Ooze & Salt Mephits

Another installment of Mephits: The Multiverse’s Comic Relief™.  Ooze mephits are, according the Bestiary, “disgusting and slow to act.”  I think we can work with that.  (They can be the worst servitors of the Runelord of Sloth ever!  Plus, stinking cloud fart jokes!) 

Meanwhile, salt mephits are “cruel and aloof.”  Unfortunately, that’s also word-for-word how ice mephits are described.  I always thought this was just a typo in my first-edition Bestiary, but seeing as how Paizo hasn’t fixed it online either, I guess we’ll just assume that salt mephits’ cruelty is…saltier (3b for the literary; 0:00–2:20 for the musical).

No brighter than most mephits, Borom doesn’t quite understand the culture of a bar—when patrons try to tell him their troubles, he flutters away muttering.  But his crude establishment serves xorns the spiced quartz crystals and garnets they crave without their having to burrow through miles of salt.  For air-breathing visitors to the Plane of Earth, there are far worse places to look for a guide.

After Glorup was nearly swallowed alive by a giant frog, he declares war on every amphibian in the swamp.  The ooze mephit’s allies in this are his kobold “servitors”—a tribe of blackscales that tolerate the lazy outsider’s arrogance because of the usefulness of his stinking cloud in ambushes and defense.  (Also he doesn’t eat.)  But since frog legs are a local delicacy, this war soon inconveniences the local humans and outrages the neighboring boggards.

The Eversalt was the Everflow—until years of drought and a sinkhole to the Below drained the inland sea in under a decade, leaving only salt flats.  The sudden environmental upheaval spawned salt mephits who now lurk in the dried up towns surrounding the flats.  The filthy language they heap on passersby is a mix of Terran and Common and swearing picked up from the sailors whose livelihoods the Eversalt sucked away.  Individually, the foul-mouthed outsiders are harmless, but a mobs of them occasionally delight in dehydrating lone travelers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 202–203

More comments and mail!

Prosfilaes left some thoughts waaay back in the derro entry!  I reply!

Todd Stewart weighs in on the olethrodaemon!  I reply!

The rest of you should write or comment!  I’ll probably reply!

Speaking of which, Wesley aka Sincubus sent me the nicest note by far I have ever received about this blog.  I haven’t had a chance to write back to him yet (it’s been another week of 10 to 12-hour workdays), so I’ll do it here:

Wesley, since I don’t know Dutch the best I can do is auf Deutsch: Vielen Dank!  Thank you so much for reading, and your support means a lot.  We should be covering the quickling and quickwood pretty soon—Q is only a few weeks away—and I’ll see what I can do about squeezing in your other favorites early.

Finally, today is a big day.  As of today, the Tumblr version of The Daily Bestiary has been going strong for a year.  This is important for both versions of the blog, because once I got on Tumblr, I also got on schedule: no more placeholder posts, no more tardiness—an entry every weekday, barring vacations, no excuses.  It’s been a better blog for me, and I hope a better, more entertaining, and maybe even helpful blog for you.  Cheers.