Vesskarra [Unique Night Hag]

Vesskarra, a night hag of the gray wasteland of despair, did not drift into the misty dread realm; she was summoned by one of the few beings able to hold her, a lich-king of a mist-shrouded realm. She has since built a device, the Veilrender, that she hopes will carry her through the misty borders.

Her true shape is a shriveled crone with bruise-colored skin, matted black hair, red-glowing eyes, blistered lips, crooked teeth, and cracked nails. Few see it, since she polymorphs at will, usually into a lonely, gnarled old woman whose would-be comforters meet a dreadful fate. She seems to speak any language her listeners know, by some unknown magic.

Her claws and fangs strike as one 2d6 attack; a victim failing a save vs. poison contracts a disease exactly as the 3rd-level priest spell cause disease, its skin blotched purple and black like sores and beatings. It is not contagious.

At will she uses polymorph self and know alignment (the latter hampered by the realm's warping of detection). Five times daily she looses four magic missiles of 1d4+1, usually at one foe to cow the rest, and thrice daily ray of enfeeblement.

Her potent sleep affects any target of 12 Hit Dice or 12th level or less unless it saves vs. spell. A sleeper is either eaten, its life essence torn out as a larva, or fed to the Veilrender to charge it. Larvae are worthless here, so she keeps them as mindless guards, said to fill catacombs beneath her lair.

Those who resist are later tormented through her ethereal dreamform, like wraithform but able to enter dreams. She turns the dream to nightmare and rides the dreamer like a horse until dawn, draining 1 Constitution permanently per night; that night brings no natural healing, spell memorization, or psionic recovery. At zero the victim dies as a larva unless she is slain first. The pure of heart are safe: she can only invade those who have ever had to make a dark powers check, passed or failed.

Her treasured charm of blackness is a ten-pointed dark iron star that cures its wearer's diseases on contraction and adds +2 to all saves. Without it she has no dreamform, and it grants that power to no one else. Each use by a good creature snaps off a point, and with the tenth it is worthless. A new one costs a month's work and 100 or more larvae.

She has 65% magic resistance, ignores charm, sleep, fear, and all fire and cold, and can be hurt only by +3 or better, silver, or cold iron weapons.

Night hags rule their home plane by sheer numbers and power. The lich-king, no longer able to learn new magic, reasoned that soul-harvesting hags must know how to pass the realm's borders, so he gated one through at random. To their mutual shock she was trapped too. Furious but too wise to fight him, she agreed to help.

Secretly she vowed to escape and to make sure he knew it and could never follow. Months later, judging her work a costly failure, he threw her out, unaware she now understood the realm's fabric better than anyone alive and had designed a machine to break it.

She settled in an old manor outside a fog-bound harbor town on a cold gray sea and spent nearly a year building the Veilrender. Finished, it sits in a cavern beneath the house, ringed by larva-filled tunnels that have so far kept her secret safe.

Ever hungry, she must kill and eat one person daily, a toll hidden by the waterfront's drifting population, where she hunts as a comely harlot or rugged sailor.