Of those, the ninja spirit shadow, beetle swarm and paper warrior sound the most intriguing.
"Tentacles" is by far the least.
I spent some time reading through
Night of the Seven Swords and there are quite a few new monsters.
A few of these creatures are just spirit versions of standard monsters - e.g. the
Giant Crab Ghost is simply a standard Giant Crab that can be affected by anti-spirit magic.
A lot of the rest are the spirit forms of deceased humanoids, a sizeable number of which could probably be represented as NPCs with the Haunted template from
Dragon #318. e.g. "haunted 1st level samurai".
However, some of these "ghosts" have special powers, most noticeably the seven weapon masters who are the "Seven Swords" of the module's title. All the Seven Swords have the power to materialize and engage in physical combat, and the usual undead immunity to sleep & charm.
The Seven Swords are:
The Reaper - Special attacks (sweep, block, "seven blades", propeller attack) with a Scythe.
The Veiled Maidens - Special attacks (blinding, entangling, strangling) with veil.
The General - Can create 20
mirror images of himself plus a flaming katana.
The Shadow Walker - Has powers of blending, wall walking, hurling paralyzing bits of shadow, and blur. Has a Con-damaging kusari-gama.
The Paper Warrior - An arcane spellcaster who can create animated origami creatures/objects (shield beetle, bee warrior, vipers, pinwheel, leaping locusts, octopus) that fight for him. Also has a magic quill that can rewrite a creature's perception of reality!
The Screaming Child - a dwarf air elementalist who attacks with a giant rattle! Has special attacks (thrown ball, hurl foe, blinding flash) with his rattle.
The Keeper - A warrior-priest who has special attacks (deflect attack, crystal shuriken) with a set of windchimes.
The
Ninja Spirit Shadow is like a weaker version of a "Sword" that can be met as a random encounter - it's basically a 6 HD undead spirit ninja/yakuza with fast-healing that turns into an indestructible and intangible 2D shadow when in bright light.
Apart from the eight "spirits" and miscellaneous spooks described above, the other original creatures I found are:
Beetle Swarms - One (random encounter) swarm has 15 hp and automatically does 1 damage to all opponents in its area, the other (location trap) swarm has 40 hp and does 1d4 damage/opponent. Both are AC 7.
Daji - A miniature 1st level samurai, as small as your little finger.
Flying Spirits - skull-headed flying killer bedsheets. I suspect these are some kind of Yokai, but I have been unable to find a Japanese monster that matches the description.
Flying Stones - Enchanted cobblestones that fly about smashing into folk. I think we can skip this one!
Goblin Rat King - a
slightly stronger version of the standard Goblin Rat. Doesn't seem worth converting.
Haunted Arm - A disembodied arm. Fights as a 12th level ninja!
Haunted Heads - A husband and wife pair of disembodied (and argumentative) "living" heads.
Tentacles - The Encounter Table has a listing for "tentacles" (AC 4, MV 6", HD 9, hp 16, THAC0 12, Dmg 2-8, SA Tangle (Str 20), Al N), but I can find no such monster in the scenario itself! The only creature with tentacles that I could find is a krakentua, but its stats are quite different.
