Back when we covered the lightning elemental, I opined that
casters who favored summoning mud elementals are likely eccentric or
self-taught, with druids and sorcerers being predominant. I still stand by that. I also think that mud elementals are
more likely to thrive and prosper on the Material Plane than most of their
quasi-cousins. Ice elementals hate
the hot mortal world, and lightning elementals and magma elementals tend to
spontaneously arise in only the most remote places of natural violence. But Earth and Water meet all over the
planet—and given the right planar conditions, that means there are countless
places a mud elemental might manifest.
The “Mud Sorceress”
Shar is known for specializing in earth and water magic. Her favored steed is a mud elemental
toad. Two mud elementals shaped
like chameleons silently watch a beach that is said to hide a portal to the
Plane of Water. And on the Plane
of Earth, the shaitan Houssam despises the soft, burbling things, but keeps a
few in his household to serve as both servants and carefully calculated insults
to unwanted guests.
Once a thriving city
of scholars, Gilderhome is now little more than a necropolis located deep
underground. Its famous library is
now the home of the ravener Harufex, a tarnished bronze dragon who embraced
undeath in pursuit of his fell studies.
The easiest way to get there is through a sinkhole from the badlands
above. The sinkhole is guarded by
mud elementals (perhaps called by the energies released in the sinking of the city
or the raveners’ ties to water in life) who brook no intrusion on their domain.
The Jealous Mire is a
planar backwater that is vaguely sentient—the whole marshy layer is somehow
alive and aware. Those who visit
(typically those druids, healers, and necromancers who want to study the region’s
magically accelerated rate of growth and decay) find the Mire as safe as any
mortal swamp—quicksand is a real problem, for instance, as are drakes, but game
and helpful herbs are plentiful.
The trouble is when visitors try to leave. The smotheringly maternal Mire considers all creatures its
children, and will send progressively larger mud elementals to persuade, detain,
or entrap anyone make obvious preparations to depart.
—Pathfinder Bestiary
120–121
First of all, hope you all had a long weekend (I did!) and
hope it was happy. Here in
Baltimore, it was particularly nice weekend. For those of you who don’t follow certain American forms of sport, let me put it in Golarion terminology for you: some New Andoran
gunslingers got their blunderbusses handed to them by some Riddleport dire corbies.
Remember the Where’s
Waldo book with the dryads(?) and their mud elemental servants? Me, too. Kinda. Barely.
If you’re looking for the mu spore, don’t panic—we’ll get to
it Thursday. The only way I can
possibly keep my sanity doing this is by ignoring spaces and punctuation, so
this is one of the rare times that I deviate from the Table of Contents order
in the Bestiaries.
You know how I say my show is “The best new and independent
rock, pop, and folk in the capital region”? This week the emphasis was on the “new”: two straight hours
of new music, including new Tegan and Sara, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down,
PAPA, and Erin McKeown. Download it!
(Music starts 5:30 into the file—not because I was late this
week, but because the computer is cranky.
If the feed skips, let load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and
enjoy in iTunes. Link good till
Friday, 1/25, at midnight.)
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