We discuss the universal theory of localized impurities in the paramagnetic state of 2D antiferromagnets where the spin gap is assumed to be significantly smaller than a typical exchange energy. We study the impurity spin susceptibility near the host quantum transition from a gapped paramagnet to a Néel state, and we compute the impurity-induced damping of the spin-1 mode of the gapped antiferromagnet. Under suitable conditions our results apply also to d-wave superconductors.