Elder Deep One

Back in April we covered the deep one and the deep one hybrid.  If you felt something was missing…well, the alphabet is as cold and unyielding as the lightless depths where deep ones dwell.

But now, finally, the elder deep one rises from the murk!

Aside from being much larger (Gargantuan) and more powerful (CR 14) than ordinary deep ones, three abilities set the elders apart.  The first is their Mind Reflection (Ex) ability.  Able to not just resist, but actually reflect mind-affecting effects back to their source is a fearsome advantage.  The wrong spell cast at an elder deep one could easily take out a party’s caster (and now that Occult Adventurers is on the shelves, parties are packing more mind-affecting magic and powers than ever).  Second is their Devastating Strike (Ex).  I don’t care what level your character is—when the monster starts taking apart entire buildings, it sends combat into a whole new realm.

But it’s their Deific nature that really stands out.  Elder deep ones can grant spells; despite not being gods as sages understand the concept, and despite only being CR 14, they still can channel divine energy to those that venerate them.  Elder deep ones even grant domains.  They even have associated divine weapons! (They probably can’t actually hear prayers per se…but there must be at least some tether there, so who knows?)

In any case, that makes any deep one or deep one hybrid allied with an elder a potential adept, cleric, or worse.  It means that deep one elders are closer to gods than even mythic PCs, without ever facing a mythic trial.  It means they have direct access to hierophanies that bypass everything humans know about mortality and divinity, and that puts them within hailing distance of the terrifying Great Old Ones and their nigh-incomprehensible Outer Gods.

Most terrifying of all, that might mean all the deep ones’ dread prophecies and assertions—that this reality is a horrible accident, and that one day the Outer Gods will return to tear down existence itself—might be true.

Interrogating a terrified devil reveals to adventurers that the Great Old Ones are indeed real…and worse, their worship thrives.  Soon the adventurers are caught up in a conflict between cultists of slumbering Bokrug and graffiti-scrawling cloaker followers of the King in Yellow.  Each side of the conflict is directed by a deep one elder, one of whom has bound the devil’s fraternal twin.

Legendary elder deep ones like Mother Hydra typically live far beneath the sea—but not all.  At least one seems to have claimed an ancient dwarven citadel, where it rutted under the waterfalls with an umbral dragon to create terrible, quivering half-dragon spawn.  Another conquered the Flying City of Adar, then mummified itself so it could watch for signs and portents far up in the atmosphere.

The hunt for a mesmer who skipped bail in Baltimore has led a party of investigators through some pretty odd turns, including battling moonshine juju zombies in the Shenandoah Valley, attending a hill giant circus run by lamias, and purging a hound of Tindalos from a university hospital.  Now the trail has led to New Orleans—just in time for Mardi Gras.  But there is something different about the krewes lining up for the parades and extravagant balls this year.  There is more magic in the air than usual, the fey floats have disappeared completely, and many of the krewes that remain have a distinctly fishy look to them.  Investigation reveals that nearly all of the non-fey krewes have been infiltrated by deep one hybrids.  Worse, the secret societies’ rites and rituals have been twisted into prayers to a deep one elder, who now stirs beneath New Orleans’s swampy sewers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 69

If you’re looking for a more physical vs. magical threat, try the kuo-toa leviathan from the 3.5 Underdark book (my review here).  If you’re looking for more about fantasy krewes, the Scarred Lands setting (see that same link) has you covered.

I still haven’t had the time to write up any thoughts about my PaizoCon experience.  (To give you some idea of what my life’s been like in the past month and a half, tomorrow will be my 11th straight day of work.)  But since I missed anomalitstic’s New Orleans game, guess which adventure seed is for him?

Deep One Hybrid

(Illustration by Dave Allsop comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Setting aside movie faces—pale-skinned vampires, furry-cheeked wolfmen, Pinhead—“the Innsmouth look” is probably the most famous physiognomy in horror.  “[Q]ueer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes," Lovecraft wrote—facial features that betray a mingling of human blood with something old and piscine.  While Lovecraft spent a lot of time (and even more adjectives) describing unknowable horrors from beyond space and time, he was just as invested in the potential threat of monsters living among us…and even becoming us…or rather, us becoming them, through interbreeding and slow degeneration.  (And whoa does his biography—rampant racist, parents both died in a mental hospital—explain a lot about those particular preoccupations.)  Whatever the genesis of his stories, they gave us the deep one hybrid—your chance to have the folk of Innsmouth in your game.

And not just in your game…but on your character sheet.  Because the most interesting thing about deep one hybrids isn’t their creepy appearance or even the fact that they don’t die but rather evolve into full-fledged deep ones, sloughing off their troublesome humanity.  No, the most interesting thing about deep one hybrids is that you can play one as your character!

How’s that for a ballsy move?  If you’re a scene-chewing role-player, taking on a character desperately trying to stave off his eventual monstrous fate is a hell of a hook.  (So is eagerly rushing toward it, if you’re in a horror-based or evil campaign.)  And if you’re a more of a dice-dropping “roll-player”…well, why fear death when you get +1 natural armor and a chance of morphing into a fish creature with +6 Str/+6 Con when you go?  A deep one hybrid isn’t the right PC for every campaign, but in the right campaign, it’s killer (literally).

The local church of Shalessa has always venerated the sea and its bounties…but lately its worship has skewed heavily toward the worship Saint Vitun, a spirit of ropes, rigging, and ships lost in stormy weather.  The rise of Saint Vitun’s mystery cult has brought with it more public penances—flagellations (self- and otherwise) are up—and more “accidents” such as suicides by hangings (and at least one strangulation that may have been a prank gone wrong or may have been murder).  The clerics pushing the rise of Saint Vitun are of course deep one hybrids eager to take control of the village.  A hidden rope dragon has caught on to their secret, though, and she longs for someone to tell this juicy gossip to.

A local adventuring group calls itself the Thrice-Damned.  Consisting of a tiefling, a changeling, and a deep one hybrid, they all fear the day that the latent curses in their bloodlines will manifest.  Unfortunately, their desperation leads them to take any job they can, often for unsavory clients, which may lead to true damnation if they’re not careful.

A series of seaside monasteries is staffed with deep one hybrid friars.  These clerics and monks are famous for the potent ciders they distill from local apples and cranberries.   The fact that they are also slavers is a well-kept secret.  Adventurers might uncover one of their press gangs in action and stop their recruitment efforts…but if they follow the slave trade back to its source, they will find a swampy temple being excavated by conscripts, marsh giants, and constantly writhing, darkness-vomiting things that might have once been wayangs but are something entirely different now.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 70

I’m not finding stats for Bestiary 5’s default deep one hybrid on the OGC so you’ll have to go straight to the source.

There’s a lively discussion about deep merfolk happening in the Blogger comments and one about deep ones happening in the Tumblr comments and reblogs.  Check them out!

Deep One

If D&D flirted with Lovecraft and early Pathfinder began a love affair with him, by now 6+ years in we’ve achieved a full-blown marriage.  While the aboleths’ skum servants echoed Lovecraft’s deep ones, now we have the (fully statted) real thing courtesy of Bestiary 5. 

And while the base model skum is slightly more physically powerful than the default deep one, the deep one is the bona fide article: equally immortal, capable of dwelling far deeper below the waves, preferring claws or magical wands and staves to crude tridents, breeding with humans for hedonist pleasure and out of religious fervor rather than crude necessity…and of course, they’re in much closer communion with their dark lords Cthulhu, Dagon, and the other watery powers of the deep.

Deep ones’ low CR and magical aptitude mean you can use them early in your game and then scale them up throughout the life of the campaign.  Their plots are often as murky as the waters they live in, hinted at only by the fish-eyed hybrid children they leave in their wake.  Unless signs in the stars or some other dark portents force their hands, deep ones can afford to be patient.  Effectively immortal, they have all the time in the world to bring about the end of the world.

A judge has been sentencing women to jail for all manner of minor offenses.  Some have come back chastened, some broken…and some pregnant.  Adventurers who investigate find ample evidence of bribery and clues leading to an odd cult.  They might even catch a deep one in the judge’s chambers, demanding in bubbly Common that the crooked magistrate (a deep one hybrid) supply even more sinners to fill the cells of the Sodden Jail.

Adventurers are sent to a gillman village to take delivery of a coral wand crafted by a merfolk artisan.  While there they meet a strange fishlike creature claiming to be a vodyanoi who demands the wand for himself.  He promises that if they agree he will teach them a series of recitations guaranteed to unlock great power within them.  If they refuse, they find themselves in the path of a flood (courtesy of a sabotaged levee) soon after.

Deep ones and fey used to share the Elder World, until the deep ones’ worship of dark powers grew too foul and the fey ended the world to save it.  Today, in what they call “the Twilight World,” they rarely cross paths.  But the deep ones remember their humiliation.  Over the eons they have worked to poison the icy realm of the Winter Queen, subtly polluting the waters that are the genesis of her iceberg lair.  Now all winter fey bear a trace of the queen’s corruption, and they are beginning to turn to worship of the Great Old Ones.  Of course, the human world is ignorant of these developments, until adventurers uncover a cult of winter fey and deep ones attempting to take over their village.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 68

I’m typing this from the set of a commercial shoot (video and photo).  Those of you who know me know how much I’m enjoying myself.  #spotthesarcasm #seriouslyshootsaretheworst

[Edit: Actually it went rather well.  I’ll stop complaining now.]

This week’s radio show asked you to get up, get by, get better, and get right with God.  (It did not ask you to get up and move that body.  Sorry, Technotronic fans.)  Look for classic Sleater-Kinney, Talib Kweli, and Lucinda Williams, along with new tracks from the Julie Ruin, Tegan and Sara, A$AP Ferg, and Look Park (a.k.a. Fountains of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood).  Stream/download it here till Monday, 4/25, at midnight.