#skum

"Beyond the Veiled Past Header" © Paizo Publishing

[Sponsored by Cranky over on the Patreon, based on the Ruins of Azlant Adventure Path for Pathfinder 1e. In the module Beyond the Veiled Past, the PCs have to contend with an amphibious invasion of ulat-kini soldiers (that's what the skum call themselves), masterminded by aboleth. These troop transports are very imaginative, but the text of the book handwaves them as warships that can go underwater. The sponsor wanted me to give them an actual stat block, and I took my previous sarmak fighting machine mechanics as a starting point. The stats are built around those of a chuul, but trying to average the stats of a chuul and a warship led to some mechanical weirdness. The end result has a lot of hit points for the CR, but since it doesn't function without a crew and is pretty limited in what it can accomplish, I think it's fair. Oh, and the name "malaca" is derived from Malacostraca, the group of crustaceans including shrimp, crabs, lobsters, isopods, and amphipods.

If you'd like to sponsor your own monsters, see bonus writing and/or just support what I do, check out the Creature Codex Patreon here]

Malaca Warship CR 12 N Aberration This gunmetal gray hulk looks like a crustacean the size of a building. It has six legs and a sharp prow, above which grow two probing antennae. Its underside opens up with two sweeping arms, revealing a vast internal chamber.

The fleshwarping techniques of the aboleth are responsible for many horrors—skum, faceless stalkers, mimics. In addition to the monsters they have created, they have also grown living tools that bridge the gap between object and creature. Malaca warships are one of these, a full submersible vehicle made of biological tissue, its nervous system harnessed to pulleys and levers. A malaca warship begins its life as a fertilized chuul egg, but the embryo inside is lobotomized and its growth thrown into overdrive, expanding into a hollow body the size of a sailing vessel. The creature can breathe both air and water, and it gains all the nutrients it needs from food scraps and the bodily waste of its crew, deposited courteously into orifices leading to its digestive system. A malaca warship can emerge onto dry land for troop landings, cargo loading and shock attacks. They must be berthed in water, however, and come into periodic contact with aboleth mucus, else their exoskeletons begin to crack and warp.

No two malaca warships may be identical, as their aboleth architects may choose to grow different partitions in their lower berth to form rooms, and their upper decks may be outfitted with different types of siege weapons. The lower deck is created from the chuul’s body cavity—its forelimbs are modified from pinchers into interlocking slabs capable of opening like a hatch, leading into what could have been a mouth if the malaca’s development wasn’t steered away from typical biology. Some warships feature an interior pool from which an aboleth can reach the controls and steer the thing itself, but most are intended to be operated by a crew of ulat-kini (to allow the skum their endonym). Most feature a large interior chamber useful as a slave pen, as malaca warships are often used in raids on coastal communities for the aboleth to gather new victims for conscription, mind control or even transformation into new monsters.

On the left, the Skum! Thier name is technically Ulat-Kini, but at this point even they've forgotten that, going be what others call them. They were rank and file soldiers and conquerers for the alghollthus, but when they retreated the left the Ulat kini to themselves. They're exactly what they seem, basic human-sized violent fish people with decent strength.

⚔️ Skum tokens on Patreon

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(art by Tiuco on DeviantArt)

 Powerful and destructive, yet also gentle and life-nurturing, the ocean is something that has been revered and reviled since ancient times. In Pathfinder, while there are many deities of the ocean, few are more widespread and well-known that Gozreh, the deity of both wind and waves, having a different gender aspect for both.

Those priests who revere Gozreh in their female, watery aspect exclusively sometimes take the title of Crashing Wave, and are blessed not only by command over the water, but also by Gozreh’s nature as a creature of balance.

As we will see, this archetype is heavily tied to this specific deity, but in theory you could use it with any largely neutral ocean deity.

Regardless, this archetype is favored not just by coastal folk, but also by aquatic races as well!

 Naturally, without homebrewing, this archetype requires the cleric to be a worshipper of Gozreh. They do, however, learn how to speak the elemental tongue of water.

Rather than channel positive or negative energy in the traditional sense, these devotees instead channel an energy associated with balance, allowing them to heal at least partially neutral beings, or to harm foes that deviate too far from neutrality.

Finally, these clerics do not gain the ability to convert their spells into healing or harming. Instead, they convert their spells into an array of water-themed spells, everything from those that directly manipulate water for attack, defense, or utility, to water breathing, to transforming into a fluid state, or even summoning vast numbers of elementals to fight.

A simple archetype, but one that does change the utility of the cleric to be more about control and support than they are about healing, though they can still do that with the right party composition, but you’ll want to take the same care when channeling healing energy in a party with a lot of strong alignments as you would if there were a dhampir in the party with a standard goodly cleric.

 Since Gozreh is a neutral god, one can imagine that clerics of different neutral alignments might interpret their teachings differently. Goodly ones might spend most of their time providing soothing seas, but still bring down the wrath of the storm; while evil ones may seek to bring down suffering with their divine gifts. Lawful ones may seek to teach others how to live in harmony with the sea and master it, while the more chaotic may simply revel in the wild and unpredictable nature of the water.

  Ships that use the Whitetongue Cape as a shortcut had best take heed that a clan of grindylows lives in the waters there. Possessing a tradition of priests of the waves there, they often ambush passing ships using the very water against them.

 On moonless nights, the skum of Mephist Reef rise from the water and chant prayers to their god, a mindless brutal thing of wind and wave. During such nights, any encounter with sailing vessels is treated as a blasphemous invasion, the penalty of which is death.

Another batch of new minis, this time including creatures from my pirate mini-campaign, Seas of Misfortune.

An easy to download .zip folder is available to all on the Patreon and features a few extra goodies, like finhead kobolds and webfoot halflings. Click here to check it out!