Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, pg 207.
Quickling CR: 1
Tiny fey, chaotic evil
Armor Class: 16
Hit Points: 10 (3d4 + 3)
Speed:
120 ft
Skills: Acrobatics +8, Perception +5, Sleight of Hand +8, Stealth +8
Senses: Darkvision 60 ft., Passive Perception 15
Languages: Common, Sylvan
Challenge Rating: 1
( 200 XP)
Proficiency Bonus: +2
Special Abilities
Blurred Movement. Attack rolls against the quickling have disadvantage unless it is incapacitated or its speed is 0.
Evasion. If the quickling is subjected to an effect that allows it to make a Dexterity saving throw to take only half damage, it instead takes no damage if it succeeds on the saving throw and only half damage if it fails, provided it isn’t incapacitated.
Actions
Multiattack. The quickling makes three dagger attacks.
Dagger. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 5 ft. or range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d4 + 6) piercing damage.
Racing faster than the eye can track, a quickling appears as little more than a blurry streak of color. Only when it stops running do its small, slender form and cold, cruel eyes become apparent.
Quicklings owe their existence—and their plight—to the Queen of Air and Darkness, the dread ruler of the Gloaming Court. Once lazy, egotistical folk, the creatures that would become the quicklings were late in answering the queen’s summons one time too many. To hasten their pace and teach them to mind her will, the queen shrank their stature and sped up their internal clocks. The queen’s curse gave the quicklings their amazing speed but also accelerated their passage through life. No quickling lives longer than 15 years.
The mortal realm is a ponderous place to a quickling’s eye: a hurricane creeps gradually across the sky, a torrent of rain drifts earthward like lazy snowflakes, and lightning crawls in a meandering path from cloud to cloud. The slow and boring world seems to be populated by torpid creatures whose deep, sonorous speech lacks meaning.
To other creatures, a quickling seems blindingly fast, vanishing into an indistinct blur when it moves. Its cruel laughter is a burst of rapid staccato sounds, its speech a shrill squeal. Only when a quickling deliberately slows down, which it prefers not to do, can other beings properly see, hear, and comprehend it. Never truly at rest, a “stationary” quickling constantly paces and shifts in place, as though it can’t wait to be off again.
Quicklings have a capricious nature and are always up to something. A quickling spends most of its time perpetrating acts of mischief on slower creatures. One rarely passes up an opportunity to tie a person’s bootlaces together, move the stool a creature is about to sit on, or unbuckle a saddle while no one is looking.
Tricks of that sort are hardly the limit of their artful malice, however. They don’t commit outright murder, but quicklings can ruin lives in plenty of other ways, such as by stealing an important letter, swiping coins collected for the poor, or planting a stolen item in someone’s bag.
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