Skuhlzecki [Hot-Headed Ice Borer]

The hot-headed ice borer is a round, segmented, hairless worm up to 2 feet long, with skin as tough as cowhide, a toothy circular mouth, and no visible eyes, ears or nose. A flat bone plate caps its head. Blood vessels packed beneath that plate can heat it until it scalds (1d4 damage to anyone touching it), and the worm uses the heat to turn snow ahead of it into slush. Its tunnel refreezes almost at once. It bores through snow and permafrost but never solid ice.

Ice borers appear blind but read vibrations superbly. When something stirs above, the pack rises to about a foot under the surface, circles beneath the prey like sharks, and together melts the snow into a quicksand-like pool. A save vs. petrification lets a target jump clear. The worms wait until the victim flounders, then bite from below and pull it deeper. Escaping their reach takes swimming proficiency checks at -2 per borer involved.

Attacking from underneath, the pack is impossible to detect by ordinary means and gains +4 on surprise. Shields give no AC benefit. Slashing and most piercing weapons work, but a hidden borer is fought as if invisible (-4 to hit); spells for seeing invisible things are no help, though x-ray vision is. Blunt weapons do half damage, their force swallowed by the slush.

A borer that surfaces is AC 10 and vulnerable to any weapon. It quits attacking, takes a round to roll over and another to plunge back in head first, or if blocked, crawls inchworm-fashion toward snow at its land speed. Kill one that has fed (inflicted over 3 points of damage on anyone) and its hot blood sac bursts, scalding all within 5 feet for 2d4 points unless they save vs. paralyzation.

Small packs live under the permafrost of a frozen northern steppe and spend their lives hunting, far more actively in winter; some think they hibernate through warm spells. No lair or juvenile has ever been found. Sages assume the worms lay eggs and, given their metabolism, mature within a month or less.

A borer digests meat and fat in minutes, routing it into its blood or fat stores, and converts everything to fat once it stops eating. It likely has several stomachs, one a sac that swells with blood after feeding, and whether that blood is the worm's or the prey's remains disputed. It will eat any warm-blooded creature but seldom bothers anything tinier than a dwarf or halfling. It keeps no treasure, though victims' belongings sink into the snow with their leftover scraps. The species lives in that one frozen region and nowhere else on the continent.