Sickletoothed frilled Swampsnake

The sickletoothed frilled Swampsnake is the most fierce and powerful creature of the sunken forest. The folks who live near the forest just call it "the swampterror".    

Appearance

The Swampsnake, growing up to nine meters in lenght, has a short and high face, resembling the head of a predatory fish, but with a very broad jaw that sports the teeth that gave the beast its name. The trick with the long, thin and serated teeth is that the creature can unfold them while making its jaw jumo forwards. The most striking features of its head are, among the ginormous teeth, the big red eyes and the boneplates that cover the upper part of the skull. Behind the head multiple other boneplates emerge from the collar, these are connected with loose skin so the beast can straighten up them to form a shield around its neck and upper torso. On top of its head and behind the boneplates these creatures grow up to nine tentacles, they basicly form some kind of secod collar - exept for the one tentacle that emerges from the top of its forehead. Normally all of them point backward, but the beast can use them in any direction to either grab something to feed on it or to use the tentacles to stabilise itself while lunging at prey. The body is quite slim and looks like you merged a snake with a crocodile - it has very powerful forelimbs with 4 claws, connected by webbing and 2 less powerful hind legs which thankfully makes it not the fastest runner on land. Behind the hind legs the swampsnake has a thin but broad muscular tail it uses as a weapon and potentially to store fat in its thick base. The whole thing is covered in a dense leathery hide with very sturdy scales on top which makes it quite hard to pierce its skin.    

Diet

As you might imagine, such a powerful creature with an arsenal of weapons as impressive as this ist a herbivore. The movable teeth are perfekt spikes to catch fish, the main prey of the swampsnakes are kingcarps. Giant herbivorous fish that live in the deeper parts of the rivers and lakes in the sunken forest. But they more or less eat everything they can overpower which means basicly everything that comes closer than a hundret meters to them. Luckily, since they are reptiles they dont need that much food and spend most of the time digesting their last meal on the few sunny open shores and beaches of the waterways in the sunken forest.    

Behaviour

Swampsnakes are very aggressive and territorial, thats one of the reason why they young ones sometimes cause trouble in settlemets outside the sunken forest - the old ones drive them out of their territory and the young ones tend to go looking for their own as far away as possible from their parents. Which sometimes makes them show up in smaller villages. Many guess that they are the reasons that you sometimes find smaller farms near the sunken forest completly empty with just a few bloodstains indicating that the owners didnt just went for a walk.   But in their natural habitat they tend to - if not digesting and sunbathing - lurk underwaterwaiting for fish big enough to chase down or terrestrial animals goinng for a drink at the water. Then they shoot out of the water and either grab them with their teeth that work like a beartrap or use their main tentacle to grab and drown their prey. A little simillar to crocodiles - just a lot bigger and way smarter.  

Trivia

The few adventurers that investigate and explore the sunken forest tell of strange shrines, depicting a human-animal-creature with the head of a swampsnake and a humanoid body. Some speak of a tribe of woodelves that worship them as avatars of their nameless gods of the forest. Ok, maybe they arent nameless, but the woman that met them was to occupied with running from a pack of menial forest-squids that interrupted the meeting with the tribe that she never got to ask for the name - all she brought bak where a rough sketch of the shrine and the woodelves of the tribe nobody had heard of.  

How to fight them

When you have the missfortune of running into one your best guess is to use a torch to keep them at distance - they can sense heat and dont like fire or bright light - so if you have some oil in arms reach light the fucker up or use some lighting spell to cast a flash. That drives them into the next pond and they tend to stay there until they recovered. Which, unfortunatly, doesnt take very long. If you feel brave or stupid you can try to either shoot a crossbow bolt into their eyes or try the same with a spear, sword or whatever - or you get on their back and cut their spine behind the head with a sword or axe. But as you might imagine that is kinda hard, considering they arent only smart and fast but also got a bunch of tentacles and wet slippery boneplates to protect their weakspots. Oh, and dont try to just smash their head in with a warhammer, unless you really have superhuman strenght and can smack through roughly 20cm of dense bone with one strike, dont bother, not gonna work.