Dusanu

Also called the rot fiend, the dusanu is a cunning, terrifying horror that stalks the remotest wilds. It looks like a yellowed human or humanoid skeleton caked in mold and often draped in rotten rags. Blue light flickers in its eye sockets, and the air around it is thick with the spores of its dry rot. Sages and wizards have tried to talk with dusanu, without any recorded success.

Dusanu fight cleverly, raking with two mold-crusted claws for 1d8 apiece. Packs try to ring their prey so that their spore clouds overlap. Every rot fiend in combat fills a 5-foot radius around itself with spores, and each human, demihuman or humanoid inside must save vs. poison or take another 1d8 and become infected.

Their spongy, mold-soaked bones soak up impacts. Nonmagical weapons deal just 1 point of damage per hit, and magical blunt weapons such as maces and hammers deal half; other magical weapons do full damage. The mold does not conduct electricity, so electrical attacks of every kind have no effect.

A dusanu is really a fungus colony living in a skeleton, and its shared group mind supplies its intellect and will. Mold fills every crevice except the eye sockets, where waste gases escape and produce the blue glow.

Infection is how rot fiends breed. For 1d3+1 days a victim shows nothing but an itchy rash, though cure wounds spells do not work on him. Then yellow mold bursts from his skin, and each day he must save vs. death; one failure means he is overgrown and dies within two hours. Cure disease destroys the spores if cast any time before death. After a dormant 1d3 days, the mold raises the corpse as a new dusanu, with none of the person's memories, personality or abilities.

Rot fiends travel in packs of 1d3+1 and are almost never met alone. They seem to signal one another with spores and can sense their kin up to 10 miles away. Nomadic, they claim no lair, roaming deep forests and swamps far from people and shunning settlements except to hunt.

From time to time a dusanu must refresh its colony by spraying spores onto a carcass, rotting log or other dead matter. The new mold devours it, then releases revitalized spores that consume the old colony to form a fresh one, while the spent mold dies once its food is gone. A rot fiend can eat through a body or trunk its own size in under three hours this way.