Paradise Dragon

(Illustration by Leesha Hannigan comes from the PathfinderWiki and is © Paizo Publishing.)

It was pretty much inevitable that we’d get planar dragons.  (Honestly, I expected them sooner than Bestiary 6, but outer and esoteric dragons arrived instead, a sign of Pathfinder’s pulp sci-fi/horror obsession).

What’s not inevitable is their naming convention.  It would have been really easy to just slap planar monikers like “Abyssal” or “Maelstrom” on top of these dragons.  Instead, we got something far more interesting: names that seem more conceptual, more distilled, that tap into essential aspects of those planes—apocalypse, bliss, crypt, edict, havoc, infernal, paradise, rift.  You feel like each dragon species could have its own planar layer or demiplane based on its specific descriptor.  (Elysium probably has many fields; Havoc feels like a specific one.)  It’s not a huge difference, but it’s a subtle and meaningful one. More importantly, it’s a surprise from the authors, and this late in the Bestiary life cycle surprises are to be treasured.

So…the paradise dragon.  Like all planar dragons, it manifests a chunk of its home plane around itself (a nice touch that feels very video-gamey or anime but still awesome).  The paradise dragon’s specific special abilities also pack a lot of heavenly flavor.  The text indicates that they create holy sanctums of light and harmony to shield their followers, and that extends to their abilities, which aid, heal, resurrect, rebound, bull rush, or banish as needed, allowing them to reshape even the battlefield to their liking.

Like archons, these dragons are pretty much the ne plus ultra of right and good…but for adventure design purposes, there’s always that one bad apple more concerned with his particular rightness than the public goodness.  Also, in the single sentence of descriptive text we get, B6 mentions these dragons attract followers…and what policies or actions a planar dragon deems necessary to protect its followers may not jibe with PCs’ plans.

The paradise dragon Pearl of Moonlight discovered the long-hidden prison lair of Alefbetraxus, an elder wyrm.  Overawed and a little infatuated by his age and grandeur, Pearl seeks to free the primordial dragon, and she will brook no interference.  Unfortunately, Alefbetraxus is still guided by his instinctual drives, one of which (in fact, the reason for his imprisonment) is to eradicate any and all forms of elemental planar pollution.  Poor Pearl has no inkling what he might do to the world she guards, where one in twenty humans has geniekin blood.

Paradise dragons are discouraged from dwelling too long on the Material Plane, as cults inevitably form around them.  The empyreal lord Enoch the Admonisher, Scourge of Pride, makes it his business to test the character of these paradise dragons, often using powerful adventurers as cat’s-paws.

Since the Shattering, there has been no single lawful good plane—a triumph of existential undermining sponsored by the daemons of the Shroud.  What remains are scattered islands of conceptual reality—the Seven-and-Seventy Heavens—each one held together and defended only by the iron will and adamantine claws of a paradise dragon and its followers.  (This includes whichever archons haven't yet fled the multiverse in shame.)

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 104–105

Not all the planar dragons appear in Bestiary 6; some show up in Pathfinder Adventure Path issues.  I think at time of writing we’re still missing one from the Maelstrom (PathfinderWiki indicates it’s the tumult dragon).  (Or maybe that plane rejects having a designated dragon species as being too orderly…or maybe doesn’t need one, thanks to the protean race…)

Speaking of the dragons we got (or didn’t)…we were probably never going to get all of the abomination, humour, mineral, thaumaturgic, sin, and virtue dragons that Mike McArtor teased all the way back in Pathfinder #4: Fortress of the Stone Giants.  But I fervently wish we had gotten some of them, and to this day I love the weirder, wilder Golarion they suggested.  If you ever get the chance to dig up the early Pathfinder issues—especially those explosive first 18 issues—do it!

Occult Dragon

(Illustration by Christina Yen comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Astral, dream, etheric, nightmare…occult?

At first glance, the occult dragon seems like a bad entry from a late-’80s anniversary issue of Dragon Magazine, following the usual recipe of “Add adjective and stir until dragon.” 

But upon closer examination, it actually fits.  Just as the other esoteric dragons have a transitive plane or dream dimension to call their own, occult dragons hail from the Akashic Record, a demiplane tucked away in the Astral that includes “a visual library of perfect psychic records of every moment in the history of the multiverse” (per Occult Adventures).

As such, it’s no surprise that these are essentially draconic librarians, researchers, and diviners—when your home demiplane is a library, that’s all to be expected.  They also make excellent appraisers and psychometrists, able to read the value and the history of an object (and use it, if it’s a magic item) with consummate skill.  For this reason, they are collectors and hoarders to a degree even other dragons find shocking (which is saying something), particularly when it comes to psychically charged objects.  Finally, they are also perhaps more urban (and urbane) than any other true dragons besides golds, happily moving in disguise through humanoid cities.

Interestingly, occult dragons aren't particularly strong.  Perhaps this is because they only hail from a demiplane…or perhaps it says something about the relative power of truth versus dreams…

Finally, even if esoteric dragons and the Akashic Record aren’t your thing, an occult dragon makes a good one-off encounter.  There are plenty of magical libraries or universities that might have a guardian that is, for all intents and purposes, an occult dragon, no matter how you re-skin it for your players.

Bruised and bleeding from more than a dozen sets of claw marks, a young occult dragon crashes its way into an adventuring party’s sanctum.  It gasps out that it has “the answer” for them, then passes out from its wounds.  What “the answer” is will remain a mystery unless the adventurers can heal the dragon…and defeat the pack of hounds of Tindalos that arrive hot on the dragon’s heels.

One of the more notable spy networks on Avilar is comprised primarily of occult dragons.  They spend much of their time in human or half-elf form, often selling their services as detectives and object readers (a convenient cover for their abilities that helps them forge connections to those in power).  They seem to be interested in knowledge for its own sake, but surely no one builds such a powerful network without an agenda of some kind…

Adventurers make their way to a library that appears to be perched on the edge of Infinity.  The library caretakers are a collection of clockwork beings, gnomes, and oddly civilized gnolls.  If they make trouble or wander into the Restricted Wing, they are met by the library’s real masters: a nest of occult dragons.  The dragons at this library specialize in knowledge relating to something called the Aeon War, which occurred long ago but, paradoxically, is about to occur for the first time (again?)… 

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 96–97

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!

There are only about 60 minutes of Christmas left, but that’s still plenty of time to stream/download last Tuesday’s Christmas radio show!  Two hours of holiday tunes, from old favorites to ska covers and everything in between.  Enjoy y’all, and since I think I’m taking tomorrow off, I’ll have more tunes for you in the New Year!

Nightmare Dragon

(Illustration by Christina Yen comes from GeekDad and is © Paizo Publishing.)

It doesn’t take a lot to sell the nightmare dragon.  It’s a shapechanging, acid-spitting dragon that lives in the nightmare section of the Dimension of Dreams—that’s scary enough.  You know who else lives in that neighborhood?  Soul-stealing night hags.  And Leng.  Like, all of Leng.  You get the picture.  (And if you don’t, a quick look at the nightmare dragon’s stat block, especially at higher age categories—with abilities like terrifying presence, rising nightmare, and dream terror, not to mention the magic of a full-fledged psychic—should convince you.  These dragons are bad news.)

Interestingly, the nightmare dragon isn’t the strongest of the esoteric dragons—not by a long shot.  This may be a statement about the redemptive power of dreams and hope, or the triumph of the conscious mind and willpower (and thus the Astral) over the depths of the subconscious.  It may also explain why nightmare dragons, particularly the younger sort, are so eager to team up with night hags—for power in numbers and access to sleeping minds and souls—but in doing so, they humble and debase themselves further.

Also, like certain other dragon species we’ve covered, nightmare dragons are worth including in your campaign even if you never touch the rest of the esoteric dragon species.  If dragons are rare in your campaign, PCs might never know they face a Nightmare Dragon™—they’re facing Rannix, the Crawler in Dreams, who then surprises them with horrifying psychic powers.  Or, if you’ve drilled into your players that your world’s dragons operate on very Krynn-ian lines—metallic dragons = good, chromatics = bad—imagine their shock when they encounter nightmare dragons completely outside their understanding of draco-cladistics.

Against their better judgment, adventurers take part in a drug handoff down by the docks.  This is a bad idea in most cities, but it’s particularly foolhardy right now—because they are in a city on the shores of Leng.  The adventurers’ exchange with their denizen contact is almost complete when two nightmare dragons burst from the water, breathing acid everywhere.  Someone narced on the deal.

A nightmare dragon resents the rule of the Nightmare Lords.  She wants to carve out her own domain—and she thinks she’s found a way to do it.  By harvesting the silk of bloated spiders known as fever weavers, she can stitch together the dreamscapes of sleeping mortals, forcing them to share each other’s nightmares.  The sewn-up dreams of a small city would be an excellent start to her empire.

A magus of the Black Blood is determined to unlock the secrets of kundalini, the serpent fire—specifically, its dark opposite, the ashen shadow.  He abducts an adept of the Hidden Flame and tortures him, forcing negative energy-laced needles into the monk’s chakras.  Attempting to rescue the monk, adventurers arrive just as the last needle pierces the poor man’s crown chakra.  As the monk writhes in agony, the ashen shadow erupts from his brow as a nightmare dragon determined to torment the bodies and dreams of all it encounters.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 94–95

Anyone else notice the nightmare dragon illustration seems to have too many eyes?  (Or the right number of eyes, in very wrong places?)  A nice touch.

I’ve mentioned her before in these pages, but if you’re looking for a role-playing model for an older nightmare dragon, a great option is the night dragon Synn from the “Voyage of the Princess Ark” series—a creature far more interested in sowing emotional pain, fear, and loss than any amount of crude physical destruction…and willing to spend a once-in-a-century wish to see her plans to fruition.  She pops up in various places in early “VotPA” installments, but Dragon Magazine #163 was her crowning achievement.

Khala

Over time, one-off dragon species have become one of my favorite monster categories.  I love their wildness and their weirdness, how they harken back to early folktales and myths, and how each one’s set of abilities and characteristics is a surprise instead of checkboxes on a five-dragon matrix.

So naturally I’m delighted by the khala, a female water dragon from Bulgarian mythology.  Introduced to Pathfinder via the Golarion’s dark, vaguely Slavic fairytale land of Irrisen, the khala has added supernatural cold to her portfolio as well.  A three-headed, snake-like, ice-spewing beast, she brings winter with her wherever she goes.  Even her bite is laced with a poisonous chilling disease.

The presence of a khala implies both history and corruption, because there is a warping in the race’s past.  Somewhere back in the distant strands of time, they were prouder wyrms and their lands more beautiful or fertile places…but no more.  Khalas tend to linger in the same regions as witches, hags, cruel magical or military tyrants, and frost giants…anywhere where decades or centuries of cold, corruption, coercion, and control have worn down the land and its people.

There’s also the mystery of how khalas reproduce, and the fate of their male zmey counterparts.  Ecologically minded adventurers might wish to see the zmeys restored; defenders of civilization might wish the khalas wiped out completely.  Other dragons might fill in for the zmeys as well—the flame-spewing, multinecked gorynyches seem a particularly good fit.  But the demise of the zmeys might also serve as an origin for the cursed taninivers or the mysterious damned azi as well…

A mysterious wood has grown up around Dun Harrow, hiding the ancient fort and its renowned, possibly magical stone carvings.  Even the weather seems to linger chill and stormy over the surrounding shire.  A khala has used repeated suggestions to take a dryad queen as her lover and force the fey’s kinswomen to reshape their forest as she desires.

When the shattering of the Sphere of Black Omens corrupted the Elflands, Par Tarthelion suffered the worst.  Its crystal towers grew dark and cracked; its trees turned thorny and brittle; its rivers ran with blood and the weeping of sores.  And when the cold winds blew from the north, no longer held at bay by elf weather magic, Par Tarthelion’s guardian green dragons shriveled and split, each one transforming into—or was it birthing?—a khala.  If there is one small consolation, it’s that the nightmarish beasts cannot breed, the guardian greens all having been female.  At least, that is what the elven exiles hope…

When the Bohemians left the poor, overworked foothills of their homeland in search of the rich plains of the American Midwest, they brought their work ethic and their mournful songs…but also their nightmares.  Through possession, subterfuge, and the mysterious Grey Roads of the Otherlands, hags, soulbound dolls, dybbuks, ice devils, and the terrible khalas all found their way to the Great Lakes region.  Canadian gnomish settlers and furriers report that monsters hold the northern shore of Lake Huron, and Lake Superior is nearly entirely overrun.  Adventurers who were running guns to the Lakota Indians and the Lake Crowfolk tengu tribes now find themselves being offered pardons if they will go with a U.S. Army detachment to drive the khalas out of the Great Lakes.

—Irrisen: Land of Eternal Winter 59 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 151

Irrisen pluralizes khala as “khala”; B5 uses “khalas.”  I like the former but went with the latter for consistency.

Jungle Drake

(Illustration by Ben Wootten comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Drakes have been with us in the Pathfinder game since Bestiary 2, with a handful appearing in each subsequent volume.  This familiarity doesn’t exactly breed contempt—c’mon, we love dragons—but it does breed complacent expectation.  You turn to a drake page expecting a speed surge, an environmental ability or two, maybe a special attack, and blah blah blah.

That’s where art comes in.

Show me the GM who can turn to Ben Wootten’s jungle drake and not want to put it in a campaign.  That camouflaged, squirrel-splayed, iguana-toed, archaeopteryx-tailed beauty is begging to be in your game—only it doesn't have to beg, because you already put it in there, probably while I was still writing this.  Last entry I was encouraging you to look past the art as a useful way of rethinking the monster; today the art is 90% of the reason to love this monster.  Just goes to show you: Every monster entry is worth approaching with fresh eyes.

(The art does have one problem—this is a jaguar- or even horse-sized creature (that is, size Large), but it’s painted to look the size of a faerie dragon, based on the surrounding limbs and leaves.  (Maybe it’s a juvenile?)  So remember that the adult jungle drake, while small for a dragon, is still a semi-proper dragon—at least the size of the raptors in Jurassic Park.)

Beyond that?  It’s a drake optimized to work in jungles.  If you’re a tactically minded GM, you can probably wreak a lot of havoc by properly comboing the drake’s woodland stride/predatory grab/speed surge abilities into a really nasty dine-and-dash strategy (particularly against Small PCs, familiars, or pack animals).  An attack by a full rampage could leave PCs wounded, scattered, gearless, and abducted/devoured in short order.

After their dirigible is blown off-course, adventurers have only one chance to make it back to civilization: a forced march through a jungle to a bubbling spring where sailors take on water.  With the monsoon season approaching, the party has two weeks to reach the spring before the last ships depart north, despite the canyons, bugbears gnashers (see the Monster Codex), flame pillars, and worse that stand in their way.  The last challenge is a sprint across an isthmus patrolled by ravenous, grasping jungle drakes.

Divinations indicate a druid was reincarnated as a jungle drake.  Adventurers are hired to escort the druid’s master to him.  They do not realize that the master intends to skin his former pupil and use the hide to craft a particularly powerful variant cloak of the bat (see Ultimate Equipment).

The blue-skinned gnomes of the Tamuti Jungle are known for their worship of totem animals, spirits that both represent and watch over their tribe.  Among the more well-known Tamuti tribes include the Sun Bears, the Jungle Drakes, the Anoa, the Blood Orangutans, and the Oru Man, a two-headed, thin man-like cryptid.  The Jungle Drakes are notorious raiders and nomads, who not only torment their neighbors but also practice the normally taboo act of riding their totem animal into battle.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 100

Etheric Dragon

(Illustration comes from artist Christina Yen’s website and is © Paizo Publishing.)

When push comes to shove, stat blocks beat fluff in most monster books.  That’s especially true when it comes to dragons—three complete stat blocks on two pages don’t leave much room for description.  And so it is that 17 words in Bestiary 5 sum up all we know of etheric dragons in terms of personality, hunting style, culture, and outlook.

The good news is, that gives you plenty of space to play.  So, what do you want your etheric dragons to be like?

It’s a given that etheric dragons are at home in the gloom and mist.  They dwell on the Ethereal Plane and seem to almost have one foot in the grave (or at least the spirit world)—in fact, by the time they are adults, the mere act of traveling renders them incorporeal.  Their breath can leave a luckless victim only a few heartbeats away from becoming a corpse, and their claw/bite attacks are as deadly to spirits as they are to physical beings.

Beyond that, it’s up to you.  Has being surrounded by spirits left them cold, cynical pragmatists untroubled by mortality?  Do they take their survivalist instincts to extremes, hiding in multiple, trap-strewn lairs throughout the Ethereal?  Are they like intelligent jungle cats, slipping silently through the mists to strike and then fade away?  Has being neighbors with dangerous creatures like xills and night hags left them leery of other species?  Or, inspired by them, do etheric dragons treat mortals simply as otherworldly cattle to be subtly herded until their bodies or souls can be put to the dragon’s use?  Do they collect secrets of the living and the dead, acting as brokers for their nightmare and occult dragon kin?  Or do they resent these soul and scroll collectors, and guard their realms jealously?  It’s all up to you…

Unbeknownst to him, a recent encounter with a manasaputra has caused an adventurer’s chakras to shine like a beacon.  The glow of the pooled ki energy glitters so brightly to those who can see it that it lures an etheric dragon out of his den to investigate.

The ranger school at Landolin is more demanding than most.  Youths who join the school hone their woodcraft to a keen edge, with special attention paid to the art of camouflage.  The instructor is no human, elf, or even centaur, but an etheric dragon so stealthy and with wings so tattered that he appears as little more than a swirling flight of leaves when he moves.

The great city of Penrus, capital of the world (or so the Penran centurions would have you believe), is mirrored by a giant necropolis on the Ethereal Plane, were souls manifest before they make their pilgrimage through the Black Gate to the Land of the Dead.  Around it is a murky wood of trees bent by the weight of time and twisted by etheric currents.  Young etheric dragons hunt here, ignoring properly manifested souls on their pilgrimage but devouring anyone who strays from the path, be they alive or dead.  The etheric dragons are especially fond of hunting mortal spellcasters and occultists, who tend to have rare books and relics the dragons can pore over when they take up adult lairs in the Deep Ethereal.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 92–93

I have so much reader mail to reply to.  You have been heard, readers!  Your words are loved!  Stay tuned and I’ll respond as I can carve out the time.

Ether Drake

One of the largest and most powerful drake species, ether drakes made their way from the Ethereal Plane to the Material generations and generations ago.  But they still retain psychic powers from their time on the esoteric plane.  They may not be as malevolent as many other drakes…but at CR 10, with the usual drake speed and the added ability to condense ether around their victims, they don’t have to be.

Haunted by mistakes from his mortal life, a spiritualist’s phantom urges his mortal companion to challenge beasts that toe the line between the Material and Ethereal Planes.  The spiritualist recruits a party of adventurers to head into the Barrowlands, so that he may test himself against the ether drakes that have a nesting ground there.

On the world of Overhaze, the Ethereal and Material planes aren't separate.  Rather, the Material Plane juts out of the Ethereal in the form of mountain ranges of reality poking above the cloud-covered spirit world.  Adventurers who descend into the Haze face enough number of threats, from roving spectres to mindlinked rampages of ether drakes that coordinate in silent and stunningly effective strikes.

Save a saint?  That’s no small order.  But when the request comes from the lips of a reincarnated St. Brendan the Navigator, who has left the afterlife in order to see this mission fulfilled, what else can a group of Catholic clerics do?  Saint Columba’s soul has been stolen from Heaven, and divination reveals it has been spirited to an island in the North Atlantic.  St. Brendan believes he knows which one—a mist-shrouded isle from his travels that he never told any chronicler about, for fear that others might mimic his journey.  The beach is indifferently guarded by ether drakes; more dangerous creatures—and otherworldly temptations—lie further inland.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 99

Yes, I just listened to the audiobook of Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut's Windlass.  That second seed owes a little to the mysterious setting of that book.

Dream Dragon

(Illustration by Christina Yen comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

It’s our first esoteric dragon!  Don't let the label scare you.  The dream dragon is definitely one of those “Even if you don’t use any other [insert monster category here], use this one” monsters.  Maybe your campaign is not much concerned with Occult Adventures’ migration of monadic souls across the Transitive Planes, so astral dragons and occult dragons aren’t your thing.  Even so, there’s still probably room for a dream dragon in your game…because hey, dream sequence! 

How you play dream dragons is up to you.  They might be the ultimate expression of the Dimension of Dream’s whimsy and chaos, acting similar to Alice in Wonderland characters.  Or dream dragons might be the calculating masters of the dimension, with the natural psychic might to dominate the countless dreamscapes that manifest every night.  Or they might be indifferent hunters, as happy to devour adventurers as they are to snap up animate dreams and night hags. 

Or they might be all three at once.  After all, dreams refashion themselves into new shapes with new moods every night.  Why couldn’t dream dragons do the same?

Adventurers are exploring the hazy Ethereal Plane, determined to track a raiding part of phase spiders.  When they reach the spiders’ lair, they find a dream dragon snacking on the magical beasts.  The dream dragon intends to take the spiders’ surviving captives back to the Dimension of Dreams, and she reacts violently to any attempt to rescue “her” thralls.

The senior faculty of the College at Redstone whisper that the lecturer on ley lines is actually a gold dragon living incognito among them.  In actuality, the lecturer is a dream dragon posing as a gold posing as a half-elf.  He has been using his vast talents to pick apart students’ dreams as if he is searching for something important.  Lately, though, his searches have gotten less discreet—and far less gentle—as if he fears some looming deadline.

Travelers to the Dimension of Dreams speak of a giant paddlewheel craft captained by a positively radiant dragon.  The craft was a dream vessel created by a great wyrm dream dragon (via dream voyage) and then enchanted again and again to become permanent.  Though the great wyrm has passed on, the vessel remains.  Adventurers intend to use the vessel to sail into the dreams of a sleeping crocodile god, but they must defeat the great wyrm’s heirs first.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 90–91

I’ve been too swamped lately to make a big deal of this, but unless something goes catastrophically wrong I’m planning to be at PaizoCon this coming weekend!

I’ve never actually attended an RPG convention before—I’ve only done anime and small-press comic conventions—so this will be a totally new experience for me.  

If you’re going to be there as well, you should totally reach out and say hi!  (I will be the guy with glasses and a beard wearing a lot of black.  How many of those could there be in fandom, right?)

Dragonkin

When the Golarion setting was introduced, it was very consciously billed as “the best of all possible worlds.”  That Panglossian take might have raised the eyebrows of the Candide fans out there, but it did clearly establish the philosophy underpinning Golarion’s construction: Golarion intended to give you a logical place to set pretty much every kind of adventure you wanted.  A Viking setting?  Easy.  Mummy-filled pyramids?  Sure.  But Golarion kept going places a lot of other settings don’t even attempt: Renaissance scheming, the French Revolution, mammoth taming, or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks-style sci-fi?  Done, done, done, and done. 

But where were those hoariest of fantasy tropes, the dragonriders and their loyal dragon steeds? 

Turns out, they weren’t on Golarion itself.  But they were a few planets over, on Triaxus.  And the dragons were actually dragonkin. 

These Large creatures are smaller and less powerful than true dragons, but more flexible in game terms.  Their alignments aren’t tied to their color, they can use arms and armor, and at CR 9 they are powerful PC allies without becoming game-ruining Mary Steeds.  That makes them ripe for using in your game, whether you want to keep them on a remote continent or different planet, sprinkle them sparingly throughout your setting, or go The Full Dragonlance.  Even to the most jaded fantasy player, there’s something magical about dragons, especially one you can call your very own.

When a ranger’s mother dies, it is her duty to take her place at the side of her mother’s dragonkin partner.  But a rift between mother and daughter is what set the young ranger adventuring in the first place, and the dragonkin still flies in the legion of a lord who the ranger has distrusted all her life.  The ranger and her friends must travel to the front lines to befriend the dragonkin and see what comes next.  If they don’t, the dragonkin will come looking for her anyway, possibly even becoming an enemy of the party.

Adventurers drilled to fear chromatic dragons and revere their metallic cousins are often caught up short by the wildly divergent alignments of dragonkin.  When good-hearted blue dragonkin scouts cross the Ambergris Strait in search of fugitives from the deposed Wraithflight, adventurers might attack them before the blues can make their friendly intentions known.  Meanwhile, one of the most brutal members of the Wraithflight, a gold dragonkin commandant, has installed itself at the right hand of the primarch of Redgate and begun whispering tales of blood, gold, and righteous fury into the primarch’s ear.

The planet of Tortal has only known two kinds of dragonkin: the stern whites who serve Gaullin’s Knights of the Air, protecting that cold land from serf uprisings and the clockwork Deathless, and the reclusive greens who dwell in jungle observatories along the equator and are bloodbound to their sorcerer-thralls.  When the greens in three cities collaborate to open a portal during the Concordance of the Fox, when the red moon darts in front of the constellation of Lupin the Hunter, dragonkin of all colors come spilling through the magical gate.  The resulting draconic, social, and political upheaval will change Tortal forever—and could send certain adventurers’ careers soaring…

—Distant Worlds 61 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 98

Last Tuesday's radio show had three missions: 1) Celebrate Pet Sounds’ 50th anniversary.  2) Honor Guy Clark.  3) And play a ton of new music, especially from Kyle Craft. Those are not goals that should be attempted in the same two hours, but I'm really happy with the results.  The bad news is, since I’m late posting this the link expires tomorrow (Monday, 5/23) at the stroke of midnight.  Stream/download it now to enjoy it before it’s gone.

Cetus

(Illustration by Wayne England comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Sea dragons are blustery but basically good-hearted commodores, forever wandering across the vast domains they protect.  Krakens are slave takers and empire builders, grasping for more power above and especially below the waves.  Sea serpents are practically natural disasters, violent irruptions (it's a word) that shatter a captain’s calm, control, and keel.

But when you want the classic sea-monster-that-holds-a-city-hostage, that’s when you turn to the cetus. 

This is the monster that Perseus fought, and I admire Bestiary 5 for being willing to go to the mat to make this monster live up to its mythological rep (even if there are no mythic ranks in its stat block).  It’s Colossal in size.  It regenerates damage.  It can control water, winds, and weather, allowing it to box opponents into their own harbors and foil aerial attacks.  Speaking of aerial attacks, it can leap 1,200(!) feet in the air to lunge at flying opponents…and even if the cetus’s victims are not unlucky enough to get fast-swallowed whole, the cetus’s dispelling bite is bound to ruin many of their enchantments (including possibly the ones keeping them aloft).  Heck, the cetus is even just plain bad luck—literally just being in its vicinity can be enough to screw up your dice rolls for the next minute (an eternity in combat).

In other words, this is a beast truly out of legend.  Normally I don’t like monsters that seem specifically designed to foil PC (and player) actions and drain their spell reserves (I’m looking at you, golems).  But for the hostage-taking, sacrifice-devouring, city-extorting cetus, it feels right.  The designers even throw the players a bone straight from the Perseus myth—the cetus is vulnerable to petrification.  So the next time your adventurers are at the flea market, keep an eye out for pickled medusa head…you know, just in case.

Petrified does not mean dead.  Adventurers race to stop a locathah terrorist from resurrecting a legendary cetus, currently lying like a stony statue at the bottom of the Devilfish Deeps.

What’s more terrifying than a cetus?  Any being powerful enough to use a cetus as a mount.  A greater dullahan antipaladin rides a cetus into the mouth of Hellbone Harbor, bringing dark tidings from below.  The cetus also bears a howdah containing all the souls of the dullahan's many, many victims.

The Afterlife is a river—one that flows every onward toward Oblivion.  Even what mortals conceive of as the Four Blessed Heavens or the Thirteen Precincts of Hell are merely ports of call along the river’s course.  But one rule of the Afterlife is ironclad: No vessel may travel upstream.  Individuals may sometimes escape the River of Death through powerful magic, fell bargains, or even dogged, determined fording upriver (usually resulting in undeath by the time the pass back into the mortal world).  But any attempt to build and sail a ship upstream is met with a fiendish cetus determined to crush the blasphemous vessel and all aboard.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 54

Speaking as someone whose eldritch knight nearly single-handedly took out an ulgurstasa courtesy of fireballing while flying, I can tell you the cetus’s Impossible Leap (Su) ability is terrifying.

One fact I didn't tackle above is that the cetus is technically a dragon.  I’m a huge fan of one-off dragons, and I like the idea of one of these crashing an otherwise stately gathering of metallic, chromatics, and imperials…

Have I mentioned yet how much I enjoyed the Pathfinder setting sourcebook Distant Shores?  In that book the mythic hero-gods of Aelyosos have a thalassic behemoth problem, but in your campaign maybe a cetus would do the trick instead.

Also, I’m repeating myself from my last entry, but the cetus is an excellent monster for a Scarred Lands campaign.

It’s last night’s radio show!  From folk songs about First Communion to Beyoncé in just two elegant hours.  With new music from Dr. Dog, Deep Sea Diver, the Frights, and more.  Stream or download it here.