Role in Its Society:
Shardplunge is less a “member of society” and more a living environmental hazard that every miner, scout, and caravan master in this stretch of the Underdark learns to fear. He lurks in a tall cavern known as the Needle Vault, where the ceiling is bristling with stalactites and the floor is littered with cracked helmets and dented shields.
To nearby dwarves and duergar, Shardplunge is the reason they wear broad helms and tap the ceiling with poles before stepping into a new chamber. Kobolds and goblins treat him like a trap that feeds itself—they coax prey beneath his favorite roost by leaving dropped packs, fake markers, or wounded beasts. A few particularly cruel overseers even march prisoners into his cavern, counting how many “survive the stones.”
Shardplunge doesn’t serve a faction or bargain for food. But his existence controls traffic: some tunnels are rerouted, bridges are built, and entire routes are abandoned because no one trusts the ceiling in the Needle Vault anymore.
Appearance Description:
At rest, Shardplunge is a medium-sized stalactite: a rough, conical stone shape hanging from the ceiling, streaked with mineral deposits in shades of grey, brown, and chalky white. Moisture beads on his surface like condensation on a cave rock.
Only a practiced eye would notice the differences: the faint, rubbery give where stone should be rigid, the subtle ripples beneath the “rocky” skin when he tenses to drop, the pattern of scratches where he has dragged himself along the ceiling.
When he moves, the disguise peels back. The stone-like shell flexes, revealing a fleshy, muscular cone with a circular maw at the tip, lined with jagged teeth. Small sensory pits around the mouth and along the body taste vibrations in the air. When he launches from the ceiling, he’s a spear-shaped chunk of living stone aimed at skulls, shoulders, and spines.
Once on the ground, he writhes awkwardly, squirming toward darkness or the base of a wall to start the slow climb back up.
Backstory:
Shardplunge began life as one of many larval forms in a roper’s brood clinging to the ceiling of an abandoned mining gallery. Cave-ins, blasting powder, and the slow drowning of the tunnel in underground seepage killed most of his siblings and eventually the roper itself. Shardplunge survived by adapting to instability.
He learned to “read” the ceiling: which stone trembled with the distant hammering of picks, which stalactites were ready to shear off at a touch, which seams were slick with new mineral growth. When dwarves reopened the gallery years later, Shardplunge watched from above as they rebuilt scaffolds and bridges beneath him.
His first big kill was an unwary foreman leaning back to shout up at a worker. Shardplunge dropped, caved in the dwarf’s helm, and fled as crossbow bolts peppered the ceiling. The survivors blamed “loose stone,” but the pattern began.
Over time, Shardplunge migrated into the tallest part of the chamber—now called the Needle Vault—where traffic bottlenecks between three adjoining tunnels. Here, every party must pass beneath a forest of hanging stone. Here, he chooses when to be a rock and when to be a falling death.
