Gargoyle

I like gargoyles.  They’re stony but they can fly. They’re demonic without being demons.  They’re urban monsters not confined to the sewer or the graveyard (a rarity), but they make equally good wilderness encounters.  And if you sic them on a party earlier enough in their careers (“So you have…what…two +1 daggers among you?”) they can be really scary. 

But mostly I just like gargoyles.

The Cathedral of Beasts is a gargoyle-covered basilica in the center of Froland’s largest city—and not all of the gargoyles are architectural in nature.  However, by long-standing agreement with the city constabulary, they do not prey on the average citizen.  However, anyone who sets foot on the grounds of the abandoned basilica is fair game.  Given that the baptismal pool in the center of the Cathedral of Beasts is a font of healing magic, the gargoyles feed on desperate risk takers more than one might think.

Stepping through a portal, a party of adventurers finds themselves in a desert, with the sun at the wrong angle in the sky and cerulean mountains on the horizon.  Any magic weapon they have not made of crystal seems subdued, almost sputtering.  And behind them, strange figures atop stony spires spread their wings…

Pearl divers have been disappearing.  The local merfolk are being blamed, and the sea dwellers are too haughty not to deny the charges, especially when made at trident point.  In reality, kapoacinths are the culprits, having claimed a nearby sunken galleon as their lair.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 137

I’m using the fact that I’m now on Tumblr as an excuse to loosen up my style a little bit.  Look, I even used the first person pronoun in my intro!  Clearly I’ve let my hair down.

Wikipedia says kapoacinths date all the way to Blackmoor.  Whoa.

For more on gargoyles, Rob McCreary’s entry in Classic Horrors Revisited has their psychology and some nice variants.

Finally, obviously this is a Pathfinder blog, but if your Venn diagram of interests happens to include indie rock in general and this week’s South by Southwest shenanigans in particular, you might like last Saturday’s show.

It’s two straight hours of SXSW artists.  Enjoy!

(Music starts about four minutes into the file.  The feed can skip, so for best results, open in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, enjoy in iTunes.  Link good till Friday, 3/16, at midnight.)