Multiple Heads. A cryohydra can be killed by severing all of its heads or slaying its body. Whenever the hydra takes 30 or more damage in a single turn, one of its heads dies.
While it has more than one head, the cryohydra has advantage on saving throws against being blinded, charmed, deafened, frightened stunned, and knocked unconscious.
Regenerative Heads. After losing a head, the cryohydra grows two new heads for each of its heads that died after 1d4 turns. The hydra regains 5 hit points for each head regrown in this way.
Fast Healing. A cryohydra’s fast healing ability allows the creature to heal hit points equal to its current number of heads (minimum fast healing 5 and max of 10), but it cannot heal over it's max HP. This fast healing applies only to damage inflicted on the cryohydra’s body.
Wakeful. While the cryohydra sleeps, at least one of its heads is awake.
Hold Breath. The cryohydra can hold its breath for 1 hour.
Multiattack. The cryohydra makes as many bite attacks as it has heads.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., 1 target. Hit: 11 (1d10 + 5) piercing damage
Ice Breath (10; Recharges after 1d4 turns) The cryohdra breaths out a blast of icy cold air in a 20 ft. cone. All creatures in the area must make DC 19 Dexterity saving throws or take 3d6 cold damage.
Description
Multiple angry snake-like heads rise from the sleek, serpentine body of this terrifying monster.
Experienced marshwalkers and fisherfolk living in backwoods bayous tell many stories of the Hydra, most of which are cautionary tales of lost friends or distant relations who ran afoul of the creature while in search of a secret fishing hole. According to these stories, the few survivors of such encounters typically abandoned the water and took up farming in the dry hill country, far, far away. While the tales are often told with a wink of humor, a deadly serious moral always underlies them: The Hydra is not a creature to be trifled with. The only thing worse than meeting one by chance is attempting to turn the tables and actively hunt the Hydra. While too dim to understand the human thirst for revenge, a Hydra is all too willing to welcome a foolhardy hunter into its coils, adding its prey’s remains to its own stock of grisly trophies hung from the branches around its swampy home. It is only the blessing of the gods that such a terror is not made worse with a sharper mind.
Ecology & Society:
Hydras reproduce by asexual budding, with neck rootlets constantly sprouting inside the submuscular fossae at the base of their necks. Each larval rootlet contains yet more endodermal sprouts, and if not released by decapitation, these sprouts begin to grow and mature within the hydra’s neck as though it were a serpentine womb. Sometimes these larvae are dislodged into the hydra’s throat and hacked up in slimy, leathery cysts, which the Hydra collects and places into swampy nests as if they were eggs until they burst open and release their maturing brood. If neck rootlets instead hatch and mature within the neck, however, the hatchlings actually tear the parent’s neck asunder, bursting out of the flaccid tissue like elongated tadpoles. The largest tadpole grafts itself onto the hydra’s body and becomes a new head, while the rest of the serpent-spawn are ejected into the surrounding swamp to fend for themselves. Interestingly, larval Hydras are not cannibalistic, and instead teem in dangerous swarms for mutual protection. They continue to bud and grow as they consume prey until the largest mature enough to set out on their own, leaving the weaker remnants vulnerable to predation.
Hydras favor temperate or warm climes and are primarily marsh-dwellers; however, rumors abound of rare Hydras that live among coastal reefs and plague the seas, and the dreaded pyrohydras and cryohydras are known to take up even stranger environs as their homes. While primarily carnivorous, Hydras are not above eating carrion or even sluicing snails, worms, frogs, and the like out of the muck when larger prey is scarce. Because of their highly efficient mode of reproduction, Hydras require huge amounts of food in order to sustain themselves and their bodily functions. Displaying eating habits similar to those of snakes, Hydras typically prefer to devour huge meals all at once and digest them for long periods of time; the average Hydra can consume as much as half its weight in a single day, subsequently fasting for nearly a week before needing to eat again.
Thanks to their size and the juicy tenderness of their fat and flesh, humans and other bipedal creatures-especially stocky ones such as dwarves-are a highly sought after meal for Hydras, which will go to great lengths to devour such beings if given the opportunity. Though they can survive off vermin, vegetation, and plant creatures.
Hardy Water Dwellers. Hydras are natural swimmers, dwelling in rivers, along lakeshores, in ocean shallows, and in wetland bogs. A hydra rarely requires shelter from the elements, so it doesn’t normally have a lair. Only in colder climes are hydras drawn to the protection of sheltered caverns and ruins.
Everlasting Hunger. A rapacious and gluttonous monster, a cryohydra snatches and tears apart its prey in a frenzy of feeding. When a cryohydra has cleared a territory of food and driven off any creatures smart enough to avoid it, it moves on to seek its meals elsewhere. A cryohydra's hunger is so great that if it can’t feed, it might turn against itself, its heads attacking each other as the creature eats itself alive.
Treasure:
As creatures with animal-level intelligence, Hydras have little interest in collecting treasure for the purposes of accumulating wealth; they do, however, dimly understand its usefulness as an attractant for prey, knowing that shiny trinkets and inedible objects are things some creatures prize enough to run heedlessly into danger to acquire them. As a Hydra consumes its prey, tearing it limb from limb between several jaws, it uses the teeth of its other heads to pry off items carried or worn, especially those that glitter and shine, and places these sparkling enticements around the fringes of its domain to be discovered by foolish passersby, hopefully emboldening them to explore the marshes, caves, and ruins where the Hydra lurks in waiting.
Hydras have learned to recognize common humanoid containers such as saddlebags for what they are, and when a Hydra devours a set of riders or stumbles upon a deserted carriage, it sends its many heads into the dark nooks and crannies of such vessels in search of hidden baubles and goods, which it may then drag into the light for display. Explorers are often puzzled by the valuables scattered haphazardly on the ground and hung from tree branches near a hydra’s lair, still adorning the rotted or skeletal body parts of their former owners. Large or fragile items are often broken by the indelicate jaws of the Hydra, as it lacks hands to handle items carefully, yet as long as the rubble sparkles, the Hydra is content to display it. Drab items are ignored by a Hydra and left where they lie, usually close to the remains of their former owners.
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