Sceaduinar

First off, The Daily Bestiary is going on vacation!  I don’t like to do this to you all (especially with three-plus months of S monsters ahead of us), but I need a break from work and some time in the sun.  So I’m seeing Wilco and Yo La Tengo this weekend, then heading to Cape Cod to relax, swim, sip cocktails, and read a ton of Pathfinder books!

But first—the sceaduinars!  Created by Todd Stewart (I have proof) for The Great Beyond, these are the gargoyle-like crystalline creatures that live on the Negative Plane of Energy, seething for hatred at the jyoti, undead, and especially…well, quite simply every living thing.  More inimical to life than anything except perhaps daemonkind, they exist to snuff out the spark of life all across the universe.

Of course, enemies like this can create some odd bedfellows.  Since sceaduinars hate undead as much as the living, these same undead miught be eager to ally with adventurers they might otherwise disdain.  Even devils and demons, while having nothing to directly fear from sceaduinars, may resent having their soul stocks snuffed out. 

Of course, you might try to bamboozle your players instead.  If they’ve met the awful jyoti (and been on the pointy ends of their spears), they might be suckered into believing that the sceaduinars are just misunderstood…for a short while at least.

Having been spurned by the haughty and reclusive jyoti, a scholar makes contact with a rogue sceaduinar.  Intrigued, the outsider tamps down its native hatred of the living long enough to learn of the scholar’s bruised feelings.  It begins to manipulate the scholar into opening a voidcyst into the Negative Energy Plane, promising friendship, knowledge, and anything else the scholar wants to hear.

Taking a darkskimmer into the Negative Energy Plane, a corsair collects what he believes to be geodes to bring back to the marketplace of Netherhag Island.  But the geodes are sceaduinar eggs, and when they hatch his crew (including a certain adventuring party) must contain the fully formed death squad that hatches.

An adventuring party’s lich enemy teleports into their midst.  Before they can react, the badly injured skeletal mage cries, “There’s no time for that you fools; this is bigger than us; we—“ and then a death squad of sceaduinars arrive and rip off the lich’s skull right before their eyes.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 239

No discussion of sceaduinars is complete without a look at the jyoti.  And it’s one of TDB’s better entries (if I do say so myself).  If you haven’t yet, go read!

And see you in two weeks!