Grisk [Unique Meazel]

Grisk's rough olive hide is pocked with red sores and blisters. Stiff black hair juts back from his triangular face as though caught in a gale, his slitted eyes gleam like black marble, and his thin mouth all but vanishes until it opens on rows of needle teeth. He wears nothing except one piece of jewelry, unusual for his kind: an earring chained to a jeweled stud in his nose.

He speaks the guttural meazel tongue and, with a heavy accent, the common speech of the mist-shrouded realm. Some claim he can talk to rats, but that may be a myth.

Like all meazels, Grisk is quicker and stronger than his Hit Dice suggest and has an improved THAC0 to match. He claws twice a round for 1d4 each, and the sewer filth on his nails forces anyone hit to save vs. poison at +4 or contract a crippling disease of the kind cure disease removes.

He loves to strangle lone victims under seven feet tall with a knotted cord, but only when he can strike unseen from the rear; his stealth and knowledge of the tunnels often grant him +4 to hit. He jumps onto the target's back, and if the attack succeeds he pulls the cord tight with his 18/50 Strength. Unless he is thrown off within two rounds, the windpipe collapses and the victim suffocates. He releases his hold only to defend himself. Escaping takes a weapon hit, a gouge or a successful throw under the normal unarmed combat rules, with armor imposing -1 to -10 on the victim's attempt.

His thief-like skills are climb walls 88%, open locks 37%, pick pockets 45%, hide in shadows 25%, move silently 33%, find/remove traps 35%, read languages 20% and hear noise 15%. Losing a fight, he simply runs. He builds no traps, but he knows every patch of green slime and pool of gray ooze in the sewers and leads chasers right into them.

Grisk is master of the endless sewers under the capital of the mist-shrouded realm. No one knows who dug them or how far they go; some blame the realm's lich-king or a darker power.

He has been there only about a year. He once lived in caves near a distant kingdom's capital on another world, until a stranger he attacked broke loose and fled. Grisk chased him through so many turns that he lost both the man and his way, and found his natural caverns replaced by masonry tunnels. After days of failing to find home, he settled in. He slaughtered the kobold tribe that lived where two great tunnels met, took their den, and laid out their bones in geometric designs. Now he has forgotten his old home and believes he has always lived here.

From each kill he takes only coins and tosses everything else, magic items included, into an eighty-foot pit floored with a foot of green slime that ruins even enchanted gear. Because slime cannot eat gems, dozens may lie at the bottom for anyone who can survive the slime. What he means to do with his coins is a mystery.

Grisk craves humanoid and human flesh, but few people come down into the sewers, so he lives mostly on rats and vermin. When that diet grows too dull, he slips into the streets at night and drags victims below to torment and kill, their screams echoing through the city.