Vermilion Pudding

Picture a crimson, tar-sticky blob lit from within by a faint red glow. This is not one organism but a colony of redrot, the flesh-devouring bacterium, which the crimson curse of the frontier coast has knit together so that billions of cells move and feed as one. Like its pudding kin it reshapes itself constantly, pouring through cracks, crawling along walls and ceilings, and seeping through any gap it can find. Even the smallest is three feet across, and its hit points scale with its size.

The pudding locates food by heat and vibration out to 90 feet. It will happily consume undead that still carry organic tissue, and when chewing on undead or magical flesh it counts as a +2 magical weapon. Given a choice, it goes for creatures bearing curse-born gifts first, and members of the curse-gifted orders, who carry more than one gift, before anyone with a single gift.

Its feeding works like a sped-up redrot infection. The first round deals 1 point, the next 2, then 4, then 8, doubling each round. Once it has struck a target successfully it hits automatically every round after that until the pudding is destroyed. Because it only needs to touch skin, every victim is treated as base AC 10; magical armor bonuses, items like a ring of protection, and Dexterity bonuses still count. Metal armor of any kind delays it for just one round while it hunts for a seam, and it ignores the armor itself, flowing past it to reach the body underneath.

Acid, cold and poison have no effect on it. Fire and magic missile harm it normally, but lightning bolts and weapon blows split it into smaller puddings, each attacking on its own. Being mindless, it never flees while there is still flesh to eat.

Vermilion puddings thrive in almost any climate. They multiply by fission: when one swells to eight feet across, it divides into two puddings four feet wide.