Darktentacles

A grown darktentacles is a slick, black, leathery mass the size of a cow that can flatten itself to cover 10'x10' or more. Up to 50 tentacles, usually 36 full-sized, sprout all over it and reach 20 feet. Each bears small shielded eyes with human-quality sight and 140' infravision (70' underwater), and nodes on its hide sense vibration, scent in water, and light and color. Its skin must stay wet or it loses 1 HD per day.

Clever and seemingly sleepless, it baits its waters with treasure and never forgets prey that escaped.

It fights everyone in reach at once, using all its arms without penalty, though at most five can reach one target per round and only two can swing weapons at the same foe. Weapons do normal damage; a single tentacle handles a two-handed weapon with no penalty to initiative or hit rolls. It can use any magic weapon or item not limited to a class that needs no speech or fine work like pressing buttons. A slap does 1d2.

Gripping takes a hit roll but deals no damage on the first round; after that each gripping tentacle constricts for 1-6 a round. Penalties rise with each tentacle holding a victim. One tentacle: -1 to attack. Two: -2 to attack, AC 1 worse, half movement. Three: -3 to attack, AC 3 worse, movement limited to three feet. Four: -4 to attack, AC 6 worse, no movement away. Five: -5 to attack, AC 10 regardless of armor or magic, and nothing but writhing. A held victim needs a Strength check for any action other than attacking.

With four tentacles on a victim, it raises an eye-covered limb before the captive's face for a charm monster effect (save vs. spell negates), three times a day; this is its only way to gain thralls, which take mental orders, lure food and guard it. The same gaze delivers hold monster five times a day, with a -3 save vs. spells against eight rounds of paralysis, usually time enough to drown.

It loves to drown prey. A passive character lasts 1 round per point of Strength underwater, a struggling one half that. Surfacing is possible in a round without attacks; while held it takes two Strength checks, to rise and to free nose and mouth, and failing both means two more checks next round, to stay up and to breathe.

A tentacle hit for 7 or more in one blow, or 14 total, releases its grip and thrashes for a round; 20 points severs it. Its three beak-like mouths do not attack, but anyone shoved into one takes 3-12, and a character walking on the creature has a 10% chance of stepping into one.

Weekly it can form a sphere of force like the 5th-level wall of force spell, but always round, up to 60' in radius, up to 90 yards away and able to pass through trees, earth or water, trapping creatures in a cavern and on the ground above at once. It lasts while the creature concentrates, isolating dangerous foes while it flees or sealing prey in with it.

Native to jungles, where primitive peoples worship them, they have inexplicably spread north into swamps; a secretive good-aligned network counts at least three in a haunted northern marsh and wants them destroyed before they multiply. They favor warm, still water but are unharmed by cold, fast currents.

These solitary hunters eat wetland birds and fish, including shoals over shallow reefs, but only fresh kills of their own. Every two years one travels nonstop for two weeks, moving 16 on its tentacles, then buds off a 2 HD offspring somewhere wild and far from home. Territories are so large that two are never found within five miles of each other.

Its flesh, eyes and ichor are prized components for wall of force and related items. Naturalists once recorded a far weaker strain, guessing at a roper-trapper hybrid; sages think the cataclysm that cast the gods down to walk the world empowered it, and one specimen found in a dead-magic zone reportedly matches the weaker form.