Nulmind

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

Quite powerful (CR 11) for a plant creature (especially at size Small), a nulmind is a caterpillar-like fungus that drains minds and feeds on magic—especially psychic magic.  Worse yet, those unfortunate enough to have their intellects drained by the fungus become its puppets, luring in other prey (until they starve themselves, that is).

While nulminds have high Intelligence and Wisdom scores, these should probably be considered to represent the fungi’s mental prowess and sheer cunning—they can’t speak, don’t remember to have their puppets feed themselves, and are as happy to slurp up the minds of each other as they are their humanoid victims.  That’s not to say you can’t have a nulmind be a mental mastermind or even the main antagonist in your games…but in most cases, the nulmind’s intelligence is likely too alien to really judge on a human scale.

Speaking of alien-ness, that’s one of the interesting things about nulminds: It is strongly suggested that they are extraterrestrial (which is always a bit weird and odd in a fantasy world).  Perhaps because of this, they also have no taste for fey minds…and even seem to actively avoid them.  Two reasons for this suggest themselves—though interestingly, they're a bit contradictory.  The first is that, since nulminds are strangers to our natural world, and fey are the ultimate expression of it, fey minds must somehow be too anchored to this world for the alien nulminds to latch onto.  Alternately (and a bit paradoxically), it’s often suggested that fey were once part of an older celestial order or rough draft of existence…and as such, they just aren’t enough in this reality to be a meal for a nulmind.  Pick the explanation that works for you.

While exploring a newly discovered vault, an occultist disturbed a long-dormant nulmind.  The nulmind awoke from its torpor too late to feast upon the occultist’s mind and magic, but it tracked him back to a school for psychics that was briefly housing the scholar.  If not stopped, the nulmind will positively gorge itself on the psychic energy there, and many of its victims will be teens and children.

The antler-headed, half-fey elf king is known for having a subterranean labyrinth so deadly that even necromancers speak of it admiringly.  He is known to possess at least one nulmind, penning it in by surrounding it with undead horrors and distasteful fey guardians, including several powerful (treat as Advanced) morgodeas (vermin-loving fey from Pathfinder Adventure Path #99: Dance of the Damned).

Adventurers are collected as specimens by some sort of cosmic biologist or avid collector.  While they are prisoners on his ark, one of his other specimens, a nulmind, escapes.  The adventurers have an opportunity to make a deal with the collector: Free them, and they’ll take care of the mind-eating fungus before it mentally masticates the rest of his menagerie.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 184

Every once in a while I remember to throw a bone to the pure dungeon delvers out there—and those second and third adventure seeds are definitely for them.  Not every campaign can be half-Pathfinder, half-Monsterhearts; sometimes you just want to kick down a door…

Mosslord

Picture the Green Man.  Or just a green man.  (Don’t worry, we’ll get to that eventually.)  Now picture one…gone wrong.  One rotted.  One that hates civilization.  Now you have a mosslord.  Or even the Mosslord, as he might be a singular entity on your world.  The point is, sometimes nature decides it hates civilization so much that it has to do something about it.  And the mosslord is a great vehicle for doing so—a twisted manikin of moss on a lumber frame with a genius intellect, a head for tactics, a patience for the long game, and that is just humanoid enough to let its victims know that it’s really pissed.

Why use a mosslord versus, say, a powerful fey or blight or a template-packed green dragon or treant?  Easy: really evocative special abilities.  Imagine sheets of moss that entangle and sicken.  Yellow mold blasts that weaken PCs and quickened fungal infestation that turn their skin to fleshy fungus.  Critical hits that straight up turn humanoid limbs to wood.  And practically no way to kill it unless you can lure it to another plane—the way the rules read, even tossing one into a volcano is only going to work if you account for (and blight/diminish plants) every last spore.  It’s no wonder these creatures are often harbingers of apocalypse and social collapse.  This is a monster worth ending a campaign with. 

(And imagine the mingled frustration and glee the players will feel when their characters see the Big Bad Cult they've been chasing all campaign summon a mosslord…only to watch the cult become the uncaring creature’s first victims, denying the PCs their revenge and leaving them with a plant monster to clean up.)

One final note: I like how the Bestiary 6 authors acknowledged that, yes, blights and whisperers are also things in the mosslord’s world, and they don’t get along.  Why this is so is not specified, but I like that there’s some awareness that we have dueling forces of natural anger all vying for our attention (and vying to turn the PCs into compost).

The Irn Islands, Summer’s Haven, and the continent of Niobe each have their own druidic orders that tend the wild places and guide their respective nations toward fruitful coexistence.  Not so the lands south of the Gash, where only nomads dwell and all attempts at civilization have been swallowed under the suffocating green carpet of the Mosslord and his army of fungal boggards and fey.

Having already wiped out the Circle of Oak, a mosslord threatens the nation of Arinoryx unopposed—unopposed, that is, until some doughty adventurers step in.  They have a plan to lure the mosslord north to the Auroran Highlands and then trap it in ice.  If they succeed, they will indeed slow and weaken the raging plant creature…but they’ll also awaken Rumor of the Ever-Midnight, a whisperer equally outraged that both the forces of civilization and a scion of rot have entered the fey’s glacial domain.

Detecting an anomaly wave, a chronomancer sends adventurers back in time to prevent a disruption of the fabled Elven Exodus.  There the adventurers discover that it was they who inspired the endangered elven race to flee by magic to another world for a millennium.  In the end, they end up playing crucial roles, battling the ur-orc hordes, surrendering the Home Forests to the protection of the fey, and holding off the nascent drow houses at the Gate of Mir Talash.  Finally they lead the elves to Sirnam, the Green Hope.  But Sirnam does not want to be colonized, the planet itself manifesting as a mosslord to drive out the elven migration.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 194–195

Sticklers for detail will notice that Bestiary 6’s Table of Contents has the mosslord out of alphabetical order.

Anyone else have Moss Man growing up?  I sure did.  (I seem to recall later hearing that one of my friends had both Moss Man and Hordak’s Slime Pit, and the combination was (predictably to anyone but a six-year-old) quite unfortunate.)

Last night’s radio show!  Come rock out with your feelings out.  Yes, just your feelings.  Put that other thing away. 

And hey, I gave a Daily Bestiary reader a shout-out!  Maybe you should listen so you can get out a shout-out, too.

Stream or download the whole thing now till Monday, 08/07/17, at midnight.

Moldwretch

(Illustration by Will O’Brien comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

The moldwretch’s appeal for GMs is largely of a problem-solving nature.  It fills a niche when you need a higher-level (CR 7) fungus creature.  It’s a Small creature that nevertheless is pretty powerful (again, CR 7, and 10 Hit Dice besides).  It's got the toughness of the plant type while moving and thinking (Int 14) like a humanoid.  And because it comes in three moldy flavors (or more, if you’re using supplements like Darklands Revisited or some homebrew tinkering), you can keep players on their toes for at least a couple of encounters.

But what a moldwretch is exactly is still up to you.  A prehistoric vegepygmy?  The spawn of some long-ago infection that merged ape and fungus?  A result of drow fleshwarping?  There’s nothing that even says they have to look like the illustration in Bestiary 6—they simply need to have at least two arms, a tentacle, and an orifice for speaking—so they might appear as fungal spiders, tripod-like mushrooms, moldy elder things, or even more outlandish shapes.

A vegepygmy infestation that adventurers had previously cleared out returns again, as if guided by a more intelligent hand.  If they go back to attack the nest a second time, they find passages leading to a different cave system that includes gardens of musical mushrooms, a rot grub-covered dwarf crypt, and murderous moldwretch masterminds still wearing the skulls of the dwarves whose graves they desecrated.

Moldwretches have a complicated caste system devoted to the molds they tend.  A moldwretch may be a gardener, an ascetic, a warrior, a priest, a wanderer, or one of several other roles, depending on the kind of mold it has bonded with.  A given moldwretch will speak of its past roles as if they were performed by another being entirely, even if it has changed several times in a year.

Adventurers exploring a cave system come across a chamber covered in pebbles arranged in geometric shapes.  At first the shapes appear merely decorative, but studying the negative space reveals a message: the Undercommon word for “Help” written over and over.  A growth of moldwretches have become the unwilling thralls of a fungus queen, and they use every spare moment they have to add still more pebbles to their message.  They don’t dare be more direct, as they fear they will either rouse the fungus queen’s attention or accidentally infect their would-be saviors.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 191

And for my Blogger readers, now it’s time for…

Audio News #1:

I like you so much better when you’re naked, and 31 other truths you will learn from Tuesday night’s radio show.  

Stream/download all the summer fun now through tomorrow (Monday, 06/12/17) at midnight.

Audio News #2:

I’m crazy-honored to have been a guest on the Laughfinder podcast this week, wherein I play Pathfinder with actual comedians and Baltimore luminaries of all kinds.

Thrill to the adventures of Aaron Henkin, Bryan Preston, Dorian Gray, Jim Meyer, Tommy Sinbazo, and me!  Red Point tourism (and Red Point’s mohrg population) will never be the same.

Edit: I forgot to mention how unbelievably awesome playing with an audiomancer (i.e. a sound-effects guy) is.  Total game changer, literally.

Mire Nettle

(Illustration by Will O’Brien comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Like many small carnivorous plants, mire nettles are a certainly a hazard, but only truly pose a danger to the young and infirm.  Still, when attacking in groups (called thickets or groves) or when the boggy terrain favors them, they can be quite deadly.

What sets mire nettles apart from similar plant creatures is their utility. Bestiary 6 lays out a couple of uses for their nettles and toxin, including blowgun darts and coming of age rituals. Since they don't lull their prey to sleep or strangle it outright, mire nettles are also easier to manage and harvest…in theory at least.  (Their pain-wracked victims might argue otherwise…)

Gripplis hate mire nettles, going to almost any lengths to root them out.  Adventurers seeking to curry favor with a grippli tribe can earn potions and tokens of safe passage for a successful mire nettle eradication.  Some gripplis with the toxic skin racial trait (see the Advanced Race Guide) use mire nettle thorns for blowgun darts, and even engage in elaborate scarification rituals.

The local abbey, which also serves as a boarding school, is run by a strict headmaster.  In the head abbot’s absence, the school prior has instituted stricter rules and more arcane punishments.  He has even subjected some boys to the painful thorn spray of a mire nettle he keeps in a secluded grotto.  Adventurers may become involved when two boys abused in this manner run away from their dormitory and are snatched up by ogrekin.

A hell hound is famous for haunting the Bog of Bonny May.  The bog’s other dangers include a band of sprites made mad by gorse wine, two shrieking skeletons, and a thicket of mire nettles with absurdly large purple blossoms whose pollen causes profound anxiety in dwarves and goblins.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 188

No stats for the mire nettle are online yet, so no link.  Also, apologies if the formatting for this post is different—Firefox and Blogger aren't coöperating tonight, so I'm using Safari instead.

Lotus Tree

Sometimes, you go looking for enlightenment.  Sometimes, enlightenment goes looking for you.

And then enlightenment punches you in the face with a tree branch and steals your hope for all time.

Lotus trees are one of the odder monsters in Bestiary 5…not because they are particularly outlandish, but because they exist as monsters at all.  In folklore, we tend to think of lotuses in connection with the lotus-eaters of the Odyssey, the navel of Vishnu, or the flowers that would spring up in the path of the Buddha.  In other words, themes of dreams, peace, calm, reflection, etc.

We don’t think of a CR 20(!) plant monster that can dish out up to 176 points of slam damage in a round, not to mention permanently charm a victim (with a mindwipe chaser), trap them in a microcosm, or choose from any number of other nasty mental effects.

In most high-level adventures, the lotus tree will probably be a role-playing encounter (“I respectfully seek an audience with the tree”) or a hazard (“We have to dig for the treasure in the Dream Lotus Grove without getting snared”).  It might even be a decent guard or penultimate bad guy, standing in as a kind of dreamy Cerberus for the right nature deity or fey power.

But at CR 20…with a neutral alignment, off-the-charts (23–30) mental ability scores, and a number of ways to bend minds and communicate with minions…why not make a lotus tree the Big Bad of your campaign?  Forget dragons and neothelids—there’s no reason the great mastermind behind it all can’t be a suspiciously lovely tree.

Adventurers must rescue a long-last war hero from the clutches of a lotus tree.  The famous tactician was fleeing the sacking of Tarkus when his trireme ran aground and the lotus tree, who does not approve of war, stole his mind.  The adventurers must first win over the tree, then convince the tactician, who has become a pacifist monk in the intervening years.

A lotus tree grove intends to resurrect the Queen of Thorns, an unnamed and long-deceased nature deity.  Certain adventurers have been encountering the trees’ minions since their first adventure, when they drove a mad druid out of their hamlet.  Now, years, later, they know the truth…but not in time to stop the lotus trees from unearthing the dead nature goddess (now a zombie-like plant kaiju).

Sailors who dare to sail the Far Western Ocean sometimes come across the Blessed Islands.  Each one is a strange and unique place, such as Jackdawlun, home to the jackdawmen (short-beaked tengus with the Claw Attack racial trait and the Scavenger’s Eye feat; see the Advanced Race Guide) or the Isle of Derig, populated by hopping fachen.  While these and a handful of others are well known and even charted, there are other Blessed Islands that exist only as rumors—an island populated by tigers and singing mists, a chain of islands that echo the parable of the 12 Carpenter Saints, a hungry island that eats travelers with its fanged caldera, and more.  These more elusive islands are actually the psychic creations of the native lotus trees.  They probe men’s minds for the paradises and purgatories of their dreams and then provide them…allowing just enough of their thralls to escape with stories that will draw new and more interesting minds on the next year’s tides.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 160

I’m not as familiar with the Occult Bestiary as I’d like to be—I like the classes, the themes, and the esoteric planes, but I’m shakier on the powers and phrenic pools and everything else mechanical.  I have realized one thing, though: I have absolutely zero ability to guess how powerful psychic spells are. 

When it comes to arcane magic, I get it—charm monster is going to be beefier than charm person.  Ray of frost grows up to be cone of cold grows up to polar ray. 

But I can't read psychic spells at all.  I quail in fear at id insinuation or oneiric horror…and then discover they're 2nd-level spells.  Meanwhile the harmless sounding microcosm…is a 9th-level spell that “Trap[s] creatures in a veiled mindscape permanently, causing their bodies to waste away in the real world.”  WHOOPS.  Pardon me while I hide all my character sheets forever.

Crap!  It’s already Monday, and I didn’t post last week’s radio show!  This installment was a total seat-of-the-pants affair—I had to spend my usual prep time doing my taxes—and it…um, shows.  So if you like a college radio show that definitely sounds like college radio, with indie and hip hop and country and whatever all crammed together uncomfortably like strangers in a cab, this is for you!  Stream/download it now, because you’ve got a little under an hour (till midnight tonight, Monday, 04/10/17) to grab it.  Enjoy!

Lotus Leshy

(Illustration by Daniel López comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Why create a lotus leshy?  That, I think, is the most interesting question about these flower-faced homunculi. 

I use the term “homunculi” on purpose.”  Most leshys have clearly been created by fey or druidic masters to serve certain servitor roles: as assistants, gardeners, gamekeepers, guards, and the like.  In this, they resemble many constructs of similar power and ability created by wizards.

Lotus leshys, on the other hand, are clearly meant for higher purposes.  Certainly, they serve a role in guarding specific sacred pools and lakes. But they’re also strikingly intelligent (Int 16) and superhumanly wise (Wis 19).  In fact, in most cases they’ll probably outstrip their humanoid creators in raw mental talent, if not formal schooling.  So, why create a servitor who is bound to be smarter than you?

First off, many druids are loners or outright hermits.  A lotus leshy is excellent companionship and a source of conversation, albeit one the druid can still command—never a bad thing for a nature priest who has trouble with social graces.

Second, leshys are amazing companions for druids (and clerics and monks for that matter) of a philosophical bent.  When you’re probing the mysteries of existence, you need someone to explore and ask the hard questions with. Lotus leshys serve as a metaphysical bridge between the natural world and their humanoid masters.  They are also boon companions for meditative activities like sitting zazen or creating sand mandalas.

Third, leshys help masters who have sworn vows of nonviolence.  Most Pathfinder campaigns take place in worlds where steel and spells matter more than soft words.  That makes vows of nonviolence all the more laudable and profound…but having a lotus leshy around (with aura of tranquility, seed spray, and dream pollen at the ready) helps stop fights before they start.

Finally, legacy.  Not every druid is part of a circle.  Not every apprentice is ready to wear her master’s stole and shoulder his burdens when it’s time for him to pass on.  A lotus leshy can be the repository for a lifetime of natural and metaphysical study, quietly tending its sacred pools until the right student passes its way, ready to learn, question, challenge, and blossom into mastery.

The Pool at Nuar is only a minor holy site—just one of the Seven Dwarven Teachers lectured there—but the lotus leshy who minds it is devout, practicing the bhāvanā of the Still Pool and mentoring pilgrims.  The leshy mistrusts goblinoids, though, so as long as adventurers travel with their hobgoblin guide they get a cold reception (and possibly even an enforced nap or two).

To atone for a past sin, a cleric’s master gives her a water lily floating in a jug to deliver to a shrine 300 miles away.  The lily is actually a lotus leshy tasked to quietly spy on and occasionally test the young cleric to see that her contrition is sincere.

After invaders murdered the blossom kami Glorious Hatsue, chopping her down as surely as they chopped down her cherry tree.  All that was left of the toshigami was a handful of lotus leshys she enchanted to watch the many ornamental pools that filled her park.  The shock of Hatsue’s murder—not to mention the ruination of her beautiful park during the lean years of occupation afterward—turned most her servants reclusive and fearful.  But one of the lotus leshys believes she is the heir to Hatsue’s park—perhaps even the kami’s reincarnation—and she seeks revenge.  The philosophical questions she asks reveal a dark nihilist streak, and many of those she engages in conversation end up suspiciously drowned

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 157

Greetings from Oklahoma.  Specifically, Ft. Sill in Lawton.  Last time I was here I was 5.  TWA was still a thing.  Datsun was still a thing.  Auto-flush toilets and the Internet were definitely not.  We live in magical times.

(Actually, now I’m back in Maryland, but I wrote most of this in OK.  I was hoping to post every day I was away but I was busy with my family, so that didn’t quite happen.)

Looking for the locust plague swarm?  It’s back this way.

Edit: Once again, apologies to my Blogger readers, who only get a few hours to download this.

Am I losing my edge?  That’s for you to decide as you enjoy Tuesday night’s radio show.  Since it was my (belated) birthday radio show, I spun songs to work out a little aging anxiety and remind myself that a) life is awesome, b) my friends are great, and c) I was there!  Enjoy classic Beta Band, some Socalled, new Mother Mother, and more.  Stream/download it now through midnight (Monday, 04/03/17).