Underground Aberrations

A dossenus is a subterranean pack hunter that can digest almost anything. Its body is mostly head and face, dominated by a huge mouth with multiple rows of black, rocklike teeth. Two thin arms and four thin legs extend from its underdeveloped body; its front limbs end in crablike claws it can use to clumsily manipulate objects. A dossenus is just under 4 feet long and weighs 60 pounds. Dossenuses are notorious for their voracious appetites and ability to gnaw through practically any substance with their savage teeth. Though their tiny eyes appear absent of thought or purpose, dossenuses are actually slightly more intelligent than mere beasts. These creatures have a primitive communal social structure, speak and understand Aklo, and practice a violent form of religion based on the indiscriminate consumption of all other forms of life. Dossenuses practice ritual cannibalism of their dead. Dossenuses are gifted climbers and burrowers and use their talents to clamber up or through walls, floors, ceilings, and over their fellows to quickly surround and overwhelm prey. Once one of these extremely tenacious creatures lays eyes on potential prey, it does not give up the chase until it or its target is dead, or enters or crosses a body of water. A dossenus cannot swim (it sinks to the bottom) and has an intense fear of deep water. Once every few generations, dossenuses gather in great numbers, sometimes in the thousands. After several weeks of worship, fasting, and frenzied mating, the creatures skitter forth as a massive swarm intent on devouring any living thing in their path.

Come from distant stars to protect unprepared worlds from cosmic horrors, flumphs are jellyfish-like creatures that float in the air and hunt with acidic spikes growing from their undersides. Gentle at heart, flumphs understand that their appearance often terrifies viewers, and thus conceal themselves and observe neighboring settlements from afar, only revealing themselves when absolutely necessary. They also know full well the limitations of their fragile forms, and rather than directly opposing the horrors they seek to defeat, they prefer to recruit and advise heroes to tackle these dangerous tasks instead. Flumphs float and speak via a constant flow of air through tiny pores in their white bodies, emitting a rhythmic puffing whenever they’re aloft. Typical flumphs weigh 15 pounds and are 3 feet across. Flumphs deeply revere dreams, seeing them as omens and portents. While they normally mate and reproduce on the world of their birth, flumphs occasionally engage in a ritual called the Seeding, in which seed pods are flung into outer space in order to provide other planets with guardians.

Underground predators that often dwell on the outskirts of subterranean ruins or in the deep shadows of nameless cavern outposts, chokers lurk in the darkness and lash out with their long, rubbery arms to grasp prey as it passes by. They seldom attack multiple enemies at once, stalking their quarry until they can isolate a weaker victim from its pack. Chokers walk with a disturbing, almost comical gait due to their extremely limber legs. Weighing only 35 pounds and standing no taller than a halfling, chokers have no problem skittering across walls and ceilings, often lodging themselves into shadowy corners, tunnel intersections, walls, or staircases. A choker will attempt to grasp creatures of almost any size, but prefers lone prey of its size or smaller. Chokers appear to have little culture of their own, gathering only briefly to mate before their wanderlust and hunger spurs them again to a solitary existence. Their just-better-than-animalistic intelligence grants them a fascination with the trappings of society even if they do not truly understand it. Accordingly, the grubby lair of a choker (often situated in a difficult-to reach nook or cranny) usually contains valuable objects such as rings, brooches, cloak clasps, and loose coins gathered from devoured victims. This fascination occasionally compels a choker to abandon its subterranean home for a closer study of the sunlit world’s many civilizations. These chokers feel most at home in the darkened narrow alleyways of human cities, squeezing themselves into sewers, forgotten alcoves, barrels, and similar cramped, overlooked spaces. Chokers prefer to keep hidden during the light of day, emerging from their hidey-holes under cover of darkness to hunt for food and cruel pleasure. Favorite tactics include using their long arms to scoop prey off the street from the safety of a nearby rooftop, attacking sleeping families by squeezing through an open chimney, or tapping on a window to bring their curious food within grasping distance.

These young rays are shaped roughly like hoods (hence their name), and drag themselves awkwardly about with their thin tentacles. Once an executioner’s hood finds a suitable hunting ground, usually a cavern or dungeon room, it hauls itself up to a high perch and hangs there, disguising itself as an irregular stone formation or a strange bit of masonry on a dungeon wall. When suitable prey walks beneath it, the young lurking ray drops, attempting to engulf the creature’s head and suffocate it, after which the ray can slowly dissolve the meat at its leisure. Executioner’s hoods are hatched from eggs laid by Trappers (see below on this page). They stay with the mother for a month, then leave to hunt for themselves.

Sinspawn are corrupted products of magic used by spellcasters in a past era as shock troops for their armies. Literally the embodiment of a sin made flesh, they are sentient abominations of distilled ectoplasm imprinted with the soul-image of slain creatures that possessed an abundance of a particular sin.

SEVEN TYPES OF SINSPAWN
The stats on this page represent a wrathspawn, the most common type of this creature. Each type possesses unique ability modifiers, which are listed after their name.
Envyspawn (+2 Str, –2 Cha): Short and thin, envyspawn often become rangers.
Gluttonspawn (+2 Con, –2 Dex): Obese yet hardy and strong, gluttonspawn often become fighters.
Greedspawn (+2 Dex, –2 Wis): Towering over 7 feet in height, greedspawn have gold-tinged veins and often become rogues.
Lustspawn (+4 Cha, –2 Con, –2 Wis): With perfectly formed bodies sitting in grotesque counterpoint to their monstrous faces and claws, lustspawn often become sorcerers.
Pridespawn (+4 Int, –2 Wis, –2 Cha): Unique among sinspawn for their long manes of hair, pridespawn are near-skeletal in their gauntness. They often become wizards.
Slothspawn (+2 Wis, –2 Dex): Thick rolls of excess skin drape a slothspawn’s hunched frame. They often become clerics.
Wrathspawn: These sinspawn use the statistics given here. They often become barbarians.

Fungal crawlers are a perverse fusion of animal and plant. Over thousands of years, they have prospered and spread beneath the world, dominating the wildest depths of these underground regions. Like hyenas, fungal crawlers are top-tier scavengers. They are efficient hunters, but just as often feed on found carrion or take meals from other predators. When times are especially lean, fungal crawlers can even survive without food, subsisting on radiation and heat absorbed through the fungal flutes covering their pale, sickly bellies. Thousands of breeds of fungal crawlers exist across the world, varying in appearance and habits, but all share a few common features. They invariably appear as monstrous crickets or locusts fused with fungal growths, often topped with mushroom-like caps. This hybridization makes them adept survivors, and infestations are notoriously difficult to clear out entirely. Their needle-like teeth cannot chew solid food, so most fungal crawlers rely on digestive enzymes injected through their bite to make their meals palatable. Average specimens grow to 30 pounds and 3 feet in length. They reproduce by releasing spores, which remain viable for decades until they contact organic matter and eventually develop into small, pale grubs. Many subterranean civilizations tame fungal crawlers as guard animals, pets, or food. Though simple-minded, they are amicable enough to be trained when well-fed. Fungal crawlers hold no loyalties, though, and often flee or attack their keepers at the slightest provocation. Thanks to the bizarre energies that suffuse their homes, fungal crawlers are incredibly diverse. They have adapted over millennia to fill every environment: flying variants fill subterranean rifts with the deafening drone of their wings, while aquatic breeds skim across the surfaces of underground lakes, and still others thrive in the fiery chambers and tunnels of volcanic networks.

The worm-like grick is a terror of the caverns and tunnels in which it dwells, lying in wait near heavily traveled underground passages or subterranean cities for the chance to reach forth from the darkness and take its prey. Those laid low by a grick are rarely consumed on the spot. Instead, fresh food is hauled back to the grick’s lair in a tight burrow or high on a cavern ledge, where it is consumed in small bites at the grick’s leisure. The origins of the grick are not known. Even though the grick has a rudimentary intelligence, it does not have any society to speak of, and most are encountered alone. On those occasions when unfortunate travelers meet multiple specimens, groups of gricks do not appear to communicate or work together; each instead attacks individual targets and retreats with its prize as soon as it manages to bring down an opponent. Capable predators, gricks also have a strangely weapon-resistant hide that makes them especially dangerous. Many novice adventurers have fallen to grick attacks merely because they were unable to damage the creature with their nonmagical weapons. Those that are familiar with gricks (especially dwarves, morlocks, and troglodytes) know the best strategy for dealing with them is to fall back and wait for more powerful or magical reinforcements. Gricks rely on their dark coloration and ability to climb walls to keep them out of sight until they’re ready to spring an ambush. On occasions when food is scarce in a given region, gricks have been known to travel to the surface and roam the wilderness in search of prey, but these sojourns are almost always out of necessity, and end as soon as the gricks find entrances to new subterranean lairs. They prefer darkness and the comfort of a ceiling overhead, avoiding the open sky and going to great lengths to keep the cover of trees, low clouds, or buildings between them and the empty gulf overhead.

Grothluts are sluglike abominations with vaguely human heads and torsos, and rubbery arms that move awkwardly at their sides. They shuffle mindlessly until other creatures come into view, then piteously moan before slithering forward to attack and feed. Those moans are the last vestige of their formerly human selves crying for release as slivers of the creatures’ intellects are forced to continuously relive their transformation. Many fleshcrafters consider the grothlut a failure, as the transformation all but stamps out its human consciousness. Others disagree, arguing that warping the creature’s mind makes it more useful, as its stupidity makes it pliable and easy to herd. The drow typically use grothluts only as guardians to slowly patrol the remote edges of their enclaves. Once in position, though, grothluts can be used as crude shock troops, unleashed to soften enemy forces before more valuable warriors wade in and cut down the enemies who have been nauseated by the grothluts’ exploded organs and flesh.

Of all the terrifying beasts an explorer might encounter underground, only the rust monster targets that which the average adventurer values most: his treasure. Typically 5 feet long and weighing almost 200 pounds, the lobster-like rust monster would be frightening enough even without the alien feeding process that gives it its name. Rust monsters consume metal objects, preferring iron and ferrous alloys like steel but devouring even mithral, adamantine, and enchanted metals with equal ease. Any metal touched by the rust monster’s delicate antennae or armored hide corrodes and falls to dust within seconds, making the beast a major threat to subterranean adventurers and those dwarven miners who must defend their forges and compete for ore. Though rust monsters have no innate tendency toward violence, their insatiable hunger leads them to charge anything they come across that bears even trace amounts of metal, and any resistance is met with unthinking savagery. It’s not unheard of for rust monsters in metal-poor areas to track escaped victims for days using their scent metal ability, provided the victims retain intact metal objects. Fortunately, it’s often possible to escape a rust monster’s attentions by throwing it a dense metal object like a shield and running in the opposite direction. Those who frequent areas infested with rust monsters quickly learn to keep a few stone or wooden weapons close at hand.

Otyughs are particularly vile and horrid creatures that lurk in places most sane creatures avoid. Their lairs are middens, cesspools, offal pits, toxic swamps, and sewers—the greater a lair’s filth, the greater the draw to the refuse-eating otyugh. They glory in the role of scavenger, wandering through vast underground caverns in search of the choicest cuts of garbage and waste. Upon finding such refuse, they gorge upon it, gathering what cannot be consumed in one debauch to bring back to their foul-smelling lairs. Otyughs spend most of their time in these filthy dens, which they keep constantly filled with carrion, dung, and worse sorts of stinking eff luvia. Intelligent creatures dwelling in subterranean areas near an otyugh often form a partnership of convenience with the disgusting beast. These creatures gladly provide their refuse and piles of raw meat to the otyugh, transforming the creature into an effective form of trash disposal. In return, the otyugh leaves its benefactors alone, and does not attack them, possibly even acting as a guardian. The most horrifying thing to most races about the notorious otyugh is not the nature of its diet or its choice of lairs, but rather that a creature with an otyugh’s tastes can be anything other than a mindless scavenger. In fact, otyughs are surprisingly intelligent, and often quite eager to form alliances with those who offer them a steady supply of delicious diversions in the form of offal and waste. Most otyughs understand the fact that other creatures find them unpleasant and hideous, but few really care.

Resembling hideously evil flying manta rays, cloakers are mysterious and paranoid creatures. A typical specimen has an 8-foot wingspan and weighs 100 pounds. A cloaker’s motives are hidden and confusing, and they distrust even their own kind. Their strange shape allows them to disguise themselves as a variety of cloaks, tapestries, and other mundane objects, and stories linger of cloakers that ally with other creatures, hitching a ride on their backs and aiding in their ally’s protection for their own inscrutable reasons. A rare few are priests of ancient gods, leading cults of cloakers and skum to undertake all manner of hideous rites and working toward singularly sinister goals.

Disgusting, loathsome, and hungry—these are the only words that properly describe the gibbering mouther. A foul beast that lurks in underground caves, sewers, and nightmares, mouthers have no societal, ecological or religious significance other than their ability to drive those that listen to them mad. Some scholars believe that gibbering mouthers are a lesser variant of the much more dangerous shoggoth, while others theorize they are a punishment by some powerful being or deity inflicted on those who have offended it.

Lunarmas are mysterious crablike creatures that come from space. They move by floating through the air and can eat flesh, wood, bone, and certain kinds of sand and dust. Highly aggressive, they attack by dropping on prey from above and grabbing it with their limbs, using their breath weapon to injure multiple creatures for easier capture, feeding, and implantation. Efficient in its digestion and reproduction, a single lunarma can depopulate a village in a few days, spawning dozens of offspring that scatter in search of more prey. Fortunately, an adult lunarma lives no longer than a year. During this time, it seeks to eat and find living prey in which to lay its eggs. A newly spawned lunarma forms a cocoon in which it metamorphoses into a preadult, emerging when it senses food. It can remain dormant in its cocoon for centuries, and clusters of eggs have been found in sealed caverns beneath icy surfaces, as well as on cold moons and drifting asteroids—as if placed there by an intelligent creature. Though lunarmas are able to communicate among themselves telepathically, they’re only barely intelligent, and their thoughts are primitive. They have no known culture, and their desires are limited to feeding and procreation. The only instinct they seem to have beyond that is a violent aversion to flumphs, which they attack on sight. An adult lunarma is nearly 5 feet across and weighs 400 pounds.

Seugathi are spawned by the hundreds by a single neothelid that has performed rituals to impregnate itself. As part of the strange process of being spawned in such rituals, the seugathi assimilates an extensive list of missions from its parent—once the seugathi completes these missions, it perishes. No single seugathi knows the purpose of these commands, but they trust that their neothelid masters have a reason for sending them on these diverse and usually cruel missions. A seugathi is 14 feet long and weighs 650 pounds.

Created from the body of a drow, fleshwarped and mutated through special poisons and elixirs to take on the characteristics of a giant spider, the drider is a dangerous creature. Driders are sexually dimorphic. A female drider’s lower spider body is sleek and graceful, often similar to a black widow’s body, while its upper drow torso retains its alluring curves and beautiful face (with the exception of sharp, poisonous fangs). A male drider’s lower body is bulky like a tarantula, while its upper body is wiry and bears a hideous face more spider than drow, complete with fanged mandibles.

Vegepygmies transformed by the vile fleshwarping process become halsoras, creatures twice cursed. The alchemical torture they undergo seems minor compared to what other fleshwarps suffer—it merely increases the mass and strength of the vegepygmy and deforms its eyes so they secrete acid. The process has a more interesting effect on the residual and previously inert russet mold within the body of the host vegepygmy. Mutating the mold, it creates a deadly spore that courses through the halsora’s insides, is slowly excreted through the fingertips, and clumps on the claws of the creature. Though their sunken eyes and constant stream of acidic tears often make these creatures seem pitiful, they are fierce bundles of rage and self-hatred. The conditioning of the fleshwarpers causes them to attack and infect any enemy of the drow they come in contact with, but what’s left of their consciousness rages against the mutated spores they carry. Worse still, many drow use these creatures to hunt down and even infect other tribes of vegepygmies.

Lurkers above are the nearly mindless males of the species, and follow much the same tactics as executioner’s hoods, save that they gain the ability to stretch themselves wide, glide with both speed and silence, and can even fly by awkwardly flapping their flesh. They typically hide on cavern ceilings, shifting their coloration and texture to match the surrounding terrain. Like all lurking rays, lurkers above are carnivorous, preferring the tang of living flesh—though they can subsist for a time on the minerals they absorb from rocky surfaces through their tentacles. Males are less able to subsist on minerals, however, and hence hunt more actively. While lurkers above are poor fliers, they’re excellent gliders, able drop off a ceiling and silently float more than 100 feet horizontally over the course of a 5- or 6-foot drop. Lurkers above can grow to be 15 feet from tip to tip, and weigh nearly 500 pounds when fully fed.

Female lurking rays, known as trappers, are the masterminds of their race. Too large to fly (and often gravid with wriggling young), the intelligent trappers scrape themselves out depressions in the floor of regularly traveled chambers and then lie in them, changing their coloration and texture perfectly to blend with the rest of the floor, and sometimes even creating protrusions in the shape of items they know to be valuable to their prey creatures. When a lulled individual steps onto the trapper’s surface, the ray twists itself up around it, smothering and beating its victim senseless before drawing it into its maw for slow digestion. Though quite intelligent even by human standards, trappers devote almost all of their mental faculties to perfectly remembering every sensory detail about their surroundings in order to make their chameleon-like disguises all the more cunning and difficult for their prey to resist. Trappers can grow to be 15 feet from tip to tip, and weigh nearly 2,000 pounds when fully fed.

Dark nagas covet luxury, wealth, and power over others. With bodies covered by shimmering, eel-like black scales, dark nagas slither deftly through forsaken lands and abandoned ruins, scouring such places for treasures and weaker creatures they might force into service. Their forked tongues spread only lies, and others whom they can’t manipulate they destroy with their insidious poison and destructive magical abilities. A typical dark naga measures approximately 12 feet long and weighs upward of 300 pounds. Arrogant and sybaritic, dark nagas seek to dominate lesser creatures, relishing the fear they inspire and power over other beings. While some manage to carve indulgent fiefdoms from tribes of goblins, orcs, lizardfolk, or other barbarous races, the luster of cosmopolitan fineries proves enticing as well, leading some to infiltrate city sewers and slums to gather an urban following. They particularly relish morbidly crafted jewelry and treasures, often adorning themselves with jeweled bands or taking their ease atop piles of treasure. Dark nagas hate others of their kind, especially other dark nagas, seeing their brethren as deadly opponents to be dispatched swiftly and mercilessly—often rightly so.

Despite its bestial appearance, the destrachan is in fact a creature of cunning and cruel intellect that enjoys inflicting pain and viciously toying with its prey. It has no eyes, and is completely blind, but possesses a pair of complex, tripartite ears it can adjust to different levels of sensitivity to sound, allowing the destrachan to hunt in absolute darkness as if it were able to see. Destrachans are carnivores, preferring to stalk and kill live prey, although they also feast on carrion. This habit serves them well, since they often kill more than they can immediately consume. They often hunt in packs, using a complex series of clicks, shrieks, and whistles to communicate with each other. While destrachans cannot speak, they are capable of understanding spoken languages like the common tongue, and often take pleasure in their victims’ cries and pleas for mercy.

Thought by some to be invaders from another dimension or planet, the sinister intellect devourers are certainly one of the world’s cruelest races. Incapable of experiencing emotions or wallowing in the sins of physical pleasure on their own, intellect devourers are forced to steal bodies in order to indulge their gluttony, lust, and cruelty. Stories tell of entire cities of these creatures deep underground, where host bodies are worn like clothes to hideous orgies and vile feasts. Lone intellect devourers often dwell in ruins or caves on the edge of a civilized region so they can make periodic forays into town to “shop” for an attractive new body. An intellect devourer is 3 feet long and weighs about 60 pounds.

Irnakurse, meaning “perfect ones” in the Elven language, represent the sum outpouring of drow hatred for their surface-world brethren. These brainwashed, rage-filled abominations are the result of elves subjected to fleshwarping—and were the drow to have their way, embodiments of the elven race’s future. Each irnakurse suffers long under the knife of the dark elves’ most practiced fleshwarpers until its body and mind lie in total ruin. When the weeks of torture and transformation are complete, what was once an elf emerges as a shrieking mockery of its lost grace, a horror of reworked flesh and broken bones, a “perfect” elf to the drow and a sin against life to elvenkind. Through the blasphemous tortures that create them, irnakurse are made completely mad and become unable to harm drow. All non-drow, however, they view as targets to vent their terror and rage upon. Elves especially provoke irnakurses’ ire. No two irnakurse look exactly the same—drow torturers take profane pride in sculpting their elven victims into unique masterpieces of agony—most stand between 8 and 9 feet tall and weigh upward of 300 pounds.

At home in the muck and filth of the sewers beneath large cities, slime nagas prey upon the weak and dejected of urban society. They lurk beneath the surface and carve out their domains in the darkened tunnels, fighting with other subterranean denizens for territory. Though they live belowground for security and safety, they have no aversion to light and occasionally sun themselves in rancid cesspools. Their scales range in color from green to brown and are often a mottled combination of various shades that is difficult to discern beneath a thick coating of putrid slime.  A slime naga stretches 12 to 14 feet long and weighs 250 pounds.

Troglodytes forced to undergo fleshwarping by the drow, ghonhatines harken to what troglodytes might have been in savage prehistory. They stand over 10 feet tall (hunched to about 8 feet) and weigh upward of 5,000 pounds.

Gugs are inhuman monstrosities that dwell in the deep places of the world. Whether they were banished to the dark lands by ancient gods or the light-loving races they terrorized, or perhaps were brought to the deep realms by dark powers from some even more inhuman nightmare realm, is unknown, but gugs are loathed by other races for their carnal rites of slaughter. Gugs are 16 feet tall and weigh nearly 2,000 pounds, but they move with an eerie, unnatural gait as though their limbs contained far too many joints. They can contort and distend their limbs for greater reach or to wriggle easily through impossibly small passages. Gugs may cling for long hours to cave walls or just within dark side-caverns, lying in wait for prey to stumble too close. Their senses are keen, however, and their joy in the bloody hunt is considerable and gugs who catch the scent of blood may stalk their prey for long days, even venturing at times beyond their caves to dare the bright lands of the surface in search of tasty meat to drag back for their horrific sacrifices. Gugs are savage fighters when driven by a strong leader, but on their own may flee if brought to fewer than half their hit points, carrying off fresh meat for later feasting if they are able. They can subsist on fungi, slimes, and molds as well as carrion and even undead flesh—particularly that of ghouls. Some bloodthirsty gugs gain awful powers as gifts from their alien patrons. These monsters are known as savants. They have a Charisma of 18 and can use invisibility, spike stones, transmute rock to mud, and unholy blight once per day each as spell-like abilities (CL 10th, concentration +14). Some become actual clerics or oracles of their mad gods—strange powers of darkness, insanity, and blood. Gug savants add +1 to their CR.

The roper is an ambush hunter. Capable of altering the coloration and shape of its body, a roper in hiding looks remarkably like a stalagmite of stone or ice (or in low-ceilinged chambers, a stony or icy pillar). In areas without such features to hide among, a roper can compress its body into a much more squat, boulder-like shape. The strands it extrudes are not flesh but a thick, semiliquid material similar to partially melted wax but with the strength of an iron chain and the ability to numb flesh and sap strength. The roper can manipulate these strands with great finesse, and can fling them as far as 50 feet to snatch objects that attract its attention. Although alien and monstrous in shape, the roper is in fact one of the most intelligent denizens of the deep caverns of the world. They do not form large societies (although ropers can be found living among some deep-dwelling denizens like the intellect devourers or neothelids, with whom they have been known to sometimes ally), but often congregate in small clusters. Particularly interested in the philosophy of life and death and the finer points of the more cruel and sinister religions of the world, a roper can talk or argue for hours with those it initially sought merely to eat. Stories speak of particularly skilled debaters and philosophers who have been kept for days or even years as pets or conversational companions by roper clusters, but in the end, if such pets don’t eventually escape, a roper’s appetite always wins out over its intellectual curiosity—especially in cases where pets are constantly outmaneuvering their keeper’s wits and patience. A roper is 9 feet tall and weighs 2,200 pounds.

When a Material Plane creature is trapped on or chooses to remain on the Shadow Plane, it often finds that its offspring take on some of the eerie qualities of its new home dimension. Those who are born in that place become weird mockeries of their kin on the Material Plane. Their colorings become jet-black (or at best a hazy gray), their features become more menacing, and their eyes glow white, a dulled crimson, a dark green, or a strange violet. The variety of shadow creatures is as vast as that on the Material Plane, creating dangers that are similar but have additional defenses and abilities characteristic of creatures truly native to the Shadow Plane’s perpetual gloom. Shadow creatures on the Material Plane will produce offspring, giving rise to shadow creature enclaves in dark corners of the world. Stranger still, a burgeoning ecology of shadow creatures that forms a colony on the Material Plane seems to create a small blighted realm of shadow where they dwell. As such, areas grow more and more overcast. Shadows become unnaturally deeper, darker, and more cloying until the land itself seems to assume the landscape and terrain of the Shadow Plane. As part of this transformation process, one of the more intelligent shadow creatures in the area becomes a shadow lord—a dread agent of shadow that controls powerful shadow abilities and works to expand its alien domain.

Although repulsive in shape, these enormous, human-faced insectoid creatures are generally peaceful and serene. Left to its own devices, an azruverda is typically content to cultivate fungal gardens in deep underground sanctuaries. These gardens are beautiful to behold— masterful combinations of fungi, rocks, and other objects arranged in an artistic manner. Although generally solitary, azruverdas collaborate when a threat intrudes upon one of their underground homes. Azruverdas stand 16 feet tall on their many legs and weigh close to 4,000 pounds.

Ghorazaghs—or gore weavers—float like tumorous specters through the deepest, most alien cavities of the lightless underground, preying upon the wretched vermin of those horrid places. Cunning, with minds and drives unknowable and obscene to those of lands above, the gore weavers only recently became aware of the fertility and bounty of the surface world and are now slowly turning their ebon eyes upward. While ghorazaghs can digest nearly anything, they are incapable of digesting blood. Their digestive systems process flesh, bone, and all other organic material, filtering out blood and storing it in large reservoirs within their bodies, whereupon the blood is mixed internally with mucus and other strange fluids to form a thick, gluelike substance. While a ghorazagh can spray this fluid as an attack to impede prey, the primary use of the foul substance is as a building material. Ghorazagh hives are constructed entirely of this material, which when it dries has the strength of metal while retaining a dark red resinlike appearance. A ghorazagh hive is a nightmare place as a result—twisting tunnels with an eerily organic appearance that can wind for miles on end.

Huge and otherworldly, the vemerak is a monster known as much for its disturbing appearance as its violent and cruel disposition. A vemerak is 10 feet tall and 20 feet long, its tentacle-like tails adding a further 15 feet to its length. It weighs just over 6 tons. Caverns that serve as lairs to these creatures invariably possess disturbing shrines where the creatures offer up portions of every meal to dark gods that dwell deep below the sane world—as a result, many believe that vemeraks exist as the physical manifestation of the will of a particularly violent and insane deity.

Hideous and corpulent, with numerous eyes dotting their bodies, hyakumes are mystics of malevolence. They steal and collect the memories of other intelligent beings to increase their own knowledge.

Dwelling only in the deepest reaches of the underworld, the immense neothelids once ruled empires in the depths, yet their numbers have been vastly reduced as other races have proven swifter to breed and adapt. Today, the neothelid is a legend, the subject of tales of horror among those few to have experienced the creature’s wrath in person and lived to tell about it. Neothelids are served by all manner of strange wormlike creatures, minions they use to observe and wage war against their enemies. The neothelids themselves were spawned by even more horrific entities, ageless horrors from strange dimensions beyond the edge of known reality—the neothelids see themselves as the chosen agents of these malevolent forces, working to ready the world for their return.