Crawling claw

A swarm of crawling claws was made from the hands of some 300 small- and medium-sized humanoids. This construct acted like a swarm of insects, but perhaps with even less intelligence. Nevertheless, it was quite disturbing when viewed first hand.

Description
Using their fingers as legs, the hands crawled toward whatever they sensed as a target and swarmed over it. They could also leap six feet (1.8 m) vertically. The swarm had no discernible front, back, or central body.

Behavior
A swarm of crawling claws had only enough intelligence to perform simple guard duty or similar tasks.

Combat
As sightless and nearly mindless constructs, crawling claws had some distinct advantages in combat. They were unaffected by illusions, gaze attacks, and other sight-related attacks. They were immune to disease, poison, stun, sleep, paralysis, death effects, necromancy effects, energy drain, ability drain, fatigue, exhaustion, and mind-based effects such as phantasms, patterns, charm, compulsion, and morale effects. They could not be effectively harmed by spells that targeted one creature or a limited number of creatures. They could not be turned, flanked, subdued, tripped, grappled, bull-rushed, or critically hit and took only half damage from piercing and slashing weapons.

The swarm attacked a single opponent at a time, using sheer numbers to overwhelm a target. When first encountered up close, any living creature susceptible to being damaged by the crawling claw was possibly nauseated to the point of distraction, unable to take action or cast a spell. If the victim was prone, the crawling claw did double damage.

The crawling claw was particularly vulnerable to area-effect and grenade-like attacks.

Appearances

 * Adventures:
 * Elminster's Back Door