Out in the Great Beyond, we’re in the last few weeks of pulling

I think the general feel of the planes is going to be bang on target for what we were aiming at: a fresh take that melds the classic feel of past planar settings with new ideas to take the Great Beyond (be it Midgard’s or your own) in different but equally exciting philosophical directions.

In the meantime, here’s the first of a few early Christmas presents from the outer planes: a nice mix of the stylish, the exotic, and the downright weird . . .

THE THROAT

Welcome to the Throat—a cylindrical planar geode that consists of a pink-hued gullet of crystallized muscle and tissue. The shaft pierces a maze of resonant caverns connected to conceptual planes of sound, song-craft, and musical arcana.

All the great music of the planes can be heard here: the echoes of Creation Songs, the Voice of Sedara whose lieder terrified all fiends for reasons unrevealed, screams arranged and amplified in the hyper-mazes of insane tesseract realms, the womb songs of the Anatan that lead souls to prophesied stillborns—all these and more reverberate in ever-varying volumes through darkness and mist-moistened rock.

PLANAR TRAITS

• Light Gravity
• Self-Contained Shape: The Throat is finite, but if you travel outward through its caverns, and you’ll end up back at the central shaft.
• Coterminous Plane: Several caves have coterminous connections with different conceptual planes: Sound, Music, Fugue, Inspiration, and so on.
• Positive-Dominant: There might not be much native plant and animal life, but creative energies thrum in the crystalline Throat.
• Mildly Neutral Aligned: The fractal dance of Order and Chaos is courtly and cooperative here. Chaos provides the inspiration, Order arranges the symphonies.
• Enhanced Magic: Magic that primarily creates sound is enhanced. Unique acoustics also ensure that all such spells are Extended and Widened (as per the metamagic feats but without increasing spell level).
• Impeded Magic: Silence and similar magic is impeded here.

Many agents of Order and Chaos identify closely with music, and both sides consider this a sacred place. In the Throat’s reverberating chambers, you can hear echoes of the Multiverse’s greatest songs mingling and breeding, reproducing new sounds and harmonies. Celestials and fiends seeking dominance over the ideals of Song or Music gather here, as do planars trading in intricate music boxes, sheet music, concerts, and instruments. Their settlement (they hate to call it a mere town—it’s always city or conclave or commune) is also filled with musically inclined Fey and Outsiders, from muses and lhiannan sidhe to lyrieen and lillends, trumpet archons, and hundun. Most of the time, these varied factions cooperate for the greater good. Most of the time.

THE CITY OF SINGING THROAT

CG large town

Corruption –2; Crime +0; Economy +1; Law +; Lore +3; Society –2

Qualities Academic, Syzyrgical, Tourist Attraction.

Danger +5

DEMOGRAPHICS

Government Magical (The Shrivelled Instruments)

Population 3,000 (2,000 mortals of various races, 850 Outsiders, 100 Fey, 50 Undead)

NOTABLE NPCS

• Ambriel the Clarion, Champion of Singing Throat (LG Trumpet Archon)
• ‘Freeman Drumming’, wandering agent of Chaos (CG Hundun)
• Ouna the Aetherine, diminutive operatic prima donna (CG Lyrieen Bard 10)
• Simon the Cowled, judge and arch-critic (NE Lich Wizard 18)

MARKETPLACE

Double the base value and purchase limit for items relating to sound and music.

Base Value 2,400 gp; Purchase Limit 10,000 gp; Spellcasting 7th

Minor Items 3d4; Medium Items 2d4; Major Items 1d4

Built on the Throat’s vertical shaft of lustrous rose- and fuchsia-hued crystal, the City of Singing Throat has many levels. Edifices such as the Woodwind Tree, the Echo Distilleries, and the Onyx Tower of Silence rise through multiple ledges and resonant caverns. The Throat’s light gravity permits the use of extravagantly delicate and outstandingly beautiful filigreed architecture that is impossible on the mortal plane. With flight heavily regulated, even winged races normally use balloons or magical transport to traverse the levels. For the wealthy, the current fashion (and Singing Throat is always a fashionable town) is for undead spiders with hollowed out abdomens to serve as transport. Their luminous silver webbing thrums with the echoes in the air, adding to the city’s melodious cacophony.

Singing Throat was built to cater to the needs of musicians and songsmiths of a hundred different races, which gives the city an eclectic and bohemian style. Beauty is everywhere, designed by creative geniuses and enforced by vicious artistic coteries and judgmental critics. With so many talented performers, standards are high, but the truly great need never fear destitution. Here rewards from a simple drink to a sparkling diamond, or even a soul or a second chance at destiny, can be garnered as payment for a song.

The Throat grants all vocal and musical performance checks a +2 circumstance bonus, but the DC of any Perform check to earn money from the populace is raised by 5 points. Locals respect only the very best talent.

In charge of the city are The Shriveled Instruments, undead aboriginal bards, whose music long ago replaced the blood in their veins. They are the authority behind the limited government that handles day to day management of the Throat. This skeletal bureaucracy does little to curb the clash of rival music schools, cabals of sonancers (the city’s specialist sound mages), and Singing Throat’s notorious song thieves, who can snatch music from a breath, a reed, or the strings of a harp.

To learn more about this project, please head on over to the Dark Roads and Golden Hells page.

—Johnny Cash

This week I am mostly cataloguing and organising the 17+ (and still growing) pages of our brainstorm thread, which the damnably keen patrons are filling with such a never-ending river of great and profound ideas that it probably deserves an analog somewhere in Midgard’s cosmology (the River of Ideas maybe, washing over a horde of happy looking bards scooping up handfuls of the torrent). The problem is it’s all such great stuff – I can’t skip a single line. Like the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, I’m perpetually playing catch-up as the thread moves ever on to bigger and better things.

This week the talk has moved away from the cold (and sometimes hellfire hot) war between good and evil and onto the more ambiguous points and axis that lay between: In particular Law and Chaos, and how our cosmology might approach them.

Far from a Moorcockian the battle of feuding forces, one of the most out-of-the-box ideas talked about is the relationship between law and chaos being almost like would-be lovers in an elaborate courtship – each seeing something in the other that they recognise, each looking to convert the other to their cause. Angels and devils woo both their courts, but proteans and inevitables play a game of mirrors more abstract and esoteric than heaven or hell: Law has music and mathematics embodied by living symphonies and intelligent equations, but Chaos has fickle muses and lightning strokes of sudden inspiration and both sides fight with fractals and chaos theory. In some places across the planes the two work together or conjoin, and the whole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. Even the great powers of heaven and hell aren’t sure how to deal with their intangible powers, and agents of Law and Chaos meddle in the affairs of both the wicked and the virtuous.

Dare the PCs explore where angels (and demons) fear to tread?

Blood War and System notes after the jump…

One Setting, Multiple Systems, Infinite Possibilities

Even Planescape’s infamous Blood War never matched the ferocity of the Edition Wars, but thankfully Open Design patrons seem to be a progressive and open-minded bunch, happy to embrace and discuss the best concepts from all systems. We’ve fans of both Pathfinder RPG and 4th edition D&D (and quite a few who like both), plus the growing voices of AGE fans and a cadre of loyal 2e AD&D planewalkers. The setting materials of course, can embrace them all.

Our aim remains to try to provide as much mechanical support for both Pathfinder and 4th edition D&D as possible, one way or another. Patron votes count, so if you have a preference or want to help with the various conversions then sign up and let us know!

Commission Status: Last Call
Thanks to new patrons dropping their shiny gold pieces into Mammon’s tithe collectors, we now have 95% of our required patronage! Soon the Angel of Commission will swoop in to carry us aloft from Development Hell, so if you want the bargain price patronage for signing up before we hit the green light, now’s your last chance!

Check out Dark Roads & Golden Hells in the Kobold store and stop by the Forums to say hi if you’ve got any questions. Come and join us in exploring the outer planes!

We weren’t ready for Planescape. We were happy with our medieval analogues, playing brave young men and women from the local village, setting out in search of fame and fortune. But this was different. This was weird.

First session went something like this: “This is the center of the universe. No one knows for sure exactly where it is but it’s shaped like a doughnut, run by 13 philosophies, and contains doorways to everywhere in existence.” After that, things got a lot more confusing.

A bunch of greener, more fourish conies you have never seen. Top shelf cutters we were not. We did all the stereotypical clueless things: “what’s over the edge of Sigil?” (eek!), “Who’s that chick with the pointy face?” (Aargh!), “If this is the hive, where are the insects?” (urgh!), and “I don’t know what a baatezu is but maybe we should sign up for their war?” (D’oh!). And yeah, we even trusted tieflings…

We completed the first published adventure and, to this date, have no idea what the hells was going on (“everything caught fire” is the best we can work out). In time, things got slightly better: we quested for intangible things with all too tangible repercussions, we discovered that the upper planes can be just as dangerous as the lower, we learnt about factions and joined them and promptly hated each other for philosophical reasons that had nothing to do with alignment (we got over it… after about 5 years of real time). And we died. A lot.

Sometimes the blood was so deep, PCs survived only because someone lifted their unconscious faces out of the gore. We renamed the setting “Painscrape” and players (not characters) actually threatened to go on strike about 3 weeks into the adventure Fires of Dis, it was so utterly horrible. Its 16 years later and we still use “ASK THE MAGGOTS TO STOP WRIGGLING???” as an exclamation when the DM says we should obviously have done something utterly ridiculous.

Ah, good times.

Where Are You Going With This, Dan?

I have a point, I promise. It’s about gaming with a sense of wonder and discovery.

Imagine playing Against the Giants in 1978, meeting your first drow and having no idea what they are. Imagine your first flickering torch-lit expedition into the Underdark (or the Abyss!), having none of the familiarity with its powers and tropes that comes with time or a quick trip to Wikipedia. It’s all virgin soil, unknown territory: the scenery strange and wondrous and out of this world, the magic unknown, and the creatures unfathomable. It’s still the same game—we still roleplay and kill things and take their stuff—but also something genuinely original and different. Like Oz or Wonderland, there are rules, but can you tear your eyes away from the chaos and glory of it all to learn them? Dare you peer behind the curtain (“pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain!” bellows the great Mask of Oz) into the secret, behind-the-scenes life of angels and devils, gods and departed souls?

That’s where we’re heading with Dark Roads & Golden Hells, to the ragged, bleeding edge of reality to channel that old Planescape spirit still alive after 17 years and multiple editions. Because I want my mind blown all over again.

Habitat & Society

As best the lords of the Abyss can ascertain, the children have a layer of their own from which they periodically emerge, but no divinations reveal its nature or location, and in the aftermath of attacks, no physical link to any adjacent layers remains. As best the demons can tell, their bane appeared out of nowhere and vanished back to the same…

Unique within the Abyss, their actual home layer serves as both fortress and religious mecca. A place of ever-shifting landscapes rising out of a shallow, glowing sea, dotted by cities of twisted, crystalline architecture, the layer centers around a glistening anarchic font. Bordered by a fluctuating number of ancient, weathered standing stones inscribed in flowing, protean runes, the layer’s core is a pocket of the Maelstrom anchored there within the Abyss like a quiescent virus, deep within the infected flesh of an unsuspecting host.

While the other layers of the Abyss randomly open as great fissures in the substance of the Maelstrom borderlands, their layer never does, instead only forming tenuous links to other layers of the Abyss itself, usually those more obscure or less populated. With their layer functioning like a two-way mirror on a grand scale with regard to divination magic, the children gather information on the objects of their hatred, and continue the work that their mad creators initiated eons ago. Whether carrying out destruction by either their creators’ mandates or their own spawned schemes, the children of malignant symmetry are a race of fanatics, and only those directly furthering their goals—the obliteration of all other natives of the Abyss—avoid becoming targets as well.

Child of Malignant Symmetry CR 13

CE Large outsider (chaotic, evil)
Init +11; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +18
Aura warp the twisted earth (30 ft.)

DEFENSE
AC 26, touch 16, flat-footed 19 (+7 Dex, +10 natural, -1 size)
hp 124 (12d8+72); regeneration 5 (lawful or good)
Fort +14, Ref +17, Will +13
Defensive Abilities amorphous anatomy; DR 10/lawful or good; Immune acid, polymorph; Resist electricity 10, fire 10; SR 15

OFFENSE
Spd 30 ft., Climb 30 ft.
Melee 2 claws +19 (1d8+3), bite +19 (1d10+3 plus poison), sting +19 (1d12+3 plus poison)
Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft.
Special Attacks baneful poison, rend (2 claws 1d8+5)
Spell-like Abilities (CL 15th)
At will—arcane sight, comprehend languages, detect magic
3/day—baleful polymorph (DC 20), chaos hammer (DC 19), confusion (DC 19), dimensional anchor, haste
1/day—discern location, greater dispel magic, greater teleport, word of chaos (DC 22)

STATISTICS
Str 16, Dex 25, Con 22, Int 20, Wis 17, Cha 20
Base Atk +12; CMB +16; CMD 33
Feats Combat Expertise, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Lightning Reflexes, Weapon Finesse
Skills Appraise +15, Bluff +20, Diplomacy +15, Handle Animal +20, Intimidate +20, Knowledge (arcane) +20, Knowledge (planes) +20, Perception +18, Ride +23, Sense Motive +18, Spellcraft +20, Stealth +23, Survival +18, Swim +18
Languages Abyssal, Protean
SQ amorphous anatomy

ECOLOGY
Environment the Abyss
Organization solitary, squad (3), or war party (5+, with 1-3 bebeliths)

SPECIAL ABILITIES
Amorphous Anatomy (Ex) A child of malignant symmetry’s vital organs shift and change shape and position constantly, granting it a 50% chance to ignore additional damage caused by critical hits and sneak attacks. They automatically recover from physical blindness or deafness after 1 round by growing new sensory organs to replace those that were compromised.

Baneful Poison (Ex) Bred as a tool to ravage and supplant the natives of the Abyss, the poison of a child of malignant symmetry’s bite or sting is capable of affecting even creatures normally immune to poison.

Malignant symmetry poison—injury; save Fort DC 23; frequency 1/round for 6 rounds; effect 1d4 Dex damage; save 2 consecutive saves

Rend (Ex) If a child of malignant symmetry hits with both claws in the same round, it automatically attacks with its lesser, insect-like forelegs, rending flesh for 1d8+5 damage.

Warp the Twisted Earth (Su) A child of malignant symmetry’s aura compromises the normal fabric of any chaotic evil plane, subverting its properties and turning them against any native creatures. Any other natives of these planes entering the aura’s radius find perspective’s skewed, their balance thrown off, and a visceral, unsettling feeling of having stepped into an alien environment. Victims are subject to a nauseating effect (Fort DC 20 negates). Additionally, feeling cut off from the natural power of their home plane, victims find the effective CL of their spells or spell-like abilities lowered by the child of malignant symmetry’s charisma bonus.

This article contains proper names (characters, deities, etc.), dialogue, plots, storylines, locations, and characters owned by Paizo Publishing, LLC. This content is used with the express permission of Paizo Publishing, LLC.

And though we hide within the very depths of this plane, fearful for the revenge of both our enemies, their spawn, and our own kind, brooding and waiting, we have seeded the depths with children of our own, and it is they who will prepare the way for us.
—

Children of Malignant Symmetry: Z’kaelii

Long considered a baseless legend among non-natives of the Abyss, the children of malignant symmetry have plagued the plane’s natives since literally the very beginning. Though small in number, as lingering remnants of the first phase of the genocidal conflict between the Maelstrom and the Abyss, the children are feared on a truly visceral level by demons—creatures of nightmare to a plane of the same. Named for their makers, they were an attempt by the heretical protean Chorus of Malignant Symmetry to embrace and devour the Abyss. Created neither to destroy nor to redeem its natives, they were meant to replace them…

Though possessed of a related form and a similar but significantly lesser shapeshifting nature as their ancient protean creators, the children of malignant symmetry were designed by paragons of creative insanity. In certain gross features, they dramatically differ from the Maelstrom’s brood. A freakish admixture of serpentine, insect, and arachnid traits, the children typically resemble great serpents with a combination of centipede and spider legs of varying size, scorpion-like stingers, insect mandibles, and often multiple sets of arms, usually a mixture of humanoid or arthropod.

Ecology

Some sages of Abyssal lore compare the children of malignant symmetry to the merging of an imentesh protean and a bebelith although they were not born of such miscegenation. Unknown to virtually any creature still living, both terrible races were inspired by the form of one of the ancient Qlippoth, the first natives of the Abyss. Captured and bound in the early days of Maelstrom and Abyssal contact, the heretical keketars of Malignant Symmetry dissected, recombined, butchered, and reformed this first subject again and again in attempts to know and fathom the enemy that had become their creative inspiration in the absence of the Maelstrom’s voice.

The bebeliths were created by the children of malignant symmetry in imitation of their own makers’ proclivities. Or, perhaps, the children of malignant symmetry were themselves merely a stepping-stone in their creation. Either way, they were abandoned into the abyssal wilds; or simply kept in reserve should their vanished makers desire to revisit their earliest attempts. However, linked by more than ancient history and latter-day speculation, the children of malignant symmetry utilize bebeliths as both beasts of burden and the equivalent of trained hunting dogs, riding them into battle or directing packs of the creatures to corner and dismember prey.

Unlike bebeliths, the children of malignant symmetry are capable of creating more of their own kind both by conventional mating, with the subsequent birth of live young, and by the corruption of captured mortal souls and demons alike. In this latter method, like parasitic wasps, the children of malignant symmetry paralyze or bind their victims and forcibly implant eggs into their still-living, often conscious bodies. As the young hatch, they consume their host’s spiritual substance, growing and maturing until literally nothing remains, creating new clutches of their kind and eternally depriving the Abyss of a fragment of its original essence.

This article contains proper names (characters, deities, etc.), dialogue, plots, storylines, locations, and characters owned by Paizo Publishing, LLC. This content is used with the express permission of Paizo Publishing, LLC.

Smoldering Host of the Risen

“This is not what we had planned to create,” sighed the Archdaemon of Wasting. “This is not what I wanted.”

“Can you call it a failure?” Her consort and servitor asked in return with a wry expression of pride.

“Yes Trelmarixian, I do.” The reply dripped with a curious mixture of ownership, disappointment, and grudging respect.

The Lysogenic Prince nodded, the gelatinous slurry of his facial features parting into a wry, flowing grin. “As you wish Lady of Famine. We shall make another attempt, and as for this…?”

A dismissive glare of black, mirrored eyes framed her reply. “Dispose of it. We care not where or how. Then, begin again.”

The Parasite Queen watched her consort leave with her other servitors, their collective failure in tow, likely soon to hurl it into the Maelstrom, or the Abyss, or some hapless world upon the material plane. They would not destroy it though, they never did, and in the fading glow of their creation’s sickly green flame, it might only be a matter of time before that callous disregard returned to haunt them and many others…

The greatest and most successful experiments by Abbadon’s daemons tend to be classified as spectacular failures. Such experiments have produced monstrosities whose power exceeded the designs of their daemonic makers and whose will vastly outstripped their masters’ capability of ever controlling them. While the demons of the Abyss were among the last and certainly the greatest of their brilliant mistakes, one of their first nearly approached that level, and it was a solitary creature, known simply as the Risen.

Dwelling within the layer of the Abyss known as the Candleflame Chancre, her name derives from the mistaken belief that she originated as a demon lord who rebelled against its own chaotic nature. Abandoned in the Abyss without a true corporeal form, the Risen lives by bodily possessing other outsiders, hijacking their physical shells as her own, at least until the time as she abandons them for another or her corrosive presence destroys them like so many expended, burned out candles.

Uncertain of her own nature and origin and tormented by these existential doubts, like a passing storm front she leaves a swathe of ruin in her wake, littering the Candleflame Chancre with her own attempts at creation in baroque, unknowing, twisted mimicry of her daemonic makers. She also leaves behind a trail of mangled fiends, tortured and then destroyed in one of her depressive fits of self-loathing and frustration or possessed and then abandoned in favor of a new host—and those who suffer her presence, those that survive at the end, known as the Soldering Host of the Risen, are never again whole.

Initially retaining a full memory of their actions and the sensations given and received during their tenure as their infernal mistress’s host, once abandoned and cast aside, these memories slowly fade in potency. In the end, they become only tormented, half-remembered dreams where only the concepts remain, rather than the fine details. And while they never retain any insight into the thoughts of the being of spiritual flame once wound around their core, they are indeed left with something tangible. Each of the smoldering host retains a fragment of the corrupting, consuming touch of the Risen who abandoned them, but never truly left them, neither whole nor free. Collectively intoxicated by her lingering influence, they depend physically and spiritually upon her corrosive touch, even as it slowly kills them. Unlike active hosts, for whom the flame devours until nothing remains, they smolder, agonized as much by what is there within them as what is not and will never again be.

The vast majority of these hosts remain trapped within the Risen’s layer of the Abyss, wandering a land of frozen forests lit by eerie, burning candles, broken by ruined, salted fields, frozen oceans breached by the crumbling spires of inundated cities, and glaciers choked with the bones of millions of demons. Such spawn have little in common beyond a shared agony, and the strong often hunt down the weak, bent on destroying any potential rivals for the ecstatic euthanasia they misguidedly desire. And for those who manage to escape, many of them later attempt to return, like masochistic addicts or moths drawn to a flame, called back by lucid nightmares of their original rebirth in the Cathedral of Splayed Demons deep at the layer’s heart where their mistress lairs. Those encountered beyond the Candleflame Chancre typically reflect the same paranoid, self-centered whimsy of their maker, often slipping in and out of periods of suicidal melancholy and frenetic creation or destruction.

Template: Smoldering Host of the Risen

“Smoldering Host of the Risen” is an acquired template that can be added to any evil outsider (referred to hereafter as the base creature).

A smoldering host of the Risen uses all the base creature’s statistics and special abilities except as noted here.

Size and Type: Same as the base creature

Hit Dice: Same as the base creature

Speed: Same as the base creature

AC: +4 natural armor

Attack: Same as the base creature

Damage: Same as the base creature, plus 1d6 fire damage for any natural attack.

Special Attacks: A smoldering host of the Risen retains all the special attacks of the base creature and gains those described below. Saves have a DC of 10 + 1/2 the smoldering host’s Cha modifier unless noted otherwise.

Embrace of the Burning Queen (Su)—As a standard action, a smoldering host may call forth the burning corruption of its maker, directing it against one opponent (15d6 fire damage, no save) or to all within a radius of 10 ft. times their Charisma bonus (5d6 fire damage).

Special Qualities: A smoldering host of the Risen retains all the special qualities of the base creature and gains those described below.

Tethered to the Flame (Ex)—A smoldering host of the Risen is incapable of natural healing except within Candleflame Chancre in the Abyss. Magical healing deals only 1/2 the normal amount.

Resistances (Ex)—A smoldering host gains resistance 10 to fire, cold, and acid, as well as immunity to disease.

Abilities: Alter from the base creature as follows: Str +4, Dex +6, Con -4, Int +2, Wis+2, Cha +5

Skills: Smoldering hosts of the Risen have a +5 bonus to Intimidate, and a +10 racial bonus on Knowledge (planes) when relating to the Candleflame Chancre. Otherwise same as the base creature.

Feats: Same as the base creature

Environment: Any, usually same as base creature

Organization: Solitary, pair, gang (3-5)

Challenge Rating: Same as the base creature +3

Treasure: Same as base creature

Alignment: Always neutral evil

Advancement: Same as the base creature

Smoldering hosts of the Risen that previously had cleric levels no longer gain their divine powers from their original patron, instead forever after gaining them directly from the Risen. They lose any previously held domains, replacing them instead from the following: Evil, Fire, Death, or Destruction.

This article contains proper names (characters, deities, etc.), dialogue, plots, storylines, locations, and characters owned by Paizo Publishing, LLC. This content is used with the express permission of Paizo Publishing, LLC.

Habitat & Society

Continually wandering, with no set layer to call their home, the peacock spawn take refuge on abandoned or unclaimed layers, but even when they find a place of relative safety, they never remain there for more than a year or two at most before moving on, resuming their search. Though their wandering seems aimless, their vision of what their birthplace resembles is a firm dogma among their kind: a warped version of the great mountain of Heaven and a cold, burning pit of lightless flame where the unworthy are blinded and consumed by something too beautiful to exist within reality’s mundane trappings…

In line with this mythology, they view themselves as slivers of perfection, modeled upon their maker’s blinding form, and as such, they disdain most clothing, eschewing anything that would cover their bodies except for armor in times of conflict. They reflect their maker’s reflection, especially in their native environment since in their mythos, the Abyss is simply a chancre, an open sore upon the flesh of a multiverse too sick and too unworthy of the proximity of their most splendid maker who awaits its children at the plane’s heart, a beautiful splinter embedded in unholy flesh.

In the absence of any documented and readily available histories within the Abyss that detail their creator, their racial religious mythology provides the only clue in an obscure entity known as the Peacock Spirit, from which their name derives. Relatively unknown even in the Abyss itself, some scholars and wizards deem the Peacock Spirit to be a reclusive demigod of the Abyss, an alternate name for one of the plane’s more established demon lords, or an independent, obscure one. The peacock spawn reject these ideas as heresies and claim their creator originated on some foreign plane of beauty, rejected and exiled by rivals jealous of her majesty. Cast out, she plummeted to the Abyss, and in the process of her fall, or even her final impact, the peacock spawn were formed from the ashes of that cataclysm like shining fragments of an even more priceless gemstone.

Far and Away

Given their nature, which rejects the very substance of the Abyss itself, and the fine details of their mythos, the archons of Heaven refuse to discuss the subject. The parallels are too close to their own Melek-Taus, and the consequences horrifying. The peacock spawn may be nothing less than the broken fragments of Law shed and hemorrhaged from the Peacock Angel’s flesh when she fell from her celestial glory as Lord of Heaven’s 6th tier—if the archons’ fears are true.

Peacock Spawn (CR 8 )

LN Medium outsider (extraplanar, lawful)
Init +9; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +15

DEFENSE
AC 21, touch 16, flat-footed 15; (+5 Dex, +1 dodge, +5 natural)
hp 95 (8d10+40); fast healing 5
Fort +10, Ref +11, Will +9
DR 10/chaotic; Immune disease, fire, poison; Resist cold 10, electricity 10

OFFENSE
Spd 30 ft., fly 30 ft. (good)
Melee 2 claws +12 (2d6+4 plus axiomatic wound) or +1 spear +13/+8 (1d8+7/x3 plus axiomatic wound)
Special Attacks blinding glory
Spell-like Abilities (CL 15th)
At will—detect magic, freedom of movement, invisibility, true sight
3/day—dimension door, dispel magic, major image, order’s wrath (DC 21), rainbow pattern (DC 21)

STATISTICS
Str 19, Dex 21, Con 18, Int 16, Wis 20, Cha 25
Base Atk +8; CMB +12; CMD 27
Feats Dodge, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Power Attack
Skills Acrobatics +12, Appraise +8, Bluff +12, Diplomacy +12, Fly +16, Intimidate +12, Knowledge (arcane) +8, Knowledge (geography) +8, Knowledge (planes) +12, Knowledge (religion) +12, Perception +15, Perform +12, Sense Motive +10, Spellcraft +7, Stealth +13, Survival +13
Languages Abyssal, Celestial

ECOLOGY
Environment the Abyss
Organization squad (3-6) or tribe (20 or more)
Treasure standard (+1 spear, other treasure)

SPECIAL ABILITIES
Axiomatic Wound (Su) Any damage inflicted by a peacock spawn (whether through natural attack or weapon) is treated as if from an axiomatic weapon, inflicting an additional 2d6 damage against chaotic creatures.

Blinding Glory (Su) By invoking the power of their mythical creator, once per day a peacock spawn may call forth a blinding column of burning light, emanating from themselves in a 30-ft. radius. Creatures caught within the burst are subject to blindness and 1d6 damage per HD of the peacock spawn (Reflex DC 21 for half damage and to negate blindness; Charisma-based). Other peacock spawn are immune to this effect.

This article contains proper names (characters, deities, etc.), dialogue, plots, storylines, locations, and characters owned by Paizo Publishing, LLC. This content is used with the express permission of Paizo Publishing, LLC.

The corners and dark places of the Abyss harbor many things. The list is legion and includes everything from colonies of rogue demodands; the creations of demon-lords like the incorporeal yix’an; unclassified terrors such as the parasitic synx; imprisoned or exiled spawn of evil gods; legacies of the plane’s first lords and those who would supplant or destroy it; and yet other failed successes of the archdaemons. However, of this catalog of horrors, three capture planar scholars’ attention most and the wary eye of others: the peacock spawn, the smoldering host of the Risen, and the children of malignant symmetry…

The Peacock Spawn

We are her children. She who fell from heights unimaginable. She who liberates. She who mocks. She who defiles the naïve. She who shall rise again like the resurgent light of an eclipsed star—hidden but raging—blinding those unworthy who behold its glory.
—Malizrek the Faceted Flame, peacock spawn

The peacock spawn are a race with no home, even among the uncounted layers of the Abyss. Perpetually wandering, they search for their mythical place of origin and the creator that blessed them with life and likewise condemned them to an agonized existence.

Appearing at first glance as idealized, statuesque humanoids, their hands and feet appear scorched and blackened by soot, with hooked, birdlike talons rather than conventional fingers and toes. Further deviating from the humanoid norm, their eyes lack a distinct pupil and swirl with color, like oil on water, and their hair shines like it was spun from burnished brass, bronze, or copper. And then there are the wings that sprout from their backs: not those of an angel or a demon, but guttering wings of flame roaring and moving like living things of their own, giving the peacock spawn the archetypal appearance of fallen celestials.

Walking the Abyss

Among the creatures that wander the Abyss, the peacock spawn are an aberration. Unlike their Abyssal brethren, they don’t seem to belong, and sages often view them as exiles or migrants from some other plane transplanted into the Abyss. Being the source of such thinking, the very essence of the peacock spawn is such that they live in constant agony, pained and weakened by the very nature of the ground they walk upon, identical to the experience of archons, devils, or axiomites.

Lawful to an extreme, and as often neutral as evil, the mind boggles at how such beings originated within the depths of the heart of evil chaos, but that they did, and as disjointed as it might seem, on the rare occasion that they venture to other planes, attempts to banish them only return them to the Abyss. Clearly, something unique led to their creation and the circumstances that have them native to a plane that rejects them on a basic level.

Planar sages long suspected them to be abandoned creations of a long-vanished god or cruel creations of a particularly twisted Abyssal Lord, but the latter seems unlikely. Unlike demons, the peacock spawn have no connection to the souls of the dead. They reproduce among their own kind conventionally, but they do so only in order to maintain the population levels of their distinct tribes which wander the Abyss largely in isolation from one another. Abhorred by other natives of the Abyss, such breeding often follows a pattern of punctuated equilibrium, with periods of stability among the immortal creatures followed by rapid repopulation in the wake of bloody encounters with their abyssal fellows.

… to be continued.

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