Sohmien

Sohmien look like enormous horses with leathery, ash-gray hides and blank white eyes. Their shoulder blades rise above their heads and necks, and from each shoulder sprout three bony spikes that grow from the spine. Mist trails behind them like the fog of the misty outer reaches they come from, and wherever their hooves fall, plants die and the land stays tainted for years.

Their favored weapons are their shoulder spines. The upper two on each side are primary spines that can be launched at a foe, each striking for 1-8 points of damage. They whistle horribly in flight and shriek when they draw blood. The spines count as +1 magical weapons, deal double damage to nightmares, and grow back in 2d4 days.

Once both primary spines are spent, a sohmien gores with its secondary spines, which jut a foot past its head and impale a foe, inflicting 1-8 points of damage. It aims for non-vital spots to stretch out the victim's suffering before the kill. A natural 20 drives the spines in so deep that the sohmien may also bite, inflicting 1-6 points of damage. Occasionally it bites and tramples with its hooves for 1-6 each.

A stampede of sohmien forces any creature under 2 HD to make a morale check, with horses, ram-folk and the horse-folk of the planes gaining +4. They can stampede only at dusk, and only when their summoner calls for it.

Legend says they arose when the final nightmare lord fell. Fiends tired of bargaining for his nightmares lured him to a grim yearly council of fiends, where his own subjects betrayed him. Bristling with cold iron arrows and spears, he fled into the misty outer reaches, and sohmien sprang up wherever his blood touched the ground. They hate nightmares above all other foes, and the tale goes that their ride will not end until every nightmare is dead.

Myth calls them creatures of vengeance. A vengeful mage or priest of enough power can summon them through the sohmien pact, a ritual thought lost long ago. The summoner must send them riding toward whoever wronged them, wrecking everything along the way. The ride stops only when the sohmien die or their target is left at 1 hit point. Then they wait, pawing the earth, and if the victim wants revenge they can be sent stampeding back to the summoner. No one knows what happens then, but the chronicles say the summoner disappears forever, and legend claims that voice joins the wailing that follows the herd. Nobody has ever ridden one.

Sohmien neither eat, sleep nor breed. Herds come and go from the misty reaches on a cycle no scholar has worked out, most likely whenever someone hungers for revenge. Their spines can harm, bind or sometimes summon nightmares, can be made into arrows of nightmare slaying, and, ground to powder and rubbed on a blade, can strengthen the enchantment of weapons of vengeance. Harvested spines evaporate within three days.