These cave and dungeon-dwelling beasts are omnivorous scavengers. Exceedingly foul smelling and ugly, they are often used as beasts of burden by more intelligent evil creatures who can stomach their foulness.

Dark Mounts have black, mangy hair on their backs fading to dark gray on their bellies and legs. They are horse-like in structure, but with bare rat-like feet and tails. Their heads are long and horse-like as well, but with cannine teeth as well as incisors for eating a diverse diet of carrion, small creatures, fungus and any plantlife they might stumble across in the darkness. Their large, wide-set eyes show all black and their pointed bat-like ears constantly twitch and rotate picking up the sounds of their surroundings.

When not domesticated, they roam singly, in mated pairs, in small teams or large herds. They spend almost all their time grazing on fungi or plants in the dark caves, forests or deep mountain canyons where they live, but their keen sense of smell alerts them to the presence of any offal or carrion that they can use to supplement this poor diet. They are not at all above attacking weak or outnumbered opponents for food or just for pleasure. Their irrascible nature and unpleasant aspect and odor make them shunned by most creatures other than the most vile evil creatures such as orcs, kobolds, troglodytes and the such who use them as beasts of burden or as mounts. (But it is rare that these races have the foresight to domesticate an animal rather than just eating it.)

Combat
Dark Mounts will only fight if they seem (to themselves) to have overwhelming might. If seriously challenged, they will attempt to use their good movement and superior dark vision to escape. If damaged while carrying a rider, they will bolt and flee unless the rider makes a successful ride check (DC 10+1 per HP of damage). The rider can make a ride check every round, with the DC becoming 1 lower each round untlil he regains control, but until then, the beast flees in the most direct route away from its attacker at 160 feet per round.

These animals have low-light vision as well as Darkvision. They take only half as long to domesticate as normal and give evil creatures a +2 circumstance bonus to their handle animal checks. All the mounted combat feats are usable when mounted on these creatures as if they were normal horses. Further, Dwarves are able to use these mounts as well (although not many choose to do so).

Society
Dark Mount society is a loose arrangement based on rule by the strongest. A mated pair will stay together only until a better mate presents itself. Teams will consist of one strong male and a harem of females with one or two (non-combatant) young. A herd will be dominated by a huge male (maximum HP) who breeds with all females (70% of the herd). The other 30% are adolescent males and females (min. HP) and young (non-combatants).

This creature has not yet been play tested.
This is not a kender type creature.