Grillig

A grillig is a small reptilian beast with long arms and squat, bent legs. It knuckles along like a gorilla, swinging its body forward on its arms. Each of its four limbs ends in three talons, prized by spellcasters. They infest jagged country: chasms, caves, mountains.

Folklore holds that grilligs sprang from flat, two-dimensional angles. True or not, nothing with an edge or point harms them; swords, spears and arrows slide straight through. They wear prey down with ambushes and traps, then close in as a group, rearing up on their forelimbs to slash with their foot talons in a blur.

A grillig never fights alone. When all but one of its pack mates on a target are dead, the last either flees or joins another group's attack elsewhere. Cornered before it can escape, it hisses and gnashes but makes no effort to defend itself.

The ram-folk call them 'pests that hunt their hunters.' Pack life revolves around finding something bigger and nastier, killing it, and moving up to the next challenge, settling for lesser prey only when nothing tougher turns up. A lone scout usually finds the quarry, then runs to fetch the pack, which stalks it and softens it up with boulders rolled from ledges, triggered avalanches, or other creatures stampeded over it. They plan these as cleverly as an average human and seem to prize the hunt over survival. Some sages think they simply need superior numbers; one mercenary fiend scholar jeered that a single point never made an angle.

Their breeding is a mystery; new ones simply turn up when numbers fall, however many the ram-folk kill, and hunted packs hide until vigilance slackens. Tribes of ram-folk on the neutral planes carry clubs and hammers because of them, and local tales claim grilligs can step out of sharp corners in buildings or terrain, though this is unproven.

Mages hope to turn grillig hide into armor against edged attacks, but the protection seems to lie in the creature's nature, not its body: at death the lizardlike skin turns brittle and crumbles to dust, and no one has kept one. Their teeth and talons serve in enchanting magical armor and as heads for magical arrows and spears, and rituals reputedly give a weapon 'grillig speed,' granting extra attacks each round. Most often a tooth or talon is added to a shield spell, lengthening casting by 1 segment and granting an extra -1 AC bonus against edged attacks; some mages wear grillig-tooth necklaces for this.