If you don’t think sea urchins are dangerous, you have never
been an echinoderm, a barefoot snorkeler, or a Pathfinder player. This is a game where you run a real risk of
being devoured by a ravenous urchin swarm.
So of course the man-sized hunter urchins and ogre-sized spear urchins are going to be a threat. That’s just science.
A band of youths aren’t
even adventurers yet—they’re just a handful of friends who get asked by
Father Michaels to check in on an old hermit.
Instead they find his cabin ransacked, with a note telling them where they
should look for the codger. If they
follow up (perhaps prodded by Father Michaels and the jingle of the pastor’s
gold, if necessary), they find the old man.
Or rather, they find his corpse, wedged into a deep tide pool and currently
feeding hunter urchins. To get the
pastor’s blessing (and his gold) they need to risk the urchins’ poisonous spines
to retrieve the body.
The libertine nobles
of Fever Bay delight in games of one-upmanship. This season the fashion is gourmet cookery, the
more outlandish the better…and if one of the ingredients killed someone along
the way, that’s even better still. Thus
are some down-on-their luck adventurers sent after “rose petal uni”…without
necessarily being informed ahead of time that rose petal uni are the tasty gonads
of the deadly spear urchin.
Most river giants
live deep inland, traveling the continent’s wide waterways. But a few outcasts eke out existences along
the coasts, hoping to avoid the attention of humanoid pirates, the perverse
marsh giants, and the far-more-powerful ocean giants. Since even outcast river giants spend a lot
of time traveling, they use spear urchins to guard their treasure troves and
supply caches while they are away.
—Pathfinder Adventure
Path #37 84–85 & Pathfinder Bestiary
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