Vargouille

Vargouilles were swarming denizens of the lower planes, flying heads that took to unlit skies searching for living victims to consume or infect.

""Until ye've seen a king's head tear off his shoulders and flap aloft amid fountaining blood, only to turn and lap up his own dying gore as his body totters and falls, ye haven't yet lived. And if ye want to go on living, ye might want to stop watching in favor of fleeing.""

- Elminster

Description
Vargouilles resembled grotesquely deformed human-like heads about high and  in weight. They had a wingspan of, with leathery, bat-like wings taking the place of ears. Flailing tendrils crowned and fringed their heads as opposed to hair and an unnerving green glow could be seen in their eyes. They often wore a wicked sneer and jagged teeth laid inside their distended, shrieking maws.

Behavior
Vargouilles were loathed to enter lit areas, extinguishing handheld light sources like torches and lanterns and avoiding anything brighter. They typically remained in dark, untraversed areas waiting for prey to come to them, but were occasionally driven by their instinctual craving for live prey to risk exposure and fly into the night. They had no sense of value, only keeping the treasures of former victims in their lairs out of indifference along with the corpses.

Abilities
A vargouille's terrible shriek combined with their and horrifying appearance could paralyze any non-vargouilles nearby. Attacks by the monsters, an inability to see them, a few seconds to recover or simply the physical and mental fortitude to withstand their presence was enough to overcome their screams. Even more dangerous were their fangs, which contained a powerful poison that prevented magical healing. The physical damage from their bites were largely permanent with the exception of certain powerful forms of magic. Neutralize poison and heal would lift the condition and delay poison temporarily allowed for normal magical restoration, but only magic on the level of regenerate or well-worded wish spells could ignore the poison while still healing the recipient.

Combat
Vargouille's shrieked before attacking, sinking their teeth into their prey and occasionally kissing them to infect them with their disease.

Society
Lacking in any form of sophistication or organization, vargouilles gathered in packs, clusters that could be as small as pairs or mobs that could contain up to eleven members. The weak and wounded were devoured by the strong, and only the most powerful vargouille was in charge.

Vargouilles were incapable of speech but understood the lower planar languages of Infernal and Abyssal, as well as the languages of their former selves.

Ecology
Vargouilles infested all the lower planes, particularly the deepest of the Tarterian Depths where they were rumored to have spawned, but in truth they were natives of the many caves and skies of the Abyss. Rarely, if not intentionally released to cause chaos, they were known to parasitically latch onto demons when they were being conjured in order to feast on the less dangerous prey of other worlds, bypassing the summoner's precautions and escaping into the world. Once loosed upon a plane, such as the Outlands or Material Plane, they made homes in cemeteries, caverns, subterranean pits, ruins and other dark, decaying places, although they occasionally managed to lair in the catacombs and sewer systems of larger cities.

Reproduction
By infecting other beings, particularly humanoids, with their unique disease, vargouilles spread like a virulent plague. Using adventurers and travelers as vectors, vargouilles shared their disease through a kiss, normally paralyzing a victim with their shrieking before delivering it. The transformation was as bizarre as it was horrid, said to be the result of a curse allowing a fiendish spirit to invade and mutate the victim. The process could take as little as a few hours or as long as a day to complete and begins somewhat innocuously as the victim lost all their hair. Afterwards, the victim's head began to resemble a vargouille more with each passing hour, their teeth sharpening into fangs, tentacles sprouting from their scalps and chins, horns appearing on the top of their heads and their ears becoming pointed and slowly developing into large wings. From there, possibly before, the victim's intellect and personality would degrade until finally the bestial mind of the former individual ripped itself away from its body and began to drink from the resulting carnage.

Vargouilles always sought to spread their sickness as outside of their hunger for living flesh the urge to breed was their only, and at many times stronger, motivation. Unless seriously faced, their need for procreation and terrifying nature would allow them to quickly overrun the surrounding area. Luckily, the vargouille curse was not irresistible and had many ways to cure it if the individual in question lacked the vitality or will to resist themselves. Spells that removed diseases or curses could dispel the condition, as could powerful magic like greater restoration. Vargouilles used infravision and ultravision but they did not avoid bright lights merely because such things blinded them. Whether continual light, the daylight spell or actual daylight, the presence of powerful illumination temporarily halted the vargouille curse.

Diet
Vargouilles largely lacked natural predators outside of the good creatures and friends of victims attempting to drive them to extinction. Their want for live prey often went unfulfilled within the Abyss where most creatures regarded them as verminous nuisances, forcing them to subsist on other pests, carrion and the ichor of dead fiends. Only when flocking together in great swarms could they give other fiends any pause, and even then only a fearless manes or lone dretch would be in serious danger.

History
"Evolved from bats? Unlikely!"

- Gorad Drummerhaven

The wizard known as Rozvankee the Strategist, a specialist in terror weapons, was said have been the creator of the vargouilles, having made them to end a continuous siege on a neighboring duchy. After unleashing the first nine of the vargouilles, that quickly ruined enemy morale she ended the siege but eventually outgrew her mortality and became a lich. She supposedly left to the Abyss with hundreds of vargouilles in tow, becoming a pirate in one of the water-based layers of the Abyss on a three-masted ship constructed from her enemies' bones and trading small vargouille mobs with tanar'ri for favors and insurance against attacks.

Legends say that a sorcerer nowhere near the skill level of their creator somehow commanded a vargouille swarm by holding up shields and banners bearing Rovankee's family's symbol, only ending her upstart empire due to dissuasion from Rozvankee herself. Regardless of the story's truth, many conmen were known to sell shields and banners claiming they protected from the vargouilles.

Summoned to Zakhara during ages past for an unknown purpose, vargouilles were believed to be remnants of the Ruined Kingdoms. They had spread from their typical desolated ruins in the Cites of Ancients and Haunted Lands to the crypts of new settlements.