Spellseekers are strange creatures from the Astral plane that are drawn to the material plane by shoddy spellcasting or uncontrolled magic. They are vermin
Appearance
A Spellseeker appears as a cluster of 1D4 large eyes held together with a cancerous looking constantly moist flesh. These large eyes can be six to eight inches across. The creature also has jellyfish like tendrils that hang from it, and it drifts on unseen currents, seemingly unbothered by the environment around them.
Abilities
The Spellseeker is drawn to magic, magic users, and magic items. This can make them useful as trackers. When they find something magical, they will batten onto it and start feeding from it. Areas of magic power can foster large populations of spellseekers. They will fight each other over magic swords, and will bind themselves to golems and other magical creatures.
Sense Magic - they can detect magic and will move towards it.
Drain Magic - A spellseeker can drain a small amount of magic with a physical attack. This can remove spell potential from magic users, lower the local power level, or even drain items, but this takes time.
Duplication - after draining enough magic power, a spellseeker grow a new large eye, or it can bud on existing eye off and create a new spellseeker.
Confrontation and Combat
Fighting a spellseeker is can be a difficult prospect. They are borderline intangible, and can only be harmed by magic weapons and magical attacks. They have almost no hit point, but have a very high evasion ability and will seemingly flow out of the way of attacks that can harm them. The most effective attacks deal area damage, or have a swarm component that the spellseeker can't evade all of. The difficult thing about fighting spellseekers is that they never really have to be fought, aside from their draining power, they cannot inflict damage, and can barely affect the material world around them.
Usage
Spellseekers can be used as magic scenting hounds, especially if searching for a weak magic item, or a concealed one.
In a dungeon scenario, the spellseekers can be used as a distraction. They resemble beholders, and the PCs could unload heavy firepower on them, depleting their abilities before the next encounter. Being trackers, a group of PCs could find themselves being followed by several of these harmless creatures, which consistently give their position away. This can allow for other dungeon monsters to spot wizards and magic item bearers.
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Interesting and fun.
Oh, I like these. Maybe you could even 'tame' them if you are strong enough wizard to feed it without being overly weakened.
Love them! Remoras of magical force. Love that they are generally harmless, yet appear dangerous. Just imagined a tragic scenario for PCs. They finally reach and enter the great treasure vault, chock-full of magical items, only to find that Spellseekers have managed find it as well, years ago, and have 'drained' the hoard dry, duplicating themselves many times in the process.
Just to clarify, a magical sword would 'damage' them with a 'hit', even as they drain a bit of its magic?
A spellseeker couldn't drain enough magic from an item during a combat encounter to affect it any. They are like fleas on a dog
This is really quite cool. I can see a party overreacting when a bunch of these start swarming to the wizard of the group. I also like that they're not in themselves a real threat but can bring about threatening situations just from their presence.