Keketar

Edit: There were so many typos in this entry I had no choice but to come in and edit them.  But that means this weird arrow now appears in the post.  There is no getting rid of it, without ruining the font size of the entire rest of the post.  To fix that, I would have to reënter all the text, as well as redo all the hyperlinks, etc.  Not to mention the weird spacing issues in yesterday's post.  Why?  Because Blogger sucks.  This is why I moved to Tumblr. I apologize to you all—you deserve a clean, easy-to-read blog.  Blogger won't ----ing let me deliver you that.  Every time you see the arrow above, that's me giving in to its stupidity.

When I worked on the imenetsh entry a few weeks ago, I remember feeling vaguely dissatisfied, like I remembered reading more about the proteans that I couldn’t find in The Great Beyond.  Turns out I was right: I had completely overlooked the imenteshes’ introduction in Pathfinder Adventure Path #22: The End of Eternity, as well as the massive “Keepers of Chaos” article by Todd Stewart in the same issue.  (Sorry, Todd!)

So if you want a proper Golarion take on the keketar proteans, go to any of the above.  (I also love the spread/vignette on pp. 138–139 of the GameMastery Guide for a sense of how an attacking protean might speak. And you should note that the stats for keketars are much meatier in The Great Beyond—any weapon they bond with becomes dancing!)  In particular “Keepers of Chaos” is pretty much mandatory if you want to explore the keketars’ strange cabals known as choruses.

If you can’t get your hands on the above, the next thing you should do is go to your local alternative magazine shop and pick up some graffiti magazines.  If you’ve never done this, you must—at least for me, it’s an entry into a world with an entirely different ethos and set of norms.  (I may be an indie rocker, but I’m also an Eagle Scout, so as artsy as I pretend to be, sentences like the previous one point me out as a square pronto.)  It’s a culture where the First Amendment is sacrosanct, notions of property are outdated at best and offensive at worst (especially if claimed by the government or faceless corporations), and—most importantly—the whole world is a canvas.

Read about those dudes, then imagine them armed not with spray cans, but with reality-bending magic and claws.  That’s your keketar chorus right there.

Also, there’s no reason you have to have keketars be emissaries of the Maelstrom/Limbo/Entropy/Chaos in your game.  Given their shapes and powers, in your campaign they might be fallen couatls, elevated serpent folk, or a unique branch of dragons.  With mysterious glyphs floating about their heads and the ability to remake reality, they will make your players take notice.

Climbing the Infinite Staircase between the planes, a party of adventurers discovers a keketar protean turning it into a glacier.  He appears to notice (and certainly speaks to) only the males in the group less than five feet tall.  Those are also the first ones he attacks.

The Chorus of a Thousand Insignificant Doors is dedicated to erasing the too-rigid boundaries between the planes.  These keketar proteans specialize in turning basilica doors, triumphal arches, and other portals into rifts to other demiplanes.  Most recently, they inverted a transmuter’s bottle laboratory into a lighthouse, filled the tulip- and windmill-lined streets of Elveers with necrotic sand from the Scarab’s Eye, and turned the Temple of the Marble Gavel into the intestinal tract of Phage, the Living Hungry Flesh.

On the world of Typhon, the deities and their servants all take reptilian forms.  Primal dragons speak for the elements, for instance, most of the gods count a race of true dragon or linnorms as their worshippers, and couatls are the Bringers of Law.  Proteans—the Unmakers, the servants of Entropy—are feared by all, and the arrival of a chorus of keketar proteans is regarded the way a visit from a lich archmage or a pit fiend might be seen on other worlds.

—The Great Beyond 60–61 & Pathfinder Bestiary 2 215

Apologies for the late entries all this week.  Work crazy.  I’ll try to be more on top next week.  It seems like the sweet spot for most of you is when I drop entries early in the afternoon Baltimore time, so I’ll try to get back to that.  And keep those random rolls coming!