#phyrexia project

(Phyrexian Negator by John Zeleznik)

CR16 NE Medium Aberration (Phyrexian)

(The negator is another iconic creature, although one whose card is simply not up to snuff nowadays- the balance of power has tipped so that its astronomical drawback is not worth the creature you get. Still, the obliterator is clearly a riff on it- and got its own, incredibly aesthetically boring riff later- and even then it's simply too fabulous a design not to use. Can you say "xenomorph"?

Lorewise, these explicitly saw most usage in the leadup to full invasion- perhaps, in a hypothetical Phyrexia campaign, this could be the final boss of the second act, before the REAL invasion force finally arrives.)

CR16 NE Medium Aberration (Phyrexian)

Negators are perfected assassins of Phyrexia, designed to eliminate key targets with compleat efficiency. They are singleminded in this pursuit- one infamous document stated simply "It exists to cease." Indeed, a negator's heart is terribly stilled- they are not known to experience any emotion but the satisfaction of a job well done and the desire to achieve so.

Negators, being stealth operatives and assassins, are rarely used once a full-scale invasion begins, although they are often deployed just in the leadup to it. Each negator is given all Phyrexia knows of its target, and is simply placed as close as Phyrexia can get it without garnering attention and sent to kill. Negators are surprisingly skilled at stealth and disguise, able to walk as a hunched figure through whatever streets it may need to to reach its target, and are surprisingly eloquent and skilled actors when they need to lie. Once it makes its kill, however, a negator rarely makes time for stealth. Such negators will begin a return to Phyrexia (such that they might possibly be reset, reprogrammed, and reused), but generally lack the precautions of one who has yet to make a kill. These assassinations are its purpose; it seems some higher part of it shuts off once it is done.

(Plague Spitter by Chippy)

(The plague spitter is meant to be closer to an environmental hazard than a creature per se; designed to sit upwind of a town and poison everyone. Personally I think it's cool and incredibly nasty of original phyrexia to have creatures designed specifically to blight an entire region. That is hardcore evil.

Also, if it's not clear, people catching smoke plague outside the 100ft radius would be an Act Of GM; get a few townsfolk infected and let the PCs not be exposed until they're in combat range.)

CR6 N Huge Aberration (Phyrexian)

Plague spitters are massive reservoirs of an engineered disease known as the smoke plague, designed to blight and destroy population centers so they can be rebuilt in phyrexia's glory.

The spitters themselves are mindless beasts, guided by an engineered instinct to stand firm wherever a phyrexian places them and respire their noxious disease, defending themselves by ramming with their armored face if any threat comes near. Despite their great bulk, spitters are capable of short sprints when stirred into action, something which surprises many adversaries of Phyrexia. Spitters are often placed near cliffs, both so that their airborn plague can travel, and so that spitters can use their weight to shove enemies off the cliff if need be.

(Witch Engine by Kev Walker)

(Hey, I'm back for the time being! Sorry about my unannounced, impromptu hiatus- the simple fact is I live with ADHD, and my attention tends to wander. This is an attempt to get myself back on track, but I make no promises.

As for the witch engine herself- what an iconic creature! They've only got the one card, but they appear in the background of art in cards to represent Phyrexia's spread. With such a great design and a great name, I HAD to make these important to my Phyrexia.)

CR18 NE Huge Aberration

Witch engines are the hands of phyrexia, overseeing much of its ingress into other worlds directly. Indeed, most worlds touched by Phyrexia will know witch engines as the highest power therein, as a trio of these artificial horrors can orchestrate a planetary-scale infiltration and invasion with minimal guidance. But a witch engine is more than just a leader; she is a deadly weapon, capable of shredding through armies with a combination of necrotic magic and her own deadly whirling claws.

Because witch engines are required to organize a phyrexian assault and react to new planets' unique challenges, they are among the most independent and intelligent of phyrexians- each witch engine has its own personality matrix, with different engines being more cautious, curious, or patient than others. Each planetary invasion force is led by three such differing personalities, and each takes the others' opinion- as well as information from the current invasion- to arrive at the best plan of attack.

A witch engine typically keeps a skirge as a familiar, although other familiars with the Phyrexian template are not unheard of.

(Contamination by Stephen Daniele)

(Converter Beast by Uriah Voth)

CR9 LE Huge Aberration (Phyrexian) HD14

A converter beast is exactly what it sounds like- a creature engineered by Phyrexia to assimilate and convert enemies and captives on the fly, the collective’s ultimate goal of conversion of flesh and eradication of culture manifest in a single squamous form. Creatures swallowed by the converter beast are trapped in its cage of bone and drenched in choking phyrexian oil, their flesh and minds slowly corrupted into phyrexian soldiers of compleation.

Converter beasts are ill-equipped to work alone, however, with their blindsight limited and their minds dull and obedient. Most frequently they are accompanied by a huntmaster, a phyrexian ranger trained to thrive in whatever environment they and the converter beast are assigned to. Notably, huntmasters are frequently converts from the populace and region they return to besiege, one of the highest ranks such a phyrexian can reach without having been born a newt or sculpted from scratch. It is the role of these huntmasters to guide them to suitable prey and keep their instincts leashed when the time does not call for it. The beasts, for their part, are obedient servants who know better than to challenge their master’s commands.

Some converter beasts, however, are simply dropped into their environment with no such commander. This is done when subtlety and precision is unneeded, as an unleashed converter beast is just as likely to convert a target as it is to shred it with its tails and jaws.

(The Fourth Sphere by Dave Kendall)

What is Phyrexia?

Phyrexia is a disease. It spreads, infects, and consumes. Phyrexia is a faith. It has gods, beliefs, and practices. Phyrexia is a threat. It's coming for you.

Phyrexia is one of the oldest and most unique factions in the card game Magic the Gathering. It has a focus on machinery and body horror that blurs the line between fantasy and science fiction. It has a long history, both within the fiction and as a fiction, and style that draws inspiration from a lot (Hi HR Geiger) but is fully its own idea; all this makes it ripe to translate to Pathfinder. (Innistrad, for example, also has rich history, but is the exact same niche as Ustalav, so I have no reason to make conversions.) This page intends to serve as a guide to Phyrexia for outsiders, as well as outline the conversion I'm making.

Old Phyrexia in Magic: the Gathering

(I am not an expert on the pre-mending lore of MtG; this intends to serve as a drive-by of the important points. That era of Magic is messy and has a lot of nits and details.)

In lore, Phyrexia began as a sort of cult surrounding a man named Yawgmoth, a doctor from an ancient science-magic society called the Thran. Technically, the original plane of Phyrexia was not created by Yawgmoth, but by a powerful Planeswalker (interdimensional godline being whose power would later get massively nerfed, as a category), but Yawgmoth quickly made it his own.

From there, the humans he brought with him turned to biomechanical experimentation and built a religion aroung Yawgmoth, who became known as the Father of the Machines. They were, unfortunately, trapped on the plane- Yawgmoth (who had ascended to a godlike state) wished to bring his conquest back to Dominaria (the plane from which they came) and beyond.

(Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor by Anna Bodedworna)

There were two major incursions of Phyrexia into Dominaria- first, the Brother's War, a story that was old when Magic was new. Two brothers- Urza and Mishra- had found powerful Thran artifacts, which lead to a power struggle between them. Mishra eventually found a Phyrexian portal, became corrupted (a recurring theme of Phyrexia), and eventually lost when Urza unleashed a magical nuke on the plane, hurtling Dominaria into a supernatural ice age and turning him into one of the godlike Planeswalkers.

The second was the conclusion of the Weatherlight Saga, an arc somwhat orchestrated by the now-ancient being that Urza had become and focusing on a man named Gerard and the crew of an interplanar vessel called the Weatherlight. They first show up having corrupted and taken over Rath, as well as Gerard's adopted brother Vuel. The saga concludes with the plane of Rath being overlaid onto Dominaria in an event that ended with most of the cast dead and Phyrexia and Yawgmoth as it stood destroyed, where they would stay for about a decade.

New Phyrexia in Magic: the Gathering

In 2009 Scars of Mirrodin was released, revealing that the setting of Mirrodin (Magic's other most original and interesting setting, sigh) had in fact been corrupted by Phyrexian Oil. The war, which lasted a year in real life, saw Mirrodin being almost entirely consumed and remade into New Phyrexia, a setting with a new art direction and five new leaders.

(artist unknown)

New Phyrexia, and exploring it card-by-card on a now defunct MtG card archive, was my personal introduction to the setting, and the style of Phyrexia that I am most fond of. It now encompassed all five colors of Magic, each with their own distinct subfaction, and felt less like an 80s metal album cover and more like its own, separate thing (for better or worse, to be clear, 80s metal album covers own).

In the 2020s, New Phyrexia had an arc where they had managed to successfully travel to other planes, and used that to do a big multiverse invasion that ended with all but one of their leaders dead and the nature of planes and planeswalkers in the wider MtG setting changed in a precedented paradigm shift.

Phyrexia on Golarion

So, with all that out of the way, let's talk about how I plan to translate that into MtG.

Phyrexian Beliefs Phyrexians are supremacists of a sort; they believe that their way, darwinist philosophy surrounding the forced merging of metal and flesh, is the one true way. Fortunately, they are not here to exterminate others- simply to convert them, by force. "All will be One."

To this end they spread across the galaxy, consuming entire planets and converting their flesh to glorious Phyrexian constructs.

Yawgmoth Yawgmoth is the progenitor of Phyrexia and its god, although by New Phyrexia he's very much dead. The five praetors took his place, with him existing mostly as allusions, even as a past failure that they will not replicate! (spoiler: they fail).

Personally, I like Yawgmoth existing in past tense. He was the god of Phyrexia, but he has been killed- possibly by some great Good divinity trying to end his scourge, more likely through conflict with the nihilistic Dominion of Black. Either way, his name is spoken in Phyrexia with both reverence and shame, and the five Praetors now each carry a fraction of his divinity.

The Five Praetors Now in Magic canon 4/5 of them are dead now, and during the lead-up there was a lot of political jockeying, but I will have them as they existed in between NPH and the Invasion arc; With Elesh Norn as de facto leader, Jin-Gitaxias and Vorinclex respecting her but doing their own thing, and Sheoldred and Urabrask believing in Phyrexia but not in Norn's graces.

Planes and Planets The nature of Planes in MtG is different from planes in Pathfinder/DnD; they're their own self-contained world, each possibly with their own cosmology, rather than being the cosmology of one coherent world. As such, I am changing Phyrexia from an interplanar threat to an interstellar one.

The Praetors, while about on the level of a nascent demon lord, are divinities of the material plane; they lack a home in the outer sphere.

Phyrexia and Other Factions Because the Praetors are acting as their own divinities, Phyrexia has little to no relationship with the gods at work on Golarion, as well as with the Outer and Elder gods.

As I alluded to before, Phyrexians have a poor relationship to the Dominion of Black. The Dominion is nihilistic, seeking to destroy all life, while the Phyrexians seek to consume and convert it. If you want to take the Illithids from @thecreaturecodex's conversion, they almost certainly have a poor relationship with them too.

(art by Igor Kieryluk)

(Compleated are intended to fill the role of sort of miscellaneous humanoids seen across Phyrexian art. The Priests of Norn are, to me, the archetypal New Phyrexians, so that's the art we're getting!)

Compleated are not a naturally occurring race; rather, they are the result of a torturous physical remaking, or artificially created through the union of vat-grown flesh with living metal, like an eldritch lichen. Completed have a variety of different forms, but the vast majority are bipedal with two arms ending in clawed hands, and all have features that blend the qualities of armor, skeleton, and musculature, and a thick black ichor performing the job of blood. 

Completed are not necessarily evil, but possess an uncaring curiosity and fascination with blood and flesh, as well as a deep belief in the beauty of their form. Most cultures of completed often believe that they are a perfect form of life, and attempt to convert others into completed, typically without their consent.

(Phyrexian Mite by Oriana Menendez)

(I'm pulling a Minotaur here and using the name of an individual for the species! Skrelv has a different design and is less evil, but I'm not using the mind control plotline for numerous reasons and this token has, I think, a more approachable design. I love the wrist mandibles even if they're utterly impractical. I converted mites, by the way, because I realized that I had a CR1 gap in the legions of Phyrexia, hardly appropriate for a campaign!)

Skrelv are small mitelike creatures first created on a distant planet by phyrexians. Like skirge, they breed true, and have come to be pests not only to places under siege by phyrexia, but to phyrexians themselves. Skrelv nests typically have one individual which reproduces asexually, gestating clones of itself and regurgitating them through its mouth. If one such queen is killed, another skrelv will quickly mature to take its place. This can be prevented by consecrating a skrelv hive, or by simply killing all skrelv in an area.

Skrelv are predators, and prefer to hunt in troops, where they typically ambush prey, trip them to the ground, and swarm them with their stings, rendering them immobile. Prey is then moved to the hive, where they will be eaten alive and frequently tortured for the skrelv’s amusement.

Skrelv are wisely agoraphobic, as they are defenseless when caught in the open and have little to no way of detecting distant enemies, especially fliers. As such, they prefer to live in surface-level tunnels and buildings, only venturing out at night when sighted creatures are at a disadvantage.

(Mortis Hounds by Chippy)

(I designed these before I decided I was actually making phyrexian creatures into Specifically Actually Phyrexians, rather than just Vague Evil Forces. I think the phyrexian hound design- another design that was kept between new and old phyrexia- is just. Really cool.

And if the tags aren't warning enough, content warning for animal abuse in this one.)

CR4 NE Medium Aberration (Phyrexian)

Mortis hounds may not be the most dangerous of phyrexia's creations, but their birth is perhaps the most sadistic- they are created from the corpses of dogs, creatures many humanoids value, which are tortured, killed, and reanimated without any spark of their original soul. They are perhaps a mockery of friendship and companionship outside the glory of phyrexia, and are nearly universally reviled by those who know of them.

Mortis hounds act as scouts and trackers of phyrexia, having a particularly keen nose, inability to tire, and a fierce hunger for humanoid- and canine- flesh. Other times, mortis hounds are simply created out of stray dogs and allowed to run wild on a local population in a savage act of war.