Haun

A haun resembles a fat gray maggot covered in fur and dotted with black or purple warts. Its little face is slimy and bare, with a pair of tiny black eyes above a mouth of serrated teeth. It moves by rippling and jiggling like gelatin, and its organs make constant visible swells beneath the skin. Hauns chatter in hums, growls, clicks, snaps and pops that shift with mood, their main way of talking, and they can also speak silently through mind link.

Normally a haun only slithers slowly, but once per turn it can coil and spring up to 18 feet forward (3d6 feet) or up to 9 feet straight up (1d6+3 feet). It tunnels through ice at half its slithering speed.

Physically a haun is pitiful. The best it can manage is to trip a foe over another haun waiting behind him and bite him once he is down; it cannot reach anything more than 2 feet above it, though once per encounter it can bite with a leap. Hauns avoid melee and much prefer fighting from inside a haundar, steering the giant slug to crush anything in its way.

Psionics are the real threat (Psychokinesis: telekinesis; animate object, inertial barrier. Telepathy: mind link; contact, aversion, repugnance, inflict pain, invisibility). A haun typically stays invisible while using inflict pain or repugnance on enemies, then raises an inertial barrier and projects aversion as it retreats. In place of psionics, a haun has once-a-day uses of suggestion, telekinesis, scare, shield and invisibility. It cannot wear armor or use weapons or tools, but it can animate objects with its mind and spin silk to seal openings, make snug cocoons or store food.

Hauns dwell in branching ice tunnels, sometimes several broods to one large system. Fiercely independent, they acknowledge no leaders and argue endlessly, with frequent short-lived quarrels that reach consensus no more than half the time.

A brood that spots a haundar creeps close, leaps onto its tail and burrows beneath the armor, usually hollowing a chamber beneath the heaviest plates on its back. That area is mostly fat, so the slug takes no harm. The hauns cut slits in the carapace like arrow loops in a castle wall. They also raid sha'az nests for eggs, whose contents weaken resistance to mental contact: each egg grants automatic success on psionic contact and mind link (a roll of 20 still fails) at half the normal PSP cost for a week. Injected into a haundar's blood, the eggs let the brood keep a mind link with the slug and teach it that disobedience brings pain. Over years the haundar becomes completely docile. Owning one is a mark of status among broods.

Hauns eat lichen and rotting meat, sliding through shallow tunnels in search of carcasses that predators have left behind.