Fachan [Forgotten Realms]

A fachan has one leg ending in a round foot pad with six evenly spaced toes, one arm jutting from the middle of its chest, and one eye centered in its face. Its skin ranges from dark gray-brown to mottled green, but its hair is always blue-black, and in many other ways it resembles ogres and orcs. Though it looks clumsy, it is quick and agile: it hops easily across 10-foot gaps, vaults a 6-foot barrier from a standing start, and can spring upright from prone in a single segment.

Fachans love to catch enemies off guard and terrify them from the first moment. Their extraordinarily sharp hearing means they are surprised only on a 1 in 6, which usually gives them time to set up an ambush.

A favorite tactic is to lie half sunk in marsh water. When a foe comes within 7 feet, the fachan launches itself with its powerful leg and rams with its rock-hard skull for 1d6 damage against targets with AC worse than 2; the victim must save vs. petrification or be stunned, repeating the save each round until it succeeds.

Its one arm can wield any weapon except two-handed weapons, bows or polearms. Clubs and flails are typical, though axes and swords are spreading. It can also bite with filthy, rotting teeth for 1d3; the bite also delivers venom that freezes muscles for 1d4 rounds unless the victim succeeds at a +2 save vs. poison. Once a victim goes down, fachans push it under any nearby water to drown it quickly.

Civilized races shun fachans for their appetite for human and demihuman flesh and their habit of toying cruelly with prey rather than killing it cleanly. They dwell in swamps and wetlands in half-submerged lodges like beaver dens, built in rings. A typical tribe has about 30 fachans in roughly six lodges, with the chieftain's, the biggest, at the center. Though lodges average 20 feet across, they are hard to find: there is a 10% chance per lodge of spotting one within 50 feet, or 15% for a ranger.

On a prime world they have never been seen farther north than certain western swamps, but they are growing more common in warm southern marshes. The largest known concentration is a cluster of tribes in a great southern spider-infested swamp, and rumor places even more, and stranger kinds, in remote southern jungles across the sea.

Properly treated and enchanted, the foot pads of two fachans yield a pair of boots of striding and springing, and their hearing organs help in brewing potions of clairaudience. Orcs tell of their one-eyed god 'blessing' them with offspring that were 'half of what their parents were, yet more'; fachan faces strongly resemble images of that god, and they are sometimes called the one-eyed god's kin.