Choking shade

Choking shade

(Creature)

Type

Undead
(incorporeal)

CR

5

Environment

Any

Alignment

LG	NG	CG
LN	N	CN
LE	NE	CE

Source: It Came from Hollow Mountain, pg(s). 82

Choking shades are incorporeal undead that arise from souls who died of suffocation in a particularly painful way.

Appearance

A choking shade resembles a vaguely humanoid-shaped swarm of ashes, bone shards, dirt, and dust.

Ecology

Choking shades usually manifest near where they died, and can be found in packs if they all died together in the same tragedy. Choking shades that drowned tend to seek out dry land but stay near the water.

Choking shades envy the breath of living creatures, attacking them on sight. Although they retain some intelligence and the ability to understand speech, choking shades are too hateful to communicate with the living in any meaningful way.

A choking shade's fear in its suffocating death is contagious toward those near them. Choking shades can take advantage of this terror to enter a victim's lungs, suffocate them, and cause them to become another choking shade.

Society

When miners die in a cave-in or builders are crushed by collapsing buildings, clerics are often tasked with ensuring their corpses are given a proper burial so they will not become choking shades. This is usually done by extinguishing a candle, putting out a flame that consumes the oxygen the dead were denied.

Variants

Some choking shades are stronger than average, due to the circumstances and intensity of their deaths:

• the crushed shade, who was killed by a cave-in or collapsed structure, and can curse its foes with claustrophobia
• the drowned shade, who drowned and can fill the lungs of its victims with muck
• the smoking shade, who inhaled smoke in a fire and can burn the lungs of its hosts
• the strangled shade, who was murdered by strangulation and can bruise its victims' throats, temporarily rendering them mute