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Medium beast, unaligned
Armor Class 12
Hit Points 16 (3d8 + 3)
Speed 15 ft., climb 30 ft.
Skills Perception +4, Stealth +6
Senses passive Perception 14
Languages —
Challenge 4 (1,100 XP)
Ambusher. The ru kel has advantage on attack rolls against any creature it has surprised.
Forest Camouflage. The ru kel has advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks made to hide in forests, woodlands, or other terrain of abundant foliage.
Dense Body. The ru kel has disadvantage on Strength (Athletics) checks related to swiming
Keen Sight. The ru kel has advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight.
Reckless. At the start of its turn, the ru kel can gain advantage on all melee weapon attack rolls it makes during that turn, but attack rolls against it have advantage until the start of its next turn.
Relentless (Recharges after a Short or Long Rest). If the ru kel takes 7 damage or less that would reduce it to 0 hit points, it is reduced to 1 hit point instead.
Surprise Attack. If the ru kel surprises a creature and hits it with an attack during the first round of combat, the target takes an extra (2d4) damage from the attack.
ACTIONS
Multiattack. The ru kel makes two melee attacks: either two beak attacks, or one with its beak and one with its talons.
Beak. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 9 (1d10 + 3) piercing damage.
Talons. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d8 + 3) slashing damage. If the target is a Large or smaller creature, it is grappled (Escape DC 14). Until the grappled ends, the target is restrained and the ru kel can't use its talons against another target.
BONUS ACTIONS
Aggressive. The ru kel moves up to its speed toward a hostile creature that it can see.
REACTIONS
Unbridled Fury. In response to being hit by a melee attack, the ru kel can make one melee weapon attack with advantage against the attacker.
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Parrots have a long and successful history in Kaimere, being one of the descendants of the Oligocene harvest during the Tyrant Dynasty and finding extreme success to this day in a wide variety of niches. One of the most surprising are those that developed on the western continent of Arvel which was isolated at the time and they quickly adapted to arboreal niches, even going so far as to lose their ability to fly all together and climbing solely with their beaks and feet. After the dynastic extinction, raptor and mammalian predators became more common and drove many of these parrots to extinction, but one species survives to this day.
Butcher of the Dead. The ancestors of the modern ru kel were fairly unassuming omnivores, although they had a few advantages that kept them from being wiped out like the other parrots, most notably heightened intelligence and aggression. They had very complex nests to deter nest raiders that would feast on the eggs and chicks, with individual preference in nest design lending itself towards adaptability and thus offering significant advantages. In addition to this, they also had a habit of killing any animals that would threaten their young, even if those animals are themselves offspring. These traits allowed them to survive where other Arveleth parrots died out, and they quickly grew massive, leading to the modern day ru kel that can average around 150 pounds.
As the largest and last of this clade, the ru kel is an impressive and unique beast. The once pneumatized bones of most parrots have become dense and sturdy, sacrificing mobility for strength, allowing the ru kel to support itself on a branch with only a single climbing appendage, be it beak or one of the the talons, and all these graspers are proficient killing tools, although of them their beak is the most dangerous. Due to their great size, they cannot invest as complex of nests as their ancestors, but they are still high off the ground and complicated enough to deter predators. Ru kel are extremely k-selected, meaning they invest heavily in a small number of offspring with involved parental care, in this case only laying a single egg each breeding season that hatches into an chick they raise until it is eight years of age. Once the chick reaches that age, they strike out on their own, with males setting up a territory in proximity to their parents' while females leave all together to seek a mate of her own. Ru kel mate for life and have minimal sexual dimorphism, with males being only slightly larger and more brightly colored than females.
Ru kel maintain the habit of hunting species that would pose threats to their young, which in modern Kaimere primarily means monkeys and leopards, the latter in particular hunted with seeming retributive enthusiasm. Related males will often band together to hunt down these threats, ensuring the entire area is safe for their chicks. As a majority of their diet is nuts and fruits, these hunts have little to nothing to do with food and are almost entirely about safety for offspring. A curious and quite frankly disturbing habit that has developed from this threat prevention behavior is the display of meticulously cleaned skulls of the beasts they kill as part of their nests: in addition to terrifying intelligent dangers, this also is attractive to females as it shows the resident parrot is a proficient hunter it is and how safe his territory is for her offspring. In particular, the skulls of demons and homunculi[1] is highly prized: for unknown reasons, the titan forests of Arvel have substantially more homunculi than the rest of the Known World and while not as common as leopards or lions, these demons do pose a threat to wildlife, including ru kel and their chicks. While ru kel are far from equipped to fully vanquish a homunculus, the skull of a demon often earns prime placement in their macabre display on their nests.
One of the most dangerous beasts in the Arvelith forests being a parrot is unusual to many Kaimerans, so much so that most consider them to be homunculi themselves if they exist at all and it was only recently when specimens were recovered that scholars have reclassified them as natural beasts. Ru kel has a long standing tradition in Arvelith folklore as a trickster for their great stealth and cunning. To the the soldiers of the Qajarith Republic stationed on the Celestial Wall, ru kel is a nuisance and more often seen as an excuse for forgetfulness, as the birds will climb the vines that cover the wall, grab any shiny objects or utensils that are left unattended, and disappear without a trace. The people of the titan gardens north of the wall however worship ru kel as the greatest of tricksters, many taking him as their patron and choosing to live near ru kel nests as their hunting the lands extremely safe for villages, as long as they offer the parrot shiny trinkets as payment. These people also claim ru kel is the most difficult beast to hunt, only able to be seen if it wants to. The tenacity, ferocity, and mysteriousness of ru kel is a testament to parrots' adaptability and a shinning example of the strange paths of evolution Kaimere has taken.
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