Murderoid

Murderoids may be the largest creatures in space: living asteroids usually 100 miles long or more, weighing billions or trillions of tons, with their own gravity and an air envelope 1d4 miles deep. The rocky hide, several feet thick, is some shade of deep gray or brown, and craters and low hills serve as eyes and ears. They have no language but signal moods by color, paler for contentment and darker for hunger or anger. Travelers named them for their vicious nature.

A murderoid senses creatures 60,000 miles away and attacks anything smaller than itself. It lures prey down onto its surface, usually opening with a special hallucinatory terrain that makes it look like paradise. Its spells, each usable thrice daily at 14th level, are earthquake, stone shape, dig, grease and hallucinatory terrain, with a range covering its surface and atmosphere.

Once something lands, stone shape folds rock over the vessel or victim to hold it fast, grease and dig keep victims off their feet, and earthquake batters ships. Then mouths split open in the rock and bite. It can form up to three mouths per square mile and twelve in total; each withstands 30 damage before destruction and regrows in 30 minutes. Earthquake does not affect it, but move earth leaves a square-mile patch of it stunned for 1d6 rounds; with stone to flesh the stun lasts 1d4 turns.

They exist to eat, roaming space endlessly with no territory and treating all smaller life as food. They are solitary; rare groups are juveniles under 50 miles long. Status matters from youth and is measured in captured ships. A murderoid eats most of a ship but leaves a piece on its skin as a trophy, and the oldest wear the most. Sometimes a trophy keeps sending out a distress signal through flashing lights or glowing magic, drawing more victims.

They mate every 50 years and produce a single egg laid on a small asteroid, which the hatchling eats and replaces, to the dismay of travelers who thought it lifeless. An infant has 10 Hit Dice and only three mouths; after five years it is a 50 HD adult. They live about 6,000 years, growing roughly a mile in diameter per century.

Void whales and radiant dragons are favorite foods, and starfaring dwarves are their natural enemies. Evil humanoids sometimes hunt infants and try to charm them for their own ends. Murderoid skin serves as a component for hallucinatory terrain and stone shape.