The earth hears many secrets, and even the worked stone of castles and towers whisper to their great mother. Jealous, foolish apprentices and ex-apprentices seek the wild regions where emerald lights gleam in the night, for old codices and older rangers' tales say that these regions are where those secrets bubble are spoken back to the sky. Traveling into borderlands where nonsense runes and ritual circles are carved on trees and stones, too late they find that these stories are incomplete, and are bludgeoned to death by a gang of cold, lugubrious cephaliths!
Stooping, sluggish mudmen with lumpy deformed skulls made of green crystal. Cephaliths are born headless from the earth in huge numbers around a cluster of disembodied crystal skulls, but most are killed almost instantly in the scramble to take one, or else slowly crumble back into dirt when all are claimed. The few that survive split into small bands that slouch off into the wilderness, corralled by a despotic leader with multiple heads haphazardly embedded within them.
Cephalith
HD: 2
AC: 13
Move: Walk, earthswim slightly slower than human
No. Appearing: 2d6; die that land on a 1 or 6 indicate the presence of a multicephalith with 4 HD.
Morale: 6, or 9 if led by a multicephalith
Intelligence: Dull and aphasic
Morality: Depressive, spiteful, and bullying
Pummel: +2 to-hit, 1d6+2 damage
Crystal Skull: that which sustains the cephalith's lifeforce, each one containing a single spell and 1 MD to cast it with; this is a good list to take from. Multicephaliths instead have 1d6+1 crystal skulls embedded within them. A skull can regain its expended MD with a night's worth of exposure to starlight, or by having a creature's brains smeared onto it. If a cephalith has no crystal skulls, it loses 1 max HP a day. It's possible to learn the spell a skull contains with the aid of 500gp worth of fragile optical equipment.
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