Yuan-ti
| Harper Field Dossier | |
|---|---|
| Combat reference | |
| Type | Serpent-folk of the Serpent Hills — a whole people remaking itself, body by body, in the image of its snake god |
| Vulnerabilities | Vanity of the flesh — a deep hood is a spy's entire disguise; bare the face and the serpent shows. The blooded kinds speak their magic, so silence unmakes it |
| Resistances | The blooded kinds shrug at spellcraft |
| Immunities | Venom, in the blooded kinds — poisoning a serpent is watering a fish |
| Condition Immunities | |
| Strong Saves | Cold-minded and hard to charm or panic; they plan in decades |
| Senses | The greater kinds read the warmth of living bodies; the lesser ones simply watch, patiently, from under hoods |
| Movement | Strong swimmers all — rivers are their roads as much as any trail |
| Notable Abilities | Spy-craft, patience, and slow self-transformation through rites of the serpent god; the higher kinds wield spoken magic |
| Provenance | |
| Knowledge | Partial |
| First Encountered | Session 54, a spy-clutch and its anathema at Boareskyr Bridge |
| Filed by | Agent Wren, of the Tellstone circle |
The Harpers' Read
The yuan-ti do not think of themselves as evil. They think of everyone else as unfinished — soft-skinned animals to be watched, used, and in the long run removed. Their god is the serpent, and their worship is not prayer but becoming: a believer spends years of rites reshaping their own body toward the snake, and how far a yuan-ti has gone tells you exactly how dangerous it is. The company's word for the practice — snake-maxing — is flippant and accurate.
Three things to hold onto. First, the hood is the whole disguise. A yuan-ti spy cannot pass among people bare-faced; under the cowl you will find green-tinged skin, lips too thin, and scale creeping up the neck. A town that keeps its hoods down is a town they cannot work. Second, they come by water as easily as by road — watch the river, not just the gate. Third, the changed kinds speak their magic. Venom will not touch them and spellcraft slides off the strongest of them, but a silence dropped at the right moment leaves even their greatest as nothing but coils and teeth.
They travel and work in groups — the word is a clutch — and they speak a tangle of Abyssal and Draconic. When you find one, assume its fellows are already watching you.
Snake Maxing
The company's name for the practice — coined at Boareskyr Bridge, ratified on the spot, and kept in the record because no better word exists.
To the yuan-ti, the snake is the finished form and everything born soft-skinned is raw material. A believer sets about remaking their own body toward the serpent, deliberately, over years of rites to the snake god. Each rite trades away something human for something serpentine — slit eyes for one, a serpent's head for another, arms, tail, or the whole skin for those further along — and because the believer chooses the rite, no two of the half-changed come out quite the same way.
The practice is also the hierarchy. The further the change has gone, the higher the yuan-ti stands: purebloods do the outside work precisely because they still pass for human under a hood, the half-changed fill the soldiery and the lesser priesthoods, and the great serpents rule — with the rare anathema, many-headed and terrible, as what a lifetime of rites aspires to reach. Baelgrum's scrying into a serpent prison-cell [1] showed the whole ladder standing in one room: near-human guards, snake-headed soldiers behind them, and over the prisoner a priest whose body was serpent from the neck down, with only the arms and the clerical garb left of anything human.
Two things follow for anyone working against them. The changes cannot be hidden, which is why the spies live under hoods and die when the hoods come off. And everything else grows along with the body — the spoken magic, the venom-blood, the heat-reading senses — so the shape in front of you is the most honest measure of how dangerous it is.
The kinds
Compiled from the Harpers' archives after the fighting at the bridge. The company has met the first and last of these; the middle kinds are what the archives expect the Serpent Hills to hold.
| Kind | What it is | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| Purebloods — the infiltrators | The least-changed and the most useful: near-human at a glance, serpent in the details (slit eyes, scale-rash, thin lips). The spies, agents, and knife-work of the race. | Met — two unmasked and killed at Boareskyr Bridge (S54); more staked at the gate by Varram the White before the company arrived |
| Malisons — the half-changed | A serpent's head on a man's shoulders, arms that are living snakes, or a serpent's tail below the waist — each shaped by the rite it chose. The soldiers and lesser priests of the hills. | Expected in the Serpent Hills (Harper archives) |
| Abominations — the great serpents | Serpent through and through save for the arms — massive, spell-speaking, and commanding. The lords of the temples under the hills. | Expected in the Serpent Hills (Harper archives) |
| Anathema — the pinnacle | A great serpent body with arms and many snake heads — what a lifetime of rites aspires to. The hills keep very few. | Met and slain — one, out of the Winding Water at the bridge (S54). Full dossier: Yuan-ti Anathema |
The yuan-ti and Varram
A clutch of yuan-ti spies infiltrated Boareskyr Bridge in the weeks before the company arrived. Varram the White unmasked and killed several of them — earning the toast "Varram, the hero of Boareskyr Bridge" — and the party killed the rest, including the anathema. But a yuan-ti corpse found on Varram's trail (throat slit, left for dead) carried a drawing of Varram sewn into secret pockets in its own flesh: the yuan-ti were hunting the Wyrmspeaker deliberately, by name and face. In Session 55 Baelgrum's scrying confirmed the hunt had already succeeded: Varram sits captive in a windowless yuan-ti cell, tortured by a fully serpentine priest and pleading for her life, in a place the vision did not reveal. Why they wanted her is still unknown. Attacks on travelers have also been reported on the Trade Way between the bridge and Dragonspear Castle.
Encounters of Record
- Session 54 — Two pureblood infiltrators unmasked and killed in the street at Boareskyr Bridge; the clutch's anathema slain as it came out of the river and harvested where it fell; a murdered yuan-ti tracker found on Varram's trail with her portrait sewn into its flesh.
- Session 55 — Baelgrum's scrying found Varram the White held and tortured in a windowless yuan-ti cell: near-human purebloods, snake-headed half-changed, and a fully serpentine priest all in one room, the ladder of snake maxing on display. Location unknown.
Harvesting
The anathema's harvest profile and record live on its own page. Pureblood infiltrators carry little worth the knife (the two at the bridge had shells and road-stones in their pockets).
See also
- Yuan-ti Anathema — the full dossier on the pinnacle form
- Serpent Hills — their homeland
- Bestiary — the company's field bestiary
- Find Varram the White — the hunt they have inserted themselves into