Bat [Ravenloft]

No realm has more bats than the misty dread realm, where every familiar variety, from common to giant, huge and mobat, lives in one domain or another. Two kinds, though, exist nowhere else.

Sentinel bats are drawn to powerful undead and serve them the way familiars serve wizards. They match common bats in size and color but usually bear a mark of their master: a bat serving a vampire with a silver crown crest might grow a gray, crown-shaped patch of fur. Their eyes are deep black, glowing like red sparks whenever the master looks through them. With clicks and ultrasonic whistles they can talk to and command ordinary or giant bats, giving the master a vast spy network made entirely of bats.

They avoid fights and flee danger, often ordering other bats to screen their escape. When they do strike, they swoop and bite for 1d4, and they share their master's signature powers. A sentinel serving a wight, for instance, drains one level per hit, shrugs off all but silver or magical (+1 or better) weapons, and ignores sleep, hold and charm. It never passes on the power to create undead, so its victims do not rise as wights, and its drain is weaker: lost levels return at one per day, or through remove curse or atonement.

Any free-willed, intelligent undead may call for one through the dark powers of the realm, once per decade, and keep only one at a time. It must ask at midnight beside a bat roost under a full moon, then return at the next full moon, when one transformed bat flies to it. From then on it may see through its pet's eyes at will; otherwise the bond works like find familiar. Since the bat's death can kill its master, sentinels are rarely risked.

They are ordinary bats empowered by the realm's dark forces, with keen sonar and eyesight and a diet of insects. Their bodies are valued ingredients in potions and devices granting power over undead.

Made with animate dead, usually by necromancers or evil priests, skeletal bats are to bats what skeletons are to men: mindless animated bones, often kept as guards. They claw for 1d3 and radiate fear, so that every onlooker must make a fear check, with +1 per complete set of 3 Hit Dice; a 5th-level character gets +1. They follow only short, clearly worded orders of two or three ideas at most, so they are given simple jobs. Their bones can go into making bone golems.