Chapter Seven: Monsters
Cruor
Combat
Huge Aberration Hit Dice: 19d8+114 (199 hp) Initiative: +6 Speed: 40 feet, swim 40 feet AC: 27 (–2 size, +2 Dexterity, +17 natural) Attacks: 2 claws +26 melee, bite +24 melee, 2 rakes +24 melee Damage: Claws 2d8+14, bite 2d10+7, rakes 2d6+7 Face/Reach: 10 feet by 10 feet/10 feet Special Attacks: Pounce, infest, infectious extermination Special Qualities: Darkvision 60 feet, fast healing 5, freedom of movement, water breathing Saves: Fort +12, Ref +10, Will +16 Abilities: Str 38, Dex 15, Con 23, Int 16, Wis 16, Cha 15 Skills: Hide +16, Listen +25, Spot +25, Swim +22 Feats: Alertness, Combat Reflexes, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Lightning Reflexes, Multiattack Climate/Terrain: Any Organization: Solitary or clutch (1d4+1) Challenge Rating: 13 Treasure: Standard Alignment: Neutral evil Advancement: 20–28 HD (Huge); 28–34 HD (Gargantuan)
Cruors leap into combat, using their pounce ability to gain a full attack on the very first round. The more attacks they score, the more wriggling, white points of infection they leave in their prey. Pounce (Ex): If a cruor charges a foe, it can make a full attack even though it has already taken a move action. Infest (Ex): With each successful hit, a cruor leaves behind 1d4 Tiny white leechlike creatures in the wound. If left to their own devices, the leeches begin to suck blood (undead, elementals, and constructs are immune), each at a rate of 1 hit point per round, beginning in the round following their infection. A victim can automatically pluck three leeches per round from an infected wound as a standard action, or five leeches if the victim takes a full-round action to pluck (either way, plucking provokes an attack of opportunity). A plucked leech dies instantly. Infectious Extermination (Ex): When a cruor is killed, its blood-filled carcass instantly detonates, spraying blood and gore in a 20-foot-radius. What is most disturbing about the gore is that some of it still lives. These independent, eellike organs begin to swim through the detritus like a salmon moving upstream, toward living targets. Each living target in the area of infectious extermination must make 1d4 Fortitude saving throws (each DC 25), simulating the number of eellike organs that manage to contact and potentially infect the target. Each failed save represents an organ diving beneath the skin of its target as if the skin were water, leaving nothing behind but a small pucker. These targets are now considered infected. Organs that do not make contact die and dissolve.
The bleached white, leechlike body of a cruor is some 20 feet long, smeared with river-bottom mud and, often enough, blood. The cruor’s resemblance to a leech begins and ends with the shape of its body—the creature has the smoothly muscled, clawed limbs of a predator, a voracious mouth, and deep-set, predatory eyes. Small white worms squirm in the depths of its mouth, and wriggle limply behind it in the tracks it makes in the ground; the beast constantly sheds miniature white leeches as it moves. A cruor appears hazy, even in bright light, as if it walks partly outside the material world (or as if it exists partly in dream). Originally disgorged by nightmare-ridden regions of Dream under the Dark Plea’s auspices, cruors replicate by infecting those who kill one of them with a disturbingly physical dream virus, as described under the infectious extermination ability at right. Cruors can also be brought into existence by the successful casting of a nightseed† spell (see Chapter Five). Cruors understand one or more languages (usually Common), but do not speak.
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