What's with Proteans

[Shaun]

So, the newest AP has a new protean and... it looks like a dragon-snake with two arms... just like almost every other protean.

I've noticed that most proteans really resemble each other, yet they're supposed to be some of the most chaotic creatures in the multiverse. Why would such chaotic creatures deviate less from their form than lawful creatures like devils or archons?

I'm seriously interested in the reason that this design choice is being made.

[Todd Stewart]

It's difficult to portray creatures who perpetually shift colors and various superficial details in static art, and their internal anatomy is more fluid than anything else. On some level the proteans are an homage to the slaadi (who had a paradoxical regularity), but they also express chaos in far more than form. The keketar choruses in their infinite number have unique philosophies and even mutually exclusive and conflicting ones (there's an intentional immune system allusion going on there as well). Plus they can all change form through various levels of polymorph (or mimicry in the azuretzis' case).

Typing from my phone, but trying to explain as best I can what I've worked on (which admittedly is most of their fluff). I tried to emphasize the seriously alien nature of their society and their mindset beyond the 'act silly or eat you' that the slaadi tended to default to.

The proteans' serpentine forms play on a lot of myth and fiction showing serpents as progenitor races long vanished, and in my case the Egyptian hebdomad of hermopolis creation mythos in which a group of elder creator gods created the world from primal chaos: the males were frogs, the females serpents. Slaadi and protean. As far as poetic little allusions go, I thought it rather appropriate.

Also keep in mind that surely deeper in the maelstrom, it gets weirder and the types of proteans more so. The major protean castes have been described as the Maelstrom's reaction to the stable planes like a living thing reacting to a foreign body or infection. So assume perhaps any implied uniformity an artifact of the sampling and an artifact of that provoked reaction forming those programs we see more of.

[Bob Bob Bob]

I think that paradoxical regularity is perfect for the embodiments of chaos. As the theory about the Slaad went, the chaotic neutral plane decided that the answer to every question was "giant frog". What's for dinner? Giant frog. How do you enter a house? Giant frog. Where can I find a sword? Giant frog. Who lives here? Giant frog.

So in terms of Pathfinder, one day Maelstrom woke up and felt like "TROGDOR!" And the rest of the plane just rolled with it.

[Pixie, the Leng Queen]

lulz. I actually like that xD.

Honestly, I feel like the Proteans need more love... Having more Chaos vs Lawful stuff would be awesome lol. Having Asmodeus and that one LG paladin god (I am completely spacing her name...) pairing up would be HILARIOUS.

Or of course you can do the opposite quite well. Chaos working together to stop the horde of uniformity and conformity (think Shivering Isles from Elder Scrolls Oblivion).

[Cerberus Seven]

To follow up on what Todd said, Protean is also the only language in the multiverse that regularly changes how the entire thing is spoken. And I don't mean new dialects or words are added, no I mean the entire tongue itself mutates at entirely random intervals. Proteans don't try to learn this new language, either; they simply know how it's now spoken. Hell, they probably don't think it ever changed. From a certain standpoint, they're right too, as there is no prior dialect to reference. Nothing from then, just as there will be no current dialect to look at some point in the future when Protean has changed anywhere from five to twenty million times.

If THAT doesn't embody chaos, I don't know what does.

[Ethereal Gears]

It's been a consistently remarked-upon fact within my home group that it feels very odd that proteans, the embodiment of pure chaos, have such an unattractively quotidian and samey creature design. I have to admit I don't find Todd Stewart's description of the reasons for this very appealing, from an aesthetic viewpoint. Basically, I don't care if there's a well-thought-out back-story justification for chaos monsters looking dull if the end result is still, well, chaos monsters looking dull.

In my opinion it would have been far more satisfying to make each protean an almost completely unique creature, with only one or two symbolic traits in common between them. Instead, what we get is "this is a blue snake with arms" and "this is a green snake with arms", essentially. As a big fan of Chaos as a fantasy concept, as well as of Lovecraftian horror, surrealism and psychedelia in art and all manner of things which I could've hoped would've been drawn upon as inspiration for the iconic chaotic outsiders, I find the execution of the protean race woefully unexciting and visually quite frankly just plain ugly and boring.

Cheers,
- Gears

[Mechagamera]

It seems that something like the hordling tables of old might work:

There are a couple of baseline protean types (with set armor, SLA's, resistances for the level of the protean), and you roll on tables B-E for body types, physical attacks, etc.

[Umbral Reaver]

I think it might be due to the classicaly mythological association of Chaos with serpents. A lot of Indo-European religions have serpent or draconic imagery used to represent 'void' or 'formlessness'.

[Ethereal Gears]

I'm not averse, personally, to the basic serpent theme, and I enjoy its mythological associations as well. I just think it could've have been, design-wise, executed with far more daring and imagination.

[Dragon78]

True, were are the Proteans with two or more heads, extra arms, extra tails, scorpion tail, crab claws, octopus tentacles, fur or feathered bodies, one bat wing and one feathered wing, extra eyes, snakes along there head and back, extra eyes, one eye, eyes covering there body, spikes, quills, or thorns, etc.

[Purple Duck Games]

More proteans by Todd Stewart can be found:

Amalgessi Protean
Karygessos Protean
Leuserris Protean

And a protean pantheon as the bottom of this page

[Todd Stewart]

I'll also add that I made several new proteans in the Hell's Rebels AP, and there was one created by Thurston Hillman in the Giantslayer AP (which partially broke from the serpentine form of the other classical proteans in that only its lower body was serpentine and the rest was more up to chance or who summoned it).