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The Hollowthroat

Flooded Cavern · Hidden Pool Cavern · area boss IV

The Hollowthroat

the Drowned Choir

A mass grown too large for one throat. The black pool at the back of the Flooded Cavern has taken people for as long as anyone has fished its edge, and none of what it took ever really left — their last breaths fused into one aberrant thing that still tries to speak with all of their voices at once.

Field notes

What's known about it, mostly secondhand, from people who got out of the water in time.

It does not hunt the shore. Everything in the Hidden Pool Cavern that hunts — the crabs, the crocodiles, the sahuagin raiding parties — keeps well clear of the deep end, and the cavern hulk that dens near the entrance has never once been seen past the second ledge. Something down there already has the run of the black water, and nothing local disputes it.

It waits for the water to be disturbed. A splash, a dropped torch hissing out, an oar — anything is enough. Then the voices start: half a dozen conversations laid over each other, all pleading, none of them its own. By the time a shape actually surfaces, most people have already stopped moving to listen. That is, by design, the last mistake they get to make on dry footing.

Stat block

Revised: CR 7 → CR 11. An audit of the Flooded Cavern's real ambient table found it running up to CR 9 (the cavern hulk), not CR 8 as first assumed — CR 7 was sitting below it. Bumped to Aberration 5 / Cleric 6 (from 3/4) to clear it with room; the same Aberration:Cleric ratio it already had.

Built to a real Aberration/Cleric chassis, not a reskinned stock monster — audited clean against the module's own D&D conventions (average hit dice, skill-rank cap, resref length).

The Hollowthroat, the Drowned Choir CR 11 · resref fc_hollowthroat
Str
16
+3
Dex
12
+1
Con
18
+4
Int
8
−1
Wis
20
+5
Cha
14
+2
Race / Class
Aberration · Aberration 5 / Cleric 6 (total level 11)
HP
99 (expected ~99 by average hit dice — audit clean)
Natural AC
6
Domains
WaterTrickery
Feats
Armor Prof (Hvy/Lgt/Med), Combat Casting, Shield Prof, Simple Weapon Prof, Creature Weapon Prof, Darkvision, Spell Focus & Greater Spell Focus: Enchantment, Water Domain Power, Trickery Domain Power, Great Fortitude
Skills
Concentration 12, Spellcraft 8, Listen 10, Intimidate 6
Prepared L0
Resistance, Virtue, Light, Cure Minor Wounds ×2
Prepared L1
Cause Fear, Bane, Doom, Obscuring Mist, Scare
Prepared L2
Hold Person, Silence, Sound Burst, Slow
Prepared L3
Poison, Searing Light
Loot flags
TYPE 26BOSS 1LOOPS 2CLEAR 1

The drowning choir

Its combat script chains onto the module's own leader AI rather than replacing it — ordinary targeting and melee stay exactly as designed. Three phases, gated on its own hit points.

Above 66% hp · every 3rd round

The Choir Murmurs

A pulse of every voice it carries, all at once, inside the skull of anything hostile within six meters. Will DC 16 or spend the next round or two frightened, too busy listening to fight back.

WillSave(MIND_SPELLS) · Frightened 1–2 rnd
66%–33% hp · every 4th round

The Undertow

The nearest enemy is hauled bodily through the black water to stand next to it — JumpToLocation under a failed Reflex save — then comes up gasping, tangled and cold, with the fight now happening exactly where the Hollowthroat wants it.

ReflexSave(COLD) · pull + cold dmg + Entangle 1 rnd
Below 33% hp · once, then murmurs resume at full strength

The Deep Takes You

Its last trick, spent only when it is nearly finished: every drowned voice screams together and the water seems to close over the whole room. Anyone close enough takes cold damage, and can fail into a full round with lungs full of black water — unable to speak a word, let alone a spell — on top of the choir's own fright.

Reflex(COLD) + Will(MIND_SPELLS) · dmg + Silence 1 rnd + Frightened 2 rnd

Why these numbers

CR 11, revised from the original CR 7 after the module's own audit of the Flooded Cavern found its real ceiling at CR 9 (the cavern hulk), one point above what the original design assumed. The gimmick and its DCs are untouched — this is a save-or-suffer boss, not a slugging match, and that was already the right shape at CR 7. It just needed the sheet to actually outrank its own cave.

Aberration 5 / Cleric 6 keeps the "monster chassis + a few caster levels" shape used for Grisla and Cairnbell rather than inventing a new pattern, just scaled up proportionally from 3/4: the racial levels carry its HD and a body an aberration is expected to have, the cleric levels buy the domain powers and prepared spells its script leans on for save DCs.

Water + Trickery over the more obvious Death/Evil pairing (already Cairnbell's) or pure Evocation (already Grisla's) — Water for the environment it never leaves, Trickery for a thing that wins fights by making victims believe something false (that they're still breathing air, that the voice calling them is a person). Spell Focus: Enchantment backs the same read: Cause Fear, Scare, Hold Person and the scripted fright pulses all key off it.

99 HP / natural AC 6 is dead-on the average-hit-dice expectation for the new level spread (verified with the module's own audit tool, not eyeballed).

How it's wired

Scripts chain onto the standard module AI rather than replacing it, the same convention every boss here follows:

ScriptSpawn fc_ht_spawn → ExecuteScript("j_ai_onsp_leader", OBJECT_SELF), +15% scale, permanent cold aura ScriptEndRound fc_ht_round → ExecuteScript("j_ai_oncombatrou", OBJECT_SELF), then the 3-phase gimmick ScriptDeath fc_ht_death → send-off VFX, then ExecuteScript("bele_ondeath", OBJECT_SELF)
Spawn table
Sparky case 96
Odds & count
always, 10% · 1–2 at once
Area
floodedcavern.are (Hidden Pool Cavern)
Wired via
sparky_variables · enc04 = 96

CR revision delivered as boss_cr_rebalance_import.erf — the blueprint only, since none of the scripts changed. Same safe ERF-import channel every blueprint change in this module uses, since the toolset's save cycle can silently drop direct edits to files already open in its palette.