Kasatha

Let’s get this out of the way first: kasathas are not Golarion’s thri-kreen.  I will hear none of that talk.  Yes, four arms.  Yes, difficult for outsiders to gender. Yes, hunters in a desert environment.  But that’s it.  Thri-kreen are insects from Dark Sun; kasathas are humanoids from a planet with a red sun.  (…Which, ironically, makes these aliens less alien in many ways than the thri-kreen bugs.  Go figure.)

More thoughts: kasathas first appeared as an experiment in the Advanced Race Guide.  But it was clear that they were more than an afterthought, and sure enough they wound up in Bestiary 4 and then got a starring role in the Iron Gods Adventure Path and related supplements like People of the Stars.  Bestiary 4 also adds some nice notes like that fact that they have a matriarchal society and are working to get back to their home world.

In your campaign, how they act and how PCs react to them is probably related to how common or uncommon they are, and whether they know where their home world is.  A kasatha who believes he is the last of his race will likely behave very differently from a teenage kasatha on walkabout for his gap year.

If you want to play a kasatha player character, PotS has more details and unique traits, feats, etc., including their spinal swords and a really badass double-bow-wielding ranger archetype.  (I also love that Sphinx is a possible starting language for kasatha PCs…a possible cultural tie that I don't explore below but am fascinated by.  Sphinx astronomers, anyone?  Maybe even sphinx mission commanders!)

And yes, if you want to do a Pathfinder version of Dark Sun, and you want it to have thri-kreen, then you can use kasathas for a quick-and-dirty version.  But you better add some funky insect traits and maybe bump up their size pronto.  Because they're not the same.  Grrr.

The secretive witchwyrds didn’t just come down from the heavens for trade.  They hunt their escaped slave race, the kasathas.  While their desire to mask their presence by blending in with the locals has slowed their search, they nevertheless have agents in every desert market.  These agents will pay handsomely for news of elusive four-armed desert hunters.  Meanwhile, an adventuring party bearing goods with witchwyrd marks may find themselves treated as enemies by any kasathas they come across.

A four-armed gladiator is the only one of his kind…or so he believes.  His singular existence and prowess in the arena have given him a bit of a god complex, and he rules over the other gladiators—including captured adventurers—with four iron fists.  His world is upended the night the stars align and the entire coliseum becomes a sort of space bridge—and a kasatha war party materializes inside the arena.

Kasathas are a commons sight on desert worlds and rougher spaceports. But when a white-cloaked explorer claims to have found the kasatha home world, the race is galvanized into a mass exodus.  Adventurers coerced into helping the stranger will soon come to suspect his “discovery “is really just a strong hunch…but also an accurate one.  Too bad brain collectors, denizens of Leng, and worse dominate the home world now.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 174

Hi guys!  Ever since I came back after my broken computer fiasco I feel like I’ve been posting to you rather than interacting with you.  A lot of that is just a) my crazy work schedule, b) continued sick loved one/hospital stuff, c) more gym time, and d) SPRING!!!—but I will try to be a little better about the back-and-forth if I can. 

Speaking of which, a rather neat conversation happened this week when stopgivingthemthings posited a kind of tempter monster and then asked for help identifying/naming it.  Here’s the original post, the dr-archeville post that got me involved, my response, and this truly epic follow-up from vee-charlotte.  (Also see Dr. A. re: some calming, much needed perspective on Ant-Man.)

And please keep sharing and reblogging as the impulse strikes you!  This second go-round the monsters much less familiar to a non-Pathfinder audience, so your enthusiasm remains the very best way to help this blog grow.

Karkinoi

The karkinoi are crab monsters.  Specifically, humanoid crab monsters.  That’s really all you need to know.  Compelling societies, complex motivations, dark racial secrets?  Nope, nope, and nope.  (Okay, maaaaybe they were created by aboleths.  Whatever.)  It doesn't matter.  They are CRAB. MONSTERS.

Which is not to say there aren’t some nice touches in the karkinoi stat block.  The fact that they can scuttle sideways is a really cute touch.  And I love that they have one massive claw, as if they were male fiddler crabs or Clawful from the Masters of the Universe toy line.  For best results, send lots of them against low-level PCs, so their numbers and devastating claws give your players a good scare before they (hopefully) rally and outsmart these hulking crustaceans.

For dwarves, burial is mandatory.  They believe a dwarf who is not returned to the earth in body is doomed to wander it in spirit.  When a dwarven thane falls to a karkinoi raiding party while he is visiting coastal allies, his kin demand that adventurers are sent to retrieve his corpse.  This means finding the karkinoi nesting grounds and facing down karkinoi nursery guards and swarms of already-hatched hungry karkinoi spawn.

A monastery sits perched like a seagull’s nest on a cliff face.  An adventuring party’s reception there is cold, even hostile, from the first instant—the lawful evil monks do not welcome visitors or their soft lifestyles.  But then karkinoi scale the cliff face in a mad attempt to devour or abduct everyone inside, and the adventurers are forced to work with the monks who were plotting to kill them only hours before.

Adventurers come across a bizarre sight: a massive whale, larger than any they have ever seen, beached on shore.  The ivory from the bones alone might be worth a fortune, not to mention the price they might fetch from a naturalist for the scientific value.  Coming around the side of the whale reveals that karkinoi are already hard at work dismembering the beast.  They attack all intruders.  Complicating matters is the rising sun.  If combat is not resolved by noon (or if a fireball is cast in the vicinity), gases in the whale ignite, causing the corpse to rupture with the force of an explosion and release a beaching of globsters.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 173

I’ve seen a reference or two to karkinoi coming from Greek history/mythology, but details are super sketchy.

Though it’s still in my to-read pile, the module Plunder & Peril has stats for the karkinoi brood swarm.

Louise Glück may have been the big-name poet at my college, but my professor was Lawrence Raab, who made it into the Norton Anthology with “Attack of the Crab Monsters”: 

So now you know

what I never found the time to say.

Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower.

You know I always loved you.

Oh, one final note: I know most of you come for the monsters, but I did get this really nice note:

Patch, I'm an irregular, but I just listened to last week’s [show] and you killed it! Lots of good, weird stuff—what is the post-CD equivalent of advance review discs? That Passion Pit track is good enough to be a highlight for a day of radio listening, but hearing it on your show I was tempted to fast forward.

Ed made my week with that note.  And you would make my week if you listened, too.  The file is good till midnight tomorrow night—download it and enjoy!

Kapre

Given that so many tropical fey seem largely bent on mischief or worse—the mockingfey and larabay (see Isles of the Shackles) being respective examples, and that’s not even counting out-and-out monsters like the popobala or blood hag—it seems the region’s plants have to fend for themselves.  Hence the kapre, a kind of tropical treant (originally from the Philippines) with a face like a Tiki mask and its own unique flair.  And by flair, I mean that literally, given that they have flaring, ember-like eyes, smoky breath, and favor magical cigars.

Given this forbidding aspect, PCs might be forgiven for not realizing that kapres play a role similar to that of treants.  The expanded kapre ecology (from Pathfinder Adventure Path #58: Island of Empty Eyes) also explains that they occasionally become fascinated by local women or are the victims of malicious rumors and superstitions.  So on the one hand, PCs might be on the side of local loggers or colonizers and have to drive a kapre off.  On the other hand, they may be playing the role of Scooby-Doo and the gang, discovering that the strange masked monster in the woods is quite friendly, and that Old Man Withers is really to blame.

A kapre has developed a fascination for a local beauty.  Unfortunately, the beauty also happens to be a disguised blood hag.  The poor kapre is so far unaware that the mysterious fires that have scorched its grove are her work.  Reveling in her deception, the soucouyant has set the plant creature against the local pineapple farmers.  She is thus free to drain the blood and burn the bodies of her victims in the chaotic aftermath of the kapre’s attacks.

A headman’s wife has run off with a dryad.  Humiliated, the headman seeks revenge, but knows he cannot hunt the dryad without risking the ire of the Smoker, the region’s kapre guardian.  He invents a series of crimes that he blames on the kapre to stir up anger against the plant creature, as well as spreads rumors of a wish-granting stone in the kapre’s possession.  While the villagers hunt the kapre and the stone, he plans to revenge himself upon his wife and her dryad lover.  Actually the kapre does have a luminous ovoid that it guards—a cloud dragon egg whose parents will be returning soon.

Sometimes a kapre cigar is not just a kapre cigar.  An elder halfling sends adventurers to retrieve a box of cigars from a kapre he befriended long ago.  But some of the cigars are actually cleverly concealed maps and detailed reports on slave ships and troop movements.  The enemy consortium has enchanters on its side, however, and before the box can be retrieved the kapre is turned against the very adventurers it was supposed to aid.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #58 86–87 & Pathfinder Bestiary 4 172

Kakuen-Taka

Mobile towers of flesh and bone followed by swarms of undead birds.  Walking flesh mansions animated by tiny fiends.  Demonic entities as likely to trap and hunt demons as they are player characters.  These are the kakuen-taka, the Hunger That Moves.

To appreciate the kakuen-taka, you really need to see the illustration in the Inner Sea Bestiary of an insectile tower made of mammoth parts.  While not one of my favorite images in general, it definitely captures the alien otherness of these evil outsiders.  This isn't a vision of the Abyss by Gygax, Grubb, or even Albrect Dürer.  These are reminiscent of the chitinous hulks of Dark Sun and the mantis-like angles of Planescape.  This is Hell as conceived by Alan Moore and drawn by Todd McFarlane in the landmark Spawn #8.  When your players spot these flesh mansion spires in the distance, they know they're not in Kansas anymore, or Middle-earth, or even one of the more well-traveled layers of the Abyss.  They are in frontier country now—and they are alone except for the tiny fey that want to ride in their skins.

The prophecy was simple: Born of his father’s divine thunder, the god-blooded storm giant Bron was to march across the Plains of Vexation and free the imperial city of Thrain from its veiled master occupiers.  But Bron never finished his journey, as he was speared through the heart and consumed by a kakuen-taka.  To fulfill the prophecy and save Thrain, Bron’s body must be reclaimed from the flesh mansion of the kakuen-taka and his spirit called back from whatever dark road it currently wanders.

Velvet Night, a succubus-controlled layer of the Abyss, lies in ruins.  Qlippoths pour into the layer via a black canyon and gangs of kakuen-taka dot the horizon.  As demon fights fiend, the pleasure palaces of Velvet Night sit abandoned, just waiting for looters to help themselves to a lifetime of magical artifacts, exotic drugs, and blasphemous alchemical reagents.  (It may be a short lifetime, however…)

Even the worm-riding tribesmen of the Sandstorm Sea avoid the Chittering Mounds.  Most of the towering structures are filled with ravenous ankhegs or the wights of tengu monks.  But sometimes the mounds themselves are alive—kakuen-taka flesh mansions preserved in the heat like mummies until their bhogas awake from hibernation at the scent of live prey.

—Inner Sea Bestiary 20-21

I’m not sure who gets the credit for this monster.  The Introduction to the ISB ascribes it to Jason Nelson, but online all the references I find seem to come from Clinton Boomer’s 2008 RPG Superstar run.  My guess is Boomer conceived of these flesh mansion-wearing monstrosities in 2008 and Nelson got tasked with polishing the entry up for the 2012 softcover.

Juvenile Seps & Seps

The seps is another golden find from actual medieval bestiaries.  Not that there’s anything wrong with making up monsters—I love a good fleshwarp or d'ziriak as much as the next GM—but there’s a certain heft to monsters who have been around since Pliny the Elder.  Plus, if a player complains your acid-blooded snake is an Alien rip-off, you can tell them to go take it up with Lucan.

That said, Alien isn't a bad model for siccing sepses on your players.  Tight confined spaces make acid attacks near sensitive machiner—er, I mean, magical artifacts—suitably scary encounters.

A saboteur is on the airship Meliscene.  His first act is to release juvenile sepses into the hold of the ship, trusting that they will follow prey like rats and halflings throughout the entire vessel.  The crew soon learns how dangerous the snakes are when killing one releases enough acid to eat through a deck and destroy a weapons locker.  Ready with a ring of feather falling and a potion of fly, the saboteur takes advantage of the confusion to begin poisoning the stores and engage in other acts of treachery while the crew hunts the sepses.

A seps guards a chokepoint in the secret tunnels beneath a fortress.  An invisible stalker is bound to the chamber as well.  Should adventurers manage to charm or otherwise incapacitate the snake, the air creature’s job is to riddle the serpent with arrows, sending acid spewing toward the overconfident party.  The room’s second hazard is its tiled floor.   The seps keeps to the magically warmed stone tiles…but its acid blood will quickly eat through the wood tiles, dropping the unwary onto spikes below.

As two families feud, their heirs agree to run away together.  And when Marieth comes across her lover Torand’s body at their rendezvous point, pale and still as if from snakebite, she resolves to join him in death.  Spying the snake she believes did the deed, she seizes it to her bosom like a tragic heroine from the books Torand used to read to her.  It is a trap—Torand has been leading her on, his “body” is a well-crafted illusion, and the snake is a seps hatchling (a juvenile seps with the Young simple template).  Now Marieth is disfigured from the snake’s acid and her father will pay handsomely for revenge…but there are plenty more juvenile sepses—and worse threats besides—guarding the grounds of Torand’s family estate.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 237

Radio show!  Last week I saw the Decemberists twice, the Mountain Goats once, missed (but got a hug from) Flock of Dimes, slept through Alex Winston, got excited for the Ting Tings, got sad to new Sufjan Stevens, and rediscovered Adam Ant.  All of which resulted in this musical journey for you to download.

(Link good till Friday, 4/17, at midnight.  If the feed skips on you, just Save As an mp3.  And don’t worry about the too-quiet first song—the volume smooths out after that.)

Junk Golem

You can probably guess I have ridiculously mixed feelings about the junk golem. 

It’s no secret I don’t like exotic golems.  When it comes to golem building materials, if you can't mine it or fire it in a kiln, I am skeptical.  And I especially don't like golems with swarm powers (mask golems, anyone?).  That seems to me to be antithetical to the core of what a golem is: a big, blocky thing inexplicably brought to life by powerful magic and an elemental spark.

That said…well as someone whose living space is constantly overwhelmed by kipple, I can't help but find the golem’s Discorporate (Ex) ability to be totally thematically appropriate.  And as someone who was in elementary school in 1986, the notion of fighting giants made out of junk has an appeal too primal to be denied.

And the golem’s tetanus-causing slam attack?  Is that stupid or totally awesome?  I can't even tell anymore!

In the end, utility wins out—a CR 4 golem is a pretty useful low- to mid-level obstacle.  And junkyards and refuse heaps are exactly the sort of places that adventurers should be spending their time in, especially in urban campaigns.  As with many constructs, the most interesting about a junk golem is its creator.  Junk is, by definition, what people throw away.  The kind of person who turns refuse into a guardian is a person worth encountering.

A syrinx takes control of the city library and archives, and begins consigning “dangerous and seditious” works and memorabilia to a remote annex.  Over time the aggregate weight of neglected and suppressed literature forms a kind of miasma.  When a malfunctioning artifact is added to the collection, the animating spirit inside manages to incorporate the room’s resentful contents into a junk golem body.  The golem has no true intelligence, though, and simply attacks anything that enters its domain.

Junk golems have been rampaging through the city.  Ratfolk, the junkyard’s main inhabitants, are bearing the brunt of the populace’s frustration, and cries of “Exterminate the vermin” are common.  The actual culprit is a junkyard-dwelling svirfneblin so spiteful his own kin drove him to the surface.  Meanwhile, other bad actors are taking advantage of the chaos.  In particular, a party of “golem exterminators” are running around town with leashed rust monsters. Ostensibly they are hunting the rogue constructs, but in actuality they are rusting away the locks, hasps, and hinges of shops they intend to burgle.

Adventurers are hired to clean out a deceased wizard’s tower.  In addition to identifying (and ideally disarming or disposing of) any traps or hazards, they are supposed to retrieve an odd assortment of items, including a peculiar bronze helm.  This is actually a trap on the part of their patron, the wizard’s nephew.  He knows that the items are the core pieces of a discorporated junk golem programmed to dismember looters if the helm is disturbed.  He knows the key phrase to shut down the golem, but he prefers to watch the party be demolished rather than pay their fee.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 132

And then there’s the golem made out of ancient Chinese boat parts.  You know, because it’s a junk golem?  Eh?  Eh?  …I’m gonna go now.  Have a good weekend.

Julunggali

It’s hard to get more mythic than the julunggali.  A Colossal, semidivine snake, the julunggali can literally move heaven and earth courtesy of spell-like abilities like control water, create water, mythic move earth, and mythic control weather.  And you don't want to mess with a being that can bestow curses at will, throw mythic baleful polymorphs (which transform partially even on a successful save), and choose at whim how serious the poison is when it bites you—including aging you a whole age category. 

That said, because julunggalis often preside over rites of passage, PCs are as likely to encounter one at the very start of their careers as they are at the end of them.  “Encounter” being the key word here, not “fight”…until they’re at least Level 16 or so.  And should they break one of the snake’s sacred taboos, they might find out just how vengeful a CR 21/MR 8 magical beast can be.

The key to stopping a qlippoth invasion is to pour the blood of a seraph onto an ideogram-carved rock in a distant wilderness.  But doing so means breaking the taboo of a julunggali adamantly opposed to keeping the carvings unmolested.  Can she be convinced to relent?  (After all, she is old enough to remember the dark epoch when qlippoths ruled.)  Or must she be defeated as the penultimate trial before the party’s showdown with the iathavos?

Even for a famously close-mouthed race like the dwarves, the Stone Shapers are a breed apart.  This is because they don’t worship the traditional dwarven pantheon, but instead revere their patron julunggali.  The dwarves keep their worship secret from outsiders, working with the serpent to reshape their domain in ways large and small according to mythical earth nodes and ley lines.  Perhaps to compensate for their spiritual divide from other dwarves, the Stone Shapers are otherwise fierce snake hunters, famous for fighting serpentfolk, tarnished couatls, hollow serpents, and the like.

The path to the Outer Planes has been blocked ever since the Rainbow Bridge was shattered.  A julunggali gathered up the pieces and has guarded them in her temple complex ever since.  Adventurers who wish to restore the bridge must complete three tasks, which may include being polymorphed into other races and species, living cursed for a year, fetching an artifact from the Realm of Death (and trusting the julunggali to supply the necessary raise dead), or fighting the Colossal serpent itself.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 164

Given that the julunggali seems to be inspired by the Australian Aboriginal rainbow snake goddess Julunggul, this mythic serpent would be perfect paired with the Aborigine-inspired chameleon men portrayed in “The Voyage of the Princess Ark in Dragon Magazine #186.  In fact, one of the Land of Wallara’s patron deities is Agundji, the Rainbow Serpent, an aspect of the draconic Immortal known as the Great One.

(I’m finally getting over my pedantic squeamishness about linking to PDFs of old Dragon issues.  Normally I’m pretty fierce about protecting OC, but we’re talking 20+ years, three editions past, and no easy way to get these mags legally, so screw it.)

(Speaking of which, that issue also has Michael Gabriel’s “50 Castle Hauntings,” James R. Collier’s “Welcome to the Neighborhood!”—a look at fantasy cities (especially fantasy ethnic neighborhoods) that still feels fresh today)—and an installment of “The Marvel-Phile” that shows Groot years before he got turned into a household name.

Is there a German word for that feeling you get when you see an old friend from years ago opening for and then dancing with the Mountain Goats?

Ah yes: Ausgezeichnet.

(Actually I missed the opening part because last night I was on hospital discharge duty for a loved one, but I was there for all of the Mountain Goats and accompanying dancing.)

Also I ran into my brother’s friend Alice, whose current flaming neon-red hair upends everything you think you know about what a League of Women Voters co-chair looks like.  Let’s put it this way: There are a lot of blue-haired old ladies in the League, but when Alice is one of them, she means it.

I also saw David Sedaris Tuesday night!  And am seeing The Ting Tings Saturday.  Skipping Alex Winston tonight because I am tiiiiiiiiiired.