#rutterkin

On the left, Canoloth! It's around 4 ft (1.2 m) at the shoulder with a 20‒30 ft (6.1‒9.1 m) long prehensile barbed tongue to grapple with. They're telepathic, covered in chitonous plates, and despite thier blindness thier amazing senses let them see everything within 120 ft (36.6 m) perfectly, ignoring all illusions or shapeshifting. They're also surprisingly chill creatures and won't do anything not SPECIFICALLY in thier contract. So if you can find some reason why stopping you isn't in thier contract they'll happily stop and chat or let you walk right past their guard gate.

Image by Arnie Swekel, © Wizards of the Coast

[It appears that the D&D 3.x Art Gallery sites have finally been taken down from the Wizards of the Coast web servers. RIP.

The rutterkin is a monster I’ve used in the past, but never with any real enthusiasm. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes finally gives them a mechanical hook, in that they’re contagious. This, combined with their grotesque appearance, made them seem a good candidate for shifting over to the qlippoth camp from its original demon designation. The mechanics here are a combination of ideas from rutterkins throughout the editions.]

Qlippoth, Rutterkin CR 4 CE Outsider (extraplanar) This humanoid creature is hideously twisted and warped, its limbs jutting at odd angles and its head pointed. Its large teeth are crooked and sharp. It carries a strange forked polearm, and has several other weird weapons arrayed on its back and shoulders.

Rutterkin are the foot soldiers of Yamasoth the Polymorph Plague. This qlippoth lord has long sought to prevent the influx of mortal souls into the afterlife by transforming creatures into qlippoth directly, or into beasts or plants with minor, unaligned souls. The rutterkins are the success story of these efforts, a wide-ranging and contagious horde of vaguely humanoid qlippoth. Any creature bitten by a rutterkin is cursed with painful disfigurement as its flesh creeps as if alive, and if a humanoid dies under this influence, it transforms into a new rutterkin.

In combat, rutterkin attempt to spread their curse as much as possible. They have spell-like abilities that help them maneuver around a battlefield and control the movement of their enemies, but once they have deployed these, they charge headlong into battle. Rutterkin wield weapons with ease—their favorites are polearms, chakram and swords. Rutterkin delight in revealing their full awfulness, which strikes creatures with so much disgust that they tear at their own bodies in revulsion.

Rutterkin are bullies and thugs, and especially enjoy picking fights with weak demons such as dretches, quasits and abrikandilu. Although stronger and smarter demons often hunt rutterkin for sport, an infestation of them can blight an area for a long time. Even if a gang of rutterkin is wiped out, their chaos phage can linger in the background before erupting into a new wave of aberrant horrors.  Their violence is sometimes coordinated by a more intelligent qlippoth like a shoggti or utukku. 

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The rutterkin, one of the most disliked demons among thier peers. They're 6 ft (180 cm) mutants of the abyss, each with thier own unique random asymmetrical bodies. Their presence fills people with immobilizing fear, and they usually travel in mobs!