Vayuphak

(Image by Jason Juta comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

The vayuphak is one of those “If you use only one monster from Book X, use this one” monsters.  Even if you don’t care about psychic monsters, this asura deserves a look. 

A) It’s a monster of Thai origin—cool!  (Though my Googling has found me only one reference, on a royal barge.  If you can find out more, definitely shoot us a comment.)  B) It’s got such an instantly iconic look: blue skin, black feathers, bird feet, elaborate gilt armor contrasting with bestial tusks, and of course a wicked spear.  And C)…

There’s something that happens in certain works of fantasy.  Especially in novels, but in movies as well—NeverEnding Story and The Black Cauldron come to mind.  It’s that moment where the heroes are too late or have royally effed up.  They get to the Important Place, but it is already ruined, and the Enemy has moved on.

Or rather, mostly moved on.  Because in the most truly brutal of these fictions, the Enemy (or sometimes just the uncaring universe) leaves someone behind to gloat.  To mock the hapless heroes.  To be seen literally pissing in the ashes.

That’s what the vayuphak is. 

And (off the top of my head, at least) there’s no one great default candidate for doing that in the Bestiary books.  Even the other vulture-esque creatures don’t help: harpies have gotten too sexy; succubi are all about the foreplay, not the afterglow; vrocks like ruining, not ruins.  None do precisely what the vayuphak does, which is to laugh at the PCs’ pain and make sure what is ruined stays ruined.  They’ve even got an enveloping winds ability to make sure no one plugs them with a crossbow quarrel mid-gloat.  And with an at-will teleport, good luck landing a killing blow.  This monster has seen heroes like your PCs come and go, and even if it is driven and the defiled site reconsecrated, it knows it has done its work.  The vayuphak revels in the fact that what is broken cannot always be mended…and it is confident that it will eventually micturate on the PCs’ bones as well.

Young adventurers have made names for themselves as demon hunters.  Granted, that was only some tiefling toughs, a quasit, and some dretches—but still, bona fide demons.  When they are sought out by a parish priest to stop the desecration of an isolated shrine, they take the job immediately.  But when they arrive, they find the shrine long despoiled, as well as a corpse that looks identical to the parish priest who hired them.  Even as they attempt to work through their confusion, they find themselves mocked—and then attacked—by outlandish blue bird-men.  After the unsatisfactory battle, a traveling monk (bearing a bound, very resentful raktavarna) informs them that the bird-men were asuras, fiends rarely seen in these lands of angels and demons, that the monk has been tracking.  Clearly, something is going on…but what?

Gillmen have discovered a lost city—not one of their race’s great lost metropolises, but a settlement famous for herb lore and enchanted clay vessels.  Vayuphaks guard the city, though—even now they still manage to find new crockery to shatter—and the young gillmen don’t have the martial skill to tackle flying foes.  A cut of the discovery will go to the mercenaries who aid them.

The original cursed artifact that caused the birth of the vayuphak race does exist.  It is a gem-encrusted barge capable of flight between planes, and the vayuphak progenitor still sleeps aboard.  Claiming the barge will not be easy, even if adventurers can somehow move the slumbering fiend, for it is well guarded by a calikang (see the Inner Sea World Guide) and an Advanced vayuphak easily as large as its six-armed companion.

—Occult Bestiary 8

Speaking of the Paizo Blog, apparently the first printing of the Advanced Class Guide had some issues…?  (I haven’t played with that book, so that news missed me.)  Details on the fix and the second printing are here.  Also hella free swag.  Have a good weekend!

Asurendra

Literally “asura-lords,” asurendras are just that: lords of the asura race, second only to the mighty and unique asura ranas.  As powerful as most of the lords of the other outsider septs—and possibly more varied in terms of abilities—these entities are the result of countless of cycles of reincarnation spent working toward the unmaking of the gods’ creations.  At once beautiful and monstrous, meditative and murderous, ascetics who revel in corpse eating, asurendras are creatures of contradictions who have several lifetimes, long even by immortal standards, with which to carry out their goals.

Asuras can claim no one plane as their own—so Blood Upon the Blade claims two.  His palace exists partly in Hell and partly on the Material Plane, tucked into the dome of the Ahi Mahal, which he long ago convinced the caliph to deconsecrate and turn into a pleasure palace.  It is said that Blood Upon the Blade’s three heads allow him to keep one set of eyes in each plane—saving his third and final set to always be watchful that his zahhak servant (see Pathfinder #24) remains loyal to him and not the divs.

The Queen Consort of Bones is a blasphemous sage of death.  She likes to wander from conflict zone to conflict zone with her asura and undead servants, posing as a charitable religious order but spreading death, disease, famine, and unbelief.  An adventuring party might travel the globe detecting signs of her passage, but only the most powerful will be able to track her down.  Those who do should be warned she is never without at least one gashadokuro lover, with whom she shares a taste for fresh corpses.

A blasphemous sage of shaping, the asurendra Tang Lok Tarl travels from world to world reshaping primordial life to his desires and planting tripurasura minions to divert the faiths of nascent civilizations.  While it is not true he created the first disenchanter, it is true that his voidjammer, modeled to resemble a mammoth’s head, is practically an ark for rare and mutated creatures.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 24–25

I keep trying to think of ways to conceptualize asuras and it can be hard, especially if your multiverse already contains demons, devils, daemons, divs, and Lovecraftian horrors all at once.  Setting aside the Lovecraftian beasties—they’re from another dimension after all—maybe a useful way to think of all these outsiders is in terms of American political parties.  If demons and devils are the two main parties—and no, I don't really believe that; I vote every election; I’m just making an analogy here—daemons act like third-party spoilers diverting soul-votes from the others.  Divs are basically a loud special interest group, rakshasas are a greedy Chamber of Commerce…and asuras?  Asuras are the ones who want to bring the whole system down—the bomb-throwing anarchists who give even other anarchists a bad name.  The other outsider races may have more power in general, but asuras have several immortal lifetimes to plan.  And the results of their plots are often the black swan events (if you’ll excuse the trendy term) that have outside effects across the multiverse.  After all, in our world the bullet of one nationalist launched the Great War…a great shuffling of power that would lay the groundwork for World War II, which set up the sides for the Cold War and redrew the map for the regional conflicts plaguing so much of our present history…you get my drift, even if I’m playing very, very fast and loose with the history.  My point is, asuras don't have to be many or even the most mighty to make even Heaven and Hell tremble…

Aghasura

I said yesterday that even if you don't plan to use any other divs, you should find a home for the aghash in your campaign—they're simply too cool not to use. 

I’m repeating that for the aghasura.  Even if asuras don’t fit your cosmology, every campaign needs a giant scimitar-wielding rattlesnake!  Especially one that can lure non-evil creatures to itself by aura alone when it stands still, only to burst into action and slice at them like some poison-laced thresher.  (That attraction, by the way, is a nice nod to the aghasura’s Vedic namesake, a giant snake that lured Krishna’s companions into its mouth as if it were the space slug in The Empire Strikes Back.)

Given the aghasuras’ origins—a deity gave her pet snakes sentience and they thanked her by devouring her priests—it’s no surprise that these snake-fiends despoil active temples and guard ruined ones.  They're also likely to be patrons of faithless guards or those who find secular ethe (ethoses?) of power and law more persuasive than religion.

And 3.5 fans, don't feel left out—aghasuras might patronize sohei (from Oriental Adventures) who have lost their faith.  They work great as denizens of Baator or Gehenna.  And while they’d need an alignment change to serve the chaotic evil yuan-ti, they are natural heralds of Set or Shekinester the Acquirer, and might serve neutral evil sarrukh (see the always-mandatory Serpent Kingdoms).

No thief has ever returned from the Golden Halls of Nemra.  Burglars of evil intent set off a pit trap that drops them onto a sphere of annihilation.  (A fettered angel with magically clipped wings dispatches any agile survivors.)  Burglars with more noble hearts typically fall prey to the aura of the very lifelife snake statue at the end of the next hall…

The atheist Hand and Will school of philosophers managed to stir up a riot between skeptics and theists in the Agora—and in the resulting chaos, it was the clerics that the city guard hauled away for disturbing the piece.  In the short time their temples were unguarded, the Hand and Will agitators took up residence, carting holy artifacts away to be smashed and precious metals to be melted down.  Their brazenness horrified even their fellow atheist allies, but with the Hand and Will’s aghasuras guarding the Temple Mount, there is little anyone with faith or without can do to dislodge the rogue “school”—if they were every really students at all…

A lamia noble questioned her faith after nearly being slain by adventurers.  The next morning, an aghasura slithered into her bedchamber.  The lamia has now forsworn her demonic patron and is rallying desert giants and behirs to her side to loot a nearby necropolis.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 23

Once again I’m sneaking in a reference the fantastic short story "How Nemra Added a Line to the Book of Thieves," from Dragon Magazine #184.

Since I’m more Tumblr-focused, I don't give the Blogger site Minis by Finch nearly the attention I should.  In a nice bit of coincidence, Finch just tackled an adherer mini conversion that looks really cool.

And agelfeygelach asks:

Being a big fan of uniquely North American monsters—both indigenous and otherwise—I was really excited to see adlets included in the Bestiary, and especially to see them so powerful and terrifying. I wonder, though, if anything could be added to them to bring up the human ancestry they had in folklore….

My answer is, of course, is that you should add it/stat it…and tell us about it!

Adhukait

You’ve seen Cats, right?  (Of course you have.)  Picture Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer.  As conjoined twins.  Fiendish conjoined twins.  From Hell.  Born from the mutilated remains of a slain divine thief. 

Oh, and they're not singing.  Because they're stabbing.  You.  With their kukris. 

That—or rather, they, both of them, but with one mind, I forgot that part, so let’s go back to the original that, that singular, that that—is an adhukait.

Stabby, stabby.

Rejects of the gods recognize each other.  A medusa raised to believe the she is the direct descendant of a deposed moon goddess finds an able ally in her adhukait servant.  The pair is responsible for a number of temple desecrations and the disappearance of several priests.  The adhukait’s calling card in these operations is that he smashes every mirror and blackens any other reflective surfaces in soot or paint, to the delight of his serpent-haired mistress.

Hell is not the province of devils alone.  Mortal adventurers discover this while trying to sneak into Hell to slay a fiend.  The estate they are charged with infiltrating is claimed by a devil, but in truth he has been leasing the fortress for the past century from an upasunda.  The devil has no intention of returning “what is mine by divine right” to “that upstart godspurned wench,” and can point to the usual contractual loopholes to back himself up.  So the asura sends a squad of adhukaits to send a message and kidnap some “insurance” from the devil’s retinue...including the adventurers, if they’re not careful.

Asuras hate the gods, but a rogue band of adhukaits believes that if they devour the flesh and fluids of their divine forbear, they will become as like to gods themselves.  (They reason that it takes one to kill one.)  Who knows if the strange colloid they have found really is divine, but it does seem to augment their elusive auras and summoning abilities…

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 22

No radio show this week, as I mentioned. Instead, I went down to Charlottesville and hung out with an old DJ coworker of mine and her coworker—who just so happened to be the first female General Manager of my undergrad college radio station!  She graduated ten years before I ever set foot on campus, so I’m still smiling ear-to-ear from getting the opportunity to meet her.

Upasunda

Well, the basement situation looks much brighter than yesterday, though the plumber will tell me the real damage/cost.  In the meantime, just a placeholder post for today.  Next week I'll do my best to catch up on some of these missing entries.  Thanks for your patience and all the kind notes!  They make cleaning a soggy basement much less of a chore.

Tripurasura

Our first asura!  (Took long enough!)  As the Bestiary 3 indicates, the greater asuras are the accidents, mistakes, and abortions of the gods of creation, now determined to undermine all the gods have created.  The diminutive tripurasuras are their creations, blasphemous little imps designed to gather recruits and raw materials.  They are an excellent choice for an unusual “shoulder devil”—one with little interest in souls themselves but a lot of interest in snuffing out the flame of faith, and whose communes amount to divine eavesdropping and theft—in other words, not communion at all.

The tripurasura Arup currently hides in the knapsack of Benjan Weaver, having led the young boy out of the seminary and into the practice of arcane magic.  He has grown tired of the lad, though, and seeks to return to his true master, an ill-tempered water naga.  As soon as he can convince Benjan to abscond with the relics from his mother’s chapel, Arup plans to abandon him…or better yet, engineer his death at the hands of some adventurers.

A gang of gnomes travels from town to town, offering their services as handymen and exterminators.  Actually disguised tripurasuras, they are particularly good at convincing town fathers to repurpose old houses of worship to other uses.  They also excel at capturing and killing “pest” birds like crows, sparrows, and whippoorwills—which just so happen to be the forms taken by psychopomps like nosois.

The magocracy of Velosus sees religion as a crutch of the weak.  Only rural communities have small shrines or temples, and houses of worship are banned outright in the capital.  Meanwhile, tripurasura familiars are common among the wizard class—a bit of a status symbol, actually, and a clear sign that one adheres to logic, reason, and intellectual discovery rather than blind adoration or navel-gazing.  The little asuras encourage this self-congratulatory attitude…and indeed, they may have helped engineer Velosus’s irreligiosity in the first place.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 26

Velosus owes its inspiration to Mystara’s Glantri, of course.

Reader feedback!  I was psyched that jenna-darknight was psyched about treants.  And meanwhile, some of you picked up the T. rex gauntlet I threw down yesterday.  Check out this one from risqueybusiness:

A T-Rex has been Awakened, and its first sentient experience was with a magistrate, traveling to his new position. The magistrate taught the Dino the law in exchange for not being eaten (for is Law not the most precious of gifts?). The problem is, now the creature seeks to spread its infantile (yet expanding) understanding of Justice to whoever it meets, and its next target is [in the path of the PCs].

Fortooate weighs in:

When an eccentric old dwarf invites the party to his private island kingdom, they are surprised to find that his money and experimental restorative magics have turned fossils into new life... but when his creations begin polymorphing into virile males, and the utahraptors gain control of several ancient headbands of vat intelligence +6...

Meanwhile, dr-archeville brings the Law & Order clang:

In the Saurian justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the tyrannosaurs, who investigate crime; and the triceratopses, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories…

Inspiring knightdisciple to ask…

So does that mean the Velociraptors are the Defense Lawyers?

…and evocatively named thefingerfuckingfemalefury to exclaim:

SOMEONE NEEDS TO MAKE THIS A THING Give me a comic about dinosaurs practicing the law please :D

And ohgodhesloose adds:

There’s a great little book out there for the Broncosaurus Rex RPG that has a dizzying amount of adventure hooks and ideas for tyrannosaurs that can be adapted for a fantasy campaign.

The entire exchange and links to all of the above readers’ blogs can be found here (except Fortooate, who hangs out here).