Tzantza
"Jenglot" © Johann Egerkrans, accessed at his Facebook page here
[This entry caused a lot of consternation; almost all of it relating to the name. This is a conversion of the basic D&D topi. But a topi is a real thing. It's an antelope. Antelope are not little shrunken undead things, and so I wanted to use a different name. @abominationimperatrix suggested jenglot, which is a real folkloric shrunken person. But they're much smaller, and inanimate. An authentic jenglot would probably be more like a magic item than a creature. @monstersdownthepath suggested the current name, which is the word for shrunken head in the Shuar language. The conversion itself, on the other hand, was very straightforward, and very close to the original.]
Tzantza CR 2 CE Undead This dwarfed figure appears to be a shrunken mummified human. Its teeth are disproportionately large in its shriveled head, and it has long hooked claws.
A tzantza is an undead minion, faster and more intelligent than a zombie at the cost of its strength and size. Tzantzas are created as an extension of the process to make a shrunken head; only, it is the entire person that is shrunken. As such, they are most commonly found in communities that practice the art of making shrunken heads. Tzantzas are used as guardians of important sites, or as bodyguards and scouts by the necromancer who created them.
Tzantzas can follow more complex orders than a zombie can, but still default to violence if situations emerge that they didn’t receive instructions for. Left to its own devices, a tzantza will gleefully kill whatever it can sink its talons into. These talons inflict a magical slowing effect, and victims that survive a tzantza attack are often still slowed long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Tzantzas are excellent leapers, and often are instructed to hide and watch their warded sites from an elevation, so they can pounce down at intruders.
Creating a Tzantza A tzantza is created by skinning a humanoid and stuffing the skin with wooden rods to serve as its new skeleton, as well as at least one living venomous animal or vermin. The whole effigy is then boiled in rare herbs worth 150 gp for eight hours while the following spells are cast: animate dead, hold person or slow, and jump or grace. Creating a single tzantza counts as creating 6 HD of undead with an animate dead spell. The same casting of animate dead may be used to create more than one tzantza at a time (assuming the caster can create that many HD), but the secondary spells must be expended for each tzantza to be created. The tzantza statistics above assume a Medium sized humanoid as the base creature; Tiny tzantzas are created from Small humanoids, and Medium sized tzantzas are created from Large humanoids.
