Monday, July 18, 2016

Emotion Ooze


There are times I have all the tools I need for this job.  Other times…not so much, especially when it comes to movie monsters.  Once you get below top-tier sci-fi and fantasy films, I’m pretty weak—for some reason I never got the steady diet of B movies and Saturday-afternoon UHF marathons that many of y’all did.  And horror movies I’m hopeless at (because I hate them).  I even missed the Slender Man reference in the Inner Sea Bestiary, despite the monster being called the thin man!  (I feel well within my rights to blame the art in that case, but still, jeez.)

This time, though—for once—I caught the reference.

Emotion oozes are the ooze from Ghostbusters II!!!

All together now:


A young etheric dragon has become trapped on the Material Plane.  The gout of ectoplasm that got trapped with him and the esoteric energies the growing dragon gives off have combined to form pools of emotion oozes reflecting the dragon’s psychological state—despair, fear, and anger in particular.  Unfortunately, the dragon is not immune to the oozes’ compulsions, and its behavior grows more and more erratic.

The countess of Rostovy was said to bathe in the blood of virgins every new moon.  In truth she bathed only in her own jealousy, stewing in the emotion until the stew became literal—a jealousy ooze that devoured her entirely.  The ooze still dwells in her sumptuous bathing chamber, but it moves through the palace pipes to foster mistrust and hunt new prey.

Officially, the Forgotten Crusade has ended.  The Rose Cardinal unmasked the Peacock Cardinal, branded and executed her as a heretic, erased her proclamations from the Book of Bulls, and announced that the crusade formerly known as the Third Crusade was not only anathema, but actually had never occurred at all.  This last fact in particular caught the besieged and besieging armies facing off at the Bleak Pedestal completely by surprise.  By all rights the demoralized crusaders should have returned home…but still they soldier on a decade later, as do the defenders (who are watered by a natural spring and can be resupplied by sea).  The reason for their persistence is occult in nature.  The glories and atrocities of the Second Crusade were so extreme that the caverns below the Bleak Pedestal are slick with the slime of emotion oozes attuned to zeal, dedication, and hatred.  These oozes’ unnatural compulsions have wiped all thought of parley or retreat from the minds of the combatants.  And so the Forgotten Crusade lumbers on until someone—perhaps a party of adventurers—disrupts the oozes’ manipulation.

Pathfinder Bestiary 5 108–109

My dad took me to see Ghostbusters II in the theater.  Ditto the 1989 Batman, which came out a week later.  (In my memory, we saw BM first, and then GB2, but I might be wrong about that.)  I was just blown away because we didn’t see a ton of movies in the theater and almost never on school nights, so the fact that I got to see two movies within a week or two of each other was mind-blowing.

(BTW, talk about fortuitous timing for this post!  Haven’t seen the new Ghostbusters yet, but I plan to!)

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