Wyrd

A wyrd is an insubstantial figure in a dark, hooded robe, a shadowy skull barely visible inside the cowl. Its feet look booted and its hands are fleshed but thin and knotted. In each palm rests a grapefruit-sized sphere, red or green, glowing faintly like dying coals. Though undead, wyrds are strongly tied to the Positive Energy Plane.

Each round a lesser wyrd can call up two red spheres. It can strike with them in melee, throw them (30/60/90 range), or do one of each. A sphere bursts on impact with a sharp crack and a brilliant flash, dealing 1d6 points of damage, or 1d6+3 to an elf. A new sphere appears in the hand at once, but even under a haste spell the wyrd can never produce more than two per round.

Wyrds prefer to fight at range, targeting elves first and then anyone able to strike back. They move without a sound, ignore poison, sleep, charm and hold, and only silver or enchanted weapons hurt them. Lesser wyrds are turned as wraiths. Their victims are usually scorched by the blasts but can be raised normally and never return as undead.

Wyrds haunt caves, forests and ruins, hiding by day in dense thickets or in dark crypts and caverns. Like most undead they hate all life and attack anything they meet. Forest wyrds are a scourge to good sylvan folk such as unicorns and dryads, who destroy them as soon as they can gather the strength. Elves loathe them for obvious reasons and hunt them down quickly.

Aside from killing, wyrds play no part in the natural world. How they arise is unknown, but the animating spirit favors elves who died violently and were left unburied, above all those deserted by their own people to die alone. Sites steeped in old evil, like fallen shrines, fields where wicked armies won and scenes of terrible treachery, seem to breed them.

When the spirit claims the corpse of an elf of great power and experience, the result is far worse. Anyone who sees a greater wyrd must save vs. spell or be gripped by a deadly chill, suffering -3 to attack and damage rolls against it (though a hit always deals at least 1 point). The chill fades at dawn, when the wyrd is destroyed, or when remove curse is cast by someone of 9th level or higher, but a victim must save anew if the creature returns. A successful save grants immunity until sunset.

Its spheres glow sickly green and burst for 1d10 points of damage, and a target who fails a save vs. paralyzation stands rigid for 2d4 turns. Elves suffer 1d10+5 per sphere but never the paralysis. It has the same immunities and weapon protection as the lesser kind, and is turned as a ghost.