Role in Its Society:
Gravelcoil is the undisputed ambush-predator king of a busy Underdark junction where three trade tunnels meet. To most denizens, he’s not a mythic horror—he’s a calculated risk: the half-remembered story of a caravan that never arrived, the reason scouts prod the floor with spears and toss rocks before stepping.
Drow patrols and duergar miners grudgingly respect his territory. Some crews throw him butcher’s scraps or the bodies of executed slaves, hoping to keep his hunger away from their routes. A few clever smugglers have even learned to weaponize him—driving enemies down “Gravelcoil’s tunnel” and letting him do the rest.
He doesn’t serve factions, but his presence shapes their borders. The tunnels he favors fall off official maps, then reappear later as “unsafe,” “collapsed,” or “avoid unless desperate.” Local guides charge extra to cross his hunting grounds—or refuse entirely if the stones “smell wrong” that day.
Appearance Description:
Gravelcoil is a large grick whose body matches the rock he hunts in. From a distance, he looks like a lumpy, moss-streaked boulder pressed into a crevice. Up close, the deception breaks: his “stone” hide is segmented, rubbery, and ridged with subtle, wormlike muscles that ripple when he moves.
His main body is a thick, grey-green trunk about as long as a horse, tapering to a blunt tail. At the front, four barbed tentacles unfurl around a jagged, beaklike maw that clicks softly as he tastes the air. Each tentacle is lined with hooks like chipped obsidian, stained with old rust and dried blood. His eyes are small, dark pits set low and wide, almost hidden among folds of skin.
Years of lurking in dust and rubble have left Gravelcoil’s hide patterned with mineral streaks and pale scrape marks where he’s squeezed through narrow gaps. Chips of old armor, bits of broken spear, and a single bent crossbow bolt are embedded in the calloused flesh near his head—trophies he never bothered to remove.
Backstory:
Gravelcoil hatched in a cramped crevice beneath a collapsed gallery. As a hatchling, he was nearly crushed when shifting rock sealed off one exit; only a thin crack remained. While his clutch-mates died or wandered into better hunting, Gravelcoil spent his early months pressing himself into that crack, learning the way stone vibrated when something walked above.
Hunger honed him. His first meals were cave rats and blind lizards that strayed too close, taken with quick, silent strikes. Over time, he realized the biggest meals came not from wandering beasts, but from predictable traffic—the same boot patterns, the same clink of armor, the same arguments about which route to take.
When duergar finally reopened the gallery with blasting powder and hammers, Gravelcoil did not flee. He hid. He watched. He learned that where the stone was worn smooth, caravans passed; where it was sharp and jagged, only scouts dared go. He chose his ground carefully.
Years later, a failed drow ambush in his tunnels left him gorged on corpses and scavenged metal. The survivors spread fearful stories: a grick that seemed to know where they would step, that attacked from the one spot no one checked, that killed the quiet scouts first. That story stuck. Gravelcoil became “the Waylayer,” and the junction became his personal hunting snare.
