Crimbil

Crimbils are said to be a corrupted line of wood gnomes, and most dark forests have tales of them. A crimbil has a gnome's huge nose and a wiry, lean frame corded with muscle. Its skin is the gray of cold ash and its slate eyes smolder with loathing for anything good. Stiff white hair sticks up in spiky tufts, though many males are close to bald, and beards are trimmed into waxed, pointed goatees with no mustache.

They dress plainly in jerkin and trousers, usually barefoot, sometimes under a pointed gray cap, keeping to black, gray and grubby white. Males may wear bronze torcs, bracers, amulets or heavy earrings set with lapis lazuli. Crimbils speak their own tongue, other gnomish languages and the local human speech, and can make themselves roughly understood by woodland beasts.

These cunning, evil creatures rarely set traps, but trespassers in their woods pay dearly. They watch a party for a while, use distractions to split it up, then fall on the weakest from every direction. They prefer live captives, since they relish torture, but switch to killing blows if prey looks hard to subdue or likely to escape.

They fight with clubs, short swords and spears, and most bands carry nets. Skilled poisoners, they often smear blades with a toxin like Type O poison that takes hold in only 1d4 rounds: anyone cut by a coated piercing or slashing weapon is paralyzed for 2d6 turns unless a save vs. poison succeeds. Clan chieftains may carry magical weapons.

Like wood gnomes, crimbils can hide in woodlands and pass without trace, each at 90% success. Once per day apiece they can also use trip, warp wood, entangle, badberry, and putrefy food and drink.

Crimbils haunt gloomy forests across the misty dread realm, including a cursed, mist-bound domain, dwelling in huge hollow trees joined to musty underground chambers. There they scheme to make humankind suffer, for reasons nobody understands: they kill livestock, burn houses and blight fields. No one has ever seen one smile or laugh. Their pastimes are grim and strange, from eerie piping to roasting living captives in wicker cages.

They trust only their own kind, though they sometimes sell their services to powerful evil beings such as wicked treants and shadow unicorns. More often they keep company with ill-omened animals like hawks, polecats, snakes and wasps, and they ride fallow deer.

Crimbils are omnivores, eating raw meat, ideally from thinking creatures, along with tubers and fungi. Legend claims the dark fey queen once turned their hearts into black garnets as punishment for some ancient crime. No crimbil has ever been taken, living or dead, to prove or disprove it.