Tsochar

he Tsochar are minions of Asharra, the Dark Lady. They are simple creatures with only one drive... To propagate. Tsocar can bore their way into the bodies of creatures both sentient and not, and assume control of the host's brain and bodily functions. This allows the Tsochar to walk amongst other races while appearing as one of them until their host bodies are too weak to support them any longer... a process that can take months or even years. Despite this disguise, hosts of Tsochar seem to act "off", no longer caring for loved ones or friends. More clever specimens who have observed the behavior of their hosts for some time will do their best to imitate it, lying about feelings they do not understand. Even they, their soulless nature makes it difficult to convince loved ones that something is not wrong with them. Tsochar often simply find it easier to kill or inhabit those people as well. Tsochar are telepathic and can communicate with any creature within' 80' of them that has a language... though they rarely communicate with anything but one another. Hosts inhabited by Tsochar tend to keep company with each other, and act with eerie unity. This is due to the Tsochar's telepathy. It can greatly disturb onlookers however.

A tsochar resembles a tangled mess of knotted ropes or a ball of barbed wire. It has dozens of thin but strong tentacles, each studded with small, sharp, sicklelike claws. Its body is little more than a thickening and joining of its multiple limbs. The creature’s eyes are small, dark orbs that rest at the end of smaller, thinner tentacles, well hidden in the mass of its other limbs, and its mouth is a round, lampreylike orifice in the middle of its underside. The tsochar is an indigo blue in color, with a mottled pattern of lighter blue spots on its upper surface. Tsochari speak their own language, but they can use their telepathy to communicate with other creatures. A typical tsochar is about 2 feet in diameter, although some of its longer tentacles trail as much as 6'.

A tsochar is not actually a single living creature, but instead an aggregate being. Each of the dozens of coiling tentacles and limbs that seem to comprise its body is, in fact, a living creature in its own right, known as a strand. A strand has its own nervous system and organs of respiration, digestion, and reproduction. Carefully detached from the rest of the body, a tsochar strand could live on indefi nitely, but it would be virtually mindless. Only in close association with twenty or thirty similar strands, linked by nerve ganglia and blood vessels into a tangle, do the tsochar strands achieve a collective sentience and sense of self.

A tsochar strand is about 3 to 8 feet in length and averages about half an inch in diameter, but it commonly coils and tangles with other strands close to the center of the body. Tsochar strands are strikingly strong and tough for their size and weight, armed with numerous sicklelike barbs (3). The barbs contain small grooves or channels through which the tsochar can inject its poison, but each barb administers only a tiny dose. It takes numerous tentacles working together to administer a dangerous dose of venom, which is why the tsochar only poisons creatures it is constricting.

Terrible devastation has been visited upon the tsochar with the complete destruction of the underdark. Those few close enough to the Abyss to flee have done so, though how long they might survive in that tortured plane is unknown.