Flowfiend

Most travelers who tumble or are pushed into the flame-sea between crystal shells simply turn to stone. Some wicked ones are instead claimed by a mighty, shadowy evil that reshapes them into lesser copies of itself, and so a flowfiend is made.

A flowfiend stands on two legs and adds a quarter to a third to its former height, so size varies with the original race. Its sickly yellow skin stretches over grotesquely swollen, knotted muscles. Four brawny arms end in strong hands with long, overgrown nails, and its jaws are packed with razor teeth. Traces of the victim's old face sometimes remain. It speaks its own warped dialect of Common, as twisted as its body.

Flowfiends love a fight and ambush every ship they can, swimming through the flame-sea hunting meat and recruits. Each of its four claw arms deals 1d12 damage and its bite 2d10, and it has 18/50 Strength. A favorite trick is to hold a victim with two arms while the others and the jaws tear it apart: if two arm attacks hit the same target, that target is pinned, after which the bite and remaining arms hit automatically. A pinned victim may try once per round to break free under the normal punching and wrestling rules.

That brutality is reserved for victims unsuitable for conversion. Any flowfiend can use know alignment, detect magic, detect good and detect evil, one at a time and at 7th level of ability, to find candidates; only evil or chaotic neutral beings qualify. These it tries to pin and carry off, and if a candidate struggles it is beaten with nonlethal damage. Flowfiends often climb aboard by gripping the hull with claws and teeth. Groups of more than three spread out to board from several sides and encircle the crew, and they sometimes just hurl sailors over the rail to packmates waiting below.

The flame-sea's calcifying effect does not touch them, nor do paralyzation, petrification, flesh to stone or hold spells. Starting three rounds after first being wounded, a flowfiend regenerates 2 hp per round, and even a slain one will rise again unless its body is burned to ash.

Nothing of their former lives survives. Flowfiends hunt as a pack devoted to the being they call the Great Sire, which scholars guess is an especially powerful flowfiend of double strength, probably from the Outer Planes. Their highest aim is to bring it captives and meat.

Captives are taken to a hidden spot in the flame-sea that looks like a rocky island but is actually a platform of thousands of calcified castaways, shaped even into ornamental pillars, a raised dais and a 6-foot-square altar. With a victim on the altar, the gathered flowfiends set up a piercing whistle. The Great Sire arrives in 1d10 hours and spends 1d4 turns on the transformation, then departs for its secret lair. The victim rolls system shock: success creates a new flowfiend, failure kills it. Chaotic neutral converts become chaotic evil, and every memory is replaced by a single drive to kill and capture in their master's name.

Flowfiends are sexless and can increase only by taking more people from starships. They need food but never sleep. Why the Great Sire builds this army is unknown, though some fear it means to conquer the void between worlds.