Guardian Naga

Despite being mostly benevolent lawful good creatures, guardian nagas are actually quite likely to come into conflict with adventurers.  After all, even the most good-hearted PCs tend to have a casual attitude toward things like grave goods, the preservation of relics, and not despoiling natural beauty.  So the aberrations can be forgiven for slinging a lightning bolt first, and asking questions later.  Win a guardian naga over, and it can be a valuable ally.  But when it says, “Don’t touch anything,” it means it.

Golden Hood is the latest in an unbroken 400-year line of guardian nagas to bear that name.  However, he chafes under the weight of the mantle.  No one can accuse him of being derelict in his duties—if anything, he covers his reluctance with too-forceful shows of zeal—but there is likely some subconscious self-sabotage in his spell choices (particularly fireball).  The sacred scrolls he guards would be a lot less sacred if someone inadvertently reduced them to ash.

For almost two centuries, Fire of Sunlight has protected the holy city of Antar, now abandoned to the desert.  He also eagerly sponsors young sorcerers, fostering their talents and training them in spell use.  But he demands they and all visitors follow the dictates of Antar’s lost caste of dervishes.  Those who stray into what he deems heterodoxy must flee or be cleansed of sin with his poison spit.

The Malkins are an extended family of cat burglars (naturally) and thieves.  Last night, three of them ran afoul of a guardian naga during a temple heist, and one of their number fell in the combat.  The Malkin sisters say they will do anything to get the body of their brother back, and have emptied their pockets to buy aid.  Actually, he is still alive—being blessed with a natural resistance to acid and a ring of regeneration—but he is also currently a lump in the stomach of the naga, who sees no reason to let him out.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 212

One of my dirty secrets is that despite Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 owning my heart and most of my wallet, my most concentrated role-playing experience lies with a phenomenal three-year, four-story-arc, same-character Vampire: The Masquerade campaign, the likes of which I may never see again.  This may explain why I like monsters who would plausibly say things like, “Well, this has been a lovely chat.  I’m almost sorry I have to kill you now.”

Gryph

My feelings on the gryph have done a complete 180 in the past 24 hours.

But first, a little background: As near as I can tell, the gryph is one of those innumerable monsters that appeared in the 1st Ed. Field Folio, never made the jump to 2nd, and languished until statted up for Necromancer Games’ Tome of Horrors series.  Since then, it’s managed to flutter its way into a published adventure or two (I’m sure I saw it in a Pathfinder Adventure Path or GameMastery Module or something) before landing in the Bestiary 2.

So, it’s always been an evil too-many-legged bird that implants its eggs in people. Then Paizo made it not just any bird, but a stork.  Yes, that’s right—a stork that impregnates people.  Haha.  We’re veering into real Piers Anthony territory here.  (What’s next—an elf named St. Nikolaus who leaves severed heads in shoes?)

And yet.  And yet.  Paizo didn’t stop there, and that’s what saves this monster.  They also gave it a strange vermin affinity—almost guaranteeing that parties will encounter it in tandem with swarms or giant insects.  That’s weird.  That’s interesting.  And it’s that one extra detail that turns a joke monster into a compelling one, making the gryph a weird mix of fecundity and morbidity—a carrion eater, a disease spreader, and a parasitic plague all in one.  I love it.

Lomburg is famous for the storks that nest among its chimneys.  When a flock of gryphs settles in town after a flood, it soon decimates the stork population, then begins to infect transients and children caught out alone.

The ostler at the Manticore Downs stable yard apparently died with his abdomen burst open, as have many of his charges.  Giant flies roost on the carcasses.  And a price racehorse set to be sold to a visiting imam is missing.

A throng of gryphs led by a half-fiend harpy lurks in the swamps of Greenshire.  The pairing is the first move in a chess game of pestilence between a nascent demon lord of insect plagues and a daemonic scientist of disease.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 150

My mail just arrived with Pathfinder Adventure Path 57: Tempest Rising, Lost Kingdoms, and Coliseum Morpheuon.  I am a) excited, and b) now very behind on my reading.

Grootslang

How do you establish a creature as mythic in an already mythic game?  How cryptic can a cryptid be in a world where wizard consortiums hold colloquia on the proper taxonomy and dissection of owlbears and centaurs?  These are the questions a grootslang raises, if you want it to be anything more than a Monster of the Week.

(We’re not the only ones asking these kinds of questions, by the way.  Penny Arcade just pointed out this problem in one of their posts/comics: As Tycho observes, Deckard’s niece “grumps around in disbelief at her kooky uncle even when she is up to her philtrum in demonic, animate flesh.  This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”)

So the trick with the grootslang is to establish its wrongness and scariness.  Establish that it breaks your world’s rules somehow in a disturbing way. 

I’m not the biggest fantasy reader in the world—I spent too much time strictly in Middle-earth, Pern, and TSR when I should have been out exploring—but I can definitely point to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series as a good model for this.  In this flintlock fantasy Earth, the British navy and aerial dragon corps are among the premier fighting forces in the world.  So when Laurence and his men go places that appear to have no dragons, like Africa and Australia, it becomes unsettling—then downright scary, when the true situation is revealed.

So let’s just steal that technique.  Imagine this: Your party is hired to help the coastal marines explore a newly colonized dark subcontinent.  The PCs are loaned griffons; a trio of officers accompany them on brass and bronze dragons.  Over time, they become disturbed.  The bronze reports there is no sign of dragons…anywhere.  The brasses, being brasses have heard…rumors.  Litter bearers who go to fetch water disappear and never come back.  And then, one night, one of the brasses dies horribly with a screech, in the dark.  Only part of a torn wing and one set of elephantine footprints remains.

That’s how to introduce a grootslang.

A colony establishes a distant diamond mine and begins producing smoky gems of remarkable size.  But getting them back to the colony proper, let alone the motherland, will be a challenge.  First their borings disturb a primitive kongamato that must be driven off.  Then a grootslang arrives, having scented diamonds in the mine tailings dumped downriver.  Speaking only in Aquan, demands tribute. If not appeased, it slaughters as many miners as it can and harasses the survivors all the way downriver with its aquatic elusion powers.

Demon-worshipping serpentfolk war with the surface nations.  Their struggle awakens the long-slumbering serpent god, Vessbenns.  But when the serpentfolk high priests call for his aid, he detects the demon taint in their prayers.  Rather than send his herald, he sends a grootslang to devour both his heretic priests and any brown- and pink-skinned interlopers.

Ambur’s Hearth is a continent said to be sacred to Ambur the Potter, a creator deity, who filled the land with marsupials, monotremes, sagaris, and other castoffs from his labors.  Grootslangs are the undisputed kings of this realm, hunting the quagga and kangaroo herds that visit their waterholes.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 144

Last week over on Tumblr, syringesin asked:

“Have you ever read the “Ecology of” articles from the 1e and 2e days of Dragon Magazine? A trove of ideas in those articles.”

Answer: Totally, and you’re right!  A little context: Technically I have every issue of Dragon Magazine—a smattering from 132–151, every issue from 152 on, and a CD-ROM of 1–250.  I haven’t read all the CD-ROM issues yet, but if it appeared in print after 1989, I’ve read it.

So if you look through the archives I definitely reference them when I remember to—the gnoll and gibbering mouther entries in particular, I think also the dark naga entry, and of course there’s the barghest debacle. 

If you can find these articles in used issues or online, I encourage everyone to follow syringesin’s lead and check them out.  Spike Y. Jones’s articles in particular are mandatory, and Jonathan M. Richards are well worth it for the laughs.  If you’ve got a favorite “Ecology” author, write in and let us know!

So I may have missed my show last week, but I made up for it in spades this week, even despite some volume issues.  Download it here, and I hope you have as much fun listening as I had spinning.

(Music starts just over five and a half minutes into the file.  The feed can skip, so let load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and enjoy in iTunes.  Link good until Friday, 6/22, at midnight.)

Grodair

The grodair is one of those magical beasts that looks stupid, right up until the time you realize that it’s totally brilliant. 

Let’s face it, we don’t talk about fantasy evolution much.  But it makes sense that creatures in a magical world would develop magical strategies for coping in that world.  After all, in the real world we have beetles and pines that depend on forest fires for part of their breeding cycle.  A magical world might have thrushes that only lay their eggs in spell-blighted areas, for instance, or when the Elemental Plane of Air is in congruence.

So the grodair, a fish that carries its own water with it, totally works.  It’s a perfect strategy for a creature from an unstable, constantly shifting realm—Golarion’s First World comes to mind, as well as Faerie, the Spirit World, Limbo, Chaos, or any number of demiplanes in other settings—where rivers cannot be relied upon to keep their courses.  But you don’t even need to keep the otherworldly setting—such an adaptation also works in subterranean realms, deserts, tundra, or even asteroids or comets.  The grodair can make a home in the harshest environments…and its long (if unreliable) memory ensures that PCs will always have a reason to seek it out.

Faerie is easy to find and nearly impossible to leave—especially after one has incurred any obligation to a fey lord.  Those so stranded might seek Blastofleur, a bloated grodair sage who travels the Ways in and out of Faerie on his self-made rivers.  He also offers a measure of protection, at least from fey of Small size or smaller—the local atomies and sprites avoid him, as he has a tendency to snap them up like flies.

A tribe of troglodytes has enslaved a grodair with drug-laced mushrooms and the threat of barbed harpoons.  The tribe uses the grodair to migrate through the most arid regions of the Realms Below, seeking relics from a now lost Kingdom of Reptiles once peopled by advanced troglodytes and serpentfolk.

A devious death trap suspends a grodair above a portable hole.  If not disarmed, the trap will drop the fish into the hole, simultaneously triggering the grodair’s death flood and creating an extradimensional rift to flush interlopers into the Astral.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 143

Grippli

I have a feeling that gripplis are going to get a lot more popular as soon as the Advanced Race Guide comes out.  (James Sutter is already showing the love.)  What can we say about them ahead of time?  Like halflings, gripplis are a doughty mixture of courage and caution—their small size and dangerous jungle homes demanding ample portions of both.  Living high in the canopies, they hold even their neighbors at arm’s length…especially when their neighbors (keches, charau-ka, girallons, and carnivorous apes of all stripes, as well as kobolds, jungle catfolk, and nagas) sometimes treat them as lunch.  PCs will likely find gripplis to be useful allies, but one wrong step will have nets and arrows raining down upon them.

Gripplis rangers save explorers from a giant wasp attack.  Pleased to have captured such delicious insects for their tribe—and envious of the large folk’s gems—they invite the explorers to join them for the night in the canopy.  But to comfortably reach the grippli settlement, the explorers will have to be magically reduced in size.

The emperor’s court musician, a marimba player of surpassing skill, is a grippli bard.  When he dies, the emperor commands his body be borne back to his home village, and his son invited to take his place.  The only danger in the journey should be the usual jungle hazards…but an assassination attempt just as the pallbearers set out indicates other forces are at work.

The most notable grippli village cannot be found on any map.  To avoid threatening hordes of charau-ka, Shambling Home moves about the jungle like a leafy Baba Yaga’s Hut.  A circle of grippli druids is responsible for animating the trees that hold the village aloft.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 149

Darth Vader voice: “The desire to base an entire grippli adventure on the Ewoks and not tell the players till after is strong in this one.”

Does anyone know if the Fat Goblin Games’ Racial Ecologies: Guide to the Grippli is good? How about the rest of the line?  On the whole I tend to be very skeptical of third-party stuff (and I vastly prefer books to PDFs), but these look pretty cool, and you can’t argue with the $1.99 price.

(A bit more about my third-party feelings, especially since I don’t want to give Fat Goblin a black eye they haven’t earned: I’ve raved about Sword & Sorcery on these pages plenty of times, and I’ve got Coliseum Morpheuon from Rite Publishing headed toward me as we speak (I browsed it in the store, put it back, and when it was gone the next week my curiosity of course became obsession).  But on the whole, non-Paizo or -WotC stuff leaves me cold.  Even when the ideas and writing are good, editing/quality control is almost always sloppy (even from authors I usually trust—a testament to the invisible power of good editors).  And third-party books are almost always over-designed, with so many “Oh, this will be so cool-looking” border elements and page backgrounds that the entire effort ends up muddy and hard to read, especially in black and white.  After one too many burns, I avoid on principle unless I’ve held the product in my hands and been impressed…but a $1.99 price tag might persuade me.)

This (which, I neglected to say yesterday, I had a very, very minor hand in,) is still going on.  The Blue Angels flying over my office is more than a little distracting…mostly in a good way.

Grindylow

What a difference a decade makes!  An edition ago I couldn’t have told you what a grindylow was.  Add some China Miéville and Harry Potter into the mix, and now it’s practically a household name.

Despite their low CR, two things make grindylows scary: First, because of that low CR, PCs are likely to encounter them before they have access to regular or reliable water breathing effects—making fighting them anywhere near their own turf a dangerous proposition.  Second, look at that organizational chart.  Grindylows can scale up fast, both in levels and sheer numbers.  So a party should be encouraged to get in over their heads—literally and figuratively.  After killing one or two of the creatures, PCs are likely to get cocky…only to find themselves surrounding by 40 of the savage, needle-toothed beasts, along with all their pets, leaders, shamans, and mutant cousins.

The shark-like, bloodthirsty adaros are hardly sympathetic figures.  So when a mother adaro and her child wash up on shore seeking sanctuary from a warband of grindylows, a seaside village has a hard moral choice to make.

When raw octopus replaces the traditional fried squid as a delicacy in Portuwar, their fishermen leap to take advantage of the new market.  This angers the nearby grindylows, who begin swarming upon solitary ships en masse, leaving torn nets and skewered men in their wake.  Soon even Portuwar’s piers are not safe, especially at night.

A river is locally known to be haunted.  In truth, it is the domain of a grindylow matriarch whose monstrous spawn are particularly bloodthirsty due to some unknown force of corruption.  The local water nagas sometimes war with the tribe; the local nixies prefer to avoid them, but are not adverse to luring mortals who have offended them into the grindylows’ clutches. 

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 148

Since we’re talking aquatic creatures, now is perhaps the time I should mention that I enjoyed Mike Shel’s Isles of the Shackles a lot.  Look for the usual nice omnibus of locations and adventure ideas, plus a particularly hefty does of monsters, which struck a nice balance between general (duppy, larabay), setting-specific (Aashaq’s wyvern, gholdako), and useful NPCs (pirates, jinx eater).

I’m also digging the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path—my current Aubrey–Maturin obsession having a lot to do with that—and so you can probably guess how much I dug the look at Golarion’s ocean races in Pathfinder Adventure Path 56.

Appropriately enough, thanks to this, there are tall ships literally outside my window right now.  I just saw the BAE Guayas go by with sailors lined along its yards.

Grig

Grigs are a great argument for story awards.  They’re neutral good fey who like getting people to dance—killing one for XP would be like gunning down a wedding DJ.  And unless truly cornered, most grigs would flee (aided by entangle, invisibility, and flight) rather than fight anyway.  But PCs shouldn’t always have to engage them in combat—joining their dances, charming them with music, providing them with aid or otherwise peacefully interacting with them can and should be worth a reward.

A child is lost—not in the woods, but in the vaster, more magical, dire wolf-haunted Deep Woods.  The safest shortcut there is via the mushroom ring where a gang of grigs regularly dances.  Anyone who can join their dance without succumbing to its staggering effect will win their aid through the magical portal.

Mercenaries with blades of cold iron slew the leader of a band of grigs.  Outraged, their new chief declares war on any Big Ones wearing metal armor.  The band follows his orders with some reservations, but nevertheless get better at sniping by the day.

A grig hears a wedding in progress and decided to aid her fiddling to the festivities; in addition to her legs, she carries a magical viol that extends her own supernatural fiddling ability.  She must be convinced to stop lest she exhaust the wedding guests; then she must be offended from the outraged, orthodox abbot, who declares the naked fey to be an abomination to be baptized by holy water…or fire.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 147

Of course, there’s nothing saying you couldn’t change grigs’ alignment and make them creepy as hell.  Tim Hitchcock and Nicolas Logue’s GameMastery Module Carnival of Tears featured dark ice grigs who had no problem going toe-to-toe with PCs.  Or picture this: A band of Tiny elfin humanoids earn a party’s trust and ply them with wine and music.  As the night reaches a crescendo, the creatures’ grasshopper bodies burst out of their disguise self-enhanced false skin husks (à la Mantis Girl in Jim Butcher’s Small Favor), and they attack…

By the way, I was first introduced to grigs (and many other fey) in Dragon Magazine 155—positively one of the best themed issues the magazine ever put out (and featuring my first encounter with Bruce Heard’s “The Voyage of the Princess Ark” series).  I read my copy so much the cover fell off (and I made sure to keep that cover).

Speaking of which: Bruce Heard has a blog!!!  You have no idea how excited I am to see the Known World in hex map form again.  Seeing new nations and coastlines appear each month was one of the highlights of opening a new Dragon issue.  I’m no dogmatically old-school gamer by any means, but there’s something about well designed hex maps I just love…