Source: Monster Manual (2024) p. 66. Available in the Free Rules (2024)
Carrion Crawler
Catacomb-Scouring Necrophage
Habitat. Underdark, Urban
Treasure. None
Ravenous corpse eaters, carrion crawlers gravitate toward places of slaughter and decay. In such charnel environs, they feast on the dead with no qualms about their meals’ origins or freshness.
Carrion crawlers have segmented bodies like gigantic cutworms. From beneath their multipart maws protrude eight thin, lashing tentacles. Creatures struck by these tentacles risk being paralyzed and consumed.
Carrion crawlers scour sewers, battlefields, necropolises, and fetid wildernesses for corpses, clinging to ceilings to ambush smaller prey and to avoid competing hunters. They’re drawn to light and the scent of blood, recognizing them as signs of food.
These scavengers avoid ingesting inorganic material. Crypts with funeral armors sucked clean of their corpses and eerily pristine catacombs are signs of infestation by carrion crawlers.
