Whipsting

A whipsting is a puckered, muddy-gray sphere only 6 to 12 inches across, its skin folds hiding many eyes that give it normal vision and infravision to 120 feet. Two nimble, tapering tentacles 5 to 20 feet long grow from opposite sides. Each ends in a sticky pad for climbing and grasping, with a rigid bony stinger jutting at an angle beside it. Underneath is a sucking mouth with three shark teeth arranged in a triangle; they move independently, can chew through plate armor, and close together to seal the mouth tight. The lash of its strike makes a crack heard 70 feet away.

While waiting for prey, a whipsting keeps one tentacle coiled beneath its body like a spring. Faced with something large, it uses that coil to bounce away like a pogo stick rather than fight. Otherwise it releases the coil all at once, hurling itself at its target and whipping its body around to drive a stinger home at +4 to hit. It then clings to the victim, trying to strangle, smother or constrict, and slaps with both tentacles to sting again.

Each sting does 1 point of damage and delivers venom; the victim saves vs. poison at -2. A failure means violent shuddering on the next round: the victim cannot attack or cast spells, drops everything held or carried, cannot attempt fine dexterous work and suffers a 1-point Armor Class penalty for that round. After that the victim can move but stays weak, taking -3 to attack and damage the next round, -2 the round after, then -1, before recovering. Every new sting that gets past a save starts another round of shaking.

Whipstings haunt rocky ledges, caves and ruins, usually in peaceful groups. Little is known of them; they are thought to be hermaphrodites, long-lived and highly variable in intelligence. They lay big rubbery eggs, greenish-white or dun, in caves and crevices; the eggs are edible but worthless on the market.

A whipsting gorges on any meat, fresh or rotten, and its stretchy body can swell to hold a meal ten times its own size. Some have been tamed as pets or guards. Griffons and perytons hunt them, biting off the stingers first to avoid the venom. Whipstings are immune to their own poison, which is used in rings of weakness and in medicines that induce vomiting.

About one in ten is a stingwing, with delicate, gauzy wings that let it glide from heights or leap up to 60 feet horizontally. Damaged wings regrow in 1d3 days. They cannot be targeted in combat, but a captive's wings (AC 10, 1 hp) can be cut off, and any area fire spell automatically destroys them.