Lashunta

Lashunta—specifically lashunta women—are the classic planetary princesses from pulp novels: almost human (save for their distinctive antennae), mentally gifted, and as beautiful as their men are brutish.  When you want to combine the beauty of elves with the ruggedness of dwarves…when you want a civilization that rides dinosaurs one minute and scribes mystical scrolls and uses mind magic the next…and when you want a PC to lose his or her heart to a doomed love with a woman from another planet…you turn to the lashunta,

The elven kingdom of Venderel is in an uproar after the crown princess gives birth to a daughter with antennae.  The uproar becomes a tumult when the Quartz Palace’s elfgate opens and a lashunta war party rides through on their drakes as if straight from one of the elves’ old epics, banners flying and demanding to collect the heir to the Mantis Throne.

Adventurers are locked in a prison cell with a bestial man whose accent and aspect are strange.  But when the prisoner telepathically organizes a jailbreak and mage hands the keys into the adventurers’ palms, they’ll have to decide quickly whether to trust him…especially when he directs them not out of the prison complex, but deeper inside it…

When their spidership crashes, adventurers must find their way across a lush planet.  A ratfolk caravan offers assistance, but charges the adventurers with nursing another refugee back to health.  This refugee lashunta is a magistrate’s daughter.  She recently discovered that the Jadeheart Magisterium has fallen to necromancers, and the lashunta bone priests hunt her even now on their skeletal steeds.

—Inner Sea Bestiary 25

Another James Sutter creation, lashunta were teased during the Second Darkness Adventure Path and their homeworld of Castrovel is explored in Distant Worlds.

If you’re following the news from Baltimore, today was quiet; fingers crossed for tonight.  Continue to refuse to believe anything you hear or read or (especially) watch on TV unless it’s coming from someone on the ground who knows the city.  I continue to recommend Baltimore’s own City Paper.