When madness leads to suicide, an allip is formed. An allip’s desperate craving for connection might inspire pity, were it not followed by blind, inchoate rage.
After a childhood marked by strange fits, fourth son Albie was deemed an inconvenience by his social-climbing father, who had him committed. But a sensitive boy prone to visions had no place in Abbot’s Hospital, a lunatic asylum for hopeless cases. After being beaten by orderlies, Albie strangled himself with his own chains. Now risen as an allip, Albie is working his way through the hospital’s many floors, exacting vengeance on the staff and incoherently begging to be returned to his family.
The Encyclopædia Lunatica is a particularly greedy work of reference, devouring the minds of those who read it and storing them as supplemental volumes. Anyone perusing one of these supplements will release the mind inside—a mind irrevocably transfigured into an allip due to the horror of its confinement.
The journey of the soul is a long and arduous one. Suicides, apostates, the unbaptized, and even a few mortal adventurers may find themselves in the Gray Reaches, an ethereal limbo of broken hillsides, swamps, and omnipresent mist. Here fiendish harpies taunt travelers, strange nagas slither underfoot, and allips roost like vultures in the crooked trees.
—Pathfinder Bonus Bestiary 4
I loved the allip illustration in the 3.0/3.5 Monster Manual—but they don't seem to appear in adventures nearly as often as, say, bodaks and mohrgs. Even Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead, by Andy Collins and Bruce R. Cordell, barely gives them a mention. Maybe their origin story is too grim? Or too freighted with certain real-world religious attitudes toward suicide? Hard to say...
ReplyDeleteLooks like the recently released Undead Revisited doesn't shy away. The book teases that allips will show up in the Bestiary 3, and Brandon Hodge's "Spectral Dead" section covers allips, the scribbling allip variant, and unique CR 6 allip adversary.
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