Time Dimensional

Often wrongly called time elementals, these are living minds made wholly of time, found in three grades: common, noble and royal. On the timeless demiplane one looks like a translucent globe of pale silver light. In normal reality, which it visits rarely because the forward flow of time annoys it, it takes shape as a drifting cloud of vapor, dust or flame.

A dimensional never strikes first. In reality it answers an attack by spraying a fine powder; on its home demiplane it lashes out with raw temporal force that leaves no mark but does heavy damage through sheer shock, even to temporal creatures unless their magic resistance stops it.

Living outside the line of time, it can pull 1-4 copies of itself from other moments into a battle, though it seems unwilling to do so unless desperate. Damage to one copy harms them all, so the usual pattern is one round of many attacks, then all of them vanish.

It can leave a fight at will by slipping out of time, moving 10 yards per round for each Hit Die it has in either realm. A chronomancer may follow its wake through the mist-smoke to the demiplane, but the creature can simply duck back the other way, again and again, knowing a mortal's crossings are limited while its own are not.

Chronomantic magic fails within 30 yards, since the creature devours it, and no such spell can affect or learn anything about it at any range unless the spell says otherwise. Because foes struggle to fix the moment it occupies, its magic resistance is 90% in reality, dropping to 25% on the demiplane where time runs unevenly.

Each dimensional exists at every moment at once, every version acting independently, though heroes meet only one at first. They graze on the momentum of time and shun other creatures, including each other. Timestream turbulence makes feeding easy, so a chronomancer whose spells stir things up may draw one, even into reality.

They understand speech but mostly ignore it. When one replies, it plucks words from the listener's own past, so he hears broken phrases in his native tongue. Chronomancers sometimes strike deals with them, at great cost and risk.

Noble: Adds time stop (which affects even commons), aging a creature 1d20 years or making it 1d20 years younger, aging dead plant matter 10d20 years or minerals 10d100 years, and carrying up to four creatures between reality and the demiplane and back (unwilling targets save vs. spell). Each is usable at will once per round, and once per day.

Royal: Said to rule the others, though the only proof is a daily summons of 1-4 commons (70%) or 1-2 nobles (30%). Royals use all noble powers once per hour each, can use melee manager every round for extra attacks, and once per hour can create a temporal shell, a tiny pocket that sits in the gaps of a clock's ticking for one hour per Hit Die.