Horrific Aura of Annihilation. The bodakodak can activate or deactivate this feature as a bonus action. While active, the aura deals 10 necrotic damage to any creature that ends its turn within 30 feet of the bodakodak. Undead and fiends ignore this effect.
Death Gaze. When a creature that can see the bodakodak’s eyes starts its turn within 30 feet of the bodak, the bodakodak can force it to make a DC 13 Constitution saving throw if the bodak isn’t incapacitated and can see the creature. If the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature is reduced to 0 hit points, unless it is immune to the frightened condition. Otherwise, a creature takes 16 (3d10) psychic damage on a failed save.
Unless surprised, a creature can avert its eyes to avoid the saving throw at the start of its turn. If the creature does so, it has disadvantage on attack rolls against the bodakodak until the start of its next turn. If the creature looks at the bodakodak in the meantime, it must immediately make the saving throw.
Sunlight Hypersensitivity. The bodakodak takes 5 radiant damage when it starts its turn in sunlight. While in sunlight, it has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks.
Spider Climb. The bodakodak can climb vertical surfaces as though it were normal terrain.
Multiattack. The bodakodak can use its Withering Gaze and make two melee attacks with either a fist or a tentacle.
Tentacle. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 25 ft, one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 3)
Fist. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (2d4 + 2) bludgeoning damage plus 9 (2d8) necrotic damage.
Withering Gaze. One creature that the bodakodak can see within 60 feet of it must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw, taking 40 (6d10) necrotic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
Description
A bodak is the undead remains of someone who revered Orcus. Devoid of life and soul, it exists only to cause death.
Marked by Orcus. A worshiper of Orcus can take ritual vows while carving the demon lord’s symbol on its chest over the heart. Orcus’s power flays body, mind, and soul, leaving behind a sentient husk that sucks in all life energy near it. Most bodaks come into being in this way, then unleashed to spread death in Orcus’s name.
Orcus created the first bodaks in the Abyss from seven devotees, called the Hierophants of Annihilation. These figures, as mighty as balors, have free will but serve the Prince of Undeath directly. Any one of these bodaks can turn a slain mortal into a bodak with its gaze. Like each Hierophant of Annihilation, every bodak bears the mark of Orcus as a chest wound, an opening where a mortal humanoid’s heart would be.
Orcus can recall anything a bodak sees or hears. If he so chooses, he can speak through a bodak to address his enemies and followers directly. Bodaks are extensions of Orcus’s will outside the Abyss, serving the demon prince’s aims and other minions.
Unhallowed Fragments. A bodak retains vague impressions of its past life. It seeks out both its former allies and its former enemies to destroy them, as its warped soul seeks to erase anything connected to its former life. Minions of Orcus are the one exception to this compulsion; a bodak recognizes them as kindred souls and spares them from its wrath. Anyone who knew the individual before its transformation into a bodak can recognize mannerisms or other subtle clues to its original identity.
Even nature despises bodaks. The sun burns away a bodak’s tainted flesh. The creature’s gaze lays waste to the living. Anyone a bodak slays with its gaze withers, its face frozen in a mask of terror. The monster’s mere presence is so unnatural that it chills the soul. Animals untrained for war instinctively flee just before a bodak arrives.
Ravaged Soul. The soul of a creature that becomes a bodak is so damaged that it is unfit for most forms of magical resurrection. Only a wish spell or similar magic can return a bodak to its former life.
Undead Nature. A bodak doesn’t require air, food, drink, or sleep.
Corrupted Monstrosities Discontent with their putrid existence, a few among the bodaks began experimenting with further necromancy. Aided by a fully insane beholder, they produced the bodakodak, a horrific merging of two bodaks. The front both looks like a normal bodak, but the spine splits into a second, quadruped torso formed from a second bodak. Eyes open all along the second torso, forming an unholy, 360 degree gaze to be avoided. Two appendages that used to be arms flail as tentacles from the middle of its body, in addition to its forward arms.
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