Giant Vulture

A giant vulture is the familiar of a death-domain cleric, a desert ranger's bond-beast, or a battlefield scavenger the party fed once that now follows the army. It understands Common, which makes it useful. Speak clearly, point, and it follows the instruction.

Never field it in melee combat. AC 10 and 25 HP means it dies to one area spell or two arrows. The loss matters more to the player than the damage matters to enemies. Use it as an aerial scout and courier. Fly 60 feet, Darkvision 60 feet, Perception +3, and it can carry written notes across battlefields, drop vials, or land and watch a door for hours.

Out of combat, lean on what it is. Vultures find dying things. A party traveling with one keeps stumbling onto bodies, and the vulture leads them there because that's what vultures do. Three weeks of travel and the vulture has guided them to a battlefield, a shepherd's grave, and a rumored lich tomb. Use that for plot hooks.

The vulture needs nothing but leftovers. Make a ritual of feeding it after fights. A player with a vulture familiar should feel the weight of always having a creature present when something has died.

A giant vulture is a CR 1 Monstrosity with 25 HP, AC 10, and a Gouge attack at +4 for 2d6+2 piercing plus Poisoned condition. It has Pack Tactics and understands Common but can't speak. It's Neutral Evil and resistant to Necrotic damage. A single vulture dies in one hit. Use them in flocks of three to six.

Stage the flock circling a battlefield where the party just finished a real fight. The vultures land to scavenge once the party leaves. The encounter is not combat; it's the moral question of whether the party stops them. If the party engages, the vultures are spotters, not fighters. Fly 60 feet, Perception +3 means they see the party from distance. They understand Common but cannot speak, which signals they answer to a Neutral Evil intelligence somewhere: a hag, a death cult, a lich feeding them. The first one dies and the flock takes wing, climbing out of range and reporting back. The party has just been spotted.

If you must fight a flock, have the Gouge attack from the JSON serve as their melee. Pack Tactics means each vulture that fights with an ally gets Advantage. Necrotic resistance is the mechanical hook. A necromancer's vultures take half damage from radiant spells but die quickly to everything else.

The setpiece is realization. One vulture circling a hill is just a scavenger. The same vulture circling the party's road two days later, in a different country, is a mark. Let the ranger roll Animal Handling to read the pattern.