Well, drop your dirndls and unstring my lute—we’ve reached
the letter I! (What, you were
looking for the hyena? We covered
that all the way back in December.)
The iathavos is less a race of qlippoth (3.5 players, read
that as “obyrith”) than it is the
qlippoth—an expression of the breed so singular the universe only allows one to
exist at a time. (There are
stronger qlippoth lords out there, but achieving that status requires a
personality, will, and sense of self (not to mention mortal worship) that
necessarily pollutes them with enough mortal/demonic essence to make them more
demon than qlippoth.) Killing or
incapacitating the CR 20 iathavos is a campaign-ending feat that’s as likely to
see the PCs teamed up with demon lords and archdevils as it is angels and the
gods of good. This is a creature
that can destroy you with a 40d6 disintegrate,
engulf you and rebirth you as a smaller qlippoth, or dissolve you with the acid
of its own tentacular ichor. Oh,
and it holds grudges—against entire worlds. Approach with caution.
Enforcers of the
church are sent to stop the rise of a nascent demon lord before he reaches
apotheosis. But they are soon out
of their comfort zone, as reaching the demon in his home requires bargaining
with devils and crewing an airship captained by a treant (who is also the
ship’s rudder) with multiple personalities. When they arrive in the Abyss, they find that the demon is
already under attack by the iathavos—and while their quarry proposes a truce,
the iathavos is in no hurry to see them go…
A party of
plane-hopping adventurers stumbles upon a night-shrouded world caught in a
battle between the planet’s vampire liege lords and the iathavos and its armies
of nyogoth spawn. They escape, but
not without rousing the interest and ire (essentially the same emotion) of the
iathavos, who endeavors to follow them to their home world and wreak destruction.
An iathavos of
immense power has just been slain—at the cost of two solars, an empyreal
lord, a totem spirit known as Cousin Mosquito, and the demon lord of diseases
of the blood. Now a new iathavos
is about to be born. The forces of
good hope to kill the young, (comparatively) weak qlippoth, entrapping it so
that it is removed from the multiversal playing field without the Abyss
spawning a new incarnation.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 2
222–223
Admittedly, the iathavos illustration in the Bestiary 2 doesn’t quite capture the
creature’s essence. But the stat
block does.
The Bestiary 2 entry might not quite capture the iathavos' essence, but the illustration of it in Shattered Star #04 -- the section "Before Sin" -- certainly does it justice.
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