Monday, March 26, 2012

Giant & Giant Queen Bees

You have to wonder: What’s the Pathfinder equivalent of an EpiPen®?

A tribe of wood elves specializes in magic that stores spell effects in candle wax rather than in scroll or potion form.  The beeswax of giant bumblebees holds metamagic spell effects particularly well, and these same bees also guard the elves’ homes.

After being ambushed by shadows in a haunted canyon, a weakened adventuring party stumbles across a hive of giant bees near the canyon’s end.  The royal jelly of the giant queen bee could be a godsend, provided the bees’ stings don’t finish what the shadows started.

A copper-kilted clan of azer artisans has decamped to the Material Plane.  They smith gold for their livelihoods but keep bees for pleasure.  (Honey is a new delicacy to them, and smoking out the bees to retrieve it is particularly easy for a race that is already on fire.)  The bees, for their part, have grown fiercely territorial and hot-tempered—perhaps touched, somehow, by their keepers’ elemental natures.

Pathfinder Bestiary 2 43

Remember the candle casters from 3.0’s Tome and Blood?  That was a cool class concept.  I have no idea how well they played as PCs, but the idea was brilliant.  (In fact, the whole book was pretty solid in terms of fresh thinking—the acolyte of the skin, alienist, and blood magus alone were riveting.

Also: Music!  Listen to it.  Starts with the Decemberists and gets better from there.  Also, birthday songs.

(Music starts about 30 seconds 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, 3/30, at midnight.)

No comments:

Post a Comment