Wastrel

At first a wastrel seems harmless: a big raven or crow with ratty plumage streaked in sickly gray, brown and black, rust-red legs and beak, and big, menacing eyes, yet most people dismiss it as a common bird with a wasting sickness. Wastrels fly lazily and clumsily, croak harshly, and travel in big flocks. They haunt the loneliest, harshest corners of the planes: gloomy forests, bleak swamps and stinking marshes.

On first meeting prey, a flock attacks boldly, even against large groups, darting in from every side. A beak does only 1d3, but the bird is not trying to kill yet; it only wants to draw blood and forge a link, and once it wounds someone it pulls back. The flock splits evenly among targets, so 60 wastrels attacking 6 PCs and 4 hirelings send 6 birds at each. They lack courage, and if they wound no one in a round or two they scatter and try again later.

Then the pursuit begins. Each bird that drew blood drains its victim as long as it stays within roughly 100 yards on average over each 24-hour day, circling or hopping ahead to wait for the prey to pass. A special sense always tells it where its victim is within 1 mile; get farther than that and the link breaks until the bird wounds that person again.

A drained victim loses 1 point of Constitution and 1/2 point of every other ability per day of pursuit, or 1/2 Con and nothing else with a successful save vs. spell. Any ability at 2 or less leaves the victim unable to travel unaided, and any at 0 or below kills. Lower scores bring their usual penalties: a priest dropping from Wisdom 13 to 12 forfeits his extra 1st-level spell and now risks 5% spell failure. Wounds dealt by wastrels do not heal naturally.

A bird with a link joins no further attacks on its victim. It glides lazily just out of reach, flies off when attacked, and returns once the victims give up, while unlinked birds may keep mobbing. Missiles work better, but the tangled terrain wastrels prefer usually imposes -2 to -4 to hit them; in open country they have no cover. Once the bird is dead or left behind, lost scores return at 1 point per ability per day, and a heal spell restores them all at once. A score that fell to 2 or less stays 1 point lower forever unless a restoration spell is used.

Their draining kills their surroundings too. Trees where a flock roosts die within weeks, small animals vanish, and a huge flock can gradually blight miles of woodland, forcing the birds to move every 3 to 6 months. Not truly intelligent, they are cunning and seem gifted at causing harm. Hateful and malicious, they kill for pleasure and often leave ordinary prey uneaten. Flocks are loud and quarrelsome yet never truly fight among themselves.

Wastrels mainly threaten those on long wilderness treks, or folk whose homes a flock settles near; short trips rarely suffer much. Knowing that victims near civilization usually escape before the end, they keep to desolate country. They almost surely come from the gray wasteland of despair, where the land itself drains life and hope, and some claim one of its grim powers made them. They are common in that plane's upper layers and spreading elsewhere. No one knows how the drain works, why a wound is needed, or why the range is so short. They also eat small insects and rodents.