[I was super happy to find this piece. There’s not a lot of art out there for the ropen, and little of it matched my imagined version. A bioluminescent pterosaur should be gaudy and ostentatious, like a David Peters fever dream.]
Ropen This crested reptilian creature
has long leathery wings and a long tail ending in a diamond-shaped flap. It has
a beak filled with jagged teeth, over which glare large black eyes. Its skin
coruscates faintly with bluish light.
Ropen are
strange, semi-intelligent offshoots of the pterosaurs, those flying reptiles
related to the dinosaurs. Their skin is filled with luminescent cells, allowing
ropen to glow and shift their coloration in elaborate patterns. Ropen use this
glow to hunt, luring fish to the surface with shimmering lights, and to
communicate. The ropen language is a semaphore based on different
patterns and colors.
Ropen are
nocturnal creatures, rarely emerging from the caves where they nest when the
sun is up. They feed mainly on fish, but have a taste for carrion. People
living in regions where ropen are common know to cremate their dead rather than
bury them or run the risk of being visited by leathery-winged grave robbers.
This taste for dead flesh even extends to the undead. Unlike most creatures,
ropen can fully sustain themselves on a diet of undead flesh. Ropen do not hunt
living humanoids, but will attack adventurers who approach too close to their
nests with snapping beaks and beams of radiance. Due to their skills as
undead-hunters, ropen are prized as pets. A ropen egg fetches a cost of 4,000
gp on the open market and a young ropen twice as much. Ropen are sentient,
however, and many good-aligned religions count such servitude as slavery.
Alliances between ropen and humanoids are uncommon, due to the gap in
intellectual capacity and the difficulties of the ropen’s visual-based
language, but they are not unheard of. Ropen can even be taught to understand
spoken languages, although they themselves cannot speak.
Cairan’s faithful prize the ropen as allies against undead, even as they are wary of their tendency to consume buried flesh. Inquisitors of the faith frequently look to them as icons for their prowess, and their battle gear is often crafted to resemble them.
Shores of Swords 