Clatter Fiend [Lesser Mercenary]

A clatter fiend has a round body on three legs, five arms ending in stubby four-clawed hands, and an insectile head that can swivel all the way around, letting it reverse direction with startling speed. It is very strong and very stupid, and speaks only by telepathy.

It is never surprised in the gray wasteland. With Strength 20 (+8 damage) it may fight with weapons, but never magical ones. If its first two claws both hit, it has seized the foe and gains +2 to hit that foe, though the two gripping arms cannot attack. A held victim can still fight but cannot move away until it breaks loose with a Strength check against half its current Strength. An armed clatter fiend can parry instead of striking, improving its AC by 2 for each weapon so used; one with three weapons that attacks with one and parries with two is AC -7 that round.

Once a day it can click its mouth pincers in a mad chatter: every creature under 7 HD that hears it must save vs. spell or be feebleminded for 1d6 rounds. It can also cast sleep twice a day and use fear and darkness 15' radius on top of the usual mercenary fiend powers. Nonmagical weapons cannot harm it, and if its body is destroyed it re-forms within a few days.

Native to the gray wasteland, clatter fiends also live in the prison plane and on the volcanic plane, and they fill out much of every mercenary company in the endless war between demons and devils. Their betters abuse them constantly, which makes them vicious, to the race's benefit. Stubborn and hard to command despite their dullness, they fight only when forced and understand nothing of the war or the profits others reap from it. Off duty they drift across the wastes in milling mobs of up to 500, stealing larvae from night hags or waiting for a brawl.

No one knows how clatter fiends come to be, since none has ever been properly studied. One theory holds that mastermind fiends turn disobedient underlings into clatter fiends as a sentence of perhaps a thousand years.