“In memory of the noble knight Roderick, slain during a valiant struggle against a basilisk. Let’s hope the beast choked on his bones.”
– Gravestone inscription, Vizima cemetery.

The great cockatrice is a large creature with the body of a beast and the head and legs of a rooster. Scholars cannot help but notice the similarity with their smaller cousins and instead theorize that the great cockatrice is the true form of the species, while the more common variation a diminished, flawed, subspecies. Great cockatrices do lay eggs of their own, but for some puzzling reason, only small cockatrices ever hatch from them. Regardless, the eggs hold great value as alchemical components, for they are the prime ingredient of an ointment that can cure petrification.

Great cockatrices are extremely aggressive, attacking anything that comes in their sight with furious cackles, even without any provocation. These omnivores have a diet that consists of large quantities of berries, corns, fruits, and animals such as cattle, deer and the occasional lost shepherd. Cockatrices thrive in dark caves, abandoned ruins, cobwebbed dungeons and old basements. Though small compared to griffins and manticores, they are more than capable of killing anyone who stumbles across them in a dark corridor.

Folktales claim that cockatrices hate everything that lives so fiercely that its glance turns the living to stone. This is not actually true, but the eyes of the beast can paralyze anyone that look at it, which might be where the confusion in the myth is coming from. The cockatrice has an irrational hatred for the rooster’s crow. The song of the bird will make it mad with anger and the creature will charge in the direction of the noise, furiously cackling its discontentment and ravaging anything that stands in its path. For this reason, villages around a cockatrice hunting ground tend to have no chicken, for fear of angering the monster. Clever adventurers can use this hatred to their advantage, forcing the monster to show on a battlefield of their choice or distracting it during a fight.

Basilisk leather, that can be crafted from a Cockatrice, is a highly-valued material used to make fashionable shoes and women’s handbags. For this reason many men, their courage girded by goldlust, take to hunting them. Most of these hunts end in disaster, but some do manage to bag their prey, which has led to a drastic decline in this creature’s numbers in recent years. Some mages and druids are of the opinion that basilisks should be included in programs meant to safeguard dying species. Everyone else thinks those mages and druids have gone completely mad.