Maelephant

Maelephants were elephantine denizens of the Nine Hells and powerful guardians used to protect the treasures of fiends and wicked spellcasters.

Description
Maelephants were vaguely humanoid in shape, standing tall and weighing. They were bewildering creatures but nonetheless terrifying, with oversized hands tipped with vicious claws. Their massive heads resembled those of elephants with smaller eyes, ears, teeth and mouths. They had rheumy, red eyes and a serpentine trunk ending in a long, narrow spike.

Personality
Maelephants were instinctually loyal beings created with a primal urge to protect. They had no possessions of their own and so wandered the Lower planes searching for things to guard.

Abilities
Maelephants could breathe out a wide,  long, cloud of noxious gas that, on contact with skin, could result in the suppression of all a victim's memories. Skills, experiences, relationships and even the victim's own name were forgotten and resting for too long could cause any newly formed memories to disappear. Although any racial abilities would remain, the victim would lose access to their spellcasting abilities, although once their memories were restored, all prepared spells would be made available. Memory loss inflicted by a maelephant could be remedied using any technique that treated poison but could not be naturally recovered from over time.

Maelephants had access to various spell like abilities, including alarm, entangle, gust of wind, light, true seeing and warp wood at will as well as blade barrier and baleful polymorph three times every day. Only enchanted weapons could harm them and they slowly regenerated from most attacks, although they could not grow new limbs.

Combat
Whether protecting a person or a place, a maelephant would give its life to defend its charge, using their claws to crush intruders and their trunks to pierce those they grappled. They always remained at their posts, would abandon any current battle to stop a more imminent threat to its ward and never allowed them out of their sight. They could rush their enemies in a frightening frenzy once per minute, or take a defensive stance to fortify themselves for a few dozen seconds during a battle, depending on whether they needed to hold a point or run off interlopers. Normally they created defensive countermeasures around their charges before attempting to engage their opponents.

Society
Maelephants, either by accidentally stumbling upon them or being intentionally sought out by them, were used by important fiends and powerful wizards as protectors. A maelephant's only stipulation was that it had to be fed a large quantity of live flesh, after which it would happily act as a defender, normally for a term of one hundred years. They could be found throughout the Lower Planes and some made their homes on the Demiplane of Nightmares but were most common in Baator.

While maelephants possessed their own unique tongue and spoke Infernal, many also knew Common. It was possible to summon them using summon monster VIII.

In the Realms
Maelephants were sometimes found in service of the duergar deities Laduguer and Deep Duerra.

Ecology
Maelephants had olfactory and auditory senses twice that of the average human and eyesight quadruple that of humanity. They possessed both low-light vision and darkvision.

History
Maelephants were originally the creations and servants of the Dark Eight, having been bred to be absolutely obedient. When their masters were deposed, many maelephants under their command fled to the other Lower Planes and multiplied. They were the ancestral enemies of the baku.

Appearances

 * Card Games
 * AD&D Trading Cards