Gate Archon

Nobody likes the bouncer.  Even when your name’s on the list he’s a figure of menace, because there’s always the chance that there’s been some miscommunication and you’ll get turned away.  (I didn’t even like the bouncer when I was the bouncer—I’m thinking of one Run-DMC show in particular.)

Or take St. Peter.  When you think of him, do you think of the most human of Jesus’s apostles, the most fallible, the most relatable, the one most like us?  Nope, you think of the cartoon guy at the Pearly Gates—the one who’s probably not going to let you in.

All of which is to say that, despite their lawful good alignment, gate archons are going to give your PCs plenty of reasons to pick fights with them.  To adventurers, doors are meant to be opened, bars are meant to be bent, and gates are meant to be crashed.  When the greater good is at stake, you can bet they’ll be willing to thrash the lawful good archon in their way.

Or at least, they’ll try.  At CR 17, the gate archon can more than thrash right back.

When the High Templar was slain atop the Altar of Light, the holy city of Nashon fell around him.  Towers fell, black mold grew over white marble, and the trees wept blood.  And in the High Temple itself, the gate archon who stood in the north transept become a devil of anguish and rage.

Breaking into Heaven’s First Precinct was easy.  Breaking out will be the hard part.  Psychopomp clerks detected the party’s intrusion into the Hourglass Aviary, and now a gate archon bars their way back to the land of the living.  The price of Paradise, it appears, is a permanent residency.

Famous gate archons include Atimixus, the quetzalcoatlus-winged archon whose statue guards the gate to the realm of lightning dragons; Evinen’shen, who loves the little liminal sprites and looks after them despite their chaotic fey natures; the Keeper of Autumn; and an unnamed archon who bravely bars one of the otherwise-accurately-named Seven Demon Doors.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 35

There was one doorman everybody liked—so much so that a D.C. blog once suggested dressing up as him in a list of D.C.-themed Halloween costume ideas.  His death has left a hole in the hearts of a number of people close to me, and he is profoundly missed.

Yesterday’s post stirred up quite a lot of Tumblr comments, which I honestly wasn’t expecting.  I had meant to mention that gancanaghs were friendly with leprechauns, but by the time I sat down to write the post I was tired and plum forgot; fortunately filbypott didn’t.  (Blogger readers, tired-me also forgot to attach the picture so a link is in your comments as well.)  And demiurge1138 and others dove into the various male rapist/seducer figures in myth and how they’re perceived in the game. 

For the record, demi, I’m going to go with your Narnia theory.  Gygax was a huge reader, famously recommending a number of books in Appendix N of the 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide.  While Narnia isn’t on that particular list I think there’s no question that Lewis’s wise woodsmen centaurs provided the template for Gygax’s.  And as we’ve talked about before, Gygax’s shadow over the hobby is (understandably) pretty long—so that the tiniest idiosyncrasies in the 1e Monster Manual tend to be with us even today.  That wagon left some deep ruts.

For the record, apparently in the 5e Player’s Handbook there’s a new list, which I just discovered courtesy of this post.  I’ve got some quibbles here and there, but good for them for expanding the canon!

Exscinder

“Exscinders,” Bestiary 5 begins, “are Heaven's censors.”

That frisson you feel—that spark created by the disconnect between “Heaven” and “censors”—that’s what makes this monster interesting.

To almost any modern fantasy fan, censors are bad.  They are the worst, in fact.  How many fantasy and sci-fi novels have you read where censors are the villains?  Fahrenheit 451, 1984…heck, I’m listening to An Ember in the Ashes literally right now, featuring an oppressed people known as Scholars who, ironically, aren't permitted to read.  Plenty of literary villains enslave, pillage, and murder…but it’s the censors and book burners that break readers’ hearts.

(I’m going to dive into a personal aside here, the kind I usually leave for the bottom of the post, because it’s germane to our discussion.  I think—and this is a total blanket generalization, so feel free to correct me—but I think this is especially true of fans born in the ’70s or before.  For those of us who grew up before the Internet, the power of information—and the power to take it away—were real things to us.  Adult books were on a different floor of the library, and even if you could take them out, you felt like an intruder for trying (and I lived in a liberal near-utopia; other libraries were stricter).  If you lived in a rural or religious area, lots of books just weren’t available.  Ditto music: Walmart wouldn’t stock CDs with warning labels.  Porn magazines, to kids, were literally currency.  And I got into role-playing in 1988, when a) the shadow of BADD and ’80s suburban panic about devil worship still hung heavy over the industry, and b) the Cold War was still very much a thing (perestroika notwithstanding), with all that implied about Soviet censors and East German secret police.  To a sensitive 10-year-old nerd, the sense that books were precious, rare, special, and that there were people who wanted to take them away from you, was real.)

So censors are bad. 

BUT.

We don’t live in a world where books can come alive or steal souls.  If we did, we might have a different attitude.  Watch Evil Dead, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, or The Care Bears Movie, and tell me books aren't dangerous.  (You can imagine the PSAs: “Parents, have you talked to your child about incunabula?”)  

So exscinders—yes, this is still a monster blog—serve a valuable purpose in a Pathfinder multiverse.  There is Knowledge Man Wasn’t Meant to Know.  There are books too dangerous to read, pages that can literally warp your soul or open doors to evil realms.  Exscinders protect mortalkind from such pernicious heterodoxy.  They are strict for a reason, though those reasons are lawful and good.  Like the monks in A Canticle for Leibowitz, they know that while knowledge must be preserved, disseminating it is a different matter—particularly when that knowledge has the ability to usher in the Apocalypse.

Theoretically, this should mean exscinders are allies of the PCs.  But evil or neutrally aligned parties, servants of gods of knowledge or magic, freedom fighters, and even librarians or scribes might object to such paternalistic thinking—particularly if they need to tap (even with the best of intentions) that forbidden knowledge themselves.

The fight against the insidious gospels of the kytons has left one archon almost as cold and clinical as his quarry.  The exscinder Maritius wears a mask of stitched kyton leather that exposes only his eyes.  As he grows more and more dogmatic, he seems to increase both his mandate and his list of forbidden texts.  Other archons fear that if he is not reined in, he will give the kytons grounds to charge and try him in the multiversal courts (an axiomatic legal arena the kytons are skilled at manipulating).  Mortal adventurers are needed to subdue Maritius to keep Heaven’s hands clean.

An exscinder attempts to steal a party mage’s spellbook.  But that makes no sense…it’s an ordinary book of spells, one the wizard has been scrawling in since his apprenticeship.  Has there been some great Heavenly mistake?  Did the pages hide some secret?  Is the wizard unknowingly the vessel for some world-threatening heresy?  It’s a mystery—and one the party members may have to solve without the aid of their best caster’s complement of spells.

A heresy devil has managed to insert some lines into the Book of Fate.  Exscinders move to remove the verses, but as they delete them, the pernicious phrases pull legitimate stanzas out along with them.  Like a scar badly healing, the resulting tortured grammar contains new meanings, new fates—and thus potential new realities.  Every edit the exscinders make risks changing the world a little more.  They must be stopped before the revisions take hold.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 34

With my late ’70s birthdate, technically I’m a leading edge Millennial (depending on who you ask), but that makes a lot of my references and outlook pretty heavily Gen X.  (This list is strikingly accurate but, being BuzzFeed, way too self-congratulatory.)

At this point, my stack of unread Pathfinder books has gone from embarrassing through humiliating to “likely to topple over and kill me.”  (Speaking of which, one of those unread books, Heaven Unleashed, has a nice exscinder NPC and lair.)  That said, my latest box just arrived, and Horror Adventurers—which I’d planned to tease for you in my PaizoCon wrap-up (that I still haven’t, er, wrapped up…or even begun)—was inside. 

It looks, as usual, gorgeous.  And I’m so excited about the various corruptions, archetypes, and creepy horror rules within. 

I’m one of the rare naysayers (along with RPG.net, apparently) who wasn’t all that impressed with 3.5’s Heroes of Horror—there just wasn’t enough for me to sink my teeth into that hadn't already been covered in Dragon Magazine or Book of Vile Darkness (or even Oriental Adventurers’ taint and blood magic rules).  But Pathfinder has been pretty solid on horror going all the way back to The Skinsaw Murders, and the corruption art previewed at PaizoCon was phenomenal, so I’m pretty excited to crack this book open.  If I have any profound thoughts, I’ll let you know.

Trumpet Archon

We’ve talked before about how archons tend to be associated strongly with their office—either the role itself or the symbol thereof.  Trumpet archons illustrate this to a T: They are the messengers and heralds of the powers of law and good, their magical trumpets equally adept at blasting enemies into paralysis as they are at playing fanfares.

Trumpet archons are CR 14, which is a nice power level—the gateway to high-level play, essentially.  Getting a message from a trumpet archon (or having to combat one) is a perfect indicator to PCs (and players) that they are about to ascend to a new level of reputation, expectation, and danger.  Heaven has taken notice, and the stakes will be a lot bigger from now on.

As usual with good outsiders, PCs will likely encounter trumpet archons as aides and boon-givers (they actually pack more than two dozen buffing or healing spells per day).  However, since trumpet archons are usually intermediaries, messengers, and soldiers, there are a reasonable number of excuses to put them in the PCs’ path as adversaries.  The message must get through.  A summit must be called.  The army must march.  If the PCs stand in the way of any of these goals—“The safety of one azata prince, even the Prince of Flowers, is not my concern”—and are not amenable to persuasion, then so be it.  Gabriel will blow his horn—at them.

A trumpet archon is a master at mixing music, magic, and blade work.  He offers instruction to good-aligned bards, magi, and rangers alike, but they must first prove their mettle (by wounding him to half hit points in single combat).

Some adventurers rely on a protean guide—which means taking time for numerous side treks and detours.  One of his pranks involves miring an axiomite caravan in entropic matter.  This in turn draws the attention of a trumpet archon, who sounds an alarm on his horn and then attacks the protean—and the mortals he perceives as its lackeys.

A hound archon, supposedly a seditious traitor, has been executed.  His celestial body is left impaled on the crystal gates of Caer Iffos.  A trumpet archon, incensed, promises to blast down the gates—and his vow is no idle one, as he holds a greater horn of blasting.  A party of adventurers has taken a vow to protect the dwarfhold, but with mounting evidence that Caer Iffos’s rulers are corrupt, do they honor their vows to the city or the Heavenly Spheres?

—Pathfinder Bestiary 21

Did any of you 3.5 fans ever play a trumpet archon PC?  I know Savage Species had rules for them…

Of course, trumpet archons owe their inspiration to popular depictions of Gabriel (or Islam’s Israfil, who is very worth checking out if you’re looking for a wilder take on angelic imagery—“ a huge, hairy body that is covered with mouths and tongues” and four wings long enough to stretch across several of the Heavens, according to Wikipedia).

Star Archon

Star archons are the strategists of the Heavens.  They also pull a phoenix act when slain, exploding in a holy supernova before reincarnating as a shield archon.  Which may explain their gift for tactics—it becomes much easier to make the hard choices when the ultimate sacrifice isn’t so ultimate after all.  Of course, given the sheer artillery at their disposal (sun burst, prismatic ray, polar ray, implosion, fire storm, meteor swarm, destruction—the list goes on), it’s rare they have to make those choices in the first place.

A party’s ghaele ally reveals disturbing intelligence that a star archon general is collaborating with legion of devils.  Is this an alliance of convenience against a demonic threat?  Payment for an ancient debt?  Part of some far-reaching plot whose subtlety will only be revealed in time?  The hot-tempered azata wants answers, and wants the party to retrieve the star archon for an interview…by force if necessary.

Adventures hoping to petition a Power directly must first get past her gatekeepers, the final one of which is a star archon.  The archon dislikes the role of majordomo, and while her charge is to pose them challenges of logic and strategy, she will do her utmost to provoke them into a physical confrontation, allowing her to unleash her many destructive spells without guilt.

Daverel is a shield archon with a dark secret.  Once a star archon, he is lauded from the Caverns of Repose to the Six Sacred Jubilances for sacrificing himself at the Umbral Blot.  But while it took a mob of invidiaks to lay him low—all of whom died in his explosive rebirth—at least some of the envy inherent in the shadow demons’ frigid bites must have struck home.  Since his reincarnation, Davarel has been secretly obsessed with returning to his former glorious state.  He is convinced that he has found a ritual that will speed the process…but the source is a book so apocryphal (and the components so morally dubious) that the rite has been banned for millennia.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 32

Seems like a lot of you dig spriggans.  Speaking of which, cheers to uwtartarus for weighing in on a particularly memorable spriggan in his game. 

Shield Archon

Unless your PCs really like assaulting heavenly strongholds, they are far more likely to encounter shield archons as allies than as adversaries.  And as allies, they are a tactically minded player’s dream.  Constant magic circle against evil and all the usual archon abilities (don’t forget aura of menace and all those immunities) make a shield archon great for creating bottlenecks; the transpose ally ability can save vulnerable PCs (like squishy mages or slow-moving Small types) at a crucial moment or enable excellent ambushes (sneak attack, anyone?); and they offer a menu of buffs to choose from.

That said, if one does irk a shield archon, they will face implacable foes who just happen to be almost impossible to disarm…

Adventurers investigate a recently unearthed tomb, only to discover relic hunters from the High Church have beaten them there.  Expecting attacks from demons, the relic hunters have summoned a shield archon to watch their backs, but he is happy to serve his faith guarding against mortal intruders as well.

Tired of always being on the back foot, a squad of shield archons goes rogue, searching for evildoers to bring the fight to.  Unfortunately, this dereliction of duty also begins to sap their celestial senses.  When they encounter adventurers whose weapons stink of evil (courtesy of being recently wielded by foul yai), they rashly attack.

In a desperate move, the bard Cantilus was able to hijack a rite and summon a shield archon in place of a devil, saving his friends and the city of Loneforge.  Unfortunately, he didn’t expect the shield archon to hold him to his side of the bargain.  Now the archon expects three years of service (see Chronicle of the Righteous) from the oath-breaking minstrel, who is currently hiding out in a magically warded brothel with time, his coin purse, and the madam’s patience running out.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 31

Katerinasfire wanted a brothel, so I delivered.  Got requests?  Let me know at dailybestiary [at] gmail [dot] com.

Also, I wasn’t on the air this weekend, but will be on tomorrow night 10–midnight East Coast time.  Tune in!

Legion Archon

With metal wings and flaming weapons, legion archons are the rank and file of the various Heavens’ armies.  When PCs encounter these celestials, it’s a good bet they’ve wandered too close to the front lines of one spiritual war or another.

Adventurers find themselves stranded on the same layer of the Abyss as a lost legion archon recently separated from his squad.  This particular layer is a place of illusion and deception, and the archon sees them as demons until the veil is pierced.

The emperor has grown so powerful even the forces of Heaven send envoys to his court.  When an assassination attempt occurs right in front of them, the unarmed black-skinned archons suddenly manifest flaming greatswords and metal wings.  Agroup of adventurers is falsely accused by the aasimar guards, and detect evil cannot detect guilt.  Will the archons believe the adventurers’ protestations of innocence—and possibly even recruit their aid—or deliver fiery judgment?

A lillend’s song holds the key to opening a magical door.  But to earn this boon from her, an adventuring party must aid her bralani kin as they fight bearded devils.  This puts them on the wrong side of a squad of legion archons.  The lawful outsiders reluctantly share custody of a fortress overlooking a titan’s grave, and the bearded devils’ zebub handler demands the archons do something about the azata/mortal incursion.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 19

Still sick.  But went to work.  Which is the worst kind of sick, really.

What’s that?  What about the leech swarm?  I give you soldiers from Heaven, and you ask about leech swarms?!? 

Er, I mean, we did those already.

Lantern Archon

Supposedly it’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.  But DR-ignoring 1d6 damage light rays work against the darkness, too.

Lantern archons are the newbies of the lawful good planes (typically known as Heaven or the Heavens)—freshly promoted good souls.  They mostly act as scouts and messengers, but with their gestalt ability they are also living symbols of the power that can come from good people working together.  On warning, though: Despite being lanterns, at Int 6 they’re not that bright.  *rimshot*

When Priambus Ironbrand died in a swamp, he was carrying a family heirloom—a sword of legendary power whose abilities he had just begun to unlock.  Now a lantern archon named Primus with only dim memories of its previous life, the young paladin’s soul has nevertheless been sent back to ensure the sword finds its way into helpful hands.  Unfortunately, Primus is not the only glowing ball in the vicinity—the swamp is infested with will-o-wisps—so it is having difficulty convincing others of its good intentions.

All the lanterns in an abandoned mansion, once the home of a vampire death cleric, are actually lantern archons bound in some kind of unhallow effect.  Driven mad by their imprisonment, if freed each archon will spend several (1d6+1) rounds attacking randomly until it is calmed or driven off.  If all are released at once, they form two gestalt whirlwind entities that attack with even greater ferocity.

In its zeal to help battle the forces of darkness, a lantern archon attaches itself to an adventuring party whose cleric shares its patron deity.  But the archon has little notion of concerns like stealth, failing to shield its light while scouting ahead, calling out sinners with truespeech, and otherwise making a nuisance of itself.  The surest way to get rid of it without angering the Heavenly Hosts is to find a good cause or site for the archon to protect.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 20

Mailbag!  Will has some tweaks to the augnagar and aurumvorax; see his notes in the comments.  (That link may not work for Safari users, because Blogger sucks and I shouldn't have tried to fix it.  #thisiswhywecan’thavenicethings)  Both syringesin and therealkendrickdane had things to say about the kyton here.  And therealkendrickdane also caught the prelapsarian vibe of my lammasu post, writing, “Eden, much?”

Did I miss anyone/thing?  Write me!

Speaking of the kyton: Is it time I finally see the Hellraiser franchise?  I’m not a horror fan at all except for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror short fiction series, but I’m at the point where I wonder if I’m missing out on canon.

Hound Archon

As loyal as the dogs whose faces they bear, hound archons are sentinels and guards.  Like dogs, they can be as gentle as a retriever or sheepdog…or as vicious as a pit fighter.  On the whole, though, their willingness to fight to disarm (rather than to maim or kill) and their willingness to hide in the form of humble strays speaks to a humbleness other celestials in the goodly planes might do well to emulate.

Though human-looking, a tiefling foundling has the blood of a pit fiend and a rakshasa in his veins.  A solar oracle has foreseen the boy doing mighty deeds, but their nature is unclear. In order to turn his heart to mercy, a hound archon has followed the boy in the shape of a lame cur, using his mortal form to gently inspire the boy’s kinder and more protective impulses.

Bascomb the True is said to be able to track an evildoer by scent across even the Astral.  He faces a hard choice when the scent of the young druid he has been tasked to protect goes one way, and that of his nemesis, a strange hive-mind-led yeth hound pack, goes another.

The foppish Lafont is known for tailored heavensilk shirts, tight breeches, and womanizing (or at least the appearance of it) to a degree most archons find shocking.  But he also has the reflexes and disarming abilities of a duelist or monk, and despite his carousing, he is able to keep his partner-in-hijinks, the bralani Éleveth, in check.  If it’s all an act, though, it’s quite a good one.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 19

Harbinger Archon

After all this time, finally The Daily Bestiary’s first archon!  Archons are the solders of the lawful good Heaven(s) or the equivalent in your campaign—creatures that strive to uphold the ideals of good and order simultaneously for the benefit of all, as well as aiding the weak and inspiring self-improvement.  Of course, sometimes upholding means doing some throwing down…and most archons have the aura of menace, spell-like abilities, and weapons to do so.

With outsiders, it can also be difficult to separate the office from the individual, and this is especially true of archons.  Like a good parish priest or a beat cop on the job—where it can be hard to tell where the stole or badge leave off and the person begins—archons are often known for their trappings: a trumpet, a shield, a star.  In the case of the weaker archons, this is especially true—lantern archons are the lights they shine; harbinger archives are the floating orreries that reflect the heavens.

Harbinger archons are heralds by and large, but sometimes also companions, advisors, and familiars.  When they’re not acting as communing conduits, that advice is mostly proverbs and simple wisdom; harbinger archons are not much more independent in spirit than their gestalt-joining lantern archon cousins.  Still, it’s best to heed their words, and heed them early.  “Harbinger” is in their name for a reason—by the time big-time heralds like the trumpet archons show up, the metaphysical Scheiße has already hit der Deckenlüfter.

An apprentice at the Lower Arcanum has called a harbinger archon familiar years before he should have been able.  Stranger still, the archon’s discs and spheres describe no known set of planets, zodiac signs, or even planar configurations.

A constellation of four harbinger archons, servants of Lumiya, descend on a town formerly beloved by her, only to find her shrine long abandoned and her faithful gone.  Confused, they determine they must guard the shrine until they receive new instructions.  They threaten to use their blades on anyone tainted by evil or chaos who trespasses too near former shrine.  Given that said shrine is now a gambling hall and a den of spice addicts, blood may be spilled soon despite the archons’ clumsy best efforts.

Comet of the Stag’s Crossing is named for the celestial event her physical body tracks. She eagerly communes for the needy in order to aid and evangelize.  But during her last session, her voice came out harsh and grating during the last two answers, as if the message had been hijacked by a third party.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 18

Should it be den Deckenlüfter?  Because the fan, being the thing hit, is a direct object, and thus in the accusative case?  Help me out, people.

Oh, and today marks 100 Tumblr posts and almost 300 Blogspot posts.  Go us!