Kaorti

Ages ago, a group of curious wizards sought to pierce the boundaries of known existence and penetrate to a distant dimension on the other side of reality. This region, known to scholars as the Far Realm, is a realm of madness and nightmare. The explorers felt confident oftheir abilities and only intended to stay for a few hours. Unfortunately, their confidence was misplaced. Not moments after their arrival in the Far Realm, they were absorbed by a nameless entity. The explorers transformed into terrible natives of the Far Realm, becoming the first kaortis.

The explorers went mad and forgot all they knew of the Material Plane. The gateway between the Far Realm and the Material Plane disturbed them. The newly formed kaortis acted without thought, traveling back through the portal to destroy it. Doing so removed the source of pain in the Far Realm, but it stranded the kaortis on the Material Plane⁠—​a realm now deadly to the very fabric of their being. Many of the new kaortis succumbed before they succeeded in encysting themselves within the secluded wizards’ school from which they had set out. From that first cyst, the kaortis have spread out to menace the world.

Humanoid in shape, a kaorti must dress in form-fitting armor made of thick resins and tissues grown and cultivated by kaorti alchemists whenever one ventures from its cyst. A kaorti in a resin suit looks like an emaciated human with elongated arms and legs. It has three long fingers and a long thumb on each hand, and its motions are slithery and undulant. Its bulbous head is affixed to its body by a long neck. A kaorti’s face almost always remains hidden behind windings of resin.

Outside its resin suit, a kaorti is decidedly nonhuman in appearance. Its skin, brownish green in color swirled with livid pinks and reds and purples, seems to be almost transparent and liquid as it slithers and runs over the creature’s visible entrails. A kaorti’s fingers are little more than boneless tendrils. Its face looks like that of a melted spider. Its palms constantly secrete a thick, green resin that can be crafted by kaorti “smiths” into weapons or armor or reinforcements for their lairs. The average kaorti is 7 feet tall and weighs 100 pounds.

Kaortis speak their own guttural language and have picked up smatterings of many other languages during the interrogation of prisoners. Most kaortis can speak Common and Sylvan.

Combat

Kaortis prefer to use magic against their enemies, while their transformed minions and thugs engage in melee. When magic fails, a kaorti tries to fight with ranged weapons if it can; kaorti are proficient with all simple ranged weapons as well as with shuriken. A kaorti caught in melee combat usually flees in an attempt to regain the needed distance for its spells and ranged attacks.

Kaorti can be summoned using a summon monster I spell.

Spell-Like Abilities: 1/day⁠—​alter self, color spray, feather fall, ray of enfeeblement, reduce person, spider climb. Caster level 2nd; save DC 14 + spell level.

Vile Transformation (Su): A kaorti can infuse any living creature with otherworldly essence from the Far Realm, permanently transforming the target into a mockery ofits previous form. This process takes 8 hours, during which time the kaorti’s jaws must be locked onto the victim, who must be either willing or helpless for the duration. After 8 hours, the victim must make a Fortitude save (DC 11). Failure indicates that the victim transforms into a kaorti (if the victim was a humanoid), or into a kaorti thrall. If the victim succeeds at the save, the kaorti can attempt the transformation again; each additional attempt to transform a victim increases the save DC by +1.

Creatures transformed into kaortis retain any class abilities and modify their ability scores as follows: Str −4, Dex +4, Int +4, Cha +6. They become neutral evil and embrace the racial ethos of the kaortis. They gain all of the other abilities and disadvantages of a standard kaorti. This transformation is the only way the kaorti can propagate their kind.

A victim transformed into a kaorti thrall gains the pseudonatural creature template.

Material Vulnerability (Ex): The Material Plane is painful to an unprotected kaorti. An unprotected kaorti must make a Fortitude save each hour (DC 15, +1 per previous check) or take 1d6 points of nonlethal damage and become fatigued. The fatigued condition persists until the kaorti recovers all the nonlethal damage it took from its exposure to the Material Plane. If a kaorti is rendered unconscious through the accumulation of nonlethal damage (from this ability or from any other source), the Material Plane environs begin to deal normal damage at the same rate (Fort save negates; save DC continues to increase per check as stated above). A kaorti wearing a resin suit, or a kaorti inside a cyst, is protected from the effects of the Material Plane.

Skills: Kaortis have a +8 racial bonus on Heal checks.

Kaorti Society

Kaortis live in remote regions, dwelling in captured forts, monasteries, or mines. They quickly coat the entirety of their lairs with the same resin they build their weapons and armor from, protecting themselves from the deleterious influence of the Material Plane. These lairs are known as kaorti cysts.

Kaortis have little interest in idle pastimes. They are consumed with one overriding goal: to pervert the natural world and feed it into the Far Realm, The kaortis understand that realization of this goal is likely centuries away, and may well be impossible. Nevertheless, they are dedicated to this goal, transforming one creature at a time if that’s what it takes.

Kaorti greatly respect and admire arcane magic. Sorcerers and wizards are often found as leaders in kaorti cysts. These leaders are charged with expanding the races territories and making sure the cyst is well defended. This leaves the bulk of a kaorti cyst’s population free to work on the transformation of creatures into kaorti or thralls. Nonhumanoid victims that are transformed into thralls make up the bulk of a kaorti cyst’s defenses.

When a cyst’s population reaches about five dozen kaortis, approximately two dozen of them strike out into the world to seek a place to build a new cyst. A few old cysts have ceased to calve off pilgrimages; the kaortis of these cysts work to perfect new thrall races designed to function on the Material Plane without danger. The skybleeder and the rukanyr are perhaps the most successful of these creations so far.

Prisoners taken by kaortis are fed and made comfortable by their captors, but only as long as the kaortis think that their captives have vital information about the outer world to impart. Once a prisoner is deemed to have divulged all pertinent information, he is quickly scheduled for transformation.

Kaortis encountered outside a cyst are either pilgrims looking for a new cyst site, spies gathering information about the neighboring lands, or a small band charged with seeking out new victims for transformation. Kaortis make full use oftheir alter self ability to infiltrate villages and cities.

Kaorti Items

Kaorti devices are made from resins secreted by the creatures’ palms. The resin is shaped while fresh, and then (if appropriate) alchemically treated to maintain its flexibility.

The principal use for kaorti resin is to create a cyst, a space enclosed by walls of resin. Within such a space, kaortis are protected from the harmful effects of the Material Plane. A kaorti can produce roughly 1 cubic foot of resin each day, enough to coat 12 square feet of surface to a depth of 1 inch. It takes a kaorti about 1 hour to produce and apply this much resin. The substance dries to a rigid covering 1 hour after being applied. Walls and doors encrusted with this resin have their hardness increased by 2.

Untreated kaorti resin lasts for only about 500 days before crumbling to shards, so kaortis constantly maintain the walls of their cysts. A single kaorti can keep a 40-foot-square room 10 feet high covered in resin by spending 1 hour a day maintaining its cyst.

Resin Suit: A kaorti resin suit consists of thin straps of alchemically treated resin that are wrapped around the body fully, similar to a mummy’s bandages. A resin suit is light armor with the following properties: +4 armor bonus, +3 maximum Dex bonus, −4 armor check penalty, 25% arcane spell failure chance. Creatures other than kaortis can wear resin suits, but the resin causes most humanoids to break out in hives. In addition to its armor qualities, a kaorti resin suit protects a creature on the Material Plane from the effects of the environment.

Resin suits are costly and time-consuming to make; ordinary kaorti (those with 1 HD) are only rarely allowed to use them as a result.

Cost: 250 gp. Weight: 20 lb.

Ribbon Dagger: A ribbon dagger is a Small exotic weapon crafted from alchemically treated kaorti resin. It consists of a resin handle to which is affixed a 1-foot-long flexible strip of resin. This ribbon of resin is razor-sharp and deals 1d4 points of damage on a hit with a critical multiplier of ×4. The ribbon can wrap around objects with ease; disarm attacks made with a ribbon dagger gain a +2 bonus.

Cost: 50 gp. Weight: 1 1b.

Kaorti Characters

A small number of kaortis turn rogue and abandon their native cysts. These characters have resisted the psychological transformation into kaorti, and struggle to survive in a hostile world.

Kaortis have a natural predisposition to become sorcerers. Kaorti sorcerers generally become the leaders of a kaorti cyst. Kaorti wizards do not keep ordinary spellbooks; they record their spells on long strips of resin that are hung from the ceiling in the kaorti’s lair. Kaorti wizards or sorcerers never summon animal familiars. Most nonspellcasting kaortis are rogues, although fighter kaortis are not unheard of. Kaortis only rarely become bararians, and no instance of a divine spellcaster kaorti has been recorded.

Sorcerer is a kaorti’s favored class. Because of its special abilities, a kaorti PC’s effective character level (ECL) is equal to its class level + 4. Thus, a 1st-level kaorti sorcerer has an ECL of 5 and is the equivalent of a 5th-level character.

Many kaorti arcane spellcasters choose the alienist prestige class; since a kaorti is already an outsider, a kaorti alienist who reaches 10th level transcends by gaining the pseudonatural creature template.

Source: Fiend Folio, page 108. Changes applied as per the D&D^® v.3.5 Accessory Update. Removed “Kaortis and Manual of the Planes” sidebar and directly incorporated the suggested changes in that section, but linked them to material from the Complete Arcane (rather than Manual of the Planes, a 3.0 source) as it contains the D&D 3.5 versions of the alienist prestige class and the pseudonatural creature template.