Flying Snake

A flying snake is a familiar, a druid's wild shape, or a courier trained by a jungle priesthood. The Find Familiar spell lists allow it as an option in plenty of homebrews and adjacent rulesets, and even where the strict 5e list does not, a wizard NPC who has bonded a flying snake makes for a vivid sidekick. The point of the snake is not damage. It is mobility, scouting, and message delivery in places ground couriers cannot go.

Run it as a tool. Fly speed 60 ft., swim speed 30 ft., walk speed 30 ft., 5 HP, AC 14. The snake can carry a folded letter, a small key, or a vial in its coils. It can deliver across a chasm, through a barred window, over a city wall. Blindsight 10 ft. is short, so dark spaces are not its specialty, but daylight reconnaissance through dense foliage is. If anything notices it and rolls an attack, the snake dies. So plan the route, send it once, and accept that any return trip is a separate gamble.

In combat, a familiar snake uses Help via the familiar rules to grant Advantage on one attack against an enemy it can reach, then retreats to a high perch. A druid wild-shaped into one drops out of the form when the snake hits 0 HP and takes no damage personally, which makes the snake the safest aerial scout shape at low level.

Describe what the snake sees in short clauses, never full sentences. Snakes do not narrate; they catch movement and color and heat. The cadence sells the perspective.

A flying snake is a jungle hazard with a CR. It is the encounter you stage when the party is doing something else, like crossing a rope bridge, hauling an idol out of a temple, or sneaking through a canopy. The snake itself is barely a threat (5 HP, AC 14, no listed actions), but a single bite landing on the wizard mid-spell is a Concentration save, and that save is the entire reason this monster shows up at the table.

Treat the snake as opportunistic. It does not march toward initiative; it drops from a branch when something walks underneath, makes one bite (treat as a +4 to hit, 1 piercing plus a small poison effect if you want to extrapolate from CR 1/8 conventions), then either flies off at 60 ft. or hangs on for one more round. Blindsight 10 ft. and a fly speed of 60 ft. mean it picks its target and its escape lane in the same beat. The party will spend two rounds trying to hit a Tiny aerial target with AC 14 and feel ridiculous about it.

Use them in flocks of three or four if you want a real fight. Coordinated bites against the same target compound the Concentration check problem, and a party crossing open terrain is an easy target. Flocks rarely fight to the last snake; once one or two are dropped, the rest scatter into the canopy and are not seen again unless the party comes back through.

Have the first snake strike before initiative, mid-description of the environment. The player whose turn was about to begin loses a beat figuring out what just happened, and that is the snake doing its job.