Miner Genie [Tasked]

Generations of forced labor below ground have compressed these former dao into something barely recognizable. A miner genie is as broad as it is tall, short enough to squeeze through cramped shafts, with massive limbs and hands that end in enormous digging claws. The claws are so oversized that the creature can no longer feed itself with them, so it eats by rooting with a small snout like a beast. Its skull is shaped like a bullet and it has no hair at all.

These genies chew through rock steadily with their claws and cannot wield weapons. The claws never stop growing: a miner that goes more than a week without digging finds them curling back into its flesh, leaving it crippled.

Daily it may use dig, faerie fire, water breathing (for flooded workings), and detect metal or mineral, once each. Like its dao ancestors it can also turn to a dusty gaseous form once daily, slipping along cracks and seams to scout. It has a 75% chance to sense poison gas or a shaft about to give way, and stone weapons cannot hurt it.

Its most fearsome trick is collapse. With one blow, a miner genie can bring down any shaft it dug itself, dropping a stretch of ceiling as large as 1,500 square feet. Everyone in the area saves vs. death magic, taking 6d10 points of damage on a failure and 1d10 from flying chips and debris on a success. The genie itself is unharmed by the cave-in.

Miners keep to dusty, poorly lit tunnels where no free genie or slave can witness how low they have fallen. They are sullen and self-pitying, given to sudden explosions of fury, and they live alone for life, going out of their way to avoid one another.

They refuse to breed, unwilling to hand children over to the wizards who own them. That same childlessness makes them unexpectedly tender with young dao, and noble dao sometimes leave illegitimate offspring in their care. Those children grow up in the miners' gloomy, hopeless warrens until their parents judge it safe to claim them. A few, left too long, have turned into miner genies themselves.

Miner genies are a fairly new kind of tasked genie. The dao employ them, but evil wizards appear to have made them. Because they feed on stone, simply staying alive carves out tunnels.

They know they are too weak alone to destroy the mages who bred them, but those wizards do not always hold them under magical binding, so revolt is a standing possibility. The miners also nurse an unreasonable grudge against the dao for not rescuing them, even though the dao are powerless against those cruel spellcasters.

Some spiteful wizards argue that every dao ought to be remade this way, since miners are smaller and easier to control. Had the miners come from a slave race the dao might find them funny. Because they are kin, many dao see them as an abomination to be wiped out once the wizards' grip is broken.