Almost impossible to distinguish from dark surroundings when resting, with glowing eyes, needle-sharp fangs, and a whip-like tail

When resting or lying in wait, a Cloaker is almost impossible to distinguish from dark surroundings. A cloaker has glowing eyes, needle-sharp fangs, and a whip-like tail. It has an 8-foot wingspan and weighs about 100 pounds. Cloakers are generally found in dark places.

Resembling hideously evil flying manta rays, cloakers are mysterious and paranoid creatures. A typical specimen has an 8-foot wingspan and weighs 100 pounds.

A cloaker's motives are hidden and confusing, and they distrust even their own kind. Their strange shape allows them to disguise themselves as a variety of cloaks, tapestries, and other mundane objects, and stories linger of cloakers that ally with other creatures, hitching a ride on their backs and aiding in their ally's protection for their own inscrutable reasons. A rare few are priests of ancient gods, leading cults of cloakers and skum to undertake all manner of hideous rites and working toward singularly sinister goals.

Cloakers earned their names for the resemblance they bear to dark leathery cloaks. Lurking in remote dungeons and caves, these stealthy predators wait to slay lone or injured prey stumbling through the darkness.

Camouflaged Lurkers

Like a stingray, a cloaker's body is composed of cartilage and muscle. With its tail and fins unfurled, it flies through darkness and lurks among the shadows of caverns the same way a stingray glides through water and hides on the ocean floor. Parallel rows of round, black eyespots run along its back like buttons, and the ivory-colored claws on its cowl resemble bone clasps.

When a cloaker unfurls and moves to attack, it reveals its pale underside and makes its true nature evident. Red eyes glow above rows of sharp teeth, and a long pendulous tail whips behind it.

Opportunistic Predators

When hunting, cloakers glide through the shadows at a safe distance behind groups of other creatures traversing the Underdark. They follow parties of humanoids to prey on the wounded after a battle, or pursue herds of Underdark beasts, attacking the sick, the weak, or the straggling.

Cloakers strike quickly and consume their meals as swiftly as possible, enveloping and devouring their victims. While it feeds, a cloaker uses its swift, whiplike tail for defense, although it rarely takes a stand against dangerous foes or groups of creatures. As an added defense, cloakers can create illusory duplicates of themselves.

Haunting Moan

Cloakers' thoughts are alien to other life-forms, and they communicate with one another through subsonic moans inaudible to most creatures. At higher intensities, a cloaker's haunting moan becomes audible, evoking sensations of doom and dread in creatures that hear it.

Cloaker Conclaves

Cloakers prefer isolation, but they sometimes convene with other cloakers for defense or to exchange information about new dangers, suitable hunting grounds, or developments that might affect their habitats. When this convergence is complete, the cloakers separate again.

Cloaker

Haunter in the Dark

Cloakers are mysterious Underdark predators, named by adventurers for their resemblance to hanging cloaks when they cling to walls. What cloakers call themselves is unknown, if they refer to themselves at all. Though they're undeniably intelligent, their behavior is often inscrutable.

Cloakers sometimes gather in Underdark enclaves, but they rarely build settlements or form social structures. Most operate as solitary predators, lurking in dismal subterranean reaches or abandoned dungeons—sometimes for months at a time—as they wait for prey to pass. They use their mottled hides to blend in with their surroundings. When unsuspecting prey nears, cloakers unfurl and attempt to latch on and then smother their victims in their powerful wings.

Cloakers delight in frightening foes. In addition to their methods of ambush, cloakers can create illusory duplicates of themselves and emit surreal moans that non-cloakers find terrifying in unexplainable, primal ways. Cloakers might antagonize explorers lost in the Underdark for days, terrorizing and scattering them before attacking. They rarely converse with other beings, except to whisper eerie riddles to those they're about to consume.

The malign energy of the Far Realm causes a cloaker to merge with the rotted corpse of its last meal, resulting in a hideous puppeteering Aberration. The cloaker mutate shrouds its actions in a miasma of phantasmic duplicates. It uses the corpse melded to its underside to absorb damage and to strike at prey.

Dangerous creatures resembling manta rays that wait in high places to drop on prey

Lurkers are dangerous creatures that wait in high places for prey to pass beneath them; in shape they are said to resemble manta rays, but have such colouration and form that they can become almost indistinguishable from the stone of the caverns in which they dwell.