Bhut

By day a bhut (pronounced bah-HOOT) looks like any normal person. At nightfall scales creep over its skin, its hair goes wild, and its fingers and teeth sharpen into claws and fangs. Some scholars file bhuts with the undead or the lycanthropes, but they belong to neither: clerics cannot turn them and their condition cannot be spread. They speak Common plus their own tongue.

Bhuts favor trickery and move in perfect silence. Their aura defeats detect evil entirely, while know alignment is fooled into reporting lawful good. They save as 10th-level fighters.

A bhut fights with claws and an ice-cold bite. Anyone bitten saves vs. paralysis or goes numb for 1d4 rounds, automatically losing initiative and taking -2 to hit while it lasts. Though turning has no effect, bhuts share the usual undead immunities to sleep, charm, hold, poison and gas. Only magical weapons harm them, and a single blow from a blessed weapon slays one outright.

Bhuts haunt the fringes of human towns as clans of blood relatives and in-laws, hiding behind a harmless cover (monks, wandering performers, a quiet family at the edge of town) and mixing with neighbors only in daylight.

An elder, usually the patriarch or matriarch, rules by fear and loyalty, dividing food and loot. The elder also decides when to relocate, before too many vanishings invite questions, and what new identity to adopt. The aura frustrates magical prying, but circumstantial evidence eventually catches up.

Spellcasters are very rare, nearly always wizards or shamans/witch doctors, topping out at 9th and 7th level respectively. A lone bhut met far from home has a 40% chance of bonus Type Q treasure (1d4 gems) on its person.

Clans pick off the lonely and vulnerable: a stranger who might simply have moved on, or a drunk everyone assumes died in a ditch. Humans are the staple food; demihumans, whose communities are hard to infiltrate, are a prized treat.

Bhuts breed within the clan, and females can also bear children to human men, usually by deceit; the offspring are always bhuts. Legend claims an angry goddess cursed a town that defiled her temple, scattering its people as the first bhuts, their freezing bite a lasting mark of her cold wrath.