Fear Liath

Echoing footsteps and brief glimpses reveal a tall, featureless gray figure that disappears as quickly as it appeared.

Large undead, neutral evil

Armor Class 12
Hit Points 33 (6d10)
Speed 40 ft.

STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
17 (+3) 15 (+2) 10 (+0) 8 (-1) 14 (+2) 7 (-2)

Skills Athletics +5, Stealth +6
Damage Immunities poison
Condition Immunities exhaustion, frightened, poisoned
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 12
Languages any languages it knew in life
Challenge 2 (450 XP)

Special Traits

  • Gray Curse. If remove curse is cast upon a fear liath, it is instantly destroyed. In addition, if the fear liath kills a humanoid creature, the fear liath is destroyed and the humanoid it killed rises as a fear liath in 1d4 hours. If remove curse is cast upon the cursed humanoid before it becomes a fear liath, the curse is broken.
  • Unwatchable. The fear liath becomes incorporeal and appears as a dark gray shadow while any living creature looks directly at it. While incorporeal, it can move through other creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain. It takes 5 (1d10) force damage if it ends its turn inside an object. While incorporeal, it also gains resistance to acid, fire, lightning, and thunder damage, and bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks. The fear liath has no control over this trait. Unless surprised, a creature can avert its eyes to avoid looking directly at the fear liath at the start of its turn. If the creature does so, it can’t see the fear liath until the start of its next turn, when it can avert its eyes again. If a creature looks at the fear liath, the fear liath becomes incorporeal.

Actions

  • Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) bludgeoning damage. The target must succeed on a DC 13 Constitution saving throw or be blinded for 1 minute. It can repeat this saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success.

About

The fear liath is a supernaturally thin, ten-foot-tall spectral giant that lurks in the passes between craggy mountain peaks. Graymen stalk travelers and take great pleasure in toying with their prey, typically by timing their footfalls half a step behind their quarry’s. All who survive encounters with a fear liath tell of the sound of crunching mountain gravel only a few yards behind them-yet when they turned around, the form of their pursuer was hazy, gray, and utterly featureless.

Freed by Slaughter. Fear liaths were once mortals and are bound to the Material Plane by a hex known as the Gray Curse. A humanoid slain by a fear liath becomes a Grayman itself, and the fear liath who passed the curse is free to move on to the afterlife. The origin of the first fear liaths is a mystery distorted by millennia of oral legend, but most tellers agree on one detail: the first fear liaths were vain human mountaineers who angered the god of the sun and were cursed to walk the earth as shadows, unable to be seen by other creatures for the rest of existence.

Undead Nature. The fear liath doesn’t require air, food, drink, or sleep.

Section 15: Copyright Notice

Creature Codex. © 2018 Open Design LLC; Authors Wolfgang Baur, Dan Dillon, Richard Green, James Haeck, Chris Harris, Jeremy Hochhalter, James Introcaso, Chris Lockey, Shawn Merwin, and Jon Sawatsky.

This is not the complete license attribution - see the full license for this page