Image © Wizards of the Coast, by Eva Widermann
[Commissioned by @coldbloodassassin. Before it was a city in Eberron, âsharnâ was a monster in the Forgotten Realms. They first appeared in the 2e Ruins of Undermountain boxset, and were one of the few Forgotten Realms creations to benefit from the conversion to 4e, whereupon their full backstory was unveiled. In FR, the sharn created themselves in order to fight against the phaerimm, but since I havenât statted those up, I made it generic âaberrationsâ in my text. I had fun with the actual mechanics of this monsterâI gave it +6 bonuses to all of its ability scores, and tried to keep its numbers in multiples of 3 whenever I could.]
Sharn
CR 10 CN Aberration
This bizarre creature looks something like an inverted cone of oily flesh, tapering away to a tail-like point that drags along the ground as it flies. It has three eyeless heads, each with great jaws, and emerging in clusters behind these are nine arms, three to a vertex. Each of these arms has a human-like eye set in the center of the palm.
A sharn is a bizarre creature, as much magic and mind as it is flesh. They were created from an arcane ritual gone awry in ancient times. A cabal of archmages, their cities under siege by magically-gifted aberration, sought to transform themselves into similar creatures in order to be better able to fight back. The ritual worked only too wellâentire villages were absorbed in the creation of the first sharns, and thousands of mortals became eighty sharns in an instant. From these eighty sharns were all future sharns born, and the memories of that distant day and its failures still rub around their consciousnesses like a stone inside a shoe.
A sharn spends most of its life in an undifferentiated pool of sharn-stuff, a thick black liquid that is the bodies of multiple individuals. Individual sharns can extrude themselves from this pool in order to interact with the outside world, usually in pursuit of information, magical treasures, or to battle with other aberrations. Sharns grow and learn by eating still-living sapient creatures, whose minds become part of the sharn gestalt. Once an individual sharn has absorbed enough minds, its body splits into two or three individuals, which swiftly regrow a full body. Sharns are highly fractious creatures, and debate even with their own individual memories and thoughts, let alone those of other sharns. Sharn pools will often divide based on disagreements of opinion or philosophy, and may fight each other, but rarely to the death. Because of their physiology, sharns have a very hard time killing other sharns without resorting to hated lawful magic and weapons.
A battle with a sharn is a hectic and confusing experience. Sharns can open what they refer to as âhex portalsââsmall hexagonal rings of force, studded with eyes, that they can see, fight and cast spells through. All sharns are gifted in the use of multiple weapons, and can cast both arcane and divine spells. Thus, no two fights with sharn are likely to progress in the same way, as they have different tactics based on their particular gifts. Â Sharn usually fight to either obtain items or knowledge, and can usually be treated with by generous offers of one or the other. They do not parley with other aberrations, only slay them, and a sharn may be a fountain of lore about these creatures if they can be kept focused long enough to reveal what they know. Those few unfortunates that have tried to read a sharnâs mind to reveal its secrets are exposed to the combined consciousnesses of all the individual personalities and identities inside a sharn, and few minds are hardy enough to survive the information overload.
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