Thursday, November 1, 2012

Lhaksharut


If you’ve ever wondered why reliable gates are always in the most ridiculously inaccessible places (besides giving PCs something to do), or why hordes of the Abyss haven’t just swept across the land, the orrery-bodied lhaksharuts are the reason.  These CR 20 inevitables are physical (note those six arms, perfect prediction, cunning reflexes, and wounding weapons) and magical (dictum and imprisonment for the win) powerhouses.

It’s worth noting that lhaksharuts top even maruts in terms of power.  So in a fantasy universe, preserving the sanctity of the planes is apparently even more important than maintaining the balance of life and death itself…

An axiomite evangelist wishes to bring the war against chaos directly to the proteans.  To do this, he will need to find a way to distract his own people’s lhaksharuts, perhaps even go so far as to sabotage the inevitable factories.  Mortal pawns from the Prime will do nicely for either task.

Through complicated legal channels—and in the Outer Planes, that’s saying something—a pit fiend has received a dispensation from the inevitables to allow a gate to open during a solar eclipse—long enough for his hellish armies to march.  Should adventurers try to stop the incursion, they must defeat not only the immolation devil general in charge of the rearguard, but also the lhaksharut monitoring the gate’s function.  While it loathes the arrangement, a lawful contract is a binding one…or is it?

Lhaksharuts maintain a wide network of informants.  A party that has spent its career combating incursions from the Elemental Planes discovers its benefactor was an inevitable all along.  The adventurers are so marked by their experiences—one bearing fiery wings, another with water magic tattoos, a third with a collection of ioun stones and bottled lightning elemental—that their employer now considers them tainted.  When the lhaksharut arrives to seal away a demiplane they found that is all that keeps an impoverished desert nation alive, it coldly thanks them for their service and tries to trap them on the opposite side of the shutting gate.

Pathfinder Bestiary 2 164–165

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