| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Backstory: In the palace of a mermaid queen deep beneath the sea, a usurper leads a coup against her. She and her minions invade the palace, kill the queen, and then begin to hunt down and massacre her family.
Conveniently, the queen's very young daughter (probably 5-7 years old) is away from that palace at this time. Her caretakers (who are assumed to be retired NPC adventurers of the lowest level possible to do what is needed) spirit her away and resort to magical means to disguise her so that the usurper cannot find her or, failing that, recognize her.
The items I have thought of so far for this purpose are an Elixir of Two Worlds (which replaces the merfolk tail with human-like legs) and an Elixir of Sex Shifting (which turns the princess into a male). After feeding those elixirs to her, they leave her on a beach near a human settlement, where she grows up with dim memories of these events and can be restored to what she was by the same means she was turned into a land-dwelling male.
Anyway, I am wondering whether any other magic could be applied to this princess to make it even less likely that she will be discovered. With the items already proposed, she is still a merfolk, albeit one who can't swim or breathe water -- and when she grows up, she would be freakishly tall by human standards, as the height of a male merfolk is 5'10" + 2d10 additional inches (although that development could be one of her motivations to become an adventurer). I would prefer not to resort to Wish, Miracle, or similarly powerful magic if possible.
Any ideas?
Obviously, you need something related to preventing her being discovered via divination magic.
So our young man must have a strange family heirloom, likely in the form of a necklace of shells or some such, which functions as an amulet of proof against detection and location.
Bonus points if it has some other function attached to it that prevents the wearer removing it, such as them losing the ability to breathe air if they take it off.
Good idea. My only reservation is that it leaves a 1st level character with a valuable magic item -- but it is one that this character literally could not live without.
A magic item which does a constant alter self might work as well or better than elixirs. A ring which has been on her hand for a decade could be very difficult to remove.
The elixirs that I named in my initial post have permanent effects that can be reversed only by a second instance of the item in question or by 9th level spells.
The sheer difficulty of scrying for somebody with whom you have no connection and selection of a particular class (vigilante) could make it next to impossible to locate the transformed mermaid by scrying -- especially if she/he stays in vigilante form nearly all of the time and no land dweller who sees the "social" form knows enough to be able to tell the usurper anything useful.
Is there any item in Pathfinder that is equivalent to Starfinder's Serum of Appearance Change? Such an item would provide the finishing touch's to the disguise if it were available. Unfortunately, Starfinder rules for gear lack the construction requirements that would point me to any spells or magic items that do what is needed even if they are called something entirely different.
Finally, we need to remember that anything used has to have been in effect since this person was a small child, so a certain degree of childproofing is needed.