Aghasura

I said yesterday that even if you don't plan to use any other divs, you should find a home for the aghash in your campaign—they're simply too cool not to use. 

I’m repeating that for the aghasura.  Even if asuras don’t fit your cosmology, every campaign needs a giant scimitar-wielding rattlesnake!  Especially one that can lure non-evil creatures to itself by aura alone when it stands still, only to burst into action and slice at them like some poison-laced thresher.  (That attraction, by the way, is a nice nod to the aghasura’s Vedic namesake, a giant snake that lured Krishna’s companions into its mouth as if it were the space slug in The Empire Strikes Back.)

Given the aghasuras’ origins—a deity gave her pet snakes sentience and they thanked her by devouring her priests—it’s no surprise that these snake-fiends despoil active temples and guard ruined ones.  They're also likely to be patrons of faithless guards or those who find secular ethe (ethoses?) of power and law more persuasive than religion.

And 3.5 fans, don't feel left out—aghasuras might patronize sohei (from Oriental Adventures) who have lost their faith.  They work great as denizens of Baator or Gehenna.  And while they’d need an alignment change to serve the chaotic evil yuan-ti, they are natural heralds of Set or Shekinester the Acquirer, and might serve neutral evil sarrukh (see the always-mandatory Serpent Kingdoms).

No thief has ever returned from the Golden Halls of Nemra.  Burglars of evil intent set off a pit trap that drops them onto a sphere of annihilation.  (A fettered angel with magically clipped wings dispatches any agile survivors.)  Burglars with more noble hearts typically fall prey to the aura of the very lifelife snake statue at the end of the next hall…

The atheist Hand and Will school of philosophers managed to stir up a riot between skeptics and theists in the Agora—and in the resulting chaos, it was the clerics that the city guard hauled away for disturbing the piece.  In the short time their temples were unguarded, the Hand and Will agitators took up residence, carting holy artifacts away to be smashed and precious metals to be melted down.  Their brazenness horrified even their fellow atheist allies, but with the Hand and Will’s aghasuras guarding the Temple Mount, there is little anyone with faith or without can do to dislodge the rogue “school”—if they were every really students at all…

A lamia noble questioned her faith after nearly being slain by adventurers.  The next morning, an aghasura slithered into her bedchamber.  The lamia has now forsworn her demonic patron and is rallying desert giants and behirs to her side to loot a nearby necropolis.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 23

Once again I’m sneaking in a reference the fantastic short story "How Nemra Added a Line to the Book of Thieves," from Dragon Magazine #184.

Since I’m more Tumblr-focused, I don't give the Blogger site Minis by Finch nearly the attention I should.  In a nice bit of coincidence, Finch just tackled an adherer mini conversion that looks really cool.

And agelfeygelach asks:

Being a big fan of uniquely North American monsters—both indigenous and otherwise—I was really excited to see adlets included in the Bestiary, and especially to see them so powerful and terrifying. I wonder, though, if anything could be added to them to bring up the human ancestry they had in folklore….

My answer is, of course, is that you should add it/stat it…and tell us about it!