Swamp

Never have legend and misinformation met upon a more inauspicious brow than that of the lowly carbuncle. Even the creature’s name summons ideas that range from the grandiose to the grotesque. Carbuncles appear to be little more than ungainly reptiles. What sets them apart, however, is their strange magical abilities and the fist-sized gemstone horn jutting from above their bulging eyes. Although tales differ regarding the type and value of the stone, many claim it is a ruby or garnet. In truth, however, a carbuncle’s gem is merely a highly reflective growth, not unlike a fingernail. Carbuncles exhibit a peculiar attraction to magic-users, especially sorcerers with the fey bloodline and any who pack supplies of fresh fruit. Many enchanters laud the extraordinary mind-control powers of these intense creatures and extol the aid they can offer mages of their field—though others consider such tales something of an academic in-joke. A neutral spellcaster with the Improved Familiar feat can gain a carbuncle as a familiar at 5th level.

Tenacious predators and bullies, goblin snakes are shrill, impulsive, and endlessly hungry. When their instinctual cunning takes hold, however, these maniacal creatures exhibit all the stealth and deadly cunning of serpents coupled with the capricious destructiveness of goblins. Cruel and selfish, goblin snakes care for little more than their next meals and indulging their unfounded arrogance. Like goblins, they can easily eat their body weight in food daily, but goblin snakes are also lazy, and are more likely to settle for easy meals rather than ones they must work to find. As a result, goblins snakes eat almost anything within reach and readily available, from carrion to rubbish (the source of their horrendous and nauseating breath). Goblin snakes delight in fresh meat, but strongly prefer having others bring it to them over hunting and killing it themselves. Enjoying the company of snakes, goblin snakes are often accompanied by several smaller venomous serpents, which the goblin snakes use to protect their lairs and supplement their food supply. Goblin snakes are exceedingly jealous of nagas, however, envying their serpentine majesty and mastery of magic. Enterprising and cunning goblin snakes have been known to impersonate nagas, demanding tribute and food from gullible creatures in awe of the “naga’s” supposed magical abilities. Some scholars have noted the superficial similarities between goblin snakes and nagas, and have gone as far as to theorize that the goblin snake might be a particularly weak breed of naga—a theory that most nagas do not appreciate at all. Although goblin snakes are not as smart as goblins, their terrifying shape allows them to take positions of inf lated prominence within goblin society. Fearful goblins typically defer to the beasts, which well suits the goblin snakes’ innate arrogance and sense of superiority. Goblin snakes affiliated with goblin tribes usually treat their goblin associates as servants at best and slaves at worst. Goblin snakes share goblins’ fear of horses (who could easily step on and crush an unwary goblin snake) and love of fire (though their lack of arms gives them little opportunity to indulge in arson), but they are not as superstitious as goblins. Goblin snakes eagerly embrace magic if given the opportunity, and it is not uncommon for a goblin snake with adept, cleric, oracle, or sorcerer class levels to serve as a goblin tribe’s shaman or high priest.

Keepers of cavernous mushroom forests and rotting compost pits deep within the swamp, fungus leshys preside over subterranean growth and the rot that fertilizes new life. Among the most alien and monstrous-looking of all leshys, these tiny rot farmers’ frightening appearance has more to do with the asymmetrical eeriness intrinsic to molds and fungi than an outward expression of evil. Like all their kin, fungus leshys vary widely in form, often adopting the colors and shapes of the mushrooms and other large fungi common to the areas they tend. Fungus leshys are spawned from realms of underground wonder or the rotting places of the natural world. They perform an important service in the lands they keep, encouraging the growth of fungi, transporting rotting material to fertilize other plants, and making the most use of growth that has died off. Fungus leshys are most active at night and spend the day in the forms of plump fungi amid their ripest compost heaps or fungal glens. Fungus leshys are 2 feet tall and weigh 25 pounds, their spongy interiors full of hollows and fluffy spores.

Water leapers are ornery hunters that thrive in lakes, swamps, and other marshy bodies of water. They eagerly ambush much larger targets. Against challenging prey, they make their namesake leap from the water, use their jagged sting to open a wound, and then wait for their victim to bleed out. Although fishermen tell tales of marauding water leapers, in reality, the creatures prefer attacking animals and other less canny prey, since intelligent creatures are both more likely to be able to halt the bleeding from the water leaper’s sting and hold a grudge afterward.  The average water leaper is a little over 3 feet long, not counting its wings or the length of its tail, and weighs between 8 and 16 pounds.

WATER MAULER  
Much like many other amphibious animals, water leapers grow through several stages before reaching the their adult form. What most don’t realize is that water leapers’ small winged stage isn’t the species’s final form. Most water leapers don’t live long enough to undergo their final metamorphosis, which occurs at an inconsistent age, but those that do transform into water maulers (considered by most scholars to be a rare separate-but-related species). A water mauler is a Large water leaper advanced by adding HD. It gains two claw attacks, rend (2 claws), and pounce (replacing water leap).  Water maulers, unlike their brethren, are more likely to interact with creatures of other species—particularly natives of the swamp such as boggards— to create mutually beneficial alliances. They can even serve as reluctant mounts, capable of carrying their riders both into the air and beneath the waves. Such water maulers mainly enter into these collaborations to procure themselves steady sources of food, but they occasionally desire something more unusual—typically colorful items they have seen in passing.

Ugothols (as faceless stalkers call themselves) are one of the many tools created and then discarded by the aboleths in their long war against the surface dwellers. Scorned by their former masters when the scheme for which they were designed unraveled, the faceless stalkers fled into swamps, marshes, or any other dark, wet places they could find—the closest they could come to the aquatic cities they once considered home. Originally designed to serve as spies that could walk uncontested among the air-breathing races, faceless stalkers adopt new forms by reshaping their skin and contorting their rubbery bodies. This painful process takes approximately 10 uninterrupted minutes—an ugothol typically seeks a private place to do it, avoiding even others of its own kind. The sensation of returning to its true form is quite exhilarating and results in a momentary burst of euphoria. Faceless stalkers cannot digest solid food even when in the form of a creature with a mouth. Instead, they subsist on liquids, including blood. In their natural forms, they have three hollow tongues which they use to penetrate and lap blood from their victims. Since they have no particular skill at grappling foes, most ugothols wait until a victim is helpless or asleep before attempting to drink its blood—although the best is when a victim is helpless but conscious during the process, so that the faceless stalker can “play with its food” by having grisly and cruel conversations with it.

Vicious creatures driven by misery and suffering, lovelorns arise from the souls of those who die when love takes a tragic turn—star-crossed lovers who committed suicide and victims of abusive relationships and violent family confrontations. In death, the stubborn spirit fixates solely on its heart, animating the dead organ and bursting free from its body, dedicated to unmaking everything it cared for in life.  Although these distressing undead monsters enjoy the sensation of using their fangs on living tissue, lovelorns thrive on feelings of misery rather than flesh, and their mere presence corrupts an area into a maze of despair and deadly traps. They may stalk and murder ex-lovers, but they just as often lurk in a home or community to seed misfortune and contempt, and feast upon the resulting anger and sadness. Their small size and ability to meddle with the memories and emotions of the living allow them to remain hidden for years, or even haunt a single family for generations. A lovelorn’s central body is almost twice the size of a healthy human heart, with 7 to 10 bone legs that stretch up to 2 feet long and resemble those of a spider.

Strangled into unlife in the filth and muck of the deep mire, swamp mummies haunt the festering depths of isolated, desolate fenlands.  Some swamp mummies are cursed by dark powers to return to unlife, while others are the victims of sacrifices or criminal executions in which the bodies were thrown into a peat bog. The nature of the death and the emotional power of the victim are both contributing factors as to whether or not the victim crawls from its swampy grave as a swamp mummy.  Swamp mummies—also often called bog or peat mummies—rarely, if ever, leave their marshy realms. Those that do most often venture forth from the swamp to take revenge on their slayers. While most swamp mummies are motivated by vengeance, many fulfill these dark yearnings in a more general sense. Filled with wrath and hatred for the living, they mercilessly attack any living creatures that dare to venture into their dismal domains. Their agonized moans echo over their putrid homes, driving away the natural animals dwelling therein and often alerting travelers to the relentless danger.  Swamp mummies delight in infecting living foes with bog rot, believing that adding their victims’ essence to their gloomy domains expands their power. After battle, they carry away the bodies of their fallen victims to sink them in deep, isolated pools. Thus, even enemies that escape the bog rot become one with the swamp mummy’s home.  Most swamp mummies are Medium humanoids, typically arising from the submerged corpses of human, lizardfolk, or elven victims—though instances of swamp mummies arising from the corpses of other races is not unknown.

Blightspawn must gestate in the body of a true believer until they’re released at the host’s death or during a ritual, and so are most often found in places where cults that worship parasitic demons or devils are strong. To the faithful, being host to an immature blightspawn is a great honor, for they believe that when the monster bursts from the host’s body, the host’s consciousness lives on in some way in the blightspawn’s mind, almost as if the host had reincarnated into the monster. The fact that cultists who die giving hideous birth to a blightspawn can’t be resurrected lends a bit of weight to this notion, even if the blightspawn themselves have nothing to say on the topic.  A host carrying an immature blightspawn functions normally in all ways until the creature emerges—except that the host can pass on new blightspawn to his or her children. A blightspawn’s gestation can last for decades, and a child separated from infected parents might live her entire life without knowing what awaits her upon death. When a blightspawn emerges from its host, it is fully grown, although its gore-soaked wings can’t be used for flight for 1d4 rounds after emerging.

Every trapper and bog farmer living near marshes or swamps has his own name for these faintly glowing balls of light—jack o’ the lanterns, corpse candles, walking fires, pine lights, spooklights, rushlights—but all recognize them as dangerous predators and false guides in the darkness. Evil creatures that feed on the strong psychic emanations of terrified creatures, will-o’-wisps delight in tempting gullible travelers into dangerous situations. In the wild lands where they’re most common, will-o’-wisps favor simple tactics like positioning themselves over cliffs or quicksand where they can easily be mistaken for lanterns (especially if they can set their traps near actual signal lanterns), allowing them to lure unwary travelers into perilous situations. On rare occasions, will-o’- wisps seeking easier pickings will move into a city and take up residence near gallows or follow along invisibly behind an army in order to harvest the fear of the dying men; why the vast majority choose to remain in the swamps where victims are scarce remains a mystery. Will-o’- wisps only use their electric shock ability under extreme duress, preferring to let other creatures or hazards claim their victims while they float nearby and feast. Will-o’-wisps can glow any color they choose, but are most frequently yellow, white, green, or blue. They can even vary their luminosity to create patterns—many will-o’- wisps are fond of creating vague skull-like shapes in their glow to further terrify their victims. Their actual bodies are barely visible globes of translucent spongy material 1 foot across and weighing 3 pounds, capable of emitting light from every surface. A will-o’-wisp’s light is approximately as bright as a torch, and though they do not seem to use sound to communicate with each other, they hear perfectly and can vibrate their bodies rapidly to simulate speech. While vilified by most other sentient creatures, will-o’-wisps are actually quite intelligent, if utterly alien in their reasoning. Sometimes organized into groups called “strings,” their society and goals remain complete unknowns to outsiders, as do their origins, though they have sometimes been known to strike bargains with those who can offer them vast quantities of appropriately frightened victims. As will-o’-wisps do not age, and are effectively immortal unless killed by violence, particularly ancient will-o’-wisps can serve as fantastic repositories of knowledge from the ancient past, although convincing one of these cruel creatures to cooperate with an interrogation can be a trick in and of itself.

While they are usually reclusive and aren’t actively malevolent, moldwretches often come into conflict with adventurers who clear away patches of mold during dungeon exploration. They get along well with vegepygmies, but loathe and fear fungus queens. A moldwretch is only 3 feet tall but is very dense and weighs 120 pounds.

When an exceptionally vile hag or witch dies with some malicious plot left incomplete, or proves too horridly tenacious to succumb to the call of death, the foul energies of these wicked old crones sometimes spawn incorporeal undead known as witchfires. These ghostly creatures appear much as they did in life, although the grotesque undead energy that births them makes them appear young and attractive and wreathes their insubstantial bodies in a powerful aura of sickly green flame, a ghostly fire referred to as “witchflame” in local legends. Strings of will-o’-wisps are often found in the immediate vicinity of witchfires and are typically led by the undead, leading scholars to speculate that the creatures feed off of a witchfire’s flames and fury.

WITCHFIRE COVENS
Witchfires occasionally join or subjugate existing hag covens. A hag coven that includes a witchfire gains the following additional coven spell-like abilities:
3/day—blight, create undead, fire storm (DC 21), nightmare (DC 18), waves of exhaustion (DC 20). All abilities function at CL 9th, and save DCs are based on a Charisma score of 16. The use of these abilities functions identically to other coven abilities.
Such covens must have at least one living hag, as covens of three witchfires gain no coven-related abilities.

Goliath spiders are giant hunting spiders that most often prey on large creatures such as giant scorpions, snakes, and younger dragons, but sometimes catch and paralyze smaller prey to eat later. Camouflaged by their hairs and coloration, they prowl atop the forest canopy, dropping upon unsuspecting creatures. Females often cannibalize their mates.

Lloronas are vengeful spirits that roam riversides, shorelines, and swamps in search of victims. They form as the result of shame and sorrow paired with a tragic drowning of a child, whether it be accidental or murderously intentional, and they want others to share in their pain and misery. Most encounters with a llorona begin as the victim hears mournful sobbing cries in the distance. Some victims she simply fills with sorrow, hoping that the experience will scar their minds or cause them to correct their ways, but others she marks for death. If a victim isn’t compelled to drown himself upon hearing the llorona’s wails, she snatches him up and drags him into the water so she can plunge him beneath the surface until death brings them both sweet silence.

The catoblepas is an aggressive beast at the best of times, willing to knock down trees, fences, even small houses to eat whatever it finds interesting, be that meal plant or animal or human being. Though it prefers swamps, the catoblepas has been known to forage in plains and forests for short periods before returning to the buoyant support of water and mud. Few creatures linger near a catoblepas’s feeding ground because of the monster’s bad temper and poisonous breath, and only rot-loving predators such as oozes or exceptionally large otyughs have any interest in hunting them. A catoblepas’ primary motivation is hunting and exerting its dominance over lesser creatures in its territory. Easily detected by its foul odor, the creature tolerates the presence of wild animals, humanoid tribes, and even predators that it can bully as long as these things flee or act submissive when the poisonous brute lumbers into view. The catoblepas is known to engage in physical battles with other Large swamp creatures such as crocodiles or even froghemoths. Some humanoid tribes claim to know techniques to domesticate a catoblepas for use as a guard animal, but the monster’s intractable nature and not insignificant intelligence almost certainly means magic is involved, as the creature has little need for alliances and can wipe out entire villages with its breath. Some have been known to use their breath underwater, creating a churning cloud of bubbles that kills fish in the area and starves out other creatures. A catoblepas’s sense of smell is blunted by its own ungodly stench, and it can’t easily recognize rival odors such as skunk musk (though this provides the beast no immunity to odor-based effects from other creatures). A catoblepas is 15 feet long and weighs 2,200 pounds.

Targothas are unusual creatures that thrive in the thick, inky fluids of naturally occurring tar seeps or pits of oil, although they are equally at home in swampy waters or muddy bogs. They depend upon their blindsense when lurking within opaque fluids like tar or ooze, and will even lurch out of their lairs and flop along the ground if necessary to pursue a meal. A targotha is a patient ambush predator, and without the need to breathe, it can lie in wait for weeks for food.  A typical targotha measures 30 feet in length and weighs 7,000 pounds. Larger specimens are known to exist, but they prefer to dwell far from areas inhabited by civilized folk in the largest and deepest of tar pits or fens. Truly enormous targothas have multiple sets of razor fins and are capable of making two, three, or even four devastating attacks with their fins in a round.

Swamp blights rule over large swaths of boggy land, populating their realms with the mummified forms of those they have slaughtered or who have fallen prey to their domains’ denizens. These mummies are the swamp blights’ preferred weapon against nearby settlements, and the mummies typically seek to drag the unconscious bodies of their victims back to be killed within their masters’ cursed swamplands so the bodies rise as new mummies to bolster the sodden, undead army. Yet even these undead eventually fall prey to the blights’ unwillingness to share their realms.  A swamp blight is 7 feet across and weighs 540 pounds.