Dungeons And Dragons Creatures C / Characters

Monsters from the myriad worlds of Dungeons & Dragons.

Notes on the Entries

A creature's Origin denotes the specific campaign setting it debuted in, if any. This is not to say that setting is the only place that creature can be found — D&D has a long history of repackaging creatures from sub-settings for general use, and ultimately the DM decides what appears in a game.
A creature's listed Challenge Rating may be for "baseline" examples of the monster, rather than listing every advanced variant presented in Monster Manuals. Also remember that 3rd and 5th Edition use a 1-20 scale for "standard" Challenge Ratings, while 4th Edition uses 1-30.
Not all Playable creatures are created equal, especially in 3rd Edition, in which Monster Adventurers can have significant Level Adjustments for the sake of party balance.
A creature's listed Alignment is typical for the race as a whole, not an absolute for every individual in it — even supposed embodiments of Good and Evil can change their alignment. Also, if there are two alignments listed, and one is for 4th Edition (in which Good encompasses Neutral Good and Chaotic Good, Unaligned encompasses the morally neutral alignments, and Evil encompasses Neutral Evil and Lawful Evil from other game editions), assume that the other alignment holds true for all other editions. Finally, the "Always Neutral" alignment listed in the first three editions for nonsapient creatures has been equated with the "Unaligned" alignment of 5th Edition.

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C

Cadaver Collector

Classification: Construct (3E, 5E), Natural Animate (4E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (3E), 9 (4E), 14 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral (3E), Unaligned (4E), Lawful Evil (5E)

Hunchbacked constructs built to gather the corpses of those slain in battle.

Achilles' Heel: 3rd and 4th Edition cadaver collectors are slowed by magic attacks that deal sonic damage.
A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It's noted that some 3rd Edition cadaver collectors behave oddly should they outlive their creators or the war they were built for. Some will just sit and wait for a new master, others will grow unable to tell the difference between the living and dead and go on a rampage as they collect fresh "corpses," and still others might conclude that, if there are no battles to give them purpose, they should do what they can to instigate conflict.
Enemy Summoner: A cadaver collector in 5th Edition can summon the spirits of the corpses on its shell to fight for it. Although these specters are individually weak, a cadaver collector can call up an almost endless supply of them, given time.
Feed It with Fire: In 3rd Edition, cadaver collectors are healed by electricity attacks, which also dispel any slow effect on them.
Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: 3rd and 4th Edition cadaver collectors can impale a grappled or paralyzed creature upon their spiny carapace, which deals additional damage to their victim and allows the cadaver collector to act normally instead of maintaining a grapple.
No-Sell: In 3rd Edition, cadaver collectors are not just immune to most magic, low level spells are redirected against their casters.
The Paralyzer: They have a Breath Weapon of paralyzing gas.
Retcon: Cadaver collectors were introduced as golem-like constructs built by mortals to clean up battlefields (or by necromancers to collect raw materials), seemingly tailor-made for Eberron. 5th Edition gave them more supernatural abilities and made them natives of the plane of Acheron, to be summoned by evil mortals.
Trampled Underfoot: In 3rd and 4th Edition, cadaver collectors can make a trample attack against smaller foes they move over.

Caller from the Deeps

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_caller_from_the_deep_3e.jpg

Classification: Elemental (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Malevolent masses of dark water that are spawned in the deepest ocean trenches, hungering for light and life to consume.

Enemy Summoner: Once per hour, a caller from the deeps can summon a watery ally, either a fiendish shark or a water elemental.
Magic Music: They can cast siren's call three times per day, causing a target to hear enthralling music that compels them to seek out and immerse themselves in the ocean, refusing to come up for air.
Murder Water: A caller from the deeps looks like a huge blot of inky black water, seething within the rest of the ocean.
Tentacle Rope: They can grab and constrict anything they hit with their tentacles, which also drains their victim's vitality, dealing Constitution damage.

Caller in Darkness

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil (2E), Chaotic Evil (3E)

Ectoplasmic clouds of silently screaming faces, formed when dozens of beings die together in terror, that now yearn to absorb more victims.

Enemy to All Living Things: Animals can instinctively sense the presence of a caller in darkness and will panic as one draws close.
Intangibility: Incorporeal undead.
A Kind of One: A cross-editional example; in 2nd Edition, The Caller in Darkness is an undead entity haunting the ruins of Giustenal on the world of Athas. 3rd Edition used it as a template for a new type of undead.
Mind Hive: Each caller of darkness is a collection of minds trapped in a hellish existence, and anyone slain by their ghostly touch attacks will have their essence absorbed by the monster, adding a new face to its form. Fortunately, this does nothing to the victim's body, so resurrection magic isn't impeded.
Psychic Powers: They can use powers like concussion blast or ego whip at will, or powers like death urge a few times each day.

Cambion

Classification: Outsider (3E), Immortal Humanoid (4E), Fiend (5E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +4 (3E), 5 (5E)
Alignment: Any Evil

The direct offspring of mortals and fiends, cambions are evil to the core.

For the 3rd edition "true cambion", the Uneven Hybrid of a tanar'ri and a planetouched, see Dungeons And Dragons Fiends Demons.

Big Red Devil: Regardless of what fiend spawned it, a cambion always has horns, batlike wings and a tail, and they're often drawn with red skin in the 5th edition sourcebooks.
Charm Person: In 5th edition, a cambion can magically charm another creature into obeying its spoken commands for an entire day. A charmed creature can break free of the cambion's control if the cambion attacks it or gives it a suicidal command. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes states that this power is specific to cambions born of incubi and succubi, and offers alternative powers for cambions born of other fiends.
Human-Demon Hybrid: One of a cambion's parents was a mortal humanoid, while the other was a fiend such as a demon, a devil, or a succubus or incubus.
Playing with Fire: 5th edition cambions can pelt their enemies with fiery rays.
Villainous Lineage: A cambion inherits the evil nature of its fiendish parent. Even if its mortal parent was a nurturing soul who raised the cambion with love and kindness, the cambion would still grow up to be evil.

Camelopardel

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Good

Graceful horned desert-dwellers that help smaller creatures survive in the harshest of lands.

Dishing Out Dirt: A camelopardel can create a haboob to drive off intruders and provide cover as it escapes powerful enemies.
Friend to All Living Things: They have the "wild empathy" feature of a druid.
It Can Think: They're no brighter than an ogre, but camelopardels can speak a desert dialect of Sylvan, and are benign enough to use their abilities to help creatures harmed by desert magic.
Mix-and-Match Critters: A camelopardel has the head and neck of a giraffe perched upon the lower body of a big cat.
White Magic: They're surrounded by an aura that defends against desiccation effects from extreme heat or magic, and can save someone from dehydration with a gentle lick.

Campestri

Classification: Plant (5E)
Challenge Rating: 0 (individual), 1 (swarm) (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Simple, jolly mushroom creatures whose love of music is only surpassed by their inability to sing on-key.

Dreadful Musician: A campestri's singing voice is described as "an obnoxiously nasal falsetto." They have dreadful taste in music as well, and will happily dance and sing along to the worst-played tunes. On the other hand, their AD&D write-up suggests that a patient bard who teaches campestris to sing on-key should earn some bonus roleplaying XP, especially if they got the other players at the table laughing — but only if the bard's player is willing to sing the song their character is teaching the campestris.
Mushroom Man: The campestri is a mushroom with a face on its stem that can (barely) move by controlling the mycelium that grows from its base. They're less intelligent than ogres, and understand Common but can only communicate by mimicking others' voices or songs.
Mushroom Samba: Once per day, a campestri can unleash a cloud of spores that can cause other creatures to be incapacitated, able to only move at half speed on their turns until they shrug off the effect.
Photographic Memory: Their 5th Edition write-up says that campestris need only practice singing a song three or four times to memorize it forever. Their AD&D entry, on the other hand, notes that they might start to muddle the lyrics after a few repetitions, "twisting them in a new way each time until [the DM] gets tired or the players start to throw things."
Salt Solution: A mundane example; campestris consume and purify soil, filtering and absorbing the salt from it in hopes of warding off predators who find salty meals distasteful. Bullywugs still consider campestris a delicacy, however.
Use Your Head: Their only melee attack is a headbutt for Scratch Damage. A swarm of campestris headbutting en masse is slightly more dangerous.

Carbuncle

Alignment: Neutral with Chaotic tendencies

Small armadillo-like creatures with rubies in their foreheads.

Apple of Discord: Carbuncles are known to approach parties of adventurers, using their empathic abilities to gauge the strangers' character and telepathy to communicate the value of their gemstones. If unmolested, the carbuncle will try to tag along with the party, but it will also try to use its limited prophetic abilities and secret telepathic conversations to encourage suspicion and even infighting within the party. If all else fails, it will try to provoke nearby monsters to attack. "Having achieved its objective, the carbuncle will watch the events in morbid fascination, then, choosing an opportune moment, it will quietly slip away."
Better to Die than Be Killed: If captured by hunters, a carbuncle can simply will itself to die, robbing the victors of its gemstone.
Carbuncle Creature: They're true to the source myth for having "shells" of leathery natural armor and having a gemstone in their forehead. If the carbuncle is killed, the ruby will shatter into worthless powder, but it can be coaxed into surrendering the gemstone intact with the help of charm monster or similar magic. A carbuncle's ruby is usually worth a good 500 gp, though rarely the gem might be worth twice or even ten times that amount. A living carbuncle will regrow its gem at a rate of 100 gp per month, and its value might change from the previous ruby's.
Obliviously Evil: Sages suspect the carbuncle's antics are due to the creatures lacking any understanding of mortality, leading them to be fascinated by combat and death. This also leaves them Not Afraid to Die, hence their willingness to kill themselves and deny others their gems.

Carcass Crab

Origin: Eberron
Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Giant mutated crustaceans that stick battlefield detritus onto their carapaces, granting them morbid camouflage and additional protection.

Body of Bodies: Downplayed; carcass crabs have normal (if oversized) crab bodies, but they also scavenge battlefields for corpses to stick onto their shells, which are covered in spines and secrete an adhesive. This lets carcass crabs hide themselves among the dead, and gives them extra defenses from the weapons and armor they're carrying.
Giant Enemy Crab: They're certifiably Huge terrestrial crabs.
Spike Shooter: Carcass crabs will hurl poisonous barbs from their carapace at distant foes.
The Spiny: Their bodies are covered with sharp spines, which combined with the weapons stuck to their shells means that anyone striking a carcass crab with a natural weapon or unarmed attack will take damage.

Carcass Eater

Classification: Animal (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Scavengers that resemble a cross between a wolf and an oversized rat, named for their tendency to dig into fresh graves for food.

The Berserker: If a carcass eater scents blood by dealing damage to a living creature, it flies into a blood frenzy, gaining attack bonuses at the expense of its Armor Class.
More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Their artwork gives them not just oversized jaws, but several rows of vicious teeth.
You Dirty Rat!: Rat-like creatures with foul eating habits.

Carrion Crawler

^3e

Classification: Aberration (3E), Aberrant Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E), 7 (4E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Grub-like creatures that feed on corpses and the leftovers of other monsters' meals, carrion crawlers often play an important role in keeping dungeons and lairs clean.

Art Evolution: Official depictions of carrion crawlers have changed considerably over time. 1st Edition depicts them with bodies divided into clearly distinct, globular lobes, each with one pair of legs ending in a pair of splayed toes, and with heads adorned with large pupil-less eyes, a cluster of tentacles, and nothing else. 2nd Edition gives them a design more reminiscent of realistic insect grubs, with two clusters of insectile legs (one at their rear ends and one just behind their heads), less distinct body segments and thinner oral tentacles. 3rd and 4th Edition change them drastically, giving them a more monstrous and formidable look, with bumpy green skin, thicker and non-segmented bodies, beady eyes on eyestalks, wide mouths filled with sharp teeth, a pair of serrated mandibles, and a "beard" of thicker, long tentacles ending in knobby topes. 5th Edition uses a look more similar to 2nd's, restoring the thinner legs and tentacles and large eyes but keeping a visible mouth, albeit one with smaller teeth and mandibles, and adding a pair of thin antennae.
Ceiling Cling: Carrion crawlers often move along the ceilings of the dungeons, ruins and caves they inhabit, which serves the dual purpose of avoiding contact with more dangerous creature and of surprising potential meals who don't think to look up.
The Paralyzer: A carrion crawler's chin tentacles are useless as actual weapons, but secrete a powerful paralytic agent that can down most creatures with a touch.

Carrion Stalker

Origin: Ravenloft
Classification: Vermin (3E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E), 3 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Foul predators that infest living creatures with their progeny, which then use their host's corpse as a hiding spot.

Ambushing Enemy: As their 2nd Edition write-up puts it, "An encounter with a carrion stalker may well be the most horrifying experience a traveler can have." It hides in a corpse until it detects movement, then bursts out to try and grapple its prey — from the victim's perspective, the corpse's rib cage and intestines have abruptly detached and attacked them. Some particularly depraved spellcasters are known to animate zombies with carrion stalker larvae in them, using the undead as delivery systems for the creatures.
Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: When prey is close enough to a carrion stalker, its larvae swarm out of it and start burrowing into the victim's flesh, dealing constant damage until they're either removed or destroyed by magic that cures disease or poison, or the victim succumbs. The larvae in the corpse will feed on it (and each other) until one to three of them have grown to maturity a few weeks later.
Mix-and-Match Critters: Carrion stalkers have been compared to horseshoe crabs with the trailing tentacles of a jellyfish.
The Symbiote: Carrion stalkers have such a relationship with carrion crawlers. The stalkers don't prey upon crawlers, and the crawlers won't eat corpses containing stalker larvae, but may pick up some of the crawlers' grubs as they move through the area, spreading them further.
Tentacle Rope: Though the carrion stalker's body is only a foot long, its tentacles can reach 15 feet in length, and are strong enough to grapple and either reel in prey or pull the stalker onto a victim.

Carrionette

Origin: Ravenloft
Classification: Construct (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E, 5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Dolls brought to life by the Dark Powers to answer the wishes of the lonely, who find their new "friends" eager to swap bodies with them.

And I Must Scream: Once a carrionette has taken over someone's body, that person's soul is stuck in the carrionette's original toy body, which is typically locked away somewhere and forgotten.
Grand Theft Me: A carrionette can swap souls with a victim after sticking them with its silver needle, taking over the victim's body while imprisoning the victim's soul in an animate toy. Destroying the carrionette's original toy body will instantly kill both it and its victim's body, but having the victim in the carrionette's body stick its silver needle into their original body will safely undo the body theft. Alternatively, 5th Edition lets protection from evil undo the swap.
Living Toys: Carrionettes can arise from any type of toy, but traditionally take the form of a Perverse Puppet or Evil Doll.
The Paralyzer: Their silver needles can also paralyze a victim's limb, reducing their movement speed and impairing their actions.
Shout-Out: They're an evil take on the Pinocchio story, embodied in Maligno, Darklord of Odaire.

Caryatid Column

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Seemingly-innocuous stone pillars that can transform into graceful, silk-draped swordswomen to defend an area.

Achilles' Heel: As per their AD&D rules, caryatid columns are instantly destroyed by stone to flesh, transmute rock to mud, or stone shape if they fail their saving throws.
He Was Right There All Along: In their AD&D rules, a caryatid column at rest looks like an ordinary pillar carved into the likeness of a beautiful female (and only close examination reveals the sword in its left hand), while in 3rd Edition, it takes a high Search check to notice distorted lines in a pillar suggesting the shape of a swordswoman. At any rate, a caryatid column at rest doesn't radiate magic, and true seeing won't reveal its animate nature, but someone with enough ranks in Knowledge (architecture and engineering) might notice that a certain column isn't bearing any of the ceiling's weight and doesn't serve any structural purpose.
Living Statue: A variant that spends most of its time masquerading as a stone work of art. Though while their 3rd Edition art depicts a caryatid column with marble skin beneath its silk clothing, their AD&D entry describes them as taking on human skin tones while animate.
Mooks Ate My Equipment: Weapons have a chance to shatter when they strike a caryatid column, and in 3rd Edition they have the Improved Sunder feat.
No-Sell: Nonmagical projectiles always shatter when they hit a caryatid column, dealing no damage.

Casurua

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (3E)
Alignment: Any (2E), Chaotic Evil (3E)

An undead manifestation that arises when a group of beings suffers a sudden, traumatic death.

Boulder Bludgeon: Their default attack is assumed to be a hail of flung stones, though they're perfectly willing to lob more dangerous objects, like weapons.
Evil Smells Bad: When a casurua is active, a graveyard stench fills the air.
Invisible Monsters: Casurua are natrually invisible, though magic can reveal their forms of dozens of glaring eyes and skeletal hands.
Our Ghosts Are Different: Casurua are classified as such, but they have some important differences from standard D&D ghosts. They aren't so much a Mind Hive of tortured spirits as they are "a type of psychic recording: the trauma of multiple deaths imprinted on the physical surroundings where the deaths occurred." This makes them resistant to Turn Undead attempts, and part of laying casurua to rest involves dismantling the environment they haunt — tearing down buildings, chopping down trees, even digging up the earth — to prevent the creature from returning in a month or so. On the upside, this all means casurua can't move 60 feet beyond the place of their creation.
Poltergeist: They get in on this trope too, as casurua attack by throwing objects around, and they can create the sounds of knocking or footsteps to lure victims closer.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Anyone confronted by one has to save against fear or flee in terror.

Catfolk

Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Good

Nomadic feline humanoids who wander warm and temperate grasslands, living off the land and occasionally trading with other races.

Cat Folk: They lean more towards the human side of the Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism than other feline races like the rakasta or tabaxi, so while catfolk's fingernails are thicker than other races', they lack natural claw attacks or an improved climbing ability. Catfolk do however enjoy low-light vision and are faster than humans, and have a feline tendency towards bursts of activity interspaced by rests rather than steady progress.
Druid: Catfolk are deeply spiritual and have a great respect for nature, and thus druids play an important role in their tribes, advising their chiefs and providing healing and other spellcasting.
Fantastic Racism: Downplayed; catfolk tribes are segregated by visual differences between them (whether their markings and appearances resemble lions, tigers, leopards or cheetahs), though there's no mention of the different-looking groups oppressing or warring with each other.
Friendship Trinket: Catfolk develop a small collection of tokens — a small brooch, a worn bowl used by a family member, the fletching from an arrow used on their first successful hunt, a dagger gifted by a friend long ago — that serve as physical representations of key moments from their lives. Such tokens are viewed as having great importance, if not quite magical powers, and the highest compliment a catfolk can pay somone is gifting one of their tokens and explaining its significance.
Mood-Swinger: Catfolk are generally good, though also emotional and mercurial. They're quick to anger and just as quick to forgive, but they're also just as likely to shrug off an insult with a jest as they are to draw a weapon at the offense.
Sexy Cat Person: Their confident and passionate natures give catfolk a racial bonus to Charisma, and most other races find them engaging company despite their sometimes-volatile temperament.
Wandering Culture: Catfolk have a tendency towards curiosity and wanderlust, so not only do they not build permanent settlements, they also don't become attached to specific territories like other nomadic cultures.

Cath Shee

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Also known as "faerie cats," these 400-pound felines have innate magical powers and an affinity for elves.

Cats Are Magic: These faerie cats are innately magical, resistant to hostile spells and able to use magic of their own.
Cats Are Superior: Cath shee are never anyone's pet, but an elf might be able to persuade one to become their companion for a time. But every six months, another check is required to convince the cath shee to stick around.
Mama Bear/Papa Wolf: Cath shee will fly into a frenzy if their mates or kits are threatened, gaining attack roll and damage bonuses and never checking morale.
Reincarnation: While some stories say cath shee were created by Corellon Larethian as companions for the elves, other myths assert that they're the reincarnated souls of elves sent back to the world by the Seladrine in order to protect the elven nations, or atone for past misdeeds.
Teleportation: They can teleport without error at will, up to 100 yards, which they use to ambush prey or escape danger.

Catoblepas

^4e

^3e

Classification: Aberration (3E), Shadow Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E, 5E), 10 (4E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Legendarily hideous swamp-dwelling monsters that can kill with a stare.

Art Evolution: Their fugliness is represented in different ways each edition — 3E gives them lean bodies with almost donkey-like heads, 4E has them with normal bodies but horned, humanoid heads, and 5E makes them bulky with a scaly, porcine head.
Beware My Stinger Tail: At the end of a catoblepas' tail is a club that can rattle body and soul, leaving a victim unable to act.
Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: One Dragon article suggested that the infamous quadrupedal catoblepas is actually the female of the species, which grazes on water weeds in marshland. The male, a harmless bipedal grass-eater, spends most of the year on dry ground, but in breeding season he enters the marshes, locates a female by her scent, waits until she's dipped her lethally-hideous head underwater to graze, mates very quickly, and then runs like hell. Offspring remain immune to the females' death attack just long enough to be weaned. All of this was retconned by the next game edition, which confirmed that male and female catoblepas look the same.
Deadly Gaze: A catoblepas' most dangerous weapon is its gaze, which makes living things wither and die.
The Dreaded: Catoblepas are deeply feared, enough so that the mere rumor of one's presence is seen as a bad omen and for the image of their silhouette to have become a recognized symbol of death and doom.
Eye Beams: In 3E, catoblepas can project thin green beams from their eyes that kill anything they touch.
Fisher King: 5E catoblepas are so supernaturally foul that their presence in an area causes it to take one their own fetid characteristics, turning wetlands feting and tangled, reducing the presence of healing herbs or clean water, tainting swamp gases with the beast's own stretch, making the animals more aggressive and attracting hostile and malevolent creatures.
Make Them Rot: A catoblepas' gaze induces necrosis in other creatures, causing their flesh to rot on their bones.
Mix-and-Match Critters: A catoblepas combines features of a bloated buffalo, dinosaur, warthog and hippopotamus.
Our Monsters Are Weird: The D&D catoblepas is a fairly oddball depiction, compared to its "standard" mythological look of a bull with a bowed head. It comes from the description of it in Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony as "a black buffalo with a pig's head, falling to the ground, and attached to his shoulders by a neck long, thin, and flaccid."
Resurrective Immortality: In 4E, slain catoblepas return to the Plane of Shadow, where they are cloaked in new bodies and resume their wanderings.
Swamp Monster: Bogs and marshes are these deadly creatures' favored habitats, and they further foul the land and water around them with its putrid taint.

Cave Fisher

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Natural Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E-5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Subterranean, man-sized arachnids that hunt with silky strands.

Crafted from Animals: A cave fisher's sturdy shell can be used to make tools, armor, and jewelry, while some thieves guilds know how to convert strands of its filament into fine, almost invisible rope, or a sticky coating that can be applied to climbing gear.
Weak to Fire: Cave fisher blood contains enough alcohol to be flammable, giving the creatures a weakness to fire damage once they're injured enough to bleed noticeably. The creatures have an intense fear of fire as a result, which is used by some trainers to keep them in line.
Weird World, Weird Food: Their meat tastes like crab cooked in wine, and their blood can be distilled into liquor and is a popular ingredient in dwarven spirits; some even drink it straight.
You Shall Not Evade Me: Cave fishers can produce a sticky filament of silk to whip enemies and reel the food to them.

Cavvekan

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Also known as "bat-faced dogs" or "cavedogs," these small Underdark scavengers live in packs that may occasionally gang up on humanoids.

Attack Animal: Some Underdark races tame and train cavvekans as guard dogs, though they're difficult to capture.
Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: Like many Underdark lifeforms, cavvekans are blinded upon abrupt exposure to bright light, and suffer a minor penalty on rolls while in it.
Mix-and-Match Critters: They have canine bodies but smooth, hairless hides, and bat-like protrusions on their faces. Cavvekans communicate with their packmates using a mixture of canine barks and howls, as well as batlike clicks and high-frequency sounds, all of which "echo eerily down the corridors of the Underdark, making it difficult to locate an individual by the noises it makes, or even to be sure how many creatures are making the noises."
Super-Senses: On top of the scent ability shared by other canines, cavvekans can use echolocation like bats, giving them blindsight out to 120 feet (unless they're under a silence effect). However, their eyesight is terrible, and their normal, low-light and darkvision only extend out to 10 feet.

Centaur

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Fey Humanoid (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 12 (4E), 2 (5E)
Playable: 2E-3E, 5E
Alignment: Neutral Good, Unaligned (4E)

Reclusive woodland creatures with the upper bodies of humanoids and the lower bodies of horses. See the Playable Races subpage for more information about them.

Century Worm

Classification: Vermin (3E)
Challenge Rating: 19 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Gargantuan worms with a voracious appetite and lengthy gestation period.

Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Rather than merely injecting their offspring into a victim, century worms swallow other creatures, exposing them to the countless larvae inside the worm. These wriggling progeny deal Constitution damage as they burrow into the swallowed victim's flesh, and once their victim is slain, a single larva attaches itself to their spine, feeding off their corpse and slowly growing to full size over the course of a century. Any creature whose corpse is currently incubating a century worm cannot be returned to life by any means.
Sand Worm: They're worm monsters that exist only to eat, track prey by tremorsense, and have a slow burrow speed.
Super-Scream: A century worm's terrible keening can permanently deafen all within 50 feet.
Swallowed Whole: They can gulp down anything smaller than themselves, depositing prey in the worm's stomach-womb where they take both acid damage and are attacked by the worm's larvae.

Changeling

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/636677974156125260.png

Origin: Eberron
Classification: Humanoid (3E, 5E) Natural Humanoid (4E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Playable: 3E-5E
Alignment: True Neutral (3E), Any (5E)

In their natural forms, changelings are pale, nearly featureless humanoids, but they can freely alter their appearance to that of any similarly-shaped creature. See the Playable Races subpage for more information about them.

Chaos Beast

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Seething horrors from the Ever-Changing Chaos of Limbo, which propagate themselves by infecting others with their corporeal instability.

Perpetually Protean: Chaos beasts have no set form, and are constantly shifting and altering themselves, growing new appendages while absorbing or mutating old ones. In combat they shapeshift every turn, and are actually immune to Forced Transformation attempts or spells like flesh to stone.
Shapeshifter Weapon: Actually subverted - even though chaos beasts can grow claws and muscles and fangs at will, they can only manage two attacks per round, which deal little damage. But see below...
Transformation Horror: Anything hit by their claws has to make a Fortitude save or have their body begin to melt, flow and boil. Each round this goes on, the victim takes permanent Wisdom drain from the experience, is unable to cast spells, and can only attack blindly, unable to distinguish friend from foe. This entropic state is quite difficult to remove, as a victim who passes a Charisma check can at best stabilize themselves for a minute, and only powerful magic like restoration or heal can save them (and an additional casting will be needed to restore the lost Wisdom).
The Virus: Any creature whose Wisdom hits 0 after being infected by a chaos beast's corporeal instability will turn into another chaos beast.

Chaos Quadrapod

Classification: Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Tentacled Terror: The chaos quadrapod is a cluster of four suckered tentacles with a pulsing mass of ethereal light as its central body.

Chaos Shard

Classification: Elemental Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (storm shard) to 16 (prismatic shard) (4E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Malevolent creatures formed from the interaction between the Elemental Chaos and the shard of evil in the heart of the Abyss.

Defeat Equals Explosion: When reduced to 0 hit points, most chaos shards fracture or shatter with one last burst of damaging energy.
Elemental Embodiment: They're more or less Abyssal elementals, unleashing fire, lightning, necrotic or radiant energy on other creatures with demonic glee, though they aren't considered proper fiends. Like normal elementals, they're sought after as servants by some mages, and are often found providing fire support to various evil beings, though chaos shards' quasi-demonic natures make them more unruly than standard elementals.
It Can Think: They're somewhere between humans and ogres in terms of intelligence.
The Spiny: Chaos shards are surrounded by auras of energy that damage those who draw close.

Chaos Wretch

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Outsider (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Creatures twisted by the fell power of Chaos, either by the dark god himself or one of his emissaries.

Axe-Crazy: Chaos wretches are "universally cunning, destructive, and violent," prone to going on "mad rampages" unless forced to follow a greater strategy.
Mortality Gray Area: They're spawned from negative energy deep within the Abyss, and in 3rd Edition share many traits with The Undead, such as an immunity to most status effects and sneak attacks, as well as being instantly destroyed upon reaching 0 hit points. However, they're still classified as living creatures, and Turn Undead and similar effects don't work on them.
Our Demons Are Different: They're outsiders from the Abyss of Krynnish cosmology, not tanar'ri or another type of fiend from the Infinite Layers of the Abyss.
Unholy Nuke: 3rd Edition gives them the ability to make a "smite law" attack once per day.

Carrion Wretch

Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)

Also known as "scavenger spawn" or "scavenger demons," these malicious creatures prefer to haunt battlefields, but will feed upon living prey as well.

Art Evolution: Their 2nd Edition art looks like a skeletal bird with a human-like, beaked skull, while 3rd Edition gives them intact vulture heads but visible humanoid bones as well.
Bird People: They are literally bony mash-ups of humanoids and Vile Vultures.
Eaten Alive: Carrion wretches are one of the few chaos wretches that eat, and like to immobilize victims with their beak attacks, then gather around for the "grisly repast," taking "great pains to work their victims over slowly before they actually start eating."
The Paralyzer: Their beak attacks can render victims helpless — in 2nd Edition, this is by inflicting a cumulative slow effect with every bite that will eventually reduce a victim's speed to 0, while in 3rd Edition they inflict Dexterity damage.

Cedar Wretch

Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)

Also known as "cedar spawn," these Abyssal spirits inhabit tree husks, waiting until a living creature comes within reach of their branches before lashing out in a vicious frenzy.

Infernal Retaliation: The good news is that flame attacks are quite effective against these tree monsters, the bad news is that when killed by such attacks, cedar wretches ignite, burning so hot that they deal hefty fire damage to nearby creatures. For this reason, cedar wretches show no fear in the face of fire attacks, as they know they're likely to take their foes down with them.
Super-Senses: Cedar wretches are blind, deaf and mute, communicating with each other by touch and using their "mystical senses" to detect prey.
Walking Wasteland: Their "extraplanar natures are anathema to plant life," so cedar wretches that linger in an area are surrounded by withered and dead trees.
Weak to Fire: While in 3rd Edition cedar wretches take double damage from fire attacks, in 2E they are "tremendously susceptible to fire," so that any flaming attack is a One-Hit Kill that can ignite another cedar spawn within 20 feet the next round, potentially setting off a chain reaction that wipes out an entire strand.
When Trees Attack: They're essentially demonically-possessed evergreens, which try to pass themselves off as dead or dying plant life before suddenly attacking while emanating a "horrid light."

Sand Wretch

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_sand_wrech_3e.png

Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)

Also known as "sand spawn," these fiendish dust devils rampage across deserts and dry plains, attacking anything they come across.

Blow You Away: In 3rd Edition, sand wretches can move into an opponent's square, dealing damage from the spinning dust storm and potentially sweeping smaller creatures up off the ground, carrying them along until the victim manages to free themself.
A Handful for an Eye: If they roll well enough with a slam attack, a sand wretch can blind an opponent by getting grit in their eyes, which can last for up to an hour unless they spend a round flushing their eyes out with water.
Kill It with Water: A thrown flask of ordinary water deals as much damage to a sand wretch as holy water does to undead, attacks from water elemental creatures deal double damage to them, while sand wretches caught in a rainstorm or trying to cross bodies of water will take ongoing damage until they quickly perish.
Sentient Sands: They're intelligent, and evil, whirlwinds of sand particles that attack foes with "whiplike tendrils of sand."

Chaoswyrd

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Huge horrors that are chaos made corporeal, brilliant but insane creatures that seek to turn other beings into minions of chaos.

Cloudcuckoolander: Though possessing a genius level Intelligence stat of 22, chaoswyrds are too insane for complex tactics. "One round, the creature might lash out with its tentacles and bite, the next round it might use a spell-like ability, and the round after that it might begin talking to its victims with idle interest." They're also vulnerable to distractions, so that a philosophical question about the nature of the planes (i.e. an opposed Knowledge [the planes] skill check) might make a chaoswyrd ponder the matter instead of attacking.
Combat Tentacles: They can make up to four tentacle attacks per round, potentially grappling and constricting foes.
Eldritch Abomination: Their skulls are a mash-up of predatory humanoid heads atop a shark-like maw, their bodies are a patchwork of fur, chitin, skin, scales, etc., they have tentacles emerging at random points from their torsos, and their lower bodies are "a tangled mass of tendrils, feelers, and coils of unknowable limbs in which hundreds of parasitic insects writhe and wriggle."
Magic Knight: Beyond their physical and mental attacks, chaoswyrds also can use magic like chaos hammer and confusion at will, or greater spells like word of chaos and symbol of insanity a few times each day.
Mind Rape: As a free action each round, a chaoswyrd can make telepathic contact with another creature, filling its mind with chaos. On a failed save, this results in a permanent insanity effect too powerful for remove curse, only stronger magic like break enchantment and greater restoration can cure it.
Parasitic Horror: Their lower bodies are infested by a swarm of semi-real magical parasites that feed upon logical thoughts. While this is beneficial to a chaoswyrd, who has no use for reason, any other creatures within 30 feet of one have to save or take Wisdom damage each round as the parasites feed and cause a "discordant mental fog" to fall over them... at least until a victim's Wisdom score falls to 3, at which point the parasites can no longer perceive them.

Charnel Custodian

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

These huge masses of corpses, grave dirt, coffins and tombstones arise in places where the deceased were never given proper rites, such as battlefields or mass graves.

Body of Bodies: They're (relatively) smaller versions of the corpse gatherer below, more or less.
Boulder Bludgeon: A charnel custodian can chuck a tombstone as a ranged attack.
Due to the Dead: Charnel custodians form where great injustice was committed upon the dead interred there — either the proper funeral rites were never performed, or someone heinous like a tyrant, foul criminal or evil priest was also buried in the same area — and can only be put to rest by setting right said injustice.
Resurrective Immortality: If destroyed, a charnel custodian will revive at its home cemetery 24 hours later, unless the site receives a hallow effect or whatever offense generated the creature in the first place is resolved.
Swallowed Whole: They can "bury" a grappled opponent inside their own body, subjecting them to constant damage from the grinding tombstones and bones within, until the victim manages to dig their way free. Anyone who dies from this attack can't be resurrected until the charnel custodian is destroyed.

Charnel Hound

Challenge Rating: 13 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

These macabre masterpieces of the necromancer's art are hundreds of reanimated corpses fashioned into the shape of a fearsome hound standing 20 feet at the shoulder.

Body of Bodies: It's not just that a charnel hound is comprised of a few tons of skeletons and zombies, it's that its component bodies are still twitching, moaning and screaming.
Canis Major: A Huge undead creature in the shape of a canine.
No Body Left Behind: Anyone killed by a charnel hound runs the risk of having their corpse absorbed by the monster. The only way to recover the body for resurrection (or looting) purposes is to destroy the charnel hound, then sift through the resulting pile of corpses.
Punny Name: Its name is a play on "hound" and "charnel house", a place where corpses or bones are piled. Fittingly enough it's a hound made of bodies.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Charnel hounds can unsurprisingly inspire fear in anyone nearby who witnesses their attacks.
Weakened by the Light: Natural daylight imposes penalties on charnel hounds' attack rolls, checks and saving throws.

Cha'thrang

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Natural Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (4E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Tortoise-like creatures that lurk in oases, ambushing prey with organic harpoons.

Crafted from Animals: The sinew of their tethers is much sought after to be braided into light but strong rope.
Defend Command: Like many chelonian monsters, a cha'thrang can withdraw into its shell for a defensive boost.
Spike Shooter: 4th Edition lets them fire volleys of non-tethered poison spines in combat.
Studded Shell: Their 4E rules give cha'thrangs a "spiny shell" aura that deals damage to adjacent creatures, which is increased if the creature withdraws into its shell.
That's No Moon: Cha'thrangs like to bury themselves up to the tops of their spined shells, making them appear as patches of bamboo or broken reeds.
You Will Not Evade Me: Their signature ability is firing a lime-coated/poisonous quill from one of the hollow tubes on their shell, then using a sinewy cord to reel their prey into reach of their jaws. Cha'thrangs prefer to target small airborne creatures over landbound prey, and aren't smart enough to consider whether or not they've harpooned something that might be dangerous.

Chekryan

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Large, scorpion-like desert predators that use psionics to hunt.

Dig Attack: A variant; chekryans have a slow burrow speed, which they use to escape the desert heat. But if they happen to find a buried ruin, they'll use it as an ambush spot, detecting approaching prey with their tremorsense, then teleporting to the surface for a surprise attack.
Psychic Powers: Their repertoire includes dimension door, inconstant location and fog cloud.
Scary Scorpions: They're "obviously engendered from the blood of scorpion forebears," and thus have Power Pincers that can constrict foes and a stinger that delivers a Constitution-damaging poison. But chekryans stand out from "ordinary" monstrous scorpions thanks to their partially-upright posture, letting them employ their mandibles in combat, as well as their psionics.
Scavengers Are Scum: Averted, chekryans notably don't scavenge their food, they're exclusively predators that don't bother with Small or smaller creatures, preferring prey that can sustain them for days.

Chelicera

Classification: Vermin (3E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Arachnids common in settlements in warm climates with poor sanitation, which lure prey in with their powers of mimicry to drain their victims' blood.

Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: Cheliceras aren't smart enough to gauge the odds of an attack's success (their Intelligence score is "—"), so they'll ambush even large groups that their sounds lure in, then retreat if the battle turns against them.
Giant Spider: They're eight-legged, wall-crawling vermin that stand about four feet tall and five feet wide, though they're distinguished from natural spiders by the odd antennae on their heads, which look something like tuning forks.
Vampiric Draining: Cheliceras drain their victims of blood, which in game terms lets them deal Constitution damage to pinned foes. The monsters then leave the drained corpses in a different part of town than their lairs, which often leaves authorities preparing garlic and holy water as countermeasures against the "vampires" plaguing their community.
Voice Changeling: These monsters can mimic any noise they've heard as a free action. Cheliceras test each sound they encounter to see what reliably draws in prey, and they usually find that garbled or faint speech, or the screams of previous victims, are the most effective lures.

Chevall

Origin: Mystara
Alignment: Neutral (Basic), Neutral Good (2E)

Magical horses who are able to shapeshift between the form of a horse or a centaur, chevalls are a sylvan race believed to be created by an Immortal to safeguard all horses from abuse and mistreatment by humanoids and monsters. They are typically found wandering the world either alone or in small bands of up to three chevalls, looking into the welfare of horses and rescuing them from harmful, neglectful or abusive masters.

Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: Chevalls predate creature types that were officially defined in 3rd edition, but bear traits from several distinct creature categories. They are considered "sylvan" creatures, which is the AD&D and BECMI precursor term to the "Fey" creature type that has been used since 3rd edition, but have a strong overlap with werebeasts, being horses that can turn into centaurs and who have the classic werebeast vulnerability to silver. They were also created by a benevolent Immortal, the Mystaran analogue to a god, to serve as divine guardians of horses, which makes them technically a kind of angel.
Our Centaurs Are Different: Although a chevall could easily be mistaken for a centaur, its horse form is the true form, and it retains a classic werebeast-style immunity to damage that isn't inflicted by silver.
Our Werebeasts Are Different: Chevalls could be thought of as "were-horses", except that the horse is its base-form and it only has two forms; horse or centaur.
Silver Bullet: In Basic and AD&D, chevalls are immune to physical attacks that aren't made with either a silver weapon or an enchanted weapon of +1 or better value.
Virtuous Vegetarianism: Chevalls are fully capable of living as omnivores, but find the idea of eating flesh distasteful and so instead stick to grains, herbs, vegetables and anything a horse could realistically eat. This is used to highlight their high empathy and virtuous origins.

Chilblain

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 18 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Large, insectoid ice monsters that hate all creatures warmer than them.

The Berserker: They use tactics while fighting, such as wearing foes down with ranged attacks before closing to melee, but chilblains always fight to the death and never look beyond their current battle.
Breath Weapon: Once per day, a chilblain can exhale a cone of coldfire, a half-liquid, half-gas mixture of pure cold energy that deals damage that only heals normally in temperate or warmer climates.
Deadly Gaze: A chilblain can turn a creature to ice permanently with a look.
Final Solution: Chilblains seek to destroy all life not affiliated with cold energy, especially creatures of fire.
An Ice Person: Chilblains are creatures of ice that can freeze with a touch and radiate intense cold around themselves.
Scary Scorpions: They have the general shape of scorpions, though chilblains' tails end in mace-like clubs rather than stingers, and they lack the scorpion's pincers.

Child of the Sea

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +1 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral (2E), Chaotic Neutral (accantus, 2E), as base creature (3E)

Fey beings with a deep connection to the ocean, growing up on land before feeling the call of the sea. While most children of the sea are peaceful, those who are abused by their adoptive family can become twisted and feral beings known as accanta, who are much more hostile to other creatures.

Apparently Human Merfolk: Children of the sea look human (or their parent race), but have a feature giving away their aquatic heritage — webbed fingers and toes, pale blue or sea green hair and/or eyes, etc. There's some speculation that they're the result of interbreeding between humans and the likes of merfolk or sirines, but nothing is certain. They have no true society of their own since they grow up among other races, and are so rare. If two children of the sea meet, they may feel glad to see someone like them, but they also painfully recognize that they have little else in common. "Truly, they are a lonely race."
Changeling Fantasy: Infant children of the sea are left in the care of a land-dwelling family, often relatives of their mundane parent. As they age, the child of the sea will manifest their supernatural abilities like summon nature's ally, control weather and control water, culminating in being able to breathe water around age 15. When fully mature, a child of the sea feels drawn to the ocean deeps, and spends the rest of their life in the sea.
Elemental Shapeshifting: An accantus can assume a liquid form once per hour, gaining watery slam attacks and several resistances and immunities, but they can only stay in this form for a short time before becoming fatigued.
Mars Needs Women: Children of the sea cannot reproduce with each other, instead they occasionally visit coastal villages for trysts with the locals. Males typically have little to do with their offspring beyond sometimes dropping by to give their child or lover a gift, while females bear their children in the ocean but then bring the baby to be adopted by a family on the land.
Pay Evil unto Evil: It's noted that the abusive foster parents of accanta "are often found drowned in their beds in otherwise dry homes."

Chimera

Classification: Magical Beast (3E-4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E), 15 (4E), 6 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil, Unaligned (4E)

Peculiar and dangerous mixtures of feline, goat and dragon.

Breath Weapon: A chimera can use the breath weapon of the chromatic dragon whose head it bears — icy wind if it has a white dragon head, acid spit if black, toxic gas if green, lightning if blue, and fire if red.
Classical Chimera: A three-headed lion with a dragon's head, tail and wings and a goat's head and legs. In personality, some chimeras take more after their dragon side and hoard treasure in solitude, while others take more after their lion and goat sides and live in groups with others of their kind. Notably, this is a rare example that doesn't include the snake tail or any real snake parts.
Hybrid Monster:
- "Dracimeras" have a maned draconic head on the front of their body, a horned lizard head growing out of the middle of their back, and the head and neck of their dragon parent growing in place of a tail — both of their draconic heads are capable of producing a Breath Weapon, each twice per day.
- "Gorgimeras" are chimera variants that exchange the dragon head for that of a D&D gorgon, gaining a petrifying breath attack.
- "Mantimeras" have the humanlike head of a manticore replacing their lion head, as well as spined tails, which they can use to fling spikes at enemies.
Mix-and-Match Critters: A typical chimera has the hindquarters of a large goat, the forequarters of a lion, the leathery wings of a dragon, and the heads of all three.

Chitine

^3e

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Natural Humanoid (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E), 5 (4E), 1/2 (5E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Creations of the drow, these spider-elf hybrids were intended to be superior slaves, but now menace both their creators and other races of the Underdark.

Art Evolution: Prior to 5E, chitines had mottled pale skin and dark hair, and looked like elves with spider features. Their current design gives them dark, furry bodies, and better blends their humanoid and spider features.
The Beastmaster: They have an affinity for arachnids, and domesticate varieties of Giant Spider, as well as arachnoid monsters like cave fishers.
Bee People: Chitines and choldriths resemble spiders, but they behave more like eusocial insects. Chitines are divided into worker and warrior castes, and choldriths occupy the top levels of a hive's hierarchy.
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: They're adept at using all four arms to fight in close combat.
No Biological Sex: Choldriths and chitines lack sexual characteristics, and choldriths need no mate to lay eggs.
Spider People: Chitines are humanoid creatures that possess both humanoid and arachnid traits.
Trap Master: They're adept of using traps to ambush victims, such as by sticking cave dust and rock chips on top of a mat of webbing over a Pit Trap featuring hardened, sharpened webbing spikes. Frequently, this false floor or wall looks like a way to bypass a normal-looking spider web put up as a decoy.
Turned Against Their Masters: As mentioned, the drow created the chitines, but something went awry — in their older lore, chitines are described as "cast-off experiments" of the drow, while 4E states that they fought their way to freedom, rampaging through a drow city in the process. 5E explains that Lolth was offended that the drow didn't show her proper deference during the chitines' creation, and as punishment drove the chitines to rebel. At any rate, the chitines are now free, despise the drow, and seek to take their place as Lolth's favorite people.
Wall Crawl: Chitines and choldriths can effortlessly climb difficult surfaces, including upside-down on ceilings.
Was Once a Man: The first generation of chitines were transformed from elf prisoners by horrible rituals performed by the drow.

Choldrith

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_choldith_5e.png

^3e

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E), Natural Humanoid (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E), 8 (4E), 3 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Mutant chitines with a far more spider-like body and an instinctive reverance for Lolth that gives them the spellcasting power of clerics.

Large and in Charge: They're at least one size category larger than chitines, and rule over their smaller kin.
Poisonous Person: Choldriths have a bite attack that delivers a Constitution-damaging poison in 3E, while 4E gives them poisonous claws and a "choking vapors" area attack.
Projectile Webbing: Unlike lesser chitines, choldriths can throw webbing to entangle foes.
Truly Single Parent: 5th Edition explains that choldriths are the only chitines who can give birth, laying eggs that birth more chitines (and the rare choldrith) without the need of a mate.

Choker

Origin: Mystara
Classification: Aberration (3E, 5E), Natural Humanoid (4E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E), 4 (4E), 1 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil, Unaligned (4E)

Small but vicious predatory humanoids with impressive flexibility and reach.

Ceiling Cling: Their preferred hunting method is to perch near the ceiling of a key passage or intersection, then grab a single creature or the last of a group passing beneath.
Mundane Utility: Mordenkainen notes that "Chokers are cowardly and dim-witted creatures, useless as guard beasts and utterly awful as servants. Yet for wizards of shorter stature, securing one as a familiar does negate the need for a stepladder."
Rubber Man: Chokers have flexible cartilage rather than a bony skeleton, allowing them to easily slip into narrow fissures and niches in the walls of caverns, or stretch their arms during attacks.
Sinister Suffocation: As per their name, chokers go for the neck when they grab victims, impairing their speech, spellcasting and breathing.
Wall Crawl: Their hands are covered in little hooks that give them the benefits of the spider climb spell, allowing them to scale sheer surfaces or scuttle around on ceilings.

Chordevoc

Classification: Animal (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Tiny, owl-like avians bred by halflings.

Attack Animal: Halflings keep chordevocs as hunting animals or guards, or simply as exotic pets; rangers may take them as animal companions. Wild chordevocs are rare, and they're hostile to non-halflings.
Confusion Fu: Chordevocs corkscrew, sideslip and zigzag through the air, making it hard for opponents to discern their flight path.
Hit-and-Run Tactics: They're not built for direct combat, but these birds excel at making flyby attacks, slashing with their talons as they pass.
Super-Senses: Beyond low-light vision, chordevocs have blindsense out to 60 feet, possibly aided by their cat-like whiskers.

Chosen One

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Grotesque caricatures of humans created by evil mages to serve as bodyguards and warriors.

The Berserker: These wretches fight in a biting, clawing frenzy at the best of times, but there is a cumulative 1% chance per round of combat that a chosen one will go completely berserk, recovering a memory of its past life and its torture at its creator's hand. At this point the chosen one will flee combat, screaming with rage as it seeks out its creator.
Poisonous Person: Their filthy claws carry a poison that can cause additional hit point damage (in 2nd Edition) or Constitution damage (in 3rd Edition).
Slave Mooks: They're twisted creatures utterly loyal to their creators, and the Red Wizards of Thay have even contemplated fielding entire armies of chosen ones to send after their enemies, but political instability in Thay and the chosen ones' occasional unreliability have nixed such plans for now.
Was Once a Man: Chosen ones are created from humans subjected to physical torture and a magical ritual, leaving them a twisted mockery of what they once were. The same process causes them to see everyone but their creator as responsible for their pain and suffering, making them loyal to their creators and eager to vent their rage on anything else.

Chraal

Classification: Elemental (3E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Natives of the Paraelemental Plane of Ice, these creatures of supernatural cold enjoy being summoned to the Material Plane on missions of murder.

Blood Knight: Chraal relish their excursions from their home plane, so long as their summoners give them opportunities to hunt and kill other creatures. Conjurers who don't will invariably have the summoned chraal turn on them.
Breath Weapon: They can exhale a 60-foot cone of damaging cold.
Defeat Equals Explosion: When slain, chraal detonate in a blast of freezing energy and icy shards, dealing cold and piercing damage to all within 30 feet.
An Ice Person: Chraal appear as eight-foot creatures of radiant cold energy within bodies of blue-black ice, and generate so much cold that physical contact with them deals additional damage. On the downside, their AD&D rules explain that chraal take damage every round they spend outside of arctic climates, and of course their ice subtype renders them vulnerable to fire damage.
The Speechless: Though possessing a "rudimentary intelligence" and capable of following commands, chraal cannot speak.
Was Once a Man: When a particularly evil being dies on the Paraelemental Plane of Ice, some planar powers may trap their life force within the icy shell of a chraal. They have no memory of their past lives, and despite their origins, chraal are not considered undead.

Chronolily

Origin: Dragonlance
Alignment: True Neutral

50-foot-wide pitcher plants whose golden nectar can reveal the past, present or future.

Chronoscope: While violet-petaled chronolilies show visions from the present, orange chronolilies give visions of the past, and yellow chronolilies the future.
Crystal Ball: They're an organic form of the "scrying bowl" variant. At rest, a chronolily's nectar will reveal random, soundless visions no more than half a minute long. Some sages spend years mastering an esoteric method of plucking leaves from a chronolily's base in a precise sequence to conjure visions of specific events, but a quicker, if less reliable, method is for someone to just dip their hand in the plant's nectar and spend a minute or two concentrating on seeing something. The latter method can only be attempted once per day, and the odds of success vary based on whether or not the user is a spellcaster, how high their Wisdom score is, how well-informed they are about the events they're trying to see, whether said events are occurring on the same plane as them, and so forth.
Defeat Equals Explosion: Should a chronolily be killed, it instantly decomposes into a huge cloud of poisonous vapor.
Phlebotinum-Handling Requirements: Chronolilies are sentient and semi-intelligent, and use know alignment to screen potential users. Should an evil being attempt to utilize one, a chronolily's nectar will turn black, denying them visions.
Towering Flower: They're certifiably Gargantuan flowering plants.

Chronotyryn

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 19 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

12-foot-tall intelligent avians from the Infernal Battlefield of Acheron, who hoard knowledge and wield power over time.

Bird People: They look mostly like ogre-sized ravens, save for a pair of scaly humanoid arms beneath their wings.
Bizarre Alien Biology: Chronotyryns have two distinct brains and two distinct voiceboxes. This allows them to provide echoes for their own voices or hold two conversations at the same time, and most dangerously, take two creatures' worth of actions in the same round of combat
Clever Crows: Though evil, these crow-like creatures are extremely knowledgeable, to the point that it's assumed they have at least 10 ranks in any given Knowledge skill. They don't willingly share any of their information, however.
Feather Flechettes: Three times per day, they can launch a flurry of their adamantine alloyed feathers as a ranged attack.
Super-Scream: Once per day, a chronotyryn can give a sonic screech to deal heavy damage in a 20-foot radius.
Time Master: Chronotyryns claim to be the masters of time, and have spell-like abilities such as time stop and temporal stasis in addition to their repertoire of sorcerer spells.

Chupacabra

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Small bloodsuckers who typically prey on livestock, though they'll also attack sentient beings too weak to fight back, such as halfings, or young or infirm humans.

Chameleon Camouflage: In a departure from the source myth, these chupacabras can change their coloration to blend in with their surroundings, granting them a bonus to Hide checks, which they can do even without cover or conealment.
Chupacabra: These goat-suckers seem to compromise between the two depictions of the cryptid, being furred, spined humanoids Running on All Fours, with decidedly feral facial features.
It Can Think: They actually have a near-average Intelligence score of 9, and evidence suggests some chupacabras can understand some words of Common. But "despite their intelligence, chupacabras possess no culture, merely a primitive cunning and skill at hunting."
Super-Reflexes: They have a rogue's Uncanny Dodge ability.
Vampiric Draining: Chupacabras drain blood from creatures they've grappled, dealing Constitution damage each round it continues. They can drain 12 points of Constitution before growing bloated and sluggish, becoming fatigued until they rest.
Winged Humanoid: There are rumors of a chupacabra variant that flies on membranous wings.

Chuul

Classification: Aberration (3E, 5E), Aberrant Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E), 10 (4E), 4 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil, Unaligned (4E)

Lobster-like horrors with a mouthful of paralytic tentacles.

The Ageless: The 5th edition Monster Manual strongly implies that chuuls cannot die of old age, and that every chuul alive in the world today has been around since the days when aboleths ruled the world.
Battle Trophy: Chuuls are known to take trophies from their victims, either pieces of wargear or their enemies' skulls.
The Paralyzer: A chuul's mouth tentacles secrete a paralyzing chemical that the creatures use to subdue prey.
Slave Race: Whom they were slaves to depends on edition.
- The 3rd Edition Lords of Madness supplement describes chuuls as the creations of Ashranezr, a mad fleshcrafter who turned himself half-sahuagin through magic and self-surgery. After perfecting his chuuls and discovering a way to make his creations (and himself) ageless, Ashranezr spent a century building up an army of his amphibious warrior beasts. However, he ran out of patience after making about six hundred of the things, sent them to raid villages and assassinate rivals, and proceeded to get himself killed by adventurers. Since Ashranezr's death, about two hundred of his first-generation, ageless chuuls still survive, and have spawned further generations of lesser chuuls.
- In 4th Edition, chuuls are associated with mind flayers, disposing of the corpses of the illithids' victims, with the explanation that brains are actually poisonous to chuuls.
- In 5th Edition, chuuls were created by the aboleths to extend their reach beyond the water, and collect sentient creatures and magic at their masters' command.
Supernatural Sensitivity: 5th Edition chuuls can sense the presence of any magic within 120 feet, like an innate, non-magical version of the detect magic spell.
Took a Level in Dumbass: In 3rd Edition, chuuls are as intelligent as an average human and capable of conversing in Common, but 4th and 5th Edition cut their Intelligence in half, and the latter renders them mute but capable of understanding Deep Speech.

Chwinga

Classification: Elemental (5E)
Challenge Rating: 0 (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Tiny elemental spirits with shy, curious demeanors.

Benevolent Monsters: They're not officially Good, but chwingas literally don't have an attack on their stats block, and once per day can gift a nearby creature with a beneficial supernatural charm.
Defend Command: Chwingas can take an action to magically hide within something like a rock, plant, or fresh water source. While sheltering like this, the chwinga cannot be targeted by any attack or effect, but will be ejected if its hiding spot is destroyed.
Expy: Of the Kodama wood sprites from Princess Mononoke, being tiny nature spirits with rock-like faces.
Horse of a Different Color: Some chwinga "astronauts" — distinguished from their planetside kin by the Technicolor Fire wreathing their heads — take to riding through Wildspace on space guppies, directed by a bauble on a fishing pole.
Intrigued by Humanity: They're curious about humanoids and their civilizations, and might follow around or quietly observe people wearing armor, cooking meals, or using tools.
No Body Left Behind: If slain, chwingas become a clump of petals, a stone, or a puddle.
Not a Mask: Chwingas resemble 6-inch to foot-tall animated dolls with mask-like faces.

Cildabrin

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classifiaction: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Large, solitary subterranean hunters who blend scorpion and spider features.

It Can Think: Cildabrins are fully sentient, intelligent as humans (leading them to scatter treasure around their lairs to attract humanoid prey), and capable of casting spells like darkness, silence and spike stones.
Mix-and-Match Critters: They're a blend of hunting spider, giving them tarantula-like hairy legs and the ability to Wall Crawl, as well as scorpion, giving them Power Pincers that can constrict prey and a stinger with a Strength-damaging venom. There's some speculation that cildabrins were created by another race, but no hard evidence.
Portent of Doom: While rumor has it that cildabrins are aligned with the drow, this is untrue, and in fact some drow religious sects consider a cildabrin sighting a "dire omen."
Speaks Fluent Animal: Despite being The Speechless, cildabrins can somehow communicate with other arachnids.
Trademark Favorite Food: Cildabrins prefer dwarf flesh above all other prey.

Cilops

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Animal (3E), Natural Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E, 4E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Huge centipedes that hunt in salt flats and wastelands, relentlessly pursuing their prey.

Attack Animal: Cilops can be captured and domesticated for use as tracking beasts, though attempts to breed them in captivity have failed.
Creepy Centipedes: They're psionic centipedes that can reach lengths of over 15 feet, prefer live prey, and are terrifyingly hard to elude once they encounter a potential meal.
The Paralyzer: Their antennae can stun victims for short periods, leaving them easy prey for the cilops' pincers.
Psychic Powers: Like many Athasian creatures, cilops have psionic powers, and use the likes of life detection, object reading and danger sense to hunt, compensating for the poor depth perception of their single eye.
Super-Persistent Predator: Cilops prefer to focus their attacks on one individual in combat, and more than that, once they've picked up a victim's trail, a cilops will track them obsessively. They'll actually ignore more vulnerable and more attractive prey in favor of continuing to chase their original target, using their psionic powers to keep on the "scent." To make matters worse, cilops are The Sleepless and can tirelessly pursue their quarry for days on end, only giving up after about a week without success.

Cinderspawn

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Undead fire elementals which attack the living to steal their warmth.

Cold Flames: Being undead fire elementals, a cinderspawn's body is composed of blue-black flames which give off no heat.
Elemental Embodiment: They are—or were—creatures of elemental fire.
An Ice Person: Touching a cinderspawn, or being touched by one, results in the cinderspawn stealing heat from your body and inflicting cold damage to you. Ironically, the cinderspawn itself is weak to cold damage.
Logical Weakness: As creatures of elemental fire, cinderspawn cannot enter water and can be snuffed out by extreme cold.
Non-Human Undead: You can't get less human than an undead elemental.
Oxymoronic Being: They are fire elementals which cannot burn anything because their fiery bodies steal heat rather than giving it off.

Ciruja Plant

Origin: Greyhawk
Classification: Plant (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Plants first encountered in the Wormcrawl Fissure, feared for feeding upon other creatures' youth.

Foul Flower: They look like a cluster of fronds with their roots above the ground, and bright red berries and blue and white flowers scattered beneath a main stalk with a bright orange and yellow flower. They're also (slowly) ambulatory and predatory, aging their prey to death.
The Paralyzer: A ciruja plant's central flower stalk can fire a short-ranged spheroid of poison that can paralyze a victim for up to 18 minutes. Each plant can have up to eight of those spheroids at a time, they regrow over the course of 24 hours, and if harvested as a grenade they remain potent for 6 hours.
Rapid Aging: After making its way to a paralyzed victim, a ciruja plant digs its roots into its prey (a process slowed by the victim's Armor Class) and starts feeding on their youth. The victim ages 1d10 years each round, gaining no positive benefits from this aging, until it reaches its species' maximum age and dies, Reduced to Dust surrounded by Empty Piles of Clothing.

Cloaker

^3e

^2e

Classification: Aberration (3E, 5E), Aberrant Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E), 12 (4E) 8 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral, Unaligned (4E)

Malevolent underground monsters that resemble cloaks when hanging from walls, only to unfold and fly to the attack.

Art Evolution: A pretty drastic example. Early cloaker art made them little more than a cape with a spooky face on the inside, but subsequent editions have made them more biological-looking, to the point that it's hard to believe anyone could mistake one for a fashion accessory.
Beware My Stinger Tail: Like stingrays, cloakers have spiny tails they use against enemies.
Brown Note: Cloakers can emit horrible low-frequency moans to unnerve and frighten foes. This is not a Supernatural Fear Inducer so much as it is a sonic effect, so it functions even in an antimagic field.
Flying Seafood Special: They look something like manta or stingrays while in flight.
He Was Right There All Along: When clinging to a vertical surface with their tails tucked up, these monsters can indeed be mistaken for dark leathery cloaks.
Large and in Charge: The cloaker lords who lead their colonies are Huge monsters, with 12-foot wingspans.
Magic Knight: Cloaker lords have the spellcasting skill of 9th-level wizards.
Master of Illusion: Downplayed; cloakers can create phantasms to replicate a mirror image effect, or in older editions even grant themselves concealment or create a silent image, but they can only use these abilities in shadowy areas.
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Cloakers are capable of speaking Undercommon and Deep Speech, but anyone who attempts telepathic communication finds that their thoughts are simply too alien to comprehend.
Monster Lord:
- Cloaker lords are a stronger subrace of cloakers often found leading groups of their smaller kin.
- Shadowcloak elders are particularly ancient, powerful and magic-wielding cloakers who rule over entire city-like nests hidden in the Underdark.

Clockroach

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Dog-sized mechanical insects primarily employed to clean up messes in laboratories and workshops, though the acid they use to do so makes them equally effective as guardians.

Acid Attack: Clockroaches can spray a line of acid every five rounds, which has obvious applications as a weapon, though the constructs also use their acid to burrow through obstacles, or dissolve stubborn messes.
Mechanical Insects: They fit the trope visually, though clockroaches aren't particularly malevolent — unless directed to guard an area against those who don't give the proper signal, or they find a creature in an area they've been ordered to clean, clockroaches never initiate combat. Clockroaches are in fact mindless, and have to follow simple "programs" of 25 words or less, relying upon sight or hearing rather than cognition, that are dictated to them by someone with the amulet keyed to a socket on their carapace.
Punny Name: They are indeed clockwork cockroaches, but have nothing to do with the Clock Roaches trope.

Clockwork

Bronze scout (5e)

Classification: Construct (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (Bronze Scout), 4 (Iron Cobra, Stone Defender), 5 (Oaken Bolter) (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Gnomish constructions built for a variety of tasks, from defense to reconnaissance to combat.

Animal Mecha: An iron cobra is a metal snake with a poisonous bite.
Clockwork Creature: Clockworks are magical constructs that don't require air, food, drink, or sleep.
Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Stone defenders serve as bodyguards to gnomes and other clockworks, and are protected by plates of stone riveted onto them.
Point Build System: Clockworks can be further customized with an additional enhancement - improved armor, additional movement types, self-repair capacity - but only if they also take on a negative trait, such as rusty gears, leaking coolant, a tendency to overheat, and so forth.
Retcon: Several of this "clockworks" appeared as standalone creature entries in past editions, before 5th compiled them as gnomish contraptions.
Spy Bot: A bronze scout observes enemies at close range with its telescoping eyestalks, while most of its body is buried.
You Will Not Evade Me: An oaken bolter's harpoon can drag enemies toward traps or melee-oriented clockworks.

Clockwork Dragon

Classification: Construct (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Breath Weapon: Depending on its maker's whim, a clockwork dragon can breathe fire, acid, cold or lightning.
Clockwork Creature: Clockwork dragons are intricately crafted constructs made to look like metallic dragons. Their advanced intellect allows them to be programmed with a wide range of orders, and be capable of wholly independent reactions to potential threats.

Clockwork Eunuch

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Ornate and unusually-intelligent and perceptive automatons, designed to guard the seraglios of sultans and emirs.

Artificial Brilliance: Clockwork eunuchs are brilliant for constructs, nearly as smart as a human and fully capable of speech. They can recognize up to 50 individuals, differentiate between gender and race, and thus reject all males except approved exceptions from entering an area, while permitting females to move about freely, as their master commands.
Blade Below the Shoulder: Rather than hands, they have Sinister Scimitars attached to their arms.
Bling of War: These constructs are always made of fine materials, decorated with gold, silver and mother-of-pearl, and have precious gemstones for eyes. As such, much of their listed treasure is jewelry pried out of their bodies. They're also usually outfitted with turbans and baggy trousers for further decoration.
Eye of Newt: One obstacle to a clockwork eunuch's construction is that one of the ingredients for the process is the dust of a destroyed Mummy.
Living Lie Detector: Clockwork eunuchs are under a constant discern lies effect, and know when someone successfully saves against the magic.
Robosexual: Despite being built specifically to avoid this issue, clockwork eunuchs are still the subject of scandalous rumors about liaisons with the harem girls they're supposed to be protecting. Their entry assures that "The act is impossible," however.
Royal Harem: The first clockwork eunuchs are thought to have been built at the order of a sultan whose eunuch harem guards had "betrayed" him, and thus these constructs are typically found screening visitors to a palace harem. They also have a secondary function of keeping women in the harem, and clockwork eunuchs are designed to be able to grapple escapees without harming them, and can cast hold person once per day.
Slippery Skid: An oil of slipperiness is incorporated into a clockwork eunuch's form, and once per day it can release enough oil to cover a 10-foot-wide area in a grease effect.
Two-Faced: Some clockwork eunuchs are designed with faces on either side of their head, allowing them to watch both approaches to a doorway or passage at once.

Clockwork Horror

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Construct (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (electrum), 5 (gold), 7 (platinum), 9 (adamantine) (3E); 2 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Spider-like constructs about two feet across, which efficiently gather metal to make more of their kind.

Achilles' Heel: 2nd and 3rd Edition clockwork horrors are resistant to magic, but are distinctly vulnerable to the shatter spell, which blinds them for several rounds.
Chainsaw Good: They have powered razor saws in place of mandibles.
Grey Goo: They're essentially a Magitek variant of the trope, remorselessly converting every piece of metal they can get their claws on into more of their kind, and attacking living creatures carrying the resources they're after. An army of clockwork horrors can devastate an entire nation in a matter of weeks.
Hive Caste System: The plating of a clockwork horror's base metal body indicates its rank and function. Copper horrors are laborers not meant for combat, silver horrors are basic guards and patrol units, electrum horrors are scouts and soldiers, gold horrors serve as supervisors and commanders, platinum horrors as generals and governors, and a single adamantine horror rules the entire swarm, and alone knows how to animate a new clockwork horror's body.
Hive Mind: All clockwork horrors share a linked consciousness so long as they're within 10 miles of a gold, platinum or the adamatine horror.
It Can Think: They aren't mindless constructs, they fight with calculated, merciless precision, and their leader castes have human-level intelligence, while the adamantine horror is positively brilliant.
Magic Knight: The adamantine horror is physically the strongest of its kind, and can also use powerful magic like disintegrate, implosion and Mordenkainen's disjunction at will.
Mechanical Insects: Well, arachnids, but close enough.
Piñata Enemy: Averted; even though clockwork horrors are plated in precious metals and have gemstones on their heads, upon death their gems disintegrate and their bodies fuse into masses of slag.
Power Crystal: Each clockwork horror has a large gemstone on the top of its head.
Shock and Awe: Gold and platinum horrors can fire lightning bolts at foes. Friendly fire isn't a concern, since all clockwork horrors are immune to electricity.
Space Pirates: Clockwork horrors move from world to world by hijacking the ships of other races, and 5th Edition gives each the ability to instantly attune to and take over a ship's spelljamming helm.
Starfish Language: They can communicate with each other using mechanical sounds when not relaying information telepathically. In 5th Edition, they can also emit light from their crystal eye, issuing dot-and-dash messages to other creatures that can see the light. Creatures besides clockwork horrors can learn this blinking light code, which is called Ziklight.
Turned Against Their Masters: An ancient, machine-loving race now known only as the "Lost Ones" built the adamantine horror, who rebelled against and killed its creators, then went on to devise the other horrors to serve as its army. The clockwork horrors would have been confined to their scoured homeworld, but several centuries later the neogi happened to visit, only to have their ships overrun, giving the clockwork horrors a means to explore Wildspace and find new worlds to cleanse of threats (i.e. everything else).

Clockwork Mender

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (individual), 3 (swarm) (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Cat-sized flying constructs that help maintain other mechanisms on the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus, though Material Plane mages and artificers also find them useful minions.

Heroic Sacrifice: A swarm of clockwork menders can take a "swarm sacrifice" action, repairing another construct up to the swarm's maximum hit points, but dealing the same amount of damage to the swarm in the process. If this causes the swarm's hit points to reach zero, it breaks up.
Mechanical Lifeforms: They are semi-intelligent, if mute, need to eat to survive, and even reproduce, constructing a new batch of clockwork menders according to a strict schedule (though only while on Mechanus — sages speculate that the plane is necessary to imbue new menders with life).
Metal Muncher: Clockwork menders feed upon bits of metal and rust as they repair other constructs, and one will consume about four pounds of material over the course of a month. Their summoners often leave out scrap metal as snacks.
Poisonous Person: Their mechanical stingers carry a Dexterity-damaging poison.
White Mage: Though only to inorganic creatures; an individual clockwork mender can repair a minor amount of damage to a construct once per day, while a swarm of them can repair one point of damage to a construct (or themselves) each round, with no cap on this ability.

Clockwork Steed

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Tireless and obedient mechanical mounts that serve their riders as well as any organic warhorse, with a few caveats.

The Dog Bites Back: The original clockwork steeds were built by a wizard for a warlord, who upon hearing how expensive they were refused to pay. The wizard then sold the steeds — and the warlord's invasion plans — to the nobles of the city-state the warlord had been preparing to attack.
Equipment Upgrade: Clockwork steeds have a short list of optional upgrades, from improved armor or Damage Reduction to the ability to trip, overrun or trample opponents.
Mechanical Horse: They're clockwork horses (or ponies, for Small riders) comprised of springs, pistons and gears. The good news is that they never require stabling, feeding or care, can gallop all day without tiring, and are so responsive that even an amateur rider can direct them with a free action. The bad news is that should their rider become incapacitated and unable to direct them, a clockwork steed will immediately come to a complete stop; they also cannot be taught tricks, and are just as willing to gallop beneath a thief as their original owner.

Cloud Ray

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Elemental Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 16 (3E), 23 (4E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Titanic and majestic flying predators that can swoop out of the sky and devour entire villages.

Berserk Button: Though possessing only an animal's intelligence, a cloud ray will fly into a fury should a psionicist attempt mental contact, and single out the offender for consumption.
Beware My Stinger Tail: Cloud rays can lash enemies with their spiny zips, so quickly that the attack makes a thundercrack.
Flying Seafood Special: They resemble Colossal, airborne stingrays.
Food Chain of Evil: Cloud rays typically hunt the likes of griffons, manticores, even rocs, but fear dragons as one of the few things capable of preying upon them in turn.
Living Gasbag: It's not obvious since they don't look like organic dirigibles, but a cloud ray's levitation comes from lighter-than-air gases inside it, not magic or psionics. This lets them ascend at a rate of 20 feet per round, or dive 500 feet per round, only to instantly pull out by levitating again.
Mind over Matter: Cloud rays use telekinesis to get around their lack of hands.
No-Sell: They can generate an inertial barrier that acts as a protection from arrows spell, neutralizing non-magical missile fire.
Stealthy Colossus: Their underbelly's coloration lets cloud rays blend in with the skies above them, offsetting their size penalty to give them a small positive modifier on Hide checks. And sometimes they'll land for up to weeks at a time, burying themselves beneath a layer of dirt and dust so that the cloud ray might be mistaken for a rock formation.
Swallowed Whole: They can snatch and swallow even a giant thanks to their 20-foot-wide mouths. It's noted that cloud rays don't have an actual stomach, instead prey is subjected to a horrendous amount of physical damage from its tooth-lined throat until it's liquefied enough to pass into the cloud ray's intestines.

Cockatrice

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Natural Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 5 (4E), 1/3 (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral (1E-3E), Unaligned (4E-5E)

Bat-winged fowls whose pecks and scratches slowly petrify their foes.

Basilisk and Cockatrice: Featherless, lizard-tailed chickens whose bite turns people to stone.
Crafted from Animals: Some wizards prize cockatrice feathers as quills for use writing certain magic scrolls.
Playing with Fire: Older bestiaries mention a more dangerous variant of the cockatrice called a pyrolisk, identified by a single red feather in its tail and the reddish cast of it wings. Instead of petrifying victims with a peck, it causes other creatures to burst into flames via its Deadly Gaze, and can cause existing fire sources to explode as per the pyrotechnics spell.
Taken for Granite: Getting bitten by a cockatrice can be deadly, as the smallest scratch is enough to — depending on the edition — slowly or instantly turn the victim into stone. Cockatrices are immune to their own species' petrification, but not to that caused by other sources.

Coldlight Walker

Classification: Undead (5E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

A form of undead which arises in the colder regions of the world, coldlight walkers are so named because they give off an intense but chilling light.

An Ice Person: Unsurprisingly, they can innately replicate the Cold Ray spell.
Blinded by the Light: Coldlight walkers emit a spectral light so intense that mortals risk being blinded when looking at them.
Deader than Dead: Creatures killed by a coldlight walker are completely frozen, and can't be thawed. This prevents resurrections.
Shout-Out: The 5th edition artwork for the coldlight walker seems like an homage to the poster art◊ for The Thing (1982).

Colossus

Stone colossus (3e)

Classification: Construct (3E, 5E), Immortal Animate (4E)
Challenge Rating: 24 (stone), 27 (flesh), 32 (iron) (3E); 28 (primordial), 29 (godforged) (4E); 20 (flesh), 21 (runic) (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned or Neutral Evil (flesh colossus)

Enormous constructs over 70 feet tall, requiring epic-level magic and powerful elemental spirits to create.

Achilles' Heel: Stone colossi are slowed by transmuate rock to mud (but healed by transmute mud to rock).
All Your Powers Combined: Primordial colossi are infused with the power of the elementals, so anything they strike — or that comes too close — suffers fire, cold, acid, thunder and lightning damage.
Anti-Magic: 3E colossi aren't just immune to magic (with a few exceptions), they constantly generate a 100-foot-radius antimagic field.
Breath Weapon: Like an iron golem, an iron colossus can exhale a cone of poisonous gas every few rounds.
Feed It with Fire: Also like iron golems, iron colossi are healed by electricity effects.
Flesh Golem: The flesh colossus creation process involves rendering no less than three hundred previously-reanimated humanoid corpses into two great vats, one filled with necrotic flesh, the other bones. The bones are then converted into a semiliquid paste and shaped into a giant articulated skeleton, then the zombified flesh is applied to it, and finally a powerful ghost is used as the abomination's controlling spirit.
Golem: They are essentially Colossal golem variants, with a corresponding increase in power and expense to create.
Living Statue: Iron and stone golems are such, and sometimes the latter are even carved to resemble their egotistical creators.
Mighty Glacier: Relatively speaking; colossi can't run, but their Colossal size gives them a stride faster than a Medium-sized creature's normal move, and their single attack per round can pulverize most foes.
No-Sell: Iron colossi are explicitly rust-proof, unlike lesser iron golems.
Retcon: While in most editions, colossi can be built by anyone with the spells and immense resources required to make them, 5th Edition brings colossi back in its Glory of the Giants supplement, casting them as the creations of giant wizards.
Revive Kills Zombie: Inverted with the flesh colossi, which are healed by negative energy effects just like undead beings.
Weaponized Stench: Flesh colossi are surrounded by a thick carrion stench that can nauseate those within 300 feet.
Words Can Break My Bones: Godforged colossi can speak with the "voice of the demiurge," generating a burst of psychic damage and stunning other creatures for a turn.

Concordant Killer

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/98674_3.jpg

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 19 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

These angels of Neutrality are part celestial, part fiend, and work as impartial assassins for the great powers of the multiverse, coordinating their activities so that no one alignment benefits the most from their talents.

All Your Powers Combined: Their swords are simultaneously holy, unholy, axiomatic and anarchic. The less Neutral that makes up a target's alignment, the more those swords hurt.
Balance Between Good and Evil: Concordant killers are devoted to the concept, and collectively track their kills to ensure that they're culling targets from across the alignment spectrum.
Barrier Change Boss: A concordant killer can take an action to align their defenses against enemies of a certain alignment component, granting them a bonus to their Armor Class and on saving throws against spells. Parties are thus encouraged to switch up who's engaging them.
Battle Trophy: Their armor is decorated with polished pieces of blades, taken from their victims.
Born of Heaven and Hell: They are infused with the essence of both the Upper and Lower Planes.
Good Wings, Evil Wings: Feathered wings like angels, but dusky-colored to indicate they aren't Good.
Killed Off for Real: Concordant killers don't reproduce, or regenerate on a home plane like most outsiders "slain" in battle. So not only does anyone who destroys one permanently reduce their total population, they earn the ire of the remaining outsiders.
Professional Killer: Their patrons include demon lords, demigods, and even deities.
Unusable Enemy Equipment: Their concordant greatswords are extensions of their bearer's will, and disappear if the concordant killer is destroyed.
Words Can Break My Bones: Once per day they can use blasphemy, dictum, holy word, and word of chaos.
You Owe Me: Rather than treasure, concordant killers prefer to be paid in favors, which they invoke later to make subsequent assignments easier - leave a planar portal open, provide information on a target's whereabouts, etc.

Cooshee

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Beast (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E), 1/8 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Also known as elven hounds, these massive canines are adapted to life in the forest, and are often found in the company of elves.

Attack Animal: Some sylvan elves keep kennels of cooshee for hunting and combat, and the hounds' bone-crushing bites are capable of dropping an orc warrior. "Elves say one elven hound is worth five orcs; that's an exaggeration, to be sure, but an elven hound is a ferocious combatant nevertheless, especially when attacking prey distracted by a hail of elven arrows."
Canine Companion: They can be convinced to serve as such, most easily by elves, though cooshee have a strong independent streak, if not quite to the extent of cath shee.
Nitro Boost: Once per hour, an elven hound can charge at five times its normal speed, moving 250 feet in one round.
Resistant to Magic: Elven hounds share their masters' resistance to enchantments.
Stealth Expert: Cooshee are notably stealthy for canines, capable of moving in near-silence, and their mottled green coats blend in with their forest homes.

Core Spawn

Origin: Critical Role
Classification: Aberration (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Chthonic monsters created by the Elder Evils. While core spawn normally dwell deep underground, cataclysmic earthquakes and other forms of intense seismic activity can bring them up to the surface world.

Big Creepy-Crawlies: Many core spawn look like oversized, vaguely Lovecraftian arthropods.
No-Sell: All core spawn are immune to psychic damage.
Psychic Powers: Deep spawn emissaries and seers have innate telepathic powers, and the seer can attack by hurling harmful globs of psionic energy at their victims.

Core Spawn Larva

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_core_spawn_crawler_5e.png

Challenge Rating: 1 (5E)

Wormlike creatures that prowl the depths in groups, looking for prey to eviscerate with their claws, mandibles, and tail stingers.

Eyeless Face: Core spawn larvae have no eyes, and are blind beyond their blindsight radius.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: The bite of a core spawn crawler can leave its victim stricken with momentary fear.
Zerg Rush: They're weak, but habitually hunt in packs, and have an ability to that effect granting core spawn larvae advantage on attacks against targets also threatened by an ally.

Core Spawn Emissary

Challenge Rating: 6 (5E)

Flying horrors which bedevil their victims with scythe-like talons, poisonous spores, and the thrumming of their wings.

Brown Note: The droning of an emissary's wings can put nearby non-aberrations into a trance, leaving them unable to fight off the creature.
Poisonous Person: Core spawn emissaries can expel clouds of crystalline spores, which act like a contact poison and can be deadly if inhaled.

Core Spawn Seer

Challenge Rating: 13 (5E)

Mages mutated by the Elder Evils, and now serve as their lieutenants.

Body to Jewel: Part of their transformation involves fluorescent crystals growing from their flesh, which give off a psychadelic glow that is visible even beneath the hooded robes the spawn seers wear.
Energy Absorption: When a core spawn seer gets hurt, it can use its reaction to halve the damage it just took. This reduced damage is then converted to radiant energy which powers up its next melee attack.
Random Effect Spell: The seer's Psychedelic Orb attack inflicts psychic damage and leaves the victim with a random status ailment.
Transhuman Abomination: Core spawn seers were once ordinary humanoid mages, but are now the most alien of the core spawn in terms of appearance and abilities. Their artwork depicts them as vaguely arachnoid beings covered in sharp crystalline growths, with a glowing mass of something where a face ought to be. They can pass through the ground like it isn't there, hurl globs of harmful psychic energies, and absorb energy from their enemies' attacks to fuel their own strikes.
Was Once a Man: Core spawn seers are humanoid arcanists corrupted by the eldritch power of the Elder Evils.

Core Spawn Worm

Challenge Rating: 15 (5E)

Titanic, tentacled worms that appear to be made of congealed magma.

Attack Reflector: Downplayed. If you hit the worm with an effect that deals radiant damage, the worm will still be hurt, but everyone around the worm will get hurt as well as the energy reflects off its hide.
Combat Tentacles: Quivering, barbed tentacles surround a core spawn worm's massive, toothy maw.
Living Lava: It's a giant monster with a body that looks like cooling magma and constantly gives off a ruddy glow, and is unsurprisingly immune to fire damage. Downplayed in that its body doesn't give off any actual heat, and the only way it can deal fire damage is by swallowing a victim.

Corollax

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Tropical birds that can blast threats with a debilitating cone of colors.

Everything's Better with Rainbows: Corollaxes can use color spray at will, potentially stunning, blinding and/or knocking out enemies. They can be trained to not blast specific creatures with a Handle Animal check.
Loyal Animal Companion: Corollaxes can be convinced to accompany a humanoid on their travels, refusing to leave their side (so long as they receive sufficient attention, food and grooming). A well-treated corollax will even make every effort to rejoin its companion should they be separated.
Silver Bullet: Though physically weak, these birds do have a low level of Damage Reduction that can only be overcome by silvered weapons.
Talking Animal: Like mundane parrots, corollaxes are natural mimics, and can be trained to repeat up to nine different phrases with a high enough Handle Animal check. "The birds don't seem to comprehend what they say, however, and many humanoids later come to regret teaching the precocious mimics to talk — particularly when they can't get the creatures to shut up."

Corpse Flower

Classification: Plant (5E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Ambulatory, corpse-snatching plants that sprout from the graves of necromancers or mighty undead, and carry some of their power.

Animate Dead: They can convert a corpse inside their bodies into a fresh zombie, which is covered in the corpse flower's debilitating stench.
Combat Tentacles: They attack by lashing creatures with their vine-like tentacles.
No Body Left Behind: After snatching a humanoid body, a corpse flower can digest the corpse to heal itself, which completely destroys the body, making resurrection difficult.
Wall Crawl: They walk on vines that allow them to scale vertical surfaces or hang from ceilings.
Weaponized Stench: A corpse flower exudes a stench of decay that can nauseate nearby creatures by overwhelming their sense of smell.

Corpse Gatherer

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 19 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Essentially an animate graveyard, these monstrosities appear as gargantuan, vaguely-human masses of grave earth, tombstones and corpses.

Body of Bodies: Along with tombstones, etc. When defeated, a corpse gatherer crumbles into a pile of debris and as many zombies as it had Hit Dice.
Evil Tainted the Place: They are thought to arise when vampires or other powerful, sentient undead are buried in unconcecrated ground, tainting the area until the entire graveyard arises as a singular undead horror.
Genius Loci: An entire cemetery, up and about and hungry for more corpses.
Swallowed Whole: Corpse gatherers like to snatch up victims and stuff them in their bodies, where the victims take damage from the grinding tombstones until they become another corpse inside the thing. This incidentally binds the victim's soul to the corpse gatherer, preventing resurrection until the monster is destroyed.
Walking Wasteland: They're surrounded by an aura similar to the desecrate spell's effect, which interferes with Turn Undead attempts and gives stat bonuses to nearby undead.

Corrupted Giant Shark

Origin: Critical Role
Classification: Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Brown Note Being: The corrupted giant shark's psychic aura causes painful distress in nearby creatures.
Healing Factor: A corrupted giant shark is covered in crystals that enable it to regenerate, unless harmed by radiant energy or critical hits.

Corruption Eater

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Ghoulish-looking creatures that empower themselves by consuming the corruption of others.

Combat Tentacles: Their basic attacks are two tentacle rakes, and it both hit the same target, a corruption eater can latch on and rend their victim for extra damage.
Helpful Mook: On the one hand, player characters trying to reduce their corruption level might welcome a corruption eater's attentions, but on the other hand, an Anti-Hero who has picked feats or even a Prestige Class around their level of corruption can find themselves losing access to their abilities after an attack.
Holy Burns Evil: A variant; "pure" characters free of any sort of taint will automatically overcome a corruption eater's Damage Reduction.
Overly-Long Tongue: They sport one, covered with extra Lamprey Mouths to boot, though it isn't used in combat.
Sin Eater: They do indeed eat corruption, and not in the "Abstract Eater" sense. When using their bite attack against victims tainted by physical corruption, they reduce their victim's corruption score by one — onlookers see little wisps of black smoke drawn into the corruption eater's mouth. This provides the creature with temporary hit points and an hour-long bonus on attack rolls, damage rolls and saving throws, and additionally powers a Breath Weapon that not only deals damage based on how many points of corruption the monster has consumed, but it can increase victims' depravity scores. Thus, a corruption eater can consume a victim's physical taint, only to convert it into mental taint.

Corrupture

Classification: Ooze (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Huge, undulating blobs of hungry, acid-filled flesh, spawned from the defilement of nature.

Acid Attack: Their pseudopods deal acid damage in addition to bludgeoning foes, and corruptures can also splash everything within 20 feet with an acid burst.
Big Eater: Corruptures are mindless predators that instinctively attack any fleshy creatures they sense nearby, growing larger as they eat. This can actually be their undoing — corruptures that eat too well will grow so large that they become immobile mountains of flesh, leading them to starve to death.
Blob Monster: They're 15-foot-wide, 6000-pound blobs of semifluid flesh of varying skin tones, covered in veins, bruises and sores. Though slow, corruptures are able to move with equal ease across land, through the water, or up sheer surfaces.
Gaia's Vengeance: Corruptures are spawned to embody "the cancerous damage to the world" done by true crimes against nature — clearcutting a forest or draining a swamp wouldn't qualify, but magical experimentation on wildlife and arcane plagues would. On Eberron, for example, corruptures can be found in the Mournland or the ruins of Xen'drik, while in Faerûn, they're associated with ancient Netherese arcanists or fading mythals.
The Spiny: The acidic sheath covering their flesh harms anything making bodily contact with them.
Trampled Underfoot: They're large enough to simply flow over smaller creatures who can't escape their 20-foot movement speed.

Cosmic Horror

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 18 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Titanic creatures from the Far Realm capable of laying waste to entire worlds.

Combat Tentacles: They have two tentacle attacks that can also grapple opponents, and as a legendary action can crush a grabbed victim.
Cosmic Horror Story: As per their name, they exist in such a narrative. Cosmic horrors normally drift through the Astral Plane or void of Wildspace in a deep slumber, but hunger or some disturbance can wake them and draw them to an inhabited world, where they feed upon the bodies and minds of mortals until sated.
Deadly Gas: They can jet out a line of poisonous gas.
Eldritch Abomination: No two cosmic horrors look alike, but each is "a seemingly impossible conglomeration of eyes, mouths, wings, tentacles, and less recognizable organs and appendages."
Kaiju: Their listed size is 100 feet tall/long, while their creature art depicts them dwarfing what looks to be a flight of dragons.
Mind Rape: Cosmic horrors can fill the minds of nearby creatures with dreadful psychic whispers, dealing heavy psychic damage.
Teleportation: They can take a legendary action to teleport 120 feet, bringing along anything grappled in their tentacles.

Couatl

Classification: Outsider (3E), Immortal Magical Beast (4E), Celestial (5E)
Challenge Rating: 10 (3E), 15 (4E), 4 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Good

Celestial winged serpents sent by benevolent deities to guard holy sites and guide mortals.

Angel Unaware: They prefer to remain hidden or diguise themselves while pursuing their divine missions, only revealing their true nature as a last resort.
Exact Words: Couatls Can Not Tell A Lie, but can withhold information, answer vaguely, or allow others to jump to conclusions if they feel a need too.
Feathered Serpent: Giant snakes with birdlike wings, who act as servants of heavenly powers and are usually found in tropical and subtropical forests.
Poisonous Person: Their bites carry a venom that can induce unconsciousness in 5th Edition, or deal Strength damage in 3rd Edition.
Psychic Block Defense: Couatls are immune to any attempt to read their thoughts, sense their emotions, or detect their location.
Psychic Powers: Traditionally, couatls use psionics rather than arcane or divine magic. 5th Edition downplays this, but doesn't make much distinction between mental and magical power to begin with.
Omniglot: Like other celestials, couatls can speak any language.
Telepathy: Alternatively, they can communicate telepathically.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: They can polymorph themselves at will, taking on humanoid form or disguising themselves as other creatures.
Your Days Are Numbered: Couatls can sense the certainty, if not cause, of their deaths a full century in advance, giving them time to wrap up their divine missions, or mate and raise a hatchling to take their place.

Crab Folk

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_crabman_2e.jpg

^{Yurian (3e)}

^1e

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Giant (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E), 3 (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Also known as crabmen or more rarely yurians, these bipedal, crustacean humanoids exist as simple hunter-gatherers, though they occasionally raid their neighbors during food shortages.

Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Despite their simple society, crabmen are capable of making artwork such as seaweed weavings, driftwood carvings and seashell constructions that are beautiful but delicate, fetching good prices from some collectors.
Art Evolution: Their original 1E Fiend Folio art depicts them as beaked humanoids with natural armor and little claws on their hands, while 2E makes them more convincingly crabby, just in an upright stance. The yurians of the 3E Fiend Folio have a less anthropomoprhic build, looking much like natural crabs walking on a pair of humanlike legs, while their 5E depiction is as a more hunched, hulking take on their 2E design.
Giant Enemy Crab: Well, Medium- to Large-sized, Neutral crabmen.
Healing Factor: They have limited regenerative abilities, not quite enough to give them Fast Healing, but they'll grow back lost limbs or eyestalks as soon as they recover hit points.
Henchmen Race: 5E crab folk are naturally servile, and still build crude effigies of the hag who created their ancestors, and might worship someone who resembles her preferred form of a hobgoblin queen. The spell that transformed them came with a compulsion to seize and hoard silver, as well as to wage war on nearby settlements when ordered by the hag's seagull familiar... the latter of which can be triggered by mundane seagulls' cawing.
Power Pincers: They fight using their claws, and in certain tribes, the males have one enlarged claw that does extra damage.
Sapient Eat Sapient: Crabmen are rumored to be quite delicious, and the sahuagin consider them a delicacy.
Starfish Language: The crabfolk's language consists of hisses and clicks, which combined with yurians' paranoia makes it very difficult for outsiders to learn even a few words of it.
Was Once a Man: While in most editions crabmen are just another race of humanoids with animalistic traits, 5th Edition presents its crab folk as the former ogre minions of a coast-dwelling green hag, given forms that increased their intelligence and let them better survive in the water.

Crag Cat

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Large predatory felines with a number of magical adaptations.

Anti-True Sight: Crag cats are under a constant nondetection effect, making them invisible to divination magic or scrying sensors.
Attack Reflector: They also enjoy the benefits of spell turning, which can potentially turn hostile magic back on the caster.
Deadly Lunge: They can pounce on foes and potentially knock them prone, leaving them vulnerable to a follow-up bite attack.
To Serve Man: Crag cats prefer human flesh to all other fare, and are sometimes called "hunters-of-men."
Voice Changeling: Their cries sound like screams of terror, to help lure in humanoid prey.

Cranial Encyster

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Tick-like beings with disturbing humanoid faces, born from the corrupting influence of the Far Realm.

Brown Note Being: A cranial encyster constantly emits a gibbering sound that can unsettle other creatures.
Cephalothorax: They look like, and are about the size of, a partially-deflated humanoid head with clawed limbs.
Personal Space Invader: They attack by trying to latch onto a victim's head so they can sink their claws into the victim's skull.
Psychic-Assisted Suicide: A cranial encyster's needle-tipped limbs, once attached to a subject's brain, implant a death-urge impulse that compels the victim to look for the fastest method to kill itself. Afterward, the encyster's face changes to that of their latest victim.

Craud

Classification: Natural Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (4E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Crustacean humanoids who stand as tall as a halfling, and occasionally swarm from the sea to attack coastal communities.

Gaia's Vengeance: Some Superstitious Sailors hold that crauds are the instruments of Melora's vengeance, sent after those who despoil nature and fail to respect the goddess of nature and the sea. Other sages believe that crauds are simply opportunists who hunt on land when other races' fishing depletes the crauds' normal food sources.
Giant Enemy Crab: They're Medium-sized, brilliantly-colorful lobster-folk, more or less. Crauds aren't intelligent enough to have a language or society, but while their aggressive behavior leads some to call them "locusts of the sea," worshipers of Melora have been known to train crauds as undersea defenders.
Luring in Prey: Craud "kings" have glowing appendages they use to direct the rest of a swarm, as well as lure other creatures closer.

Crawling Claw

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Construct (3E), Undead (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1/3 (3E), 0 (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral (3E), Neutral Evil (5E)

A reanimated hand with a mind of its own and a will to kill.

Coup de Grâce: In 3rd Edition, crawling claws dealt double damage against prone combatants.
Helping Hands: Crawling claws are the severed hands of murderers animated by dark magic so that they can go on killing.
No-Sell: Crawling claws are explicitly immune to Turn Undead attempts.
A Sinister Clue: Traditionally, crawling claws were specifically the severed left hands of murderers.

Crodlu

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Animal (3E), Natural Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 5 (4E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Large, bipedal creatures resembling featherless birds, whose herds wander deserts and scrublands, eating whatever they can forage.

Adaptational Intelligence: In 2nd Edition, crodlu are given an animal-level Intelligence score of 1, increased to 2 in 3rd Edition, but 4th Edition takes it up to 3, higher than the average non-sapient creature and nearly as high as an ogre's Intelligence 4 in that edition. The crodlu's 4E entry also mentions their curiosity, habit of picking up and examining objects, and use of simple tools like sticks to flush prey from hiding.
Horse of a Different Color: Despite their unpredictability and occasional viciousness, crodlu can be domesticated and trained as mounts. Humanoids have even developed heavy/war crodlu breeds that are hardier and better-suited for combat, though they have to be kept apart from normal crodlu lest they attack each other.
Raptor Attack: They look something like Utahraptor-sized Oviraptors, and fight in packs, attacking by pouncing on foes.

Crucian

Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Desert-dwelling humanoids who are well-protected by their crab-like shells.

Armor Is Useless: Averted; while crucians have a whopping +8 natural bonus to their Armor Class, giving them the same protection as a suit of full plate, they augment it further with leather chaps, helmets and armlets (providing an equipment-based armor bonus that stacks with their natural armor, as per 3rd Edition's rules on armor types).
Body Paint: They decorate their shells with brightly-painted sigils, and also kill tallies.
Carry a Big Stick: Crucians habitually wield warhammers, weighted to crack rival crucians' shells.
Giant Enemy Crab: They're explicitly compared to desert crabs, and are highly territorial, raiding other crucians' water sources and occasionally uniting into warhosts that plunder cooler lands.
Manipulative Bastard: Despite their warlike nature, crucians are also cunning negotiators who use verbal feints to draw others out, allowing the crucians to work out how they think.

Crypt Chanter

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Ghostly musicians whose melodies are simultaneously entrancing and soul-shriveling.

Intangibility: They're incorporeal undead.
Magic Music: Their signature "Draining Melody" at first dazes listeners who fail their saving throws, then subjects them to an enthrall effect even as they gain negative levels for each round the melody continues. Each negative level bestowed this way gives the crypt chanter temporary hit points.
The Virus: Anyone slain by a crypt chanter's draining melody becomes another crypt chanter under the original's control.
Weakened by the Light: Crypt chanters are utterly powerless in natural sunlight, unable to do more than flee to the safety of darkness.

Crypt Thing

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Skeletal, robed undead created to defend locations from intruders, in an at least initially nonlethal manner.

Black Cloak: Typically garbed in dark robes.
Cool Chair: They're often given a stone throne to rest on during their long vigils.
Mook Bouncer: Crypt things exist to keep intruders out of a location.
Non-Malicious Monster: Unlike the vast majority of undead, crypt things aren't evil, nor are they aggressive, and they're perfectly willing to speak with those who don't threaten them. They'll even try to scare away weak-looking intruders before resorting to combat. But they will oppose anyone who tries to trespass where they're guarding, and if intruders persist after being scattered, crypt things will use lethal force.
Party Scattering: Their signature "Scatter Defilers" ability targets a group of enemies and then teleports each of them in a random direction, up to 1,000 feet away. While their most recent rules prevent Tele Frags and note that scattered opponents materialize in the nearest open space to their destination, early gamebooks allowed crypt things to intentionally teleport a victim to right over a chasm, or a thousand feet straight up.

Crypt Warden

Classification: Deathless (3E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Good

These deathless protectors normally lie inert in their tombs, but should intruders threaten their sacred places, their souls temporarily return from the Upper Planes to animate their remains.

Dem Bones: Crypt wardens look like better-dressed skeletons.
Good Counterpart: They can be considered as such to undead skeletons, albeit much more competent and dangerous.
Holy Hand Grenade: They can use holy smite at will, blasting and blinding evil creatures.
It Can Think: Many would-be tomb robbers have made the fatal mistake of confusing crypt wardens for ordinary, mindless undead.
Mook Maker: Crypt wardens can channel positive energy to replicate the animate objects spell, typically targeting statues in the tombs they're defending.
Not Afraid to Die: Crypt wardens are incredibly tenacious in battle, because they have literally nothing to lose - even if their physical form is destroyed, their souls just go back to their eternal reward.
Revive Kills Zombie: Explicitly averted; while deathless share many traits with undead, they're healed by positive energy and harmed by negative energy, the same as living creatures. This also means that many spells such as consecrate and desecrate have the opposite effects on deathless as they would on conventional undead.

Crysmal

Classification: Elemental (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Any lawful

A crystalline creature from the Elemental Plane of Earth that feeds upon gems.

Bizarre Alien Reproduction: They don't just eat gems, they make more crysmals from them. It takes about eight to ten gems worth roughly 25 gp each to form a new crysmal.
Crystalline Creature: They resemble large scorpions made out of crystals, and regular crystals serve as both their primary diet and their means of literally building new crysmals.
Eat Dirt, Cheap: Crysmals eat gems such as quartz, beryl (emeralds and aquamarine), corundum (rubies and sapphires) and carbon (jet and diamonds).
Immune to Fire: Crysmals are immune to fire damage, due to being made out of non-combustible crystal.
Psychic Powers: They use powers like control object, mind thrust and psionic dimension door to hunt, and have unfortunately caught on that humanoids often carry the gemstones they crave.

Cursed Cold One

Classificaiton: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Properly geluns, these humanoids were indeed cursed to require tremendous heat to avoid freezing, and are thus effectively exiled to the hottest wastelands.

Feed It with Fire: Cursed cold ones are healed by fire attacks, and in fact gain all the nutrition and energy they need from absorbing warmth.
Harmless Freezing: If a gelun's environment falls below 110 degrees Fahrenheit, it freezes solid, entering a state of helpless, timeless stasis until the temperature rises. Since they hate being frozen, cursed cold ones dwell in the scorching hearts of deserts, but even then must trade, forage or raid for sources of wood and coke to support bonfires to keep the night's chill at bay.
An Ice Person: Played with. Geluns are natural heat sinks, so their heat-sucking claw attacks deal additional cold damage, and their icy gazes can daze victims, but they take additional damage from cold attacks, which also daze them for a round.
Noodle Incident: Who cursed the geluns and why is uncertain, since each community of cursed cold ones has their own story behind it.
The Resenter: Geluns are bitter about their curse, and are usually hostile to other creatures, especially those from temperate environments.

Curst

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +1 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Tormented undead creatures created by the bestow curse spell being followed by a specially-worded wish or miracle. Their condition makes them all but indestructible, but drives them mad.

Black Eyes of Evil: Well, of Chaotic Neutral.
Curse: A particularly potent one that defines their existence. Any curst who is targeted with a remove curse spell is likely to smile and whisper their thanks right before they crumble to dust.
Eye of Newt: Their 2E entry mentions that some alchemists and wizards are studying the dust left behind by a destroyed curst for potential uses.
Poison and Cure Gambit: Cursts are free-willed undead under no control from their creators, but some evil spellcasters create a curst, then use the promise of a remove curse spell to get their victim to cooperate. This can backfire if the curst attacks its creator in an attempt to be destroyed in self-defense.
Resurrective Immortality: Cursts constantly, slowly regenerate their health, and when reduced to 0 hp will simply be paralyzed for a time while they recover. Even if decapitated, their bodies turn to dust while a new form slowly grows from their severed head.
Revive Kills Zombie: A notable aversion, as despite being classified as undead, curst can explicitly be healed with cure spells. This is presumably also why they're immune to Turn Undead effects.
Sanity Slippage: Unlike a lot of undead, curst aren't mindless, but they do suffer some mental degradation from their curse. They lose any magical ability they had in life, and only about one in ten curst retain their previous Intelligence score, the rest have theirs drop to 8. Curst also have a one-in-twenty chance of acting very strangely during periods of activity — stopping to burst into song, "drawing" on a wall with a finger, staring blankly into space — and will even ignore enemies attacking them during these bouts of madness.
Undeathly Pallor: Curst are all unnaturally pale.
Who Wants to Live Forever?: Being trapped in an endless state of undeath has driven every curst at least a little crazy.

Cyclops

^4e

Classification: Giant (3E, 5E), Fey Humanoid (4E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (lesser), 11 (greater) (3E); 14 (4E), 6 (5E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (lesser, 3E), Chaotic Good (greater, 3E); Unaligned (4E), Chaotic Neutral (5E)

Huge, one-eyed humanoids who may or may not be giantkin.

Art Evolution: Most renditions of cyclopes are straight out of Greek mythology, but 4th Edition cyclopes have gray skin and small horns on their heads.
Classical Cyclops: In most editions of the game, cyclopes are one-eyed giants who eke out a meagre existence in wild lands, often looking after herd animals they seal in their cave lairs with boulders at night. They avoid contact with other races and try to drive away strangers in their territory, but aren't great thinkers, and can be tricked and manipulated by clever opponents.
Curse: 4E cyclopes can make "evil eye" attacks, which can mark a target to make it easier to hit, allow the cyclops to immediately retaliate if the victim fails to hit it in combat, or make the target more vulnerable to energy damage.
Happiness in Slavery: 4E cyclopes view the fomorians as divine figures, and so willingly serve them as soldiers, laborers and craftsmen.
Logical Weakness: They lack binocular vision, so cyclopes have lousy depth perception, and thus have trouble landing ranged attacks on foes more than 30 feet away.
Nay-Theist: Cyclopes largely ignore deities and find prayer and religious ritual overly complex or pointless. The exception is if a cyclops can find a direct benefit from a site of divine power, or if they're threatened by a supernatural foe.
Our Giants Are Bigger: Some cyclops claim to be giants descended from Annam, but most true giants consider them another result of Othea's indiscretions.
Our Ogres Are Hungrier: 4th Edition radically changes the cyclopes' backstory, making them natives to the Feywild who were born as an "unforeseen echo" of Material Plane ogres.

Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures C

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Carrion Wretch

Cedar Wretch

Sand Wretch

Choldrith

Core Spawn Larva

Core Spawn Emissary

Core Spawn Seer

Core Spawn Worm

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Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures C

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Carrion Wretch

Cedar Wretch

Sand Wretch

Choldrith

Core Spawn Larva

Core Spawn Emissary

Core Spawn Seer

Core Spawn Worm

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