Doru

The smallest of the divs, dorus are little more than floating heads.  But divs are all about ruination…and to ruin, all you really need are a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, and a mouth whispering the right foul words.  Appropriate, then, that dorus are obsessed with secrets (the promise of which being the reason they are so often pressed into service as familiars) and spread pain through lies, exaggeration, and the power of suggestion.

A doru has teamed up with a gang of tooth fairies to prowl the city streets, pairing the div’s stronger magic with the fairies’ speed and cunning.  The doru uses the fairies to threaten secrets out of his victims—if they refuse to divulge, he lets the fey go to work.  Of course, if the secrets he learns are especially juicy, he lets the fey go to work anyway.  After all, toothless gums have a much harder time telling what they know…

Manfred of Orm was a black-hearted but confident student of magic in his apprentice years.  When he returned for graduate studies, he used the Collegium’s cold iron summoning circle to bind a doru familiar.  So publicly taming the outsider won him repute, but months of his servant’s whispers, insinuations and prodding have left the once easygoing man a suspicious and scheming wretch.  When adventurers come to town to peruse the Collegium’s library, Manfred is convinced they are plotting to replace him and attempts to eliminate the spellcasters one by one.

Jealous of her comelier rivals, a noblewoman uses various ruses to abduct, imprison, and eventually behead them.  The doru Ablavad thinks this is great fun, and he eagerly guards her collection of heads while ruminating over the secrets the desperate and Wisdom-sapped girls shared with him during their confinement.  Meanwhile, Ablavad’s master, an aghash, is prepping the noblewoman for ever-greater acts of despoliation.

—Pathfinder #19 80–81 & Pathfinder Bestiary 3 84

I’ve gently poked at Ed Greenwood before for his love of undead, floating eyeballs, and especially floating skulls…but given my obsession with vargouilles, beheaded, and now dorus, I suppose I’m just as bad. 

By the way, you can find a hair more on the doru in Pathfinder #19: Howl of the Carrion King.

Looking for the dodo? We covered it with other exotic familiars back here.

Thanksgiving at The New Indie Canon means Thanksgiving songs!  (Of which there are two, and one of them is “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre.”)  It was also the 20th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy.  Tune in! 

(By the way, the feed cut off the first song, Manchester Orchestra’s very nice “Girl Harbor.”  Show link good till Friday, 12/5, at midnight.)

Akvan

My Wednesdays have become rather involved schedule-wise of late.  Rather than rush to get this entry out by midnight, I'll post more thoughtfully in the morning.

Aghash

Got your Bestiary 3 handy?  Okay, flip open to page 83 and look at the art.  Pretty much sells itself, doesn't it?  That eyeball of a face!  Surrounded by fangs!  Those claws!  And is that a cloak?  Hair?  Sand?  All three?

Even if you never use another div (though I think you should, because the idea of corrupted genies with weird phobias is awesome), the aghash is worth putting into your campaign.  As an embodiment of the evil eye given physical form, it can curse from near or far (with spectral hand) and then dimension door to safety—making it a potential long-term threat capable of dogging the PCs’ every step.  And while the aghash’s genie origins and sandstorm ability suggest desert encounters, its compulsion to despoil and ruin things of beauty might find it up to no good in the most secure art museum or harem, far from the ruins favored my other divs.

Plus, the evil eye is a universal enough notion that you could ally the aghash with any number of monsters (hags especially) or come up with other origins.  (Dare I mention the Far Realm again?)  Given its wide-ranging potential, the following adventure seeds play relatively fast and loose with the aghash for exactly that reason…

A blood hag and her aghash servant lived deep in the desert, but come to town from time to time for their own mysterious purposes—to hunt changelings, to acquire components for crude homunculi, or to treat with ghuls over a corpse dinner.  The aghash’s main task is to lure comely men to the blood hag’s lair via suggestion and minor image.  Comely women it jealously keeps—and maims—for itself.

A cyclops witch can trace his ancestry back to a demigod of shipwreckers and reavers.  He has the ability to pluck out his own eyeball and send it in the form of an aghash to spy on and assault his foes.  (Killing the aghash temporarily blinds and enrages the cyclops, but he has magic to compensate…)

Hobgoblins attack the market square with no memory of why, imperiling a decade-old peace treaty.  Ghouls begin to make raids in broad daylight.  A once harmless club for spouse-swapping nobles descends into scarification and gouged-out eyeballs.  Behind it all is the subtle suggestions and darker magic of an aghash.  Though a div, he serves not Ahriman, but something known as the Yellow Sign…

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 83

Slim Naccache wondered, “Are you forgetting [adlets] are not evil but chaotic neutral ?…”  Thanks for the second look, Slim!  But looking back over yesterday’s seeds, I’m still comfortable where I netted out.  No alignment judgments are made in the first adventure seed.  In the third, the emphasis is on the capricious breaking of a contract.  (Besides, given how I describe the noble houses’ games, I doubt the emperor is a paragon of virtue.)  In the second, the shaman is indeed responding to an unusual situation with an evil act…but chaotic neutral creatures are certainly capable of evil, and the adlets might have been reasonable neighbors otherwise until the wendigo forced their hands.

Plus, keep in mind that adlets have no compunctions about cannibalism (which is specifically called out as evil in books like 3.5’s Book of Vile Darkness).  So adlets may be chaotic neutral, but they’re not far from the evil border.  They point is, they are CR 10 hunters from a resource-poor land.  In good times, they are likely good neighbors and trading partners.  In bad, they hunt, and previous alliances or contracts or the nobility or intelligence of their prey be damned.  They aren't evil per se, in the same way nature isn't evil.  A winter storm isn’t evil, but it will kill you all the same…

Shira

By now, we’ve covered plenty of divs, so you know the drill: They’re exiled genies “striv[ing] to ruin and despoil all things created by mortals,” the Bestiary 3 tells us.  The lion-like shiras are the hunters who “embody the deadly nature of the wilds and the dispassion with which beast and land might turn against mortals.”  Ever been on a camping trip where absolutely everything went wrong?  Now imagine you were being hunted the whole time, too.  By something you couldn’t hide from, because it had true seeing and was sapping your strength with waves of fatigue.  And that the thing hunting you could devour not only your body, but literally gobble up your soul.  That’s a shira.

Interestingly, unlike some divs, shiras don’t have any easily exploitable vulnerabilities like the tolling of a bell or the color red.  However, their customary solitude and compulsion to hunt the most powerful prey available might be avenues a GM could exaggerate to an obsessive-compulsive degree to evoke a properly straight-out-of-the-myths feel.

As an added bonus, the div stat block is supremely adaptable.  Any number of bestial monsters could devour souls and hate cold iron and good weapons.  Need an über-barghest?  Use a shira, with the dust from its pelt now iron filings and cave dirt.  Does the rakshasa they’ve angered need a gladiatrix bodyguard?  Shira.  Does an evil werewolf clan need a loup-garou leader?  A shira fits the bill, and the first time it shrugs off the PCs’ silver weapons they’ll be terrified.

A wealthy patron has fantasies of hunting with an amazonian queen reputed to live on a forbidding island.  He hires—or more likely uses his influence to coerce—adventurers to escort him there.  But they find out the island is cursed, populated by divs and their tormented slaves.  The queen and her retinue are shiras, and they are always up for a hunt—starting with the wealthy patron.

After an adventuring party foils his drug smuggling operation, a rakshasa reaches out to a shira for aid.  While the div does not trust the shapeshifter—rakshasas by nature indulge themselves overmuch in the very trappings of civilization that shiras seek to strip away—his offer to prove she is the greatest hunter in his urban landscape is too appealing to ignore.

Of the three werewolf clans that inhabit the Kikkery Forest, the Scar Flanks are by far the most otherworldly, boasting rangers whose powers wax and wane with the migration of birds and barbarians whose rage manifests in ghostly spirit totems.  But when the stars align for Sabermas, they enact a rite to unite all the clans under their banner, summoning a loup-garou from the Realm of Gnawed Bones.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 90

If you’re looking for the shipwrecker crab, we covered it just last week in fact.

Sepid

Sepids are the warlords of the divs, leading the lesser breeds into battle against both genies and the mortals whose oblivion they crave. In addition to being physically powerful, sepids’ array of spell-like abilities is dizzying.  They can also deflect magical rays, making them good mage hunters, and they can literally rain down destruction on opponents.

Sepids’ congenital flaw is that they are also pathological liars cursed (at least in their dealings with mortals; I’m guessing while leading their own troops they have more flexibility) with always saying the opposite of the truth and doing the opposite of what they’ve promised.  They’re ordinarily too intelligent (19) and wise (19) to let this fact trip them up, but in the right setting PCs might be able to turn this tic against them.

A sepid leads an attack on the minaret-studded city of Pesharv.  While his aghash soldiers content themselves with destruction and looting—hating beautiful mortals and their works, they take particular pleasure in molesting and scarring attractive citizens and putting the torch to sumptuous homes—the sepid works to eliminate influential members of the city’s suli minority, hoping to crush the spirits of the genie-blooded populace before rounding them up for deportation and slavery.

Born of the soul of a shaitan, a sepid still gravitates toward creatures of earth as siege breakers.  Currently it has a trio of blue dragons in its employ—the sepid has promised to help them take care of a society of troublesome wizards.  Adventurers might ally with the wizards against the sepid by manning their towers’ defenses.  They might also find a way to use the sepid’s own inability to tell the truth to sow discord among his lawful dragon confederates.

Two sepids guard a passage in the pyramid of the Never Pharaoh.  Bound to repeat a Knight and Knave riddle, one of them has been ensorcelled to always speak the truth—a stricture so against its nature it causes both spiritual and physical pain (they being largely one and the same thing for an outsider).  If the party cannot answer the riddle both sepids attack, but if the party does successfully pass the test, the truth-telling sepid will hunt them later—after having sewed its own mouth shut.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 89

Edit: This post is a revision because I was slammed schedule-wise.  The original post contained no intro and only the first and third adventure seeds.

Pairaka

Pairakas are blatantly disease-ridden divs who hide behind beautiful forms, sowing corruption and ruination—first of the morals, then of the body.  Their similarity to night hags and succubi (both in terms of bailiwicks and abilities) may catch even experienced parties off guard…at least until the pairaka attacks them for wearing the color crimson…

The Night Hag is no mean brothel.  Run by a pairaka, it is a veritable pleasure palace that caters to the rich merchants and aristocrats of Baghrev, male and female alike.  A patient creature, she uses her lustful dreams and bubonic plagues sparingly, allowing her patrons’ natural shame, jealousy, and corruption to ruin them over the seasons.  The Night Hag’s name is no accident, either—when her clients are utterly ruined, the div hands them over body and (especially) soul to a night hag confederate.  Recently, though, investigations by nosy clerics and sha’irs are moving up the div’s timetable.

A former marid, Sheliahgosh is now the Festering Tide, a foul pairaka.  She and her undead mermaid servants go from cove to cove, seducing sailors and fishermen who then carry the bubonic plague home to their wives.

A construct adventurer (perhaps a wyrwood from the Advanced Race Guide or a warforged from 3.5’s Eberron setting) is unaffected by the taboo-wallowing dreams that torment its fellows.  The pairaka responsible sends gnoll thugs and a redcap to disassemble what she refers to as “that clockwork upstart.”

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 88

Obviously, in Golarion pairakas are likely to have strong ties to Urgathoa and might ally from time to time with various fiendish powers of disease, lust, and corruption.

I have more stuff to say.  I have a bunch of reader comments to reply to.  But once again, tonight, I must beg off and sleep. And by “sleep,” I mean: go back to work and write radio scripts. 

Saturday’s radio show is triply late: It’s going up on Tuesday instead of Monday, SXSW is over, and so is St. Patrick’s Day. Nevertheless, enjoy an hour of SXSW and other fun tunes, then we switch over to Irish and Celtic rock of all stripes.  Download it.

(Music starts about 30 seconds into the file.  If the feed skips, let load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and enjoy in iTunes.  Link good till Friday, 3/22, at midnight.)

Ghawwas

The Daily Bestiary’s first div!  As I mentioned in my back-and-forth with The Great Beyond/Horsemen of the Apocalypse’s Todd Stewart, I’m super-excited by these fallen genies, which strike me as a great addition to the Outsider catalog. 

Some background: I never jumped aboard the Al-Qadim train; I was a “basic” D&D player with a high-schooler’s earning power, and anyway I couldn’t understand why TSR would launch a desert campaign when they were already in the middle of Dark Sun. 

That changed with some of the Campaign Journal articles in Dragon, especially Wolfgang Baur’s “Scimitars Against the Dark” in issue #198.  Suddenly I saw the appeal of an Arabian setting, especially one tinged with a bit of darkness.  (More recently, I tried to pick up some of the Al-Qadim PDFs Paizo had for sale before they were flushed from the online store, but my wallet only stretched so far.)  So when divs appeared in the Reign of Fire Adventure Path, I was stoked—they’re a neat idea whose time has come.

End background.

Anyway, ghawwas: evil fish genies.  Can boil the very seas.  Expect to be poisoned.  Don’t ring any bells.

To the pilot of a battered skiff, a small island looks like safe refuge…until it is revealed to be a barren atoll shielded by the hallucinatory terrain of a div.

While a single bell will enrage ghawwas, a whole town’s worth usually suffices to keep them at bay.  When every bell in every steeple and minaret in Yizmir vanishes overnight, ghawwas are the immediate suspects.  Without a full complement of bells, the port city is vulnerable.

An investigation into the disappearance of local sources of cold iron reveals the strangest arms smuggling operation ever.  Locathah embroiled in a war against the divs are in constant need of cold iron, as it rusts quickly in their salty environs.  The fey see this as an opportunity to enrich themselves and remove the hated metal from their territories, and have taken up dealing in weapons and ore through selkie intermediaries.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 87

Is it just me, or does the ghawwas look like Mer-Man crossed with a lionfish?

I wonder if a div influenced my rather ridiculous but awesome purchase of this last fall.