Dune Freak

Dune freaks are slow-witted humanoids with bony, wedge-shaped heads, small ears flattened against the skull, and deep-set, beady eyes protected from grit by clear membranes. A ridge of fin runs down the spine; it is a sensitive organ that reads faint tremors in the sand, letting a dune freak locate a lone walker up to five miles away.

The desert sun blinds them by day. At night even starlight lets them see as well as a human at noon, but they lack infravision, so pitch blackness leaves them helpless as any human.

A dune freak burrows under its target and strikes upward with sharp claws, imposing a -3 penalty on the victim's surprise roll. It keeps fighting from inside the sand as long as possible, giving opponents -2 to hit. If both claws connect, it holds the victim still and bites. The bite does no damage itself, but the venomous saliva forces a save vs. paralyzation; failure freezes the victim in place for 1d4 rounds. One round after the paralysis takes hold, the dune freak hauls its prey under the sand, where suffocation deals 1d4 per round.

Dune freaks inhabit any deep sand, from dunes to the alluvial fans at canyon mouths, hunting in packs of two to twelve led by the biggest and most aggressive. They can walk upright over other ground but are badly exposed there and avoid fighting at all costs, so they seldom leave the sand.

These nomads keep moving through the wastes, and their passage is often marked by dead plants whose stalks still stand after the roots were chewed away. They also eat meat: dune hulks, shellback lizards, scale-runners, elves, dwarves, halflings and almost anything else, though never pack insects.