Parrot-Fiends of House Manati (and the Unceasingly Useful Dermestid Box)

I mentioned these creatures in my last post, so I felt it was probably a good opportunity to write them up and describe more about them! 

Its hand twisted backwards, perhaps a hint to its provenance.

Parrot-Fiend

Number Encountered: 1d6

Hit Dice: 2+2

Attacks: claws/bite (1d6/1d6+1)

Armor: as leather

Morale: N/A

Avian Screech: Parrot-fiends are able to let out an ear piercing shriek. This shriek will always attract 1d4 additional parrot-fiends, as well as 1d6+1 city guards or house Manati stooges depending on the context. Typically, a parrot-fiend will only screech either when they have someone in their undying grasp, or when they are close to dying.

Magic Resistance: Parrot-fiends have +4 to saving throws versus spells and magical effects.

Moonlight Power: Parrot-fiends are weak and delirious on the night of the new moon, and emboldened on the night of the full moon. 

Undying Grasp: The parrot-fiend may sacrifice its claw attack to instead attempt to ensnare a single human sized enemy in its grasp. The target of its undying grasp must make a saving throw or be captured, and once captured only a successful open doors roll with assistance will be able to free them.

Undying Loyalty: When confronted with the dermestid box (see below), they have advantage on their fleeing roll (i.e. they roll twice and take the better result).

The dreadful parrot-fiends are the foul undead creations of the sorcerous scions of House Manati, the descendants of the Conquering King's princes stationed in Elburz Satrapy all those centuries ago. They are created in a secret ritual, passed down only through one particular matrilineal of the noble house, that which claims descent from the stargazer wife Vani, third wife of Manat son of the Two-Horned Conqueror. This ritual is done only on the night of the full moon, its eerie greenish light bathing the princely sorcerer in unnatural energies. Other than this, very little is known about the creation of the parrot-fiends, and in fact nobody knows where the parts which make them are sourced; it is obvious that the things are the merger of the desiccated body of a human being and the head of a great big crimson parrot, but who the bodies are from is the subject of rumors and nobody in this part of the world has ever seen a parrot of such a hue or size before. Gossip and whispers that the Vani-Manatis use the bodies of dead servants or of slaves or of long dead ancestors are just hearsay, and only in far eastern hinterlands can it even be dreamed that such a large and brilliant red parrot may roost.

House Manati employs parrot-fiends as a gruesome additional security in their palatial estates and, most notably, in the rich princely quarter of Tabur, the Bay of Red-Feathered Plenty. This is not to say that they rely solely on parrot-fiends, since they are slow, incapable of communication, and can only be produced once a month, not to mention their eerie uncanny countenance that puts even members of House Manati on edge. The parrot-fiends are more roving jailers and alarm systems than actual guards or mercenaries; they only capture intruders for humans on Manati or municipal pay to deal with rather than being a true defense themselves. In Tabur, in fact, the city guards despise the parrot-fiends and find that the undead creatures take a significant portion of their job, and perhaps even obstruct their sovereign operation in a full quarter of the city. But the interests of Manati and of the lesser notables of the city are great, and the wishes of those who are protected by the shuddering corpses win the day. The city guards would be very kind to anyone who could at all bring the parrot-fiends down a peg, even if it means angering House Manati. Outside of Tabur, parrot-fiends are a fixture of Manati estates, with the exception of those lesser scions and isolated valley dehqans who the heads of the house deem unworthy of receiving any fiends. These less notable princes would do anything to have a parrot-fiend in their possession; having even one is a status symbol of sorts within the circles of the house. 

An officer of the guard, drawn a tad too messily (also an akinakes short sword)

Tabur City Guard

As a level one fighter (HD 1+1, ATK 1, AC leather+shield, MRL 7)

Officer of the Guard: Large groups of guardsmen may be led by an officer of the guard, a high ranking guardsmen, second only to the city's captain. Officers of the guard fight as city guards with a +1 to hit and armor as chain+shield. When an officer of the guard is present, all guardsmen have morale 9. Officers of the guard are identifiable by the banner upon their back that looms over the streets, decorated with the symbol of Tabur, the ancient basilisk.

Equipment: City guards wield maces or akinakes (short swords). Those stationed at or near the city walls carry bows. Additionally, they always carry with them rope for tying up targets.

House Manati Stooge

As a level one fighter (HD 1+1, ATK 1, AC leather, MRL 6)

Mercenary: Most, but not all, men at arms in the employ of House Manati are mercenaries in some form or another. Their allegiance is to coin or to land, not to the noble house. 

Equipment: House Manati stooges wield hand knives, wooden bludgeons, hatchets, or slings. All stooges will have slings and one such melee weapon.

The Unceasingly Useful Dermestid Box!

Not everyone can be initiated into the beauteous cosmic mysteries that provide the ability to turn the undead, and yet standing skeletons and crawling corpses are a perennial, albeit not overwhelmingly common, hazard to travelers along abandoned roads or delvers into dark depths! The solution, then, is to find the one thing which can prompt disaster for the dead: decomposition. Enter the dermestid box, a wooden export of that ever industrious city Humakuyun on the Sea. This is a wooden container wherein lies a crawling mass of skin-devouring beetles; by simply opening the box and tossing its contents on a beskinned undead foe, it is possible that faint memories of self preservation will prevail and the thing will stagger back at the thought of its skin and flesh being eaten.

Dermestid Box.....20 drachmae

A single use item that, when thrown on an undead target that still has its skin (skeletons and the like are unaffected) prompts a d6 roll to see if they stagger back in sudden realization. There is a 3-in-6 chance of a reaction. Some undead which are made feverishly loyal through special sorceries, such as the parrot-fiend, have advantage on this roll.

The Dog Who Speaks Softly and the Woman Who Barks Like a Dog

 

The Dog-Headed Men of the barbarian north feast on the flesh of their fellow men. They go hunting with their spears and lances, pouring forth on horseback to slay woman, man, eunuch, and child. The naked bodies slung over their mounts, their packs full of stolen silver, they return to their homes in the wilderness. The nomad Dog-Men wear necklaces of human teeth and spheres of silver. They take perverse pleasure in desecrating the idols of the gods of the Enlightened Empire's Good Religion. In the east, the Dog-Headed Men of generations past seized the lands beyond the Empire and formed their own kingdom, at the crossroads of west and east. The Dog-Headed Men of this land do not act so wildly, but instead keep their fellow man in outdoor preserves and cook them up in high brow ways. The eastern Dog-Men wear gold and rich silks and long gloves that reach up to their elbows.

The fire-priests of the Good Religion use the Dog-Headed Men as a moralistic example of what not to do. Their cannibalism is a most heinous sin, and one which suffuses their whole bodies with uncleanliness, but they are not unclean by nature. Humans are never unclean by nature. Rather, the Dog-Headed Men worship daevas and sully their holy form with cannibalism. The mobads refuse any Dog-Man who does not abandon meat for the flesh of fish and flora (the life furthest from manflesh in all respects). 

It is a well-known fact that the gaze of a dog dispels unclean spirits. The Dog-Headed Men despise dogs (the mobads say because the demons riding on their backs fear the dog's gaze, the Dog-Men say because domesticated dogs are just disgusting and uncanny). When descending on a town, they bash the heads in of the people's hounds and leave their bodies to rot. They fear and hate wolves as well, culling them in the wilderness and sacrifice them in mass pyres and ashen burials. 

The Dog Who Speaks Softly

In the city of Humakuyun, the port of the north, there dwells a lone Dog-Headed man. His new name is Pesir Khub, and he hates to hear his old name. He wears his hair cropped close to his head, and is clad in a green cloak that descends over his whole body. He lives with a local wife (a woman without a dog's head named Somayeh), and has a single daughter (Elnaz) cursed with dog-headedness. He despairs over his daughter's already present taste for flesh.

Pesir Khub moved to Humakuyun from a town on the borderlands with the barbarian north. He was member of a group of Dog-Men who bowed before the governing authority there and took part in the rituals of the local shrine, abandoning their ways. Taken into the employ of the temple, he traveled to Humakuyun with an entourage of similarly converted Dog-Headed Men (although he kept with him a wooden idol of a Dog-Man god, stained red from soaked blood). On the way there, his companions were attacked by bandits and slaughtered, leaving him and a young temple functionary to flee across the wilderness to the port city. He was the first Dog-Headed Man to live in Humakuyun for some time (there were several Dog-Headed Women there when he arrived), and he disavowed bloodshed for the second time in his life. He had his canines removed so that he may never again puncture the arteries of a man, and for this reason he speaks with a lisp, and mutters quietly to avoid barking brashly as the Dog-Men do. He is ashamed of who he is. He keeps a pale greyhound to keep himself beneath its baleful gaze.

One day, he returned home to find his daughter gnawing on a bird. She took to crawling around on all fours and snatching at flitting insects and crawling lizards with her gnashing teeth. She still has the canine fangs her father tore from his mouth. She is sixteen years of age now, and sneaks out at night to do things her father and mother do not know. He fears his own daughter.

Pesir Khub is a level two fighter but does not carry weapons. He can speak and understand the speech of the Dog-Men, but refuses to utter any of its words. His most valued possessions are his dog and his hidden bloody idol, and his greatest loves are his wife, his daughter, and his work.

She's like this but more chainmail and with a sword (also it was Really hard to find a suitable picture of a chainmail-clad barbarian woman)

The Woman Who Barks Like a Dog

Among the Dog-Headed tribe of Kanashan, there lives a woman without a dog's head. She only goes by the name Half-Moon, and she bellows out wildly and harshly when the tribe goes on hunts. She is a warrior of the Dog-Men, who left her life in the fertile valleys of the Enlightened Empire to join the people who ate her neighbors. She was gracious to them for doing so; the very ones they devoured were the ones who tormented her for her blemishes, her clumsiness, and her quietness. When they gulped down the flesh of the firebrand preacher, she saw the man who ordered her exiled into the forest for perversion destroyed in cosmic justice. Despite everything that the mobads say about the Dog-Headed Men, about the daevas that ride upon their backs and the heinous sin of cannibalism that curses their whole people, she was saved by the rapacious rampages of the Kanashan Dog-Men. And so she joined them.

Half-Moon walks on all fours when she is not riding a horse. She finds it an easier way to move around than shakily stepping around on two feet. She keeps her hair long and unkempt, and wears mail armor and cloaks that drape over her body as she crawls around. She used to speak haltingly in Shahanistani, but now issues orders to her fellow dog-warriors in the barking tongue of the Dog-Men. But she refuses to eat the flesh of men, instead hunting beasts in the forest and snatching the burnt flesh of wolf-sacrifices. She leaves the cannibalism to her Dog-Man benefactors.

Half-Moon is a level four fighter who wields a long rusted sword as her primary weapon. She lives in a yurt that she can tear down and carry with her on her horse. She collects trinkets and baubles and curiosities, and is fond of little things that catch her eye. She never wants to return to Shahanistan.