Emerging from the water with barely a ripple is a slender, serpentine creature with human arms and a wicked grin on its wide, lizard-like mouth. The creature is no more than a foot long and has pale green skin and blood-red eyes.
Ophidian Fey. While attercroppes have a vaguely snakelike appearance, they are not cold-blooded creatures and have nothing but disdain for true snakes and reptilian creatures like lizardfolk and nagas. They hate other creatures just as much and despise everything that is beautiful and pure in the world.
Poisonous Fey. Attercroppes radiate supernatural poison from their bodies. While their poisonous aura cannot harm living creatures directly, it is remarkably good at poisoning fresh sources of drinking water, such as wells and ponds. Rivers, streams, and lakes are usually too large for a single attercroppe to poison, but several attercroppes working together can poison a larger body of still or slow-moving water.
Fey Enemies. Water-dwelling fey, such as kappa and lorelei, and many forest-dwelling fey, such as dryads, hate attercroppes with a passion and seek to slay the horrid creatures whenever possible, even going so far as to team up to wipe out an attercroppe nest. Because of this, attercroppes are never encountered with other types of fey. Their only allies are evil monstrosities and aberrations with a tolerance for poison and a lust for destruction.
Egg-Laying Fey. Attercroppes are hermaphrodites and reproduce by laying eggs. They typically lay hundreds of eggs at a time, the eggs hatching after a few days, when the young attercroppes are abandoned by their parents. Young attercroppes resemble tiny green worms for their first year of life, until they develop their poisonous aura and magical abilities. Few attercroppes survive to adulthood, but those that do become a blight on the natural world.