Due to its origins as spinoff of Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder's earlier years contained a number of creatures drawn from its bestiaries under the Open Gaming Liscence. Over the years many of these creatures were renamed to further distinguish Pathfinder as its own game, and with the OGL dropped entirely in favor of the Open RPG Creative License in 2023, many were retconned out of Pathfinder canon entirely.
This page documents those creatures that have not made the jump to the ORC. Those that have can be found can be found on the appropriate creature pages, and can be referenced in the folder below.
OGL - ORC
- Ancestries
- Aasimar -> Empyrean Nephilim
- Duergar -> Hryngar
- Gnoll -> Kholo
- Grippli
- Kenku -> Tengu
- Kobold
- Locathah -> Athamaru
- Svirfneblin -> Drathnelar
- Tiefling -> Cambion Nephilim
- Monsters
- Petitioner -> Shade
- Animals
- Ankheg -> Ankhrav
- Purple Worm -> Cave Worm
- Elementals
- Invisible Stalker -> Phade
- Mephits -> Elemental Scamps
- Tojanida -> Tantriog
- [[Pathfinder Ethereal Ethereal]
- Xill -> Zecui
- [[Pathfinder Fiends Fiends]
- Barbazu (Bearded Devil) -> Vordine (Infantry Devil)
- Dretch -> Pusk (Sloth Demon)
- Kyton (Chain Devil) -> Evangelist Velstrac
- Lemure -> Ort (Drudge Devil)
- Pit Fiend -> Nessari (Tyrant Devil)
- Spirits
- Rakshasa
- Undead
- Nightshades -> Darvakka
OGL Creatures
Aboleth (Alghollthu Master)
Level: 7
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Size: Large
Over the course of Pathfinder's first edition, the aboleth were fleshed out into a piscine empire with numerous subspecies and renamed the alghollthu. With the transition to the ORC, the alghollthu continued but the individual creature based on the aboleth did not.
- Non-Indicative Name: Alghollthu masters are actually the common folk of their species; they use this word because they see themselves as masters of all others.
Adherer
Type: Humanoid
Level: 3
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Size: Medium
- Eaten Alive: Adherers digest food unusually slowly, and can feed on a single creature for days or even weeks, taking only one or two bites a day and forcing their living captives to endure a hellish, drawn-out death.
- Was Once a Man: Though once human, adherers have been transformed by hideous processes on the Ethereal Plane and forgotten all traces of humanity.
Allip
Type: Undead
Level: 3
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Medium
Undead created by those who kill themselves out of madness.
- Dem Bones: They look like ghostly skeletons wrapped in shadows.
- Driven to Suicide: What creates them, specifically when the cause is insanity or other madness.
- Mind-Control Music: They constantly babble and the sound is hypnotic to others, putting them in a trance and allowing the allip to approach before attacking.
- Mind Rape: Attempting to make contact with their minds, whether to control, communicate, or just to read their thoughts, causes Wisdom drain as their tortured minds fray the sanity of others. Their attacks do much the same thing, though with additional Wisdom damage on a critical hit.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Rather than being spectral copies of the deceased, they're warped specters whose insanity has overwhelmed their minds and altered their bodies.
- Talkative Loon: Allips constantly babble incoherently.
Ascomoid
Type: Fungus
Level: 5
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
- Festering Fungus: The bodies of ascomoids' victims become hosts to quick-growing colonies of rampant fungi. After 48 hours, their bodies are too vitally pervaded and thoroughly consumed by the fungus that they can no longer be restored to life by raise dead.
Assassin Vine
Type: Plant
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
- Animal Assassin: Tales often tell of people planting assassin vines in a flower bed or greenhouse of someone they wish to see dead.
- The Berserker: Assassin vines will attack everything they can see, regardless of size or strength.
- Man-Eating Plant: Assassin vines collect their own fertiliser by killing animals.
Aurumvorax
Type: Animal
Level: 9
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Small
Highly aggressive creatures who enjoy gnawing metal items.
- Gratuitous Latin: Their name is Latin for, roughly, "gold glutton".
- Meaningful Name: Their common name and the synonymous appellation the dwarves use for them, "golden gorgers", are dual references to their habit of chewing on metal and to their golden pelts.
- Metal Muncher: A bit of a variation. They don't eat the metal they go after, strictly speaking, but they greatly enjoy chewing on it and some speculate that they may still derive some nutrition from it.
- Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: Eight-legged mustelids, essentially.
Balor (Fire Demon)
Type: Fiend (Demon)
Level: 20-25
Size: Large
The most powerful non-unique demons, serving as rulers of their kind.
As of the Remaster, they've been replaced by vrolikai as the top dogs of demonkind.
- Big Red Devil: Balors are towering demons with horned heads, large wings, hooved feet and bright red skin.
- Blood Knight: If presented with an opportunity to join a fight, few balors choose to resist.
- Flaming Sword: Balors favor flaming whips in combat, which can strike with enough force to take a person's head off.
- A God Am I: Some balor lords view themselves as objects of worship.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Much like their D&D counterparts, their name, appearance and frequent use of flaming whips betray their inspiration from J. R. R. Tolkien balrogs.
- Monster Lord: A balor typically commands vast legions of demons.
- Playing with Fire: Most balors are closely tied to fire, and can choose to wreathe themselves in flames or to call down rains of fire from the sky. There are good reasons many know them simply as fire demons.
- Wreathed in Flames: Balors are usually wreathed in constantly burning flames that the balors can suppress at will, although they rarely do so.
Barghest
Level: 4 (normal), 7 (greater)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Medium (normal), Large (greater)
With the Remaster, this version of barghests no longer exist, as they were carried over from Dungeons and Dragons. The new barghests are based instead on the original folklore barghests the name comes from.
- Breath Weapon: Some greater barghests develop the ability to exhale clouds of toxic gas.
- Despotism Justifies the Means: Barghests' entire goal in life is basically to get more powerful, which requires eating non-evil humanoids and devouring part of their souls. Once they do this enough they become a greater barghest.
- Hellhound: Barghests are fiends from the lower planes that resemble monstrous wolf-like monsters with twisted goblin faces, which come to the material world to hunt down and devour mortal victims.
- Monster Lord: Greater barghests often seek out a goblinoid tribe to rule over.
- Monstrous Cannibalism: If multiple barghests find themselves sharing a common territory, one will typically end up killing and eating the others.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: They can take on the form of goblins (including hobgoblins and bugbears) or dog at will. Each individual barghest has only one humanoid form and one dog form. Typical barghests often hide in these forms, only taking their true forms to frighten their prey and exult in the hunt.
Basidirond
Type: Fungus
Level: 5
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
- Random Effect Spell: A basidirond's spore cloud causes random hallucinations in those who breathe it in, saddling them with different combat penalties as they attempt to respond to each nonexistent set of problems.
- Spider Swarm: One of the hallucinations caused by breathing a basidirond's spore cloud is that you're being attacked by a swarm of spiders, which then causes you to waste a turn attacking the empty ground.
Bebilith
Type: Beast, Fiend
Level: 10
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Huge
Large spidery predators from the Outer Rifts. Created by the qlippoth lord Mazmezz before she became one of the demons she so hated, they continue to prey on demons in accordance with their purpose.
- All Webbed Up: They have the web ability.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: Successful claw attacks let them peel apart a target's armor.
- Food Chain of Evil: The bebilith's favourite food is demons.
- Giant Spider: A bebilith looks like a spider the size of an elephant.
- Hunter of Monsters: Against demons.
- It Can Think: They're as smart as people despite their bestial appearance.
- Poisoned Weapons: Their bites make flesh rot and melt.
- Spell Blade: Their claws count as chaotic and magic weapons, as well as cold iron and good when attacking demons.
- Weapon of X-Slaying: A bebilith's claws are especially effective against demon flesh.
Behir
Type: Beast
Level: 8
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Huge
Behirs are many-legged, serpentine reptiles found primarily in desert hills and canyonlands. Temperamental, greedy, and self-centered, behirs attack nearly any creature that comes to their attention and bear a particular hatred for dragons.
- Ambiguously Related: One a species-wide level. Behirs are blue-scaled, lightning-spitting, horned reptiles who live in deserts and speak draconic; consequently, many scholars speculate that they're related to blue dragons somehow. This speculation is best kept quiet in the presence of either behirs or blue dragons, as neither appreciate the comparison.
- Breath Weapon: They can spit lightning.
- Fantastic Racism: Many behirs carry deep grudges against dragons and will attack them on sight.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: A behir is very territorial and bestial, and has a tendency to attack first and ask questions later.
- Underground Monkey: A variant of behirs with silvery scales, an icy breath weapon and cold resistance, known as frostcrawlers, are known to inhabit the planet Triaxus.
- Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: A reptile with twelve legs at a minimum — some have more.
Belker
Level: 7
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Size: Large
Violently xenophobic and nomadic creatures with a particular hatred for jaathooms.
Their stats can be found in Bestiary 2 or online here
.
- Absolute Xenophobe: Xenophobic in the extreme, phades see most non-elemental creatures as threats, and stalk and kill any such intruders in their territory.
- Super Smoke: A belker can switch from its normal form to one of pure smoke or back again.
Berbalang
Type: Undead
Level: 6
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Medium
Cunning but ultimately cowardly undead.
- Astral Projection: A berbalang can enter a trance that separates its spirit from its body. When separated in this way, the physical body is unconscious and helpless. If the body is slain, the spirit body immediately dies as well.
Black Pudding
Type: Ooze
Level: 7
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Huge
These oozes are the scavengers of the underworld, scouring caves for objects to dissolve with their corrosive secretions easily dissolving both organic material and metal.
- Asteroids Monster: Black puddings reproduce by budding off a smaller black pudding.
- Underground Monkey: Variants of black pudding can be found across the world: white ones in the arctic, tan ones in deserts and brown ones in swamps.
Blindheim
Type: Animal
Level: 2
Size: Small
Frog-like creatures whose gaze can emit a blinding light.
- Fantastic Light Source: Caged blindheims are sometimes used as a particularly ostentatious source of lighting.
- Glowing Eyes: Their eyes constantly emit a bright white light, but blindheims possess a retractable membrane that allows them to modulate the glow. They use this to attract prey, herd fish towards shore, and blind and disorient attackers so that they can flee.
Blink Dog
Type: Beast
Level: 2
Alignment: Lawful Good
Size: Medium
- Heroic Dog: Blink dogs are intelligent, friendly canids that often help other creatures out when needed.
- Undying Loyalty: Blink dogs are fiercely loyal, defending their own pack or friends to the death, and maintaining oaths handed down from litter.
Bodak
Type: Undead
Level: 8
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Medium
Exposure to pure, unrestrained evil is sometimes enough to kill and reanimate mortals as bodaks.
- Bald of Evil: Completely hairless after their transformation.
- Body Horror: Their transformation involves their skin withering, their eyes burning into ash, and their bones warping even as they undergo a series of seizures. Oh, and this whole process lasts 24 hours.
- Brown Note: What created a bodak. They witnessed something so indescribably evil it destroyed them body and soul.
- Dumb Muscle: Much stronger than they are smart. This trait makes them desirable minions for liches and demons, who often employ them as guards and assassins.
- Eye Beams: A particularly lethal version called a Death Gaze.
- Eye Scream: If they kill a victim but are unable to convert them into a bodak they'll gouge out the eyes and carry them as trophies.
- Handicapped Badass: The seizures they suffer as part of their transformation does permanent damage to their muscles, leaving them with a slow, plodding gait. While this means one can just walk away from a bodak if they get enough advanced warning, this doesn't make them any less lethal if they get close.
- Horror Hunger: They yearn to show others the signs they've seen through their death gaze because that's the only way they can get even a modicum of relief from their torment.
- Humanoid Abomination: The barely-recogniseable result of a person being transformed by witnessing Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.
- Mind Rape: The event that created the bodak constantly replays in their mind and those who are hit by its death gaze see snippets of it, though they don't see the whole event unless the attack kills them.
- Monster Progenitor: That pure, unrestrained evil that creates bodaks? Their death gaze is one such example, allowing them to convert others into bodaks.
- Our Zombies Are Different: A type of corporeal undead that exist primarily within the Abyss.
- Omnicidal Maniac: They hate all living creatures, though they're slightly more ambivalent to things that aren't technicaly alive like outsiders.
- Weakened by the Light: Sunlight scorches their skin and damages them every round they're exposed to it.
- Wolverine Claws: When their gaze isn't enough, they make do with the claws that tip their fingers.
Bulette
Type: Animal
Level: 7
Size: Huge
Ravenous burrowing predators created by forgotten arcanists ages ago, capable of eating flesh, bone, armor, and even magic items.
- The Berserker: Bulettes have a notorious disregard for self-preservation and will attack far larger creatures readily.
- Extreme Omnivore: They have six stomachs, each capable of processing food differently from the others, and notoriously potent stomach acids. This allows bulettes to eat and digest nearly anything, and they thus chow through flesh, armor and wood alike without distinction, eating anything that ends up near their mouths and trusting their guts to handle the rest.
- Fast Tunnelling: Bulettes can move through solid earth as swiftly as if they were swimming through the water.
- Threatening Shark: Bulettes often burrow through the earth just beneath the surface with only their dorsal fin visible, giving rise to the common appellation "landshark".
- To Serve Man: Bulettes' favourite food is halfling flesh, and halflings are advised to stay away from bulette territory.
- Underground Monkey: Distinctive variants of bulettes, each with its own characteristics, exist: among the most common are leprosy-infected ones whose attacks spread the disease, spiny bulettes whose thorny armor deals damage to those who deal them melee attacks, and the feared, demonic and actively evil xenarths.
Cave Fisher
Type: Animal
Level: 2
Size: Medium
Subterranean predators that snag prey with lines of web.
- All Webbed Up: Cave fishers can produce a sticky filament of silk to whip enemies and reel the food to them.
- Giant Enemy Crab: The cave fisher is a man-sized crab-like monstrosity.
- Truth in Television: Of a sort. While giant crab-spiders most certainly do not exist, their hunting method is essentially that of the real life bolo spider.
Choker
Type: Aberration
Level: 2
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Small
Subterranean predators who hunt the weak or isolated.
- Creepily Long Arms: A choker's arms are abnormally rubbery and long.
- Primal Stance: Chokers walk in a hunched stance due to a combination of extra long arms and limber legs.
Chromatic Dragon
What the hell kind of Fantasy RPG doesn't have evil dragons for you to slay? The really lame kind, that's what. These dark, treasure hoarding beasts are everything that Humanoids fear Dragons are: terribly powerful, massive, cruel, long-lived and intelligent.
- Chromatic Arrangement: Reds, blues, and greens are referred to as the greater chromatics, feared and respected more than the relatively simplistic blacks and whites.
- Heel–Face Turn: Rarely, a chromatic dragon will forsake its evil ways in an event dragons refer to as a "redeeming".
- Law of Chromatic Superiority: Red, unsurprisingly, is the distinctive color of the strongest variety of chromatics, and white of the weakest.
- Mascot Villain: A red dragon decorates the cover of the original Core Rulebook, with a white dragon taking its place for Second Edition Playtest. As of the Remaster that role has been taken by the infernal dragon, which is the closest of the new true dragons to looking like a red dragon.
Black Dragon
"Hatred drives them like a barbed whip, pushing them ever forward to wallow in the toils of sadism and evil."
Type: Dragon
Level: 3-19
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Tiny to Gargantuan
Vicious sociopaths, black dragons hate with a fury few other dragons bother to muster. With short tempers and cunning minds, they combine the worst parts of dragonkind into a creature that enjoys scarring bodies as much as they do shattering minds.
- Acid Attack: Their Breath Weapon is a gout of acid and older black dragons deal additional acid damage with their bite.
- Acid Pool: Older specimens can create one using their breath.
- The Beastmaster: Great wyrms can use Charm Reptiles to control all reptilian creatures in their domain, from lizards to crocodiles.
- Dark Is Evil: The cruelest of the chromatics with pitch black scales and the ability to create magical darkness.
- Fisher King: Between their habit of overhunting, their willingness to liberally douse anything around them with acid, and the fact that they stagnate water with a touch, a black dragon's swamp tends to be a terrible place to visit.
- Green Thumb: Once they're old, they get plant growth as a spell-like ability.
- Horns of Villainy: Like most dragons they have horns, but some of them take it a step further than most by breaking their own horns and cause them to heal incorrectly into jagged angles and jutting shards, solely for the sake of looking more intimidating.
- It Amused Me: When a black dragons slaughters a village, tortures someone for days, or eats a baby, this is almost always their motivation.
- My Death Is Only The Beginning: The sadism of a black dragon does not end with their death and most who manage to slay one find themselves beset by all manner of contingency plans.
- No-Sell: Immune to acid in addition to typical draconic immunities.
- Pest Controller: At ancient age, they get insect plague as a spell like ability.
- Poisonous Person: Once they become adults, they gain the ability to stagnate water with a touch.
- Sadist: Black dragons tend to be highly sadistic, and take immense pleasure from capturing humanoid prisoners, imprisoning them in their lairs and subjecting them to whichever torments they can devise; they are particularly fond of inflicting disfiguring scars and injuries on their victims, especially those who are particularly beautiful.
- Scars Are Forever: The scars their acid leaves are permeant, defying most healing magic.
- Self-Harm: That practice of breaking their own horns mentioned above? Explicitly mentioned to hurt a lot.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: All black dragons older than young can speak with reptiles.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: All black dragons can breathe water.
- Swamps Are Evil: These vicious, aggressive and foul-tempered dragons prefer to make their home is swamps. A joke among dracologists is that they live in swamps because no other terrain would take them, though woe be the one who repeats that joke to a black dragon.
- Torture Technician: Of all the chromatic dragons, black dragons tend to be the most fond of Cold-Blooded Torture. Various uses of their acidic breath and saliva are a recurring theme, but water torture of different sorts is also a favorite.
- To Serve Man: They prefer meals that can beg for mercy, because of course they do given the rest of their tropes.
Blue Dragon
"You will most likely never meet the blue dragon manipulating your lives."
Type: Dragon
Level: 5-21
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Size: Small to Colossal
The masterminds of the chromatic dragons, controlling networks of spies, operatives, and sometimes entire countries from behind the scenes. They're driven by a need for control, both over others through their manipulations and themselves through strict personal discipline.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: They are quite a bit more aesthetically pleasing than the Dungeons & Dragons version. due to their electric blue and gold coloring, and their more sleek an elegant shape.
- Affably Evil: They certainly are the most talkative of the Chromatics, even if only for the sake of giving a Hannibal Lecture.
- Deadly Dust Storm: Great wyrms can create sandstorms at will, great to cover up an escape or an attack.
- Eat Dirt, Cheap: Blues can obtain a small amount of nutrition from minerals in rocks, and when particularly starved they will swim through areas of nutrient-rich sand and allow grains to filters through their teeth.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Blue dragons are responsible for more half-dragons and dragon-blooded beings than all other true dragons combined, although they often do this by magically altering other creatures rather than traditional mating.
- Man Behind the Man: Their modus operandi. They're perfectly content ruling for centuries without their names ever being known, allowing them to pull all sorts of strings without being hindered by their ego.
- Master of Illusion: Fitting given their love of manipulation. Old blue dragons can create illusionary duplicates of themselves, and all their spell-like abilities they get with age are from the illusion school.
- Meat Versus Veggies: Firmly on the side of meat. They refuse to eat plants under any circumstances, considering it the food of cattle and lesser beasts.
- Pragmatic Villainy: They're all too happy to simply wait for their antagonists to die of old age, taking the minimum of effort to keep such pests from disrupting their plans in the meantime.
- Orcus on His Throne: Under no circumstances does a blue dragon simply set out to do things themselves after being failed by their underlings. Even those who actively hunt them down don't warrant personal attention.
- Sand Worm: They habitually swim through the desert sands, both to avoid notice and for relaxation. Their sleek, streamlined shapes and smooth, tightly layered scales help them move through this dense medium. In turn, these sand swims ensure that the profusions of hornlets, bony growths, spurs and ridges that most dragons grow as they age don't break up the profiles of the blues, as such outgrowths are quickly ground away by friction with the sand.
- Shock and Awe: Their Breath Weapon is a line of electricity, and ancient and powerful blue dragons can use it to generate full-out storms. In addition, adult and older blue dragons are surrounded by an electrified aura that damages those close to them.
- The Social Expert: A requisite when one manages hundreds of operatives over the course of centuries.
- The Spymaster: Blues often control extensive webs of contacts, spies and agents that they use to keep tabs on and direct the affairs of other species' cultures without revealing themselves to either the humanoids they manipulate or to other dragons.
- The Stoic: Taciturn and joyless, even by the standards of chromatics.
- Thirsty Desert: Their typical habitat. In addition, they can dry out liquids within a certain range, including potions.
- Troll: They very much prefer mind-games and manipulation to brute force.
- Tunnel King: Blues are capable of burrowing through sand and soil, an ability which shapes their lairs, plans, and general behavior.
- Villainous Virtues: Blues strive for discipline and self-control in all situations, though their lack of instinctual predilection it means they have a tendency to snap from the tension every few centuries. They're also suprisingly humble, happy to go without recognition from their unwitting subjects their whole lives.
- Voice Changeling: Almost from birth, blue dragons can perfectly mimic voices and sounds.
Green Dragon
"Greens are obsessed with perfecting their minds and bodies, and exceed even the learned bronzes in scholarship and study."
Type: Dragon
Level: 4-20
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Size: Small to Colossal
Green dragons seek mastery over everything, including their own minds and base desires. This makes them the most intellectual chromatics, focused on improving their minds through research and scholarship. But despite their more reasonable temperaments, they are still dragons and remain as capable of cruelty as the most vicious red if properly motivated.
- Acid Attack: In 1st Edition, their Breath Weapon is a cone of acidic vapor and ancient green dragons can create clouds of corrosive gas. 2nd Edition swaps this out for poison instead.
- The Archmage: Those who specialize in magical research will often uncover powerful magic secrets that augment their already potent arcane power. That said, a centuries old green may fall behind a decades old human wizards in pure spell power, as their research tends to lack in immediate practical application.
- Badass Bookworm: Greens may be the most intellectual of dragons, but they are still dragons. On top of that, their drive for self improvement also extends to their bodies and most perform rigorous exercise every day to stay in peak physical condition.
- Berserk Button: Misattributing a green's work, or worse, taking credit for it. This goes double if the culprit is a lesser species like a human, and even greens who've never heard of the slighted dragon will take great offense on their behalf.
- Challenge Seeker: As a lack of challenge can mean stagnation, greens tend to seek out difficult tasks. These can range from frustrating social interactions to semi-dangerous fights, so long as it's not something that can be bested easily.
- Chameleon Camouflage: Old and older green dragons can hide in any natural terrain just by standing still, even without cover or concealment. The fact that this works equally well in deserts and caves despite the vast difference in coloration indicates they can actually change color biologically, as the ability is non-magical in nature.
- Deadly Gas: Their breath weapons consist of a cloud of deadly gas — acidic in 1st edition, toxic in 2nd.
- Enchanted Forest: Their preferred habitat are vast, primal forests where the trees tower over even their own sizable forms, and actively cultivate their home woodlands to turn them into this.
- Fisher King: A forest in a green dragon's territory tends to be in better condition that nearby woodlands, as they view the condition of their domain as a reflection of themselves.
- Friendly Enemy: So long as there isn't a specific reason for enmity, they get along quite well with bronzes due to their respect for fellow scholars.
- Genius Bruiser: No less physically dangerous than any other dragon, greens are naturally gifted at mathematics. They typically leverage this gift towards magical theory, astronomy, planar research, and other advanced subjects.
- Green Thumb: Green dragons develop a number of ways to manipulate plant life as they mature, such as the ability to hasten plant growth or to animate and control trees.
- Heel–Face Turn: More greens abandon their evil ways than all other chromatics combined. That said, few actually go all the way to Good, settling instead into some strain of Neutral.
- Horns of Villainy: A large rhino-like horn on their nose. This actually becomes a problem as they grow older and the horn begins to create a blind spot, so many carve or otherwise shape it to be less obtrusive.
- Kiss-Kiss-Slap: Their competitive natures mean most reproductive trysts end in violence when one points out a flaw in the other.
- Mook Maker: They can temporarily animate trees as treants to serve as minions.
- Noble Demon: Compared to other evil dragons, green dragons at least have a sense of honor, and they are noted to be more open to diplomacy than the other kinds of chromatic dragons. They're also the most likely chromatics to abandon evil in favor of neutrality or even benevolence, although it's still a small portion of their numbers that ever does that.
- Poisonous Person: In 2nd Edition, their breath weapon is a cloud of toxic gas that poisons anyone standing within it.
- Pride: They will grant others access to their research not out of any sense of altruism, but to make sure they get credit and admirations for their discoveries.
- Stealth Expert: Besides their ability to blend in with any terrain, they leave no tracks or other signs of their passage unless they so choose to.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: Like black dragons, greens can breathe underwater.
- Villainous Virtues: They're moderate and self-controlled to an extend that rivals gold dragons, they focus on self-improvement both physically and mentally, and they actually cultivate and grow the forests in their territories.
- We Have Reserves: Not in combat, but greens will happily spend the lives of many hundreds of lesser lifeforms for their research.
- When Trees Attack: Green dragons can animate trees to aid them in battle.
Red Dragon
"Be assured that no known language contains a singular word to describe the awesome and terrible power of red dragons."
Type: Dragon
Level: 6-22
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Small to Colossal
When you think dragon, this is probably what pops into your head. Incredibly powerful, ruling over their domains with an iron fist, and all too willing to reduce the merest potential of a problem to ash.
- Always Chaotic Evil: There is exactly one recorded instance in all of history of a red dragon that wasn't evil. The rest are as vile and monstrous as they come.
- Evil Counterpart: Traditionally to gold dragons. Both are immensely powerful paragons of dragonhood and closely tied to the element of fire, as well as the strongest representatives of their respective septs. However, reds are hateful and sadistic where the golds are benevolent and peaceful, violently destructive where the golds are mentoring, and proud to be feared and loathed where the golds are respected and admired. They're also both incredibly proud and arrogant, with the golds' tendency for casual condescension being mirrored in the reds' delusions of godhood, and gold dragons are the only creatures alive that the reds treat with something approaching respect.
- Extreme Omnivore: The fires that burn within the bodies of red dragons allow them to process and digest almost anything they can fit down their gullets — there are very few types of animals, plants or mineral substances that a red cannot, in a pinch, digest and gain nutrition from.
- Fire Is Red: Red dragons are the only chromatic dragons with access to fire as a breath weapon or to fire-related abilities, and these abilities are more extensive and developed than what metallic dragons have.
- A God Am I: Their ego makes it nigh impossible for them to consider anything greater than themselves, so they have a tendency to declare themselves as gods.
- Law of Chromatic Superiority: It's only natural that the red dragons are the strongest, most magically adept and most widely-feared of all dragons.
- Playing with Fire: Red dragons have the most traditional dragon Breath Weapon of all, a jet of fire. In addition, adult red dragons gain an aura of intense heat surrounding their bodies that causes damage to anyone standing near them, as well as the ability to manipulate fire and flames.
- Pride: Reds are extremely proud beings: they are some of the strongest and most powerful entities they are likely to ever encounter, and they know this very well. As a result, old and powerful reds are some of the most prideful and arrogant beings alive, viewing themselves as so close to godhood that most don't even bother with religion out of deep-seated dislike for admitting that there's anything mightier than themselves.
White Dragon
"White dragons are stupid, weak, savage, and pathetic — as dragons go."
Type: Dragon
Level: 2-18
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Tiny to Gargantuan
The least of the chromatics, white dragons are nonetheless masters of their domains due to making their homes far in the arctic where no other true dragons go. In temperate climes they lair in high, cold mountains, which can often bring them into conflict with the red and silver dragons that also live there.
- An Ice Person: Their Breath Weapon is a gale of freezing air, and they have access to a number of ice-based abilities, such as the power to create localized blizzards or to shape and control ice and snow.
- Butt-Monkey: Their stupidity and relative weakness makes them a laughingstock among other dragons. Not that they're not capable of casually wiping a Humanoid settlement off of the map.
- Dumb Muscle: White Dragons are some of the only true dragons that are, across the board, dumber than most humanoids.
- Overshadowed by Awesome: White dragons are not, on an objective scale, weak creatures. They are still dragons, after all, and older whites are in many cases the among the most powerful and dominant creatures in their icy arctic homes. They simply have the poor fortune to be in the same family as red, blue and green dragons and of sharing their preferred habitats with both the more powerful silver dragons and the more numerous and organized frost giants. While mighty by humanoid standards, whites rarely shine against either their relatives or their neighbors.
Chuul (Chu'ulothis)
Type: Aberration
Level: 1 (larval), 4 (lesser), 7 (mature)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Small (larval), Medium (lesser), Large (mature)
Armored predators who lurk in shallows and swamps and take a disturbing degree of pleasure out of tormenting their victims.
- Eaten Alive: A chuul's paralyzed victims are typically eaten while alive and immobilized.
- Giant Enemy Crab: Chuuls are crustacean-like creatures as large as or larger than a human.
- The Paralyzer: They inject paralytic venom through their tentacles.
- Sadist: Chuuls take perverse enjoyment from other creatures' physical and emotional suffering, eating them alive and taking time before each kill to insult and torment their victims and talk at some length about how they will enjoy devouring them.
- To Serve Man: Chuuls prefer the flesh of intelligent creatures; surface-dwelling chuul prefer to hunt lizardfolk, while subterranean ones usually go after hryngar or morlocks.
Cloaker (Fulthrethu)
Type: Aberration
Level: 5
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Size: Large
Originally created as spies for the alghollthu, cloakers are paranoid to the extreme.
- Brown Note: Cloakers have the ability to emit an infrasonic moan which unnerves anything that hears it.
Darkmantle
Type: Beast
Level: 1
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Small
- Casting a Shadow: Darkmantles can cloak the nearby area in magical darkness.
- Combat Tentacles: A darkmantle attacks by wrapping its tentacles around the victim.
- Underground Monkey: Darkmantles can evolve quickly, resulting in many variations like swimming ones in aquatic caverns, fire-resistant ones in volcanoes, or giant ones in deep caverns.
Delver
Destrachan
Type: Aberration
Level: 8
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Size: Large
Sadistic monsters with a potent sonic attack.
- Bizarre Alien Senses: Destrachans sense the world via echolocation, represented by extremely high perception skills and one of the higher ranges for blindsight found in the game.
- Disability Immunity: Their lack of eyes (and correlating reliance on echolocation) nullifies a huge range of basic tactics like invisibility, illusion spells, and darkness.
- Eyeless Face: A destrachan has no eyes and is completely blind.
- For the Evulz: The destrachan enjoys inflicting pain and viciously toying with its prey.
- It Can Think: Probably the most dangerous thing about them. The basic stock version is statted with human-level intelligence and genius-grade wisdom, and is explicitly a pack hunter. The GM is not merely justified in playing them as
Magnificent Bastards, but actively encouraged. - Super-Scream: A destrachan can project a blast of sonic energy in a cone, an area-affecting Brown Note, or as a targeted attack on an object- say, your sword or armor, or the door you just closed while running away.
Devourer
Type: Undead
Level: 11
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Size: Large
Beings who venture beyond the farthest reaches of the multiverse and become lost, returning as monsters warped in body and mind with an undying hunger.
- Humanoid Abomination: A lot of undead count to one degree or another, but Devourers may have the best claim, being warped, soul-stealing remnants from beyond the edges of time and space.
- Omnicidal Maniac: Devourers threaten all souls with oblivion.
- Soul Eating: The souls killed by a devourer will be trapped within its chest and can't be brought back until the devourer is destroyed or forced to release it.
Dire Corby
Level: 1 (dire corby), 2 (dread corby)
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Size: Medium
- Bird People: They're muscular, humanoid crows with powerful arms instead of wings.
Disenchanter
Type: Beast
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
Trunked, blue-furred camel-like creatures that feed on magic.
- Magic Eater: Disenchanters feed by siphoning the magic out of magical items with their trunks, leaving the items broken and useless and metabolizing their magic energies to sustain themselves or storing it to unleash as an energy attack.
- Mooks Ate My Equipment: In addition to their magic-draining tongue attacks, any magic weapon that successfully strikes a disenchanter has to save or lose a property or point of enhancement bonus.
Drow
Type: Humanoid (elf)
The descendants of the elves who chose not to flee the planet before Earthfall. They were forced underground and eventually were corrupted by the forces of the Darklands and their growing hatred of their kin who left.
With the switch to the ORC, the drow no longer exist. The serpentfolk now serve as the major villainous empire of the Underdark, while subterranean elves are now known simply as cave elves.
- Always Chaotic Evil: Downplayed. The Advanced Race Guide states that most drow are Chaotic Evil, but actual character creation doesn't give alignment limits. In theory, the drow species as a whole is evil by nature due to being elves that were transformed by the evil in their own nature (the Second Darkness Adventure Path actually shows this happening), but it's possible for a (second generation or later) drow to be non-evil. The tricky part is surviving in drow society long enough to reach adulthood and escape. Most non-evil drow are found out and either killed or turned into driders long before then.
- Body Horror: Their fleshwarping does this to anyone unlucky enough to be caught by them.
- Card-Carrying Villain: These guys developed vegepygmies so that even their vegetables could be made to suffer.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: When the game transitioned from the OGL to the ORC with the 2nd Edition Remaster, the drow were retconned out of existence; their role as Sekamina's main villainous species is now taken by the serpentfolk.
- Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: Without the "Surface Infiltrator" alternate race trait, drow, like dhampirs, are left dazzled by daylight.
- Fantastic Racism: They hate all non-drow, but their dislike of surface elves tends to be most noteworthy.
- Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Drow society is built on the backs of its legions of slaves, but their contempt for their thralls means that drow slavemasters are afforded extremely little standing or respect.
- Matriarchy: Men have very little status within drow society, and are generally restricted to serving as low-ranking soldiers and servants. Female drow hold all positions of power and authority, and non-drow are advised to have the women in their group do the speaking when dealing with them in order to be taken with anything approaching respect.
- Our Dark Elves Are Different: Archetypal dark elves — subterranean, cruel to the point of absurdity, lavender-skinned and with a tendency towards less than modest clothing styles. Drow were once standard elves who "fell" and had their bodies transform, and normally worship various demon lords. Any elf can still become a drow, though the conditions are more complex than merely being evil. When the game adopted the new Open RPG Creative License after the January 2023 Open Game License controversy, the drow were retconned out of existence, with the implication that everything known about drow was essentially (in-universe) fiction written by an author racist against elves.
Ether Spider
Type: Beast
Level: 5
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
- Arch-Enemy: Ether spiders are the natural enemy of another denizen of the Ethereal Plane, the xill.
- Giant Spider: Ether spiders are far bigger than the maximum size of real life spiders.
- Poisonous Person: They are spiders, what else did you expect?
- Spider People: These spiders have the faces of humans.
Ettercap (Web Lurker)
Type: Aberration
Level: 3
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Size: Medium
Web lurkers are ugly monsters that not only dwell within the lairs of spiders and swarms, but actively cultivate and shepherd such vermin.
Their 1st Edition stats can be found in Bestiary or online here.
Their 2nd Edition stats can be found in Bestiary (2nd Edition) or online here.
- The Beastmaster: Ettercaps have supernatural control over the spiders they lair with, which they keep as both pets and guardians.
- Meaningful Name: "Ettercap" is an old Scottish word meaning both "spider" and "a spiteful or cantankerous person".
- Spider People: Spider-like humanoids with arthropod eyes, mandibles and magical control over common spiders.
- Writing Around Trademarks: "Ettercap" is the name used by Dungeons & Dragons, and thus by Pathfinder after it split off as its own thing. With the switch to 2e, Paizo renamed it "web lurker" to help step out of the shadow of the game's progenitor.
Flail Snail
Type: Beast
Level: 4
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
- Attack Reflector: The flail snail's shell is capable of warping spells and flinging them back at the caster.
- Combat Tentacles: The spiny tentacles which give the flail snail its name can be used to bludgeon potential enemies.
- Starfish Language: Flail snails speak an impossibly complex sign language consisting of waving tentacles.
Flumph
Type: Aberration
Level: 1
Alignment: Lawful Good
Size: Small
Noble and kind messengers from the depths of space, the Flumphs risk everything to ensure that other races across the universe understand the threat of the Dominion of the Black and are prepared to fight it.
- The Cassandra: Their peculiar appearance and origins make their quest considerably more difficult.
- Creepy Good: They are aberrations from the most distant reaches of space — something that in Pathfinder breeds little but mind-breaking horrors — who resemble acid-dripping flying jellyfish... and are also Always Lawful Good, genuinely helpful beings who want nothing but the best for regular, planet-bound people.
Froghemoth
Type: Aberration
Level: 13
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Huge
Apex predators of the swamps, capable of hunting dinosaurs or even dragons.
- Combat Tentacles: It attacks mainly by lashing foes with its tentacles.
- Overly-Long Tongue: Like actual frogs, a froghemoth has a long sticky tongue which it uses to grab and reel in distant prey.
- See the Invisible: A froghemoth's alien eyes allow it to perceive invisible or ethereal creatures.
Gelatinous Cube
Type: Ooze
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
Strange, cubical oozes that seem to treat dungeons as their natural habitats, gelatinous cubes are clearly not naturally occurring beings. They are thought to have been magically created to serve to guard the homes and workshops of their creators and keep them clean of refuse, and to have continued to thrive on their own long after the downfall of their original makers.
- The Ageless: Gelatinous cubes can live for millennia if not killed or starved for food.
- Elemental Absorption: Frost cubes, thanks to their symbiotic brown mold, can absorb heat to heal themselves.
- Elite Mook: The ebony cubes, which unlike the regular kind can digest metal, and the sapient and spell-slinging sorcerer oozes.
- The Paralyzer: A gelatinous cube secretes an anaethesising slime.
- Shock and Awe: Electric jellies can produce powerful shocks.
- Swallowed Whole: A gelatinous cube can simply engulf creatures smaller than itself.
- Underground Monkey: Besides the most commonly encountered kinds, numerous strains of gelatinous cubes exist, each with unique characteristics, abilities and weaknesses making for different challenges and encounters:
- Ebony cubes are crossed with black puddings, making them solid black in color and capable of digesting metal.
- Electric jellies are translucent purple gelatinous cubes capable of emitting powerful electrical pulses.
- Frost cubes live in symbiosis with brown mold, consume heat and radiate cold. In practice, this allows them to heal themselves when exposed to fire or extreme heat.
- Sorcerer oozes are cubes with human-level intelligence and the ability to cast spells, and typically originate as botched attempts at immortality on the part of wizards with perhaps more power than foresight.
Gibbering Mouther
Type: Aberration
Level: 5
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
Screaming masses of misshapen flesh who drive others mad with their cries.
- Acid Attack: A gibbering mouther can emit a stream of acidic spittle.
- Blob Monster: It's a seething, constantly shifting blob studded with toothy maws and staring eyeballs.
- Extra Eyes: A gibbering mouther is covered in eyes, and it gains more every time it devours a hapless victim.
- Too Many Mouths: Countless mouths constantly form and disappear all over a gibbering mouther's body.
Gorgon
Type: Beast
Level: 8
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
- Brutish Bulls: They're foul-tempered, armor-plated bulls whose standard reaction to meeting other creatures is to attack them on sight and attempt to gore, trample or petrify them.
- Monster Organ Trafficking: A gorgon's lungs can be used to craft items requiring either flesh to stone or stone to flesh in their creation.
- Taken for Granite: They breathe out a gas that petrifies those it comes in contact with.
Gray Render
Type: Beast
Level: 8
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
- Counter-Attack: When injured, a gray render may lash out blindly against a random creature within its reach that is not its charge.
- Extra Eyes: A gray render has six eyes.
- Little Guy, Big Buddy: Their main dynamic in the game. Anything small and innocent enough has the chance to attract the attention and affection of these beasts.
- Protectorate: A gray render often develops an affectionate bond with other creatures, acting as a guardian for them, never straying more than a mile away, running to protect them if they are attacked.
Gray Ooze
Type: Ooze
Level: 4 (gray and crystal ooze)
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
Some sages theorize that gray oozes are not living organisms, but rather the alchemical result of an unfortunate mixture of rare caustic fluids and magical waste. The digestive acid that covers these oozes dissolves metals and organic material, but not stone.
- Nobody Here but Us Statues: A gray ooze, due to its transparency, can make it dangerously easy to mistake one for a harmless-looking pile of mud.
- The Paralyzer: A crystal ooze secretes a paralysing slime.
Grick
Type: Aberration
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
Burrowing worm-like creatures with high durability against mundane weapons.
- Combat Tentacles: Th grick's mouth is a sickening tangle of tentacles and hooked jaws.
- Made of Iron: They're a CR 3 monster with DR 10 that can only be beaten by magic. That's high enough at that level that only supremely lucky rolls with high damage weapons can get through it if you don't have any magic on you.
Howler
Type: Fiend
Level: 3
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Large
- Brown Note: A howler's constant howling is a grating, exhausting baying that can drive listeners insane.
Inevitables
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Living machines created by the axiomites to wage war against proteans and the forces of chaos.
As of the Remaster, inevitables have been removed from the Age of Lost Omens setting, as they were originally created by Wizards of the Coast, though most of the individual inevitable types below were Paizo creations.
- Demoted to Extra: In 1st Edition, inevitables were the main
Lawful Neutral outsider race. In 2nd Edition, they were relegated into a secondary role as a subgroup of aeons, who were changed into Lawful Neutral and replaced inevitables as the main outsider race corresponding to this alignment, as part of Paizo's effort to distance the game from Dungeons & Dragons (inevitables were wholly made up by Wizards of the Coast and have no basis in real world mythology). And as of the Remaster, they've been [{Chuck Cunningham Syndrome removed from the setting entirely]]. - Dying Race: The inevitables are on the decline, and have been for a long time. Their numbers are slow to replenish, and their demigods, the primordial inevitables, cannot be replaced at all and have shrunk dramatically in number over the ages. Some scholars take this decline as a sign that entropy itself is on the rise in the Great Beyond.
- Mechanical Lifeforms: Although inevitables are living outsiders, their bodies are made of stone, metal or similar materials, and gameplay-wise they count as both outsiders and constructs.
- Professional Killer: Usually, a transgression that needs an inevitable's attention is so severe that only execution will suffice.
- Omniglot: An inevitable can always speak to any creature that has a language.
- Retcon: In 2nd Edition, inevitables were revealed to be created by aeons all along, a connection which never existed in 1st Edition. And in the remaster, they were removed and it's the axiomites who were rogue aeons all along.
Novenarut
Level: 4
Size: Medium
Inevitables that arbitrate duels and formalized combat and enforce their outcomes.
- Everything's Better with Samurai: Novenaruts resemble samurai in armour fashioned of plates of jade and steel that cover whirring metallic gears, and serve to officiate duels and structured combat.
- Honor Before Reason: They personify this trope, and even have the ability to smite dishonorable opponents (e.g anyone who uses sneak attack or a dirty trick on them.)
Kastamut
Level: 6
Size: Medium
- Good Old Ways: Kastamuts represent the powerfully conservative forces of tradition and custom. They oppose sudden, radical changes in the course of a culture's traditions, and work to prevent the destruction of established belief systems, rites and social customs.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Kastamuts are short and stocky, giving the appearance of a dwarf. Some scholars speculate that this appearance reflects the level of importance tradition has within dwarven society.
Zelekhut
Level: 9
Size: Large
Inevitables that chase down criminals fleeing punishments and lawbreakers whom mortal laws cannot touch.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: A zelekhut's arms end in barbed chains.
- Chain Pain: Their primary weapons are the barbed chains that grow from their wrists, which they can use to trip and knock down foes.
- Our Centaurs Are Different: A zelekhut looks like a winged, mechanical centaur.
- Shock and Awe: Their chains crackle with electricity, and can send painful shocks into their targets.
Impariut
Level: 10
Size: Medium
Inevitables that safeguard responsible governance and punish and dethrone corrupt and unlawful rulers.- The Good Chancellor: Impariuts typically offer their targets their ongoing assistance as an advisor to help steer the leader back to a proper path.
- Internal Reformist: Each impariut serves to reform a powerful leader, guiding that figure toward sustainable policies that maintain order.
Valharut
Level: 11
Size: Medium
Inevitables that, rather than punishing a specific form of transgression, serve as Law's soldiers in the direct struggle against the forces of Chaos.- Double Weapon: Valharuts fight with an exotic weapon that consists of two hooked blades projecting from opposite ends of a shaft.
Kolyarut
Level: 12
Size: Medium
Inevitables that enforce oaths and binding agreements.
- I Gave My Word: Kolyaruts enforce this trope by ensuring that oaths are kept and oathbreakers punished, caring little for what the actual assignments are.
- Master of Disguise: Kolyaruts can disguise themselves to move through humanoid land without being detected.
Yarahkut
Level: 14
Size: Large
Inevitables that stifle magical and scientific developments in cultures not yet ready for them.- Schizo Tech: Defied. Tasked with preventing magic and technology from falling into the wrong hands, yarahkuts ensure that advanced technologies and magic aren't introduced to regions where they could have a disruptive impact.
- Two-Faced: Three identical faces surround a yarahkut's head, staring in separate directions.
Marut
Level: 15
Size: Large
Inevitables that protect the sanctity of life and death by hunting down those who would extend their lifespans through unnatural means.
- Bare-Fisted Monk: They don't make use of actual weapons, instead fighting with their bare fists.
- Shock and Awe: A marut's fists strike with the power of lightning or thunder.
Hykariut
Level: 18
Size: Large
- Make an Example of Them: A hykariut has no compunctions against publicly pulverising a revolutionary leader as an object lesson in civic obedience for onlookers.
Rokyamut
Level: 19
Size: Gargantuan
- Improbable Weapon User: Rokyamuts can conjure mathematical symbols into their hands to use as weapons, which can slice through unliving matter.
- Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Four powerful arms protrude from a rokyamut's torso.
- Teleport Interdiction: A rokyamut's presence impairs folds in space, causing all teleportation to fail if they begin or end within 300 feet of a rokyamut.
Lhaksarut
Level: 20
Size: Huge
Inevitables that protect the sanctity and boundaries of the planes, seeking to disrupt permanent planar portals, mass migrations between planes and attempts by the natives of one plane of existence to conquer or colonize another.
- Elemental Powers: A lhaksarut can throw bolts of elemental energy (acid, cold, electricity or fire) from two of its arms.
- Giant Flyer: A lhaksarut is capable of flying with its gigantic wings.
- I Gave My Word: A lhaksarut is mentally incapable of reneging on a promise it made on good faith.
- Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Six arms, four for weapons and the others to throw energy bolts.
- Shoot the Medic First: The lhaksarut always prefers to eliminate healers before tackling on foes that can directly harm it.
Iron Cobra
Type: Construct
Level: 2
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Small
Metal serpents made to serve as assassins with an interchangeable poison reservoir.
- Animal Mecha: As their name indicates, iron cobras are constructs made in the shape of a snake.
- Poisonous Person: An iron cobra has a poison reservoir in its body and can inject it with its bite.
Jackalwere
Type: Beast
Level: 2
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Medium
- The Beastmaster: They can communicate with and control regular jackals.
- Forced Sleep: They can force other creatures to go to sleep by looking them in the eyes.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: They're a sort of reverse were-creature — they're naturally jackals, but have gained the ability to take on the shape of humans and of humanoid jackals.
Lava Child
Type: Humanoid
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Small
- Magma Man: A lava child can cough up a ball of magma into its hand and throw it at foes. Lava child chieftains can additionally channel volcanic energy to produce an explosion of molten rock.
Lurking Ray
Type: Aberration
Level: 2 (executioner's hood), 7 (lurker above), 8 (trapper)
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Tiny (executioner's hood), huge (lurker above, trapper)
Originally three distinct creatures in D&D, Pathfinder 1e consolidates them into a single species of aberration with multiple distinct stages to its life cycle.
- More Deadly Than the Male: The females of this species have one more CR than the males.
Metallic Dragon
The wise, good-aligned counterparts of the chromatic dragons, older metallic dragons are some of the most world-shakingly powerful beings on Golarion. Now if only they would do something...
- Breath Weapon: Unlike chromatic dragons, metallics get two breath weapons: one that deals direct damage and one that induces a status effect.
- Face–Heel Turn: Metallic dragons will sometime fall to corruption and evil, an event dragons call a "tarnishing".
- Gold–Silver–Copper Standard: Gold dragons are the most powerful and respected of the metallics, followed by silver dragons, then bronze dragons, and finally brass and copper dragons. They also follow this as an informal social system of sorts, with gold dragons generally being the most influential and respected among the metallic breeds.
Gold Dragon
"In a world ever in flux, it is the unmistakably powerful golds who seem to remain unchanging fixtures within it."
Type: Dragon
Level: 7-23
Alignment: Lawful Good
Size: Small to Colossal
The metallics par excellence, gold dragons are creatures of immense power and boundless paternalistic benevolence, keeping the company of celestial beings and seeing the rest of mortalkind as children in need of guidance.
- Always Lawful Good: Gold dragons are, among all the metallic dragons, the least likely to ever tarnish away from empathy and benevolence. In fact, such an event only ever happened once in recorded history, and the dwarves who eventually found the tarnished gold's body even thought they had discovered a new breed of chromatic "yellow dragons" rather than a fallen metallic.
- Befriending the Enemy: Their ageless wisdom can allow them to reason with their enemies and turn them into allies or abandon their evil ways. Learning to use this trope wisely becomes a major theme in Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous during the Golden Dragon Mythic Path.
- Good Is Not Dumb: They're typically clever enough to know when to know when someone is too far gone to be redeemed and needs to be taken down.
- Knockout Gas: Older dragons can use these instead of their fire breath to incapacitate their enemies.
- Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Unlike other metallics, they are borderline immune to falling to madness. They can even lead other dragons who are in the process of falling back to lucidity.
- Knight in Shining Armor: Their main shtick is hunting down evil, no matter where it lurks. Unfortunately, this makes them the most likely of the metallic dragons to go off the deep end.
- Light 'em Up: Ancient and older gold dragons can cast sunburst as spell-like ability at will.
- Light Is Good: The golds are the most noble dragons and the ones most associated with light.
- My Grandson, Myself: Gold dragons often take on humanoid guises to blend into other species' societies; however, since most dragons will outlive even the most long-lived elves by millennia, they generally need to at least put on a pretense of aging. While golds will generally fake their own deaths once their "lifetimes" are up, ones particularly attached to their guises will pose as their own children, grandchildren and so on. While this tends to work fine at first, their neighbors tend to catch wise to there being something fishy going on after a few generations of single people suddenly producing grown children out of nowhere.
- The Paragon: They're always ready to stand against great evil, but one of their favorite passtimes is inspiring others to find the courge and strength to battle evil themselves.
- Playing with Fire: Their Breath Weapon is a cone of fire, and as they age they develop of fiery aura as well.
- The Redeemer: If a villain has a shred of humanity left in their heart, a gold dragon will try its best to bring it out and redeem them.
Silver Dragon
"Some humans mistakenly call silver dragons the paladins of dragons, but doing so ignores the very fact that silver dragons existed long before paladins and follow codes more limiting than humans can fathom."
Type: Dragon
Level: 6-22
Alignment: Lawful Good
Size: Small to Colossal
Silver dragons are knights and crusaders, devoting their lives to fighting evil and championing goodness. Their immensely strict codes of ethics help ensure that they live up to the lofty ideals they hold... but silver dragons fall more often than any other metallic dragons, and when they fall they fall hard.
- An Ice Person: Their Breath Weapon is a cone of freezing air, and they gain a damaging aura of cold as they age.
- Closer to Earth: They have probably the best understanding of the Humanoid races they protect out of all the metallic dragons.
- The Fettered: Silver dragons live, largely voluntarily, under incredibly strict codes and traditions governing almost every facet of their lives, and only allow themselves to undertake important actions — crusading, warring, meditating, praying, hunting, mating — for very specific reasons, at very specific times and/or in very specific, ritualized manners. They even used to have strictures governing how and when they were allowed to defecate, until a scandalized copper dragon petitioned a council of golds to have these lifted.
- Face–Heel Turn: Silvers are more prone to tarnishing and slipping into uncaring neutrality or outright evil than any other type of metallic dragon — although it's still a rare thing, in absolute terms — which some theorize is linked to their obsession with imposing strict rules and codes of conduct upon themselves.
- The Paralyzer: Their other Breath Weapon allows them to be this, paralyzing anyone who fails their saving throw.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Technically, most dragons can Polymorph. That said, silver dragons are the only ones that respect other races enough to do it on any kind of regular basis.
- Solid Clouds: They can walk on clouds as if they were solid ground.
Brass Dragon
"A brass dragon knows everyone worth knowing in the nearby cities, and many not worth knowing."
Type: Dragon
Level: 3-19
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Size: Tiny to Gargantuan
Brass dragons are intensely social creatures, and greatly enjoy the company of other dragons and of humanoids alike. They frequently visit human cities, rarely bothering to conceal their true forms when doing so, and form enormous social networks around themselves that they use to keep tabs on the communities they are part of.
- Dishing Out Dirt: Brass dragons have the ability to control sand and summon sandstorms.
- Forced Sleep: Their secondary breath weapon is a cloud of sleep-inducing gas.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: The natural gaiety and light-heartedness of brasses often leads to them being perceived as foolish and scatterbrained simpletons, an image they deliberately cultivate to lead their opponents to underestimate them.
- Playing with Fire: They breathe fire, and gain a fiery damaging aura as they age.
- Summon Magic: Brass dragon great wyrms can summon a noble djinni once a day.
Copper Dragon
"Those with a mission of mercy to perform, a tyrant to overthrow, or a wrong to right cannot hope to find a more enthusiastic supporter than a copper dragon — for a time."
Type: Dragon
Level: 4-20
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Size: Tiny to Gargantuan
Mercurial, emotional and intensely freedom-loving, copper dragons are the most inconstant members of the metallic sept — while their sense of morality is as strong as any metallic's, their attention span is quite low and often prevents them from fully devoting themselves to whichever case they've impulsively sworn themselves to. They're also quite emotional, and the most likely metallics to rampage.
- Acid Attack: Their Breath Weapon is a line of acid.
- Brown Note: A great wyrm copper dragon can tell a joke so funny you die laughing if you hear it.
- The Gadfly: They enjoy a good joke and are generally quite quick to politely point out flaws in plans. They also enjoy annoying and frustrating enemies when fighting, and have a number of abilities themed around forcing others to laugh.
- The Prankster: Of the non-malicious sort, considering they are good aligned.
- Weak, but Skilled: They are the weakest of the metallic dragons by a fair margin, but tend to also be quite quick-witted and creative, even by Dragon standards.
Bronze Dragon
"You can trust a bronze dragon with your secrets, your gold, your dearest treasures. A bronze would rather die than betray that trust"
Type: Dragon
Level: 5-21
Alignment: Lawful Good
Size: Small to Colossal
Bronze dragons are hermits among the metallics, rarely seeking to involve themselves in the affairs of the wider world and preferring to spend their time reading and researching in their lairs. They also frequently act as guardians of precious or dangerous objects, as they have few objections to sitting in one place for years at a time to stand watch over their charge.
- The Hermit: Bronze dragons are the least sociable of the metallics and prefer to spend their time alone with their books and research, often spending years or decades at a time holed up in seclusion before being forced to return to society to acquire new reading material.
- Making a Splash: Bronze dragons are the most aquatic of the standard dragons, and gain a number of water-related abilities as they age, culminating in the ability to create vortexes and tidal waves.
- Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold: Solitary, even by dragon standards, but firmly good nonetheless.
- Shock and Awe: Their Breath Weapon is a line of electricity. In addition, old bronze dragons are surrounded by an electrified aura that damages those close to them.
Mimic (Multispothol)
Type: Aberration
Level: 4 (normal), 8 (failed apotheosis)
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium (normal), Huge (failed apotheosis)
An old RPG favorite, mimics can take the form of any number of inanimate objects to lure the careless into their waiting jaws. They were originally creations of the alghollthu, but have long since slipped the leash and become an independent menace.
- Become a Real Boy: Mimics that encounter humans enough will find themselves gripped with the strange belief that they can one day become human themselves. Those who become utterly focused on this goal are known as metamorphic-scholars and tend to enact strange experiments on humans in order to understand them and ensure their transformation will be a success.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: Some mimics have a mutation that lets them mimic light of varying colors and brightness. All failed apotheosis mimics gain this mutation as well.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: In their natural forms they combine the qualities of the anglerfish, the rock octopus, and the scorpion: translucent, chitinous plates shift freely around the hulking frame of a distended mass of pale tentacles and eyes, all supported by the strength of a clear, trunk-like pseudopod. Thick gelatin holds the mass together, acting as blood, digestive system, and skin all at once.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Mimics are asexual, and reproduce via spores. When a mimic controls enough food and territory, it undergoes an involuntary internal change called spatter-spawning, laying out a large, thick glue-carpet of spore-rich protoplasm 30 or more feet in diameter. Having marked the walls and floor of a particular cavern or ruin with this stinking graffiti, it departs, never to return. Immature mimics bud out of the whitish glue-carpet, feeing on each other and any animals that are lured to and trapped in the sticky secretion.
- Bizarre Alien Senses: Some mimics have a mutation that makes their entire body into a primitive sensory organ, granting them blindsense.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: They are puzzled by human expressions like "pet", "friend" or "love", and often misinterpret the words to mean "food".
- Body Horror: A failed-apotheosis mimic’s natural form is a shifting weave of spurting tendrils, melting human visages, and tortured organs trapped within a web of alien light and slashing bones. It's so horrible, just looking at it inflicts physical ability damage.
- Chest Monster: Their most classic form. The variations they can take on inanimate objects are theoretically limitless, though the average mimic only has a repertoire of a few dozen favored disguises. A mimic might be found posing as a throne, a statue, a fountain, a massive crystal, a coffin, a tree, a protruding stone doorway complete with doors, a writing desk, a wall, a rocky outcropping, or even a bookshelf stocked with individual books. Although a mimic cannot divide into multiple pieces or actually become a complex mechanical object such as a wagon or functioning ballista, it can easily take the outer shape of such a thing.
- Easy Amnesia: The memories of the mimic are as mutable as their forms, and their famous patience is due to this very ability: mimics can discard boring or unpleasant memories as easily as a human throws out moldy bread. Mimics casually edit their minds in this way constantly, and think nothing of removing several weeks' worth of "empty" time spent waiting for a meal to arrive. Consequently, they have a hard time judging things like how long ago an earthquake occurred or a certain creature passed by them.
- Excrement Statement: The slime of a mimic serves to mark their territory and leave messages for other mimics. As they usually live deep underground where there is no weather, such messages tend to last years.
- LEGO Genetics: Sages posit that their abilities, habits, and obsessions are simultaneously too esoteric and too perfectly crafted to have arisen naturally. They're right. Mimics, or multispothols as they were originally called, were created by the alghollthu as weapons of subterfuge.
- Genetic Memory: All mimics hold the deep-seated instinctive belief that they can one day become human, although they never actually realize this until they start encountering humans.
- Healing Factor: Some mimics have a mutation that lets their protoplasm regenerate extremely quickly, granting them fast healing 5.
- If I Can't Have You…: Mimics that encounter Azlanti-blooded humans willing to talk to them will soon become fascinated with their new friends, fawning over and praising them. This praise soon turns violent if the human tries to leave, as the mimic would rather see them killed than fall into the clutches of another mimic.
- I Work Alone: The mimic has no understanding of community or companionship, and actively avoids contact with all other beings except within the predator-prey dynamic; even the most clever and manipulative lair-tyrant mimics cannot stand the presence of other beings for more than a few minutes at a time.
- Living Structure Monster: Big enough mimics, usually failed-apotheosis mimics, can pose as entire rooms or even small buildings.
- Man Behind the Man: Lair-tyrants, mimics that have developed past their distaste for other creatures, building lairs and traps while manipulating simple societies to serve them. A lair-tyrant often acts as the secret mastermind behind the sudden expansion of a humanoid tribe, directing them always toward the taking of ever further territory.
- Monster Organ Trafficking: A mimic's skin can be used to replace polymorph spells when crafting magic items.
- More Teeth than the Osmond Family: A mimic's only consistent feature as it devours foes regardless of its current disguise.
- Morph Weapon: While most mimics simply bludgeon prey with Combat Tentacles, some constantly shift their weapon limbs to form clubs of hardened protoplasm, blade-like claws, or jagged stingers.
- Non-Malicious Monster: They aren't evil, just hungry. They are also as intelligent as most humans and can sometimes be reasoned with (provided you speak Aklo).
- Not Quite Flight: Some mimics learn to sue their amorphous bodies to form crude wings and glide on air currents.
- Shapeshifting Failure: Mimics who attempt the final transformation to become human instead realize only horror: they become awful parodies of life, composed of aborted human-like limbs and melting faces crashing one over another like an endless wave of corpses. Sages theorize that what the mimic understands in that moment of failure is its true, alien origin, as eternally divorced from humanity as any force or concept could be; this monstrous self-revelation is the only memory a mimic cannot wipe away, and madness consumes them utterly.
- Sticky Situation: All mimics can secrete a sticky coating they use to trap prey that touches them in their disguised forms. For some mimics this glue is also acidic, making it even worse to be stuck to.
- Stomach of Holding: If a mimic wants to carry something, they simply swallow it and keep it in a cavity within their body.
- Twin Desynch: In extremely rare circumstances, multiple plasmoids from the same spawning will all survive to the hunter stage of their life cycle. As they have functionally identical memories, they identify themselves as pieces of the same organism and will drive out any of their number that ends up developing differently.
Mohrg
Type: Undead
Level: 8 (normal), 12 (demonic)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Medium
Powerful and dangerous undead that rise from the corpses of those who killed many people while alive, such as mass murderers or berserkers.
- Calling Card: If they had a preferred method of killing in life, they will often employ it in undeath.
- Dem Bones: They resemble normal undead skeletons, except with a mass of writhing, prehensile entrails filling their torsos and extending up and out of their mouths.
- It Can Think: Despite their desperate need to kill they employ tactics, picking off the most dangerous opponent first and preferring to strike at isolated targets.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: They arise from a serial killer who is executed for their crimes, meaning a party catching a killer and handing them over to the proper authorities can create a much worse monster than they stopped.
- Night of the Living Mooks: Anyone they kill turns into a zombie, and their favorite trick is to make them pretend to be dead until they have a small army buried in the local graveyard.
- Overly-Long Tongue: Their intestines reform and extend up through their mouth to act as a grotesque ten-foot long tongue.
- The Paralyzer: Their tongue paralyzes people, and they take particular satisfaction in the helplessness of their victims.
- Serial Killer: Mohrgs arise from people who were these in life, and becoming undead strengthens their urge to kill.
- Underground Monkey: Certain specific variants of mohrg, each with its own unique abilities, can arise from the bodies of murderers executed under specific conditions:
- Desert mohrgs arise from the bodies of killers executed through exposure in hot, arid environments, and their victims rise as burning skeletons rather than as zombies.
- Frost mohrgs, by contrast, are created from murderers killed by exposure to cold. They retain most of their flesh — although black with frostbite — and deals cold damage in melee.
- Fleshwalker mohrgs are created from nonviolent executions that do not mar the body. Their flesh does not rot, meaning it's often impossible to determine their true nature until their tentacular entrails come slithering out of their mouths.
- Mohrg-mothers are a particularly horrific variant formed when the executed murderer was a pregnant mother. In this case, the resultant mohrg will have the undead remnants of its fetuses or embryos still clinging to its guts, and will possess the ability to turn one victim per day into another mohrg instead of a zombie.
Mu Spore
Type: Fungus
Level: 21
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Size: Gargantuan
Titanic flying creatures who live in the Darklands.
- That's No Moon: The Midnight Mountains, one of the Vaults of Orv, are lit by six large, glowing "moons" — which are, in fact, six very, very large glowing mu spores.
Necrophidius
Type: Construct
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
Stealthy but simple minded constructs capable of disabling opponents with paralysis or hypnotism.
- Animal Mecha: These constructs are made in the shape of a skeletal snake.
Neothelid
Type: Aberration
Level: 15 (normal), 20 (overlord)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Gargantuan
Creatures of immense power who view themselves as favored by unknowable entities from beyond the Outer Sphere. The neothelids are the spawn of the Outer God Shub-Niggurath, and one of the greatest horrors in the Darklands' depths. Much diminished from their long wars against the elder things, the aboleths, the Vault Builders and the intellect devourers, they have slowly rebuilt their power base and harbor terrible designs for Golarion's depths and surface alike.
- Cannibalism Superpower: Neothelids who consume a large number of their kin can transform into immensely powerful neothelid overlords.
- Expy: Not to the original, OGL neothelids of Dungeons & Dragons (these neothelids are an aberrant part of the life cycle of the mind flayers, who are not OGL themselves and cannot be legally used in Pathfinder), but instead to the chthonians of Brian Lumley's Cthulhu Mythos stories: a powerful race of giant worms that live underground and are connected to the Elder Mythos.
- Flight: All neothelids can fly — twice as fast as they can crawl, in fact — despite not having wings.
- Immortal Procreation Clause: Neothelids are technically mortal creatures, but are functionally immortal insofar as most other races are concerned — their lifespans are measured in the tens of millennia — and magic can easily allow them to transcend their own theoretical mortality as well. This is offset by a glacial birth rate, as neothelids are born very, very rarely. This is a significant problem for them, as they have effectively no ability to absorb losses in population and the death of even a single neothelid is a disaster, and as they simply cannot keep up with the rapidly swelling numbers of more short-lived species.
- Monstrous Cannibalism: There is no food as dear to a neothelid as the flesh of its own kind. Neothelids find cannibalism to be an euphoric experience, and in their species' early days large numbers of neothelids perished to their conspecifics' hunger. This practice has almost entirely ceased in modern times, however, as modern neothelids' low numbers, slow reproduction and many, many enemies mean they cannot afford to kill one another anymore.
- Multiple Head Case: Neothelid overlords have two heads, a manifestation of the minds of two powerful neothelids struggling for supremacy after one devoured the other.
- Psychic Powers: Neothelids are powerful telepaths, and can easily dominate the minds of other beings.
- Teleportation: All neothelids can teleport as an innate skill, and they can further track the teleportation of other beings.
- Time Abyss: Neothelids are immensely long-lived creatures; most living individuals predate the fall of Azlant, having lived for tens of thousands of years in the dark beneath the world.
Ochre Jelly
Type: Ooze
Level: 5
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
Animate masses of protoplasm hued a sickly combination of yellow, orange, and brown. Some ancient cultures would entomb bodies with these oozes to break down the flesh and clean the bones.
- Damage Discrimination: An ochre jelly's acid only dissolves flesh and practically nothing else.
Otyugh
Type: Aberration
Level: 4
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
Creatures that revel in their role as scavenger and garbage disposal.
- Arch-Enemy: Ofalths' domains typically overlap with those of otyughs. Otyughs consider ofalth flesh an intoxicating delicacy, while ofalths seem to particularly enjoy taking otyughs apart one piece at a time.
- Mundane Utility: More than one city keeps otyughs in its sewers as a living waste disposal system.
Owlbear
Type: Animal
Level: 4
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
Owlbears are ferocious chimeras of unclear origins and violent tempers. Theories on their origins abound, but nobody actually known how the first of these bizarre monsters came to be.
- Beast of Battle: Owlbears are often captured and trained by orcs to make powerful, if unpredictable, war animals. Most are used as mounts or basic attack beasts, but some are trained to bear small siege engines on their backs.
- Death from Above: Sloth owlbears hunt by hanging from trees and waiting for suitable prey to pass below them, at which point they let go and plummet on their meal's head.
- Horse of a Different Color: When orcs can tame one of these beasts, they often seek to train it to bear a rider. Owlbears trained as mounts make excellent wartime steeds for obvious reasons, but are unpredictable, difficult to direct and prone to forgetting their training and turning on their riders.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: A giant owl's head, arm feathers and talons on a grizzly's body. They're generally thought to have arisen as deliberate magical fusions of normal bears and owls, although exactly who did this and why is a matter of some debate.
- Monster Progenitor: Owlbears can trace their origins to the First Owlbear, which is in fact still around, roaming the forests of the world and siring new litters of his kind on giant owls, bears and preexisting owlbears.
- Multiple-Choice Past: Nobody actually knows where owlbears come from, but it hasn't stopped people from guessing. Theories include them being descended from an owl and a bear fused in an unfortunate summoning accident, the creations of a mad transmuter and simply some of the First World's weirdness that escaped into the Material Plane and went native.
- Teleporter Accident: One theory on how owlbears came to be goes that a wizard with an owl familiar summoned a bear in an area with a strong background transmutation field, accidentally fusing the two creatures and creating the first owlbear.
- Underground Monkey: Numerous different types of owlbear exist as a result of both natural adaption and further magical mutations:
- Arctic owlbears have snow-white fur and feathers, giving them excellent camouflage in their northern homes.
- Darklands owlbears are distinguished by their pale, discolored fur, feathers and eyes, and have darkvision.
- The Fruss owlbear has hollow bones and well-developed wings, and is capable of awkward flight.
- The great hook-clawed owlbear has large, curved talons and is a more competent climber than other varieties
- The Maelstrom is home to the highly mutable screaming owlbears, which are as much creatures of living chaos as natural animals.
- Siege owlbears are massive, vicious beasts bred for war by the orcs.
- Sleeyk owlbears are slimmer and faster than other kinds, but weaker.
- Slime owlbears are otherwise normal owlbears constantly coated in green slime.
- Sloth owlbears are tree-dwellers, and hunt by waiting for prey to pass below and dropping on top of it.
- Spectral owlbears are ethereal owlbears native to the Estrovian Forest of Mendev, and may be either undead or living owlbears capable of phasing into and from the Ethereal Plane.
Pech
Type: Fey
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Small
Subterranean fey who accidentally spawned the dero, plenty of normal pechs are still kicking around the planes. They're pretty chill as long as you don't interrupt their work.
- Our Gnomes Are Different: They play more closely to the notion of "Gnomes as Earth Elemental creatures" than do the game's actual gnomes.
Quickling
Type: Fey
Level: 3
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Small
- Absolute Xenophobe: Quicklings hate every non-quickling and barely tolerate their own kind, rarely working together for longer than a few weeks.
- Invisibility Flicker: Quicklings are naturally invisible when motionless, they rarely contain themselves, and bob and twitch while standing and talking to other creatures.
Remorhaz
Type: Beast
Level: 7
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Huge
Remorhazes are arctic predators resembling immense, armored centipedes. They possess powerful internal fires, allowing them to breathe flames and melt their way through the ice, and are aggressive ambush predators. A remorhaz that lives for a century without succumbing to injury or starvation will enter a deep hibernation, during which its fires will cool and its body reshape itself, and emerge several centuries later as a frost worm.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: They look like centipedes sixty feet in length.
- Breath Weapon: They can breathe fire.
- Fast Tunnelling: They can burrow through solid ice at a very good clip, nearly as fast as they can run.
- Playing with Fire: Fires burn eternally within a remorhaz's body, allowing it to breathe out gouts of flame and granting and permanently scorching aura.
Retriever
Type: Construct
Level: 11
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Huge
Abyssal constructs built to hunt down those who betray their demonic masters.
- Animal Mecha: The retriever is a large, spider-like construct built by demon lords.
- Eye Beams: The retriever's eyes can fire four kinds of magical rays, each with a different effect.
- Flesh Golem: Retrievers are made from the protoplasmic flesh of the Outer Rifts.
- Giant Spider: The retriever isn't a spider itself, but it's made in the shape of an elephant-sized spider.
- Lightning Gun: One of its eye rays' firing modes is a jolt of electricity.
- Taken for Granite: A retriever can petrify enemies permanently with one of its deadly magical rays.
Roper
Type: Aberration
Level: 10
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Large
Ambush predators that look almost perfectly like stalagmites, ropers are cruel philosophers and theologists who will engage in complex debates with the creatures they're eating.
- Faux Affably Evil: Ropers are particularly interested in the philosophy of life and death and the finer points of evil religions, and can talk or argue for hours with prey, but never allow such intriguing prey to escape alive.
- That's No Moon: To all but the most sharp-eyed underground explorers, a roper appears to be nothing more than a large stalactite, stalagmite, or pillar of ice.
Rust Monster
Type: Aberration
Level: 3 (normal), 6 (rust lord)
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium (normal), Large (rust lord)
Monsters greatly feared not for what they do to people, but what they do to treasure and equipment.
- Metal Muncher: Rust monsters feed on metal, "digesting" it by very rapidly corroding it.
- Mooks Ate My Equipment: Rust monsters aren't terribly powerful creatures and can't do much to a player on their own; their main danger comes from their ability to quickly turn a party's worth of high-end gear into a pile of rust.
Shadow
Type: Undead
Level: 3 (normal), 8 (greater)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Size: Medium
Commonly found haunting tombs or other dark, abandoned places, shadows drain the life out of anyone they encounter to create more of their kind.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: Greater shadows are visually indistinguishable from regular shadows, but their CR is six levels higher.
- Demonic Possession: Some greater shadows develop the ability to possess a body.
- Demonic Spiders: Between their immunity to mundane attacks, resistance to magical attacks, and dangerous strength-draining touch (where a few unlucky rolls can quickly make it hard to fight back or even run away), they can be very hard for low-level parties that can't Turn Undead to deal with.
- Evil Is Petty: Shadows can arise spontaneously from people whose evil deeds were small, sordid, and self-serving.
- For the Evulz: It's noted that shadows have no discernible goals or motivation for what they do — they hunt living beings, drain the life from them and turn them into more shadows enslaved to their will because they want to.
- Living Shadow: Well, undead. Shadows are just that — two-dimensional black silhouettes that move over solid surfaces but have no physical presence of their own.
- Night of the Living Mooks: They can be created with the Create Undead spell, and that combined with their low intelligence and ability to generate spawn makes them a popular minion for necromancers.
- The Virus: Most shadows don't arise spontaneously, but because people killed by shadows become shadows.
Shambling Mound (Shambler)
Type: Plant
Level: 6
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
Masses of vegetation formed after parasitic spores from Akiton infect and grow within an organic host.
- Man-Eating Plant: Shamblers are intelligent, carnivorous plants with a fondness for elf flesh in particular.
Slithering Tracker
Type: Ooze
Level: 4
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Small
- The Paralyzer: Any creature that is hit by a slithering tracker's slam comes into contact with the anesthetising slime it secretes.
Stirge (Bloodseeker)
Type: Animal
Level: 0 (standard), 2 (giant), 3 (swarm)
Size: Tiny
Scourges of swamps and damp, abandoned places, bloodseekers are ravenous blood drinkers.
Their 1e stats can be found in Bestiary or online here.
Their 2e stats can be found in Bestiary (2e) or online here.
- Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: They serve as a fantastic but nonmagical stand-in for mosquitoes, vampire bats, and other flying blood-drinking animals.
- Horse of a Different Color: The Court of Ether breeds bloodseekers to enormous sizes to serve as cavalry mounts for warriors without wings.
- Writing Around Trademarks: Stirge is the name used by Dungeons & Dragons, and thus by Pathfinder after it split off as its own thing. In 2nd Edition, it was officially renamed bloodseeker, a name that can be legally used in non-OGL products.
Thessalhydra
Type: Aberration
Level: 18
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Gargantuan
Legendary beasts renowned for their speed and savagery.
- Acid Attack: A thessalhydra's snake heads can spit highly corrosive acid.
- Multiple Head Case: A thessalhydra has eight serpentine heads arrayed around a central maw.
- Our Hydras Are Different: While not true hydras in-game, thessalhydras resemble monstrous and warped versions of their namesakes, being hulking, quadrupedal reptiles with necks topped with a gaping, jawless maw ringed with writhing snake necks.
Thought Eater
Type: Aberration
Level: 2
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Tiny
Tiny predators from the Ethereal Plane that feed on thoughts.
- Abstract Eater: As their name would indicate, these creatures feed on thoughts. A living corporeal creature that takes damage from a thought eater's bite loses some of its thoughts.
Vampiric Mist
Type: Aberration
Level: 3
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Size: Medium
Amorphous creatures halfway between liquid and gas, vampiric mists spend most of their time seeking prey.
- Vampiric Draining: Vampiric mists feed on blood, and are often mistaken for vampires in gaseous form.
Vegepygmy
Type: Fungus
Level: 0
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Small
When creatures are killed by an infection of russet mold their corpses will split open to disgorge a group of vegepygmies, dangerous humanoid plant creatures with surprising intelligence.
- Mushroom Man: Vegepygmies are very humanoid, and are born from russet mould.
- Spawn Broodling: Vegepymies are born from corpses of victims killed by a dangerous fungus called russet mould.
- The Speechless: They lack the necessary organs for speech, and cannot produce sounds beyond a few limited squeaks and hisses. Consequently, their language consists mostly of touches and pheromone secretions.
Thorny
Type: Fungus
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
Quadrupedal, vaguely doglike fungal creatures often found alongside vegepygmies, thornies secrete a paralytic toxin used by their masters to help subdue victims. Creatures subjected to russet mold while thorny venom lingers in their systems have a small chance of producing thorny offspring.
- The Paralyzer: They inject a weak paralyzing agent through their spikes.
- Spike Shooter: They can launch clusters of their venomous thorns up to thirty feet away.
- The Spiny: A thorny's thorny hide causes any creature that grapples it to take piercing damage and be exposed to its toxin.
Violet Fungus
Type: Fungus
Level: 3
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
- Make Them Rot: A violet fungi's tendrils are coated with a virulent venom that causes flesh to rot and decay. If left untreated, it can cause the flesh of an entire limb to drop away in no time at all, leaving behind only bones that soon rot as well.
Viper Vine
Type: Plant
Level: 13
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Large
- Man-Eating Plant: Viper vines gain nourishment through the consumption of creatures rather than through moisture and soil, and the area around their hunting grounds is often strewn with the remains of wild animals, ill-fated adventurers, and even giants.
Wolf-in-Sheep's-Clothing
Type: Aberration
Level: 8
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
Stealthy predators that puppeteer corpses as bait for future prey.
- That's No Moon: A wolf-in-sheep's-clothing appears at first to be little more than a tree stump sitting in a clearing, perhaps with a small animal sitting atop it. Only when a predator comes close does it become clear that the small animal is in fact long dead, before the 'tree stump' drags the would-be hunter into its maw.
Worm That Walks
Type: Aberration
Level: Same as base creature + 2
Alignment: Evil
Size: Same as base creature
Evil spellcasters who persist after death by inhabiting the swarms of vermin that fed upon their corpses.
- Underground Monkey: Worms that walk arise chiefly by the accidental reincarnation of a deceased spellcaster into a swarm of nearby vermin when in an area of high background magic, and their "births" are only tied to those of others of their kind by the manner in which they happen. The result is that they tend to be extremely varied, with different strains arising in different manners and from different species of vermin. Common variants include ravenous ant- and locust-based worms, stealthy and secretive roach-based worms found in urban areas, and poisonous and aggressive wasp-based worms that walk.
- The Worm That Walks: They're hive-minded swarms of vermin possessed by the consciousness of an evil spellcaster and holding themselves in a humanoid shape. While literal worms are the most common component of worms that walk, some have been known or rumored to be composed of swarms of almost any sort of vermin or small, unpleasant creatures — wasps, bees, locusts, ants, roaches, mosquitoes, rats, fetal bats...
Xorn
Type: Elemental
Alignment: True Neutral
Level: 6
Size: Medium
- Eat Dirt, Cheap: They eat almost exclusively minerals.
Yellow Musk Creeper
Type: Plant
Level: 2
Alignment: True Neutral
Size: Medium
- Parasite Zombie: After killing prey, a yellow musk creeper infests them with its seeds and pollen, then animates them as zombies. These zombies are animated by the plant that grows throughout their body, and are classified as plants, not undead.
