Sirine

Sirines are lovely humanlike women at home in any water. Skin runs from ordinary human shades to a pale yellow-green, and hair comes in nearly any color, silver and dark green most often. They dress, if at all, in very little.

Each speaks the sirine tongue plus the languages of nearby intelligent races, breathes both air and water, and has 120-foot infravision.

A sirine alone always has 6 or 7 Hit Dice, while members of a group are equally likely to have 4, 5 or 6. A group always shares the same moral outlook, all good, all evil or all neutral. Most are antisocial and drive intruders off, evil ones harshly, while some lonely ones lure human or demihuman men to stay a while.

Dexterity 18 plus innate magic gives them an excellent Armor Class. Nine in ten carry a dagger or short sword, and 30% also have javelins or slings; any weapon has a 10% chance to be magical, javelins of lightning being common.

Once a day each, as an 11th-level wizard, a sirine can use improved invisibility, polymorph self, fog cloud and charm person. The charm comes through her song and affects everyone within 30 feet, hostile or not.

Her touch forces a save vs. poison; failure drops the victim's Intelligence to 2. Charmed targets are touched automatically, others need a normal attack roll. Dispel magic cast successfully against 11th-level magic undoes it, and so does the touch of any sirine who chooses to.

They save as 11th-level wizards with +2 vs. poison and are immune to all gases.

Sirines live only in lonely, empty places, mostly among sea rocks and small islands. A few settle in fresh water, though such spots are usually populated or hard to reach.

Young sirines live with sisters and are more sociable; older ones seek solitude to sing and think, though they still sometimes crave company and may trade their knowledge of local history and events for it.

Mates are usually human men, sometimes elves, tritons or merfolk, and children may inherit pointed ears, green skin from aquatic elves, or scales and webbing from merfolk and tritons. The call of the sea always ends the relationship. After nine months a sirine bears 1d4 daughters and raises them to age five, after which they live off the sea alone. Adult at 10, they live about 50 years without losing their beauty. Cut off from water or robbed of her voice, a sirine slowly wastes away and dies.

Sirines kill only to eat and never overfish. Natural foes are rare and easily handled. They sew garments of shells, seaweed and fish skin and scavenge everything else, treasure included, from wrecks.