Poludnica

She looks like a tall, striking young woman with pale skin and wild, raven-black hair, wrapped in heavy folds of rough white cloth. Her razor-edged sickle, usually caked with old blood, never leaves her hand. Her lips hold a thin, crooked smile and never make a sound. She apparently understands the local human languages but cannot or will not communicate.

A poludnica prefers murder to open battle, relying on stealth and surprise. Anyone in her field between about noon and two in the afternoon risks her attention, and she favors lone victims, which is why field hands who must work through the heat always go in pairs. She turns invisible at will and uses it to gain surprise every time.

She can strike normally with her sickle, but whenever possible she tries for the neck, taking -4 on the attack roll on top of other modifiers. A natural 18, 19 or 20 on such an attempt cuts off the victim's head, killing him outright.

Meeting her eyes is perilous: anyone who does must make a madness check, using the standard gaze attack rules. The GM may pick the madness result, ideally something rooted in the farm country, such as visions of dark, hostile shapes moving through the grain. She can raise a dust devil at will, passes without trace through any farm field, and has 50% magic resistance.

Poludnica haunt the grain fields of the heartland domains, especially those where the valley's common tongue is spoken, and the locals say that anyone caught alone in the fields at midday has earned his fate. They appear almost only at midday during the growing season, vanish over winter and return when new crops sprout. No one is foolish enough to look for them at other hours.

Many villagers think she is a guardian spirit protecting overworked farmers from heatstroke and exhaustion by scaring them out of the fields at noon, and the stories do work: most sensible farmers rest at midday, and only the odd curious child or clueless stranger is lost each year. Her obvious love of blood makes that theory hard to swallow. The wandering seers, and a few morbid scholars, suggest she serves the dread land itself, her spilled blood soaking into the soil to make the harvest richer, a notion that unsettles farmers most when it comes up over a fresh loaf of bread.

She seems to have no role in the countryside's natural order, and sightings are so brief that almost nothing is known of her habits. She appears to be a living, breathing creature, but whether she needs food, water, sleep or air is unknown.