Gauntling

In places like the Gravelands, undeath permeates the very soil of the land. This unholy pollution can have significant effects on regional flora and fauna over the course of generations, causing plants to become twisted and diseased looking and contaminates wildlife so their remains spontaneously rise as mindless undead.

Yet in some cases, particularly for those beasts who forage primarily through the act of scavenging, the consumption of undead flesh can have an entirely different effect over the course of months. How quickly an animal is affected depends on whether it ate from the remains of an undead creature left behind after its destruction or consumed it "fresh" from an undead in a desperate throe of starvation. Assuming the unfortunate creature survives any onset of disease or other afflictions brought on by their ghastly repast, these scavengers sometimes undergo a transformation into a twisted, ravenous beast known as a gauntling.

Most gauntlings arise from scavengers, carnivores, or omnivores, but in certain cases, desperate herbivores can become transformed as well—these creatures are perhaps the most disturbing type of gauntling, due to the significant change in their behaviors pushing them toward diets of fresh meat. Once animals become gauntlings, these creatures abandon their previous wilderness habitats in favor of those near more settled regions and often choose sewers or other underground locales as dens from which they emerge to hunt. In their transformation into a gauntling, regardless of what the creature's previous dietary leanings might have been, all gauntlings share one horrific hunger—the flesh of sapient humanoids. A gauntling looks similar to the animal it was before its transformation, but with large sharp fangs and with painfully emaciated frames, regardless of how much they eat.

This gauntling (as are all of those encountered in Troubles in Grayce) were once boars, but you can use these statistics to represent any terrestrial Medium animal that's succumbed to this unholy transformation. Regardless of its original form, all gauntlings share a mouthful of sharp, twisted fangs.

Other Gauntlings

The gauntling presented here comes from a Medium terrestrial animal (a boar, to be precise), but other animals can be transformed in this way by consuming undead flesh. To represent one from a swimming or flying Medium animal, simply grant it a swim or fly speed equal to its base speed. To represent a smaller or larger creature, use the statistics presented here as a starting point, then rebuild the statistics using the guidelines for building creatures that begin on page 112 of GM Core