Minor Animator

No one knows what an animator truly looks like. Outside a host it is completely invisible and immaterial; someone able to see invisible things might glimpse a vapor as one is forced out. A minor animator can control only tiny or small objects, which gain no special powers from it. Tipping a clay mug of scalding coffee onto someone is about its usual scale, but it becomes a real menace inside a weapon or other dangerous tool.

It has no language, and magical attempts to talk to it are hopeless. A psionicist who reaches for its mind finds something utterly unlike a human or demihuman intellect and must make a madness check.

Because its hosts are small and its pushing power weak, it gravitates to inherently deadly objects such as daggers, straight razors, garrotes or knitting needles, and avoids open fights. Subtlety is its weapon: a rope slithers around a sleeper's throat, or a kitchen knife drops off a counter point-first into a foot.

As a guideline, its attacks deal no more than 1d4, though exceptions exist. A rope that trips a victim at the top of a staircase can cause much more and may require a save against serious harm.

Like all animators, it is immune to every spell or attack that targets the mind or the body's biology, so charm, hold and poison are useless. What else can harm it depends on its host's material.

Any ordinary item will do as a home, whether rope, bucket, dagger or pillow, but being evil it prefers things that can hurt people. Minor animators are the most erratic and unpredictable of their kind, and they make up for weakness with exceptional malice and cunning. Knowing a frontal attack seldom works, they strike sideways. A thief might wake to find his own dagger planted in the back of a rival in the party, and since detect magic reveals nothing unusual about the blade, suspicion falls squarely on him.

They are clever enough to play dead. Since no one is likely to notice one until it acts, it can simply wait for the ideal moment.

Like its kin it feeds on the emotions, present and lingering, of other creatures, by a process even the greatest sages cannot explain. Almost nothing is known of whether animators interact or have any society, and it seems unlikely. They are not undead, so presumably they reproduce somehow, but there is no evidence of how.