Theriocephalus's page

I had a question about sphinxes -- the 2 ed Bestiary lists them as sphinxes, simply, without the gyno/andro split from 1st ed and for that matter without the "x, y and z varieties are rumored to exist" teaser other monsters get to, I assume, leave the door open for including future variants or one that didn't make the first cut. My question is, then, whether the male/female sphinx division has been discarded or not -- and if it has, how likely are we to see female criosphinxes and hieracosphinxes in the future?

As a shameless Classical mythology nerd who's always been bothered by nymphs being treated as their own species and a separate thing from dryads, naiads and so on, I am very happy about "nymph" being retooled as a general category for nymph types. If I'm reading this right, the nymph queens here would take the place of 1st edition's nymphs? If so, that seems like a very nice way of retconning the potential canon conflicts that would arise from nymph characters grandfathered in from 1st ed material.

I'm very curious to see what, if anything, is planned about oreads... and of course this opens the door to creating more subtypes based on different sorts of mythological nymphs -- nereids, lampads, alseids and all the rest. There's certainly no shortage.

(Honestly, the nymph-as-its-own-distinct-species thing always seemed to me to be like saying that, well, you've got chromatic dragons, and then you've got red dragons, and that these are distinct and separate, if somewhat similar, species.)

I do not know if this has been asked before, but there's something that's been bugging me for a bit now. Back when Bestiary 6 came out, you described choosing to include only five planar dragons in the book (as opposed to one per outer plane) to keep the number of dragons in each sept stable. Likewise, they were described as having been characterized as dragons that come to the material plane and establish little colonies there to give them a personality beyond just dragons from the outer planes and to leave the door open for a possible future sept of planar dragons that do something else.

In the last few adventure paths, a number of new extraplanar dragons have been released that seem to fit the Bestiary 6 dragons' niches for the neutral planes -- i.e., they're all geared around establishing little pockets of their homes on the material plane. Was this a deliberate choice to abandon the older plans for a second sept of planar dragons?