Literary Monsters of Bestiary 6

Thursday, April 27, 2017

For this last Bestiary 6 post (the book officially released yesterday, so I can't really call it a preview post!), I want to build upon last week's post, where I talked a bit about monsters from mythological sources. In this case, since these creatures aren't protected by copyright law and aren't the intellectual property of content creators, the field is wide open—we can create specific creatures based on these things in the same way we can stat up things like donkeys and rats. But there's another category of inspiration that we often draw upon that's a bit trickier—literary sources.

In this case, we've either opted for simply taking inspiration for a monster and making up something entirely new, but that's not exactly what I want to highlight here. When we look at older stories that are now in the public domain, there are a huge number of interesting creatures we can "import" into Pathfinder. We've been doing this in every Bestiary, from the first one (which has H. G. Wells's morlocks and Lovecraft's shoggoths for example) on. That doesn't change in Bestiary 6.

Of course, since I was the one picking the monsters, it should come as no surprise that my favorite author, Lovecraft, has some strong representation here. In some cases, the monsters picked up from his stories are specific creatures he took time to describe and explore (such as the yaddithian and the Great Old Ones). In other cases, they're creatures he wrote entire stories about but never really named, so I came up with specific names for them (the Leng hound, from his short story "The Hound", and the unrisen, the lively awful remnants from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"). And in one case, they were just name drops with only a few words of tantalizing description—the urhag is a throwaway reference in "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" where they're described as things flying in the sky along with bats in a creepy corner of the Dreamlands. In this case, other than "they fly" we were able to create an entirely new monster to provide context for the creature.

But Lovecraft wasn't my only source of literary inspiration. Like the urhag, the whisperer is never mentioned by name in the story that inspired it, but those who have read Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (one of my all-time favorite stories) will recognize its themes and the weird wounds its touch causes in flesh, I hope. The other, the horla, is the opposite—a creature that not only heavily features in Guy de Maupassant's story, but gives that story its name: "The Horla." The fact that the horla is invisible in the story gave us some leeway in creating its appearance for those who insist on using methods like see invisibility to peer into the unknown, but its creepy abilities to feed on slumbering victims and secretly drive them to murder and insanity are right out of the pages of the tale. I've actually been trying to get the horla into print as far back as Bestiary 2, so I'm glad the critter finally gets to see the light of day!

Illustrations by Rafael Rivera, Will O'Brien, and Florian Stitz

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Mythological Monsters of Bestiary 6

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Now that Bestiary 6 is making the rounds and folks have had a chance to get over the shock of seeing archdevils and kaiju and qlippoth lords and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and empyreal lords and all sorts of other powerful creatures like the ones we spoke of last week, I'd like to thank humanity as a whole for being such an endless font of inspiration. We've been creating monsters to fill our stories and myths since we first started telling stories and weaving myths, and over the thousands and thousands of years humanity's been around, well, that's a lot of time to create a lot of monsters!

While there's always been a core collection of monsters drawn from mythology in fantasy RPGs, the ones that have appeared in print only scratch the surface. Whenever we start gearing up for a new Bestiary, one of the first places we go to is real-world myth and legend. Bestiary 6 is no exception. From the very first monster in the book, the blood-drinking alp, we drew from mythology to populate the book with a diverse array of critters. As the book came together, I was amused to see a few unintentional themes develop among these mythological monsters—I think my favorite is the "creepy monster with one eye." The ghole, the mapinguari, and the psoglav all come from myth or cryptozoology, and it was a fun challenge for me to make sure that, while all three are similar in theme (vaguely human-shaped one-eyed menaces), they all fit different roles in the game.

Another theme that I was delighted to finally explore in a Bestiary was no accident at all. The Wild Hunt was one of the initial monsters I had in mind for the book, and for some time was my go-to in house when folks would ask me "Are there any monsters in this book that I've heard of that aren't in print yet?" or its variant, "Are there any monsters in the book that I'll be surprised HAVEN'T been put in one of our products already?" The Wild Hunt, which expanded from a single entry into several, is a prime example—a well-known entire category of mythological monster that we've done nothing with, until now. I love what Linda Zayas-Palmer did with these things, and how the art ended up making them all look of a kind even when they include such diverse shapes as horse, hound, or humanoid.

Of course, not all of the monsters inspired by myth had one eye or were part of the Wild Hunt. Check out the following three examples as proof! And I'm eager to see if folks can pick out all of the other mythological monsters from the book in the comments below!

Illustrations by Nikolai Ostertag, Rafael Rivera, and Florian Stitz

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Powerful Monsters

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Bestiary 6 is slithering out into the world, but even though the book is out there, I've still got a few more things to chat about the contents. Going forward, we'll continue to sow off some art from the book but these posts will be more "behind the scenes" than "monster previews."

Which brings us to today's theme—powerful monsters. For some time now I've wanted us to produce a Bestiary whose challenges skew higher than traditional. While it's true that more games are run at lower level, and thus there's a need for a lot of low and mid tier monsters, we've published a lot of those already in prior Bestiaries. One of the problems facing GMs and adventure writers of high-level content is a lack of monsters to fill the role of threat. As a result, high-level adventures tend to have lots of creatures with class levels, templates, advanced Hit Dice, or sometimes two or even three of these categories in play.

With Bestiary 6, I wanted to give us all more toys to play with for adventures that take place above 10th level, be they powerful creatures to fight again and again or unique foes to serve as a long quest's final boss or as the theme for an entire campaign. I also wanted to populate some niches of monsters that have long been denied higher CR representation—usually, the high CR monsters are outsiders or dragons or giants. In preparing for Bestiary 6, I realized that we'd done a shockingly few number of monstrous humanoids and plants above CR 10, for example, so those two categories were ones I immediately looked to address. I spoke about oozes a few weeks back with the blights, of course, but when you get your copy of Bestiary 6, I think you'll be delighted by the number of new options of monsters to throw at your players, particularly powerful monsters that aren't overly huge and can fit into areas as small as the player characters themselves!

Three of my favorite high CR additions to the game include the kaiju (including the most powerful one of them all—Lord Varklops), the apocalypse horse (which came about as a natural result of the decision to include the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and then realizing these high CR demigods needed something more significant than an advanced nightmare to ride around on), and the ouroboros (a monster I've wanted to get into an RPG for well over a decade). Ranging from CR 21 (the ouroboros) to CR 25 (the apocalypse horses) to CR 30 (Lord Varklops), these three make a perfect cross-section of the variety of powerful foes in Bestiary 6!

Illustrations by Joshua Wright, Ben Wootten, and Nikolai Ostertag

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Dragons of Bestiary 6

Thursday, April 6, 2017

It should come as no surprise that, in Bestiary 6, when you turn to the "D" section, you'll see some welcome and familiar reptilian shapes. I'm talking about dinosaurs of course. Who doesn't love dinosaurs?

OH! There's also true dragons.

One of the increasingly tricky things to do with true dragons is that we've established them as existing in families of five—not six, not four, but five. So when we do a set of true dragons in a book, that's pretty much it for that category, which means the next bestiary that comes along has to have a new category. Fortunately, there's a LOT of really cool categories to explore when it comes to true dragons, and with Bestiary 6 I was able to explore one that I'd been itching for since Bestiary 2, which presented dragons associated with several of the inner planes.

I'm talking, of course, about Bestiary 6's planar dragons. At first I wasn't sure how to pull this off, since there are, after all, nine significant outer planes, each of which map to one of the nine alignments. Doesn't that imply that there should be 9 planar dragons? Perhaps... but in the end I decided it did not. Instead, I picked five alignments out of nine. These planar dragons include the crypt dragon (representing the neutral plane of the Boneyard*), the havoc dragon (representing the chaotic good plane of Elysium), the infernal dragon (representing the lawful evil of Hell), the paradise dragon (representing the lawful goodness of Heaven), and the rift dragon (representing the chaos and evil of the Abyss), yet the role these dragons play is not "Dragons you meet on the outer planes." Instead, they're dragons that you'll normally encounter on the Material Plane, after migrating there via portals or other methods with a singular goal—to reshape a material plane lair to reflect their home planes. In this way, we give this group of five dragons a unique shared trait beyond "they're all from the outer planes," in a way that doesn't make a potential future category of other planar dragons from existing. We'd just need to figure out a different theme or niche other than "dragons who come to the Material Plane to colonize" is all.

The fact that this gives GMs one more vector to include other-planar elements in Material Plane adventures without resorting to the old trope of "a wizard conjured things" is icing on the cake.

Pictured below are three of the five planar dragons. You'll need to wait for the book's release to check out the havoc and infernal dragons, of course!

Illustrations by Leesha Hannigan

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Blights of Bestiary 6

Thursday, March 30, 2017

So here's a secret about the text we create for the back cover of our books and the blurbs that go on our website and catalogs. They're usually done at the last minute by a developer who's been working on the product possibly for many months. In my case, that means I get a chance, finally, to play around with some writing of my own, even if it's only for a few paragraphs. When I wrote the blurb for Bestiary 6, I mentioned something called "strangely sentient oozes," because of the new category of ooze I came up with to include in the book. I didn't want to reveal their name or theme yet (that's for this blog post... read on for more!), but I did want to mention them in some way that felt nice to read and fun to write. And so I came up with the phrase "strangely sentient oozes," because I enjoyed the sound of the phrase; its consonance makes you hiss when you read it, which evokes in the mind (in theory) imagery of something slithering and sliding sloppily in subterranean sloughs or sepulchral sewers. See? I wasn't trying to give folks hints as to a new system of calculating intelligence for ooze monsters or trying to make folks deduce the nature of how a primordial ooze might become self-aware. It wasn't a clue as much as it was an attempt at lyricism.

But it was certainly a blast seeing folks try to figure out clues anyway!

So, the time is here to reveal a little more about these strangely sentient oozes. They comprise a new category of ooze called a blight. This is a subtype of ooze, all of which are very intelligent (the dumbest one in the group has an Int of 15), all of which are quite powerful (the CR scores range from CR 13 to CR 19—I can't see any blights coming in future products that are CR 12 or lower, but there's absolutely room for blights above CR 19!), and all of which are linked to a remote, wilderness terrain.

Blights themselves were created eons ago by serpentfolk druids who worshiped the raw savagery of nature, and when they discovered a way to infuse the terrain itself with malevolence and sentience to recruit the land as yet another minion against their enemies, the first blights were born. But when they performed the ritual, it backfired... not only did the land liquefy and awaken, but so did their culture and the druids themselves. These druids, their sacred grounds, and the surrounding terrain transformed into a protoplasmic monstrosity that viewed all civilization (yes, including serpentfolk civilization) as the enemy. The first blight split itself apart into countless blots of slimy hatred and infested several different regions. The nature of those regions further shaped and forged these first blights' powers. The least powerful of them settled in the relatively lifeless deserts, where they developed powers of drawing moisture out of surrounding life and cursing their domains with extreme temperatures. The most powerful seeped into the deep caverns in the heart of the serpentfolk domain, absorbing radioactive ores and developing the power to petrify at a touch. Others settled in forests or mountains, sewers or swamps, and even in the frozen tundra. All possess spell-like abilities, a favored terrain, the ability to curse that terrain, and a tendency to rejuvenate if you don't uncurse their realm after defeating them. Blights are also tailor-made to serve as "boss" monsters for wilderness-themed adventures, for while they detest other creatures that have intellects, they understand that such creatures make great agents and soldiers in their campaigns against civilization. That they save their agents for last in their murderous plans is an uncomfortable truth that all who serve blights eventually learn.

Although there's seven blights in all, I'm only gonna show off three of them, but that should be enough to get an idea of their shared physical traits and themes!

Illustrations by Damien Mammoliti and Andrew Hou

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Demigods of Bestiary 6

Thursday, March 23, 2017

With the reveal of Pathfinder RPG: Bestiary 6's fiendishly ferocious cover last week, the time is finally right to start looking INSIDE of this book... or should I say the STARS are right? Because yes indeed we've got three more of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones appearing in this book. In fact, one of the recurring themes you'll notice right away (it's right there on the cover) is that we're including more statistics for demigods in Bestiary 6 than any other bestiary we've done. Now, obviously a stat block for a creature of CR 26 to CR 30 in power isn't going to be useful for every game, but that's not the only way to use a demigod in your game. These are foes not only intended to be the end bosses for full-on mythic campaigns, but movers and shakers for multiple campaigns. Demigods work best when they're NOT just stacks of hit points for your players to deplete... but printing statistics for them helps to quantify in a player's mind just how powerful they really are. In addition, each demigod entry is fully supported with rules for how their worshipers function, including information on cleric domains, subdomains, and favored weapons. We've also added a new appendix to this bestiary at the very end that reprints several domains and subdomains that have never before been printed in the RPG line, making it easier than ever to play a character who wants to use powers from the Scalykind domain or the Revelry subdomain, for example.

But enough about that. The point of this blog (and the next several to come over the following weeks) is to show off some art!

In Bestiary 6, we've got 4 categories of demigod represented—archdevils, empyreal lords, Great Old Ones, and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. We've also got representation from the next tier down—so called "quasi deities" like qlippoth lords or the verdant Green Man. I've chosen three of these to illustrate below, focusing on new illustrations for each: the archdevil Baalzebul, the aforementioned Green Man (of which there are multiples—some neutral, some good, and some evil), and Tawil at'Umr.

Illustrations by William Liu, David Melvin, and Will O'Brien

Actually, that last one's a somewhat unusual case. As an avatar of Yog-Sothoth, Tawil at'Umr has never really been quantified as a Great Old One before, but the Lovecraft mythos are nothing if not mutable and accommodating. And rather than invent a brand new category of demigod, I decided that this eldritch master of time and space would work best in the Great Old One category. He (she? they?) certainly fits into the category, rules-wise, with the ability to kill you in your dreams only to immediately reincarnate you into a new body on another world, or the power to hurl those who gaze upon its true form into their own permanent microcosms. Tawil at'Umr was first introduced to the world in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price. In the story, the entity is referred to as 'Umr at-Tawil, but in Bestiary 6 I decided to shift the name around a little to match Chaosium's preferred (and more grammatically correct when one interprets the name as being inspired by the Arabic language) version used in their Call of Cthulhu RPG, but just like all of these mythos monstrosities, changes to names or roles in world likely won't matter if your character decides to throw down against them. Tawil at'Umr is probably the toughest monster in the book, and in fact, might be the toughest monster we've ever statted up in a bestiary. He's "only" CR 30, but as an avatar of Yog-Sothoth, killing it isn't gonna stop it. From the Great Old One's Immortality entry in it's stat block:

"If Tawil at'Umr is killed, Yog-Sothoth can create a new avatar immediately. The replacement Tawil at'Umr typically does not reappear where it was killed, and it usually does not seek revenge against those who slew its predecessor. Usually."

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Keep One Eye Open, There's Monsters Out There!

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

In a few weeks time, a new tome of monsters begins making its way to game and book stores, and into the hands of GMs! Until then, take a look at the amazingly wicked cover illustrated by Wayne Reynolds for Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 6 and stay tuned for previews, starting next week!

Chris Lambertz
Community & Digital Content Director

Onward To Adventure!

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

February has the tendency to sneak up on you when you least expect it, and fly right by! This first month-and-a-bit of 2017 has been chock full of exciting projects and new announcements, including our latest Humble Bundle initiative in partnership with Dynamite and our lineup of Starfinder products launching at Gen Con 2017. Since it's been a minute (or two... possibly three) since we've given folks an update on our product schedule, let's take a look at what the next few months have in store.

The next Pathfinder Adventure Path kicks off in just a few weeks with the first two volumes of the Ironfang Invasion—Pathfinder Adventure Path #115: Trail of the Hunted and Pathfinder Adventure Path #116: Fangs of War. The Ironfang Invasion Adventure Path calls back to classic adventures, focusing on exploring the unknown and confronting the fantastic, all to stop a monstrous enemy from wiping out the good people of Nirmathas and Molthune. The PCs will delve into dungeons, siege well-guarded keeps, explore the wilderness, and battle some of the most iconic creatures from the 40-year history of fantasy RPGs.

Speaking of "iconic creatures", how many of you are excited for even more monsters? This April, pick up Bestiary 6! This sixth monstrous-tome for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game includes over 200 monsters like archdevils, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, play-character-suitable races, and even the creepy and horrific Krampus himself. While previews for Bestiary 6 are still a few weeks away, I snuck some artwork out for you to feast your eyes upon...

Illustrations by William Liu, Jorge Fares, Jim Pavelec, and Roberto Pitturru

But there are more options for your Pathfinder campaign rolling through! For me, summer means backpacking and in the months leading up to it, geeking out over the latest gear. What better than to prep your next character or tailor your next campaign with with the Adventurer's Guide releasing this May? And, if you're trying to cut gear weight like me, we just announced that both the GameMastery Guide and Advanced Player's Guide will be available in the travel-friendly Pocket Edition format.

To recap, here's the lineup of Pathfinder products releasing March:

• Pathfinder Adventure Path #115: Trail of the Hunted
• Pathfinder Adventure Path #116: Fangs of War
• Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—Mummy's Mask Adventure Deck #6
• Pathfinder Player Companion: Monster Hunter's Handbook
• Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Forbidden Jungle
• Pathfinder Society Scenario #8-16: House of Harmonious Wisdom
• Pathfinder Society Scenario #8-17: Refugees of the Weary Sky
• Pathfinder Legends—Curse of the Crimson Throne #3: Escape from Old Korvosa

August 2017

If you're heading to Gen Con later this summer, you can expect a full compliment of Pathfinder and Starfinder excitement! To get more details about the Starfinder products in this list, you'll want to read James L. Sutter's blog about their announcement. And of course, since this is months in the future, titles are subject to possibly shifting (or being added) to this list.

• Pathfinder Adventure Path #121: The Lost Outpost, the first volume in the Ruins of Azlant Adventure Path
• Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Magus Class Deck
• Pathfinder Player Companion: Elemental Master's Handbook
• Pathfinder Map Pack: Village Sites
• Starfinder Core Rulebook
• Starfinder Adventure Path #1: Incident at Absalom Station
• Starfinder GM Screen
• Starfinder Player Character Folio
• Starfinder Core Pawn Collection (and Base Assortment)
• Starfinder Flip-Mat: Basic Starfield
• Starfinder Flip-Mat: Basic Terrain

As we begin the slow-roll into a jam-packed convention season, more announcements are sure to come! Keep your eyes out, and until next time!

Chris Lambertz
Community & Digital Content Director

That Notorious Haunter of the Holidays

Friday, December 23, 2016

Illustration by David Melvin

Krampus has nabbed the Publisher Preview! Stay tuned for updates on miniatures and more after the holidays!