Stone Maiden

Stone maidens are lovely women who make their homes within outcrops of rock, menhirs, and the stone sides of remote caverns. Poets credit them with moon-pale faces, gazelle eyes, and rose-petal lips. Each appears as a lovely woman of human or elven stock in simple, loose robes and veils colored to match her stone, dusty red for sandstone, black for a basalt cave.

Like gazelles they are timid, peaceful, and quick to run, but provoked they become formidable. Handed a weapon, a maiden can use it, but she almost always relies on spells instead. Three times a day each, one per round and at 14th level, she can use suggestion, stone tell, stone shape, meld into stone, spike stones, and animate rock.

Against hostile visitors her first move is a potent suggestion (saves at -3) urging them to leave. If that fails, she uses an improved meld into stone that lets her enter any rock formation and stay indefinitely, still able to use her other powers from within. She uses stone tell to learn about anyone approaching her home, and if they are clearly evil she casts spike stones to slow them.

Her strongest weapon, saved for serious threats such as a band carrying mining tools, is animate rock on a man-sized boulder that moves 60 feet per round and fights with these statistics: THAC0 15, AC 1, 11 Hit Dice, 28-84 (28d3) hit points, 14-28 (14d2) damage. If no suitable stone exists she makes one with stone shape. Her deep connection to elemental earth makes her immune to magic that affects earth.

Each maiden is literally part of a specific rock and never wanders beyond a quarter mile of it; taken away by force, she weakens by 1 hit point each turn and eventually dies. Over time she may gather treasure, either loot from evil creatures driven off or 'gifts' she suggested to rude desert nomads, some of whom think a former stone maiden would make a fine addition to their roster of wives. Many live near gold or gem veins and magically shape the riches into pleasing forms, sealing the hoard inside a nearby stone.

Legends call them descendants of a desert priestess carried off from her people and imprisoned within rock by a wicked dao, forever seeking to break the curse and rejoin the nomad life. Some do seem wistful, but just as many are confident, independent, and content, with no wish for rescue. Freeing one is said to be an epic task, usually recovering a personal belonging such as a veil from a mighty dao or genie. Return it and her tie to the Elemental Plane of Earth is severed, leaving her an ordinary woman stripped of her powers forever.

Some maidens guard the land within a quarter mile of their stone, but most keep to themselves and have little effect on the desert lands around them.