Lurking Strangler

Many species enjoy pets that resemble themselves. Some humans keep monkeys as companions and some rakshasas keep house cats. Gauths and beholders enjoy lurking stranglers. This lesser creature acts as a companion, pet, and occasional spy for them.

Lurking stranglers are 3 feet long from eyeball to eyeball. They weigh 5 pounds.

Lurking stranglers understand Beholder and Common. They have neither a mouth nor any means of speaking. They communicate by twisting their bodies. A wide-open posture usually signifies assent, and a tight spiral indicates fear, tension, or disagreement.

A lurking strangler primarily uses its eye rays to attack. It can use its entire body to lash at an adjacent foe. However, it prefers to keep its distance and let its eye rays defeat its enemies. Once its victims are asleep, it will coil itself around a foe and choke it to death.

Eye Rays (Su): Each of a lurking strangler’s two eye rays resembles a spell cast by a 3rd-level caster. One eye acts as the cause fear spell, and the other produces a sleep effect. Each effect is negated with a DC 11 Will save. The save DCs are Charisma-based.

Cause Fear: This ray works like the spell. It has a range of 30 feet.

Sleep: This ray works like the spell, except that it affects one creature with up to 4 Hit Dice. It has a range of 130 feet.

Suffocate (Ex): If a lurking strangler hits a helpless foe with its lash attack, it wraps itself around the victim’s throat and begins to choke it. In the first round, the victim falls unconscious (0 hit points). In the following round, she drops to −1 hit points and is dying. In the third round, she suffocates and dies.

Flight (Su): A lurking strangler’s body is naturally buoyant. This buoyancy allows it to fly at a speed of 20 feet. This buoyancy also grants it a permanent feather fall effect (as the spell) with personal range.

The daelkyr (see page 278 of the Eberron Campaign Setting) created the first lurking stranglers out of boredom, and only later did their beholder minions adopt them as companions and pets. Although the beholders find lurking stranglers amusing and occasionally useful as sentries and spies, the species wasn’t spawned for either purpose; they merely serve as living examples of the daelkyr’s willingness to experiment.

In the Forgotten Realms setting, beholder mages are the progenitors of lurking stranglers, creating them by means of a spell. Wherever beholder enclaves are found, so too are lurking stranglers. Ooltul, a small city in the Underdark, harbors the largest population of lurking stranglers.