Harionago

[Apologies for the lateness of the corrected version of this post.  Last night I had a work function that kept me out till nearly midnight, then I got home only to find my laptop had no juice and I’d left my charger at work.]

The harionago is another one of those Japanese monsters that is both awesome in its own context and easily exports into a Western fantasy setting.  Whether PCs face a “harionago” or a “barbed ghoul,” it’s a great monster.  (Also, for balance I hope somewhere there’s a Japanese version of this blog where some dude is going, “Okay so a pixie is like a kodama but with butterfly wings…”  Actually, I think the Japanese word is yōsei, but you get my drift.)

Anyway, the harionago is an undead woman with barbed hair whose laughter is magically infectious.  Originally the spirit of a brutally murdered woman, she is one of those troubled spirits that doesn't stop once her killing has been revenged, but continues to seek out her murderers’ families, then simply plagues lone travelers, especially young men.

A lot of monsters straddle the line between the realm of the fey and the realm of the dead, and the harionago is a perfect example of this (she even speaks Sylvan!).  So you could easily cast her as an unseelie fey, with or without a stat tweak.  (For a quick and dirty version, just consider her to have both the fey and undead types, change her DR to “10 magic and cold iron” and boost her channel resistance to +3 or +4 to even things out.)

A harionago haunts the crossroads of Blackwatch, having lost the trail of her murderer several seasons past.  Her damsel-in-distress act slakes her bloodlust but not her undying pain and frustration at being stymied.  She is too powerful for most adventurers who pass this way, and those that do are encouraged to run in opposite directions to foil pursuit.  She might let a victim go if he or she promises to look into the whereabouts of her murderer, but she will interrogate the would-be detective thoroughly (with her Sense Motive +20 and charm monster as necessary) so that if she is being lied to she may hunt down the offender as well.

A pixie sorcerer falls under the spell of a magical tome.  Already gifted with the ability to cause hideous laughter, the pixie soon transforms into a harionago.  The book’s power is such that her butterfly-winged kin fail to notice her transformation, or are transformed themselves into necromancers, redcaps, grimstalkers, and worse.  Only by destroying the tome will all the forest be returned to normal—all, that is, except the new harionago, who is too far gone for any fate but death.

Driven out of their homeland by crusaders and leopardfolk, gnolls pray to their blood goddess for revenge.  They are shocked when their prayers are answered by the arrival of a white-skinned elven woman.  In short order, the woman kills the tribe’s chieftain for weakness and its druid for blasphemy—with her hair, no less!  Now the tribe is taking back its territory, a pack of gibbering, cackling hyenas led by their laughing harionago chieftainess.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 149

Yesterday I mentioned including adventure seeds for the torble from Pathfinder #25, which prompted demiurge1138 to write:

Is that the plan once you finish B4? To loop around to make seeds of the Pathfinder AP creatures that haven’t been promoted to a hardcover book?

Ha!  I wish, but no.  I definitely thought of doing that, but those plans were pre-Bestiary 3 and 4, when this was a manageable two-year project.  Now that I’m almost four years in, that would just be crazy talk.  So if there’s a Pathfinder Adventure Path monster you really want to see, send me an email (dailybestiary [at] gmail [dot] com; link written that way to avoid spam spiders) and I’ll see what I can do.  (I also have a request for the aarakocra in the queue.)

Otherwise my most pressing post-Bestiary 4 plan involves a beach, a Mai Tai in each hand, and backrubs from a cosplayer with a thing for animal ears. (Pale cis females, the line to apply forms to the left.  If you need a uniform, one will be provided for you.)

Speaking of females…only not necessarily pale, cis, or, well, female…RuPaul’s Drag Race is back on the air!  Can I get an “Amen!”?

Amen?  Anyone?  No?  Just me?    …Okay bye.

In other “Things Only Patch Cares About” news: I did two radio shows last weekend.  TWO.  Here and here.  FOR YOU.

One of the silver linings of my trip to Illinois last week was that I got to read Coliseum Morpheuon on the plane, which has been buried in my to-read pile forever.  It was a third-party book from Rite Publishing by Clinton J. Boomer and Jonathan McAnulty, and it hooked me through its interesting NPCs (I think it was the Advanced half-copper dragon ravid sorcerer that caught my eye), and its setting on the Plane of Dreams.  Also after I dithered on buying it, it totally disappeared from my comic shop, which sent my inner Gollum on a rampage until I ended up ordering it online.

Among the reasons I like it is that it’s clearly a writer’s labor of love.  That has its downsides—the art budget was clearly modest (most of the illustrations are recycled from the covers), any map of the Coliseum Morpheuon is hand-waved away thanks to the plane’s morphic nature, and the layout could pretty much have been accomplished via Microsoft Word.  (Seriously, there is actually underlining.)  That said, it also means it’s a third-party book that is actually readable!  I mean that in every sense of the word—it’s enjoyable to read and it’s not overdesigned like so many third-party books are. 

(I’m not trying to be a design diva, but bad design is the number one thing keeping me away from third-party books.  Even the biggest publishers can't seem to tell the difference between headline and type fonts, and I’m worn out from every page being cluttered with dagger-pointed subheads and art in the “margins” that takes up half the page.  Design, layout, and font choices matter.  One day I’ll finish my essay on why 3.0 Forgotten Realms was so much more readable than 3.5 Eberron.  And I’m convinced the font was one of the reasons I could read page after page of 4e’s Underdark and The Plane Above and not recall a word.)

(It’s also clear that many publishers are making layout choices based on what they see on the screen but not looking hard enough at how it all prints out.  Razor Coast, for instance, is a hell of a book—seriously impressive and worth getting in hardcover—but even so I’d swear it was meant to be read on a tablet, not on the page, based on how the leading looks on screen vs. in print.)

Speaking of Razor Coast, Coliseum Morpheuon operates in a similar fashion but on a much smaller scale.  You get a setting, NPCs, and a strong overall plot, but you’re offered a choice of paths within that plot (courtesy of which benefactors your PCs attract and which interstitial encounters they stumble upon).  It also adds some unique flavor and mechanics to the plane in terms of dreamburning—the ability to tap into your dreams/goals/hopes/aspirations (as well as those of your enemies—for extra power, but at a cost.

So your enjoyment of Coliseum Morpheuon largely depends on your engagement of all of the above.  You have to want an adventure for high-level characters (16-20).  You have to want to spend a lot of time on the Plane of Dreams—and not just on the Plane of Dreams in general, but alternately hobnobbing in the court of a lawful evil khan or fighting in the arena for the khan’s amusement.  This last element is probably the strongest selling point—the NPCs are pretty unforgettable and could be adapted to any number of high-level campaigns, and the khan’s court and coliseum could easily be transplanted to the chaos of Limbo, the order of Hell, or any number of under-regulated neutral planes.  If you want to flirt with Leng and Kadath without going the full Lovecraft, this is the book for you.  If your big complaint about The Hunger Games is that there wasn’t a tarrasque, this is definitely the book for you.

That said, any time you marry terms like “third-party” and “labor of love,” along come their children “typos” and “how did you come up with that stat block?” and “too many callouts to other Rite Publishing books that aren’t explained.”  (Wyrds for instance, play a role but are left almost entirely vague, and several of the included pregenerated characters have races like ironborn or jotun with zero explanation).  I don't want to harp on that, though, because there are plenty of new spells/feats/etc. that are explained. And again: This is a readable third-party book!  It seems to work as an adventure!  I would show it to friends!

Can I recommend it?  Not sight unseen, given the narrow audience it’s going for and all the narrative strictures I mentioned two paragraphs ago.  But if you see it in your store, definitely give it a browse or consider getting the PDF.  (Especially given that the Paizo Messageboards reviewers have slapped 5 stars on it.)  If you’re really into planar adventures or mixing politics and combat in an evil NPC’s court, give it some serious thought.  And if the notion of actually putting your hopes on the line to get a dice bonus appeals to you, or if you long to steal your enemy’s most cherished dream right out from under her nose, then this is your book.  It truly does add something new to your game, and by taking dreams seriously it truly is doing something other settings simply aren’t.  That’s a accomplishment for any book, third-party or no, and if you’re at the point in your collecting where that matters to you, Coliseum Morpheuon likely belongs on your shelf.

Haniver

I’m fascinated by gremlins in Pathfinder, because I just can't peg down the design philosophy behind them.  There’s no “default” gremlin, like there was in the world’s oldest role-playing game—jinkins kind of have the look, but it’s the insectile vexgits who have the usual hatred of machines.  (And let’s be real: The real default “gremlins” in Pathfinder are its iconic goblins anyway.)  Pathfinder’s gremlins also don’t belong to any one tradition like, say, the oni, or have a coherent feel despite being borrowed from all over, like psychopomps.  Instead they’re a mishmash of physiognomies and abilities, both real (that is, from our world’s folklore) and imagined.  It’s like someone mixed up the Lego collections of Brian Froud, Charles de Lint, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jim Henson all in the same bucket and built whatever came to mind. 

That’s not a knock against them; it's just interesting—they're a monster family that defies easy categorization and ordering…just like gremlins themselves.

So creating a gremlin out of Jenny Haniver, a Cockney name for a bizarre Belgian tchotchke (and I say that as a bizarre Belgian, if only by birth, myself) made out of a mummified skate?  Sure, why the hell not?!  And the fact is, it works, because the haniver is instantly real-feeling in its own right.  I don’t question that it’s an actual creature because…well, it kind of is.

Every gremlin has a focus, and hanivers are about stealing little treasures and objects of value.  That precious thing of yours that nevertheless managed to lose itself?—a haniver’s doing, courtesy of its misplacement ability.  The intrinsic worth of an object means nothing to a haniver; it's another creatures desire for the object that gives stolen things value to the fey.

At CR 1/2, hanivers are great aquatic/coastal encounters for PCs just starting out.   A fishing village’s annual haniver hunt is not a bad way to throw together a disparate group of PCs.  And since hanivers are congenital thieves, they can land PCs in hot water with the law at a low enough level that 1st-level fighters are still a threat PCs will have to take seriously.

It’s Hope Harbor’s annual haniver roundup.  Teams of boats go out to catch as many of the troublesome gremlins as they can.  Even landlubbers get into the act, as having a properly prepared haniver hung on your door is meant to ward off ill luck (or at least, more gremlins).  But this year’s hunt is fouled by a boating accident that may be a murder, sightings of the mysterious shoal elves, and rumors that the hunt has angered Magatha the Sea Witch…not to mention swarms of hanivers that prove exceedingly difficult to net or kill.

A dwarven thane demands to see a mermaid, pointing to a relic of his old adventuring days: a dried and shriveled haniver.  He may be off his shop stool, but he strong-arms a group of young adventures into hunting for “mermaids” with him.  When they actually do face the troublesome gremlins, he slips away…off to meet a mermaid he fell in love with in his youth, whom he has secretly and faithfully visited every 20 years since.

Usually hanivers steal trinkets of little value to anyone but their owners.  But when a haniver overhears a power-hungry noble covet a young prince’s signet ring, it cannot resist the theft…and inadvertently causes a crisis of succession.  Now the prince’s guardians and the noble’s retainers hunt the ring and each other.  The haniver realizes what he’s done can only cause trouble for him and his kin, but the more desperate the searchers get, the more his fey nature refuses to let him return the ring.  Talking the gremlin out of his prize possession may take a lot of diplomacy…but it’s nothing compared to talking one’s way past the noble’s men without being searched and detained.

—Pathfinder #25 76–77 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 143

I should mention that participating in a haniver hunt might cause PCs some alignment troubles, as they are neutral creatures and reasonably intelligent to boot.  That also might make the custom of nailing dead hanivers to one’s door a bit troublesome.  If you want to avoid those dilemmas, you can just have the greedy and territorial fey attack the PCs…but if it’s an experienced group of players, make ’em squirm a bit if they attack the fey without talking first.

More on the haniver can be found in Pathfinder #25: The Bastards of Erebus.  That issue also gave us the Pathfinder version of the rot grub, our first look at the strix, and the torble, which a reader asked me to do adventure seeds forever ago.  (I will get to it!  Eventually!)

Hamadryad

Mythologically, there’s pretty much no difference between dryads and hamadryads.  If there is any, it’s pretty much splitting hairs, with hamadryads being somewhat more integrally tied to their trees.  But if you give something two names, it's an excuse for role-players to create two monsters.  (Which I fully support, by the way.  See my rant on oreads. But anyway…)  In Tall Tales of the Wee Folk, for instance, hamadryads are dryads who spontaneously arose out of trees, whereas dryads are the daughters of dryads and hamadryads who have to seek out a tree of their own to bond with.

In Pathfinder, a hamadryad is essentially super-dryads—queen of the entire forest rather than a single tree, and not bound to her ward.  Alone, she (with the aid of the dryads and trees in her charge) can tend the health of nearly every acre in her care.  When paired with an erlking sibling or spouse, they form a yin and yang of nature’s gifts—its patience and its passion, its stillness and its speed, its healing touch and savage bite.

An ancient forest covers the land bridge between Elurian and Kitsunar.  And where the two continents meet, so too do the spirits of those lands—which is how the hamadryad Querquetulania fell in love with the jinushigami Muk. But spirit love operates by different rules…and when a winter erlking (see Pathfinder Adventure Path #68: The Shackled Hut for the winter fey template) trespasses in the forest, his supernatural influence turns a helpless Querquetulania and her dryad handmaidens hateful and xenophobic.  Muk is outraged, of course (though in the slow, glacial manner of his kind) and concerned fey and kami of both woodland courts recruit adventurers to free the hamadryad from the corrupted erlking’s control before war rips the great forest apart.

The hamadryad Magnolia has a home forest.  She just chooses to ignore it, apparently.  Instead she runs a myrtle-shrouded teahouse and clinic in the Seventh Ward.  She guards the secret of her race carefully, however, and will attempt to silence those who probe too closely (usually via call lightning storm, summoned creatures, or by creating treant assassins with liveoak).  The reason she has taken up city life has something to do with the crossed scimitar and shillelagh hanging over her fireplace (and guarded by sentinels that are not readily apparent to mortal eyes) and a particular paving stone in her garden that is actually a stone table from legend.

A hamadryad is losing her memory.  A being of ancient age, she is fast losing her recollections of the present day, spending more and more time locked in the primeval memories of her past.  In her confusion, she summons dinosaurs, mammoths, and frost giants to comfort her and drive off the humanoids that “infest” her lands.  Adventurers become involved when sightings of dire tigers and tyrannosauruses become too common to ignore.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 148

I don’t give two coprolites about college basketball, but my grad school alma mater does make some nice videos.

Oh, and the dress was really made of displacer beast hide, so it was black and blue and white and gold, but then disappeared because it wasn’t Open Game Content.

Halsora

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

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

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

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

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

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 104

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

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

Guardian Dragon

I don't like reducing monsters to statistics.  But CR 24/MR 10 is a number that has its own gravity. 

There are bigger, more powerful monsters in the Bestiary 4—demon lords and Great Old Ones and kaiju, oh my—but none of them have the dragon type.  That still matters—even in these enlightened latter days, when we’re more about finding paths than we are about delving you-know-whats guarded by you-know-whos.  At the end of the day, you picked up that sword to slay a dragon. 

And this dragon was created by none other than a god.  There are worse ways to start a tale…or end it, if PCs are unlucky.

So.  The guardian dragon.  As published dragons go, it’s second only to Mythic Adventures’s mythic wyrm red dragon in power (and that’s only by a hair).  Its spell-like abilities are there to foil and confound you.  Its immunities and resistances practically run the table.  Its physical abilities and attacks—and there are so, so many of them—are designed to punish you this round and for several rounds in the future.  It lairs in the farthest corners of the multiverse, can create demiplanes at will, and track all but Fine-sized intruders.  It can grant its mythic power to allies or use it to literally remake the world around itself.  And if you steal from it, it will find you—period.

A god of thieves has had his divinity stolen—a crime of such sublime irony that the god would laugh in delight, were he not terrified for his new life.  (Gods of thievery have a talent for making enemies with long memories.)  Worse yet, when he returned to his divine realm to retrieve an old blade still invested with his power, his guardian dragon servitor refused—or was unable—to recognize him as its master.  Believing retrieving the sword is the first in a series of necessary steps to reclaim his mantle, he teams up with some of his greatest mortal worshippers (or perhaps just some mortals unfortunate enough to be in his debt) for the (second-)greatest heist of all time: to steal from himself.

It’s the perfect heist.  Ally with your enemies to break into a guardian dragon’s secret lair and steal its divine treasure.  Wait for—and ideally survive—your enemies’ sudden but inevitable betrayal.  While they flee with the artifact, guardian dragon in hot pursuit, you return to the lair to clean out the dragon’s personal treasure after its private demiplane collapses.  Abscond with the treasure, race to your enemies’ location to finish off any combatants left standing, and claim the divine artifact as your own as well.  Again, it's the perfect heist.  What could possibly go wrong?

On some worlds, color is not the only allegiance.  On Helia, the elemental tide that pulses with every dragon’s heartbeat is stronger than any skin tone or moral/ethical pole.  As Fire dragons war with Earth and Water, only the beasts of Air and Cold stand apart, maintaining the balance.  But when a pair of guardian dragon siblings (which in itself should be an impossibility) joins the war on the side of the Water Sept, it may forever shift the balance of the war—and the makeup of Helia itself.  An adventuring company’s sovereign dragon patron begs them to come out of retirement for one last mission: end the threat of the guardian dragon twins or die trying.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 146–147

I love me some one-off dragons.  Where my gorynyches at?

With that centurion-like armor and spiraling snake tail, Jorge Fares’s design for the guardian dragon underlines its singular nature.  Interestingly, while it has only two non-winged limbs, it appears to have true arms like a lamia noble rather than the crude forearms of a linnorm or the legs of the more birdlike wyvern.

Also, how much do you want to bet that planting the teeth of a guardian dragon would sprout udaeoi?

Finally, while guardian dragons don’t have a vomit attack per se, their blood is poisonous dragon bile and their breath is a lingering poisonous cloud…  Does that make us three for three on puke-themed monsters this week?

Grothlut

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 103

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

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

Grimple

(Placeholder post. Still in Illinois doing funeral stuff. Will post when life calms down.)