Agony Beetle

It looks like a plain black scarab, its shell veined and banded in darker lines over a pair of small wings. Six hooked legs let it cling to skin, and its long snout hides a retractable tendril. Eyeless, it senses vibration with two stubby antennae.

It preys only on man-sized or smaller vertebrates. When it climbs onto someone, the DM secretly rolls an Intelligence check; a roll under the character's Intelligence means he feels it crawling. Sleeping, magically held, fighting, casting, using psionics or otherwise concentrating hard means no roll, and the beetle goes unnoticed.

At the spine it extends a tendril slick with numbing bile and makes an attack roll, ignoring any armor it is under, to pierce the skin. Once the tendril enters the spinal column, the victim can do nothing but thrash and scream.

Through its unique cannibalize other ability and psionic drain, it turns 1 Constitution point per round into 10 PSPs, feeding only on Constitution and pain. The victim dies at 0 Constitution, or in 1d12+5 rounds if it has no Constitution score. Sated or not, the beetle stays until its host dies, and only someone else can remove it, so a lone victim is doomed.

Its telepathic devotions are contact and mind blank, backed by the science mind link. In the metapsionic discipline it knows two devotions: cannibalize other, a special ability with no cost, and psionic drain, which costs nothing while it is tapped into a spine.

Mostly a crawler, it can flutter up to 6 feet and leap 3 feet straight up. It lurks near water where prey gathers, takes only the odd sip of water, attacks its own kind, and often loses to better-armed insects.

Tales claim the first ones escaped a sorcerer tyrant's torture chamber; more likely such places attract them. They are inedible. Halflings sometimes sling them into trespassers' clothing, which shortens the hunt without spoiling the meat.