Q'nidar

A q'nidar looks like an enormous bat with a hide that is half crystal, something like a radiant dragon's. Heat and light flicker endlessly across and through its body, and from a distance this energy streams behind it like a trail of vapor. Dragon-bodied void folk met them first and named them q'nidar, meaning heat-eaters; most other spacefaring peoples call them vapor bats.

Lights, bustle and simple curiosity draw vapor bats to starships. They talk with thermal breath that other q'nidar read easily, and in the past they often mistook ships for kin and tried to converse, with disastrous results.

That breath is intensely hot. In empty void it does nothing, but inside a ship's air envelope it becomes a cone of flame 30 feet long and 10 feet wide at the end. Everyone caught takes 2d12 damage, flammables must save or catch fire, and wooden or organic hulls take 1d3 hull points.

Typically a bat waits until the fire reaches 5-point intensity, burning 5 hull points each round, before it starts to feed, and its feeding smothers the blaze within two rounds. So they will put out their own fires if left alone. Attack one while it is talking and it screams at the ship instead, adding 1d12 damage and a further hull point, and keeps screaming until it can feed undisturbed.

Q'nidar fly in single file, each feeding on the heat trail of the pack leader. Background thermals muddle their senses and speech, so their path is erratic, and too much heat from nearby stars confuses them; for that reason they do not always stay near suns. Having learned that ships mean meals, they haunt trade lanes and spaceways. They mean no harm, but they are still among the most dreaded creatures of the void.

Only after gorging on energy can they reach starhelm speed (rating 3). If a passing ship drags one out of that speed, it breathes on the ship to make the heat it needs, though it seldom needs more than 5 or 6 points of thermal energy to resume speed.

Vapor bats appear in the flame-sea only in a rare crystalline form. There their breath wraps them in an endless fireball, and they die from absorbing too much heat. The resulting crystal differs from normal and is excellent for making a crystal ball. A q'nidar hit by a fireball of more Hit Dice than its own soaks up all the energy and forms the same crystal.

Their hides are useful components for heat and light spells, and heated scales give off good light. Remains are rare except along trade routes where bats have been killed. Driven by instinct, a dying q'nidar plunges sunward, drinking energy until its whole body turns to crystal. Most such bodies are swallowed by the star, though a few are salvaged. Such crystal absorbs heat, light and magic like a starhelm, and a small seat shaped from it works as a minor starhelm.