Named for a Celtic stag figure we don’t know much about, Cernunnos
is an empyreal lord of nature, wildness, and the hunt. He’s the most powerful (CR 30) empyreal
lord we have stats for…yet the most likely to mix it up with mortal PCs. (Lucky them!) As an azata lord, he is on the side of righteousness, but
you know how those chaotic good near-deities of the hunt are… Roil his temper, pick the wrong side in
a battle (especially against elves or fey), agree to the wrong wager, carry a
demon-tainted weapon, bargain with an archdevil, despoil the wrong wilderness
(even accidentally or for a good cause), and you might be fair game in
Cernunnos’s book. (His book, of
course, being a hunting and fishing license.)
Admittedly, the PCs who are able to even think about
tackling a CR 30 empyreal lord are going to be few and far between. That said, once PCs get to that level
of power, they’ve probably made a string of enemies and are so powerful in
mythic might that they risk treading on the toes and portfolios of any number
of Powers. (I probably drop references
to the Dresden Files too often in these pages, but see the more recent entries
in that series for how much trouble one mortal with serious magical weight can
get into.) It may seem unlikely
that PCs, especially good PCs, would ever tangle with the Stag Lord…but when
your peer group is that small in a multiverse so fractious, perhaps it’s
inevitable…?
And of course, that’s all assuming you keep Cernunnos as an
azata. In the Golarion setting,
Cernunnos was originally a lord of the fey. A few stat/spell swaps, and Cernunnos can serve as the
nastiest sidhe this side of Tír na nÓg…
An arcane archer
reaches the pinnacle of her abilities.
Soon after, a strange figure recruits her and her companions to hunt in
his game preserve, promising trophies found nowhere else in existence. He also asks them to kill any poachers
they encounter, and he proposes several side wagers “to make things more
interesting”—money and magic items at first, then memories, years of life, and
more esoteric commodities.
Meanwhile, the game preserve slowly reveals itself to be a nightmare
realm. In the end, it is revealed
that a monstrosity-creating elohim and its demodand servants are behind the
entire affair, trying to trick the arcane archer into wounding “the poacher”: Cernunnos,
no less, who opposes the mythic outsider.
Cernunnos is wounded
in a fight with a demon lord. The
demon prince even manages to rip the high azata’s shadow and portfolio of
hunting from him. He infuses the
shadow with enough unholy energy for it to live on as a dark mirror image of
the empyreal lord. Once Cernunnos
heals he will have no trouble reclaiming what he has lost—the demon lord, wary
of his rivals, did not sacrifice enough of his own might to power a more
permanent animation. But that
could take centuries in mortal terms, and with more demons gathering on the
border of Elysium, the chaotic evil Cernunnos clone needs to be stopped now.
Cernunnos occasionally
takes dragon mounts, particularly those that breathe lightning (as he is
immune to and can redirect electrical energy). When adventurers slay an exceedingly wicked
cloud dragon, his sire, a former mount of Cernunnos, appeals to him for
revenge. Honoring the old debt,
the empyreal lord will not slay the party outright, but he may demand
satisfaction in other ways, including duels, archery and wrestling contests, a
period of service, tests of druidcraft, and so forth.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
88–89
You'll want to alter his stats anyway, he's very weak for a CR30 being as written (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2qo79?Empyreal-lord-complaints-and-concerns#23).
ReplyDeleteYou may remember me as the person who's taken it upon emself to fix that back when you posted about Vildeis. It's an ongoing process so I solicited the Paizo boards for suggestions on improving my write-ups (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2rii6?Suggestions-for-empyreal-lord-spelllike).
--AlgaeNymph