Banshee Queen

Medium undead (spirit), neutral evil · CR 9

by Thistlegrave Quills

Banshee Queen
Armor Class
16
natural armor
Hit Points
150
20d8 + 60
Speed
0 ft., fly 50 ft.
  • STR -2
  • DEX +3
  • CON +3
  • INT +2
  • WIS +3
  • CHA +5
Saving Throws
Dex +7, Wis +7, Cha +9
Skills
Insight +7, Intimidation +9, Perception +7
Damage Resistances
Acid, Bludgeoning (nonmagical), Fire, Lightning, Piercing (nonmagical), Slashing (nonmagical), Thunder
Damage Immunities
Cold, Necrotic, Poison
Condition Immunities
Charmed, Frightened, Grappled, Paralyzed, Petrified, Poisoned, Prone, Restrained, Exhaustion
Senses
darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 17
Languages
Common, Elvish, Sylvan
Challenge 9 5,000 XP

Traits

  • Incorporeal Movement. The Banshee Queen can move through other creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain. She takes 5 (1d10) force damage if she ends her turn inside an object.
  • Detect Life. The Banshee Queen magically senses the presence of living creatures up to 5 miles away. She knows the general direction they are in but not their exact locations.
  • Crown of Mourning. While within 30 feet of the tomb, hall, or grave that holds her remains, the Banshee Queen has advantage on saving throws and regains 10 hit points at the start of each of her turns. If she is destroyed anywhere else, she reforms at that place after 7 days unless her remains are burned and the ashes scattered over running water.

Innate Spellcasting

Their spellcasting ability is Charisma (spell save DC 17, +9 to hit with spell attacks).

  • At will. Minor Illusion, Silence
  • 3/day each. Blindness/Deafness, Fear
  • 1/day each. Dream

Actions

  • Multiattack. The Banshee Queen makes two Grave-Chill Touch attacks.
  • Grave-Chill Touch. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 27 (5d8 + 5) necrotic damage. The target's hit point maximum is reduced by an amount equal to the necrotic damage taken. The reduction lasts until the target finishes a long rest. The target dies if this effect reduces its hit point maximum to 0.
  • Wail (Recharge 5-6). This action is unavailable in sunlight. The Banshee Queen looses the cry she died making. Each creature within 30 feet of her that can hear her must succeed on a DC 17 Constitution saving throw. A creature that fails is also frightened of her until the end of its next turn. Creatures that cannot hear are unaffected. Each creature in the area must make a DC 17 Constitution saving throw, taking 33 (6d10) psychic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. On a failed save, a creature is also frightened for 1 round.
  • Summon the Mourners (1/Day). The Banshee Queen calls up the shades of those who died grieving for her. Four specters rise in unoccupied spaces within 30 feet of her. They act on her initiative, obey her spoken commands, and crumble to dust after 1 hour or when she is destroyed.

Bonus Actions

  • Keening Step. The Banshee Queen vanishes with a thin, rising note and reappears in an unoccupied space she can see within 30 feet. The destination must be in dim light or darkness.

Reactions

  • Grief Answered. Trigger: When a creature the Banshee Queen can see within 30 feet of her reduces one of her undead allies to 0 hit points. The Banshee Queen answers on her servant’s behalf. The triggering creature must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or take 13 (3d8) psychic damage.

Lair Actions

  • The Hall Remembers. Water rises ankle-deep across the floor of the drowned hall and remembers the night it came in. Each creature on the ground within 60 feet of the Banshee Queen must succeed on a DC 15 Strength saving throw or be knocked prone and have its speed reduced to 0 until the end of its next turn.
  • Court of Silence. Every voice in the hall except the Banshee Queen’s is pressed flat. Until the next lair action, creatures within 60 feet of her cannot cast spells with verbal components and cannot speak above a whisper.

Origin Story

The Banshee Queen is what happens when a banshee keeps her throne. Aerlenne was a small sea kingdom with a good harbor and a bad sea wall, and when the wall went, Queen Ilveth Marrowe did not leave the great hall. She stood on the dais and called her people back to her, by name, in the voice that had held a court for thirty years, and enough of them came that the histories record the drowning as an act of loyalty rather than a flood. She was still calling when the water closed over the gallery.

What rose afterward was not a grieving spirit. It was a grieving government. An ordinary banshee mourns and is dangerous by accident. The Banshee Queen still holds court in the flooded hall, still issues instructions, still expects an answer within a reasonable time, and treats the failure to provide one as treason. Her wail is not despair. It is a summons, and everything that can hear it is presumed to be a subject.

Habitat and Ecosystem

The Banshee Queen does not wander. She is bound to the drowned hall that holds her remains, and her domain reaches about as far as her voice once carried in life: the flooded gallery, the stair, the courtyard above it, and the tidal flats where the harbor used to be. Fish do not enter the hall. Gulls will not land on the roof. Divers working the Aerlenne wrecks have a rule about it that predates anyone asking why.

Lesser undead gather around her the way courtiers gather around any throne. Specters drift the stair, and the drowned of the original flood still stand along the gallery walls in what was once a receiving line. None of them were raised on purpose. They simply never received permission to go.

Behavior Patterns

She is procedural rather than frenzied, and that is what catches out parties who have fought banshees before. She opens by asking who has come and what their business is, in Common, politely, and she means it. Answering her is genuinely safer than not answering, and a party that treats her as a monster rather than a monarch will find that the hall itself takes offense first.

She does not pursue beyond her domain and does not need to. She keeps the name of everyone who has entered her hall and she is patient in the way only the dead can afford to be. Violence comes when a petition is refused, when a servant is destroyed in front of her, or when someone turns their back while she is still speaking.

Sounds and Vocalizations

Her speaking voice is intact, unhurried and human, which survivors report as the worst detail. It carries evenly through water and stone and does not echo, so it is impossible to tell from sound alone where in the hall she is standing.

Her wail is a different instrument. It begins as the rising note of a name called across a distance and then does not stop rising. Fishers on the flats above describe it as a sound the water makes. It cannot be raised in direct sunlight, and nobody has satisfactorily explained why.

Interaction Guide

Treat the first round of any encounter with the Banshee Queen as a conversation, because she does. She grants audiences. She can be petitioned, and she will honor an agreement to the letter and not one step past it. She wants three things, in order: her people accounted for, her hall acknowledged as a hall rather than a ruin, and the name of whoever let the sea wall go untended.

That last one is a hook. The engineer responsible fled inland before the flood, his descendants are alive and prosperous four hundred years later, and the Banshee Queen has recently learned this. She cannot leave. She is entirely able to send someone.

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