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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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Pack Fiend

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Stealthy predators native to the Gray Waste of Hades, though fiends across the Lower Planes routinely capture them for use as hunting beasts.

Attack Animal: It's mentioned that pit fiends and glabrezu in particular are fond of keeping kennels of starving pack fiends, waiting for the right moment to go hunting.
Beware My Stinger Tail: Their sting attacks deliver a Strength-damaging poison.
Deadly Lunge: Pack fiends pounce when they charge, allowing them to make a full attack action at the end of their move.
Mix-and-Match Critters: They look like some unholy cross between a wolf and cockroach, with a streamlined scorpion's tail.

Painspeaker

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

Withered walking corpses that constantly gibber and coo in corrupted truespeech.

Nothing but Skin and Bones: They look nearly skeletal, with their grayish flesh drawn tight across their bones.
Unfinished Business: Painspeakers died with an important message left unspoken, whether a confession of love, an entreaty for peace, or testimony that would have saved an innocent. These tortured, unvoiced words have compeled them to rise as twisted undead, but there's at least one example of a painspeaker crumbling to ash after finally confronting and confessing its love for a cleric.
Words Can Break My Bones: They can use the Recitation of the Fortified State to bolster their defense, and a reversed moderate word of nurturing to harm other creatures.

Palimpset

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Alignment: Unaligned

Sheets of rune-inscribed paper or parchment that have become carnivorous predators.

Achilles' Heel: Electricity attacks not only deal damage to palimpsets, they have a chance, increasing with the attack's severity, to make them spit out any creatures they're currently digesting.
Animate Inanimate Object: Palimpsets are slow but ambulatory, moving as if blown about by a stray breeze.
Chest Monster: Rumors abound of entire libraries filled with palimpsets, in volumes with enticing titles such as Manual of Bodily Health, Libram of Gainful Conjuration, and Elminster's Black Book.
No Body Left Behind: This is what makes it so difficult to resurrect someone who's been absorbed by a palimpset. If they're found while being digested, they can be restored using a specific sequence of spells: a remove curse to animate their illustration, abjure to lift them from the sheet as a colorless, lifeless paper doll, and then resurrection to restore them to normal. But if a palimpset has fully digested someone, then only a wish can bring them back.
No-Sell: Counterintuitively, palimpsets are immune to fire and attacks with edged weapons.
Portal Book: A sinister variant. Prey that makes contact with a palimpset is in danger of being absorbed by the creature, appearing as a sketch or illumination upon it — "mice screeching to get out, or a scribe screaming in terror among the fanciful scrollwork." After one day per Hit Dice, the victim is fully "digested" and vanishes from the paper. Fortunately, sometimes the absorption attempt fails and only deals a nasty paper cut (in which case the blood is quickly absorbed by the monster), and even if successful, absorption takes two rounds over which the monster is helpless and vulnerable to attack. For this reason, palimpsets prefer attacking lone victims.

Pari

Classification: Celestial (5E)
Challenge Rating: 13 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Good

Angelic beings with the power of foresight, who visit the mortal world with prophetic warnings or as harbingers of events to come.

Amazing Technicolor Population: Pari are known for their pastel blue skin tone.
Brown Note: Pari can weaponize their prophetic powers by flooding a creature's mind with disorienting visions of the future, dealing psychic damage and giving them disadvantage on attack rolls for their next turn.
Our Angels Are Different: They're modeled off the pari/peri of Persian Mythology, though they lack their source's angle as "mischevious beings denied entry to paradise until they complete a penace."
White Magic: Their spell-like abilities include cure wounds, dispel good and evil, and lesser restoration.

Pech

^2e

Classification: Elemental (5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Good

Small humanoid elemental-kin from the Elemental Plane of Earth, who often find the depths of the Material Plane to be a more hospitable home.

Art Evolution: They look like fairly normal humanoids in 2E, while 5E amplifies their stony elemental traits, to the point that the example pech's hairless head has a chunk broken or chiseled off.
Attack Its Weak Point: The pech's extensive knowledge of stone lets them know precisely where to strike a Rock Monster to reduce it to rubble. In 2E, their attacks against the likes of stone golems or galeb duhr always deal maximium damage, even with non-magical weapons, while in 5E, attacks with their fortified pickaxes always score critical hits against Constructs and objects.
Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: They find exposure to direct sunlight nauseating, and have the Light Sensitivity rule in 5E.
Dishing Out Dirt: The pech have power over rock and stone, and each can cast stone shape and stone tell several times per day. By working together, pech can use more powerful magic such as wall of stone or flesh to stone.
No-Sell: Pech are immune to petrification effects.
Pint-Sized Powerhouse: They're at most four feet tall, but pech are quite strong for their size, and their flesh is nearly as hard as granite.
Prophet Eyes: Their eyes are large and have no visible pupils; appropriately, pech have infravision/darkvision out to 120 feet, but are sensitive to light and will ask other creatures to douse their lamps.

Pegasus

"Behold the pegasus. It can outrace a dragon in the open sky, and only the best among us can ever hope to ride one. A fitting emblem for our great house, don't you think?" — Tyllenvane d'Orien

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Celestial (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Good

Intelligent winged horses. Pegasi are greatly prized as aerial steeds, although finding one can be quite difficult and winning its trust harder still.

Animal Jingoism: Pegasi normally reserve their enmity for evil beings, but bear a particularly deep-seated hatred of griffins and hippogriffs due to their fondness for equine prey.
Being Tortured Makes You Evil: According to the 5th edition monster manual, Nightmares are pegasi that have had their wings amputated and been tortured into evil.
Gameplay and Story Integration: In the 5th edition monster manual, a note contains a quote from a House Orien scion who boasts that the pegasus can outrace a dragon in the open sky. True enough, the pegasus' flying speed of 90 is 10 feet faster than the fastest dragon in the book.
Horse of a Different Color: Pegasi are popular flying mounts for good-aligned characters.
Pegasus: Goodly white horses with bird wings and with feathers making up their manes and fetlocks.
Whale Egg: In early editions, despite being primarily mammals with a few bird parts tacked on, pegasi reproduce by laying eggs. 5th changes this to them giving live birth like normal horses.

Peltast

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Alignment: Unaligned

Shapeshifting parasites that take the form of enticing items, so they'll be picked up and carried by their hosts. Standard peltasts disguise themselves as leather goods, while greater peltasts resemble gemstones.

Artifact of Death: Greater peltasts have magical abilities they use to maximize bloodshed and bodies upon which they can feed, and use a variant of summon monster to make hostile creatures attack their hosts, or make suggestions to encourage violence.
I Ate WHAT?!: Peltasts expel their waste when immersed in water, tainting it so that any drinkers become nauseated for several rounds.
No-Sell: Peltasts are immune to poison or crushing effects.
Picky People Eater: These creatures primarily feed upon humans and goblinoids — they'll allow themselves to be picked up by the likes of elves and dwarves, but never feed upon them, and will try to find a better host as soon as one presents itself.
The Symbiote: Peltasts feed by applying a liquid that serves as an anaesthetic and also dissolves a patch of their host's skin, allowing the creature to absorb nutrients from its blood. This deals a single hit point of damage each day, which many hosts don't even notice, while in exchange, the peltast neutralizes any poisons in its host, shares its minor spell resistance, and in emergencies can inject a few hit points back into its host, once per day. It's a little more obvious when a greater peltasts feeds, as the blood can be seen collecting within their crystalline forms, which also grow larger after feeding — as such, they prefer to feed upon sleeping or dying hosts.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: Peltasts can change their forms over two rounds, usually to take the shape of an item it sees a perspective host drop, so that the parasite might be mistaken for it.

Pennaggolan

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: As base creature +2 (3E), 10 (4E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

These fearsome blood-drinkers can masquerade as the living, but when they hunt, their heads detach from their bodies and fly into the night, trailing their internal organs beneath them.

Combat Tentacles: They can attack victims with their entrails, or more dangerously, grapple and constrict with them, also allowing the pennaggolan to bite and drain blood.
Flying Face: A gruesome example, in that the creature's viscera is dangling beneath their levitating heads.
Human Shifting: An odd variant; a pennaggolan's "natural" form is a flying head trailing entrails, but if it soaks said organs in vinegar to reduce their engorgement, a pennaggolan can stuff its viscera back into the shell of its former body and put its head back into position. In this guise, a pennaggolan appears normal, and more insidiously cannot be turned, and will register as its original alignment to spells like detect evil.
Hypnotic Gaze: Like vamipres, pennaggolans can mentally dominate other creatures by looking into their eyes.
Our Vampires Are Different: They actually share many traits and abilities with "classic" vampires, but the pennaggolan's grisly appearance sets them apart.
Soul Jar: If a pennaggolan's body is destroyed while its head is separated from it, the creature will die in one to four days.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Other creatures within 30 feet of a pennaggolan have to save or become shaken.
Vampiric Draining: They drain blood from victims they bite, dealing Constitution damage.
The Virus: In most cases, a pennaggolan's victims are strangled to death by their entrails before succumbing to its blood-draining attack, but if the latter does occur, the victim will rise as an independent, and irredeemably evil, pennaggolan, should its body go unburied for three days.

Peryton

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Natural Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E), 4 (4E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Stag-headed birds of prey that feed on human hearts.

Mix-and-Match Critters: They resemble enormous eagles with the heads of stags — some early art also gives them cervine legs — and the fangs of predatory mammals.
Our Perytons Are Different:invoked They're more bird-heavy than typical deceptions, being fully avian except for their stag heads. They're Chaotic Evil as a rule, and are gluttonous eaters of hearts — especially human ones. There's a great deal of in-universe debate about the nature of their shadows — some believe that a peryton casts the shadow of the last creature whose heart it ate, while others say that they always cast human shadows and yet others that they only cast their own shadow after killing a victim but before devouring it. "Ecology of the Peryton", in Dragon #82, describes a colony of perytons having invaded an island-nation named Atlantis on a far-off world before it sank beneath the waves, and as being fated to some day bring about the fall of the great city of Roma.
Picky People Eater: Perytons crave humanoid hearts over everything else, as female perytons need to eat them before being able to reproduce. Their first action after making a kill is to tear out the desired organ, after which they abandon the carcass and fly off. They're also fairly picky about the provenance of these hearts; they prize human ones above all others, but never eat those of elves and fairies.

Petal

Classification: Fey (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Good

Tiny fey who, when not serving as messengers for their larger kin, work to ensure that travelers and adventurers benefit from a restful sleep, whether they want to or not.

Forced Sleep: They can sing songs to duplicate lullaby and sleep spells, which they typically use one after the other. The more petals that contribute to the sleep song, the harder it is to resist.
Our Pixies Are Different: Petals are little fey at most a foot and a half tall, with flower petals for hair and wings, garbed in clothes made from leaves.
Stupid Good: Petals believe everyone deserves a good sleep, and to awake refreshed and surrounded by beauty. As such, they use their sleep songs on anyone they encounter, and once their guests fall asleep, the fey remove their uncomfortable armor and clothes to garb them in clothing of leaves and garlands of flowers. As might be imagined, this can leave the sleepers helpless against any thieves or monsters in the area.

Petitioner

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: As native plane

The souls of mortals given physical form on the Outer Planes, where they are rewarded or punished as their faith and actions in life determine. Their appearance and qualities can vary wildly depending on the Outer Plane they inhabit.

Angelic Transformation: Petitioners sent to Mount Celestia become lantern archons, who are guided by older archons until they're ready to evolve into a higher form of celestial.
Animorphism: Petitioners who end up in the Wilderness of the Beastlands soon become A Little Bit Beastly, and eventually transform into celestial beasts after a few centuries.
Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The goal of many petitioners — at least the ones who aren't spending eternity being tortured for their sins — is to become one with their patron deity, or even their home plane itself. The petitioners of Mount Celestia take this almost literally, as they hope to develop enough virtue and enlightenment to ascend through the plane's layers to reach Chronias, the highest of the Seven Mounting Heavens, from which no one returns.
Death Amnesia: Anyone who becomes a petitioner, but is later restored to life by magic, loses all memory of their time as one.
Demon of Human Origin: Some petitioners sent to the Abyss (who aren't simply absorbed into the plane itself) are transformed into manes, the least of demons, and similarly mortal soul shells damned to the Nine Hells might be tortured until they're transformed into lemures.
Departure Means Death: In 2nd Edition, petitioners undergo a Cessation of Existence if they ever leave their home plane (at least without a power sponsoring the excursion). 3E softens this to a "Planar Commitment" trait that means petitioners are teleported 100 miles in a random direction if someone attempts to move them off-plane.
Ghost Amnesia: While petitioners retain their mannerisms, general interests, speech patterns, etc. from life, they forget most memories of their past, and at most have a "shadowy recollection of a previous life" that is less important than their current circumstance. Or in 3E terms, they forget all their skills, feats and class abilities. There are exceptions to this — the petitioners of Elysium, for example, are noted to have stronger memories of their mortal life, translating to some retained character levels that make them extra dangerous when mobilized to defend their plane.
No-Sell: Beyond an array of energy resistances and immunities, petitioners are immune to all mind-influencing effects. "This may be due to the mindless nature of their existence, devotion to their deities, or being surrounded by a similarly-aligned plane."
Spear Carrier: The 3E Manual of the Planes directly refers to petitioners as such, while the 2E Planescape book compares their roles on the Outer Planes to that of commoners on the Prime Material.
Weird Currency: Most petitioners in the Gray Waste of Hades are mournful, ghostlike beings, but the most selfish and malicious mortal souls instead become larvae, human-sized worms with the mortal's face. Larvae are traded like currency across the Lower Planes, trafficked by the likes of liches, night hags and other fiends for use as food, spell components, or the raw material from which to make a new fiend.
Welcome to Corneria: Planescape describes petitioners as difficult to converse with, as they're so fixated on merging with their god or home plane that they come across as monomaniacal.

Phaerimm

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Bizarre-looking flying beings feared for their evil natures and mastery of sorcery.

Absolute Xenophobe: Averted, to an extent, as their 3rd Edition write-up notes that phaerimm would like to exterminate all other life, except that would deny them slaves they could torture to death for sport.
Attack Reflector/Feed It with Fire: As per their AD&D rules, any magic that fails to penetrate a phaerimm's (considerable) spell resistance will both heal the monster and be rebounded back on the caster.
Beware My Stinger Tail: They have a poisonous sting that also implants eggs in the victim.
Blue-and-Orange Morality: Again, averted; "If phaerimms were less evil, they would be more alien and difficult to understand, but their overwhelming drive toward inflicting pain makes them somewhat predictable."
Mage Species: Phaerimm are natural spellcasters, and their 3rd Edition rules let them cast sorcerer spells like they were spell-like abilities, without requiring verbal, somatic or material components, while their AD&D write-up notes that the most powerful phaerimm mages are equivalent to 22nd-to-27th level wizards. They're also egotistical about their magic, and view physical combat as a sign of weakness, an admission that their arcane power is insufficient.
No-Sell: They're immune to polymorph and petrification effects.
Omnicidal Maniac: They would gladly wipe out all other life, except that then they wouldn't have anyone to enslave.
Our Monsters Are Weird: They look like nothing less than 12-foot-long windsocks with a Lamprey Mouth and multiple humanoid arms.
Poisonous Person: A phaerimm's tail stinger carries a weird poison that both paralyzes their victim on a failed save, and also causes them to levitate off the ground for potentially hours, immobilizing them unless they have a stick or something to push against the ground. And with their AD&D rules, victims also have to save to see whether they've been implanted with a viable phaerimm egg, which will hatch after a few days, at which point the young phaerimm will begin eating its way out of the host. Thankfully, a cure disease spell kills the larva.
Sealed Evil in a Can: In the Realms, most phaerimm were sealed beneath Anauroch by their ancient sharn rivals, and only a few escaped — though some of those are working to free their kin.
Supernatural Sensitivity: In 3rd Edition, phaerimm have "full vision," allowing them to detect magic and perceive ethereal or astral creatures out to 120 feet.

Phaerlock

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

The descendants of lizardfolk modified by the phaerimm, leaving them tortured creatures wandering the Underdark in search of victims.

Agony Beam: Phaerlocks can fix their gaze on a nearby creature, which has to save or share the agony of the phaerlock's existence. A failed save will leave the victim paralyzed in horrible pain for a round, and shaken for several more rounds afterward. This effect doesn't work on things without proper nervous systems like constructs, plants, undead, etc.
Extra Eyes: Part of their augmentation involved having two extra eyes implanted in their heads, providing phaerlocks with all-around vision and preventing them from being flanked.
Flaying Alive: The blood-colored organic armor plating covering their bodies evokes this.
Lizard Folk: Phaerlocks are derived from such, and retain their ancestors' ability to hold their breath underwater for extended periods.
Tortured Monster: Even breathing is agonizing for these creatures, forcing them to either develop mental tricks to block out the pain, or ease their torment by forcing other creatures to experience it.

Phaethon

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challeng Rating: 2 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Distant relatives of elves with the ability to manifest wings of fire. Not be confused with the abominations also known as phaethons.

Angelic Transformation: Some phaethons feel a pull towards something greater as they mature, until at some point they're compelled to fly skyward towards the sun, to the very limit of their endurance, and undergo an apotheosis into a living embodiment of their gods. Those who complete this Rite of Ascension return as elder phaethons, blessed with 30-foot flaming wingspans that deal increased damage and can harm enemies who simply come near them, and become native outsiders who stop aging and only rarely need to eat. Councils of such elders lead phaethon communities, though other elders are more aloof and spend most of their time on the wing patrolling their homeland.
Bare-Fisted Monk: Phaethon tend to be spiritual and traditionalists, and their communities are orderly, austure and isolated, built above the treeline on mountainsides — as such, they're natural monks. Though some phaethon abandon their Lawful traditions to make a more Chaotic "Dance of Flames" in combat.
Hot Wings: Their signature trait, and why phaethon architecture makes no use of wood. As a free action, a phaethon can manifest a set of blazing wings, allowing them to fly or add fire damage to their unarmed attacks or grapple actions. Those who devote themselves to Habbakuk (as Phaeran the Firebird) and complete certain religious rites have their fiery wings turn blue.
Immune to Fire: They have the fire subtype, making them immune to fire damage but vulnerable to cold. Phaethons thus seek out active volcanoes as a ready source of molten stone and metal to craft.
Our Elves Are Different: Phaethons look like half-elves until their wings ignite, are descended from a Kagonesti elf, and have an elven fondness for nature, animals and forests... as well as a tendency towards aloofness, introversion, and the confidence that outsiders have nothing to offer phaethons that they can't learn from their own predecessors. In 3E they retain the elf subtype, so are subject to anything that targets elves.
Semi-Divine: On Krynn, they claim to be descended from a son of the god Habbakuk, the Blue Phoenix.

Phanaton

Origin: Mystara
Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Good

Small, arboreal humanoids resembling gliding monkey-raccoons, who keep to themselves, tending to their forest homes.

Arch-Enemy: Phantons hate aranea and attack the spider-folk on sight, "casting aside all tactics and stealth."
Nature Hero: They act as tenders to their home forests, keeping them healthy by "cultivating favorite plants, clearing away dead plant matter, and ensuring that the balance of nature in their area is maintained." Loggers trespassing in their woods will suffer pranks and sabotage, though anyone threatening their homes will be attacked directly. In return, phanatons have an empathic connection with forests, resulting in a slight bonus on saving throws when inside them. Unsurprisingly, they get along well with the likes of sylvan elves, dryads and treants.
Not Quite Flight: They can use their patagia to glide, moving 20 feet forward for every 5 feet they descend.
Trademark Favorite Food: Though they primarily eat plants, phanatons are omnivores who occasionally eat meat, and particularly relish spiders.
Treetop Town: Phanatons live in such, building their villages on platforms high in the trees.

Phantasmal Slayer

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: 15 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Horrors whose hunting methods may have inspired the phantasmal killer spell.

Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: These creatures' true form remains a mystery, as even if someone disbelieves their phantasmal facade or looks upon them with a true seeing effect, an onlooker sees a "ghostly shadow of their greatest fear."
Armor-Piercing Attack: A phantasmal slayer's incorporeal touch attacks don't just bypass normal armor, they also ignore any form of Damage Reduction that doesn't rely on a special material like silver or cold iron.
Emotion Bomb: Beyond their trademark ability below, phantasmal slayers know magic like scare, fear and crushing despair.
I Know What You Fear: Anyone who looks at a phantasmal slayer sees "the most hideous, most terrifying sight you have ever seen," the reflection of their greatest fear. Just like with the phantasmal killer spell, if someone fails their initial roll to disbelieve the illusion, and the slayer then touches them, they have to save again or die of fright.
Intangibility: They're naturally incoporeal.
Telepathy: Beyond speaking several languages, phantasmal slayers can communicate telepathically out to 100 feet.

Phantom Fungus

Classification: Plant (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Mobile, carnivorous fungus monsters that are naturally invisible, and remain so even while attacking.

Attack Animal: Though only as intelligent as animals, phantom fungi are trainable, and make dangerous guards since most detection magic doesn't pick them up. Their invisibility also makes training them difficult, however, leading to handlers throwing flour on them or tying ribbons around them to keep track of their location. Phantom fungi are often trained to click their teeth after performing a trick, a habit which can give them away.
Invisible Monsters: They're under a constant greater invisibility effect, which allows them to remain unseen even when taking actions like attacking. Since phantom fungi are pretty quiet while stalking prey, often the only thing that gives them away is their strange, moldy odor.
Man-Eating Plant: Fungus, but close enough. They have bizarre bodies with four stumpy legs supporting a green-brown mass, a toothy mouth, and a cluster of nodules that serve as sensory organs, but are normally only visible when slain.

Ghosteater

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

Incorporeal creatures that appear related to the phantom fungus, but have a much more specialized diet.

Cannibalism Superpower: If a ghosteater consumes a ghostly mage, until that ghost is fully digested, the creature can cast its victim's prepared spells or remaining spell slots as if it were that ghost, provided said ghost was carrying the required material components and arcane foci on its form.
Exactly What It Says on the Tin: They eat ghosts, and only ghosts. Groups of living beings have reported ghosteaters observing them before ducking through a solid wall, but if a ghost is present, the creatures will attack.
Intangibility: They're naturally incorporeal, and even if they fully manifest on the Material Plane, they can make an ethereal jaunt several times per day.
It Can Think: Unlike their presumed cousins, ghosteaters are near-geniuses, and seem to have some way to communicate with each other, but make no efforts to do so with other creatures. "They seem to be content to be high-end predators of very specialized prey."
Non-Health Damage: Their tentacle attacks deal temporary Wisdom damage, which can put living creatures into nightmares if their Wisdom score hits 0. Ghosts, on the other hand, will then be swallowed by the ghosteater and stored in one of its fleshy sacs, where the ghost takes normal and Wisdom damage each round until it is consumed.

Phase Wasp

Classification: Magical Beast (3E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Oversized wasps with a dangerous magical attack, and a tendency to make nests from paper stolen from libraries, magical and non-magical.

Big Creepy-Crawlies: A phase wasp is 18 inches long.
Magic Missile Storm: They can fire a pair of magic missiles every few rounds. Since phase wasps live in swarms of up to about 20 creatures, that equals a lot of unavoidable, Non-Elemental damage.
See the Invisible: Phase wasps can see and attack invisible and ethereal creatures (through the planar boundary in the latter case).

Phasm

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Amorphous shapeshifters that use their ablities to devote their lives to exploration, philosophical contemplation, or pure hedonism as their whims decree.

Blob Monster: In its natural form, a phasm resembles an ooze and attacks with pseudopods.
The Hedonist: They crave new experiences, from scents or flavors to obscure trivia and juicy gossip.
It Amused Me: Phasms' fundamental motivation. This means that there's no telling how they'll react to a given situation, whether they'll attack or parley with or retreat from opponents. Sometimes phasms will team up with doppelgangers just for the fun of it, other times they'll hire out their talents as spies, except they're notoriously unreliable since they don't feel any obligation to share what they learn.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: Phasms can take the form of almost any other creature or object of Large size or smaller, an ability they use in combat or to aid their infiltrations.

Phirblas

Origin: Planescape
Alignment: Neutral Good

Gaunt humanoids sometimes encountered on the Ethereal Plane, known for their unusual non-verbal method of communication.

Compelling Voice: A non-verbal example; once per day, a phirblas can use its words and telepathy to make a suggestion.
Fearless Fool: Phirblas don't fight among each other, don't seem to age or contract diseases, and rarely meet with fatal accidents. As such, they have little fear or understanding of death, which makes other planar travelers consider phirblas quite naive.
Hover Skates: In another trait they share with the dabus, phirblas' feet don't touch the ground. They can't actually fly, and move about as if they were walking, just slightly above the surface beneath them.
Mass Hypnosis: Three times per day, phirblas can form a dizzying array of words above them to replicate a hypnotic pattern.
No Biological Sex: Phirblas don't have recognizable genders, and in the rare cases they reproduce, do so asexually to produce a fully-grown phirblas.
Pocket Dimension: Though their listed environment is the Ethereal Plane, phirblas properly hail from Inphirblau, an ancient demiplane that contains a veritable metropolis housing millions of phirblas.
Speech Bubbles: A weird variant; phirblas have a form of telepathy that allows them to communicate by having words form in the air right above them, about ten at a time, appearing in the language of their intended recipient. The nature of said script indicates the phirblas' emotional state, so flowing and elegant letters are used for a formal address, while quick and simple text indicates a casual conversation, messy writing indicates that the phirblas is in a hurry or doesn't wish to converse, and shaky script suggests emotional distress. This trait suggests some connection between the phirblas and the dabus of Sigil, but nothing conclusive has been proven.
Veganopia: The phirblas' dietary needs are met by herbariums all over their demiplane-city, and their chefs have devised mutliple hot and cold vegetarian dishes so complicated that it takes several days to prepare them.

Phiuhl

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Also known as "vaporous horrors" or "lingering deaths," these murderous clouds of poisonous steam haunt the Bleak Eternity of Gehenna.

Deadly Gas: A phiuhl more or less is a sentient cloud of superheated poisonous vapor, and anyone within 50 feet of them has to save or take Constitution damage (in 3rd Edition), or be in danger of collapsing and expiring in a matter of rounds (in 2nd Edition). On the upside, their gaseous nature makes phiuhls vulnerable to being blown around by effects such as the gust of wind spell.
Evil Living Flames: They get in on this trope as well due to their sweltering heat, which damages anything that comes close to phiuhls. Things only get worse if a phiuhl envelops a victim in their gaseous form, dealing Level Drain from the intense, dessicating heat. Some phiuhls are known as "harvesters as flame" because they lack the poisonous aspect or normal phiuhls, but double down on the fire damage, and are even able to damage creatures explicitly immune to heat.
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Phiuhls have inscrutable and alien minds that can drive anyone trying to make mental contact with them insane. A cambion sorcerer by the name of Rgillyth attempted to use ESP to interrogate a phiuhl about the creature's origins, and was left ranting about "undead lords of brass," "spirits of long-dead wind dukes," and a "melded prison of steam."
Riddle for the Ages: No one's sure what exactly phiuhls are, and mortal and fiendish scholars alike have tried to capture and study them, to little success. The prevailing theory is that phiuhls are the spirits of slain elementals, except no priest has been able to successfully turn them, and 3rd Edition classifies them as aberrations rather than undead.
Starfish Language: Phiuhls speak no audible language, but appear to have some way to communicate with one another, as they often operate in pairs. Night hags have been known to strike short-term bargains with phiuhls, usually offering larvae in exchange for safe passage or small favors, but attempts by tanar'ri and baatezu to bring phiuhls into the Blood War have been unsuccessful.

Phoelarch

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid/Magical Beast (3E), Natural Humanoid/Elemental Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (phoelarch) 3 (phoera) (3E); 12 (4E)
Alignment: Chaotic Good (3E), Unaligned (4E)

Phoelarchs are humanoids with avian features said to be kin to phoenixes, who wield the power of fire as they wander the world, fighting for freedom. When a phoelarch is slain, its ashes give rise to a purely-avian phoera.

Art Evolution: While their 3rd Edition art depicts phoelarchs with brilliantly-colored feathers on their heads and upper bodies, 4th Edition gives them full-on flames instead.
Defeat Equals Explosion: When slain, phoelarchs detonate in a 20-foot fireball.
Feed It with Fire: Phoelarchs and phoera are healed by fire effects.
The Phoenix: They're suspected of being related in some way to the legendary firebirds, and they share many phoenix-like traits, particularly how they die. After detonating, a phoelarch leaves behind a pile of ashes and a black glass egg, which in 24 hours will hatch into a phoera. This phoera is an entirely new creature, with no memories of its phoelarch "parent's" life, but once that phoera has hatched, the original phoelarch cannot be brought back to life by any means short of a wish or miracle used in conjunction with resurrection. If a phoera is slain, its body too immolates and leaves behind another black glass egg, which will hatch into a new phoera; once again, it is very difficult to bring back the original phoera after its "child" hatches.
Playing with Fire: Phoelarchs wield spell-like abilities such as scorching ray, produce flame and fire shield, while phoera have a fiery Breath Weapon and can ignite foes they attack with their beak or claws. Both creatures are also hot enough to damage foes who touch them, an ability they can choose to suppress.
Underground Monkey: Vazalkyon and vazalka are cold-themed variants of phoelarchs and phoera, and are identical save for wielding and healing from a different energy type, and causing foes to be shaken from cold rather than igniting from heat.

Phoenix

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Elemental Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 24 (3E), 19 (4E)
Alignment: Neutral Good (1E-3E), Unaligned (4E)

Large, fiery birds capable of resurrecting themselves when slain.

For the 5E iteration of this creature, see the "Elder Elementals" section of the "Elementals" entry.

Giant Flyer: Phoenixes are usually very large birds, with wingspans at or over the forty-foot range.
Organ Drops: Phoenix feathers are useful additions to a staff of healing or various curative potions, while their eyes, beaks and talons can fetch up to 5000 gp apiece from buyers who aren't appalled by someone killing and butchering a firebird.
The Phoenix: There have been several versions and interpretations of this creature over the years. Depending on the edition, they're either Neutral Good inhabitants of the Upper Planes or destructive Elemental Embodiments of fire. Either way, they're usually very large, with red-gold plumage, extremely powerful, and hard to keep dead.
- In the first edition Fiend Folio, it's stated that phoenixes are based on garbled accounts of reptilian ostrich-like monsters called giant striders bathing in fire (see the "Firenewt" entry). This is immediately contradicted by the subsequent Monster Manual II introducing actual phoenixes to the game.
- 3rd Edition's Monster Manual II presents phoenixes as being powerful creatures of good and opponents of evil beings, and as being considered omens of either fortune or disasters when seen.
- The 5th Edition Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes takes the Elemental Embodiment aspect to the extreme with an elder elemental called the phoenix. It's pretty damn intense, powerful enough to rival an ancient red dragon, and desires to see everything burn.
Playing with Fire: While the specifics vary between editions, phoenixes' ties to the element of fire typically allow them some control over flame in the form of spell-like abilities such as fire seeds, incendiary cloud and pyrotechnics.
Resurrective Immortality: Famously, a dying phoenix will burn itself to ashes and then rise to new life from its own remains. In 3rd Edition, this isn't quite an Auto-Revive, but a full-round action the phoenix can take when death is near.
Speaks Fluent Animal: Phoenixes use Telepathy to communicate with most creatures, but can "speak" with other avians.
Super-Scream: A phoenix can emit a piercing war shriek that slows opponents.
White Magic: Beyond their fiery abilities, phoenixes can also wield curative magic like cure light wounds, heal, remove curse, and even reincarnate.

Phthisic

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

A repressed neurosis given life, hungering for the mental energy of other creatures.

Achilles' Heel: Since they're creatures of the mind, feeblemind and confusion spells deal damage to phthisics in 2nd Edition, and nullify their Healing Factor for several rounds.
An Ice Person: In 2nd Edition, phthisics can, once per hour, surround themselves with an aura of cold strong enough to deal damage to anything within 10 feet, though only for a single round.
Art Evolution: 2nd Edition phthisics appear as enlarged and twisted versions of the being from which they emerged, but their 3rd Edition incarnation is much more monstrous, so that it takes a DC 25 Spot check to notice the resemblance between the phthisic and its source.
Attack Reflector: Their AD&D rules explain that phthisics are "born of turmoil, self-deprecation, and doubt," and thus have a 25% chance to reflect any offensive magic back on their casters.
Horror Hunger: A phthisic "constantly craves the sweet nectar of sanity to soothe its mental torment, if only for a while."
Psychic Powers: 3E phthisics have the psionic subtype, and an array of powers such as brain lock, ego whip and mind thrust.
Retcon: 2E phthisics are specifically the creations of the mind flayers, the only creatures skilled enough to draw them from the minds of their thralls. In 3rd Edition, phthisics' origins are unknown, though speculated to be the product of a variant of psychic chirurgery.
Soul Jar: In 2nd Edition, phthisics are bound to complex psionic circuitry affixed to an inanimate object. While this means they can't move more than three miles away from this source, or spend too long apart from it, the phthisic can instantly teleport back to its lair, and perceive everything around its psionic circuitry. But destroying the psinoic circuitry will instantly destroy the phthisic (in contrast to killing the creature from which the phthisic is spawned, whose death does nothing to the phthisic).
Stupidity-Inducing Attack: A phthisics' bite attacks cause a feeblemind effect in 2nd Edition, and if it's able to feed in peace, the monster can drain Intelligence from its victim. In 3rd Edition, its bite deals Intelligence damage that, should a victim reach 0 Int, becomes permanent ability drain. Those who the phthisic is draining in this way experience a deathly chill, and should they succumb to it, their corpses will shrivel as a side-effect of the feeding.
Tulpa: Phthisics are spawned from the troubled psyche of intelligent beings, the physical embodiments of a repressed memory or suppressed neurosis.

Phynxkin

Classification: Animal (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (normal), 4 (dire) (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Stealthy pack hunters about five feet long, whose bodies blend feline and draconic traits.

Deadly Lunge: Like mundane hunting cats, phynxkin can make "pounce" attacks, biting and raking prey during a charge.
Dragon Ancestry: They're drakken, creatures descended from dragons, but without any supernatural qualities. However, phynxkin's blood still has some latent magic, and in rare cases, exposure to dragons or draconic magic can cause the creatures to grow into Large "dire" phynxkin that tend to bond with humanoids, "a habit that some scholars attribute to genetic memory of their dragon ancestry."
Hit-and-Run Tactics: When attacking as a group, phynxkin alternate pouncing and retreating, and often switch up opponents, making it difficult for a foe to concentrate on one phynxkin at a time.
Super-Persistent Predator: Their entry has a quote from a ranger describing how one phynxkin shadowed his party through two days and nights despite them setting a grueling pace. They've also been known to break off a hunt to tend to the rest of their pack, only to resume stalking their prey weeks or even months later.

Pixie

Classification: Fey (3E, 5E), Fey Humanoid (4E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E), 1 (4E), 1/4 (5E)
Playable: 2E-4E
Alignment: Neutral Good, Unaligned (4E)

Diminutive fairies who delight in playing harmless tricks on people.

Crafted from Animals: Pixie wings can be ground into dust of disappearance. "Naturally, pixies frown on this use of their wings."
The Dandy/The Fashionista: Pixies style themselves as the princes and princesses of the sky, and dress accordingly in sparkling silken gowns and doublets, or in outfits crafted from leaves, tree bark and small animal pelts. One of the surest ways to win a pixie over is by complimenting their fashion sense.
Rivergleam: Petal gowns and acorn caps are so last summer!
Fairy Trickster: They amuse themselves by leading travelers astray with dancing lights, sneakily tying shoelaces together, blowing out candles, and so forth.
Honest Axe: Pixies like to trick misers out of their treasure, accumulate it in a small hoard, and use it to taunt other greedy people. But if one of their victims takes the pixie's pranks in good humor and shows no greed when led to the treasure pile, the fey may allow the individual to choose an item from their hoard.
Our Pixies Are Different: Pixies resemble diminutive elves with bright, luminous gossamer wings and an assortment of magical powers. They use their spells for harmless pranks, though their pixie dust is said to have magical properties ranging from bestowing flight to putting creatures into an enchanted slumber, leading some mages and monsters to pursue pixies to take advantage of this power.
Painting the Frost on Windows: On both the Feywild and Material Plane, pixies wake the birds for springtime, sprinkle dew on summer flowers, paint the autumn leaves, and draw frost on windows during winter.
Shrinking Violet: They like to spy on other creatures and can barely contain their excitement upon seeing interlopers, but their overwhelming urge to introduce themselves and strike up a friendship is only controlled by the fear of being captured or attacked. Those who wander through a pixie's glade might never see them, yet hear the occasional giggle, gasp or sigh.

Plague Blight

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E)
Alignment: Any evil

The animate corpses of plague victims, their bloated, putrid flesh is barely constrained by their cloth wrappings, while their lurching forms are surrounded by a sickening stench.

Deceased and Diseased: Their attacks infect victims with an accelerated form of gangrene that progresses in a matter of seconds, dealing Constitution damage and causing those who succumb to molder into a stinking mass.
Super-Toughness: Any physical attack against plague blights only deals half damage, even before applying their Damage Reduction against all but slashing weapons.
Weaponized Stench: Plague blights can emit stenches so foul that living creatures take Strength damage from being near them.

Plague Brush

Classification: Plant (3E)
Challenge Rating: 17 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

35-foot wide, poisonous tumbleweeds that normally roll about the scarlet plains of Cathrys, second layer of the Tarterian Depths of Carceri.

Homing Boulders: They're essentially free-roaming, vegetable examples, instinctively chasing down and flattening anything they come across. With a 60-foot movement speed, escaping them is more easily said than done.
Poisonous Person: Plague brushes constantly emit a 30-foot cloud of spores that cause heavy Strength and Constitution damage.
Trampled Underfoot: These plants' primary attack is to simply roll over other creatures, dealing damage and potentially causing them to get scooped up in the tangle of vines, trapping them inside the plant until they either extract themselves or succumb to the plague brush's spores. In fact, these mindless plants often ignore creatures they've rolled over or entrapped, and after tumbling through an encampment will just keep rolling along their way.

Plague Spewer

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 10 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Giant-sized undead that spread plague and disease, either directly or through the swarms of vermin they can disgorge.

Deceased and Diseased: Plague spewers' slam attacks carry a supernatural plague that incubates in a mere minute, deals heavy Dexterity and Constitution damage, and worst of all can spread through simple contact with an infected victim.
Mook Maker: Four times per day, a plague spewer can vomit up a Swarm of Rats, usually in response to enemies attacking it from out of reach.
The Virus: Any Huge-sized victim who succumbs to their plague becomes another plague spewer themselves.

Plague Walker

Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Undead whose bodies are filled with diseased matter and putrid flesh to the point of being nearly spherical, and capable of exploding when sufficiently damaged.

Action Bomb: When a plague walker's hit points fall past 25%, it can choose to explode, damaging and nauseating anything in a 30-foot radius. This isn't a case of Defeat Equals Explosion, however, since if the undead is reduced to 0 hit points before it can take that swift action, it instead dissolves into a pile of rotting flesh.
Deceased and Diseased: Their filthy claw attacks carry a nonspecific disease that can sicken anyone struck by them.
Logical Weakness: Plague walkers are bigger targets than their size category would indicate, so opponents shooting at them don't receive the normal penalty on ranged attacks against a target in a melee.

Planar Incarnate

Origin: Planescape
Classification: Celestial or Fiend (5E)
Challenge Rating: 22 (5E)
Alignment: Any

Gargantuan manfiestations of planar power, spawned at critical moments to protect their home plane from opposing forces.

Contractual Boss Immunity: They're immune to just about every status effect, on top of a host of damage resistances and immunities.
Evil Living Flames: Planar incarnates from the Lower Planes take sinister forms, roiling waves of fiendish flames.
Genius Loci: They can be considered as such, physical embodiments of a plane's philosophy, "akin to natural disasters that work to protect and further the virtues and vices of the planes they originate upon."
Omniglot: Planar incarnates are quite intelligent, and capable of speaking every language.
Playing with Fire: In response to being hit by an attack roll, a planar incarnate can magically gaze at a creature and command it to combust.

Planetouched

A chaond and zenythri (3e)

Classification: Outsider (3E)

"Planetouched" is a catch-all term describing those whose bloodlines have been touched by powers beyond the Material Plane. Though this effect is not as pronounced as in a half-celestial or cambion, this extraplanar heritage manifests in supernatural abilities and physical traits for many generations.

Several of the most common planetouched, the aasimars, tieflings and genasi, are discussed on the Playable Races page.

Divine Parentage: Planetouched's heritages can range from Good and Evil to Law and Chaos. Axani for example have a touch of pure Law in their blood.
Mark of the Supernatural: Planetouched tend to have something that visibly sets them apart from normal Material Plane races, whether something as dramatic as a different skin tone, weird eyes, or vestigial wings or horns, or something as subtle as being a little too good-looking, or strangely nondescript.

Chaond

Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Usually Chaotic

The descendants of someone who survived a slaad's reproduction attempt, but had their bloodline tainted with raw Chaos in the process.

Combat Pragmatist: Their chaotic natures mean chaonds have no patience for "rules" of warfare — they fight dirty and often hide small, Poisoned Weapons on their bodies.
Frog Men: They're a downplayed example, but show their slaadi heritage with stocky bodies, wide feet, and gravelly voices that tend to come out as croaks when they're excited.
Kaleidoscope Eyes: Chaonds crank this up a notch by having not just their eye color slowly shift over time, but their hair color and skin tone as well.
Make Some Noise: They can cast shatter once per day on fragile objects or crystalline creatures.

Gloaming

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Usually contrary to the dominant Alignment in an area

Small beings descended from natives of the Plane of Shadow, making them comfortable in the Underdark.

Arch-Enemy: Gloamings hold a "deep-set, racial hatred of the drow," allegedly because the dark elves only learned how to cast the cloak of dark power spell by conducting torturous experiments upon captive gloamings.
Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: Due to their Shadow heritage, gloamings are blinded by sudden exposure to bright light and take a minor penalty on rolls while remaining in it.
Innate Night Vision: Downplayed; they have low-light vision, not full darkvision, though their ability to be their own light source mitigates this somewhat.
Mistaken Identity: Most who see a gloaming can tell they're planetouched, though they're so rare that those people tend to assume they're tieflings. This might contribute to the fascination gloamings feel towards tieflings, so that they view them as kindred spirits or distant cousins.
Phosphor-Essence: They can cause their pale skin to glow, up to the brightness of a torch, until the gloaming chooses to change the intensity, or they die and the glow gradually fades over 10 minutes. Gloamings are known to get tattoos specifically to cause interesting shading effects when they make their skin glow.
Picky People Eater: Gloamings benefit from this; mind flayers find their brains unpalatable and gloamings to be problematic slaves. As a result, illithids ignore these planetouched unless provoked.
Walking the Earth: They're curious and seemingly incapable of settling in any place for long, making gloamings compulsive travelers.
Winged Humanoid: They have dark, furry insectile wings, allowing them to fly at twice their land speed.

Mechanatrix

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

Humanoids with an ancestor among the clockwork beings of Mechanus, giving them inorganic features and a coldly rational approach to life.

Child of Two Worlds: They're hit particularly hard by this, as humans tend to shun mechanatrices, while Mechanus' natives consider them "tainted and impure."
Chrome Champion: Mechanatrices tend to have a metallic sheen to their skin, and are sometimes born with a mechanical limb.
Feed It with Fire: They're healed by electricity, recovering a hit point for every three points of damage an electrical effect would have dealt them.
Reluctant Warrior: These planetouched consider fighting to be "destructive and wasteful," and try to avoid it whenever possible. But when pressed, mechanatrices are shrewd tacticians, and their innate knack for engineering and crafts makes them excellent siege engineers.
Shock and Awe: Mechanatrices can use shocking grasp once per day.

Shadowswyft

Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Any Chaotic

Lanky, dark-hued planetouched from the Plane of Shadow, quick to take action and naturally adventurous.

Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: They generally have short attention spans, and even their associations with other creatures rarely last long before the shadowswyft moves on.
Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: Shadowswyfts are blinded for a round upon being exposed to bright light, and dazzled so long as they stay in it.
Fragile Speedster: Their base speed is an impressive 40 feet (compared to standard races' 30 feet), and they have a racial bonus to Dexterity and initiative checks, but shadowswyfts also take a penalty to their Constitution.
Innate Night Vision: They have both low-light vision and superior darkvision, and can see twice as far in total darkness as the likes of dwarves and tieflings.
Leeroy Jenkins: Shadowswyfts tend to be mercurial in temperament and prone to acting with little regard for consequences — "In the amount of time it takes to formulate and evaluate a plan, worlds could be won or lost."
Starfish Language: Downplayed; the shadowswyft language utilizes both sound and kinesics such as body language and facial expressions. This means that Shadowswyft's written form includes multiple symbols to show the connotations for each word, while their names tend to be accompanied by a signifying gesture: Brot (point right index finger), Gheer (headshake), T'Har (wink), Phaer (touch chin), etc.
Sneaky Spy Species: Shadowswyfts have racial bonuses to Hide and Move Silently checks, and favor the rogue class.

Shyft

Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: True Neutral

Seemingly-human planetouched with an ancestor from the Ethereal Plane.

Intangibility: They can make an ethereal jaunt once per day, allowing shyfts to eavesdrop out of sight on the Ethereal Plane or use it to make an attack or escape as needed.
The Nondescript: Shyfts look remarkably unremarkable, easy to overlook and forget, and prefer to wear dark, simple clothes that don't attract attention.
Sneaky Spy Species: They get a racial bonus to Hide and Move Silently checks, and tend to find employment as thieves or spies, selling their services to the highest bidder.

Zenythri

Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Usually Lawful

Humanoids descended from unnamed beings of pure Law, making them strive to attain their personal perfection and gravitate towards leadership positions in their societies.

Amazing Technicolor Population: They look nearly human, save for the faint blue or purple tint of their skin and hair.
Clean Up the Town: Zenythri have an instinctive urge to impose order on their surroundings, and some go so far as to travel to lawless areas in order to bring some sort of structure to them.
Combat Clairvoyance: They can use true strike once per day to guide an attack.
Uncanny Valley: Implied; zenythri are noted for their flawless features and hair that naturally falls into place, but don't get any Charisma bonus from it, and in fact their basic statline has them with lower-than-average Charisma, implying that other creatures find them too perfect-looking.

Plasmoid

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Ooze (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1/4 (5E)
Alignment: Any

Intelligent, amoeba-like beings who can alter their body configuration at will, assuming roughly-humanoid forms or more amorphous shapes. See the Playable Races subpage for more information about them.

Poltergeist

Classification: Undead (5E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil (2E), Chaotic Evil (5E)

Restless spirits that express their anger by hurling objects around.

Invisible Monsters: Poltergeists are naturally invisible, though their 2E entry says those who use magic to perceive them will see humanoids with tortured faces, clad in rags and heavy chains representing their evil deeds in life.
Mind over Matter: 5E poltergeists can slam victims with telekinetic force, or toss around creatures or objects weighing up to 150 pounds.
Peek-a-Bogeyman: AD&D poltergeists never actually deal damage with their attacks — even if they manage to telekinetically hurl something dangerous like a knife or sword, their entry tells DMs to treat the attack as "terrifying near-misses." Instead, the undead can only cause their victims to flee in terror from their hauntings.
Pensieve Flashback: Some particularly strong AD&D poltergeists can cause "phantom shifts" around them, illusions that take other creatures back to the time the poltergeist was alive, which usually reveal why the spirit became a poltergeist. Such illusions tend to happen on the anniversary of the poltergeist's death, and though occasionally terrifying, always end the moment their viewers are put in apparent danger, or they try to interfere with it.
Poltergeist: True to the trope, their key trait is throwing things rather than employing the horrific attacks of other undead. In 2nd Edition, poltergeists are classified as a type of haunt, speculated to be the spirits of those "whose hideous crimes went unpunished in life." 5th Edition dubs them a variant of specter, the enraged and confused spirit of someone with no sense of how they died.

Porcupine Cactus

Classification: Plant (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Spiny, barrel-shaped cacti that can explode at the slightest touch.

Exploding Barrels: They're basically an organic example. Immature porcupine cacti have flat shapes and leathery textures, but the plants swell up during the rare desert rains, sprout large flowers, and soon swell even more with seeds. A turgid porcupine cactus can detonate when struck by a creature, or in the presence of 20-mile-per-hour winds or strong vibrations (such as those produced by a tunneling ashworm). This deals damage to everything in a 10-foot radius, leaves behind thorny flesh on the ground that acts as caltrops, and most dangerously, is likely to start a chain reaction among the other cacti in the patch.
Man-Eating Plant: They don't have mouths, but porcupine cacti seeds tend to grow in the bodies of those slain in the detonation of their parent plants.
The Spiny: Anyone trying to handle (or more stupidly, make a natural melee attack against) a porcupine cactus takes damage from its thorns.

Portal Drake

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Dragon (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Small dragons who lurk around freestanding magic portals, using them to secure treasure and prey.

Ambushing Enemy: Portal drakes usually camp a teleportation portal, using their "portal sight" ability to see through it (and any other portal they've gone through). When prey walks past one of those portals — especially adventurers with a lot of magic items — the portal drake jumps out, uses their breath weapon to incapacitate the targets, grabs their loot, and then flees back through the portal.
Breath Weapon: Theirs is a short cone of poisonous gas that deals Strength damage and induces unconsciousness.
Doppelgänger Spin: Portal drakes can cast mirror image once per day.
Portal Network: These drakes can make their own. Once they've traveled through a given magic portal, they can choose to return to that destination when passing through any other portal regardless of where it's set to lead.
Unreliable Illustrator: Their entry describes them as looking like light gray copper dragons, though the accompanying illustration lacks the coppers' distinctive facial structure and manta-like wings.

Protean Scourge

Classification: Monstrous Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Diabolic-looking shapeshifters who love to murder, and duplicate themselves when attacked.

Asteroids Monster: Protean scourges' signature ability is to, after taking damage, immediately split in two identical monsters, each with as many hit points as the original creature. The only downsides are that the monster can't use its shapechanging ability until its duplicates have re-merged (a process that takes a minute and leaves it helpless), and the duplicates use a shared spell "pool" rather than each having their own array of unspent spell slots.
Big Red Devil: They appear as such, being Horned Humanoids with pebbly red skin, though they aren't actually fiends.
Magic Knight: Protean scourges are formidable in melee, and cast spells as 8th-level sorcerers.
Psycho for Hire: These monsters excel as assassins, though others find work as spies or as the leaders of thieves guilds, roles they are content with so long as they find chances to shed blood.
Sinister Scythe: An invoked trope, as protean scourges favor the weapons "mostly to add to the myth that the creature is some sort of evil outsider."
Voluntary Shapeshifting: They can freely take the shape of any Medium-sized humanoid, and revert to their true form when slain.

Pseudonatural Creature

Classification: Outsider (3E)
Challenge Rating: Varies by base creature's Hit Die
Alignment: As base creature

Entities from beyond the known planes, which assume the form and abilities of Material Plane creatures when summoned there.

A Form You Are Comfortable With: Attempted, but the results tend to be gruesome regardless. For example, the pseudonatural hippogriff pictured displays Body Horror such as gaps in its skin, Extra Eyes that look disturbingly human, and a whole row of vestigial beaks running down its underside.
Game Face: As a standard action, a pseudonatural creature can drop its facade of attempted normalcy and appear "in a manner more consistent with their origins," typically a squirming mass of tentacles. This doesn't change its combat capabilities, but means other creatures receive a minor attack roll penalty against the horror.
Underground Monkey: "Pseudonatural creature" is a template that can be applied to any corporeal creature, granting it additional resistances and Damage Reduction, a once-per-day true strike ability, and a very flavorful appearance, all without drastically changing how the creature runs in combat.

Psurlon

^3e

^2e

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Aberration (3E, 5E), Aberrant Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E), 17 (4E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil, Evil (4E)

Malicious, worm-like beings with formidable mental powers.

Art Evolution: Psurlons' depiction can vary even within an edition. In some 2nd and 3rd Edition art, they look like a clothed humanoid figure comprised of giant earthworms, but a later 3E supplement gave them a bloated, monstrous body on spidery legs, which carried over into 4th Edition. 5th Edition gives them thicker bodies with hoofed legs, but upright fronts draped in clothing.
Emergency Transformation: 4th Edition asserts that only the psurlons' minds survived the distruction of their homeworld, forcing them to possess mindless slug creatures on the Astral Sea. After thousands of generations, the psurlons had modified their new bodies to their liking, and now prefer their worm-like forms.
A Head at Each End: In 5E, one in a hundred psurlons is born a mutant with a head at each end of its body, granting them superior intellects and mental powers, and making them natural leaders of their kind.
Human Shifting: Most 4th Edition psurlons can use change shape to assume humanoid form, though in 5th Edition they use disguise self instead.
Kill and Replace: Psurlon ringers, added in 5th Edition, can consume a Medium-sized humanoid, go into a psionic trance for 8 hours, and then physically transform into their meal's likeness. This gives the psurlon access to their prey's memories, and the resulting transformation is permanent until undone with a wish spell. Other psurlons can recognize a ringer no matter its guise.
Lamprey Mouth: In some depictions, they have large, circular mouths filled with gnashing teeth.
Monstrous Cannibalism: When a psurlon dies, others lay their eggs in its corpse, which hatch into Tiny infant psurlons that consume both the corpse and each other, until seven days later a single adult psurlon emerges from the putrefying remains.
Psychic Powers: Psurlons fight with their psionic powers, crushing foes with telekinesis or immobilising them with mental energy.
To Serve Man: Every century or so, the psurlons leave the Astral Plane to embark on the "Feast of Worlds," spending the next seven years infiltrating various worlds and eating as many sentients as they can, particularly relishing the taste of humans and halflings.
Stronger with Age: Psurlon elders are simply ordinary psurlons that have developed even more psionic powers as they aged. Other psurlons instead undertake a rapid physical growth into giant psurlons the size of ogres.
Super-Senses: They have darkvision thanks to the sensory organs round their mouths, as well as blindsight due to being able to detect foes by scent, sound and vibration.
Where I Was Born and Razed: The psurlons attempted to create a Hive Mind amongst their race, but the psychic backlash blew up their homeworld, forcing the survivors to relocate to the Astral Plane. They're unrepentant about this, and have no desire to return to the Material Plane... though they are interested in the world of Athas, which they think would survive another attempt to psychically link their minds together.

Pterafolk

Hybrid form (3e)

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Shapechanger (3E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 1 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Evil reptilian humanoids that use their shapeshifting to aid in their attacks on neighboring tribes.

The Beastmaster: Averted; unlike proper lycanthropes, which often take command of mundane animals related to their bestial forms, pterafolk have no particular control over proper pterodactyls and pteranodons, the latter of which actually prey upon them.
Death from Above: They often attack by swooping on victims from above, which in their AD&D rules deals double damage.
Lizard Folk: In two of their forms, they look like reptilian humanoids with a Pteranodon's beak and crest, and potentially wings. There's in-universe speculation over whether pterafolk are a Living Relic, a precursor to proper lizard-folk that didn't evolve like their kin, or enchanted relations of pterosaurs.
Treetop Town: They make their homes in collection of huts built high in thick-trunked trees, and all but invisible from the ground.
Voluntary Shapeshifting: Pterafolk can naturally polymorph between three forms: a fully-humanoid shape, a fully-pteranodon form with a 15-foot wingspan, or a hybrid between the two, replacing the humanoid arms with functional wings.

Pterran

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Humanoid (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E)
Playable: 2E-3E
Alignment: True Neutral (2E), Neutral Good (3E)

Reptilian humanoids resembling bipedal, wingless Pteranodon.

Fantastic Caste System: Pterran society is divided into three "Life Paths," each with its own test required to join, and the eldest member of each Path serves in a tribe's Triumvirate. Most pterrans follow the Path of the Warrior, and are only accepted as such after managing to capture and tame a pterrax mount. Others follow the Path of the Druid and venerate their Earth Mother goddess, and prove themselves by surviving alone in the forest for six months, with no equipment other than what they make. Rarer still is the Path of the Psionicist, whose aspirants must prove their ability by reading the thoughts of the tribe's psionicists and telepathically sharing them with the Triumvirate.
Lizard Folk: Of the "dinosaur-folk" variant, though modeled off a non-dinosaur. In their home setting, pterrans look enough like pterrax that they're probably related somehow.
Mage Species: Like many Athasian creatures, pterrans are latent psionicists, though only a minority develop their wild talents into the actual psion class.
Poisoned Weapons: 2nd Edition mentions that pterrans coat their melee and thrown weapons with a nasty poison that causes victims to lose 1 point of Strength and Constitution each day until they expire, a condition that can only be cured by magic.
Starfish Language: The pterran tongue is a collection of hisses, pops, snarls and growls mixed with claw-clicks and taps, so it's difficult for non-pterrans to understand and impossible for the likes of humans to speak.

Pterrax

Origin: Dark Sun
Classification: Animal (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Large, leathery-winged reptiles made more dangerous by their innate psionics.

Crafted from Animals: Pterrax teeth are collected by pterrans for use in their thanak, an axe-like weapon, while pterrax skin is used to make ceremonial drums.
Horse of a Different Color: The aforementioned pterrans make extensive use of pterrax as flying mounts.
Psychic Powers: As an Athasian species, pterrax are latently psychic, and can wield powers like psionic crush, complete healing and flesh armor.
Terror-dactyl: They're basically psychic Pteranodon that are quite capable in combat even without their psionics, diving upon opponents to rake with their claws, making flyby attacks, or even carrying off smaller prey.

Puppeteer Parasite

^3e

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 1 (standard), 2 (flesh harrower) (3E); 3 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil (3E), Neutral Evil (5E)

Psionic parasites that can hijack the bodies of their hosts.

Anti-True Sight: 3E puppeteers can hide their minds from detection by divination spells or clairsentience powers.
Art Evolution: In 3rd Edition they're small and leech-like, able to hide beneath a host's clothes, while in 5E they're amoeba-like creatures the size of dinner plates with a ventral surface covered in bony hooks.
Charm Person: 3E puppeteers know the psionic version of charm person, and use it to take over a host by asking to be picked up by it.
Dumb Muscle: Comparatively speaking; a puppeteer variant known as flesh harrowers lack the ability to psychically dominate a host, but are larger and much more physically capable than their kin, possessing a maw of fearsome teeth and a twin-bladed tail. They're used to deal with threats through direct combat if the puppeteers' usual methods fail.
Life Drain: In 5th Edition they can make a "Consume Life" attack against a creature they're attached to, healing themselves by the amount of damage dealt.
Puppeteer Parasite: It's in the name, though the mechanics differ by edition.
- If a 3E puppeteer is able to make physical contact with a charmed host, it'll attach itself somewhere out of sight on their body. The parasite will drain a negligible amount of nutrients from the host creature, but so long as the puppeteer is attached, the host creature is mentally dominated by it. Once they have hosts, puppeteers strive to take control of a society to ensure a steady supply of bodies for their kind.
- 5E puppeteer parasites are larger and harder to hide, and have a more limited capacity to control their host, as they can only cast suggestion once per day.

Purple Worm

Classification: Magical Beast (3E), Natural Beast (4E), Monstrosity (5E)
Challenge Rating: 12 (3E), 16 (4E), 15 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Enormous subterranean worms with armored bodies and insatiable appetites.

Beware My Stinger Tail: They have a poisonous stinger at the end of their tails.
Eat Dirt, Cheap: Purple worms swallow dirt and stone as they burrow, and if they encounter mineral deposits, they consume gemstones that get lodged in their gizzard to help grind up food, while precious metals usually pass through the other end of the creature. "There are more dignified methods of striking it rich than digging through purple worm dung, but the end results are often worth it."
Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It is a wormlike monster, and it is purple.
Fast Tunneling: They have a 30-foot burrow speed, and can even bore through solid rock at half that rate, leaving behind a round, 10-foot-wide tunnel. These passages often connect to existing caverns, and might extend to the surface, providing vital air shafts for the Underdark.
Healing Factor: Purple worms don't have fast healing, but like the common earthworm, they can regrow a severed tail spike, tail, or even their head in about a week. In the last case, the purple worm typically curls up to conserve its energy until its ability to bite and burrow is restored.
Horse of a Different Color: It's impossible to ride a purple worm normally, but the mind flayers have developed an odd way to use one as a mount. If an irritant is placed in the purple worm's throat, it will develop a cyst that can be drained and used as a driver's compartment. Though since purple worms are mindless, illithids have to resort to speaking Undercommon to give them commands, and the rider's cyst prevents the worm from swallowing Large creatures, while smaller ones might make an attack of opportunity at the worm's rider as they're swallowed.
Our Dragons Are Different: A little-known fact is that the purple worm is referred to as the purple dragon in Gary Gygax's notes: "the purple, or mottled, dragon is a rare, flightless worm with a venomous sting in its tail." This was quickly dropped in later editions.
Pheromones: Badly-injured purple worms give off a "warning scent" to keep others of their kind away from a threat. Some Underdark races routinely harvest this chemical from immature purple worms, then splash it around their settlements as a protective measure.
Sand Worm: Giant, carnivorous worms that burrow underground at high speeds, and which hunt by tracking prey from below and attacking in a sudden, explosive surge through the surface.
Swallowed Whole: With its cavernous maw, a purple worm can swallow even an ogre in one gulp.
Underground Monkey: In older editions, "thunderherders" are a desert offshoot of purple worm, while "mottled worms" are an aquatic variant that inhabits the shallow muck at the bottom of bodies of water. In 3rd Edition, the former was expanded upon into the ashworm described elsewhere, while the latter was clarified to be perfectly ordinary purple worms — they can breathe water as easily as air, but look mottled due to the water washing away some of their coating of mucus. "That this belief went unchallenged for so long is not surprising, as few individuals could get within observing range of a 'mottled worm' without becoming the creature's next meal."

Q

Qlippoth

Origin: Dragonlance
Classification: Plant (3E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Often called "Zivilyn's Bane," these 15-foot-tall ambulatory plants stupefy victims with their foul fruit and sap, then beat them to death for use as fertilizer.

Poisonous Person: Qlippoths' fruit carries a potent Wisdom-damaging poison, which can easily render victims unconscious and helpless. The plant can cause a fruit to burst and splash an adjacent attacker, or hurl its fruit at distant foes.
Weaponized Stench: The boils and pustules that cover a qlippoth's bark emit such foul-smelling juices that all within 10 feet of the plant must save or suffer a confusion effect so long as they're close to it.
When Trees Attack: They're thought to be the result of some Black Robe wizard experimenting on plants, giving rise to evil, diseased-looking plant monsters. Qlippoths can try to hide among normal trees, but only the most desperate of creatures will try to eat their foul fruit, leaving the plants to actively seek out victims.

Quaggoth

Classification: Humanoid (3E, 5E), Natural Humanoid (4E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 9 (4E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: True Neutral (1E-2E), Neutral Evil (3E), Unaligned (4E), Chaotic Neutral (5E)

Sometimes called "deep bears," these savage, 7-foot ursine humanoids eke out a primitive existence in the Underdark.

Good Old Ways: The great divide in the free quaggoths' society is between those who "follow magic" by using weapons and dyeing their white fur with dung, blood and mind flayer gall to help them blend in with their surroundings, and those who "follow the beast" by fighting with their claws and eschewing camouflage.
I'm a Humanitarian: When they can't find food, quaggoths prey on each other. A thonot that fails the tribe is devoured in a cannibalistic ritual, in the hope that its power passes to another more worthy quaggoth.
It Can Think: Quaggoths' bestial appearance, snarling language, and penchant for fighting unarmed and unarmored have led many to assume they're bipedal cave bears, but quaggoths are in fact sapient, though not particularly intelligent. Their Intelligence score has even been going down over the game's editions, so their current stats only make them slightly smarter than ogres.
Made a Slave: Approximately half the quaggoth population has been enslaved by races like the drow or illithids.
The Morlocks: At one point the quaggoths had a more advanced society on the surface, before being driven underground by the elves and falling into cannibalistic savagery. For this reason, quaggoths captured by the drow need little prompting to join raids against surface elves.
Psychic Powers: Thonots are quaggoths which have gained psionic powers through exposure to the psychic energies which permeate the Underdark.
Turns Red: When a quaggoth comes close to death, it flies into a berserker rage, making its attacks more powerful and more accurate.

Quanlos

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

Insectoid monsters sometimes called "abyssal wasps" due to their ability to control other creatures, and for their gruesome reproductive method.

Big Creepy-Crawlies: Quanloses are dog-sized insectoids with a horrific life cycle.
Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Though they look like insects, each quanlos is in fact a self-contained hive, reproducing asexually and storing their larvae in abdominal sacs. After being implanted in a victim, quanlos larvae spend a week to a month consuming their host's corpse before bursting out as Tiny quanloses that reach full adulthood in another year.
Explosive Breeder: They have a rapid reproductive cycle, and quanloses implant five to ten larvae into a creature at a time, but quanloses are still relatively rare, since the bulk of quanlos larvae are consumed by other larvae while inside their parent, and three-quarters of adult quanloses are slain by other quanloses within the first months of their lives.
Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Quanloses can inject a creature with larvae, which acts something like a poison that, should a victim fail their saving throw, will deal damage each subsequent round. Unless a victim is saved with neutralize poison or remove disease, they'll slowly be devoured from within.
Mind Control: Their stingers carry a potent magical toxin that replicates a dominate monster spell, usable three times each day. With their Intelligence of 1, quanloses aren't smart enough to direct their dominated minions to do more than follow general commands such as attack, defend, gather food, etc. Slaying a quanlos instantly frees any mind-controlled creatures.

Quaraphon

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)
Playable: 3E
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Blue, bellicose, centaur-like creatures that wander the plains in search of food, good fights, or wargear to steal.

Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Their tribes' "bullmasters" are the strongest males in them, but have to constantly defend their positions from younger rivals. "The bellows of dueling quaraphons can be heard for miles around, lending a chilling quality to the desolate plains."
Boisterous Bruiser: They're described as "belligerent, swaggering creatures" constantly looking for a challenging fight.
Does Not Like Magic: Quaraphons have a superstitious distrust of arcane magic, and any of their kind who befriend a mage are deemed insane and exiled from their tribes.
Dumb Muscle: They're not too bright, and have -4 racial penalties to Intelligence and Wisdom, but compensate with a +10 bonus to Strength and +12 to Constitution.
Extra Eyes/Too Many Mouths: Quaraphons' faces have four eyes, placed seemingly at random, and two mouths positioned one on top of the other.
Our Centaurs Are Different: They look something like centaurs with warty blue skin and highly assymetrical features.
Super-Scream: Once per day, a quaraphon can use its two mouths to loose a bellow that deals sonic damage and can potentially deafen those within 60 feet.

Quell

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

These ghostly undead have fiery green eyes and a ring of unholy symbols orbiting their heads, declaring their hatred of all things divine.

De-power: The quells' signature "Intercession" ability allows them to cut off divine spellcasters from their deities, preventing them from using spells or Turn Undead attempts from one minute to potentially 24 hours. Multiple quells can work together to shut down higher-leveled clerics, but if the quell who initiated the intercession attacks the cleric, the effect ends.
Intangibility: Their description can't decide whether their sepctral forms are draped in ghostly robes, or if their "flesh" is naturally loose and flowing.
Kill the God: Quells would dearly like to, but settle for severing the connection between gods and their clerics and paladins.
Weakened by the Light: These creatures are utterly powerless in natural sunlight, and can only flee in it.

Quesar

Origin: Planescape
Classifiaction: Construct (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Neutral Good

Radiant, free-willed humanoid constructs native to the marshes of Belierin, third layer of the Blessed Fields of Elysium.

Blinded by the Light: At will, quesars can intensify their glows sixfold, potentially blinding nearby creatures.
Healing Factor: They constantly recover hit points so long as they're exposed to sunlight, or magic like daylight. This functions even after a quesar has been "killed," so the only way to permanently destroy one is to keep its remains in an area of darkness, forever, or to use magic like disintegrate to dispose of their bodies.
Interservice Rivalry: Their AD&D write-up notes that Lawful Good celestials resent the quesars for their past rebellion. "On the planes of goodness, the aasimon are to be obeyed without question. Those that do not adhere to that stricture are not well liked." This lack of support can result in proactive quesars leading one-person crusades against the Lower Planes, which for all a quesar's power are still suicidal actions.
Light 'em Up: After they've had their blinding radiance active for a round, quesars can replicate a sunburst effect, dealing damage to all in 30 feet.
Phosphor-Essence: Quesars constantly shed bright light in a 20-foot radius, providing shadowy illumination 40 feet beyond that.
Reduced to Dust: A quesar's most dangerous ability is to, three times each day, unleash a burst of energy so intense that it subjects every creature and object within 15 feet to a disintegrate effect, dealing heavy damage and reducing those that succumb to ash.
So What Do We Do Now?: After becoming independent, most quesars remain on Belierin, pondering the purpose of their new lives.
Turned Against Their Masters: The quesars were crafted by angels as servitors, and while the intelligent constructs were initially grateful enough to follow their creators' commands, the quesars eventually expressed that they did not intend to exist as slaves. This offended the angels — "The clockworks do not tell the clock maker what to do. The clay does not instruct the sculptor." — and so there was a brief war in Elysium before the local deities intervened, chiding the angels that the quesars were not creatures of order, and the quesars that they should not foment chaos by rashly causing conflict with those who had treated them well. Thus the angels wordlessly departed Belierin, leaving the quesars to figure out what to do with their independence.

Quickling

Origin: Greyhawk
Classification: Fey Humanoid (4E), Fey (5E)
Challenge Rating: 9 (4E), 1 (5E)
Alignment: Evil (4E), Chaotic Evil (5E)

Tiny and malicious fey notable for their incredible speed.

Blessed with Suck: It is said that they were once a human-sized race of fey belonging to the Gloaming Court, but they were lazy and blew off their Queen's summons once too often. To quicken their pace and teach them to mind her will, she sped up their internal clocks. This gave quicklings their characteristic fast pace, but also sped up their aging process, leaving them with a lifespan of twenty years at best.
Super-Speed: In 5th edition they can move 120 feet per round without dashing, and their sheer speed imposes disadvantage on all attack rolls made against them.
The Trickster: A quickling spends most of its time perpetrating acts of mischief on slower creatures: tying a person's bootlaces together, unbuckling a saddle while no one's looking, or planting a stolen item in someone's bag. They don't commit outright murder, but quicklings can ruin lives in plenty of other ways. Quicklings enjoy causing suffering that transcends mere mischief, especially when they can create discord by blaming others for their actions.
We Are as Mayflies: Quicklings live incredibly short lives on account of their hyperactive metabolism. They die of old age in less than twenty years.

Quill

Origin: Planescape
Alignment: Unaligned

Herbivores hardy enough to survive in the most hospitable parts of the Great Wheel. They're one of the few known species that can eat razorvine, and are even willing to nibble on predatory plant monsters like bloodthorns and ironmaws.

Beware My Stinger Tail: Their spine-studded tails are capable of killing an armored human.
Crafted from Animals: A quill's quills can be converted into blowgun darts or other light weapons. While some people will also attach these spines to their armor, the efficacy of such efforts is questionable, though it at least looks intimidating.
Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Anyone who ends up with a quill's spine in them will find them wickedly barbed, so that removing the spine deals additional damage on a failed check, while leaving it inside the victim runs the risk of causing the wound to fester.
Mix-and-Match Critters: They're four-foot-long porcupines with the leathery armored shell of an armadillo.
Spike Shooter: Unlike normal porcupines, quills can fire their spines at aggressors within 20 feet, though the creatures aren't very accurate with this attack.
The Spiny: Those foolish enough to attack a quill bare-handed or with a natural weapon run the risk of getting stuck with one to three spines.
Weird World, Weird Food: Most people dislike the flavor of quill meat, but sometimes a planewalker can't afford to be picky, and some denizens of the Lower Planes consider quill a delicacy.

Quori

Origin: Eberron
Classification: Outsider (3E), Aberration (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Otherworldly and hostile entities from a realm of nightmares, who seek to claim the waking world as well.

Demonic Possession: They have the natural ability to possess other creatures, with the caveats that the host has to be willing, boast a Charisma score equal to or greater than the quori's, and share the same alignment. While possessing a host, a quori can use its spell-like and psionic abilities, combines its skill ranks with its host's, and grants its host a bonus to Charisma.
Dream Weaver: Quori can invade the dreams of other creatures, appearing however they wish as they replicate a dream or nightmare spell. This is one of their most powerful tools for manipulating mortals.
Eldritch Abomination: Though originally classified as Outsiders, quori come from a plane of dreams and nightmares, and thus tend to look more bizarre than most fiends.
Eternal Recurrence: In their home cosmology, Dal Quor alternates between ages of light and darkness at regular intervals. The ending of the current Age of Darkness would mark the end of the quori, so the Dreaming Dark wants to break this cycle and keep their Age of Darkness going indefinitely.
Living Dream: The quori are the embodiments of dreams and nightmares that serve a dark power known as il-Lashtavar, or the Dreaming Dark.
My Species Doth Protest Too Much: While quori are generally considered evil, a number of good-aligned quori live in self-imposed exile from Dal Quor. They often end up bonding with humans, and this bond has given rise to a sub-race of humans known as the kalashtar.
Psychic Powers: The quori are natural psions, with each type having different psychic abilities.
Sealed Evil in a Can: In Eberron, the ancient giants, with the assistance of the dragons, prevented a quori invasion by using powerful magic to permanently isolate Dal Quor, the plane of dreams, from the Material Plane. To get around this, the quori have devised new tactics to exert their influence over the waking world, reaching it through the dreams of its inhabitants.

Du'ulora

Challenge Rating: 11 (3E)

Also known as "blackfuries," these quori act as battlefield commanders when they aren't engaging their foes directly.

Combat Tentacles: The du'ulora fights by grappling its enemies with tentacles formed from shadow matter.
Eyes Do Not Belong There: Each of a du'ulora's tentacles is capped with an eyeball.
Hate Plague: The du'ulora's fury aura induces rage in other creatures, stripping foes of their ability to use magic or sophisticated tactics.
Oculothorax: The du'ulora's body is a bulbous mass dominated by a central eye.
Playing with Fire: After constricting an enemy, a du'ulora can call on its inner rage to trigger spontaneous combustion.

Hashalaq

Challenge Rating: 9 (3E, 5E)

Also known as "dreamstealers," hashalaqs are the loremasters and judges of the quori, studying mortals for weaknesses and ensuring that their underlings don't interfere with their race's grand schemes.

Counter-Attack: When a hashalaq takes damage, it can force its attacker to experience painful empathic feedback.
Emotion Bomb: The idyllic touch of a hashalaq can make it victim laugh so hard that they fall prone.
In the Hood: In 3rd Edition they're usually depicted as hooded figures with nothing but a glowing void where their face should be, though their true form is that of a centipede-like creature made up of squirming tentacles.
Psi Blast: 5th Edition hashalaqs primarily attack with Mind Thrust, a psychic power that inflicts large amounts of psychic damage to the victim.
Sense Freak: Inhabiting human bodies as Inspired has granted the hashalaqs a taste for the hedonistic urges of humanity.

Kalaraq

Challenge Rating: 20 (3E), 19 (5E)

Also known as "eyebinders," these are the quori ruling caste, the rare and terrible masters of Dal Quor.

Animalistic Abomination: 5th Edition depicts kalaraqs as a shadowy mixture of mantid and serpent, in contrast to the more humanoid kalaraq of earlier editions.
Eyes Do Not Belong There: A host of disembodied eyes whirl around a kalaraq, each reflecting a consciousness the creature has consumed.
Intangible Man: Kalaraqs are incorporeal in their true form, allowing them to pass through solid matter and making it impossible to grapple or restrain them.
Living Shadow: A kalaraq is an intangible, monstrous shadow surrounded by a haze of sinister light.
Manchurian Agent: Kalaraqs can implant a sinister "mind seed" into a humanoid just by touching them. if the seed is allowed to germinate, it takes over the person's body, turning them into a loyal puppet of the kalaraq.
Psi Blast: Kalaraqs can bombard an area with spectral eyes, inflicting psychic damage and, ironically, blindness to anyone caught in the blast.
Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Although the kalaraqs never fight one another overtly, each has its own agenda, and each hopes to someday seize the throne of the Devourer of Dreams.
Your Soul Is Mine!: When a kalaraq kills someone in melee combat, it rips out their soul and shoves it into one of the many eyeballs orbiting the creature, making it almost impossible to revive them while the kalaraq still lives.

Tsoreva

Challenge Rating: 5 (3E)

Also known as "mindblades," the tsoreva can serve as enforcers among the quori, but relish their role as shock troops.

Blood Knight: They're bloodthirsty creatures that live for the sensation of slicing through their foes.
Laser Blade: Their primary weapons are a pair of "mind blades" of solid psychic energy, similar to the key feature of the soulknife psionic class.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Anyone struck by those mind blades has to save or become shaken from fear.
Wall Crawl: They're canny enough to take advantage of their climbing speed to attack enemies from high on walls or ceilings.

Tsucora

Challenge Rating: 7 (3E, 5E)

The most numerous of the quori, tsucoras are as hideous as they are cunning and cruel, talents which serve them well as the Dreaming Dark's primary agents on the Material Plane.

Beware My Stinger Tail: The tsucora's serpentine tail is tipped with a vicious stinger.
Brown Note: The prick of a tsucora's stinger ravages body and mind, instilling terror and inflicting psychic damage.
Extra Eyes: A tsucora's face is dotted with eyes in every shape and color.
Life Drain: In 3rd edition, a tsucora recovers hit points whenever it kills a creature with its stinger.
Power Pincers: Tsucoras have lobster-like pincers with which to put the squeeze on their foes.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Tsucoras keep their humanoid chattel in line by manipulating their fears.

Usvapna

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/d&d_quori_dream_master_3e.png

Challenge Rating: 11 (3E)

Also known as "dream masters," these quori are inquisitors and assassins, studying the dreams of mortals to identify threats to the quori's rule.

The Blank: They have no heads, only a "void of inky darkness" that emanates malevolence.
Mind Hive: Usvapnas habitually use their schism psi-like ability to split their minds in two before combat, allowing one mind to fight using their claws while the other uses additional psionic powers.
Power Pincers: Theirs are powerful enough to potentially daze opponents they strike with them.

Quori Hosts

Two groups of humanoids are closely associated with the quori, though their aims are very different.

Inspired

Origin: Eberron
Classification: Humanoid (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 5 (3E), 2 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

A human subrace bred by the evil quori of Dal Quor as perfect hosts.

The Beautiful Elite: By human standards, most Inspired are quite comely, having naturally high Charisma, and are collectively the rulers of a tyrannical empire.
The Empire: In their home setting, the Inspired are the leaders of the Unity of Riedra, an empire which rules the continent of Sarlona with an iron fist. Riedra has designs on Khorvaire and has been making subtle inroads into the continent.
Human Subspecies: A realistic example (apart from the possession angle, anyway), as they are caused by specific breeding of desirable traits.
Psychic Powers: Between being selectively bred for psionic ability and being possessed by the naturally psionic quori, the Inspired have many psychic powers at their disposal.
Raised as a Host: The Inspired of Sarlona are humans bred to be vessels for the quori. They have no choice in this destiny, since they can't resist quori possession.
Super Breeding Program: The quori picked out the humans with the strongest bodies, greatest psionic potential and weakest wills to possess, then had them breed to make perfect hosts.

Kalashtar

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/b2fb494fc0191ad574093f60bb04339b.png

Origin: Eberron
Classification: Humanoid (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3E), 1/4 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Good

Humans with a hereditary bond to a benign quori spirit, whom they commune with rather than dream. For more information, see the Playable Races subpage.

Quth-Maren

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Undead (3E)
Challenge Rating: 7 (3E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Created by the clergy of the drow goddess Kiaransalee, these flayed undead constantly ooze caustic blood from their skinless flesh.

Bloody Murder: Their blood deals acid damage, which applies to both enemies who strike them in melee and victims hit by their slam attacks.
Flaying Alive: Quth-marens are created from enemies of Kiaransalee who are flayed and reanimated.
Mook Lieutenant: They can command undead as a 5th-level cleric.
Super Spit: They can also spit globs of their caustic blood as a ranged attack.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: Any creature that meets a quth-maren's gaze has to save or cower in fear.

Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures P To Q

P

Ghosteater

Chaond

Gloaming

Mechanatrix

Shadowswyft

Shyft

Zenythri

Q

Du'ulora

Hashalaq

Kalaraq

Tsoreva

Tsucora

Usvapna

Quori Hosts

Inspired

Kalashtar

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Index

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Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Creatures P To Q

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P

Ghosteater

Chaond

Gloaming

Mechanatrix

Shadowswyft

Shyft

Zenythri

Q

Du'ulora

Hashalaq

Kalaraq

Tsoreva

Tsucora

Usvapna

Quori Hosts

Inspired

Kalashtar

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Index

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