Berbalang

Description

From Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (2018):

Berbalangs creep across the petrified remains of dead gods adrift on the Astral Plane. Obsessed with gathering secrets, both from the gods they inhabit and from the bones of dead creatures, they call forth the spirits of the dead and force them to divulge what they learned in life.

Speakers of the Dead. Berbalangs prefer to speak only to dead things, and specifically only to the spirits they call forth in the hope of learning secrets. They record their stories on the bones that once belonged to these creatures, thus preserving the information they gain.

Spectral Spy. The pursuit of knowledge drives everything berbalangs do. Although they mostly learn their secrets from the dead, they aren’t above spying on the living to take knowledge from them as well. A berbalang can create a spectral duplicate of itself and send the duplicate out to gather information on other planes by watching places where the gods and their servants gather. When a berbalang is perceiving its environment through its duplicate, its actual body is unconscious and can’t protect or nourish itself. Thus, a berbalang typically uses its duplicate for only a short time before returning its consciousness to its body.

Weird Oracles. The knowledge that berbalangs accumulate makes them great sources of information for powerful people traveling the planes. Berba­langs ignore petitioners, however, unless they come bearing a choice secret or the bones of a particularly interesting creature. Githyanki have found a way to coexist with berbalangs, and sometimes use the creatures to spy on their enemies and to watch over their crèches on the Material Plane.

From Planescape: A Guide to the Astral Plane (1996):

Sad little solitaire,

Sad little hermit.

Wandering so far and near,

has no self-worth to it.

(From the poem, Berbalang, by Tycho Sint, known as one of the worst poets in all Sigil)

Ah, the Astral sure isn’t the home of anything normal, is it? Case in point: the odd little berbalang, and the equally odd community that it has on the Astral.

The berbalang’s a native of the Prime, but one that spends most of its time astrally pro¬ jecting a form on the Astral. The creatures never meet each other in their real bodies, but in the Silver Void they gather into little en¬ claves to talk, debate, learn, and even mate. It turns out these solitary creatures are philoso¬ phers at heart and spend much of their time in lone meditation, contemplating existence, real¬ ity, perception, and a virtually limitless number of other topics. Then, they gather on the Astral to exchange their theories.

A few folks have tried to infiltrate the enclaves to learn the dark of berbalang theo¬ ries. What they tumbled to was that despite their fiendish appearance and monstrous reputation as chaotic evil carnivores (this is the common chant among many primes), their philosophies are remarkably gentle and pleasant. Their outlook on life and the multiverse is usually extraordinarily positive, uplift¬ ing, and wondrous. The strange thing is, they don’t feel they have any rightful place in it. They resign themselves to be loathsome, mur¬ derous monsters undeserving of love or kind¬ ness from others.

These gatherings of astral berbalangs occur within structures created by the berbalangs for this purpose. The outside of a berbalang meeting hall is always made of a sil¬ very, semireflective metal so that it is hard to see in astral space. They are a peery folk, so these struc¬ tures are well-protected and well-guarded, with plenty of exits from which to flee.

See, as a general rule, berbalangs are cow¬ ardly bashers who avoid direct confrontation with any other creature. Sometimes, however, they’ll follow a cutter around, apparently only to observe. For this reason, some folks call them stalkers. Stalkers never attack on the Astral Plane and flee immediately upon being threatened. Though these carnivores feed every now and again, such activities are always to their physical bodies on the Prime - so it’s no concern for a cut¬ ter on the Astral.

No one knows how, but berbalangs mate on the Astral in such a way that they produce physical offspring on the Prime. It’s been suggested that this is an indicator that berbalangs aren’t normal physical creatures at all.

Berbalang: AC 6; MV 6, FI 24 (B); HD 4+1; THACO 17; #AT 3; Dmg Id4/ld4/ld6 (claw/claw/bite); SZ M (4'-7" tall); ML average (10); Int very (11-12); AL CE; XP 65.

Notes: The berbalang can astrally project (as astral spell) at will and can create an astral-like physical projection on the Prime that can act and fight as the actual berbalang.