The Archons

In the steppes to the south of the Barony there are legends of ancient maker-devils who fought against the star people in terrible, catastrophic wars that far predate human history. These strange, pale figures are venerated in festivals of appeasement on nights when the stars are obscured by the weather - rare on the steppe, and a bad omen to the nomad smiths. In that dark obscurity the smiths and their retainers paint their bodies white, and stalk the nomad encampments, screaming and crying, and savagely beating with clubs those that they find outside their tents beneath open sky. 

On those strange nights it is not uncommon for the nomads to find a percentage of their herds of cattle and horses butchered in horrible ways - dismembered, drained of blood, charred black, or flayed. The dogs that usually guard them, who hold status as family in the clans, spend these nights in the tents with their human kin, so none can say what terrible forms the steppe devils take.

Baronials travelling in the southern regions have, on these dark, windy nights, reported strange fires burning at the horizon, and things in the distance that look like towers, or the masts of ships, glinting white like bone in the twilight and gloaming.

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Archons

An Archon's remote-body is a sealed, spherical container that strides over the steppe atop three long, many-jointed stilt legs. The entire thing stands about 15 feet tall, and is built from star metal, and so nearly impervious to damage. NPC nomads, and especially smiths, will refuse to acknowledge that they exist, and have a good chance of trying to kill you if they think you might be trying to track one down - they might attack you outright, or try to poison you or something. They will also do this if you present incontrovertible evidence that it does exist, or let them know that you intend to find such evidence.

Archons usually lie completely still beneath the surface of bogs or muddy water, rising up out of the muck to perform their inscrutable business and hiding themselves before the stars can once again be seen in the sky. This business seems to centre around the vivisection of living creatures - cattle in the hundreds, but also people, when they can find them alone and unprotected on the steppe. 

When they hunt they make weird trumpeting bellows, and kill or paralyse their prey with flashes of arcfire and whining steel flechettes. 

Archon Remote Body

HD6, Star Weapon x2 (roll on the nomad table re-rolling armour results; Archon weapons never run out of ammunition), Manipulator Tendrils, armour: star metal (as plate +2, additionally subtract 5 damage from any physical damage that connects), speed: as horse, disposition: excitable hunter, switching to fixated vivisectionist once suitable prey has been subdued. 

Tripod: If you can entangle the legs of a Remote Body, it will fall to the ground and be unable to move for about 10 minutes as it struggles to right itself again. Rope won't do it, the Body is too strong, but an iron chain would work fine. 

Manipulator Tendrils. These short, sensitive, star metal tentacles protrude from the bottom of the spherical 'body' for about 2 feet - the tripod must lower itself to use them. They split into finer and finer ends, and are extremely dextrous and precise. On a hit, they can try to pull you apart (d8 tearing damage) or dose you with a potent paralytic (CON save or paralysed for 1 hour). If the Remote Body paralyses something in this way they will not pursue new targets and instead retreat from combat to commence with the dissection. 

True Body. If you reduce the Remote Body to 0, the shell cracks open and the Archon's True Body forces its way out. 

Archon True Body

Looks like a large meat pudding the colour of liver, with twenty or so radially arranged tentacles and ten large ink-black eyes, also arranged radially. The whole is about the biomass of an adult human. It has HD2, is unarmored, can pull itself slowly and torturously along the ground with its tentacles, and cannot speak, although it is quite intelligent. It will be holding a third Star Weapon, which is always a pistol, and a Feeder Device.

Feeder Device. This is a long steel needle that the True Body can use to extract the blood from a corpse. This is how it feeds, and it must drain an entire corpse every five days or it will die. The True Body can also take the form of anything whose blood it has drunk - the form only lasts for a day, after which the True Body must consume more of the same corpse's blood to maintain their shape. An adult corpse has five 'charges' of blood that can be used in this way. The transformation is not quite perfect, although it is convincing. If you know someone well, you will begin to notice that something is off about them after about ten minutes. In the final two hours of the transformation, the form visibly degrades - the eyes turn inky black, and the skin grows slightly too red. This degeneration can, naturally, be staved off with more blood. 

Warwick Goble, for H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds