Winged Gnasher

Winged gnashers are a little bigger than their earthbound kin and share their crowded jaws. Thick skin membranes stretch from each foreleg back along the whole flank, folding loosely when the animal walks. That slack lets them run well on the ground, though not as fast as an ordinary gnasher; they can still overtake prey that lacks a head start.

These beasts glide rather than truly fly. Leaping from a height, a winged gnasher covers 50 feet of horizontal distance for every 10 feet it drops, but its wings tire fast and no glide lasts beyond 200 feet. From flat ground it can only hop and sail about 20 feet, and attacks made from such a hop suffer -2 to hit.

Packs use the same encircling tactics as common gnashers, closing the ring and then rushing in shockingly fast. They add one trick of their own: tucking their wings and plunging from as high as 20 feet onto a target below, often achieving surprise. Treat the drop as a charge, granting +2 to the attack but worsening the gnasher's Armor Class by 1.

Locals often just call them wings. They are found only where natural rock outcrops jut from the land, and they den in caves in rough hill country, sleeping in the open only if something bigger and nastier has evicted them. Beds are messy heaps of straw and sticks. A den holds little treasure, since the pack has no interest in it and leaves valuables lying on the corpses of its kills.

Pack leaders have 1 extra Hit Die and stand larger than the others. Young males constantly test the leader, and those who lose are chased out to survive alone. Most exiles do not last long, because lone gnashers make easy targets for other wilderness predators.

Most of their meals come from land animals. Flying creatures are usually quicker and nimbler in the air, so a winged gnasher can bring one down only by surprise, and only if it flies lower than 40 feet. Like their cousins, they strip a region of every sizable animal and then wander on, leaving silent, empty country behind them.

Other aerial monsters loathe them, griffons and hippogriffs above all, and such creatures will set aside their own quarrels to wipe out a gnasher pack. Unless one of these hunters blunders, the gnashers stand no chance, so packs try to settle well away from their nests.