Gray Troll

A gray troll is tall and gangly like its ordinary kin, but its skin, gray or gray-brown, is parchment-dry and peeling and its tangled hair is gray or white. Cold blue sparks glimmer deep in its eye sockets. It sees 150 feet with infravision and climbs with a 75% chance.

It tears into anything near with claw, claw and bite, spreading them over as many as three foes, and never uses weapons or missiles. Every successful bite carries toxic saliva. After 20 minutes the victim saves vs. poison; success ends it, failure brings a coma that lasts until someone neutralizes the toxin. A second save at -2 comes 36 hours later: success means 2d6 damage and waking, failure means death.

Three times a week it may become gaseous for up to six rounds. Changing either way takes a full round that does not count toward the limit, during which it cannot defend itself. As a gas it must stay within 5 feet of the ground, moves at double speed and is harmed only by magic and magical weapons.

It regains 6 hit points per round starting the fourth round after injury and takes no damage from acid, cold or electricity. Fire deals double damage that never regenerates, and gray trolls attack anyone carrying fire to put it out. Edged weapons sever limbs on a natural 18-20; a lost limb fights for up to five rounds and rejoins the body if the fight ends by then, otherwise it turns to dust.

Sunlight is equally lethal. Forced into it, a gray troll flees for shade, fights as if blinded (-4 to attacks, saves and AC) and takes 5 unregenerable damage per round; at 0 hit points in daylight it withers to gray and black ash. Other light does not affect it. Food dropped in its path distracts it 75% of the time.

Gray trolls start as normal trolls fully level drained, usually by undead. Fewer than 5% survive; the negative energy reacts oddly with their regeneration. The troll lies in a 24-hour coma, immune to sunlight during that time, and wakes with all its new traits. It is not undead, but its tie to the Negative Material plane leaves it sterile and strips any spellcasting. It lives 25 to 75 years before crumbling to dust. Most roam the deep underworld alone, hate-filled and hungry, though some take over their old tribe or a new one.

Gray trolls exist to eat and destroy. Since they are alive, clerics cannot turn or command them. Their rare dust fetches high prices for magic of healing and resistance to acid, cold and electricity.