Garmorm

A garmorm is a round, legless bulk around an enormous fanged mouth. Travelers also call it a mindworm or faceworm, because every mind it consumes surfaces as a copy of the victim's face bulging from its flesh. These faces can talk, bite and even cast spells, but above all they sing, and that awful, beautiful choir is the only way the creature communicates.

The garmorm sings throughout a fight. At set points in the song, its main jaws bite for 2d6 and every protruding face bites for 1d4. With five to ten faces, it makes 1d6+5 attacks per round.

Each face has a 10% chance of having been a spellcaster, bearing the spells of a level 2d4+1 wizard or priest, refreshed daily as if the victim still prayed or studied. Only one spell per round can be woven into the song. Absorbed magic items, usually 1d4 of them, also work through the song if they do not require touch, so wands, rods, rings and plenty of other devices function but weapons and staves of striking do not. Each round the garmorm may cast one spell or use one item power along with its bites, or try to absorb a new mind instead.

To absorb, it targets one foe with its main mouth. The victim saves vs. death magic, and magic resistance applies; on a failure his body is pulled in and dissolves, and his face joins the choir. The garmorm gains one Hit Die and one bite, plus his spells and items. It holds at most 10 faces and Hit Dice, though it keeps devouring past that point without further gain. Since the song drives absorption and spellcasting, wise travelers carry silence: a garmorm that cannot sing can do neither.

Slaying it within 10 rounds of an absorption brings the victim back whole inside its belly with 1 hit point, too weak to escape unless cut free. Otherwise he becomes a willing part of the collective for 4d4 weeks, after which the beast loses that face's Hit Die and bite and must replace it. None has ever been found with fewer than five minds, which seems to be a minimum.

It can stay on the Astral Plane while attacking creatures on any plane touching it, seeing both at once. Those who cannot see into the Astral are always surprised, and fighting it requires a magic item or spell; to them it is invisible and its AC becomes 0. Stories of companions eaten by an unseen force, sometimes accompanied by faraway singing, may describe garmorms. They are immune to psionics.

Garmorms are hungry, lonely, selfish and evil. A few roam in small groups, but most keep apart because they are quarrelsome, and even the faces of one garmorm bicker. They drift on the Astral's currents of thought, grazing on its ambient energy like monstrous cattle, and never leave by choice, though they gladly eat travelers on the Prime or an Outer Plane's top layer who stray near the matching astral spot. They hate a certain race native to the Ethereal Plane for reasons nobody understands, and individuals occasionally ally with a vorthani, to what end no one knows.

They feed on any sentient mind and reproduce by budding, splitting off part of their captive choir to form offspring. Sages wonder how much of a garmorm is really the beast and how much the minds it holds. The faces seem content, and those rescued remember nothing. After a kill, experienced travelers cut it open, since items from absorbed victims survive inside for 4d4 weeks; at least two working devices can usually be salvaged.