Oblivion

Spheres of annihilation suck don’t they?  (Facing one in combat, that is.  If you’re in control of one, wheeee!)

But…what if one of those spheres was somebody’s egg?

That’s what you get with the oblivion…a one-eyed, Colossal smoke cloud from the Negative Energy Plane that leaves a trail of annihilation, dubiety (man, that’s a good word), and enslaved servants of entropy in its wake…and which might, maybe, possibly have hatched from a sphere of annihilation.  Who’s to know?  You’ll already be dust and dubiety (woo!) before you find out.

Stat-wise, it’s pretty clear that the oblivion is meant to be the penultimate or even the final monster of a campaign.  It sneezes through damage reduction.  It disintegrates at will.  (Yeah, you read that right; disintegrate is a cantrip to this thing.)  You can’t banish it unless you’ve got an artifact or you’re a god…you get the idea.  Oblivions mean to deliver just that—oblivion, and the eventual end of the cosmos—and only the mightiest heroes have a prayer of stopping one.

Arcanist Aron of the Black Rod is the most famous mage of the age…perhaps of any age since the falling of the White Tower.  His vanishing in the Year of Lost Hope was met with alarm across the continent, and his return in the Year of the Shadowed Griffon was enough to turn back the orc horde at Karsum.  He has walked the worlds many times since then, each time becoming more powerful and more distant from mortal men.  His latest planewalk was once too many, however.  He fell to the touch of an oblivion, and the “Aron” that returned is a servant of entropy who is currently preparing a ritual to summon his dire master.

The oblivion known as the Dustsinger is responsible for the deaths of at least three planets: the Flesh Orb (now a spheroid lattice of bone and rotted tendons known as the Cage), the former forest moon of Nesserit (whose fey, driven mad with grief, are more undead than faerie), and Ossus.  This last planet put up the best fight against the Dustsinger, and it’s said that the cat-headed goddess Bastet helped her worshippers escape to another world—at the cost of one of her lives.

A band of adventurers has been mercenary, larcenous, duplicitous, backstabbing, and murderous…and that’s on their best day.  But they find themselves forced into new roles as heroes when one of their oldest allies, the sorcerer-magistrate Inwelm, unleashes an oblivion in the very heart of Singate.  With the White Rose paladins in exile (the adventurers’ fault), the High Prelate jailed in disgrace (ditto), and the duke dying of night pox (a coincidence, though they did raid his treasury), only Singate’s worst adventurers stand between the oblivion and the city’s—and then the world’s—destruction.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 202–203

Hi guys!  It’s The…Fortnightly Bestiary?  Sigh.  I’m trying.  But hey, I wrote an adventure seed for evil PCs!

Hey, have a radio show!  I play music.  Mostly indie rock, though some other genres managed to sneak in there as well, including a Christmas/Hanukkah song or two.  It’s a blast.  You’ve got till midnight tonight (Monday, 12/11/17, U.S. Eastern) to stream/download it, and since that’s in an hour, why not grab it now?

Mountain Blight

One of the things I appreciate about Pathfinder’s Bestiaries is their thoughtful construction.  (Compare for instance, Bestiary 3’s intentional focus on non-European monsters to the 3.0 Monster Manual II’s throw/wall/whatevsticks design philosophy.)  And even when these books engage in open problem solving, that’s thoughtful as well—the designers are clearly carefully tweaking nobs and dials, not rushing to slather on spackle.  (Again, compare with, say, 3.5’s unpopular and filler-stuffed Monster Manual IV.)

Take oozes, for instance.  At the best of times, they're only so interesting.  And this deep into an edition…yeesh, there are only so many colors of pudding you can serve up.  Having already pretty much taken ordinary oozes as far as they could possibly go (gunpowder oozes, anyone?), for Bestiary 6 James Jacobs & Co. took the next step of rethinking the Ooze type’s core assumptions.  “Oozes are sightless and unintelligent,” the old books say.  James’s reply was, “…But what if they’re…not?”  And so blights were born.

This blog post and (of course) B6 itself go into more detail on blights.  But the short version is that blights are descendants of a terrifying blob monstrosity summoned by serpentfolk druids to wipe out their civilized enemies.  The blob did its work too well—the druids were destroyed along with their kin—and the blob’s descendants spread out into the forgotten places of the world, diversifying per their particular habitats.  They are malevolent, many-eyed, intelligent, and magical.  For the rest, I’ll just quote Mr. Jacobs:

All possess spell-like abilities, a favored terrain, the ability to curse that terrain, and a tendency to rejuvenate if you don't uncurse their realm after defeating them. Blights are also tailor-made to serve as "boss" monsters for wilderness-themed adventures, for while they detest other creatures that have intellects, they understand that such creatures make great agents and soldiers in their campaigns against civilization.

Mountain blights don’t hunt civilized creatures as aggressively as their blobby kin do, but you still don’t want to meet one in a high mountain pass.  Assuming a mountain blight’s dominated thralls haven’t already murdered you, or you haven’t fallen off a cliff courtesy of hallucinatory terrain, it can still always kill you via hypoxia, a localized earthquake tremor, or just slam you into a granite wall.

The monks in an isolated lamasery have been acting strangely, at least according to rumor.  Fearing a yak folk incursion, adventurers journey to investigate for themselves.  The culprit is not yak-headed body snatchers, but something far more alien.  A mountain blight recently woke from a 500-year hibernation, discovered the monks, and promptly enslaved them all.

A family of sphinxes is notorious for difficult riddles and their inevitable brutal aftermath.  The sphinxes are actually not as malevolent as they appear, but they are the terrified thralls of a mountain blight.  They are bloodthirsty because the blight demands regular offerings of man flesh, but at the same time the sphinxes secretly hope that their wicked reputations scare off all but the most foolhardy or arrogant victims.

The asexual blights do not experience romance per se…but unhealthy fascination, that is another matter.  Upon discovering the presence of a nearby, more powerful tundra blight, a mountain blight is determined to impress the superior slime.  It plans to crack open a dwarf hold and present the shattered mountain for the tundra blight to freeze.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 42

Have yak folk not appeared in Pathfinder yet?  Holy crap, do we need to fix that.  Do turn to the excellent Dragon #241 (browse here, buy here) for more.

The jukebox is in the corner / My mouth is the speaker

It plays your favorite songs / And you know where the coin slot is

Yup, it’s Tuesday’s radio show!  Stream or download now through Monday, 08/15/17, at midnight.

Mezlan

If we were going to give the latest Pathfinder Bestiary a proper Hollywood sequel title, we could do worse than Bestiary 6: The Rehabilitation of the Ooze.  Every Bestiary engages in certain projects, and one of B6’s is trying to figure out what to do with the Ooze subtype now that we already have five monster hardcovers under our belts. 

The creation of blights is one answer—we’ve got our first blight coming soon, actually—and highly intelligent, high-CR threats like the mezlan is another.  Blurring the line between ooze and construct (with a dash of undead thrown in), a mezlan is an ooze created from the consciousness of a willing volunteer.  Nearly impossible to kill and often retaining their class levels, mezlans were the elite spies and shock troops of a long dead civilization.  Now they are among the last remnants of that civilization—some still carrying out old missions, others trying to find purpose in a world that has moved on. 

For players and PCs of a philosophical bent, mezlans raise questions about the nature of consciousness and humanity.  And because the techniques needed to create them have been lost, mezlans are a reminder that some secrets will always remain in the past…and probably should stay that way.

Told to seek a scion of the river god Proteus, adventurers instead encounter a mezlan posing as a shapeshifting ichthyocentaur.  If the adventurers have acquired the right symbols its fallen empire, the mezlan treats them as elite agents and begins reciting a millennia-old message.  But it will allow no one entrance into the temple it guards—even if the message instructs the adventurers to proceed inside.

The rivalry between the Golden Imperium of Nal, the first and greatest human empire, and the elven league of the Vith T’shir was a long and bitter one.  No less than three mezlans were created to kill the five elven royal families (for a sum that quite literally beggared a Golden colony and cost Nal its embassy on the Elemental Plane of Earth).  One was destroyed; the other is presumed to have followed the Vith Pana when they sailed to the Morninglands.  The third is still missing, and some elf scholars hope to interrogate it so they can learn secrets about the Vith T’shir they themselves have forgotten.

A mezlan operates an orbiting android manufactory—nevermind that no orders have come through in more than a century.  The mezlan sees her fluid form and dim memories of her natural life as proof that she is superior to the machinefolk she creates and tinkers with.  The presence of organic living creatures or proof of android souls (such as an android capable of casting divine spells) call that superiority into question and may drive her to violence.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #66 90–91 & Pathfinder Bestiary 6 186–187

(Note that at time of writing, the link to the mezlan’s OGC stats is cranky, but I’ll link above anyway.)

Not long ago I finally finished watching my first ever Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine.  Mezlans would serve pretty well for the Dominion’s Founders.

Living Mirage

To someone seeking far-off wonders or desperately needed water, mirages already seem cruel.  So a living mirage—a creature that not only misleads such seekers but also feeds off them as well—is downright horrific, siphoning streamers of blood and fluids from its confused and terrified victims, who die in agony just as they reach the objects of their desires.

Most explorers never reach the Blackstone Sphinx.  Magnetic deposits in the sand befuddle lodestones, and landmarks are few and far between.  But really it is the explorers’ own hopes and dreams that do them in.  Many spot the Sphinx miles before they should, and rather than question their luck they run straight into the desiccating embrace of a living mirage.  Worse yet, their dying frustration and desperation often traps their spirits in undead forms of fear and confusion, such as allips and worse.

An enchanted isle lies at the tip of the Finger Bone Keys—according to rumor that is.  But sailors had best beware, the stories go, because fierce seaweed (treat as Advanced) kelpies protect the island’s secrets.  Actually it is the island itself that is deadly, for it is the home of a living mirage.  The kelpies are merely opportunists who try to snatch a share of the mirage’s victims.

Exploring a giant vessel that fell from the sky long ago, adventurers come across a kind of nursery chamber in one of the habitat pods.  Adjusting a dial causes the picture-walls to show a variety of fanciful and exotic scenes.  Soon phantasmal images begin appearing in the room as well—animals and fey with whimsical shapes that match the scenery.  These are actually holograms projected by a field of tiny nanobots.  Unfortunately, the nanobots have not been charged since the crash, and after five minutes the nanobots’ programming switches to molecular harvest mode, consuming all those in the room in the same fashion as a living mirage.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 159

Everyone like the reference to Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” there? #thanksmiddleschoolenglishclass

Also props to Bestiary 5’s authors for Ooze-type creatures that aren’t oozes—a smart move.

Regarding yesterday’s post, a reader alerted me to some of Pogo’s recent (2015) writing.  Sigh.  And sigh again.  (Nope, not linking.  MRA stuff.)  Given the amount of time he’s spent with Disney heroines, let’s hope he’s spent some time with—and learned something from—some flesh-and-blood women in the years since.

Hag Eye Ooze

Part of my mandate here at TDB is to make you fall a little in love with each and every Bestiary monster.  But certain monsters can be hard to drum up enthusiasm for—oozes in particular.  Once you start getting oozes made of gunpowder that splurt out flaming gobs of themselves, you start to feel like you’ve hit the limit for what oozes can be.

Not so with the hag eye ooze, though—because the hag eye ooze is a brilliant idea.  I mean, of course not all hags are going to trust their sisters or their minions with their precious hag eye stones.  What if they lost it?  What if they’re slain?  That’s a lot of trust to dole out.  Why not instead spend a little extra time in the hag eye enchantment process cooking up a minion goopy minion to bear the artifact?  Especially one that’s instinctively shy and stealthy in the bargain.  That’s the best use for an enchanted cauldron since boiling children and raising armies of the undead, right?

Remnants of a tribe of sprites beg the Big Folk for help.  A slimy monstrosity has been tormenting them, oozing into their homes and devouring them no matter how many times they relocate.  Now reduced to half their number, the fey seek salvation—and answers.  The culprit is a hag eye ooze under the control of a malicious green hag.  She has been consolidating power throughout her dismal wood; tormenting the sprites was just an enjoyable sideshow.

Adventurers make an enemy of a hag in wintertime.  The next time they are camped out of doors, the hag sends her cold-immune ooze through the snow to douse the adventurers’ campfire—with its flame-resistant body, if necessary—so that they either freeze to death outright or are softened up for the local bugbears.

Slirrup was an ordinary hag eye ooze—until the day the alchemist it had been set to spy upon spotted it instead.   The slimy creature found itself forced into a bottle and experimented upon for months.  Eventually, Slirrup’s creator tracked down the alchemist, slaying him. Her wayward ooze, however, was forever changed by the experience, the experiments having gifted it with physical power and a crude intelligence (per the Advanced simple template).   Slirrup still follows its mistress’s commands, but is restless and resentful in the manner of a neglected pet.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #72 86–87 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 140

PAP #72 also features the coven ooze, which is what happens when a hag eye ooze eats its dead mistresses.   (Answer: It grows to Large size, gains rudimentary intelligence, and generally becomes a flesh-absorbing monstrosity.  Good times!)

Gunpowder Ooze

(Illustration by Dieter Miller comes from the PathfinderWiki and is © Paizo Publishing.)

It must be hard to be a high school sophomore in a Pathfinder world.  Can you imagine taking chemistry in a reality where any mistake you make has, let’s be honest, a base 50% chance of becoming an ooze?  (The other 50% probably become haunts.)

So gunpowder oozes are what happens when gunpowder and magic mix.  (Throw in some alchemy and you get admixture oozes.)  Like other oozes, gunpowder oozes seek to absorb and devour other living creatures.  Unlike other oozes, they can blast gunpowder from their bodies.  (I presume this arose as a defense mechanism or waste byproduct.  I say “arose” because “evolved” doesn’t seem very accurate for creatures that are probably pretty new to most worlds, depending on how long the society has had gunpowder.)

And of course, even if you survive a gunpowder ooze’s initial blast, the gunpowder residue leaves you vulnerable to a subsequent fiery death.  One can imagine some inquisitors interrogating a party of PCs suspected of having robbed a gunpowder ooze-protected vault.  Checking for gunpowder residue in that scenario wouldn’t be an NCIS-style swab; instead the inquisitors would just brandish a torch and see who explodes!

So all in all, gunpowder oozes are signs of progress run amok.  When magic and technology collies, sometimes it explodes…

The Titan Wall separates Newland and the Reaches—a mile-wide, monumental structure that splits the world between the realms of Man and the realms of Magic.  But along the wall itself (particularly in the dungeons that riddle its core) exist chimeric creatures that could not survive in either realm, including dracolisks, girtablilus, and the notorious gunpowder oozes.

Master Qui-Sen has been making fireworks—an act forbidden to all but the emperor’s alchemists.  He has been careful to hide his wares and dump his waste products deep in the sewer.  Unfortunately, this has led to the creation of admixture oozes with strange abilities.  Adventurers get involved when one of the admixture oozes slithers up a drainpipe and sets a granary alight in the Ratfolk Quarter.

The inhabitants of the Seventh Age know nothing of gunpowder—to them, gunpowder oozes are “flash terrors.”  But the ubiquity of flash terrors in the Seventh Age is a legacy of the Fifth Age, when gunpowder and alchemy were commonplace.  Adventurers who study gunpowder oozes may be able to reëngineer some of these lost technologies…providing the inevitables of the Sixth Age’s Great Cleansing don’t reactivate to stop them.

—Wardens of the Reborn Forge 63 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 139

Emotion Ooze

There are times I have all the tools I need for this job.  Other times…not so much, especially when it comes to movie monsters.  Once you get below top-tier sci-fi and fantasy films, I’m pretty weak—for some reason I never got the steady diet of B movies and Saturday-afternoon UHF marathons that many of y’all did.  And horror movies I’m hopeless at (because I hate them).  I even missed the Slender Man reference in the Inner Sea Bestiary, despite the monster being called the thin man!  (I feel well within my rights to blame the art in that case, but still, jeez.)

This time, though—for once—I caught the reference.

Emotion oozes are the ooze from Ghostbusters II!!!

All together now:

Your love, lifting me higher

Than I've ever been lifted before…

A young etheric dragon has become trapped on the Material Plane.  The gout of ectoplasm that got trapped with him and the esoteric energies the growing dragon gives off have combined to form pools of emotion oozes reflecting the dragon’s psychological state—despair, fear, and anger in particular.  Unfortunately, the dragon is not immune to the oozes’ compulsions, and its behavior grows more and more erratic.

The countess of Rostovy was said to bathe in the blood of virgins every new moon.  In truth she bathed only in her own jealousy, stewing in the emotion until the stew became literal—a jealousy ooze that devoured her entirely.  The ooze still dwells in her sumptuous bathing chamber, but it moves through the palace pipes to foster mistrust and hunt new prey.

Officially, the Forgotten Crusade has ended.  The Rose Cardinal unmasked the Peacock Cardinal, branded and executed her as a heretic, erased her proclamations from the Book of Bulls, and announced that the crusade formerly known as the Third Crusade was not only anathema, but actually had never occurred at all.  This last fact in particular caught the besieged and besieging armies facing off at the Bleak Pedestal completely by surprise.  By all rights the demoralized crusaders should have returned home…but still they soldier on a decade later, as do the defenders (who are watered by a natural spring and can be resupplied by sea).  The reason for their persistence is occult in nature.  The glories and atrocities of the Second Crusade were so extreme that the caverns below the Bleak Pedestal are slick with the slime of emotion oozes attuned to zeal, dedication, and hatred.  These oozes’ unnatural compulsions have wiped all thought of parley or retreat from the minds of the combatants.  And so the Forgotten Crusade lumbers on until someone—perhaps a party of adventurers—disrupts the oozes’ manipulation.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 108–109

My dad took me to see Ghostbusters II in the theater.  Ditto the 1989 Batman, which came out a week later.  (In my memory, we saw BM first, and then GB2, but I might be wrong about that.)  I was just blown away because we didn’t see a ton of movies in the theater and almost never on school nights, so the fact that I got to see two movies within a week or two of each other was mind-blowing.

(BTW, talk about fortuitous timing for this post!  Haven’t seen the new Ghostbusters yet, but I plan to!)

Doppeldrek

It took me a while to find my way into the doppeldrek.  (Some monsters instantly have a theme or a hook or something that make them stand out; some take a bit more work.  Ironically, shapechangers are sometimes the most trouble—once you get past the shapechanging, it’s not always clear what makes them special.) 

Then I realized the answer was sci-fi TV (with a healthy dose of fantasy novels on the side).  There’s always that episode (or chapter) where the hero winds up trapped in a cave or a starship with a shapeshifting goo.  Worse yet, the longer the goo spends time in another shape, the more it tends to get ideas above its squicky station.  After that, it’s usually a race against time to escape the cave or space the goo before it gets all murdery.

The doppeldrek seems a bit more innocent than that…it seems to just want to belong…but once it gets an intelligence score, well, all kinds of things can happen.

A game warden notices something odd about the deer in the King’s Wood.  Some of them are acting oddly…just not quite right…  When he sees one of them nearly gore a local lord, then collapse into foam on the end of his spear, he knows something his wrong.  He hopes to hire adventurers to investigate quietly so he will not be punished for dereliction in his duties.

The elves didn’t leave this world.  They just hid in it, using powerful enchantments to tuck their vast domains inside much smaller forests.  These same enchantments also generate various guardians to protect the elfwoods, including turning river foam and fog into animate protectors.  The misty oozes typically take the shape of stags, horses, wolves, and gars that work to drive away intruders.  But as the elves become more insular and xenophobic, their guardians have begun to take the form of humanoids—even other elves—and sometimes exhibit a malign intelligence to boot.

A crashed kasatha starship holds a mimic sphere—a floating ball of ooze that spawns doppeldreks, who then take the shape of those they come in contact with.  The dreks seem to operate independently of the sphere, and the few surviving kasathas know little about them.  So where did the sphere come from?  Are the doppeldreks part of it…its servants…or entirely separate entities?  And what happens when they go from dumb miming to canny, self-aware mimicry in the course of only a few encounters?

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 85

Cerebric Cyst

Cousins of brain oozes, cerebric cysts feed on the mental energy of psychically gifted people.  Now, lots of psychic creatures do that, and lots of them look like brains*, so you’d think I would hate the cerebric cyst.  And I would, except for this line from the Occult Bestiary:

[C]erebric cysts occasionally establish facades such as fake schools for gifted children in order to lure such pliable chattel to them and thus avoid the need for arduous hunts for psychic sensitives.

The notion of Tiny floating purple brains (shades of Futurama?) covered in eldritch symbols being able to set up entire fake schools(!) despite being Tiny floating purple brains (and being only one rung up the evolutionary ladder from brain oozes, to boot) is really appealing to me for some odd reason.  Go on with your bad, barely-there selves, cysts!

Where cerebric cysts really shine is reaction time.  Not only are they never surprised or flat-footed, but if they get in a tentacle strike they can lash out at that target with a spell-like ability as a swift action.  And given that list of spell-like abilities—including mind thrust II and dominate monster—it’s no wonder these floating oozes are so effective in their plots and subterfuges.

Adventurers investigating arson at a school for gifted children come across far stranger crimes.  The school was actually a front for a flight of cerebric cysts.  But when the king’s chamberlain inquired about the crown prince attending the academy, the cerebric cysts decided the risk of exposure wasn’t worth the proximity to the throne.  The cysts attempted to have their dominated thralls torch the school so they could relocate without offending the royal family.  Unfortunately, these troublesome adventurers now represent a loose end…

Astral caravels run on brainpower—often, the harnessed power of batteries of brain oozes.  But too much time in the psychic winds of the Astral can prompt these oozes to mature into cerebric cysts.  Then it is only a matter of time before the cysts stage a mutiny and take the helm of the caravel for themselves, with their former masters now serving as both crew and provisions.

Malfus isn’t a familiar per se. But the foul-mouthed—or rather, foul-cerebrumed—perches like a loathsome parrot on the shoulder of his blood kineticist “master,” Ephril.   Really the relationship is more like that of an abusive, cigar-chomping older uncle…but it works, as Malfus’s guidance has helped Ephril unlock darker and darker talents, while Ephril’s growing status and wealth help Malfus find new minds upon which he can snack.  (In fact, in social situations Malfus has a disturbing habit of telepathically broadcasting just how delicious he thinks future victims’ minds will be—but only to Ephril and the victim in question.

—Occult Bestiary 13

*Every Psionic Book Ever: “Behold, we have unlocked the infinite and inscrutable mysteries of the mind!”

Me: “Do all the monsters on your pages have big heads or look like brains?  And do they eat thoughts, usually with tentacles?”

Every Psionic Book Ever: “Um…yes.  And yes.  Also yes.”

Me: “So kind of finite then.  Also scrutable.”

That said, Occult Bestiary suffers this a lot less than most psionic monster books.  Again, the Pathfinder team’s skill at synthesis comes to the fore.  By making the Occult Adventures/Bestiary/Realms rules about other mental and mystic phenomena besides psionics—from phantoms to chakras to ley lines to the migration of souls—the authors broadened the scope of the books and avoided a lot of the traps other games/editions fall into when tackling psionics.  I heartily approve.

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!

Shard Slag

Sure, black puddings are bad.  But at least they're not on fire and thrusting a sword-like shard into your gut. 

According to Bestiary 4, shard slags “dwell within the iron-rich molten cores of worlds, the hearts of active volcanoes, or any location where the borders of the Material Plane and the Plane of Fire are thin.”  I especially like #1 in that series—I’m a sucker for center-of-the-world adventures. 

But you don't have to go that far to look for a shard slag.  With more and more campaigns flirting with steampunk/magitechnical levels of industry, adventurers might be only a few blocks away from a potential shard slag eruption.

The Plane of Fire exhibit in the Gymnasium Zoologikum has an intruder!  A shard slag has managed to pull itself through the pinhole leak to the Fire Plane that warms the exhibit.  The fire, steam, and magma mephits have fled to the highest corners of the enclosure (and the poor magmins have already been consumed).  Adventurers who answer the call for help must fight the ooze in tight quarters…and ideally determine whether its presence is an accident or sabotage.

When the foundry on the Street of Shedus explodes, the resulting torrent of magical energy and molten hot iron manages to transform the bound fire elementals that heated the furnaces into something far more deadly—a supersized shard slag.  Even before adventurers put down the slag and put out the fires, they find themselves under attack—first by the foundry’s private guards and then members of the city’s own wand-wielding fire brigade.  Whatever burned in the fire, someone important has something to hide.

Adventures flee from morlock vampires and find themselves lost in a series of great chambers below the earth.  One superheated chamber hides a shard slag intent on consuming them.  The sound of lapping waves offers salvation—a bay that opens into a shallow, sauna-like sea—and tactically minded adventurers might use the presence of water to escape the hydrophobic ooze.  Of course, then they have to face the bay’s resident gargiya (see Pathfinder Adventure Path #60: From Hell’s Heart), a sea monster that flourishes in such steamy waters.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 240

You can find a shard slag in wesschneider’s level of The Emerald Spire Superdungeon, a veritable playground of things hoping to burn you, vivisect you, or both.

In other news, I feel compelled to share this link.  I might even share it a second time.

What the hell, number three.