ECOLOGY

Environment any
Organization solitary
Treasure standard (+5 keen adamantine scythe, other treasure)

Known by many names throughout nearly all cultures, grim reapers are the personifications of death and all the pain and fear associated with that state. They are universally feared by the living as harbingers of destruction and masters of all that has already passed from life. These hooded beings travel through the planes with the sole intent of bringing about the end of life, slaying with a deliberateness inscrutable to all but themselves.

While grim reapers are the most feared of their kind, they are not alone. The towering, ghost-like grim reapers are served by minor reapers, corporeal servitors that enact their master’s dreadful will and meet out death’s unrelenting touch. A grim reaper is 15 feet tall and, as an incorporeal creature, has no physical weight except for its equipment. Minor reapers stand 7 feet tall and weigh approximately 70 pounds.

Ecology

Grim reapers have no creator and are not born by any definition of the word—they simply exist, much as the multiverse itself does. Some philosophers argue that grim reapers were created along with the Negative Energy Plane, manifesting from this plane when mortalkind first realized death’s terminal permanency. Others claim that multiple minor reapers meeting on the Negative Energy Plane or another area infused with overwhelming negative energy might join together to form a new grim reaper.

While similar in shape to the psychopomps, reapers care little for mortal souls, reveling in the moment of death and dissolution of the impermanent, regardless of the elaborate bureaucracy that oversees the doomed.

Habitat & Society

While grim reapers stalk the planes, spreading death and despair for their own sakes, they are not alone in their endeavors. Among their many powers, grim reapers can summon lesser versions of themselves to seek out and kill specific individuals. These minor reapers are encountered far more often than their masters, either in the service of their masters or summoned by evil magic-users to do their foul bidding. While stripped of their more powerful brethren’s necromantic powers, these minor reapers are nonetheless brutal hunters and stop at nothing to achieve their objective. Minor reapers usually wait until their target is alone before appearing for battle, though if a pack of these undead assassins are sent after a group of victims, they will engage multiple targets if necessary.

If summoned by a grim reaper, minor reapers act as its additional eyes and ears, and if they are destroyed, their master is immediately aware of their obliteration. Other times, a grim reaper may summon minor reapers to aid in its escape from a battle it expects to lose, and flees to another plane of existence where it may recover and better prepare for the annihilation of its targets.

Grim reapers possess the ability to speak to any intelligent being, and the few who have survived encounters with a reaper or its minions claim that the bringer of death spoke to them in a deep, unearthly voice like nothing in the material realm.

Minor reapers can be created by casters of 20th level or higher using the spell create greater undead.