Mimic

How appropriate that on a day we unwrap mysterious boxes of all sizes, our monster is a treasure chest filled with teeth...

I’m a fan of all of Paizo’s Revisited books, but Dungeon Denizens Revisited is definitely worth an extra look because of how seriously it takes some of the typical but typically weird monsters that stock your average dungeon.  Clinton Boomer’s take on the biology/psychology of mimics (as insane creatures convinced they will evolve into humans) is definitely worth a read (as is his list of variant abilities for tweaking yours). 

And that’s the thing about mimics—with Int 10 and the ability to speak Common, they may have loads outlandish (or revelatory) things to say…if you can stop one from eating you long enough to talk to it.  Of course, when your bed or your rowboat sprouts a fanged mouth, conversation is probably not the first thing on your mind.

Caught in the middle of a religious war between the Revivalists and the Cerulean Heart, a sprawling citadel has changed hands several times; each side sits firmly entrenched in a wing as they duel over the keep’s heart.  Each cohort also believes the other is ignorant of the secret door hidden in the bookshelf in the library, sending agents through the tunnels to sabotage and spy on the enemy.  But some of these agents don’t return—the secret door is actually a mimic lured from the dungeon by the constant fighting, who allows the spies to go through but gobbles them up on their return trip.

A clutch of chokers stole several children, intent on devouring them, only to be driven off by an unlikely protector: a mimic fascinated by these “people dolls.”  Squirreling them away in its lair, it seeks to talk to them and amuse them by changing shapes.  But if adventurers do not intervene, eventually it will grow tired of this and demand the children demonstrate how they grow into real people…or it will “take their doll bodies apart” to find out.  Meanwhile, the chokers still hunger for their lost repast...

On most worlds, sages suspect aboleths or ropers created mimics.  On Nimmelheim, the gnomes tell a different story.  When Garen Highmount proposed a prank contest for all the gnome deities and demigods, Jaxen of the Jet Pommel offered a jewelry box that tried to bite anyone who opened it.  The wound it gave Garen nearly cost the god his finger, and was deemed in such poor taste by the assembled host that Jaxen was shunned for a year.  The box was hurled into the depths, where it spawned the first mimics.  Since then, Nimmelheim mimics have held a particular hatred for gnomes.  Jaxen, meanwhile, would go on to suffer the Seven Shunnings, eventually warping into the acid-oozing, protoplasmic demon lord the Delver, the adversary of the entire gnome pantheon.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 205

Thanks to some rather…evocative mimic miniatures my GM had (featuring some particularly tentacular pseudopods), mimics in our campaign came to be known as “rape boxes.”  *facepalm*

Sigh—I was coming up too close on the midnight deadline to pull together my radio show post last night.  But if you’re not sick of Christmas yet, here’s Saturday’s radio show—a New Indie Christmas edition of The New Indie Canon.  It’s two hours of new and classic holiday music, including Calexico, Best Coast, Guster, Rufus Wainwright, and more. Download it and enjoy the merry!

(Music starts just shy of the four-minute mark in the file. If the feed skips, let load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and enjoy in iTunes. Link Good until Friday, 12/28, at midnight.)