http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/DungeonsAndDragonsCreaturesWToZ

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, assume that the other alignment holds true for all other game editions. Finally, the "Always Neutral" alignment listed in previous editions for nonsapient creatures has been equated with the "Unaligned" alignment of recent editions.

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Wallara

Origin: Red Steel
Alignment: Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral

Also known as "chameleon men," these reptilian humanoids live a simple existence far from civilization.

Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Wallara are a One-Gender Race of lizard-men, who reproduce by placing their shed skins into a sacred site called a tookoo, where the skin has a 1-in-20 chance of budding a newborn wallara who grows to maturity over the next eight weeks.
Chameleon Camouflage: Unsurprisingly, they can blend in with their surroundings, becoming 90% invisible. Unfortunately, this means some wizards seek wallara skins to make robes of blending.
Dragon Ancestry: Wallara are descended from dragons, hence why they can live to be 250 years old, and such elders pick up magic resistance near the end of their lives.
Fantasy Counterpart Culture: They're basically Aboriginal Australians as lizardfolk, to the extent that they go on a walkabout accompanied by spirit guardians that take the form of kangaroos, kookaburras and koalas, they believe in a Dreamworld that exists parallel to the waking world, and so on.
Lizard Folk: They're the oldest of Mystara's "lizard kin" races, looking like humanoid reptiles with multicolored skin that seems to shift and swirl as they move. These colors can include any hue, but most wallara only have three or four prominent colors.
Teleportation: On top of seeming to vanish thanks to their camouflage, wallara can replicate a dimension door effect at will, reappearing 120 feet away.
Vestigial Empire: In their home setting, the wallara once had an enlightened civilization the equal of their aranea neighbors, but roughly 1500 years before the setting's present, the aranea went to war with them for an unknown reason, reducing the wallara to Stone Age primitivism.

Wang-Liang

Origin: Kara-tur
Classification: Giant (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

10-foot-tall, black-fleshed giants with a bitter hatred of humans.

Absurdly Sharp Claws: Wang-liang have retractable, cat-like claws for Natural Weapons.
Fantastic Racism: Wang-liang despise humans for their greedy consumption of resources and prolific population growth, especially compared to the wang-liang's own rate of reproduction. The rise of mankind has come at the expense of the wang-liang, who consider themselves a Dying Race and lay the blame squarely on humans. As such, wang-liang will never pass up an opportunity to harass, humiliate, maim or kill a human, and any death of a wang-liang at the hands of humans is considered a blood debt that requires a hundred dead humans to satisfy.
Human Shifting: They can use alter self at will, but only to take a humanoid form between four and 12 feet tall.
I Gave My Word: Their deep sense of honor means that wang-liang will always keep their word, even to a human, even if it results in the wang-liang's death.
Immortal Procreation Clause: Wang-liang can live for two millennia, but their females become fertile exactly once during their lifetimes, at which point they seek out a male to mate with — any female who can't find a mate during her fertility period will die, and any male who can't find a mate ten years after reaching sexual maturity will suffer a similar fate. These pairings produce a male and female child (or rarely, two sets of twins, one male and one female), which at least keeps the wang-liang's gender ratio stable.
Invisibility: They can turn invisible at will.
Oni: They're described as cousins to oni/ogre mages, though they have their own bestiary entry rather than being considered an oni subtype.

Warforged

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/636678011094821341.png

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

Living constructs created to be soldiers, the warforged unexpectedly developed sapience and free will, allowing them to seek meaning in their lives beyond fighting others' battles. See the Playable Races subpage for more information about the standard warforged.

Warforged Charger

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Large and unsophisticated warforged, designed to charge into the enemy ranks and smash them to pieces.

Dumb Muscle: They're about as smart as the average ogre, and tend to cling to their simple orders. Though capable of speech, they talk haltingly at best.
Fantasy Metals: Their bodies are plated with adamantine, letting chargers ignore the damage reduction of other constructs and the hardness value of objects, while granting the chargers a hefty armor bonus and damage reduction of their own.
Flawed Prototype: The chargers are an intermediate step between the titans and warforged proper, both in terms of size and ability. Unlike the titans, they're classified as living constructs, but chargers are still less adaptable and intelligent than their Medium-sized successors.
Killer Gorilla: They have the body plan of such, and can do plenty of damage pounding foes with their adamantine fists.

Warforged Colossus

"Norr," Colossus WX-5, in the ruins of Metrol (5e)

Classification: Construct (5E)
Challenge Rating: 25 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

The largest of their kind, warforged colossi are walking weapons of mass destruction.

Awesome Personnel Carrier: Although it can operate without a crew, a warforged colossus is built to carry elite troops.
Giant Foot of Stomping: With emphasis on "giant". The foot of a warforged colossus occupies an area greater than that of most Gargantuan creatures, meaning its Stomp attack can crush dozens of foes with each use.
Humongous Mecha: These things are of gobsmacking size. A colossus's foot alone covers the same area as a fireball's blast radius, allowing it to crush dozens of enemy combatants underfoot with every step. The sheer size of a colossus is enough to strike fear into the hearts of nearby enemies. The hollow interior of an inactive colossus can even serve as a dungeon, one potentially filled with armed magical defenses, the undead remnants of its crews, or dangerous elemental energy leaking from its magical components.
Ray Gun: Warforged colossi can fire beams of light from their mouths that can incinerated whole legions.
Superweapon: The colossi were meant to be Cyre's trump card in the Last War, being mountain-sized weapons platforms that could shrug off conventional attacks and devastate entire armies singlehandedly. Fortunately for the rest of Khorvaire, the Mourning happened before the colossi could make it out of Cyre's borders. Now the colossi are as inert and lifeless as everything else in the Mournland, and only seven of them are rumored to survive in a salvageable state.
Wave-Motion Gun: A colossus's deadliest weapon is a beam of energy fired from its mouth, which can incinerate hundreds of foes in a single shot.

Warforged Scout

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

The smallest warforged variant, intended to serve as light infantry and reconaissance units.

Awesome, but Impractical: Scouts are far less common than other warforged variants, mainly because their commanders realized they offer few advantages over conventional flesh-and-blood scouts.
Hit-and-Run Tactics: They're aware they're not as sturdy as other warforged, and thus scouts prefer to fire on foes from cover and slip away before attacking again.
Sneaky Spy Species: They were intended to be as such, being Small living constructs with a natural bonus to Dexterity.

Warforged Titan

Classification: Construct (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (3E, 5E)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

The first warforged developed, the titans are huge constructs that function as autonomous siege engines, capable of laying waste to whole formations of enemy troops with their oversized weapons.

Blade Below the Shoulder: Warforged titans lack hands, instead having the heads of an enormous maul or axe where the hands should be.
Dumb Muscle: Though towering war machines, the warforged titans are barely sentient, and just intelligent enough to follow commands.
Flawed Prototype: Though powerful and more intelligent than purely-mindless golems, the warforged titans proved susceptible to massed troop formations, and took heavy losses when deployed in the Last War. Later refinements of the titan construction process resulted in Medium-sized warforged that were far more intelligent and adaptable, with the "living construct" trait to make them easier to maintain.
Trampled Underfoot: Their 3E rules let titans crush smaller targets they move over.

Water Weird

Classification: Elemental (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Like their water elemental kin, these creatures of living water are often summoned to the Material Plane, in their case to guard a location with a pool or fountain to which they are bound. Not to be confused with a water elemental weird (see "Elemental Weird" in the "Elemental" folder).

Achilles' Heel: 2nd Edition water weirds are instantly slain by a purify water spell, with No Saving Throw. In 5th Edition, meanwhile, they die if they ever leave the water to which they're bound, or if that water is somehow destroyed.
Grand Theft Me: In their AD&D rules, a water weird that comes into physical contact with a normal water elemental can attempt to take control of it.
The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: In 5th Edition, water weirds are naturally Neutral, but if their pool is befouled by dark magic, they'll change alignment to Neutral Evil and kill for pleasure, perhaps turning against their summoner. Conversely, if their pool is blessed and made into holy water, water weirds will become Neutral Good and attempt to scare off intruders instead of attacking. In either case, casting purify food and drink on the water weird's pool will purify its alignment as well.
Murder Water: They're invisible when immersed in a pool of normal water, and fully capable of crushing or drowning those that intrude on the location they're guarding.
Sinister Suffocation: Anything grappled and pulled into a water weird is in danger of drowning.

Webbird

Alignment: Unaligned

Actually closer to an insect or arachnid than an avian, these flying creatures restrain their victims with silky strands.

All Webbed Up: Their tails can fire strands of sticky webbing that is extremely strong and capable of restraining human-sized victims. And the more webbirds that are firing those strands at a victim, the higher the DC to escape.
Death of a Thousand Cuts: Webbirds are Small creatures, about ten inches long including their tails, with foot-wide wingspans, and thus their bite attacks only do a single point of damage. Unfortunately, they attack in swarms of a dozen to nearly 50 creatures, and mutiple webbirds will descend upon an entrapped victim to bite it at the same time.
Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Rather than simply biting an immobilized victim, a webbird can use an ovipositor in its chest to inject eggs into its prey, which hatch in a number of turns into grubs that immediately begin feeding upon their host. This deals damage each round and leaves the victim helpless from the excruciating pain, and unless a spell like cure disease is used to kill the grubs, fledgling webbirds will emerge from the victim's corpse in about seven hours.
Kill It with Fire: Webbirds instinctively fear fire, and won't attack anyone carrying an open flame or approach a bonfire.
You Have to Burn the Web: Averted, webbird silk is fireproof. A wineskin's worth of an alcoholic beverage, on the other hand, will dissolve enough webbing to free a Medium-sized humanoid in one round.

Wemic

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Playable: 2E-3E
Alignment: True Neutral

Tauric lionfolk who live in prides that roam warm and temperate plains.

Barbarian Tribe: A non-Evil example. Wemics live in a Stone Age, nomadic society, don't have a written language, and are fairly superstitious, but they generally keep to themselves rather than raid their neighbors. Some find work as guides or mercenaries, preferring to be paid in magical weapons, while other prides may charge tolls for safe passage through their territory.
Cat Folk: Their upper bodies are humanoid, with a strong feline influence — fur, leonine facial features and eyes, and a mane of hair on males.
Depending on the Artist: Even in the same game edition, artwork can vary on just how catlike their faces are, ranging from "mostly human" to "basically a lion's head."
Nature Hero: Wemics take care not to over-hunt within their ranges, and are enraged if an outsider intrudes and kills an animal simply to take a trophy from it.
Our Centaurs Are Different: Their lower bodies are those of lions.

Wendigo

Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +2 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Cursed beings from the cold forests and tundra, embodying eternal, desperate hunger.

Elemental Shapeshifting: Wendigos can use wind walk at will, assuming a misty form to travel or stalk prey.
An Ice Person: They have the cold subtype, making them Weak to Fire (doubly so since it stops their Healing Factor), and know spells like ray of frost and chill touch.
Mind Rape: Wendigos wear down their victims' sanity before physically attacking. They can take a "maddening whispers" action once per day to fill a chosen victim's ears with whispered, insane invitations to join the wendigo's predations, which deals a few points of Wisdom damage, and while the creature is stalking someone with the benefit of wind walk, it always seems to lurk in the corner of the victim's eye, imposing a penalty on Wisdom-based rolls. A wendigo uses these abilities to make their victim more susceptible to the disease they carry, but if a given target resists their maddening whispers for more than three days, the fey will fly off in search of easier prey.
The Virus: Anyone bitten by a wendigo has to save or be infected by its hunger, as if it were a disease. Those who fail their saves take Wisdom damage and then have to save again or be overcome by an insatiable, cannibalistic hunger, driving them to stalk, kill and feed upon the nearest member of their species, then return home with no memory of the crime. A victim whose Wisdom hits 0 immediately transforms into a wendigo, racing off into the night so quickly that their feet are reduced to charred stumps.
Wendigo: They follow the original myth more closely than more recent interpretations, being twisted mockeries of humans crazed with hunger rather than deer-headed monsters.

Wheep

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Miserable undead creatures defined by their constant weeping and poisonous tears.

Eye Scream: The wheep's write-up mentions that the monster's eye sockets are empty, though their art goes a step further and portrays them with a pair of huge metal nails driven into their eye sockets.
Prone to Tears: Wheeps are almost constantly sniffling or sobbing in pain... unless they've temporarily shut up so they can sneak up on someone.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Their crying and blubbering is so horrible that nearby creatures have to save to avoid becoming shaken for the duration of the encounter.
Tears of Blood: A wheep's empty eye sockets constantly leak black ichor that coats the creature's mouth (interfering with its sobbing to make a horrible bubbling, popping sound) and its claws, serving as a contact poison that deals Constitution damage. This also makes wheeps easy to track through a dungeon, as their tears leave behind a trail of bile that takes an hour to evaporate.
Too Many Mouths: Depicted with a pair of extra mouths in its palms in its artwork, though stat-wise they have a pair of claw attacks, not extra bite attacks.

Whistler

Classification: Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Creatures from the Far Realm that stalk their prey accompanied by a soundless psychic tune.

Humanoid Abomination: They look like Large, gray, near-featureless humanoids, but hail from the screeching reaches beyond reality.
Overcrank: Whistlers exist in a state of "perpetual physical uncertainty," and are untethered to any point in space. This gives them a blurred appearance and makes them hard to hit.
Sadist They relish the fear their attacks generate, and unless they face opposition, will kill their victims at an unhurried pace.
Sinister Whistling: Their trademark ability is to telepathically whistle an eerie, otherworldly melody that only one or two other creatures can hear. This "invades and scourges the mind" of listeners, dealing a nasty amount of psychic damage, and can make victims frightened of the whistler. The few who survive a whistler encounter are forever haunted by its soundless, seven-note tune.
Teleportation: They can take a "Surreal Step" to teleport up to 20 feet as a bonus action.

Wichtlin

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +2 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (2E), Neutral Evil (3E)

Ghastly elves cursed by the death god Chemosh to claim new souls for him.

Invisible Monsters: Almost; in most cases, wichtlin look like a pair of floating eyeballs and skeletal hands wrapped in a Sickly Green Glow, but see invisibility or similar magic reveals their full form, that of a blackened skeleton. This partial invisibility makes the undead hard to hit, though they become fully-visible for a few rounds after killing something.
Non-Human Undead: Wichtlin are exclusively elves or half-elves. Their origins lie with Sylvyana the "Ghoul Queen," a Silvanesti monarch who was struck from elven histories due to her practice of necromancy. When members of her court rose against her, she cursed them with undeath on behalf of her deity, turning them into the first wichtlin.
The Paralyzer: They can paralyze victims with a touch, traditionally with their left hand; in 2nd Edition this works on anything, but 3E specifies that this "elfstroke" only works on elves and half-elves. An elf paralyzed by a wichtlin can then be implanted with a suggestion by the undead.
Poisonous Person: Their right hand deals poison damage in 2E, while in 3E they can cast poison at will with a touch attack, but only on non-elves.
Raising the Steaks: The animal companions of druids or rangers who become wichtlin follow them into undeath, gaining the same abilities and a similar appearance — the elk steed of a wichtlin ranger, for example, might appear as a pair of glowing antlers over disembodied eyes.
The Virus: Elf-blooded beings slain by a wichtlin rise as one seven days later.

Wicker Man

Classification: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Giant-sized, animate wooden effigies with a cage in their torsos meant to hold a humanoid burnt offering.

Caged Inside a Monster: A wicker man can stuff a grappled foe inside its chest cavity; encaged victims can try and force their way out with an opposed grapple check, or cut their way free with a light slashing weapon or claws (after which the wicker cage magically reknits itself). Alternatively, warp wood or wood shape will open the cage door for a round.
A Fête Worse than Death: Wicker men are the centerpieces of festivals led by a druid or cleric who worships a dark deity such as Nerull, in which undesirables or outsiders lured into the community are ritualistically sacrificed. If a victim manages to elude their captors, the wicker man may be animated to help chase them down.
Golem: They're more or less a variant of golem, and share 3E golems' immunity to most spells.
Infernal Retaliation: Wicker men are not only meant to burn, they're immune to fire's harmful effects. If they would take fire damage, a wicker man instead ignites, becoming Wreathed in Flames that damage everyone within 30 feet, add fire damage to its melee attacks, and deal even more fire damage to anyone in a grapple with the construct — especially anyone encaged within the thing. A wicker man will burn for 10 rounds, after which it cannot be relit for the next 5 rounds.

Wight

Classification: Undead (3E-5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (wight), 8 (slaughter wight)(3E); 5 (wight), 18 (slaughter wight) (4E); 3 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

These undead are consumed by their need to snuff out the living's spark of life, and drain away their victims' vitality with every blow they inflict.

Elite Mook: Slaughter wights have better stats than standard wights, and a higher chance of dealing a Critical Hit with their slam attack.
Level Drain: Traditionally, wights' melee attacks inflict "negative levels" upon their victims, making them less effective and weaker, and if a character's negative levels exceeded their actual character level, they died. Even if a character survived a wight attack, if they failed a Fortitude save the next morning to shake off the effects, any negative levels became actual level loss.
Life Drain: 5th Edition gives wights' attacks this trait instead, dealing damage and reducing a victim's hit point total until they've had a long rest to recover.
Our Wights Are Different: In some editions, wights are undead distinguished by their violent hatred of life. 5th Edition instead presents wights as self-obsessed mortals who cried out to dark powers in their last moments of life, and were granted a new existence as undead creatures sworn to their patron's service. They're also a lot tougher than your plain skeleton or zombie, and can only be seriously damaged by weapons made of silver, or with magical weapons and spells.
The Virus: Those who have their live force drained away by wights typically rise as one themselves, sometimes in a matter of seconds.

Vilewight

Challenge Rating: 8 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

These variant wights' torsos have torn open upon rising from their graves, exposuring their animate intestines, and have additional abilities compared to their basic kin.

Combat Tentacles: Their intestines, which have sprouted bile-dripping mouths, can be used to attack or grapple opponents.
Make Them Rot: Every other round, a vilewight can fire a 30-foot line of negative energy that deals heavy damage.
Poisonous Person: They carry the odd "life blindness" disesase, which renders those who succumb unable to perceive living creatures.
These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: In life, vilewights "delved too far and too long into the black arts," and thus are just in common in ancient libraries and hidden rooms in mages guilds as they are in graveyards.

The Wild Hunt

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_wild_hunt_3e.jpg

Classification: Magical Beast (hound of the hunt), Fey (master of the hunt) (3E)
Challenge Rating: 18 (hound of the hunt), 22 (master of the hunt) (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Towering fey hunters who test their skills against intelligent prey.

Damage-Increasing Debuff: Three times per day, a master of the hunt can mark a target as their prey, surrounding them with moonlight that replicates a faerie fire effect, and additionally granting the master of the hunt bonuses to attack and damage rolls against their victim, as well as automatically confirming any potential Critical Hits. A master of the hunt can only mark one target this way at a time, and the effect ends when the moon sets.
Hellhound: The masters of the hunt are usually accompanied by hounds the size of grizzly bears, with skeletal heads trailing otherworldly flames from their eye sockets, and coats that glitter as if covered by a sheen of moonlight.
Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The masters of the hunt were once fey monarchs, until centuries of boredom led them to abandon their thrones for the thrill of hunting powerful mortals.
Lunacy: The wild hunt is most active at night, as both the master and their hounds deal bonus damage with their attacks when the moon is in the sky. Additionally, the master of the hunt can use discern location against any creature beneath the moon — it is said that the moon is the mirrored eye of the wild hunt.
Master Archer: The master of the hunt is an absurdly dangerous archer, capable of firing five arrows a round with their Rapid Shot feat, or using Manyshot to deal potentially over a hundred points of damage to a single target with one attack. This is even worse beneath the moonlight, which causes the master's arrows to magically grow to the size of spears as soon as they're loosed.
No-Sell: A master of the hunt and their hounds are under a perpetual freedom of movement effect, allowing them to ignore any movement penalties from magic or the environment.
Summon a Ride: A master of the hunt can cast phantom steed for themself at will, at a high enough caster level for the steed to be capable of galloping through the air.
The Wild Hunt: These fey live only to challenge themselves against worthy prey, whose only hope for survival is to elude the hunters for a night or turn the tables and kill them. Thankfully, their hunts are usually rare events that occur toward the end of the year.

Wilden

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_wildren_4e.png

Wilden (4e)

^{Killoren (3e)}

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

Also known as killoren, this young race of fey humanoids defend the natural world from those that would despoil it, manifesting nature's might in varying ways.

Expository Pronoun: Wilden always use the plural when speaking of themselves, as individuality has little place in their lives, and the fey consider themselves a part of a greater whole.
Gaia's Vengeance: These fey have emerged specifically to defend nature from a growing threat. The Wild, a faction of killoren, have gone so far as to declare that they've seen enough of the so-called "civilized" races, and are willing to defend their natural refuges with lethal force.
Allailai, killoren ancient: Hunter, destroyer, and keeper of ancient knowledge; I am nature's answer to the rising power of man.
Nature Hero: They were literally born to be nature's defenders, and are deeply In Harmony with Nature, so that they cannot be helped but moved by the peace and power of nature when they walk through a forest glade or behold a mountain. What few small settlements they have blend in with the land around them.
Plant Person: While the killoren are described with leaf-green skin and long, supple limbs, the wilden are explicitly plant-like, with bones of hardwood, bark-like skin, and a cloak of vines and leaves (though they're still classified as fey humanoids rather than plants). This also affects a wilden's appearance as they age, with young wilden having a greenish cast to their skin, which tans as they mature until their leaves eventually turn brown and drop off as the wilden withers and enters their twilight years.
Retcon: Besides the name change and design tweaks, the biggest difference between the 3E killoren and 4E wilden is that the former are nature's response to the encroachment of civilization, while the latter are born from the Feywild to defend against Far Realm incursions.
Stance System: These fey's signature ability is to, each dawn after a complete rest, decide which aspect of nature they'll embody that day: the Ancient, the Destroyer, or the Stalker. Each aspect grants a different power, such as a short-ranged teleport or the ability to smite enemies of nature, and it also affects the fey's eye color, alters their body with thorns or natural camouflage, and tends to change their personality to match their role.

Wildren

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Good or Neutral Good

Hailing from the Wilderness of the Beastlands, these animalistic beings resemble dwarves covered in grizzled fur, and rarely leave their burrows in the lightless layer of Karasuthra. Not to be confused with the wilden above.

Beast Man: Wildren are descended from the spirits of dwarven petitioners who gravitated towards the Beastlands (where petitioners gradually transform into animals) and the plane's native, intelligent animals, in this case badgers.
Fast Tunnelling: Downplayed; wildren's burrow speed is only 10 feet per round, though they can dig out a warren big enough for a single Medium-sized creature in just an hour.
Hair-Trigger Temper: Wildren are notoriously short-tempered and vengeful, and positively savage and feral when defending their burrows. Once per day, they can also fly into a rage like a barbarian, gaining a bonus to Strength but a penalty to their Armor Class.
The Nose Knows: They have the Scent ability, and typically identify each other by scent, hence why wildren only have one name. This means they're often confused by people who wear perfume or have multiple names.
Our Dwarves Are All the Same: They also inherit some dwarven traits like a resistance to being pushed around, and the ability to move at their (slow) full speed in heavy armor.

Will-o'-Wisp

Classification: Aberration (3E), Undead (5E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Eerie, malevolent lights that haunt the dismal places of the world, waiting to lure too-trusting victims to their deaths.

Coup de Grâce: in 5th edition, a will-o'-wisp can force an adjacent creature with 0 hit points to make a saving throw. If the creature fails the save, it immediately dies as the wisp snuffs out its life force.
Emotion Eater: 3rd Edition wisps sustain themselves on the fear and hopelessness felt by those they lured into a lethal trap.
Intangibility: Incorporeal beings that can pass through terrain without incident, but obviously can't carry anything.
No-Sell: 3rd Edition will-o'-wisps are just flat-out immune to magic, with the exception of the magic missile and maze spells.
Will-o'-the-Wisp: They're type of a monster that haunts dangerous and deserted places like catacombs, swamps and bogs with traps that can kill the unwary (Pit Traps, Quicksand Sucks, etc.). When a victim is killed by one of these hazards the Will-O-Wisp feeds on their Life Energy.

Windblade

Windscythe (3e)

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (windrazor), 4 (windscythe) (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Winged fiends who claim the Windswept Depths of Pandemonium as their own, and relentlessly attack anything that intrudes upon their domain.

Hit-and-Run Tactics: They make extensive use of their Flyby Attack feat, swooping in, slicing foes with their claws, and retreating out of reach all in the same turn.
Large and in Charge: Standard windrazors are Small creatures and treated as second-class citizens in what society the windblades have, while the ruling windscythes are Large. Even though the windrazors outnumber the windscythes, the former's fear of the latter keeps them in line.
Razor Wings: Windblades have razor-sharp bone claws on the ends of their wings, which they can use to slash foes they fly past, or latch onto and rend their flesh.
The Theocracy: Windblades believe that they were created by Erythnul (or a similar god of slaughter, depending on campaign setting), and many windscythes become clerics, using their spells to spill blood in their lord's name and keep the lesser windrazors in line.

Windghost

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 15 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Bizarre creatures that drift through the skies, and can warp magic around them as a defensive measure.

Anti-Magic: They can move "dead magic" areas around at will, which in their 3rd Edition rules let windghosts use dispel magic or create an antimagic field.
Attack Reflector: Alternatively, windghosts can use their "warp dweamor" ability to try and take control over a spell, redirecting it as per spell turning.
Combination Attack: Two or more windghosts within 90 feet of each other can emit a harmonizing drone known as the "windsong," which other creatures find intensely disorienting. In 2nd Edition this prevents creatures from hearing each other, casting spells, or even concentrating enough to read, while in 3rd Edition the effect causes hefty penalties to Dexterity and Concentration checks, while forcing those in the area to move at half speed due to their disrupted equilibrium.
Non-Malicious Monster: Windghosts look decidedly spooky, and inspire confusion and fear in those who see them, but they never attack without provocation. Unfortunately, their unexpected arrival and alien appearance can cause other creatures to mistake them for a threat and attack.
Our Monsters Are Weird: They're 24-foot-long flying cones studded with eyes around gaping, circular maws, with a pair of 20-foot tentacles hanging from their bulks.
Phosphor-Essence: Windghosts get their name for the blue and violet glow that surrounds their bodies, a fairy fire-like radiance that is especially visible at night.
Swallowed Whole: When pressed into combat, a windghost can swoop down and swallow a human-sized opponent.

Winterspawn

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Ice-wielding, intelligent undead who can command lesser undead.

Deadly Gaze: With a mere glance, they can cause a single foe each round to have to save or take a blast of cold damage.
Elemental Weapon: Winterspawn's arms and armor are made of magical ice, which are fully functional while the undead is alive, but are likely to dissipate into vapor within a day of the undead's destruction.
Horse of a Different Color: Some winterspawn ride frost worms or white dragons that have been pressed into service.
An Ice Person: They not only have the cold subtype, winterspawn have ice crystals jutting out of their skin. They can also cast the "chill shield" variant of fire shield at will, to reduce incoming fire damage.
Mook Lieutenant: They can rebuke or command undead as a 12th-level cleric, five times per day.

Witchknife

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: True Neutral

Humanoids who call themselves athames, and possess the fearsome ability to compel other creatures to follow their spoken orders.

Back Stab: They can deal sneak attack damage like a rogue.
Compelling Voice: They can use command at will as a psychic power, compelling listeners who fail their saves to follow an order during their next round. Witchknives can also use greater command once per day to make multiple creatures follow an order, such as "lie prone and do not resist" while the witchknife systematically delivers a Coup de Grâce to each in turn.
Cunning Linguist: Since their mind-control powers depend on them speaking the language of their targets, witchknives try to learn as many tongues as possible.
Curse of Babel: According to the witchknives, in the distant past they were the magnanimous rulers of the entire world, until some deity (whose identity the various witchknife settlements can't agree upon) taught their subjects to speak new languages, fostering a rebellion that tore the witchknives' glorious empire to pieces.
Godzilla Threshold: Their very existence serves as one to other races — it's mentioned that elves have allied with orcs, and dwarves with giants, in order to defeat witchknives.
Noiseless Walker: They can cast a variant of silence that only affects themselves, which has the additional benefit of protecting them from sonic attacks, which witchknives are vulnerable to.

Witchlight Marauder

Primary form (2e)

^{Secondary and tertiary forms (2e)}

Origin: Spelljammer
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Truly colossal creatures bred to scour worlds of life.

Arch-Enemy: While these creatures will indiscriminately eat anything they encounter, the secondary marauder forms are capable of homing in on the scent of elven blood in particular, and will pass up an easier meal to go after an elf.
Bioweapon Beast: Witchlight marauders are living weapons of mass destruction, devised by orc shamans during the First Unhuman Wars against the Elven Imperial Navy.
Hive Caste System: The witchlight marauders' specialized forms provide a non-insectoid example.
- Primary marauders are Gargantuan but relatively slow sluglike creatures with Too Many Mouths, who eat their way across planets while spawning other marauder forms.
- Secondary marauders are Huge hunter-killers, much faster than the primaries and capable of scaling sheer surfaces with their six metallic talons. Beyond those (poisonous) claws, the secondaries also sport steel teeth, spiked tails, and the ability to spray jets of acid at foes.
- Tertiary marauders are Small but strong berserker warriors with blades for hands.
- Space marauders are organic starships, with crocodilian heads surrounded by secondary maws on long necks, a trunk-like body trailing into a mass of tentacles, and organic sails to propel them through Wildspace (and which can also be used to reflect starlight into a beam attack). The space marauders eat small celestial bodies as they move, which they digest to spawn land marauders to drop on planets, or convert into explosive projectiles the space marauders can spit at foes.
- The space marauders can also spawn 550-foot-wide remote feeders, flying gullets that ferry organic matter between planets and the space marauder to nourish it.
Horde of Alien Locusts: Their only purpose is to consume, reproduce, and consume some more. The primary form of a witchlight marauder is capable of devouring everything — plants, animals, structures, mountains — in its path. In the process, they periodically spawn secondary marauders that hunt for survivors of the primaries' attack, which in turn spawn tertiary marauders to support them. After a week of gorging itself, a primary marauder will retreat underground to establish a lair and eventually reproduce by fission, after which the two primary marauders return to the surface to repeat the process. This cycle continues until the witchlight marauders run out of food, at which point they turn on each other.
Kaiju: The primary marauder form is over 500 feet long, dwarfing even great wyrms, while the spacegoing marauder form are a thousand feet long.
Killed Off for Real: The elves are confident that all the witchlight marauders were wiped out in the First Unhuman War, and any reports to the contrary are orcish propaganda. But legends persist of marauders surviving under time stop effects somewhere, or specimens that slipped past the elvish blockades to escape into Wildspace. "If an adventuring party were to find one of these organic timebombs, it would behoove them to leave the area immediately."

Wolf-in-Sheep's-Clothing

Alignment: Unaligned

Odd plant monsters that use a harmless-looking lure to coax prey into reach of their tentacles.

Combat Tentacles: Wolves-in-Sheep's-Clothing are near-immobile, but compensate by attacking with long tentacles.
Killer Rabbit: They look like a harmless bunny or similar critter sitting on a tree stump, except the rabbit is a fuzzy prop and the "stump" is the body of a carnivorous monster.
Luring in Prey: The wolf-in-sheep's-clothing looks like a small fluffy rabbit-like creature, but that is only its lure. The monster's real body is disguised as a tree stump and lies in wait for prey that mistakes its lure for a potential friend or easy meal.
Man-Eating Plant: They resemble tree stumps that feed on animals and people.

Wolfwere

Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Lupine shapeshifters who can assume humanoid form to lure in victims.

Literal Maneater: When preparing an ambush, wolfweres take on a human form that's the same race but the opposite sex of their target, passing themselves off as an exceptionally beautiful traveler, wandering minstrel, pilgrim, etc.
Magic Music: In humanoid form, a wolfwere can play a stringed instrument in a way that makes listeners lethargic, subjecting them to a slow effect that lasts several rounds. At that point, the creature typically assumes hybrid form and attacks.
Our Werebeasts Are Different: As their name suggests, wolfweres are essentially werewolves from the other direction — rather than humans who can transform into wolves, they're intelligent (dire) wolves who can transform into humans. Like werewolves, wolfweres can assume a hybrid form and are repelled by wolfsbane, but unlike proper lycanthropes, the wolfweres' condition isn't contagious, and they're weak to Cold Iron, not Silver Bullets. Finally, wolfweres despise werewolves and vice versa, so that the two creatures will attack each another on sight.
Savage Wolves: They're an "evil and hateful creature that delights in the brutal slaying of humans and demihumans alike." When not hunting solo or in small groups of other wolfweres, they can be found leading packs of mundane wolves or worgs in vicious attacks on humanoids.

Wood Woad

Classification: Plant (3E, 5E), Fey Humanoid (4E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E), 8 (4E), 5 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral, Unaligned (4E)

Roughly-humanoid wooden protectors who zealously guard a chosen location or person.

The Ageless: Wood woads don't die of old age, which can lead some to outlive whatever person or place they were originally guarding, in which case the wood woad will usually roam until it finds something else to watch over.
Green Thumb: 3rd Edition wood woads can use warp wood at will, ruining (or repairing) wooden weapons, items or structures.
He Was Right There All Along: Yes, these creatures of living wood are good at blending in with other plant life.
Healing Factor: 5th Edition lets them regenerate health each turn, so long as they haven't taken fire damage.
Heroic Sacrifice: A wood woad is invested with the soul of someone who gave up life, free will and sentiments to become an eternal guardian, through a ritual that involves having their heart cut out and placed in a tree, which then grows into a wood woad.
Plant Person: They're more bark than leaf, but wood woads are still mobile plants, and can root themselves in the ground to take in sustenance.
Primitive Clubs: They wield simple wooden clubs in combat, appropriate for their crude forms, though in 5th Edition said clubs are enchanted to deal a lot of bonus damage.
Teleportation: Wood woads have the tree stride ability of dryads, allowing them to step into one living tree and step out another.
Weak to Fire: Like most plant entities, they take extra damage from fire.

Worg

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Natural Magical Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E), 9 (4E), 1/2 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil (4E)

Wolf-like monsters who often ally with goblin tribes.

Art Evolution: Worgs have become progressively more monstrous over time. In and before 3E, they're essentially just big, evil wolves. In 4E, they're depicted with scaly and demonic hindquarters. 5E worgs are fully hairy and mammalian, but have humped backs, longer forelimbs, and elongated, hairless faces.
Horse of a Different Color: Worgs allied to goblin tribes often serve as mounts for their partners, bringing with them a level of intelligence, power and combat prowess that horses cannot match. However, as worgs are intelligent beings, this is first and foremost a partnership of equals, a detail that goblins are served well to remember.
It Can Think: Mistake worgs for normal wolves at your peril. They're not only smart enough to speak Goblin, they even have their own language, easily confused for the howling of ordinary wolves, which they can use to convey information over great distances, or coordinate an attack.
Savage Wolves: Worgs are intelligent, evil creatures resembling large, powerfully built wolves. They live as savage predators in the wilderness and eagerly attack travelers and isolated settlements, and often ally with goblinoids.

Guulvorg

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Natural Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 13 (3E), 16 (4E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil (3E), Chaotic Evil (4E)

Immense, mace-tailed worgs created by goblinoid shamans as superior war beasts.

Beware My Stinger Tail: Guulvorgs have long tails ending in bony maces.
Bioweapon Beast: Guulvorgs are unnatural beings created by the magical alteration of common worgs by goblinoid shamans seeking to create stronger and deadlier war mounts. They're still mostly found as war beasts for hobgoblin forces, although some have escaped into the wild. They also suffer from drawbacks from their artificial and imperfect creation, as the accelerated metabolism that fuels their speed and power also makes it difficult for them to keep themselves properly fed.
Bloody Murder: Striking a guulvorg with a piercing or slashing attack will send its boiling-hot blood gushing out, badly scalding its attacker.
Morality Pet: Guulvorgs are violent, spiteful creatures, cruel hunters, foul-tempered loners, and provided with little empathy for other living beings — but they are also very loyal to their mates and, when they manage to breed, become doting and self-sacrificing parents to their pups.
Necessary Drawback: Guulvorgs have incredibly high metabolisms, giving them boiling-hot blood that harms anyone who tries to wound them, and fueling their swift reflexes and constant growth. However, maintaining such a metabolism requires an immense amount of energy, forcing guulvorgs to eat voraciously and leaving them constantly hungry, and most die young from either starvation or literally burning themselves out.

Winter Wolf

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Natural Magical Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E), 14 (4E), 3 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil, Evil (4E)

Stronger kin to common worgs with ties to elemental cold, who haunt frozen northern climates.

Breath Weapon: Winter wolves can breathe out a cone of freezing air.
Elemental Shapeshifting: In 4th Edition, winter wolf snowfangs can turn into whirlwinds of ice and snow.
An Ice Person: They deal cold damage with their bites and can exhale blasts of frigid air.

Wraith

Classification: Undead (3E-5E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (wraith), 11 (dread wraith) (3E, 5E); 5 (wraith), 25 (dread wraith (4E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil (4E)

Most evil souls are dragged to one of the Lower Planes upon death, but other souls are so all-consumingly evil that they collapse in on themselves, becoming a spiritual black hole that wishes to destroy all living things.

Enemy to All Living Things: In 3rd Edition, animals find the presence of a wraith extremely disturbing and will not voluntarily approach one. They will panic and run away if the wraith approaches them.
Make Them Rot: The touch of a wraith saps vitality and withers flesh, draining Constitution in 3rd edition and dealing necrotic damage in 5th edition.
Omnicidal Maniac: A wraith is malice incarnate, and exists only to quench all life.
The Virus: Those slain by a wraith may arise as additional wraiths (in 3E) or specters (in 5E) under the original's control. Wraiths sometimes rule legions of the dead, plotting the doom of living creatures.

Wurm

Classification: Dragon (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (wurmling), 9 (adult), 15 (greater), 23 (elder) (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Any Neutral (varies by subtype)

A family of sinuous dragons, who serve as protectors for various biomes.

The Berserker: Mountain wurms are unpredictable and dangerously easy to rile, and can fly into a barbarian's rage several times per day.
Breath Weapon: All wurms have some sort of breath attack. In some cases this does nothing but deal damage — hill wurms can fire a cone of flesh-shredding thorns, lava worms fire a line of molten rock that burns and bludgeons targets, and mountain wurms can spray a line of digestive acid. Other wurms have a Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack for their breath weapon — forest wurms spray a cone of rapidly-hardening resin that entangles foes, grassland wurms can fire a line of magic that causes confusion, river wurms spray a cone of slippery foam that forces victims to make Balance checks to avoid falling over, sand wurms spray a contact poison that deals Dexterity damage and may cause unconsciousness, sea wurms spray blinding spittle, and swamp wurms blast enemies with a line of nauseating muck. And then some wurms have a breath attack that deals damage and causes a secondary effect — cave wurms breathe a cone of phosphorus that deals initial and ongoing fire damage that also illuminates victims like faerie fire, storm wurms blast foes with a cone of lightning that can also stun them, and tundra wurms breathe a cone of cold so fierce that it saps victims' Strength.
Chameleon Camouflage: Wurms have a limited ability to change their coloration to blend in with their home biome, giving them a bonus to Hide checks.
Druid: In ancient times, a group of druids created the wurms in "a grand experiment to protect the wilderness from the intrusion of 'civilizing' forces." As such, they gain druidic rather than sorcerer spells as they age, eventually learn Sylvan and Druidic, and some wurms become full druids, their favored class.
Forest Ranger: Or cave ranger, or tundra ranger, etc. All wurms, even those of evil alignment, will vigorously protect their home territory and the creatures within it from defilers, and a few even take up the ranger class. However, the wurm subtypes' varied personalities means that they approach this responsibility in different ways and to differing degrees — a forest wurm might sacrifice itself to save its woodland, while lava wurms do all they can to trigger a volcanic eruption in order to remake the landscape and erase the works of humanoids who might take advantage of the fertile soil.
Home Field Advantage: All wurms get a racial bonus to Climb or Swim checks in their home biome, and may have additional benefits — river wurms can make great leaps from the water, while tundra wurms can walk across ice without difficulty, for example.
Interservice Rivalry: Cave wurms and hill wurms are both committed to defending their respective biomes, but should their territories overlap, it ends in one breed either killing or driving off the other due to their clashing philosophies. Hill wurms are sometimes known as "keepers of the meek" for being willing to protect small animals from predators, while cave wurms have a Darwinian commitment to "cull the weak," to the point that they'll ignore a creature they deem "worthy of its race" but in combat will always target the weakest of a group.
Lightning Bruiser: Grassland wurms have the fastest land speed of their kin, combining "the speed of a cheetah and the mass of an elephant" to deadly effect.
Our Dragons Are Different: Wurms are "distant cousins" of true dragons, and are physically differentiated by lacking wings and carrying their snake-like bodies low to the ground. Wurmlings range from three to eight feet long, while elder wurms can be 30 feet long and five feet in diameter. Like true dragons, wurms are fully intelligent, have breath weapons, and grow physically and magically stronger as they progress through age categories, but they don't have a frightful presence.
Sand Worm: Sand wurms like to ambush prey by bursting out of the sand and dragging them underground, though they actually have the longest limbs of the wurms.
Sea Serpents: Sea wurms are amphibious, Neutral Evil wurms who viciously defend their home waters, whether from passing ships or merfolk settlements.
Summon Magic: There are druid spells that specifically summon one or more wurmlings, adult wurms, or greater wurms.
Tentacle Rope: Wurms can coil their long bodies around foes and deal constriction damage.
Underground Monkey: Wurms come in several climate-adapted subtypes — cave, forest, grassland, hill, lava, mountain, river, sand, sea, storm, swamp, and tundra. This affects their appearance, the nature of their breath weapon, and their alignment and personality, but otherwise all wurms use the same four stat blocks.

Wyndlass

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 10 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Also known as the vaka-te-nok, or the "Mouth beneath the Earth," these huge, voracious creatures prey upon swamp wildlife and travelers alike.

Antlion Monster: Wyndlasses operate similarly to such, digging out watery pits some 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep next to a game trail or swamp road, hiding beneath the surface until they detect prey, then pulling it in with their tentacles.
Eye of Newt: The oil they secrete is an important ingredient in an oil of slipperiness, though it's just as useful as a non-magical lubricant.
Giant Squid: They look something like three-eyed squid 20 to 30 feet long, and are suspected to be cephalopods mutated by either the passage of the Graygem or some wizard's experiments to live in swamp muck — they don't have a swim speed anymore, and can only haul themselves overland or slowly burrow.
It Can Think: They're incapable of speech, but wyndlasses are smarter than ogres and can understand Common.
Sinister Suffocation: Wyndlasses can excrete a potent oil that initially replicates a grease spell, but will soon convert a section of soft earth into a morass with less surface tension than even ordinary quicksand. Once they get their tentacles around something, they hold their prey beneath the surface of this quicksand to drown.
Stealthy Cephalopod: Their bodies are normally a muddy brown, but wyndlasses have a natural camouflage ability, resulting in a racial bonus to Hide checks.
Tentacled Terror: They have ten barbed tentacles they use to lash at and grab prey, something made worse by said barbs. Fortunately, these tentacles can be targeted by sunder attempts.

Wynling

Classification: Fey (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Tiny winged fey who dwell in the mountains, harrassing any intruders, though good music and sweet food may lure them into nearby humanoid settlements.

Invisibility: They can turn invisible almost at will, an effect that lasts for a minute (or until the wynling attacks something), and extends to anything the fey is carrying.
Mischief-Making Monkey: Wynlings look something like winged, blue-furred monkeys, and delight in pranks and mischief.
Trademark Favorite Food: They can be bribed into pranking specific targets with offers of persimmons.

Wyste

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

Tentacled, leech-like creatures two feet wide and 25 feet long, which lurk in pools of extradimensional slime before lunging out at victims.

Food Chain of Evil: Wystes are dangerous alien predators, but they in turn are preyed upon by dharculi.
Hostile Terraforming: They're the result of it. When the Far Realm intrudes upon the Material Plane, it can cause bulbous black plant-like growths to form on walls and ceilings, fed upon by ambulatory white lumpen things. The white things also secrete a blue slime that accumulates in pools, which attract wystes. Should the Far Realm influence be removed, the creatures that renew the wystes' slime pools will die off over the course of a month, dooming the wystes in turn.
Sinister Suffocation: In their AD&D rules, wystes might grab prey and drag it into their slime pools to drown them. Their victims have to save to escape the wyste's clutches, and then make another roll to be able to discern which way is up in the pool of otherworldly sludge.
Super-Senses: Wystes have no eyes, but their tentacles and cilia can detect prey by scent and vibration, giving the monsters blindsight out to 120 feet.
Tentacle Rope: These creatures use their tentacles to bring prey to their maws, which latch on and deal bite damage each round until their victim extricates themself.

Wyvern

^3e

^2e

Classification: Dragon (3E, 5E), Natural Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E, 5E), 10 (4E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil (1E-2E), True Neutral (3E), Unaligned (4E-5E)

Bestial kin to dragons usually found as either wilderness predators, or minions of greater draconic beings.

Art Evolution: In First through Second Edition, wyverns are quite similar to the game's proper dragons (especially since the "four legs and wings" pattern for true dragons hadn't become standardized yet), just with reptilian tails ending in poisonous stingers. In Third and Fourth, they instead have full scorpion tails growing from their posteriors, and gain a more birdlike facial profile with a beaklike upper lip and a "goatee" of chin scales. Fifth reverts them to a more reptilian appearance, while also giving them a cobra-like hood.
Beware My Stinger Tail: Wyvern tails end in venomous scorpion-like stingers.
Crafted from Animals: Averted; their AD&D write-up mentions that while spellcasters may have use for some wyvern body parts, the beasts' bones are too light and brittle to be used as a crafting material, and no one has found a way to cure wyvern hide. Even their meat has little use for hunters, since it tastes foul.
Hybrid Monster: Wyvern drakes are, as their name suggests, dragon-wyvern crossbreeds, gaining their dragon parent's breath weapon and energy immunity, as well as some measure of a true dragon's intellect.
Make Them Rot: Fell wyverns, a variant native to the Shadowfell, possess an entropic breath weapon with necrotic effects.
Our Wyverns Are Different: Wyverns are mid-level monsters under the dragon creature type, although not true dragons and lacking a Breath Weapon. They have scorpion-like stingers that inject a deadly venom and are much smaller than true dragons, although considering the sizes dragons reach on adulthood wyverns are still large enough to comfortably fly off with a cow in their talons. They are also much less intelligent and much more bestial than true dragons, although they are smart enough to occasionally serve their more powerful relatives as minions.
Stealthy Colossus: Wyverns are cunning hunters that often make surprise attacks, thanks to attacking prey from downwind, or flying without letting their shadow fall over targets, then diving at them in total silence.

X

Xeph

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

A race of psionic humanoids known for their agility and speed.

Fragile Speedster: Xephs have a racial bonus to Dexterity, but a penalty to Constitution.
Nitro Boost: Three times per day, xephs can gain a temporary bonus to their base movement speed.
Proud Merchant Race: While part of the xephs' wealth comes from trading their exquisite artworks, they also have a strong desire to see the world and experience other people's art (and wealth), leading them to form caravans or go on voyages. As such, their chief deity is Fharlanghn, the god of travelers.
Psychic Powers: Xephs are naturally psionic, and many become soulknives, manifesting their power in the form of psionic blades.
Underground City: The xeph dwell within a great rift valley, deep enough that the chief illumination comes from psionically-illuminated trees. Visitors are welcomed, though some ancient temples will remain off-limits to non-xephs.

Xixchil

Origin: Spelljammer
Playable: 2E
Alignment: Any

Intelligent, five-foot-tall mantoids who are skilled crafters, specializing in surgical enhancements.

Biomanipulation: Not only do xixchil modify themselves, they're also willing to surgically enhance paying customers with stronger bodies, wings, specialized limbs, and so forth. The catch is that the Required Secondary Powers of such upgrades are likely to come into play, so not only is an adventurer with wings going to have difficulty fitting through dungeon doors, they'll also be given the enhanced appetite and hollow bones necessary for flying. In another example, a dwarf who paid for enhanced strength might find that his xixchil surgeon considered his head little more than a "muscle anchor" — "Suffice to say, there are more than enough 'beautiful people' who are no longer that way thanks to the gentle ministrations of the xixchil. But oh, are they functional!" Beyond combat augmentations, xixchil sell novelties such as "blooming birds" and winged kittens.
A xixchil surgeon: You wished us to give you the vision of an eagle, and so we did. The beak and feathers were free.
Blade Below the Shoulder: Xixchil have natural weapons in the form of retractable blades in their forelimbs, which strike as hard as greatswords. Those who specialize in close combat might graft on two additional limbs, which can be modified to act like weapons such as maces, mancatchers or even blowguns. The catch is that xixchil can't wield other races' weapons, even with their natural limbs.
Combat Pragmatist: A xixchil adage is "Stealth equals efficiency," and they prefer to attack from stealth or other advantageous positions. This, their flair for sharp objects, and their ability to produce poison can make xixchil renowned assassins.
Insectoid Aliens: They're mantis-like beings, though leaning more towards the "mantis" part than the somewhat more humanoid thri-kreen.
Organic Technology: Xixchil can produce organic spelljamming vessels that resemble sculpted plants, with leaf sails and orchid gangways. This has actually upset the elves, since the xixchil's craft rival theirs in quality, but are easier to maintain.
Poisonous Person: After tasting a subject's body (or something that's been in close proximity to it, like clothing or a held item), a xixchel can immediately synthesize an "enzyme soup" in its saliva, ready for use the next round. Benignly, this can be a tailor-made anesthetic that puts a patient under for surgery, or more offensively, a xixchel's bite can paralyze a victim, or even kill them instantly if they fail a saving throw (made with a penalty, due to the personalized nature of the poison).
The Social Darwinist: Xixchil society is very much "survival of the fittest," to the extent that it was accepted that their hatchlings would immediately duel and eat their dozens of siblings until one or two remained to join their civilization. They value individuals over families, with society as a whole as a distant concern. Xixchel adventurers may come to view their companions as a family, but are rarely willing to sacrifice themselves to help them.
Transhuman: Or transxixchil, in this case. These beings believe that "the body is like a house, and that one must add to the blank shell to make it truly one's home." Xixchil commonly modify their bodies, with cosmetic enhancements like inlaid gemstones, or giving themselves fantastic shapes, or grafting on additional specialized limbs. Those who deal with other humanoids might adopt names like "Spike," "Crest," "Hook" or "Spinner," based on their modifications.

Xill

Classification: Outsider (3E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E), 3 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Four-armed, red-scaled reptilian raiders from the Ethereal Plane, feared for their reproductive method.

Expy: Of the ixtl from The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Xill can take a standard action to implant their eggs inside a paralyzed victim. The young emerge 7 (in 2E) or 90 (in 3E) days later, devouring their host from the inside out, unless they're removed with a Heal check or a spell like remove disease.
Intangibility: Xill live on the Ethereal Plane, and can shift from it to the Material Plane as a move action. Returning is slower, however, a process that takes two full rounds, over which the xill is motionless, but attacks against it have an increasing chance to miss. Notably, they can use their planewalking ability while carrying a willing or helpless creature.
Multi-Armed and Dangerous: They make good use of their four limbs to grapple and restrain victims to be bitten and implanted with eggs, then haul them off to the Ethereal Plane until those eggs hatch.
The Paralyzer: Their bites can inject a paralytic into their victims.
People Farms: Xill society is divided between the Lower Clans, who forgo weapons and remorselessly attack other creatures to propogate themselves (and don't call themselves "Lower Clans," or acknowlege other xill), and the High Clans, more "civilized" xill who dwell in cities within the Deep Ethereal, craft goods, and will trade with visitors, while rarely if ever leaving the Ethereal Plane themselves. The xill of the High Clans can't use their paralysis poison more than once per day because those glands have atrophied from disuse, but they still need intelligent creatures as hosts for their young, leading to a longstanding rumor that they maintain a hatchery/nursery in the Deep Ethereal where the descendents of kidnapping victims are bred as nothing more than incubators for xill young. "The modern slaves, if they exist, are said to have lost all traces of intelligence or sophistication, and rarely live beyond their late teens before serving as hatcheries. Most folk hope that this rumor isn't true and try not to think about it too much."
Retcon: While most editions treat xill as just another race of extraplanar beings with no clear origin, 5th Edition presents them as the creations of the wizard Keraptis, who sent them to steal magical artifacts and kidnap specific people to some unknown end.

Xorn

Classification: Outsider (3E), Elemental Magical Beast (4E), Elemental (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (minor), 6 (average), 8 (elder) (3E); 9 (4E); 5 (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral, Unaligned (4E)

Trilaterally symmetrical stone-eaters from the Elemental Plane of Earth.

Dungeon Bypass: Xorns' earth glide ability lets them move through solid stone as easily as a fish swims through water, passing without leaving a tunnel behind them. They use this ability to seek out food, but since it lets them bypass living and nonliving obstacles, xorns can be valuable sources of information about a dungeon's layout.
Eat Dirt, Cheap: Xorns feed primarily on gemstones and minerals, although they also enjoy metal. They are in fact unable to digest meat at all, and consequently tend to ignore fleshly beings unless these threaten their food supply — or unless they're wearing a significant amount of jewelry or armor.
Metal Muncher: In addition to gemstones, xorns feed on metal and can smell it up to twenty feet away. If a xorn encounters Player Characters who are carrying metal (copper, silver, gold and so on), it will do whatever it can to make them hand it over, first offering information its learned from its travels in an exchange, then resorting to threats or even force.
Mooks Ate My Equipment: A xorn variant known as xarren are slightly smaller and shinier. They specifically eat enchanted metal, and can crush metallic magic weapons in combat.

Xvart

Origin: Greyhawk
Classification: Humanoid (3E, 5E) Fey Humanoid (4E)
Challenge Rating: 1/3 (3E), 1 (4E) 2 (5E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Evil, Evil (4E)

Small blue humanoids who survive by stealing from other creatures, but occasionally take prisoners to ransom, torture or sacrifice.

Body Double: In 5th Edition, xvarts were created by Raxivort, a demon-turned-demigod who stole a treasure from Graz'zt's hoard and became a planar fugitive. Xvarts look like smaller versions of their creator, and screw with magical tracking, as any attempt to track their creator will result in the spell pointing to the nearest xvart. Raxivort continually spawns xvarts to keep his enemies off his tail.
Human Sacrifice: When things aren't going well for them, xvarts naturally assume that Raxivort is angry and kidnap enemies, which are dragged back to the lair and sacrificed on a makeshift altar. If the ritual is successful, Raxivort may appear in person, put all the tribe's valuables into a sack, and leave.
One-Gender Race: As of 5th Edition, xvarts are all male and lack the ability and desire to reproduce, and are instead created by Raxivort whenever he needs a fresh set of decoys.
Retcon: Xvarts were originally introduced as another breed of small, nasty humanoids alongside goblins and kobolds. 4th Edition cast them as gnomes who were captured by fomorians and then further twisted by the Shadowfell. 5th Edition has the most elaborate backstory yet, explaining that xvarts are the creations of a paranoid demigod meant to throw his enemies off his trail.
Speaks Fluent Animal: One constant across the editions is that xvarts can communicate with bats and rats (and their giant variants), which they domesticate, as well as wererats, who end up the dominant party in alliances.

Y

Yakfolk

Origin: Al-Qadim
Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E); 3 (warrior), 4 (priest) (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Ogre-sized, yak-headed humanoids who call themselves Yikaria, "the lucky chosen." Despite their air of culture and sophistication and their seemingly-idyllic mountain cities, they are ruthless slavers.

Enemy Summoner: Any yakfolk can summon a dao (in 2nd Edition) or evil janni (in 3rd Edition) once per day, who is bound to serve the yakfolk until the second sunrise after the summoning. The genies are resentful servants, but are unable to directly harm their masters, and instead vent their frustrations upon the yakfolks' enemies, or attempt to subtly undermine their masters, perhaps by giving information to their foes.
Grand Theft Me: Beyond merely capturing other creatures as slaves, yakfolk can take over other beings' bodies by physically merging with them, during a 20-minute ritual that is a unique variant of the magic jar spell. This grants the yakfolk access to their victim's memories, so that only someone who knows the victim closely has even a chance of realizing something's wrong. Yakfolk use this ability to infiltrate other races' societies, and once a mission is complete, they're liable to amuse themselves by causing the hijacked body to run amok, then abandon control and escape, leaving the bewildered victim to face the consequences.
Made a Slave: They are notorious slavers, so that even the poorest yakfolk owns a servant or two, while their cities contain five to six times as many enslaved minions as yakfolk.
Mage Species: Yakfolk dabble in magic, so that while they cannot innately spells on their own, every one of them can use any sort of Magic Staff, and their leaders are all spellcasters.
Our Minotaurs Are Different: They're pretty much a yak-themed variant of minotaurs.
The Shangri-La: Their mountain strongholds appear as such, with impressive defenses surrounding libraries, temples and green gardens. "Outsiders stumbling into an enclave of yak folk are usually surprised and pleased to find what appears to be a utopia hidden in the mountaintops, and the yak folk do all in their power to foster that image until the strangers can be disarmed and enslaved."
The Theocracy: All yakfolk are fanatic in their worship of a deity outsiders know only as the Forgotten God, who appears as a yakfolk wearing a smooth, featureless mask. Said deity is responsible for subjugating the genies, forcing them to serve the yakfolk for "a thousand years and a year." He also demands constant sacrifices of slaves, who are ritualistically slain in "the matter elemental" — thrown off a cliff, immolated, drowned, or buried alive.

Yellow Musk Creeper

A yellow musk creeper and zombified orcs (3e)

Classification: Plant (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Climbing plants known for their beautiful yellow flowers, enticing aroma, and their propensity for consuming the brains of other creatures and turning them into mind-controlled puppets.

Alluring Flowers: Their numerous yellow flowers produce a heady, entrancing musk that lures those who smell it into the heart of the plant, whereupon the creeper's sharp vines quickly skewer the unfortunate and consume their brain. In-game, this is treated as a mind-affecting compulsion place on anyone who gets a good whiff of the plant's pollen.
Brain Food: Yellow musk creepers feed by stabbing their vines into the heads of their victims and sucking out their brains.
Combat Tentacles: A creeper's main melee weapons are its fast, strong and razor-edged vines.
Man-Eating Plant: Yellow musk creepers are aggressively carnivorous plants whose diet consists exclusively of the brains of others — they don't even photosynthesize, and in fact avoid bright light. They don't limit themselves to human prey specifically, however, and will happily go after anything with a developed central nervous system.
Mind Control: When a creature comes within 30 feet of the creeper, it blasts them with a spray of potent-smelling dust that can cause the creature to fall into a trance, desiring only to walk right into the creeper's reach and not react even as it feeds on them.
Puppeteer Parasite: The creeper's main mechanical claim to fame is its ability to plant seedlings into the heads of other creatures, which turns the victim into a yellow musk zombie that thereafter lives only to protect the creeper. After a few months of this thralldom, the zombies leave their creeper, wandering randomly for a few days before dropping dead and allowing their seedling to take root and grow into a new yellow musk creeper.

Yeth Hound

Classification: Outsider (3E), Fey (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 4 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Evil canines with uncannily human faces, who take cruel delight in hunting intelligent prey.

Beast with a Human Face: Yeth hounds resemble large dogs with the faces of ugly, distorted humanoids.
Flight: They can run across the ground or glide through the sky.
Right-Hand Attack Dog: 5th Edition yeth hounds are created by powerful fey as rewards for a servant, who becomes the pack's master, able to telepathically communicate with them. Should their master be slain, yeth hounds seek out a new evil individual to serve, like a hag, necromancer or vampire.
Sadist Yeth hounds delight in terrorizing their prey, and will draw out their hunts for as long as possible, until the threat of dawn brings an evening's entertainment to an end.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Yeth hounds' horrible baying can cause other creatures to flee in a panic.
Weakened by the Light: Yeth hounds can't stand sunlight and never willingly prolong a hunt beyond dawn, no matter the amount of coercion by a pack's master. In 5th Edition, if a yeth hound is exposed to natural sunlight, it fades away, vanishing into the Ethereal Plane, and can only be retrieved after the sun has set.

Yeti

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Natural Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E, 4E); 1/8 (yeti tyke), 3 (yeti), 9 (abominable yeti) (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral (1E-3E), Unaligned (4E), Chaotic Evil (5E)

Apelike predators found in high, cold mountains.

Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: As typical for yeti depictions in fiction, they are white, hairy monsters living in snowy areas but, unusually, they also have horns. There are also abominable yetis, a larger and stronger variant found in isolated areas.
Breath Weapon: Abominable yetis can exhale cones of frigid air.
Elite Mook: Abominable yetis, a rare variant which grows to be three times larger and much stronger than common yetis.
Horned Humanoid: Beginning in fourth edition, yetis have goat-like horns despite resembling ape- or bear-like humanoids otherwise.
Unwitting Pawn: Yetis tend to rampage into humanoid settlements when food grows scarce, and mountain warlords are known to deliberately overhunt game in order to lure them into enemy towns and camps, using the unwitting beasts' instincts to weaken opposition and rid themselves of a dangerous monster in one swoop.

Yggdrasti

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Plant (5E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Splinters of the legendary World Tree that fly through Wildspace, attacking any spelljamming ships or settlements they encounter.

Combat Tentacles: Yggdrasti lash and grapple creatures with their roots.
Shock and Awe: They can discharge bolts of lightning a few times per day, and if a foe is foolish enough to attack one with electricity, the yggdrasti immediately recharges its lightning bolt attack.
Weak to Fire: Like most plant creatures, they take extra fire damage.
When Trees Attack: They look like gigantic, barnacle-encrusted trees when they drift through Wildspace with their roots trailing behind them. If they make landfall and root themselves in the ground, yggdrasti look like any ordinary tree until they move or attack.
World Tree: They're thought to be scions of Yggdrasil, and yggdrasti can serve as downplayed examples — they're large enough to generate gravity planes and air envelopes, and have multiple cavities in their bodies large enough for creatures to fit into, so yggdrasti can form the centerpieces of small space ecosystems.

Yrthak

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Giant, eyeless, winged reptiles who hunt using sonic attacks.

Bizarre Alien Biology: Dragon #352 goes into detail with its "Ecology of the Yrthak" article. Yrthaks possess a bulbous organ on the tip of their tongue known as an aural lobe, which allows them to perceive their surroundings via sound with the help of a secondary, acoustic brain that processes information, filters sounds, and helps control the creatures' sonic attacks. Said attacks are generated by harmonic diagrams and resonating sinuses, then through a process not fully understood, all the sonic energy is fired from the yrthak's horn, which contains a porous structure called the tonal multivibrator to help focus the noise into a damaging attack.
Giant Flyer: They're Huge winged creatures with 40-foot wingspans, and as such are officially giant-sized.
It Can Think: Despite their monstrous appearance, yrthaks are nearly as intelligent as humans, and far more cunning than an ordinary animal. Though solitary, they're quick to come to each other's aid, since they can easily hear each other's sonic blasts — this may in fact be a secondary function of such attacks.
Make Some Noise: Yrthaks attack using focused beams of sound from the conical protrusion on their heads. They can emit a lance of solid energy against a single target, or fire at the ground or a stony surface to create an explosion of shattered stone to deal less damage to all within a 10-foot-radius of the impact site.
Music Soothes the Savage Beast: Music stimulates yrthaks, with the most wild of tunes "resonating through their bodies in a kind of tonal ecstacy." This can lead them to kidnap bards and other musicians back to their lairs, though savvy performers have been able to survive for years in captivity, or escape it altogether, by playing a song that lulls the yrthank to sleep.
Starfish Language: They're incapble of speaking humanoid speech, but yrthaks have their own language of "subtle rasps, flaps, clicks and subharmonic tones" that allows the creatures to communicate a great deal of information with each other. Most other species can't reproduce the yrthak language, but creatures like destrachans and nycters can hear and potentially learn it.
Super-Senses: Though blind (and immune to gaze attacks and illusions), a yrthak's aural lobes grant it blindsight out to 120 feet and lets it detect loud noises out to a range of 30 miles, but renders it effectively blind if affected by a silence spell. The aural lobe also retracts into a divot in the creature's jaw when it stops to eat, drink or attack with its jaws, meaning it's blind when taking those actions, as well as whenever a yrthak closes its mouth. This hypersensitivity to sound leads yrthaks to roost in areas of regular, interesting noise, like waterfalls, coastal cliffs, volcanoes, rustling forests, storm-wracked mountains... and most dangerously, atop tall structures in bustling cities.
Was Once a Man: According to the mystery cult of Nyx, there once was a masterful and ambitious bard named Brannius of Apollo who prayed to any deity who would listen for a way to let his music reach everyone across the world. After a week of fervent hymns, a trumpet archon appeared to offer her instrument to Brannius, promising that his music would be remembered for all time. But a succubus also appeared to offer a macabre bone horn and the vow that she could give Brannius music that would "change the lives of all who heard it, songs no living thing could deny and that even the deaf would notice, and do so within his lifetime." The bard ultimately reached for the bone horn, but the succubus quickly jammed it into his skull, transforming Brannius into the first yrthak.

Yuan-ti

A yuan-ti pureblood and abomination. (3e)

Alignment: Chaotic Evil (3E), Evil (4E), Neutral Evil (5E)

The descendents of humans who performed dark rituals to take on the traits and shapes of serpents. Though their ancient empire was overthrown, the yuan-ti survived, and plot to control and enslave other nations.

Almighty Janitor: The yuan-ti were originally a Servant Race but their masters grew so lazy and dependent that they basically ran the empire themselves.
Chameleon Camouflage: In many editions, yuan-ti halfbloods and abominations can psionically change the coloration of their scales to blend in with their environment.
Charm Person: In 5th edition, all yuan-ti can innately cast the suggestion spell.
Cult: They often set up serpent cults in other races' cities, offering hedonistic pleasures or cures for physical and emotional ailments, to expand their influence and gain leverage over those in power.
Emotionless Reptile: Yuan-ti are by nature completely devoid of emotion, operating only on cold logic and self-interest. When they display any kind of emotional reaction, it's always faked as part of a calculated ruse.
Expy: Many traits of the yuan-ti are lifted from the Serpent Men of Kull: Snake People who ruled an ancient empire, live by a Religion of Evil, and infiltrate human society to try to take it over.
Fantastic Caste System: A yuan-ti's standing in society is determined by how reptilian they are — the less serpentine they look, the less power they wield, and the earlier they're sent into battle ahead of their superiors.
Fantastic Racism: Yuan-ti look down upon humanoids as inferior, and most think it beneath themselves to converse with "meat." Purebloods, owing to their vocation as spies or spokesmen, do the best job of disguising their disdain towards lesser humanoids, but their training involves learning how to suppress their annoyance about having to treat lesser beings as equals.
Godhood Seeker: Yuan-ti rarely worship deities out of any true sense of reverence — their extremely dispassionate and emotionless natures aren't very conducive to this — but rather seeks to emulate their deity, learn the secrets of their ascension or divine nature, and use this knowledge to become deities themselves and supplant their former patron.
Happiness in Slavery: In Forgotten Realms, the yuan-ti were originally the most successful and loyal of the sarrukh's Servant Races, and were typically trusted with the most important assignments and the greatest degree of independence. The yuan-ti in turn genuinely embraced and accepted this position, as they viewed the sarrukh as their natural superiors and their subservience to them as their ideal and natural place. Even in the modern day, they still respect the remaining sarrukh despite also viewing their creators' civilization has having become decadent and past its prime. This was bred into them at a fundamental level, and contemporary yuan-ti are profoundly unsettled by the eagerness to serve that arises upon personally meeting sarrukh.
Lack of Empathy: The cold and emotionless yuan-ti view all other creatures as either threats to be avoided or hunks of meat to be used and discarded as they see fit, and they view the emotions of other beings as an exploitable weakness. They don't even feel empathy for their own kind: while the yuan-ti place a higher intrinsic value on fellow yuan-ti than they do on everything else, a starving yuan-ti would still kill and eat one of its fellows without hesitation or remorse.
Mayincatec: They live in cities deep within the jungle, their temples are step-sided pyramids adorned with fancy snake artwork, and they practice human sacrifice to please their serpentine gods. If that wasn't enough of a clue, Volo's Guide to Monsters has a list of sample yuan-ti names drawn from Nahuatl names and nouns.
Metamorphosis: It's possible for yuan-ti to undergo rituals to transform their bodies and thus rise in rank, but the cost in time, rare ingredients, and sacrificial victims means that most yuan-ti never get the opportunity to "promote" themselves.
Monstrous Cannibalism: The yuan-ti's ancestors debased themselves through cannibalistic rituals to gain their powers, and their descendents have no taboo regarding eating each other for lack of other options.
Poisoned Weapons: They tip their arrows with their own venom for added lethality.
Poisonous Person: Their malisons and abominations have poisonous fangs, while the purebloods can innately cast the poison spray cantrip.
Psychic Powers: Traditionally, yuan-ti have been psionicists as well as arcanists and priests, so that some of their supernatural abilities such as the shapechanging have been explicitly psionic abilities. 3rd Edition also offered variant rules exchanging their spell-like abilities with innate psionic powers.
Snake People: They vary in form, but are typically some combination of snake and humans. Most are either primarily to fully humanoid and scaled or have humanoid torsos on a snake body, while others are fully snakelike or made out of multiple smaller snakes.
Snakes Are Sinister: They're tainted by snake blood, and are coldly, thoroughly evil.
The Sociopath: Yuan-ti are natural manipulators, completely devoid of emotion, and believe themselves to be the pinnacle of creation, destined to rule over the lesser races.
Elminster: Ye cannot goad one of the serpent folk into hatred or fear, or evoke in it love or friendship. They make fake such things to cozen ye, but within they are always cold, calmly calculating.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: Yuan-ti can take the form of vipers, their size varying based on how the yuan-ti's ranking.
Was Once a Man: The first yuan-ti were humans who, after developing a cold-bloodedly logical philosophy, resorted to sinister and increasingly-extreme rituals to transform themselves into hybrids of human and snake, in emulation of their inhuman gods. In the present, they sometimes reward loyal human cultists with transformation into a pureblood.
The Unfettered: They refuse to allow concepts like "morality" or "taboos" to limit their actions.

Yuan-ti Pureblood

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Humanoid (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 1 (5E)
Playable: 3E, 5E

The most human-looking of the yuan-ti, and therefore the lowest caste. They serve as minions or expendable soldiers in their temple-cities, but their appearance makes them valuable infiltrators and go-betweens for their more serpentine superiors.

Exploited Immunity: They sometimes take advantage of their humanoid appearance and immunity to poisons to assassinate human nobles, by getting themselves hired as food tasters and then certifying poisoned food as being OK.
Little Bit Beastly: Purebloods are almost completely human in outward appearance, with only minor traits such as a few patches of scales, ophidian eyes or a forked tongue betraying their nature as yuan-ti.
Mouth of Sauron: Yuan-ti leaders typically rely on purebloods to interact directly with humanoids, both because the purebloods are the best at it, and also because it's beneath higher-ranked yuan-ti.
Reptilian Conspiracy: Due to their ability to pass off as humans, purebloods are often sent to infiltrate human societies to serve as spies, agents and assassins, in order to weaken a city or nation for an eventual takeover or, more commonly, to subtly manipulate it into playing along with the yuan-ti's goals.

Yuan-ti Malison

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_malison_5e.png

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Natural Humanoid (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E); 13 (4E), 3 (standard), 4 (mind whisperer, nightmare speaker), 5 (pit master) (5E)

Also known as halfbloods, malisons are the most varied of the yuan-ti in terms of appearance. They make up the middle class of yuan-ti society, overseeing the purebloods and fulfilling the orders of the abominations.

Charm Person: Mind whisperers can compel other creatures to do their bidding with spells like friends, charm person, and crown of madness.
Church Militant: Many malisions become disciples of the yuan-ti's serpent deities.
- Mind whisperers are warlocks in service to Sseth the Sibilant Death, schemers and manipulators who seek to expand yuan-ti influence through subterfuge.
- Nightmare speakers are cruel and sadistic torturers who prolong the suffering of their victims to nourish their dreadful goddess, Dendar the Night Serpent.
- Pit masters are priests of the chief yuan-ti god Merrshaulk, and mastermind plots to infiltrate the governments of nearby humanoid civilizations, while keeping their own cities hidden.
Half-Human Hybrid: Halfbloods are a roughly even mix of snake and human, but the nature of that mixture varies tremendously. Some malisons appear human other than their snakelike heads, others have serpentine tails in addition to legs, or have a serpent's lower body replacing their legs, and some have functional humanoid arms while others have masses of snakes hanging from their shoulders.
Master of Illusion: Mind whisperers can cast a number of illusion spells like minor illusion, hypnotic pattern, and illusory script.
Forced Sleep: A pit master can invoke the power of Merrshaulk to put nearby creatures to sleep once per day.
Poisonous Person: Pit masters are even more poisonous than the typical yuan-ti, and can invoke Merrshaulk's power to inflict extra poison damage with their melee attacks.
Spell Blade: Twice per day, a mind whisperer can imbue one of its melee attacks with psychic energy to increase that attack's damage, while a nightmare speaker can do the same with necrotic energy.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: By invoking Dendar's power, a nightmare speaker can torment a nearby creature with an illusion of its worst fear. The terror inspired by this illusion is so great that the victim can actually die of fright. They can also cast the fear spell through their pact magic.

Yuan-ti Abomination

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Natural Humanoid (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E, 5E), 14 (4E)

Abominations are the most snakelike of all yuan-ti, and typically a pair of arms is the only sign of their human heritage. They are the masterminds, temple leaders and warlords, leading fights from the rear as they observe and evaluate opponents and provide magic support, only entering melee combat as a last resort.

Large and in Charge: Abominations are Large creatures, whereas their malison and pureblood underlings are Medium.
Personal Space Invader: They can use their tails to grapple and constrict foes.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: In 5th edition, an abomination can innately cast the fear spell once per day.

Yuan-ti Anathema

^4e

Classification: Aberration (3E), Natural Magical Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 18 (3E), 21 (4E), 12 (5E)

Anathemas are the rarest, mightiest, and most monstrous of all yuan-ti, venerated as something like demigods by their kin. Their presence shifts a temple-city's priorities to small-scale wars of conquest and expansion.

Acid Attack: 3rd Edition anathemas could make a dissolving touch attack for heavy acid damage, which dealt even higher damage when used against a victim the anathema was constricting.
Appropriated Appellation: These monsters represent such a perversion of their human origins that human deities, even evil ones, declared that their very existence is heresy, but these "anathema" bear their label with pride.
Art Evolution: 3rd and 5th edition depicted the anathema as a giant yuan-ti abomination with a nest of vipers for a head. 4th edition turned this on its head (heh) by making it a nest of vipers with a giant snake head.
Bio-Augmentation: In 3rd Edition, anathemas know the secrets of transforming humanoids with yuan-ti grafts such as snake tails, serpent arms, scales and poisonous fangs. They can also create broodguards and tainted ones, described below.
Even Evil Has Standards: Their 3rd Edition write-up notes that while yuan-ti venerate anathemas, they're also seen as a destabilizing force in the temple-cities, as the aberrations are interested only in obliterating every other civilization around them. As such, anathemas normally live as outcasts in the wilderness, ruling over cults of other yuan-ti attracted to their auras of unspeakable evil.
Large and in Charge: An anathema towers over all other yuan-ti, even the abominations, and has the power and charisma to seize control of multiple yuan-ti cities.
Multiple Head Case: 3rd and 5th edition anathemas have six heads, allowing them to savage their enemies with a flurry of bites.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Anathemas project a magical aura which fills their enemies with a crippling fear of snakes and snakelike creatures. They can innately cast the fear spell as well.
The Worm That Walks: 4th edition anathemas are basically a mass of snakes assembled into a vaguely humanoid form.

Yuan-ti Servitors

Ssvaklor

Classification: Dragon (3E)
Challenge Rating: 10 (ssvaklor), 20 (greater ssvaklor) (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Dragons crossed with the yuan-ti, resulting in creatures with serpentine forms, dangerous venom, and psionic abilities. While lacking the brilliance of their yuan-ti progenitors, ssvaklors eagerly assist the yuan-ti in their schemes.

Artificial Hybrid: While it's possible for ssvaklors to be born naturally (or as naturally as any dragon crossbreed), in other cases, yuan-ti create them by capturing and transforming dragon eggs.
Hybrid Monster: Ssvaklors originated as a cross between dragons and yuan-ti.
Pint-Sized Powerhouse: They're a lot smaller than true dragons, with their "greater" ssvaklors only reaching Large size, but at CR 10 and 20, respectively, ssvalkors are a lot more powerful than true dragons of the same size category.
Poisonous Person: The ssvaklor's breath weapon is a cone of toxic gas, while their bite carries a poison that both paralyzes and deals Constitution damage to their victims.
Psychic Powers: They have psionic abilities such as aversion, entangling ectoplasm, and id insinuation.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: Like many yuan-ti, ssvaklors can assume a serpentine form, though only once per day.

Ti-khana

Ti-khana deinonychus (3e)

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +2 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Reptiles given augmented intelligence and additional powers by the introduction of yuan-ti qualities.

Artificial Hybrid: They're another product of yuan-ti breeding experiments, giving the base creature a more snake-like appearance, as well as additional powers.
Poisonous Person: Ti-khana gain fangs that deliver a Constitution-damaging poison.
Psychic Powers: They can use detect poison at will, as well as plant an aversion effect in a target creature to make them shy away from snakes and yuan-ti.
Scaled Up: They can psionically shapechange into a Tiny to Large viper.

Yuan-ti Broodguard

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_broodguard_5e.png

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E), Humanoid (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E), 2 (5E)

Former humanoids transformed, physically and mentally, into monstrous slaves of the yuan-ti. As their name suggests, they are often entrusted with guarding their masters' brooding chambers.

The Berserker: Broodguards can fly into a reckless rage in combat, gaining a bonus on attack rolls at the cost of defense.
Dumb Muscle: This is part of the trade-off of converting a slave into a broodguard — the transformed creature may be more capable in combat, but it's not good for much else but guard duty.
No-Sell: In 3rd Edition, broodguards are immune to hold and charm spells, while in 5th they have advantage on saving throws against such magic.
Was Once a Man: Most broodguards are made from human prisoners forced to consume a magical brew that renders them helpless. A broodguard loses all semblance of who it once was, and even its human origin is barely discernible. 3rd Edition notes that it takes a very specific sequence of spells to save someone mid-transformation into a broodguard, but once that transformation is complete, only a wish or miracle can turn them back to normal.

Yuan-ti Tainted One

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +1 (3E)

These creatures appear to be normal humans, but are loyal to their yuan-ti creators, making them capable of infiltrating areas that would give purebloods pause. They are actually created from the same concoction that can transform humans into broodguards, though tainted ones are considered the more successful outcome.

My Instincts Are Showing: While tainted ones look perfectly human, they can display some qualities that might give away their true allegience, such as a tendency to frequently lick their lips, draw out sibilants, or keep serpents as pets.
Poisonous Person: Tainted ones have poisonous saliva, but no natural bite attack, so they can only use this poison in combat by grappling someone with exposed skin. Alternatively, they can deliver the poison with a kiss, though the save DC is lower.
Psychic Powers: As part of their transformation, tainted ones unlock some of a true yuan-ti's psionic potential, and can poison foes as well as polymorph into a serpent form.

Yugoloth

A canoloth and ultroloth (3e)

Classification: Outsider (3E), Elemental Humanoid (4E), Fiend (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil (4E)

Mercenary fiends from the Bleak Eternity of Gehenna, embodying the Neutral Evil alignment. See the Yugoloths subpage for more information about them.

Yuki-on-na

Origin: Kara-tur
Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (2E), Chaotic Neutral (3E)

Fey that appear as pale, beautiful women, some of which are kindly and helpful, while others will lead the trusting to an icy death.

An Ice Person: They have the cold subtype, and their mere touch deals cold damage, but yuki-on-na don't have any actual control over ice or snow. Instead, yuki-on-na have the power to make someone lose their way, being unable to so much as navigate their way out of a closet for the next three to eighteen hours.
The Paralyzer: Yuki-on-na can also freeze someone in place with a chilly look, as per the effects of hold monster.
Was Once a Man: The original yuki-on-na was the concubine of an early Kara-tur emperor who poisoned his wife and children so she'd have his full attention — as punishment, she was transformed by the Celestial Bureaucracy into a form as cold as her heart and banished to a frozen wasteland. Legends have it that subsequent yuki-on-na are the spirits of similar villains (if evil), or the souls of shamans or shugenja who perished to cold (if not).
Yuki Onna: They're spirits native to the coldest regions, and while their AD&D incarnation is purely malicious, 3rd Edition yuki-on-na are more varied, with some benign examples that wish to do nothing but dance in the snow.

Z

Zaratan

Origin: Al-Qadim
Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 20 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Colossal sea turtles that can be easily mistaken for islands as they float along warm ocean currents, lazily feeding on whatever washes into their open mouths.
For their 5th Edition incarnation, see the "Elder Elementals" section of the "Elementals" entry.

Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Often literally! Zaratans are normally content to just drift, feed and sleep, and their usual response to an attack is simply to retract into their Nigh-Invulnerable shells and take a nap. But if a foe persists, zaratans are devastating opponents with a fearsome bite, or they can simultaneously sweep their flippers to bludgeon everything in a 40-foot-radius around them.
Heavy Sleeper: Zaratans spend most of their lives asleep, reflexively swallowing whatever ends up in their mouths, and sleep longer the older they get. After a battle, they'll immediately fall back asleep for up to a century.
Horse of a Different Color: It's possible to steer a zaratan, but it takes a group effort to overcome its natural lethargy. A primary rider needs to stand near the creature's head and shout or sing loudly to convey instructions, while at least three others stand on the shell's circumference and stamp or pound it to encourage the zaratan to move. Even so, it takes a very high Diplomacy, Perform or Intimidate check to convince the zaratan to obey its riders' wishes.
It Can Think: Zaratans aren't brilliant, but they understand simple commands in most languages, speak Aquan, and are nice enough to resist the urge to dive if they know they have riders on their shells, unless the zaratan's life is in danger.
No-Sell: AD&D zaratans are immune to poison due to their extremely slow metabolisms, and their shells are invulnerable to anything short of magical weapons.
Turtle Island: Their shells can be several hundred feet in diameter, more than enough space to support a small ecosystem. Sometimes shipwreck survivors who wash up on a zaratan never realize they're on a turtle, while in other cases small tribes will dwell upon the zaratan and worship it as a local god. And if someone knows that they're on a zaratan, they won't take kindly to anyone who bothers it.

Zeitgeist

Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: 23 (3E)
Alignment: Varies

Strange, rare fey generated by the people living in a large city, and able to physically manifest using portions of old buildings, urban smoke, or even humanoid figures.

Genius Loci: The zeitgeist appears to be created by the lives and emotions of a city's residents. They are incapable of leaving their city, and die if it is destroyed.
Guardian Entity: They can be considered one for an entire settled population, but are pretty unreliable. A zeitgeist's "natural" alignment matches that of their home city's predominant outlook, but since they manifest in times of crisis, they tend to act Chaotic Neutral, and their behavior can be altered by the fear and anger that a city's populace is experiencing. They are committed to protecting their city, but don't have as much regard for the individual people and structures within it. All that to say, a zeitgeist may manifest when its city is under siege, only to kill everyone within reach after the fighting breaches the outer walls, or spawn during a riot and mindlessly attack anything around it, or appear during a flood and rescue some citizens while slaying others.
Invisible Monsters: Zeitgeists are invisible even when attacking, unless they choose to suppress this ability, or when they choose to take a manifested form.
Playing with Fire: Downplayed; a zeitgeist's smoke manifestation deals a little bit of fire damage with its slam attacks, but it's not enough to set things on fire.
Poisonous Person: A zeitgeist's smoke manifestation can simply surround smaller creatures with choking city smog, potentially sickening them.
Rock Monster: A zeitgeit's stone manifestation takes the form of a giant humanoid composed of stone and detritus.
The Swarm: They can also manifest as a Huge mob of humanoids.

Zern

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

Lanky humanoids with unparalleled control over their own body structure, and an interest in modifying the flesh of lesser beings.

Fantastic Racism: Zerns view themselves as the only truly sentient race, while every other species is obviously an evolutionary dead end since they have so little control over their bodies. Thus, zerns are fully within their rights to use these lesser creatures in their experiments.
Healing Factor: Beyond having fast healing, zern can slowly regrow severed limbs or digits.
Mad Scientist: The zern are obsessed with discovering the perfect biological form, by way of experimenting on the strongest, smartest and most successful specimens of other races to create entirely new creatures. Most of their experiments die on the operating table, but zerns have developed some stable creations described below, which they're willing to sell to other beings.
No-Sell: Zerns' constantly-changing physiology lets them shrug off any attacks on their bodily functions, ignoring any effect that requires a Fortitude save unless it also applies to objects.
Non-Elemental: They can fire a ray that rips apart an opponent's flesh for a bit of undefined damage.
Sex Shifter: Zerns are born male, at 40 undergo a process that turns them female, and after giving birth become a sterile neutral gender.
Sizeshifter: They're Medium-sized in their "default" form, but can freely compress or expand their bodies to become Small or Large as needed.
Stance System: Zern's malleable forms lets them use a swift action to adapt their bodies as the situation requires, instantly growing their muscles for a boost to melee attacks, liquefying their own bones to let them squeeze through a tight space or escape bonds, grow armor plates to improve their defense, or lengthen their legs for a speed boost.
Tentacle Hair: They have fleshy tendrils in place of hair, which also serve as olfactory organs.

Zern Arcanovore

Classifiation: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Small, bulbous creatures that specialize in shutting down hostile mages.

Anti-Magic: They can generate an antimagic field three times per day.
Deflector Shields: They're surrounded by a telekinetic field that gives incoming attacks a 1-in-5 miss chance, though it doesn't work if the arcanovore has an antimagic field up.
Dispel Magic: Arcanovores' can use the spell at will, and true to their name, feed upon the dissipating magical energy of the effects they dispel.
Pet the Dog: In sharp contrast to the eminently disposable blade thralls, arcanovores are treated well and protected by their masters due to their usefulness, and stronger zern minions are often given special orders to protect them.

Zern Blade Thrall

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

These worm-like monsters are dim-witted, but useful as loyal and expendable soldiers.

The Ageless: Due to being immune to illness, poison, and other ailments, blade thralls are theoretically immortal, but in practice most die in battle a few years after their creation.
Blade Below the Shoulder: Their bone blades are fused with their forearms.
Cannon Fodder: Zerns typically use their blade thralls as meat shields, keeping other creatures from threatening the zern in melee, though they'll also order the blade thralls to undertake suicidal actions like forcing their way through the enemy line to go after a mage in the back.
No-Sell: Like their zern creators, blade thralls can adapt their biology to ignore effects that require a Fortitude save, unless they also work on objects.
Snake People: Though their body is more worm-like than serpentine, other than that they look much like a 7-foot-long snake with humanoid arms.

Zeugalak

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

Mountain-dwelling aberrations that rejoice in the wild power of lightning storms.

Beware My Stinger Tail: A zeugalak's snakelike tail ends in a venomous stinger.
Feed It with Fire: Striking a zeugalak with electricity-based attacks doesn't harm it, and instead limbers it up by granting temporary points to its Dexterity. As such, they cavort during mountain thunderstorms, giving bellows of excitement that can be heard for miles.
Shock and Awe: Zeugalaks are closely tied to electricity; in addition to taking no damage from it, they're constantly surrounded by a crackling electrical aura and can exhale a line of electricity as a Breath Weapon.
The Spiny: An aura of electrical energy surrounds a zeugalak at all times, electrocuting anyone who tries to damage it in melee.
Teleportation: If a zeugalak is struck by an electric effect, whether natural or magical, it can instantly teleport to its source. In the case of natural lightning, they use this ability to teleport up into the clouds, then slow fall their way through the storm.

Zezir

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

Bipedal, semi-intelligent saurians that delight in spreading fires.

It Can Think: Downplayed; zezirs are as smart as ogres, and cunning enough to use Combination Attacks during hunts, but they're incapable of communication.
Playing with Fire: They have the fire subtype, and have a two-stage way to set things aflame. Zezirs can use an action to spray a sticky, superheated, flammable goo from glands in their necks, affecting a 30-foot cone. The goo itself deals fire damage from its intense heat, but if it contacts an open flame, the goo will ignite for three rounds, dealing continual fire damage to everything in the area. If no flames are present, zezirs can also shoot a stream of sparks from their mouths as a 30-foot ranged attack.
Pyromaniac: Zezirs feed on ash, and so have a biological excuse to start fires, but more than that they live to start and spread fires. They're known to pull Hit-and-Run Tactics against caravans, with one wave spraying flammable goo on targets, another wave rushing by to ignite it, and then the entire pack withdraws to cavort in joy as the wagon train goes up in flames.

Zhackal

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil (2E), Unaligned (3E)

Small scavenging canines that use psionics to help feed upon the dying.

Dirty Coward: 3rd Edition notes that zhackals that aren't hunting will run rather than fight, even if doing so abandons their lairs or young.
Emotion Eater: 2nd Edition specifies that while zhackals are omnivores, they also need to feast upon the emotions of a dying creature — specifically, one dying of despair. Since violent deaths don't produce the right emotions, a zhackal pack will choose to run rather than go through combat. Some amoral nobles are able to keep zhackals as loyal pets by letting them feed upon the emotions of dying slaves or gladiators.
It Can Think: 2nd Edition zhackals have low intelligence but are sentient, enough to have an alignment and be contacted telepathically, though they lack a language and can only convey emotion... most commonly, "a lust for the death of the being who contacts them."
Mind Rape: They hunt by locating a weakened or dying creature and stalking their unlucky prey until it is on the verge of death, at which point the zhackal pack will combine their mental effots to repeatedly assault their target with ego whip, filling the victim's mind with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness and eroding their sense of self until they stop clinging to life.
Perception Filter: 3E zhackals can use cloud mind to close with prey undetected. 2E zhackals just use invisibility.

Zodar

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Construct (3E), Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 16 (3E, 5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral (2E-3E), True Neutral (5E)

Powerful and mysterious beings resembling six-foot figures in obsidian armor, who travel the planes in pursuit of their inscrutable objectives.

Animated Armor: They look like humanoids in all-encompassing dark plate, except it's actually a ceramic exoskeleton surrounding a core of pure muscle fibers.
Art Evolution: Their 5th Edition art is broad-shouldered with a massive domelike head, making it harder for a zodar to pass for a humanoid in full plate.
Bare-Fisted Monk: The overwhelming majority of zodar eschew weapons when fighting, and when pressed into combat usually grab and crush opponents.
Nigh-Invulnerable: In their 2E and 3E rules, zodar are flat-out immune to damage from anything but bludgeoning weapons, and even then, such weapons' magical enhancement bonuses are ignored when resolving attacks against zodar.
No-Sell: 2nd Edition zodar are immune to magic, even beneficial spells. 5th Edition zodar have immunity to acid, fire and poison, and additionally cannot be teleported or shifted to another plane against their will.
The Quiet One: Zodar are habitually silent, and a given specimen might say only a single sentence fragment over a typical human's lifetime. When they do speak, every being around them can understand them perfectly.
Reality Warper: In their older rules, zodar can use the wish spell once per year, but typically do so no more than once per century, and the effect is always so subtle that it's difficult to recognize as the work of a zodar. In 5th Edition this is a Death-Activated Superpower, and the zodar crumbles to dust immediately afterward.
Super-Strength: Zodar are immensely strong (Strength 25 in 2E and 3E, and a whopping Strength 30 in 5E), and in their older rules can effectively double that score three times per day in bursts of strength. They've been observed performing feats that would give even titans trouble, such as picking up a ship's broken mast and hurling it like a javelin at an enemy.
Unusable Enemy Equipment: It's theorized that a zodar's outer shell would make for exceptional armor, but anything capable of killing a zodar reduces its "armor" to a bunch of useless fragments.
The Watcher: A zodar might attach itself to a group of adventurers in their travels, but they typically follow at the back of the party in silence without actively participating — at most they'll defend themselves when attacked, but more than one zodar has watched a Total Party Kill unfold in front of it without doing anything to help. On very rare occasions, a zodar might suddenly burst into action, such as bounding into a melee to grab and crush a specific target, then go back to its passive role.

Zombie

Classification: Undead (3E-5E)
Challenge Rating: Varies by the base creature's Hit Dice (3E), 2 (4E), 1/4 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil, Unaligned (4E)

Corpses imbued with dark magic that allows them a semblance of life. They are mindless, but capable of following simple orders.

Dumb Muscle: Zombies are not terribly bright, and their mental ability scores range from low to nonexistent depending on the edition.
Last Chance Hit Point: In 5th edition, all zombies have a trait which allows them to remain standing with 1 hit point after taking damage that would otherwise defeat them. They need to make a saving throw to use the trait, and it doesn't work against radiant damage or critical hits.
Monster Lord: A "zombie lord" rarely arises when some dark power meddles in a raise dead spell cast on an evil humanoid, resulting in a fully intelligent zombie surrounded by a sickening stench, and capable of mentally commanding any zombie within sight.
Non-Human Undead: Zombies can be made from practically any living creature, not just humans. The 5th edition Monster Manual includes statistics for a beholder zombie, just to give you an idea.
Our Zombies Are Different: Mindless, shambling corpses animated by dark magic, zombies are the weakest and most basic of all physical undead and are typically found under the control of either novice necromancers or ones who need to raise large forces very quickly.
Zombie Gait: They are typically slower than both other undead and whatever creature they were in life. 3rd Edition even had a rule that zombies could take a single action on their turn — a normal move or a single attack, but not both (though charges could still be attempted.)

Husk Zombie

Origin: Critical Role
Challenge Rating: 1 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

An Exandrian zombie variant born from the lingering corruption of the Calamity, whenever a terrible roving fog causes the dead to rise.

Dead Weight: Some husk zombies, called bursters, become bloated with disease and bile. When destroyed, they explode and spread their horrid infection.
Elite Zombie: Unlike the standard shambling corpse, these undead are faster than a living human, and much more vicious, able to make multiple attacks each round with their claws.
The Virus: Any humanoid slain by a husk zombie rises as one the next turn. For this reason, these undead never stop to feed upon their kills.

Juju Zombie

Challenge Rating: As base creature +2 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

A superior form of zombie raised by powerful magic or curses.

Elite Zombie: They're better than normal zombies in every way, averting a Zombie Gait and retaining enough wits to wield weapons with some semblance of battle tactics. Juju zombies enjoy Damage Reduction and Turn Resistance, as well as immunity to electricity and magic missile attacks.
Unwanted Revival: A "hateful light" burns in the eyes of a juju zombie, as they are intelligent enough to fully grasp their undead state and hate the magic sustaining them.
Wall Crawl: They can scale walls as thieves in 2nd Edition, and have a climb speed in 3E.

Zorbo

^2e

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

Small, bear-like carnivores that use their deceptively cuddly appearance, as well as their ability to harden their hides based on their surroundings, to bring down prey.

Arch-Enemy: Bears attack zorbos on sight, whether because of the creatures' appearance, or the fact that their roar sounds like the crying of a bear cub.
Art Evolution: Their 5th Edition art does a much better job of hiding the fact that these things are basically carnivorous koalas.
Crafted from Animals: Zorbo hide, when properly treated, carries enchantments well, and items made from it receive a bonus on saving throws to avoid destruction or other harmful effects.
Field Power Effect: A variant; zorbos can rub up against their surroundings (which looks like a bear scratching its back on a tree) and improve their Armor Class based on what they're in contact with, getting increasingly sturdier defensive bonuses from wood, metal and stone.
Killer Rabbit: In their old art they look like slightly toothier koalas, but zorbos are aggressive, like the taste of humanoid flesh, and can ruin an adventuring party's magic items. They can also form colonies numbering 60 strong.
Mooks Ate My Equipment: AD&D Zorbos' most dangerous ability is to drain the effectiveness of magic items like a ring of protecton or bracers of defense with its claw attacks, which adds their defensive bonuses to the zorbo's own Armor Class while turning the item to dust with No Saving Throw. They aren't much better in 5E, in which their claw attacks can permanently reduce the effectiveness of mundane armor, and even destroy remove the enchantment bonus of magical armor and shields.
Yowies and Bunyips and Drop Bears, Oh My: They're more or less a D&D spin on the drop bear, being a dangerous animal that looks like a koala.

Z'tal

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

Small, stupid, and cowardly bipedal lizards known for their debilitating screeches.

Crafted from Animals: Z'tals' sharp scales, which they only use in desperate circumstances by lashing against foes, make for servicable razors or small knives, though they'll go dull after a week of use.
Super-Scream: When threatened or startled, z'tals loose a piercing scream that induces vertigo in other creatuers, inflicting penalties on rolls, interfering with spellcasting, and in severe cases can leave an afflicted creature on the ground, unable to tell which way is up.
The Swarm: Z'tal groups (called "leaps") are prone to stampeding, and 4th Edition treats a z'tal horde as a terrain hazard that leaves behind a slippery ooze and noxious vapor that can damage creatures trying to pass through it, while those in the midst of the creatures are in danger of falling.
Weird World, Weird Food: Assuming the scales are carefully removed, z'tal meat can make for good eating, whether as drumsticks or roasted tails or as the basis for soup. Their eggs however are inedible — their young develop their scales almost immediately after conception.

Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures W To Z

W

Warforged Charger

Warforged Colossus

Warforged Scout

Warforged Titan

Vilewight

Guulvorg

Winter Wolf

X

Y

Yuan-ti Pureblood

Yuan-ti Malison

Yuan-ti Abomination

Yuan-ti Anathema

Yuan-ti Servitors

Ssvaklor

Ti-khana

Yuan-ti Broodguard

Yuan-ti Tainted One

Z

Zern Arcanovore

Zern Blade Thrall

Husk Zombie

Juju Zombie

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Index

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Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures W To Z

Edit Locked

W

Warforged Charger

Warforged Colossus

Warforged Scout

Warforged Titan

Vilewight

Guulvorg

Winter Wolf

X

Y

Yuan-ti Pureblood

Yuan-ti Malison

Yuan-ti Abomination

Yuan-ti Anathema

Yuan-ti Servitors

Ssvaklor

Ti-khana

Yuan-ti Broodguard

Yuan-ti Tainted One

Z

Zern Arcanovore

Zern Blade Thrall

Husk Zombie

Juju Zombie

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Index

Next