Dungeons And Dragons Creatures R / 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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Radiant Idol

Origin: Eberron
Classification: Outsider (3E), Celestial (5E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3E, 5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Angels banished to the Material Plane for their hubris, where they present themselves as divinity and seek to gather a cult of worshippers.

Blood Oath: Implied in their 3rd Edition ability named as such, which allows a radiant idol to conduct an over two-hour Initiation Ceremony that binds a number of creatures to it. Those involved must save or fall under an enthrall effect, and the radiant idol gains a number of abilities allowing them to locate, scry on, remotely torture, or even instantly kill their cultists, so long as they're on the same plane as them.
Broken Angel: Radiant idols are unable to fly because their wings have either been ripped clean off or bound in unbreakable restraints (a condition they typically disguise with spells). In 3rd Edition, this goes beyond a normal mutilation — radiant idols can never fly again, to the extent that spells like fly or gaseous form stop working within 30 feet of one as if they'd entered an antimagic field, and even if polymorphed into a form with a flight speed, the radiant idol can't make use of it.
Charm Person: 5th Edition radiant idols project an aura of false divinity which charms any creature within a 30-foot radius of them, and they can innately cast spells like charm person and mass suggestion.
Fallen Angel: They were banished to spend eternity in the world of mortals, though their entry points out that they aren't quite as thoroughly corrupted as the fiends that inhabit the Lower Planes — the radiant idols' main sin is their wish to be worshiped.
A God Am I: The sentiment behind their banishment. In the mortal realm, most radiant idols gather cults of devoted followers, presenting themselves as gods of fire or destruction.
Light Is Not Good: Radiant idols retain most of their angelic powers after falling from grace, but now they use their powers in pursuit of selfish desires and evil ends.
Our Angels Are Different: They have a lot of traits common to 3E angels in that edition — an innate tongues ability, immunity to acid, cold and petrification effects — but they're classified as Outsiders with the Native subtype instead of the Angel subtype.

Raggamoffyn

From left to right, a common raggamoffyn, shrapnyl, guttersnipe and tatterdemanimal (3e)

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (tatterdemanimal), 3 (raggamoffyn), 5 (guttersnipe), 7 (shrapnyl) (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Strange constructs comprised of animate scraps of cloth and metal, which can entrap and puppet an unlucky host creature.

Achilles' Heel: Shrapnyl are distinctly vulnerable to the shatter spell, taking damage from it.
Action Bomb: The shrapnyl variant can live up to its name by exploding into a deadly cloud of flying steel once per day, damaging everything in a 10-foot radius centered on its host. This doesn't deal any damage to the shrapnyl or its host, but it does relinquish control over the latter, so a shrapnyl only uses this ability in emergencies.
Animate Inanimate Object: A raggamoffyn forms when leftover magical energy interacts with inanimate objects, and appears as a crawling or clumsily-flying ragtag assortment of odds and ends. Common raggamoffyns look like a bunch of discarded hats, gloves, and robes, shrapnyls are made up of loose metal like jewelry, cookware or wargear, guttersnipes are frayed rope and belts with a core of glittering glass shards, and tatterdemanimals are just dirty rags and cloth scraps.
Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Raggamoffyns reproduce by taking over a host, using it to gather and destroy enchanted clothing, then performing a rite that somehow makes the scraps into a new raggamoffyn.
Blinded by the Light: Guttersnipes can use the glass powder in their forms to replicate a glitterdust effect once per day, usually to make an escape.
One to Million to One: Raggamoffyns can get through tight squeezes by dispersing into their component bits, flowing under a door or through a portcullis gate, and reforming on the other side.
Puppeteer Parasite: A raggamoffyn can attempt to take control of any creature it has grappled, replicating a dominate monster effect, then uses its host to defend itself and other raggamoffyns. This means that any damage dealt to the raggamoffyn is split between the construct and its "captured one."
Sinister Suffocation: Common raggamoffyns can shift to cover their host's nose and mouth, asphixiating them if they try to resist the construct's control.

Rage Drake

Classification: Dragon (3E), Natural Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E), 5 (4E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (3E), Unaligned (4E)

Red-scaled, quadrupedal dragons infamous for their fearsome tempers.

The Berserker: Rage drakes' signature ability lets them fly into a rage several times per day, gaining a bonus on attack rolls and damage at the cost of defense.
Covered in Scars: A rage drake's scales are typically chipped and scratched from their many battles.
Deadly Lunge: They can make a pounce attack during a charge, letting them rake victims with their claws.
Eat Dirt, Cheap: Rage drakes lack a true draconic urge to hoard treasure, but do enjoy gemstones, as snacks.
Horse of a Different Color: Rage drakes can be bribed or bullied into serving as a mount, though they require up to 1500 gold pieces' worth of creature comforts every month to keep happy, and even so, their riders need to remain vigilant that the drake doesn't turn on them.
Sapient Steed: Downplayed; sages speculate that rage drakes were created specifically to serve as a mount with draconic might, but lacking the intelligence and magic of a true dragon. As such, they're smarter than animals but dumber than ogres, possessing only a rudimentary ability to reason, and are incapble of speech, only understanding Common and Draconic within the limits of their intelligence.

Ragewalker

Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: 14 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Also known as "war-torn fey," these 15-foot-tall beings embody battle the same way dryads or nymphs embody the natural world, and exist to spread strife and bloodshed.

Attack Reflector: Any thrown weapon or missile attack attempted against a ragewalker will turn and attempt to strike the attacker.
Blue-and-Orange Morality: Ragewalkers are spawned from terrible conflict, but exist to end war, by way of killing anyone capable of waging it, a position that would seem "insane by the standards of any but the uncaring forces of nature."
Chain Pain: When they battle directly, ragewalkers wield enchanted spiked chains sized to their stature, letting them strike foes 20 feet away.
Flying Weapon: They're surrounded by a cloud of whirling, slashing weapons that never interfere with the ragewalker's movements or attacks, but will deal damage to anything adjacent to the fey.
Hate Plague: As much as these fey lust for bloodshed, they prefer to turn others against each other rather than fight them directly. Any creature within 10 feet of a ragewalker has to save or fly into a murderous rage, attacking the nearest target within reach, gaining attack bonuses at the cost of defense penalties, and becoming so furious that speech and spellcasting are impossible.
Magic Knight: Ragewalkers use spells such as blade barrier and wall of fire to control the battlefield and divide their foes, and bull's strength and greater magic weapon to buff themselves.
The Minion Master: They have the odd ability to command living spells the same way evil clerics can rebuke and command undead, and ragewalkers are typically accompanied by one to three of the magical anomalies.
Unusable Enemy Equipment: A ragewalker's form-fitting armor is scavenged from countless battlefields and made to fit the fey perfectly, imposing no penalties to it, but not even another ragewalker can wear one's armor.

Ragewind

Classification: Undead (3E-4E)
Challenge Rating: 19 (3E), 18 (4E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil, Evil (4E)

Sometimes called sword spirits, these howling undead can be found on the multiverse's worst battlefields, and embody the wrath of soldiers who died in futile combat.

Blow You Away: Ragewinds in their true forms are vaguely humanoid clouds of fog, but can freely become a howling whirlwind.
Deadly Dust Storm: Should a ragewind in its whirlwind form make contact with the ground, the result is a cloud of debris that obscures vision.
Master of the Levitating Blades: A ragewind is essentially a tornado carrying a multitude of weapons, so they can make six weapon attacks each turn, and anything close to them has to make a Reflex save or take damage from all the spinning cutlery.
Tornado Move: Ragewinds are doing this more or less constantly, and three times per day can expand themselves outward and fill a 15-foot radius with swirling dust and weapons, dealing a massive amount of damage.

Ragewing

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

Small winged horrors that use their ability to inspire rage in other creatures to make potential prey kill each other, so the monster can feed on the remains.

Attack Reflector: An odd variant that overlaps with one-way Synchronization: if a ragewing takes damage while it has an empathic link with another creature, it transfers that damage to the creature instead of suffering the injury itself. Using this ability gives the other creature a new saving throw to break the empathic link, however.
Blinded by the Light: Downplayed; ragewings absorb ambient radiation, which they can release in a pulse of visible light once per hour, potentially dazzling other creatures within 15 feet.
Eldritch Abomination: A ragewing's body is "a tangled mess of feelers, tendrils, and strange sensory organs between a large pair of batlike wings," with a dozen insectoid legs, a Lamprey Mouth on a tentacle-like neck, and a ratlike tail.
Hate Plague: Once a ragewing has formed an empathic link with another creature, it can spend a full-round action driving that creature into a murderous frenzy similar to a barbarian's rage, so that it attacks anything within 60 feet. Since this effect includes the ragewing, the monster usually takes care to fly or hide out of reach of its victim.
Hive Mind: Up to five ragewings within 60 feet of each other can join into a single acting mind, gaining bonuses to attack and defense, but they can only form such a bond when they aren't already in an empathic link with a victim.
Psychic Link: They can take a standard action to attempt an empathic bond with another creature, which allows the ragewing to use its other abilities, but only persists so long as it stays within 30 feet of that creature.
Underground Monkey: Their entry describes a Large, aquatic ragewing variant that uses its wings to swim and can't form a hivemind with others of its kind, but doesn't provide stats for it.

Raiment

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Empty sets of clothing, animated by the victims of atrocities who use them to inflict the same pain and suffering they felt in their final moments.

Animated Armor: These restless souls are using the only tool they have to lash out at the living, the very clothes they died in.
Clothing Combat: Raiments attack by grappling and constricting victims with their sleeves or pant legs.
Sinister Suffocation: Downplayed; rainments go for the neck when grappling, but while their victims are unable to speak or cast spells with verbal components, they don't take actual suffocation damage.

Rakasta

Origin: Mystara
Playable: 2E
Alignment: True Neutral

A prolific race of anthropomorphic felines, some of whom live as warlike nomads, while others have forged great empires. Not to be confused with the similarly feline rakshasa below.

Cat Folk: They're one of the oldest examples in D&D, dating back to the 1981 modules X1: The Island of Dread and X2: Castle Amber. Rakasta are bipedal felines with human-like bodily proportions but distinctly cat-like traits, including a bestial head, fur, claws and a tail. Depending on their subrace, a rakasta might resemble a tiger or lion, or a domestic housecat. Their feline physiology allows rakasta to exhibit sudden bursts of strength and energy, as well as catlike grace, senses and stealth, but can also pose drawbacks like a water phobia and euphoric reaction to catnip.
Creation Myth: The rakasta claim to be descendants of an ancient cat familiar called Ba-steh and her male human master Kum-rah; such was the cat's love for her human that an Immortal took pity on her and transformed her into a human as well, so they could be together. However, when the Immortal realized that Ba-steh hadn't gained total control of her feline instincts, they denounced her as a failure, but since transforming her back into a cat would be unfair to Kum-rah, the Immortal instead transformed them both into the first rakasta. They had many children, some of whom continued the Stone Age lifestyle of their progenitors, while others would go on to raise great empires such as Bellayne and Myoshima.
Divine Parentage: Inverted. The rakasta's patron Immortal, Ba-steh, was born a mortal cat and then was transformed into a god-like being called an Immortal through her own quests. Older lore states that she did leave Mystara and traveled to Earth, where she founded a religion and became worshiped as the Egyptian goddess Bastet, only to grow bored and return to Mystara after her human followers abandoned her for Christianity.
Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The rakasta of Myoshima have a Japanese-inspired samurai culture, while the rakasta of Bellayne are characterized more as being flamboyantly British, to contrast with the flamboyantly French lupins of neighboring Renardie.
Heavy Sleeper: As a consequence of their feline physiology, rakasta need to sleep 12 hours a day total (not including catnaps after bursts of intense activity), or else their Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence scores are halved until they're fully-rested. That said, while rakasta sleep a lot, they're also light sleepers who can wake up at any suspicious sound, ignoring a snoring roommate but waking when someone tries to rummage through their backpack.
Horse of a Different Color: Rakasta warriors known as hatra ride saber-toothed tigers into battle, and have adapted special saddles that allow them to fight with both hands while remaining in control of their mounts, or make 20 foot leaps from the saddle onto foes.
Loads and Loads of Races: Similarly to their Lupin rivals, 2nd Edition saw an article published in Dragon #247 that divided the rakastas into multiple subraces, which are collectively grouped together in several categories:
- "Ancestral Rakasta" are a pair of subraces based on prehistoric cats; Cave Rakasta (cave lions) and Rakastadon Fatalis (smilodon/sabertooth tigers).
- "Greater Rakasta" are subraces that resemble big cats; Fast Runner (cheetahs), Jakar (jaguars), Mountain Rakasta (pumas or mountain lion), Pardasta (leopards), Sherkasta (tigers), Simbasta (lions) and Snow Pardasta (snow leopards).
- "Wild Rakastas" are, as the name suggests, subraces that resemble wildcats; Caracasta (caracals), Cloud Pardasta (cloud leopards), Jakarundi (jaguarundi), Lynxman (lynxes), Ocelasta (ocelots), and Servasta (servals).
- Finally, there are the "Domestic Rakastas;" Alley Rakasta (uneven hybrids of the other subraces), Basic Rakasta (generically cat-like) and Domesticated Rakasta (so urbane and civilized that they have lost much of their bestial strength).
Mighty Roar: Some rakasta subraces can roar at the start of combat, giving foes a minor attack roll and saving throw penalty for a few rounds.
Proud Warrior Race: The "generic" rakasta from the 2nd edition Monstrous Compendium Appendix: Mystara sourcebook are characterized in this way. Their culture values skill in battle above anything else, and their warriors live by a code of conduct known as the Sri'raka. Tenets include "No challenge to fight is ever refused," "Wounded are never left behind; carry them or kill them," "Better to die in battle than in one's sleep," "Give no mercy; never expect it," "Retreat is permissible only in order to regroup. A new attack must be launched against the other force within two sunrises," and "Never surrender. Those who would exist as prisoners are not rakasta."
Wolverine Claws: Rakasta disdain conventional weapons, but while they do have retractable claws, for most rakasta subraces said claws deal less damage than a dagger. So the rakasta have developed metal war claws called kasas as a cultural weapon, which can be blade-fingered gloves or claw-like blades worn on the back of the wrist. While a kasa's damage still falls short of a longsword's, rakasta enjoy an instinctive grasp of the weapon's use, and they're known for sinking both kasas into a foe and then raking with their rear toe-claws.

Rakshasa

Classification: Outsider (3E), Natural Humanoid (4E), Fiend (5E)
Challenge Rating: 10 (3E), 15 (4E), 13 (5E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Lawful Evil, Evil (4E)

Tiger-headed fiends with reversed hands, a flair for illusions, and a hunger for humanoid flesh.

Cat Folk: Rakshasas can have the heads of other savage animals, namely apes, crocodiles or mantises, but since their earliest art depicts them with the heads of tigers, that's the design that has stuck. It doesn't help that rakshasas are very cat-like in temperament — they're egotistical creatures who crave comfort and luxury, and enjoy long naps and lazing about.
The Chessmaster: They set up criminal empires using pawns and lackeys, building a network of spies, informants and bribed government officials. Starting in the guise of an innocuous business owner or humble priest, rakshasas use a succession of disguises to expand their reach into mercenary companies, thieves guilds, and even the crime rings of rival rakshasas.
Curse: In 5th edition, a rakshasa's claws inflict a curse which prevents the victim from resting, meaning they don't regain any hit points or uses of their class features when they take a short or long rest.
A Day in the Limelight: While most settings treat rakshasas as an afterthought, in Eberron they are the most important fiends in the setting, having ruled the world for millions of years until their masters, the Overlords, were overthrown by the dragons and couatls. In the present day, they infiltrate mortal civilizations and carry out far-reaching plots to free the Overlords from their imprisonment.
Enemy Civil War: Rakshasas don't cooperate as equals. Should two meet, the result is often "a shadowy war of intrigue and misinformation" that ends with one rakshasa dead or subjugated by the other.
Ethnic God: Their patron deity is Ravanna, a ten-headed Lawful Evil god who more or less conscripts likely clerics into his service, demanding constant sacrifices of blood and treasure as they covertly expand their influence.
For the Evulz: These fiends "take great pride in ruining the lives of mortals, stealing everything from them, killing their families, and spreading horrible rumors and lies." Rakshasas don't just enjoy stealing from someone, they enjoying taking from the desperate and destitute, who suffer the most from that theft. Above all else, they love to see "an otherwise good and upstanding brought down by others of its kind due to some dark secret."
Human Shifting: Rakshasas can freely assume the form of any humanoid, typically that of a wealthy merchant, priest or noble.
Made a Slave: They're "notoriously cruel" slavers, who collect their captives "with the same relish they do exotic and rare art." Beyond pampering and pandering to a rakshasa's ego, slaves are a way for them to increase their status among their kin.
Nigh-Invulnerability: In 5th edition, rakshasas cannot be harmed by nonmagical weapons and are not affected by spells of 6th level or lower unless they wish to be. Good luck fighting one if you don't have a magic weapon or aren't able to cast 7th-level spells.
Red Right Hand: Apart from a fiendish light in their eyes, what distinguishes rakshasas from less malevolent cat folk are their reversed hands — if one lays their hands palm-down on a surface, the rakshasa's thumbs will be pointing outward rather than inward. Most other creatures find this quirk disturbing, though it doesn't impact a rakshasa's manual dexterity in any way.
Resurrective Immortality: In 4th and 5th Edition, slain rakshasas spend a torturous interval as a wandering spirit/are sent back to the Nine Hells, but eventually return to the Material Plane, fully-formed, in full possession of their memories, and seeking vengeance on their "killer" — or if not them, then their foe's family.
Retcon: While rakshasa have been consistently portrayed as a race of malevolent spirits encased in flesh, their origins vary by edition.
- 3rd Edition isn't sure where they came from, but speculates that they're descended from crossbreeding between devils and fiendish animals.
- 4th Edition describes them as "fiendish spirits veiled in flesh," later elaborating that they're specifically the corrupted form of (its edition's take on) devas.
- 5th Edition states that they're devils who have cast their essence from the Nine Hells to the Material Plane, in order to sate their hunger for mortal flesh.
Telepathy: They can detect thoughts at will, something they use to help them learn "every weakness, sin, and secret" about their enemies, to either bring them into the rakshasa's web or destroy them if they refuse.
To Serve Man: Rakshasas love the flesh of humanoids, treating it like a delicacy and often preparing grand meals with lots of spices using human flesh as the primary ingredient.

Ak'chazar Rakshasa

Challenge Rating: 15 (3E)

Fearsome arcanists, ak'chazar rakshasas utilize their brilliance and power to lead criminal networks, using mortal dupes, undead, and their fellow rakshasas as minions.

Diabolical Mastermind: These rakshasas prefer to operate as shadowy overlords, "manipulating events to suit their dark whims and relying on their web of spies, assassins and intelligent undead to carry out their nefarious plans."
Grand Theft Me: They can cast magic jar as a spell-like ability, and frequently use it to replace the leader of an underworld network after learning how to act as them.
Great White Feline: The ak'chazar is a subspecies of rakshasa with white fur.
Necromancer: While they're adept in other schools of magic, ak'chazars are most feared for their necromantic skill, and commonly travel with entourages of powerful undead servitors. Their lairs are frequently near cemeteries or battlefields that provide a supply of corpses to work with.

Naityan Rakshasa

Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)

Rakshasas who have learned blade magic, which they employ by physically transforming into a shape best suited for a martial style.

Animal-Themed Fighting Style: Naityan rakshasas take this up a notch by using their shapeshifting to adopt hybrid humanoid forms evoking various animals — a serpent, hellhound, eel or displacer beast — that grant access to associated martial maneuvers as well as changes to the naityan's combat stats.
Mars Needs Women: These rakshasas are an extremely rare subtype of an already uncommon species, so they routinely use their shapeshifting to reproduce with humanoids. Most of the resulting offspring are stillborn or so deformed that they soon perish, but every so often a child is born who is beautiful, but posesses backwards hands. Their naityan rakshasa parent then steals them away, guiding their offspring until they're able to assume their true form and full power.
To Serve Man: While all rakshasas enjoy eating humanoids, naityan rakshasas enjoy the taste of humanoid blood to the point of obsession. They're known to collect a variety of slaves to sample, bottling their blood like wine — but as might be imagined, such clear evidence of their inhuman nature has been the undoing of many a naityan.
Supernatural Martial Arts: They know several martial stances and strikes, but can only employ them when shapeshifted.

Naztharune Rakshasa

Challenge Rating: 11 (3E)
Playable: 3E

Black-furred rakshasas who hire themselves out as spies and assassins.

Back Stab: They deal Sneak Attack damage against surprised foes like a high-level rogue.
Psycho for Hire: Unlike other rakshasas, naztharunes show less of a need to be "the boss" of operations, and are much more mercenary, willing to work for other rakshasa breeds, or even non-rakshasas. They're just as sadistic and thoroughly evil as their kin, however.
Shadow Walker: Naztharune rakshasas can do a short-ranged teleport from shadow to shadow.
Sneaky Spy Species: They're this compared to other rakshasas. Naztharunes specialize in murdering unsuspecting targets, and are so stealthy they can hide in plain sight, provided there are enough shadows to lurk in.

Zakya Rakshasa

Origin: Eberron
Challenge Rating: 8 (3E), 5 (5E)

A rakshasa subrace that specializes in melee combat.

Blood Knight: Zakya rakshasas prefer armor and honed swords to fine robes and luxuries, and relish the opportunity to charge into combat.
Magic Knight: Their magical repertoire is small compared to other rakshasas, and limited to close-ranged spells like chill touch and vampiric touch in 3E or a defensive shield in 5E.
Magically Inept Fighter: Zakya rakshasas have some innate magical power, but it's nowhere near what a normal rakshasa possesses. They make up for it by being even stronger and tougher than the typical rakshasa, and have the training to excel in hand-to-hand combat. 5th Edition lets them show their martial prowess by subjecting opponents to Knock Back, trip attacks, and disarm attempts.

Ramfish

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

10-foot-long fish that use their armored hides and fearsome horns to dominate stretches of ocean.

Food Chain of Evil: Ramfish schools prey upon anything smaller than them, but larger sea predators like dragon turtles and krakens have no problem hunting ramfish.
Horn Attack: A ramfish's bone deposits grow into wickedly spiraling horns, which it uses with its Powerful Charge feat to deal hefty damage.
Imprinting: As dangerous as they are, ramfish take well to domestication by sea elves and locathah — the creatures are very protective of their schools, so trainers just imprint themselves on a ramfish so it views them as part of that school.
More Teeth than the Osmond Family: A ramfish has a mouth full of needlelike teeth that can be used as a weapon if it is cornered.
Orphaned Etymology: Averted; to undersea races that have never seen a ram, these creatures are known as "hornfish" or "spiralfish."

Rampager

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Elemental Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (3E), 21 (4E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil, Unaligned (4E)

Also known as so-ut, these large, vicious, centaur-like creatures kill for pleasure and destroy any metal they come across.

Acid Attack: A rampager's claws are coated with acid that adds extra damage to their melee attacks.
Berserk Button: For some unexplained reason, manufactured items, especially those made of metal, drive rampagers completely mad. They'll prioritize attacking armored foes over any other, then those wielding metal weapons, followed by structures, and will ignore other foes attacking with non-metal weapons while doing so, at least until the rampager loses half its hit points.
Blood Knight: Rampagers enjoy killing, and usually kill far more than they can eat. As long as prey is available, a rampager doesn't even stop killing long enough to feed.
Cephalothorax: Their upper torsos don't have real heads, just eyes and a mouth in the middle of their "chest."
Gaia's Vengeance: They're known for their hatred of civilization, and demolish settlements down to their foundations, removing any sign of artifice.
Heavy Sleeper: Rampagers tend to sleep through the heat of the day, and some bold adventurers have been known to walk right over the creatures without waking them.
Mooks Ate My Equipment: Their acidic claws can also dissolve armor and clothing in as little as one round, while their bite attacks can tear apart and ruin suits of armor and shields. Fortunately, anything that doesn't crumble immediately from their acid can be saved by washing it with water for a minute.
The Nose Knows: A rampager can detect approaching enemies, sniff out hidden foes, and track by sense of smell.
Our Centaurs Are Different: They have a somewhat elephantine lower body supporting a headless upper body, 10 feet high in total.
Poisonous Person: Their saliva is simultaneously acidic and a weak poison that deals a bit of Strength damage.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Rampagers emanate an aura of fear that can frighten anything within 30 feet.
Tortured Monster: 4th Edition presents them as such, stating that rampagers are goaded to violence by primal spirits seeking vengeance for Athas' destruction, spirits that might be seen driving the rampager forward. If those spirits are appeased somehow, the beast's rampage can be halted.

Raptoran

Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Good

Winged humanoids who dwell in cliffside settlements on the edge of civilization.

Bird People: They look mostly humanoid, but beyond their wings, raptorans have downy feathers in place of hair, keen yellow eyes, taloned feet, and hatch from clutches of three or four eggs (but still nurse their young).
Blow You Away: Raptorans gained their power of flight from an ancient pact with the lords of the Elemental Plane of Air, which also lets raptoran spellcasters boost the power of magic with the air descriptor.
Death from Above: An airborne raptoran can make a dive attack to deal double damage with a piercing weapon, and they much prefer to rain arrows upon landbound foes rather than engage on equal footing.
Handy Feet: Raptorans' taloned feet have a strong grip, assisting with climbing and allowing them to wield a specialized composite longbow dubbed the footbow.
Immortal Procreation Clause: Raptorans live longer than humans but shorter than elves or dwarves, and have cyclical periods of fertility between the ages of 20 and 150, during which time a given raptoran (male or female) will only be fertile for one year out of three. This leads to the raptorans' odd marriage customs — couples marry in the spring (often in mass ceremonies among age-mates), and each marriage lasts for a matter of months, just long enough for a couple to potentially produce eggs and raise their hatchlings to fledglings. The next year, a raptoran couple may renew their previous marriage to one another, or split up and wed different partners for the season.
The Night Owl: Raptorans are nocturnal (their character art notwithstanding), rising with the moon and going to sleep at dawn. Their communities thus have a dedicated "Sunspeaker" to handle diplomacy with other races during daylight hours.
Our Elves Are Different: Though they're taller than D&D's elves, raptorans have elven builds, use a language (Tuilvilanuue) derived from Elven, and their Creation Myth involves their lead goddess Tuilviel Glithien clashing with the fallen elven goddess Lolth, giving raptorans a hatred for the drow equal to elves'. Raptorans also tend to be aloof and coolly cordial towards strangers until they've worked out their intentions, and have a reputation as being snobbish towards races that can't fly.
Rite of Passage: Raptorans are not born able to fly, instead they use their wings to glide or assist with jumping. When a young adult raptoran is deemed ready by their flock chief, they are given leave to undertake the Walk of the Four Winds, a voluntary exile that tests the raptoran's mettle until they gain the strength and prowess to fly under their own power. Or in gameplay terms, a raptoran adventurer cannot fly until they reach 5 Hit Dice, and even then for only a few rounds each day, until at 10 Hit Dice they grow strong enough that flying requires no more exertion than walking.
Winged Humanoid: Raptorans' most striking feature are their feathered wings, which are predominantly white, though black-tipped feathers increasingly appear as a raptoran ages.

Rasclinn

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Small herbivorous canines that graze in packs, protected by their metallic hides.

Chrome Champion: Rasclinn have the unique ability to extract trace metals found in the plants they consume, metal that they then incorporate into their fur, hides and teeth. This grants them natural armor as good as full plate and makes their bite attacks more effective.
Crafted from Animals: Unsurprisingly, Athasians eagerly hunt rasclinn for their metal hides, which can be made into armor that offers superior protection at the cost of weighing more. While it is possible to try and smelt the iron out from a rasclinn's remains, not many smiths have the forges required for the task, and the actual iron yielded is negligible, only five coins' weight (worth 50 cp) per hide.
Psychic Powers: 2nd Edition rasclinn have no psionic attacks, instead they're under a constant tower of iron will effect that makes them all but immune to psionics. 3rd Edition instead lets them use befuddle at will and burst and skate a few times per day.
Turns Red: Rasclinn packs will fly into a berserk rage should any of their members get downed, especially if those injured are pups.

Rast

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Ravenous hovering monsters native to the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Ash, though packs of them can be found across the planes.

Big Eater: Rasts are insatiable creatures that eat almost continuously.
Flight: They have the supernatural ability to fly, though if this power is suppressed, rasts are nearly helpless on the ground despite their many legs. In such cases they can only make a single move or attack action each round, and move at most five feet.
Immune to Fire: As creatures with the Fire subtype, rasts are immune to such damage, but take extra damage from cold.
Monstrous Cannibalism: Packs of rasts will never eat their own, but will happily attack and feast on rival packs.
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Rasts can have up to 15 claws, but can only use up to four at once.
The Paralyzer: A rast's mere stare can paralyze opponents for several rounds, leaving it free to focus its attacks on those who resisted its gaze.
Vampiric Draining: They can bite into grappled opponents and drain blood each round, dealing Constitution damage, though the rast doesn't recover any health from the attack.

Rastipede

Origin: Spelljammer
Playable: 2E
Alignment: True Neutral

Insectoid beings found across Wildspace, trading with other races. They're unrelated to the rasts above.

Canon Immigrant: Like the hadozee, the rastipedes debuted in Star Frontiers, where they were known as the vrusk.
Inept Mage: While rastipedes can take up the Mage class, they can't progress past 4th level in it, and no rastipede has been known to master a spell above 2nd level. This hasn't impeded their ability to travel Wildspace, because for some unknown reason, any spelljammer helm used by a rastipede mage operates as if they had three times the spellcaster levels they actually do.
Insectoid Aliens: They're six-foot-long insectoids with centauroid body structures, scuttling about on eight legs supporting an upright humanoid torso.
The Nose Knows: Well, antennae, but rastipedes' keen sense of smell prevent others from sneaking up on them.
Proud Merchant Race: They're the "penultimate" traders in Wildspace, second only to their close associates the arcane/mercane. The catch is that rastipedes have a shade of Honest John's Dealership — while rastipedes won't renege on a deal and will fulfill it to the letter, and obey laws against smuggling and slave trafficking, they delight in invoking the Exact Words of a bargain. One example is a rastipede selling a lottery ticket with this week's winning numbers on it, only said ticket is from last week and invalid. Another anecdote has a scro captain about to execute a quartermaster because the "half-off" armor he bought from a rastipede was sized for gnomes.

Ratatosk

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Good

Humanoids resembling flying squirrels, who live upon, worship and protect the plane-spanning world tree Yggdrasil.

Beast Man: They're Medium-sized squirrel-folk, specifically flying squirrels, and as such can glide with their flaps of skin and have larged, flattened tails they use to steer while in the air.
Berserk Button: They take their self-appointed role as Yggdrasil's guardians very seriously, and will fight to the death to defend her. Similarly, don't question their Creation Myth that insists that the ratatosk were hatched from a nut on the top of the tree, making them the favored creations of Yggdrasil. Finally, they take a dim view of interlopers starting fires while traversing the world tree, who might wake to find their mounts loose, their food scattered, and their tents collapsing around them.
Dodge the Bullet: The ratatosk are skilled at dodging missile attacks on the wing, and in 2nd Edition can roll to negate even magical attacks like Melf's acid arrow.
Hit-and-Run Tactics: When forced to fight, ratatosk prefer to dive down on foes from above, then disengage and scamper up a branch to repeat the process.
I Shall Taunt You: They have a supernatural ability to infuriate sentient creatures with their words and mocking tone, which can cause those affected to throw aside ranged weapons or spell components as they try to chase down and attack the offending ratatosk in melee combat.
A Kind of One: Ratatoskr was an individual squirrel in Norse Mythology, who runs up and down Yggdrasil's trunk, bearing messages between the serpent Níðhöggr at its roots and the eagle atop its crown. Here the ratatosk are an entire race that serves a similar role.
Screwball Squirrel: Ratatosk packs might harass and taunt any creatures they deem intruders within Yggdrasil's boughs, steal metal goods from passersby, and if pressed into combat do so out of panic rather than bloodlust, even when defending their young. But if sufficiently bribed (usually with one of Yggdrasil's huge, sterile seed pods), they can be willing to carry messages to anywhere the great tree reaches.

Ravid

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Strange flying serpents native to the Positive Energy Plane, and as such brim with life energy.

Achilles' Heel: According to their Planescape stats, ravids are instantly slain by an energy drain spell or the touch of a life-draining undead like a wraith or spectre, though in the latter case the result is also a Mutual Kill. For this reason, ravids are terrified of the undead.
Animate Inanimate Object: Ravids can use the animate objects spell as a 20th-level caster, at will. They consider the rest of the cosmos a desolate place compared to their home plane, and thus will use their abilities to animate everything around them. As a result, they're usually surrounded by animated objects that will defend the ravid to the best of their ability (though the ravid isn't smart enough to use tactics when directing its minions), and a ravid's progress through an area can be tracked by the unnaturally lively environment.
Explosive Overclocking: Their AD&D rules are a bit more involved about the consequences of a character getting dosed with a ravid's positive energy, ranging from having the character's hit point total decrease if the touch "overhealed" them, to a haste effect that also ages the subject one or two years from the burnout, to granting the benefits of a strength spell at the cost of permanently reducing the subject's Strength afterward, again from the physical burnout.
Healing Shiv: Ravids' tail slaps and singular claw attacks lash a target with positive energy. In the case of living creatures, this can heal whatever physical damage the ravid's attack dealt, while undead will instead take extra damage from the positive energy.

Razhak

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Elemental (3E)
Challenge Rating: 14 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Large, 12-ton earthen beings who prefer to quietly observe mortal races.

Dungeon Bypass: They have the "Earth Glide" ability, letting razhaks "swim" through solid stone without leaving any trace of their passage. In 2nd Edition, they recover health while doing this, with the explanation that the razhak is essentially leaving its cracked and damaged stone "flesh" behind and absorbing new rock as it moves.
Healing Factor: 3rd Edition gives razhaks regeneration, which can be shut down by acid damage, or by bringing the creature out of contact with the earth or other mineral surface.
Long-Lived: Their lifespans run into the millennia, hence why razhaks rarely intervene in mortal affairs — they prefer to take the long view, carefully considering the consequences of actions, while the fleshy races simply move too fast. But the recent upheaval on Krynn has made the razhak reconsider their detachment, "lest they get left in the past while methodically planning."
The Needless: Razhaks don't breathe or sleep, but still need to "eat" a small amount of rock and dirt to replenish themselves — if one was kept levitated off the ground for 150 years, the razhak would eventually consume itself to the point of disappearing.
Silicon-Based Life: While 3rd Edition classifies razhaks as Elementals, 2nd Edition emphasizes that they're not related to earth elementals, but are beings composed of rock with magical power over it.
Telepathy: 2nd Edition mentions that razhaks are constantly aware of one another's general status, and are able to verbally communicate no matter the distance. 3rd Edition instead gives them shorter-ranged telepathy that isn't limited to other razhak, and states that the creatures will occasionally meet in person to share what they've observed.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: They can use an effect similar to stone shape to alter their rocky bodies, whether by disguising themselves as a boulder, or by giving themselves extra limbs for use in combat.
The Watcher: Razhaks are quiet and curious about the affairs of fleshy races, and often hide near underground settlements to observe their inhabitants' day-to-day lives. The few dwarves aware of the razhaks' existence consider them "stone spirits" sent by Reorx to watch over his people. In rare cases, a razhak will interact with adventurers it is curious about, and during the Chaos War, the razhaks around Thorbardin and Thoradin took subtle action to aid the dwarves in ways that wouldn't be noticed.

Razorvine

Origin: Planescape
Alignment: Unaligned

A plant resembling organic razorwire, found all across the Lower Planes, parts of the Outlands, and even within the planar metropolis of Sigil.

Alien Kudzu: The stuff can grow just about anywhere, at a rate of several feet per day, so that a single plant can expand to cover a building or untended wall in just a week, and just a single cutting can quickly grow into a full-fledged tangle. It probably originated somewhere in the Abyss, but can now be found on multiple planes. Razorvine is such a pain to get rid of that it's rumored that the planar border town of Ribcage had someone drawn and quartered after re-introducing the plant right after their latest clearing effort. Still, some people cultivate it as a passive defense against thieves and other intruders.
Counter-Attack: The plant's twisting vines are under tension, so each time someone trys to cut at it, they're lashed by a strand springing free of the main mass.
Crafted from Animals: Well, plants, but it's possible to treat razorvine cuttings to preserve their sharpness and flexibility, for use as bladed whips, bindings that cut any prisoner that tries to wriggle out of them, or cruel garrotes.
Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: A pair of elven brothers in the Outlands border town of Curst knows the trick of turning razorvine leaves into heartwine.
Immune to Fire: Downplayed; living razorvine only hardens when exposed to conventional fire, but magical flames deal full damage, and once cut and dried it makes for decent kindling.
Razor Floss: Anyone unfortunate enough to fall into a patch of razorvine takes damage from the initial drop, and then additional damage each round they try to extricate themself.

Razorwing

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Animal (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Flying predators that burst out of hiding to slash at prey with their eight-foot-wide, razor-sharp wings.

Chameleon Camouflage: 3rd Edition gives them the ability to change their skin's color to blend in with their surroundings, granting a bonus on Hide checks.
Dig Attack: They prefer to launch themselves at prey from just beneath a layer of sand or silt.
Not Quite Flight: Razorwings can glide just fine, but the bone edges of their wings are too inflexible to let them fly normally, instead they use their psionics to propel themselves (or even hover in place as needed). If said psionics get shut down by something, razorwings will end up gliding to the ground.
Psychic Powers: Beyond their psionic flying, razorwings use lifesense to detect prey and create sound to communicate with each other.
Razor Wings: Quite. The razor-sharp bone edges along their wings let these creatures make fly-by attacks on prey, preferably floaters.

Reason Stealer

Classification: Ooze (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Amorphous subterranean horrors that must murder other creatures in a desperate attempt to maintain their sentience.

Blob Monster: In its nonsentient, default form, a reason stealer is a 4-foot-wide puddle of grainy, brown-yellow slime.
Cannibalism Superpower: After dealing the killing blow to a creature, a reason stealer transfers its victim's Intelligence score to itself, which both heals it and allows the ooze to use its victim's ability scores, skills, feats, prepared arcane spells, saving throws, and attack bonuses. The ooze also changes form, reshaping its body into a grotesque parody of its latest victim, allowing it to use weapons and items. If the reason stealer kills another creature after that, the mental benefits are cumulative in the case of spells or feats, or it uses the better of the two attributes in the case of ability scores, skill ranks, and so forth. But in any case, these benefits only last for 24 hours, at which point the reason stealer collapses back into a mindless blob.
Super-Senses: Reason stealers are blind, but their entire bodies are primitive sensory organs able to track prey by vibration and scent, giving them blindsight out to 60 feet.
Talkative Loon: After stealing a creature's mind, the monster mumbles random words in its victim's language.

Red Sundew

Classification: Plant (3E)
Challenge Rating: 13 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Carnivorous plants some 20 feet high and 10 feet wide, which pre-digest their prey with sticky acid before pulling their corpses into the plant's body mass.

Acid Attack: Red sundews are coated in acidic gunk that damage for several rounds after exposure, unless washed off with a gallon of water as a full-round action.
Informed Species: They're called sundews, but are described as "a wide mound of tangled, ropy rags in red, green and rust colors," which is pretty different from what real-world plants from the Drosera genus look like.
Man-Eating Plant: They're aggressive hunters capable of moving 20 feet each round, and they're much more nomadic than other plant monsters, wandering from hot jungles and coastal forests to cooler woodlands in search of prey.
No-Sell: They're immune to both fire and acid.
Supernatural Sensitivity: Like their greenvise cousins, red sundews can detect anything within 60 feet that's in contact with some form of vegetation.
Tentacle Rope: They lash and grapple prey with their sticky tentacles, holding them helpless while the acid coating their bodies does its work.

Redcap

Classification: Fey (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (young), 7 (elder) (3E); 3 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Murderous fae who must soak their signature caps in the fresh blood of their victims to survive.

Bizarre Alien Reproduction: 3rd Edition redcaps reproduce by budding once or twice over their lifetimes, carrying around a hump for six months before it falls off and rapidly grows to full size within another year.
Blood Knight: From the moment it awakens, a redcap desires only murder and carnage.
Fertile Blood: 5th Edition redcaps are born from blood shed in the Feywild, or places under that plane's influence. This results in the growth of tiny, blood-red mushrooms that sprout into fully-formed redcaps under the moonlight. Some redcaps seek out and kill whoever shed blood to create them, others work with a murderous creator as kindred spirits.
Organ Drops: Redcaps vanish when they die, leaving behind a single tooth that, when worn, grants the wearer a minor bonus on Charisma checks when dealing with fey, particularly other redcaps.
Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Though Small creatures that look like hunched, wizened old humanoids, redcaps are quite strong for their size, able to wield Medium-sized weapons without difficulty and grapple larger opponents on equal terms.
Sinister Scythe: Redcaps wield scythes or sickles, always larger than what beings of their stature ought to be capable of handling.
Suffer the Slings: 3rd Edition redcaps carry slings for ranged attacks, and have the ability to imbue their stones with eldritch energy for additional damage.
With Catlike Tread: Redcaps wear heavy iron boots that clank noisily with every step. Accordingly, they have disadvantage on Stealth checks in 5th edition.

Reigar

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Celestial (5E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Androgynous humanoids who wander Wildspace in search of artistic inspiration, which they extend to warfare.

Agent Peacock: They are, in a word, fabulous... and if they ever enter combat, "several hells break loose."
Amazing Technicolor Population: As of 5th Edition, reigar can change the coloration of their skin at will, or even give themselves vivid patterns of bioluminescent spots or stripes — the explanation is that they're humanoids evolved from cephalopods with similar abilities.
Ambiguous Gender: Their 2nd Edition entry notes that reigar females are very handsome, and their males are very beautiful. 5th Edition just avoids using gendered pronouns when discussing reigar.
Bishie Sparkle: They're surrounded by a halo of twinkling motes known as a glory, which helps repel attacks. Some say the colors of a reigar's glory reflects their mood, but this hasn't been confirmed.
Blue-and-Orange Morality: Their code of conduct can be summed up as "Anything for art, nothing without style, and everyone for himself."
Combat Aestheticist: The reigar deem war the highest form of artistic expression, and carefully consider the aesthetics behind every act of violence — a fireball spell is boring because it blasts victims in an instant, but cloudkill gives the caster more time to enjoy their victims' last choking, writhing moments of life. "To a reigar, this is art at its best."
Golem: Using a piece of jewelry known as a talarith, a reigar can summon a "helot" that is essentially a construct duplicate of its summoner.
Mad Artist: The reigar's "Master Stroke," the grand finale of their effort to "create the most beautiful display of carnage the multiverse had ever seen," ended up destroying their homeworld.
Magic Knight: Reigar are no slouches in close combat, and also accomplished mages (or psions, in 5th Edition). Their AD&D material notes that while they have access to all schools of magic, they dismiss illusions as gauche, since they dislike making things that aren't real.
The Pawns Go First: If attacked, reigar will let their helots and any lakshu warriors do the fighting while the reigar continues their artistic pursuits, but should those underlings fail, the reigar will enter the fray.
Parody Sue: They're near-immortal, inhumanly beautiful, superbly fashionable, and even sparkle. They're Shrouded in Myths along the lines of "the reigar taught the elves everything they know about art, and the elves forgot most of it," are rumored to give orders to the mercanes or even mind flayers, and are credited with creating the first spelljammer helm, or even entire races like the zodar and humans. They have access to special organic spaceships, and magical animal-themed armor unlike anything used by other races, made of a special material harder than steel. And so on.
Power Up Mount/Powered Armor: Shakti are palm-sized animal statuettes similar to a figurine of wonderous power (which the reigar are credited with inventing) normally worn or carried by a reigar. But with one command word, the statuette grows to eight feet long, becoming a flying vehicle the reigar can sit or stand on. Another command word transforms the shakti into a suit of armor and accompanying weapon, themed to the animal statuette it started as, with a special ability such as a fiery blast for a dragon-themed shakti. The reigar's lakshu warriors are outfitted with their own shakti, and in rare circumstances, a reigar might reward someone with a lesser shakti that can only change function once per day.
Unusable Enemy Equipment: A reigar's talarith or shakti won't function in the hands of anyone else.

Esthetic

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

The reigar's living spaceships, resembling starfish, jellyfish, or less-definable shapes.

Boarding Party: Esthetics have a hollow spike they can jab into other vessels to deploy a boarding party — though against organic targets, the spike instead injects its victim with a digestive enzyme.
Can't Live Without You: An esthetic whose reigar creator dies will sicken and expire in a matter of days.
Combat Tentacles: Their tentacles can grab both opposing vessels and their crew, the latter of which are grappled and subjected to acid damage.
Living Ship: They're fully organic starships, though without their reigar around to guide them, esthetics are near-mindless creatures that will wander aimlessly until they die. They have enough space inside them for their reigar host and up to six other passengers, and can sustain them indefinitely, though only their reigar can open an esthetic's entry hatch. Esthetics are as fast or faster than any known spacefaring vessel, and are rumored to be able to teleport between crystal spheres, carried by bizarre reigar starbases.
No Warping Zone: Esthetics can make a "Jammerscream" attack to keep enemy ships from fleeing. Either the attack will suppress a ship's spelljammer helm for two to twenty days, or the spellcaster attuned to the thing can attempt to resist the "Jammerscream" — a failed save means the caster takes a heavy hit of psychic damage and the helm is disabled for a matter of hours, while success means the caster takes less psychic damage and the helm is only inoperable for a few minutes.

Lakshu

Origin: Spelljammer
Alignment: True Neutral

A race of warrior women who serve the reigar as ship crews, bodyguards and soldiers.

Amazon Brigade: They're muscular, green-haired, "teeth-gritting, armored harridans" who now fight on the reigar's behalf.
Battle Thralls: The lakshu once made the mistake of raiding the reigar homeworld, assuming that the "namby-pamby artistes" wouldn't put up much of a fight, little realizing how the reigar defined art and the lengths they'd go to pursue it. After seeing the reigar's shakti devices in action, the lakshu decided entering an alliance was in their best interest. For their part, the reigar approved of the lakshu's warlike temperament, and were pleased that they quickly proved adept at repairing shakti, work the reigar find tedious. In exchange for their service, lakshu are given reigar technology such as personal shakti and helot constructs to command.
The Berserker: If reduced to half her hit points, a lakshu flies into a berserk rage, gaining bonuses on attack and damage rolls until all enemies around her are dead.
Ditto Aliens: Enforced; once the lakshu agreed to fight for the reigar, the latter set about "appropriating the lakshu as a work of art," creating a uniform height, body mass, appearance, etc. for the race as a whole. The lakshu thus use tattoos, Body Paint and equipment to express individuality, and take their names from the totem animals of their shakti ("Manta," "Phoenix," etc.).
One-Gender Race: Lakshu are in fact entirely female, and reproduce via parthenogenesis at set intervals.

Rejkar

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Intelligent, caribou-like fiends native to Cania, though many have been driven out to frozen lands on other planes. They are not baatezu, and in fact despise Hell's current rulers.

Emotion Control: They can use crushing despair at will to demoralize enemies, or rage to rile up their minions.
Fighting for a Homeland: The rejkar's ultimate goal is to build up an extraplanar power base that will allow them to drive the devils out of Cania.
Harmless Freezing: A rejkar's gaze attack causes a creature to freeze in place, completely covered by a layer of ice until they make their saving throw or the frozen creature takes some fire damage. No matter how long a victim is frozen, they don't take any damage or suffer ill effects from it.
The Man Behind the Man: Rejkars like to appear to the leader of an arctic-dwelling tribe of humanoids as a "mystic caribou," using their abilities to aid the tribe — fabricate to make weapons and armor, augury to divine the future, and three rejkars working together can even cast heroes' feast to reward their pawns. With the fiend's help, the sponsored tribe is able to grow more powerful and conquer its rivals, bringing even more humanoids under the rejkar's indirect control.

Relentless Killer

Relentless juggernaut (5e)

Origin: Ravenloft
Classification: Fiend (5E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (slasher), 12 (juggernaut) (5E)

Beings who made dark bargains to pursue vengeance, transforming them into supernatural killing machines.

Damage Over Time: Anyone hit by a relentless slasher's weapon, or a relentless juggernaut's "scything shrapnel" legendary action, takes ongoing necrotic damage until they're healed or close the wound with a Medicine check. In the case of the slasher's knife, this damage increases with each turn it continues.
Deal with the Devil: These killers made pacts with fiends "or other nefarious entities," gaining abilities that made them fiends themselves.
Hit-and-Run Tactics: Relentless slashers can make a "Vanishing Strike" as a legendary action, attacking and immediately teleporting up to 30 feet away.
The Juggernaut: If the name wasn't a hint enough, a relentless juggernaut can make an "Implacable Advance" as a legendary option, ignoring difficult terrain and dealing trample damage to anything it moves over.
No-Sell: All relentless killers are immune to charm or fear effects, relentless juggernauts can never be exhausted, while relentless slashers can't have their thoughts or emotions read and can't be detected by abilities that sense Fiends.
Powerful Pick: The relentless juggernaut wields an "Executioner's Pick," dealing heavy piercing damage and reducing a victim's speed for a turn.
Reality Warper: Relentless juggernauts can warp their very surroundings into weapons, making chunks of stone fly out to bludgeon opponents, or iron fences slash at foes.
Serial Killer: The relentless slasher is the classic knife-wielding slasher who targets individuals or types of victims, while relentless juggernauts live for carnage and kill anything that enters their territory. Their entry also has a table of origins and methods for relentless killers, giving them quirks like taking certain trophies from their victims, making grisly "art" from those they kill, or always targeting a certain type of victim.
Shout-Out: The relentless juggernaut looks like a bird-themed cousin of Pyramid Head.

Remnant

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Spectral mages who died due to an arcane mishap, leaving them to linger in their towers or laboratories, tormented by the loss of their magic.

Chill of Undeath: They're surrounded by a chilling atmosphere, which both drives away nearby animals and also reduces the effectiveness of magic, giving a remnant Spell Resistance.
Green-Eyed Monster: Remnants target living arcanists above any other foe, out of jealousy for their ability to cast spells.
Intangibility: They're incorporeal undead.
Stupidity-Inducing Attack: A remnant's touch drains Intelligence from its victims, healing the undead in the process. This is particularly dangerous to wizards, who will quickly lack the Int score to cast their best spells.
The Virus: Any arcane spellcaster slain by a remnant becomes one in a few rounds, enslaved to their maker until its destruction.
Weakened by the Light: When in natural sunlight, a remnant can only take a single move or action in a round, and cannot attack.
X-Ray Sparks: A variant; remnants look like ghostly versions of their former selves, but their bones glow with magical power and can be seen through their "flesh," bright enough to leave visible trails like afterimages.

Remorhaz

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Elemental Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E); 21 (4E); 5 (young remorhaz), 11 (remorhaz) (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Gigantic, arctic-dwelling centipedes whose bodies give off tremendous amounts of heat.

Arch-Enemy: Remorhazes and frost worms attack each other on sight, resulting in terrible battles that can devastate entire areas. The remorhazes usually win such brawls due to damage typing — their bites and bodies inflict fire damage, which frost worms are vulnerable to, but remorhazes don't actually have the fire subtype, meaning the frost worms don't get any damage multipliers against them.
Beast of Battle: Remorhazes can be trained from hatchings to obey commands and guard frost giants' citadels.
Creepy Centipedes: They resemble monstrous centipedes, are big enough to prey upon polar bears and mammoths, and can swallow a human whole. They can give an adventuring party a serious fight as a result.
Dig Attack: Remorhazes have a respectable burrowing speed, which they use to burst out of the ice and snow and ambush prey.
Mooks Ate My Equipment: Up through 3rd Edition, a remorhaz's superheated body could melt or char weapons into uselessness.
Organ Drops: The secretions a remorhaz uses to superheat its body, known as thrym, can be sold to alchemists, who may pay up to 1400 gp for what can be harvested from a single monster.
Playing with Fire: An enraged remorhaz generates so much heat that merely touching it will inflict severe burns, and in 5th edition, the creature's bite attacks deal aditional fire damage.
Swallowed Whole: Fully-grown remorhazes can swallow creatures of ogre-sized or smaller after hitting them with a bite attack. In 1st and 2nd editions this was a One-Hit Kill due to the intense heat within a remorhaz's body, while 3rd edition merely had swallowed creatures suffer a ton of fire damage in addition to the bludgeoning damage from the thing's gizzard. In 5th edition, swallowed creatures instead take acid damage.

Reth Dekala

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Cursed infernal warriors wrapped in sorcerous fire, who serve as mercenaries while they work to end their torment.

Deal with the Devil: The reth dekala were once mortals who made a pact with an archdevil, gaining the power to conquer their homeworld in exchange for serving him after death. But when the archdevil set them on their own descendents, the reth dekala rebelled, killed the fiend, and took his Crimson Citadel for their own. For their betrayal, the reth dekala were cursed with ever-burning flames that consume their bodies without ever killing them.
Demon of Human Origin: They are now evil outsiders who require no food or rest, don't age, and can only be slain on their new home plane of Acheron.
Faceless Mooks: They prefer face-conealing helms, covering "oddly flat, seamed, leathery features and wide mouths studded with numerous small, pointed teeth."
Fog Feet: Their legs trail off into a pilar of green flame, which lets them move as if under an air walk effect to attack foes from above.
Offing the Offspring: To lift their curse, the reth dekala intend to fulfil the order they disobeyed so long ago, and kill every one of their descendants — hundreds, if not thousands of people scattered across the world that carry the reth bloodline.
Private Military Contractors: The reth dekala routinely hire themselves out as mercenaries to gather wealth and prestige, either as lone bodyguards or elite companies of dozens of warriors, but only after a lengthy discussion on what the reth dekala will do for their client and what they expect in return.
Proud Warrior Race Guy: They consider themselves an orderly brotherhood of knights more than an army, "and even a common reth dekala expects to be treated as an overlord and conqueror by any lesser being." They prefer to avoid battling "dishonorable" foes like rogues or Cannon Fodder and instead seek out enemy champions and leaders to duel.
Supernatural Martial Arts: They know several martial maneuvers and combat stances from the Devoted Spirit, Iron Heart and Tiger Claw schools.
Technicolor Fire: Reth dekala are shrouded in "vilefire," unnatural green flame that deals both fire and acid damage, and might sicken others who come in contact with it. They can hurl a blast of vilefire as a ranged attack, and anyone adjacent to a reth dekala will take damage each turn.
The Virus: They no longer have conventional genders, but to make more of their kind they can bathe a captive humanoid in vilefire to turn them into a reth dekala — "an agonizing process that the reth dekala view as a great honor to bestow upon a worthy foe."

Retriever

Classification: Construct (3E, 5E), Elemental Animate (4E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3E), 27 (4E), 14 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (1E-3E), Unaligned (4E), Lawful Evil (5E)

Sinister spider-shaped constructs that are faultless trackers and capable of subduing even mighty demons.

Eye Beams: Retrievers have multiple eyes that can make different magical attacks. In 3rd Edition, they can shoot beams of fire, cold or electricity, or a ray of petrification, but they can only make one such attack per round, and each ray can only be used once every four rounds. 5th Edition streamlines things so that retrievers can either fire a beam that deals force damage or another that paralyzes the target.
Giant Spider: The retriever is an elephant-sized construct made in the shape of a spider.
Retcon: Originally retrievers were constructed by demon lords to capture priority targets like runaway slaves, stolen items, or mortal enemies, but 5th Edition casts them as creations of the drow, designed to capture demons to bind to the dark elves' will. In their old lore, retrievers were built in the image of bebiliths, while in 5th Edition they are actually powered by bound bebiliths.
Scarily Competent Tracker: They are appropriately very good at retrieving things, including living beings, and unerringly know the distance and direction to their current target.

Revenant

Classification: Undead (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: Base creature's +1 (3E), 5 (5E)
Playable: 4E
Alignment: True Neutral

Intelligent undead which rise from the grave to avenge their own murders.

Body Surf: If a revenant's body is destroyed or unavailable, its spirit will fly off in search of a suitable replacement corpse. Once it finds one, it takes possession of the corpse and begins its hunt anew.
Implacable Man: Nothing will stop a revenant from tracking down its killer. It pursues the killer unerringly and relentlessly, and even the destruction of its body is just a temporary setback because its spirit will take possession of a suitable replacement within a day. It also knows the exact location of its killer at all times and cannot be turned by divine magic.
Living on Borrowed Time: Revenants have limited time to track down the people who wronged them in life. The exact amount of time varies between edition, but in all cases a revenant who fails to catch and kill its quarry in time must abandon the hunt and move on to the afterlife.
Mortality Grey Area: 4E revenants are considered undead for the purposes of effects targeting them, but also as living creatures as well.
Promoted to Playable: The 4th Edition Heroes of Shadow supplement has a revenant "race" (though you also pick what race your character was prior to death) playable from 1st level, casting them as rare individuals revived by some god of death — those chosen by the Raven Queen, for example, tend to develop scaly, bird-like arms and legs with elongated nails.
Purpose-Driven Immortality: A revenant is driven by a single goal: to take bloody revenge on whichever person or persons wronged it in life. The instant that goal is achieved, it departs to the afterlife. Until then, it will keep coming after its targets no matter what they throw at it.
Revenant Zombie: A revenant forms from the soul of a mortal who died in a cruel and undeserving way. After returning to the world, a revenant reclaims its corpse and superficially resembles a zombie. Unlike a zombie's lifeless eyes, a revenant's eyes burn with resolve and flare in the presence of its killer.
Situational Damage Attack: A revenant's punches inflict much greater damage than normal when attacking the object of its vengeance.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: A revenant can paralyze someone with fear just by glaring at them, though it only works on the revenant's quarry.

Rhek

Rhek chaosgrinder (3e)

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Good

A Material Plane race of rhino-like humanoids who immigrated to the Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia shortly after it lost its third layer to Mechanus, and helped restore order in that time of crisis. Now they strive to crush evil and impose order upon an unruly cosmos.

Acrofatic: Rheks are seven feet tall and weigh 350 pounds, but can still employ the monk class' acrobatics and increased movement.
Bare-Fisted Monk: Rhek chaosgrinders are skilled martial artists who don't require weapons to destroy their enemies.
Healing Factor: Downplayed; they don't have fast healing or regeneration, but their redundant internal organs and rapidly-congealing blood mean that rheks automatically stabilize themselves when brought below 0 hit points.
Holy Hand Grenade: All rheks can make a Smite Chaos attack three times per day, dealing extra damage to Chaotic foes.
Horn Attack: They can make gore attacks with their horns, which does double damage during a charge.
Obsessively Organized: Fittingly for the more-Lawful-than-Good plane of Arcadia, rheks are very organized, striving for harmony and perfection by making sure everything is in its proper place, and having little tolerance for unpredictability.
Rhino Rampage: They're anthropomorphic rhinos, and while not bloodthirsty, are perfectly willing to enforce their vision of order through violence.
Supernatural Sensitivity: Rheks can detect chaos at will.

Riffler

Classification: Fey (5E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Gnomish fey obsessed with the destiny-altering power of the Deck of Many Things.

Blue-and-Orange Morality: Rifflers have an "incomprehensible" agenda that leads them to wander the Feywild and Material Plane in search of cards for the Deck of Many Things, which they alternately collect, scatter, trade, or hoard. A riffler might attack someone for just one card from the deck, or they might give a full deck to someone in need of a change of destiny.
Death Dealer: They attack with spectral playing cards, and can unleash a conical spray of them that might root foes in place.
Fast Tunneling: A strange variant; they can "shuffle" or "riffle" their way through solid matter, which closes solidly behind them.
Supernatural Sensitivity: They can smell enchanted cards, such as those from the Deck of Many Things, from up to a mile away.
Winds of Destiny, Change!: Rifflers can "shuffle destiny," adding or subtracting a d6 from another creature's roll.

Rilkan

Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Rakish and vivacious humanoids with patches of scales on their throats and forearms, a sign of their reptilian heritage.

Ghost Memory: Rilkans can use incarnum to access the racial knowledge of their people, letting them treat all Knowledge checks as trained skills, and giving them a competence bonus on such checks (and bardic knowledge) that increases as they shape more soulmelds. The reason the rilkans dislike the skarns is because the former believe the latter used to be part of a similar racial link, supplying martial knowledge and combat skills, but the skarns broke it after growing dissatisfied with the rilkans' progress towards "perfection."
The Hedonist: Downplayed; while rilkans are taught to "seek out and experience the best of what life has to offer," this doesn't mean total hedoism, instead the emphasis is on "heroic struggle" and "epic strife," with days filled with drama and nights filled with passion. That said, rilkans are still "consummate seducers and seductresses," and their roleplaying notes suggest players come up with a list of "lines" to use when interacting with potential paramours.
Nicknaming the Enemy: Rilkans "delight in attaching belittling epithets to their nemeses," and use their bardic traditions to make sure these insulting nicknames spread far and wide.
Precursors: Like their brother race the skarns, the rilkans are descended from a mysterious people called the mishtai who sought "perfection of form." The rilkans decided that "perfection was to be found in the journey, not the destination," and went off to live their lives to the fullest, something the skarns haven't forgiven them for.
Proud Merchant Race: Rilkans believe that "gold is the root of all good," since trade ensures that people have what they need to live life to the fullest. As such, trading guilds are as powerful as adventuring companies and bardic colleges in rilkan settlements, and their stories are filled with heroic merchants and oligarchs who brought wealth to themselves, their families and their communities.
Snake People: Downplayed; the main sign of the rilkans' non-human ancestry are colorful, pebbly, corundum-hard scales on their necks and forearms — rilkan males' scales are a solid color, while females' are patterned. They still retain the Reptilian subtype, however.

Rilmani

An aurumach and cuprilach (3e)

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Outsider (3E), Celestial (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Natives of the Concordant Domain of the Outlands, the rilmani embody pure neutrality. Rather than staying out of the great conflicts of the multiverse, they are committed to upholding the balance between the powers of good, evil, law and chaos, and subtly act whenever one side threatens to dominate the Great Wheel.

Art Evolution: In their original Planescape incarnation, rilmani look like fairly normal humanoids, save for the metallic sheen to their flesh, glow to their eyes, and overwhelming presence. In 3rd Edition, they're hairless beings with flesh the color of their associated metal. 5th Edition drastically redesigns the rilmani, rendering them as sleek beings with metal bodies, whose "extraordinary anatomies often act in defiance of natural forces."
Balance Between Good and Evil: Their primary goal is to uphold Balance across the multiverse, whether on an interplanar scale or on an individual Material Plane world.
Chrome Champion: Each rilmani is a humanoid whose flesh is the color of their subspecies' namesake, so ferrumachs have iron skin, aurumachs gleam golden, and so on.
Color-Coded Castes: Like other outsiders that embody an alignment, rilmani are divided into several specialized subtypes, in their case defined by their metallic skins.
Enemy Summoner:
- Like many "embody an alignment" outsiders, rilmani can summon more of their kind as reinforcements, with a small chance of success for the low-ranking rilmani to automatic success for the aurumachs.
- On the flipside, their 2E lore states that rilmani can never be summoned by any spell, or even travel to the Prime Material Plane on their own. Instead, they can "piggyback" on the summons of an extraplanar creature of equal power, so the rilmani can observe what's going on.
No-Sell: Rilmani as a race are immune to electricity and poison, and resistant to acid and sonic energy.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: All rilmani can use polymorph self several times a day to aid in their infiltrations.

Abiorach

Slender rilmani with a liquid, silvery sheen to their flesh and crystalline, multicolored eyes, who usually monitor the Balance on the Inner Planes.

Blue-and-Orange Morality: Even beyond the rilmani's devotion to the Balance, the abiorachs' time on the Inner Planes has given them an elemental viewpoint, making them "emperamental and capricious creatures."
Enemy Summoner: They can't gate in other rilmani, instead abiorachs have a 25% chance to summon an elemental.
Guile Hero: Abiorachs are among the weakest of the rilmani, and well aware of this, and thus prefer "manipulation and trickery rather than open battle."
Muscles Are Meaningless: They have the slight builds of an adolescent humanoid, but boast an impressive Strength score of 18. "Many a mephit's misjudged an abiorach to its everlasting woe!"
No-Sell: They can attune themselves to whatever Inner Plane they're on, becoming immune to the fires of the Elemental Plane of Fire, for example, and being treated as a native elemental creature by the plane's inhabitants.

Argenach

Silver-skinned sages who play puppetmaster on the Material Plane.

Light Is Not Good: Their skin has a silvery sheen, and they favor white robes on their home plane, but argenachs are just as likely to be advising heroes on how to combat chaos and evil as they are to be aiding villains against law and goodness.
Situational Damage Attack: Argenachs can fire rays of what look like silver light from their hands, but which deal a damage type that their target is vulnerable to. So a ray that hits a fire-immune baatezu might deal electricity damage, while a ray that hits an electricity-immune archon might deal cold damage.
Treacherous Advisor: Argenachs like to work by providing information and advice to Material Plane factions, but are only following the rilmani's greater agenda, and will only aid their partners to the point where they put an opposing power in check.

Aurumach

^2e

Challenge Rating: 17 (3E, 5E)

The golden leader caste of the rilmani, who in rare cases may intervene directly in a conflict as diplomats, or as devastating warriors.

Aggressive Negotiations: Aurumachs only intervene if the rilmani's covert attempts to influence a situation have failed, and will first attempt diplomacy, appearing unarmed and unarmored as they encourage a conflict's participants to seek a middle ground. If their words fail, they summon their weapons and armor in an instant and use force.
Damage-Increasing Debuff: In 5th Edition, an aurumach can "Invoke Weakness" in an opponent, cursing them to take more than double the normal damage from the rilmani's next attack.
Floating Limbs: In 5th Edition, an aurumach's head, limbs and lower bodies seem connected to their torsos only by glowing energy.
Godzilla Threshold: Normally the aurumachs remain near the Spire on the Outlands, and are content to delegate the details of missions to their argenach subordinates ("There's trouble on Toril. Deal with it."). It takes a dire threat to the Balance or one of the planes for the aurumachs to intervene directly. "They are remorseless and coldly efficient when such a cause pulls them away from the Spire; cutters who meet them at these times'd be wise not to get on the aurumach's bad side."
Gold-Colored Superiority: Aurumachs are the rilmani's leaders, the strongest of their race, and the largest as well.
Instant Armor: 3E aurumachs' enchanted golden armor is never truly worn, it simply appears on their bodies in time to deflect an attack and vanishes the next instant. The upside is that this lets aurumachs move without being impaired by a suit of full plate, the bad news is that in an Anti-Magic field, they're effectively naked.
Non-Elemental: In 5th Edition, an aurumach's "manifested blade" melee attacks and "gleaming ray" ranged attacks deal force damage.
Situational Damage Attack: Aurumachs' "Antithesis" ability in 3rd Edition makes their touch or melee attacks deal extra damage to a target based on how far from True Neutral it is, so a Lawful Neutral target would take some chaotic damage, while a Chaotic Good target would take even more lawful and unholy damage.
Summon to Hand: Similarly to their armor, 3E aurumachs' golden halberds can be summoned or dismissed instantly as a free action

Cuprilach

^2e

Challenge Rating: 12 (3E, 5E)

Copper-fleshed rilmani who serve as infiltrators and assassins.

Acid Attack: A 2nd Edition cuprilach can loose a 20-foot spray of acid, once per day.
Back Stab: As assassins, 3E cuprilachs can deal Sneak Attack damage like a rogue.
Blade Spam/Rain of Arrows: In 3rd Edition, cuprilachs can make a full attack with a standard action, allowing them to move and unleash a flurry of sword strikes, or loose three arrows before the first has hit its target. What makes this even more dangerous is that in ideal circumstances, they'll apply Sneak Attack damage with each hit.
Combat Pragmatist: To put it simply, "Cuprilachs don't fight fair." They abuse magic such as polymorph self or disguise self (depending on edition), on top of spells like silence and improved invisibility, to close with their targets, and have no scruples regarding what tactics they'll use to finish a mission. Cuprilachs are the most dangerous rilmani not just because of their deadly skills, but because they believe that the best way to protect the Balance is to eliminate powerful creatures of extreme alignment, and might decide on the spot to kill someone they deem a threat, without consulting their superiors first.
Hot-Blooded: They're "hot-tempered, violent, and rebellious at the best of times," but cuprilachs never refuse a mission from their superiors. It's noted that other rilmani give cuprilachs a wide berth back between missions, as when the assassins aren't undergoing rigorous training, they're "tearing up the Spire in wild celebration."
Smug Super: As their Planescape entry explains, "There aren't many bloods in the Outlands who're as cocky or arrogant as a cuprilach, but their attitude stems from a professional pride — they're some of the best assassins on the planes, and they know it."

Ferrumach

^2e

Challenge Rating: 9 (3E, 5E)

Iron-skinned rilmani soldiers who often fight as cavalry, whether on a kuldurath or phantom steed.

Angelic Transformation: Subverted; there's a rumor that ferrumachs are born from the souls of soldiers who died battling for lost causes, but it's false.
The Big Guy: They're this to the other rilmani, bring the brawniest-looking. "There's no hint of grace, athleticism, or agility about them; ferrumachs are walking slabs of stone."
An Ice Person: One constant throughout editions is ferrumachs being able to drop an ice storm on foes at least once per day.
Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In 5th Edition, ferrumachs can make a "Skewering Charge" attack that deals extra piercing damage and can leave a victim grappled, shall we say.
Martial Pacifist: Their 3E entry explains that ferrumachs "would rather have creatures obey their commands and observe rilmani ideals than fight them," and will attempt to use intimidation to avoid conflict, only using violence as a last resort.
Odd Friendship: Ferrumachs live apart from other rilmani in gray fortresses overlooking the Spire, and are also the most lawful-leaning of the rilmani, obeying the argenachs and aurumachs without question. Despite this, ferrumachs are on good terms with the temperamental cuprilachs, "whom they regard as fellow fighters and professionals."
Supernatural Fear Inducer: 3E ferrumachs can surround themselves with an aura replicating the fear spell.

Kuldurath

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_khuldurath_3e.jpg

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

Hulking but swift warbeasts often ridden into battle by ferrumach rilmani.

Beast of Battle: They're bred for combat and often outfitted with enchanted full plate barding.
Bond Creatures: Downplayed; kulduraths have the supernatural ability to share their riders' damage reduction or energy resistances, as well as the effects of any beneficial spells.
Horn Attack: A variant; kulduraths deal double goring damage with their tusks on a charge.
It Can Think: Kulduraths are as smart as ogres, enough to understand Sylvan, though they cannot themselves speak.
Mix-and-Match Critters: They have a rhino's tough hide and powerful musculature, but the way their bodies are set up makes them run and leap like Large, predatory rabbits, while their heads have tusks rather than horns or long ears.
Shock and Awe: Three times per day, a kuldurath can surround itself with an aura of electricity that damages all within 30 feet (their riders, being rilmani, are immune).
Trampled Underfoot: Kulduraths are large and heavy enough to trample smaller foes.

Plumach

The lead-colored workers and traders who maintain rilmani society, and rarely venture from the Spire at the center of the Outlands.

Hidden Elf Village: The plumachs live as such, keeping to the Spire and hoping other people stay well away. "Their brand of neutrality is the simplest and most apathetic view held hy the rilmani: Don't get involved."
Non-Action Guy: They're this among the rilmani subtypes. While plumachs aren't helpless in combat — their fists for example hit like lead — they play a supporting role in rilmani society, making and selling goods, and keeping an eye on the Outlands while out on trade missions. The plumachs will only be organized for battle by the authority of an aurumach, and only in a great emergency.
True Craftsman: It's said that any given plumach is "the equal of the finest human craftsmen at his chosen trade."

Rimefire Eidolon

Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Good

The shattered, scattered remnants of the ancient goddess Hleid, a deity of winter and ice, rimefire eidolons spend their lives hiding from the dark forces that would see Hleid's demise completed.

Bond Creatures: Rimefire eidolons can forge magical bonds with rimefire witches, the remaining worshippers of Hleid. The eidolon will transform into an icy copy of their partner, and the eidolon becomes permanently aware of their partner's location and condition while gaining resistance to mind-affecting magic. This bond breaks only on death of one of its members, and instantly reforms if one is returned to life within a year of their death.
Cold Flames: Rimefire eidolons burn with icy blue fire, which deals equal parts ice and fire damage and can be thrown at a distance.
Divided Deity: When the murdered goddess Hleid fell to earth, her shattered remnants took on living form as the rimefire eidolons.
An Ice Person: Rimefire eidolons have fairly extensive powers insofar as ice magic goes. Besides being able to thrown their Cold Flames as projectiles, they can shape and manipulate ice at will and further have access to a number of icy spell-like abilities, such as ice storm, wall of ice, cone of cold and polar ray.
Technicolor Fire: The Cold Flames that burn around an eidolon's form are a bright blue-white in color.

Ring-Worm

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Alignment: Unaligned

Creatures that disguise themselves as enchanted rings to feed on the magical energy of their wearers.

Magic Eater: Ring-worms drain magic to survive, and their magical aura will grow stronger as they leech magic from their hosts. Though this also makes them fairly easy to trap, and rumor has it that some people capture the creatures for use against magical foes.
Mana Drain: Once worn by a host, a ring-worm begins feeding on their magic. Spellcasters will lose one spell level per day they wear a ring-worm, forgetting the magic as soon as they try to prepare it, an effect that is cumulative. Once a spellcaster has lost all their spells, or if the ring-worm is worn by a non-mage, it drains power from magical items, imposing a cumulative 10% chance per day worn that the items fail to function. Thankfully, once the ring-worm is removed the magic items begin working again in a matter of rounds, though a spellcaster will have to wait until the next day to prepare more spells.
Object Shifting: When curled up and motionless, ring-worms appear as golden rings, and more insidiously, register as a ring of protection +1 to the identify spell.
Pun-Based Creature: They are worms that disguise themselves as rings.
The Symbiote: A purely parasitic example. What's worse is that once put on, a ring-worm bonds with its host's skin, and spells like remove curse or healing magic won't remove it — instead it takes dispel magic, and the longer the ring-worm has fed on magic, the easier it can resist the spell.
Weak to Fire: If a ring-worm is attacked by fire, it immediately detaches itself and tries to flee.

Ripper

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

Monsters who lurk in the darkest parts of cities to hunt sentient prey.

Bizarre Alien Psychology: Rippers are fully sentient and intelligent, and can understand Common but are unable to speak it — they communicate with one another using scent and high-pitched clicks. What passes for ripper society comes when a clutch cooperates during a hunt, and they view all other creatures as either prey or rival predators. Rippers have little in the way of self-awareness, and not only have no names for themselves, they have difficulty with the very concept of names.
Chameleon Camouflage: They have a chameleon-like ability to blend into their surroundings, and are good at acting more human that they are.
Emotion Control: A ripper can replicate fear and deep slumber spells, or the "attack nearest creature" result of a confusion effect. The catch is that this is all done by bursts of pheromones usable every few rounds, meaning that Spell Resistance or Anti-Magic offers no protection, while creatures immune to poison or inhaled gas won't be affected.
Humanoid Abomination: They're only vaguely humanoid — a ripper's limbs are abnormally long and unnaturally-jointed, bending in alien ways, their "head" is just a bulge at the top of their carapace, and their mouths are vertical slits where a human's sternum would be.
Stupidity-Inducing Attack: A ripper is constantly surrounded by a 60-foot aura of disorienting pheromones, causing creatures who succumb to take a penalty to their Wisdom scores, and making it harder for other creatures to get a clear look at the ripper.
To Serve Man: Rippers can survive on animals, but crave the flesh of intelligent beings — they'll follow along behind muggers and finish off injured victims, target newcomers to a city who won't be missed, or incite riots with their pheromones and feed on the resulting carcasses.

Riverine

Classification: Fey (5E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (5E)
Alignment: Any

Nature spirits who embody specific rivers, protecting them from harm and interacting with those who travel upon their waters.

Amazing Technicolor Population: Their skin tone is the same color as their river's waters.
Fisher King: A riverine is closely tied to the river they incarnate, which means their personality reflects their waters' — a slow, lazy river is embodied in a lethargic riverine, while a fast-moving one gives rise to a wild and reckless fey. Similarly, if a riverine is sealed away, their river will dwindle into some swampy streams.
Fog Feet: Their lower torsos can be humanoid legs, or columns of churning water.
Making a Splash: They unsurprisingly have potent water magic, and can blast enemies with freezing water, use control water at will, generate terrifying phantasmal mists, or turn terrain into swampy ground.
Lord of the Ocean/Our Nymphs Are Different: Depending on whether they take a male or female form, they can be considered equivalents to Classical Mythology's potamides and river gods. An appeased riverine can ensure that their waters have bounties of fish and plant life, and feature tracks along the banks leading to shelter and safety, while an angry riverine can unleash raging deluges.

Roach Thrall

Origin: Eberron
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Giant intelligent cockroaches that hatch in human bodies, wearing their flesh and masquerading as normal people until it's time to implant the next generation of their kind in another host.

Big Creepy-Crawlies: A roach thrall is about 5 feet long and weighs about 150 pounds in its true form.
Discard and Draw: Roach thralls can reproduce and blend into human society, but do not fight well in their human host. When a roach thrall is seriously threatened, it sheds its human host, but can't ever reproduce again, and spends the rest of its life protecting other roach thralls.
Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Roach thralls reproduce by implanting their eggs within human hosts. When it emerges from the egg, a juvenile roach thrall consumes the brain and internal organs of its host.
Human Disguise: These giant cockroaches wear human skin to masquerade as humans and perpetuate their reproductive cycle.

Roc

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_roc_5e.png

Classification: Animal, Magical Beast (chaos roc) (3E); Natural Beast (4E); Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 9, 22 (chaos roc) (3E); 14 (4E); 11 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned, Chaotic Neutral (chaos roc, 3E)

Vast, predatory birds that make even giants look tiny in comparison.

Eye Beams: A chaos roc can emit a spray of prismatic light from its eyes.
Giant Flyer: They have a wingspan of 200 feet in 5th edition and prey on otherwise massive animals like giants, elephants, and even whales. Even at rest, these birds of prey rival dragons in size.
Horse of a Different Color: They're often tamed by giants to serve as flying steeds.
Roc Birds:
- Rocs have appeared since the game's first edition as birds of prey large enough to carry off elephants in their claws. They are often associated with giants, who tame them as aerial mounts, although wild rocs will hunt giants. In fact, 5th edition lore says the giants' chief god Annam created rocs as air support in the giants' ancient war against the dragons.
- In Al-Qadim, it should come as no surprise that they are a prominent part of the setting, given the "Arabian Nights" Days theme. In fact, the setting has three variations. Asides from the common roc found in other settings, there are also the intelligent great rocs and the evil-aligned two-headed rocs (based on the Ray Harryhausen one from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad).
- In 4th Edition, The Phoenix and Thunderhawk are considered species of rocs native to the Elemental Chaos and possessing the elemental powers that come with such an origin.

Rogue Eidolon

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Statues animated by dark deities, granting them dangerous power that has also driven the constructs mad.

The Blank: The faces of rogue eidolons are blank, except for the bleeding symbols of whatever dark god created them.
Bloody Murder: They can spray thick gouts of blood from the symbols carved into their faces, which can cause all those hit with the stuff to perceive their allies as enemies and spend several rounds trying to murder them.
Living Statue: A dark deity that was especially pleased with a particular cult cell sometimes sent the tiniest shred of its power infuse that cult's statue, granting it minimal sentience.
Murderous Malfunctioning Machine: A fantastic example. Over the years, most of these constructs went insane from the dark energies within them, becoming rogue eidolons that in many cases murdered the very cults they were created to protect. Now they act at random, sometimes ignoring an adventuring party entirely, perhaps mistaking it for a group of cultists, and other times attacking the same adventurers they ignored previously.
Stupidity-Inducing Attack: Those hit by a rogue eidolon's slam attacks have to save or become permanently confused, acting randomly until healed by magic like greater restoration or limited wish.

Rokuro-Kubi

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

Monsters normally indistinguishable from humans, until they attack with their fanged mouths and elongated, serpentine necks.

Dwindling Party: Rokuro-kubi like to set this up, disguising themselves and joining a group of travelers or peasant family, then murdering them one by one.
Long Neck: 20 feet long, to be precise, enough that a rokuro-kubi can use it to wrap around and constrict opponents — though they'll obviously reserve that attack for isolated victims.
Snake People: They're compared to hannya and hebi-no-onna as another monstrous humanoid with serpentine features, and speak both Common and Yuan-Ti.

Roper

"You see, stalac-tites grow down from the ceiling, while stalg-mites reach — AAHHHHHHHHH-"

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Elemental Magical Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (3E), 14 (4E), 5 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (1E-3E), Evil (4E), Neutral Evil (5E)

A monster that looks like a stalagmite.

Ambushing Enemy: Ropers hunt by closing their eyes and mouths, retracting their tentacles, and disguising themselves near-perfectly as formations of inert stone. They can stay like this nearly indefinitely, only opening their eyes and maws and lashing out with their tentacles when prey stumbles across them.
Combat Tentacles: Every roper has half a dozen tentacles which it uses to ensnare potential meals and drag them toward its mouth.
Extreme Omnivore: A roper eats any creature, from Underdark beasts to adventurers and their gear.
He Was Right There All Along: Ropers are consummate ambush predators which sit perfectly still while waiting for something edible to appear. Once they are within grabbing distance, it reveals itself by lashing out with its tentacles.
You Will Not Evade Me: A roper’s tentacles can snag people from up to fifty feet away and reel them into biting distance in short order. Their touch also saps the victim’s strength, making it harder for the victim to break free and escape.

Piercer

Classification: Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

The immature form of the roper, piercers disguise themselves as stalactites and employ similar hunting tactics.

Death from Above: A piercer clings to a cave ceiling and waits for some unwitting creature to pass underneath it. When that happens, it lets go and drops onto the unfortunate victim, skewering and crushing them to death.
Death or Glory Attack: The piercer is screwed if its initial drop fails to kill its would-be victim. It has no other way to attack and moves too slowly to escape reprisals.
He Was Right There All Along: Clinging to the ceilings of caverns, piercers blend in perfectly with stalactites, silently dropping to impale unsuspecting foes on the ground.
Related in the Adaptation: For most of the game's history, ropers and piercers were entirely unrelated monsters that simply had thematically similar gimmicks. In 5E, piercers are recast as larval ropers.

Prismatic Roper

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

These roper offshoots only have an animalistic intelligence, and rather than disguise themselves to launch ambushes, use their control over their coloration to hypnotize and lure in prey.

Chameleon Camouflage: Prismatic ropers can change the color of their skin to blend in with their surroundings, giving them a hefty bonus on Hide checks when they aren't putting on a hypnotic display.
Everything's Better with Rainbows: They can also use color spray three times per day.
Hypnotic Creature: Much like some species of squid, prismatic ropers can spend an action rapidly changing the coloration of their skin, putting on a dazzling, colorful display that may hypnotize other creatures, compelling them to do nothing but approach the prismatic roper at a walking pace. When the fascinated victims are within reach, the prismatic roper drops the display and strikes with its poisonous tentacles.
The Paralyzer: Their tentacles carry a poison that deals Dexterity damage with paralysis as a secondary effect.

Rot Harbinger

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/84733.jpg

Classification: Undead (3E), Elemental Humanoid Undead (4E)
Challenge Rating: 15 (3E), 20 (4E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Sometimes known as "angels of decay," these abominations are spawned by lords of the undead, such as Orcus and Atropus.

Brains and Brawn: They're smart enough to strategize and serve as field commanders, and in 3e they are the size of ogres with strength to match.
Large and in Charge: In 3e, angels of decay were the size of ogres, and frequently employed by undead lords as generals for their armies.
Make Them Rot: They aren't called rot harbingers for nothing. Their touch rots flesh, and their bodies exude a foul substance which makes nearby creatures rot while still alive.
Our Angels Are Different: These winged undead humanoids are sometimes called "angels of decay," but are sick parodies of celestials unaffiliated with the Upper Planes.
Undead Abomination: They are frequently spawned as heralds of these, and are not too shabby themselves. They are said to embody rot and decay, appearing as rotten corpses of humanoids practically radiating negative energy.

Rot Reaver

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (standard), 12 (necrothane) (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Ape-like humanoids with a pair of freakishly long tongues and a taste for the undead, particularly those they animate from the remains of their murder victims.

Animate Dead: They can use the spell at will, but only on corpses of creatures afflicted by their "wound rot" attack within the last 24 hours. Rot reavers are smart enough to keep some undead minions around rather than consuming all of them right away, but won't hesitate to feed off them to heal damage in a battle.
Life Drain: Every time a rot reaver deals damage to an undead creature with a cleaver, it heals itself by an equal amount.
Make Them Rot: After wounding a creature with a cleaver attack, a rot reaver can try and lick the wound with one of its tongues, dealing Constitution damage and allowing the creature to potentially animate the victim's remains later.
Overly-Long Tongue: They have two of them, dripping with black ichor and coiling all the way down their arms to their weapons.
Picky People Eater: Rot reavers feed upon the negative energy that animates undead, which would make them sound like a boon in a setting with necromancers, except they derive the most fulfillment from killing living creatures, animating them themselves, and then consuming their undead essence. This incidentally gives rot reavers an odd place in a world's religions, with some death-related faiths like that of Wee Jas viewing them as scourges created to punish evil undead, while others see rot reavers as abominations that are nonetheless very useful at keeping undead minions in line.
Tin Tyrant: Necrothanes are the "vicious, malevolent champions of the rot reaver species," able to wield negative energy like evil clerics, and readily distinguished by their jet-black, enchanted, full plate armor.

Roving Mauler

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

Bizarre-looking predators that share the same habitats as normal lions, though these beasts have a unique hunting method.

Bizarre Alien Locomotion: Roving maulers constantly cartwheel about, and can even scale sheer cliffs this way, albeit more slowly than they move across open ground.
Morality Pet: They never hunt natural lions, and in fact roving maulers have been known to surrender kills to their cousins.
Our Monsters Are Weird: They look something like leonine starfish with heads on both sides of their bodies, giving roving maulers a strong resemblance to the vestige Buer, though the relationship between the two is unknown.
Trampled Underfoot: Their trademark attack is to simply run over other creatures, even larger ones, and rake with their claws as they pass.

Ruin Chanter

Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: 14 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Morose and solitary fey who embody worldly decay, claiming crumbling ruins as their demenses and driving off intruders.

Blue-and-Orange Morality: These fey are devoted to protecting their ruins, and will attack intruders until they perish or flee, but ruin chanters will tolerate animals native to the region, constructs or undead who also lair in the ruin, and even intelligent creatures who share the fey's melancholy worldview. Anyone who tries to tear down a ruin chanter's home will face its wrath, but someone who seeks to restore the ruins to a usable state will be welcomed. And some evil ruin chanters decide to make new ruins out of thriving settlements.
Emotion Bomb: Ruin chanters can channel their sorrow over the state of their homes into the crushing despair spell.
Enemy Summoner: Once per week, they can undertake an hour-long ritual to summon a ruin elemental from the rubble of their surroundings, accompanied by a storm appropriate to the area.
Flight: Ruin chanters have a perfect flight speed, but they're deceptive about using it, preferring to appear to "leap" great distances or lightly "run" across difficult terrain. Sometimes they'll try to lure opponents onto unstable structures that collapse beneath the landbound foes.
Magic Music: They have the supernatural musical abilities of 12th-level bards.
Rapid Aging: With a pointed finger or wave of their hand, a ruin chanter can curse a creature with an infrmity of body or wind, causing the victim to appear stooped and aged, and inflicting penalties on their physical stats or rendering them senile as per the confusion spell, respectively. Thankfully, a given creature cannot be under both curses simultaneously, the effects only last for an hour, and remove curse instantly ends the effect.

Rukarazyll

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 14 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Loathsome beings from the Elemental Plane of Earth who delight in deceiving and ruining the lives of mortals.

Acid Attack: Their bite attacks are physically weak, but also hit victims with more serious acid damage.
Cult: Rukarazylls usually operate by assuming charismatic humanoid guises and setting up cults supposedly dedicated to a benevolent, but wholly fictitious, minor deity. Over time, they pervert their cult's worship to that of an existant, evil deity.
Eldritch Abomination: Rukarazylls' central bodies are masses of fungoid matter studded with eyes, with six barbed tendrils that can serve as legs or hands as needed, as well as a horned, skull-like head on a stalk, with fungal filaments growing from its empty eye sockets and acidic black goo bubbling from its fanged mouth.
Festering Fungus: Any creature hit by a rukarazyll's melee attack has to save or become infested with a fungus. A few rounds later, fibrous white filaments grow out of the victim's body, actively interfering with their movements to impose a penalty on attack rolls and Dexterity-based checks. Worse, the fungus' secondary effect deals Charisma drain each day, and when a victim's Charisma reaches zero, they fall unconscious and soon transform into a heap of fungoid matter that can infect new victims. Thankfully, a remove disease spell — or taking 10 points of fire or cold damage — removes the infestation.
Honest John's Dealership: When they aren't running cults, rukarazylls amuse themselves by selling cursed magic items they pass off as beneficial.
Mook Maker: Once every ten minutes, a rukarazyll can spit up a gray ooze that fights alongside it for up to eight rounds before dissolving into goo.
Plaguemaster: They can cast magic like unholy blight and contagion, and rukarazylls are known to try to pass themselves off as healers, only to inflict diseases upon those seeking aid.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: Beyond using alter self at will, rukarazylls can use polymorph self three times per day to aid in their infiltration of Material Plane society.

Runehound

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

Lupine horrors whose oversized maws drip with vile fluids.

Acid Attack: A runehound can spray a stream of acid against a single target, out to 100 feet.
Animalistic Abomination: They're aberrant canids, with a freakishly large, eyeless head on a long neck attached at the middle of their spine rather than the front of their bodies, and strange glyphs and tattoos inscribed upon their hairless flesh.
Long Neck: Runehounds' are long enough to give them a 10-foot reach with their bite attacks despite being Medium-sized monsters, but said necks are also flexible enough to let them attack adjacent foes without penalty.
Sticky Situation: Instead of acid, runehounds can spit a glob of sticky goo that acts a single-target web spell.
Supernatural Sensitivity: Runehounds are eyeless, but can track non-mindless creatures by their "psychic scent," though this can be foiled by magic or psionics that grant shields against mental effects. The creatures also use their psychic abilities to perceive their surroundings, and have blindsight out to an uncanny 500 feet.

Rusalka

Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Beautiful female spirits bound to cold rivers, lakes and streams, known to use their beguiling songs to lure in men for companionship, or to simply drown them.

Can't Live Without You: Like similar fey, a rusalka will perish if taken too far from her home waters, beginning to drown until she's immersed in them.
Compelling Voice: A rusalka's song forces a single creature within 300 feet to save or become compelled to move toward her, taking the most direct route possible. Those who follow her into deep enough water are in danger of drowning, but any who come within 5 feet of the rusalka become charmed by her.
Our Nymphs Are Different: They're bound to a body of freshwater much like dryads are bound to trees.
Star-Crossed Lovers: Some lonely rusalkas will entice men to join them in their streams or ponds, using their magic to let their paramours stay with them safely beneath the surface. Such relationships always end sadly, as the rusalka realizes her lover is not truly content in her world, and eventually frees him from her enchantments and stops casting water breathing on him, to force him back onto land.
Super Not-Drowning Skills: They can cast water breathing four times per day, if a rusalka desires a companion rather than a drowning victim.
Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Rusalkas are sometimes depicted as the wives of the filthy, pot-bellied vodyanoi, their fellow water fey.

Rust Monster

Classification: Aberration (3E), Natural Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 6 (4E), 1/2 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Odd bug-like creatures known and feared for their ability to turn metal arms and armor into piles of rust.

Attack Animal: Rust monsters can be domesticated, most commonly by gnomes, to serve as guard beasts capable of disarming intruders for other defenders to mop up. But the creatures' lust for rust overrides any training or loyalty to their masters, so their handlers shouldn't keep any metal on them during interactions.
Expy: Their design draws from a collection of knockoff Ultraman kaiju figures found by Gary Gygax, with the original figure being presumably a depiction of Kemular.
Food as Bribe: They're actually easily tameable and friendly creatures if given scrap metal snacks.
Horse of a Different Color: Some dwarves are known to breed Large rust monsters to be ridden into battle by soldiers wielding stone weapons and wearing hide or stone armor. Such cavalry can rout an enemy army all on its own.
Magic Eater: 4th Edition states that some rust monsters develop a taste for enchanted weapons and armor, becoming "dweomer eaters" that can drain magic items in combat.
Metal Muncher: Rust monsters subsist on rust, which they can create by touching any kind of metal. Their cousins, the folugubs, can liquefy crystals at a touch and feed on the result. They corrode metal extremely quickly, enough so that corroding and consuming enemy weapons mid-combat is a very viable combat tactic for them.
Mooks Ate My Equipment: Rust monsters are the bane of any player who wears metal armor or carries metal weapons, as the touch of a rust monster's antennae corrodes metal in the blink of an eye.
Painting the Medium: The rust monster's illustration in the first edition's Monster Manual shows its corrosive antennae eating a hole in the picture's frame.
Retcon: Planescape posits that rust monsters are the larval forms of the much more dangerous rust dragons of Acheron. This has been ignored by later entries for rust dragons.

Annihilator

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 15 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Suspected to be a mutation of the rust monster, these Underdark horrors' destructive touch isn't limited to metal.

No Mouth: One of their big differences from ordinary rust monsters is annihilators' lack of mouths. Despite this, they seem to derive some sort of sustenance — as well as sadistic pleasure — from destroying things.
Reduced to Dust: Anything, including magic items, so much as brushed by an annihilator's antennae has to save or be affected by a disintegrate spell.
Super-Persistent Predator: Should anything escape an annihilator's attack, it grows obsessed with its quarry, tracking it over great distances until it can finish the job.

Rylkar

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (madclaw), 4 (rylkspawn swarm), 6 (tormentor), 9 (harridan) (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Ratlike monsters from the Underdark, who are born in fire and spread filth and death wherever they go.

Body Horror: Their bodies are covered in bulges and tumors that occasionally burst during activity, splattering their surroundings with pale green fluid. This doesn't harm the rylkars, who enjoy the resulting patterns of filth.
Evil-Detecting Dog: Normal wildlife can detect the corruption inside rylkars, and flee from them or immediately attack on sight.
Eye Scream: Rylkar harridans are all blind, since the tormentors put out young harridans' eyes as soon as they're detected, in a futile bid to avoid being eaten — the harridans simply use their scent and blindsight to find prey.
Feed It with Fire: Rylkars, apart from the harridans, are healed whenever they're subjected to fire damage, and in fact fire plays an important part in their reproduction.
Hive Caste System: Rylkars provide a mammalian example.
- Madclaws are Workers, who despite being the harridan's consorts also serve as drone laborers, cannon fodder, and frequently snacks for their queen.
- Tormentors are proper Warriors, guarding the harridan's breeding chamber, carrying in sources of fire to assist in reproduction, and occasionally murdering other rylkars to pass the time.
- Harridans are the Hive Queens directing the entire colony, who spend their days wallowing in filth, eating and breeding.
Hive Mind: All rylkars within 10 miles of their colony's harridan are in constant telepathic communication.
Horror Hunger: Rylkars are perpetually, ravenously hungry, and will strip the ecosystem around their colonies bare until they're forced to move on or die.
It Can Think: Grown rylkars are as smart as ogres, and capable of speaking Undercommon.
Large and in Charge: A rylkar's size denotes its place in the colony's pecking order — rylkspawn are Tiny, madclaws are Small, tormentors are Medium, and harridans are Huge, bloated monstrosities.
Monstrous Cannibalism: Rylkars feed upon each other almost as much as they prey upon other creatures. Rylkar swarms cannibalize one another until only a few young madclaws, tormentors or nascent harridans remain from a starting swarm of hundreds, but harridans have been known to devour their rylkspawn immediately after birthing them.
Poisonous Person: Normal rylkars carry filth fever, while the harridans have a variant called rylkar fever. More than that, a rylkar harridan contaminates the area around it, so that any food or water, or potentially even magical potions, becomes foul and poisonous enough to deal Constitution damage to non-rylkars. After a harridan has settled in a suitable lair for at least a week, this contaminated area spreads at a rate of 20 feet per day, until the harridan is slain and remove curse cast in its nest.
Super-Scream: Rylkar madclaws can loose a "mad shriek" once per day that can cause other creatures to become confused for a round, while their tormentors can give a "hate sthriek" to give madclaws a morale bonus on attacks and damage for a minute.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Rylkar harridans have a frightful presence out to 30 feet. Rylkspawn swarms, in contrast, have a "terror musk" that can cause nearby creatures to become shaken, but it's an extraordinary effect, not magic.
Swarm of Rats: Rylkspawn are only encountered in swarms of at least three hundred creatures. Sometimes their tails seem to be caught together in one big knot.
Weaponized Offspring: If a rylkar harridan takes fire damage, three times per day it can respond by releasing a rylkspawn warm.
You Dirty Rat!: They are ratlike monsters that delight in filth and decay, and spread disease and poison wherever they go.

Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures R

R

Ak'chazar Rakshasa

Naityan Rakshasa

Naztharune Rakshasa

Zakya Rakshasa

Esthetic

Lakshu

Abiorach

Argenach

Aurumach

Cuprilach

Ferrumach

Kuldurath

Plumach

Piercer

Prismatic Roper

Annihilator

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Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures R

Edit Locked

R

Ak'chazar Rakshasa

Naityan Rakshasa

Naztharune Rakshasa

Zakya Rakshasa

Esthetic

Lakshu

Abiorach

Argenach

Aurumach

Cuprilach

Ferrumach

Kuldurath

Plumach

Piercer

Prismatic Roper

Annihilator

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