Tychilarius

We’ve barely gotten our occult feet (or our occult tattoos/fungalcaps) wet and already we’ve come to the biggest, baddest monster in the Occult Bestiary: Tychilarius.

In Pathfinder’s Golarion setting, Tychilarius is part of the Dominion of the Black—horrors from the void between the stars that are little understood.  Don't mistake these nightmares for Lovecraftian Great Old Ones/Elder Gods, though.  (Those the Dominion actively opposes, actually.)  Instead they operate more like Babylon 5’s Shadows.  They are of this reality, but the represent this reality at its worst—an empire of psychics and scientists, flesh farms and living warships, demanding fealty and worship but offering only rendering and consumption or reconstitution.

Tychilarius is a leader of these entities currently trapped on Golarion—well, not on, but near (as otherworldly prisons go).  It resembles a sarlacc (original release, of course) with eye tentacles and a truly awful maw.  Born from thousands of creatures destroyed and then regurgitated in a bolus by a black hole, it is an engine of psychic destruction and physical transformation (via a horrible digestive tract best left unexplored).

In other words, it is bad news…and its release from the aforementioned prison would be an appropriate climax to an occult or Dominion of the Black-themed campaign.

But of course this is a setting-neutral blog.  That doesn't make Tychilarius any less scary in your home setting.  In your world it could indeed by a nascent Great Old One, a divine miscarriage, a qlippoth that shed its Abyssal taint, or an über-neothelid/caulborn/neh-thalggu.  The point is Tychilarius is big.  It’s mind-shattering.  It can fly through space and devour creatures only to spit them back up a day later as aberrations.  It is an apocalypse from the stars, and it is almost free.

A group of adventurers were palace pages when a well-mannered prophet first came into the king’s court and spoke of the Advent of the Hunger.  Much has happened since then, but encounters with similar prophets…as well as cultists, strange aberrations, weird plots of summoning, and worse…have dogged the adventurers ever since.  Now that a beast from beyond the stars has landed in Ni Carmel, it seems the prophet was telling the truth…and indeed, worked very diligently to see his prophecy fulfilled.

Strange things live in the places between the planes.  When demons were first birthed by the Abyss, one qlippoth paragon’s response was to devour itself rather than submit to the new order.  In the end it managed to self-digest itself into a new entity devoid of Abyssal taint.  It now feasts like a maggot on godflesh wherever it can find it—the divine corpses in the Deep Astral, bodies piled up on the Morgue Moon of Tarter, sleeping insectile pupae in the Star Cocoon, and beyond—in search of some new apotheosis.

Holy adventurers have fought the Servants of Sin their entire careers—dark priests, undead, demon worshipers, and diabolists in the main.  But the Servants of Gluttony have always been…different.  Bloodmages.  Kuru.  Otherworldly aberrations.  Psychic vampires.  Fear eaters and intellect devourers.  Creatures with no seeming connection beyond the sin itself.  This lack of coordination has always seemed a liability.  But when the Scion of Sin—a bloated, tarnished copper great wyrm—begins to birth the Devourer of Stars without the Church being the wiser, Gluttony now looks like a hydra whose disparate heads have ensured its eventual success.

—Occult Bestiary 56–57

Turns out I never ordered Occult Adventures—um, yikes!—which would explain why it hasn’t shown up in my mail yet.  (Apparently I got distracted while ordering the Occult Bestiary, Occult Mysteries, and Occult Realms.  Go figure.)  So despite the fact that we’re going to be very psychic monster/magic-heavy for the next few months, it may be several weeks before I’m able to reliably reference the new classes and special abilities (though of course I’ll do my best).  My bad.

What did arrive in the mail?  Inner Sea Races.  As usual, it’s gorgeous, and given how thick it is with lore and racial trait options, I think I’m going to be very pleased…