Shira

By now, we’ve covered plenty of divs, so you know the drill: They’re exiled genies “striv[ing] to ruin and despoil all things created by mortals,” the Bestiary 3 tells us.  The lion-like shiras are the hunters who “embody the deadly nature of the wilds and the dispassion with which beast and land might turn against mortals.”  Ever been on a camping trip where absolutely everything went wrong?  Now imagine you were being hunted the whole time, too.  By something you couldn’t hide from, because it had true seeing and was sapping your strength with waves of fatigue.  And that the thing hunting you could devour not only your body, but literally gobble up your soul.  That’s a shira.

Interestingly, unlike some divs, shiras don’t have any easily exploitable vulnerabilities like the tolling of a bell or the color red.  However, their customary solitude and compulsion to hunt the most powerful prey available might be avenues a GM could exaggerate to an obsessive-compulsive degree to evoke a properly straight-out-of-the-myths feel.

As an added bonus, the div stat block is supremely adaptable.  Any number of bestial monsters could devour souls and hate cold iron and good weapons.  Need an über-barghest?  Use a shira, with the dust from its pelt now iron filings and cave dirt.  Does the rakshasa they’ve angered need a gladiatrix bodyguard?  Shira.  Does an evil werewolf clan need a loup-garou leader?  A shira fits the bill, and the first time it shrugs off the PCs’ silver weapons they’ll be terrified.

A wealthy patron has fantasies of hunting with an amazonian queen reputed to live on a forbidding island.  He hires—or more likely uses his influence to coerce—adventurers to escort him there.  But they find out the island is cursed, populated by divs and their tormented slaves.  The queen and her retinue are shiras, and they are always up for a hunt—starting with the wealthy patron.

After an adventuring party foils his drug smuggling operation, a rakshasa reaches out to a shira for aid.  While the div does not trust the shapeshifter—rakshasas by nature indulge themselves overmuch in the very trappings of civilization that shiras seek to strip away—his offer to prove she is the greatest hunter in his urban landscape is too appealing to ignore.

Of the three werewolf clans that inhabit the Kikkery Forest, the Scar Flanks are by far the most otherworldly, boasting rangers whose powers wax and wane with the migration of birds and barbarians whose rage manifests in ghostly spirit totems.  But when the stars align for Sabermas, they enact a rite to unite all the clans under their banner, summoning a loup-garou from the Realm of Gnawed Bones.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 90

If you’re looking for the shipwrecker crab, we covered it just last week in fact.