It's another glogtober folks, so let's start things off by getting in spirit for the season with challenge 1: Some Spooky Halloween Monsters.
Caterwaul
Cats stare at into empty spaces becouse they see spirits, everyone knows that. Just as cats lick them selves to keep clean, the staring at empty spaces also serves hyigene. It keeps the spirit they are staring down from trying to enter them. Cats are naturally more vulnerable to possession like human psychics, but unlike them the habits for keeping parasites out come to them instinctively so cats much more rarely possessed. However no defence is perfect, and on a cool autumn night, something slimey and slick might crawl into your old cat's skin, coil itself in knots around the instestines until it's impossible to tell where the thing ends and cat begins. In it's pain it will wail something horrible, the unmistakable shrill cry of a Caterwaul¹.
When a Caterwaul is born, a a high pitched howling caterwaul is heard by everyone in a half a mile radius. Usually prompting people to round up thier children, sick and elderly (wise), escape (unhelpful), start killing the closest avaliable cats (unfruitful) or hunt down the thing down (best left to the professionals). Hunters must be called forth as quickly as possible, before it can start sucking out breath out of the weak and vulnerable.
Each day in which no one knows where the Caterwaul is, roll a d8. If the d8 is equal or lower to the Caterwaul's current stage, then it's manage to suck the breath out of someone, increasing it's stage by one and completely healing it. Even if a Caterwaul kills multiple people during the same day, it will only take the breath from one of them at a time, and sometimes forget to even do that. It takes some time to process someone's breath you see. If the afflicted community has an organized and calm response to the threat, increase the die size to d10, if everything falls to chaos decrease it to a d6.
- Stats as cat. These little bastard start out as slightly more clever cat. It will only target those who are defenceless and alone. Toddlers, senile elders and passed out drunks.
- Stats as cat. Having stolen one breath, the Caterwaul can use it's victim's voice and the intellegence of a small child to trick others. It can give an awful hiss that sends the feeling of pins and needles down a random limb, forcing a person to fail thier next action, but it only works on each target once.
- Stats as goblin. The little bastard grows in size to around that of a child, and start targeting those who are able bodies but foolish. They will put new grubby little hands to all sorts of mischief. Pit traps, buckets placed above doors and the exploration of weaponry. Thier mimicry of the voices they stole starts to have a notably cat-like twang.
- Stats as goblin. Bothered by the inconvience of thier size, the Caterwaul figures out how to compress into the size of a rat. The voices from all the breathes it stole will merge into one unique voice, that can no longer force failed actions with a hiss. It becomes able to flatten itself onto a wall, to smoothly glide across the surface or pretend to be a drawing. Some of it's traps become impossible and nonsencial, like making your knives drunk or causing doors to scream.
- Stats as imp. It can freely change it's size anywhere from a rat to an adult man, fly when nobody is looking and turn invisible except for it's mouth. The Caterwaul grows, attacking anyone caught alone. Not going straight for the kill anymore, but toying with them, the way that cats do.
- Stats as imp. The Caterwaul gains the power to shapeshift into any creature within it's size range. It however can not change the color of it's eyes, fur or skin and any wounds or scars will remain on it. It's as smart as any man.
- Stats as tiger. Increasing it's largest size to match. It is now so bold as to target small groups, slowely wittling them down for sport.
- Stats as tiger. At this stage it completely loses intrest in breath, and moves a meat based diet normal for a feline this size. The Caterwaul gains the power to extend it's neck, limbs and tail to ridiculously long sizes, allowing it to make melee attacks at a range of 30' and slightly skulking on long spindly legs at a pace of 4x normal speed. Which it will probably use to run away and find some where secluded to have a nice little cat nap.
Footnotes
1. The name Caterwaul was suggested by Sylvanas on the GLOG discord refering to this post. Once I've seen this post I can't help but agree that these creatures should find thier way into the Halloween canon and will be trying to convince my friends and family that this is a thing.
Additional thanks to the good people of the GLOG server who suggested wierd powers for these bastards. I tried to incorporate as much of what you said into this thing as possible.
Technically the prompt is for Spooky Halloween Monsters, but I think this counts becouse there are multiple distinct forms in this guy.
EDIT: When I first published this, this guy rolled every dungeon turn, now I've changed it to be every day after some discussion on the GLOG server. There is a lot that can be scaled here to be honest. I also tweaked a few of the stages after the fact.
Oh, that's wonderful! Having it grow by the *dungeon turn* is startlingly fast - I assumed the caterwaul was for a "woah, what's happening to the people in this town" mystery adventure, so the a chance (however slight) that it spikes from an essentially normal cat to an invisible shapeshifting tiger in less than two hours is a delight. Better investigate quick, eh?
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