Couatl

Couatls have been part of the world’s oldest role-playing game forever—Wikipedia says since 1976’s Eldritch Wizardry.  Usually they were generic planar do-gooders, though; it’s only in the last few years that they really seem to have captured designers’ imaginations.  In 3.5’s Eberron setting, they were enemies of that setting’s rakshasa lords and allies/incarnations of the Silver Flame.  And in 4th Edition, The Plane Above: Secrets of the Astral Sea casts them as scheming, status-seeking manipulators, doing or sponsoring great deeds but for self-serving reasons—one of the more interesting monster facelifts I can think of.  Meanwhile, in Pathfinder’s world of Golarion, they’re still relatively blank slates.  In your campaign, you might cast them as kin or rivals to dragons, messengers of the gods, portal guardians, cosmic chess-players, mysterious sensei, or smug serpentine jerks.

After traveling to another continent to rouse a pair of couatls—named for the East and West Winds—from their slumber, an adventuring party returns home to their elven patrons.  The couatls greet their patrons as old friends, raising questions as to the elves’ true identities and motives.

Instead of an Astral Plane, the worlds of Mol sit nestled in an airy archipelago of floating islands linked by vast root structures, waterfalls, and stepping-stones.  Couatls guard the paths between the planes, attacking yeth hounds and guiding or warning off the rare planeswalkers.  Dragons, even chromatics, honor these couatls, and call them the First Brothers.

A couatl and an ogre mage duel via proxies.  Should their various intrigues to be plotted on a map, one would discover a vast game being played, an almost living version of draughts performed by thieves guilds and musketeers.  The spoils to go to the victor include a magical ship, a singing sword, and a small library.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 49

Copper Dragon

Freedom fighters and pranksters, copper dragons are likely to get involved in revolutions, slave revolts, and other noble causes...whether the PCs might want them to or not.  Their impulsiveness when choosing causes, as well as their tendency to tarnish, make them one of the few metallic species a party might in good conscience have to fight.

Bards still sing of Verdigris, a copper dragon whose sins tarnished his wings near to turquoise after his role in the Siege of Seven Sabbaths.  He still lives as a recluse, avoiding the silver dragon paladins who would bring him to justice.

Slaves fleeing Pharaoh find an ally in a copper dragon, whose skill with illusions, traps, and magical stone-sculpting soon becomes invaluable to the refugees.  Unfortunately, a party of adventurers is also following the slaves, trying to bring them word of aid while outracing Pharaoh’s charioteers.  Sadly, the copper’s traps and deadfalls, once set, don’t discriminate.

Most sages regard the copper dragon’s deadly joke ability to be a myth.  A clan of assassins is not so sure, and seeks to wrest from a copper great wyrm the words that can kill in situations where their weapons can’t reach.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 106–107

Constrictor & Venomous Snakes

The Harry Potter movies were good to a lot of monsters: hippogriffs, grindylows, giant spiders.  But they were really good to snakes.  It’s one thing to watch National Geographic—Is that even on any more?  Am I dating myself?—and see snakes lording it over rodents.  But it’s anther thing to see Nagini punch through walls with her head and watch the plaster rain down.  These snakes aren’t quite at that level yet, but all it takes is a template…

In the baths of Kemakhet, jars are brought to patrons filled with soaps, salts, and sponges harvested at the seashore and long dried in the sun.  But since the baths are also run by an assassin cult, the jars sometimes contain constrictor snakes, typically sand boas.  The boas kill the target—usually a political enemy, occasionally a random sacrifice—and return to their jars.  The servants quickly learn never to complain about jars that leave the chambers heavier than the arrived.

The so-called flying snakes of the Hool Jungles can glide from tree to tree.  Certain venomous red-bellied varieties don’t just use this method for travel—they launch themselves at prey and strike even before they land.

Orc shamans, especially druids and oracles, tend to have all sorts of animal pets and mounts.  But snakes are reserved for orc sorcerers (and especially for the exceedingly rare orc wizards).  Some of this is custom—the sinuous serpents seem mystical to orcs, who read portents from their tracks and scale patterns.  But some if it is also survival.  Being the slightest bit frail or bookish can single one out for death in an orc clan, so having a venomous friend can be a literal lifesaver.  (The bonus to Bluff checks doesn’t hurt, either.)

—Pathfinder Bestiary 255

Cockroach Swarm & Giant Cockroach

To do: Sic cockroaches on your PCs.  What not to do: Use live ones as minis.

For budding sellswords, the hardest part is finding that first adventure: one that will make their names without leaving them dead.  Exterminating a giant cockroach intrusion in the granary isn’t the most glamorous quest in the world, but if an adventuring party can do it—and keep their mouths shut—their talents will not go unnoticed by the local burghers.

A visit to a reputedly wise treant goes south when the seekers find only his rotted trunk, out from which pours a hissing swarm of cockroaches.

What’s worse than a shambling mound?  The Huge CR6 spitting cockroaches that share both the shambler’s fetid grotto and its immunity to electricity, due to long feasting on the mound’s vegetable matter.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 58

Cockatrice

We’ve covered the basilisk; on to the cockatrice!  The cockatrice’s lower CR and slow petrification make it a nice challenge for low-level parties…a foreshadowing of monsters with more lethal special abilities.

A pair of cockatrices and a basilisk duel for territory.  Monsieur Dafoe the alchemist needs the blood from one for his reagents.  The real prize would be the cockatrices’ eggs, provided their nest could be found before the local dire badgers raid it.

A harpy witch, prone to hallucinations and devoted to a plague patron, has raised a cockatrice chick as if it were her own child.  In actuality, the chick now serves as her familiar.  The harpy loathes flightless humanoids, despite often being half-stone and too heavy to fly herself due to nips from the chick’s beak.

The cockfights of the Hidden City are among the strangest one will ever witness.  Held in dockyard warehouses by half-orc attendants, the fights feature cockatrice roosters dueling for the pleasure of bloodthirsty, largely half-breed crowds—especially undines and tritons, who are just mad for the sport.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 48

Cloud Giant

There’s something different about cloud giants.  The lesser giants are clearly creatures of the hills, mountains, and icy valleys they call home.  But the greater giants, beginning with cloud giants, point to something more magical—even titanic—in character.  When you face a frost giant, you have earned yourself a story; when you face a cloud or storm giant, you are in Story.  Cloud giants’ spell-like abilities, sorcerous bloodlines, and affinity for griffins all reflect this, as do their divergent alignments.  One cloud giant might appear out of the mist to save adventurers in trouble…and the next will grind their bones to make his bread.

The halfling eagle riders of Daergun report a previously unheard number of attacks from griffons, as well as a giant castle on the peak of Iron Crag that was never there before.

Perhaps, despite the legends, there never were any cloud castles…but there is one now.  The cloud giant sorcerer Melin Eissbeard has sent his keep aloft on the mists, but now a tribe of evil cloud giants, led by a mad blind oracle with milk-white eyes, will stop at nothing to claim it.

A cloud giant enters town and causes a panic when he heads straight for the market.  He politely commissions the town’s best smith to repair his Gargantuan longsword, mentioning that the dwarves who he usually patronizes seem to have vanished.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 147

Cloud Dragon

Cloud dragons have floated in and out of the world’s oldest role-playing game on and off 1st Edition, usually as neutral aloof beasts flying far above the cares of men.  (It’s interesting that most new dragons added to the game tend toward neutral or even good.  Apparently even the most hard-hearted monster designer secretly wants to ride Falkor.)  Pathfinder’s cloud dragons, of the primal sept and associated with the Plane of Air, are more mercurial, free-spirited creatures, prone to acquiring expensive souvenirs of their travels.

A party of adventurers must race against time and a cloud dragon through the jungles of Kemf, in pursuit of a ruby hummingbird idol the size of a man.  Failure means tracking the dragon to its lair on the Plane of Air.

An elven swanboat has gone missing, along with her pilot.  The birdlike airskiff, the pride of the clan, was scooped up by an acquisitive cloud dragon, and the pilot cannot fly to freedom unless the skiff soaks up enough sunlight to recharge.

A flight of demons, vrocks in particular, boil in the skies over Inverness.  Even the local dragons seem powerless—the demons’ ability to shrug off the dragons’ breath weapons telling greatly during the first engagement.  But demons fear sonic assaults, and the thundering bite of an ancient cloud dragon might turn the tide, if only one could be persuaded to take an interest.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 96–97

Clockwork Golem

Clockwork golems may have “clockwork” in their name, but don’t be mistaken—these are not simple spring-wound automatons.  They have the same potentially violent elemental spirits bound inside them that all golems do—as their resistance to magic and their ability to supernaturally unfold into a wall of gears attests—making them true magical constructs, no matter how many gears or difference engines may be included in their makeup. 

The key to unlocking the great machine city of Polis Or is to make peaceful contact with the gatekeepers there.  What no one has yet figured out is that these legendary guardians are the gates themselves.  Each whirring wall of gears at the cardinal and ordinal entrances of Polis Or are actually just clockwork golems in their supernatural forms.

Mikam of Garn, a fighter whose reputation spans the continent, loathes mages.  He commissioned an inventor to craft him bodyguards and sparring partners no wizard or sorcerer defeat.  He was pleased with the clockwork golems he received, until he discovered the bill of sale listing all the magical components that went into their construction.  His first order to the golems is to grind their creator to ribbons in their gears.

Gambling on golem, zombie, and cockatrice fights is illegal in the steam-powered city of Mechus.  But the strict laws of the Artifice Lords can’t touch the bookmakers of the Floating Isles, a ring of zeppelins and dirigibles spiraling in lazy loops just above and outside the city walls.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 137

Clockwork golems can easily give your adventure a steampunk or a Hellboy feel—neither of which is a bad thing in all but the most strictly Arthurian campaigns.

Cloaker

Rays that fly.  Cloaks that come alive.  Geniuses too mad to cooperate.  Worshippers of gods too alien to answer back.  Ties to aboleths, vampires, and the Plane of Shadow.  Whatever else you may know of cloakers—Sean K Reynolds gives an excellent rundown in Dungeon Denizens Revisited—the central takeaway should be one of wrongness.  All aberrations should feel just that—aberrant—but a good cloaker encounter should leave PCs and players alike shaking their heads and shuddering.

Worship of Cerneres, god of secrets, confessions, and knives, has been officially discouraged for some time.  Yet when priests of Cerneres rededicated the temple in Whitegate, they did so unmolested.  Anyone approaching the priests in their black leathery cloaks fell ill or succumbed to panic.  Now Whitegaters leave the priests be and turn a blind eye, though beggars tell of strange shapes fluttering into and out of the temple after dark.

An ancient skum archivist and a nascent cloaker lord have reached a strange détente.  The cloaker demands obeisance but craves knowledge of the ancient aboleths, whom the archivist served firsthand.  The skum is no match for the cloaker’s power, but doles out his secrets slowly in exchange for captured humanoid wives.

A starship shaped like a manta ray sails through the void of space.  Boarders will likely take the ship to be unoccupied, as there is no sign of humanoid life and only a rudimentary helm.  However, a strange aviary on the poop deck is actually the bridge.  The cloakers inside slumber, but if aroused their strange flight patterns actually steer the ship in a blend of wing beats and prophecy.

—Dungeon Denizens Revisited 10–15 & Pathfinder Bestiary 47

Clay Golem

Iron and stone golems may be more in fashion, especially among the wizarding set.  But clay golems are the original automatons.  Use clay golems to suggest age, ritual significance, and ancient power come to life.  Their ability to haste themselves—and their propensity to go berserk—adds extra spice to the encounter.

On the world of Helm, the first golems were created to defend fledgling human tribes against the theocrats of their giant overlords.  Clay golems dating from that era therefore resemble cyclopes, stone giants, and sleeping monks.  The drow of Helm, similarly enslaved and resentful of the humans’ unwavering spirit of independence, have since crafted a society that boasts as many construct-wreckers as it does giant-killers.

The evil Worrick the Boy-King was tricked into commanding his clay golem shield guardian to defend his line forever, and was immediately thereafter killed and buried with the command amulet.  The pall that hung over the House of Sturbridge was lifted, and Worrick’s far more benevolent family members prospered, defended for generations against all challengers by the golem.  When adventurers accidentally raise the Boy-King, his first act is to see if the amulet he wears still controls the golem he once commanded.

The ancient clayworks of Bez’lel are staffed by clay golems, who have tended the great kilns from time immemorial.  The priests who oversee them claim to instruct them, but if pressed they will confess that the golems, while accepting their commands, seem largely free-willed.  The constructs occasionally observe rituals that priests cannot explain or expedite—and the frequency of these strange events is increasing.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 159

Chuul

For such a relatively new monster (first appearing in the 3.0 Monster Manual), the chuul has managed to worm (slither? crabwalk?) its way into nearly every campaign that touches water.  In Pathfinder, the chuul’s CR of 7 makes it a lethal challenge at low levels and a fierce side obstacle or villain’s lackey (likely magically coerced) in mid-level adventures.  And there is no moral quandary about slaying chuuls—while they are as smart as humans, they are uncommunicative, totally evil, and devoted to their horrific trophy collections.

A band of lizardfolk warriors comes out of the swamps at dawn.  They surround the local chapel of the Copper Chalice during services, then kneel and offer their spears.  Three months ago they killed and devoured a young traveling priest of the same faith, and then were immediately set upon by a chuul.  Now they’ve lost a quarter of the tribe to chuul predation, and are convinced that by converting to the Chalice they will be spared.

An extraordinary tribe of troglodytes—led be a particularly clever cave druid with white dragon blood—have taken to ambushing their enemies near a chuul lair, safe in the knowledge that the aberrations will attack their foes and leave them unmolested.

A chuul is spotted at night carving strange runes with its claws on the sides of the barges lined along the quay.  A witch on a broom of flying, part of the local messenger service, arrives with news that the same is happening up and down the delta.  Further scrying reveals that the chuuls are all acting in concert, as if directed from afar by some sinister marionette.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 46

Chupacabra

Many GMs may be reluctant to introduce chupacabras into their games.  Only “discovered” in 1995, they still have the feel of an early Internet sensation about them, rather than as bona fide cryptids.  Still, having more lizards to throw at your PCs is never a bad thing, especially lizards that deliver nasty Constitution damage.

In the rocky, cactus-strewn lands of Santa Lagarto, mongrelmen toil in the haciendas of lizardfolk and desert dwarf overseers.  One reason for their submission is the gangs of chupacabras that haunt the nearby badlands—the mongrelmen fear a blood-drained death in the wild more than their masters.

A dryad begs for help.  A chupacabra has demolished the flock of her on-again, off-again satyr lover, and now she fears for his safety.

Soucou Yotz, a demonic bat lord, is by and large a lethargic power, but still a jealous one.  Locals of the archipelago he claims as his own typically worship other gods, but still leave him a small blood sacrifice on the night of new moon.  As long as this nominal offering—usually a chicken—is made, he is satisfied.  But those who are remiss suffer plagues of bat swarms, mobats, and winged chupacabras, his especial pets.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 57

Choker

Of all the monsters introduced in the “basic” Dungeons & Dragons Gazetteer series, it’s hard to believe that the choker, from Aaron Allston’s GAZ 6 The Dwarves of Rockhome, has been one of the most enduring.  (It’s certainly not because of its original baby-bodied illustration—Stephen Fabian was a wizard at wizards and city skylines, but he was no monster designer.)  But it got the bump to AD&D, then 3.0 (boosted by Wayne Reynolds art) and now Pathfinder.  With every incarnation the choker gets creepier and creepier, cementing its status as an iconic dungeon dweller.

Despite their love of gold, dwarves put kin and clan first, by long tradition and by taboo.  Those who grasp their coins and gems too greedily are said to lose their beards and shrink in on themselves while reaching ever after more wealth.  Eventually they become chokers, hungrily seeking the flesh of those they neglected in life.

In the Hollow Halls, one of the most defensible campsites borders a small crevasse, prompting many adventurers to stop there.  Recently a choker has moved into the area and begun to pick off careless sentries one by one.  He has learned to manipulate the echoes in the canyon so that any cries for help seem to come from deep in the crevasse, as if from a fallen comrade, while he safely makes his escape upwards.

The City of Chimneys, Smelton is blessed with abundant coal and many nearby forests to fuel its tightly packed townhomes’ fires.  Smelton is also home to a renowned guild of chimney sweeps that sing as they work.  They may sound like characters out of some children’s panto, but these slender sweeps are actually bards whose songs boost the courage of their fellows—for Smelton’s rooftops are also home to many chokers displaced by the coal mining.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 45

Chimera

Chimeras have fallen in stature since Bellerophon’s day.  They’re almost no adventure’s boss monster, being relegated instead to wandering monster/side trek duty or the gladiatorial pits.  Three things perk up the chimera’s potential, though.  1) The different-colored dragon heads could suggest regional/species differences or ties to draconic forbears.  2) While they rarely speak, that doesn’t mean they never do…and the fact that they can (and what they might say) could surprise a party that knows Draconic.  Finally, 3) few adventures play up the fact that these are, in the words if the Bestiary, “monstrous creatures born of primordial evil.”  Perhaps chimeras reflect the displeasure of the gods in some way, or are drawn to (or even arise spontaneously from) sites of evil and insult.  The presence of a chimera, instead of being a sideshow, could instead by the sneak preview of a larger drama.

Maleffin the Azraq, blue dragon suzerain of the Three Pleasant Lands, loathes the similarly colored chimeras that roam the wastes in her domains—evidence of some long ago blue’s rutting that she finds distasteful.  Nevertheless, blood is blood, and she demands the heads of anyone who harms one of them.

In the veldt, sleek leopard- and green-dragon-headed chimeras are more common and slightly more agile than their leonine cousins.  Occasionally one appears with a brass or copper dragon head instead.  These tend to be no less evil than the chromatic variety, but they are more talkative…and sometimes willing to parley or trade information for a fat herd animals.

A usurper sits on the Rose Throne, having killed not only the royal line but also the bishops who refused to confirm him.  Now a chimera stalks the land, devouring a member of his retinue every solstice and equinox.  If the chimera is killed, a new one arrives at the next solar event.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 44

Chernobue

Pregnancy is a miracle…until the first time someone shows you Alien.  The fact that those unholy creatures can inject—no, impregnate—PCs with a semi-sentient poison—that horribly scars even on a save(!)—should be suitably alarming for even the most hardened parties.

Worship of the goddess of fertility has been subverted by a mad priest who lost his own wife in childbirth.  He has given hope to dozens of infertile women before secretly turning him over to his qlippoth mistress, who fills them only with pain.

Chernobues’ ability to plane shift can place them in the most unlikely places. The loathsome chernobue that answers to “the Bountiful Spasm” has dined on or impregnated most of the guests in a djinni’s palace.  Judicious use of its spell-like abilities allowed the Bountiful Spasm to pick them off one by one before the victims could take flight.

The layer of the Abyss known as Life’s Insistence is a place of fecundity gone wrong.  The trees hang heavy with rotting fruit, parasites swim in viscous water, strange animals give birth at random, and even the smallest insect bites become swollen boils.  Small colonies of doomed souls and even mortals live there, kept alive by the layer’s regenerating aura.  The mortals bear the horrific scars of surviving repeated chernobue poisonings, but the layer will not let them rest in peace.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 220

Cheetah & Leopard

Cheetahs put on a burst of speed to attack.  Leopards (and jaguars and panthers/cougars/pumas/etc.) attack from ambush.  Either way, the PCs won’t see them coming.

Cheetahs are the highly prized companions of the Llanfair elves of the veldt, who use the cats for hunting.  Fleet of foot themselves, a Llanfair elf hunting party and its cheetahs can strike and vanish before game—or trespassers—can react.

A leopard has been menacing a grippli village.  When they can’t bring the beast down themselves, the grudgingly ask for help from a neighboring human tribe.

The bandit puma has sleek gray fur and a domino-masked face similar to a raccoon.  They are highly prized for their pelts, especially their striped tails.  However, it’s said it takes two men to catch one—one man to hold the net, and a second man to kill the puma while it’s busy eating the first man’s face.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 40

Charybdis

Despite being figures of legend, Scylla and Charybdis have never really been featured in role-playing—perhaps because the cursed Scylla was too singular and Charybdis too nebulously described.  But the Bestiary series loves its mythical monsters and gifts the pair with pretty savage CRs.  To my mind, the charybdis is best used to give some color to your oceans, especially as one of several bad options.  For instance, a certain strait could be the PCs’ fastest route…if they dare face the rending claws of the beast.

The Lorelei of Ulster, a mermaid bard/enchantress of surpassing power, sings to lure sailors to their deaths in the maw of her pet charybdis.

The blockade of Marne is crippling the war effort of Terre D’Héron.  But one strait too dangerous to be watched by ships of the line, is left unguarded.  If a shipment of magical scrolls and weapons could be smuggled past the charybdis there, the Heron Throne would be saved.

Sages assure the superstitious that the charybdis is a simple monster, not the avatar of a vengeful deity.  But when the people of Crooked Harbor abandon their traditional blood sacrifices, they are rewarded by a charybdis arriving to haunt the port's narrow exit to the sea.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 56

Charda

There are not many cold-dwelling creatures in the role-playing, and even fewer cold-dwelling humanoids (one reason the yetis in the first Bestiary are such a welcome sight).  Chardas are another such race, though they typically dwell deep underground.  Their origins are intriguing—so small, yet so tough, and four-armed to boot—as is their xenophobia and their sense of honor—fiercely proud, independent, not evilly aligned, yet seeing no harm in cannibalism or infanticide.  Their dome villages, then, must be places of Darwinian jockeying for place and power—a fact adventurers could use against them.

Ilmaluk ice fishers are disappearing.  Traditionally they hunt seals and gurry sharks, spearing them through holes they carve in the ice.  It is to be expected that one or two lose their lives to storms or polar bears every season, but this spate of disappearances and rumors of “strange black not-men” portend a new threat.

A man dies in a Redchapel pub clutching a bottle of black bile.  When the Watch turn it over to Redchapel’s only alchemist, he can tell them nothing about it or the dead stranger.  But he declares the bile the find of a century, and recruits adventurers to bottle him more.  The trail leads to a caravan track, a cave of troglodytes, a cave tuned like a klavier, and an icy underground vault where hateful chardas hunt in loosely organized gangs.

A sect of charda oracles claim their goddess of cold, Urzka, has born a successor goddess, Il-Repesh, to replace her, calving the new deity from her own body like an ice shelf collapsing into an iceberg.  Urzka’s established clerics and inquisitors are having none of it, accusing the oracles of heterodoxy.  They name druids their enemy as well, an act of overreach that has charda society split.  Charda tribes in the North are thus splitting apart at the seams.  Whether or not civil war is declared, all this religious fervor demands sacrifices, a fact the nearby human and gnome populations will find out all too soon.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 55

Chaos Beast

Chaos beasts might hail from Limbo, the edge of reality, other dimensions, deep underground, dreams, or planar storms—anywhere the rules and shapes of existence break down.

A transmuter has found a spell that can lock a chaos beast in one form.  This angers some primordial entity of chaos, who sends a plague of the creatures across the land in pursuit of the wizard.

A ranger is so accomplished he has blazed trails from plane to plane.  But his last journey took him too near the borders of what is, and a great chaos beast reduced him to an amorphous blob just before as his party was bearing him away through a gate.  Now a band of azatas needs his expertise to sneak them across the borders of the Jotunheim of myth, but first a cure for his condition must be found.

A trip through a magic mirror reveals what at first appears to be a mirror image dimension.  But any inhabits met there are actually chaos beasts in disguise, who revert to their true forms (or lack thereof) when no longer reflecting into the real world.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 54

Ceustodaemon

The guardian daemons, ceustodaemons are easy to summon and relatively easy to control.  But that “relatively” is key.  If it is true that ceustodaemons are the souls of suicides, they’re happy to broaden their portfolio to include murder should their summoner lose control.  Meanwhile, at the gaming table having three varieties with varying breath weapons will keep players on their toes.

A lesser ceustodaemon is almost suspiciously docile when summoned.  It is under strict orders to behave, in order that it may spread as much disease as possible for its leukodaemon master.

A ceustodaemon seethes with hatred for the half-elven sorcerer who called him.  After a century of unliving forgetfulness, his mortal memories come flooding back as he faces his former master—the man who drove him to suicide—still in control of him even now.

A greater ceustodaemon is summoned to defend a vault, but he lifts nary a clawed finger to defend the vault’s owner.  After all, the sooner his master expires, the sooner he can drag the soul screaming to oblivion.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 XX

Cetaceal

The oceans are full of evil—aboleths, devilfish, krakens, and so on.  Cetaceals are rare otherworldly agents for good in the depths.

Named for his orca-like form, the Killer Priest is a cetaceal known for performing the laying on of hands to villagers who are generous to strangers and birds.

Beluga-bodied Armeen seeks word of her daughter.  An aasimar of pale white elven aspect, whose connection to the agathion has made her an outstanding summoner, the young woman is adventuring deep in the mountains of Butal where Armeen cannot easily follow.

Provosi is the solitary southern guardian of the ice-rimmed White Ocean.  She also lacks many allies, the waters being too cold for most traditionally good aquatic races—but not for her grindylow nemeses or the shoggoths who lurk near many of the deep volcanic vents.  She’s taken to liberally awakening great blue and sperm whales to act as her deputies.  But she can only monitor a few pods at a time, and many of her newly conscious charges have taken to eliminating the whaling trade instead.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 43