Xantravar

Also called the stinging horror, the xantravar haunts swamps, salt marshes and lonely coasts riddled with tidal caves. Its body is really two identical teardrop-shaped bulbs, rubbery and mottled from wine-red to gray, each 6 to 7 feet long. At the narrow base of each, powerful cords of muscle drive a hollow bone stinger. Eight eyes ring each bulb just above the sting, granting normal sight and 90-foot infravision. A strange glowing field links the two bulbs, usually 2 feet long but able to stretch to 12 feet vertically or 20 feet horizontally.

The two stingers look alike, but only one carries paralytic venom, usable once a round up to four times a turn; once spent, it takes two turns to refill. The venom sting deals 1d4 points, and a victim who fails a save vs. poison takes 15 more; man-sized or smaller creatures save at -3, larger ones at -1. Anyone who resists a particular xantravar's venom is immune to that individual forever. The creature itself is immune to all poisons. The other stinger also hits for 1d4 and drinks 1d6+3 hit points of blood with each strike.

Rings of iris valves above the eyes vent jets of gas for steering. The gas mixes air with digestive vapors and is highly flammable: if a jet meets a torch or other naked flame, it becomes a 10-foot gout of fire burning everyone it crosses for 1d3, and the creature itself takes 1d2 and reflexively shuts the valve.

Higher in each bulb are gas-filled flotation chambers, filled somehow by the glowing field. That field always exists while the creature lives, ignores dispel magic, disrupts other force fields it touches and ends only with the xantravar's death. Heat, lightning and bursts of magical force like magic missile feed it, the damage adding to the creature's hit points, although such spells still harm the bulbs normally.

In serious fights the bulbs spread at least 10 feet apart. A puncture to a flotation chamber, followed by open flame in that round or the next (the leak seals by the third), destroys the creature: a flaming arrow can do both at once. The result is a 20-foot-radius fireball dealing 4d6.

Xantravars attack any living thing within reach of their stings, preferring night or thick fog, and spend the day in deep flooded caverns or shallow coastal water. They get along peacefully with each other but mate rarely; each has both sexes.

They interact with other creatures only as predators, or as carrion when wounded or dead. Only the biggest octopi, fish and raptors dare to bother them.