ECOLOGY

Environment any (Abyss)
Organization solitary, pair, or tangle (3–8)
Treasure standard

Like all demodands, stringy demodands are devoted to serving their thanatotic titan masters in the Abyss. Stringy demodands fulfill this duty by serving as kidnappers, slavers, and slave masters throughout the Abyssal realms.

Stringy demodands are physically well suited to this charge, being lankier, scrappier, and more agile than other demodands. Such agility allows a stringy demodand to quickly snatch up slaves-to-be and prevent slave revolts before they start. Taut muscles, wicked teeth, and sharp claws also make a stringy demodand a formidable fighter in the event of a struggle, and it should go without saying that a stringy demodand's defining feature—its hundreds of long, obscene ropes of skin—are ideal tools for easily binding and restricting its quarry.

It's the stringy demodands' long, obsidian-colored skin growths that give the abhorrent outsiders their name.

These growths resemble nothing so much as elongated skin tags the girth of a human finger and roughly 4 feet in length. The fibrous outgrowths stretch from stringy demodands' heads to the tips of their batlike wings to their shins. These ropy villi bob and sway wildly as a stringy demodand moves, creating a truly disturbing image for those victims who dare to look back at their Abyssal pursuer.

Because these rubbery growths cover most of the creatures' bodies, they provide greater natural protection than the hides of other kinds of demodands and allow stringy demodands to eschew armor. Stringy demodands are typically 6 feet tall and weigh almost 300 pounds.

Ecology

Although all demodands are disgusting creatures, stringy demodands are among the most unnerving in terms of appearance. It's thought that when the thanatotic titans were sculpting the first stringy demodand, its waxen image drooped and melted from head to toe, forming the foul, stringy growths that now define these misbegotten monsters. Like the hairs of a human, these growths don't contain nerves yet grow at an incredible rate. When a stringy demodand loses these growths through carelessness or from wounds in battle, the fleshy strands rapidly regenerate.

When at rest, stringy demodands wrap their ropy growths around their bodies like grotesque shawls. Some twist them around their lean torsos and intertwine the growths to produce elaborate headdresses of braided black skin.

Stringy demodands arise from fertilized demodand eggs just like all others of their kind. Since a given demodand's clutch produces a random distribution of different types of demodands, a stringy demodand's emergence cannot be planned. When a stringy demodand does happen to hatch from a demodand egg, it quickly savages the other eggs in the clutch to eliminate its competition. If it cannot ruin or consume the other eggs in its clutch before they hatch, a stringy demodand swiftly bullies its brethren into submission and proves itself to be the dominant sibling, establishing from birth its natural instinct to coerce and enslave.

A stringy demodand's horrific appearance is often cause enough for potential victims to quake in their boots, but its unsightly aspect is far from the only feature that makes this being a formidable intimidator. In addition to its grotesque appendages and distasteful visage, a stringy demodand has a grating, alien voice that is simultaneously guttural and nasal. So terrible is its call that when it roars, a stringy demodand sends humans and demons alike scurrying for safety. Some say that when the thanatotic titans accidentally created the demodands and beheld their monstrous progeny for the first time, one of the titans let out a cry of anger and shock that shook the whole of the Abyssal realm. It's said that the stringy demodand heard his creator's shout and swallowed it hungrily, learning to scream like a god in so doing.

Habitat & Society

Though they prefer to work alone, stringy demodands grudgingly accept the company of other demodands when their thanatotic titan masters demand it. Stringy demodands' devotion to the titans is as fervent as that of any other among their kind, but these beings have the unusual tendency to take their masters' orders to the extreme, justifying any and all obscenities and collateral damage in the name of their Abyssal overlords. Such devotion can sometimes even lead stringy demodands to obliterate their demodand kin during missions should they see their brethren's efforts as lacking. Only shaggy demodands can deter stringy demodands' bloodlust with any consistency, as the latter realize that to attack their commanding brethren would be very foolish.

Always striving to please their masters, stringy demodands can be found on nearly every Abyssal realm capturing and enslaving future minions and playthings for thanatotic titans. When at rest, stringy demodands gather alongside other demodands to form enclaves of like-minded fiends so they can plot their next moves and calculate the most prime specimens to subjugate. In the Abyss, these victims are typically demons, the enslaved prisoners of these demons, and wandering mortals who happened into the Abyss at the wrong time. Though rarely encountered on the Material Plane, stringy demodands can sometimes be found as part of larger hunting parties tasked with capturing valuable mortals to bring back to their Abyssal realm.

Stringy demodands' loyalty and rashness make them well suited to serving as solitary slave masters, roles the thanatotic titans delight in having them serve.

The demodands embrace this task with their typical overzealous fervor and happily bully, abuse, and torture their charges, often shattering slaves' minds as well as their bodies in the process. Although they understand that their thanatotic titan masters want as many mortal recruits as possible, it's sometimes difficult for the reckless stringy demodands to bring slaves to the titans without irreversibly breaking them first. Stringy demodands kill or violently maim more slaves than they successfully convert into the titans' faithful. This predilection for violence explains why, when stringy demodands take part in Abyssal slaving parties, they are usually accompanied by enough slimy and tarry demodands to keep their violent urges in check.