Gourd Leshy

Gourd leshys aren’t exactly tough combatants.  But for atmospherics and role-playing opportunities (not to mention adorability—I mean seriously, they have pumpkin heads!), they can’t be beat.  Their superstitions bring them to life as NPCs; their ability to hide MacGuffins in their heads can kick-start a campaign.

A girl in an isolated village believes magic is a thing of fairy tales and rumors.  When a gourd leshy surprises her on a moonlit night and produces a stone that unlocks her latent sorcerous powers, her world changes forever.

An angry-mouthed, squash-faced gourd leshy torments the nephew of its master with its entangling seeds.  The rude boy regularly humiliated the creature when his uncle was alive, and now the leshy is taking revenge.

An abandoned cottage has become the court of a patch of gourd leshys, who engage in small ritual actions with the devotion of priests—hoeing the garden in a widdershins direction, collecting blue jay feathers, pushing shells around on a chessboard, and so on.  They respond with silent approval to big folk who join them in their efforts, which may or may not unlock the site’s secrets.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 178

If I ever GMed a really small role-playing group—say, one or two players—I would almost certainly insert a gourd leshy to get the campaign moving.

Backlog alert: Barghest/greater barghest and basidirond entries are finally up.

So on Facebook I do a thing called F--- Fridays, where I post a song I can’t spin on my show thanks to FCC concerns.  Here’s this week’s track to get you pumped for the long weekend: the Main Attrakionz remix of Dominant Legs’ “Make Time For The Boy.”