Lukwata

On the whole I don’t love antimagic/dispelling monsters, except where tradition dictates (like golems).  I think it’s an allergy I developed reading 1e and 2e Forgotten Realms products, where every other new monster was a magic-eating or magic-resistant mystical blob.  But Pathfinder has been more chill with such monsters, so I’m happy to see the lukwata—the eldritch encrustation actually gives this cryptid a little bit of an edge, so it’s not just yet another big aquatic beast, and their funky damage reduction ought to drive the typical mid-level party nuts (especially if they’ve been lording their gear over the local natives). 

Pathfinder Adventure Path #41: The Thousand Fangs Below has a full write-up of the lukwata, including how much local tribes revere them, but the abbreviated Bestiary 3 entry still offers plenty of ideas to work with…

Hexed by a forest spirit they offended, members of an adventuring party are having trouble removing the various curses under which they labor (slowly turning into plants, suffering wereboar lycanthropy, agathion hallucinations, etc.)  After ordinary and magical remedies fail, they are told they have one option left—they must court the dispelling bite of a lukwata…and survive.

The Uronbo people take life debts seriously.  One such life debt is the only thing keeping a cannibalistic druid in service to a party of northern explorers.  But they in turn must save his dire crocodile from the jaws of a lukwata, or the cannibal will declare the debt null, leaving them stranded in a land of serpentfolk, strix, and charau-ka.

The blue-woad-sporting Highlanders are suspicious of arcane magic—they force their sorcerers to live alone and loathe wizardry as an import of their Aelish oppressors.  Capable fighters in their own right, they turn to divine, usually temporary enchantments when needed (such as weapons blessed by their clerics or left under a trilithon for a night).  Aelish war wizards, meanwhile, are reluctant to push their supposed magical advantage.  The sheer age of the Highlands themselves seems to cause magic to behave strangely, and the land is bordered by a succession of rivers and lochs, each with its own territorial lukwata that seems to sense when a mage is passing nearby.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path 41 86–87 & Daily Bestiary 3 187

Hi!  Patch here.  Since more than 20(!) percent of you are new in the past six weeks, let me bring you up the speed: In addition to being a big Pathfinder/D&D nerd, I am also a big music nerd.  I have a radio show called The New Indie Canon on 88.1 WMUC-FM in College Park, MD.  I used to post links to my shows, but in mid-September things on our website went kaboom in a big way and the archive busted.

But the good news is, we now have a new web address!  (Take that, cybersquatting Norwegians!)  And stream ripping/archiving is back up!  So how did I celebrate my first to-be-archived show in more than a month?

…Um, by only prepping half my show, showing up late, and turning on the wrong mic, thus botching my intro.  Sigh.  (Oh, and right before I went on, iTunes decided it wanted to check my music library.  Which takes, like, 10 minutes of the rainbow swirl of sad, because I have 60 days of music on my laptop alone.  Thus I had to totally rethink my first set.)

So I’m lame.  But the music is not.  So click here for the best new and independent rock in the capital region (including that great Purity Ring/Danny Brown mashup), plus a bonus look back at the 20th anniversary of a little acoustic folk album known as…let’s see, what was it?…oh right, Rage Against the Machine.

(Music start about 8:15 into the file.  The feed can skip, so for best results let load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and enjoy in iTunes.)