Beached Things
The true death of Kelemvor and his assistant Jergal on the Astral Plane had many consequences, both known and unknown to the avatars of the Abyss who performed the deed. What none of them could have predicted, however, was the stranding of souls. With both creatures capable of taking up the mantle of psychopomp thrown to the oblivion of the Astral Sea, none were left to guard the Fugue Plane and maintain its fragile peace. The dead no longer needed to rest.
The Fugue Plane was torn asunder. The walls of the City of Judgment, held together by the bodies of uncountable numbers of the Faithless, broke. Their souls, so beaten and broken by millennia of idle suffering, could finally move. The devils who wandered the city in search of souls, in one moment happy to make deals with the downtrodden, were suddenly overcome by tides of flesh the next. Not even the pit fiends were spared the wild frenzy of the bodies of the Faithless, who tore apart the City of Judgment in a fever born of thousands of years of rage at their unjust oppression.
The destruction of the City of Judgment was the destruction of the Fugue Plane. When Kelemvor's Crystal Spire fell, the last of the buildings to resist the hands of the dead, the entire plane burned to ashes, and the souls within scattered into the broader Shadowfell which contained. But they did not scatter without purpose; with nobody to guide the souls to their respective afterlives, there was only place for a soul: the body which it left.
But the vast majority of these uncountable many souls no longer had bodies to return to. Stranded between life and death, these souls were forced back to where they came, body or not. But they came back wrong. With no bodies, they could come back only as disembodied spirits, not like the ghosts and specters that many an adventurer has killed, but as something uniquely horrid: a thing beached on the shore between life and death itself, with nothing but desperate claws reaching out for something to touch.
Aging Rain. Beached things are known first by the rain they bring, and second for the voidouts they cause. The magical rain they produce, known by scholars as timefall, accelerates the aging process of anything that it touches, immediately turning nonmagical as it touches a surface. Timefall has turned the territory of beached things unlivable except for plant life, which thrive as their growth happens at an explosive rate. One looking outwards at the rain can see the plants grow, flower, and die, all within a minute. Some enterprising druids have used this process to accelerate the growth of the creatures which guard their forests.
Voidouts. The connection of the beached things to the Shadowfell grants them a unique power to reproduce themselves, namely by ending the lives of others. With the Fugue Plane destroyed, it is a much more tumultuous process to enter the afterlife, but the beached things can shut this process down altogether if they are the ones to kill a creature. With its death, they can create another one of themselves out of the creature's tortured soul in an explosion of necrotic energy known as a voidout. Too many cities have been lost on account of these time bombs being introduced into a city and kept secret until it was too late. The only way that has been found to stop this transformation is to utterly incinerate the body, which makes the victims of a beached thing impossible to resurrect except to the most powerful clerics.
Deliverance to a True Afterlife. There exists only one force that can work in the place of a psychopomp to bring the beached things to their true afterlife: the blood of a repatriate, a creature that was resurrected at least once before the stranding of the beached things. No resurrection is perfect; every creature brings a little bit of its afterlife with it back to the Prime Material, physically or mentally. The blood of a resurrected creature contains this potent connection to both life force and the emotional bond of the creature who spills it, and it has the power to guide these creatures to their afterlife. When they fall to a weapon that is covered in this blood, they scream, not in pain, but in joy, as their immortal souls finally find the rest they were denied for so many years.
Undead Nature. A beached thing does not require food, drink, or sleep.
Repatriate Blood
Adventuring item
A cup worth of blood, extracted willingly or otherwise from a creature that has died at least once and was resurrected. As an action, or replacing one of your attacks if you take the Attack action, you can apply this blood to a weapon, which lasts for one minute before drying.
Image Credit
Image is sourced from https://gamewith.net/death-stranding/article/show/13353, edited in Pixlr.
Beached Thing
Medium undead, neutral
- Armor Class 9
- Hit Points 163 (25d8 + 50)
- Speed 35 ft., fly 30 ft. (hover)
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 20 (+5) 8 (-1) 14 (+2) 1 (-5) 18 (+4) 6 (-2)
- Skills Athletics +8, Perception +7, Stealth +2
- Damage Vulnerabilities bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing dealt by weapons coated in the blood of a repatriate
- Damage Immunities necrotic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical weapons
- Condition Immunities blinded, charmed, fatigued, frightened, incapacitated, poisoned, unconscious, exhaustion
- Senses blindsight 30 ft. (blind beyond this radius), passive Perception 17
- Languages knows the languages it knew in life but cannot speak
- Challenge 8 (3,900 XP)
Ambush Predator. If the beached thing hits a surprised creature with a Grasping Hands attack, it can perform Submerge as a bonus action.
Echolocation. The beached thing's blindsight does not work while the beached thing is deafened.
Timefall. The area within 500 feet of the beached thing is covered in an endless rain that rises as high as the clouds. Creatures within the rain with no physical armor (i.e. not force armor such as mage armor) that are exposed to the timefall age 1d6 years at the start of their turn while they are in the timefall. Beached things are immune to this effect. Creatures in nonmagical armor that spend a cumulative amount of time exposed to timefall equal to 1 minute gain a permanent -1 penalty to their armor as it ages beyond use. If this reduction reduces the base AC of the armor to 10, it is permanently destroyed. Objects worn or carried by a creature are also affected by the timefall. Objects and structures that take damage while exposed to timefall take double the normal amount of damage from all effect, which stacks with the Siege Monster feature.
To the Other Side. The beached thing automatically succeeds on all saves against being banished, unless an optional material component of 1 cup of the blood of a repatriate is consumed for the material component, in which case the beached thing automatically fails the saving throw and is immediately turned into a petitioner of its plane.
Visions of Death. The beached thing is always magically invisible. This can be disabled for 1 minute with any effect which dispels magic, such as dispel magic or when in the area of an antimagic field. Repatriates who are still children are capable of seeing beached things without assistance.
Voidout. When a creature that is not an undead is reduced to 0 hit points by damage dealt by the beached thing, it dies. If the creature's body is not burned to ashes within 1 day of its death (which can be extended by spells such as gentle repose) or it is not resurrected before that point, it will rise as a beached thing and the body of the creature will explode, dealing 200 necrotic damage to any creature within 1 mile of the creature. Any creature which dies in this explosion also is raised as a beached thing in 24 hours, but does not trigger the voidout feature. A creature turned into a beached thing cannot be resurrected even by a wish spell until the beached thing it became is killed.
Actions
Multiattack. The beached thing makes 2 Grasping Hands attacks. It can replace any number of Grasping Hands attacks with Submerge attacks.
Grasping Hands. Melee Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit 27 (3d8 + 5) bludgeoning damage plus 5 (1d8) necrotic damage, and the target is grappled (escape DC 16). While the beached thing has grappled a creature, the area within 10 feet of the beached thing counts as difficult terrain as viscous black tar bursts from the body of the beached thing.
Submerge. The beached thing makes a Strength (Athletics) check with advantage against a creature it has grappled. On a success, the creature is restrained, submerged into the ground in a pool of tar, and starts suffocating. The creature can make a Strength (Athletics) check as an action at the end of its turn to break free from the tar, ending the grappled and restrained conditions and no longer suffocating. If the beached thing is killed, the creature can spend 5 feet of its movement on its turn to leave the tar, falling prone.