7 Geezers

1. Old Death

Old Death is a large stooped figure wearing a long robe made of tatters of grave shrouds. Under the cloth, Old Death appears to be a nearly mummified half-giant. There is little left of its face but taut skin stretched over shining bone. The jaw is wrong, there are too many teeth, and they are not human teeth, but the teeth of a predator. The Geezer has two magic items, its formidable scythe and a great heavy lantern. Old Death haunts the depths of elder dungeons, apart from their control, but seemingly a guest (or perhaps, ghast) of honor. It also ventures to the surface during nocturnal holidays and celestial alignments associated with darkness and ill fortune.

Boon - Old Death is wise in the lore of the departed and can summon shades of the damned, a psychopomp for those who require such services. It is also immune to the powers of the undead, so even the powers of a liche are unable to even touch the ancient Geezer. Old Death knows where lost things are, where bodies may be found, and can facilitate communication with the dead.

Bane - Old Death will very much try to kill anyone and everyone who sees it. Like a horror movie villain, it never rushes but glides along at a slow rate, but can shadow step hundreds of feet at a time and always stay just a hair's breadth from the back of a potential victim.

2. Old Wounds

Old Wounds is the largest Geezer ever seen, nearly 12 feet tall. It is covered with leathery bulging flesh covered in runes, scars, and ritual mutilations, a mix of artcraft depicting the wars and battles it has been in, and magic craft that increases its raw strength, durability, and combat prowess. Old Wounds was a warrior, and became obsessed with killing, and as a Geezer, has become very good at it. The good news is that Old Wounds has been wounded so very many times, and this has left it a collection of walking pains, aches, and arthritis. It's slow in the chase, and agile foes can evade it, or parlay with it before it can ambush them. It has a belt of skull trophies that radiates magic and a two-handed Geezer hooked hammer pole arm.

Boon - Old Wounds knows more of historical battles (it participated in by use of shapeshifting magics to hide its nature), weapon skills, and about many of the old great heroes. It didn't fight with those heroes, it fought against them. Old Wounds and other Geezers like it are among the first to flock to an evil overlord's banner.

Bane - Old Wounds is cunning, and acts as a battlemaster/controller for monster mobs. Heroes evading Old Wounds might run afoul of a pack of zombies, gnolls, or some other easily controlled foes because it trapped them.

3. Old Belcher

Old Belcher is a large Geezer, notable for its long ropy arms, bowed legs, and bulbous pot belly. It's rancid smells surrounds it like a cloud, and it cannot sneak as its great belly constantly bubbles and gurgles, and it lets out long shuddering belches, the source of its name. Old Belcher has a terrible sack it carries, stuffed with the things it takes a fancy to. This is typically a living thing, that the bag forces into dormancy until it opens the bag to pull one of them out. It also has a great cauldron it keeps over a fire to make Geezer stew. Out of the bag and into the pot, as the expression goes.

Boon - Old Belcher knows more about foraging and how to handle and prepare even rotten meat than anything else alive. Geezer stew has amazing restorative effects, but cannot be made without unwilling intelligent victims dunked in it while it's boiling. It loathes famine and will help other people find food.

I said there was no food, I didn't say there was nothing to eat

Bane - Old Belcher has an unsanitary presence and can cause preserved food to turn, and unpreserved food to instantly become contaminated or start rotting. It also has a great preference for eating sentient beings, with magic users, high-charisma individuals, and smaller beings being preferred.

4. Old Smoke

Old Smoke is a withered figure of a giant man, with a long beard down to his knees, yellowed with the constant streams of smoke coming out of its mouth, nose, and even ears sometimes. It chuckles and laughs to itself before blowing out a vision obscuring cloud of smoke while hacking and coughing. It has a long pipe with a bowl as large as a soup bowl that it can use without having to light it, though Old Smoke can conjure flame from its fingertips for this purpose. It also has a great leath pouch stuffed with rare, exotic, and even unique herbs dried and spiced for smoking.

Boon - Old Smoke has a vast and terrible intelligence and knows more things than can be imagined, though these things are old things, and not new ones. It can teach rare and obscure skills, especially related to craftsman and artisan trades.

Bane - The smoke roiling off of Old Smoke is usually somewhat poisonous, and can cause health loss, confusion, euphoria, insanity, or hallucinations. Victims Old Smoke catch are carried back to its lair where it smokes them over a low fire, as it loves its smoked dried meat, not wet and screaming. The horror is that old Smoke's herbs and preparations can keep a victim alive even as they are reduced to a jerky form of themselves, and remaining alive in a slowed tortured state until the Geezer is ready to start snacking on them.

5. Old Boozer

Old Boozer is a rail thin grizzled humanoid shaped piece of gristle and malice. Typically garbed in a sloven antique fashion it staggers and stumbles through the deep and dark places of the world, and when the nights are right, haunts the worst of the worst dives and taverns. Stinking and vile, it laughs and routinely lets out long streams of bilious vomit and rivers of urine. If a beset tavern cannot slake its thirst, it will fly into a violent rage and kill most of the patrons, devour a few of them, and leave the survivors maimed and traumatized.

Boon - Old Boozer is an alchemist in the arts of brewing and distillation, and can teach another how to become a master in the craft.

Bane - It can also infect others with alcoholism, remove the ability to control violent urges, and can inflict sadism as a curse on others, leaving them both traumatized and as violent as Old Boozer. It will lean back and laugh watching the violence it causes, while pouring ale down its gullet by the barrel.

6. Old Scratch

Old Scratch is a smaller Geezer, but tends to be the most presentable and the easiest to parlay with. It appears from the depths, or in places of ill-portent such as graveyards, gallows, or crossroads. It has a polite and jovial manner, highly at odds with its almost infernal appearance. It's two magic items are a cloak made out of the skin of a demon lord, complete with tanned bifurcated tail that just barely reaches the ground behind it, bright shiny brass buttons and all. The other is a terrible tome of axiomantic magic. Old Scratch is a legalist and makes deals.

Boon - Make a deal with Old Scratch and you might just get what you deserve, which are very obviously going to be monkey's paw deals.

Bane - This Geezer's deals are bound with axiomantic magic, making said deals inviolable. Not even a god or dungeon core can break a pact that Scratch has scratched into its book. The deals will always go wrong in the end, always.

Always.

7. Old Grumpus

Old Grumpus is a slow-moving heap of creaking, cracking, popping, snapping flesh and bone, draped in long graying hair, large ears, a lumpy nose, and any bit of exposed flesh is cracked and calloused. Of the Geezers, Old Grumpus is the most commonly known, the least encountered, and the most dangerous, as it is ancient and capricious.

Boon - If roused from its slumber, which can be so deep trees will grow on it, Old Grumpus can perform physical acts that border on miraculous, or demonic depending on what is parlayed for. It also has a deep and primordial access to the Axis Mundi, the great axle the entire universe revolves around, and all things are known to it, though its memory is frayed and ragged from the ages that it has survived. Grumpus remembers the DungeonVerse when there were neither dungeons nor stars, when it was naught but darkness and quietude.

Bane - There is no fury like Old Grumpus when roused. The only things that could match or surpass it are the Terrasque, elder dragons, and the Great Beasts that no longer stride the world.