Scarlet Dancer Mist

Scarlet dancers look like tiny crimson deaths without the humanlike faces, floating together in clusters of 10 to 100 as a drifting red haze. Some scholars suspect they are juvenile crimson deaths, but despite the resemblance in looks and feeding method, the two are not related at all.

A cluster senses warm-blooded creatures up to 100 feet away and closes in, extending tentacles of red mist that pull blood from the victim's body. The bigger the cluster, the deadlier it is: each 10 dancers count as 1 Hit Die (with matching THAC0) and drain 1d3 hit points with each successful hit.

Metal and leather armor are useless against them, since the vapor seeps through every seam to find bare skin. Only magical protection and Dexterity adjustments improve the target's Armor Class.

Hungry dancers have AC 1. Once a group of 10 has taken 7 hit points of blood it grows sluggish and its AC falls to 8, and after 14 points per 10 dancers it stops attacking to digest.

Though daylight does them no actual harm, dancers bred in the dark sewers instinctively flee from sunlight.

Scarlet dancers are known only from the tunnels under a ruined fortress-city. Clusters roam the sewers looking for food and settle only when they have drunk their daily fill of 14 hit points per 10 dancers, then hide somewhere quiet for 1d4 hours. Few people are foolish enough to go below, so most of their meals are mice, rats and other warm-blooded vermin, though they prefer humans, whose blood they need to breed.

The city's rulers know of five clusters, which are marked on certain maps and spoken of with dread. Many more drift through the deeper passages honeycombing the ground below, growing more numerous the deeper one goes. The resemblance to crimson deaths terrifies the city's lords, who fear an outbreak of the larger monsters.

A cluster must feed every day; three days without blood kills it. Any iron-rich blood keeps them alive, and the vermin-choked sewers rarely leave them hungry. They are not cruel, merely animals surviving as they must. No one knows where they came from. Some blame a failed experiment by a secretive cabal of wizards, but the truth may lie far below the city.