I love monsters that suggest an entirely new way for a
campaign to look and feel. And an
animate walking umbrella monster does just that.
I should probably go back and explain.
One of the things I’m adamant about—and have occasionally
spent space here trying to prove—is that Pathfinder can support adventures that
don't feel like the default Pathfinder (or D&D or dungeon crawls or Tolkien
or what we’ll call “trilogy fantasy” in general). I believe Pathfinder can support the
open-ended, anything-might-happen nature of European fairy tales and the
symbol-rich spirit worlds of Anansi and Raven.
I believe it can handle low-magic settings inspired by Westeros, the
pulp space of Barsoom, and the fantasy space of “Spelljammer: Shadow of the
Spider Moon.” I especially believe it
can handle private school fantasies inspired by Hogwarts and Glantri, quotidian
magical workplaces recalling Howl’s
Moving Castle and Spirited Away,
and cruel magisteria and wild frontiers that echo His Dark Materials.
Anyway, while I’ve skimmed Bestiary 5, I haven’t read it cover to cover yet. So I was delighted to turn to the
“Tsukumogami” entry and discover this wonderful kami template. Quick, go look at the illustration of the
kasa-obake, an animate umbrella with a single eye, a single foot, and slavering
jaws. The koto-furunishi is an
animate zither(!). (I repeat: !
Tell me the last time you considered having a zither in your game, let
alone one with immunity to polymorph.)
And the boroboroton is an animate sleeping mat or futon (college me
really appreciates this one). Aren't we
done with vampires and invisible stalkers?
Next time your PCs find the corpse of someone who died in his sleep,
can’t it please be from a murderous sleeping roll, as if Carpet from Disney’s Aladdin went horribly, horribly wrong?
All these creatures are objects that reached their 100th
birthday and gained a spirit, becoming (or uniting with, per Pathfinder
cosmology) a kami and becoming animate in the process. Not only is this a neat move statistically—a
template on top of a template on top of an object—but, to go back to my
original point, it speaks to a fundamentally
different kind of Pathfinder game.
I was not concerned about whether my bureau had a spirit
when my fighter helped Aleena face Bargle back in D&D’s Mentzer days. I did not consider the age of my chamber pot
the first night my future eldritch knight booked a room in Nirmathas. But thanks to these monsters…now I will.
Somewhere in my future there is now a campaign where my PCs’
first adventure is finding a home for a newly awakened koto-furunishi, where
along the way we meet a strange kasa-obake, where a spiritualist (from Occult Adventures) introduces us to the
world of channeling the phantoms of the dead, and by the end of our journey one
of the PCs has been admitted to a priory to be schooled in the holy art of transmutation. That’s not a Pathfinder campaign I’ve ever
been a part of or even dreamed of until tonight. But with a copy of B5 and OA, my Harry Potter
books, and my Miyazaki and Cadfael DVDs,
I can picture it now.
Adventures are tasked
with finding a hidden maestro—actually a koto-furunishi that leads a band of
tsukumogami. Their quest is complicated
by the fact that the magical instruments refuse to play for strangers, a witch
craves the zither for herself, and superstitious goblins (sometimes led by
goblin oni; treat as fiendish goblins) attempt to smash any musical instruments
they find to drive the kami away.
Not only has a
kasa-obake turned to evil, its diet—wizard’s familiars, faerie dragons, and
children with sticky fingers—is even worse.
Well on its way to becoming an oni, the umbrella spirit must be
stopped…though adventurers who pick the right rainy night to request its
assistance might be able to return the 100-year-old spirit to the light.
A boroboroton
rejoiced when the mausoleum that imprisoned it was finally opened…only to
find itself tossed aside by the archaeologists who opened the tomb in favor of
more important relics. A sacred sha has
found the inconsolable mattress spirit and spent several nights whispering
exhortations of smothering murder into the kami’s straw-filled head.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 5
252–253
My belief in the elasticity of d20 in general and Pathfinder
in particular is only exacerbated when I go to my favorite game store and see
all the indie and old-school Renaissance titles out there, each with their own
new rules system to learn. I totally get the appeal of streamlined
systems, and I appreciate that good mechanics can reinforce flavor in certain
genres, especially romance or humor.
That said, I can't tell you the number of time I’ve picked up a book and
waded through pages and pages of rules I’ve seen before (“Your Ride skill determines
how well you ride a horse”—well, duh)
to get to the new ideas and the world, when some bolted-on mechanics and a new
core class or two would have done just as well. It’s one of the reasons I’m liking (though
I’ve only just cracked it) A Red &
Pleasant Land. While most of my
exposures to Legends of the Flame Princess products have turned me off, I
appreciate that AR&PL’s author
didn’t write Alice: The RPG; instead he just picked the LotFP system to work
with and moved on to the good stuff fast.
An alternate creation myth for boroborotons locates them in
the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta. They
are all named Zem.
LAMENTATIONS. LAMENTATIONS of the Flame Princess. I was typing this too late last night and brain-farted.
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