Stone Spirit

These minor evil spirits are bodiless and use a statue as their body, animating it at will. Any figure of a creature or person in any stone serves, usually marble, granite, limestone or sandstone. Carving detail is irrelevant (an eyeless statue still sees), but the spirit needs legs or similar to move. Only small spirits in winged statues, about 30% of them, can fly, at movement 3 (class E).

Small spirits, the commonest, live in frogs, birds, bats, little cats and dogs, and miniature people. Medium ones, slower and deadlier, occupy great cats, ponies, boars, servants, dancers and jugglers. Large ones, the worst, inhabit giant horses, dragons or oni, but mostly huge faceless samurai.

They guard set buildings, rooms or landmarks and fight to the death, attacking all intruders or only some, such as one race, sex or alignment. They hurl their stone bodies like battering rams, plummeting from ledges or rolling and hopping over the ground into their targets. Spells affect them normally, but they save at -2 against earth magic and take +2 per damage die from it, while elemental burst heals them 1d10. A slain spirit's statue crumbles to dust.

A spirit never leaves its chosen statue. Some come at the bidding of evil eastern sorcerers and priests; others are lured by fine carving, and small ones love ornate marble walls carved with processions of sorcerers and monsters and topped by little animal figures. Medium spirits often guard tombs and treasure caches, large ones wicked shrines, monuments and mountain passes.

They swallow coins and gems, which stay undigested in the statue and may turn up in its dust. That dust is prized: a small spirit's for lasting royal cosmetics, a medium one's for a tooth powder that ends toothache forever, a large one's as an ingredient for a potion of invulnerability.