Oronci

You guys keep showing the love to the orcs!  Thanks!  (Between that and your gnoll love, I should have just called this blog The Daily Humanoid.)  So I bet you’re all excited about the oronci…

*crickets*

Don’t have the Inner Sea Bestiary?  Courtesy of Jim Groves, the oronci is an orc-centipede centaur in the vein of a drider—and indeed, created by the very same drow fleshwarping techniques.  (They and several disgusting cousins were first mentioned but not statted up in J. D. Wiker and Darrin Drader’s “Abominations of the Drow” from Pathfinder #16: Endless Night.)  As you might guess, they’re everything one typically expects from orcs—green skin, big damage—with everything one expects from giant centipedes—poison bite and spit attacks—with the added bonus of a once-per-day frenzy attack that acts like a three-round haste.  So, uh, don’t get them mad.

Obviously, the quickest way to make your oronci special is to mess with their origin story and established dynamic…

Adventurers in the Deepearth of Vasharen need to beware oronci, the foul shock troops of the dark elves, who use their arthropodean skill at climbing to launch spit attacks from cavern ceilings.  But even oronci on the march must beware driders.  Failed results of the drows’ first fleshwarping efforts, the spider-creatures proved untameable and now hunt drow, oronci, and surface dweller alike.

Adventures exploring the Realms Below run afoul of strange orc/centipede crossbreeds.  Some of these can even breathe water, and appear to be marines of some kind.  Following the trail of the oronci leads to supply lines manned by elite skum troops and shamans.  And if skum are involved, then can aboleths not be far behind?

The savage Northmen say oronci are the first orcs, crafted to be soldiers by the goddess Hela from the worms that bore ceaselessly beneath her palace.  But this does not explain their presence in the rainforests of the Southlands, where oronci dwell in the darkness beneath the canopies and even full-blooded orcs fear to tread.

—Inner Sea Bestiary 36

Oread

Typically my love of Paizo and Pathfinder borders on hagiography.  But the Pathfinder oread irks me.  You’re going to think my reasons for being irked are pedantic and lame, which irks me even more…especially since you’re right, which just throws me into full-on irkfest of irking proportions.  Sigh.

Here’s my beef: When it comes to Greek mythology, we have nymphs.  We have dryads.  We have nereids.  And you can swap in nixies or nereids for naiads with no problem.

But where have oreads, the mountain nymphs, been in fantasy role-playing?  Answer: Practically nonexistent, except for two brief mentions: Planescape’s Planes of Chaos and 3.0’s Fiend Folio.  So they deserve some time in the spotlight.

But the oreads in the Bestiary 2 aren’t mountain nymphs; they’re planetouched…what the 3.0 Forgotten Realms would have called earth genasi.  Ditto the sylph and undine, which also aren’t much the faerie-like sylph and watery undine from the world’s oldest role-playing game.  (I’m fine with the ifrit, since that pays homage to without treading on the efreeti.)

I know I’m nitpicking, and I probably could just stat up my own mountain nymph by giving a dryad rock powers…but it’s just an odd creative choice from the Bestiary 2 authors.  I would have preferred that we get the oread and a differently named earthtouched creature.  That way we’d get two creatures…instead of one mythologically incorrect one that sits around irking me, making me look like the proverbial guy yelling about kids and their place on or off his lawn.

All that said…the oreads as written are pretty cool.  And that Kekai Kotaki illustration is amazing.  And the options in the Advanced Race Guide make the oread look crazy-fun to play as a PC race.  For instance, a student of stone monk combined with one of the alternate racial traits like treacherous earth or ferrous growth (not to mention the Earth Glider feat tree) sounds like something straight out of Avatar: The Last Airbender or Full Metal Alchemist!

I’m feeling less irky now.

One thing to point out when it comes to the planetouched: A lot of times the artists get carried away—because drawing a dude made out of rock who looks like The Thing or Concrete is way more fun that drawing a dude with gray hair.  That said, many oreads won’t be immediately obvious as such.  The only hint might be an ashen color to their features and a flinty or ponderous aspect to their personality…at least until combat starts.

Many oreads are dwarf-blooded rather than human.  Their strength, wisdom, and affinity for stone make them respected warpriests and paladins, even if they are not always the most charismatic speakers.  Currently there is quite the rivalry for the hand of Brigga Stolzt, an oread cleric with locks that practically sparkle.  Her grandfather is rumored to be an influential shaitan, although this may just be gossip.

A family of oreads who can pass as human travels with a caravan.  After attacks from bandits and lycanthropes, the members of the caravan are jumpy—they may attack armed adventuring parties who come too close, preferring to be safe rather than sorry.  The oreads fear their companions will turn on them if they reveal themselves as outsiders.  But a third ambush, this time by undead (which happen to be vulnerable to the oreads’ magic stone attacks) may force the issue.

Kurzon Stonescar’s craggy appearance and lithoderm birthmarks marked him as nonhuman and illegitimate from childhood.  It also marked him for scorn and ridicule (“scar” being an epithet in Vale for “a bastard whose mother’s skirts were cut open,” according to the folk idioms of the region).  The oread kept the name and the memories of every insult…and aims to pay Vale back with an avalanche.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 205

Thanks to all of you who dug the orc entry!  Also, grimnoir gave me a reblog that was full of love.  I am assuming it was illicit love.  I hope so—I’m feeling chaotic neutral today.

If you’re looking for the orca entry, we covered it way the heck back here.

Hey indie rock radio fans!  (Yeah, I’m talking to both of you!)

This week’s radio show featured a SXSW spotlight!  It also featured me with a cold slowly succumbing to Benedryl fog mid-show, with some amusing (by which I mean, annoying) technical foul-ups along the way.  In fact, I’m pretty sure you can hear the exact moment I begin to go into full-on coma!  But the music is great, so download it.  Did I mention it’s all South by Southwest-y?  And there's a tribute to Stompin' Tom Connors for my Canadian listeners.

(Music starts about 1:45 into the file.  If the feed skips, let load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and enjoy in iTunes.  Link good till Friday, 3/15, at midnight.)

PS: Once, you're tired of listening to me, you can download most of the songs I played for free here.  But you'll miss my curatorial prowess.  Oh, such prowess.

Orc

Seriously, what am I supposed to do that’s original with orcs?  They’ve been invented and reinvented 30,000 times.  Gaz10 The Orcs of Thar, the very first D&D Gazetteer I ever bought (which started my lifelong adoration of Bruce Heard, kicked off my obsession with nonstandard PC races, introduced me to shadow elves, and began my deep fascination with world design) introduced us to yellow orcs and red orcs.  Spelljammer gave us the militaristic scro.  Eberron gave us noble demon-hunters and druids.  Even the decision not to use orcs (as in the case of Dragonlance) is revelatory. 

And with Classic Monsters Revisited and the Pathfinder Bestiary, Paizo brought the threat of orcs back to the table.  According to CRM, they’re mask-wearing raiders and looters in small groups, torturers in their lairs, and a tidal wave of fury breaking against civilization in large bands.  If you get the drop on them, you can go all Legolas/Gimli and hew through them pretty easily (at about 6 hp a pop).  But if they get the drop on you, they hurt.  Being on the receiving end of an orc crit (note the 18–20 threat range on what is already 6–12 points of damage) nearly killed one of my low-level characters in one blow, and she was a plate-wearing paladin!  (These books also brought the threat of the orc horde back, with encounter numbers that can hit triple digits and orc battle standards as morale boosters.)

So orcs have been reinvented and revisited already.  Orcs are done.

But wait!...

Over there…in the back of the cave, under that pile of skulls and sleeping furs…there’s a tiny corner of orcdom still left to talk about.

The first regards half-orcs.  In most games, half-orcs are the product of rape, raiding, and other violence.  (See below for an article that critiques that stance, by the way).  But we forget that in Tolkien’s works, half-orcs were the products of science: the results of Saruman’s experiments.  Perhaps to change things up, half-orcs can be the same in your campaign: elite troops that are the results of a wizard’s (or a whole magocracy’s) experimentation…or a mutation…or a willing experiment by two peoples against an external foe…or any number of other reasons.  The “bandit’s bastard” doesn’t have to be the default.

The second I already mentioned in the ogre entry: That orcs stand in contrast to elves and dwarves.  (Indeed, if you go back to Roger E. Moore’s article, “The Half-Orc Point of View”—very worth Googling or tracking down in print—there’s even some suggestion in Tolkien’s legendarium that the first orcs were corrupted and twisted elves, which explains why they are opposites (short-lived, fecund, bestial, loathe beauty, etc.) in almost every way.)  If elves and dwarves are the lords of the forests and mountains, orcs are the rot at the root and the rust in the metal.

Notice, though, that orcs don’t stand in contrast to humans.  They loathe civilization, yes, absolutely…but humans don’t represent the opposite of all that is orc.  In fact, to elder races like the elves and dwarves, humans and orcs have many disturbing similarities: short life spans.  Fertility.  Grasping for territory and influence.  A disregard for and fouling of their environments.  A love of weapons more for the damage they cause than for the skill in the craftsmanship.  The list goes on.

That is the secret of orcs…and of humans…  And while it may never affect your gameplay, keep it as a thought lurking in the back of your head: that to many of the wise races, the only real difference between orcs and humans is which side of the wall they’re on…

Orcs love masks of all kinds.  One of their treasures is a magical mask, a kind of witch doctor fetish capable of casting disguise self and many other spells.  Non-orcs wearing the mask find they cannot take it off—and worse yet, it subtly draws all orcs within fifty miles toward the wearer.  Inevitably, these orcs form warbands in an effort to reclaim what is theirs.  The chaotic artifact is a gift of the orc trickster god, often known as the Horde Caller for his skill in getting orcish armies to mass (while leaving the generalship to someone else).

The orcs of the city-state of Ramblen dwell in the bowels of the giant citadel-city (a many-leveled complex as large as a barony), where they mine, stoke the giant smelters and furnaces, and engage in blood sports.  Their gladiators are famous for sporting the Flames of Ferocity.  These brands are awarded to orcs who have won their bouts while in the thrall of “the living death” (fighting below 0 hp due to ferocity).  These orcs are healed by their shamans, then branded to show their fortitude.  They also join a brotherhood secretly dedicated to overthrowing the city-state and wetting the streets with blood.

Elves and dwarves have always labeled orcs and other evil races durche’wyth—a portmanteau that combines Dwarven and Elven speech to mean “foulers of the waters.”  When humans begin producing firearms, the Conclave of the Elders pronounces them durche’wyth as well—especially after orcs begin creating grenades and bombards, apparently with human aid.

—Classic Monsters Revisited 52–57 & Pathfinder Bestiary 222

Regarding orcs in Golarion, I would love to see more about the Quest for the Sky.  There were lots of hints about it early on, but we haven’t gotten much new info recently—it’s just a phrase to explain where dwarves and orcs and the Sky Citadels came from.  I want details.

Obviously, the people who really love orcs are the Games Workshop and White Dwarf folks.  Their (Cockney?) greenskins and cobbled-together machines are a lot of fun—and just browsing the models is a good source of inspiration.  Orcs with falchions are all well and good, but if your Pathfinder characters start slinging guns, you should make darn sure the orcs get cannons.

Also on the subject of orcs, this article is really thoughtful and well done—and even more thoughtful and well done are James Jacobs and Wes Schneider’s responses (included in the article).

Ooze & Salt Mephits

Another installment of Mephits: The Multiverse’s Comic Relief™.  Ooze mephits are, according the Bestiary, “disgusting and slow to act.”  I think we can work with that.  (They can be the worst servitors of the Runelord of Sloth ever!  Plus, stinking cloud fart jokes!) 

Meanwhile, salt mephits are “cruel and aloof.”  Unfortunately, that’s also word-for-word how ice mephits are described.  I always thought this was just a typo in my first-edition Bestiary, but seeing as how Paizo hasn’t fixed it online either, I guess we’ll just assume that salt mephits’ cruelty is…saltier (3b for the literary; 0:00–2:20 for the musical).

No brighter than most mephits, Borom doesn’t quite understand the culture of a bar—when patrons try to tell him their troubles, he flutters away muttering.  But his crude establishment serves xorns the spiced quartz crystals and garnets they crave without their having to burrow through miles of salt.  For air-breathing visitors to the Plane of Earth, there are far worse places to look for a guide.

After Glorup was nearly swallowed alive by a giant frog, he declares war on every amphibian in the swamp.  The ooze mephit’s allies in this are his kobold “servitors”—a tribe of blackscales that tolerate the lazy outsider’s arrogance because of the usefulness of his stinking cloud in ambushes and defense.  (Also he doesn’t eat.)  But since frog legs are a local delicacy, this war soon inconveniences the local humans and outrages the neighboring boggards.

The Eversalt was the Everflow—until years of drought and a sinkhole to the Below drained the inland sea in under a decade, leaving only salt flats.  The sudden environmental upheaval spawned salt mephits who now lurk in the dried up towns surrounding the flats.  The filthy language they heap on passersby is a mix of Terran and Common and swearing picked up from the sailors whose livelihoods the Eversalt sucked away.  Individually, the foul-mouthed outsiders are harmless, but a mobs of them occasionally delight in dehydrating lone travelers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 202–203

More comments and mail!

Prosfilaes left some thoughts waaay back in the derro entry!  I reply!

Todd Stewart weighs in on the olethrodaemon!  I reply!

The rest of you should write or comment!  I’ll probably reply!

Speaking of which, Wesley aka Sincubus sent me the nicest note by far I have ever received about this blog.  I haven’t had a chance to write back to him yet (it’s been another week of 10 to 12-hour workdays), so I’ll do it here:

Wesley, since I don’t know Dutch the best I can do is auf Deutsch: Vielen Dank!  Thank you so much for reading, and your support means a lot.  We should be covering the quickling and quickwood pretty soon—Q is only a few weeks away—and I’ll see what I can do about squeezing in your other favorites early.

Finally, today is a big day.  As of today, the Tumblr version of The Daily Bestiary has been going strong for a year.  This is important for both versions of the blog, because once I got on Tumblr, I also got on schedule: no more placeholder posts, no more tardiness—an entry every weekday, barring vacations, no excuses.  It’s been a better blog for me, and I hope a better, more entertaining, and maybe even helpful blog for you.  Cheers.

Omox

Jubilex in Pathfinder, Juiblex in the world’s oldest role-playing game, Szhublox in Gary Gygax’s novels—by any name he (it?) is the Lord of Slimes and Oozes, and omoxes are his favorite minions.

But he isn’t exactly a demanding lord, so omoxes pretty much do as they please.  And you can do as you please with them too, because they’re incredibly easy to insert into a campaign.  Demon haunting the sewers?  Omox.  Scary thing in the wizard’s cauldron?  Omox.  A mudslide pollutes a profane spring?  Omox.

A murder has been committed.  The suspect fled into the sewers, and divination reveals he died there.  But the magistrate demands his corpse bear testimony at the inquest (courtesy of speak with dead).  Someone has to go into the sewers and find the body…which is currently still nestled inside the gooey form of the omox who smothered him.

The makers of a vile transmutation sludge have summoned an omox to guard their chemical plant.  As a fail-safe, the evildoers warded the floor against the demon and teleport effects, so it attacks intruders by leaping from vat to vat or using its fogs/clouds and dropping from the ceiling onto adventurers when they are atop machinery or conveyer belts.  If the battle turns against it, the omox tries to get to the drainage spillway where the contiguous flow of sludge will allow it to dimension door into the river and escape.

Part of a human mercenary troop quartered in the elven city of Wythrohen during the Rescue of Ilvendish, Argus Mazzerick buried his dagger in the city’s famous White Tree—up to the hilt, for no reason than because the Tree was there, and it was beautiful.  The living artifact took ill, and to this day no leaves grow on the Tree’s western face.  Mazzerick died in the siege, and in the Abyss his soul took the form of an omox.  Though he does not remember anything else about his mortal life, the desire to finish what he started obsesses the demon.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 79

The omox is one of the only demons I’ve actually fought as a player.  At least I think it was an omox.  It was some kind of sludge demon, and it sucked.

I should have mentioned yesterday that if you were lamenting the lack of ogre spiders, rest easy—they are lurking in the giant crab spider entry.

Olethrodaemon

Other CR 20 fiends plot and plan and scheme.  Not the olethrodaemons.  They just want to cause death and devour souls on a mass scale.  (See, kids?  It’s important to have goals.)

To me, olethrodaemons are interesting because they are by definition juggernauts—that is, practically living siege towers.  So I also imagine things riding on them or accompanying them: other daemons, fiendish vermin, or undead basking in the fumes of the olethrodaemons’ soul-drained breath.

And, of course, there’s the question of whom these daemons serve: Is it a Horseman, a mad mortal, or their own ends?  Which leads us to another interesting thing: Olethrodaemons are actually comparatively risk-free to summon compared to most other fiends (and even certain super-celestials like solars).  These daemons want to be summoned; they want to cause epic destruction.  So they’re actually (as Horseman of the Apocalypse and Ultimate Magic point out) practically bargain-priced as forces of annihilation go.

Oh, and PS: Four stomach chambers.  That drain levels.  Getting swallowed by one of these things?  Sucks.

The city of Preservation is one of the only safe refuges for adventurers on the Plane of Daemonus.  No lesser daemon will travel near it, as Preservation is founded on the site where the Oinodaemon once dewinged and beheaded an early Horseman of War.  But now an olethrodaemon bears down on the city like an engine of death, the call of the many succulent souls there too strong to bear any longer.

An olethrodaemon is summoned to destroy the dam at Bighorn Pass.  A creature of fiery hunger, this daemon favors its wall of fire attack, and fiendish magma elementals and whole flocks of fire mephits drop off its bloated body as it travels.  While these parasites are not much of a threat to adventurers who can stand up to an olethrodaemon, the confusion and devastation they add to the encounter further confound rescue efforts.

Hemisite is an olethrodaemon who serves the Horseman of War; hunts of sangudaemons (see HotA) ride its back.  The olethrodaemon paragon Um Kul Tar serves the Horseman of Pestilence and revels in destroying cities already weakened by plague.  The bone-white orb Skullcrusher serves no one, but it leads two devourers on a chain and once was seen vomiting up a dread wraith.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 70–71

As usual, I avoid mentioning planes that are Paizo IP by name above.  Obviously most Pathfinder campaigns will locate their olethrodaemons in Abaddon; in 3.5’s Great Wheel they hang out in the Gray Wastes and especially Gehenna.  In fact, the crawling cities of Gehenna might actually be olethrodaemons grown to enormous size.

Also, the olethrodaemon should not be confused with the olestradaemon.  The latter has only one special attack, but it’s a doozy.  (*rimshot*  Thanks, folks; I’ll be here all night.)

Still encouraging reader questions and feedback this week.  Send me an email—to avoid spambots, 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.

Ogre Mage

The genius of the world’s oldest role-playing game was inclusion and complexity.

Wait, let me go back.  We’re talking 1e (AD&D) here.  (The genius of D&D (both the primal editions and the return to basic “basic” version of the ’80s box sets) was that it let you play a character in a story, rather than just reading about one.)  We good?  Good.

Where was I?  The genius of 1e (AD&D) was inclusion and complexity.  Everything went in—races, classes, monsters, weapons, everything—and everything got a table.  (Seriously, read early issues of Dragon Magazine or check out the ochre-spined 1e sourcebooks.  If a concept didn’t have a table to roll on, it wasn’t worth exploring.)

The genius of 2e (AD&D) was invention: the Forgotten Realms blown out, Greyhawk reborn, thr advent of Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Planescape, Birthright, and more kits and specialties than you could shake a stick at.

The genius of 3.0/3.5 (D&D) was clarity: classes balanced and streamlined.  Ability scores, sizes, etc. rationalized.  Mechanics smoothed out.  One d20 to rule them all.

Pathfinder’s genius has been synthesis and foresight: a determination to make it all work seamlessly together.

Which brings me to the ogre mage. 

The ogre mage made no sense in 1e or 2e or even 3.0/3.5.  Here was this dumb brutish monster, and then suddenly here was this smart magical version of that monster, taken from the mythology of a different nation continent away.  But since they were both ogres, we pretended they were related to each other.  Somehow.  Sorta.  Even if one ogre was blue and was always drawn wearing lamellar armor and holding a katana when all its “kin” were wearing chain with spiked clubs.

Out comes the Pathfinder Bestiary.  And lo!  There is the ogre mage.  With a special note stating that this is an example of an oni: “an evil spirit come to the Material Plane and clad in living flesh—in this case, that of a brutish ogre.” And a promise: “The oni are a diverse race of evil outsiders…  Other types of oni exist as well.”

 In other words: “Don’t worry.  We got this.  For the first time in 34 years, since the Greyhawk supplement in 1975, you are going to get an ogre mage that makes sense in your game world, plus some more monsters besides.  We promise.” 

And with the Jade Regent Adventure Path and the Bestiary 3 this promise was paid off. 

That’s one of the reasons why I love Pathfinder: They had the foresight to put a single oni in the Bestiary and the fortitude to finish the job three years later.

So, oni: greedy spirits who take on mortal shapes to indulge in pleasures of the physical world.  Ogre magi: the most common version.  There’s a good chance that an encounter with an ogre mage will be PCs’ (especially Western-style PCs’) first encounter with this branch of the Spirit World.

But if you’re a Forgotten Realms fan or you just want to skip the whole Japanese mythology thing, you can always stick with the notion that ogre magi are simply special magical ogres.  I won’t stop you; in fact, the third hook below is for you.

An ogre tribe defies the efforts of the local lord to wipe them out, and even several mercenary parties have had little success.  A strange woman approaches the last of these (a group of heroic adventurers down on their luck), saying that she can help—that they face a spirit from her homeland known as an ogre mage.  As proof, she demonstrates that she is something more than human as well—by sprouting a fox tail.

A kuwa and an ogre mage duel for territory, with the vineyards of Kölm caught in the middle.  The kuwa has the aid of the local thieves’ guild.  The ogre mage’s supporters are more magical in nature: a flock of midnight-blue perytons and a brutal band of quicklings.

The Time of the Tusk occurs roughly once every 250 years, when the comet Al-Sim the Changer blazes in the eastern skies.  While Al-Sim hangs in the heavens, the sha’irs say, ogres become unusually fecund, and roughly one in a hundred develops magical abilities.  These “ogre magi” inevitably go on to great destinies.  Some eschew the barbarity of their people altogether.  Far more unite the ogre tribes under their banners to squash the soft lowland humans.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 221

The genius of 4e?  Healing surges.  Aaaaand…  Wait a minute.  I’m sure I’ll think of something.

My favorite magi?  These dudes.

I was so amused by Friday’s orog rant that I posted a revised version of it on reddit.  They were not amused.  (“Do not meddle in the affairs of 1st Edition fans, for they will downvote you within milliseconds.”)

It’s been three long weeks, but The New Indie Canon is back!  Including some way overdue Macklemore and a Breeders flashback.  Download it.

(If the feed skips, let load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and enjoy in iTunes.  Link good till Friday, 3/8, at midnight.)

Edit: I had not realize M&RL were on SNL this weekend as well.