Friend Folio: PF1E Monster Hooks

Welcome to the Friend Folio!

Back in June of 2011, The Daily Bestiary was launched. Its purpose was to examine the various monsters of the Pathfinder setting, creating three adventure hooks for each of them. It was something I followed with absolute glee in college, and was a massive inspiration in how I run my own campaigns.

Unfortunately, TDB stopped updating on December 2019, after a period of relative inactivity and frequent hiatuses. TDB had already gone above and beyond its mission, covering every monster that had been out when it started and more; however, to someone like me who'd always had a hyperfixation on monsters, such an end felt... disappointing.

So, several years later, I figured: why not try my own hand?

Part spiritual successor, part writing exercise, and part self-indulgence, Friend Folio is a blog dedicated to carrying on the mission. Keeping with the format, the Friend Folio will cover every monster in the six PF1E bestiaries, providing commentary and adventure hooks along the way.

I will be following several rules:

An effort will be made to keep hooks unique, and not to tread ground already covered by the Daily Bestiary.

Monsters rooted in weirdo shit like theosophy will be removed from said context as much as possible. While I cannot promise I'll get everything (the amount of European mythology based in antisemitism is fucking bonkers), I will at least make the effort.

Regardless of whether I dislike a monster (Bestiary 5 my beloathed), cynical subversions will be tightly limited. It's not my job to be a grumpy shit.

There will be an attempt to avoid relying on the Golarion setting as much as possible. I'm trying to be original here.

A lot of proper names may be taken from Fantasy Name Generator, a resource I highly recommend.

With that said: happy reading!

Animate Hair are an interesting take on what counts as an "ooze", having more in common with an undead than our friendly neighborhood sewer creeps. Its statblock is tuned towards more combat-light campaigns, and gels well with intrigue-focused plots (especially considering its bestiary released a scant four and a half months before Ultimate Intrigue).

Oddly enough for something with a nature so tied to its owner, animate hairs can occasionally appear in packs -- presumable so the fight doesn't just boil down to "low level evil guy and their living hair".

Not everyone in the Marsyas Crusade needs to start out throwing themselves at the Flenser King's horde. Sometimes, it's enough to scout the streets of Old Auberlogne for the discarded hairs of its slain champions, that their corresponding ecorches may be tracked and put to rest by the more experienced.

Cursed with poisoned blood by a vengeful witch, Ofana bit Uktannu's hair has been falling out. Eshkhugir being what it presently is, no one bats an eye when an otherwise boring governor of an irrelevant province adopts an extravagant new haircut. The mysterious deaths of her circle of advisors? That's a bit more troubling.

After the unification of Cudnau, it was decided those found guilty of wartime atrocity were to be executed as soldiers. Each was allowed a dignified appearance before the headsman -- including a haircut. Unfortunately, while the esteemed Henry Vaesser is certainly a star barber, he has no background in necromancy, and no reason to believe leaving the hair of Cudnau's worst with the newly-established waste management services might be related to the recent disappearance of municipal workers.

The above image is but one of the unique forms an Animate Dream may take on. It's one of those monsters that really gels with both the roleplay and attrition-based aspects of Pathfinder 1E, with an incredibly unpleasant touch attack and a challenge rating around the point where incorporeal enemies start coming into play. If you're the type to incorporate mechanics into roleplay, now's the time to break out your knives and ghost touch macguffins.

So, whose dream has animated here? In a standard adventure, this can be a great way to flesh out important NPCs and make your players feel like true heroes. If you're running the (dubious) sanity mechanic from Horror Adventures, this also slots really well into it. The 3/day nightmare and 1/day phantasmal killer almost feel superfluous at this point.

Killing an animate dream is well and good, but having to fight an overlarge chimpanzee made of ground turkey every night is getting exhausting. If the contractors looking to kill it for good want to succeed, they'll need to figure out which resident of St. Sviato's Comatorium is having these dreams, what's causing said dreams, and how they're going to put an end to them.

The Ruby of the Third Charlatan has immense historical, academic, and practical value. Anyone looking to steal it from the Fort Blueclay Museum of Art should be advised that in addition to the typical museum defenses, the curator is pretty bad at identifying the local bogeyman's prank items. Nighttime raiders can expect impressionist trompe l'oeils, statues walking off their podiums, and their own worst nightmares crawling out of an uncanny pottery set.

Demons don't need sleep, and they don't dream -- so when a nabasu earns the ire of a night hag coven (gem fraud), he's wholly unprepared for his first ever nightmare. Coulli the Graven's dreams have now animated into a bigger, stronger "nabasu", representing his fear of being upstaged before establishing himself. Like any nabasu, it grows as it feeds. If Coulli's foul nightmare isn't killed soon, it might complete its transformation into a "vrolikai"... or worse.

Animal Lords are another template, humanoids with a special connection to a specific animal. The provided flavor says there's only one, barring a power struggle, though TDB has already talked about the potential for more.

I've talked about how one of the strengths of PF1E was it's ability to slot into any kind of setting, and a consequence of that is that there's a ton of animals to play around with, something that becomes even more apparent when you remember that giants count as humanoids. Even if you're hewing to a specific geography, you've got plenty of options. Now, some of those might include:

Direwolves are beginning to disappear from the southern reaches of Digguay. As far as a group of bounty hunters are concerned, this fact has nothing to do with their contract against the Wolf Lord of the Boundary Lands. As far as the Wolf Lord's taiga giant successor is concerned, a gaggle of outlanders is about to steal the opportunity to prove herself as the superior warden of direwolves, and she's willing to ally with her predecessor if it means a fair fight in the future.

The Cat Lord of Ruava Wilds dies, and the catfolk weretiger who took care of him in his final days is subsequently chosen as the new... Serpent Lord?

The city-state of San Rodrigo has learned to tolerate their surprisingly well-behaved rodents. This is largely a process of elimination: those vigilant in exterminating rodent nests have a habit of disappearing from their beds. San Rodrigans have also become accustomed to watching what they say in the subways and below-ground markets. Something might be listening -- and that something might be reporting to someone.

Pathfinder's Anemoi takes full advantage of the release of the Kineticist class, taking on various infusions among its many, many abilities. While the setting sometimes has a tendency to turn big-shot mythological figures into generic monsters (a problem partially inherited from DND), the anemoi hew pretty close to their namesake, and your party can expect a fair amount of trouble if they get on an anemos' bad side.

Anemoi also benefit from having built-in cardinal variants, which are always a fun way to turn what might have been a major but singular plot beat into an entire adventure.

The planet fortress of the Oblivion Conglomerate is not exempt from the laws of aerodynamics, and thus remains subject to their designated anemoi council. With no hope of a direct assault, destabilizing Thalin Minor's winds - and thus, their ecosystem -remains Earth's next best plan.

Gods retain an affinity for the music they listened to at thirteen hundred-years-old. If the dispute between a choral angel vocalist (fallen, currently an infernal paper pusher), a legendary halfling harpist (presently the thrall of a Nosferatu), the protean lord of percussion (chronic philanderer), and a zephyr anemos flautist (the drummer's bitter ex) can be resolved in time, perhaps they can quell the thrashings of the waking Lord of Nails.

Fiending for another hit of mythic power, legendary sellswords in service to the Horseman of Pestilence dig up a buried temple of wind from which a great power emanates. Said power is an austral anemos elder, and while killing them would certainly feed their hunger, the anemos would be of much help if, when their master finally rides onto their world, they decide to blow his swarming hordes back through the gate, knock him off of his horse, and take their first spot in the upper echelons of daemonkind.

On the Egyptian side of sphinxes, the Androsphinx is a lot less likely to eat you for failing to solve a riddle. This carries over to its Pathfinder interpretation, a CG monster with a penchant for philosophical debates and sphinxy romance.

I'm gonna second Patch's opinion on sphinx mating habits, this is something that should have been relegated to a throw-away line, if at all. Socothbenoth's Book of the Damned entry should not have been a more comfortable read than the summary of a stock Fantasy RPG monster.

Moving on.

A juvenile futsanglung has formed an uneasy friendship with an androsphinx that, disappointed in his middling intelligence, has taken it upon himself to tutor the young wyrm on philosophy. In his pride, Munnen fails to consider why Tulong keeps emerging from his burrow for more lessons -- and what an underworld dragon is doing so far from the badland caverns of Western Xinchun.

Famed Balgiari painter Sabino da Amante has been commissioned by an androsphinx to capture his glory. During a break, a thief breaks into Sabino's studio, and the ensuing fight leaves the artist in a critical condition. Upon seeing his wounded painter, the androsphinx roars for help -- disturbing a party next door and a quartet of sellswords perusing the jewelry shop two floors below.

Pse-nirina valued creativity in life, giving his androsphinx guardian Dahrebi permission to scrawl philosophical musings upon the surface of his grand tomb. In the millennia since the Prince of Ink's death, Dahrebi has ran out of space on the outside, and his writings extend into the tomb's interior; the point at which his musings become tainted by the many-armed obelisk haunting his dreams occurs a few meters after the foyer. A few rooms later, his manifesto goes from merely disturbing to an active psychological hazard.

Are Androids people? It's weird how it's felt like we've had about a century of work fictional musings on that question before [PREACHY LLM GUN-POINTED-AT-MY-PRINTER ASIDE].

Yeah, it's uh... it's gotten difficult to talk about sapient robots in the past few years. I'm hoping that, if you're reading from the future, everything that's happened over the past few years feels like a distant nightmare. But if you're a DM with players keen on having a deep CR-style game or vice versa, the question might inevitably come up. Anyways, glad y'all had your butlerian jihad.

The biggest question for your pre-modern setting is how androids came to be. Unlike wyrwoods or WotC's warforged, the android is pretty explicitly based in biotech. It's the end result of creating a robot so human-like that it takes on a mortal soul. Even its base special ability, Nanite Surge, bases itself in presently-emerging robotics.

But hey! Answering questions is what you're here for, and if not, androids are fucking cool! Paraphrasing Patch here, but their special abilities are well suited for climactic scenes and even the ever-loved android reveal moment. So, if you're looking to electrify your setting...

Gutted, bisected, locked in a freezer, beheaded; a demon lord's champion just won't stay dead, returning to harass the Electric Leviathan's most persistent enemies time and time again. As it turns, soul transplants are a lot easier when you can cook up another body in a vat -- especially if your serve the metaphysical embodiment of misused technology.

Gahiji Asghar has the coordinates to the Mother Egg implanted in his mind -- he just doesn't care enough to pay her a visit. It's only after a bout of (unbearable) peace that he begins to considers a trip to see what his siblings have gotten up to.

Graverobbing: it's a living! A band of "research assistants" have been tasked with procuring the bodies of slain heroes for a local university. "Blue-Joint" Antran Monada's corpse is particularly valuable, as it has yet to rot. It's a mystery that only deepens when, upon dissection, their patron discovers just how much Antran's body differs from his fellow legends. If they can find a live specimen of Homo android for Dr. Legazpi -- preferably before his tenure review -- his assistants might never have to work another day in their life.

Amphisbaenae sit somewhere between mythology and proto-zoology in real life, creatures that don't exist outside of polycephalus development but find frequent reference in many antiquity texts. In mythology. Pliny the Elder in particular references their use in contemporary folk medicine. As a fantasy role-playing game, Pathfinder has no such issues with cryptozoological viability.

The most interesting part of the amphisbaena's statblock is its splitting ability. Given which classes tend to deal critical slashing damage, it might already be dead by the time it comes up, but it's certainly a fun idea.

What Taurinus Zoo thought to be an invasive rattlesnake just regrew the head it lost a few weeks back, and they're hoping some explorers might know a thing or two about the behaviors and requirements of this newfound reptile, either through research or observation.

Rumors abound of the obstetric benefits of amphisbaena skin. They're false, of course -- ill-informed adventurers seeking to ease a frail woman's difficult pregnancy end up a couple of days poorer and a couple hundred GP richer.

Zanteiave the Medusa is slain, and her head can be safely delivered to the Greymetal Guild as proof of a contract fulfilled. The finer details of medusa blood are relatively obscure, so when a dozen or so amphisbaenae spill out of their bag of preservation, ce la vie.

The Amphiptere is probably best known for its frequent appearances in European heraldry. I say "probably" because that's about the only thing I can find about it online, and going through a bunch of books on European dragonology isn't on my docket. From what it looks like, the amphiptere's general shape pops up a lot in antiquity, likely owing to its relative simplicity.

While the flavor isn't anything to write home about, the statblock has a few interesting tidbits, including an automatic pin upon a confirmed tail critical and an amusing limitation to its flying speed. So, without further ado...

It has been a very bad day for Matsura Ietaka, Deputy Minister of Health and kuwa gunslinger in disguise. Presently, he's being dragged around by the hyperactive amphiptere that speared him on his vacation day hike, and the fact that he isn't dead yet is making it increasingly obvious that he's not actually human.

A minor Alsatian marquis is incensed that his family crest is being copied by even less relevant noble families. To compensate, he decides to redesign his logo to give his amphiptere a greater level of detail -- and he wants the real thing as a reference.

The kobold canyon villages of Scassari Plateau face displacement as Cavila's armies march eastward. While the goblins on the plateau have already pledged their support, their cavalry's amphiptere mounts are refusing to help on account of a centuries-old grudge.

In the process of reading up on the Amarok, I learned that dire wolves were an actual animal. Huh.

In Inuit folklore, the Amarok may be a judge, a mentor, or the thing that eats you if you don't follow the buddy system. Pathfinder synthesizes all of this, and I can definitely see it working in any of these capacities. The aside about the pups is even taken straight from the same tale as its star feature.

If you're the kind of DM who likes making level-ups a mini adventure (or you want to accommodate a player w/ similar inclinations), the amarok is explicitly a great tutor, with a constant discern lies and true seeing to cut through a character's walls. Their solitary nature and harsh environs mean even seeking one out can be an interesting challenge.

The entrance to the City of the Boreal Lords is guarded by an amarok. More accurately, the amarok is protecting explorers from the fruits of their own curiosity. Of course, travelers need not kill the beast to pass: anyone who can trick or sneak past the city's fearsome gatekeeper will find that those skills transfer quite well in the City proper.

A dwarven barbarian can feel himself growing stronger, but a brother he couldn't save in a hunt gone wrong haunts him even now. His mind won't let his body access this newfound strength -- not until the recurring dream of the enormous wolf that once saved him is resolved.

Not all winters are made in the same image. When the cold winds blow, the ice bridges the gap between the quiet island of Kangaatdal and the forested expanse of Windhurst. Bored with its tight-knit adlet tribes and cowardly qallupilluk, the amarok Tikaanissu ventures south for excitement, only to find herself embroiled in a conflict between a village of paranoid werecaribou requiring nightly curse removal, a group of meat-trading vagabonds left stranded in a sudden blizzard, and a lipless, short-fingered monster she has never seen or heard of before. She'd be a valuable ally, to be sure, if she can be convinced to stay.

Out of universe, an Amoeba Swarm isn't going to be isn't going to be too much trouble to a party that's packed sufficient alchemical fire. In universe, the idea of being digested by coin-sized protists is quite terrifying!

Classifying a real-life animal as an "ooze" is definitely one of those things I didn't really think about, though I imagine protists defy a lot of categorization. Do you think black puddings could be protists? What about gelatinous cubes? Do you think there's qlippothic protists? Is Jubi--

The rise of taxonomy as a scientific field has lead to a renewed debate on the mysterious oozes found swarming the stagnant waters of Rakai Lake. If possible, the local university would appreciate some samples.

Yobanna Chidey lived in mortal fear of the Patron Saint of Silence's rodent servitors, leading to the installation of various traps, moats, and pits of amoebas in his estate. When he dies (heart attack), the executor of his will calls in a team of sellswords for protection.

A jack-of-all-trades contractor and a prisoner on work-release sign up to help clear an amoeba infestation from a mid-rise basement. A thief picks the worst possible time to burgle the worst possible place. An unemployed wizard school graduate goes downstairs to wash their clothes, having missed the posted notices. It's the ugly start of a beautiful friendship.

The Amargasaurus is a dinosaur we only have a single skeleton of. Makes it a bit hard to determine behavior to a B, but it does mean you've got some fun leeway...

The sole known skeleton of an amargasaurus is reanimated. Museum contractors will be paid handsomely if (and only if) they can take it down without destroying it.

Colesadas National Park is a beautiful tropical rainforest hosting a number of ancient sauropods. Among them are the amargasauri, pack herbivores noted for their vibrant rows of spines. These spines are coveted by poachers for their supposed medicinal properties.

Not all half-dragons benefit from their new heritage. A blue dracomargasaurus has been discarded by the wizard who synthesized it, due to the weight and length of its neck spines interrupting its basic function. When not curled up in physical and emotional pain, it can be found wandering the grounds near the wizard's lair.

The creature above is just one of the many Alter Egos a party might encounter. Born of a sudden trauma, alter egos are tragic reflections of their progenitors, driven by a piece of psyche that broke off during their creation. The concept as envisioned by Paizo likely derives from... yeah, this is another one of those late 19th/early 20th Century things that debuted with Occult mechanics.

Honestly, though? I think there's something here.

Alter egos are a great way to confront your players with their characters' worst aspects or recontextualize their favorite behaviors. Indeed, you can use this as a great excuse for a post-session backstory aside, allowing your player to infodump about their character while you tailor-make the hurt. If you subscribe to Knife Theory, here's your knife rack.

Conversely, this is also one of the best ways to reveal your NPC's insecurities. Player characters looking to non-lethally deal with an obstructive bureaucrat, petty tyrant, or draconic gatekeeper might glean some useful information from their peculiar look-alikes.

An exhibition match between a swashbuckling matador and a minotaur barbarian ends in tragedy when an ill-timed gore leaves the matador paralyzed from the waist down. For his part, the minotaur willingly turns himself in -- which makes it peculiar when he's spotted around the city, dispassionately hunting its officials.

A bogeyman has taken an abandoned fairground as his lair. A hall of mirrors acts as its foyer, and while bounty hunters would be right to suspect its warped decor holds some hidden terror, Mr. Maestro prefers to savor his victim's paranoia; visitors will have to wait until the haunted house attraction for their dull-eyed dopplegangers to begin hunting.

The Banquet Hall, Malien Diyecht's domain, is filled with dozens of listless alter egos, the remnants of failed heroes the Once and Future Empress defeated and humiliated before friend and follower. They serve as her first line of defense -- and a grim portend of the Icon of Failure, Humiliation, and Downfall's terrifying proclivities.

(Bestiary 6 pg. 8-9)

The Alraune takes its name from the German novel of the same name, which took inspiration from the legend of the mandrake. I'll fully admit to being unfamiliar with the source material, but any fantasy monster that takes inspiration from Gothic literature has a place in my heart.

Alraunes are a cruelty-free (barring its victims) and plant-based (depending on if you also consider figs plant-based) alternative to succubi, a seductive plant with a statblock based around hunting and charming prey into letting it feed... or grappling, constricting, or holding prey to cut out the middleman. With a 1/day mind fog to embolden its save-or-sucks, four grabbing vines per full-attack, and a wall of thorns to keep its prey from fleeing, the Alraune can very quickly become a nightmare even on its lonesome.

A massive, multipurpose store has just opened up in heart of Heusberge. Its most popular "department" sells perfume, a business lucrative enough that, if you're strong enough to kill an alraune and don't ask too many questions, will net it procurers quite the pretty copper.

When an animal buries itself in a hole and lies still, you're allowed to eat it, right? That's what a group of fungal leshies believe. Altruistic at heart, they see no problem leading the pilgrims (she used that word, right?) seeking repose (whatever "repose" means) to that one kind flower with the weird stamen.

The Republic of Cudnau went on a bit of a public hanging spree after the Mandrake Uprising was put down. Unfortunately for the Republic, the executioner had been an infiltrator from the start, and the, uh, "fluids" collected from his fellow cultist went right back to his surviving compatriots and their willing vessels. Five years later, the fruits of these foul rituals begin haunting Cudnau's forests.

To its credit, Pathfinder tries a lot of new things beyond the "tactical combat sim" the RPG is mainly known for. One of those is the Alpluachra, a transplant from Celtic mythology.

Alpluachras are an interesting sort of monster, because the most dangerous part of their statblock is purely noncombatant. With the power to starve and dehydrate its victims, the alpluachra plants itself in the realm of rations, something a lot of DMs and players don't necessarily consider in a game whose three main appeals are combat, exploration, and showing off your cool OCs. Logistics just aren't fun, y'know?

(Survival stories notwithstanding.)

I think most players will see this ugly little thing as a disease, ultimately, but the idea of contracting one outside of combat/traps might throw them off, a bit. In that case, it might be best to stick to NPCs, so the players don't find it cheap. Or...

After a nice nap in the Otherside, a group of explorers attend a comedy put on by a troupe of nymphs. A few minutes in, one of the explorers unexpectedly finds themself heckling the performers in perfect Aklo -- a language they don't speak, especially not through closed lips.

King Krikke's master of the guard wants him dead. Normally, if the King of Fryrec were to be poisoned at a fancy dinner party, he'd be tasked with the investigation (and subsequently be able to pin the blame on, say, the court physician). If the King were to suddenly vomit up a dead newt, however, that might require some outside help.

A new drug has found its way into Monamore, synthesized from the numbing slime of an alpluachra. The fey are in on the racket, though some will supplement their income by consensually implanting themselves in those addicted who can no longer afford the real thing. Peacekeeping contractors might be able to learn more of the O'Cuilin Ring from these stragglers -- though they could just as easily turn them in to the Family for some extra cash.

The Alp comes from German folklore, and acts as your bog-standard sleep paralysis demon when it's not doing the typical German elf business. Oh yeah, these things are (classical) elves and mares.

Against a party caught with its pants down, the Alp is a real sunuvabitch. Its Nightmare Rider allows it to inflict 1d2 Con damage for as long as a victim fails to beat its +24 stealth checks, and further inflicts the ever-dreaded nightmare SLA at +4 DC and with an added 1d6 Cha hit. Thankfully, the alp doesn't typically kill its targets... though if it wanted to, its Crushing Leap is certainly an unpleasant way to go about it.

A rash of illness is spreading through Oldenbruck. Symptoms include general malaise, a dulled affect, spontaneous nighttime bleeding, nightmares, and a peculiar form of sleepwalking that causes infectees to hide bags of flour where they might spill onto the unsuspecting.

The elves of the Black Forest advise travelers not venture too deep... and if they do, not to fall asleep within its bounds, lest their primal cousins make a snack out of the Forest's intruders.

When the night hag Blood Worm makes the mistake of operating in an alp's territory, she becomes the target of its increasingly elaborate pranks. Fleeing to the Rifts won't help -- one of her old victims has provided the damn thing with a souped-up tuning fork -- and her reputation has begun to slip among the demons of the Smashed Cities. Blood Worm will trade literally any gem out of her current stock for things to go back to "normal".

Remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Forget it, cause the concept of a killer bunny predates that by several hundred years. The Almiraj has been terrorizing the Islamic World since Poland's been eating dumplings.

Almiraj are the kind of monsters that start off a rollicking adventure of magic. At CR 1, they're a good monster to introduce the fantastical journey your players are about to go one, and their petrifying attack lacks the "save or suck" that marks some of the other monsters you might face. Plus, such a hex-prone creature might have an owner who'll be quite miffed to hear what's happened to their beloved pet...

The naturalist Salman Farahani comes back from Ziyarid Tabaristan with tales of a wondrous new animal... and a request for assistance in unpetrifying his companion.

Almiraj are an endangered species. When Lord Ebner forgets to put away the peculiar spiral dagger she keeps in her office, the Paladin of the Green grouped up with some local sellswords must find a way to right this wrong without compromising her barony's social services.

In the Northern reaches of Ravalankais, the sucking desert sands and cold peaks give way to the Mediterranean fields that elevated its provincial cuisine to global stardom. A coven of vindictive hags seek to starve the prosperous nation through the spread of wild magical beasts. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Maiden of the coven is greener around the gills than the coven's green hag, and her choice of monster is too carnivorous to start a proper famine.