Shito, Sachiel

“Sachiel” © deviantArt user Viking-Heart, accessed at his gallery here

[Commissioned by @canwefixitnoitsfucked​. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a series I have a love/hate relationship with. The design of the show is great, and it has some of the best kaiju battles in the genre. But the relentlessly despairing tone is not my idea of a good time. So I’m going to spend some time focusing on the parts I like. The commissioner wanted these to be lower in CR than kaiju are in Pathfinder. I borrowed some abilities from the behemoths, which are in the midpoint of the CR range I’m aiming for. There will be ten shito, one each of CRs 16-25.]

Shito

The shito are a race of powerful, philosophical alien creatures. The name means “angel” or “messenger”, and each has a title pertaining to the domain with which they are concerned. They are each the unique creations of some manner of demiurge, perhaps an elohim or cabal of annunaki, but have long roamed the universe on their own personal missions. Some of them can be called via powerful magic or bribed in order to perform services, but the shito are most interested in information or tools that will help them recover their lost creators or discover enlightenment. Those that communicate with the shito report that this form of enlightenment is hazardous, if not fatal, to mortal life.

All shito possess a core, a large gem-like object that marks them as members of the same type. These cores are objects of immense power, capable of generating an “AT Field”, a force construct that fuels the shito’s various defensive capabilities. Force effects are thus the most likely to damage a shito, as the excess force overwhelms its core. Even the destruction of a shito’s core is not necessarily the end—it has been reported that shito have reappeared, in slightly different form, in weird demiplanes or parallel realities after having been slain.

Shito is a subtype of native outsider with the following special traits

Shito, Sachiel CR 22 N Outsider This enormous creature is vaguely humanoid, with humped shoulders and gangly arms and legs. A face like a bird’s skull protrudes from the center of its body, over a gleaming red sphere. Its shoulders feature domes of bone, spurs protrude from its elbows, and gills grow along its thighs.

Sachiel is the Angel of Water, and it contemplates the ebb and flow of the waves and tides. Change is natural to Sachiel, and its appearance changes over time as its body regenerates from damage and new, seemingly cosmetic, bones grow from its rubbery greenish-black flesh. Sachiel is as comfortable on land as it is in the water, and is most often found in coastal or transitory habitats. The destructive potential of water is part of its domain, and it often appears in the wake of hurricanes, tsunami or floods.

Sachiel is single-minded in combat, and it will often ignore minor obstacles in order to approach a target of interest. It can use its AT field to enhance its body, granting it the ability to fly through the air, or to increase one of its ability scores to deal with a particular threat. Sachiel’s favorite tactic is to grab an opponent and tear them apart with beams of force projected from the palms of its hands.

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Ah! I love it so much! Using up the hit point pool from the AT field is perfect.  It means they can try to balance being more offensive and defensive round to round without a host of spell-like abilities. Cross Blast is the perfect combination of being faithful to the material and actually possible to implement and position. Jackhammer strike absolutely captures the feel of that part of the battle in NGE.

Lycanthrope, Wereoctopus

“Cephalid Looter” © Wizards of the Coast, by Keith Garletts. Accessed at Spiderweb Art here

[Much like the wereweasel, I actually used a version of this in game during the 3.5 era. That wereoctopus monk was a kuo-toa, which was technically cheating (kuo-toa were aberrations, making them ineligible for the lycanthrope template), but it was a memorable encounter nonetheless. It did end in the death of a character, and I suspect that this wereoctopus similarly punches a bit above its CR class. Being one of the few monsters in PFRPG to have 9 attacks below CR 10 makes giant octopus very dangerous.]

Lycanthrope, Wereoctopus CR 9 LN Humanoid This rubbery skinned humanoid has a bulbous head with large eyes and a parrot like beak. Its arms are tentacles, and it moves on six additional tentacles as if they were legs.

Wereoctopuses are rare lycanthropes, most common among aquatic humanoids such as merfolk and locathath. Their physical appearances are often disturbing or strange, especially to land-dwellers, but they are not inherently evil. They are most noted for their curiosity—they tend to devote themselves to solving problems, and physical and mental training. They make excellent scholars or monastic types, but are known to cause problems due to their meddling. In combat, a wereoctopus has many attacks, which they tend to spread out over multiple foes. They favor tactics that disrupt, confuse or impede enemies over outright killing them, but will fight to the death if pressed.

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F

Keeper

Image by Tony DiTerlizzi, © TSR. Accessed at Monstrous Manual here

[”We are normal.” Unlike the yak folk, @canwefixitnoitsfucked actually did get to play a keeper at one point. They were also a running presence in both my senior year high school game and the Planescape game I ran as a college undergrad. Part of what made them so intimidating was that the players never actually fought any of them. This was good, because the 3.0 Fiend Folio version was greatly over CRed for its power level. @thecreaturechronicle did a version more in tune with its 3e CR, whereas my version is aiming more at the power level of the 2e Planescape version.

Also, the reference to Kazik is in honor of Alfred K. Bender, the creator of the Men in Black, of which the keepers are a definite homage to.]

Keeper This gray-skinned creature looks almost human, but is slightly off, as if it were an incomplete sculpture. They wear dark goggles and a leather coat, and bear a grim expression.

The keepers are a mysterious race of vaguely humanoid creatures obsessed with information and secrets, and willing to kill or die to protect them. If asked of their origins, they say only that they are from “Kazik”, but whether Kazik is a city, another plane, another planet or all of these is unknown—even divination spells do not reveal this information. Although keepers are superficially humanoid, they lack many of the details of humanoid bodies—they are hairless (although some wear wigs) and have no nails or claws, and they have a single block in their mouth with lines to give the appearance of separated teeth. They have no eyes, but typically wear goggles or dark glasses to obscure this fact.

Keepers are information brokers who desire to suppress dangerous or sensitive information, particularly that relating to new technologies or magical breakthroughs. They typically do this through intimidation, threats or even outright murder. They have no regard for good or evil, and find the behavior of most other creatures to be chaotic and unpredictable. In conversation, keepers are often unthinkingly rude or offputtingly polite, and their lack of understanding social norms often walks a fine line between comical and unnerving. They can be enticed to reveal less important secrets through barter or bribery, and what information a keeper considers “unimportant” may still be fantastically valuable in the right hands.

In combat, a keeper reshapes its body to form weapons from its hands, moving into flanking position or striking from ambush to take advantage of its sneak attack. They rarely fight alone, and may leave some of their numbers in reserve to attack in waves. Keepers can switch positions with each other through teleportation, swapping fresh forces in as the old wave is exhausted. A keeper would rather die than be forced to reveal its secrets, and they can will their bodies to collapse into a pile of quickly evaporating toxic sludge.

A keeper stands as tall as a human being, but their strange composition makes them one and a half times heavier than a human of their height and build.

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Love it! I don’t know how many people remember this old meme, but they are reminiscent of the Pusher/Shover Robot from The Terrible Secret of Space.  

I actually had a chance to play a Keeper (but not a set of three like I did for you!) in another short-lived game.  The best bit I got to pull off is aggressively greeting strangers by holding out my hands and saying “I HAVE NO WEAPON”, and by session three or four when we had our first combat and my arms turned into swords my recently-made adventuring partners felt, somehow, betrayed.

In particular I like the way you’ve fixed the arm blade ability.  In the original version they could take the form of any one-handed manufactured melee weapon, which let open a flood gate of bizarre rules interactions. 

The question I always had was you would think that for beings dedicated to learning and keeping secrets they would have some way to read.  IIRC their blindsight was explained as being auditory.  One time I included them I suggested that their extra-sensitive fingers can read conventional text as someone would read braile.  Other times I gave them an at-will cantrip from 3.5 that allowed you to immediately memorize a bunch of pages of text by touching it.

One issue I see is that, because they are quasi-living space robots they defy D&D or Pathfinder creature types and can be difficult to stat.  I think thematically aberration (with extraplanar and construct traits) is a good fit, however it does mean they still need to eat, sleep, and breathe, all of which seem out of place for a Keeper.

To access Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine, Mario enters a cannon, which then shoots Mario to a different island in a cutscene. However, by rendering the scene as a wireframe, we can see that whatever is shot out of the cannon is not Mario, as he remains inside the cannon after it is fired.

Suppermariobroth I just want to say your expertise at subtley phrasing basic video game construction factoids as if something sinister is going on every time is acknowledged and appreciated

T E L E T R A N S P O R T E R    P R O B L E M  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

throwback to that time in my existentialism class where the professor asked ‘who thinks hell is other people’ and half the class slowly and meekly put their hand up

then the prof was like ‘…i mean who originally said it’

a brutalist sandcastle

turns out yes people make them

This is the funniest joke I’ve ever made 

This is my daily life.

The related issue that has been bugging me lately is that the second crime could have easily been deemed “violent” and therefore more severe than the first case which is somehow not an instance of violence.

Story Time!  So at a friend’s wedding the officiator couldn’t make it at the last minute, so a fannish friend of the groom volunteered but was left with the question of what to say.  After thinking a bit he was able to start: “Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today...” and since only a couple people in the audience recognized it, they kept their chuckling to a minimum, and he got all sorts of compliments after the service in how he was able to come up with something so touching a beautiful on the spot.

Series: Nerdy Semantics

Have you ever aked yourself what the hell are “events”? Well, let’s see what Donald Davidson has to say about it:

“[…] `I didn’t know it was loaded’ belongs to one STANDARD pattern of excuse” ????

Me: What?!?! Where are you from, Donald? … hm… ok… America… Well, yeah… linguistics is a very dangerous job!

(Figure taken from: Davidson 1967 – worth reading!)

[Thinking about my cyberpunk hagfish uplift OC]

Eel slime as computational substrate

@canwefixitnoitsfucked it you?

Sorry for the vertical video but these three baby Hirudo manillensis leeches came just yesterday from a breeder all the way in the netherlands and they just ate some pork blood from a butchershop - I froze it in little pieces and thawed one for them.

If they survive and they eat regularly for ONE YEAR they will get this big:

For the “why would you get that as a pet” people, you can see from the video how entertainingly active they are, even busier than almost any pet fish. When they aren’t swimming or inchworming around they will just “sleep” all together with each other, or hide in something like an old snail shell or a pipe.

@demiurge1138

I think my dream aesthetic is just to be slightly inhuman looking. Like no crazy mods or anything. Ill even have natural hair. But i just want to be off putting. I want people to look at me and feel that something is off. Something isnt right. There is ~something~ going on with me and it makes them nervous or unsettled. Like having skin a little too shiny or canines a little too long, ears a little too pointy. I want to be someone who if you saw in the woods at night, you would question your own sanity.