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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 9030903" data-attributes="member: 20323">GM POST<img src="https://5e.tools/img/adventure/IDRotF/017-01-008.duvessa.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable fr-fil" data-size="" style="width: 182px" /> Exchanging a glance with the Sheriff in which he seems to relent in his standoffishness to her unremitting gaze, Duvessa Shane narrows her eyes. "Bryn Shander was nearly wrested from me. The mage responsible is locked away in Revel's End, but had I trusted my gut sooner the damage he wrought would have been less. I fear this situation with Jelenneth is similar."Young though she may be, the dark-haired Speaker realizes that for a person in her position gut feelings are not enough. "For several months, Jelenneth's preaching – restricted to Bryn Shander's cold market square (and no other towns) until recently – made frequent use of the phrase "a dagger in the Frostmaiden's heart." While I don't know her to be a spellcaster, she is a cunning manipulator who has swayed people that the only way to stave off the Endless Rime is to offer human sacrifices to the Frostmaiden."[GM][USER=6669245]@Necropolitan[/USER] Leaving aside shapeshifters or a mage with the disguise self spell, there are three broad categories of arctic creatures which might originate as a man, only to become something much worse. Aberrations, Fiends, and Undead.Insofar as Aberrations are concerned, aboleth are not normally associated with the Sea of Moving Ice, but such entities are known to transform humans into psychically dominated "skum." Typically their appearance becomes inhuman during the transformation. Likewise, intellect devourers can crawl inside a creature's head and control it, but all records indicate the creature has to be living...whether or not a corpse sufficiently preserved by cold could still be inhabited, no writer has ever reported.Of the Fiends, one name stands above all others: Levistus offers devil's bargains to travelers facing death beneath winter's claw. Those he spares always bear a token of some kind signifying their pact with Levistus and the damning of their soul. Should such a man send others in his stead to the Stygian Depths, he may lose his mortality and become a fiend.And then there are the Undead, of which there are several. Wights may form through dark magics kept trapped in the ice or through resurrections gone wrong. While victims sacrificed to the Gods of Fury (Talos, Umberlee, Malar, Auril) rarely animate as undead, in the case of a druid who is sacrificed they may return as an icegaunt – akin to a spellcasting wight able to see through blizzards, but rarely going far from the spot where they died. A sailor who feasts on the flesh of men might return as a sodden ghoul (also called a "lacedon"), though the circumstances are murky – more than mere cannibalism is required, some act that is truly depraved and inhumane.[/GM]</blockquote>

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