Alguduir

**Alguduirs**, also known as **swamp dragons**, are a semi-aquatic and avian monstrosities that reside in the marshes and swamps of Faerûn. Distantly related to the other avian races of Aearee stock, the Alguduirs are a brutal remnant of the age of the Creater Races. The name "swamp dragon" was given to them by others, who mistook their scaled bodies for a sign of draconic heritage.

## Description

Alguduirs appear fat and sleek, with bodies covered in tough oil-glistening scales. These scales provided both natural armor and camouflage, typically being gray or green-gray, colors that would allow an Alguduir to hide among marsh plants. Alguduirs are quadrupedal, with five black talons each on their front feet and four talons each on their rear. Alguduirs possess oily and mottled white, brown, or gray wings. These oily wings allowed Alguduirs to shed water quickly after surfacing from marsh water, thereby allowing to take flight immediately after. This oil was nonflammable, and is secreted naturally by the skin of the Alguduir. Additionally, a set of gills is located along their neck, just under their avian beak.

## Abilities

Alguduirs are skilled swimmers and capable of breathing underwater. In addition, they have a natural ability to reflect magic they are subjected to back at the caster. This ability was involuntary, and Alguduirs were not able to selectively reflect spells casted upon them. It is theorized by scholars that this spell-turning ability and their amphibious nature were a result of torturous experimentation done by the Batrachi on Aearee slaves. Even after death, the corpse of an alguduir continues to have this spell-turning property for 1-4 hours. This has made Alguduirs the subject of experimentation and reanimation by evil mages, who often seek a means to acquire this magical property or raise an army of powerful undead. The latter requires either a great many corpses or spells, but has been accomplished in the past to great effect.

On top of the spell turning capability of the Alguduirs, they also possessed an innate resistance to magic that protected them from the dangers of the few spells that actually affected them.

## Personality

Alguduirs are territorial and have little tolerance of others outside their mates and their offspring. They do not kill for malicious reasons, but they view anything that looks weaker than themselves as prey. When encountering creatures they view as a threat to themselves or their nests, Alguduirs avoid said creatures or try to lure the threat far from their nest.

## Combat

Alguduirs, despite their bestial behavior and low intelligence, are clever ambush predators. Using repeated marsh-bird calls, an Alguduir and their mate could position themselves on opposite sides of a target, opening the target up to back and flank attacks. When facing an aquatic foe, they tend capture these foes with their rear claws, raising them out of the water to suffocate them. If they faced a terrestrial or aerial foe, they would do the inverse, bringing the creatures down into the water to drown them.

Adult alguduirs can use both their front and rear talons in combat, but prefer to use their front talons and sharp beak in most scenarios. Juvenile alguduirs could not use their rear talons to attack, as the decreased size of the talons made them less useful as natural weapons.

## Society

Alguduirs lair in tangled, weedy clumps of solid ground found at the heart of the marshes they call home. They protect these nests with their lives, especially if the nests currently house any young. At any sign of danger, young alguduirs stick to the ground or hide in the marsh waters, while their parents stalk the intruders. If the adults are faced with trespassers that are too strong to defeat, the adults lead them from the nest, flying or diving to escape when the danger no longer threatens the lair. If the alguduirs deem the trespassers edible and easily killed, they hunt or attempt to ambush the prey, feeding the victims to their young. They always deposit the remains far from the lair to avoid calling attention to their safe haven.

Alguduir lairs usually only house two adult alguduirs and three to five young. Alguduirs mate for life, finding their mate as soon as they are old enough to leave the nests of their parents. Mated pairs hunt and fight together, and when one of the pair dies, the other usually follows suit. This is usually because they die enraged in battle, or because the survivor becomes despondent and stops hunting for their own survival after the death of their mate. Alguduirs become adults at around 3 years old, at which point they leave the nests of their parents to find their own territory to hunt in. These grown up offspring rarely see their own relatives again, unless the marsh is too small and they are forced to have overlapping territory. In that case, blood-related Alguduir remain amicable with their relatives, unless diminishing amounts of food forces them to fight one another.

### Diet

Alguduirs are carnivorous, primarily feeding on the fish, snakes, frogs, mussels, and other aquatic life that live in the same marshes. When possible, they feed on the giant varieties of these creatures, preferring them over the smaller varieties. They hunt for these beasts by flying low over the marsh plants, and then using their claws and bill to stab at creatures in the reeds and boggy ground of the marsh. Alguduir will eat any humanoid that appears edible, even other Alguduirs. They possess enough intelligence to avoid eating the brains of any fellow alguduirs, and never eat the bodies of their own kin.

### Homelands

Alguduirs only live in the marshes and swamps of Faerûn, in the regions once dominated by the Batrachi in the Days of Thunder. They are known to exist in great numbers in the Mere of Dead Men, in Northwest Faerûn. There, they struggle for control over territory with the resident bullywugs, the descendants of the Batrachi who enslaved the Aearee long ago.

### Language

Alguduir are capable of limited speech, and use Auran to communicate with their mates and educate their young. They are also capable of making marsh bird calls, which they use both to find a mate and to coordinate with that mate in battle. In rare occasions where they are forced to learn other languages for their own survival, alguduirs are capable of learning a few words of other languages to communicate with creatures they have no hope of destroying- such as dragons that might move into an alguduir's swamp and demand tribute. Alguduirs are almost always illiterate, as they have no need of written language in their short and usually uneventful lives as marsh predators.

## History

The Alguduir were once members of the Aearee race enslaved by the Batrachi during the Days of Thunder, around -33300 DR. These ancestors of the alguduirs were experimented on more intensely than their kindred, as the Batrachi were obsessed with creating an army of enslaved triphibious thralls. Using dark magicks granted to them by Ramenos, as well as the secrets of the Sarrukh flesh-shapers, the Batrachi Thearchs transformed captured Aearee into magic-resistant and amphibious monstrosities. These early alguduirs had their cognition and societal development stunted by their batrachi masters, becoming the slave-soldiers the Batrachi had designed them to be.

In -31000 DR, a war between the Batrachi and the giants of Ostoria finally came to an end after having raged since -31500 DR. This end of the war was brought about by the Tearfall, when the ice moon Zotha fell upon Toril and devastated the continent of Merrouroboros. The Tearfall brought upon the fall of the Batrachi Empires, as well as the Seven-Fold Winter. During the fall of the empires and the catastrophic climate change, most of the alguduir slave-soldiers perished, sometimes on the altars of Ramenite priests and other times at the hands of their less altered Aearee cousins. The population of Alguduirs fell dramatically during this time, and they almost went extinct during the seven years that followed the Tearfall.

When the Aearee empires rose after the Long Night, the alguduirs received no aid from their kin, being seen as too volatile and monstrous to be included in proper Aearee society. Only the Vulchlings, an Aearee people similarly twisted by their slave masters, provided aid. The Raptor Knights, a religious order comprised primarily of Vulchlings in service to the god Phraarkiloorm, spent the years after the Long Night hunting the Batrachi to near-extinction, which allowed the alguduirs to thrive in the marshes and swamps previously dominated by the Batrachi. As the alguduirs were not a part of the Aearee empires, they survived the fall of those empires in the first Flight of Dragons, and past that they have survived into the Present Age.
Catgeory:Amphibious Creatures