Mobat & Skaveling

And we’re back from vacation!  Happy New Year, and thanks for allowing me some much-needed R & R across the Pond.

Mobats aren’t much different from dire bats, but they are just enough so to be magical beasts—suggesting beings from a different epoch or deep underground where eldritch energies are at play.  Skavelings are these same bats turned to ghouls through necrotic manipulation.  Urdefhans are the default riders of these creatures, but there are any number of creatures that might find such beasts useful…

Mobats’ superior blindsense makes them nocturnal hunters par excellence.  Under the Darkreach Mountains they lair by pockets of netherjet, taking advantage of the ore’s magical-darkness-oozing properties to hunt prey with impunity.  And a mobat or skaveling challenge is one of the trademark signs of a Jasom Winterquill-designed tomb or trap.

The mummy-priest rulers of Kfuri favor skavelings as steeds.  The mobility the ghoul bats allow is essential for holding wide swathes of desert territory.  And roughly once a month the mummy-priests allow their bats to fly forth unsaddled to feed.  Doing this at irregular intervals keeps their human and armadillo-folk citizens cowering in their houses after dark, too frightened to rebel.

A stranger arrives at an adventuring party’s favorite inn.  The first sign of this is the death screams coming from the stable, where a newly arrived (and rubbed down!) skaveling has begun feasting on the helpless horses boarded there.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 42

It occurs to me that not enough adventures really take advantage of the bat family’s echolocation…

Arrived back in the U.S. late last night, and got to work this morning to find not just one, but two Paizo packages waiting for me.  Among the many books enclosed was the Inner Sea Bestiary.  Once I get the monsters therein alphabetized in the same format as the hardcover Bestiaries, I’ll start including them in this blog starting with the letter N.

Much more to say, but for now I need sleep; the five-hour London-to-Baltimore time difference hurts…