Caller in Darkness

I could have sworn the caller in darkness was an older monster, but all my Google-fu reveals is that it dates back to 3.0’s Psionics Handbook, or possibly Dark Sun’s City by the Silt Sea.  In all of these sources, a caller in darkness is made of dozens or even hundreds of souls who died in terror. 

Pathfinder’s caller in darkness is a more run-of-the-mill undead, made from only a single soul (“a creature with psychic sensibility that died a violent death” says Bestiary 5).  One important detail is the same, though: The caller in darkness eats minds, and by extension souls.  So even a single caller in darkness is soon an amalgamation of many stolen minds, all trapped within the terrible swirling undead form.  Facing such a creature is enough to make you despair…and if you don’t, the caller is happy to help you with its Wrap in Despair supernatural ability.

So between its nasty attacks (I don't want to face anything incorporeal that does 6d6 plus Wisdom damage on a simple melee attack), the usual hooks associated with intelligent undead (particularly ones with access to the minds of their victims), a tradition of mass deaths in their lore, and a killer name, there’s a lot for a GM to work with here.

Musty tomes mention that a rare artifact, a cloak of living skin with magical and perhaps even psychic properties, is guarded by “a caller in that dark place.”  The adventurers’ researcher, a sage who specializes in subterranean races, thinks the passage may refer to a dark caller, a caste of dark folk of whom he has heard only rumors.  The adventurers have no reason to doubt his surmise, as his advice for dealing with dark creepers and dark stalkers proved invaluable on a recent adventure.  But translation is a tricky art, and the passage actually refers to a caller in darkness—an undead entity far more dangerous than even the priests of the dark folk.

Fifty years ago an unnatural sandstorm brought the desert to Tolemar…and with it, a plague of locusts and mindless mummies.  Over time the sands have receded, but the abandoned city is still dangerous.  Nor are mummies the only undead threat.  The trauma of the initial sandstorm and the plagues that followed created a caller in darkness.  The creature uses its ability to cause an aversion to keep interlopers away from Tolemar’s central acropolis.  A magical spring there could restore water and drive away the taint of undeath from the city, were it to be unplugged.

In organized crime families, loyalty is everything.  But criminal family ties often wind up ensnaring the members in ways they never expect.  When one of the Miko sons tried to outmuscle a strange vishkanya, the golden-skinned man obliterated him without a thought—or rather, he obliterated the Miko boy with a thought, an excruciating psychic flensing.  The trauma was so great that the young Miko’s consciousness persisted as a caller in darkness, which in its confusion fled back to the family home and soon consumed the minds of the rest of the clan.  But absorbing so many members with such close ties and similar mindsets has had an odd effect on the psychic undead.  Much of the time the caller in darkness is still a mind-consuming horror, but its lucid periods are frequent enough that it has managed to continue the Miko family’s vile schemes by passing orders on to (or just plain terrorizing) the right subordinates in a macabre parody of the clan’s usual business dealings.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 48

Trying to use this blizzard to catch up on some of my backlog.  Hooray!

Caligni

I’ve been enjoying the way we've learned about dark folk culture in dribs and drabs throughout the Bestiaries.  It’s clear the folks at Paizo are fans of them—dark creepers and dark stalkers (and many other Fiend Folio monsters) got some love in the very first Adventure Path, Shackled City, back in Paizo’s Dungeon-publishing days—but the authors have shown a nice restrained touch in how they’ve dished out more dark folk subspecies and details over time.

Since Bestiary 4 revealed that owbs had a hand in perverting the dark folk race, it’s probably inevitable we got a prelapsarian dark folk species: the caligni.  A throwback to a nobler, less stunted phenotype, caligni are what dark folks were and could one day be again, were it not for the owbs.  They’re still dark folk, right down to the death throes, but they aren't the shrouded, rag-covered, disgusting messes so many of their fellows are.

Every caligni is a potential adventure—they are by their very birth chosen ones and messiahs, a challenge to the owb order.  They are also likely to be outcasts, murder victims, political prisoners, and just plan victims of the dark folk establishment.  A caligni encountered in dark folk society is either a leader or a target; a caligni found far from dark folk society is running from someone…or something.

And best of all, they're a playable race—perfect for that player who wants the Dark Outcast™ character without all the in- and out-of-game baggage of the drow or the planar ties of a fetchling.  (Did I say perfect for the player?  I meant perfect for his beleaguered GM.)  Not only are they a pretty reasonable build for someone who wants a tough and nimble character (they make absurdly good rogues despite the hit to Intelligence), but also their death throes make combat just that little extra more risky and meaningful for the player—never a bad thing.

A caligni returns to Shroud, the subterranean city of his childhood, a rare melting pot of tolerance and trade amid the many mad and evil races of the Lands Below.  But all is not well in the city.  Dark folk militants are moving into Shroud in threes and fours, pushing out the more discreet and peaceable dark folk who have always called the city home.  These militants hunt the Dark Messiah, a rabble-rouser whose very existence is a rallying point for those who have rejected more orthodox dark folk ways.  Worse yet, the Dark Messiah is the caligni’s identical twin.

A strange gray-skinned half-elf has become the grandmaster of the Night Hands thieves’ guild.  As the previous grandmaster was a noted follower of the Cat Lord, the new half-elf has worked to eliminate all Cat Lord worshippers, catfolk, and even stray street felines from his territory.  In fact, the grandmaster seems to have a hatred of all extraplanar creatures, which makes him a deadly foe of summoners and conjurers but a potentially useful ally against both the selfish wizards of the Protean Tower and the angel-leashing martinets of the Golden Dome.

When Oliver Cromwell’s forces took over England, wags joked that he would paint the country as black as the robes of his Puritan followers.  They were more right than they knew.  For ever since he became Lord Protector and closed England’s borders and ports, the country has been shrouded in a figurative fog of secrecy and a literal fog of dark magic.  Adventurers who dare to cross the English Channel or slip down from the Highlands of Scotland discover a realm shrouded from the sun where every man, woman, and child has become one of the dark folk…and only a few brave caligni stand up to the Great Owb Crom of the Black Well’s armies, zealots, and spies.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 66

Full fridge.  $44.00 worth of alcohol.  Netflix, two Lego sets, and more unread role-playing books than I could get through in a month, let alone one weekend?  Provided I keep my power/heat/Internet (*knocks on wood*), I am ready for this blizzard.

How is it Friday already and I haven’t posted this week’s radio show yet?!?  Tuesday I braved 22 °F temps to bring you tons of new music, plus bands we expect big things of in 2016 and a few classics.  Get everything from Bossie to Blondie, Tove Styrke to Titus Andronicus, and Chance the Rapper to Beck.  Stream or download it now, though, because the file disappears Monday, 1/25, at midnight.

Brain Mole Monarch

Sapience can be a terrible curse.  And few creatures experience that pain more deeply than the brain mole monarch.  The diet of psychic energy that enhances their intelligence to near-human levels is the very same diet that encourages the magical tumors that metastasize through their bodies.  Thus, hard on the heels of the arrival of their self-awareness comes the knowledge that they are sick, that their bodies are betraying them, and that they are mortal.  Worse yet, a brain mole monarch suffers this discovery alone, since the other unascended moles in its nest are just dumb animals by comparison, little more than components for the hive mind.

And so, desperate to leave a mark on the world in the short time they have, brain mole monarchs scheme, plot, plan, carve monuments, hunt humanoid candidates for mind swapping, attempt risky experiments, push their psychic-gestalt-linked kin to take ever-greater risks, and generally cause havoc in their wake.

One more note: Last entry we covered the theory that, since brain moles have six limbs, they might be from another planet  (that all hexipedal and/or psychic creatures come from space being a common trope in pulp fantasy).  But there’s another tradition, especially from sword & sorcery fantasy and 1e AD&D, that says that psychic creatures tend to come from Deepearth/the Underdark (or whatever your preferred name is for the subterranean realms).  And brain mole monarchs fit well into that mold too.  There’s another hook as well: One of the only evil gnomish deities, Urdlen the Crawler Below, resembles a giant naked mole rat, just as Pathfinder’s brain moles do.  If you don’t mind mixing Pathfinder and Greyhawk/Realms lore, brain mole monarchs might be Urdlen’s children, recipients of his mental gifts but cursed by the dark energies that long ago curdled his soul…

A wave of strange trances strikes the city of Nerislann.  The victims seem to suddenly understand no Common, fear bright light, and eagerly eat bugs and worms.  Often they are reported to have stolen books or other small objects.  Sometimes their minds return—always with tales of tunnels, and darkness, and the strange pressure of chittering minds inside their own—but others remain trapped in an animalistic state.  A brain mole monarch has been collecting humanoid minds and depositing them in the pale bodies of her servitors.  Soon she will have one trapped mind for every planet that tracks across the night sky…

Tormented by tumors that wrack her with pain and rendered her nearly blind, a particularly bright brain mole monarch, Soilsworn Fenn, has turned to the same answer so many death-fearing humanoids do: necromancy.  Now she rules an army of tiny skeletons, zombies, and even an attic whisperer or two (that latter drawn by the negative energy and the plethora of rodent skulls to choose from).  Hoping to cause a wave of deaths whose energy she can harvest for a ritual, Soilsworn Fenn has set her servants to work on destroying the dam that overlooks a nearby town. 

Adventurers exploring a dungeon come across a strange chamber whose floor is almost entirely taken up with a miniature city, and whose walls are lined with images telling a saga of some sort.  A brain mole monarch (whose mind is supposedly represented in the structure and street layout of the bizarre model city) seizes the opportunity to induct the adventurers into the rites and articles of faith of her “priesthood,” so that the outside world may know of her glory when the tumors take her.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 47

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.