Nightcrawler [Ravenloft]

At a glance a nightcrawler could be a lost child, but not for long. Its skin is blotched green and brown, rotting rags hang from its small frame, wet hair is pasted to its scalp, and its watery gray eyes have no pupils. Weeds and algae cling to it, and it stinks of the marsh. The bloated skin visibly squirms, because beneath it is only bone and swamp life: frogs, small snakes, crabs, crayfish, leeches, water bugs and earthworms, forever crawling out of its mouth and torn hide.

It still speaks its old language, though the voice, produced by vermin rather than throat, is slurred and laced with hisses and clicks.

Its little teeth bite for 1-4. In its home swamp it climbs walls, hides in shadows and moves silently with an 80% chance each.

Like other undead it shrugs off sleep, charm and hold, but the living swarm inside it leaves it open to poison, paralyzation, disease, suffocation and life-affecting magic. Holy water and holy symbols do nothing; priests turn it as a shadow.

Its flesh is no tougher than a corpse's. The trouble is regeneration: inside the swamp, fresh vermin rush in to fill every wound, restoring 2 hit points per round. At 0 hit points or below it collapses but keeps mending, and rises again once back to half its starting hit points or more.

Track every point of damage it suffers. When the running total hits twice its original hit points, the skin is too ruined to hold together, regeneration stops, and it dies normally.

These creatures never leave the swamp estate of the bayou domain's zombie lord, and they avoid his crumbling plantation house in favor of the wildest marsh. There they play without end, searching for adults to join their games. They are wholly evil but think like children, flipping between sweetness and atrocity; a traveler may hear a small voice asking if she is its mama and whether it is time to play.

Their master can summon them with a thought from anywhere in the domain, using them as shock troops when a job needs some wit and a great deal of terror. They see him as a kind, all-knowing father and will destroy themselves at his word. He alternately pampers them with attention and carrion and tears them apart in fits of rage. They dislike his mindless zombies but cooperate with them on command.

The zombie lord devised nightcrawlers recently, blending his power over both life and death. Only a child who died in his swamp will do; he has no idea why adult corpses fail. A swarm of foul marsh creatures enters the body, devours every soft tissue, then stays inside to fill and animate it.

Unlike most undead they must eat and drink to keep their inner swarm alive, though mud, peat and filthy bog water suffice. Human flesh is the treat they crave.