The gallows speaker (I love the name) haunts places where many people have been put to death, echoing their last words and foretelling the dooms of others (I love the concept). Is it really a monster, though? That is, is it going to pose a danger if player characters simply leave it alone?
I’m inclined to say no. An insight I had about undead creatures long ago is that they all have two things in common. First, as everyone already knows and understands, they occupy a liminal space between life and death—they’re no longer alive and not yet dead. Second, the transition to this space imbues them with a compulsion, which causes them to engage in repetitive and often illogical behavior. Skeletons keep going through the motions of their prior lives. Ghouls and ghasts devour the living. Ghosts are unable to leave a place where they have unfinished business. Mummy lords cling to lost glory. Et cetera.
Gallows speakers have a compulsion, too, but their compulsion is all talk. They haunt the gibbet—but they never wander away from it. They yammer away, but their yammering isn’t an attack per se; it’s merely a behavior with an unfortunate damage-dealing side effect. Like a number of other creatures, such as vampiric mist, it’s not a monster, in the functional sense, as much as it is a hazard. And I’d say it fights only when it’s actually attacked.
(more…)