Cockatrice

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Magical Beast: Magical beasts are similar to animals (some know at least one language, but can’t necessarily speak). Magical beasts usually have supernatural or extraordinary abilities, but are sometimes merely bizarre in appearance or habits.

They have darkvision.

They have low-light vision.

Magical beasts breathe, eat, and sleep.

Stupid, vicious, and repulsive, cockatrices are avoided by other creatures due to their magical ability to turn flesh to stone. Legends say that the first cockatrice emerged from an egg laid by a cockerel and incubated by a toad. Whether or not the story is true, today’s cockatrices breed true in terrifying and filthy dens haphazardly excavated by as many as a dozen of the squawking creatures. Males greatly outnumber females in these flocks, and are distinguished only by their wattles and combs. The typical cockatrice stands just over 2 feet high and weighs 5 pounds.

While their diet consists primarily of seeds and petrified insects (which conveniently double in the creature’s gizzard as both gastroliths and nutrition as they grind away), cockatrices fiercely defend their territories from anything they deem a threat, and the wanderings of rogue males seeking new spots to build dens sometimes bring them into unintentional contact with humanoids, with devastating results.

A cockatrice’s bite causes flesh to calcify and harden — multiple bites can cause a living creature to fossilize into stone. Each time a creature is damaged by a cockatrice’s bite attack, its flesh and bones stiffen and harden. (This slow petrification does not alter a bitten creature’s natural armor.) A creature may turn completely to stone, as if petrified by a flesh to stone spell. Every day, a creature petrified by a cockatrice in this manner may recover from the petrification, and thereafter can be restored by natural healing or magic as normal) — but after a petrified creature has remained so for days in a row, the petrified state becomes permanent. A cockatrice is immune to the petrification ability of itself and of other cockatrices, but other petrification attacks affect them normally.

The cockatrice’s strange ability to turn other creatures to stone is the creature’s greatest defense, and a cockatrice lair is invariably littered with petrified remnants of foes. In an ironic twist of fate, however, weasels and ferrets — the creatures most likely to slip into cockatrices’ nests and consume their eggs — appear to be completely immune to the effect. For unknown reasons, cockatrices are both terrified of and enraged by conventional roosters, and are equally likely to flee or attack when confronted by one.

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