Towards the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors: Vargouilles

History is a bottomless well of blood, poisoned by grudges. From out of its depths rise the curses of hateful generations past and forgotten.

These living curses lurk among us - by day ordinary-seeming, unaware of their true nature, and by night their heads detach, warp and flitter, trailing the tubes of their entrails on gloomy missions, inflicting pain and panic. An arrow loosed eventually lands, and lies still. A curse is a weapon for no just war, for it flies night after night without ever stopping.

They are

Vargouilles

HD: 1 AC: 14 ATK: 1d6 bite, OR Kiss OR Shriek SAV: 8  MOV: Fly as bat INT: As human ML: 7
No. Appearing: 1d10

Kiss: A vargouille spreads its curse with a kiss. One kissed by a vargouille must save, or contract their curse - on the first round after contracting the curse, a thin pink line of raw flesh circles their neck. On the second round, the line weeps corrupted blood. From the third round on, if their head is not firmly secured to their neck by their hands, or bandages, or suchlike, then it flies off as a new vargouille. Vargouilles are reluctant to overpopulate - too large a population of vargouilles in a community is a beacon to the headless huntsmen. The curse of a vargouille's kiss may be lifted by the same means as any other curse.

Shriek: Those within 30 feet must save or take 1d6 non-lethal damage each round they don't spend hiding or fleeing for the next 1d6 rounds. Those who fall unconscious due to this damage have their hair turn white permanently. Those who make their save against a vargouille's scream are immune to all such screams for a day. Headless hunstmen are immune to this.

A vargouille can chew the head off a corpse to make that corpse its new host body. Both the vargouille and its new body will appear to be an ordinary human during the day, but one's appearance is not changed to match the other.

Should a vargouille pass over the Seal of Iphegor it will be flung down to earth and become unable to fly until it removes itself from the radius of the Seal - however the true form of the Seal of Iphegor has been lost for centuries, and countless counterfeits crowd grimoires.

The Headless Huntsmen

HD: 3 AC: 16 ATK: 1d8 longsword & Hanged Man's Rot grenades, or 1d6 bow & arrows, or 1d6 bident and net SAV: 9 MOV: As human, or as riding horse INT: As human ML: 10
No. Appearing: 2d4

Impatient, ruthless exterminators of the vargouilles. The horses they ride are fearless, but otherwise ordinary.

Their neck-stumps are plugged by plates of lead printed with worn runes. Their blood does not flow except at the moment of their deaths, when it is expelled in a flood. When they attempt to go about incognito, they will wear hoods or helmets supported by gourds or tubers underneath. They communicate through gesture, and are somehow able to see without eyes, hear without ears. Headless huntsmen possess no special sense to detect vargouilles, but know the signs of their presence in a community - pregnant women whose children have been gnawed from their wombs, pets left impaled on branches, feces smeared on window-sills, and suchlike.

Hanged Man's Rot: Save vs. CON when breathing it in miasmic form, or contract. A Hanged Man's Rot grenade has a 10-ft. radius. Where a serious infestation has been detected, the headless huntsmen will bring a copper cooking-wagon which can in time fill an entire hex with Hanged Man's Rot miasma.

The disease is an affliction of the cervical vertebrae and its nerves - at first only a stiffness in the extremities, then becoming apparent as a harsh, weeping rash around the neck when it advances - in the end it leaves its victims paralyzed and suffocating. Save or take 1d6 DEX damage each week, which cannot be recovered until Hanged Man's Rot is cured. A dose of cure to the sickness can be produced with 20 sp of rare herbs, the knowledge of a sage or equivalent figure, and a day's work.

A vargouille can contract Hanged Man's Rot from both miasma and victims of it they feed on, yet takes no DEX damage. Instead, their ability to control a host body is destroyed. To those afflicted with Hanged Man's Rot, a vargouille's kiss is simply fatal if their head detaches rather than accursed.

D6x6 Bonkers Boots

Click the button below to get your boots:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: https://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	These boots have the style
1	of jodhpur boots.
2	of cowboy boots.
3	of go-go boots.
4	of hessians.
5	of poulaines.
6	of jackboots.

D6	These boots are made
1	from the stitched soles of men who outran justice.
2	from a wicker-like weaving of the spines of serpents.
3	from a pair of hollowed camel-humps and the unplucked hide of an ostrich.
4	from the manes, fangs, and leather of a pair of gay man-eating lions.
5	of quicksilver miraculously woven into rippling cloth.
6	from the contiguous carapaces of remarkably boot-shaped insects.

D6	These boots are adorned
1	with colourful ribbons like ballet shoes.
2	with jingling golden bells.
3	with feathery plumes down their backs.
4	with bejewelled hobnails.
5	with in-sewn stockings embroidered with calligraphic prayers to gods of movement and travel.
6	with thin chains of tin and painted glass.

D6	These boots let their wearer
1	tread unharmed on water, lava, oozes, and all other at-least-mostly-fluids.
2	dance any dance perfectly.
3	kick with the force of a horse, and let any of their strikes against something marked by their boot-print - even something as light as a breath - hit it with the force of a horse's kick.
4	leap vertically up to any height they can see - though they provide no protection on the way down.
5	march forever without becoming exhausted, and at the moment of death set a location anywhere in the world for their boots to march their corpse to.
6	click their heels together twice to return to the position they stood ten paces back.

D6	These boots can be found
1	with their last wearer's legs still sticking out of them - bone-in - in a dungeon.
2	being modelled by an animate mannequin.
3	in the collection of a leprechaun cobbler who is trying to figure out how to curse them, as he does all his wares.
4	in the cottage of a giant, who uses them as thimbles.
5	being worn by a senile wanderer with outlandish tales of far-flung lands.
6	being worshiped by a colony of feral cats as their god.

D6	If these boots don't fit
1	you're shit outta luck.
2	they can be resized by any wizard with knowledge of transmutation.
3	they'll magically resize themselves.
4	they'll Bed of Procrustes your feet to fit them.
5	you can go on a quest on behalf of a god of footwear (or some similar domain) to have them miraculously reshaped.
6	you can remake them by hand - but take care not to break their enchantment in the process.