Cloaker

Cloaker
(Creature)
Common CN Large Aberration Level 5 Alignment LG NG CG LN N CN LE NE CE Images of cloakers Source: Bestiary, pg(s). 65 Type Aberration CR 5 Environment Underground Alignment LG NG CG LN N CN LE NE CE Images of cloakers Source: Bestiary, pg(s). 47

Cloakers, or fulthrethus, look like monstrous manta rays that have long tails that end in a bony whip. Horns beside their heads end in thumb-like claws and are as black as their oversize skin. Their underside is pale and it contains a fang-filled mouth and two red eyes. Their wings spread farther than a grown man can reach, and they fly quickly at an average quality.

Cloakers were created by alghollthus in order to spy on their Azlanti thralls. Loyal Azlanti leaders were rewarded with cloaker bodyguards and assassins.

When the alghollthus destroyed Old Azlant, they cast out the cloakers, who fled to the Darklands. Most aquatic cloakers returned to serve the alghollthus, but the remainder informally serve the Great Old Ones.

Cloakers in the Darklands are equally distributed between Sekamina and Orv. Cloakers tend to avoid Nar-Voth due to its proximity to the surface and its many humanoid settlements.

Cloakers may have tattoos that resemble Varisian tattoos, but the source of the cloakers' tattoos is a much different and much older in origin.

Variants

Many variants of cloaker exist, including individuals specialising in murder, cloaker assassins, and those focusing on serving deities, cloaker priests. Additionally, separate breeds of cloaker exist, such as:

• Amphibious: Devolved closer to their original ancestors, amphibious cloakers can breath water as well as air and swim like other cloakers fly. There may be examples so regressed that they can no longer breathe air and have returned to the aquatic service of their creators.

• Fungoid: Some cloakers can become infected with one or more strains of parasitic fungi or mold, avoiding the negative side effects due to their alien biology but forming a symbiotic relationship with their new passenger. Fungoid cloakers can be distinguished by the layer of fungal growth on their bodies, which ruins their ability to pose as an article of clothing but allows them to better pose as mounds of refuse. While many fungoid cloakers are bonded to harmless mushrooms or bioluminescent fungi, others become host to russet mold, violet mold, brown mold, or yellow mold.

• Halfbreed: Crossbreeds of cloakers and rays. Looked down on by all other cloakers for their slow wits and lack of magical abilities, they typically serve as thuggish muscle for their purebred kin and parents. Halfbreed cloakers are sterile with each other but fecund with normal cloakers and rays, in which cases their offspring will always be the species of the other parent.

• Shadowbrood: Midnight-black cloakers believed to be infused with the power of the Plane of Shadow. Sometimes mistaken for incorporeal undead, shadowbrood cloakers have innate magical powers linked to the darkness.

• Stinger: Cloakers whose tails bear a jagged, venomous stinger.

• Vampiric: The result of cloakers practicing parthenogenesis, typically as a result of a cloaker becoming isolated and thinking itself the last of its kind. Yellow-gray in coloration, vampiric cloakers attach to other creatures and drink their blood like giant leeches.

• Webspinner: The result of drow fleshwarping cloakers with arachnids and ettercaps. Webspinner cloakers can spin webs and shoot web nets, and many also have venomous fangs or stingers.

References

For additional as-yet unincorporated sources about this subject, see the Meta page.