Giant & Glacier Toads

Tough enough to live in more environments than giant frogs, giant toads naturally have a higher CR…and glacier toads a much higher CR (with bitter cold damage to boot).

In the desert, water is precious.  Before a tired search party can pause and refresh themselves, they must fight off the giant toads that are unwilling to share their breeding pool.

Overnight, a glacier retreats at an astonishing rate, revealing a heretofore unknown cave complex.  To reach the cave, would-be explorers must tackle an obstacle course of avalanche-prone boulders, loose scree, and glacier toads.  The toads were hibernating in the ice until the melting glacier calved them off in its wake.

A closemouthed bargeman is famous for transporting refrigerated spell components, choice exotic meats, and even flavored ices down from the alps.  His secret—a pair of glacier toads stowed in the hold and radiating cold—is revealed when the amphibians escape and wreak havoc along the docks.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 268

It’s our last week of giant animals!  Which was actually more fun—and way easier to write—than I had anticipated. 

If there’s one thing glacier toads have on their side, it’s surprise.  When in the arctic, one does not expect a) toads, b) big toads, or c) big toads that radiate cold damage.   My halfling cleric (shout-out to Marra Shem!) would be peeved.

Saturday's show featured the usual new tunes (including Larry Gus and, to my surprise, Best Coast) and celebrated 10 years of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

(Music starts about a three minutes into the file. If the feed skips, Save As an mp3 with Firefox or Chrome and enjoy in iTunes.  Link good until Friday, 5/4, at midnight.)

Giant Tick & Tick Swarm

Giant ticks are the bane of every PC with a low Constitution score.  And tick swarms are just…yikes.

Mastodons migrating farther south than usual bring ticks to the Sterngrass Plains.  The ticks begin breeding rapidly, spreading as swarms and decimating the local centaur population.  More than one centaur runner has inadvertently worsened the crisis while seeking help, collapsing in a blood-drained, swarm-covered husk just as he reached the next tribe’s land.

A rash of bubonic-plague-carrying tick swarms appears to be the work of a daemon.  Actually, the swarms are the work of a gelugon determined to keep the local paladin order off-balance while he makes his next move.

The first hint that there is something wrong with the hamlet of Ramble is the sight of the children playing with their pets—not dogs and cats, but giant ticks.  The docile ticks do not seem to regard the children as prey, but leap to attack any strangers.  Of course, defending oneself against the vermin only upsets the children, who run for their parents.  And that’s when things get weird…

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 265

I am excited with some of Blogger’s changes—for one thing, my formatting is not going out of whack the second I try to make an update.  (Maybe now I can go back and edit all my many, many typos…)

Backlog alert: Black pudding, blindheim, and fungus leshy entries are up.  Speaking of Plant creatures, the Paizo blog recently had some previews of plant companions from the forthcoming Advanced Race Guide and bumped up the pirate familiar list for the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path.

Giant Squid & Squid

In the real world, squid aren't quite the mystery they used to be (I remember when the giant squid arriving at the Smithsonian was big news).  But they still suggest watery depths we will never fully know.  And anything that can tussle with a sperm whale deserves respect.

A standoff between treasure hunters and merfolk in a sunken city goes bad.  It gets worse when a giant squid, drawn by the commotion, begins attacking both groups indiscriminately.

A minor artifact found in a skum lair is cursed.  As long as it is carried, schools of squid will attack the bearer any time she enters salt water.

Food is a powerful teaching tool.  A particularly cunning giant squid has learned a trick: it picks clean one vessel, then attaches itself by its suckers to the keel and waits.  When the rescue ship arrives to look for survivors, it attacks them, too.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 259

Backlog alert: A quick browse of the archives will tell you August was work-heavy for me…and thus post-light.  I’m doing my best to fix that, most recently with the blink dog entry.

Giant Spider & Spider Swarm

Monster-wise, it doesn't get more basic than this.  Back before solifugids and scorpions, before the red box or even the blue and white boxes, there was a Hobbit, a dark wood, and giant spiders.

Three sarcophagi contain what appear to be silk-wrapped mummies.  Closer examination reveals that they have actually been wrapped in fine webs.  Closer examination also disturbs the spider swarms within the corpses, who come spilling out to attack intruders.

A foolproof plan to invisibly sneak into an enemy base through the postern gate runs afoul of giant spiders.  The gate lies near the cesspit that is the spiders' primary hunting ground, and with tremorsense they don't need to see to spot potential prey.

Spiders are considered unlucky in the Jacinth Kingdom.  In part the reason is cultural—lunar eclipses are said to be the work of the Night Spider.  But there is a more practical reason as well.  The Jacinth Kingdom is a magocracy beset by div-touched kobolds, who specialize in using giant spider egg sacs as missile weapons and catapult shot.  The sacs burst on impact, releasing spider swarms that are incredibly effective at disrupting spellcaster concentration.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 258

Giant Snapping & Snapping Turtles

Snapping turtles are cantankerous beasts prone to biting anything that provokes them.  And then there are the Gargantuan ones…

Young villagers come across a kappa fishing by the river.  He promises them a boon if they catch a half-dozen snapping turtles for his soup.  Agreeing might lead the villagers to becoming patsies for his pranks…or the boon may be the thing that launches their careers as adventurers.

An ingredient for a vital ritual potion is a gland found in the stomach of a giant snapping turtle—but the solution’s magic will be spoiled if the turtle is slain in the process.  Someone will have to both survive the trip down the turtle’s gullet and manage to cut a way out—an effort hampered by the turtle’s armored stomach.

The new prodigy at the Academy of Magic, Amelie Wyvernrite, stuns everyone by calling a snapping turtle as her familiar.  But given that an oracle has pronounced that a doom lies upon the girl, her choice (and the turtle’s offered Fortitude bonus) may be a fortunate one.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 273

Giant Slug

Simply put, giant slugs are pretty badass monsters.  That’s not a term I throw around lightly—we like to keep it professional here on TDB—but giant slugs earn it.  They’re CR8—nothing to sneeze at.  They’re Huge, but don’t think ducking down the corridor is going to help—they can squeeze down to 5 feet.  Oh yeah, and they spit acid—10d6 worth of acid.  (And when was the last time your party prepped any kind of acid resistance, as opposed to fire, cold, or lightning?  Probably never.  Despite ample cautionary examples.)  Even some DR to boot.  Bad. Ass.

The Bestiary actually includes a lot of monster/adventure hooks for the giant slug, including mites, troglodytes, skum, and aboleths.  Let’s see if we can add to that, shall we?

A giant slug attacks a sleepy village.  Reports come in of two more attacks in nearby towns.  Following the slugs’ trails reveals a common source.  The vermin sprang from a single polluted pool as ghastly side effects from the birth of a nuckelavee.

An advanced zuvembie has grown in hateful power.  While she cannot control vermin, she is effectively invisible to them.  She uses her claws to goad a giant slug against the targets of her rage, then uses her corpse call to lure victims to feed the beast and slake her bloodlust.

In the only recorded example of human/mite cooperation, a tribe of mites lives in the cellar of a village common house.  The mites earn their keep serving in the militia, whose main job is to drive giant slugs and other dangerous vermin away.  Now half the mites have disappeared, the other half have gone into hiding, and unless the mystery is solved, a giant slug will demolish the town.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 254

Final notes:

1) The illustration in the Bestiary has a giant slug crushing a house.  A house.  Just sayin’.

2) The giant slug is one of those monsters that gets more creepy, rather than less, the more you learn about its real-life counterparts.  Again, this is a family show, but check out the Wikipedia entry and scroll down to “Reproduction.”  Yikes.

3) Finally, I think the giant slug gives you a great excuse to just ignore CR for an evening.  Throw one at the party a few levels too early, give them plenty of clues that they are out of their league, and see what they come up with.  Maybe there’s a salt mine or a great salt lake nearby that they can lure it into.  Maybe they can cajole all the town’s merchants and housewives to donate their salt stores.  Maybe they sacrifice the tavern in which they first met to intoxicate and drown the beast.  If their solution seems like a good one, let them run with it.  You may have to fudge a few die rolls so the acid spit doesn’t wipe them out, but it’s a great chance to foster problem solving instead of spell-slinging out of necessity.  (Extra points if any of your older players reference the G.I. Joe episode, “The Germ.”)

And yes, my show.  On Saturday The New Indie Canon celebrated Record Store Day and the 20th anniversaries of Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted and the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head. Check it here.

(Music starts about a minute and a half into the file. If the feed skips, Save As an mp3 with Firefox or Chrome and enjoy in iTunes.  Link good until Friday 4/27, at midnight.)

Giant Skunk & Skunk

Skunks—giant or otherwise—are less literally prickly than porcupines, but just as problematic.

The spray from a surfeit of skunks appears relatively harmless.  But it makes a party of fugitives remarkable easy to track—especially for the fork-tongued lizardfolk ranger who engineered the encounter in the first place.

A hermit in the badlands is rumored to be a prospector or a farmer.  Actually, he’s a wizard/gunslinger in hiding.  He lets a giant skunk have free rein in his modest garden, as the territorial beast makes for a loyal and crotchety alarm system.

The halfling cavaliers of Banderwood wear black-and-white striped livery to match their giant skunk mounts.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 247

Hey, so a friend of mine from back in the day put out her solo record last night, just in time for Record Store Day. 

And another friend/former roommate/ex-coworker of mine put her on the second cover of his revamped rag.

Hey, did I mention Record Store Day? It’s tomorrow!

Giant Sea Anemone

You don’t have to move (or breathe air) to be deadly.

Sailors swept overboard in a gale are pulled by the current into a cluster of giant sea anemones.  (The sailors are treated as bull-rushing…but of course, the anchored anemones are resistant to such conditions.)

Cecaelias raise constricting darkforest anemones to guard their oyster beds.  The octopus-folk cover themselves in a pungent slime (produced by pet giant clownfish) when they go to harvest the mollusks for meat and pearls.

A deep tiger anemone does not hide a sunken treasure, but rather a sunken mystery: a pyramid of unknown origin studded with gems and carvings.  The object radiates both abjuration magic and an aggressively neutral divine aura, discomfiting the few sages who could survive both the crushing water pressure and the anemone’s acid attack.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 238

Giant Scorpion

There’s something about scorpions that screams “Danger.”  Their silhouettes alone are unmistakably threatening.  Now inflate them to Large size (or larger) and they become truly terrifying (since they can easily be scaled to your players’ level).

The yellow-skinned Orthari elves are not drow. Nor are they evil per se.  But given their xenophobia and their rabid worship of the Stone Scorpion, trespassers who feel the sting of their envenomed blades—to say nothing of the stings of their giant scorpion pets—can be forgiven for making assumptions.

Deadfall scorpions are aptly named.  After they ransack jungle villages, keches will often chop down trees to create deadfalls, forming habitats for the Huge scorpions.  The vermin then make short work of any stragglers or escapees the keches might have missed.

A chronoclysm sends adventurers back in time to the Age of Insects.  When they awake in a daze on the primeval shoreline, they are immediately attacked by giant sea scorpions.  Worse yet, their presence arouses the interest—and horror—of local qlippoths, who have never encountered humanoid souls before.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 242

Wizards of the Coast’s Eberron setting should get a nod here for making scorpions (and drow) new life.

Backlog alert: Apparently today is ScorpionFest, since I’m also writing up the black and cave scorpions.

These scorpions will not, however, take you to the magic of the moment on a glory night.

Giant Rot Grub & Rot Grub Swarm

There’s always going to be one player in every gaming group who rhapsodizes about the 1st or 2nd edition of the world’s oldest role-playing game.  Give them what they want: Drop them into a pit of rot grubs.

The accident at Patchett Gulch forever changed the miners in Orvalt.  Everyone knows the story—the cruelty of the overseers, the cave-in that trapped most of the men below, and then the tragedy: the dying purple worm that burst in on the trapped men, then began spewing rot grub swarms in its spasms. Every man who survived that day bears the scars from burning the rot grubs out of their bodies. But what most don’t know is that the worm revealed a seam of mithral and an entrance to the Realms Below.  Now, in order to earn the right to mine the rare ore—or to pass Below (as some adventurers might wish to do)—the miners require all new hands to suffer a rot grub infestation and burn it out themselves.

A god of pestilence and parasites favored by evil giants protects his most ardent worshipers in the most disturbing way possible: He causes a rot grub swarm to grow in their guts.  If the giant host falls to half hit points, the grubs burst out to attack the offending infidels.

Grubs are a good source of protein for hunter-gatherer tribes...making giant grubs are a great source.  An alliance with the Sho-Shar can most easily be procured with the gift of a giant rot grub steak.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 215

Backlog alert: I wrote up the avoral, which means I’m finally 100 percent caught up for the months of June and July.

Giant Porcupine & Porcupine

The bane of golden retrievers is now the bane of your player characters.

A gnome seeks to test a party’s character by sending a prickle of porcupines into their midst at night while they’re in their bedrolls.

A hunter’s blind is the best place to keep a lookout on the sheriff’s tower.  Unfortunately, a giant porcupine has recently claimed it as a residence.

A local test of arms matches contestants against their opposites.  The scar-faced young Count Roderick, who has no respect for those who don’t take up arms and armor, pairs any monks against a giant porcupine as an insult.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 222

Three weeks of Giant creatures down, three weeks to go.  If you’re tired of loitering in the Gs, might I suggest browsing D, E, or F?

Also, after a week off, here’s a new episode of The New Indie Canon, featuring new Dar Williams, Alex Winston, Kishi Bashi, THEESatisfaction, and old Sly & the Family Stone.

(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, 4/20, at midnight.)

Giant & Great Horned Owls

Like wolves, great horned owls walk the line between good and evil—noble and wise in legend, but also creatures of the night and the powers that walk in darkness.  Pathfinder’s giant owls up the mystical ante, with supernatural abilities (animal telepathy, insightful senses, and even limited true seeing) that make them undisputed rulers of the animal world.

Elves may haunt Grimwing Forest, but the wood’s ruler is the giant owl for which it is named, who sits in judgment over all things under the forest canopy.  “Grimwing” is actually as much a title as a name, since it is passed down from each giant owl monarch to his son.

The woods surrounding the alpine city of Wilhelm are home to many great horned owls, and more than a few residents keep them as pets.  Of note are the priestess Alora at the Temple of Wisdom, whose owl is a symbol of her god; the footpad Quentin, who raised his bird from a chick (and who now can’t keep her from following him during his evening excursions); and Xaman, the infernal-blooded sorcerer/ranger who glorifies the thrill of the hunt above all else.

A giant owl and a kolyarut make an unlikely team of enforcers.  If anything, the giant owl Aspen is even more effective to the cause of Law than his inevitable partner Fist Seven.  Aspen’s keen but mortal mind allows him to cut through Gordian knots of conflicting statutes and precedents that might tie up the kolyarut’s processors, and his animal telepathy and inquisitor class levels allow him to solicit some surprisingly accurate testimony.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 213

Regarding yesterday’s events: six Gold ADDY®s—two of them I had a major hand in.  Of course, all I can think about is the Silver we got that should have been Gold, as well as other disappointments.  (Apparently I’m a bit of a perfectionist.) 

I should shut up about myself now.  Back to monsters, right…?

Giant Octopus & Octopus

Anyone who works in an aquarium can tell you: Octopi are camouflaged, cunning, and perceive far more of the world than we used to suspect.  There's no reason fantasy octopi can’t be the same.

A battered, sunken treasure chest with a false bottom contains a map sealed in a bone scroll tube.  But two octopi have taken up residence in the chest, and don't take kindly to being disturbed.  One squirts a cloud of ink around pursuers, while the other tries to drag the chest away.

An undine's octopus companion can survive for several hours out of water.  The undine wears the creature wrapped around one shoulder, and it seems to eye all who come near with uncanny clarity.

A giant octopus in a wizard's lab disrupts a wizard's summoning circle when it escapes its tank.  The wizard perishes in the feedback, while the octopus, now a half-fiend, revels in its new intelligence and power.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 219

In other new, Baltimore ADDY® Awards get announced tonight.  I’ll let you know if I take anything home.

Backlog alert: I finally got around to writing up the attic whisperer.

Giant Mosquito & Mosquito Swarm

With a few levels under their belts, your players will probably scoff at giant insects.  But these particularly nasty bugs (CR 6 and 3, respectively) should get under their skins.

Faerie’s Queen of Summer sends a heat wave to punish mortal loggers for despoiling her forests.  Aside from rising temperatures, the first sign of this is the rampant hordes of mosquito swarms moving up the coast, spreading disease as they go.

A traveling zoo and circus brings a megatherium to town.  The giant mosquitoes follow in its wake, driving the animals mad and killing many onlookers.

A strange, cloaked entity called the Mosquito Lord menaces the land and leaves blood-drained corpses in his wake.  Thought to be some kind of twisted druid, daemon, day-walking vampire, or even an intelligent gryph, he is constantly surrounded by mosquito swarms.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 193

My former roommate is a malaria researcher.  Now there’s a man who knows his Culicidae from his Plasmodium.

Backlog alert: I finally got around to writing up the annis hag.

Giant Mantis

I see the giant mantis as following the B-actor-made-good plotline.  A big splash early on—1957’s The Deadly Mantis, naturally—followed by years of toiling in the business—decades of PBS nature specials—only to be rescued, like John Travolta or Mickey Rourke, by the right part written with him in mind—the scion of Golarion’s assassin god.  Way to tough it out and seize the spotlight, giant mantis!  But if assassins aren’t your bag, here are some more mantis adventure seeds for your home campaign…

A dragon abducted the princess in the blink of an eye!  Or so say the terrified eyewitnesses, who only saw a green flash and a blur of wings.  But the standard save-the-princess narrative falls apart when the rescue party finds the real culprit—a treebender mantis.  The princess is long dead, the mantis is out of the party’s league, and the king will execute them if they do not return with a live daughter and a dead dragon’s head.

The assignment is a simple one: help svirfneblin take their fire beetles to market.  A journey of 25 leagues underground, the travelers must contend with cave-ins, poisonous fungi, and the fire beetles’ natural predators, a cave-dwelling species of giant mantis.

A brotherhood of half-elven rangers teaches outcasts a rare two-weapon fighting style.  The price of admission is the head of a giant mantis.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 200

Giant Leech & Leech Swarm

Time for your players to whip out their Humphrey Bogart impersonations.

All the clerical magic in the world isn’t enough to tend to every wound.  So most peasants make do with folk remedies, hedge wizardry, and visits from itinerant doctors who range in skill from gifted healers to bloody-minded madmen.  One of these, the mass-murdering Obalt the Vivisectionist, hurls a jar full of leeches when cornered.  The jar breaks and the leech swarm attempts to exsanguinate all in the vicinity. 

A party of adventurers startles some bathing hadrosaurs.  As they flee the shoreline, dark blobs drop off their flanks and ooze toward the party.  These giant leeches had attached to the duckbills, but now seek mammalian blood.

A crafty mandragora seeks to lead a party through leech-infested waters.  After all, the plant creature has no blood to lose.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 187

A word of praise is due here for Golarion’s bloatmages, an absolutely inspired creation that make leeches even creepier than usual.

Also, no radio show this week, but I'll try to get a mix thrown together in the next few days.

Giant Jellyfish & Jellyfish Swarm

It’s hard to convey the beauty of the jellyfish family at the gaming table.  But there’s nothing like a few Fort saves to convince players of the deadliness…

Throughout the course of their lives, a group of friends have received dire portents from the sea—gulls dropping out of the sky; a message in a bottle, clutched in a severed hand; a prophecy spat by a mermaid, who then hexed them.  Now, with the arrival of a jellyfish swarm at high summer, their destiny claims them in earnest.

The strait of Corwin is known for being infested with giant jellyfish.  But since the island prison at its mouth is surrounded by reefs and warded against teleportation and flight magicks, swimming is the only reliable approach.

A sultan believes he is cursed.  Adventurers hired by the grand vizier detect no magic and find only red herrings.  But when crimson jellyfish appear in his private pool—now miraculously full of salt water—is is clear someone is out to get him.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 170

I’m in Boston for the weekend, and still posting.  Go me!

When I went to Australia last year the jellyfish warning signs were so scary I took pictures of them.  (I also took pictures of myself in the full bodysuits we had to wear just to go swimming, and no, I will not be sharing.)

Giant & Poison Frogs

It’s not easy being green.  But being six feet long or laced with poison helps.

A party of sellswords is recruited to escort a young pixie princess to her bridegroom in a foreign forest.  Despite—or perhaps because of—her youth and undeveloped magical abilities, the pixie has no respect for non-flyers in general, and humans in particular.  She tries to escape or inconvenience the party at every opportunity, which brings her afoul of the speedy, sticky tongues of the region’s giant frogs.

Explorers wish to convince a tribe of awakened chimpanzees to serve as scouts as they hunt down a reclusive band of cultists.  Having had numerous run-ins with jungle troglodytes, the chimps will not treat with anyone who cannot climb up to their arboreal village.  Unfortunately, the tree trunks that lead to the village are the home of poison tree frogs.

Leaf leshys love to play war games.  Brambledown Abbey’s current champion is a pine-cone-armored general who will unleash a cavalry charge of giant poison frogs if he feels the Abbey is threatened.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 135

Giant Frilled & Monitor Lizards

Two more examples of monsters who are more Discovery Channel than Elder Edda, with healthy YouTube clip reels to boot.

The Boy-King Malcolm keeps a monitor lizard for a pet that he delights in startling courtiers with.  The reptile is a relic of his fostering with the lizardfolk, back when he was seventh in line for the throne and only seen as a bargaining chip by his now-insane father.

Paladins from desert orders often raise giant frilled lizards.  The paladins are largely immune to the lizards’ intimidating charges, and Small novitiates can even train them as quite effective mounts.

Giant frilled lizard packs are the top predators beneath the eucalyptus boughs of Western Isle.  Rather than charge directly, these lizards run right by opponents, using their whip-like tails to make trip attacks, and the circling back to attack the fallen.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 134

Giant Flytrap

I throw around words like “iconic” and “paradigmatic” too often on this blog.  But some icons just are (iconic that is).  There’s simply no plant monster more monstrous than the giant flytrap.  Because of that, the flytrap easily falls into three encounter buckets: jungle hazard (see: any Saturday morning cartoon ever), magical/science experiment gone wrong (see: Little Shop of Horrors), and druid’s pet (drool: DC’s Poison Ivy).  So the question is, where else might one find a giant man-eating plant?

The lily pads in the Velkimaar Jungle grow so large a small woman can walk across them with her water gourds.  But not all the lily pads are so supporting.  Some are actually the open, patient mouths of a waterborne variety of giant flytrap.  They feed on jaçanas, herons, capybaras, giant frogs, and unwary humanoids.

A hungry ghost monk (Advanced Player’s Guide 110) tends a giant flytrap.  He sees the plant’s predatory nature as a guide for his own meditations (not to mention a convenient means for disposing of his victims).  Besides, he sees little point in bonsai that can’t snip back.

An emerald stolen from a temple carries the Glutton God’s curse on it.  As long as the thieves are in the bounds of the forest, the gem calls every giant flytrap in the area toward it.  The flytraps may move slowly, but as they don’t need to sleep, the thieves may awaken surrounded by very different foliage than they recall from the night before.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 134

Giant Fly & Giant Maggot

At first glance, giant flies don’t seem like the most exciting bugs to throw at a party—wasps, mantises, and spiders all pack more obvious menace.  But where giant flies and giant maggots win out is the yuck factor.  Go watch Beetlejuice—giant flies are gross.  And their habit of taking PCs by surprise or hitting them while they’re down qualifies them as true monsters.

A cleric barely out of her acolyte robes is the only one left standing after an orc attack.  Now she must stabilize and heal her unconscious companions while fending off the giant fly that arrives to feast on their prone bodies.

After slaying an ogrekin, a party of young adventurers finds themselves labeled giant-killers.  They get lucky on their next assignment as well: the hill giant that would have hopelessly outclassed them lies already dead in its lair.  But if they get too close, a swarm of giant maggots erupts from the corpse.

Trapped in a burning building, with the City Watch covering all the exits, a party’s best hope for escape is the gushing sewers below.  The ride ends with a drop into the city cesspool, where the party’s ungentle arrival stirs up a cloud of giant flies.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 124

Thanks for sticking with me as we ford through the “Giant” section of the alphabet.  If you need more variety, try starting with A, B, or C.

And check out this weekend’s special edition of The New Indie Canon, as Her Fantastic Cats drops by for an interview and a guest DJ slot.

(Music starts about two 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, 4/6, at midnight.)