own terrible suffering on others. Each broken soul has a unique appearance, the torture it has endured plainly visible on its body. Its skin is a mass of scar tissue, marred with bruises that do not fade and scored with countless scars. In some cases, a broken soul’s flesh has been flayed away, revealing the musculature and bone underneath. Weeping sores and open cuts cover a broken soul’s body, wounds that never fully heal. Its limbs are often twisted, the result of broken bones that were never set properly, and it might be missing fingers, toes, ears, or other appendages. A broken soul’s existence is one of unending suffering, and the constant pain often drives the creature irrevocably mad. In their insanity, these unfortunates hate all other creatures and seek to inflict their wounds and their agony on all they encounter. The creation of a broken soul can happen in a number of ways. Some broken souls arise spontaneously, the result of horrific treatment at the hands of cruel abusers. With no way to escape their torment, these creatures embrace the pain and anguish and transcend them, making them a part of their very being. In so doing, they become something both more and less than they were. Other broken souls are purposefully created out of helpless prisoners by sadistic torturers through a harrowing gauntlet of mental and physical torments. By breaking a creature’s mind and body, these torturers hope to create guardians or servants whose loyalty is ensured by the constant pain they must endure. Even more harrowing, some broken souls take it upon themselves to create more of their kind, fashioning gruesome works of living, mutilated art in an effort to share their suffering. These “artists” often turn on their own torturers first, perfecting their skills on those who created them before turning their attention to any other unfortunate creatures they can find.

This troop of drow nobles is composed of clerics devoted to a demon lord. They have trained well to fight together and serve their fiendish master.

Scitalises are horned dragons with long, ophidian bodies; beautiful, many-colored frills; and thin, tapered horns. Their heavy scales have an elliptical shape, and grow ragged and thicker as the scitalises age. A scitalis glows from within, its scales and frill lighting up like a stained-glass window and projecting mesmerizing patterns that the dragon uses while hunting.  Scitalises covet territory and food more than the gold and gems that true dragons prize. They live in caves, forest grottoes, and rocky crags, and mark their territories with a combination of musk and their sour, bile-scented sedative. Scitalises often range up to 5 miles from their nests every few days to hunt large herd animals and livestock. Lacking forelegs with which to tear apart a meal, scitalises allow their kills to ripen for a day or so in their lairs before eating them. They keep some treasure and can be bribed, burying what they do attain in the walls and floors of their nests. Scitalises lay clutches of one to three eggs, and males and females share duties guarding the nest. The pair remains together until the juveniles reach maturity after 2 years. These eggs sell for 5,000gp in large cities, and juveniles can command prices of 8,000gp. Scitalises coexist with wyverns, but detest basilisks and griffons, which regularly devour the scitalises’ eggs when they run across them.  An average scitalis is between 14 and 18 feet long and weighs approximately 2,500 pounds.

When a powerful spellcaster with a strong personality, a lust for life, and a remorselessly evil soul dies and is buried in a graveyard infused with eldritch magic, a strange phenomenon sometimes occurs. The flesh of the decaying body fats and instructs the very worms that gnaw, and these graveworms quicken not only on corruption but upon the spellcaster’s memories and magical power. The spellcaster’s very soul is consumed in this vile process, only to be split apart to inhabit each of the individual chewing worms in so many fragments. The result is a hideous hive mind of slithering life known as a worm that walks—a mass of worms that clings to the vague shape of the body that granted it this new existence, and can wield the powers and magic the spellcaster had in life. A worm that walks retains memories of its life as a spellcaster before its death, but is not undead—it is a hideous new form of undulant life.

Taninivers are a degenerate race of diseased dragons. A taniniver’s body is alive but constantly rotting. Wracked by never-ending pain, with the stench of its own decaying flesh so strong it nearly overwhelms the vile creature’s enhanced senses, the foul taniniver spends most of its time in magical research to reverse the progression of its diseases or, failing that, to stave off further deterioration. Taninivers often ally with cults of undeath or dragonkind.

Vishaps think of themselves as guardians of the ley lines that connect the life forces of the Material Plane to one another. Like all dragons, vishaps claim expansive territories, but these territories often make little geographical sense to others—a single vishap might claim unconnected areas on different hemispheres of a planet, for example, and yet multiple vishaps sometimes coexist within mere miles of each other with no apparent animosity. To those attuned to the occult mysteries of ley lines, however, the vishaps’ territorial borders are clear. Each vishap claims one or more networks of ley lines, which may stretch for thousands of miles (or even across galaxies), and sometimes overlap with each other without ever touching. A vishap’s first priority is the integrity of its ley line network, so any corruption of a ley line draws the attention of the vishap that cares for it.  Vishaps claim only small physical territories in places where their ley lines coincide with interesting geography. In these places, vishaps make psychic contact with intelligent creatures nearby, encouraging them to create standing stones called vishapakars. A vishap can’t place a vishapakar on its own, but the presence of a vishapakar on a ley line allows the vishap a great deal of control over that ley line. Evil or less diplomatic vishaps often travel to these desirable locations to intimidate the local people into appeasing the dragons with standing stones. Vishapakars can stand for thousands of years, even as the ley lines that they once marked drift and change course, so a vishap must return to each vishapakar periodically, entreating (or forcing) locals to create new vishapakars on the ley lines’ new locations. At particularly ancient locations, it is possible to map the gradual drift of ley lines by the age of the nearby vishapakars.  Vishaps become deeply attached to their ley line networks over their millennia-long life spans, and can live peacefully alongside other vishaps with nearby networks. When ley lines drift and converge, however, it often results in a mortal duel. Sometimes this happens as a corporeal battle in the skies of a planet, or between the dragons while in their ethereal forms. Most commonly, vishaps engaged in mortal combat for control of converging ley lines meet each other in elaborate psychic duels. These duels can last for years, and often spill over into the Material Plane, with each vishap subtly manipulating the creatures and locations along the converging ley lines in a proxy war to defeat its opponent.  Vishaps keep their treasure hoards, like their territories, in strange places, hidden in eddies of psychic energy along their favorite ley lines. A vishap’s hoard might be physically scattered across dozens of planes, though to the vishap each cache is only minutes away from the others. A vishap favors items of psychic signif icance, so one is as likely to find a mundane wooden spoon that belonged to a powerful occultist or the skull of a famous psychic in a vishap’s hoard as a magical sword or mountains of gold.  Vishaps procreate only once during their lives, as tending to their ley lines takes priority over almost any biological imperative. When a vishap is finally ready to mate, it commits its form wholly to the ley line network, drifting listlessly along the psychic currents. Inevitably, it meets with some other drifting vishap, and the two consciousnesses merge, exploding in a spray of psychic force. The resulting motes of ethereal energy scatter across the universe, slowly drifting back toward each other and forming eggs, which sometimes drift along ley lines for millennia before hatching a young, ethereal vishap that awakens to full consciousness upon hatching.  A fully grown vishap is 70 feet from head to tail and weighs 60,000 pounds.

Over the eons, gods and would-be divinities have unleashed countless monstrosities on the multiverse in vain attempts to create worshipers or punish oath breakers, or just out of spite. Many such beasts outlive their usefulness and run amok, defying their creators’ commands to stand down.  Elder wyrms were once divine avengers, granted life in order to seek and destroy rogue agents of the gods and other such abominations. After annihilating several condemned species, the dragons broke free from the gods’ control. Despite this, elder wyrms have a flexible but insistent sense of justice instilled in them by their divine mandate, and acting as the judge, jury, and executioner of mighty foes scratches an existential itch. The few elder wyrms that live on a given planet spend much of their time dozing in secluded places, waking occasionally to hunt or seek out injustices to punish based on their individual interests and moods. This cycle of inactivity leaves most elder wyrms woefully ill-informed of current events, though once they have cause to pay attention, their keen intellects and powerful divinations allow them to gather and process several centuries of news in short order.  Because they wake so rarely, elder wyrms often become centerpieces of local legends and cautionary tales. Especially convincing or foolhardy heroes might even seek out an elder wyrm in order to direct its vengeful wrath against a specific target, though the wyrm is just as likely to determine that the heroes are more worthy of destruction than their targets. Having two heads does, after all, make elder wyrms better equipped to see both sides of an issue and render judgment. Each head can think independently and seamlessly share control of the body, allowing the dragon to perform dizzying acts of synchronicity. Often the two heads’ personalities diverge, leading to good-natured bickering and debate between the two, much to the dread of anxious onlookers.  An elder wyrm is 100 feet long and weighs 25,000 pounds.

A guardian dragon is an immense, serpentine dragon created by a deity to hide and guard a fabulous, legendary treasure. Spiriting its charge away to the farthest ends of the earth and beyond, the dragon maintains its eternal vigil surrounded by a garden, a labyrinth, a palace, or something uncanny, either building such a place itself or occupying a structure crafted for it by the deity. Over time, the guardian dragon enhances the defenses around its lair. As most guardian dragons have been protecting the same item for decades or centuries, a typical guardian dragon’s lair is full of natural hazards and stocked with a variety of lesser Mythic and Non-Mythic opponents that add to the lair’s defenses. A mortal hero might brave the dangers of such a lair, seeking the dragon’s prize, but the guardian’s thirst for vengeance when recovering its charge is unending. The dragon considers any theft of its possessions an affront to its honor, and takes such an offense personally. With magic that allows it to find any creature at any distance, the dragon is relentless in pursuit of its lost items. Many enterprising thieves have escaped with a treasure, only to be located days or weeks later, killed, and dragged back to the dragon’s lair with the stolen items. Because of its many victories over thieves and dragonslayers, a guardian dragon is usually in possession of a large collection of magic items, and it doesn’t hesitate to make use of rings, scrolls, wands, and other items to protect itself or fortify its lair—or for instructing its lesser guardians on how to use these items. A guardian dragon might be willing to trade items it can’t use for something more suitable, as long as the other party makes no attempt to take anything without permission (especially its charge, but it considers any theft reprehensible). A guardian dragon is 50 feet long when fully uncoiled and weighs 7 tons.

The legendary tarrasque is among the world’s most destructive monsters. Thankfully, it spends most of its time in a deep torpor in an unknown cavern in a remote corner of the world—yet when it wakens, kingdoms die. Although far from intelligent, the tarrasque is smart enough to understand a few words in Aklo (though it cannot speak). Likewise, it isn’t mindless in its rampages, but instead focuses on targets that threaten it, and is difficult to distract with trickery.