Caller in Darkness

The Caller is not one creature but a multitude of ghosts caught in a supernatural whirlwind on the Ethereal Plane, overlapping the ruins of the ancient fallen city. In the physical world it has no form and acts only through psionics. Seen from the Ethereal, it is a vast vortex packed with shrieking, spinning spirits. Travelers tell of an unseen power that reaches for susceptible minds, maddening them and driving them to brutal violence. It speaks through images and visions, and its own language is the city's dead tongue.

The Caller sustains itself by harvesting minds. It sweeps a five-mile radius around the ruins, but only for psionicists and wild talents of the races that lived there when the city died: humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, and half-elves. Everyone else it ignores.

Outside the walls, each power such a character uses has a 25% chance, plus the PSPs spent to start and maintain it, of being noticed (roll when the power ends); inside the ruins the base rises to 50%. A noticed character then faces a potent contact attack, once a day outside the walls or twice a day within: save vs. spell or contact is made. A success leaves only a feeling of dread that day. The Caller can track a noticed target anywhere in range on the surface, but loses it in the tunnels below the city, and it can work on several victims in one day.

Outside, a contacted victim sees comforting visions of loved ones or whatever he most desires, understands their voices, but answers in the city's ancient language. He saves vs. spell again every hour. Either way he yearns for the ruins; success lets him resist rushing off, but failure sends him marching there at once, ready to kill companions who try to stop him.

Inside the walls the visions turn to horror, replaying the city's slaughter, because the storm feeds on fear. A contacted victim suffers a new vision every half hour and saves vs. paralyzation each time at a growing penalty (-1 on the first, -2 on the second, and so on), losing 1d4 Wisdom on each failure. At 0 Wisdom the Caller compels him to take his own life.

The dread spills onto everyone nearby, regardless of race or talent. Every half hour in the ruins, characters not contacted save vs. paralyzation; after failures equal to one-quarter of their Wisdom (round up), they act as if under a fear spell.

A contacted character who dies inside the walls is drawn into the storm for 100+2d20 years and cannot be raised or resurrected meanwhile. A wish, or another spell able to pluck spirits from the Ethereal Plane, can free him.

The storm was born in the carnage when the sorcerer tyrants brought down the undead dragon king and his city. The vortices channeling their elemental might spun off a separate whirlwind in the neighboring Ethereal Plane, snaring the spirits of the city's dead. Over centuries their psionic power fused into one group mind, and though it holds thousands of souls, it believes itself a single being.

The storm is slowly weakening, and some spirits have slipped free. The Caller reads this as its own death and hunts ever harder for new psionic souls to feed the whirlwind.