Dark Stalker

Among their stunted followers, dark stalkers are impossible to miss: they are human-sized and tower head and shoulders over the creepers. They are pale and thin, with long, sharp faces, and dress in dark hoods, cloaks, shirts and leggings. Their boots rarely fit, and were most likely stolen.

A stalker's weapon of choice is a short sword coated in dark muck so it never flashes. There is a 10% chance the coating is poisonous or infectious; a victim who fails a save vs. poison takes 14 extra hit points of damage and 1-4 more every round afterward until the effect is slowed or cured. One sword in four carried by a stalker is magical.

Stalkers share the creepers' create darkness power and can also raise a wall of fog twice a day. In battle a stalker adds one fog wall to its minions' darkness but holds back its own darkness and the second wall to cover a retreat. Neither darkness nor fog hinders it.

Mostly it fights through others, steering its creepers with guttural snarls in their unintelligible speech. It treats them as expendable, ordering whole squads into suicidal charges or sacrificing every last one to get away. If cornered, it tries to escape under darkness and fog, since in ordinary light it too is only AC 10, and draws its sword only when that fails.

When a stalker dies it explodes in a blinding blast equivalent to a 3 Hit Dice fireball, with the same effect on gear. Anyone in the area, friend or foe, may take normal damage and flammable objects may catch fire. Some creepers have been seen bolting from a fight when their leader looks mortally wounded.

A stalker is rarely met alone. Roughly one rules every 25 creepers, and each creeper village has at least one. Stalkers never labor. They stand motionless giving orders while creepers wait on them, and they are harsh, cruel masters. Creepers have been seen handing magical items to them, though whether as worship or bribery is anyone's guess.

Their wealth travels with them: each has a 7% chance of carrying a magical ring and a 12% chance of jewelry (1-2 pieces) or gems (2-5), although the death blast often ruins it.

Even less is known of stalkers than of creepers. One theory holds that they are a superior bloodline ruling by birth, as a queen bee rules the hive. Every stalker yet found has been an adult male, so perhaps females and young are hidden still deeper underground. Another idea is that a stalker is a transformed creeper, changed by magic or nature when the old leader dies, with the flash and heat of that death serving as the trigger.