Choker

A choker is a nasty little cave dweller with mottled gray or stone-brown skin and a roughly human shape. Its head and torso are as small as a baby's, but its arms, legs and fingers are absurdly long and thin; fully stretched, an adult would stand almost 6 feet tall. The limbs are tentacle-like, held up by cartilage rather than bone and knobbed with many joints, and the cartilage in the fingers pokes through the skin as stiff, razor-sharp edges. That lack of support gives it a bowlegged, rubbery lope. It is not entirely boneless, though: it has a skull, spine and ribs. Chokers are dimly intelligent and speak a crude language.

Chokers creep through the fissures, dry underground riverbeds and air shafts around dwarven and other subterranean diggings, hunting for gaps that overlook places where dwarves, humans or humanoids walk. There they wait for someone alone. The first grab deals 1d4 damage, and after that the strangling does 1d8 automatically each round. Nothing breaks the hold except killing or disabling the choker.

Chokers dislike long fights. If the victim struggles too hard, or is still alive after 2-6 rounds, the choker lets go and flees. Once its prey is dead it slices the body into portable chunks with its finger blades and carries them off. If it misses its ambush or is cornered, it slashes with those fingers for 1d4 damage per attack.

Their caution can be used against them. Goblins and dwarves in choker country bang weapons on shields and make a racket to scare them off, though the noise sometimes draws in something far worse.

Chokers are too primitive to make or use tools, but their fingers can cut through solid rock, and their boneless limbs let them wriggle through holes too small even for a goblin.

Being shy, they would rarely find mates without their keening call, an extremely irritating whine to humans and others, which males and females alike send echoing through the caves. A choker that hears a likely partner answers, and the two keen back and forth, drawing closer until they meet. The female gives birth to a litter of two to six some months afterward. Parents and young remain a family for three years while the offspring mature, and then the adults go their separate ways in search of new partners.

For its slight weight a choker burns calories at a furious rate, so it is always hunting and eats fast; one goblin feeds it for about two days. Goblins are its favorite meal by far, though it will eat dwarves, humans and others.

Goblin legend claims chokers descend from a goblin band that, in hard times, fell to cannibalism, the young eating the old. As their minds twisted, so did their bodies, the arms stretching and the fingers turning to steel so they could better seize and throttle prey. In time they stopped eating each other but never lost their taste for ordinary goblins.