Guardian Scroll

The guardian scroll is a very Harry Potter-movie kind of monster.  I mean that very much as a compliment, both to it and the HP franchise.  Before Sorcerer’s Stone, if you sprang a guardian scroll on the PCs your players would be like, “You’re attacking us. With paper. Yikes.”  Post-SS (and especially post-Chamber of Secrets), it’s a lot easier to sell the image of a strangling, slicing, animate paper monster.

It’s also the kind of monster that has the potential to make PCs’ lives very difficult, irrespective of its CR.  Nine times out of 10*, if PCs encounter a guardian scroll anywhere that’s not a moldering dungeon or pyramid, it’s because they are Doing Something They Shouldn’t Be—consulting the Forbidden Section of the library, sneaking into the College of Wizards, stealing from the daimyo’s painted scroll collection, robbing the Pirate King, etc.  Perhaps the guardian scroll is a threat, perhaps not.  But fighting off a guardian scroll is almost certainly going to be a noisy affair—one that will cause other interested parties to come running (preferably aimed with pikes and spells).

*The 10th time is when the PCs’ enemies send them a guardian scroll in an assassination attempt.  Speaking of which, in a world where sepia snake sigils and explosive runes exist, it’s a wonder anyone even reads their mail.

The Shogun of the Brilliant Sunrise Prefecture is an avid collector of painted scrolls.  He is also an avid employer of guardian scrolls, many of which fold themselves into gorgeous paper cobras, cranes, and chrysanthemums before attacking.

The priests of the Bookbinder are known for wearing linen scrolls as stoles that drape over their chasubles.  Typically the scrolls are scribed with a sacred verse or a poem, and careful observers can detect praise, insults, or veiled warnings in a cleric’s choice of scroll.  The high priests’ stoles are often guardian scrolls, which explains why priests of the Bookbinder have longer lifespans than many of their ecclesiastical peers.

Adventurers are sent a guardian scroll by an enemy.  But as the scroll tube is not addressed to them specifically, they have the chance to pawn it off on someone else—assuming they suss out the nature of the construct within before it attacks.  Forcing the enemy who sent the scroll to either open the tube himself or be publicly seen refusing to do so could win them prestige in the cutthroat world of court.  That in turn could mean entry into the king’s intelligence service and/or lucrative charters to explore otherwise off-limits dungeons.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #79 82–83 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 138

The guardian scroll (including a more magical variant with spell-like abilities) originally comes from the Mummy’s Mask Adventure Path, which I rather dug.  For one thing, it was an AP I got to enjoy as it unfolded.  (I fell way behind my Paizo reading during Reign of Winter and Wrath of the Righteous and had to scramble to catch up, which is never as fun.  I’ve had the same problem recently, so I committed myself to keep on track during Strange Aeons no matter where I was in Giantslayer/Hell’s Rebels/Hell’s Vengeance.)  For another—and forgive me if I’ve mentioned this before, because I feel like I’m repeating myself—there’s a part of me that always resists pyramid/mummy setups because they’re so stereotypical, so it was nice to have an AP that executed those things so well I couldn’t help but be won over.  (The undead invasion that kicked off the second MM entry went a long way toward achieving that.)  Finally, after two or three APs that involved Really Big Stakes—the fates of Magnimar, Irresin, and the Worldwound/all of Avistan, respectively—it was nice to have an AP that kept it simple: stop a badass mummy. Sometimes you need a palate cleanser.

Gristly Demodand

Gristly demodands are stout, bat-winged brutes who wield bloody mauls.  Appropriately enough, they serve their fallen titan masters as assassins, executioners, and torturers.  Seemingly made of skin stretched over half-chewed muscle and tissue, gristly demodands’ hides literally split, ooze, and heal as they move about.  Their victims’ skins are usually not so resilient.

The marilith Me’salis was tired of quarreling with the demodands that lurked on the border of her domain.  So the brilliant tactician simply hired the gristly demodand and his tarry demodand followers, hoping to coöpt them through employment.  She has since tired of the disgusting brutes—while they are excellent torturers, their zeal for tormenting demons spills more ichor than secrets—and she wants them out of the tower they’ve occupied.  When mortal adventurers make an incursion into her castle, she allows them to clean out the demodands’ quarters without interference…though what the adventurers find there may aid them against Me’salis herself.

An arcane poem instructs adventurers that they must “spit in the eyes of the gods even as you deny them.”  Successful interpretation of the line indicates that they need to procure the sacrilegious spittle of a gristly demodand.

The executioner known only as the Stitcher is famous for flaying his victims…and worse still, for unashamedly making clothes out of their skin.  When adventurers try to stop him from executing a woman he knows to be innocent (but who was not released thanks to a technicality), they find his malevolence and his years of wearing skin-suits have turned him into a gristly demodand.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 72

Pathfinder Adventure Path #77: Herald of the Ivory Labyrinth has a big article on demodands courtesy of Amanda Hamon.

Speaking of executioners, has anyone read any of Oliver Pötzsch’s A Hangman’s Daughter Tale novels?  I listened to The Werewolf of Bamberg, and if you could get past the unlikeable protagonists it was worth it for the grim inspiration.  His brutish 1600s Germany is excellent fodder for an Ustalav or Ravenloft campaign.

Grioth

(Illustration by Miguel Regodón Harkness comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Grioths, according to Bestiary 5, “inhabit rogue planets cast away from their stars.”  That seems to be an exceedingly rare ecological niche, which suggests that either a) grioths have a way of seeking out and traveling to such planets, especially during the eclipses that they love so much, or b) grioths have some foreknowledge of such calamities—or even play a hand in making sure said calamities come to pass.  Given that grioths worship the Outer God Nyarlathotep, who’s a bit of an expert in nudging societies toward apocalypse, the latter seems very likely.

Some other things to mention:

1) Grioths are only CR 1, which means they can be a useful way to expose parties to Lovecraftian or interplanetary themes very early in the campaign.

2) In The Dragon’s Demand, grioths had spell-like abilities; these have been changed to psychic magic in B5.  (Also, mentions of the grioths’ voidglass weapons were genericized down to “a strange metal.”)

3) Another quote: “The grioth race is prone to mutations.”  Translation: Go nuts with the templates and class levels.

4) Grioths hate many other alien races.  (In the Golarion setting, this means the Dominion of the Black.)  Which raises the question: What aliens are so awful that even worshippers of Lovecraft’s Outer Gods fear them?

A group of young adventurers begin their careers when an eclipse giant appears in their village and blesses them, forever marking them as destined in the eyes of the gods.  Soon after, the eclipse the giant foretold comes to pass…bringing with it an invading force of grioths from a wayward frozen planet.  The village elders tap the blessed youngsters to thwart the otherworldly creatures.

After a wizard is executed for vile crimes, some adventurers are tasked with clearing out his laboratory.  While they are there, they come across a strange bat-winged creature.  The grioth is also scouring the lab, seeking to erase all evidence of the collaboration he and the wizard shared.  The moment he sets his four eyes on the adventurers, he decides that they know too much to live.

Bartimaeus’s Bestiary of Beasts Most Baleful is widely regarded as the most fanciful—and dangerously error-ridden—manual of monsters in circulation.  Unfortunately for a certain young adventurer, Bartimaeus is also her uncle and her adventuring company’s main benefactor.  When rumors reach him of an urd sighting—urds being a race of winged kobold considered so unlikely that Bartimaeus’s publisher stripped them out of the third edition of the Bestiary—the old scribe sees a chance to restore his battered reputation.  He sends his niece and her compatriots to fetch him an urd, “alive or competently stuffed.”  Unfortunately, the bat-winged creatures are actually otherworldly grioths, with psychic abilities and strange weapons beyond even Bartimaeus’s wildest imaginings.

—The Dragon’s Demand 62 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 137

2e fans, that urd was for you.

One final thought: Both D&D’s Forgotten Realms (especially in 2e and 3.0/3.5) and Pathfinder’s Golarion are both exceptionally well-realized worlds that allow for a wide variety of adventure styles and settings.  (Want to fight mummies?  Vikings?  Ninjas?  Both pretty much have you covered.)  If there’s one way to quickly differentiate the two, it’s this: The Realms, thanks to Greenwood and Salvatore, teach you to fear what’s below the ground.  Golarion, thanks to Lovecraft and Jacobs, teaches you to fear the night sky.

Did any of you get that thing that’s going around?  Major congestion, bit of a fever, tiredness, general suckitude?  Because I’m on Day 9, and it is zero fun.

Grimslake

(Illustration by Damien Mammoliti comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

The Abyss!  What a plane.  In the Abyss, grub eats you.

Extraplanar aberrations, grimslakes feed on corpses, lesser demons, and hapless adventurers.  (The first two are common in the Abyss; the last is typically found at the gaming table.)  Grimslakes resemble giant grubs and are known for sucking the marrow out of their meals, causing excruciating Constitution drain.

Given that they're so monstrous, it’s easy to forget that grimslakes are somewhat intelligent, speak Abyssal, and have spell-like abilities.  Granted, their conversation revolves around food and the savoriness of certain screams, but it is conversation nonetheless.

“The Iron Brethren never leave a man behind.”  So goes the saying, and often enough it’s true.  Disaster strikes, though, when an Iron Brother falls in the Abyss.  The Brethren send a sortie out to retrieve his body, not realizing that it is already incubating grimslake eggs.  By the time a party of adventurers reaches the scene, the young have hatched and devoured their way through a full third of the Steel Citadel.

Adventurers are sneaking through an Abyssal dungeon when they come across two cowering quasits—who surprisingly are not invisible.  The quasits were supposed to be herding dretches, but grimslakes tunneled into their stockyard and devoured most of the demonstock.  Too cowardly to either report the disaster to their superiors or flee into the grimslakes’ tunnel, the quasits beg the adventurers to help slay the creatures.  They even promise to throw in a casting of commune as payment, free and uncorrupted…honest.

Adventurers are forced to attend a ball hosted by a diabolist.  He tests both their command of etiquette and their fortitude with a succession of dishes ranging from the profane to the truly taboo.  At last he serves the pièce de résistance: grimslake young straight from the corpse (an especially daring choice giving grimslakes’ association with the Abyss).  Due to a “misunderstanding,” the adventurers are served an adult, very much alive grimslake instead…and naturally their host and the other guests will be so shocked, verily, shocked at the mix-up that it will take them several seconds (about three rounds) to recover and come to the party’s aid.

—The Worldwound 55 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 136

Grim Reaper

(Illustration by Wayne Reynolds comes from the Paizo website and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Death has gotten pretty complicated in Pathfinder.  You’ve got psychopomps who want to shepherd souls to their just reward, sahkils who want to terrorize them, night hags who want to bottle and sell them, daemons who want to destroy souls entirely, shinigamis and inevitables who will take you out if you try to defy death (except the shinigamis who take bribes or go rogue)…look, it’s a mess.

And now we have grim reapers and lesser deaths to deal with, which is where I give up and hurl my Bestiaries into the air.  (And then duck, because five of those things are heavy and pointy.)

Except.  Except.  Hang on…I played 52-Book Pickup too soon.  It turns out those books are going to be useful after all.

Every threat we mentioned in the first paragraph above is an outsider.  They’re interested in souls.  Grim reapers and the lesser deaths are undead.  Their interest lies in death itself—the noun and the verb.  It’s a subtle distinction, but a significant one (one that puts them closer to nightshades than shinigamis, cosmologically speaking).  They are interested in the act of dying and the moment of death, not how the spirit is apportioned.  In fact, grim reapers are pretty much death itself given form—kind of like the purple-robed lady Thanos is always trying to get with in the Marvel comics, only more scythe-y.  To put it another way, while a shinigami is the farmhand busy harvesting his soul crop, the grim reaper finds satisfaction in simply cutting the grass.  When what you want is a well-mowed lawn devoid of life, wheat and chaff are all one.

By and large, all the nuance above is the kind of thing that matters to certain GMs a lot, and not at all to everyone else.  But on balance I think it’s good to know, because you never know what players will try to pull at the table.  At the very least, when the PCs try to challenge one of Bestiary 5’s grim reapers to a game of checkers, you can confidently say he isn’t that kind of death and roll for initiative.

Other tidbits: 1) Both grim reapers and lesser deaths (originally called minor reapers) have gotten a CR boost and I presume some stat changes since they were introduced in Pathfinder Adventure Path #48: Shadows of Gallowspire.  2) There may be just one Grim Reaper…or there might be nine (which, if you’ve been craving Nazgûl in your Pathfinder game, should have jumped out at you like a neon shark).  3) Grim reapers sometimes ride dragons, yet one more sign (along with, for instance, their elemental subtypes) that dragons are something more than just monsters and are tied up in the fabric of the world somehow.  4) Lesser deaths are associated with the deck of many things.  Who knows what other ephemera they might be bound into?  And if you can capture lesser deaths, could you capture lesser lives?  Births?  Menarches?  Fears?  Angers?  Joys?

Okay, on to the adventure seeds:

When St. Tomin’s Cathedral was erected upon Argyle Mound, the builders couldn’t eliminate the famous faerie gate there…but they could bar it.  Four stained glass windows representing the four seasons mark the ambulatory behind the chancel.  The figures that represent Winter, Spring, and Summer are trapped fey who block the way between the worlds.  The figure representing Autumn is a bound lesser death who manifests if anyone tries to tamper with the other three windows.

Adventurers must speak with a wyrm of ancient power and might.  Their timing, unfortunately, is abysmal.  The ancient dragon has just begun five centuries of service to a grim reaper.  Addressing the steed without insulting the deadly master will be difficult, especially when the wyrm has no desire to speak with them in the first place.

To save Death, you have to kill it. A cabal of daemons seeks to unseat Lady Death and tear down the ordered bureaucracy that guides souls to their proper rest.  Their plot partially succeeds, temporarily rendering the Final Judge mortal (albeit still mythic and mighty).  But the hint of a vacancy in the office allows the daemons’ co-conspirator, the god of murder, to call up a long dormant aspect of death, the Grim Reaper.  Now adventurers must leap to the defense of the Obsidian Alcazar, leading psychopomps to battle and preventing the scythe-wielding Grim Reaper from stalking and gruesomely murdering Lady Death in her own palace.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #48 86–87 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 134–135

Speaking of magical beings and magical decks of cards, thanks to everyone who’s been engaging with my Campaign in a Bottle series.  Want to get caught up?  Click here.

Also: “Shut up!  Shut up, you American.”

Oh, and no radio show this week, so no link.

Griefgall

Plants that control emotions are pretty standard fare in spooky media.  I’m sure that one of the many sharp-eyed horror fans who read this blog will be able to suggest a number of TV shows or books that the griefgall shares traits with.  (For my part, I have a feeling Poison Ivy has used a few griefgall-like plants in her schemes.)

Beyond parasitization (which is nothing to sneeze at), the griefgalls main party trick is casting psychic spells that make those around it feel so terrible or remorseful that they are paralyzed with pity…or even go so far as to hurt themselves.  All in all, not a bad suite of spells, especially for a plant that feeds on emotions.

Two other interesting things about griefgalls: 1) They prosper in urban decay; 2) they speak Aklo.  The former makes them a marker for good-hearted PCs who want to enact social change—if they can prove conditions are so bad for the poor that griefgalls are growing, they have leverage to get the local lord to do more for the least fortunate.  The latter is more disturbing—plants that speak are plants that have intellects, or perhaps even agendas.  Do griefgalls spread merely to propagate the species or do they have other motives in mined?

The princess and her whipping girl look so alike they trade places to prank their governess.  With the princess about to go through her menarche rituals, the whipping girl was to be placed into fosterage…only the night before the rite, the palace steward packed off the sleeping princess instead.  By the time the mix-up is discovered, the princess has been deposited in a dismal foster home...the same night a griefgall takes over the home’s cook.  Adventurers sent to discreetly retrieve the girl will have to fight off the plant creatures before it’s too late.

Rebellion is playing out in the lower wards of the Thanehold of Argus.  Young and impoverished dwarves gather in angry mobs, demanding opportunities and justice.  A particularly canny griefgall matriarch has had her children parasitize flower sellers and hand out lilies and carnations to the crowds for free.  Every dwarven tough who sports a flower as a symbol of his cause is a dwarf helping the griefgalls pass unnoticed.

Servants of the Great Old Ones are often insidious and disturbing.  But perhaps no cult or sleeper agent is as terrifying as the griefgall, for they make their puppets speak tortured fragments of Aklo over and over.  Some scholars have even proposed that the fragments are part of a single monologue or a diatribe.  But if that’s the case, it suggests that the sum of all griefgalls is really one giant colony creature—a creature that may be just as powerful as the other Great Old Ones.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 133

Huh.  A plant that feeds on strong emotions.  A bit on the nose after the last week, dontcha think?

If you’re looking for the great assassin bug, we covered that what should have been a week ago, but sadly has been more like a month and a half.  Oy.

I don't want to talk about last Tuesday, and you don't want to talk about last Tuesday.  If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can get the link to my Election Night radio show here for the next hour and a half.

Gray Goo

As a phrase, “gray goo” was never meant to be a literal blob of gray goo—it was simply a shorthand way of discussing a potential problem in nanotechnology.  But once you start tossing around terms like “replicators,” “nanobugs,” and “ecophagy”…well, the image of flying, flesh-eating dust is pretty hard to shake.  And that makes gray goo a pretty amazing monster for Pathfinder as well.

Now, given that I spent most of the last entry fretting about whether grays are too sci-fi to fit into Pathfinder, it probably seems weird that I’m like, “All right, nanites!” 

But whereas grays carry all this cultural baggage with them, gray goo is just straight-up terrifying.  It’s also incredibly useful from a game perspective—it’s a flying, high-CR ooze-like construct swarm, making it a useful threat at a time in your campaign when puddings and jellies just aren’t going to cut it.  If you’re already messing around with robots and androids, gray goo seems like a logical fit.  And in the experience at the gaming table, is there that much difference between gray goo and, say, a living disintegrate spell in the Eberron setting?  Not really.

So bring on the nanites!  Just be sure to triple-check your coding before you let them loose…

On board a mining facility that straddles the back of a comet, adventurers race to rescue cryogenically frozen elf children before the hurtling ball of space ice crumbles to nothingness.  But after an outer dragon streaked past one of the habitat pods, the benign nanite swarms inside became warped by the alien presence.  Now swirling mists of gray goo, the malfunctioning nanites seek organic life to incorporate and reconstitute.

A clockmaker has achieved the seemingly impossible.  Not only has he created mechanical men, but these clockwork beings can create smaller clockworks of their own, and so on till the constructs vanish from sight.  But the clockmaker’s children grow frustrated with their father’s human frailty and paranoid about carrying out his will—and so they will meet any perceived threat with an attacking cloud of nearly invisible, tiny, flesh-tearing gears.

On one world, archaeologists excavate a stone pyramid guarded by living sandstorms.  On another, colonists explore a metal ziggurat buzzing with the hum of a gray goo storm.  The monuments are one and the same—a single pyramid split across two dimensions, housing a godlike being that cannot be perceived on either.  And it is hungry…

—Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars 50 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 130

For my U.S. readers, normally this is the part where I would encourage you to vote tomorrow—that no matter where you live, no matter which candidate you support, and no matter which party you belong to, I support your right to vote encourage you to act on it.

This isn’t the year for that.

This week more than 300 gaming professionals, including weschneider, Mark Moreland, Sean K. Reynolds, Jason Bulmahn, Jeff Grubb, Wolfgang Baur, Keith Baker, Andy Collins, Bruce Cordell, Mike Selinker, Mike Mearls, Chris Pramas, and scores of other authors, designers, and developers whose work I love wrote a letter supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and denouncing Trump’s. 

I stand with them.  And you should too.

For my readers who are Republicans, I apologize for bringing the contest even here, to a place where you probably wanted some respite from the shouting.  But this is not a normal post.  This campaign has not been normal.  And the actions of Trump, his surrogates, many of his supporters, and much—not all, but much—of his party this year (from blocking Supreme Court appointments to engineering widespread voter disenfranchisement based on race) have been completely unacceptable in a functioning democracy.

There comes a point where you have to draw a line.  I would rather lose readers than stay silent.  It is not enough to vote tomorrow.  You need to vote for our future.  You need to reject hate and lies.  You need to vote Democratic all the way down the ballot.  This year, it's the only acceptable choice.

Gray

Normally I try to keep personal stuff confined to the bottom of the post, but with the gray that’s hard to do. That’s because when I was a kid, images of grays were everywhere. 

I think I was too young to notice when Whitley Strieber’s Communion came out in 1987, but by the time Transformation dropped a year later I’d gone from a kid who only read nonfiction books about dinosaurs and sharks to a kid who was hardcore into mythology and beginning my love of fantasy novels.  That meant trips to Walden Books and B. Dalton, where HOLY CRAP you could not miss the endcap displays full of copy after copy of Transformation—every single cover of which featured half a Visitor’s face peering straight at you with one haunting silver foil eye.  You didn’t even have to go into the store to encounter them.  The aliens stared at you through the entryway glass, dozens of eyes in geometric columns and rows all tracking your motion with the same flat expression as you walked by.  Thanks to multiple editions (the half-face one I mention above may actually have been a reissue; I can’t recall exactly), this went on for years.

It was creepy as f—.

Adding to the creepiness was the uncertain nature of Strieber’s tale, which even as an elementary-schooler I picked up on.  Communion purported to be a true story but was packaged like a novel; Transformation was sold as fiction—very glossy, high-end fiction—but Strieber, in a rift with his publisher, loudly proclaimed it was true.  Later in life, in college and grad school, I positively reveled in books that towed the line between biography and fiction, but as a kid this Schrödinger’s fact (see what I did there?) disturbed me to no end.

I bring all this up because I have trouble putting this baggage away when I tackle Pathfinder’s grays.  Grays, to me, are 100% sci-fi.  Not Spelljammer science fantasy, not Edgar Rice Burroughs/James Sutter laser sword & sorcery, not Victorian steampunk, not Miéville/VanderMeer weird fantasy, not an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks-style Easter Egg, not nor even mythological aliens (like Bestiary 5’s anunnaki, Stargate’s gods, or whoever the Nazca lines were for).  Grays are Roswell, X-Files, Alien Autopsy, Weekly World News paranormal sci-fi.

But then again…that kind of sci-fi is more fantasy than far-future anyway.  Weekly World News also had Bat Boy, vampires, yetis and sasquatches.  So my notion of what can go into my sword & sorcery campaign ought to be elastic enough to fit grays in as well.

Really, it’s all in how you deploy grays.  If you like alien chocolate in your fantasy peanut butter, they’re ready to go as-is, spaceships and all.  Or grays could be from another dimension, in the vein of hounds of Tindalos and the denizens of Leng.  Their connection to sleep also makes them ideal for the Dimension of Dreams, the Ethereal Plane, the Plane of Mirrors, or similarly intrusive dimensional/planar layers.  Or they might be fallen fey or transcended undead, mysterious beings who have become divorced from or transcended their former states.

 

In other words, there’s a lot to probe here.  (Really?  Did I really have to go there?)  But grays are on the cover of Bestiary 5 for a reason—because they have a way of invading your mind and your game whether you’re ready or not.

Adventurers go to check on a sleeping comrade, only to spot her being spirited away through a glowing door by little gray humanoids.  If they follow, they find themselves in the sterile confines of an alien ship.  They must scour the twisting corridors to find their friend and escape.  Fortunately, a slave caste of androids stationed on the ship may be able to help them in their flight.  The reason for the abduction remains mysterious, however…for now.

Adventurers spend the night in a lamasery, eager to consult with the monastery’s elders after many days of hard travel.  Soon, though—thanks to a mishap involving a one-way mirror—they discover they are not alone.  The entire lamasery is actually a carefully disguised testing facility where grays silently probe the psychic strength of this world’ humanoids.

Long considered a sign of an addled mind or too much drink, gray sightings have become so rampant they can no longer be ignored.  Adventurers investigating the creatures on orders from the crown soon make a startling discovery—grays are not alien invaders, but rather explorers returning home.  The grays, on the other hand, are dismayed to find humans covering a world they deem as theirs like a pox.  They begin haunting or flat-out abducting key nobles in an effort to destabilize human civilization.  They also use their technology to rouse their closest evolutionary relatives—the savage orcs—and spur them into forming ravening hordes to overrun the leaderless nations.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 129

“No, no, that felt super off-the-books.”