Jungle Stirge

Jungle stirges are close to twice the size of the ordinary kind and poorer fliers for it, slow and awkward in the air and unable to stay up longer than a turn. Their feathers are vivid red; the hanging beak and the pincer feet are a pale yellow-green, and the rear legs are larger and stronger to help with perching. If the DM lets characters wrestle one off, their Strength checks or saves should suffer a penalty for its greater strength.

The jungle stirge attacks with its proboscis as a 4 HD monster. A hit deals 1d4+1, and every round it stays latched it drains another 1d4+1 automatically. It is satisfied only after 15 hp of blood, then flies off to digest.

Its venom is not deadly but is dangerous all the same. Right after the first hit, the victim saves vs. poison, and success brings only a brief reprieve: the stirge keeps pumping venom until the target stops struggling, so another save is required every round at a cumulative -2 (-2 on the second round, -4 on the third, and so on) until the stirge dies, is driven away, or the victim succumbs. A failed save brings paralysis once the next round ends, lasting 2-12 hours; then the victim saves again with no penalty, and a failure adds another 2-12 hours. This continues until a save succeeds or 24 hours have passed.

Its beak is longer and sharper than its cousins' and pierces everything but the finest metal armor. Leather is useless; only full plate or specially made metal suits covering the entire body give full protection. Creatures with natural AC 1 are thick-skinned enough to be immune. The stirges can smell who is invulnerable and will not waste time near them.

Colonies seldom exceed 20. Rather than hanging like bats, they build bird-style nests high in treetops, along ledges, or among overgrown ruins. They are tidier than common stirges and void their waste away from the nest, often beside a drained victim, which makes nests hard to find except by luck and leaves their breeding habits a mystery.

They need steady blood and hunt the jungle's large animals; some native experts say only females drink blood while males live on fruit sap. The biggest concentrations are found in ruined cities, which may hold several colonies. No one has confirmed raising them in captivity, but their fondness for ruins hints that someone once bred them as guards. Dangerous to small parties, they live too far from civilization to be a widespread worry.

Keen smell and 240-foot infravision let them locate suitable prey soon after it enters their territory. A high metabolism means they sleep only a day per 3 hp drained, five days at most, and stealthy attackers impose a -2 on their surprise roll while they are sluggish. If more than half a colony has drunk 12-15 hp each in the past 24 hours, its flight maneuverability drops to class E.

Poor flying keeps their range small, rarely beyond half a mile across. They leave their high roosts only to hunt, and their sole natural enemy is the tree-dwelling constrictor snake that shares their canopy. Even so, they are hard to detect: drained bodies rot quickly in the steamy heat or are hauled off by scavengers.

Jungle tribes prize the venom, stored in two gland sacs in the 'jowls' where beak meets head. Each sac holds 2-12 doses that stay potent while kept in the sac at body temperature, and the venom works only when injected into the bloodstream. The sacs are hard to find and harder to cut out; the DM should pick a suitable skill or proficiency to judge success. The few nests found have contained valuable gems, since the stirges carry home jewelry and other shiny things but no other treasure.