Irnakurse

BEWARE. 

I LIVE. 

RUN, COWARD!

Whoa, sorry.  Don’t know what came over me there.  But hey, The Daily Bestiary is back!

As I mentioned on Monday, I apologize for the delay.  I never expected to take a fortnight off—I figured even with a broken computer I could manage a week’s worth of posts over two weeks—but it was decidedly not to be. 

In other news, drow really hate elves.

And on some worlds, like Pathfinder’s Golarion, the ultimate punishment a drow can inflict upon an elf (for the crime of simply existing) is to fleshwarp it into a strange half-tree, half-roper-like aberration known as a “perfect one”: the irnakurse.

The sad irony, of course, is that even in this mangled state the tree-like aberrations are still closer to the elves’ beloved nature than a drow ever could be.  But given that irnakurses are programmed to hate elves as much as their masters do, few victims of an irnakurse’s soul screams have the leisure to reflect upon this fact.

But let’s take drow out of the equation.  How else might an irnakurse pop up in your campaign?

There are no evil elves on Telerra.  Elven spirits are tied to the very world itself, and should an elf give her heart over to evil, she will become an irnakurse on the spot.  This doesn’t make Telerran elves beneficent by any means—in fact, most find the enforced morality agonizingly confining.  This explains their racial reclusiveness, xenophobia, and habit of alternating between cruelty and kindness seemingly at random.  It also explains why elven forests are dangerous to elves and intruders alike: Every glade might hide an irnakurse who gave up the struggle against the pull of her dark nature.

The Feadadil bloodline labors under an ancestral curse, members of the clan metamorphosing into irnakurses on their 300th birthday.  Only an abjuration fueled by blood magic can stave off the curse’s effects…which explains Feadadil necromancers’ rapacious need for new test subjects.  Less talented members of the family are artfully potted around the towers of their more gifted kin.

A genie noble has fallen from grace, misusing his wishcraft to warp and reweave the very Pattern of Fate.  Among his talents is the ability to reshape flesh as if it were soft wax, and he regards his gallery of irnakurses as the highlight of his art.

—Pathfinder #16 86–87 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 105

The top of this post is actually totally borrowed nostalgia.  I was pretty young when Sinistar came out (and even if I’d been older I was strongly discouraged from setting foot near an arcade) so I’ve only heard that voice on YouTube.

Halsora

The halsora is the metamorphic rock of fleshwarps—twice transformed into a creature with completely new characteristics.  From humanoid to plant to now a hulking (as much as a Small creature can hulk), acid-weeping aberrant thing, halsoras are the stocky hunting dogs of their drow makers and masters.

I’m curious about the halsoras’ self-hatred as described in the Bestiary 4, because you rarely think of plant creatures, even superficially humanoid ones, being so intellectually/emotionally/spiritually driven.  But maybe that spiritualism is the root cause (no pun intended, I swear).  Halsoras have been divorced from both their vegepygmy bodies and from the birth bodies they held such reverence for (and likely took mementos from).  What's worse, they have lost their connection to their communities and the russet mold patches that linked them together.  Instead they feel the mutated spores coursing through them and hate the weeping infection they are powerless to step.  It’s tragic, really…or would be, if they weren’t already body-stealing nightmares in the first place.

A drider lurks on the outskirts of a subterranean settlement, obsessively tending her “garden” of halsoras among the piles of trash. The mask and coverings she wears to protect her from the aberrations’ acid and spores have given rise to tales in the community about ghosts, clockwork creatures, and scorpion knights.

The small nation of Ilvdeep is run from below the surface by drow mages and warpriests who reject their kin’s demon-worshipping ways.  That doesn’t make Ilvdeep drow any more peaceable, however—they rely on the Houndmasters (half-drow rangers, slayers, and sorcerers) and their Hounds (trained halsora shock troops) to keep the fearful populace in line.

A besieged city needs hardy warriors, and adventurers find themselves pressed into service.  As they reluctantly go about missions on the defenders’ behalf, they discover a mad plan by one of the army commanders to create more powerful troops: first by infecting peasants with russet mold spores, then by fleshwarping the resultant vegepygmies into halsoras.  The commander firmly believe his actions are justified and that history will laud his actions…but just in case he sends his halsoras to silence the adventurers before they can go public with his plot.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 104

Resurrecting Darth Maul as a drider wasn’t my favorite move The Clone Wars TV show made, but it gave me an adventure seed at least.  Meanwhile, if you like drow-controlled surface nations, Forgotten Realms’ Dambrath is another candidate for adventure.  (Shining South has some details— while it didn’t officially make my Top 18 list, I did give it some love and it's still a book I’d recommend to both D&D and Pathfinder fans alike.)

Sing it with me now: “Halsora, sora… Whatever will be, will be…”  I’m going to Hell for that, but TOO LATE!  It's in your head forever now.

Grothlut

It’s only Tuesday and we’re already on our second puke-attacking monster in a row.  It’s going to be a good week.

Another drow fleshwarp, the grothlut is the product of fleshcrafting a human.  The result is an abomination that makes a lemure look cuddly.  Sluglike creatures that can barely hold themselves together, much less keep their gorge down, grothluts make everyone around them sick as well with their piteous moans.

Of course, in your campaign it’s easy to divorce grothluts from their drow origins.  They can be alchemical experiments gone wrong, the result of tortures inflicted by a totalitarian state, servitors to a cult of illness, aasimars who fell from grace, or anything else both pitiful and revolting.

Adventures are hired to lead the annual grothlut drive from Bleakheart to Chel Ne’Thram.  (The drow find the work too distasteful to do themselves.)  Along the way, the adventurers must defend their charges from rock falls, giant insects, troglodyte ambushes, and especially dire corbies, who like to feast on exploded grothlut viscera.  The party might also discover the vile origins of the creatures.  If they do, the adventures may come to suspect (quite rightly) that the only reward they will receive for a successful drive is to become fleshwarps themselves.

After a long time away, adventurers come home to discover a totalitarian ruler has taken over their hometown.  When they speak too freely with an old blacksmith friend, his forge sits cold and empty the next day.  Eventually in a secret gaol they will discover a grothlut bearing the blacksmith’s tattoo on its fleshy arm.  He and the rest of the disappeared have been warped to serve the new lord’s strange and vile ends.

Mozart didn’t die of the pox.  He was murdered for discovering a secret society devoted to Baphomet lurking within the already-secret Freemasons.  Adventurer friends of Mozart (they met gambling, naturally) are hired by a patron to clear the names of both the Masons and the unjustly slandered Salieri.  Among the culprits who murdered young Wolfgang is Maximilian Faustus, a descendent of the famous alchemist and a composer in his own right—or rather, rites.  A century and a half before Schoenberg, Faustus is already working on his own twelve-tone scale—seven for the Seven Deadly Sins and five for the five points on a pentagram—sung by a choir of chained and goaded grothluts, whose moans supply the vile scale in piteous (semi)quavers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 103

Indie rock?  Bah!  This week we veered hard into folk and country territory, as we looked at the album Tomorrow You’re Going from Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky’s The Pine Hill Project, and did a more personal In memoriam as well.  Plus the Nields, Kasey Chambers, Nanci Griffith, and more.  Listen and download!

Also a heads-up: If all goes well—weather and Murphy’s Law permitting—I’m throwing an 18th birthday party for my radio show.  Tune in this Friday evening, 2/27, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM US Eastern, as we party like it’s 1997 and play college radio favorites from spring 1997 to spring 2000.  I promise it will be thoroughly undignified fun. 

Ghonhatine

Our first fleshwarp, the ghonhatine! 

(Not counting driders.  We didn’t know fleshwarps were going to be a thing back then.)

(Actually that’s not true, because fleshwarps actually predate the Pathfinder game; in fact the ghonatine and irnakurse got statted up the Second Darkness Adventure Path.)

(And crap, we covered the Inner Sea Bestiary’s oronci all the way back in March of 2013.  Look, whatever.  Chronology is hard.  The point is: Hey look, fleshwarps are in the Bestiary 4!)

Anyway, ghonhatines are fleshwarped troglodytes…but maybe “warped” isn’t so much the right word as “de-degenerated.”  Instead of the frail, disgusting creatures that are the bane of spelunking adventures, these are monstrous CR 10 hulks that recall an earlier, more vital age in troglodyte evolution.*

They're still disgusting though, with an even nastier stench than their troglodyte forebears.  They are also perhaps the only creatures in the Bestiaries whose specialty is devouring PCs for extra hit points and then vomiting up the remains as a splash weapon that deals acid damage and filth fever.  Now that’s adding insult—and disease—to injury.

A baron stands accused of trafficking with drow—an offense even worse than treason in civilized realms.  He’s covered his tracks exceedingly well, though, to the point that even divinations do not reveal his perfidy.  Only the most observant adventurers will notice—or be informed by an escaped kobold slave, if they have treated the pitiful creature well—that the beasts that guard his estate at night are not the lizardfolk mercenaries he employs by day, but ghonhatines—a gift from a drow matron herself.

A drow estate sits on the tiered shelves of an ancient petrified bracket fungus.  The first level is the slave and servant quarters, and the third level is reserved for the matron and her family.  The darkness-shrouded second level, home to the house artisans, poisoners, spellcasters, and assassins, actually hangs from the foundation of the third level courtesy of reverse gravity.  Anyone attempting to enter the apparent (and very much illusory) second level discovers only a park filled with dangerous plants and ravenous feral ghonhatines.

Legally, the government of Andulaine recalled its ambassador after a border dispute with Montauk.  But the ambassador never arrived in Andulaine to report to the Chief Minister, and someone is clearly still living in the shuttered and locked embassy in Montauk’s capital.  In truth, the ambassador became enamored with fleshwarping, and by the time of the recall was too altered to return home.  Adventurers who investigate the embassy will find her wearing the shape of a lamia matriarch, defended by leashed ghonhatines and tended by crab claw-handed maids who are only too glad not to be one of the piteous grothluts that moan in the cellar.

—Pathfinder #16 84–85 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 102

*Though actually according to canon ghonhatines are actually riddled with disease and dying on the inside; each has a life expectancy of only two years.  See the excellent Pathfinder #16: Endless Night for more details and an overview of drow fleshwarping in general.

Anytime you see dark elves and reverse gravity in the same sentence, it’s an homage to the shadow elves’ City of the Stars, which sits on the ceiling of its cavern.

The only monsters we’ve been waiting for longer than fleshwarps?  The abomination, humour, mineral, and thaumaturgic dragons teased by Mike McArtor in Pathfinder #4: Fortress of the Stone Giants.  Man, I want me some abomination dragons… 

I’m not just saying this to nudge the overworked Paizo folk who browse this blog.  (Though that’s plenty fun, too.)  I’m saying this because—to me at least—there’s a tension that exists in Golarion between the singular vision and wild and wooly weirdness of Varisia as depicted in Rise of the Runelords/Curse of the Crimson Throne and the more general and multifaceted “Best of All Possible Worlds” setting that Golarion evolved to become.

Upon close examination this generalization falls apart—early Varisia was the work of many hands all contributing both home campaign elements and fresh ideas, and the rest of Golarion has plenty of weirdness to go around.  (Just look at the alien influence on Osirion and Katapesh, the River Kingdoms in all their variety, or the decidedly un-twee First World.) 

But there’s still something fresh and new and alien and strange about the Golarion of the first two or three Adventure Paths, a world of lamias and sin magic and assassin gods, where you’re as likely to run across a rot, phlegmatic, pyrite, or illusion dragon as you are to encounter a green or gold.  I love the Golarion we have, but that other Golarion is out there, too, hiding in the shadow of the Irespan or off the lee shore of the Mordant Spire.  When the stars are right and the mists part (and publishing schedules allow), I want to see more of it.