Rooftop Prowler
Image © Kenzer and Co, by Anthony Carpenter
[I love me an urban predator, so the rooftop prowler was right up my alley. They first appeared in Kingdoms of Kalamar: Denizens of Tellene, where the stats were somewhat strange. Despite their total lack of magical abilities and relatively mundane anatomy (they’re all mammal), they were classified as aberrations, and given an Intelligence of 13 that the flavor text really didn’t reflect. Their flavor text was also pretty gross, namely that all reproduction in the species was the product of rape, and that childbirth was universally fatal for the mother. This weirdly misogynistic background was kept in the Hackmaster conversion, but there’s no need for that, so I cut it entirely. I also went ahead and gave them some minor magical abilities, to make the stat block more unique.]
Rooftop Prowler CR 5 CN Magical Beast This creature has a lean, panther like body, and its head looks like a cross between a man’s and a bat’s. It has large ears, a nose leaf, and rows of sharp teeth. All four of its legs end in clawed toes as flexible as a man’s fingers.
Rooftop prowlers are predators of cliffs and caves that have made themselves at home in the urban jungle. They think and hunt three dimensionally, clambering down ledges, along roofs and squeezing down alleys in search of prey. They are highly active creatures and prefer fattier meals—merchants and the wealthy classes are often their targets, leading some of their attacks to be mistaken for revenge killings or a serial murderer. They will also happily hunt non-sapient prey if it is available, and rats, dogs, cats and especially pigs are all components of their diet.
Rooftop prowlers attack from ambush. They are usually solitary hunters—on occasion two siblings will share a territory, but for the most part they repel attempts of other prowlers to enter their hunting grounds. They strike from above, leaping down onto prey and biting and clawing it rapidly to death. Their senses are keen and bat-like, and they are adept at detecting those that would try to counter-ambush them with a baited trap. Most rooftop prowlers are more skittish than determined, and retreat and hide if they find a potential meal puts up a strong fight.
Rooftop prowlers call themselves “kurra”. They are mostly asocial among each other except during mating and child care, in part because of the difficulties of finding ample prey in a city. There is little sexual dimorphism among kurra. A pregnant kurra relies on her mate to hunt for both of them during the time, and she always gives births to twins. Rooftop prowlers raise their young until they are strong enough to hunt on their own, whereupon they are chased from their home territory and must find new hunting grounds. Rooftop prowlers compete for territory with gargoyles, and where the two species overlap, the gargoyles nearly always win because the kurras’ claws and teeth cannot penetrate their stony hides.