Ogrekin

Ogre lineage doesn’t just ruin offspring—it ruins whole bloodlines.  Ogre seed is so dominant, so foul, and so ruinous, that it warps the entire family tree.  The traits simply do not breed out.  The child, grandchild, and so on down the line are always ogrekin.

And an ogrekin is a mutated mess—blessed and cursed with deformities that reveal its giant heritage, and with rages, desires, and lusts acceptable in only the vilest of humanoid societies. 

Bear with me, everyone reading yesterday, but I’m going to repeat myself: If you care about ogrekin, Nicolas Logue’s “The Hook Mountain Massacre” in Pathfinder #3 (which introduced them), is pretty much essential for demonstrating how one a family of these inbred half-breeds operates, as well as for more adventure ideas in that issue’s “Bestiary” section.

That “Bestiary” also contains even more GM deliciousness, like two longer, more gruesome lists of deformities.  And unlike the hardcover Bestiary’s ogrekin entry, which limits the template to humanoids, the original template allowed for monstrous humanoids and fey as well.  So while half-ogres, orogs, ogrekin bugbears and the like are all well and good, if you want to create an ogrekin medusa, green hag, or dryad, I’d love to see that disgusting stat block.

Oh and 1e orog fans, you’re not forgotten. Stick around through the end and we’ll chat…

A caravan has been dragged off the road—it’s wedding season for a family of ogrekin (the fruit of their own incestuous labors having all been stillborn).  Fortunately for the horrified captives, the ogrekin are still human enough to crave elaborate wedding ceremonies—remarrying is one of their favorite pastimes when trading sibling-spouses—which buys would-be rescuers time to save them.

The orcs of the Iron Skull clan are famous for their warped orog shock troops.  The Iron Skulls sometimes grant an orog to another clan as a gift, but only after gelding it first to preserve their monopoly.

The Trollwoods are misnamed; encounters with ogres and ogrekin are far more likely.  At least one family of half-ogres lives there, as well as isolated half-elf ogrekin and a tragically corpulent half-dryad ogrekin bound to an oak as stunted and rotund as she is.  Some of these ogrekin grow to enormous size (ignoring the template’s confinement to Medium humanoids), particularly the half-troll ogrekin near Grasp-Ankle Bridge, and Og-Bog, a woebegone half-ettin ogrekin who can’t understand why he/he has two heads (not to mention a vestigial arm).

— Pathfinder #3 & Pathfinder Bestiary 2 204

Mail call!

So filbypott writes:

Any chance you’ll touch on the classic orog and ogrillon in the ogrekin entry?

Sure, I’d love to, except…er…I don’t know that much.  I wasn’t a 1e or 2e player, so I never saw the orog or ogrillon in context, aside from the occasional offhand reference in Dragon or Dungeon.  So I can’t say much with any authority.  (And as far as I know, the 3.0 orog only really showed up in the Forgotten Realms book Races of Faerûn, and those weren’t even half-ogre/half-orc; they were just tougher orcs from the Underdark.)

And also…I never really got the orog and ogrillon.  Because while the orog is a great idea, together they made zero sense.

To quote Wikipedia, “An orog is a crossbreed between a male orc and a female ogre. Orogs usually live among orcs; they are stronger, more intelligent, and more highly disciplined than typical orcs.”  Um, because ogres are paragons of discipline?  These aren’t hobgoblins we’re talking about.  And where are these female ogres living?  Are they palling around with the orcs on a regular basis?  Otherwise, the orogs would be lucky to make it through childhood among their larger cousins.  Or at some age did the orogs just get tired of always being the short ones and decide to find some orcs so they could beat up on someone smaller?  (Wait, that actually does make sense!)

Okay, so it’s a draw there.  But the ogrillon is where things really get nuts: “The ogrillion is the brutish, armor-skinned offspring of a female orc and a male ogre.” 

Um, how does that work?  The dominant genes must be tied to the sex chromosomes; otherwise the sex of the father and mother wouldn’t matter.  But clearly sex-related genes work differently in magical settings, because otherwise only male offspring would get the fDNA (fantasy DNA) that would be expressed as the ogrillon phenotype. 

And armor-skin?  Bwah?  Where does that come from?  (Other than, y’know, it’s an “ogre-armadillo.”)  And what does that do to a female orc’s uterus?  Yikes!

(My dad’s an OB/GYN; this is not exactly odd conversation for me.) 

If anything, ogrillons should come from the male orc/female ogre pairing, as the female’s larger womb would offer a more secure shelter for the child to grow and develop, thus explaining the more advantageous physical characteristics later in life.  So I could buy the orog/ogrillon split, if and only if the parents’ sexes were reversed.

So in short, filbypott is right: orogs are a completely logical result of orcs and ogres living in proximity, and awesome in theory.  But in terms of publication history, everything written about them since has been categorically bat-guano insane.  :-)

So hail to the orog, and meanwhile I’m sticking the ogrillon into the same category as the faun/satyr rape problem and the perennial nast-fest that is the sphinx: fantasy sex that makes me go ewww.

Back to filbypott:

I haven’t seen many non-human ogrekin; odd since the template can apply to any humanoid. Imagine troll or hill giant ogrekin.

Technically it’s any Medium humanoid, but I’m not going to quibble.  Your wish is my command—see above.

PS: There was a joke to be made yesterday about the octopus entry being yesterday’s sushi.  But I forgot to make it.  I gotta stop doing this at 11 PM.

Ogre

I can’t improve upon the reinvention of the ogre Paizo has pulled off—with Nicolas Logue’s “The Hook Mountain Massacre” in Pathfinder #3 setting the stage and Classic Monsters Revisited bringing down the house.  

The result is intense, to put it mildly.  Pathfinder’s ogres explicitly draw from movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes.  The Bestiary name-checks “brutality…savagery, cannibalism…torture…rape…dismemberment, necrophilia, incest, mutilation, and all manners of hideous murder.”  Rape may be the most important of all of the above (that’s how ogrekin are made), with incest coming a close second (given ogres’ fealty to their twisted families).

If you’re not a horror fan…or if the Pathfinder-reimagined ogre squicks you out too much…you can always go back to the D&D ogre.  In that case, what sets ogres apart is that they are “human but.”  Human but larger.  Human but monstrous.  Human but gluttonous, ravenous, murderous.  They are Mr. Hyde: the id unbound in a body to match its appetites.  Whereas goblins/hobgoblins/bugbears are clearly alien, and orcs are an expression of the terror of the horde (and stand more in contrast to elves or dwarves than humans; see Roger E. Moore’s semi-famous article “The Half-Orc Point of View”), ogres are us…just an “us” gone horribly, horribly wrong.

A clan of ogres is trekking through the Sunrise Hills, spreading devastation wherever they go.  Their modus operandi is to force all the inhabitants of the hamlets they raid into the largest barn…and the less said of what comes after, the better.  They’ve avoided conflict or capture so far because their perambulations are completely at random.  Superstitious, they leave their last victim’s head out for the scavenging animals, and travel in whatever direction the coyote, crow, or giant beetle leads them.

The Mushmouth tribe’s faces are nearly paralyzed from eating their swampy home’s poisonous fungi.  They compensate by pounding their victims into slurry or soaking them in brine.  Not so the Bear Jaws, who wear rude prosthetic teeth made of animal incisors and pilfered saw blades. Tragically, Trag’s Boys are more concerned with the other end of their anatomy, and no adult Boy is allowed a share of supper if his Wife Cage does not have a female humanoid or fey locked inside it.

Ogre bards are particularly terrifying, as they tend to be more cunning than their kin; they egg on these same relatives to further acts of depravity with their rough banjos and improvised drums.  Some exceptional specimens are even able to augment their weak Charisma with their prodigious Strength, using bone percussion and still living victims as instruments to achieve demoralizing effects.

—Classic Monsters Revisited 46–51 & Pathfinder Bestiary 220

TL;DR version of above: Ogres have layers.

Yet another reason I like the setting created for the Monte Cook and Sean K. Reynolds’s Ghostwalk book: It includes a region of humans who rely on ogre slave labor.  Slavery is abhorrent, evil by definition.  But what happens if the creatures enslaved are evil and pose an even greater threat when free?  That’s built-in moral conflict right there (read: adventure).

Also, I don’t talk enough about Games Workshop’s world-building.  I really like their Ogres’ obsession with food, eating, and bellies as a source of strength, social rank, and even magic.

I like to know what you want to know.  This week I’m encouraging you to write.  Shoot me questions, thoughts, things you’re curious about, etc.  Send me an email—to avoid spam spiders, I’ll type my address as dailybestiary [at] gmail [dot] com, but you get the idea—or leave a comment and I’ll do my best to respond here.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where the octopus entry went, look for it here.

Ochre Jelly

The ochre jelly arose out of a joke.  We all get that, right?  At least on some instinctual level? 

I imagine it this way: Having suffered through green slime, yellow mold, and gray ooze, one of Gary Gygax’s players quips, “What’s next, brown jelly?”  To which Gygax—with the words “brown jelly” sitting right there in his notes—primly replies, “No…it’s ochre!” 

Either that or someone spilled marmalade on a miniature, and he just ran with it.

(And before anyone accuses me of taking Sir Gygax’s name in vain, let’s look back at the early days of the world’s oldest role-playing game: A badly molded toy spawning the owlbear.  The black pudding, full stop.  Deities baptized by reversing the letters in players’ names (like Zagig Yragerne…as the God of Humor to boot).  Now tell me I’m out of line.)

But now the ochre jelly is an institution—heck, it’s apparently part of the Final Fantasy franchise, if my Googling is accurate—so let’s give it a look.

Paizo’s Pathfinder authors have actually ladled a bunch of adventure hooks (alchemists, canopic jars, etc.) into the Bestiary’s ochre jelly entry.   All take advantage of the unique property of the jelly: Since it only affects flesh and soft tissue (even wood is unaffected), it is in some respects less intrinsically dangerous than other oozes.  But that very manageability makes it easier to use in dangerously surprising ways. 

So in the subterranean wilds, a heavily armored PC with a mace might actually prefer the Large CR 5 ochre jelly to the metal-devouring Medium CR 4 gray ooze.  But an ochre jelly can hide (or be stashed) in places other oozes can’t—the bole of a tree, at the bottom of a tun of ale, in a vampire’s false coffin, and so on—surprising PCs when they’re unarmed, unarmored, or expecting other threats.

An ochre jelly dwells in an abandoned thriae outpost, feasting on animals that attempt to settle there.  In the honey-colored cells, the ooze is nearly impossible to spot.

Clever spellcasters, alchemists, and rogues can trap or breed ochre jellies in surprising places.  Oozes have been found inside wood golems, graven guardians, and animated cauldrons—even encouraged with food (“trained” is too strong a word) to “ride” Large skeletons.  And the treant renegade Bilewood is known for vomiting ochre jellies onto unsuspecting victims who come to treat with him.

As a comparatively new race of constructs, wyrwoods (see the Advanced Race Guide) jealously guard their autonomy.  Many of their defenses involve pit and ceiling traps that dispense ochre jellies.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 218

We’ve made it to the letter O!  And 200 Tumblr followers—thank you, ozzie-111 and rpguildhall!  Not to mention all the anonymous, typo-tolerant souls here at Blogger who I don’t give nearly enough props to.  Thanks everybody!

Don’t forget, I’m in a question-answering mood.  Shoot me questions, thoughts, things you’re curious about, etc.  Send me an email—to avoid spam spiders, I’ll type my address as dailybestiary [at] gmail [dot] com, but you get the idea—or a comment and I’ll do my best to respond here.

Nyogoth

Nobody likes an escort mission.  I’m pretty sure I never finished the Human track for  Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (on my baby brother’s blueberry iMac!) because of an escort mission I couldn’t crack.  (Clearly I am not much of a video gamer.  I beat it on Orc, though.) 

But if your gaming table is going to the Abyss, why not bring a sage along?  Just so you can hear him say things like, “Well, primarily nyogoths eat the, ahem, filth of other qlippoths and demons…but this one seems to have resorted to self-cannibalism.  Look, see how it has gnawed off a tentacle in frustration…and is now nursing on its own digestive...well, juices, I suppose one would say…”

Yeah, that’d be worth it.  Ideally someone at the table will be eating spaghetti, too.

Sometimes you just need a monster that’s all mouth, tentacles, and (to quote the Bestiary 2) “buoyant intestine.”  Thus, the nyogoth.  GMs, go gross on this one—that’s why this thing bloody well (ichory well?) exists.

Summoned when unlucky adventurers activated a sigil, a nyogoth has been trapped in a warded area of a sewer ever since.  The local otyughs (after learning the hard way not to approach too close) are in awe of the outsider and worship it as a god, bringing it offerings to consume.  They have devoured the nyogoth’s excreta in turn, and have mutated into Huge fiendish aberrations.

A quasit has tormented an adventuring party for weeks.  Leading them on a merry chase, it accidentally lures them into a layer of the Abyss known as Envy’s Appetite.  Suddenly the plainly terrified quasit proposes an alliance to seek an escape from this domain—for it is a qlippoth layer, and broods of ravenous nyogoths convulse through the air overhead.

The Pearl of Barnabus the Sane is located in one of the most maddening dungeons in existence: the innards of the dead god who swallowed the artifact.  But deities take a long time to die, and this god’s still-hungry intestines (use nyogoth stat block) will attempt to devour and digest any and all interlopers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 224

Courtesy of the boys over at Shut Up & Sit Down and Kotaku, here’s another creature that exists only to eat…

Also, I meant to say this yesterday: It’s FAQ time!  I haven’t heard from you guys in while.  Shoot me questions, thoughts, things you’re curious about, whatever you want to know.  Send me an email—to avoid spam spiders, dailybestiary [at] gmail [you know the rest]—or a comment and I’ll do my best to respond here.

Nymph

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my—  Oh wait, that’s a nymphet…a very different breed of monster.  Beware.

The role-playing nymph doesn’t have much to do with the original Greek nymphs (which tend to resemble RPG’s dryads and nereids); if anything the RPG nymph is more like Galadriel when she unveils her power in The Fellowship of the Ring. 

Normally I might grouse about this (by now you all know fidelity to the source material is a bit of a fetish/crutch of mine), but I don’t mind with the nymph.  This is because her wide range of powers makes her a rare thing: a fey suitable for midlevel parties.  (Seriously, off the top of your head, name one besides the rusalka.  See?  They’re practically all either under CR 2 or over CR 20—remember the 3.0 Epic Level Handbook’s leShay and hoary hunter?)  Unlike in some D&D editions, Pathfinder’s nymph doesn’t kill with a look (although an Advanced specimen might), but her blinding beauty and stunning glance still pack a wallop, especially when followed up with her druidic abilities (ice storm will do the trick nicely).

The chaotic good alignment matters, though—nymphs in your game should not just be “the pretty medusas.”  If PCs run afoul of one, it’s usually because of a transgression of some kind…and even then she’ll probably give parties a chance to repair the breach, if they aren’t too hotheaded or unrepentant.  But if they scoff or try to take advantage of her…well, that’s what summoned monsters are for.

And of course, when nymphs go bad, they go really bad.  See the Kingmaker Adventure Path for an example of this.

If you want to scale your nymphs, class levels are ideal, and you can beef up the special abilities as well (death gazes anyone?).  This is your chance to dig deep into the archetypes and prestige class lists, too, to make each nymph singular.  For instance, just a quick glance at only a few pages of Ultimate Magic already suggests some options: a menhir savant nymph might be a guardian of ancient secrets and ley lines; a mooncaller nymph might guard against (or run with) lycanthrope packs; a reincarnated druid nymph might discover ties to her past life that need resolving; and a shark shaman or storm druid nymph might have ties to water and air spirits, challenging even experienced players’ expectations of what a guardian of nature looks like.

A bard goes mad after botching a performance in front of royalty.  The nymph upon whose supernatural inspiration he relied offered her favor to another just as he took the stage—he actually felt the magic draining away.  Shattered and now unfashionable to the point of ruin, what he will do next is anyone’s guess.  He might jealously recruit others to attack the nymph in revenge, vent his fury on the new object of her fascination (a gnomish hurdy-gurdy player), go to absurd (even criminal) lengths to stage a comeback performance, or just sell his knowledge of the noble class’s foibles to dire operators.

Born of a mahogany tree, the nymph Adwoa distrusts all Easterners, having been burned (sometimes literally) too many times by colonists’ greed and carelessness.  Local adventurers should have no problem in her domain, provided they offer blessings to any trees they fell.  But Adwoa has the perfect answer for white-skinned interlopers—attacks by white-furred dire apes drunk on fireweed.

The beauty of an evil nymph is a terrible thing.  The nymph M’trace is a sorceress of great power, thanks to her stunning charisma.  Riding a cauchemar steed, she now tends a blighted Ethereal version of her half-remembered forest home, full of entropic and fiendish carnivorous plants.  A linnorm supposedly know what caused M’trace’s fall from grace, but his price for the information—that no thrush sing in the Vale of Kent—seems too outlandish to pay.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 217

Allow me to give props here to Stephen Fix, who taught the Nabokov & Pynchon class at my college and deserves respect like nobody’s business.

Blogger readers, apologies there were so many typos in the nuglub entry.  Of course, now you can look at the tortured formatting and see why I don’t usually bother trying to fix your typos. 

Reader/artist justjingles (and a bunch of the rest of you!) gave some props to the nuglub.  Tell us what you do with it in your campaign, jj!

Once again, no radio show this week.  Next week we will do it up in style.

On another subject entirely, I woke up this morning to see pictures of an actress I’ve written commercial scripts for holding an Oscar.  Good for her!

And meanwhile, the treatment of another young star has raised some hackles worth reading.

Nuglub

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Nuglubs are, in the parlance of our age, messed the hell up.  They have three eyes.  They wear their hair as a cloak.  They are obsessed with sharpening their claws.  They have “kneecapper” as a special ability.  When they argue, the loser gets cannibalized.  These are not CR 1/2 pugwampis.  These guys are The Dark Crystal crossed with Freddy Krueger.

If I wanted fey for a weird fantasy campaign, or if I wanted to create a Pan’s Labyrinth version of Faerie, nuglubs would be my first choice.  They are evocative, strange, and look like practically nothing else in the Bestiaries.  And while they’re only CR 2, I bet you can make your PCs feel like they’re a lot worse.

An infestation of vexgits captures an adventuring party who stumbles into their warehouse.  The good news is the gremlins don’t kill them right away.  The bad news is the vexgits leave them in a metal box as a present for a heat metal and shocking grasp-casting nuglub maniac they call Uncle Blade.

Adventurers stop for the night in an inn.  Midway through the evening, the atmosphere turns dangerous when a dhampir enters.  He does not have enough money to rent a room, but no one wants to let him have a sleeping pallet in the common area  Soon both the locals and a visiting band of mercenaries begin fingering their blades.  And that’s when a mob of nuglubs decides to set off the booby traps they’ve spent a fortnight preparing around the inn.

The Moon Torque is a magical necklace sacred to the fey of the Myrwood.  Once a year at the Spring Equinox ownership of the artifact passes from one tribe to the next.  Two tribes of pixies, a band of atomies, and a troupe of sprites share the honor ever year.  This year there will be no exchange, however—nuglubs have stolen the Moon Torque.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 143

I’m in Farmersville, IL!  That is actually the name of the town.  …It is accurate.

Sigh.  There were so many typos in this I couldn't let it stand unedited.  Behold the weird formatting artifacts that creep in!  You should see what happens if I try to change the font…

Nue

The Japanese chimera, the monkey-faced, tiger-bodied, snake-tailed nue is a creature that haunts dreamers and the vulnerable from within a black cloud.  The nue is particularly nasty for a magical beast: CR 10, stealthy, two bite attacks (one featuring energy drain, the other poison), and magical abilities.  So detective-minded players tracking down possible murder suspects might be shocked to find out the animate dream or wicked oneiromancer they are hunting is actually “just” a beast.

The Temple of the Apes is a site of healing in Pon Kat, and the augmented apes and monkeys that haunt the temple grounds are reputed to bring magical herbs to those who offer food.  An ambush of nues now takes advantage of this, following home the invalids with large families—whose later death at the nues’ hands will radiate the most misery.

The lamia noble Miyatar relies on pet nues as her spies and assassins.  Adventurers wishing to take her on would do well to consult the kitsune arcane archers of the neighboring valley, who are specially trained against nues, vargouilles, and other exotic cursed malefactors.

Are nues the reincarnated spirits of cursed children?  Sages say it is hard to know.  But when a chorus of attic whisperers begins to plague a town, the culprits are revealed to be a night hag and her nue sidekick, preying on the fears, bodies, and souls of local children so badly that even their spirits cannot rest.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 204

This, courtesy of justjingles, is exactly right.

Sammy’s For Your Ears helped me write this post.  Listen!  (Link good till Wednesday, 2/27, at midnight.)