Spirit Centipede

This shapechanger often serves the celestial court of heaven as an executioner of its sentences. In its true shape it is a centipede about 4 feet long with a segmented body, many legs, and two long antennae, but its head is a bald human face with a bushy mustache and nine eyes spaced evenly around it. Its shell bands alternate green, scarlet, and silver. It can speak simple phrases in the trade tongue and in local languages.

The greater spirit centipede can change freely among five shapes, the Five Venoms named long ago by a celebrated eastern scholar: toad, spider, snake, scorpion, and its own centipede shape. A change takes a full round, during which it can do nothing else. Every form is about the same size and color and it keeps its hit points, AC, and all other statistics, and each bites or stings for 1-4.

Each form can also cough out a 15-foot-wide black fog. It may shift shape as often as it likes, but each form's fog can be used only three times per day. Only creatures touching the cloud are affected, the centipede itself is immune, and the effects stack.

Centipede (MV 18): save vs. paralyzation or be unable to move for 2-8 (2d4) rounds. Scorpion (MV 12): save vs. spells or have blurred vision for 2-8 (2d4) rounds, suffering -4 on all attack rolls. Snake (MV 15): 1-10 poison damage, halved by a save vs. poison. Spider (MV 18): unless a save vs. spells succeeds, the victim suffers as from a pain spell for 2-8 (2d4) rounds, with Strength and Dexterity reduced to 3, -3 to hit, -1 to damage, -3 to reaction attacking adjustment, and +4 to reaction defensive adjustment. Toad (MV 9): a save vs. death magic or collapse for 1-6 turns in a coma resembling death.

Spirit centipedes keep no lairs. They wander looking for food, or go wherever the celestial court sends them to punish heretics and the unworthy.

They can digest most inorganic matter and especially relish minerals. If a greater spirit centipede freely gives up one of its scales, that scale, sealed in an earthen jar and kept indoors, protects the household as a charm of protection from disease would.

This smaller variety has a solid black shell and only three forms, each slower than the greater kind's: toad (MV 6), snake (MV 9), and centipede (MV 12). The fogs work normally but cover only a 10-foot diameter. Whatever its form, if it crawls across a sick person it duplicates a cure disease spell.

The tiniest kind is pure white and takes just two forms, toad at MV 3 and centipede at MV 6, with fogs only 5 feet across. As a favor or to settle a debt of honor, one may sacrifice its next reincarnation; dying this way, its body becomes brass, and that brass corpse, hung indoors, wards the building like a charm of protection from spirits.