Othaos

High-CR aeons are concerned with the great dualities of existence: creation and destruction, life and death, the peaks and ebbs of karma as it ripples like a sine wave through existence.

The othaos, being only CR 5, handles a more elemental duality: light and darkness, protecting the one from the other so that the worlds of shine and shadow remain in harmony.  If a mysterious obelisk casts an unnaturally large shadow or outsiders made of light make an incursion onto the Material Plane, expect an othaos to manifest.

The Spear of Dumar is an incandescent stalactite of unspeakable size that casts a rosy glow over the dwarf city below.  It is lovingly tended by the Glowstones, a sect of earth druids and elementalists, as well as an othaos that has spent more than a generation inspecting the unique crystal.  When the Spear of Dumar begins to dim unexpectedly, the Glowstones recruit adventurers to rule out sabotage.  They also seek a way to contain the othaos—the aeon seems mad with grief and has already attacked two innocent citizens.

The Mirror Plane actually moves through the Shadow Plane, a ribbon of glowing silver in the eternal darkness.  Othaoses guard crucial passages and intersections along this winding road, preventing incursions from the Shadow Plane onto the Mirrorways, and vice versa.  Owbs are these aeons’ particular foes, and they will attack anyone who seems marked by their stain—including adventurers injured in combat by the magical weapons or death throes of the dark folk.

The expansion of the Incandium, Porthos’s college of magic, has led to an explosion of magical innovations and curiosities, with recent graduates eager to apply their new talents for the public good (or at least for public acclaim).  Chief among these are Porthos’s new streetlights—some magical, some alchemical—which shine brighter than torches throughout the city.  An othaos takes exception to this interruption in the cycle of night and day, dimming or consuming every streetlamp he can find.  With no Lamplighters’ Guild to pick up the slack, Porthos is facing a rash of muggings, assaults, burglaries, and attacks from cloakers, gremlins, and other photophobic monstrosities.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 10

I’m no expert in the subject, but I’m pretty sure the othaos would make a kickass Pokemon. 

Also, I could use an othaos to do something about the apartment building across the street that has taken a chunk out of my bedroom’s natural light.

Longtime reader/encyclopedic dr-archeville gave me the heads-up about the Pathfinder Second Edition playtest.  I was really hoping this day wouldn’t come anytime soon, but given the life cycle of the product line—they’d splatted pretty much all the hardcover splatbooks it seems reasonable to splat—and the general veering of the tabletop world away from complexity/having a stat for every situation to ease of creation/use, 2e Pathfinder was probably inevitable.   (The learnings from the development of Starfinder was probably also a big third factor.)

So naturally I’m a little bit nervous (like Garth in Wayne’s World, I fear change), but of course I’m excited too.  Any time an edition switches over, that creates opportunities for hungry creatives like yours truly—and possibly for many of you out there as well. 

Last night The New Indie Canon went architectural and intellectual, courtesy of our guest DJ, mcmansionhell’s Kate Wagner.  We had a great time spinning songs about buildings, architecture, the financial crash, and masses great and smol.  A huge thank-you to her for coming out and to many of you for listening.  If you missed the fun, stream/download it now till Monday, 03/12/18, at midnight.

Lipika

Most aeons are experienced by mortals as avatars of contrast and opposites: light and darkness, beginnings and endings, freedom and fate, and so on.  Closer in apprehension to the Monad itself, lipikas know that these opposites are merely points along the same rippling sine wave of existence.  Moreover, lipikas are the Lords of Karma and the guardians of the Akashic Record, ensuring that the psychic truths of every moment are faithfully recorded and that karmic cleansings or stains are properly apportioned. 

But since the Lords move in mysterious ways, that means powerful adventurers can easily fall afoul of them.  Lipikas have their own imperatives and their own agendas—as Bestiary 5 says, “A lipika is just as likely to chastise a righteous person for her charity and goodness as it is to scold an evil creature for its misdeeds.”  All adventuring parties will know when they encounter a lipika (at least at first) is that karma is being adjusted…but not how, why, or where they fall in the accounting.

Adventurers raise a sunken island nation, capturing the imagination of the multitudes and royalty alike.  After helping to reactivate the risen capital city’s power system, the sellswords are on hand as their lord uses genie wishcraft to build a bridge of crystal and song to connect the island to the mainland.  Just as it is about to be completed, a lipika arrives to shatter the bridge, broadcasting visions of future disasters rippling across the multiverse due to the karmic resonances the wishcraft bridge is destined to transmit.

Seeking satori, a member of an adventuring party (likely a druid, monk, mystic theurge, or samsaran) discovers he must first defeat a lipika.  Worse yet, he must do it one-on-one (though his adventuring companions can certainly ward off the Advanced time elementals (see The Tome of Horrors Complete), time and occult dragons, and lesser aeons that might accompany such an august creature).  If the seeker of wisdom has been both dutiful in his studies and in leaving himself open to revelation, he will glean that the “defeat” does not have to be through single combat, but perhaps through the casting of spells and their opposites, a dreamscape philosophy debate, or by beneficially altering the karma of another.  That said, a lipika will likely try to provoke a physical confrontation first, if only to more quickly weed out the unready and karmically stained.

If there is a psychic record of the entire multiverse…might there not also be a psychic eraser?  This is the argument of the sage Algernon Absalos…or at least it was, before he was torn apart in his own study by ravening hounds of Tindalos.  His notes and papers postulate a kind of anti-lipika, to whom the Akashic Record is merely a slate that must eventually be erased.  Adventurers who explore further may find themselves being admonished by the fiery-winged exscinder archons…a sure sign they are on the path of some essential truth…or some truly foul lie.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 8–9

In our world, Lipikas are also the Lords of Karma, but details on where they come from are obscure to the casual Googler.  The name is Sanskrit, and I’ve seen them variously described as gods, devas, and angels.  They’re apparently important in Theosophy, but that is a subject I know zero about…and searching Wikipedia left me, if anything, knowing even less than when I started.

What would a lipika listen to?  With that sine-wave bass, Pogo of course.

Edit: Apologies to my Blogger readers.  Once again you are getting this link late.

Tuesday night I took advantage of UMD being on spring break to play songs that were longer than usual and world beater/Irisher than usual.

Enjoy new music from WHY?, Diet Cig, Sinkane, and Fleet Foxes; anniversary flashbacks to U2, Arcade Fire, and LCD Soundsystem; and some surprises.

Click here to stream/download, don’t panic at the IRS intro PSA, and enjoy!  (Link good till tonight (Monday, 03/27/17) at midnight.)

Theletos

A body of crystal and limbs and tentacles, the theletos is an aeon responsible for freedom and fate (and thus slavery and prophecy as well).  Mechanically, it’s kind of fun: the theletos’s wreath of fate ability forces players to choose between the staggered condition or lousy dice rolls, while its spell-like abilities are a range of compulsions, charms, and curses that will be either comic or tear-your-hair-out frustrating, depending on your group’s dynamic.  Thematically, though, the aeon is tricky, because when should the GM deploy it? 

Here’s why I ask this: PCs fighting a bythos (CR 16) or pleroma (CR 20) are already probably fighting for big stakes; adding a living concept of duality to the foe roster isn’t a big deal.  But the theletos is only CR 7…making it far easier to incorporate into most campaigns…but you don’t want one showing up every time the party paladin frees a handful of slaves. 

I suppose the key is to save the theletos for certain crisis points—when a prophet reveals too much about a certain subject, or when the PCs’ actions could spark a rebellion or abolition rather than just a few more or less freed slaves.  Theletos interference could also explain why slavery, serfdom, or fortunetelling are so entrenched in certain areas.  PCs devoted to powers of balance, neutrality, or order might even be compelled by their faith or their divine patrons to aid a theletos—even if that means temporarily supporting slavery or killing prophets—which could be an interesting moral challenge for the right (read: mature and thoughtful) party.

Adventurers help azer slaves rebel against their overseers, who belong to a more powerful azer clan.  But when the slaves begin to talk of forming a democracy, the adventurers find their efforts undermined by a theletos determined to preserve the fire-dwarf custom of slavery.

The Prophet Plague slays soothsayer after soothsayer, all of whom die with blue-white fire and prophecies streaming from their lips.  Clearly some greater plan is afoot, because attempts to save the affected seers are met with theletos opposition.

A cluster of xorns regards a theletos as some kind of divine emissary.  Sensing an opportunity, the theletos harnesses the xorns to help slaves tunnel to freedom.  But neither the theletos nor the xorns care that these tunnels will cause an entire mountainside to avalanche, so it is up to a local ranger and some adventurers to find a better escape route.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 14

The relationship of azers to slavery has interested me for a long time; see more here.

Pleroma

Despite having nearly been a Religion major (our department was nuts in a good way—you got handed Eliade, Freud, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, and Tillich in the first six weeks alone), I don’t know if I have the chops to take on the Greek concept of the pleroma, or its Gnostic spinout (where the Monad and bythos comes from also).

Here’s what I do know: The pleroma is your chance to go Steve Ditko(/Kirby/Byrne) on your players.

There’s a reason the pleroma kind of looks like this guy.  Aeons are guardians of the totality of the universe itself.  They get invoked when then machinery of existence breaks down.  And pleromas are the most powerful of the lot—creating and destroying as necessary to preserve the balance and thwart apocalypse.

Players, of course, are likely going to think in terms of friends and enemies, good guys and bad.  The pleroma is a chance to come at them sideways.  They kill a demon lord, only to have a pleroma restore it to life…and lecture them on its importance in the grand scheme.  They lose to a fell demigod, only to have a pleroma give them a chance to even the odds…or maybe even temporarily invest them with the god’s portfolio and power.

Or an encounter with a pleroma can take PCs out of existence as they know it to witness/affect events on a galactic…or molecular…scale.  If your standard adventure is an issue of X-Men, an adventure with a pleroma should feel like Dr. Strange—strange blank limbo landscapes, vistas that peer into nothingness and everythingness, and epic-powered characters who are more concepts than people.

Down to practical stuff: PCs should hopefully want to talk to a pleroma, not fight it (at least not without cause).  It holds the powers of creation and oblivion in its hands.  You want weapons?  It throws spheres of annihilation.  Oh, and its touch does 20d8 damage.  Not to mention it wields a list of spells as long as your arm, especially those focused on creation, destruction, and contending with all the cardinal points on the alignment compass.  Have the online Reference Document up, because you’re going to want to consult it on the fly.  The pleroma is an epic-level encounter for parties who want to ask—or fight—the universe’s Big Questions.

The millennia-rusted wheels of the Annihilation Machine become unstuck.  Souls begin to be sucked out of the mortal world, turning it lifeless.  The daemonic Horsemen of the Apocalypse threaten to ride.  When a pleroma manifests to observe, an adventuring party has the chance to sway it to action…or risks being obliterated for interfering.

A party of adventurers teams up with the son of a demigod to kill a nascent demon lord.  After the slaying, a pleroma arrives to unmake the son’s life to preserve the balance.  If the party objects, the pleroma will attack disdainfully; otherwise their ally submits.  But after his destruction, the nascent demon lord reappears, courtesy of some powerful contingency magic…but will this affect the pleroma’s earlier sentence?

To fulfill the strictures of a prophecy, a party must travel outside time and space to create a landscape that has never existed before.  To do this, they must trick a titan, befriend (as much as is possible) a bythos, submit to judgment in a court of demodands, and finally appeal for help to a pleroma.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 12–13

Why didn’t I finish the Religion major?  I missed a crucial Hermeneutics course with Mark Taylor, and then got distracted studying poetry, fiction, and running concerts.  I regret missing the courses; I don’t regret what came after…

Paracletus

Most aeons are focused on big-picture concepts: birth, death, time, creation, destruction, etc.  Paracletuses take much more of an interest in human-sized concepts—especially emotion, logic, and the interplay between the two—and, fortunately, their power is also several orders of magnitude weaker.

The following adventure seeds use paracletuses in three ways: as comic relief, as one-off adversaries, and as an early foreshadowing that the campaign will tackle bigger themes.

An adventuring party’s charismatic barbarian (and his rages) attracts the attention of an emotion-studying paracletus.  The barbarian is delighted to have his own “familiar”…at least at first, while the emotions the paracletus broadcasts are still positive.

A pair of paracletuses finds a derro’s investigation into the nature of pain (and the attending emotional responses it engenders) complements their own.  Should adventurers interrupt his research, the aeons will defend him in order that their research project not be interrupted.

More and more samsarans are attracting the scrutiny of paracletuses—many serving as familiars, others observing less obtrusively (or more, depending on the aeon).  They seem to be interested in how the cycle of reincarnation affects the reasoning and hearts of these serene humanoids.  More ominously, some of these paracletuses are also interested in seeing what happens when samsarans fail—in their clerical duties, in their oaths as paladins and samurai, or even when they jeopardize their place on the cycle of reincarnation itself.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 11

I don’t have a lot of time to explore other folk’s gaming blogs, but a little Googling turned up this encounter seed on what looks to be a very accomplished blog.

Bythos

When players try to break the universe—and they always do—it’s nice to have an in-game reason to convince them why they shouldn’t…or punish them in a game-appropriate way for going ahead.  Bythos aeons will quickly teach any time-traveling parties why mucking in the fourth dimension is a no-no.  And parties trying to take advantage of a planar rift may have to delay a bythos who wants it closed—if it’s even possible to delay a master of time. (GMs might want to be careful about how they run bythos combat, though; the confusion of a few Temporal Strikes should be fun, but a heavy succession of time-related effects may frustrate players in a bad way, rather than in a constructive one.)

An artifact allows users to go back in time 12 hours.  If they overstay their deadline, they attract the attention of a bythos tribunal.

A prophecy fulfilled returns a king from his watery grave on a boat pulled by swans.  But a bythos determines someone must replace him outside the time stream—likely a cavalier or aristocrat of equal level—and is implacable in its search for candidates.

The plane-hopping corsairs of The Mendicant come screeching into town through a rift in a burst of gatefire, two bythos hot on their tails.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 10

Akhana

Newly introduced in the Pathfinder Bestiary 2, aeons are inscrutable agents of cosmic balance, in the same way that inevitables are arms of Law.  As such, one might be an adventuring party’s ally, obstacle, or both—but never to be trusted.  As akhanas are involved in life and death, adventurers who make liberal use of raise dead or mass killing spells may be more likely to encounter them.

The baptismal font in the cathedral of Kech has spontaneously begun raising one dead body a day, and the line of pilgrims bearing shrouded loved ones is now choking the town.  As if in answer, an akhana has settled upon the basilica's steeple, but it has not communicated or taken any action—yet.

The most prominent chirurgeon in the planar elven nation of Elbe had his soul siphoned by an akhana just minutes before a celestial symphony in his honor.  A pixie honor guard bearing his limp reduced body are flying desperately to keep pace with the aeon, in hopes it will release his trapped soul…but the physician’s jealous rivals bar their flight.

Day after day, men, dwarves, goblins, and orcs hurl themselves at one another on the Bleak Plains.  What was to have been a decisive battle has become a nightmarish war of attrition, thanks to four stubborn generals and a colony of akhanas seemingly determined to cure everyone in sight.

—Bestiary 2 9