"Your companions sleeping soundly on the ground next to you, you shift your weight on the uncomfortable log, moving some coals around in the fire with a stick. Not very long in to your watch, you hear the shifting sounds of something moving in the darkness, outside the reach of the light from the fire."

"I wake my companions!"

"You want to move to move your arm to rouse your nearest companion, but your arm doesn't seem to be obeying your command, as if it has fallen asleep. You attempt to move your other arm to slap it, but that arm doesn't move either. Your next panicked thought is to yell to your friends, but your mouth does not open. You sit there, staring in to the darkness beyond the safety of the campfire's light, because something out there does not allow you to do anything else.

Then you see it, the crawling shadow in the dark, slowly moving towards you. Right before the first flickers of light touches it, you could assume it was a small child crawling towards you, but as it comes closer you see the pale, shiny skin pulled taught around the body of the small creature, the blackened claws at the end of its fingers, and its face, lacking ears, nose, eyes and mouth in favor of just skin betraying the subtle shapes where these things should have been.

A bead of cold sweat rolls down your brow. It doesn't have eyes, yet it seems to stop its approach every now and then to look right at you, with the empty depressions where eye sockets should have been, before continuing towards you. It comes right up to you, putting its hand on your leg and looking in to your eyes. Still, you can not move. Or fight. Or run, or scream, or cry. You just look back.

It seemingly loses interest before moving past you. You can not turn your head to see, but in your periphery it climbs atop the chest of your sleeping companion, that begins to toss and turn. "Wake up!" "You scream in your head as your eyelids slowly slide down to cover your eyes.

The Mara has made an appearance in one of my game nights for the first time, and I learned her initial mechanic of paralyzing nearby creatures was far too weak. It goes against my design philosophy to let NPC enemies have abilities to put players out of commission for one or several turns at a time, therefor I made this ability almost a bit too useless in my initial creation of this monster. Since the Mara is more of a thematic horror encounter, and due to her being very weak in combat, preferring to escape rather than fight unless cornered, I decided to ramp up the power of her paralyzing presence ability.

It now takes her one action point to use, there was never a reason for her to spend her whole turn in an attempt to make the players skip their next turn, and it has a stronger effect on creatures that haven't discovered her yet. If a character successfully withstood the paralysis, they would then be immune for 24 hours, a caveat I have put in most of my debilitating monster abilities, but that has now been removed, to compensate, any character that loses their round to the Mara's paralyzing presence, will gain a temporary bonus to their opposing roll against the effect, lowering the odds of the same characters being chain-paralyzed by her. Of course, had she had any other fighting capabilities, these changes would've been completely unfair to the players, making it an awful encounter to play out, but the Mara, not really being a traditional combat encounter will set a new standard for how I design some monster abilities in the future.