Ghawwas

The Daily Bestiary’s first div!  As I mentioned in my back-and-forth with The Great Beyond/Horsemen of the Apocalypse’s Todd Stewart, I’m super-excited by these fallen genies, which strike me as a great addition to the Outsider catalog. 

Some background: I never jumped aboard the Al-Qadim train; I was a “basic” D&D player with a high-schooler’s earning power, and anyway I couldn’t understand why TSR would launch a desert campaign when they were already in the middle of Dark Sun. 

That changed with some of the Campaign Journal articles in Dragon, especially Wolfgang Baur’s “Scimitars Against the Dark” in issue #198.  Suddenly I saw the appeal of an Arabian setting, especially one tinged with a bit of darkness.  (More recently, I tried to pick up some of the Al-Qadim PDFs Paizo had for sale before they were flushed from the online store, but my wallet only stretched so far.)  So when divs appeared in the Reign of Fire Adventure Path, I was stoked—they’re a neat idea whose time has come.

End background.

Anyway, ghawwas: evil fish genies.  Can boil the very seas.  Expect to be poisoned.  Don’t ring any bells.

To the pilot of a battered skiff, a small island looks like safe refuge…until it is revealed to be a barren atoll shielded by the hallucinatory terrain of a div.

While a single bell will enrage ghawwas, a whole town’s worth usually suffices to keep them at bay.  When every bell in every steeple and minaret in Yizmir vanishes overnight, ghawwas are the immediate suspects.  Without a full complement of bells, the port city is vulnerable.

An investigation into the disappearance of local sources of cold iron reveals the strangest arms smuggling operation ever.  Locathah embroiled in a war against the divs are in constant need of cold iron, as it rusts quickly in their salty environs.  The fey see this as an opportunity to enrich themselves and remove the hated metal from their territories, and have taken up dealing in weapons and ore through selkie intermediaries.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 87

Is it just me, or does the ghawwas look like Mer-Man crossed with a lionfish?

I wonder if a div influenced my rather ridiculous but awesome purchase of this last fall.