Astral Searcher

An astral searcher is a hazy, roughly humanoid shell with no mind inside, born from the intense or wounded thoughts of prime-material visitors to the Astral Plane. Violent deaths, destructive spells cast there, and astral battles often spawn them, usually without the source ever noticing. No malice or plan goes into their making.

Whenever a searcher reaches another plane or meets a planar native in the Astral, it attacks. Only living humanoids count as prey. Prime-material travelers in the Astral are safe, shielded somehow by their silver cords, but natives of the Inner and Outer Planes have no cords there and no such protection.

Weapons seem to pass through a searcher's misty form, but they really do hurt it, as do damaging spells. It has 50% magic resistance and can be struck only by +1 or better weapons. Brought to 0 hit points, its will to exist breaks and it fades into harmless vapor.

It strikes at the mind, so every target counts as Armor Class 5; only rings of protection and high Wisdom bonuses change that. It must touch its victim with spectral claws, delivering a burning whip of psychic force that can be blocked psionically just like id insinuation.

The damage is wholly mental, though the victim's mind supplies real-feeling pain and wounds. It fades fast, recovering 1d8 points per turn. Still, it counts. If the searcher lands a blow that brings the target to 0 or fewer hit points, the target sinks into a coma while the searcher slips inside and wipes out the psyche, which amounts to death. Searcher damage adds to damage from other sources, but if something else delivers the killing blow, the searcher cannot claim the body.

Wandering the Astral, searchers hunt for thin places where the Astral touches other planes, crowding there until the stress lines align and let them through. Such tears occur naturally, and they also open briefly (1d6 rounds) wherever travelers enter or leave the plane. They also gather around color pools opening onto the Outer Planes or the Prime Material, but cannot pass through unless a planar being goes first.

Before it has a body, a searcher is lifeless, nothing but loose emotion. Once it takes one over, the victim's mind and personality are gone. The searcher gains the body's physical abilities and full hit points, since all damage from the attack vanishes, and fills it with the emotion that created it, whether fury, dread, resolve or something else. The body can make sounds fitting that mood but cannot speak, and it loses every spell and skill. The searcher's first goal is to rebuild the mood of its birth: one born of a wizard's fear of capture by the vorthani would keep trying to spread terror, believing that feeling to be the natural state of the multiverse.

Because the brain it lives in was trained once, it relearns quickly. Language and nonweapon proficiencies return within hours, most other tasks take a quarter of the usual time or less, and it can even regain class abilities and levels. Memories and life history never return, like permanent amnesia. It will accept a name and may drift into pieces of the dead person's former life, but it never abandons its obsession and can never gain new experience levels.

Searchers have no substance until they possess a body. One can be exorcised, but the victim's psyche is already gone, and nothing short of a wish can raise or restore the character. A body emptied of its searcher has no essence at all and may draw fiends or other bodiless beings looking for a vessel.

Stories tell of planar travelers who came home with their pasts erased and lived for years among family and friends as mental invalids, until some knowledgeable visitor finally revealed what had really happened.