Monitor

Within a crystal shell or on the Outer Planes, a monitor appears as a golden-skinned centaur with wings, its eyes and hair burning like red fire. In the flame-sea alone it becomes a silver pegasus with ice-blue eyes and mane. Both forms move at the same speed. Besides their own complex language and common, they know every tongue spoken by the evil races of the void and flame-sea.

Monitors fight when they must but usually offer foes a chance to surrender first. A centaur-form monitor has Strength 17 and swings a two-handed flame tongue twice per round, dealing 1d10 to small or man-sized foes and 3d6 to larger ones. The blade is +1, rising to +2 versus regenerators, +3 versus birds and creatures that use cold or burn easily, and +4 versus undead. In pegasus form it may exhale cone of cold, as a 10th-level caster, up to three times daily. In either form they can also kick with both forehooves for 1d8 each, but they find this undignified and save it for desperate moments.

Beyond their magic resistance they are immune to every enchantment/charm spell.

At 0 hit points a monitor falls, surviving 1d4+1 rounds, during which it lets out a piercing keen that tells every monitor in the same crystal shell who is dying, where, and what its killers look like. Content, it then dissolves with its sword into a puff of golden smoke.

Monitors patrol in squads whose command rotates among all members, enforcing lawful good ideals everywhere: punishing evil, rescuing the helpless, shielding the innocent. Selfless, fair and fearless, they meet impossible odds calmly. One story tells of a monitor surrounded by vorthani pirates who, asked for last words, announced they were all under arrest for piracy, murder and menacing an officer of the patrol, and offered mercy for surrender. When the fighting ended, she had won.

Diplomacy is not their gift. They see only right and wrong, find compromise repugnant, and like to say that shades of gray always hide some black. Monitors have been known to save halfling thieves from mind reavers and then hand the thieves to the law.

With mind reavers, web-eel slavers and gazer tyrants loose in the void, few dare alienate them; monitors are mocked constantly, yet called first when real evil rises.

Though they look like handsome centaurs of both sexes, monitors do not breed, and no young has ever been seen. Some scholars think they are departed paladins whom good gods rewarded with this calling; cynics say they are the paladins who fell short and got stuck patrolling space. They require nothing to breathe, eat or drink, but may share a meal to put others at ease, and then only vegetarian fare.