The Girtablullu's Fearful Gaze
In Dungeon Crawl Classics, the girtablullu is a scorpion-torsoed sentinel built to guard thresholds, and it guards them with more than claws and sting. Its fearful gaze demands a Will save at DC 15. Fail, and the affected character flees. That is the whole mechanism, and it is enough.
The damage is not the problem. The movement is. A failed save pulls a body out of the line, and a line with a hole in it is no longer a line. Front-rank fighters find their flanks open, casters lose their screen, and the retreating character often drags the formation apart in the scramble to follow or cover. Judges who treat the gaze as flavor are underselling it. Players who ignore Will saves until this moment are the ones who learn.
The counters are ordinary and worth having ready: anything that raises Will saves, any reroll a cleric or luck-spending warrior can supply, and spacing that limits how many allies stand in the creature’s sightline at once.
At the table: Position the girtablullu at the mouth of a ten-foot corridor so the party must bunch to approach, then let the gaze sweep the stacked ranks and watch the retreat jam the hallway behind them.
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