Your Party finds themselves, as they so often do, underground. Vast, dark caverns where the walls drip and strange, luminescent fungi are the only light they have. They’ve disturbed a nest of Stirges, dodged Piercers, and watched countless Bats fly past them from one cavern to another. They think they’ve seen everything the underground has to throw at them.

Then they hear the clicking.

At first it just sounds like rocks clicking and clacking together, but soon they realize—there’s a pattern to it. A rhythm. It echoes through the cavern, bouncing from wall to wall until it’s not just one set of clicking noises but two. Or three. Or more.

Then, from the darkness, a giant chitinous hook lashes out to snag whoever is lagging behind, to drag them screaming into the darkness.

Your Party has met the Hook Horror.

Like so many creatures of the Underdark, the Hook Horror is an excellent ambush predator. While its stealth isn’t great, it can hang from the ceiling, crawl through the stalactites up above, and drop down on its prey, long, hooked arms slashing as it does so. And that would be bad enough, really, if it weren’t for the clicking—and what the clicking implies.

Here’s a fun fact for you: in his early levels, Grog Strongjaw of Critical Role fame had an Intelligence of 6 and a Wisdom of 10. While he wasn’t the most brilliant of characters, no one ever doubted that he was a sentient being, capable of thought and feeling and very poor decisions involving talking swords.

The Hook Horror has an Intelligence of 6 and a Wisdom of 12. It has a language that is special to its species, which perhaps no one has yet understood.

The Hook Horror is a thinking being, and maybe it would really rather we stop referring to it as a Horror.

One of the running questions we ask in this blog is: Why is this a monster? Why does Grog get to walk around and be a hero, while these chitinous monstrosities have to make a living by snatching screaming adventurers out of the darkness?

The answer, of course, is simple: because we want it to be. Here’s this large, insectoid creature that lives in the darkness and has hooks for arms—what do you want it to be, a romantic lead? Of course it’s a monster! Just look at it! It’s an affront to nature!

Sure it is. I get that.

Or maybe Hook Horrors have family structures. Perhaps they live in colonies, there in the deep darkness, and they call to each other in clicks and screeches that have evolved far away from the sun. They have young, they have parents. Hell, they have love.

And along come a bunch of upworlders with their torches and their steel and their meaty, breathy jabbering sounds. Just stumbling their way through the darkness like hatchlings, like they can’t hear the shapes of the walls around them. Leave them alone and maybe they’ll go away. But if they get too close, well… they are meat, and the young are hungry.

So without knowing why, your Party is beset by these horrifying monsters and, as most D&D Parties do, they proceed to kill the hell out of them, never knowing that they just killed a poet. Or a mother. Or a hero.

As the DM, you don’t need to let them know any of this. You could just use Hook Horrors the way countless DMs have done—as an Underdark hazard that can chip away at your Party’s resources before they get to the real threat that you’ve been planning since the last session. And there really is nothing wrong with that. That’s a time-honored tradition in D&D.

But if you want to throw your Players a curveball and mess with their sense of certainty a little, you can make the Hook Horrors the real quest. Your Players will have to not only recognize that these horrifying things are thinking beings, but perhaps they have something your Players need. They might know the best path to the Drow Fortress of Laryrr Torsek, avoiding patrols. They might have a way to get across the Abyssal Chasm that lies between them and the Lich’s Tomb.

They may know how to avoid the Shadow Dragon that has made its lair down there in the darkness, drawing away the life and what little joy there is to be found down there.

In return, perhaps the Hook Horrors need your Party’s help. To throw off the Drow hunting parties that kill them to make armor. Or to slay the Shadow Dragon that is destroying their hunting grounds. Thinking beings can negotiate, after all, if one is willing to hear them out.

Are your Players prepared to treat a monster like a person? You never know. D&D Parties have a habit of trying to adopt Goblins as mascots and Blink Dogs as pets. It’s hard to say what they might do, given the chance.

So make sure you signal to them. Give the language of cries and clicks an understandable pattern, one that your high INT wizard might be able to work out as a language. And with that, understand that they are reachable by means such as Telepathy or Sending or maybe even just Message.

Have them stumble upon a nest of Hook Horrors, which do not attack but rather wrap their long, hooked arms around their young or their elderly. In an empty burrow, perhaps there are scratchings on the walls, images etched into the stone that depict their history or dreams or community.

It takes time and planning, but the look on your Players’ faces when they realize that they’ve found a monstrous civilization should be well worth all the effort.

Not all monsters in the Manual will allow you to do this, but here we have been given a present by the Monster-Makers at Wizards of the Coast. The Hook Horror is perfectly built to allow you either a terrifying fight in the darkness or the discovery of an entire civilization hidden in plain sight.

The only name we have for these creatures is the Hook Horror. Perhaps you and your Party can find out what name they have for themselves.