Peuchen

(Illustration by Dave Allsop comes from the PathfinderWiki and is © Paizo Publishing.)

I’m a big fan of Dave Allsop’s art—he did the Bestiary’s woeful mite and the amazing papinijuwari I was so excited about a few months ago—so I’m a little bummed that his peuchen, while beautiful, doesn’t capture the scale of the beast.  What he’s painted looks like an exotic species you’d see on display in a fantasy reptile house or curled around the arm of some sorceress.  But it’s actually a roughly human-sized (Medium) monster that punches in at a mighty CR 10.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I like the peuchen: It’s a pretty good dragon substitute for low-level campaigns.

But let’s back up.  The peuchen is a cryptid from Andean mythology, especially Chile and Argentina—likely a mashup of the boa and the vampire bat—that is a feared shapeshifter who drains the blood of livestock and lone shepherds. Pathfinder’s version follows that outline almost exactly (right down to bleed and blood drain abilities, as well as the ability to cast hold person and vampiric touch).

I’m always looking for good non-European monsters I can point GMs to, and the peuchen definitely checks that box.  (Which is awesome, as South America is probably our least-represented continent in terms of Bestiary monsters.  Even Antarctica has a better selection once you start throwing in Lovecraft, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Hollow Earth tales and other pulp inspirations.).  Then again, if you’re a Euro diehard, the peuchen reskinned could make a perfectly acceptable version of Fáfnir the dragon.  I’m also always looking for ways to tell bring more intimate, narrative and folktale-inspired gaming into Pathfinder.  And I can totally see a slow-moving, low-XP campaign where a PC’s parent’s death hangs over the campaign…with the peuchen teased as the culprit all along but finally revealed somewhere around Level 6 or 7, just as the players are really coming into their full powers.

But if you want straight-up hack & slash…well, Camazotz is about the most badass god/devil/demon (depending on your game world) out there.  Someone’s got to clean out his creepy jungle temple superdungeon…and guess what’s the perfect monster to fight on Level 10?

Nutmeg’s value to spice traders isn’t just from its rarity and taste—it’s also dangerous to harvest.  Peuchens delight in polishing their scales with the crushed aromatic seeds of the nutmeg tree.  Harvesters in the Bluewater Isles need adventurers who will guard their crews from the cunning winged snakes.

The fey of the Bier of Bone—bloodthirsty pixies, tooth fairies, quicklings, redcaps, and worse—all serve the mad leanan sidhe Umlar.  Her prize pet is a peuchen the blue of a bird of paradise.  Recently she has been distracted by the charms of a larabay (who secretly plots to steal her throne), leaving the peuchen as the main guardian of her ivory hoard.

Years ago, a silver-tongued drover talked his ways out of the jaws of a peuchen by offering to deliver livestock the likes of which the winged snaked had never tasted.  Intrigued, the peuchen agreed, and was rewarded with Huwari beef from the Olfshires—a kind of cattle newly brought by Northern colonists.  Desiring more such delicacies, the peuchen and the drover began trading Northern cattle for alpacas, llamas, and other livestock. Today the drover is the most powerful beef importer in the thriving colony Sor Pelag, with the peuchen as his silent partner—and occasional enforcer.  When a new source of flesh—glowing, duergar-raised deep oxen—threatens the pair’s monopoly, they turn to murder to keep their balance sheets in the black.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 189

The history of nutmeg is actually super interesting.  Nutmeg is also one of the reasons that, while Pepsi always does better in blind taste tests, Coke is more popular in reality—the nutmeg in a Coke Classic sets off more flavor sensors and yields a more complex, richer experience over the course of the entire can.  (At least according to some New Yorker article I read years ago.)

I keep waiting for my day job to hand my some kind of nutmeg-related project, but so far I’ve only played around with turmeric and bay leaves.

Looking for the penguin?  We covered that way back here.

Ouroboros

The ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, is a common ancient symbol, appearing in Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Gnostic, Vedic, and South American texts and carvings...which is interesting, because there aren’t actually a lot of stories about it (compared to say, dragons or giants or even sphinxes).  Instead, the ouroboros’s value seems to be almost entirely as a symbol—for life and death, consumption and renewal, light and dark, the circle of samsara, and so forth.

Given what a well-established symbol the ouroboros is, the first question about it was always going to be: When would someone turn the ouroboros into a Pathfinder monster?  And the second question was: How would someone turn the ouroboros into a Pathfinder monster?  (A serpent constantly eating its own tail is great from a visual perspective, but it’s going to have trouble making a bite attack.)

But if it’s a snake made of thousands of snakes…on the Astral Plane…constantly devouring and regenerating itself…with blood that’s can raise the dead or baleful polymorph you into a swarm of snakes…and it’s CR 21 for good measure…now that’s a Pathfinder monster.

I also dig the video game-ness (or 4th Ed D&D-ness) of its Self-Consumption (Su) ability—that if you damage it down to half its hit points, it stops eating its own tail, which both makes it more vulnerable, but also unlocks some of its special abilities (and makes it pissed, presumably).  I don’t need every monster to get special abilities for being bloodied, but it is a nice perk for certain significant baddies.  It also works thematically.  One of the exceptions to my “There are no stories about these things” gloss above is the Norse World Serpent, Jörmungandr, who could be considered a kind of ouroboros.  One of the climactic acts of Ragnarök is Jörmungandr releasing his tail from his mouth and surfacing to fight the gods. There’s no reason fighting an ouroboros at your game table can’t be just as epic.

Adventurers discover a divine secret: the goddess of death and the goddess of birth are one and the same. In her gestalt form, the Splintered Queen dwells in a palace ringed not by a moat, but by an ouroboros that both symbolizes her twin portfolios and makes a singularly unforgiving guardian.

Planar travel through the nested Tiers of the Celestine Stairs is difficult.  Even a successful casting of the gate spell opens the archmage’s mind to maddening influences from beyond the Tiers. (An unsuccessful casting may result in disintegration, polymorphing into a gibbering mouther, the calling of a shoggoth, or worse.)  But a few rifts connect the Tiers, the most famous being the Ouroboros Gate—a living ouroboros whose ravenous coils can be traversed to reach the vast expanse of the Astral Tier.

With the awakening of the serpent god Sardsorius, the serpentfolk race, long thought extinct, has erupted from the bowels of the earth. Worse yet, their shamans are poised to succeed in a quest that has eluded them for millennia: piercing the veil hiding Refuge, the last lost retreat of the elves. Embattled on all sides, the elves risk everything to resurrect their mythic hero king, Kin-Yalyn—including tasking a rogue band of adventurers to acquire the ouroboros blood the ritual demands.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 206–207

Hey!  Remember me?

I think I first read about the ouroboros in the Xanth books…which means I just admitted to reading the Xanth books. (Leave me alone, this was middle school.)  The use of an ouroboros as a moat monster is a direct homage to one of these novels (The Source of Magic, I think).  While we’re at it, any elves vs. serpentfolk scenario I write probably owes a debt to Ghostwalk.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if I’d posted this entry last April, when my article on resurrection was coming out in Pathfinder Adventurer Path?  Yeeeeeah, that would have been smart.

Ostovite

One of the hallmarks of the original Outer Planes—the 1e AD&D Outer Planes, that is—was their lethality.  If arriving on the plane itself didn’t kill you—on many planes you were only a saving throw or two away from energy drain, suffocation, or reaching your full potential and exploding into a star (no, really, that was a thing)—then the Wandering Monster tables surely would (“Suddenly a…*GM rolls dice*…Type V demon appears!” “Is that bad?” “Roman numbers are always bad.”). 

These days planar travel isn’t nearly so grim—2e’s Planescape setting and 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder’s templates went a long way toward ratcheting down the deadliness.  But it’s still really nice to run into fresh low-CR Abyssal creatures.  Ostovites are a great excuse to bring the Lower Planes into even the most introductory adventures.  That may not be the right arc for every campaign, but for certain setups—especially one centered on a holy city or religious order or crusade (in my head I’m immediately flashing back to the visuals of the Claymore anime series)—ostovites are an outstanding option.

But I’ve totally let the metanarrative distract us from the monster itself, which deserves a look: It’s a silverfish made of tiny bones!  That gathers up the bones of other creatures!  And rides them in something called a bone chariot.  Why?  BECAUSE IT HAS AN INFERIORITY COMPLEX!  (If any of you are Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men fans, this is your cue for a “WHAAAT?!?”) 

Come to think of it, it’s funny—I’m guessing that, for a lot of us, inferiority complexes are probably the main driver of conflict in our daily lives.  And yet when was the last time you ran across a monster driven by inferiority?  Let alone one who literally collects bones and rides them like a parade float because it hates looking up to the demons and human slaves around it?  That’s a pretty unforgettable hook for what is otherwise nothing more than an extra-nasty silverfish.

Novice adventurers stray into a crypt that is mirrored in the Abyss.  Fortunately for them, the crypt protects them the demonic horrors of that plane.  But the crypt’s more mundane inhabitants do not care to have their domain disturbed.  After spying on the adventurers from cover, the crypt’s ostovites eagerly seek their bones to ride like the lords of death they see themselves to be.

Adventurers stumble across a rare scene—an ostovite mating dance, where the Abyssal arthropods gather to challenge each other for status and mates.  While the scholars at the Collegium would pay handsomely for notes on the encounter, the adventurers likely won’t get the chance to take any.  First of all, there are more ostovites in the area than normally would congregate together, making them extra aggressive.  And since most of the ostovites in this year’s colony have only been able to cobble together bone chariots the size of halflings and dwarves, they are driven to a frenzy by the sight of taller prey.

The Day of the Dead comes every year to the seaside town of Mazatlan, as it does all across Mexico.  But this year not all the skeletons in the parade are human.  A nest of ostovites took advantage of the seasonal porousness between life and death to slip back into the mortal world.  They quickly assemble bone chariots from recently interred corpses and attempt to join the festivities of the living.  However, a young seminarian and his friends discover the disturbed graves, and anxiously attempt to recover the stolen bodies.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 187

God, I’m so tired I can barely see.  Forgive any typos, please.

A bit of Coco in that last adventure seed, no doubt.  Also, I visited Mazatlan over spring break my senior year of college.  Loved it, especially watching the pelicans fly home at sunset.

Also, for my Blogger readers—or any Tumblr fans who missed the news—I have two Pathfinder articles coming out in the next two months!!!  Details are here and here.  I hope you preorder, I hope you read, and most importantly I hope you enjoy!  Thanks!

And finally, last Tuesday we celebrated my radio show’s 21st(!!!) birthday!  Tune in for an hour of songs about drinking, then an hour about sex, drugs, poor decisions, and consequences…not to mention just a whole lot of 1997.  Stream/download it now through Monday, 03/05/18, at midnight.  Also keep an eye out for news about—*fingers crossed*—a very, very special guest DJ coming up.

Ophiotaurus

Bestiary deep cuts don’t get much deeper than the ophiotaurus.  It’s only found in a single reference from Ovid—and not from Metamorphoses, either, but Fasti.  That’s the mythological equivalent of saying your favorite ’90s alternative song is Sloan’s “Stove/Smother” cover.  Like, I can tell how you got there, but man, you were looking.

Aside from being a Gargantuan, mythic half-bull, half-snake-monster, the ophiotaurus is most significant for what it offers—a massive power boost in the form of either its ascension spell like ability and its Questing Beast (Su) ability—if PCs kill an ophiotaurus they have access to certain divinatory powers, and if they’re willing to accept a geas on top of that, they also get a massive moral bonus (+6 to Str and Con) per vengeful outrage. 

In other words, facing (and possibly slaying) an ophiotaurus is an excellent step along the way to facing a mythic Big Bad—perhaps even the penultimate step.  Every hero needs his Campbellian journey, and the Ophiotaurus checks off the Road of Trials and/or Apotheosis boxes pretty nicely.  An ophiotaurus’s death, though, should be more than a plot coupon—it should carry an air of what it is: a necessary sacrifice.

Adventures attempt to seal a portal to the realm of Baphomet, the demonic patron of evil minotaurs.  If they fail to light the temple braziers and burn the proper offerings, the snaking tile labyrinth beneath their feet reveals itself to be the pebbled hide of an awakening ophiotaurus.

At the behest of a sovereign dragon, adventurers race to the ends of the earth to place a magical yoke upon the shoulders of an ophiotaurus—an animal they did not even believe existed mere days ago.  Unfortunately, their demodand rivals have sent a lackey to beat them to the punch.  And “punch” is the operative word, for the vile servant is one of the Hundred-Handed Ones, a hekatonkheires.

Adventurers slay an ophiotaurus and eat its entrails, as the old legends instruct.  But in doing so, they have inadvertently performed a religious act, for the sacrifice of a bull, even a mythic one, belongs to Tiernos, the Lightning Lord.  Now the long-slumbering Allfather wakes, and the adventurers must contend with his assumption that they are his new high priests…and vassals.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 185

Somewhere out there someone is screaming, “The Ophiotaurus was also in the Percy Jackson series!!!” 

Fair enough.  I have not read the Percy Jackson books.  Usually mixing mythic tales and modernity is not my jam—I’ve had some grim experiences in the past.  But surely it can’t be any worse than the Nicholas Flamel books, right? Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say…

Percy Jackson saves [the Ophiotaurus] in the middle of the night, when he was warned by his favorite pegasus, Blackjack. He first thinks it is a female and names it "Bessie". The Ophiotaurus thinks that Percy is his protector. Later, the creature is brought to Olympus via a magic water bubble and is put under the care of Percy's father, Poseidon.

…Nope.

*gently closes laptop, stares into space for a minute, gets up to walk away*

Nope.  I’m out.  Not going to happen.  Nooooope.

Someone burn the room after I leave.  It’s the only way to be sure.

Once again it’s Monday night, and once again I am encouraging you, with barely an hour to spare, to click a link I should have posted last Wednesday.  Sigh.  Sorry about that.  But click anyway—it’s my first radio show of the Spring 2018 semester, and we’ve got new Hop Along, Camp Cope, and Baltimore’s own Wye Oak and Letitia VanSant, plus 20 years of Pearl Jam’s Yield.  Stream/download it now through midnight tonight (Monday, 02/12/18, U.S. Eastern)!

Nekomata

To say I am a cat person is an understatement.  (If I did not have allergies, I swear I would have five.  And I would be creepy about it.  Like, I’d name them all after Roman emperors and give them each their own Instagram account.  …I should stop talking now.) 

But even I am willing to acknowledge that yeah, if you die in your house with only your cats around, they are probably going to eat your corpse.

The nekomata goes one better: It doesn’t eat your corpse; it animates it—just by licking it!  Oh, and the animated corpse is a free-willed juju zombie or skeletal champion, because of course it is.

But let’s go back a second.  A nekomata comes about when a cat lives past its allotted lifespan.  Should that happen, the cat becomes an evil spirit, grows in size (with its tail splitting in two along the way), and begins casting spells and taking on the shape of nearby humanoids.  It then goes about humiliating them, ruining their reputations, driving them mad, killing them, and then animating the corpses—starting with the family that loved and cared for it.  And after everyone is dead, it picks a new family and starts all over. For no reason than that it overstayed its welcome in life. 

In other words, it’s a goddamn CAT-LICH. With a SNUFF-CEST FETISH.

Now that’s a monster.

I love having a fresh shapechanger-that-impersonates-your-friends-and-neighbors to work with, especially one with a bit more CR heft than the doppelganger.  I love the friendly housecat suddenly becoming a malevolent beast merely because it had its claws too deep in life to die.  And I’m a sucker for any living creature that creates undead—lookin’ at you, pukwudgie!—and the fact that the nekomata creates intelligent undead is just icing on the cake.  And since it’s a reputation destroyer, put it in any context where honor and shame are on the line—samurai clans, knightly orders, paladins on crusade, etc.—and it can do damage in your campaign that far outlasts a single encounter.

This would also be a killer monster for a solo adventure or one-shot. Next time you want to run a game for just one player, or if one character needs a side quest for character development or XP catch-up, the nekomata is waiting

Beset by orcs from the Wastes and fevers borne by the yearly swamp flooding, the city of Engelyn prospers because of the ceaseless labors of Kelman the Robed.  With no heir to take up his mantle, he has extended his life twice through dangerous magic so that Engelyn remains protected.  But the same magic preserved his feline familiar…with dire consequences.  While Kelman was away fighting orcs, the cat became a nekomata under the black of the new moon.  The magical creature then triggered the wards which seal Engelyn Castle from disease, trapping the duke’s family and his retinue inside a magical bubble.  Now the nekomata stalks the halls in stolen shapes, murdering as it goes and creating undead monsters in its wake.  Adventurers in the duke’s service must act to save the duke’s family—and themselves—or the entire household will be slaughtered before Kelman can return to undo the ward.

Adventurers are on the trail of a necromancer…or so they think.  Actually, they hunt a nekomata that was once a barge cat.  The nekomata happily goes from town to town along the river spreading undeath.  If it realizes the adventurers are on its trail, it tries to frame them as necromancers instead.

A nekomata impersonated Lord Tono, and its actions nearly sparked war between the Third Shogunate and the ninja clans of Cliffreach.  Outraged, the shogun demands Tono cut his hair and make the Walk of Repentance or be executed.  Tono plans to acquiesce, but his son, First Lord of the Admiralty, swears to lead the navy in revolt if his father is so shamed.  Tono’s wife, once a renowned geisha, uses her underworld contacts to recruit sellswords to find the nekomata and prove Lord Tono’s innocence before the Walk occurs.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 201

There are hints of Daniel Polansky’s Low Town in that first seed.

Also: Hey, nekomata, whaddaya say? / I just got back from the auto-da-fé

That’s been in my head all day, and now it’s in yours.

Switching gears entirely, have you guys been following Lindsay Ellis?  She always kills it, but she’s been killin’ it to the killeth power lately.  For a critical one-two punch of awesome, check out her look at the male gaze in Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise and her take on the theme of fatherhood in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.  Both are must-watches.  (And since I referenced Mel Brooks’s Spanish Inquisition song, maybe check out her take on his movies, too.)

And hey, Shanah Tovah to my Jewish readers.  5777 wasn’t exactly an easy year, so best wishes to all in 5778.

Oh, and if you’re looking for the narwhal, it’s here.

YOU’RE NOT PUNK / AND I’M TELLING EVERYONE

Stream/download last night’s radio show here!  New Blondie, classic Jawbreaker, Professor Elemental for the nerds, and “Dammit” turns 20.  Enjoy!  (Link good till Monday, 9/25, at midnight.)

Oh, and I finally met my Dream Daddy.  Specifically, Dream Daddy director/lead developer Tyler J. Hutchison. He was at SPX, conveniently tucked between Abby Howard (of Strip Search/Junior Scientist Power Hour fame), who I was excited to meet, and writer/illustrator team Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, who I went to college with.

Naturally, Tyler and I got someone to take our picture.  Three guesses who we sent it to.

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.

Mngwa

Inspired by tales from Tanzania, the mngwa is a magical beast indeed—a jungle cat that only exists between sunset and sunrise.  Of course, the reason that the mngwa exists actually puts it more in fey or undead territory, as it is “an incarnation of malevolent jungle spirits, driven by anger toward the focus of their hate,” according to Bestiary 5.  Typically taking the shape of a large, jet-black lion, the mngwa is nearly impossible to kill.  Its only real weaknesses are its vulnerability to natural sunlight and the daylight spell.  Hunters might also take advantage of the fact that it always appears in the place where it first manifested.  But since it comes back each night fully healed—and even if slain will return to life within five nights—the only safe bet for dispatching a mngwa is to right the wrong that caused it to manifest in the first place.

Fed up with mngwa attacks near his sapphire mines, the colonial governor of Azbian begins rounding up and executing the witch doctors he suspects of summoning the creatures.  But since it is the witch doctors who are responsible for appeasing Azbian’s omnipresent and fractious jackfruit, baobab tree, and water spirits, the governor is only breeding more of the beasts with each passing week.

A sacred grotto has two guardians—a guardian naga who minds it by day and a mngwa who prowls relentlessly around the rocky spring by night.  The mngwa mourns the wanton felling of a particularly ancient tree that once stood near the grotto.  It longs to slake its thirst with the blood of the traveling woodcutter who did the deed, but the man’s village is too far for the mngwa to reach in a single night.  However, it is more than happy to attack any other humanoids in the area until it can take proper vengeance.  The naga, meanwhile, is interested in a cache of wooden puzzle boxes it found near the spring, possibly carved by a supremely talented but long-deceased dryad.

Lions are the most common shape for mngwas to take, but tigers, jaguars, and leopards are also known.  Some tribes on the far edges of the world report mngwas in the form of bears, great wolves, leucrottas, or even bunyips.  While mngwas are mainly reported in jungle regions, the sun priests of pyramid-dotted Toth are particularly careful not to offend any local nature spirits, as their mngwas are particularly gruesome (Advanced) specimens: part lion, part hippopotamus, part jackal, part cobra, all murder.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 173

I can't remember if I own the Southlands Bestiary or not—I definitely Kickstarted the main Southlands book, but all my Kobold Press stuff is languishing in the “You should really read this sometime” pile.  But I believe (via some Googling) it has another version of the mngwa.

Eagle-eyed readers will note we last visited Toth in 2013.

It’s (a)live!

The PDF version of Pathfinder Adventure Path 118: #Siege of Stone—written by Thurston Hillman and featuring an article by yours truly—went live Wednesday night.  If you like PDFs, please pick it up here.  If you like actual books, the print version ships soon, so you can order it right now or just look for it at your local game store.  And once again, thank you all for your support!

(Illustration by Remko Troost comes from the Paizo website and is © Paizo Publishing.)

I was very late to my radio show last week because I was the guest on a comedy podcast—more details on that in a week or two—but I still made it into the studio to play exam-worthy jams for the UMD listening audience.  Stream/download it here until midnight tonight (Monday, 05/22/17, U.S. Eastern) at midnight.  FYI fellow DJ Adam covers for the first chunk; my stuff kicks in at the 37-minute mark.

Mapinguari

Bestiary 6’s mapinguari may not exactly line up with the version that’s come down to us through Amazonian folklore—for one thing, it’s usually described in folklore as red—but it’s hard to complain about the lizard-skinned, cyclopean-eyed, giant ape we ended up getting (especially given how awesome David Melvin’s accompanying illustration is).  It’s got a supernatural frightening howl that can be heard from a mile away, and up close is literally paralyzing (which could be downright deadly if the mapinguari surprises a PC—note the +19 Stealth in forests—and then achieves a claw/claw/rend combo while the PC is frozen).  And it’s got a classic folklore vulnerability: The mapinguari is afraid to cross running water.  That’s a great bit of flavor, a nice excuse for why the mapinguari is rare, and is both a great tactical option for smart PCs to take advantage of and a nice out for GMs who want to scare cocky PCs without achieving a TPK.  (“Good thing you made it to the bridge, huh guys?  Maybe a side quest or two will help you get some experience before you tackle that spooky ape temple.”)

Of course, you can play with the look of the mapinguari all you want—if you want to boost the South American feel of the beast, you could easily describe it as looking more like a giant sloth, a New World monkey, or a monstrous iguana.  Also, many legends say the mapinguari has backward-facing feet, which is a great excuse for using it as a guard animal for powerful rakshasas.  Some legends even mention the mapinguari having a second mouth on its belly, which might be a terrifying extra attack you can add to an Advanced or fiendish version of the creature if you like mucking around with stat blocks.  Just some food for thought…

Now swallowed by the jungle, the city of Tnochitl was once crisscrossed by numerous canals and lochs.  Adventurers who brave the ruined city will find the canals to be an effective deterrent against the jungle’s deadly mapinguaris, who can only traverse the city’s vine- and silt-choked northern district.  The same canals that keep the mapinguaris out also keep certain other threats in…including the vampire blood priests of Cama-Zotz in the Temple District, whose limited diets have left them feral and ravenous.

A rakshasa noble has a pleasure park full of dangers, including several living topiaries and a semi-tame mapinguari.  The beast’s terrifying howl helps keep the neighbors out of the hedonistic fiend’s affairs, and its backward-facing footprints mask the rakshasa’s own twisted tread.

Mapinguaris have such well-defined territories that each section of the Davo Jungle is actually named after the legendary mapinguari who used to live there.  The only tribes who can safely live in the Davo are skinwalkers or werespiders whose taste the local mapinguaris find repulsive.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 183

No stats for the mapinguari online yet, but you can obviously find them here.

Makara Vahana & Vahana

Our theme of Hindu-folklore-inspired monsters continues with the makara vahana and the vahana template!

(By the way, if you think it’s odd that we’re getting a templated version of a monster without ever getting the plain vanilla monster…yeah, it’s hella odd.  Best I can tell, it was a call made because of how the Bestiary 5 team had to make the two-page spreads work, which is a perennial juggling/struggling act for the editors.  Bestiary layouts are harder than they look.)

Makaras in Pathfinder are part-elephant, part-crocodile (not half-and-half like a griffon, but more an all-over mishmash).  In mythology, by the way, the makara has a number of associations, including as a vahana steed for several gods, as well as connections to gates, thresholds, and weddings.  Meanwhile, vahanas are divine steeds in general.  (Elephant-headed Ganesha rode a giant mouse!  How awesome is that?  And how weird is it that the apocryphal elephant/mouse association goes that far back?)

Obviously in Pathfinder makara vahanas and vahanas in general will be serving favored prelates, gurus, and rishis, not the gods themselves.  But their speed, resistances, and magical rider bond and blended beast abilities ensure that the connection these steeds have to the divine is never forgotten.

Every year at the spring equinox, the priests of the Masked Moon ride their makara vahanas from the Winter Temple to the sacred lagoons where they reside in summer.  This year the stately procession is interrupted when the vahanas go wild and stampede, injuring dozens of onlookers.  Adventurers who investigate may find a plot to discredit the influential but mysterious religion.

A usurper seeks every possible sign to legitimize his rule.  He strong-arms some adventurers into retrieving a rare makara for him, so that he may ride it and claim it is his vahana steed as a mark of the gods’ approval.

The high priestesses of Bellvereth, goddess of love, are famous for the peacock vahana steeds they ride.  Those miscreants who assume these lovely birds are not up to the task of guarding the priestesses soon learn the error of their ways.  (Use the terror bird (a CR 4 Advanced axe beak) as the base animal.)

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 262

According to Bestiary 5’s Table of Contents, I should be tackling the makara now, but according to the big bold text of the monster entry itself, I should be waiting until we get to the “V”s.  These are the questions that keep me up all night.