Brain Mole

We often talk about a meme or an earworm burrowing into your brain.  (In fact, it's what I count on.  #askmeaboutmyadvertisingcareer)  Well, if that’s what earworms do, brain moles are what prey on them. 

Resembling naked mole rats, only more awful, brain moles use their clawed feet and terrible incisors to grapple the heads of humanoids (especially spellcasters) to drain their spells and mental energy.  This makes them potentially terrifying pests for dungeoneers.  And as they are able to sense psychic creatures while hiding from them at the same time, they not only fit well into their subterranean ecosystems, but are also useful familiars and service animals to spellcasters who can bring them to heel.

Of course, all of the above refers to ordinary brain moles.  Those in the thrall of a brain mole monarch form a horrible hive mind…but that is an avenue we’ll explore in the next entry.

Also note that brain mole monarchs are described as having six limbs, but we don’t know how many limbs ordinary brain moles have.  Perhaps the six limbs are just artifacts of the monarchs’ terrible transformation.  But if all brain moles have six limbs…?  Well, there’s an unofficial tradition in Pathfinder that creatures with too many limbs—aurumvoraxes, girallons, kasathas, etc.—are of alien origin…which is not a bad origin story for brain moles in campaigns with a pulp adventure bent.

Traveling through the Underchasm, young adventurers undertake a forced march through the Howling Deeps.  They’ve been instructed that it is essential to get to a way station tended by svirfneblin before any wights or hobgoblins inevitably catch them.  But when they reach the way station, they find it empty.  A nest of brain moles sapped the minds and wills of the deep gnome scouts not long ago.

Smart adventurers keep their eyes peeled for the red tabards and chainmail uniforms of the Mindguard at Arkenmeer.  The watchmen use caged brain moles to sniff out those with psychic talents, who are then promptly arrested.  Halflings have it the worst; they are sometimes jailed on sight due to their race’s talent for telepathy and phrenic amplification.

With the Ælfingates’ ancient links shattered, desperate elves must find new ways to travel from world to world.  Novice adventurers are helping to haul precious cargo, an elven Spirit Tree, when a fungal blight forces their ship to land and collect fresh soil.  Unfortunately, the replacement earth they collect is rife with brain moles, who promptly begin devouring the mental energy of the crew during Nightwatch.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 46

Previous incarnations of brain moles have resembled star-nosed moles, but I like Bestiary 5’s way better.

That last seed combines tropes from Pathfinder, the Realms, pulp sci-fi, and Companion-level 80’s D&D.

Thanks again for everyone who boosted my call for comments to the CDC last night, especially those of you who went the extra mile and left a message.  Very much appreciated!  Seriously, it meant a lot on this end.

Boroboroton, Kasa-Obake & Koto-Furunishi

I love monsters that suggest an entirely new way for a campaign to look and feel.  And an animate walking umbrella monster does just that.

I should probably go back and explain.

One of the things I’m adamant about—and have occasionally spent space here trying to prove—is that Pathfinder can support adventures that don't feel like the default Pathfinder (or D&D or dungeon crawls or Tolkien or what we’ll call “trilogy fantasy” in general).  I believe Pathfinder can support the open-ended, anything-might-happen nature of European fairy tales and the symbol-rich spirit worlds of Anansi and Raven.  I believe it can handle low-magic settings inspired by Westeros, the pulp space of Barsoom, and the fantasy space of “Spelljammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon.”  I especially believe it can handle private school fantasies inspired by Hogwarts and Glantri, quotidian magical workplaces recalling Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away, and cruel magisteria and wild frontiers that echo His Dark Materials.

Anyway, while I’ve skimmed Bestiary 5, I haven’t read it cover to cover yet.  So I was delighted to turn to the “Tsukumogami” entry and discover this wonderful kami template.  Quick, go look at the illustration of the kasa-obake, an animate umbrella with a single eye, a single foot, and slavering jaws.  The koto-furunishi is an animate  zither(!).  (I repeat: !  Tell me the last time you considered having a zither in your game, let alone one with immunity to polymorph.)  And the boroboroton is an animate sleeping mat or futon (college me really appreciates this one).  Aren't we done with vampires and invisible stalkers?  Next time your PCs find the corpse of someone who died in his sleep, can’t it please be from a murderous sleeping roll, as if Carpet from Disney’s Aladdin went horribly, horribly wrong?

All these creatures are objects that reached their 100th birthday and gained a spirit, becoming (or uniting with, per Pathfinder cosmology) a kami and becoming animate in the process.  Not only is this a neat move statistically—a template on top of a template on top of an object—but, to go back to my original point, it speaks to a fundamentally different kind of Pathfinder game. 

I was not concerned about whether my bureau had a spirit when my fighter helped Aleena face Bargle back in D&D’s Mentzer days.  I did not consider the age of my chamber pot the first night my future eldritch knight booked a room in Nirmathas.  But thanks to these monsters…now I will. 

Somewhere in my future there is now a campaign where my PCs’ first adventure is finding a home for a newly awakened koto-furunishi, where along the way we meet a strange kasa-obake, where a spiritualist (from Occult Adventures) introduces us to the world of channeling the phantoms of the dead, and by the end of our journey one of the PCs has been admitted to a priory to be schooled in the holy art of transmutation.  That’s not a Pathfinder campaign I’ve ever been a part of or even dreamed of until tonight.  But with a copy of B5 and OA, my Harry Potter books, and my Miyazaki and Cadfael DVDs, I can picture it now.

Adventures are tasked with finding a hidden maestro—actually a koto-furunishi that leads a band of tsukumogami.  Their quest is complicated by the fact that the magical instruments refuse to play for strangers, a witch craves the zither for herself, and superstitious goblins (sometimes led by goblin oni; treat as fiendish goblins) attempt to smash any musical instruments they find to drive the kami away.

Not only has a kasa-obake turned to evil, its diet—wizard’s familiars, faerie dragons, and children with sticky fingers—is even worse.  Well on its way to becoming an oni, the umbrella spirit must be stopped…though adventurers who pick the right rainy night to request its assistance might be able to return the 100-year-old spirit to the light.

A boroboroton rejoiced when the mausoleum that imprisoned it was finally opened…only to find itself tossed aside by the archaeologists who opened the tomb in favor of more important relics.  A sacred sha has found the inconsolable mattress spirit and spent several nights whispering exhortations of smothering murder into the kami’s straw-filled head.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 252–253

My belief in the elasticity of d20 in general and Pathfinder in particular is only exacerbated when I go to my favorite game store and see all the indie and old-school Renaissance titles out there, each with their own new rules system to learn.  I totally get the appeal of streamlined systems, and I appreciate that good mechanics can reinforce flavor in certain genres, especially romance or humor.  That said, I can't tell you the number of time I’ve picked up a book and waded through pages and pages of rules I’ve seen before (“Your Ride skill determines how well you ride a horse”—well, duh) to get to the new ideas and the world, when some bolted-on mechanics and a new core class or two would have done just as well.  It’s one of the reasons I’m liking (though I’ve only just cracked it) A Red & Pleasant Land.  While most of my exposures to Legends of the Flame Princess products have turned me off, I appreciate that AR&PL’s author didn’t write Alice: The RPG; instead he just picked the LotFP system to work with and moved on to the good stuff fast.

An alternate creation myth for boroborotons locates them in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta.  They are all named Zem.

Bone Ship

Ghost ships are a common trope in fantasy and horror fiction.  (And real life as well—the Wikipedia page on them is riveting.)  But bone ships are something else entirely—no mere derelict or phantom or even the classic ship crewed by lacedons and draugrs.  Instead of being crewed by undead, the bone ship is itself the undead creature, a thing of tissue and muscle and sinew and negative energy and, yes, lots and lots of bones.  And if that doesn't get you excited enough, it’s a CR 18 creature.  It trails a wake of blood and sends out ghostly boarders.  Even though it is a singular entity, it also possesses a hive mind of souls (that, naturally, can drive others insane).

But here are the things that are going to work for you or not: It can form four cannons that fire bone shards.  And it can combine those cannons into a single cannon of spectral energy.  It also heals itself by crawling along the bottom of the ocean scavenging the corpses of sea creatures, and may (the flavor text says yes, but the stat block doesn't list a land speed) be able to crawl along the shore to hunt prey.

That’s an image that some GMs are going to love.  A living ship that scuttles along the ocean floor absorbing whale bones and then rises to the surface to spontaneously generate cannons of bone and spectral energy is a notion that, if it doesn’t work for you, doesn’t work for you…but if it does work for you, it reeeally works for you. 

As a CR 18 monster, a bone ship can stalk your PCs for months of near-misses, until in the end it is one of the final baddies your players face in a campaign.  And since cannons are involved, this is an undead creature that easily plays outside the usual late medieval/early Renaissance fantasy milieu.  In fact, you might find some more modern (and not) ideas in the adventure seeds below.  

Also as you might expect, since these ships are so powerful, they don’t have your run-of-the-mill creation stories either.  Gods make these ships.  Disasters make these ships—not your average shipwrecks, mind you, but all-hands-down-with-the-ship-and-all-the-hands-were-evil-cultists disasters.  And evil rituals make these ships—again, not the kind that involve sacrifices, but the kind that involve abattoirs.  Bone ships are bad news…and even when their creation appears accidental some dread purpose, compulsion, or divine hand almost inevitably reveals itself.

Norse legends tell of Nalfgar, Hel’s ship made entirely of the fingernails and toenails of the dead, which Loki or Hrym will ride to Ragnarök.  Adventurers on their way down the trunk of the World Tree to battle Níðhöggr follow a root into a strange harbor.  There they discover the myths have both taken a bit of poetic license and understated the threat.  Hel’s ships are not made of nails but bone and muscle…and she has a fleet of them.

The Templars of Jianvia are held in suspicion—quite rightly—of being too enamored with the clink of gold and the ledgers of finance than with containing the div hordes and corrupted night couatls of the Flamelands.  That said, their expertise in the handling and disposal of dangerous artifacts is second to none.  So it is a double tragedy when the galleon carrying both the head of the Jianvians and the Dread Hand of the Butcher is lost to a squall.  Adventurers soon discover that not only did servants of the Great Old Ones call the squall, but the lost galleon already sails the seas once more.  In its madness the ship is still trying to deliver the Dread Hand, even as it attacks or drives insane all who come into contact with it.

Few hatreds are as enduring as the hatred of the slaver for the people who have thrown off the yoke of oppression.  In the bloodiest days of the American Civil War, a convoy running guns and slaves to Charleston is set upon by the Union’s Colored Silver Dragon Corps.  The Union corpsman corral all the ships but one—the convoy’s flagship, whose white supremacist commodore slaughters his own sailors and scuttles his own ship rather see freed slaves set foot upon his deck.  In fact, the man’s hatred and the suffering of the human cargo that went down with the ship combine to reanimate the vessel as a bone ship.  Now adventurers must destroy the undead monstrosity as it hunts Union ships and merchants up and down the coast.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 44–45

Boggart

What a difference a letter makes!  Dangerously close alphabetically to the first Pathfinder Bestiary’s froglike boggard, Occult Bestiary’s boggart hews closer to the original folkloric bogey.  Possibly born of corrupted brownies (a reeeally nice throwback to the incomparable Roger E. Moore’s original write-up in Dragon #54), boggarts haunt farmsteads and nearby wetlands, where they feed on the negative psychic energy created by the disruption and trauma thy cause.  (Interestingly, the boggart retains a brownie’s focus on a particular family—Occult Bestiary describes how unmoored boggarts are much more likely to kidnap and even eat victims, whereas a boggart with a family to obsess over is content to merely make them miserable.)

A boggart’s abilities are centered around the illusions it creates and its ability to position others—dragging with its long arms and Improved Drag, paralyzing with hold person, and bull-rushing, grappling, or otherwise repositioning foes with telekinetic maneuver and Combat Expertise.  So when fighting a boggart—assuming you can even find it in the first place—you’re dealing with a fey that truly has the upper hand in its own domain.

PCs don't usually engage with their families much—being an orphan is a great origin story, and if a player does give his PC’s family some backstory you can almost bet they’ll be dead or betray him by level 10—and engaging with an NPC’s family is just asking for a) more death, b) ghost hauntings, or c) the dreaded annoying-kid escort mission.  The boggart is a great excuse for a family-focused adventure that keeps the stakes relatively low.

A boggart has abducted children and murdered their parents.  But when adventures are sent to dispatch him, a coalition of grigs, pixies, sprites, and other goodly fey works to undermine their efforts—even going so far as to take up nonlethal arms in his defense.  The fey don't want the boggart slain; they want to find him a home and a family to give him purpose.  (They will even volunteer to keep the misery he causes to manageable levels…but (being faeries) they only offer this if pressed.)

After luring a berserker into a quagmire, a boggart steals the warrior’s horned helm…and instantly becomes a brownie, having been zapped by the helm of opposite alignment  that made the berserker so bloodthirsty in the first place.  He is delighted with the turn of events and even finds a family farm to discreetly serve.  His boggart sisters, meanwhile, are horrified.  They do everything they can to both make his chosen family miserable and reverse their brother’s curse (which, as the helm is a very low-powered specimen, they have a decent chance of doing with the negative emotions they are generating fueling their efforts).

Cascade Manor is a haunting complex of building perched above churning rapids.  When the old lord died he bequeathed his title and lands to a nephew, but gave much of the wealth to a school for foundlings and disinherited children.  The grasping nephew and his sister hate their obligation to the students and have purposefully staffed the school with martinets, scolds, and tyrants.  The resulting stew of ill feeling and sorrow has in turn drawn the attention of a boggart and a bloody bones (treat as a variant ghoul that lurks under stairways and hunts children who catch sight of it).  The boggart mentally tortures a particular child for days before handing it over to the bloody bones for its repast, then the cycle begins anew.  Meanwhile, the new lord and lady of Cascade Manor have so far shown no concern over the schoolmaster’s reports of missing children.

—Occult Bestiary 11

For you history buffs out there, a quick glance through Dragon #54 also reveals AD&D stats for the jabberwock and what appears to be some of the first public write-ups of the Forgotten Realms’ deities courtesy of Ed Greenwood—all the way back in October of 1981, no less!

For another take on the bloody bones, Tim Hitchcock’s Pathfinder Module Hungry Are the Dead borrows the Tome of Horrors’s version, and apparently frequent commenter demiurge1138 statted one up for 3.5 over at EN World.

Blue Whale & Narwhal

Blue whales are the largest mammal on Earth…which means that even in a fantasy world they should be in the top 10 or so.  And your druid totally deserves a bigger pet.

Meanwhile, narwhals are the unicorns of the sea…or at least that’s what salty old sailors like to tell landlubbers.  The truth is more mundane, but you still don’t want to be gored by one.

A red tide kills fish…and maddens mammals.  Driven wild by the taint in their diet, a pod of narwhals harasses a party of adventurers, goring at the sides of their kayaks.  If the beasts are somehow cured of the red tide, they will flee in confusion but may remember the adventurers (or at least their boats) at a later encounter.

Someone harpooned a blue whale.  Never mind the taboos against it, never mind that elven corsairs will burn offenders to the ground, and never mind that right whales serve up better oil and sperm whales better ambergris…someone harpooned a blue whale. And now the injured and half-mad beast is smashing every ship that leaves Manticore Harbor into flinders.

It’s the perfect scam.  Join a whaling expedition, come back with a narwhal tusk or two, catch the cogwheel down south to Morrowton, present the narwhal horns as unicorn horns, and gain entrance to the prestigious the League of Hunters of Monsters Most Foul.  What could go wrong?

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #59 86–87 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 51

And that closes us out for 2015!  Thanks for your patience and fandom during these last two or three post-light months, and let’s look forward to many more monsters in the year to come!

Blood & Horn Caterpillars

Putting “blood” in front of a noun is practically cheating when it comes to monster names, but damn does it work wonders in the blood caterpillar’s case.  That’s a terrifying juxtaposition, particularly when the result is the size of a horse, deals Strength damage when attacked, and feeds on rotting flesh. 

“Horn caterpillars feed on the hooves and horns of dead ungulates,” says Bestiary 5.  Which means that they should be at the top of pretty much every GM’s list of low-level monsters. 

One of the ways fantasy role-playing falls short in the verisimilitude department is that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to livestock.  Cattle matters to the pre-modern world, even a magical one.  The Táin Bó Cúailnge was sparked by a cow.  Half of Heracles’s labors involved one farm animal or another.  The defining crime of the bad guy in a Western?  Cattle rustling. 

So in any halfway “realistic” fantasy world, a monster that feasts on the hooves and horns of cattle and other livestock should be a pretty common nuisance.  Clearing out a clutch of horn caterpillars that have taken over the local slaughtering yard might be the first unglamorous job for many a would-be adventurer.

Just on the cusp of adulthood, a band of young friends is charged with escorting their clan’s dead to the traditional resting place, a network of deep caves.  Unfortunately, a clutch of horn caterpillars now infests one of the chambers near the surface, feasting on the offerings of antlers and horns left there by clan shamans.

Adventurers accompany a local celebrity, a renowned halfling sellsword, to the Moot at Highbarrow.  Spotting the telltale signs of battle and cobwebs strewn in the road along the way, he takes a detour to hunt giant spiders—a callback to the ambush that made him famous.  Only the cobwebs aren’t cobwebs; they're caterpillar silk…and the halfling’s famed magic sword carries no enchantment against other vermin.

High on their success defeating goblins, some fresh-faced party adventurers soon find themselves out of money and hurting for work.  They’re forced to take jobs at the local abattoir rooting out a horn caterpillar infestation…and then they come across a corpse that isn’t bovine.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 51

Achieved escape velocity, finally home in Maryland.

Blightspawn

The blightspawn may look like a giant mosquito, but it’s far more deadly.  Not only is it man-sized and man-smart (a not-bad Int 7), it’s also got a poison sting, a stagnation aura that lulls its victims into torpor, and spell-like abilities—including bestow curse, blur, and contagion—even many druids would envy. 

But its neatest party trick is its ability to gestate for years and even decades inside a human host.  The blightspawn was originally introduced as the blightspawn of Ghlaunder (courtesy of the adventure Feast of Ravenmoor) and they are a combination boon/weapon from Golarion’s demigod of parasites and disease.  A cultist carrying a larval blightspawn may nurture the aberration his entire life, only hatching the creature in death…and all his children may be likewise so favored.  In your campaign, blightspawn might serve a similar god of disease, a Horseman of the Apocalypse, demonkind, or an evil plane itself.  Or blightspawn might just be a natural (if truly horrific) parasite, with no divine strings attach.  Fantasy worlds can be buggy like that.

One last note: A lot of GMs struggle with making character death scary in a raise dead world.  Having a character’s corpse birth a blightspawn (and all the complications for resurrection that implies) could be an ideal way to ratchet up the fear level.

Three separate groups of pilgrims embarked from Brighton today through the Gate of the Faithful…and one of them is hiding a pupating blightspawn among its number.  Adventures must attempt to suss out which band of pilgrims the ailing cultist is hiding among and apprehend the would-be aberration.

A remote stronghold struggles to contain an epidemic of thorny vines that seem intent on walling off the barony.  The glands of a blightspawn could be used to ward off the vegetable horrors and even stunt their growth (as per diminish plants).  Adventurers in search of these components follow disturbing rumors to a town given over to the worship of parasites, where every adult lives in service to—or as a future meal for—one entity or another, including several blightspawn.

An adventurer isn’t trying to stop a blightspawn—he intends to become one.  Raised by cultists from birth to worship the Maiden in Shrouds, the adventurer leaps into battle believing his death will only hasten the birth of the moth-winged avatar inside him.  If he succeeds in being slain in combat, he will leave his companions fighting one more monster.  Assuming they bring him around to the worship of another deity before this happens, the next challenge will be safely extracting the larval blightspawn from inside him.

—Feast of Ravenmoor 29 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 43

Another canceled flight.  Another night in Minneapolis.  Uff da.