Ningen

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

While they’re everywhere in comics and cartoons, we don’t get a lot of Colossal monstrous humanoids at the gaming table.  Things that aren’t dragons or colossi or space whales just don’t tend to get that big—even dinosaurs rarely get much past Huge.  So the ningen is neat just because it’s that big.  Like, how do you show Colossal on the battle mat?  (I’m remembering an ad for a Gargantuan blue dragon D&D mini that used a whole frozen chicken to give you an idea of scale.  I’m guessing for a Ningen you’d need a turkey.)

Reclusive and mysterious, barely having more than a suggestion of a face, ningens are creatures of the polar waters, more whale than person to most human eyes…or even more iceberg than person in some cases.  But behind that blank face lurks intelligence, the ability to converse in Aquan, and some (highly dangerous) magical control over water and ice.  A ningen can also breach and crash down on ships or icebergs for a combined brutal total of 20d6 points of cold and piercing damage to creatures and objects—damage that will sicken and stagger your characters and smash their vessels to flinders.  So maybe just because you can hunt these intelligent folk for cold-related magical ingredients, that doesn’t mean it’s wise.

A rakshasa noble believes the key to awaken his dormant magical blade is to slay “the whale that walks” with it, per an ancient scrap of text he recently unearthed.  The tiger-headed native outsider is willing to stake his fortune and risk the lives of his retinue of fiends and nagas in the frozen south, just to slake his sleeping dagger’s thirst.

The songs of ningen bards have power over ice.  Their songbergs fetch exorbitant prices in the planar art trade.  Sadly, so too do the artists themselves—when rendered for spell components—and their demise only drives up the price of their existing work.

Adventurers are too late to stop an artifact from triggering eternal winter.  Still on the trail of the now-very-active relic over a suddenly frozen ocean, they come across a ship locked in the ice…and the crew trying to defend itself from a ningen enraged that it can no longer reach deep water.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 183

#notsobabybeluga  <—Admit it, you were all thinking it.

Ningens are cryptids from our world, but Wikipedia doesn't say much and I can't vouch for the quality of the other sites that mention them.  Also, you can’t mention reports of ningens without mentioning “whale research” vessels, and…yeah, that’s a can of worms.

In between training some fledgling DJs, I managed to work in a radio show! This week was more Canon than New or Indie, for obvious (Tom Petty) reasons.  Stream or download it now till Monday, 10/09/17, at midnight.

Ichthyocentaur

To paraphrase Krusty the Clown: Once in a great while, we are privileged to experience an RPG event so extraordinary, it becomes part of our shared heritage.

1986: Pegataur walks on the moon.  1989: Pegataur walks on the moon… again.

Then, for a long time, nothing happened.  

Until tonight.

[And in a perfect world, I would post a picture of Ben Wooten’s Bestiary 5 ichthyocentaur—BAM—right here.  But I can’t find a legit (i.e. not from Pinterest) copy anywhere.  Grrr…]

Okay, I may be overstating the case here.  Perhaps nothing will ever top my beloved pegataurs for awesomeness, but ichthyocentaurs are pretty badass too [as the art I cannot show you would demonstrate were it here I repeat grrr…].

With Pathfinder’s merfolk being more cagey and isolationist than in other RPGs—a legacy of Golarion’s wild and woollier early days—and aquatic elves being beset on all side from skum, sahuagin, and worse, ichthyocentaurs are left to take up the mantle of undersea courage and nobility.  Ichthyocentaurs are everything you want from a race you share a coastline with—friends of wisdom and courage; led by bards, clerics, or oracles; mentored by fey and sphinxes; able to pull a seashell cart when you need to move house…ideal neighbors, really.

But ichthyocentaurs are also proud, quick to defend their homes when necessary, and as susceptible as any other race to falling under the spell of charismatic demagogues or bloody-minded religions.  So while PCs should be inclined to think of ichthyocentaurs as friends, they could easily end up facing the wrong end of a masterwork harpoon.

Inspired by their time frolicking on the beach with a seilenos, a band of ichthyocentaurs began honoring a fey lord of revelry and intoxication.  The fey power answered them by sending a pair of maenads to tutor them in madness and the drinking of blood.  Now fish-men and fey alike stalk the coast for cogs laden with wine and victims.

A school of ichthyocentaurs traveled through the Strait of Misfortune to consult the famous Sphinx at Sparrow Rock.  When they got there, they found the Sphinx was a sham—the androsphinx that had once lived here had been slain and his taxidermied skin used by illusionists to gull travelers out of magic items.  Distraught, the ichthyocentaurs seek vengeance for the sphinx and a new home for themselves.  Heartbroken and suspicious, they likely treat adventurers as enemies until the latter prove themselves to be friends.

The Quondam Conch is a spiraling, shell-shaped demiplane of sand and sea that houses civilizations that have sunk below the waves or been lost to tsunamis.  Ichthyocentaurs ply the seas between these city-states, on errands of their own or in service to the demiplane’s mysterious stone idol overseers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 146

Do any of my readers have Wikipedia editing powers?  That entry on Vengeance of Alphaks needs some help (the right sidebar, especially).

Another place you might have seen pegataurs was the D&D Creature Catalogue, which I wrote a long appreciation of two years ago.

Grioth

(Illustration by Miguel Regodón Harkness comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Grioths, according to Bestiary 5, “inhabit rogue planets cast away from their stars.”  That seems to be an exceedingly rare ecological niche, which suggests that either a) grioths have a way of seeking out and traveling to such planets, especially during the eclipses that they love so much, or b) grioths have some foreknowledge of such calamities—or even play a hand in making sure said calamities come to pass.  Given that grioths worship the Outer God Nyarlathotep, who’s a bit of an expert in nudging societies toward apocalypse, the latter seems very likely.

Some other things to mention:

1) Grioths are only CR 1, which means they can be a useful way to expose parties to Lovecraftian or interplanetary themes very early in the campaign.

2) In The Dragon’s Demand, grioths had spell-like abilities; these have been changed to psychic magic in B5.  (Also, mentions of the grioths’ voidglass weapons were genericized down to “a strange metal.”)

3) Another quote: “The grioth race is prone to mutations.”  Translation: Go nuts with the templates and class levels.

4) Grioths hate many other alien races.  (In the Golarion setting, this means the Dominion of the Black.)  Which raises the question: What aliens are so awful that even worshippers of Lovecraft’s Outer Gods fear them?

A group of young adventurers begin their careers when an eclipse giant appears in their village and blesses them, forever marking them as destined in the eyes of the gods.  Soon after, the eclipse the giant foretold comes to pass…bringing with it an invading force of grioths from a wayward frozen planet.  The village elders tap the blessed youngsters to thwart the otherworldly creatures.

After a wizard is executed for vile crimes, some adventurers are tasked with clearing out his laboratory.  While they are there, they come across a strange bat-winged creature.  The grioth is also scouring the lab, seeking to erase all evidence of the collaboration he and the wizard shared.  The moment he sets his four eyes on the adventurers, he decides that they know too much to live.

Bartimaeus’s Bestiary of Beasts Most Baleful is widely regarded as the most fanciful—and dangerously error-ridden—manual of monsters in circulation.  Unfortunately for a certain young adventurer, Bartimaeus is also her uncle and her adventuring company’s main benefactor.  When rumors reach him of an urd sighting—urds being a race of winged kobold considered so unlikely that Bartimaeus’s publisher stripped them out of the third edition of the Bestiary—the old scribe sees a chance to restore his battered reputation.  He sends his niece and her compatriots to fetch him an urd, “alive or competently stuffed.”  Unfortunately, the bat-winged creatures are actually otherworldly grioths, with psychic abilities and strange weapons beyond even Bartimaeus’s wildest imaginings.

—The Dragon’s Demand 62 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 137

2e fans, that urd was for you.

One final thought: Both D&D’s Forgotten Realms (especially in 2e and 3.0/3.5) and Pathfinder’s Golarion are both exceptionally well-realized worlds that allow for a wide variety of adventure styles and settings.  (Want to fight mummies?  Vikings?  Ninjas?  Both pretty much have you covered.)  If there’s one way to quickly differentiate the two, it’s this: The Realms, thanks to Greenwood and Salvatore, teach you to fear what’s below the ground.  Golarion, thanks to Lovecraft and Jacobs, teaches you to fear the night sky.

Did any of you get that thing that’s going around?  Major congestion, bit of a fever, tiredness, general suckitude?  Because I’m on Day 9, and it is zero fun.

Gegenees

(Illustration by Nemanja Stankovic comes from the artist’s ArtStation page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

What a difference some flavor text and an art choice can make.  Gegenees are deep cuts from Greek mythology: six-armed giants from Turkey with only a small mention in the Argonautica to their names.  But those arms also recall the Martians from Burroughs’s pulp novels, and Bestiary 5’s decision to make gegenees blue recalls the multi-armed azure gods and heroes of Indian lore.  It’s just one more reminder that RPGs are the ultimate myth remix engine. 

Gegenees are easy to drop into high-level adventures.  They’re somehow both novel and still classic guards for mythic sites.  Their venerable mothers may have insights into realities non-giants can’t perceive.  And gegenees sorcerer exiles might be found wandering anywhere—perhaps hunting for obscure secrets, perhaps longing for revenge against their xenophobic kin, or perhaps looking to found kingdoms of their own.

Exiled from his people, a gegenees sorcerer employs genie slaves to dominate a city.  He demands the citizens scarify themselves with symbols denoting their castes.  This in turn draws the ire of the venerable mothers who cast him out, for the patterns too closely resemble the holy patterns of their clan.

The lamia queen Ovencia has already conducted two dark rites to transform herself into a half-fiend and make her palace feed, vampire-like, on other cities.  Now she seeks to create an army that will do her bidding by sowing dragon teeth into a fertile field.  Unfortunately for her, she actually used linnorm teeth.  The gegenees warriors that sprang up from the field immediately began wreaking havoc on the surrounding lands, entirely out of the evil serpent-woman’s control.

On the outskirts of Limbo, islands float upon seas that will eventually melt into the chaotic realm’s mists of possibility.  Gegenees live upon these islands, equally suspicious of the proteans who are their neighbors and of strangers from more lawful planes who sometimes land upon their shores.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 118

If there’s one complaint I have about the gegenees, it’s that CR 16.  It’s a giant so powerful that many parties will never face one.  I’d love to see a CR 10–12 cousin.

PS: If you’re looking for the gearsman, we covered his clanking self back here.

Last night at the radio station I was training new DJs, so I barely even remember my show happening. Let's listen to it together, shall we?  (Link good till Monday, October 3, at midnight.)

Hmmm…I wonder what (NSFW) thing I’ll be doing on Monday, October 3, at midnight?

Enlightened Contemplative

Several of the monsters in the Occult Bestiary fall into the category of “Monsters You Always Knew Were Psychic, So Here Are Some Slightly More Powerful Versions Built With the New Rules.”  Which is totally okay by me—it rewards GMs for buying the new books and adds complexity to existing monster societies without erasing the non-psychic versions that came before.  Everybody wins.

So you’d assumed that enlightened contemplatives are, like, super contemplative.  (Hell, ordinary contemplatives have evolved to barely even have bodies…how much more enlightened can you get?)

But instead—unlike similar advanced occult monsters that we’ve covered before (the xill matriarch or the yithian elder, for instance)—enlightened contemplatives aren’t necessarily revered by their contemplative kin.  In fact, the other contemplatives are scientists who think the esoterically minded enlightened contemplatives are a little crazy.  They get results, sure…but at what cost?  “Daring,” “reckless,” and “radical” are all words used in the Occult Bestiary to describe these pioneers.  Or are they schismatics…or heretics…or phrenic-disrupting outright monsters?  It’s up to you…and that’s what makes these brainy guys fun.

A mesmerist believes he can have a better hold over his victims if they are exposed to the energies of various esoteric planes and demiplanes.  He is guided in his studies by an enlightened contemplative who secretly has her own agenda, involving the use of interlaced mindscapes and transitive planes to achieve travel between the planets.

Trapped on another planet, adventures seek shelter from rabid plains girallons in the mountain fastness of an order of contemplatives.  The sentient brains have no answers for the party, but they suspect a splinter coterie of contemplative renegades might. Reaching these “enlightened” contemplatives means hiking through a thorny jungle of cannibal wood.  The adventurers find the splinter contemplatives under siege from terrible, four-armed wights.

An order of enlightened contemplatives cannot perceive gnomes—neither their physical forms nor their mental patterns (likely because of the gnomes’ fey heritage).  Instead they must infer gnomes based on the descriptions and tales of other humanoids.  Disturbed to encounter a phenomenon unexplainable by either contemplative science or enlightened contemplative metaphysics, these esoteric sages hire bounty hunters to round up gnomes to study, creating prison camps for small folk they cannot sense and subjecting them to laboratory experiments whose data they only dimly comprehend.

—Occult Bestiary 17

If you never read my original entry on contemplatives, maybe give it a look—I had a lot of fun with it.

Elder Deep One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 69

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

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

Deep One

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 68

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

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

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

Trox

(Image by Rayph Beisner comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

When we were looking at the kasatha, I made it a point to highlight ways that the kasatha was not simply Pathfinder’s thri-kreen.  That said, perhaps I was doth-protesting a bit too much.  Because when I was first browsing the new sample races in the Advanced Race Guide…well, it was hard not to think, “This is how you do Dark Sun in Pathfinder.”  Not because of the kasatha, but because of the trox.  Because once you got past the blasted landscape, sorcerer-kings, defiling and preserving magic, psionics, half-giants, and brutal reconceptualizations of the core races…Dark Sun had a lot of big bugs. 

And trox are big bugs indeed.  (With big warhammers to boot.)

Of course, once trox showed up in Bestiary 4, we had a better sense of where/what roles Pathfinder intended for trox—deep underground, escapees from duergar slavery, grappling masters prone to frenzy.  That makes sense.

But if you want to put them on a harsh desert world to fight in the baking sands of a gladiatorial arena, I’m not going to stop you.

Speaking of which, here are a few other ways to approach trox:

A disowned son of a viscount intends to win back his title and his family’s fortune.  No one in the county will back him—the few fools who initially flocked to his banner were executed for treason (while he rabbited).  Now he is back for another try, only this time he has brought an army of bug-monsters with him.  It turns out the slavery-hating trox have lived secretly in the highlands for years.  They believe they are supporting a freedom fighter, and only extremely persuasive adventurers can convince them of their error.

Having helped them escape from bondage, a couatl and his adventurer allies lead his Chosen People to the home he has chosen for them: a sheltered mountain valley.  Only when they arrive, they discover the valley is occupied by trox.  The couatl assumed that his adventuring friends could lead the people in exterminating the bugs, but they are all taken aback to discover the bugs are intelligent.  Torn between his promise to his people and his desire to do good regardless of the cost, the couatl heads to the heavens to seek out the patron god of the trox (if one exists).  Until he returns, his adventurer friends must keep the peace between the two sides—or make preparations to win the war, should it break out.

The seas of Blight are acidic, courtesy of acid rain that buckets from angry skies.  The resinous byproduct of trox construction seems impervious to the sizzling seas, however, and that means trox mounds are sought-after real estate for coastal and island nations.  As trox burrow deeper into the earth and build toward the sky, they give over the middle layers of their giant mounds to other races, who scrabble and fight for space to farm and dwell in.  The trox never let anyone forget who owns the mounds, though, making them the default law and order—and the aristocracy—within sight of the deadly water.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 264

Hey thirteenfunbreaker, I told you we’d get to the trox!

If you’re looking for the trapper, we covered it back here.

With all the excitement last week, I never got around to posting last week’s radio show!  The link is only good until tonight (Monday, 9/21) at midnight, so if you want it (or even if you’re just curious) the time to stream/download it is now.  Featuring new Yacht and new Thunderbitch (thanks to Melissa of WNRN for pointing those my way), and celebrating 10 years of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled record and 20 years of Blur’s The Great Escape.  Whether you’re Team Claret or Team Beaujolais, there’s a song for you right here.

Edit: Sorry for the tardiness on this one.  Hoping to get back on schedule sometime this week courtesy of a long flight to San Fran.

Tikbalang

(Image comes from artist Dave Melvin’s DeviantArt page and is and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Man, what is it with horse-headed evil things?  The Mares of Diomedes, kelpies, nightmares, leukodaemons…  Maybe it’s because horses retain a certain lively, sometimes wicked spark that has been snuffed out of other herbivores we’ve domesticated.  Or because the balance of power between horse and rider can shift so quickly—one minute you’re the master, the next just helplessly along for the ride. 

Or maybe it’s because horse skulls are just freakin’ creepy.

Anyway, the tikbalang is a creature from Philippine folklore that, like so many creatures in folklore, likes to lead travelers astray.  The Pathfinder version has got a number of magical talents to aid it in its endeavors, from the usual illusory effects right up to and including banishing victims into an extradimensonal maze.  And then of course it can puncture you with its spines, trample you, or simply devour you (after “pack[ing your] mouth with leaves and moss to stifle [your] screams”—a nice little tidbit from Bestiary 4).

Unlike many other similar creatures in folklore, there’s no one good way to ward off a tikbalang’s attention.  Bestiary 4 mentions that it can be “bribed or mollified […] with offerings or the performance of strange rituals, such as singing a song, wearing a shirt inside out, or giving the monster bread and honey”…but the exact offering can change day to day with no explanation or advance warning.  One imagines that peasants who live near a tikbalang rely on an assortment of these rituals to satisfy the creature, as well as their own familiarity with the jungle and basic good luck.  Out-of-town adventurers will likely have to rely on the old standbys: swords and spells.

Adventurers must traverse the jungle along a narrow path that just barely holds the wild at bay.  Worse yet, tikbalangs haunt the path, always spying for an opportunity to lure the gullible into the underbrush or even seize a victim and pull him up into the trees.  Fortunately, a shaman the adventurers befriended secures them the services of an exceptional guide: a chain-smoking kapre.  The plant creature serves the forest first, however, and if the adventurers show disrespect to nature the kapre will leave them for the tikbalangs to hunt…or worse, join the tikbalangs in tormenting them.

A particularly sickly tikbalang (for simplicity’s sake, use the Young template) haunts a moss-hung forest tainted by necromancy.  But the monstrous humanoid’s infirmity has not stopped it from racking up a body count.  Its specialty is leaving the beheaded bodies of its victims for their friends to find.  Thanks to the forest’s vile taint, many of the absent heads have reanimated as beheaded (use stats for shrieking medusa head from Pathfinder Adventure Path 43: Haunting of Harrowstone) that follow the tikbalang like hungry hounds.

Adventurers transport a cleric to his new post, a monastery above a sugar cane plantation, only to find the town in fear.  The rapid expansion of the settlers’ farms has disturbed and displaced the strange fey known only as thin men.  For revenge the thin men have lured a tikbalang and his soucouyant bride to the settlement, promising them man-flesh aplenty.  Now new dead turn up daily.  If the adventurers succeed in slaying or coming to terms with the tikbalang and the thin men, the blood crone will attempt to steal away on their ship to spread her evil to new lands.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 260

Shobhad

If you go to a majestic and mysterious low-gravity red planet, expect to fight a shobhad.  In fact, if you don’t fight a shobhad, you haven’t gotten your money’s worth.  I would complain to management pronto. 

(Be warned: Management is probably a telepathic floating brain.  That kind of thing happens around here all the time.)

The cover model for James L. Sutter’s Distant Worlds, the shobhad draws on the classic pulp novels of the past, particularly the Green Martians of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom.  Teased during the Second Darkness Adventure Path and properly statted up in DW, shobhads are the classic dangerous-but-honorable alien barbarians—proud people who prize strength and courage over the trappings of urban civilization.  Adventurers who interact with them will need to prove themselves by strength or cunning, not book learning, to prove they are not sheep in the eyes of these giants.

Of course, you can dump the low-gravity pulp stuff and just put shobhads in your world, too.  Either way, they are a clear sign to the party that they aren’t in the Kingdom of K’ansas anymore.

Blasted by undead mind-mages, adventurers awaken on another world entirely.  On the one hand, in the low gravity they are able to achieve astounding feats of jumping and strength; on the other, they are prisoners, lab experiments for a floating brain-like creature called a contemplative.  The scientist wants to see how they fare in battle against the planet’s native shobhads.  To survive the party will have to kill the giants or free them from the contemplative’s magic slave collars.

Adventures book passage on a crystal sky skiff but have to take up arms when the captain reveals himself as a slaver and Servant of the Scroll.  Once he and his men are defeated, the party will have to win over or otherwise bully the shobhads in the crew.  Otherwise the giants will mutiny and divert the skiff to shobhad lands, scuttling all the adventurers’ plans.

As the elves fall into their Twilight, humans rise in Tanniel, building soaring castles, smooth roads, and bustling cities.  With three of the seven High Forests now open for proper logging, their shipbuilding progresses at lightning speed as well.  Now some adventurers have been asked to join the expedition to find Jorash, the fabled continent all humankind once came from, back before their tattered arks landed on Tanniel’s shores.  But the Jorash they find is not the land of plenty and chivalry from the old stories.  Instead they discover floating orc fishing villages, cliffs guarded by half-dragon sphinxes, and vast plains where four-armed giants hunt the local humans like game with weapons that strike farther and faster than any crossbow bolt.

—Distant Worlds 63 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 242

Am I the only one who pronounces the “bh” in Shobhad in the Irish way, as a “v”?  …Probably. 

(Dibs on “Siobhan the Shobhad” for my next online profile name.)

Want to play a shobhad PC?  People of the Stars will give you the details.

Speaking of which, I love that the suggested languages for shobhads, beyond Common and Giant, are Dwarven, Draconic, Gnoll, Orc, and Sphinx.  You could easily design a whole planet based on on that list.  (Or a continent—see above.)

Going to Gen Con?  Tell everyone you know about The Daily Bestiary!  (And keep an eye out for sellers who have 1e and 2e issues of Dungeon for sale.  Get their contact infooooooooo!)