Same question as subject. Wanting to use Whippoorwills heavily in a Pharasma-focused campaign.
Awesome! I would have never thought to use that. Truth be told, I plan to use the stats in my villain(s') schemes to essentially piss Pharasma off and get her to let her guard down (or more so direct her servants in a manner advantageous to the villain/villains) by conjuring up undead whippoorwills, werewhippoorwills, and other such mockeries.
Edit: Darn, having a problem I've had before; Thrushes are dimunative, and lycanthropes can only be creatures 1 size category away from the base creature. Any way around this?
I may very well start a new thread for this question, but I'd prefer to see if it can be answered here, (my bad if it's a bad call) but is there any simple method to turn a creature into some sort of trinket with which to utilise its special abilities mobilely? I've already got a calendar setup to chart the full moons, but I want an unwilling lycanthrope in hybrid form much earlier on, and the best thing I can come up with is a Moon Giant's waxing Lunar Aura, but given off by the Moon Giant in a small, pocket-size form.
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No worries. One of the common assumptions is that a GM needs permission to tweak the rules in order to make a cool adventure. If you want to have humans who can turn into fiendish were-thrushes, that should be a lot of fun. If you want it to be involuntary, just call it a curse instead of a disease, and suddenly the phenomenon has a much more sinister and unpredictable feel. Perhaps the full moon triggers transformation not because of lycanthropy but because that is when Groetus's influence is at its strongest.
As for the trinket, you might look at the hosteling armor property. I recall there is also a spell that allows one to transform his animal companion into a trinket.
Anywho, as the GM, feel empowered to make these fun tweaks to common templates, and spin it all into a fun story!
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Since Golarion has ties to the Lovecraft Mythos, here's a little whippoorwill weirdness for you: http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Whippoorwills
Oh ok! Templates kind of are weird, since templates aren't automatically PC friendly, so for the most part templates are designed for GM use, so I just figured they should be used as written, and shied away from bending rules, at least where templates were concerned.
I won't deny, those spells are pretty sweet, though they don't really get close to the effect I'm going for, but the spell True Form does, BUT only the variant in the Mythic Adventures book, so I'm unsure what upgrade it's received, and how that limits what sort of character can cast it.
Uh, are you asking as the GM or as a player?
Because it's looking like that's an important detail.
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I'm the GM in this campaign. Sorry if I didn't clarify. Most templates don't look like players should really have access to them or how they work (besides being informed by the GM when they acquire them) but the one size category thing for the lycanthrope template def seems hand-waveable by the GM.
Idk about the Mythic version of True Form necessarily.
My campaign has 2 main layers: 1 is going after an artifact I initially dubbed the "Papyrus Finalis", a page from Pharasma's records, initially conceived as an in-game Death Note reference, but what with her having psychopomp scribes and Sun Wukong actually ascending to godhood via manipulating his own entry in her recordbook, I've begun to take it far more seriously than a Death Note reference, so a villainous scheme is underway to essentially manipulate Pharasma's patience (via increasing the number of undead in the region, to outright mocking her using things like her sacred animal for examples SUCH as undead whippoorwills and werewhippoorwills) so that her servants and psychopomps and such will be tasked with dealing with the living & un-living blasphemies, giving the schemers the opportunity to find the location of the page and seize it for themselves to use it LIKE a death note, perhaps even to kill the unkillable like a god even, or to bring someone back, or exempt someone from death.
The 2nd is to satisfy my Godzilla-fanatic friend who's playing, and since my little brother is playing a Jiang-shi dhampir from Tian Xia who unknowingly swears fealty to one individual who is orchestrating the first part, I felt having a kaiju appear near the end would be satisfying. The final encounter will very likely be "Lunar Mogaru", an evil group project to create an appropriate deterrent to opposition against one party's rule/a nihilistic death weapon. (And of course a reference to Space Godzilla lol) So I was considering playing around with lycanthropes as it was, but finding a plausible way to curse said friend into being a werekaiju was a satisfying endeavor, but due to the size category issue, and a bigger than usual theme of food & eating (one player is a Kuru who intends to eat his allies when he's able, the dhampir has a stockpile of fortune cookies I intend to trigger geas onto the party and pass along cryptic messages, and one segment of the campaign will be based on the "you are what you eat" concept by having the party order exotic foodstuffs and throughout the meal be polymorphed into the main components of their orders) AND the final encounter will be a CR ~28 kaiju, since the Godzilla fan is playing a squole, I offered him a quirk that will allow his character to ingest other oozes to take on a quality or so and work towards going up a size category or so if enough oozes are eaten, so werekaiju becomes... remotely possible.
So sorry for length, getting excited xD but I'd always intended on playing with lycanthropes, so some ideas were werewhispoorwill, wereowlbear, werekaiju, and one background ally is blessed (or cursed in his opinion) to be a Foo Lycanthrope, and if werekaiju can't be feasibly done, the Godzilla fan DID stubbornly want to be a squole and a naga simultaneously, but FINALLY settled with being a druid archetype that gives him serpentine qualities, I may settle with turning him into a weresnake of some sort.
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Awesome! I would have never thought to use that. Truth be told, I plan to use the stats in my villain(s') schemes to essentially piss Pharasma off and get her to let her guard down (or more so direct her servants in a manner advantageous to the villain/villains) by conjuring up undead whippoorwills, werewhippoorwills, and other such mockeries.
You know what would be really scary? ...a SWARM of undead whippoorwills! :)
(Also a great way to piss Pharasma off..)
Lol Definitely the plan. Hmm, wonder how I could literally do a swarm of zombie whippoorwills. Or what else could get the job done?
Songbirds in myths are pretty common, people transforming or being trapped as them.
One idea you could use is having these corrupted whippoorwills being used to control/boost undead. For example, you could have a set up being that whippoorwills are very common in an area, and it's been eerily silent at night recently. Then, when a PC is on watch, tell them they can hear one singing in the distance, have them make a Knowledge (Nature) check, then give them info that makes it seem creepy and off (the check determining not whether they know something's off, but how much detail). Then suddenly they're attacked by undead, but the whippoorwill's song is bolstering them to be immune to turning and more effective.
I'd look at different variants too, having the whippoorwill's basically being Bard's and using their song against the players, or casting certain effects like Bane.
Make the players fear the whippoorwill song!
Oh, that's pretty clever, thanks, I might just use that. What other ways to make them warped in obviously horrific or satirical manner?
OH! Maybe I could have a computer or my phone to play whippoorwill calls, and maybe even edit a clip of their songs to sound more like a lycanthropic whippoorwill song lol
Actually, that's kind of perfect, the bulk of the werewhippoorwills coukd be able to cast Song of Discord once per day, and one of my PC's mother has a recognizable lullaby she used to sing to the character during their time as slaves together, so one unique werewhippoorwill will have a song that is identical to the lullaby, and affects that PC the most and puts her to sleep.
Also, since the final boss is a variant of Mogaru, it would likely be susceptible to song, so the 'main' villain would have use for said mother as she would be a high level bard, what he needs to keep the kaiju under his control.