Ether Drake

One of the largest and most powerful drake species, ether drakes made their way from the Ethereal Plane to the Material generations and generations ago.  But they still retain psychic powers from their time on the esoteric plane.  They may not be as malevolent as many other drakes…but at CR 10, with the usual drake speed and the added ability to condense ether around their victims, they don’t have to be.

Haunted by mistakes from his mortal life, a spiritualist’s phantom urges his mortal companion to challenge beasts that toe the line between the Material and Ethereal Planes.  The spiritualist recruits a party of adventurers to head into the Barrowlands, so that he may test himself against the ether drakes that have a nesting ground there.

On the world of Overhaze, the Ethereal and Material planes aren't separate.  Rather, the Material Plane juts out of the Ethereal in the form of mountain ranges of reality poking above the cloud-covered spirit world.  Adventurers who descend into the Haze face enough number of threats, from roving spectres to mindlinked rampages of ether drakes that coordinate in silent and stunningly effective strikes.

Save a saint?  That’s no small order.  But when the request comes from the lips of a reincarnated St. Brendan the Navigator, who has left the afterlife in order to see this mission fulfilled, what else can a group of Catholic clerics do?  Saint Columba’s soul has been stolen from Heaven, and divination reveals it has been spirited to an island in the North Atlantic.  St. Brendan believes he knows which one—a mist-shrouded isle from his travels that he never told any chronicler about, for fear that others might mimic his journey.  The beach is indifferently guarded by ether drakes; more dangerous creatures—and otherworldly temptations—lie further inland.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 99

Yes, I just listened to the audiobook of Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut's Windlass.  That second seed owes a little to the mysterious setting of that book.

Esipil

It’s our first sahkil!  A new category of outsiders introduced in Bestiary 5, sahkils are renegade psychopomps.  All too aware of the mortality of all things, they would rather spend their finite eons making souls suffer rather than shepherding them.  Taking forms out of nightmares—nightmares that even death is no release from—they find inventive ways to spread terror and torment living victims and vulnerable souls.

The esipil may be the weakest sahkil revealed so far, but they’re also my favorite.  They’re just so gleefully malevolent, particularly given their habit of masquerading as lovable pets that are seized by sudden violent outbursts.  (I once dogsat a racist Dachshund, so I can confirm that that sudden transformation is scary as hell…not to mention humiliating to all parties involved.)

And the best part about them is that they can be familiars!  I so want to see one of these in a Hogwarts/Glantri School of Magic-style campaign, or in a guild or society (such as the Pathfinder Society) where members of different alignments are forced to coexist and play nice.  Imagine a group of students sharing their classrooms and corridors with students and familiars of all shapes and sizes…but one of the familiars (ideally that of a hated rival or resented professor) is just wrong somehow.  This feeling might persist for days, weeks, or even whole semesters until the esipil finds the proper moment to reveal itself in the way that causes the most fear.

Adventurers traveling to the Ethereal Plane are greeted by a talking terrier who claims to be a party member’s spirit guide.  The mutt is helpful in all things until he is able to catch the character alone or in combat with other ethereal threats.  Then the terrier, actually an esipil, uses cause fear and then attacks, howling to summon the rest of his pack.

Ever since a young wizard’s near-death from drowning, an immature nosoi has been his companion (due to become an ordinary nosoi when the wizard achieves the appropriate level and feat).  Having such an exotic familiar at such a young age has earned him no small praise from his masters and peers at the Academy…save for one lecturer, who seems to dislike the birdlike psychopomp intensely.  The lecturer’s familiar is actually a carefully disguised esipil, and the beast spends every night whispering dreams of torturing the nosoi into his master’s ear.

Cast off by their outsider masters long ago, a doru and a esipil haunt the souk in Ibor.  When the esipil successfully cajoles his way into the service of a haruspex, the doru becomes mad with envy.  The resentful div finds down-on-their-luck adventurers and offers to show them the graveyard where the esipil has stashed his treasure.  Should the esipil discover he has been robbed, he will do everything in his—and his soothsayer master’s—power to exact revenge.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 213

Enlightened Contemplative

Several of the monsters in the Occult Bestiary fall into the category of “Monsters You Always Knew Were Psychic, So Here Are Some Slightly More Powerful Versions Built With the New Rules.”  Which is totally okay by me—it rewards GMs for buying the new books and adds complexity to existing monster societies without erasing the non-psychic versions that came before.  Everybody wins.

So you’d assumed that enlightened contemplatives are, like, super contemplative.  (Hell, ordinary contemplatives have evolved to barely even have bodies…how much more enlightened can you get?)

But instead—unlike similar advanced occult monsters that we’ve covered before (the xill matriarch or the yithian elder, for instance)—enlightened contemplatives aren’t necessarily revered by their contemplative kin.  In fact, the other contemplatives are scientists who think the esoterically minded enlightened contemplatives are a little crazy.  They get results, sure…but at what cost?  “Daring,” “reckless,” and “radical” are all words used in the Occult Bestiary to describe these pioneers.  Or are they schismatics…or heretics…or phrenic-disrupting outright monsters?  It’s up to you…and that’s what makes these brainy guys fun.

A mesmerist believes he can have a better hold over his victims if they are exposed to the energies of various esoteric planes and demiplanes.  He is guided in his studies by an enlightened contemplative who secretly has her own agenda, involving the use of interlaced mindscapes and transitive planes to achieve travel between the planets.

Trapped on another planet, adventures seek shelter from rabid plains girallons in the mountain fastness of an order of contemplatives.  The sentient brains have no answers for the party, but they suspect a splinter coterie of contemplative renegades might. Reaching these “enlightened” contemplatives means hiking through a thorny jungle of cannibal wood.  The adventurers find the splinter contemplatives under siege from terrible, four-armed wights.

An order of enlightened contemplatives cannot perceive gnomes—neither their physical forms nor their mental patterns (likely because of the gnomes’ fey heritage).  Instead they must infer gnomes based on the descriptions and tales of other humanoids.  Disturbed to encounter a phenomenon unexplainable by either contemplative science or enlightened contemplative metaphysics, these esoteric sages hire bounty hunters to round up gnomes to study, creating prison camps for small folk they cannot sense and subjecting them to laboratory experiments whose data they only dimly comprehend.

—Occult Bestiary 17

If you never read my original entry on contemplatives, maybe give it a look—I had a lot of fun with it.

Encantado

(Illustration by Jim Nelson comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

So like us—warm-blooded, clearly intelligent, full of personality—and yet living in a world so different from our own, it’s no wonder aquatic mammals inspire tales of charming shapechangers.  In Ireland, seals transform into selkies; in the Amazon, river dolphins inspire tales of encantados.

Encantados are especially interesting because they aren't shy or elusive fey—they like a fiesta.  These means that PCs are as likely to encounter them in the middle of an urban, conversation-based role-playing session as they are on a wilderness wandering monster table.  Since their imperfect shapechanging always gives them something to hide, players might either find them coy—perfect for a romance subplot—or suspicious—making for a great red herring in a murder-mystery scenario. 

And when in doubt, obsessive kidnappers and violent narcissists always make great villains.  Imagine the look on your players’ faces the next time they get critted by a spear-wielding dolphin-girl bard during a thunderstorm she summoned…

An encantado enchantress fuels her narcissism by always having several human thralls on hand.  Many of these she sends back to their home villages bearing her squalling young.  (She has no patience for children.)  If these children grow up to exhibit half-fey or undine traits, the encantado reappears on their fifteenth birthday to claim them as her “heirs” (more accurately, her slaves).  Those who acquiesce become her agents on land.  Those who resist she baleful polymorphs into dolphins, using a wand she stole from a hag decades ago.

During a masked ball, a dashing young woman dares an adventurer to best her in swashbuckling.  During the duel, he accidentally knocks off her hat and wig, revealing a gaping blowhole.  Aghast, the young woman then tries to kill the adventurer to protect her secret.

Along the Uke River, brides fleeing abusive husbands will sometimes hurl themselves into the falls, hoping to be transformed into encantados.  After a baron loses his daughter to the falls, he hires adventures to bring her back, whether she is a fey or a corpse.  (The marriage contract included a heavy penalty should the bride renege that he has no intention of paying, abuse or no—even a raise dead spell would be cheaper.)  Along the way, the adventurers will have to brave the falls, kappa pranksters, bloodthirsty merrow, and the liberated encantados themselves.  Worse yet, not every bride who throws herself into the falls is transformed…and many of the luckless suicides return as undead.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 110

I pretty much picture every encantado trying to hide her blowhole as Amy Winehouse.

I like the encantado now, but it took me a while to get over the angry twitch I get whenever I see whale-fey.  There’s a reason for this: As I’ve mentioned before, 3.0’s Monster Manual absolutely gutted the fey roster.  (And, if I recall correctly, its authors went on to diss and dismiss the excised faeries in the pages of Dragon, rubbing salt in the wound.)  And when Monster Manual II came out, what kind of fey did we get?  (Drum roll, please!)

…A 20-foot-tall orca-giant called an ocean strider.

I may or may not have screamed and thrown the book across the room.  You decide.

Speaking of which, I question the rationale of making Pathfinder’s selkies monstrous humanoids while encantados are fey…but to be fair, Pathfinder’s selkies are pretty damn monstrous compared to anything we saw in The Secret of Roan Inish.

Empyrean

Solars may be the most powerful angels, the ne plus ultra of pure Good.  But there’s something special about empyreans.  Because they serve outside the usual chain of command—often as secret agents—they are free to act in ways that the regular choirs may not.  Because each empyrean tends to have a tie to a specific deity, they are considered movers and shakers in both the celestial and infernal realms.  Because they predate mortal life (and unlike solars, their ranks are not replenished by either mortal souls or angelic promotion), they truly take the long view in their plots, plans, and alliances. And because there are only ever a set number of empyreans, the loss of one is always a momentous event (even though a new empyrean will eventually be born to take its place).

And then of course, there are the empyrean paragons, who rival even the solars in power and who each have unique abilities determined by their patron deity’s portfolio.  All in all, these are powerful agents of Good—sometimes secret agents, sometimes free agents, but always working on the side of the Light.  (Unless of course, one of them falls…)

Truly ancient beings, empyreans usually refuse calling spells.  So why has one been answering the fire priests of Tarquin?  Adventurers are dispatched to the colossus-guarded port city to find out.  Have the miserly, mercenary priests turned over a new leaf and embraced the song of the Choir?  Do they have some powerful artifact binding the angel to them?  Or is there some far deeper and more ancient celestial plan in play?

There has never been a god of vampires before.  Indeed, one of the defining features of vampirism on Terna is that the undead are loathsome in the eyes of the gods—even the evil deities resent vampires for diverting souls meant for the Black Court’s dark palaces.  But somehow, a vampire has recently ascended to godhood…and worse yet, he has claimed one of the few beings in the multiverse who could thwart him, the empyrean Paragon of the Dawn, as an enslaved thrall.

To save sorcery, adventurers must kill an agent of Good.  When the Paragon of the Blood was slain, the damage to the Arcane Flow was so great that good-hearted sorcerers began to lose their powers.  Worse yet, the new paragon born in her place, the Paragon of the Blaze, serves a god of invention…and gunpowder.  Adventurers who wish to save sorcery may be forced eliminate this new empyrean, ideally so that the eight gods of magic can pour their energies into the birth of the next great angel.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 24–25

Emotion Ooze

There are times I have all the tools I need for this job.  Other times…not so much, especially when it comes to movie monsters.  Once you get below top-tier sci-fi and fantasy films, I’m pretty weak—for some reason I never got the steady diet of B movies and Saturday-afternoon UHF marathons that many of y’all did.  And horror movies I’m hopeless at (because I hate them).  I even missed the Slender Man reference in the Inner Sea Bestiary, despite the monster being called the thin man!  (I feel well within my rights to blame the art in that case, but still, jeez.)

This time, though—for once—I caught the reference.

Emotion oozes are the ooze from Ghostbusters II!!!

All together now:

Your love, lifting me higher

Than I've ever been lifted before…

A young etheric dragon has become trapped on the Material Plane.  The gout of ectoplasm that got trapped with him and the esoteric energies the growing dragon gives off have combined to form pools of emotion oozes reflecting the dragon’s psychological state—despair, fear, and anger in particular.  Unfortunately, the dragon is not immune to the oozes’ compulsions, and its behavior grows more and more erratic.

The countess of Rostovy was said to bathe in the blood of virgins every new moon.  In truth she bathed only in her own jealousy, stewing in the emotion until the stew became literal—a jealousy ooze that devoured her entirely.  The ooze still dwells in her sumptuous bathing chamber, but it moves through the palace pipes to foster mistrust and hunt new prey.

Officially, the Forgotten Crusade has ended.  The Rose Cardinal unmasked the Peacock Cardinal, branded and executed her as a heretic, erased her proclamations from the Book of Bulls, and announced that the crusade formerly known as the Third Crusade was not only anathema, but actually had never occurred at all.  This last fact in particular caught the besieged and besieging armies facing off at the Bleak Pedestal completely by surprise.  By all rights the demoralized crusaders should have returned home…but still they soldier on a decade later, as do the defenders (who are watered by a natural spring and can be resupplied by sea).  The reason for their persistence is occult in nature.  The glories and atrocities of the Second Crusade were so extreme that the caverns below the Bleak Pedestal are slick with the slime of emotion oozes attuned to zeal, dedication, and hatred.  These oozes’ unnatural compulsions have wiped all thought of parley or retreat from the minds of the combatants.  And so the Forgotten Crusade lumbers on until someone—perhaps a party of adventurers—disrupts the oozes’ manipulation.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 108–109

My dad took me to see Ghostbusters II in the theater.  Ditto the 1989 Batman, which came out a week later.  (In my memory, we saw BM first, and then GB2, but I might be wrong about that.)  I was just blown away because we didn’t see a ton of movies in the theater and almost never on school nights, so the fact that I got to see two movies within a week or two of each other was mind-blowing.

(BTW, talk about fortuitous timing for this post!  Haven’t seen the new Ghostbusters yet, but I plan to!)

Elder Deep One

Back in April we covered the deep one and the deep one hybrid.  If you felt something was missing…well, the alphabet is as cold and unyielding as the lightless depths where deep ones dwell.

But now, finally, the elder deep one rises from the murk!

Aside from being much larger (Gargantuan) and more powerful (CR 14) than ordinary deep ones, three abilities set the elders apart.  The first is their Mind Reflection (Ex) ability.  Able to not just resist, but actually reflect mind-affecting effects back to their source is a fearsome advantage.  The wrong spell cast at an elder deep one could easily take out a party’s caster (and now that Occult Adventurers is on the shelves, parties are packing more mind-affecting magic and powers than ever).  Second is their Devastating Strike (Ex).  I don’t care what level your character is—when the monster starts taking apart entire buildings, it sends combat into a whole new realm.

But it’s their Deific nature that really stands out.  Elder deep ones can grant spells; despite not being gods as sages understand the concept, and despite only being CR 14, they still can channel divine energy to those that venerate them.  Elder deep ones even grant domains.  They even have associated divine weapons! (They probably can’t actually hear prayers per se…but there must be at least some tether there, so who knows?)

In any case, that makes any deep one or deep one hybrid allied with an elder a potential adept, cleric, or worse.  It means that deep one elders are closer to gods than even mythic PCs, without ever facing a mythic trial.  It means they have direct access to hierophanies that bypass everything humans know about mortality and divinity, and that puts them within hailing distance of the terrifying Great Old Ones and their nigh-incomprehensible Outer Gods.

Most terrifying of all, that might mean all the deep ones’ dread prophecies and assertions—that this reality is a horrible accident, and that one day the Outer Gods will return to tear down existence itself—might be true.

Interrogating a terrified devil reveals to adventurers that the Great Old Ones are indeed real…and worse, their worship thrives.  Soon the adventurers are caught up in a conflict between cultists of slumbering Bokrug and graffiti-scrawling cloaker followers of the King in Yellow.  Each side of the conflict is directed by a deep one elder, one of whom has bound the devil’s fraternal twin.

Legendary elder deep ones like Mother Hydra typically live far beneath the sea—but not all.  At least one seems to have claimed an ancient dwarven citadel, where it rutted under the waterfalls with an umbral dragon to create terrible, quivering half-dragon spawn.  Another conquered the Flying City of Adar, then mummified itself so it could watch for signs and portents far up in the atmosphere.

The hunt for a mesmer who skipped bail in Baltimore has led a party of investigators through some pretty odd turns, including battling moonshine juju zombies in the Shenandoah Valley, attending a hill giant circus run by lamias, and purging a hound of Tindalos from a university hospital.  Now the trail has led to New Orleans—just in time for Mardi Gras.  But there is something different about the krewes lining up for the parades and extravagant balls this year.  There is more magic in the air than usual, the fey floats have disappeared completely, and many of the krewes that remain have a distinctly fishy look to them.  Investigation reveals that nearly all of the non-fey krewes have been infiltrated by deep one hybrids.  Worse, the secret societies’ rites and rituals have been twisted into prayers to a deep one elder, who now stirs beneath New Orleans’s swampy sewers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 69

If you’re looking for a more physical vs. magical threat, try the kuo-toa leviathan from the 3.5 Underdark book (my review here).  If you’re looking for more about fantasy krewes, the Scarred Lands setting (see that same link) has you covered.

I still haven’t had the time to write up any thoughts about my PaizoCon experience.  (To give you some idea of what my life’s been like in the past month and a half, tomorrow will be my 11th straight day of work.)  But since I missed anomalitstic’s New Orleans game, guess which adventure seed is for him?