Tattoo Guardian

It’s our first monster from the Occult Bestiary!  [Stan Lee voice] Because you asked it for it, True Believers! [/Stan]  I won’t pretend to be an expert on the new rules—heck, my copy of Occult Adventures hasn’t even shipped yet—but we’ll muddle through as best we can.

Tattoo guardians combine some of the best features of magical tattoos and familiars—they rise up in defense when their master is threatened, then return to become a simple (if intricate and eye-catching) adornment when the threat has passed.  In the Golarion setting, these tattoos tend to adorn nobles and the clergy, but on your world, who knows how common or rare they might be?

Best of all for PCs’ purposes, all you need to have a tattoo guardian of your own is a 9th-level caster!  Or you can do it yourself—what better use for the Craft skill can you think of?

Just beware—in the rare cases where the tattoo guardian survives and its master doesn’t, sometimes the tattoo guardian gets a splinter of its master’s sentience…and the results are never good.

A crime lord offers to settle a dispute with a party of adventures via a test of strength: a wrestling match, his champion versus theirs.  Only once the champions come to grips, the dragon tattoo adorning the crime lord’s representative animates and begins carving up his challenger.  Protesting will do little good—“We said no spells, magic items, familiars, or outside assistance…can I help it if the tattoo is none of the above?”—and they are outnumbered, so the adventurers may have to get creative to save their friend.

An animate tattoo of a two-headed eagle has been attacking city guardsmen.  The tattoo matches the one that sits on the back of a well-known local paladin—or did, since the paladin just turned up dead with no tattoo on his body.  Investigation by a party of novice city guardsmen reveals that the paladin was murdered, and the tattoo guardian is hunting those it believes responsible while it still has the will to do so.

A half-elf nude model is the talk of the university town of Fairhope.  Bards and painters alike compete to respectively sing her praises and sketch her curves, with some of the more ambitious artists even painting her body like a canvas for use in avant-garde shows.  But not everyone is so pleased, included the local clerics and Fairhope’s strongly traditionalist elven community.  At a show some adventurers are attending, a knife flies through the air and buries itself in her back.  That’s when her tattoo guardian, a heron, rises up to strike—and since it did not see who cast the knife, it begins attacking the crowd at random.

—Occult Bestiary 54

Stats for the tattoo guardian don’t seem to be online yet, but you can always find them here.

Taniniver

Pathfinder went to mythology’s way-back bench to find the taniniver—but the results were worth it.  Based on Lilith’s steed Tanin'iver from Kabbalistic teachings, this one-off dragon species is amazing; Bestiary 4 calls the wyrm a “legless, winged, white-eyed dragon […] covered in patches of diseased flesh, squirming with maggots and oozing pus.”  It’s an entire dragon species riddled with disease, constantly rotting away yet doomed to live in agonized, imperfect health for centuries.  For villain fodder, how cool is that?

So yeah, if you’ve got your high-level PCs fighting undead, daemons, or other forces of evil and decay, now you've got a hell of a curveball to throw at them.  And the presence of a taniniver practically begs you to explore other deep cuts of evil: divs, azi, asuras, and worse.  Every taniniver in existence is looking for surcease from pain for himself and a cure for his race—and when you are looking forward to centuries of agony, you will do almost anything and ally with almost anyone to get the job done.

A taniniver has been able to find relief from his condition by constantly bathing himself in magical energies.  He harvests these energies by tapping into ley lines, and in fact has converted an entire pharaonic pyramid to this effort.  (The fact that this caused the pyramid’s dead inhabitants to rise as undead is a triviality to the dragon.)  But the hijacked magical apparatus is delicate, requiring the pyramid to remain sealed.  When adventurers breach the pyramid’s defenses, they face not only the usual mummies and death traps but also an outraged, maggot-covered dragon.

To find an artifact locked away in a magical deck, adventurers must face challenges represented by the major arcana pictured on the cards.  Defeating the Blind Serpent means crossing into the fey realms to fight the Taniniver, a jabberwock-like creature blessed with eternal life but not eternal youth or health.  The Taniniver, meanwhile, is tired of his imprisonment in the demiplane, and he has allowed daemons to begin construction on a bridge to their dark homeland.  Theoretically, the very deck of cards the adventurers are holding could become a staging ground for the Apocalypse.

On an alternate Earth where magic still thrives and the Second Temple never fell, the Davidic and Ottoman Empires are wary partners against the political machinations of the Roman Magisterium.  When a magical plague strikes Jerusalem, everyone suspects the Pope’s magisters.  Then the Holy See, too, begins reporting illnesses, sending lantern archons and ironbound quickling servants from Eire to Timbuktu begging its priests and paladins to return home to fight the pestilence.  The real culprit is a descendant of one of the Jews’ most ancient enemies: a taniniver.  The diseased dragon  has received the promise of Ahriman that the Lord of All Divs will cure the taniniver race once no human, half-elven, or sylph in King David’s line is left alive.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 258

One of the nice surprises of this summer is that I’ve gotten to hang out with and correspond with D. Watkins.  Yeah, that D. Watkins and that D. Watkins.  I was supposed to go to his book launch tonight…and naturally that meant that two minutes into his introduction I got called away.  Sigh.  Still, if you’re at all interested in current, up-to-the-minute thoughts on race, poverty, the police, and growing up in Baltimore, look for his new book, The Beast Side.  Also check out his cover story interview in this week’s City Paper.  (You might remember the interviewer as well; it’s my friend Brandon who featured in this photo during the Uprising.)

Here’s last night’s radio show!  This week I played September songs and gave some love to the Push Kings’ unfairly maligned Feel No Fade.  Stream or download it here.

(Link good till Monday, 9/14, at midnight.  If the feed skips, Save As an mp3 and enjoy it from your desktop.)

Swan Maiden & Trumpeter Swan

Important: This post has a theme song.

So.  Swan maidens.  (Or swanmays, if you want to be old school about it.)  They’re a classic trope of folklore, one that tends to follow the similar tales involving selkies, crane wives, kitsune, etc.—either a man steals a swan maiden’s cloak and they live together until she finds it, or a mysterious woman marries a man but hides her secret from him and is compelled to leave if he ever discovers her true nature.

Thanks to the heavily influential (meaning I haven’t read it but know I should) Three Hearts and Three Lions, swan maidens have floated in and out of fantasy gaming for years, taking on a much more active role as defenders of nature with aspects of the ranger or druid classes.  Sometimes they are fey; sometimes they are human; in 3.5 they were even a prestige class.

Pathfinder goes the fey route, making them agile fencers and archers with a dash of fey magic to go with.  Their fey nature is still heavily tied up in their cloaks, though—a swan maiden can’t transform into swan form without one, and a good-aligned female of any humanoid race can be transformed into a swan maiden through a 24-hour ritual (which you have to imagine involves the investiture of a feathered cloak).  If you’ve got a good female PC whose player wants to switch characters or leave the campaign, a retirement as a swan maiden would be a hell of a send-off.

That said, you can scrap the female requirement as far as I’m concerned.  The stories of Lohengrin and the Knight of the Swan are nearly swan maiden tales already, give or take a swan-drawn chariot or two.  So maybe next adventure throw some swan men your PCs’ way.  Or, if you like gender fuckery—I normally keep this blog FCC-clean but it’s the appropriate term of art—maybe men become swan maidens when they acquire the cloak, too, and only retain their new gender as long as they retain the feathered mantle.  So the PC hoping to get a new cohort (or a new bride) by stealing a swan maiden’s cloak might be surprised to find a very angry bearded man demanding his clothing back.

And as for trumpeter swans…dude, swans are territorial.  Don’t mess with them.  Urban legend has inflated their reputation somewhat, but still.

“Flush the rebels out of Durham Wood.”  A seemingly simple command.  But when adventurers discover that grigs, brownies, and even unicorns are aiding the rebels, it’s clear that this is no ordinarily hullabaloo over taxes and crop seizures.  A scouting mission into the nearby valley reveals someone is clearcutting trees, crafting strange clockwork soldiers, and holding local children in locked pens.  Do the adventurers ride out their contract or switch sides?  And how can you convince the baron you’ve captured the rebels’ charismatic swan maiden leader when she turns into a man 24 hours after her cloak has been removed?

“Retrieve the king’s swan.”  A seemingly simple assignment.  But when the swan in question is a gift from a nixie queen a continent away, the gamekeeper has been poisoned, there are goblins on the loose, and the swan itself is rather adamant about not being retrieved…then it becomes another assignment entirely.  The price for failure is the king’s displeasure…but succeed or fail this just might be the assignment that turns a ragtag band of nobles’ bastard children, acolytes, apprentices, and promising servants into a bona fide adventuring company.

“Steal the banner from the top of Château Cygnus.”  A seemingly simple dare.  Unlike the dapper (when they’re not publicly carousing and brawling) musketeers, church magi, halberdiers, city watch, and other public and private armies roaming the streets of Sierre, the Swan Knights spend most of their time dispatched leagues away in the Royal Game Preserves and keep to the château when in town.  Musketeers who take up the challenge will find that the Swan Knights are not precisely human and have unique ways of foiling the plans of ambitious braggarts.  But—assuming the swan maidens don’t kill them outright—the musketeers may also be on hand to stop a disturbing plot by some cold-iron wielding rakshasa agents intent on destroying the fey shapechangers who might spot their machinations.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 257

I think some Tamora Pierce snuck into that first adventure seed.

I first came across swanmays in the pages of Dragon Magazine #155, a fey-focused issue you’re probably sick to death of me talking about.  (It’s so good, though!)

Dragon #266 had a whole article on variant swanmays from James Wyatt, “Feathered Friends and Foes.”  It’s actually kind of great, and if you’re a big fan of swanmays/swan maidens, it's worth checking out.

For me though, that issue has always represented something grim.  It came out in December 1999, amid a series of issues (the amazing Underdark-focused #267 being a very notable exception) that were clearly marking time until Third Edition came out.  In fact, it was worse than that…these issues just felt exhausted and out of ideas.  (Even James Wyatt’s article, while I like it for itself, in context is symptomatic of that exhaustion: “You know that one shapechanger near the end of the alphabet that you’ve never used?  Here are four more of them.  I hope you like gull-people.”)  Normally I dread edition changes the way most people fear an IRS audit, but the decline of late-2e Dragon really makes the case that it was time.  Reading from fall of 1999 through 2001 is to watch a magazine surrender to exhaustion, then be utterly reborn with the shot of adrenaline 3.0 provided.

Worse than that, this was around the time the hobby store in my local mall just gave up on RPGs whatsoever after a remodel.  But for some reason, they had stacks of issue #266 lying around.  Stacks.  And they just lingered there unbought for months, propped up on a bottom shelf in the remodeled store as this awful mocking symbol that the magazine I loved was barely wheezing along and that my favorite hobby store didn’t care about my hobby anymore. 

So I hate this issue.  But props to James Wyatt for a nice article.

Svartalfar

I’m back!  Major pitch submitted, 19-day workweek survived, and a Labor Day weekend with board-gamer friends miraculously achieved.  Let’s monster it up, shall we?

The mythical svartálfar have been just waiting to be worked into your game.  Given that their name means “black elves,” they were probably Garry Gygax’s inspiration for the drow, but in and of themselves they’ve never played a big role in D&D or Pathfinder that I can remember.  (I think GAZ7 The Northern Reaches might have name-dropped them, and dock-alfar/dockalfen got a mention in the 2e Vikings Campaign Sourcebook and Ian Malcolmson’s excellent “Dark Ages” article in Dragon #257, but that’s about it that I can recall.)

Pathfinder’s svartalfars take what little source material there is and riff on it nicely.  Bestiary 4’s svartalfars are ebon-skinned fey exiled from the fey realms to live on the Plane of Shadow.  Their main trade is assassination, for which they demand payment in secrets (and if that sentence doesn't scream adventure potential, I don’t know what does).  Since they are superbly talented swordsmen who can imbue their weapons with bane and other abilities, they’re clearly good at their jobs.  And if one cabal member can’t pull it off, the rest will jump in to finish the kill and preserve the group’s honor.  In fact, it’s this loyalty and efficiency that makes them kind of the anti-fey—they are lawful evil, emotionless, and always keep to their contracts.  But in the end, what they know is still far more deadly in the long run than how well they kill.

Svartalfars collect secrets…and since the Plane of Shadow’s kytons are some of the best torturers in the multiverse, svartalfars take pains to collect the screams that fall from their victims’ lips (sometimes openly, sometimes clandestinely).  When adventures rescue their friend from a kyton’s operating theater, their mad escape attempt takes them down below the complex…and smack into a svartalfar listening post.  Only a very good secret will keep the fey from butchering them on the spot for putting their position at risk.

A svartalfar accepted an assassination target beyond the reach of his abilities, and now half his cabal has been left dead or maimed trying to preserve his honor.  If it spills beyond the cabal, the entire clan could suffer, and that the clan chief cannot allow.  The calculating fey hires adventurers to find a loophole that will nullify the original contract.  Their research will likely put them in the path of the remaining cabal members still on the hunt, and since the clan chief cannot reveal his involvement, the adventurers are on their own when it comes to defending themselves.

No one wants to be in debt to a servant of Death, so when a viduus calls in the favor some adventurers owe him, they leap at the chance.  Besides, the viduus said the mission was something called “interlibrary loan”—how hard could returning a simple book be?  Of course, only after the party agrees does the pychopomp mention that the book belongs in one of the deepest svartalfar libraries on the Plane of Shadow…and that they books wasn’t ever properly borrowed; it was stolen.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 256

Hi, guys!  Miss me?

In case you’re wondering, this weekend I played Kingdom Builder (my feelings for which fall about halfway between Quinns and Paul’s thoughts on the subject), Dixit (great art) and some Star Trek co-op that used dice pools to resolve mechanics.  I don’t remember what it was called, but since I was utterly useless for the entire game and then saved everyone with a last-minute deus (or rather dice) ex machina, it definitely felt just like an episode of ST:TNG to me.  So that’s…good?

Styracosaurus & Velociraptor

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

A star of dinosaur picture books for its horned frill, the styracosaurus in the Pathfinder game uses those horns in a devastating defense (up to five attacks of opportunity in a single round).  Meanwhile, the movie star velociraptor gets cut down to its paleontologically accurate size—only one-and-a-half feet tall—but with sickle-like claws and coordinated pack hunting, that’s still deadly enough when facing novice adventurers, particularly those who have never seen a dinosaur before.

Orcs love “spearshields”—their word for styracosauruses.  They goad their beasts into wherever the fighting is thickest, where the dinosaurs’ thrashing can have the most devastating effect.  Orcs paint the frills of their beasts in tribal colors, and knowledgeable adventurers can use this to figure out which tribe is currently in charge—or even to sneak through orc lands themselves, if they have a styracosaurus companion they can paint.

Velociraptors are a constant hazard in the Oni’s Tears, an archipelago favored by pirates, smugglers, spice merchants, and drug runners (the last two often being one and the same).  More than one ghost ship has turned out to be the result of a pack of velociraptors sneaking aboard and eviscerating the crew.

Drought has struck the White Eagle Desert for the third year in a row.  Now even traditionally healthy rivers are drying up.  To the rock gnome village of Mollawud, this means they are no longer protected on three sides by water.  The gnomes need help defending their homes and fields against the velociraptors that are now free to strike at them day and night.  If the adventurers instead try to help the gnomes move, they must defend them along the way against heat exhaustion, fire wolves, thylacines, bunyips, and their fever gnome kin.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 59

Man, you guys have gone nuts with the likes/reblogs this week.  Thanks!

I got several nice private notes from people reacting to this answer I posted two weekends back, and among the lines in one of them was the following:

I’d love for you to continue, as your posts are always fantastic inspiration for my own game, but it sounds like you’re getting a bit burned out.

To which my response was, “Oh noes!  Everyone thinks I’m burned out!”

If you read the other weekend’s post and thought that’s what I was saying, that’s my bad for leading you astray.  I am definitely *not* burned out on The Daily Bestiary—not at all; I could keep this up forever.  There’s just also all this other stuff I want to do too, and only 24 hours in a day.  It’s not a question of being burned out; it's a question of “How do I deliver the most awesome content I can and have fun doing it?”  Ideally I can do The Daily Bestiary *and* all that other stuff, but I also have to pay a mortgage and occasionally sleep, too.  So I’m just trying to figure out how to juggle all of that and still serve up the best entertainment I can, in whatever form it takes.

Which, by the way, is why you shouldn’t panic if I take chunks of the next two weeks off.  I’m hitting crunch time on several work projects and already know I’m working through the next two weekends.  (So instead of looking forward to a day off tomorrow, I’m looking forward to Day Six of a 19-day week—on the last two weekends of summer, to add insult to injury…and guess who had travel plans he had to cancel.  Sigh.)  We should be finishing up Bestiary 4 in the next two weeks, but since I can't guarantee I’ll have enough juice to post, I’ll instead use the time to catch up on some reader mail and otherwise work on my backlog.

See you in a week or two, and keep your eyes peeled in case I do any posting in the interim—I’ll keep you posted in the comments or over on Tumblr!

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.

Star-Spawn of Cthulhu

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

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him…”

—Genesis 1:27

I already shot my pseudopod re: pseudogod Cthulhu himself back around Halloween.  (And as far as I can tell it’s my most popular post, bar none.)  So I don’t have all that much to add about his star-spawn, especially since their entry in the Bestiary 4 is so comprehensive.  For all practical purposes, they look the same as their dark high priest, though they only top out at 30 feet high.  (As a bonus, their elastic limbs can also stretch 30 feet in combat—hope you have some polearms handy!  That’s assuming their telepathic minds didn’t already knock you out in your dreams last night.)  We know they warred with the elder things in the distant past and have manipulated the mi-go to their purposes, so if either of those two baddies have shown up in your game, you have a reason to tie in the star-spawn.  They also move and plan long-term—this is a race happy to use its immortality flying between planets with only the limited starflight ability—so PCs will likely never know if their interference saved the day or merely set back the spawn’s goals by a millennium or two.

But let’s face it…really, the reason you have the star-spawn of Cthulhu in your game is because it’s only a CR 20 creature.  I feel like I need sarcasm quotes every time I say “only,” but you get my point.  In other words, it’s a Cthulhu proxy most parties can face and possibly even survive against without resorting to mythic ranks and divine intervention.  Maybe the spawn is a servitor of Cthulhu…or maybe it’s actually an aspect of him intruding into the world.  (D&D 3.0/3.5 did similar things with aspects of the various demon lords.)  If the PCs win, they’ve saved the world (for a little while at least), and if they lose, they’ve still got a chance to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and rally allies for another strike.  That makes fighting the star-spawn an epic task, but not an impossible one—perfect for heroic fantasy role-playing.

Best of all, if they have too easy a time of it, you don’t even have to sweat.  Just imagine the look on your players’ faces when you announce that, congratulations, the noise of their battle with the star-spawn has awakened 1d6 of his friends…

Adventures have fought the watery servants of Dagon their entire career.  They’ve battled cultists in sunken canals, defeated marsh giants in Drowned Ulm, took on mer-form to battle inside the gut of a ceratioidi temple-fish, and scalped a fiendish brine dragon.  Now as the demon lord’s temple city falls around them, they consider their work well and truly done…until the city is borne aloft on a cloud of noxious gases and coral sails.  And as the city ascends into space, the adventurers meet the Navigators—three star-spawn who bow before the same power Dagon does: Great Cthulhu.

Cthulhu is dead.  In fact, he never even existed.  The First Gods literally unmade a chunk of creation itself to remove the Great Old One from this reality, then shed the parts of themselves that knew of him, birthing the New Gods from their very own selves rather than keep even mere knowledge of the abomination.  But dreams of Cthulhu survived and birthed a star-spawn…or maybe a star-spawn survived and birthed the dream of Cthulhu.  The point is, books with Cthulhu’s name have appeared without anyone writing them.  Cultists have appeared worshipping a god who is not a god but nonetheless grants them spells.  And somewhere on the Demiplane of Dreams a star-spawn of Cthulhu sleeps, and if he is not slain before his dreams are finished, Cthulhu will be dreamed into full existence once more.

When even devils get nervous, you know something’s wrong.  And when a half-fiend kasatha arms dealer from Dis closes up shop and takes adventurers out for drinks—and actually volunteers to pay—on auction day at one of the biggest salvage planets in the Known Spheres, you know wrong isn’t even the half of it.  “It’s those fungus bugs, the mi-go,” he says.  “I found out where they’ve been getting their gear from.  Well, the idea-seeds for their gear.  Only it’s not a ‘where’…not even on a planar level.  It’s another dimension—you might say it’s a ‘when’ and a ‘what if?’ and a ‘once was.’  And it’s a ‘who’…this thing called—”  And that’s the last thing he says before the shoggoth bomb goes off and he is devoured.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #46 90–91 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 254–255

The note count was up around 90 for yesterday’s post when I discovered some fluke of the mouse had linked to the wrong radio show.  *headdesk*  Sigh.  So if you tuned in and got my big anniversary show from last February I apologize—it was a fun show, but not exactly what I do week to week.  You were supposed to get this.  (BTW, yesterday’s link is now fixed on Tumblr; I can't fix it on Blogger but I posted the correct link in the comments.)