#mosslord

 In your average fantasy setting, gunpowder and the art of gunslinging are probably the upper tier of technological advancement in the world.

However, sometimes you want to play with some more fancy toys, be they relics from a forgotten age, bleeding-edge volatile experiments, or literally fell out of the sky on an ancient spaceship, as is the case for the country of Numeria in the Pathfinder core setting, where techslingers are most likely to be found.

While fully capable of using gunpowder firearms when needed, a techslinger is in their element when they finally get ahold of an advanced weapon, like a laser gun, a zero rifle, or one of the mighty weapons in the heavy category. They may barely understand how the weapon works, but their intuitive methods help them make the most of these powerful tools.

This archetype was definitely built with the timeworn and glitching rules in mind, so if you’re interested in a gun-toting character with weapons that are normally reliable, perhaps such a build would be more suited to Starfinder, but if your fantasy game dives into strange inventions and tech, perhaps you might find a use for it.

 This archetype sports a number of unique deeds, the first of which allows them to get a surprisingly large number of shots out of a single battery, burning grit to retain a charge in the weapon, which is useful since timeworn items sometimes break down to the point they can no longer accept batteries. Whether this represents channeling grit directly into energy, fiddling with the settings to reduce consumption, or the sheer luck that grit partially represents is up to the player.

Additionally, they are exceptionally lucky when it comes to the unreliability of such weapons, glitches happening less frequently thanks to their grit.

Whether it is by a crude recharging action or something else, they can also temporarily add charges to a tech firearm, though these are fleeting, draining from the battery naturally if not used.

As long as they maintain their grit, they can even make use of their luck with the bigger weaponry they might find, unleashing devastating blasts with surprising finess.

Given their associated region, it only makes sense that these gunslingers can take the technologist feat as a bonus feat.

Additionally, like other gunslingers, they learn to specialize in specific weapons, though techslingers focus on specific models of the strange weapons they focus on.

Planning a campaign in a sword and raygun campaign? This archetype is perfect if you are fancying the gunslinger class, though obviously its use outside of that scenario is unlikely. The deeds associated with this archetype are less about providing a unique flavor and more about putting these gunslingers on part with their normal counterparts with their different weapon selection. In a way this makes them similar to the bolt ace, but in the opposite direction.

Build them as you would any gunslinger, but don’t forget how their deeds change the class. (honestly the charge recycling deed is only really good at later levels when you’re down to your last grit point and are running out of weapon charges, for example).

 In a land where understanding of the strange alien technology that litters the landscape can bring great power, techslingers demonstrate power rarely seen outside of the technomancers. Many may live for the rush of using these weapons.

  Raised by a caregiver robot in a peaceful nursery, Ilkas always wondered about the outside. When a power failure shut down the facility, he was forced to leave and fend for himself, discovering that he had been living on a section of an ancient advanced facility that had been running on backup power. He has seen much since then, including hints at the truth behind his shackleborn tiefling heritage, and has taken to collecting the strange firearms he finds for protection.

 When the Ship of the Gods crashed into Bollino Swamp, it quickly was renamed Godpoison swamp, for the ship leaked deadly energies into the water, killing many, twisting others, including the mutated mosslord that rules over it now. Still, for those brave enough, deadly weapons that call lighting and burning light on foes wait for the right hand to grasp them.

Picture the Green Man. Or just a green man.  (Don’t worry, we’ll get to that eventually.) Now picture one…gone wrong.  One rotted.  One that hates civilization.  Now you have a mosslord.  Or even the Mosslord, as he might be a singular entity on your world.  The point is, sometimes nature decides it hates civilization so much that it has to do something about it.  And the mosslord is a great vehicle for doing so—a twisted manikin of moss on a lumber frame with a genius intellect, a head for tactics, a patience for the long game, and that is just humanoid enough to let its victims know that it’s really pissed.

Why use a mosslord versus, say, a powerful fey or blight or a template-packed green dragon or treant? Easy: really evocative special abilities.  Imagine sheets of moss that entangle and sicken.  Yellow mold blasts that weaken PCs and quickened fungal infestation that turn their skin to fleshy fungus. Critical hits that straight up turn humanoid limbs to wood.  And practically no way to kill it unless you can lure it to another plane—the way the rules read, even tossing one into a volcano is only going to work if you account for (and blight/diminish plants) every last spore.  It’s no wonder these creatures are often harbingers of apocalypse and social collapse.  This is a monster worth ending a campaign with.  

(And imagine the mingled frustration and glee the players will feel when their characters see the Big Bad Cult they've been chasing all campaign summon a mosslord…only to watch the cult become the uncaring creature’s first victims, denying the PCs their revenge and leaving them with a plant monster to clean up.)

One final note: I like how the Bestiary 6 authors acknowledged that, yes, blights and whisperers are also things in the mosslord’s world, and they don’t get along.  Why this is so is not specified, but I like that there’s some awareness that we have dueling forces of natural anger all vying for our attention (and vying to turn the PCs into compost).

The Irn Islands, Summer’s Haven, and the continent of Niobe each have their own druidic orders that tend the wild places and guide their respective nations toward fruitful coexistence.  Not so the lands south of the Gash, where only nomads dwell and all attempts at civilization have been swallowed under the suffocating green carpet of the Mosslord and his army of fungal boggards and fey.

Having already wiped out the Circle of Oak, a mosslord threatens the nation of Arinoryx unopposed—unopposed, that is, until some doughty adventurers step in.  They have a plan to lure the mosslord north to the Auroran Highlands and then trap it in ice.  If they succeed, they will indeed slow and weaken the raging plant creature…but they’ll also awaken Rumor of the Ever-Midnight, a whisperer equally outraged that both the forces of civilization and a scion of rot have entered the fey’s glacial domain.

Detecting an anomaly wave, a chronomancer sends adventurers back in time to prevent a disruption of the fabled Elven Exodus.  There the adventurers discover that it was they who inspired the endangered elven race to flee by magic to another world for a millennium.  In the end, they end up playing crucial roles, battling the ur-orc hordes, surrendering the Home Forests to the protection of the fey, and holding off the nascent drow houses at the Gate of Mir Talash.  Finally they lead the elves to Sirnam, the Green Hope.  But Sirnam does not want to be colonized, the planet itself manifesting as a mosslord to drive out the elven migration.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 194–195

Sticklers for detail will notice that Bestiary 6’s Table of Contents has the mosslord out of alphabetical order.

So I'm going to be honest. When I first constructed this list, I had omitted to put Green Men anywhere on it. I've no idea why I made this error, as it fits in to all of my rules and is certainly significant enough to warrant being on this list. I am a little bit glad I did not end up doing so however as, for the most part, the Green Man is a significantly more powerful Treant.

Stat-wise, its very different, with a huge host of spells to add to its wrath and protection of nature. But operationally, it functions the same way in being... well... a tree person dedicated to the wrath and protection of nature.

And you may be thinking, doesn't the text above say Mosslord. And you're right. Because that is about as much as I can say about the Green Man. So I couldn't do a full entry for it. But I felt this was the best place to give it some additional credit before losing the chance to acknowledge it because the Mosslord is also... a significantly more powerful Treant. From the same exact book no less.

That's not entirely fair, as though the Mosslord doesn't have as much power as the Green Man, it has some distinctions from the Treant. But where the Green Man may fall on either side of the coin as a defender or destroyer in the ancient texts, they speak only in ill omens of the Mosslord. For dating back to when civilization first sprouted, the Mosslord has yet to decompose beneath the soil, always clawing its way up again to rot the world.

Undying and unending, this creature rises from its corpse come Spring, only able to truly die by the utterance of two spells in all the written arcana man has created. No one knows where it first came and no one knows what drives its deep hate for humankind. It is seemingly more ancient then the Blights, and we've been over them, as well as pretty much anything else we've talked about on this list.

The Mosslord is unrelenting in its need for utter annihilation and this is not an enemy that's going to be much for roleplaying out a conversation. This does lose it some points in my book, however the creature is not at all unwilling to resort to cunning, they just know their own demeanor is not suited to this. On the contrary, the creature is often able to commit to long and committed campaigns against a civilization, calling upon others to do any negotiations for it. Though these 'negotiations' are inevitably going to be nothing more than diversions, as ultimately the Mosslord has no intention of giving quarter to its enemies. There is also the interesting added element of the doomsday cults that get built up around these beings for an added third element to any quest, as the Mosslord's ire extends to them the same as any.

Its real allure, however, does inevitably come down to its combat. Because it goes beyond just being a powerhouse. Everything in the Mosslord's aresenal is keyed to a very particular kind of natural horror. It's can cause the flesh to be cursed into twisted driftwood, slowly transforming its victims into haunting caricatures, its yellow mold blast showers blankets the terrain in layers of rot, like the mustard gas hellscape of World War I, and a host of spells to infest the entire forest around it with the same spite it holds inside it. The Sheets of Moss ability is also horrifying as it stands, twisting around foes in a writhing mass. However, I would extend the possibility that a Mosslord could also serve as a sort of carrier for hostile plant-life, literally incorporating other creatures into its body and cloak.