We’ve got quite the colorful creature this week for Menagerie Monday. The Weave Squid is a strange, extraplanar being that’s composition is as much magic as a human’s is water. It’s strange nature means you can throw it into just about any environment as a surprise for your party and still have a fun encounter.
The Weave Squid is a peculiar creature that shows up at the most surprising times, in the most surprising of places. It has an obvious affinity towards arcane energy, and is more likely to appear in areas steeped in magic. This includes locales you would expect, like mana fonts, leylines, and planar portals. It also includes areas of relatively fresh magic, like battlefields, caves and dungeons inhabited by magical creatures, or arcane universities. This has led scholars to believe that the squids are drawn to magic, rather than a cause of it, as was a prevailing theory for some time.
Weave Squid are quite tricky to catch, as they have a tendency to suddenly slip away by some means of conjuration magic currently unknown. Their bodies also seem to shift in corporeality at random, making them very difficult to confine. Finally, Weave Squids are capable of innately manipulating magics, and do so to great effect to discourage would-be predators.
Tactics
Weave Squid are not aggressive nor particularly inclined to combat, and it will rarely bother other creatures if not threatened. While controlling one in your game the focus of the squid should generally be on escape. It should immediately begin to use Weave Stitch if it feels itself in danger. It will then will spend the duration of the time required to complete the ability moving away from any hostile creatures and slinging inconveniences back at them. Chaos Bolt and Color Spray are considered cantrips for the Weave Squid, so it may cast them on the same turn as a Bonus Action spell (Misty Step).
Rewards
Weave Squid can be quite profitable marks for hunters, as the ink they naturally produce in their bodies can be used for the transcribing of spells onto spell scrolls or into spell books. If a player chooses to do so, they may make a DC 12 Wisdom(Survival) or Intelligence(Arcana) check to attempt to harvest the ink from a dead Weave Squid. On a success they gain a quantity of magical ink worth 10 times the result of their roll in gold pieces. On a failure they gain 1 ounce of non-magical ink of a random color. While poison upsets the magic nature of the Weave Squid, making them easier to down, it does taint the ink. If the squid took poison damage in the minute before its death, rolls made to harvest its ink have disadvantage.