Gonn

The Gonnlingdaah, called gonn for short, look like small gas giants: perfect spheres ringed with colored bands. Inexperienced sailors, fooled by perspective, often take them for distant planets. They never speak, only sing, in their own mysterious tongue or in Common.

These gentle beings fight only to protect good. Unless a foe is truly vicious and hateful of life, they first try to talk, offering to help it abandon violence. If refused, they unleash everything without hesitation.

Their weapon is song, and each gonn can sing every song three times a day. The gentlest and most favored is a soothing melody of pacification: chosen targets save vs. spell at -1 or stop fighting to relax and listen, and 30% of those who fail also drift into a 2d10-turn slumber. Even a successful save leaves the target confused, unable to act for one round.

A lilting ditty works as a 9th-level dispel magic on spells within 240 feet. A single shrill note forces all nonliving matter in 240 feet to save vs. disintegration or shatter, while deafening chosen living creatures for 1d4 rounds. Most terrible is a piercing keen against chosen enemies within 240 feet, for 10d10 sonic damage, halved by a save vs. breath weapon made at -2; anyone who fails must also save their gear vs. crushing blow at -2. They save this for the most destructive foes.

Their preferred choir is a scale of eight, every member performing one song together. A lone gonn's song is weaker, and saves against it carry no penalty. Their music pours from every pore, so silence spells do nothing to them, although enemies standing inside a silence are shielded. No bard can drown them out.

A scale travels in formation behind a leader called the conductor, each member holding one note. Gonn live up to six thousand years, collecting stories and songs. A gonn's true name is a song lasting 1d20 hours, so among short-lived peoples they use brief melodies instead.

They love questions but answer at enormous length in song. A petitioner must usually sit through 1d8 days of continuous music, with a cumulative 10% chance each day of getting the answer. The fee is a story or a song, needing a successful nonweapon proficiency check, or failing that, gems worth 500 gp. Their repertoire also holds legend lore, identify, heal, raise dead and restoration, sung at a price of gems worth 1,000 gp for each spell level plus a song or tale, but anyone they find wounded by evil they heal, rescue and defend for free. They roam constantly and, like some other reclusive void-dwellers, dislike seeing the same visitors twice in a year; finding the same scale again is nearly impossible.

Each century a scale performs a song of perpetuity lasting 1d12 months, which produces 2d4 young. These cannot sing until they mature at five years, and simply hum until then. Gonn work to preserve life wherever they go, and some say a god of lore or a god of music shaped them to fill the cosmos with beauty.