Spaug

Spaug
No. Enc.: 1d4
Alignment: chaotic
Movement: 120'
            Swim: 80'
Armor Class: 4
Hit Dice: 4 (Can advance as magic users or clerics)
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d6 bite or by spell
Save: F3
Morale: 6

Special: Spaugs can use Water Breathing, Charm Person, and Speak With Anyone at will. They also can cast Raise Dead or Reincarnation (not both), Stone Tell, and Word of Recall once a day.

Sinister, cold-blooded sorcerers from the plane of Ylb, the Spaug are notorious for abducting beings from across dozens of planes and worlds by way of special coins of electrum edged with a strange form of restructured silver known only to the minters of Ylb. The stuff has been described by various uneducated adventurers as resembling a type of silver that was somehow turned inside-out, which is ridiculous, of course.

Spaug Coins
Each coin radiates a faint magical aura and is enchanted to serve as a one-way portal to the deep grottoes of Ylb. Any particular Spaug-coin will only open its portal once in a given hour. The coins are indiscriminate as to who or what they allow through their portal. It is not at all uncommon for some sorcerers and others to place a Spaug-coin in their private chambers or tombs as a trap for the unwary. In over three thousands of years no one has learned how to subvert the Spaug-coin's portals, and nothing has ever come back through one of these coin-gates. This doesn't rule out it ever happening, but it hasn't happened yet, so it is considered fairly unlikely to ever take place.

The Wading Pools
On the other side of each Spaug-coin are the subterranean Wading Pools of Ylb where each newly captured prisoner finds themself up to their knees in cold, brackish water in a cavernous, almost nautilus-shaped chamber that extends for miles and miles along either direction of the spiral. The air is breathable but cold and the darkness is oppressive, even seemingly invasive. A number of small predators and scavengers scuttle about in the dark, waiting for a chance to pick bones or to suck blood or whatever other unpleasant things they do with those who give them the opportunity.

The Spaug have been at this for a long, long time. There's a good chance that newcomers might be overlooked for a while and left to wander aimlessly in the dark before finally getting rounded up and thrown into the arenas or converted into exotic food-stuffs, depending on the whim of the Spaug.

The Arenas
Spaug are decadent and inscrutible masters of their own dark realms, but it is a slowly declining, decaying and dying domain that they lord over. The ancient walls that have protected their private dome-estates are crumbling into ruins. Slaves have run off to set-up nomadic camps that wander through the interstitial regions between the Spaug's domes and the ruined zones that stretch outwards beyond the main enclave-clusters where no Spaug ever goes any more. The Spaug do not notice, or they do not care. They occupy themselves with the on-going perpetual contests of the Arenas where beings from across hundreds of universes fight and die for the amusement of these inheritors of a dying world.

Escape?
Among the rebellious nomads who prowl the forgotten and deserted ruins of Ylb, there are those who have learned some of the Spaug's old secrets, revived their cast-off technologies or studied their spells and rituals within collapsed libraries and other places. Some of these beings whisper of ways that one might escape from the Spaug's dread, dark domain. But the dangers are great. Few have been brave enough, powerful enough or foolish enough to attempt these perilous paths. Perhaps they've simply not had suitable motivation...