Foulspawn Mangler
"Star Spawn Mangler” © Wizards of the Coast, by Christopher Burdett. Accessed at the artist’s blog here
[Hey! New art! Getting Christopher Burdett to illustrate some of the starspawn for Monsters of the Multiverse was a good idea. He’s so good at textures. Previous editions of this monster used daggers, but I think switching to claws was a good idea. Makes the seer and its staff feel special, as opposed to, “yeah, some use weapons, and some don’t”.]
Foulspawn Mangler CR 8 CE Aberration This creature is vaguely humanoid, with an elongated torso. It has six clawed arms, and multiple smaller appendages like the legs of a centipede that twitch and thrash along its sides. Its face is twisted, with a pointed skull and misshapen features.
Foulspawn manglers are fast and stealthy killers. Their epithet derives from their habit of playing with their victims, leaving completely mutilated corpses in their wake. They are more treasure oriented than other foulspawn, and make sure to look for shiny or otherwise interesting objects on the creatures they murder. They refer to themselves as hadremoi in the Aklo language. Manglers grow and shed arms the way some creatures grow and shed teeth—the largest pair of arms sits the closest to the head, and over time falls off and the next set grows larger. A set of appendages near the hips becomes the next set of arms, and the cycle continued.
Foulspawn manglers are mobile combatants, skittering down walls or out of cracks and crevices to ambush prey. When attacking from ambush, a foulspawn mangler can damage the psyche as well as the flesh, and those that escape a hadremoi attack suffer from nightmares and delusions for days afterwards. They stay moving throughout the combat, and can even make full attacks on the move, although doing so tires them out. Foulspawn manglers have a sense of self-preservation, and will flee from a losing fight, although they maintain a grudge and may track down creatures who best them for a rematch under more favorable circumstances.
