Named after an Irish war goddess, the nemhain (pronounced “NAY-wuhn,”
because Irish spelling is the world’s greatest exercise in trolling) is an
undead creature who is interesting on a number of levels:
1) The nemhain chose
to become undead—Bestiary 5 says
“as a means of protecting a person, object, place, or ideal.” That’s automatically interesting to
me—committing yourself (and your loved ones; see below) to eternal unlife to
protect something is devotion/fanaticism on a grand scale. You don't do that just to guard treasure in a
10’x10’ room…but you might for a holy (or unholy) relic, a political movement,
a beloved hero, etc. Every nemhain once made
a choice, and that means every nemhain has a story…perhaps one that your PCs
would be wise to ferret out.
2) The nemhain is
surrounded by a cloud of bound spirits—usually the spirits of her relatives
or friends. I love this because it
recalls one of my favorite undead of all time, the gray philosopher (from the Creature Catalogue and the Monstrous Compendium: Mystara Appendix),
whose malevolent thoughts took shape as wispy spirits called malices. I also love it for the pure horror of this
scenario—B5 makes it clear that these
souls were usually unaware that they would be drawn into the nemhain-to-be’s
self-sacrifice. It’s one thing to
consign yourself to eternity; it’s quite another to bring the local PTA along
with you. And speaking of which…
3) Some nemhains start
out good—but they all become
evil. No matter how pure a
nemhain-to-be’s motives, the vileness of undeath and the violation inherent in
harvesting the souls of her loved ones seals her fate. So the nemhain is at best a tragic figure
whose single-mindedness damned both herself and those around her. At worst, she’s an abomination willing to
sacrifice anything—and anyone—to her cause.
All in all then, every nemhain is special, every nemhain has
an interesting story, and every nemhain is deadly (CR 15) at the gaming table.
The pride of elves is
dangerous indeed. When a wild elf
soothsayer foretold that the Rose Chamber would be claimed by the dead, the
grey elf princess Dharotea swore it should never come to pass. She promptly closed the borders to the human
mage-scholars, the halfling river traders, and especially the dwarf nations and
their necromancer-kings. Even as her
self-isolated nation suffered, Dharotea, now queen, never wavered—she would
protect the capital, the palace, and its glittering Rose Chamber at any
cost. Finally, to stave off her own
death, she performed the Act of Reaping to become a nemhain…inadvertently
slaying the rest of the royal court and fulfilling the vision the soothsayer
warned of so long ago.
No one expects a
bardic college to be deadly—especially not one famous for its jugglers,
tumblers, and acrobats. But the nemhain
known as the First Harlequin roams the Laernuin College grounds, and those he
selects to perform in his monthly pantomimes must have the ancient forms
memorized exactly or be struck down mid-performance.
The worst
revolutionaries are the time-traveling ones. After thwarting a dangerous anarchist—a
fiendishly charismatic bard with enough alchemy under his belt to be a literal
bomb thrower—adventures discover that he has hatched plots in both the future
and the past to undo their hard work.
Worse yet, defeating the anarchist’s allies in one time period doesn’t always
mean they’re off the game board. While
in their own time the anarchist’s chief lieutenant, Victoria Graves, is too
elderly to do more than fund whisper campaigns against them, in the past she is
a dashing vigilante, and in the future she is a nemhain determined to see the
Scarlet Revolution come to pass.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 5
182
I’ve always wanted to learn Irish (I’m still in touch with my
whatever-cousins-however-removed in Carndonagh) but I’m pretty sure I’m 20
years too late for my brain to expand as far as it needs to. (Hell, I bought a bodhrán in Donegal when I
was 17 and I still can't play it, and
I’ve been drumming since fourth grade.)
If you’re looking for a fantastic fall-from-grace tale that
echoes the nemhain’s, I highly recommend Garth Nix’s Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen, as well as the rest of The Old Kingdom
series.
I should have linked to my essay on the Creature Catalogue. Read it here.
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