Alternate Versions
Size
Hero Forge: 7 ft.
Lore: Medium
Suggested: Medium
Other Monikers
Wrech, abyssal zombie
Appearance
Abilities
- Bite inflicts slashing damage
- Once transformed to a wretch, mortals cannot be transformed back by anything short of a Wish spell
Much like the rutterkin who spawn them, abyssal wretches are fiendish, corrupted versions of their original mortal forms, often sporting additional eyes, animal limbs and other grotesque, unnatural features grown from the chaotic energies of the abyss.
Description
Veteran demon hunters know that there are more hazards to venturing into the abyss than simply death. Many foolhardly enough to make the journey return changed, be it mentally, spiritually, or physically. And those few unlucky ones who fall to the warping energies of the plane become something more nighmarish than they could have ever imagined in life.
Abyssal wretches are hard to look at; their ruined, corrupted forms only bear a passing resemblance to the mortal they once were. These horrors are spawned from those who succumb to a demonic attack - usually the poisoned bite of the rutterkin, or, more rarely, the warping presence of a sibrex. The transformation is instantaneous upon death, their teeth sharpening into serrated fangs, as the spirit of a lesser demon inhabits the corpse and immediately raises it as a newly-spawned fiend, hungry for the flesh of mortals. Once the change occurs, nothing short of a wish spell can rid the demonic spirit from the body and change them back into a person.
The Abyssal Wretch cannot speak; it remembers nothing of its past life, and any friends or loved ones are nothing more than tasty meals to the creature, or objects to inflict torment upon. While fairly weak and stupid, the arrival of an abyssal wretch has been known to break the spirits of adventuring parties, especially when these parties recognize the warped features of a fallen companion in the fiend's soulless eyes.
Mercifully rare outside their home plane, most wretches wander the abyss, trailing behind the gang of rutterkin or sibrex that created it. In a mob of rutterkin, most find wretches indistinguishable from the other twisted fiends, but rutterkin do not always accept wretches into their horde, so many are abandoned to shamble aimlessly across the wastes alone, attacking anything weaker than they are, or serving as meals or objects of torment for greater fiends.
Sources