If you’ve watched The
Wire (and you better have) you know that judges guard their prerogatives
and the sanctity of their courtrooms very highly. They’re supposed to be impartial, but that doesn't mean they
leave their personalities behind in the cloakroom. And when you’re a CR 20 Huge
crow-dragon whose mandate to maintain the flow of souls is more important than
any one case, who’s going to tell you how to run things?
Yamarajes are also art lovers, students of entire planets,
and gourmands who just so happen to breathe beetles and drink lightning, if
you’re keeping score. I also love
the Bestiary 4’s description of
yamaraj parties: “bacchanals [where] solars and pit fiends may hobnob alongside
one another […] attempting to win future favors.” The banquet-as-RPG-adventure is one of my favorite module
setups—my time as a Vampire player and a Shackled City fan is clearly
showing—so the thought of spending a session among the living, the dead, and
the divine in a yamaraj’s manor (and what crazy forms that edifice might that
take!) is delicious.
A demigoddess has
been promoted to deity after her master’s death, but still has several
centuries to go before she learns the proper decorum required of
immortals. Her overenthusiastic
lobbying for her favorite souls in a yamaraj’s courtroom has pushed the grave
magistrate to the breaking point, and he bars her from his courtroom,
threatening to make the afterlife miserable for her supporters. Unfortunately, he does this just as her
herald, the one destined to save the world from a daemonic incursion, is slain
by kytons. Adventurers must
testify on the herald’s behalf in front of a hostile judge and jury if they
want to keep a single soul on their planet alive.
The God of Strife
has raised an ancient hero from the dead to serve his people one last time—by
slaying a dragon. But the dragon
is no dragon at all; it is a yamaraj whose manor rides the weights that keep
the hands of the Eternity Clock spinning smoothly. If the hero—a long-lost ancestor of a certain group of
famous adventurers, it just so happens—succeeds in killing the yamaraj, the God
of Strife may well have accomplished much more than the murder of just one
psychopomp.
Yamarajes are
supposed to be impartial, but friendship can corrupt in a way no bribe or
diabolic promise ever could. A charming
rakshasa immortal has carefully cultivated Prandeep, Sentinel of the Severed Sentence,
for millennia, to the point that the two share a lush greenhouse lair for much
of the year. Adventurers
attempting to take down the rakshasa rajadhiraja
must survive rakshasa and pyschopomp underlings, Advanced juggernauts, houseguests
that range from azatas to ghoul kings to sentient libraries, and an
embarrassed, enraged, and possibly compromised-beyond-saving Prandeep.
—Pathfinder Adventure
Path #48 90–91 & Pathfinder
Bestiary 4 222–223
One more note: Yamarajes owe their name to a Hindu demigod of death and punishment. My
knowledge of the Vedas is next to zero, but the rakshasa entry above is at
least a nod in the source material’s direction.
This was one of those totally free-form shows that happens
when you’ve done zero prep because the night before you accidentally wound up
drumming for a dance party for two hours.
Whoops. But it sounds
pretty good, so please download and enjoy!
(Usual disclaimer: If the feed skips, Save as an mp3. Link
good till Friday, 5/16, at midnight.)
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