Death slaad

Death slaadi, also known as the lesser masters, were possibly the most deadly of the slaad race, responsible for organizing the disorderly creatures into mobs and releasing them across reality to wreak havoc. The transformed gray slaads were thought by other slaads to be the pinnacle of their kind, but rather than being true paragons of chaos they embodied its corruption by evil.

Description
Death slaads were visually indistinguishable from gray slaads.

Personality
Despite still having all memories of their former green and gray slaad selves, the behavior of the death slaadi starkly contrasted their previous attitudes, specifically in regards to their interests. No longer concerned with increasing their magical powers, death slaadi were sadists focused on bringing death and pain to those around them, the most powerful of which undergoing rogue training in order to later become full-fledged assassins.

Abilities
Death slaadi, by some mysterious means, obtained many of their powers by controlling the Spawning Stone in Limbo. They were creatures of destruction and decay, stunning and rotting those they struck with their natural weapons  and draining the life energy from those they pierced with their fangs. They possessed the same potential powers as their former selves in addition to more death related spell-like abilities such as cloudkill, astral projection, phantasmal killer, finger of death and circle of death.

Like in their previous forms, they could polymorph into their original humanoid hosts, reportedly while retaining their incredible strength. They could also summon red, blue, green and gray slaads, although not other death slaads.

Combat
Though they seldom wore armor and were lethally proficient with their claws and fangs, death slaads preferred to wield magical weaponry, often blades such as swords of sharpness.

Society
Despite being too chaotic to respect any form of authority, all slaads obeyed the commands of the death slaadi out of a combination of fear and respect. They viewed the death slaads as exemplars of their race and greatly feared, and revered, their insurmountable strength, and thus fervently followed their orders. It was said that they, from within the Spawning Stone's inner chambers, carved the symbols of rank into the slaads, granting them a vast amount of control over the race's loose hierarchy. It was also by their command that hordes of red and blue slaadi were gathered in Limbo and sent to other planes, particularly small, lower planar villages, Blood War battlefields and Prime Material Plane worlds, to slaughter the inhabitants and imprison the survivors to use as incubators and hosts.

They themselves organized the race under the orders of the Lord of Entropy, Ygorl, who desired the mass spawnings in order to sow further chaos in the multiverse. At the same time, Ygorl also killed and consumed powerful death slaadi for fear that they could learn how to obtain even greater power as slaad lords, making them both potential rivals and attractants for powerful beings throughout the multiverse seeking to prove their greatness. Death slaads themselves were rarely seen in the Material Plane since they almost exclusively disguised themselves as humans, to the point where only six were truly known.

Religion
As beings dedicated to death, some death slaads became cultists known as pale raiders, clerics that inhabited the Negative Energy Plane and were revitalized in their desire of magical power, not for its own sake but to honor death in all its forms.

Ecology
Death slaads were former gray slaads that, through enigmatic, evil rituals that imbued them with negative energy, became virtually immortal monsters bent on murder. They could also emerge as the result of a gray slaad having devoured the corpse of a preexisting death slaad. Despite being seen as the perfect slaad specimen by other slaads, they could still grow even more powerful.

Through a process similar to how their green slaad forms became gray slaads, death slaads over a century old could isolate themselves from slaad society, returning from their self-exile as white slaads. Others sought to explore a unique aspect of chaos in order to grant them an identity outside of the typified slaad castes, a process as barely understood as it was incredibly dangerous. If they succeeded in their investigation they would transform into slaad lords, empowered with extraordinary abilities, a sense of chaotic purpose and true individuality, although only four death slaads ever managed to complete the transformation.

Spawning Stone
During the death slaadi breeding season, they filled a few hundred yards around the Spawning Stone with poisonous and acidic fogs, making it uninhabitable for the red slaads that arrived there first. However, despite their power, they would inevitably be forced away by the mobs of red slaadi, possibly because their egg-pellets could infect even them.

Notable Death Slaadi

 * Loru, the death slaad who drove the miller from Daggerford insane and sought to infect the grains with a slaadi plague to create an army out of local farmers in 1372 DR.
 * Sorel, the death slaad lieutenant of Ygorl being trained to become the Slaad Lord of Anarchy and a powerful weapon of chaos.
 * Thuruppl the Kicker, an ancient death slaad that led his own private army of battle-hardeneded blue slaads known as the Quick Tongue.

Appearances

 * Video Games
 * Neverwinter Nights series (Neverwinter Nights • Darkness over Daggerford • Tyrants of the Moonsea) • Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone • • Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms