Reaver Wyrm

A reaver wyrm is a mucus-coated worm of dragonlike size that leaves a poisonous slime trail. Adults reach 10 feet thick, and the body keeps lengthening all its life, past 120 feet. Four 20-foot tentacles thrash around a round maw in its eyeless face, wide enough to swallow a man-sized creature whole. Its mauve color sometimes gets it mistaken for a purple worm at a distance; happily both are rare.

It perceives the world through innate telepathy reaching 360 feet, sensing every sentient being not psionically shielded and speaking mind to mind with intelligent ones, even through solid stone.

Cornering prey, it first breathes, twice per day, a cone 60 feet long, 5 feet wide at the mouth and 20 feet wide at the end. The breath is an enzyme rather than acid, and it dissolves organic tissue: living creatures take 12d12+6, halved by a save vs. breath weapon. Anyone it kills liquefies entirely except clothing, gear, and an exposed brain.

Survivors face its bulk: in a large cavern it coils and strikes like a python, biting for 6d6 or lashing with four tentacles for 3d6 apiece, adding psionics if needed. Touching its slime requires a save vs. poison or death in 1d10 turns; mind reavers are immune.

Psionics: it has no psychokinetic, psychometabolic, or psychoportive sciences, but knows control body, telekinesis, body equilibrium, and dimension walk as devotions. In telepathy it has the science domination and the devotions taste link, ESP, awe, and post-hypnotic suggestion.

On the very rare occasions when tadpoles grow up with no adult mind reavers around, a few live long enough to become reaver wyrms. These hunt any mind reaver they meet, and mind reavers, revolted by news of one, quickly send hunting parties to wipe it out.

A tadpole that never transforms grows slowly into one, if it survives a century as a witless slug eating cave vermin. Its first sentient brain marks the change, and afterward it hunts all life, mind reavers included, with insane hunger. Brains are a vital part of its diet. It cannot tunnel through rock, so it hunts in natural or dug passages, and when a region is stripped it moves on psionically. Its existence raises unanswered questions about the true origin of mind reavers, a mystery even to them.