Muhuru

The muhuru is cryptid from Kenya, joining the mokele-mbembe as yet another Lost World-type magical beast/super dinosaur you can put in your game.  Wikipedia’s description points to a stegosaurus with an ankylosaurus’s club tail, but Pathfinder went further back in the fossil record, giving us more of a dimetrodon-type beast (still with the club tail!) with a magical sail that can store up sunlight and blind opponents.

Whether your muhuru looks like a dimetrodon, a stegosaurus, a parasaurolophus, a spinosaurus, or even something wholly original is up to you.  Similarly, you might treat the muhuru as a magical dinosaur, an offshoot of the drake family, a never-before-seen species, a magical creation, or any other ecological niche.  For such a big animal, it is stealthy, able to avoid detection in most cases, and blinding, knocking prone, or staggering the few hunters savvy enough to track it.  While muhurus are probably not true nature spirits, despite how rumor labels them, they are certainly representatives of all in nature that is secret and defies easy discovery.

A new Butterfly Queen is to be crowned.  Part of her ceremonial raiment is a set of costume wings made from the blinding fin of a muhuru.  Successfully delivering the sail of a full-grown muhuru will earn the party entrance into a machine valley forbidden to outsiders.

An army needs to pass through the Hissing Jungle, and that means negotiating with a powerful kapre.  If negotiations are successful (ideally helped along by the gift of some particularly fine cigars), the plant creature allows the army to pass, providing that they use no axes during the trip.  Should this stricture not be obeyed, or if negotiations fail outright, the kapre looses a pack of muhurus on the scouting party.

Sir Teveral of the Thorn and Shield has organized an expedition to hunt the fabled muhuru in Xogana.  He invites along a group of adventurers recently returned from this vast continent.  (If they are reluctant, he induces them with the promise to use his influence to get back a piece of treasure that was confiscated from them by the colonial government.)  Actually, though, the entire expedition is nothing more than a complicated scheme to get Sir Teveral’s wizard sister away from the many-layered magical defenses of her tower.  He thinks her diary implicates him in a murder, and he intends to ensure that she is not an obstacle to his plans—even if it means feeding her to a magical dinosaur.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 196

Lots of great responses to my mountain giant post, including a couple people pointing out that the mountain giant did indeed appear in D&D 3.0, courtesy of Monster Manual II.  Thanks for the reminder—clearly my Google skills were not up to par that day!  You can see most of the comments and follow the conversation here.

One of these days I need to really jot down some notes on MM II, because man, it is a mess and I have thoughts.

Looking for the muckdweller?  It’s back here.