Grothlut

It’s only Tuesday and we’re already on our second puke-attacking monster in a row.  It’s going to be a good week.

Another drow fleshwarp, the grothlut is the product of fleshcrafting a human.  The result is an abomination that makes a lemure look cuddly.  Sluglike creatures that can barely hold themselves together, much less keep their gorge down, grothluts make everyone around them sick as well with their piteous moans.

Of course, in your campaign it’s easy to divorce grothluts from their drow origins.  They can be alchemical experiments gone wrong, the result of tortures inflicted by a totalitarian state, servitors to a cult of illness, aasimars who fell from grace, or anything else both pitiful and revolting.

Adventures are hired to lead the annual grothlut drive from Bleakheart to Chel Ne’Thram.  (The drow find the work too distasteful to do themselves.)  Along the way, the adventurers must defend their charges from rock falls, giant insects, troglodyte ambushes, and especially dire corbies, who like to feast on exploded grothlut viscera.  The party might also discover the vile origins of the creatures.  If they do, the adventures may come to suspect (quite rightly) that the only reward they will receive for a successful drive is to become fleshwarps themselves.

After a long time away, adventurers come home to discover a totalitarian ruler has taken over their hometown.  When they speak too freely with an old blacksmith friend, his forge sits cold and empty the next day.  Eventually in a secret gaol they will discover a grothlut bearing the blacksmith’s tattoo on its fleshy arm.  He and the rest of the disappeared have been warped to serve the new lord’s strange and vile ends.

Mozart didn’t die of the pox.  He was murdered for discovering a secret society devoted to Baphomet lurking within the already-secret Freemasons.  Adventurer friends of Mozart (they met gambling, naturally) are hired by a patron to clear the names of both the Masons and the unjustly slandered Salieri.  Among the culprits who murdered young Wolfgang is Maximilian Faustus, a descendent of the famous alchemist and a composer in his own right—or rather, rites.  A century and a half before Schoenberg, Faustus is already working on his own twelve-tone scale—seven for the Seven Deadly Sins and five for the five points on a pentagram—sung by a choir of chained and goaded grothluts, whose moans supply the vile scale in piteous (semi)quavers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 103

Indie rock?  Bah!  This week we veered hard into folk and country territory, as we looked at the album Tomorrow You’re Going from Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky’s The Pine Hill Project, and did a more personal In memoriam as well.  Plus the Nields, Kasey Chambers, Nanci Griffith, and more.  Listen and download!

Also a heads-up: If all goes well—weather and Murphy’s Law permitting—I’m throwing an 18th birthday party for my radio show.  Tune in this Friday evening, 2/27, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM US Eastern, as we party like it’s 1997 and play college radio favorites from spring 1997 to spring 2000.  I promise it will be thoroughly undignified fun.