The Seadrake

Some six centuries ago, under the old emperors, a merchant named Corvan Mareth grew prosperous hauling grain, steel and cloth across a busy strait to the island realm beyond and coming home loaded with gold and spice. His ruin was a passenger who paid his own weight in gold. A storm rose during the one-day crossing and tore back the stranger's hood, revealing a horned, scaly lizard-thing that began butchering the crew. Corvan, no great fighter, could not stand by; he crept up behind it and ran it through with a harpoon. It died cursing him.

Whether from that curse or from latent divine blood the killing awakened, scales crept over him in the following years. He hid behind agents and couriers, and finally walked into the sea to drown. The water would not take him. The brine sped the change instead, and he became a small sea serpent. Time has made him huge and strong, and the transformation still has not stopped, though he is not truly evil.

Today he is a 50-foot serpent with a great fanlike crest along his back, mottled green and blue so he vanishes in choppy water. Fangs crowd his jaws, and flukes near his front drive him powerfully through the sea. Nothing human remains but his morals and his grasp of every human tongue. He breathes air or water but is clumsy on land, and though he has chased foes ashore, he prefers the sea.

Captains pay up for good reason. His bite deals 3d10, enough to tear a man in half in one pass, or he can batter with both flukes for 2d8 each; any breakable object they strike must save vs. crushing blow or shatter.

He has lately learned that his size grants two new attacks. On a natural 19 or 20 with his bite, a man-sized victim is swallowed whole, taking 1d20 sliding past the teeth. The victim then has 1d6 rounds to carve his way out, needing 20 points of damage against AC 5 and using only size S weapons, before he drowns and is scalded by stomach bile. The serpent can also coil around any ship no more than 20 feet across the deck; the wood must save vs. crushing blow or the hull splits and the vessel slowly sinks.

To escape, he squirts ink from beneath his flukes, a darkness spell 50 feet in radius that works only underwater. He regenerates 2 hit points a round while his wounds stay submerged, but any wound exposed above water longer than 3 rounds heals only at the normal rate. He dies at -10 hit points.

His home is a solitary grotto beneath a lonely isle in the strait, gazing at his hoard. Rumor says a primitive tribe there worships him, but no one has visited in two centuries.

For five centuries he has extracted tribute from ships crossing the strait, and within a few decades almost nobody refused. He kills only in self-defense, with one exception: pirates who try to take what he regards as his. He seems to feel he must earn the merchants' gold, and slaughtering pirates is his half of the deal.

He patrols the strait eating sharks and whales and can live on plankton or seaweed if he must. Tribute is dragged back to the grotto. A few bold thieves have robbed it, and others plot to slip in while he is out, but he keeps no routine and may return at any moment. Mild as he usually is, he kills anyone who touches his treasure, which he guards jealously for its company alone. Some think the hoard reminds him of the man he was and that he would do anything to get that life back or to end this one, yet he fights savagely when attacked, as if afraid to die.

He can be bargained with, but only for tribute, and refusal makes him utterly unreasonable. Promises to return with more gold have never saved anyone; he is greedy, not stupid. No one leaves him with a full purse.