Come away from an encounter with one of these vengeful spirits merely deaf and count yourself lucky for the rest of your peaceful, silent days. Often mistaken at first glance for a ghost or wandering spirit, the banshee reveals a far more deadly talent for sonic assault when angered. And her anger comes easy. A victim of betrayal (often by a loved one) the banshee makes known her displeasure with a roar or scream that can putrefy flesh and rend the senses. If you can help her get her vengeance, they say she might grant rewards. Whether the affection of a spurned spirit is a thing you’d want, well, that’s another question. Instinct: To get revenge

• Drown out all other sound with a ceaseless scream
• Unleash a skull-splitting noise
• Disappear into the mists

Corpses sewn onto corpses make up the bulk of these shambling masses of dark magic. Most undead are crafted to be controlled—made to serve some purpose like building a tower or serving as guardians. Not so the abomination. The last aspect of the ritual used to grant fire to their hellish limbs invokes a hatred so severe that the abomination knows but one task: to tear and rend at the very thing it cannot have—life. Many students of the black arts learn to their mortal dismay the most important fact about these hulks; an abomination knows no master. Instinct: To end life

• Tear flesh apart
• Spill forth putrid guts

Spot a lantern floating in the darkness, lost traveler in the swamp. Hope—a beacon of shimmering light. You call out to it, but there’s no answer. It begins to fade and so you follow, sloshing through the muck, tiring at the chase, hoping you’re being led to safety. Such a sad tale that always ends in doom. These creatures are a mystery—some say they’re ghosts, others beacons of faerie light. Nobody knows the truth. They are cruel, however. All can agree on that. Instinct: To misguide

• Lead someone astray
• Clear a path to the worst place possible

Tall. Real tall. Eight or nine feet when they’re young or weak. Covered all over in warty, tough skin, too. Big teeth, stringy hair like swamp moss and long, dirty nails. Some are green, some gray, some black. They’re clannish and hateful of each other, not to mention all the rest of us. Near impossible to kill, too, unless you’ve fire or acid to spare—cut a limb off and watch. In a few days, you’ve got two trolls where you once had one. A real serious problem, as you can imagine. Instinct: To smash

• Undo the effects of an attack (unless caused by a weakness, your call)
• Hurl something or someone

Some elementals are conjured up in sacred circles etched in chalk. Most, in fact. There’s a sort of science to it. Others, though, aren’t so orderly—they don’t fall under the carefully controlled assignments of fire, air, water, or earth. Some are a natural confluence of vine and mire and fungus. They do not think the way a man might think. They cannot be understood as one might understand an elf. They simply are. Spirits of the swamp. Shamblers in the mud. Instinct: To preserve and create swamps

• Call on the swamp itself for aid
• Meld into the swamp
• Reassemble into a new form

Great lumbering beasts, they live in places long since forgotten by the thinking races of the world. Gentle if unprovoked, but mighty if their ire is raised, they trample smaller creatures with the care we might give to crushing an ant beneath our boots. If you see one, drift by and gaze in awe, but do not wake the giant. Instinct: To endure

• Stampede
• Knock something down
• Unleash a deafening bellow

The shape and craft of men wedded to the hunger and the endless teeth of a shark. Voracious and filled only with hate, these creatures will not stop until all life has been consumed. They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be controlled or sated. They are hunger and bloodlust, driven up from the depths of the sea to ravage coastal towns and swallow island villages. Instinct: To spill blood

• Bite off a limb
• Hurl a poisoned spear
• Frenzy at the sight of blood

The medusa are children of a serpent-haired mother, birthing them in ancient times to bear her name across the ages. They dwell near places of civilization—luring folks to their caves with promises of beauty or riches untold. Fine appreciators of art, the medusa curate strange collections of their victims, terror or ecstasy frozen forever in stone. It satisfies their vanity to know they were the last thing seen in so many lives. Arrogant, proud, and spiteful, in their way, they seek what so many do—endless company. Instinct: To collect

• Turn a body part to stone with a look
• Draw someone’s gaze
• Show hidden terrible beauty

A traveling sorcerer once told me that lizardmen came before we did. That before elves and dwarves and men built even the first of their wattle huts, a race of proud lizard kings strode the land. That they lived in palaces of crystal and worshipped their own scaly gods. Maybe that’s true and maybe it ain’t—now they dwell in places men long forgot or abandoned, crafting tools from volcano-glass and lashing against the works of the civilized world. Maybe they just want back what they lost. Instinct: To destroy civilization

• Ambush the unsuspecting
• Launch an amphibious assault

Some are wont to lump these little, rat-like dragon-men in with goblins and orcs, bugbears and hobgoblins. They are smarter and wiser than their kin, however. The kobolds are beholden slaves to dragons and were, in ancient times, their lorekeepers and sorcerer-servants. Their clans, with names like Ironscale and Whitewing, form around a dragon master and live to serve and do its bidding. Spotting a kobold means more are near—and if more are near then a mighty dragon cannot be far, either. Instinct: To serve dragons

• Lay a trap
• Call on dragons or draconic allies
• Retreat and regroup