Greater Homunculus, Malformed

A greater malformed homunculus is a tortured creature, controlled by an overpowering conviction that they are incomplete. They wander the world, seeking new body parts to add to themselves.

What it wants: New body parts. They will take anything new, cutting it from its former owner as best they can (with whatever claws, pincers, or fangs they have already acquired) and attaching it to themselves. Attachment is simple, as their blood has a mysterious way of melding flesh. The homunculus needs only to slice itself open and jam the new part into the wound, and the blood will rapidly clot and bind. When the wound heals, the new organ will be perfectly integrated into the homunculus.

What it needs: Food. Greater homunculi have prodigious appetites that only grow stronger as they add to themselves. Their mismatched bodies have strange nutritional needs, needs that can change seemingly at random as their metabolisms shift.

Morale: Cautious. They will only fight if they believe they can win, and will not hesitate to flee if they begin to lose. They do not feel pain, but sense damage and seek to avoid it.

What happens if you eat it: Greater malformed homunculi are made entirely out of flesh, and so are as edible as any animal. What animal any given part was originally part of can be impossible to determine, however, making for a challenge for chefs, a delight for the culinarily adventurous, and a toxic surprise for the unlucky.

What can be crafted out of it: Greater homunculi blood is the basis of many powerful medicines. Note that in its raw form it is highly dangerous, able to fuse flesh to flesh even in small amounts. Many foolhardy adventuring parties have had to be surgically separated after being inadvertently conjoined by blood.

Hollow Men

Hollow men are all skin and bones. They have no eyes, only empty holes in their skull to match their mouths, noses, and ears. Their skin has become a hard shell. Wounds become new holes, and do not impede the hollow unless a part is severed.

Where it comes from: Any who dies by starvation and is left unburied or unburned will become hollow.

What it wants and will fight for: Hollow men want meat. They will tirelessly hunt down living creatures, then pull them apart and stuff their meat into themselves. They will ignore living creatures to try to get dead meat, which has led to the common tactic of luring them into groups with animal carcasses and setting them aflame.

What happens if you eat it: Hollow men are tents of dried skin and bone filled with rotting meat. You will get sick.

Dread Hive

Bee queens may be sentient. This is demonstrated by the use of necromancy by some honeybee queens. Some maintain that the necromancy exhibited by some bee queens is merely a natural magical ability, and does not necessarily prove sentience. But most naturalists believe that the queens are sentient, and like all sentient life, can investigate things men (and bees) were not meant to know.

In a dread hive, all but the queen are undead. The queen no longer lays eggs, but dances rituals to raise the exoskeletons of dead insects. Her tireless workers haul in spell reagents and exoskeletons, and arrange themselves in complex patterns to amplify, always fueling the continuous expansion of the hive rituals.

Dread hives differ from living ones in one obvious way: they are too large. The workers collect natural spell reagents, which they purify into dread honey, a powerful spell reagent. The interior of the hive is laid out with geometric precision, in accordance with geomantic and numerological principles.

Where it comes from: Like all sentient beings, honeybee queens occasionally delve into forbbiden knowledge.

What it wants and needs: Dead insects. Their exoskeletons will be raised and join to the colony. The queen wears parts of insects as her armor, and can control them. Her colony incorporates the risen corpses of other insects; while most are still worker bees, everything from wasps to centipedes can be expected.

What it will fight for: They will fight other insects to kill them and incorporate their bodies. Otherwise, they fight only defensively.

What happens if you eat it: Dread honey is made from purified natural reagents. Eating it can awaken magical potential, cause prophetic dreams, or make for a bizarre death.

What can be crafted out it: Dread honey can be substituted for many other spell reagents, making it a very valuable substance. Candles made from dread wax reveal the presence of ghosts.

Hummingbees

To the unfamiliar, hummingbees are not easily distinguished from hummingbirds, their close relatives. The big giveaways are their bright plumage in bright violet and deep black, and their longer, thinner beaks, which get longer and sharper as they grow older.

Hummingbees live in colonies of a few dozen, building large nests out of thin sticks and mud in the crooks of trees. All their eggs and young are raised collectively. The birds are thus willing to sacrifice themselves in the defense of their nest, knowing that their young will still be cared for. They attack intruders one at a time, oldest bird to youngest. They attack by darting quickly and powerfully at the enemy, piercing soft tissue with their needle-like beaks, aiming most often for the eyes. The wounds inflicted are small but deep and can often kill through blood loss or infection. Most animals have learned to avoid hummingbee nests.

Where it comes from: They are born from small blue eggs and raised by all the adults of the colony.

What it wants and needs: Hummingbees eat both for themselves and for the young in their nests. They eat massive amounts of nectar, supplemented by small insects.

What it will fight for: Hummingbees will always fight in defense of their nests.

What happens if you eat it: Delicious!

What can be crafted out it: Their beaks can be used as needles, awls, or shanks.

Zombie Troll

Zombification is a disease, passed through saliva like rabies. Trolls are large humanoid monsters known for their ability to rapidly heal. When a troll contracts the zombie disease, a fierce stalemate results, the disease continually spreading and the troll continually recovering.

Where it comes from: It is not easy for a troll to catch the zombie virus, as they are both strong and fast. Usually it happens when a zombie stumbles upon a sleeping troll.

What it wants and needs: To eat. Half the monster is a zombie, and half is a troll, and both are hungry. The troll pursues prey, the zombie bites, and so both creatures are fed. The hunger never leaves, however, and it will eat soil if nothing else is available.

What it will fight for: Food. A zombie troll will not stop trying to eat, no matter what. It does not feel pain or fear. It can be distracted, however, by a more convenient meal. 

What happens if you eat it: Your death will be complicated and agonizing. The zombie tissue will cause food poisoning, abdominal necrosis, and possibly zombification. The troll tissue will attempt to reform itself inside you, absorbing your flesh to create more of its own. You may be turned into a new zombie troll, as the zombification of your flesh is matched by the growth of the troll, or you may be slowly torn apart, as your flesh is killed by zombie toxins and your body burst open by a troll teratoma. Or both.

What can be crafted out it: If sterilized, dried, and powdered, zombiefied troll flesh is a powerful addition to healing potions. The hide of a zombie troll is very tough, albeit uneven, and requires a great deal of work to be turned into leather.