Chaggrin [Elemental Grue]

Called to the material world, this earth grue usually looks like a yellowish hedgehog, though the skull it wears for a face gives it away at once. It can also become a big mole. It measures a mere two to three feet yet tips the scales at over 140 pounds, and the heaviest reach 210. Its true form is a revolting two-legged, humanlike lump of what looks like wet, knobbly clay, with a lopsided, savage face and tiny eyes that shine with feral light.

A chaggrin can switch at will between mole, hedgehog and natural form, preferring the last on its own plane. In its true shape it can meld into unworked earth or rock, betrayed only by a dark, damp outline that a careful observer might faintly make out; the unwary take -5 on surprise rolls. It cannot pass through stone this way, though, and must claw its way through rock by digging.

It delights in cruelty. Its favorite tactic is to sink its long, keen foreclaws into a victim and simply hang on as the poor creature flails and runs about trying to shake it off. Every round it clings deals another 1d6+6, and while it wears the hedgehog shape, its quills add 1-4 per round against bare skin.

Earth magic is useless against it. Stone shape, passwall, glassteel, wall of stone, earthquake, statue, transmute rock to mud, dig, stone to flesh, move earth, glassee and their like all fail, and any such enchantment that comes within 40 feet of a chaggrin is dispelled, even a permanent one, though magical items are untouched.

Left to themselves, chaggrin eke out a living by eating rich mineral veins. Each belongs to a sprawling family group that may work together a little but quarrels often. Outsiders are rarely welcomed by choice; instead, mates are seized in bloody raids on neighboring clans and must adjust as best they can. A chaggrin that leaves or is cast out can never return, and must kidnap a partner before it can found a clan.

Any found on the material world are exiles, banished for some betrayal and unable to go home. Many enter the service of wicked powers of the deep underworld like duergar or derro, while most drow find them too puny and vile to bother with. Evil gnomes devoted to a malevolent burrowing god treat them as holy and spoil them in subterranean temples.

On their home plane they are pests because they eat valuable minerals, and most intelligent races there wipe them out on sight. A few put up with them; some crysmals render them harmless with psionics and keep them as servants, and some dao enslave them as diggers or watchdogs, though most races think them too spiteful for good workers or trustworthy guards. Certain earth elementals find them tasty and will take enormous pains to catch one. Wizards, especially elementalists, sometimes capture chaggrin to dispel earth magic laid down by their rivals.