Ophiotaurus

Bestiary deep cuts don’t get much deeper than the ophiotaurus.  It’s only found in a single reference from Ovid—and not from Metamorphoses, either, but Fasti.  That’s the mythological equivalent of saying your favorite ’90s alternative song is Sloan’s “Stove/Smother” cover.  Like, I can tell how you got there, but man, you were looking.

Aside from being a Gargantuan, mythic half-bull, half-snake-monster, the ophiotaurus is most significant for what it offers—a massive power boost in the form of either its ascension spell like ability and its Questing Beast (Su) ability—if PCs kill an ophiotaurus they have access to certain divinatory powers, and if they’re willing to accept a geas on top of that, they also get a massive moral bonus (+6 to Str and Con) per vengeful outrage. 

In other words, facing (and possibly slaying) an ophiotaurus is an excellent step along the way to facing a mythic Big Bad—perhaps even the penultimate step.  Every hero needs his Campbellian journey, and the Ophiotaurus checks off the Road of Trials and/or Apotheosis boxes pretty nicely.  An ophiotaurus’s death, though, should be more than a plot coupon—it should carry an air of what it is: a necessary sacrifice.

Adventures attempt to seal a portal to the realm of Baphomet, the demonic patron of evil minotaurs.  If they fail to light the temple braziers and burn the proper offerings, the snaking tile labyrinth beneath their feet reveals itself to be the pebbled hide of an awakening ophiotaurus.

At the behest of a sovereign dragon, adventurers race to the ends of the earth to place a magical yoke upon the shoulders of an ophiotaurus—an animal they did not even believe existed mere days ago.  Unfortunately, their demodand rivals have sent a lackey to beat them to the punch.  And “punch” is the operative word, for the vile servant is one of the Hundred-Handed Ones, a hekatonkheires.

Adventurers slay an ophiotaurus and eat its entrails, as the old legends instruct.  But in doing so, they have inadvertently performed a religious act, for the sacrifice of a bull, even a mythic one, belongs to Tiernos, the Lightning Lord.  Now the long-slumbering Allfather wakes, and the adventurers must contend with his assumption that they are his new high priests…and vassals.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 185

Somewhere out there someone is screaming, “The Ophiotaurus was also in the Percy Jackson series!!!” 

Fair enough.  I have not read the Percy Jackson books.  Usually mixing mythic tales and modernity is not my jam—I’ve had some grim experiences in the past.  But surely it can’t be any worse than the Nicholas Flamel books, right? Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say…

Percy Jackson saves [the Ophiotaurus] in the middle of the night, when he was warned by his favorite pegasus, Blackjack. He first thinks it is a female and names it "Bessie". The Ophiotaurus thinks that Percy is his protector. Later, the creature is brought to Olympus via a magic water bubble and is put under the care of Percy's father, Poseidon.

…Nope.

*gently closes laptop, stares into space for a minute, gets up to walk away*

Nope.  I’m out.  Not going to happen.  Nooooope.

Someone burn the room after I leave.  It’s the only way to be sure.

Once again it’s Monday night, and once again I am encouraging you, with barely an hour to spare, to click a link I should have posted last Wednesday.  Sigh.  Sorry about that.  But click anyway—it’s my first radio show of the Spring 2018 semester, and we’ve got new Hop Along, Camp Cope, and Baltimore’s own Wye Oak and Letitia VanSant, plus 20 years of Pearl Jam’s Yield.  Stream/download it now through midnight tonight (Monday, 02/12/18, U.S. Eastern)!

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. 

Devastator

In pop culture, the name “Devastator” carries certain weight—literally.  Devastator was the first super-robot (gestalt to you fans out there) in the Transformers line, formed when the Constructicons combined.  Other giant robots would come along (I always thought Bruticus and Predaking were terrifying) and neither the individual Constructicons nor Devastator were the brightest tools in the shed…so you’d think familiarity would breed contempt.  But Devastator’s place in our mental mythology was secured by his appearance in The Transformers Movie, when the hushed voice of the otherwise jaded, I’ve-seen-it-all Kup whispers a horrified “Devastator” as the giant bot takes shape.  This was soon followed up by a shot that puts the audience in the Autobot defenders’ POV as Devastator rips open their defenses while Megatron calls for slaughter.  From then on, Devastator’s iconic status was assured.

So if you’re going to use the name “devastator” in your game, you better deliver.  Pathfinder’s devastator does, with a CR 22/MR 8 Gargantuan war machine powered by the soul of a corrupted and imprisoned angel being tormented for all eternity.  It’s got immunities and damage/spell resistance galore, its attacks are +5 unholy anarchic weapons that deal every kind of damage, it has nasty spell-like abilities like implosion and an at-will blade barrier, its aura boosts demonic allies, and the thing even absorbs good magic to gain temporary hit points. 

It. Is. A. Nightmare.

In fact, it’s so grim and grisly it feels like something more out of the Warhammer or even the Warhammer 40K universes rather than Pathfinder.  Even the Bestiary 5 art seems like Warhammer art—no surprise, since Helge C. Balzer also does work for Games Workshop.  And that’s perfectly appropriate for a construct this mythic and monstrous.  When you want to shrink the hope of Good and Man down to a single flickering candle flame…and then introduce a hurricane to snuff that flame out…the devastator is the way to go.

One final note: Remember what I said about every cannon golem having a name? That goes triple for devastators.  (In fact, the full entry in Pathfinder Adventure Path #78: City of Locusts outlines the three named devastators known to patrol Golarion’s Worldwound.)

Obviously, devastators are meant to lead demonic invasions.  Since I assume you can handle that, here are three more unusual scenarios involving devastators:

When the army of demons and oni burst out of the Shadow Realm, their first target was Rotaru, the jinushigami whose forest lined the slopes of the Sleeping Mountain.  After three days and nights of fighting, the outsiders fed the exhausted elder kami into the eternal burning furnace of a devastator prepared especially for his tree-trunk frame.  Now not only do the demons have a new weapon of war for the second phase of their invasion, but as long as the mountain spirit is imprisoned the Sleeping Mountain will smoke, blotting out the rays of the sun so the dark spirits can frolic.

There was a time when demons were common in space, their ships knifing through the blackness like horrible flaming sharks.  Driven back and sealed within the Pain Nebula, demons are no longer a threat, but their many war machine creations are.  Demon moons not tied to any one planet or star float from system to system, their surfaces pockmarked with scars and furnaces.  Some of these carry undead, shadows, oozes, degenerate races like morlocks, and especially constructs.  Nearly every demon moon is patrolled by at least one devastator, and true demon worlds may have dozens.

Taniyar was an angel rescued from the metal gizzard of a devastator after a century of torment.  She spent twice that long recovering in a celestial hospice as her body and mind were restored.  Only the healing of her mind didn't take.  Now she longs to return to the only home that makes sense to her, the excruciating cage at the heart of a devastator.  Adventurers investigating either an incident of vandalism and theft at a heavenly library or the disappearance of Taniyar herself will eventually track her to the Junk Plane, where she has just used the stolen plans to finish constructing a new devastator.  The construct will be her agonizing home for the next millennium as she smashes world after world.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #78 90–91 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 77

I had Devastator as a kid, but early on I broke the hard-to-transform Hook so I almost never got to play with him fully constructed.

Danava

(Illustration by Tomasz Chistowski comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Danavas may seem like a bit of a departure on Bestiary 5’s part.  Up until now, Pathfinder’s titans have either owed their inspiration to Greek mythology (for instance, the hundred-handed hekatonkheires) or have been strictly fantastic creations (thanatotic titans)—with Elysian titans splitting the difference.  Danavas come from Hindu mythology, so to see them mingling with Greek giants is a bit of a surprise at first.  But given that we mix Victorian faeries with ancient Greek satyrs under the label of “fey” without blinking, we shouldn’t stress about calling danavas titans…especially since the ancient Greeks and Indians actually did semi-regularly trade and war with each other, which the ancient Greeks and the Victorian English certainly didn’t.

Besides, danavas are properly ancient, from-the-bones-of-the-earth kinds of monsters in the same way titans are.  In fact, Pathfinder goes one step further, making them mythic creatures of Law, central pillars of existence itself.  (And, “pillar” is exactly the right word to use, as that is what particularly powerful danavas who oversee aspects of existence are called.)  Other titans wish they were as ur- as these ur-titans.

Fans of epic stat blocks will enjoy the danava—how can you not like abilities like Iron Resilience (ignore the thing!) or Devastator (bypass all the things!) or attack rolls that start at 40.  But more importantly, a danava is surprisingly easy to work into the game, despite its absurd CR 24/MR 9 challenge Rating, because of its absurdly lawful nature.  You already know I’m a fan of lawful opponents—sticklers for rules are often way more fun to play than simply evil villains, and way trickier to eliminate or subdue without making powerful enemies.  Plus, danavas are so ancient and powerful that humans aren’t even covered by the laws they’re following.  (Hell, even elves and demons are just a passing fad to them.)  If you think of a planet as a house with a leaky roof, a human city is the wasp nest the danava knocks down so she has a place to put the ladder when she climbs up to fix it.

Which makes danavas the supreme case of the lawful cure being worse than the chaotic disease.  Hundun invasion?  Demonic incursion?  Great Old One rising from the deep?  Those things all suck, but they're nothing compared to what will happen if a danava wakes up and decides to “help” get rid of the problem.

Adventurers have been foiling plots by the mysterious hunduns for years now.  Finally, at the apex of their careers, they understand what the faceless aberrations were after: shards of the World Egg, the primordial container of the Creation that the hunduns intend to reverse.  The adventures face their nemesis, a supremely powerful hundun occultist/necromancer…but the echoes of their conflict ripple across the multiverse, waking a pair of danavas who are determined to smash every last fragment of the World Egg, as well as anyone else in the vicinity (which they define as the entire nearest country).

The cold-iron-fearing daoine sídhe (treat as high-level elves with the fey creature template) speak of their aes sídhe forbears garbed in glittering bronze.  And should they be found in their hidden lairs deep in the Otherworld, the aes sídhe (as above but with mythic ranks) will tell you of their parents who were also gods: the Tuatha Dé.  Buried, trapped, or perhaps just slumbering in their city beneath the waves, these majestic lawful titans are so advanced beyond their chaotic fey childer that the family resemblance is almost unrecognizable.

An entire layer of Hell is missing.  In a time before the Lord of Morning fell from grace to become the Archduke of Night…in a time when there were no pits of punishing fires because no crimes had yet been committed…a danava pillar ruled that pitiless realm.  Having been woken from his slumber, he simply marched across existence and took the lair back—literally, as he simply dragged it away.   Now both the pillar and one-ninth of Hell are simply missing, and the entire multiverse trembles at the implications.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 246–247

We’re finally at letter D!!!  Sorry it took me so long to get here.  If it’s any consolation, at least I didn't paralyze half my face with stress this winter—no, really, that’s a thing that happened last year—so as much as my more laid-back approach to posting pains both me and you, it’s probably for the best.

Last night thanks to my old roommate I got a tour of the new building for my old radio station, and was on the guest list for a live show from the Great American Canyon Band to boot.  After so long away, it was a nice homecoming of sorts. 

(Apparently I also met Prince’s former art director.  WUT.)

Also, I want to thank everyone who came out to Light City last week.  I figure with 5,000 of you following this blog, at least one of you got to enjoy some of the art or one of the performances.  The festival was definitely a success—they were expecting 300,000 and got roughly 4—so I’m crossing my fingers that a) it happens again, and b) I get to write the advertising again.

Last Tuesday’s show!  Including the Sun Days, Frankie Cosmos, Against Me!, Sturgill Simpson covering Nirvana, and more more.  This is a good one, so if you’ve never clicked, this is an excellent week to give into temptation.  Stream/download it till Monday, 4/11, at midnight.  If you have trouble with the stream or want to keep the show forever and ever, Save As an mp3.

Bat, Locust & Rat Plague Swarms

When you’re a PC, fighting swarms is bad enough.  But plague swarms…that’s when things get really nasty.  Because plague swarms are manifestations of a deity’s wrath, sent in retribution for some slight.  That means they're more powerful (even the humble rat plague swarm clocks in at CR 11) and mythic (8 ranks!) to boot.  They multiply with alarming speed and reform until their destruction condition is met.  Sometimes they have beneficial strategic or defensive attributes (individuals in a rat plague swarm share a hivemind; bat plague swarms are divinely protected).  Worst of all, they all have a unique nasty attack.   Rat plague swarms are diseased, spreading lycanthropy.  Bat plague swarms cause bleed and negative level damage—which can birth vampires(!) that serve the swarm (not the other way around).  And locust plague swarms?  They just eat everything—including magic items—with what are effectively adamantine jaws.

So say your prayers and start researching destruction conditions…because once called, these magical beasts don't stop until an entire city is destroyed.

A ratfolk sage immolates himself in the central square of Newport, promising vengeance even as the flames take his body.  The vengeance, when it arrives, is swift and deadly: a rat plague swarm.  Adventures must not only defeat the foul skittering hivemind, but then solve the mystery of what Power sent it—for no one in Newport, including the small ratfolk community, understands what sin was committed against the sage or his faith.

Adventurers need to recover the body of Preston Melark, an oracle whose visions may hold the key to the defeat of the Minotaur Lord.  But Melark fell in the defense of Tamar, the Living City, whose very stones (courtesy of a divine blessing and a strong conduit to the Positive Energy Plane) heal the wounded and birth new defenders into being.  Now a vampire puppet of the plague bat swarm, Preston Melark’s undead corpse is caught in an unending cycle of death, coming every night to feed at the throats of the fresh soldiers born to the Living City that dawn.

It’s said that the Lur of Laram could knock down a city wall or rouse the Sleeping Celestials.  And it may be just the thing to stop Daemon Tide.  But some other player is at work, for when adventurers reach the city of Parsin, a locust plague swarm and its brood are already devouring everything in its path—including the ancient horn.

—Bestiary 5 192–193

Working on getting this regular update thing happening again.  Please continue to bear with me.

I’m not finding stats for Bestiary 5’s plague swarms online yet, though Pathfinder Adventure Path #79: The Half-Dead City had several nonmythic swarms, including the plague locust swarm.

Wayfinder #14 went live on Monday, with fiction by yours truly—the first fantasy story I’ve ever published, and my first published work in ages.  It’s a dash of ghost story and a pinch of noir.  (The brutal word count restrictions inspired the staccato tone.)  I hope you enjoy it!

Thanks to Tim and Paris for the acceptance email, the other contributors for submitting, the slushers and patient editors (especially Charlie and Matthew, who went through my piece line by line) for all their hard work, and Stephen Wood for the great illustration.  Download it for free here.

Tuesday’s show turned out really nice.  I wasn’t expecting anything special, aside from things being a bit more gravelly/fuzzy than usual, but I relistened to it and was just like, “Yeah. Nice.”  Maybe you’ll dig it too.  Stream or download it till Monday, 12/7, at midnight.

Tyrant Jelly

Giant bee royal jelly is special.  In a hive, it’s what produces a new queen.  When harvested by adventurers, it can aid in healing wounds and curing disease.  And when an ochre jelly devours a larval queen made fat on royal jelly—presumably a rare, perhaps once-in-a-century occurrence—the result is an equally rare monster: the mythic tyrant jelly.

Nobody expects an ooze to be mythic or intelligent, and that works to your advantage with this monster.  After adventurers fight a hive of too-deadly, too-well-organized bees, they’ll be looking for some malicious druid or thriae to blame, completely overlooking the honey-colored slime that oozes maliciously from the very walls…

A tyrant jelly has used giant ant servitors to turn the entrance to one of the nation’s most famous dungeons into a maze of dead ends and pits.  It also regularly calves off blobby pieces of itself via the dungeon’s electricity-warded door, and uses its control over the resulting ochre jellies to set up grisly ambushes for would-be relic hunters.

Fleeing a camarilla of sadistic thriae seers, a company of thriae soldiers stole away with a recently hatched larval queen.  Their hopes to found a new colony were dashed when an ochre jelly gobbled up their future liege.  Now the poor humiliated thriae feel helpless to do anything but tend to the needs of the mythic tyrant jelly, in hopes that the young queen may still be somewhere inside that vile muck.

After an ochre jelly engulfed the egg capsule laid by a fiendish deadly mantis, the result was a tyrant jelly ruled by a legion of wills, rather than a single mind.  This mad tyrant jelly calls all manner of mantises, wasps, and centipedes to itself, sending them off on strange, even competing errands as the minds inside the egg capsule vie for control of the mythic blob.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 266

And with that entry…we’ve made it all the way through Bestiary 4!!!

Hard to believe it’s been almost two years since we tackled the udaeus.  It seems like the time went a lot quicker—probably because now that we’re on our second trip through the alphabet I don’t have to juggle four Bestiary hardcovers at once anymore!

Savvy readers will notice that I didn’t say we’ve finished the book…because we haven’t.  There are just over a dozen Bestiary 4 monsters I had to postpone tackling for one reason or another, including some PC races like the changeling and some heavy-hitters like Dagon.  But we’ll get to them, never fear.  In fact, as of tonight the marrowstone golem’s entry is up, and we tackled the coral golem just the other day as well.  So give those entries some likes/comments/reblogs, keep an eye out for me slipping some B4 baddies into the feed from time to time, and get ready for two solid months of Occult Bestiary monsters on the way!

Stone Colossus

(Image by Damien Mammoliti comes from the Paizo blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

A stone colossus is the dream of every master siege breaker: a castle that fights back.  Able to morph from a small keep into a 70-foot-tall construct (and better yet, one that fires ballista bolts the way Destro fires wrist rockets), a stone colossus is the closest most adventuring parties will ever get to fighting—or piloting—Metroplex.

Adventurers are on the trail of the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga.  Following the outlandish artifact seems impossible, until they discover the hearthstone that will turn an isolated keep into a stone colossus that can keep up with the chicken-legged cottage.  And given that the colossus has the face of a fox, maybe that’s what its purpose was all along.

The Iathavos is coming….and if it reaches the Fountain of Souls in the City of the Risen, it may permanently dam the spiritual river that mortal souls ride to the afterlife.  Adventurers have little hope of stopping the mighty qlippoth, but if they can assemble the components to waken the stone keep that serves as Risen’s postern gate, they just might pull off a miracle.  Assuming, of course, no one beats them to the construct first…

On the world of Quake, lands move almost as frequently as cicadas spawn—every dozen or so years a tapped ley line will swell the borders of a magocracy, a plain will phase out of the Dreamtime and form a vast veldt, and an island might sink beneath the waves or rise into the sky.  Small wonder, then, that the subterranean realms are just as given to change.  Unable to burrow like the dwarves or glide through stone like the xorns, dark elves migrate during the shifts, following the path carved by Annelis the Burrower.  Most ride in great stone-wheeled barges or gem-powered skiffs, but some maverick dark elf lords command great walking colossi they can pilot along the Worm God’s trail and then fortify when their travels end.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 37

I think I’ve mentioned before that I own all of two books for 4e D&D, Underdark being one of them.  I actually really dug that book’s vision of a constantly shifting Underdark ruled by an ever-crawling maimed god, hence the above adventure seed (along with nods to Roger E. Moore’s creation of Urdlen the Crawler Below).  For whatever reason though, 4e books didn't work for me, and I’ve barely cracked either Underdark or The Plane Above: Secrets of the Astral Sea since then.  Which is really too bad, because I love fluff for any system—hell, I buy old White Dwarf issues just for kicks—but something about 4e’s writing style and layout/design just never clicked.

Myrmecoleon

A little bit bombardier beetle.  A little bit Vlad the Impaler.  A little bit mythic.  And a lot bit Alien (or Alien³).   The myrmecoleon is an acid-spewing horror that, thanks to its mythic ranks, makes horror movie monsters look easy to kill.  A byproduct of excess mythic energy, myrmecoleons are proof that even the gods have roach problems.

Prince Hadrian has worn the signet ring of his family since his first birthday…and being a ring of regeneration, it has saved his life more than once.  Now it keeps him alive but in utter agony…for Prince Hadrian currently lies speared on the chitinous back of a myrmecoleon after he and his men failed to slay the beast.  Too weak to tear himself off the terrible spike, Hadrian is trapped by his own body as his wounds continually open and reheal.  Adventurers are needed to find the myrmecoleon and retrieve the prince.  The hard part will be collecting him without setting off the beast’s death throes, injuring Hadrian beyond the ring’s ability to repair and dissolving his corpse for good measure.

In a desperate gambit to obtain mythic assistance against a demigoddess of discord, adventurers plant dragon teeth liked seeds in hopes of sprouting udaeoi.  It works—but not before the demigoddess sends insects to devour a share of the teeth.  The insects that eat the teeth then turn on each other, swelling as they cannibalize their fellows until only a single myrmecoleon is left.  Before the adventurers can order their soldiers to march, they must save them from the nightmarish creature.

Adventurers make the arduous journey to Mimir’s Well to seek the soothsayer’s advice.  When they arrive, they find the famous Asgardian sage is no more—a myrmecoleon was drawn to the scent of the decapitated head’s oozing neck stump and devoured him.  Now startlingly intelligent thanks to its repast, it sets a trap for future wisdom seekers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 198

Myrmecoleons come from medieval bestiaries, but they clearly made a wrong turn near H. R Giger’s houses.

Leanan Sidhe

The leanan sidhe (literally “fairy-lover”) exemplifies the dangers inherent in faerie gifts: that they are rarely gifts.  There is always a price, an exchange.  The leanan sidhe also personifies the costs artists pay to follow their muse—sometimes sacrificing fortunes, health, and even their lives in the process.  And the leanan sidhe illustrates how narrow the line is between fey and other monster types with their almost vampiric feeding habits.

Speaking of which, where a leanan sidhe is found is likely a symptom of how aggressively she feeds on life energy.  A leanan sidhe who is a reclusive nature spirit behaves like a dryad, gathering around her the pleasing and talented thralls who happen to come her way.  Her tokens may even be bargaining chips to convince these servants to protect sites of natural beauty.  Other leanan sidhe act more like vampires, heading into urban societies—high, bohemian, or both—to from cliques, salons, or schools around themselves from which to draw ample talent for entertainment and feeding.

In a low-magic or historical campaign, facing a mythic creature like a leanan sidhe might also be a good way to introduce high-level/more magical play.  A Celtic or Anglo-Saxon party might have had a grand old time with clan politics, hewing goblins, and fighting Romans, but when they run afoul of the sidhe suddenly their world is changed forever.  And of course on some worlds a leanan sidhe might be the Leanan Sidhe, a singular entity in the vein of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files…in which case her class levels and mythic ranks might go even higher.

To learn a masterpiece, a bard and his friends must track down a musician currently in the hands of a leanan sidhe.  Not only will they have to convince the musician to give up the fey’s tokens before her life draining kills him, but they will also have to defeat her “lapdogs”—former slaves she had infected with lycanthropy once she was done with them.

Disguised as a college chambermaid, a leanan sidhe has managed to bring the Chair of Transmutation under her sway.  Seemingly rejuvenated by her possets and tender ministrations, the man has become addicted to her various blessings and the great flexibility they give him in spell selection and recovery.  Meanwhile, she quietly stokes his rivalry with the Chair of Abjuration, coaxing him into experiments that undermine the wards protecting the college.

A leanan sidhe becomes enchanted with the masses sung at a temple famous for its chanters.  Her zeal for the music is such that she attempts to convert to worship of the faith, but she soon becomes frustrated by the dogged silence of human deities.  The mercurial fey decides that the priests have been mocking her all along, and by the time adventurers arrive at the scene the rectory is rife with factions, accusations, and bloodshed, with the leanan sidhe egging on her various charmed and blessed servants into greater and greater acts of debauchery.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 180

Intellectually I’ve always known I’d get a bigger response if I included pictures (something I’ve hesitated to do because of rights/permission issues).  But still…wow.

Julunggali

It’s hard to get more mythic than the julunggali.  A Colossal, semidivine snake, the julunggali can literally move heaven and earth courtesy of spell-like abilities like control water, create water, mythic move earth, and mythic control weather.  And you don't want to mess with a being that can bestow curses at will, throw mythic baleful polymorphs (which transform partially even on a successful save), and choose at whim how serious the poison is when it bites you—including aging you a whole age category. 

That said, because julunggalis often preside over rites of passage, PCs are as likely to encounter one at the very start of their careers as they are at the end of them.  “Encounter” being the key word here, not “fight”…until they’re at least Level 16 or so.  And should they break one of the snake’s sacred taboos, they might find out just how vengeful a CR 21/MR 8 magical beast can be.

The key to stopping a qlippoth invasion is to pour the blood of a seraph onto an ideogram-carved rock in a distant wilderness.  But doing so means breaking the taboo of a julunggali adamantly opposed to keeping the carvings unmolested.  Can she be convinced to relent?  (After all, she is old enough to remember the dark epoch when qlippoths ruled.)  Or must she be defeated as the penultimate trial before the party’s showdown with the iathavos?

Even for a famously close-mouthed race like the dwarves, the Stone Shapers are a breed apart.  This is because they don’t worship the traditional dwarven pantheon, but instead revere their patron julunggali.  The dwarves keep their worship secret from outsiders, working with the serpent to reshape their domain in ways large and small according to mythical earth nodes and ley lines.  Perhaps to compensate for their spiritual divide from other dwarves, the Stone Shapers are otherwise fierce snake hunters, famous for fighting serpentfolk, tarnished couatls, hollow serpents, and the like.

The path to the Outer Planes has been blocked ever since the Rainbow Bridge was shattered.  A julunggali gathered up the pieces and has guarded them in her temple complex ever since.  Adventurers who wish to restore the bridge must complete three tasks, which may include being polymorphed into other races and species, living cursed for a year, fetching an artifact from the Realm of Death (and trusting the julunggali to supply the necessary raise dead), or fighting the Colossal serpent itself.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 164

Given that the julunggali seems to be inspired by the Australian Aboriginal rainbow snake goddess Julunggul, this mythic serpent would be perfect paired with the Aborigine-inspired chameleon men portrayed in “The Voyage of the Princess Ark in Dragon Magazine #186.  In fact, one of the Land of Wallara’s patron deities is Agundji, the Rainbow Serpent, an aspect of the draconic Immortal known as the Great One.

(I’m finally getting over my pedantic squeamishness about linking to PDFs of old Dragon issues.  Normally I’m pretty fierce about protecting OC, but we’re talking 20+ years, three editions past, and no easy way to get these mags legally, so screw it.)

(Speaking of which, that issue also has Michael Gabriel’s “50 Castle Hauntings,” James R. Collier’s “Welcome to the Neighborhood!”—a look at fantasy cities (especially fantasy ethnic neighborhoods) that still feels fresh today)—and an installment of “The Marvel-Phile” that shows Groot years before he got turned into a household name.

Is there a German word for that feeling you get when you see an old friend from years ago opening for and then dancing with the Mountain Goats?

Ah yes: Ausgezeichnet.

(Actually I missed the opening part because last night I was on hospital discharge duty for a loved one, but I was there for all of the Mountain Goats and accompanying dancing.)

Also I ran into my brother’s friend Alice, whose current flaming neon-red hair upends everything you think you know about what a League of Women Voters co-chair looks like.  Let’s put it this way: There are a lot of blue-haired old ladies in the League, but when Alice is one of them, she means it.

I also saw David Sedaris Tuesday night!  And am seeing The Ting Tings Saturday.  Skipping Alex Winston tonight because I am tiiiiiiiiiired.