Monster Spotlight: Scarlet Walker
Lawful Evil Huge Outsider
Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, pg. 414
These massive spider-like monstrosities hail from the nightmare Plateau of Leng, where they weave titanic nests from the gore of countless victims from all over creation. To say that Scarlet Walkers enjoy blood is a wild understatement; they love talking about blood as much as sommeliers love talking about wine, to the point it's basically the only thing they talk about with others of their kind or even with unfortunate visitors to their horrific dwellings. They love it so much that they have the rare Bloodsense, able to detect even the smallest traces of blood within 60ft of them as if they had blindsight. From its flavors, its texture, its scent, or its uses as building materials, all the way to its visual appearance and composition when exposed to specific stimuli... Every aspect of blood is discussed at length between hives of Walkers, so of course in order to keep conversations flowing, they need a lot of it from as many different creatures and planets as possible.
Which leads to the primary problem: Getting it in the first place. Unable to leave the Dimension of Dreams themselves, the Scarlet Walkers have taken on many curious adaptations to assure they can nonetheless reach into the waking world to bring back new samples for their brethren to enjoy. Primarily, and most mundanely: their ability to bargain with the other two easiest ways off of Leng, providing muscle and utility in exchange for transport. Despite their towering strength and dangerous attacks, they have no true defenses against the paralytic bites of either the Denizens of Leng or its ghouls (nor the Fortitude to reliably resist the paralysis), which assures the most foolish and violent of them perish at the hands of creatures which are still essentially their lessers.
More unusually, Scarlet Walkers can arrange for their own summoning if they know someone on the other side. They can use Sending at-will to send messages across the boundaries of planes to beseech any being they know of to bargain with them, leading to an interesting case where a hopeful summoner and the being wishing to be summoned are working together to make it possible. Should their prospective patron prove to be too pathetic to follow simple orders, the Walkers can also send Demands 3/day to force compliance, 25 words at a time. Whatever the case may be, whether they're bargaining with the men of Leng to travel aboard their ships, the ghouls for passage through their tunnels (which they CAN easily fit through via Compression), or a hopeful binder of the otherworldly, the end result is one of these massive spiders creeping into the waking world to do what they do best: obtain blood.
This is done primarily via their natural attacks, a trio of frightening limbs with an even scarier reach. Though the small central bodies of a Scarlet Walker give them only a 15ft space, they have a prodigious 30ft reach with their pinching claws and lashing feeding tendrils. Combined with their superior speed (40ft), a 40ft climb speed, AND the ability to stand on empty air, a Scarlet Walker can dominate most battlefields with its reach and heavily punishes any player party that can't either force it down or rise up to meet it. Their claws deal 2d6+7 damage, their tentacles 4d6+3, and all three of them tack on 1d6 extra bleed, which will be important in a moment. What's important now is that the tentacles also inflict a supernatural Paralysis, like the touch of many other creatures from Leng, so any creature struck by them must succeed a DC 23 Fortitude save or be rendered helpless for 1d4 rounds.
You may notice that neither its claws nor its tendrils have Grab or Blood Drain, but no creature from a nightmare realm would have a feeding mechanism so pleasant. No, Scarlet Walkers feed with their Blood-Draining Gaze, a gaze attack that affects all creatures within 20ft of it, forcing blood to flow from their open wounds and orifices and into the strangely human eyesockets on its lower face. Yes, those pits are its mouths, not its eyes, which are actually the quartet of tiny black marbles on the forehead. Any creature subjected to the Blood-Draining Gaze must succeed a DC 23 Fortitude save every single round or take 1 Con damage and be sickened for 1 round, but any creature that's already bleeding--such as from the Walker's natural attacks--takes a further -4 penalty to save against the gaze attack as the blood flowing from their wounds takes on a distressing life of its own, slithering through the air towards the nightmare beast.
If all it could do was be a walking Bleed Zone, it would still be a powerful beast, but perhaps one of a slightly lower CR. Unfortunately, those "curious adaptations" I mentioned means they also have a degree of power over the mind, able to blast an area with Confusion 3/day and use Quickened Lesser Confusion 3/day as well to potentially rob someone of their turn. Despite their raw physical power being impressive enough, the book notes that Scarlet Walkers are most often employed as interrogators and torturers by the men of Leng and binders in the Material Plane alike, due to their ability to read the minds of anyone they can see (via a permanent Detect Thoughts), their +24 to Intimidate, and their propensity for inflicting gruesomely slow and hideously painful deaths on anyone that meets their gaze. While suffering from the slow Con damage and wracking pain AND shaken by the spiders' intimidating presence, victims are unlikely to be able to keep the answers to any of the beast's questions (which it's asking telepathically for that extra bit of invasive horror) from bubbling to the surface and being detected.
Once someone has coughed up everything they can, the Walkers are usually ordered to either kill them or shatter their minds to uselessness, which they can do one of two ways, both 1/day each: Insanity or Feeblemind. BOTH of these spells are powerful Save-or-Sucks that boil the brain of whoever they're aimed at, the former inducing permanent confusion, the latter essentially turning the target into a barely-sapient version of itself, and if the Walker is trying to preserve its own life, it's under no compulsion to save these spells for its interrogation victims and may just unleash them in combat to mentally microwave an unfortunate player character.
All this, and we haven't even gotten into their defenses yet! Though Scarlet Walkers possess no DR, they DO have Fast Healing 10 to tick them up so long as enemies can't reliably hit their 28 AC and their tendency to stick to the high ground. They're immune to Acid and Cold damage as well as all forms of poison, and while they have no resistance or immunity to Fire damage, they DO have SR 23 and the Evasion ability, which is almost Fire immunity when combined with a +19 to Reflex saves. More importantly, it serves to take the bite out of the Scarlet Walker's biggest weakness: its Vulnerability to Electricity. Without Evasion a Walker could be annihilated by a single well-placed Lightning Bolt even if it succeeded its save, but this gives it a chance to keep a bunch of its HP intact as it slowly, painfully drinks everyone around it dry.
Due to their Bloodsense and impressive 300ft of telepathy (letting them question the identity of anything entering their sensory radius), it's almost impossible to catch a Scarlet Walker by surprise. Between their Bloodsense, Detect Thoughts, and 1/day True Seeing, it's basically impossible to hide from one. Their spidery appearance and single-minded fixation on blood may make them seem like just more mooks to be dispatched of on the way to the real final fight, but Scarlet Walkers are dangerously intelligent entities which, while unlikely to be the masterminds of any particular scheme, are nonetheless boss fights in and of themselves, ones which impose a time limit on the fight due to their Con-damaging gaze... which, by the way, works for each individual Walker in a battle, something a DM trying to use a gang of them should keep in mind, less the party be drank dry before the first turn is even over.
You can read more about them here.
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