Salamanders are…
YOU GUYS, WAIT!
We totally forgot
something! Yesterday was The Daily Bestiary’s SECOND BIRTHDAY! And I missed it! …I forgot
to acknowledge the birth of my child.
Worst. Father. EVER.
But seriously, two years ago yesterday I sat down on my
loveseat and began this crazy endeavor.
Definitely feel free to check to check those older posts out—they were
shorter, sweeter (originally all I posted was adventure seeds, with no intros),
and I buried my personal thoughts in the comments. Obviously I’ve loosened up since then.
Want to help me celebrate? You know what to do: Get your friends to read the DB. Reblog or otherwise share (especially the cleaner, less
typo-plagued Tumblr addy). Post it
to message boards you like. And
there’s always listening to the radio show (link good from noon Saturdays
through midnight Fridays) or following me on Twitter—but if that’s more Patch
than you can handle, I do not blame you.
Pardon me as I shove a frosting-covered candle into my CD drive.
Huzzah!
Okay, salamanders.
Here’s how you know salamanders are bad news: They often hang out in the
Abyss by choice. If that’s not indicative of their
natures, I don’t know what is.
The other concept to keep in mind with salamanders is inertia. They are lazy, surly, prone to violence,
and like dominating those weaker than themselves (…basically like teenagers,
really.) (Or picture the worst
parts of orc and lizardfolk society mixed together…and then set on fire.) If they start fighting, they will keep
fighting; if they can be persuaded not to fight, their more sluggish instincts
will take over. Unfortunately, the
cold makes them irritable, and almost everywhere is colder then the Plane of
Fire.
An aasimar is found
murdered—or is it martyred?—with iron spears piercing his body and his
clothes charred as if by a fire.
Is he the victim of random violence, or did his charitable work arouse
the ire of dark forces?
Traveling to the
Abyss, adventurers discover few demons but many salamanders—they have been
transported to a salamander ghetto.
Their goal is to get to the next portal
with fewer than three street fights.
If they manage this (ideally with quick, clearly decisive victories) the
salamanders let them leave; if not, the various street gangs unite to enslave
and sell the heroes.
Adventurers discover
the mansion they have been staying
in exists on the Material Plan and the Plane of Fire simultaneously—and
their host is an efreeti. Taking
advantage of the debt they owe him, he asks them to retrieve some valuable escaped
salamander slaves. Turning the
offer down will offend not only their host but also high society in both cities—the
rites of hospitality must be observed.
The efreeti also makes a persuasive case that salamanders kept contained
is the lesser evil than salamanders left at large.
—Pathfinder Bestiary
240
Does anyone know why salamanders became humanoidish? All the descriptions I’ve read of them
in folklore were of “ordinary” magical salamanders.
Yes, I still need to do a big mailbag post (looking at you,
A.A.!). But real quick I have to
thank the always-perceptive minneyar42 for a thought-provoking reblog. (Go look!) And Pathfinder author Todd Stewart popped by to fill us in a
bit:
So as it turns out, I
wrote that part of Heart of the Jungle,
and originally they started out as sasasbonsam (from West African myth). During
the book's editing/development the name got changed to sabosan.
Ah…the name change explains why I couldn’t find anything
about them while Googling. *Shakes
fist* You win this round, Paizo.
While we’re at it, Todd, The
Great Beyond doesn’t really cover salamanders. Thoughts? I
presume they want to stay as far away from the stifling strictures of efreet
and mephit society as they can…
They'd have their own kingdoms, and they'd probably be wary in dealing with some of their neighbors to avoid being largely a slave race like the azers. I'd probably split them into a number of nations, each with a slightly different viewpoint on relations with those from outside of Elemental Fire (some as clients of the shaitan genies for instance), others as slavers no better than the efreeti, while still others as isolationist racial and elemental purists.
ReplyDeleteHonestly I ran out of space. There was a ton of stuff (like 10k words +) that didn't make it into that book because of space, some of which ended up being used in later books where appropriate. But yeah, the salamanders (and the azer to a lesser extent) would be fun to expand upon at some point (personally above all others I adore the fire mephits).