Riftspawn

Tiny Abyssal scavengers, ostovites skitter across demonic battlefields, amid charnel pits, and through that plane’s festering sewers looking for corpses on which to feed. When they find these morsels, they use their acidic saliva to digest the flesh, taking what they need for sustenance. Yet what ostovites truly desire is not food, but self-improvement. Though only barely intelligent, ostovites have a deep-seated jealousy of larger races, as well as an instinctive shame regarding their own forms, which resemble silverfish made out of thin, compressed bones. When an ostovite locates the corpse of a larger creature— particularly that of a humanoid or other intelligent being—it doesn’t stop at feeding. Instead, as soon as it has sated its hunger, it begins using its acid to soften the creature’s bones, drawing them out and reconstructing them into a twisted parody of their original configuration, with the ostovite resting in a nest-like structure in the sculpture’s center. Once it’s finished, the ostovite magically animates its creation, controlling it like a puppet and at last experiencing the thrill of being larger and—to the ostovite’s mind—more important. These ghastly creations are generally more disturbing than normal undead, as ostovites’ understanding of biomechanics is often crude, potentially resulting in humanoid skeletons that move around on all fours or drag themselves along like land-bound octopuses. Like hermit crabs changing shells, ostovites regularly replace their chariots in order to increase their social status and impress potential mates. Though they often squabble over smaller skeletons, when a particularly prime corpse is located, an entire nest of ostovites may band together to create a single bone chariot of epic proportions.  Adult ostovites are 2 feet long and weigh 3 pounds. Natural cowards except when enshrined in their chariots—at which point most believe themselves invincible— ostovites have a species-wide hatred of the more powerful vermlek demons, with whom they often compete for quality corpses.  

The howler is a native to the Abyss, an Outer Plane where madness is the norm and cruelty is expected and often rewarded. The howler prowls these Abyssal realms, serving the role of a hungry predator like a lion or tiger, save for the fact that the typical howler is much more intelligent than a big cat. Worse, howlers have little interest in eating their prey—they need not feed to live, but rather enjoy the process of stalking, mauling, and killing living creatures. In a way, the act of inflicting intense pain and madness upon mortal life is what fills a howler’s life instead of the desire to feed. The howler’s mane of razor-sharp quills makes it a poor choice of mount for most creatures, but it serves quite well as a guardian or sentinel—especially for outsiders, who may not enjoy the creature’s constant howling, but aren’t adversely affected by the supernatural sounds. When a howler sees prey, the tenor of its howls changes— howlers cannot speak, but they can use their howls to communicate quite a bit of information if required. They understand the Abyssal tongue, and when serving demons as guardians, their howls can not only alert their masters to the presence of intruders, but also to their number, appearance, and weaknesses. A howler is about the size of a tiger—12 feet from snout to tail and weighing 6,000 pounds. They are normally pale in color, with darker quills and milky eyes.

Lamhigyns are simple pests that emerged from the chaotic fabric of the Abyss. They poison their prey until it falls into a coma, and then they slowly tear it apart, piece by piece, with their rasping mouths. Lamhigyns view intruders on their territory with disdain, and their stings have left many adventurers insane and debilitated, opportune victims for the Abyss’s insatiable predators. Though lamhigyns might not appear frightening on their own, greater terrors sometimes follow in their wakes, hoping for easy meals.  Lamhigyns are strange-looking creatures often characterized by mortals visiting the Abyss as overgrown, flying tadpoles with bat wings and stinger-tipped tails. They lurk within dark places in the Abyss and in similarly lightless places on the Material Plane near rifts to their home plane. Their bulbous, unblinking eyes are vaguely froglike, and are often the last things unprepared adventurers see, as the pesky creatures are fond of wrapping their wings around their victims’ heads to blind their prey. Their tiny mouths house thick tongues that flick about in the presence of prey.  Lamhigyns have thick, scaly skin ranging in color from red to green. Though lamhigyns are typically encountered flying, on the ground they stand on four insectile legs that they keep tucked beneath them while nesting. Although they are small, their 2-foot-high, 8-pound bodies are impressive sights when hurtling through the air at their victims.  When it comes to their own kind, lamhigyns can be quite volatile. In general, they tend to get along with other lamhigyns, though almost anything can set them off. When this happens, lamhigyns unleash the full force of their chaotic fury on each other, stinging and grappling until only one—or sometimes none—of the bizarre creatures remain.  When they’re not fighting among themselves, lamhigyns live together in noisy, flapping hives, waiting for hapless creatures to stumble into their dens. When it comes to victims, lamhigyns prefer those that can think and walk, for they provide the most deliciously terrif ied reactions. There is nothing lamhigyns love more than injecting their mind-numbing toxin into terrif ied victims while they ineffectually scream and flail. Lamhigyns ignore most normal animals unless they have waited too long for fresh prey and have grown bored. Sometimes, however, a particularly large hive of lamhigyns will attempt to bring down large, imposing creatures simply for the challenge of it.

Once found only in the lightless crevices and shrieking half-live jungles of the Abyss, the yammering, gluttonous vermin of the Abyss called vescavors crawl through portals into the Material Plane to feed and spawn. Ruled by enormous, hideous queens who direct their swarms in finding food and destroying foes with the help of pheromones and mental commands, vescavor swarms devour objects, creatures, and structures alike. Their hunger is insatiable and carries with it the terrors of the Abyss itself, warping the minds of even those creatures who escape the vescavors’ maws. Only adamantine can endure their gnashing teeth, and a swarm of vescavors that descends upon a settlement devours everything and leaves nothing behind.

The grublike grimslake is commonly found on Abyssal battlefields, where it crawls among the bodies, sucking away marrow and other vital tissues found within the dead. Of course, when fresh carcasses aren’t available, grimslakes eagerly to turn to living victims—they take particular delight in the sound of screams as they feed. While on the Abyss, they often hunt lesser demons, but these semi-intelligent scavengers find mortal humanoids a particular delicacy.  The hermaphroditic grimslakes use the remnants of their meals as incubators for their eggs. After eating, they fill the drained bodies with their eggs and fertilize them. Then they abandon the eggs to search for new feeding grounds, leaving behind a hideous legacy. Other scavengers instinctively avoid the egg-filled bodies, and 10 to 12 days later, the corpses burst open, releasing a mass of grimslakes the length of a human arm. These creatures fall upon each other in a ravenous orgy of cannibalism, growing quickly as they consume their kin until, a few days later, the few surviving, fully grown grimslakes go off in search of new food and incubators.  In the Abyss, some demon lords use grimslakes to dispose of bodies. Others use them as implements of torture. The worst keep them as food sources—not to eat the grown specimens, but to dine on corpses pregnant with the grimslakes’ seething young.

Like the more powerful retriever, the warmonger wasp is a construct built from the protoplasmic flesh and chaotic fecundity of the Abyss itself. Partially organic and partially metallic, warmonger wasps serve demonic armies as air support in large battles. Their electricity-based explosions work well on battlefields where demons and mortals clash, as electrical attacks have no effect on demons. Warmonger wasps are grown rather than constructed, and while the procedure of crafting these constructs is beyond the ken of mortal crafters, spellcasters can conjure them to do their bidding. Warmonger wasps are only intelligent enough to understand simple commands, and even then they generally understand only commands universally associated with battlefield conditions.  A warmonger wasp is about 10 feet long, has a 20-foot wingspan, and weighs 1,200 pounds.

MASSACRE WASP  
Warmonger wasps grow organically from protoplasmic flesh and chaos, so it’s no surprise that, unlike many constructs, each warmonger wasp has a uniquely terrible appearance, and the wasps warp, twist, and mutate over time. While in most cases, significant mutations prove crippling and ultimately cause the wasp’s death, in rare cases, the mutated wasp reaches a new state of evolution and becomes a massacre wasp: a more powerful version of the warmonger wasp that is capable of strategizing and leading other warmonger wasps in battlefield maneuvers. Massacre wasps usually have the advanced or giant simple template as well as either 6 evolution points’ worth of summoner eidolon evolutions or other monster abilities of a similar power level and scope. Massacre wasps’ static discharge works once per round instead of once every 1d4 rounds.

When mortal humanoids find themselves exposed to profound, supernatural evil, a horrific, occult transformation can strip them of their souls and damn them to the tortured existence of a bodak. Changed into a twisted, misanthropic husk, a bodak wanders the endless tracts of evil-aligned planes, periodically stumbling into other realms by passing through portals or otherwise being conjured elsewhere. Possessing only fragmented memories of its former existence, the bodak is driven by profound emptiness, sorrowful longing, and vengeful hatred of all life. A bodak’s appearance is profoundly disturbing. Its flesh looks dried, taut, and desiccated, though it possesses a strange, otherworldly sheen. Its body is disproportionate and distinctly androgynous. Hairless and with only vague hints of facial structure, the bodak’s eyes are deep set in their sockets and constantly weep foul-smelling smoky vapors. A planes-wise traveler who recognizes its shape knows to flee, for most travelers can outrun the relatively slow bodak. Bodaks vehemently despise all living creatures and immediately seek to destroy any they encounter. A bodak retains the ability to speak one language it knew in life (typically Common), but it rarely engages in conversation, instead spitting out an incomprehensible stream of vile accusations, curses, and threats. On occasion, a bodak might wield weapons, but most rely primarily upon the effects of their deadly gaze. Bodaks are rarely encountered outside of the Abyss. As they are slow-witted, powerful evil creatures such as liches and nabasu demons sometimes use bodaks as thralls, assassins, or guardians. Bodaks encountered on the Material Plane exude extreme malevolence when forced to confront the realization of their abhorrent transformations. So great is their desire to inf lict their fate upon others that many attempt to drag off the bodies of their slain victims and guard them until they rise as undead. A 20th-level spellcaster can use create greater undead to create a bodak, but only if the spell is cast while the spellcaster is located on one of the evil outer planes (traditionally the Abyss).

Urannags have long vexed scholars, some of whom contend that they’re creatures, while others argue that they’re complex traps. In truth, they’re both—an unsettling example of how reality on the Abyss doesn’t match mortal expectations. An urannag behaves like an ambush predator, yet has no need for sustenance and is driven to flense prey out of innate sadism.

Appearing as an amalgam of twisted, unnatural insects, a vescavor queen is a hideous sight to behold, even among the terrifying denizens of the Abyss. Not only is a queen’s bite stronger than that of its spawn, but the queen can also spit acid at opponents, and its arms end in scything claws poised to rend through flesh and armor. Vescavor swarms instinctively obey a queen, eagerly seeking out those foes marked by the queen’s attacks. A vescavor queen measures roughly 10 feet from head to tail, and weighs nearly 500 pounds— more when carrying a brood.

The Abyss is a terrible place, yet even in this horrific realm there exist predators and wild beasts that prey upon the demonic horde—the bebilith being the most notorious, a creature evolved to hunt and slay demons. Far more intelligent than its verminous shape would suggest, it is perhaps a blessing that the bebilith is such a focused and devoted hunter of demons, for had these dangerous outsiders more of a mind to conquer and expand empires, their ability to plane shift would make them a menace indeed. Although, as an outsider, the bebilith has no biological need to eat, it does enjoy the sensation of chewing on demonic flesh.

Not all constructs are formed from unliving matter like stone, wood, metal, or dead flesh. In the darkest corners of the Great Beyond, certain powerful demon lords have mastered the art of shaping the raw, protoplasmic flesh of the Abyss into hideous monstrosities devoid of life, emotion, and the will to resist control. The monstrous retriever is the best-known of such constructs, a huge spider-like creation capable of unleashing potent energy upon those it has been ordered to seek. Demon lords use retrievers to seek out those who dare abandon their loyalties or flee from servitude. Often, the presence of a retriever in a demon’s den is enough in and of itself to ensure the loyalty of the lesser demons. The constructs also excel in tracking down specific objects and returning them to their masters—their intelligence is just enough to allow them to focus on their ordered tasks but not quite enough for them to form ideas of rebellion and longings for freedom. A retriever’s body is the size of an elephant, and its legspan is nearly 30 feet. It weighs 6,500 pounds.

Although natives of the Abyss that often serve as minions for powerful demons or demon lords, baregaras are not in fact demons themselves. Some scholars classify them as “proto-demons”—monsters like bebiliths or xacabras that could perhaps someday complete their supernatural evolution into full demonic glory, but that have not quite yet reached that end. Of course, to the baregara’s victims, these debates are incidental. In the Abyss, baregaras form small troops just like the apes of the Material Plane. These troops are led by the strongest fighter or an individual anointed by a powerful demon the baregara troop serves. Rivalries between troops are part of a complex hierarchy that is all but incomprehensible to non-baregaras, but planar scholars have observed that all baregaras take trophies from notable kills, and that these grisly mementos play some role in establishing the convoluted social standing of the troop leaders and their followers. Even when knuckle-walking on their enormous hands, baregaras stand over 12 feet high when measured to the top of their horns, and their dense bodies can weigh up to 1,500 pounds.

Dwiergeths hunt Abyssal rift valleys, digesting prey in a gnawing process of transdimensional rumination. Sure-footed dwiergeths leap and sprint along vertical surfaces with disturbing ease, and often cling to cliff sides for hours or even days, waiting for prey to approach from either above or below. They have a supernatural mastery over the wind as well, and make use of their spell-like abilities to cause climbers to fall from cliffs or flying creatures to be dashed against rocky walls—it’s easier to eat bleeding, broken meat, after all.  A dwiergeth’s anatomy is often difficult for humanoids to comprehend. Trembling bristles protruding from the creature’s flesh act as eyes, allowing it to see in all directions at once. Although dissection of a slain dwiergeth reveals a single coiling digestive tract winding from one of its mouths through its bulbous body to the other mouth, the entrails of a living dwiergeth actually extend into other strange dimensions generated by the monster’s Abyssal heritage.

Heaving masses of unnatural protoplasm known as riftcreepers prowl the Abyss’s shattered canyons. Despite their name, these intelligent, malevolent oozes are quite agile and swift, slithering up and down canyon walls and swimming through even the foulest water. Although smart enough to understand Abyssal, riftcreepers have little interest in listening to the babbling of the sacks of meat that will soon be their food.

Fiends hailing from the darkest reaches of the Abyss, xacarbas are manipulation and destruction intertwined. With their infamous ability to redirect spells, these serpentine goliaths wreak havoc on the mind as well as the body, turning allies against one another and reveling in the destruction doing so produces.

Wherever they go, rift dragons leave behind shattered ruins.

Some believe that the titans were the first children of the gods—if this myth is true, then the fact that they waged war upon the gods becomes even more tragic. After they were betrayed to the gods by their own kin, the Thanatotic titans were banished into the Abyss. Today, they seethe with jealousy that their Elysian kin are allowed to wander the planes at will, while they can leave their Abyssal realm only by stealth. Now, these powerful outsiders spend much of their time brooding, fighting among themselves, and waging war for control of Abyssal realms against the legions of various demon lords. Thanatotic titans see themselves as the true icons worthy of worship. Some work to found personal cults among mortals, while others simply wage unending crusades against the minions of the gods.

In an unholy act of twisted, demonic humor, devastators derive their power from the souls of good outsiders.

Fomorian titans were the first titans created by the gods. In their pride, the titans intruded on the domain of their masters and created life of their own, so they too might be worshiped. The gods were forced to battle their creations, and though they won, they could not bring themselves to destroy the fomorians, and instead shackled the titans in armor that hid their beauty and imprisoned them in secret prisons across the multiverse.

Horrifying abominations shunned by the gods immediately upon their creation, the hekatonkheires are perhaps the most powerful and devastating race of titans in existence. When the titans—envious of the gods’ divine strength— rebelled against the deities, the hekatonkheires were among the first to pick up arms, weary of the scorn their own creators felt for them. The betrayal of the Elysian titans led to the hekatonkheires’ swift capture by the gods, who found the hekatonkheires’ power to be so immense that they were not banished to the Abyss with their Thanatotic brethren. Instead, the gods cast the hekatonkheires into the furthest reaches of the multiverse they could find. There, the hekatonkheires drifted in expanses of nothingness for unknown eons, and the madness wrought upon them by isolation destroyed their memories. Yet from their madness these shattered monstrosities spawned progeny to replace them in their pursuit to destroy, and some of these monstrous offspring discovered ways to break through planar boundaries and wander the multiverse freely. The gods initially created only three hekatonkheires, seeking to make the ultimate warriors in order to guard the gates to the Abyss. These three ancient titans still drift in the unknown expanses between planes—the hekatonkheires that now walk the worlds are their lesser spawn. But these so-called “lesser” titans remain almost unimaginably powerful themselves. They have no knowledge of why their forgotten ancestors were originally banished, and so they wander in search of answers, all the while destroying entire worlds. They are warped engines of mayhem, their existence based wholly on the devastation of life and anything that might remind them of their age-old war against the gods, having inherited only the haunting ghosts of such memories from their ancestors. Those hekatonkheires who have emerged back into the multiverse have done so in different realms, and to date, no record of any two of these spawn meeting one another exists. It is fortunate that only one hekatonkheires is encountered on a world at any given time, as even scholars cannot fathom the power that would arise out of two or more of the titans’ collective strength. They traverse the planes alone, caring not for allies of any sort until they can remember what their purpose was when they were born eons ago. Though hekatonkheires are as intelligent as the rest of their titan relatives, they wander with such destructive and seemingly mindless intentions that they spare no time in communicating with other creatures, especially those that would beg for mercy. The hekatonkheires were created to destroy, and so that is all they desire to do; the crushing blows of their fists and the goring slashes of their weapons speak for themselves. They serve no master, and halt their otherwise endless rampage only if called by their true names, which few—if any—mortals know. Those that do know these names speak them only in whispers, for their mere utterance seems to carry with it immeasurable power. A hekatonkheires can only be called via mighty spells such as gate if a conjurer knows the plane the titan is currently on, and only if the conjurer knows the true name of the hekatonkheires it is seeking to call. Only the mad or depraved would dare such a feat, however, as the might of one of these unique goliaths is so massive that the being cannot be controlled, and even if it is banished back to the realm from whence it came, it is never long before the hekatonkheires sets its sights on the world it visited so brief ly, if only to sate its lust for destroying it. Each hekatonkheires has 50 heads and 100 arms so that one is never caught off guard. The stones that it hurls with its 100 hands are as big as boulders, and those who have seen a hekatonkheires hurl such rocks and lived to tell the tale have said that it is as though an entire mountain is falling from the sky. In addition to their unworldly strength, hekatonkheires are known for their awesome control over the powers of lightning and thunder, and an individual hekatonkheires’s arrival is often prefaced by an abrupt and tumultuous storm in the area. Like all titans, hekatonkheires are immortal, and do not die unless they are slain. A hekatonkheires is 50 feet tall and weighs 25 tons.