Irnakurse

BEWARE. 

I LIVE. 

RUN, COWARD!

Whoa, sorry.  Don’t know what came over me there.  But hey, The Daily Bestiary is back!

As I mentioned on Monday, I apologize for the delay.  I never expected to take a fortnight off—I figured even with a broken computer I could manage a week’s worth of posts over two weeks—but it was decidedly not to be. 

In other news, drow really hate elves.

And on some worlds, like Pathfinder’s Golarion, the ultimate punishment a drow can inflict upon an elf (for the crime of simply existing) is to fleshwarp it into a strange half-tree, half-roper-like aberration known as a “perfect one”: the irnakurse.

The sad irony, of course, is that even in this mangled state the tree-like aberrations are still closer to the elves’ beloved nature than a drow ever could be.  But given that irnakurses are programmed to hate elves as much as their masters do, few victims of an irnakurse’s soul screams have the leisure to reflect upon this fact.

But let’s take drow out of the equation.  How else might an irnakurse pop up in your campaign?

There are no evil elves on Telerra.  Elven spirits are tied to the very world itself, and should an elf give her heart over to evil, she will become an irnakurse on the spot.  This doesn’t make Telerran elves beneficent by any means—in fact, most find the enforced morality agonizingly confining.  This explains their racial reclusiveness, xenophobia, and habit of alternating between cruelty and kindness seemingly at random.  It also explains why elven forests are dangerous to elves and intruders alike: Every glade might hide an irnakurse who gave up the struggle against the pull of her dark nature.

The Feadadil bloodline labors under an ancestral curse, members of the clan metamorphosing into irnakurses on their 300th birthday.  Only an abjuration fueled by blood magic can stave off the curse’s effects…which explains Feadadil necromancers’ rapacious need for new test subjects.  Less talented members of the family are artfully potted around the towers of their more gifted kin.

A genie noble has fallen from grace, misusing his wishcraft to warp and reweave the very Pattern of Fate.  Among his talents is the ability to reshape flesh as if it were soft wax, and he regards his gallery of irnakurses as the highlight of his art.

—Pathfinder #16 86–87 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 105

The top of this post is actually totally borrowed nostalgia.  I was pretty young when Sinistar came out (and even if I’d been older I was strongly discouraged from setting foot near an arcade) so I’ve only heard that voice on YouTube.