Reaver

Reavers are tall, scaly humanoids with big fishlike eyes, webbed hands and feet, short but wickedly sharp claws, and wide mouths packed with rows of needle teeth. Their speech is a lisping hiss full of ultrasonic sounds that humans cannot even hear, and none has ever learned any language of men.

Reavers fight with brute savagery rather than cunning, simply tearing victims apart. Each round a reaver attacks twice with claws for 2d6 apiece and once with its bite for 2d4.

If both claws hit, it has grabbed its victim and pulled it against its scales, whose edges are razor sharp. Anyone grappling or grappled by a reaver takes 1d6 each round. Breaking free requires a Strength check on 3d6: failure means another 1d6, while success limits that round's damage to 1d4. Fighting one barehanded costs the attacker 1d3 per blow landed, while a whip or other soft weapon snaps whenever its wielder rolls a natural 1-3 to hit.

Reavers dwell under the sea off the western coast of the misty dread realm, where they ambush swimmers, fishermen and small boats. Few seaside villages in the region's coastal domains lack tales of them.

They gather in schools of about a dozen and are fiercely territorial, treating any nearby human settlement as an invasion even if it was there first. Offending villages suffer nightly raids, each a calculated act of terror against single households, meant to drive the invaders off.

Lairs lie hidden beneath coral reefs or deep in thick kelp forests. There reavers are expert stalkers who seem to burst from nowhere, and intruders rarely see them before dying.

Reavers eat raw flesh, but only from land creatures and sea mammals. They value intelligent prey above animals and will ignore easier game to strike at traveling humans or demihumans. Once sated, they leave a gory scene behind, both a trophy and a warning to would-be avengers.

A reaver that fails some important task may be exiled. Outcasts abandon salt water for freshwater lakes and rivers, so even inland villages are not entirely safe. Outcasts use the normal reaver statistics.