Tag: Mark Tygart

Gloomwing (Solitary, Large, Stealthy, Planar)

Implant Eggs (d6 damage) 10 HP

Special Qualities: Charm, Flight

This immense moth has huge purple wings marked with spiraling black patterns that seem to shift and writhe.A gloomwing hunts for 2 to 3 hours at dawn and again for 2 to 3 hours at dusk, preferring to spend the remaining hours of the day hiding in abandoned buildings, caves, or deep canyons or foliage where the shadows are thickest. During its periods of activity, it flies through the sky on the hunt for creatures to attack and implant its eggs in—the gloomwing does not need to eat, leaving this urge to propagate its species as its primary drive.The eerie shifting of patterns on a gloomwing’s wings is hypnotic—make a Defy Danger +DEX at or become charmed. This is a mind-affecting effect—gloomwings and tenebrous worms are immune to this effect.A gloomwing can lay eggs inside a small or larger helpless creature as a attack.Within 24 hours of a creature’s death, 1d4 young tenebrous worms emerge from the corpse, devouring it completely in the process. The eggs can be destroyed via any effect that cures disease or magically heals.For all the dangers a gloomwing presents, it is the creature’s young that pose the gravest threat. These creatures are known as tenebrous worms, and despite being the larval form of the adult gloomwing, are much more dangerous creatures. The fact that a gloomwing can lay several eggs a day if presented with enough living hosts makes them dangerous not for what they can inflict themselves, but for what they can spawn.

Instinct: Implant Eggs

Tenebrous Worm (Group, Tiny, Planar)

Acid bite (d6-2 damage)1 HP

Hand, Ignores Armor

Special Qualities: Paralytic poison, Melts flesh into shadows

This pallid worm clatters upon dozens of small legs. Writhing bristles twitch on its back, and its shadow seems strangely mobile.The caterpillar-like tenebrous worm is a voracious predator that hungers for mortal flesh. The tenebrous worm is the larval stage of the gloomwing—but in a strange reversal, these younger creatures are more dangerous than the adults they grow into. A tenebrous worm hatches from the corpse of an unfortunate creature that has been implanted with an egg by a gloomwing. The tenebrous worm is fully grown upon hatching, and immediately begins to scour its environs for flesh to consume.Although the tenebrous worm tends to be relatively pale-colored, its internal organs seethe and roil with shadowy energies and dark fluids. As the creature feeds, these shadowy innards begin to grow out of its body, forming strange bristle-like filaments of semisolid shadowstuff not only capable of piercing the flesh of those who would attack the worm, but also possessing a deadly paralytic poison. Additional shadowy fluids constantly seep from the worm’s mandibles—when it bites prey, these fluids melt flesh into shadows that the creature can then consume. When a tenebrous worm feeds on enough of this shadowy flesh, the creature seeks out a secluded, shady area (typically just within a cave entrance or in a ruined building) and spins a shadowy cocoon around itself. A tenebrous worm’s cocoon exudes the effects of a darkness spell, muting the surrounding light. After a period of several days, the cocoon tears open and a fully grown gloomwing emerges, ready to seek a host for its eggs.

Instinct: Consume

*Custom Rule: When first hit by a Tenebrous worm the player must Defy Danger+CON or become paralyzed until the party next makes camp.