All Sorts Of Critters

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No, you're right. Nowhere actually talks about their origins in absolutes, not even Blood of the Moon, the book that's ALL ABOUT them. The closest we get to a concrete answer is Jezelda's article in Book of the Damned, where she's credited as the first werewolf... a fact that's debated and denied in-universe, by her own minions. Her article in the BotD frustratingly taunts me with "the original source of lycanthropy has long fascinated scholars and philosophers, for it is an affliction that has plagued civilization from the very beginning" before launching into "yeah not even Jezelda's faith considers her the first one." I suppose it does make her unique when among her peers Kabriri "The First Ghoul" Gnawingone and Zura "The First Vampire" Vampqueen (who is also only debatably the first vampire, but she openly claims to be).

I think the most tantalizing hint to the origins of therianthropy is actually in 2e's Howl of the Wild, snuck in via two sentences on page 194: "It could be the curse exists on its own, to be filtered through any type of beast. Or it began as a curse for one animal, and some influence of other animal magic caused the malady to splinter to other species."

The implications there are fascinating and more than a little horrifying; that the curse spreads almost like a prion disease. leaping from species to species until it makes its way into a host who expresses the symptoms obviously and violently. It's easy for someone (me) to come to the conclusion that there may be swaths of Golarion's wildlife who are infected by this transformative illness, but humanity largely doesn't notice because the rabid transformed animals either keep to the wilds or are slain in the dead of night before anyone got a good look at what they actually were.

There's a nonzero chance that werewolves WERE the first therianthropes, but they spread the curse to other creatures via nonfatal bites (or into scavengers consuming their corpses), who went on to create their own variants of the polymorphic curse in anything they bit or anything that bit them.

(sorry if you've answered this before)

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A Cleric of the Whispering Way would just be a necromancer Wizard!

The Whispering Way doesn't have domains because it's not being backed by any divinity, even secretly. Divine Mysteries even says "the Whispering Way claims no founder, prophet, or divine muse" and "requires no belief to be true," so it makes sense that there'd be no domains attached to it. It's the same as the Laws of Mortality and the Prophets of Kalistrade (the former is especially funny; it rejects the divine and yet in 2e gives a Divine Attribute and Divine Skill if you follow it???); all three have adherents and all three are technically religions (much as the LoM might reject the label), but all three have nothing divine behind them, all their power coming purely from mortal belief.

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I'm not sure who'd be willing to take the bargain of "escape this mental torture by submitting yourself to an eternity of physical, spiritual, and mental torture!" But having it just be a one-sided blast bargain of 'i'll sell you my soul if you torment this person for the rest of their lives' is good.

CR 14

Neutral Evil Huge Humanoid

Bestiary 6, pg. 134

These gigantic grotesqueries are the offspring of an ancient clade of giants that sold themselves out to the Horseman of Pestilence. While the majority of them remain aligned with Abaddon's hideous will, others have taken to following the path of the Gossamer King, or Cyth-V'sug, or forces even fouler and more ancient. This makes them among the least pleasant giants to be around, which is saying something when you remember how bad some of them can be, and like many of the Evil-aligned giants, Plague Giants aren't usually solitary threats, mingling not only with their own kind, but all manner of outcasts, exiles, and criminals seeking to turn their pain and suffering into a weapon. Sometimes literally, but we'll get to that in a bit.

Plague Giants are about as straightforward of a threat as you can imagine. Wherever they go, they sow pestilence, able to cast Contagion at will, instill their minions (or themselves) with Plague Carrier up to 3/day to spread death in their stead, or use their 3/day Plague Storm to create a foul smog that seeps through the streets of a settlement to blight everyone in its path. Interestingly, they possess a +26 to Heal checks, allowing them to effortlessly provide succor to anyone suffering from the diseases they inflict, which typically allows them to keep their own subjects alive just long enough to wring all possible use out of them before sacrificing them to whatever dark gods they serve. This also does give them some leverage over whatever settlement they've blighted, i.e. a "pay me tribute and I will cure your sickness."

Whether they're extorting a population or simply ruling over it with physical strength, these gangrenous giants make themselves menaces a party needs to deal with, quickly, lest the spreading sickness kill more than the giant ever could on its own. And let's be clear, they may look like withered lepers barely held together by their own clothes, but they're still giants and are very capable of slaughtering their way through entire squadrons of guards without much issue. Their 15ft space and 15ft reach means their attacks are hitting exactly who they need to hit more often than not, though they thankfully have only a single AoO each round to dole out punishment off-turn. The flails can hit up to three times for 3d6+11 damage each, but if the giant has allies, it can also make dangerous use of Greater Trip and Greater Disarm. The giants have a +30 to attempts to trip or disarm targets (well, +32 to disarm due to using a flail), making the maneuvers a near-certainty against smaller foes, with Greater Trip meaning anyone they trip can get AoO'd by the giant's associates, and Greater Disarm sending an enemy's dangerous weapon flying inconvenient distances away.

Plague Giants can and should use an action or two to rid troublesome enemies of their primary weapons or force foes to waste time standing up (and getting beaten for their trouble), because like most Giants, they're piles of unguarded HP that fully rely on their AC (29) and saves (+15/+11/+18) to keep healthy. Their obscuring Plague Storm adds a lot of defense to them, but they're going to want to use their combat maneuvers to give them time enough to use their real trump card: Wither Limb at 3/day. A single casting robs a creature of the use of one of its arms, severely cutting down on the amount of damage (or protection) they can do each round, while two castings can shut down 90% of a spellcaster's entire arsenal. They're basically incentivized to use this crippling ability, as they have no ability to heal themselves and no easy means of retreat, and besides this are unquestionably malevolent, so once a fight starts it's typically to the death. Whether that death happens now or later matters little, hence why they're so keen on spreading contagious illnesses, not just with their magic but with all of their attacks.

Plague Giants are immune to disease but can easily harbor it and spread it, each one being born with the unique Atrophic Plague disease which follows them for their entire lives. This sickness is spread by ALL of their attacks due to the festering effluvium that erupts from their bodies with each movement, so anyone struck with their flail or their meager slam (1d8+5) must make a DC 26 Fortitude save or contract the rot, which causes 1d4 Con damage and 1d4 Dex drain. This disease takes effect immediately, but the good news is that once you fail the save, you're not going to get infected multiple times, so the maximum damage they can do is the initial blast, and you can just cure the disease after battle before it does any more damage. Unless they start stacking multiple diseases onto you, I mean.

Plague Storm is incredibly dangerous in this regard, as it reduces the incubation period for the disease it spreads to "immediate." Not only does it obscure vision on itself, but it can also spread Blinding Sickness through the whole party, which does exactly what it sounds like, making the team more vulnerable to being beaten to death... and once someone dies, ally or enemy, the REAL awful fun starts! Plague Giants have Rock Throwing like any good giant, but they uniquely have Hurl Corpse, an ability that lets them supercharge a dead body they grab with vile energy and turn it into a bomb.

Any corpse grabbed and thrown by a Plague Giant in this way deals 2d6+16 damage on impact, spreading the giant's Atrophic Plague with a touch, and then explodes, Not only does this make resurrection a pain in the neck (or outright impossible at lower levels), but it creates a noxious 10ft cloud of vapor that nauseated anyone inside, giving the giants yet another way to control the shape of a battlefield in the most disgusting way possible. Not only is it a morbidly effective tactic, turning the fallen into a self-replenishing weapon, but it makes for a distressing sight for anyone coming in after the massacre; a battlefield filled with nothing but empty clothes and greasy smears on the ground... and of course gigantic, misshapen footprints leading off into the countryside, marching towards the next civilization.

(Art source: Devil Survivors, pulled off the wiki)

(Author's note: This one's an oddity I feel like I should comment on. I only ever encountered this guy in the Devil Survivors' series, itself a branch of the Shin Megami Tensei series. While most of the devils/demons/spirits/whathaveyou in SMT are pulled from real mythologies from all over the world, this specific guy is a wholesale reference to a manga I've never read, but incarnated as a menace instead of as a prankster. I've made him close to his Devil Survivors self, since that's where I first encountered him)

(I played Devil Survivors 2: Record Breaker over 15 years ago, and it became one of my favorite games ever made. And THIS guy, for whatever reason, stuck with me harder than any other spirit in the game despite his limited usefulness, to the point that the moment I got reminded of him, I got the urge to stat him out. The name isn't inspired, but his name in-game is just "Ghost Q" so I wanted to add a little something to it; I'm taking suggestions, so long as they begin with Q)

In times of great economic prosperity, when the pantries of families burst with excess far beyond their needs, they must take care not to brag of their abundance lest they invite a visit from a Qan. Believed to be everything from the souls of those who perished from famine, to fragments of spite from lords jealous of their subjects' plenty, to bizarre incarnations of economic balance, the Qan are small but powerful spirits with an even more powerful appetite and a strange fixation and interpretation of "fair shares."

In idle times, the Qan wander roads aimlessly but are rarely actually encountered by travelers due to their ability to turn invisible, giving the illusion that the unusual undead randomly pop into existence and accost anyone they've "judged" as living beyond their means. Instinctually guided towards settlements experiencing a prosperous boom, Qan arrive with little pomp and circumstance, marching past any stunned onlookers while making no attempts to hide their garish and incongruous appearance, nor their gluttonous motivations. Anyone that gets between them and their targets is shoved aside, or battered if they're particularly stubborn, as a Qan's minuscule frame hides enough strength to send a soldier flying out of his shoes with a single punch.

Upon reaching their destination, the Qan attempts to politely enter the home via invitation. If/when denied, they try to trick their way inside, or loudly pester and needle the families until they're verbally permitted to enter... But if not invited in by dinner time, the Qan will lose patience and use its strength to terrifying effect, knocking out a window to crawl through or bashing a door off its hinges, leading many to deny it only until they can set the table for it and minimize its destructive presence. Brushing past terrified (or utterly exasperated) families, the Qan messily and noisily consume its "share" of the household's food, often making terrible puns related to anything it sees as it does, just to add further absurdity to the situation. A Qan can and will eat a whole day's worth of meals in a single sitting, and if the household has yet more after this, the spirit promises to return the next day to claim its "share" then, too, until it's finally satisfied that the house has become "properly balanced," typically meaning they've enough food to feed themselves for one to two weeks and no more.

... At which point the spirit moves on to the next house to do the same thing over and over, until the whole settlement meets some arbitrary economic threshold or, more frequently, the Qan is chased off, banished, or slain by a third party... or a common pet. For unknown reasons, Qan are mortally terrified of dogs, fleeing at top speed from as little as the sight of untrained puppies and becoming frightened by the sound of barking alone. Some scholars posit that Qan may be the spirits of ravenous goblins, which goes a long way to explaining their foul behavior, atrocious fashion sense, and terrible table manners.

All Qan stand at approximately 3 feet tall, often wearing hats as tall as they are, and weigh almost nothing despite their gluttony. Their unpleasantly humid breath smells strongly of cooked rice, a food they love above all else; meals primarily made up of rice can be used to bribe them to behave as a proper guest, though never to actually leave.

CR 8

Chaotic Neutral Small Fey

Bestiary 5, pg. 228

These bizarre creatures haunt the edges of civilization for dupes and wanderers to stock up on precisely what you'd expect, snatching away at the shadows of people whose lives are filled with regret. Shadow Collectors have numerous reasons for doing what they do, ranging from survival to fashion, using every part of the shadows they steal whenever they manage it. They "sift" memories and regret from shadows to consume, can wear someone else's far fancier shadow(s) in place of their own due to the fact they have No Shadow themselves. And if they don't like how it looks "raw," they can process a shadow (or multiple shadows) into a fabric they can weave into a wide variety of useful magical items aligned with darkness, shadows, and illusion.

I said they "steal" shadows, but Shadow Collectors can run the full gamut from con-artists tricking mortals into selling them off, to sneaky thieves, to blatant muggers, and all of them are dangerous to a party that doesn't know what they're dealing with and doesn't realize just how badly they need their shadow. If a Shadow Collector manages to snatch your shadow, not only do you obviously not have a shadow anymore, but this supernatural robbery also somehow steals your reflection, potentially tricking onlookers into believing that you're some manner of undead or fiend... if the negative levels didn't kill you first. Yes, when a Collector yanks it away, a chunk of your memories go with it, inflicting 2 negative levels onto you that cannot be removed, period, until you get your shadow back. Now, getting it back is a simple affair! A Shadow Collector can release any or all of its stolen shadows as a simple standard action, so bargaining/tricking/negotiating/threatening can work... and if it can't, a creature can also regain their shadow by getting blessed with Break Enchantment or, more likely, touching the Collector while it's either helpless or dead.

So that's how to get it back once it's gone, but how does it snatch them in the first place? Well, their Steal Shadow automatically collects the shadows of any creature they destroy, incapacitate, or kill with their two claw attacks, though the 1d6+2 damage isn't likely to kill much of anything. The +3d6 Sneak Attack on both of them is a different story, able to burst down most common citizens they need to pad their pockets and severely injure folk with much fancier shadows outright. They also have the unique Tear Shadow ability, giving their claws Ghost Touch while dealing an automatic 1d6 Charisma damage to incorporeal creatures. Tear Shadow destroys any incorporeal creature that hits 0 Charisma, letting them effortlessly hunt down actual Shadows and shove them in their packs... and, amusingly, means a Collector can set up a shadow-harvesting operation near the sites of respawning Undead like Poltergeists and Ghosts.

They can also just use the Steal Combat Maneuver to snatch the shadow of an unsuspecting rube, yanking it out from under them like a carpet they were standing on. They've got a +14 to steal checks, giving them a decent chance against similarly-leveled creatures, though a DM could also rule they could use their more unfair +22 to Sleight of Hand to yank it away too. It's not exactly a subtle theft in either way, what with the sudden 2 negative levels, but a victim suddenly reeling from the theft might not notice the perpetrator slinking away with a +26 to Stealth.

Stealing a shadow has one final, powerful benefit for the cruel Collector: it grants them Shadow Points (SP). Each stolen shadow grants them 2 SP, which never expire until they do, and each point allows them to use one of their powerful spell-likes. They have unlimited access to powerful utility spells like Disguise Self, Major Image, Shadow Step, and the Shadow Evocation version of the obnoxious Leashed Shackles, but each use of their power requires the expenditure of a single SP, limiting just how often they can throw out powerful illusions, disappear into crowds, or flat out disappear.

They also have the wide-open toolbox that is Shadow Conjuration at 3/day, able to call in phantasmal assistance or--as the book suggests--plunge foes too powerful for them to deal with into illusory pits they need to waste enormous amounts of time clambering out of. As you can imagine, phantom assists are especially powerful for a creature with Sneak Attack, as they can provide flanking even against creatures who know they're just illusions. In times when an even bigger burst of damage is needed, they can use a full powered Shadow Evocation 1/day to throw out illusory Walls of Ice, blow up the battlefield with a phantom Fireball, or give everyone at the table a rules headache when considering how Resilient Sphere functions when channeled through Shadow Evo. Importantly, however, is that they can also use it to cast Darkness, a spell they can see through because they know it's an illusion, but everyone else has to save against or they're vulnerable to being hit with Sneak Attack... and of course, creating a sudden area of darkness means the Collector can suddenly disappear from the battle entirely, either using its at-will Shadow Step or its 1/day Shadow Walk to just get out of town.

Like many shifty and irritating Fey, Shadow Collectors are more likely to flee than fight against multiple creatures, leaving trails of victims in their wake if the party can't stop them from vanishing into the darkness. Their DR 10/Cold iron can protect them from most forms of retribution, with their SR 19 making up for their lack of any form of resistance or immunity, so their resilience lets them get away with some pretty audacious crimes, such as running up and ripping away someone's shadow in broad daylight. With DR to tank the retributive strikes and Shadow Step fueled up and ready to get them out of sight, the simple Daylight spell--or even just Dancing Lights--has a new chance to shine, keeping these lethal pests from vanishing until the party can gang up and beat the shade out of them.

CR 14

Neutral Gargantuan Magical Beast

Bestiary 6, pg. 32

These wonderfully weird creatures have the honor of following directly in the footsteps of the Archdevils in Bestiary 6 thanks to the alphabetic placement, so as you're scrolling past the most imposing series of demigods you've ever seen BAM! GIANT WORM! Or, rather, giant cucumber. Yes, the beast before you is a Gargantuan sea cucumber, literal bottom-feeding scavengers whose primary concerns in their day-to-day life are eating waste and learning to love the little fish that live in their orifices. Unlike the cucumbers we have on Earth, the Atuikakura--wait, what do you mean "we have that on Earth?" What do you mean "that's not its name?" I'm going to stick with the Paizo name for now, if for no other reason than convenience.

Anyway, like the specific mythological sea cucumbers we have on Earth, the Atuikakura spend most of their lives at the bottom of the ocean, slurping up detritus, corpses, and anything too slow to escape from their maws. However, they're noted to enjoy swimming up and twining themselves around sturdy pieces of driftwood to bask just below the waterline, feeding on creatures closer to the surface, but this is where a lot of problems occur. While the Atuikakura (I'm going to shorten it from now on to Auti) are only occasionally roused into violent action when food becomes scarce and they need to make their own detritus, their unusual habits can be easily perceived as violence by people who don't live around them. After all, wooden ships look an awful lot like an attractive piece of driftwood to these colossal cucumbers, leading to poor sailors believing they're under attack by a horrible monster when it wraps entirely around their boat, which leads to further tragedy if they attack.

Despite their size and their enormous power when compared to the average Humanoid, they're also easily startled by... just about anything, leading to them performing the same destructive, ship-smashing panic attacks that their Earth counterparts are known for. They have the Capsize ability to twist entire small vessels completely over, dumping its contents into the sea and leaving the crews helpless to its retribution. If they're lucky, it will simply leave them stranded in the water as it flees below, but most aren't, especially if they managed to actually strike it and make it angry. While commoners aren't going to hit its 29 AC, a player character might, at which point they find themselves switching the beast from flight to fight.

Atui ARE opportunistic carnivores, and free-floating fools in the water are a perfect opportunity to have something more substantial than fish corpses. They have an enormous threat radius befitting of their size category, a 20ft space and a 20ft reach with all their attacks, and take advantage of it with three attacks: slamming them with their enormous body (2d8+13), biting down (3d6+13), and lashing out with all their oral tentacles at once (2d6+6), and all three attacks carry the cucumber's psychotropic, organ-destroying poison. This poison prompts a DC 25 Fortitude save once a round for up to 6 rounds (2 consecutive saves ends), with each failure inflicting 1d6 Con damage and... Huh. Apparently victims of the poison are "assaulted by visions of the past" that are so distracting that it leaves them blinded for a round, which is a sentence I don't think I've ever seen on a poison before. By the way, if you're wondering how precisely its slam injects the poison, their Spiny Slam puts those bristles in its art to good use, letting its slam deal bludgeoning and piercing damage at the same time.

Con damaging poison is always bad news due to the feedback loop it can cause, each failure lowering the victim's chance to succeed the next one, and it's especially bad when all of the Atui's attacks inflict it, lengthening the duration AND raising the save. If the only thing it could do was this it would be bad enough, but the Atui has plenty of incredibly nasty tricks it can pull on an unprepared party, especially if they weren't ready for underwater combat. The most annoying ability it has is Self-Evisceration, an ability famous to all sea cucumbers but exaggerated to an almost comical degree for the Atui. ANY time one takes damage, it sprays a glob of sticky extraneous organs in a 10ft cone (20ft if underwater), potentially entangling anyone who fails a DC 25 Reflex save and exposing them to its poison even if they succeed the save! There's no limit to the number of times an Atui can jettison its ballasts, though it can only do so once each round, giving the illusion that they're all just jam-packed with useless organs they're waiting for an excuse to fire. Maybe they ARE, given that they've got a generous Fast Healing 20 restoring their HP every single round.

It's probably predictable at this point given that they're tubes with a mouth, but anyone who ends up grappled by the enormous echinoderms risks getting swallowed whole, taking a monstrous 6d6+19 bludgeoning damage every round from their crushing innards, and given that they're Gargantuan, they can happily gulp down entire ship crews or adventuring parties at a time. There IS some mercy in that the Grab isn't on its mouth, but its tentacles, so it must waste some time transferring victims from one to the other to give them time to escape or be rescued, but that's a small mercy due to their tenacious Tentacle Grip.

This ability is at the very end of their statblock and is only a few sentences long compared to their utility-based Collapse (we'll get to it), their obnoxious Self-Evisceration, and their scary poison, but it's arguably one of their most potent powers. Tentacle Grip prevents them from gaining the grappled condition when snaring a Large or smaller creature with their tentacles and allows them to make grapple checks with their tentacles as a free action (though importantly they can't then follow it up with a second check to pin the victim! They have to wait to next round), freeing up the rest of their turn to Full-Attack someone else in their threat radius, move the grappled creature to their mouth... or just move. Tentacle Grip also removes the penalty for moving, allowing the Atui to grab someone and then move its full speed to pull them away from help. It's not an impressive ability, mind, given that the Atui has a glacial land speed of 10ft.

And a swim speed of 120ft. Yes, despite being sedentary silt-wigglers for most of their lives, Atui are terrifyingly fast when motivated to move, and their Tentacle Grip goes from an annoyance to a morbid timer on the battle. Can you burst down the cucumber before it decides to flee with your ally in tow, dragging them 120ft straight down? You might be able to! They have no DR, only 29 AC, NO resistances or immunities, and no SR, with only their +17/+18/+12 saves to protect them from anything more complicated than weapon attacks. But it needs only a single round of grappling someone to pull them into the briny depths, isolating them from the rest of the party and leaving them to be swallowed whole... at which point the Atui can use Collapse to turn itself into a gelatinous mass with both Amorphous and Compression, cramming itself in a tiny fissure with its miserable meal and using its +27 to Stealth (normally +15, but Collapse removes its -12 size penalty) to hide from anyone hoping to rescue them.

Much like the Titanoboa I linked earlier, a sudden Atui attack can turn from a fight into a tense rescue mission as the giant scavenger wrecks the boat entirely by accident out of panicked reflex, then grabs an important NPC or party member and drags them screaming into the depths to feed. At the very least, Atui can be reasoned with. Yes, they're just barely intelligent enough to be considered sapient, but they speak and understand Aquan, so a party not wanting to comb the ocean floor for their ally might be able to talk the beast out of its attack before it destroys their vessel or steals away anyone irreplaceable.

Oh yeah, they also have Combat Reflexes, so they can grapple people entirely off turn and then use their full-round action to flee/eat them if you're not careful!

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The critter in question

It makes me happy to know they're getting used! Looking over their sheet again, though, has made me nerf them: their Lashing Limbs now only allows them an extra tentacle attack if they didn't full attack that round.

As for the actual question here, I recommend actually watching the animated Parasyte: The Maxim anime or reading through the manga to get an idea of exactly what a Legion is capable of. They're way above a normal member of their kind--imagine if the T-1000 was also as fast as a speeding car.

CR 24

Chaotic Evil Gargantuan Aberration

Adventure Path: Strange Aeons: Black Stars Beckon, pg. 71-72

It's been a little bit since our last Milestone Monster, so I wanted to break out something special for this one: a monster few people will have seen if they don't actually own the book it comes from! The Watcher in the Bay is one of many "post-game boss fights" that occasionally show up at the end of Adventure Paths in the "Continuing the Campaign" section, often with lore blurbs and outlines for adventures that could lead up to them. While most post-game bosses are powered up monsters with class levels or humanoids with unique abilities in addition to their class levels, you do rarely get fully unique entities, and the Watcher is one of them!

However, because she's not in the bestiary section and isn't an NPC, she was never recorded in the Archives of Nethys or the d20PFSRD. Near as I can tell, her stats simply do not exist online aside from her CR listed in her wiki article! If this is your first time ever hearing that she actually HAS stats and exists outside of a spooky setpiece in Carrion Crown and any other AP or module that takes place in Avalon Bay, then congratulations! Now you have something to sic on your players if they neglect to throw a sacrificial goat overboard when traveling Lake Encarthan. And it had better be a goat, because this lovely lady here? She's no ordinary lake monster. No, this CR 24 beast is a tentacle of Shub-Nishurath, the Black Goat herself!

Labeled as an "aspect of the Black Goat," the Watcher in the Bay is a Great Old One fully original to Pathfinder, though she's the weakest of the currently statted roster by a huge margin, being 2 full CR under the other two GOO's tied for last place (both of them Paizo originals too... hm...), and she's also got the weakest Unspeakable Presence of any of them, causing a simple 1 round stagger in anyone who fails the DC 33 Will save... and granting 24 hours of immunity in anyone who succeeds the save twice in a row, something no other GOO does! The poor thing doesn't even get a unique affliction for using her Nightmare spell-like ability OR any kind of Immortality! I suppose that's what happens when you're basically a god's pinky that got stuck in in a hole in the bottom of a lake. It's not even the Black Goat's normal territory, which has severely cut down on the shenanigans she can do in a normal campaign, which is probably why she's more or less a setpiece in every story she crops up in.

That being said, she's still a terrific powerhouse, more than a match for creatures she encounters in Avalon Bay even as the Whispering Tyrant awakens. She plays the villain role well thanks to her ability to repurpose creatures she devours into obedient minions, directly corrupting anyone sacrificed to her by her servants to swiftly build up a proper cult to the Mother of a Thousand Young, one that has the direct goal to free the Watcher from her watery environs and turn her into a horror more suited for the primeval forests the Elder God prefers. One could even view the Watcher as a larval stage of a greater entity, though the threat of her turning into a full manifestation of the Black Goat is motivation enough for a party to stop her.

And what happens if they try? Let's find out...

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I thought this sounded familiar for a reason I couldn't put my finger on, and scoured my blog because I could have sworn I answered this before! Then I found this,

Sitting in my inbox from... a year and a half ago. I had a response for it and just plain completely forgot to post it, then went on with my day thinking I did. I'm so sorry!

CR 2

Chaotic Good Medium Ooze

Planar Adventures, pg. 244

These mounds of gorgeous glittering goo are natives of Elysium, where they presumably congeal from sheer heroic resolve or from the blood spilled by powerful azata. Far from your usual mindless eating machines typically found with the Ooze typing, Sapphire Oozes are intensely curious, unrelentingly brave, innocently cheerful, and possess an unquenchable thirst for adventure that endears them to most of the plane's residents. While there's no shortage of exciting adventures to be had in the untamed wilds of Elysium, there IS a shortage of genuine, helpful good to do, and these Oozes will sometimes venture into the Material Plane to pursue actual villains to fight and lives to save.

Granted, they're not going to be doing much fighting on their own. They dream big, but struggle to put their money where their amorphous mouth is with their sole means of offense being a pair of weak slams for 1d4+2 damage each, which is enough to wallop only the lowliest of lowlifes. They DO have a decent number of defenses, mostly from their Ooze typing which renders them impervious to sneak attacks, flanking, sleep, stunning, poison, paralysis, and being polymorphed, and their blindness renders them immune to most visual tricks--sorry, wait, they have All-Around Vision? AND blindsight? Why do they have AAV if they're already an Ooze? Does this mean they can see? Hm. Something to adjust as needed, probably.

Besides this, they've got DR 5/Bludgeoning to deflect incoming slashes and stabs and are immune to Acid... and infinitely more importantly, they're immune to all mind-affecting effects despite being an intelligent Ooze. Yes, when I said "money where their mouth is" I wasn't kidding; they not only talk a big game, they talk in general, being quite chatty and friendly AND fluent in both Common and Celestial! Something they use to approach adventurers from fresh-faced to experienced and offer their services, services you may have guessed by the image above.

Indeed, while they're not so good at attacking, a Sapphire Ooze is phenomenal at defending. They can become an Amorphous Aegis at will, glomming onto any Medium or Small creature to become the equivalent of a mithral breastplate, which means the wearer gets armor with the following stats: +6 AC, +5 max Dex, 15% arcane spell failure, Armor Check Penalty -1, no speed penalty. That's some pretty beefy protection from a little ball of goo! But the utility goes beyond this, because remember the Ooze has 30ft of blindsight. Imagine if your armor could tap you on the shoulder whenever an invisible foe was nearby, tell you about illusions, or whisper guidance through mist and/or darkness! The book does say the Ooze can't take any actions while shifted into armor, so I suppose it really just comes down to whether or not the DM qualifies "talking" as an action, or whether or not free actions in general count towards that restriction. I do want to point out that blindsight requires no action to use and is just passively on all the time, and the rules state "the creature usually does not need to succeed at Perception checks to notice creatures within range of its blindsight ability," so a DM might want to keep this in mind if they want to use the Ooze for its intended purpose!

Also, at the very least, this is medium armor that requires only a full-round action to get into or out of, which is more of a boon than you'd think if you're deep in enemy territory and can be ambushed at any moment. There is one weakness to this symbiosis, though: If the wearer takes more than 6 damage from any one attack, the Sapphire Ooze automatically takes 1d6 damage which ignores its DR. This might not sound like a lot, but the goo's only got 22 HP, and enemies start hitting for 6+ damage pretty damn early in Pathfinder, so you'd best hope the AC you're getting from it keeps that damage to a minimum, because once the protective putty hits 0 HP it falls off immediately and leaves you naked! If you thought having to stop and mend your armor was bad before, now it's taking some precious healing resources instead of a cantrip!

Sapphire Oozes make for fun potential encounters for a normal party, granting someone some higher protection than they may be used to at early levels, or as a stopgap measure if the main tank's armor is being repaired but you really can't wait to march out against Vilejerk the Foul, the same guy this ooze just happens to be opposing! It's even got a second ability, Heroic Infusion, for boss fights with especially frightening foes, granting its wearer +4 to saves against fear effects for 1 round as a swift action, either letting them shake off an ongoing effect or dodge it entirely if the Ooze saw it coming. Unfortunately, for all its power at lower levels and the charm of being able to wear a friendly monster, without some serious HP buffs or the ability to increase the AC it conveys, Sapphire Oozes simply don't have the staying power to keep up with a party advancing past level 6 or 7, when they can start affording actual mithral armor WITH their own enchantments.

It does make for a cute and funny story, though. The party Fighter passing their prized armor to a new recruit, and the recruit being overjoyed at the prospect right up to the point the armor liquefies itself and leaps over onto them like a symbiote. If a DM wanted to keep the Oozes useful at high levels, the Symbiotes may just be the right kind of inspiration...

The actual Void has crystals of immense entropic power that the Sceaduinar and their ilk make their homes on, as well as bits of matter ranging from the size of cities to the size of planets that have broken away from the outer shell and drifted inwards to be slowly consumed over the years unless something stops the decay.