Bi-nou

A bi-nou is a rough stone pillar with two stubby, jagged arms ending in spiked claws, nearly impossible to pick out among real stalagmites. Common bi-nou stand 5 to 7 feet tall, weigh 600 to 1,000 pounds, and range in color from pale off-white to deep gray, choosing caves whose rock matches them. Having no mouths, they talk telepathically in their own tongue and in that of the drow.

A bi-nou goes unnoticed 70% of the time. Blind and deaf in the usual sense, it reads heat and vibration with a bat-like sonar that maps the shape and size of anything within 80 feet and tells the living from the inert. Invisibility, darkness, light and similar effects impose no penalty, and its alien mind shrugs off psionics and all mind-affecting magic.

Bi-nou never coordinate; each simply kills whatever enters its cave, though some wait until prey is within 40 feet to study it. Many open with innate magic, using dig, slow, wall of stone and stone shape once each per day at 10th-level wizard ability. In melee it swings two limbs; if both hit one target, the victim is pinned against its body and takes 1d8 extra damage per round until it breaks loose (a bend bars/lift gates roll), kills its captor, or suffocates.

Despite natural magic resistance, certain spells are deadly: passwall stuns one for 1d4 rounds, rock to mud kills it instantly, and stone shape heals it like a heal spell, leaving it short only 1d4 hit points.

Bi-nou hate warm-blooded life, especially the humans and humanoids who steal their eggs, and attack even against long odds; only the sick and the very young hold back. Sages think they make a game of the killing, egg thieves above all.

Loners are rogue young or exiles. Family clans obey their largest member in all but combat; the leader picks the lair, assigns egg warmers and punishes lapses. A clan holds 2-8 faceted, gem-hard eggs worth 100-1,000 gp each. Drafty, damp caves sharpen their senses, and their lairs fill with cast-off arms and armor, which they set on stone-shaped pedestals as bait for adventurers. A clan threatened by numerous drow may ally with them, serving as sentries or tunnel guards and devouring any outsider, drow included.

A bi-nou feeds by flowing over a body and absorbing its flesh, which ruins most gear, though magic items usually survive. Duergar and other dwarven builders use dead bi-nou as building stone, and dwarves hunt the clans for eggs and loot. Chilling an egg for hours kills the young and preserves its gemlike look; young eggs are small and bright, old ones large and dull. Some sages blame drow experiments for the race; others credit a mad archmage seeking guardians, arguing drow never shape life from crude stone.

Rockworms are kin shaped like armed stone serpents that cannot stand and crawl clumsily on their jagged arms. Sages call them a rejected earlier version, but in truth both races came from separate experiments run at the same time. Rockworms hate anything that walks, raid bi-nou for territory and kills, and never hide, trusting their nearly impervious hide to wear prey down. They brood their own eggs, leaving only to hunt nearby; dwarves fear them more, since dim as they are, they kill more readily.

Rocklords are bigger, heavier-limbed and able to stand or slither, with hides so dense they are very hard to wound and blows that hit enormously hard. Perhaps they are ancient rockworms. They lay no eggs, shun their own kind and never fight over caves. Subterranean races send war bands to kill them carefully, prizing the hide, tougher than any other bi-nou skin, for building barriers. Some dwarven smiths claim rocklord-skin maces carry +3 damage and +1 attack bonuses by nature, but each takes triple the normal time to craft.