Nuno

Major props to whichever Pathfinder author brought the nuno into the game.  It’s a Philippine monster (short for nuno sa punso, "old man of the mound") that Bestiary 5 gave a mushroom makeover and a branch on the gremlin family tree.  Best of all, B5 managed to translate many of the nuno’s original folkloric elements into game mechanics, such as the Nuno’s Curse (Su) and the delightfully one-of-a-kind Wax Locator (Su) vulnerability.  (In fact, my only quibble is that I think the Bestiary team should have added termites to the nuno’s Ant Affinity (Su) description—I recommend you house-rule that one.) 

It’s notable that while nunos are gremlins, unlike their kin they don’t go out of their way to proactively wreak havoc on others.  Instead they save their spite for those who disturb their homes…but those who suffer their unkind attentions will have no doubt that a nuno can be as spiteful as any jinkin.  You can also be sure that any villagers who live near a nuno will have a number of traditions to make sure they stay on the gremlin’s good side (as well as folk remedies to cope with any curses hurled their way).

Perhaps because they are more solitary creatures, some nunos become ascetics.  Most likely become geokineticists or psychics, but rare individuals might become mediums (if their mound is located near a place of power) or even spiritualists (the phantom likely coming from a corpse the mushroom-like nuno once fed upon to learn its secrets).  Nuno ascetics even get to customize their curses, which gives each one an individual signature.  (Revealing the extra details about a well-known nuno ascetic to PCs who take the time to make nice with the locals is a good in-game pat on the back.) 

One final note: The mound the nuno’s full name refers to of course means an ant or termite mound…but faerie mounds of quite another sort are also part of the legends of British Isles faerie stories.  And this happy accident of language is a great excuse to mash both traditions together.

Adventurers come across a young tanuki in the throes of agony after having disturbed a nuno’s mound.  If the adventurers can alleviate his suffering—most likely by dispatching the gremlin, but other means might be found—the tanuki will reward them with his grandmother’s magical cloak of transformation.  Of course, he doesn't have the grandmother’s permission to offer up such a treasure, which may get the party into trouble with an entire village of sake-enraged raccoon-dog-folk.

A group of youths become adventurers after a giant ant abducts one of their sisters.  A nuno took a fancy to her and wants her to sit for a portrait, so that he may have her image in his lair forever…but he thought nothing of sending one of his giant ant servitors to fetch her, rather than just asking.

At the winter solstice, the trooping faeries come to the faerie mound of Dun Gallar.  Led by the bronze-clad sidhe lords (treat as elves with the fey creature template), the fey circle around the mound three times until it rises up and opens to greet them.  There they remain for a week, before vanishing into the Underworld to return to their homes by spring.  The rest of the year Dun Gallar is guarded by the Old Man of the Mound.  This powerful nuno ascetic is said to draw power from the keepsakes of all the mortal heroes who have died beneath his faerie mound when they foolishly challenged the sidhe for one reason or another.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 132

The fact that I came down with fever yesterday afternoon as I was writing this was all that saved you from timely puns about the Nuno, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.  You’re welcome.

Naiad

Having checked off the nymph, dryad, oread (well, sort of; don’t get me started), nereid, oceanid, and even the cave-dwelling lampad (talk about a deep cut, amirite?), the Bestiaries were way overdue to serve up Greek mythology’s naiad.  But with nixies, nereids, and rusalkas all operating in a similar design space/ecological niche, there just hasn’t been the urgency…until now.

The good news is, it was worth the wait.  Not only do we get a decent low-CR fey creature—I like the inspiration tokens that recall Pathfinder’s Fey Revisited book, and the water bond is true to mythology while being more flexible than the dryad’s tree bond—but we also get naiads as a player character race as well!  That’s right, you can now play a full-on fey straight from your favorite myth.  (And we’re not talking just Greek myths—you find near-human river spirits in folktales across the world.)  If you want a wise, sorcerous master of water, play an undine, but if you want to play a mysterious, charming fey with a mystic connection to the rivers and streams around her, the naiad is ya girl.

The naiad also lets us do something we haven't been able to do as much on this blog lately: talk about the thematic potential of a monster.  (That's a problem once you get to the higher-number Bestiaries—you get more original monsters, which is great, but they lack the years of shared folklore and fictional heft that more established creatures have accreted.)  And naiads suggest at least two themes worth very worth exploring:

The first is transformation and journeys.  In myth, naiads are constantly getting transformed into other things: rivers, plants, animals, and so forth.  Now that’s not something you have to literally have happen in your adventures (aside from the odd baleful polymorph).  But I think on a metaphorical level it ties nicely to the naiad’s ability to shift her water bond.  You can easily imagine a naiad PC shifting her bond as she adventures…from the local creek to a nearby stream to the wide river…and then to waters she has only dreamed of…fast rapids, raging waterfalls, even great inland seas. At the same time, she’s also changing as a character, growing in terms of power and responsibility.  Your naiad PC probably won’t be turned into a laurel tree like Daphne, but she may be unrecognizable by the time she completes her final quest.  Water is always flowing, always moving, traveling across the world, taking new shapes and touching new shores as it goes along…why not your naiad PC, too?

The second theme is why so many of those mythical naiads wind up getting transformed into something else: assault/rape, lack of consent, and the aftermath thereof.  In these tales, naiads are always being chased by Zeus/Apollo/Pan or any number of minor gods or satyrs…and when they quite sensibly run and call for help, they tend to wind up transformed into something else.  Which is, when you think about it, a pretty goddamn high cost for not giving in to assault.  Take Daphne: She asked her father to save her from Apollo, and his best answer was to turn her into a laurel tree for the rest of eternity.  Gosh, thanks Dad!  Syrinx, fleeing from Pan, got it even worse: Her sisters turned her into a reed…and Pan, not sure which reed was her, cut them all down and then made the first panpipes so he could still hear her mournful voice every time he blew on them.  And most books still tell this story like Pan is a rascal who just went too far this one time.  Is that isn't male supremacy BS, I don't know what is.

But at your gaming table…in your myths…maybe the story doesn't have to end that way.  Maybe the PCs can step in and stop the assault.  Or maybe they can get justice for the transformed naiad.  Or, if you’re playing a naiad PC, maybe an assault is what launched her adventuring career...because she’s determined such an act won't be the end of her story, but rather its beginning.  No one can cut her down if she’s the one wielding the blade.

This is tough material to tackle sensitively, and not appropriate for every gaming table.  But if your group is a group that can handle hard questions and big themes, naiads offer a window into stories that don’t usually get told in an ordinary dungeon crawl.

Adventurers are warned that a certain fey lord is bound to betray them.  They will be put to sleep for 100 years, pixy-led into another realm, offered fruit that will trap them in Faerie, given seven-league boots that will rip them in half the first time they're used—any number of these awful fates and more.  Prepared for this, the adventurers are stunned to find the lord to be an amiable host, who immediately and publicly names them his guests, offers them safe passage, and aids them in their quest.  It is only on their return to his lodge that his trap is sprung.  The fey lord’s daughter is a naiad whom the demon-possessed satyr Blackhoof has named as his betrothed—whether she consents or not.  Blackhoof is coming to take his intended away with him this very night…and the adventurers, having partaken in the oaths of hospitality, are honor-bound to defend her with their lives while the fey lord watches.

A naiad gives a ranger her token, fortifying his will and steadying his hand so that every arrow he fletches flies a little straighter.  Unfortunately, at the next river he comes to he is immediately set upon by boggards.  The boggards are the thralls of the naiad’s jealous sister, who recognizes her sibling’s token and is determined to slay anyone who bears it out of spite.

The new dam at Carter Bridge is weeks behind schedule.  The delay is the fault of a naiad who has been working to charm, distract, and if necessary harm the workers there, fearing what the dam will do to her beloved stream.  But the snows were heavy this year, and if the dam is not built, the snowmelt may destroy whole villages during the spring floods.  Adventurers may use force or diplomacy to bring the naiad to their side.  If the dam is built, though, the change from wild stream to man-made lake causes the naiad to morph from female to male.  How the naiad reacts to this gender transformation could be the germ of many adventures to come…

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 200

Do you find a race of comely, all-female nymphs to be a somewhat sexist notion?  Guyads are a thing in Pathfinder, so I’m sure gaiads are too.

If you’re looking for more Pathfinder monster content, the new blog monstersdownthepath has a similar passion for our favorite beasts.  Dive in and see some fresh takes on your favorite beasts!

Looking for the myrmidon?  Look way back here.

Audio News #1: Last June I was on the Pathfinder comedy podcast Laughfinder (find out more here and here).  It was absurdly fun, and I’m delighted that my out-of-game rivalry with fellow (and much more professional) DJ Aaron Henkin has since become a running joke on the series.  (Laughfinder has also since been nominated for the City Paper’s Best of Baltimore awards!)

The guys were kind enough to ask me back to reprise my role as the shapechanging urban ranger Renn Tallshoe in their special end-of-season epilogue.

This is a bit of a weird episode, as it’s inspired by Aaron Henkin’s award-winning Out of the Blocks series.  So we trade the laughs and Dick Jokes™ for wry chuckles and a more thoughtful look at Red Point and its citizens.  Nevertheless it’s a lot of fun and features a number of Baltimore comedians, including special guests Erik Woodworth, Todd Fleming, and Bunny Themelis.  Enjoy!

Audio News #2: Ohmanohmanohmanohman.  It’s Tuesday’s radio show!  Youguysyouguysyouguys, I’m really excited about this one.  New SPORTS, new Phoebe Bridgers, Sufjan Stevens “Illinois” turns gold, and more!  This episode is a keeper, so stream/download here.  (Sadly, because I’m posting this on Blogger pretty late, the link is only good till midnight tonight (Monday, 09/18/17).  That’s less than an hour away, so grab it now!)

PS: Seriously, oh my God, the SPORTS happens at minute 2.  Trust me.

Liminal Sprite

Okay, I’m warning you up top: This post is gonna go some weird places.  And it’s as pretentious and bloated as a Harvard admissions officer.  So if you keep reading, remember I gave you a chance to bail before I became utterly insufferable. 

We cool?  Okay, here goes…

Guys.  Guys.  GUYS.  You have no idea how excited I am for the liminal sprite.

My paper for my college’s famously hard Religion 101 midterm?  It was on liminality.  The reason I spend Labor Day and New Year’s playing board games?  I made a lifelong friend tutoring a frosh on her liminality paper.  My favorite school mascot?  The Liminal State Bobcats.

So yeah, this is my kind of monster.  Add to that the fact that it’s a fey with a killer backstory, great art, and a low CR, and this just all adds up to “Squeeeee!” territory for me.

Bestiary 5 gives us plenty to work with: These are sprites cursed to rest neither out in the open or inside any building.  This leaves them only liminal (that is, threshold) spaces in which to make their homes—in sheltered doorways; behind shutters; under eaves, porches, and outside stairs; and so on.  That’s an absolutely fantastic fluff detail that also suggests some nice encounter options.  Need a witness to a burglary?  Liminal sprite.  A guardian for a magical gate?  Liminal sprite.  Servant of your world’s version of Janus?  Liminal sprite. 

Liminal sprites also love comedy, so they might hang around actors and theaters, particularly outdoor stages.  The next time your PCs stop into town for supplies, a side quest involving a liminal sprite wielding a girdle of opposite gender could be a delightfully Shakespearean side trek.  They’re also knowledgeable about local events and stealthy as hell (+17!).  And as familiars, their Repartee (Su) ability, which turns the +2 aid another bonus to +2d4, can help a chaotic sorcerer or bard really punch above their weight on Charisma checks.

But there’s another way to use liminal sprites.  If you remember your college reading of van Gennep and Turner—actually, I think my copy of The Ritual Process is still on my bookshelf somewhere—the original notion of liminality was meant to refer to certain threshold moments in time, not space.  These were transitional phases during rites of passage, or special times of the year, neither sacred nor profane, where the ordinary rules are suspended and society’s low and high temporarily occupy an equal footing.  (The perfect example of this is the move between (profane) Ordinary Time in the Catholic liturgical calendar and the (sacred) Season of Lent.  What falls in between?  Mardi Gras, where we get ready for weeks of repentance by gorging on baked goods and showing our tits.  It doesn't get more liminal than that.  Communitas, bitchez!)

This is perfect for liminal sprites.  Like many outsiders and undead, the best fey not only exist in and of themselves, but also represent or embody a larger something…sometimes a thing (like a dryad’s oak), but sometimes a notion (like the fear of drowning or the joy of the hunt).  The very curse that hampers the liminal sprite ray also gives them a conceptual/spiritual reason for being.  It might even nourish them in some way—I can imagine scenarios where a liminal sprite gets a small bonus during times of ritualized upheaval (like Carnival), certain days of the calendar (like Leap Day), or specific astrological events (such as eclipses).

“But wait,” you remind me, “this is for a game.  That’s a lot of conceptual bull$#!† to hang on a CR 2 sprite.”  And honestly, you’re right. 

But when the party sorcerer’s liminal sprite familiar gets extra antsy or powerful or flat-out vanishes during your game world’s version of New Year’s Eve, you’ve just made that world a little more real.  And if your PCs are planning a Leap Day treasury heist and are agonizing over whether to wait an extra day to recover spells, or go today to take advantage of the ad hoc bonus you’ve announced having a liminal sprite along will confer…but only until midnight…well, suddenly all those ridiculously pretentious paragraphs above have at-the-table, tactical risk/reward consequences.  Not bad for a 3 Hit Dice, size Tiny fey, right?

Gnomish thieves are robbing the citizens of Westphal blind during the summer theater festival.  They pick the pockets of the distracted citizens during performances, then vanish under the stage, where an open manhole allows escape into the sewers.  The gnomes have attracted the attention of a court of liminal sprites, but the faeries are only too happy to guard the portal for the gnomes, so long as they get their cut.  Last night, though, sewer-dwelling derros discovered the open manhole, and now a lot more than treasure is going to disappear into the darkness.

After a contentious year of peasant uprisings and arguments with Parliament, the queen declares a curfew during Winterfeast.  Among other things, this will prevent the midnight crowning of a Lord and Lady of Misrule—conveniently sparing the queen the need to surrender her authority, even if only symbolically, to a couple of upstarts during the week of parades and masked games.  The peasants are disgruntled, even angered, at the news…but the region’s liminal sprites, who delight in the festivities and are spiritually nourished by this time of upheaval, are outraged.  Until a Lord and Lady of Misrule are crowned, the sprites do not intend to let the city have a moment of peace.

In the Polish city of Kraków during King Casimir the Great’s reign, liminal sprites have been delighted to find companionship and shelter under the eaves of Jewish households.  The sprites enjoy eavesdropping on the debates of the rabbis, and they treat guarding the mezuzahs on their neighbors’ front doors as an honored nightly obligation.  So when the day comes that every mezuzah in the Old Town has vanished, and not a liminal sprite is to be found, the concerned Jewish citizens of Kraków want answers.  Acceding to their demands, Kraków’s prezydent hires adventurers to look into the mystery.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 158

The Liminal State Bobcats are a creation of my college friend, Dorothy Gambrell.  (She lived one floor up and one suite over freshman year.)  Webcomic fans will know her as the creator of Cat and Girl, one of the longest-running webcomics to date.  She actually has a Kickstarter going on right now with about 4 hours left, so this is an excellent time to show her some love.

If you’ll indulge me for a second: That tutoring session I mentioned above has become something of a story among a different set of my college friends.  The short version is that the frosh originally thought I was horrifying.  To her, I was a drunken weirdo.  (I maybe used to bring 40s to pep band rehearsals.  Whoops.)

But then came her brutal Religion 101 paper.  (To give you context, I didn't have to do any reading for the first three weeks of my 600-level grad school courses because of this same Religion 101 class.)  Turned out we’d both written about liminality; turned out I still remembered the course; turned out my advice on revising her paper helped earn her an A.  We’ve been friends ever since. But her roommate later told me she came back to her dorm saying, “The drunk guy from Band saved my paper and I have to lie down because the world doesn’t make sense any more.”

For any of my high school readers about to go to college, there’s an Alien-esque moral here: In a single room, no one can see you study.  (And later on, you’ll really get to mess with people.)

Kikimora

(Photograph comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

I’m thrilled that the Reign of Winter Adventure Path and Bestiary 5 introduced us to more Eastern European fey.  Particularly because so many of these fey are just the right amount of troublesome.  It’s really easy with fey to go too twee (this was a problem in 1e AD&D) or too grimdark and murdery (I love Paizo’s tooth fairies, but not every GM will).

The bird-beaked kikimoras, then, are a Goldilocksian just right.  A kikimora will torment his or her adopted family for months and even years, making the house appear dirty, sending illusionary (and real) swarms of vermin, or breaking things in order to be offered bribes to fix them.  Worse yet, kikimoras drive away potentially helpful brownies and house spirits, then go about ruining the reputation of these charitable creatures by posing as mean, mercenary versions of them.*

If all this sounds relatively harmless, remember again that this is for years.  (A redcap’s attentions may be fatal, but at least they’re over in a night or two.)  And when the fey aren't masquerading as brownies, they’re playacting as ghosts…and the prices most exorcists charge will likely beggar a poor family. Even once the fey is identified, its extradimensonal hidey-hole makes it exceedingly difficult to flush out.  And even if the poor farmwife could corner the kikimora, a fight with a CR 5 nasty house spirit is likely to be fatal to the average peasant.  But that’s the good news: Fighting a kikimora is a perfect job for journeyman adventurers.

The other reason I like the kikimora is that it’s a relatively powerful domestic terror.  That makes it perfect for nonstandard, magic-light, or slow-progression Pathfinder campaigns such as the Hogwarts-inspired school of magic or modern private school adventure seeds I sometimes post.  And while I’m not the biggest E6 fan around (E6, for the uninitiated, is a take on D&D/Pathfinder that caps out around Level 6, before wizards and clerics get too reality-bending), a kikimora is a truly mystical creature and a proper threat in such a low-powered campaign.  Heck, in most campaigns Baba Yaga is a Mythic (Pathfinder) or Epic (3.0/3.5) encounter…but I can easily see a low-magic campaign where she’s simply an Advanced kikimora with some scores to settle…

A kikimora tormented a local brickmaker for years.  Then one day he spotted the sigil she used to mark her hidey-hole scrawled into the baseboard.  Thinking quickly, he left out a growler full of barley wine.  When the growler disappeared, the bricklayer quickly bricked up the wall in front of the baseboard, gambling he could have her sealed in before the drunk fey would notice.  Years later, adventurers investigate the bricklayer as part of a murder case/exorcism (the victim was bricked up in an alcove and left to perish, and his starving spirit still thirsts for blood).  If during their search the adventurers dismantle the suspicious-looking, out-of-place wall in the man’s home, they release a kikimora driven to near-berserk fury from her long years of confinement and boredom.

On the lam, a gang of redcaps demand aid and shelter from a kikimora, citing ancient fey compacts and invoking the Queen of Air and Darkness.  The kikimora reluctantly agrees to hide the redcaps on her humans’ farm, but this becomes more and more difficult as their bloodthirsty natures take hold and local villagers begin to go missing.  If adventurers find her in the redcaps’ company, the kikimora is honor-bound to fight to the death (or at least until she can plausibly slip away via invisibility).  But if they encounter her separately, the bird-beaked fey (who knows she has a pretty sweet setup already) may agree to ally with the adventurers…for the right price.

Having achieved notoriety in the newspapers for averting a horrible dirigible crash at the London Aerodrome, adventurers are hired as private security for the maiden voyage of the new Geistzeppelin.  An already-difficult voyage involving a prickly captain, some would-be saboteurs, and a Sicilian magician’s pet girallon becomes even moreso when it turns out that a kikimora stowaway is loose on the magical zeppelin, courtesy of a hidey-hole glyph scratched on the Russian ambassador’s steamer trunk.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 152

*Weird.  For some reason I’m having a really hard time avoiding comparisons between these Russian fey and certain misinformation campaigns, fake news websites, and Russian-supported U.S. presidential candidates…  Something about replacing noble and beneficial institutions with kleptocratic mockeries of the same…  Crazy, right?

My readers: You’re going to use any mention of fey as an excuse to link to that one issue of Dragon Magazine you always link to, right?

Me:  …No. 

Me: You don’t know me. 

My readers: Whatever.

Me: (Aw yiss.)

By the way, sorry for last week’s utterly pathetic posting schedule.  A slow recovery from being sick and some bad time management decisions undercut me all week.  If it’s any consolation, I also had to skip two radio shows, so everything I love has taken a hit.

Hobkins

Given that I’m currently fighting gremlins of my own (the guest access where I’m at could give the censors from 1984 a lesson in information control), it seems appropriate to close out the year with one of the malicious fey—in this case, the mysterious hobkins.

Like all gremlins, hobkins delight in causing chaos and destruction.  Unlike other, more hands-on gremlin species, their particular joy comes from tricking their victims into destroying their own possessions—startling a maid into hurling her precious looking glass through a window, for instance, or goading a smith into dulling a masterwork dagger digging for nonexistent rats in the walls (simulated via ghost sound). 

Then there are the hobkins malefactors.  Gifted with psychic magic, they are able to control and direct other hobkins.  Worse yet, they are not content with causing their victims to destroy mere possessions—they want their victims to destroy their loved ones.  When a hobkins malefactor and his coterie descend on a village, he won't rest until every child in the vicinity is slain…ideally by his or her parents’ hands.

Interestingly, hobkins are somewhat out of phase with the Material Plane.  What this means—whether they are more tied to the realm of the fey, some other dimension, or some other alien genesis is up to you.

A hobkins has fixed his glowing eyes upon the son of a glassblower.  He torments the boy to the point of madness, hoping to get him to destroy five years of his father’s work—the stained glass windows for the new cathedral.

A hobkins is obsessed with an intelligent magical sword.  Whenever the sword gets a new owner, the hobkins attempts to trick the owner into destroying in.  After years of such pursuit, the sword has become quite paranoid, neurotically begging its owner to take more and more outlandish steps to protect it.

The Roanoke Colony has vanished.  Adventurers dispatched to investigate find the village intact but abandoned.  Further inspection reveals a site of slaughter in the dell below the village—children murdered by adult hands, then a mass suicide of those selfsame adults.  The culprit is a hobkins malefactor and his allies.  Worse yet, they had help—a black-hearted girl named Virginia Dare, whose malice originally attracted the gremlins, and who now lives among them as a queen.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 131

Happy New Year, everyone!  Here’s to a fantastic 2017—and many more monsters, radio shows, and other surprises to come!

Glaistig

(Illustration by Rogier van de Beek comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Ho.  Ly.  Crap. 

When the glaistig came up on the schedule (yes, I have a schedule—this operation may be tardy, but it’s organized), I had in my head the image of a goat-legged woman with some dancing skills and maybe a little blood-drinking.  That’s the one I knew from books like Brian Froud’s Faeries or 3.5’s Monster Manual III.

I was not expecting a CR 21 mythic creature.  (And not a little bit mythic; we’re talking MR 10).  We haven’t seen fey like this since the Kingmaker Adventure Path.

Turns out there’s another take on the glaistig, the nobler and more tragic Green Lady archetype.  But Paizo’s glaistig isn’t quite that either.  Instead, she’s a full-on faerie queen with mythic power in spades.  And “spades” is the operative word, because she’s also an earth-moving machine, courtesy of terrakinesis and various spell-like abilities.  Plus she’s a witch as well.  (And yes, there’s also plenty of dancing—emphasis on the irresistible.)

In other words, she is the ultimate fey spirit of the land and the green wood.  When kings go to faerie mounds to make pacts with the land, she’s the one who consummates the arrangement (and I do mean consummate).  When mythic heroes go to meet the Spirit of the Forest, she’s the one sitting on the throne.  When there’s a forlorn heath or a fertile valley whose sanctity even angels and demons respect, she’s the reason why.

Bound by oaths of fealty they cannot break, adventurers serve a king who takes his marching orders from Hell itself.  The arrangement has always been tolerable, as the canny liege makes sure to send them on errands—kill the chromatic dragon, slay the demon, rescue the princess—that align with their goals as well as his.  All this goes out the window when a glaistig swears vengeance against the hellspawn king.  Years ago the king made a contract with the glaistig, then exploited a loophole to ignore its strictures.  To a devil, this is fair play…but to a fey queen used to the equally slippery contracts of the fey, it is a base insult.  Now the glaistig is on the warpath, causing the very earth itself to hammer the king’s vassals.  The adventurers must choose: subdue the glaistig or take up arms against their lord...possibly forfeiting their souls.

Glaistigs are almost always encountered singly.  When they do gather in groups (usually known as circles or dancing circles), it is to face truly existential threats to their lands or to the fey realm.  On the world of Shadovan, a circle of glaistigs helped hide the elven homeland from ravening orc and half-orc hordes.  But when the elves who knew the secret of return were slain, their kin became a lost, nomadic people, forever searching for a way back to their lost land.  After millennia of searching, a ragtag group of adventurers may have found the key…but it means defeating the circle of glaistigs in tests of magic, riddles, and mythic combat.

Well-known glaistigs on Erren include the Green Lady of Loch Lalan, who rose the standing stones at Ashford; Hope of Summer, a golden-haired maiden who helps shepherds who give her gifts of milk and barley wine, but who once crushed a dragon’s throat with her kinetic whip; and Mae F’nula, who is slowly dying of an otherworldly fungal infection that has turned her woods to slime.  Finally, Queen Stoneheart is a glaistig warrior who regularly sends summoned earth elementals to spar with the equally huge bone constructs of the Bleached Court and the golem chariots of the Clockwork League.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 124–125

Sorry about the delays, guys.  I’ve spent the past two weeks doing hospital visits and catsitting, the combination of which is brutal to my writing time.

Once again I’m posting a radio show link with only about an hour to go before it expires.  Stream/download it now because it vanishes at midnight tonight, U.S. Eastern.  Don't miss it though—it’s good!  New Crying, Flock of Dimes, Mannequin Pussy, Amber Coffman and more.  But first, songs about the news...  Seriously, snag this before midnight. 

Feargaunt

There’s a being in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, He Who Walks Behind, who is a devastating hunter—in part because he is always behind his victims when he attacks, no matter how quickly they whirl around.  The feargaunt seems to owe some inspiration to him—with the Never Far Behind (Su) ability mimicking his signature attack, while Prideful Defense (Su) has shades of the Walker’s hubris—as well as to Bestiary 4’s nightgaunts, which in turn owe their inspiration to H. P. Lovecraft. 

All in all, the feargaunt is a unique ambush predator, able to inspire fear and then use that fear as a window to attack.  It may use fear, phantasmal killer, nightmare, and other effects to herd its prey and make the mental terrain more favorable, but the final tormenting touch will always be delivered personally.

In order to boost their abilities, a circle of psychics pool their mental energy to invent dream pylons, crystal shards called from the Dimension of Dreams.  The pylons are a success, empowering psychic magic in general and phrenic amplifications in particular.  But then new pylons begin appearing unsummoned from the dream realm, and with them come terrible feargaunts.  As long as they stay close enough to the pylons, the outsiders can attack from behind as if both they and their victims were standing in the Dimension of Dreams.

Adventurers are being stalked by a feargaunt as they journey through the Dimension of Dreams.  So far the being has only toyed with them, harassing them with its nightmare aura and the odd phantasmal killer.  But when a castle made of mirrors appears in the distance, the feargaunt howls in range and attacks in earnest.  The feargaunt is determined not to let his quarry reach the shining sanctuary where its every move can be observed.

The world of Murn has no Ethereal or Astral Planes.  Rather, the world is cradled by the Dimension of Dreams.  This makes it easier for the gods to touch the minds of sleepers—oracles and clerics converse with their patrons with a clarity that holy folk on other worlds might envy.  But physical travel through the Dimension of Dreams is dangerous, as feargaunts eagerly hunt those who would trespass on their domains.

—Occult Bestiary 28

I typed “The world of “Mirn” in that first seed, only to discover on r/rpg some Kickstarter using the same name.  Great minds…?

Speaking of He Who Walks Behind, let’s talk about He Who Walks Behind the Rows from “Children of the Corn.”  Many readers caught the “CotC” reference in my “Fastachee” post—I figured it was so obvious I didn’t need to call it out—but for those who were wondering, yes, that was a straight-up Steven King homage there.

Still getting to the rest of my reader mail—it’s not you; it’s me; I am so behind!!!—but theravenousgm went hog wild on my fear eater post.  Read the whole thing here.

Fear Eater

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

Man, these guys.  Born (I believe) from Kalervo Oikarinen's RPG Superstar 2015 monster entry, fear eaters definitely stand out from the rest of the Occult Bestiary pack, courtesy of some creepy art by Ben Wooten.

You know all those ’80s kids’ movies—especially the live action ones—that now you look back and go, “How did they ever think this was kid-appropriate?”  (I’m looking at you, Return to Oz.)  This one fits right in there.  In fact, I’m gonna score this next sentence with daggers for creepy emphasis.  Imagine that the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland(†) straight-up tied her up(††) with sticky strands(†††) disgorged from his own mouth(††††) and then caused mushrooms to burst from her body(†††††) and feed on her fear(†you get the point).

Yes, you read that correctly.  Forget fantasy role-playing—we’re in full-blown body horror territory here.  X-Files monsters aren’t this gross and scary.*

But the real horror is this.  Fear eaters don’t just devour the mushrooms for themselves.  They sell them(†) as a delicacy (††) to fey rulers(†††).  There’s a market out there for your PCs’ pain and suffering(††††).  One assumes fear eaters’ customers are mostly Unseelie fey (the Court of Ether in the Golarion setting).  But given the mercurial nature of the fey, one can easily imagine a faerie queen who has lauded adventurers in the past being unconcerned if they wind up as fertilizer once she no longer owes them any favors…

Drow already reject and loathe their surface kin. So any suggestion that they may also be related to the fey is typically met with scorn and drawn blades.  Still, the Defanwe drow tell a different origin story from most drow, one of a broken vow, an outcast queen, and the shearing of gossamer wings.  If the Defanwe taste for fear eater mushrooms is any indication, the tales may even be true.  Certainly, every Defanwe settlement has a sizeable minority of fear eater merchants and farmers.  And Defanwe drow do not callously murder their slaves as often as other drow, as there is far more profit in selling used-up livestock to the fey mushroom growers.

A fear eater found a giant’s discarded drawstring bag and was inspired to create her own trap.  Cutting open and restitching the voluminous leather with her own fungal spewing, she has created a snare that will close up after adventurers pass through it, blocking their escape.

The first disaster was the Dragon Dawn—a convulsive racial rage that overtook the dragon species, driving them to war with each other and with humanity.  With so many towns reduced to ash, roads in ruin, and ships lost at sea, the cities that remain have become isolated and fearful.  Then there came the Chitterbloom, which saw house-sized mushrooms sprout where trees should have grown, and insects the size of ponies run amok.  And finally, the Elfwind—not a wind at all, but a phosphorescent magical mist, part drug and part infection, that wafted from caster to caster sapping wit and will.  Now in the city of Vale whole districts are given over to spiders and hungry plants, and residents fight to eradicate the Elfwind and bring order back to their fallen land.  They are opposed by goblins, vegepygmys, ettercaps, and worse, all of whom delight in the new disorder.  Fear eaters, in particular, have profited in the chaos.  Having left their subterranean homes for the shady eaves under the house mushrooms, the fey have a world of new victims and new customers to cultivate.

—Occult Bestiary 27

*Actually, given the themes of bondage/involuntary female transformation, maybe the better X comparison is any issue of X-Men written by Chris Claremont.  (Oh yeah.  I went there.)

Seattle alt-weekly nerds may remember that I like using daggers.