Efreet emissaries

On the coasts of the Sea of Burning Sand lies a city ruled by a council of mysterious men. They are known as the Emissaries, and they secretly work for the City of Brass on the plane of fire. As their efreet lords cannot easily enter the material plane in sufficient numbers to conquer it, they have created their own breed of lawful evil humanoids by magically mixing devil and human stock.

These emissaries of the efreet are exceptional diplomats due to their infernal blood, and most have some talent in simple sorcery. Most of their talents lie outside of combat, however, and they prefer to conquer cities with their silver tongues rather than their swords. While they have some resistance to fire, the efreet do not allow the emissaries to grow too powerful lest they decide to invade the plane of fire next. The emissaries are easily identified from their stubby horns and the stripped brass half-plate that has been branded permanently to their arms and breast. All emissaries radiate an aura of law and evil.

Quick Pathfinder stats for a typical emissary:

The Black Wheel Casino

Samael Black is the owner of the Black Wheel casino and a minor demigod of (mis)fortune. He is Neutral Evil, and uses his powers to alter the chances of players so that he comes out with the biggest profits possible but so that there's always at least one person with a magical winning streak. After all, it's excellent marketing. He can also use his powers for the good of other people. For a price, of course.

Black's powers as an aspect of luck allow him to re-roll dice for any action done in his presence. This includes all actual dice or drawn cards in the game world as well. However, the second roll once rolled has to be accepted and cannot be re-rolled.

Beastmaster Pits

This idea came to me while watching an episode of Samurai Jack. It's basically a psychotic version of the druid.
The Beastmasters form packs of primitive scavenger scum who live in the outskirts of a city, usually in a garbage dump or a scrapyard. A Beastmaster pack is lead by from 1 - 3 alphas, one or more of whom is a shaman. These shamans have the ability to command all kinds of animals (and even some animalistic humans) and force the minds of an animal and a human to change places. A Beastmaster pack always has a cadre of beasts with them, ranging from carrion birds to vermin swarms and frenzied, degenerate dog-things.

The favorite entertainment/justice system with many Beastmaster packs is to exchange the minds of two humans with two dogs and then pit them against each other in their makeshift arena. Meanwhile, the human bodies with the dog spirits inside are kept in their cages. When one or both of the combatants die, their original body lives on, and the beastmasters use the resulting creatures as shock troops and disposable cannon fodder.

Usually the Beastmasters pit captured outsiders against their champions, as the dazed victim usually has little control of his new body. Some prominent alphas even manage to intimidate the shamans to give them a sort of immortality; moving their minds to new bodies as they begin to age. Though this is a risky business, as the alpha is easy to betray when mindswapped.

Chrono-Assassins

[Sorry, no picture this time. I've been moving apartments and recovering from the said move during these past two weeks and we still don't have a passable internet connection x.X]

Chrono-Assassins are mysterious operatives that hail from the haunted deserts of the Southeast. Only few people even know about them and none have been known to hire their services. They only work for their almost monastic secret order, the Order of the Hourglass. Some say that the assassins work for Chronolords, powerful liches that have uncovered the secrets of the sands of time and now lurk in timeless dimensions, sending only their agents to work in the material plane.

The Chrono-assassins have control over time, due to the secrets taught to them during their meticulous training. First, they can see a few seconds to the feature with their singe mechanical golden eye, giving them a 50% chance to evade any attack they have the speed and mobility to evade. They are also never caught surprised, unless sleeping. Any given chrono-assassin wields one of two weapons; a gilded bronze khopesh or a silenced firearm, usually a rifle of exquisite detail. Each assassin that has the rifle also has 1d6 chronobullets. These bullets affect their target 1d6 rounds after being fired, usually allowing the assassin to shoot their target a couple of times and, if lucky, even leave the crime scene before the target is hit.

Some veteran (and with a chrono-assassin this might imply thousands of years of training) assassins have additional powers, including jumping in time 1d6 rounds into the future or even the past, effectively summoning a duplicate from the future to fight alongside himself. After 1d6 rounds, however, the original disappears as he travels back into the past. Any wounds done to the original also appear on the duplicate, including death.

The Red Corps

The Red Corps a.ka. the Red Angels are a mercenary military company that first mobilized in the Weird Wars. The Corps is unique in that it's composed almost entirely of medics and usually only a few soldiers from the company are recruited per mission. The angels are easily identified by their crimson trenchcoats, blood-shot eyes and anemic look.

The Red Corps was founded by Major Rothmann, a medic and a magus who specialized in blood magic. He found that the ability to quench, control and purify blood was an invaluable ability on the front lines of the first Weird War. His superiors, however, condemned the nigh-demoniac blood-rites heretical and kicked him out of the military. Rothmann, just a captain then, decided to found his own mercenary company.

A Red Corps blood-mage can serve in battle by rapidly healing and causing wounds, neutralizing poison and inciting fear and rage in the enemy. They are quite useless against undead or mechanical forces however. And while peerless in the field of battle-surgery they can't raise the dead like their necromantic brethren in the Black Battalion.

Demon summoning

Demons, though often confused with devils, are more primal and protean in nature. In their natural forms demons are immaterial spirits, manifesting themselves as electrical malfunctions, weird shadows, radio interference and so on. To create a true demon, one must perform a summoning.

To summon a demon, you need a receptacle for the spirit. This vessel can vary greatly, though corpses and special homunculi are the most common. There is only one variable that never changes from summoning to summoning: human blood. The blood gives the demon its intelligence and hunger for life, twisting the spirit to the raw animal needs of the body it didn't have before. During the summoning, the blood and the demon with it bond with the receptacle on a primal level, and if one is destroyed, the other follows.

To get the most powerful and useful demons, one needs to use lots of blood and a mostly human corpse. The corpse is usually spliced together using animal and human parts appropriate for the task. The most common formulae for this splicing include a bat/monkey for messenger imps and familiars, a goat/human for a dark satyr and many many others from minotaur warriors to octopus-headed psychics. During the summoning, the demons power twists the corpse to its proper proportions, turning the flesh soot black and the eyes milk white.

Zombies

Zombies are an rpg staple. Here's the Hunters' version.
I'm still experimenting with stat-block formatting so bear with me here.

Zombie
Fighting 1d6
Agility 2d6
Charisma 0d6
Toughness 3d6
Smarts 1d6

Willpower 0
Stamina

Edges: Grappler (+1 to attacks made while grappling), Surprise attack (+1 to avoid notice when approaching target), Undead (+1 when resisting disease, poison, etc.), Life sense (+1 to determine if there are living things nearby)

Special: Zombies have no Charisma at all. Zombies don't have Willpower and are immune to social attacks and succumb automatically to applicable mental attacks. Zombies do not sleep and never tire. Zombies only die from hits to the head or spine.

All Fighting roll Criticals made against a zombie automatically kill it, even if not used to cause Damage.

Infectious bite: Any living creature that is bitten by a zombie (meaning its attack's Effect is at least 1), takes a Diseased Condition equal to the attack's Effect. They also must immediately roll Toughness against the disease. They must thereafter do it at the beginning of every scene. If they fail, they die and are turned into a zombie in d6 turns (not rounds).

Horde Rules

This week I add some Horde rules to Hunters.
First of all, Hordes consist of Minions. Minions are basically just nameless NPCs that have Stamina and Willpower of 1 (i.e. it takes 1 damage to 'kill' them). They have Skills and Edges like normal characters.

When there are more than 5 Minions of the same type in the same place, they form a Horde. A Horde is a special type of 'character'. It has the same Skills and Edges as the base Minion and two actions per turn as normal. Additionally, it has one other stat: Numbers. Numbers is the amount of Minions in the Horde.

When a Horde attacks, it rolls its Skill normally, adding any appropriate Edges as normal. Then, however, it adds its Numbers to the Roll. After which the Horde may divide the Effect between targets as normal.

If a Horde is attacked, it defends like any other character. However, the Effect of the attack is the number of Horde members defeated. For example, say a knight attacks a Horde of cultists. His attack Roll is 6 and the Horde's defense Roll is 4. The knight's Effect is 2 and so he kills/incapacitates 2 cultists (the Horde's Numbers going down by 2.) If a Horde's Numbers go below 6 they disband to Minions.

The same attack rules govern all types of attacks, including attacks to charm, intimidate, mesmerise or dominate the Minions to switch sides or stop fighting. In these cases, however, the defeated Minions separate from the Horde and (when there are enough) create a new Horde that then does whatever it is that the attacker wanted to achieve.

A Leader can use her leadership skills and defend the horde against an attack as well. In this case, combine the Effects of their defenses.

Of course, a Horde may be given Conditions as normal, provided that they are powerful enough to cover the whole Horde. It's hard to Blind a Horde of 20 pikemen with a handful of sand.

If you want different types of Hordes, just adjust the stats of the base Minion. A Horde of plague rats is very different from a Horde of rock band groupies.

The Gift of Pyrokinesis

Pyrokinetics are humans who have the ability to control fire with their minds. These individuals are often the offspring of powerful psionics, though some seem to exhibit the talent spontaneously while others receive it as a gift from their dark masters. Most born pyrokinetics are spontaneous and quick to anger. Whatever the source, each individual pyrokinetic has his own methods and problems with handling fire.

Roll a D6
1 - Nightmares. You sometimes subconsciously trigger your ability while asleep. The chance of you manifesting your pyrokinesis while dreaming ranges from 1 to 5 in six, depending on your nightmares.
2 - Manipulator You can only manipulate fire, not create it. You need a flame or sufficient heat to create one to use your pyrokinesis.
3 - Vulnerable Your can't shield yourself from fire. You and items in your possession are not protected from flames.
4 - Destroyer You can only bolster a fire, not cool it down. Likewise, you can only spread fire, not move it from one place to another.
5 - Bad Temper You subconsciously activate your ability when angry. The angrier you get, the harder it becomes to control your powers.
6 - Pyromaniac You become a slave to your gift. You treat fire as if it was your god, worshipping and sacrificing for it.

Reskinning the Elf: The Ghoulkin

While looking at the elf from D&D 3.5E and reading this post from the Sorcerer's Skull I got to thinking of another interpretation of the elf racial traits: the ghoulkin. I'm amazed by how the stats need no change for this to work apart from the small change of favored class to rogue and some languages. The elf racial traits out of context really suggest to me some unsocial tomb-dwelling wretch what with the immunity to a ghoul's paralyzing touch, the constitution penalty and the other traits befitting a paranoid, hard-to-charm, sleepless scavenger.

Ghoulkin
The ghoulkin are graveyard dwelling long-lived humanoids with close ancestry to both ghouls and humans. Ghoulkin value their privacy and traditions, and while they are often slow to make friends, at both the personal and communal levels, once an outsider is accepted as a comrade, such alliances can last for generations. The ghoulkin favor black humor and are generally obsessed with morose 'art', be it cooking, tale-telling or physical crafts. Ghoulkin are excellent tomb-robbers and often cross swords with the undead guardians of the crypts.

The ghoulkin are lanky and sickly, their skin usually corpse-gray. They have pointy ears and their eye-color ranges from the human range to gray and red. They are paranoid and usually chaotic evil. Ghoulkin favor light weapons to backstab their enemies or bows so they can attack from hiding.

Ghoulkin Racial Traits
+2 Dexterity, -2 Constitution
The ghoulkin are agile, but their unhygienic lifestyle wreaks havoc on their health.
Medium
Ghoulkin are man-sized and have a base speed of 30.
Low-Light Vision
Ghoulkin can see twice as far as humans in dim lighting.
Ghoulkin immunities
Due to their inherent insomnia and paranoia, ghoulkin are immune to magic sleep effects and +2 racial saving throw bonus against enchantment spells and effects.
Ghoulkin are also immune to a ghoul's paralyzing touch.
Scavengers
+2 racial bonus on Listen, Search, and Spot checks. A ghoulkin who merely passes within 5 feet of a secret or concealed door is entitled to a Search check to notice it as if she were actively looking for it.
Weapon proficiency
Ghoulkin receive the Martial Weapon Proficiency feats for the longsword, rapier, longbow (including composite longbow), and shortbow (including composite shortbow) as bonus feats.
Languages
Automatic Languages: Common and Ghoul. Bonus Languages: Draconic, Gnoll, Gnome, Goblin, Orc, and Underdark.
Favored class Rogue

Statue Spawn

A statue spawn is an alien lifeform that in nature creates a shell for itself from rock. It is so named due to the tendency of sorcerers to infect the inside of a statue with the thing, allowing it to burrow and grow inside it. A spawn is amorphous and can be divided into several smaller spawn that eventually grow into additional spawn.

The spawn can be tamed by the use of chemicals so that they recognize their masters by their smell. The sorcerer usually carries two flasks of liquid, one of which is a blue one that makes the spawn complacent, allowing them to hide almost indefinitely, immobile in the statue. This chemical can also calm them down after they have frenzied.

When exposed to air around spawn, the liquid in the red flask cause them to enrage, followed with their statue shells cracking to allow movement, after which they attack anything in the area until everything is dead or they smell the green chemical again.

The spawn are usually moved to a different statue after they have once enraged, due to the obvious cracks and holes it creates in their shells, revealing the glowing purple spawn inside and ruining the element of surprise. In addition, oxygen is slightly toxic to the creatures and if not within a mostly airtight shell, the spawn dies out in 1 - 10 days depending on the size of the cracks.

Unlike normal animated statues, the spawn don't really use the limbs of their stone shells as nature intended and therefore are sometimes concealed in unconventional forms (such as pillars, orbs, or walls) that might fool someone looking for more obvious guardians.

The Messengers

The Messengers, or, the Angelicus, are an intergalactic race of parasites. Their bodies are composed of some sort of sentient energy, fueled by the electromagnetic flame in the middle of their bodies. From this core also extends what is roughly analogous to organic limbs. These are their tails, feelers, and skeletal wings that appear as arcs of gas-covered electricity.

It is through these electric appendages that the Messengers control their victims, sending electric signals to their nerves to control their actions. They usually occupy vertebrae by nesting in their brains, coiling their tail in the spinal cord and occasionally extending their feelers through the eyes.

The Messengers are extremely dangerous, as they can emit a wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation from their eyes, including gamma-, infrared- and ultraviolet radiation, capable of killing most organic material in mere seconds and melting even the most resilient of metals. They can also emit any color of visible light. Messengers can be detected by their small background emissions that deter radiocommunications and radar.

It is theorized that radiation is in fact the Messengers' primary form of communication. This constant telepathy allows them to act as a unified force, where singular Messengers often act like extensions of a hive mind.

It is rumoured that the Messengers' ship, a research vessel referred to as the Lightbrindger, crashlanded somewhere in the east, hidden under a temple built by sorcerers who made a pact with the things. Since their landing, hidden cults have continued to rise that wish to either control or contain the radiant creatures, the most prominent since the Sorcerer Kings being The Order of the Flaming Angel.

The Messengers die or dissipate if submerged in water or other conductive liquid. They can be contained only by applying a constant stream of electricity when occupying a victim, so that they cannot maintain form long enough to create coherent radiation.