Crawling Hand & Giant Crawling Hand

For the most part, crawling hands are just one of the hazards of breaking into a wizard’s tower.  But a solitary crawling hand (especially an Advanced specimen or one enchanted with a sleep or hold person effect) has the potential to be a great silent assassin in a locked room mystery.  And giant crawling hand invariably inspire questions…foremost among them being: Where did the necromancer get a hand that large?  And what happened to the rest of the body?

One of the so-called “white necromancers,” Carson Vederack explores his discipline’s potential to heal and empower without trucking with spells that owe their energy to the Negative Energy Plane or other dark forces.  Nevertheless, he is rarely without the service of at least one crawling hand.

The assassin lord known as the Mask has a crawling hand he calls Crandall.  The dexterous hand can juggle, perform sleight of hand, pick pockets, and even do shadow puppets—indeed, journeyman rogues are often tasked with putting on a show with Crandall to practice their showmanship and mark-finding.  But the Mask’s favorite use for Crandall is bestowing the hand as a gift to politicians who fail to do his bidding.

Setting himself up as a sorcerer-duke paying only nominal fealty to the Rose Scepter, Shartan Mourne rules from a throne made out of two giant crawling hands—one of which is often out on assignment pursuing marked quarry.  Little does he know that the previous owner of the hands—a rune giant betrayed and maimed by his rivals long ago—is very much alive and intends to pound the sorcerer-duke to a pulp with his iron-shod stumps (as well as any meddling adventurers who get in his way, or who harm Mourne or the hands before he can get to them).

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 50

The movies love crawling hands.  (Wow, I think I’ve seen #4.)  And yeah, also there’s this.