Mnemor Devil

(Illustration by Audrey Hotte (I think; it’s a little unclear) comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

With distended jaws the reveal lolling, probing tongues, mnemor devils siphon up the memories of mortals. Some of these mortals are desperate to forget the past, and make deals to have their memories erased or altered…deals they later come to regret, as the new memories plant new doubts, suspicions, and fears.  Others are simply the victims of a devil so slippery that even the memory of him vanishes when he steps out of the room.

At first I was thinking that mnemor devils (also known as memory devils) would be hard to play at the gaming table—players know what they know.  (Think how many times you’ve struggled to RP a failed Perception check when you just know something bad is about to go down.)  But memory is a tricky thing, especially in a long campaign, and it’s easy to forget what happens session to session.  A GM who’s thrown a mnemor devil against his players a time or two could really mess with their heads next time they try to remember if they found a particular NPC trustworthy, or who really betrayed them at court that one time…

GMs will want to play mnemor devils, because at CR 5 they are easy to deploy at low-to mid-levels, with greater teleport making them consummate escape artists and recurring villains.  But PCs themselves may seek out a mnemor devil if they have memories they need wiped (perhaps to pass detect/discern spells or escape a Lovecraftian taint) or if they seek knowledge found only in the banks of a mnemor devil’s eidetic memory.

A young adventurer realizes mid-conversation that he is speaking with an infernal spirit dressed in the robes of a confessor.  As the devil teleports away, the adventurer can’t shake the feeling he’s met the confessor before.  In fact, the devil has appeared to him on and off again since childhood; this is simply the first time he has come back to awareness (in game terms, passed his Will save) before the devil could tidy up his mental manipulation.

A door in a wizard’s tower leads an otherworldly chamber.  There the adventurers find a psychic surgery staffed by a mnemor devil.  The wizard and he have a strictly business relationship, so the devil is unconcerned by the adventurers’ presence.  He even offers to remove a troubled memory from the party member who has most recently sinned…for a small price.

Both a library and a prison, the Memoriam was designed by inevitables to store important memories from across the multiverse.  With their typical cold, calculating logic, the inevitables deemed mnemor devils to be the ideal staff at such a facility—and thanks to a recent failed infernal plot, the inevitables had plenty of the memory devils locked in their prisons to choose from.  The paroled devils do indeed make excellent librarians, but their hellish system of cataloguing means that a patron researching a specific memory is utterly at their mercy.

—Occult Bestiary 21

When we covered the mezlan the other day I suggested their stats might make good DS9 Founders (an idea badmadwolf seemed to like).  But Bucephalus pointed out the even more obvious movie monster I’d completely overlooked: Terminator 2’s T-1000 (right down to forming weapons with its body).  Duh, seriously, where was my head?