Sacrol

A sacrol is a great skull adrift in a swirling, many-hued mist that forms its body. The skull is that of one creature whose life is trapped within, and two long, ropy tentacles of mist hang from it like entrails. A clammy chill surrounds it. It has no language, only howls made of many dying screams; a careful listener can pick out the separate voices.

Each round a sacrol may lash two different victims, never one target twice. A hit deals 2d8 and drains a level at once; next round the tentacle coils around the throat and chokes for 2d4 every round until one of them dies or the victim makes a bend bars roll. Once per day it can shriek with the effect of slay living on one target, but magical silence or a singing bard cancels the shriek.

It can also cast animate dead to raise and command 8 Hit Dice of undead, and cannot cast it again until those servants are destroyed.

Only +1 or better weapons hit it. Mind-affecting spells such as charm and sleep and cold attacks do nothing to it, while holy water deals 1d4+1. It turns as a spectre. A good priest's dispel evil or exorcism destroys it outright and lets the trapped souls rest.

Sacrols rise where great numbers have perished: battlefields, sacked temples, plague-struck towns and farmland. A sacrol is the gathered rage of those dead and hates all living things, its slayers most of all. It is bound to its death site except when chasing those killers, whom it can track unerringly; anything alive in its path dies too, so wise travelers hide. Theologians suspect that even good victims are swept into one by death trauma combined with a chance nearness to a rift into the Negative Energy Plane. A sacrol that gets its revenge must go back and haunt its birthplace forever.

It lives only on the life energy of its victims. Some priests gather its ectoplasmic residue for brewing potions of undead control.