All drakes are degenerate.
(The Bestiary series is a bit
judge-y on the subject of dragon evolution.)
But spire drakes…they’re just wrong.
Because anything whose breath and bite
are so corrupted they can breed wights simply shouldn’t exist as a natural
creature. Yet the spire drake does.
My best guess is that some stunted offshoot of the umbral
dragon line produced both shadow drakes and spire drakes, with shadow drakes
getting a version of their progenitors’ shadow powers and spire drakes getting
the umbral dragons’ taint of undeath. Or
you can skip the evolutionary root cause and blame the spire drakes’
environment. Lands tainted by long
exposure to undeath, storms of wild magic, or blood magic and other dark rites could
certainly give rise to spire drakes.
(Russ Taylor’s “Ecology of the Drake,” from Pathfinder Adventure Path #92: The Hill Giant’s Pledge, blames
mutations in other drake bloodlines caused by the Golarion setting’s deadly Mana Wastes.)
The point is, spire drakes straddle the line between the
natural world and worlds far, far worse.
If PCs don’t want to find out what those worlds are like, they would do
well to stay sharp and avoid the spire drake’s coup de grace.
Sometimes the hardest
part of the dungeon is the journey home.
When adventurers reach sunlight for the first time after plundering the
Spiral Crypt of Dorn, they are met by a rampage of spire drakes demanding
tribute—namely, all the adventurers’ magic items. If the adventurers refuse, the spire drakes attack
immediately. If driven off, they will nonetheless
attempt to harry the adventurers all the way back to civilization in a series
of guerrilla attacks, hoping to make off with what magic and hunks of meat they
can. Should the adventurers make it to
the safety of the city walls, the drakes slink away in frustration…but not
before warning an osyluth ally, in hopes that his infernal wiles may succeed
where theirs did not.
In the Scar, divine
magic withers and arcane magic blooms into wild energies. Spire drakes, horribly warped goblinoids
(including the mudlike murds), and greedy oozes hunt in the shadows of the
canyon that gives the Scar its name. Two
of the most terrifying hunters in these lands are the spellscarred fext (a
generic version of Inner Sea Bestiary’s
Spellscar fext) Simon Kraal and his spire drake steed Lash. Though Lash cannot bear Simon aloft, she can
rampage along the blasted landscape with the undead knight astride her back,
and together they hunt down any magic-employing prey they can find.
There are no undead
on Vashon. No undead that is, until
they begin being born in the wake of spire drake attacks. Where the drakes come from is still a
mystery, but the spawning wights they leave in their wake inspire horror in
every Vashon man, woman, and child.
Worse still, while these wights rarely last for long, other undead
species seemingly unrelated to spire drakes have begun manifesting too, as if
the door to the Realm of the Dead has suddenly been propped open. If there is one blessing in all these dark
tidings, it’s that clerics and other divine casters are discovering new powers
they can use against these monsters—spells and channel abilities that have lain
dormant for centuries. But clearly these
drakes must be exterminated and the way to Death shut again if Vashon is to
endure.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
81
No comments:
Post a Comment