Dwarrowyrm

There is a horror story that no one remembers any more.

This is because it was told by a culture alien to the ones that currently inhabit the Barony, and because the human kingdoms have short memories.

The horror story is about losing your mind, and finding that you have become a monster. It's about your body stretching and changing, about loneliness in dark places, and about fixed, insane, unbreakable focus. This is how you lose your mind. You focus, and over time you find that you cannot stop, and then that you cannot sleep, or blink, or eventually even close your eyes. 

The ones that told this story used it as a cautionary tale. There were themselves given to obsession, craft, jewellery-making, and for them the ability to produce objects of great beauty was a virtue. They used the horror story to stop themselves forgetting that they needed other people around them too, lest they grow strange and fey, and lest the powerful machinery of their minds drown out and score itself across their gentler, kinder impulses. They loved drinking together, and singing, and storytelling, because these things eased the tension in the brain, and kept the horror story far away. 

The story is of a thing that looks a little like an enormous snake. It has soft, pale, pink skin, and four thin limbs with long, long fingers, which it uses to push itself through the black tunnels in the earth. Its face is nothing at all like a snake's face. It is elongated and awful, but obviously humanlike. The eyes are the thing you must never look at; they are the worst thing about this horrible creature. They will hypnotise you, but worse than that is what they show to you - the grinding, writhing insanity of them. Their crystal and murderous intelligence. Their cruelty and their curiosity. They are obviously human eyes, but each is half a foot tall; these are big snakes. Below them a horrible smiling mouth and sharp, sharp teeth. They breathe poison. They dig in the earth and they watch people come and go in secret, and they hate, and scheme, and plan relentlessly for betrayals and persecutions. They take a sort of torturous enjoyment from picturing exactly how alone they are, exactly how cut away from the kindness that might make them vulnerable, that might draw their attention for even a moment, that might let them rest.

No one remembers this story, because the people who used to tell it all died or went away hundreds of years ago. Their holdings and their cavernous halls all stand deserted in the deep places beneath the earth. 

The worst thing about the horror story was how it promised that the worm that you find yourself turning into, drowning in paranoia, day by hideous day, would never die. 

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Dwarrowyrm 

HD8; armour as leather; bite d8 + poison (see below); speed: faster than a human but ungainly; disposition: cruel, curious, vindictive, abusive, petty, fixated.

Dwarrowyrm always speak common, and usually many other languages as well. 

Eyes of Madness. If it can see you and you can see it, you must save CHAR with disadvantage or do nothing that turn. You may automatically succeed on this roll by closing your eyes (treat yourself as blinded for the turn). 

Poison Breath. Semi-liquid, semi-gaseous, acidic and toxic. Falls constantly from their long, sharp teeth. They can breathe/spit it out for about 20ft, and it deals d8 damage with a CON save for half. 

Fey Mood. Trying to read the mind of a Dwarrowyrm fails, and you take d6 psychic damage. If, God forbid, you were ever polymorphed into a Dwarrowyrm, the change is permanent and you immediately become an insane and very evil NPC. 

Mirror Hatred. There is nothing that scares a Dwarrowyrm except its own reflection. If you show it that you have a mirror it will flee from you (and immediately turn its attention to how to break or otherwise separate you from it). If you give it a good look at its own face - say, a mirrored shield at close range - it will flee from you through the earth for d6 days. If you do this, the Dwarrowyrm will make hurting and torturing you literally the only thing it thinks about for the rest of your life. It will use whatever it can to do this, and it is clever, creative, biologically immortal, and utterly driven by cruelty and malice. 

Hoard: They always have a hoard, and 9 times in 10 this will be piles of gold and powerful magic items. The hoard is often the thing that began their tragedy of transformation in the first place. 

Barony dragons don't do hoards, and you can't really fight them, so a niche needed to be filled.