Crimson Shark-Squid

Take the front end of a huge shark, replace its tail and fins with ten trailing tentacles, and you have the crimson shark-squid. The arms make up most of its 75-foot length. It is a uniform deep red from snout to tip, except for flat black eyes and pale pink suckers on the inner faces of its arms.

Twelve rows of razor teeth, each three inches long, fill its jaws, and since biting gets food into its mouth fastest, it bites first, for 3d6, shredding a victim in moments. Two longer, barbed tentacles hit for 2-12 and the other six for 1-6 each.

If biting fails, it grabs. It may focus all eight attacking arms on one target, or each long arm may hold a different foe while the rest keep striking. Once wrapped, a victim takes 2d6 every round automatically. Percentile dice decide pinned limbs: 01-25 both, 26-50 left, 51-75 right, 76-100 both. Held characters cannot cast spells, but with an arm free they may strike the tentacle, at -3 with one arm or -1 with two.

The head has AC 0, the arms AC 5. A normal arm is cut off by 15 points of damage and a long one by 20, counted apart from Hit Dice, and lost arms regrow fully within two weeks. If four or more are severed, the beast dives deep behind an ink cloud 60 feet across, 60 tall, and 80 long that ordinary sight cannot pierce.

Ships up to 40 feet long can simply be hugged and pulled under. Bigger hulls stop dead after one turn of dragging, and six or more arms squeezing for three consecutive rounds deal ramming damage, so the ship floods and sinks.

It is also a psionic wild talent with 86 PSPs, and its phase power lets it slip past nearly any lethal attack. Its attack modes are psychic crush, mind thrust, and psionic blast; for defense it has tower of iron will, mind blank, and mental barrier.

Solitary and half legendary, it may be one of a kind. It needs little food, mostly eating whatever lives on the sea floor and only now and then chasing big prey. It sleeps for long stretches on the bottom, and anyone who wakes it should pray they live long enough to regret it.

Sailors know the tales and roughly where its waters lie. Ships that cut straight across that region on a regular route sometimes vanish, and the survivors ashore blame the monster.

The one known specimen dwells in a hidden inland sea, trapped in their sunken valley when the psionic overlords raised a psionic barrier. It must be at least nine thousand years old. Content now merely to live, it respects the psionic overlords, who reportedly speak with it on occasion.