Tomb Tapper

Tomb tappers are tall, bald, naked and sexless humanoids with hard, smooth blue-gray skin and claws that bore through solid stone. Their heads are blank ovals with no features, hence their nickname, the faceless, and their true mouths are huge toothed maws set in their bellies.

Each long-fingered, iron-hard hand strikes for 4d6. A tapper can also fold over or throw itself onto a foe to bite with its belly maw, which grinds through armor, stone, flesh and bone for 1d12+9. When cramped, or when it would rather keep its distance, it swings a great hammer for 1d12+6, either one-handed at -2 or thrown with uncanny accuracy at +2.

They perceive by sonar, sending out sounds too high to hear that echo back, accurate to 440 feet even in total darkness. This reveals invisible things and makes them immune to spells that depend on sight, such as color spray, hypnotic pattern and phantasmal force. They detect magic at will, and once every 12 turns they can use the 7th-level priest spell animate rock, moving up to 9 cubic feet for a freshly rolled 1d4+2 rounds.

Charm and enchantment spells fail against them, as do all fire and cold attacks. Electricity deals half damage, or none on a successful save. Petrification saves are made at -2, and 1-2 rounds after death the body becomes stone.

They talk by humming through vibrating skin, a tongue mind reavers partly follow, and by 120-foot telepathy that cannot read minds or carry attacks. They tunnel up into tombs, temples and wizards' towers to carry off magic items, and try to seize them from anyone they meet. Magic is holy to them: they never use it, only guard and revere it, and spend long lives searching the deep earth for the hidden wellspring they think all magic flows from. Earth elementals awe them as possible products of that source, and they hate to fight them.

Magic items are guarded clan property. Personal treasure is pretty stones like agate, amethyst, jade and quartz (uncut gems look too dull), kept deep down in caverns of glowrock, a soft, harmless stone with amber or lime-green faerie fire that brightens near the deep underworld's radiation without being radioactive. Tappers need no light but seem to enjoy its glow.

They aid dwarves and deep gnomes and leave their magic be, and ignore drow cloaks and boots powered by underworld radiation rather than true dweomers. They sometimes enslave tunnel brutes from birth, ignore xorn, mistrust both drow and duergar, and bitterly hate mind reavers and a sinister race of subterranean sorcerers, who have killed many of them.

Tappers are artificial, made in the twilight years of a proud magical empire of ages past by wizards hunting whatever was draining its magic. Blank faces hint at an altered humanoid form, their immunities at a purpose of fighting those subterranean sorcerers. An ancient sage-wizard believes they began as animated rock in human shape, which fits their petrifying at death.

They drink through skin of adjustable porosity, chew rock for minerals and take iron from blood and marrow when offered, but never hunt to eat. Their 10-foot-plus hammers of a secret magma-born alloy outlast most rock; claws dig, hammers split smooth faces. They live long in regional clans, no young or pregnant tapper has ever been seen, and their leaders are unknown, though they keep their bargains.