Astereater [Gazer Abomination]

Picture a large gazer tyrant with no eyestalks and a hide that looks and feels exactly like rock. All that remains of the family look is one big central eye and a wide mouth of pointed teeth. Its own language has only a handful of words, and it seldom uses them. Proud, brilliant gazer kin flatly deny any kinship with this dull, magicless relative.

With eye and mouth shut, its stony skin shrugs off everything short of magic or truly mighty blows, and it passes for an asteroid: within 30 feet there is a 50% chance an observer is fooled, and beyond that range nobody can tell. Too slow to flee a losing fight, it picks targets carefully, lurking at the fringe of an asteroid field until someone drifts close.

Its bite deals 2d4. If the attack roll beats the needed number by 5 or more (say, 14 when it needs 9), a victim no bigger than the astereater is swallowed. Stomach acid deals 1d6 per round. Only a captive already holding a small weapon can fight back, against AC 5, and dealing 12 points to the stomach gets him spat out. While anyone is inside, the astereater cannot attack.

Spiteful and cruel like all gazer kin, astereaters cooperate with nobody unless it greatly profits them. Very rarely one takes command of a battered, understrength platoon of hippo-headed mercenaries, never more than 10 strong; the arrangement is closer to slavery, and nobody knows why they choose these soldiers in particular.

Gazer tyrants already wage wars of extermination on their own kind, but they reserve special loathing for astereaters, seeing them as hideous mistakes of creation to be destroyed at any cost.

These carnivores eat anything, with a taste for thinking prey such as humans and elves. Natural armor leaves them no real predators, but intelligent hunters go after them for their stomachs. They keep no hoard, yet older ones often carry dozens of coins, weapons, scrap metal, and sometimes magic items and potions, since glass and ceramic vials do not digest either.