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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 9355222" data-attributes="member: 2209"><a href="https://paizo.com/products/btpy9r1y?Pathfinder-Roleplaying-Game-Bestiary-6" target="_blank">Bestiary 6</a>Pathfinder 1eAnimus Shade: The typical intelligent mind exists as a war of aspects—primitive survival urges and base wants opposing intellectual reason and high-minded goals. Some of these aspects dominate the mind, defining a creature’s personality, while others are shackled away. Sometimes psychic injuries can loosen these shackles, revealing aspects a creature would normally control and suppress. When a creature dies from a psychic injury, its conscious mind may shear away, leaving only those subconscious aspects—the creature’s animus—behind. Called animus shades, these spectral undead are gripped with feral rage and lash out at the living. Individuals who engage in psychic combat are particularly prone to succumbing to this form of undeath, and their shades sometimes seek out their former opponents, not content until their one-time adversaries are slain. Animus shades always bear a superficial resemblance to their former, living selves, but manifest in death as wild brutes, made powerful by their anger and feral by their long suffering. They often appear hunched and contorted after a lifetime of being crushed beneath the weight of the dominant psyches, and can sport wicked claws, overlong limbs, cracked flesh, severed (but still present) body parts, and other nightmarish deformities reflecting the fears their living selves harbored about the dark corners of their own minds. Any gear or items the creature had appear rotted, cracked, and torn in spectral form, though it may carry ghostly versions of the weapons it used in life, deadly implements still capable of harming the living. Most often, animus shades linger near the sites of their deaths or wander without any specific purpose. As many psychic contests occur in mindscapes or on far-flung esoteric planes, animus shades are frequently found roaming such realms, endlessly raging over the sometimes centuries-old defeats that resulted in their demises. Even when not consumed by such losses, animus shades commonly target those they happen across who remind them of the dominant selves that repressed them in life—whether because of similarities in physical appearance, personality, or activity. However, some rare animus shades have greater clarity of focus and are gripped with the need to undo the accomplishments they achieved in life, taking pleasure in destroying those things they once loved or took pride in. Because they’re created through psychic violence, animus shades usually appear among intelligent races and beings known for mastering occult forces. Among such races, these undead prove far more common within cultures and groups that cultivate psychic prowess. They’re easy to mistake for ghosts or other undead—often to tragic ends. Fortunately, in lands that value physical strength over mental prowess and in strictly martial cultures, animus shades are almost unknown. Members of races such as hobgoblins, kobolds, and orcs, which seldom give rise to psychically talented individuals, almost never return as animus shades. Poisoned by the psychic violence that spawned them, animus shades rarely, if ever, cooperate. In death, even animus shades created from former allies slain by the same foe viciously strike out at each other. The mental trauma that fills them and holds them to the world scars these undead deeply, but ultimately makes them most resentful of themselves—they know it was their own weaknesses or distraction that resulted in their deaths. Much of their rage is thus pointed inward, and they take particular satisfaction in viciously unleashing their hatred on those who resemble them, especially if the resulting conflicts remind them of the battles in which they died. “Animus shade” is an acquired template that can be added to any living creature that has a Charisma score of at least 6 and an Intelligence score of at least 8. Medusa Animus Shade: ?Bloody Bones: Bloody bones are the creations of horrific creatures known as rawheads, which have the ability to command these gory undead to do their whims. A rawhead can create a bloody bones from a Small or Medium helpless, living humanoid. As a full round action, the rawhead extends its finger tentacle to pierce the creature’s flesh, ensnares its bones, and attempts to rip the creature’s skeleton free. This deals 10d6 points of damage to the victim. If the victim is helpless as a result of Charisma damage, it takes 10d8 points of damage from this attack instead. If this damage is enough to reduce the creature’s hit points below 0, it is instantly slain as its skeleton is extracted from its body. The skeleton immediately animates as a bloody bones under the rawhead’s control. This is a death effect. Combusted: Most scholars of the strange consider accounts of spontaneous combustion to be nothing more than superstitious folktales. But those with a deep understanding of the occult know it is indeed possible for a person to feel a sudden fever come on, only to find the heat within her body rising to incredible levels until she bursts into flames and perishes, leaving behind only a charred corpse. The sudden and violent deaths of such individuals make it easier for dark powers to reanimate their bodies, and sometimes for the victims to return from the dead on their own. However they return, the undead creatures known as combusted all suffer the telltale signs of their demise: their corpses constantly burn and their desiccated flesh is never fully consumed by the flames. Roiling clouds of smoke, thick with the stench of burning skin and hair, surround them at all times, and may reveal their presence from over a mile away. These shambling horrors can arise at any location that has a particular affinity for undead, Exiled Shade: An exiled shade is a wretched, undead remnant of an evil organization. Driven out and possibly even slain by its former allies, the exiled shade wallows in the pain of its betrayal and its paradoxical desires to simultaneously destroy and be reunited with its former comrades. Exoskeleton: Found skittering through forgotten tombs, crawling through deep forests, and filling damp caverns, exoskeletons are animated carapaces of arthropods and other vermin. Most exoskeletons are the intentional creations of necromancers, but some of these undead monstrosities arise spontaneously from places awash with negative energy or are created by malfunctioning artifacts. Sometimes, the simple act of feeding on freshly destroyed undead creatures is enough to transform an insect into an exoskeleton upon its eventual death. Though exoskeletons are just as mindless as they were when they were living, they have become infused with an evil instinct in their new unlife that drives them to relentlessly attack all living creatures on sight, exploding in a burst of dusty remains when destroyed. A spellcaster can create an exoskeleton using animate dead. An exoskeleton can be created from a mostly intact dead vermin that has an exoskeleton. This includes arachnids, crustaceans, insects, and even some mollusks, but not soft-bodied vermin such as jellyfish and leeches. “Exoskeleton” is an acquired template that can be added to any corporeal vermin that has an exoskeleton Giant Cockroach Exoskeleton: ?Giant Stag Beetle Exoskeleton: ?Titan Centipede Exoskeleton: ?Haunted Exoskeleton: Rarely, an exoskeleton is haunted by the lost spirit of a stubborn soul. Fallen: When a righteous crusader is denied the path to the afterlife in death, its spirit can rise as one of the fallen— undead driven to enact a crusade against all life in a frustrated corruption of their beliefs. The undead creature’s fall in battle remains the greatest disappointment vexing its soul. Driven by hatred and shame, the fallen wander battlefields and wildlands in constant search of someone to end their misery by performing last rites. Herecite: Herecites are a particularly blasphemous form of undead created via an obscure ritual of sacrifice, wherein a priest of an evil god offers up at least five worshipers of a nonevil deity to her own deity. All of the sacrifices must worship the same deity. Upon the deaths of the sacrificed worshipers, their souls and bodies seethe and surge with negative energy and then melt away, only to re-form into a single entity—a herecite. The ritual for the creation of a herecite is recorded in certain rare and blasphemous texts that are hidden away in dark libraries. It is also known to exist in certain texts describing the Outer Planes and their denizens, and likely exists in texts associated with powerful necromancy cults, although groups composed primarily of arcane spellcasters find herecites more of a curiosity than a viable addition to their ranks. The ritual to create a herecite often focuses on the torture and slaughter of young, inexperienced priests while a captured leader of the same faith is forced to watch the cruel torment of his flock. The overwhelming pain and anguish experienced by the high priest as his acolytes are forcibly converted into undead serves as the ritual’s catalyst. Herecites never take levels in cleric or any other class capable of casting divine spells, for the ritual of their creation results in a tenuous awareness and an inability to ever again profess such powerful faith in a deity. Herecite of Asmodeus: ?Hupia: ?Llorona: They form as the result of shame and sorrow paired with a tragic drowning of a child, whether it be accidental or murderously intentional, and they want others to share in their pain and misery. Lovelorn: Vicious creatures driven by misery and suffering, lovelorns arise from the souls of those who die when love takes a tragic turn—star-crossed lovers who committed suicide and victims of abusive relationships and violent family confrontations. In death, the stubborn spirit fixates solely on its heart, animating the dead organ and bursting free from its body, dedicated to unmaking everything it cared for in life. Psychic Stalker: Psychic stalkers are the undead minds of psychic spellcasters who suffered unexpectedly violent deaths. Such minds are sometimes powerful enough to persist even after their bodies’ destruction, transforming into incorporeal creatures composed entirely of thought, yet they retain no true memories or abilities from their former existence. Siabrae: When druids are faced with threats to the natural world, they are steadfast and, at times, relentless in their defense of the land. Even in the face of overwhelming odds—an incursion of demons from the Abyss, a creeping plague of necromantic corruption, an unstoppable blight of magical radiation, or a similar supernatural threat to the natural world—some sects of druids refuse to give up or abandon their duties. In these tragic cases, the desperate druids adopt the blasphemous tactic of accepting the corruption into themselves and becoming powerful undead guardians. They fight on not only against the original source of the corruption, but against all living creatures, for these druids become siabraes, and are filled with bitterness and hatred for all others—particularly other druids, whom they regard as cowards. Siabraes do not form spontaneously; they arise only as the result of the following horrific ritual [Welcome the Blighted Soul]. “Siabrae” is an acquired template that can be added to any druid who successfully performs the welcome the blighted soul ritual. A siabrae can’t have the blight druid archetype.Old Human Siabrae Druid 14: ?Trailgaunt, Dreaded Trailgaunt: Any humanoid creature killed by a trailgaunt becomes a trailgaunt itself at the next sunset as long as the body is both unburied and not within line of sight of a well-maintained road. Legends hold that trailgaunts rise from the remains of seasoned travelers who became lost and then perished from exposure or starvation, suffering great shame and humiliation to have come to such unexpected and lonely ends in addition to their physical torment. Unrisen: An unrisen is rarely created intentionally, as most come about when a resurrection attempt is poorly performed and results in a mishap, or through experimental alchemical processes that attempt to restore life to the dead. Vrykolakas, Free-Willed Vrykolakas: A humanoid slain by a vrykolakas becomes a free-willed vrykolakas itself in 1d4 days if not blessed and given proper funerary rites. A blessing might entail either the spell bless or a more mundane consecration, but at the very least requires a proper prayer (with a successful DC 15 Knowledge [religion] check) invoking a good-aligned deity. Reanimated corpses of wicked and vengeful souls denied even the most basic burial rites.Yurei: When a person dies a violent death in the grip of extreme emotion, such as in a blinding rage or in overwhelming sorrow, she may return from the dead as a twisted and horrific undead creature known as a yurei. Zombie Spore, Undead Spore Zombie: There are certain evil fungal creatures (such as fungus queens [see page 130], but also rare fungal growths or extraplanar blights upon the wild) that can infest vermin with spores that have been infused with sinister power and negative energy. These foul spores grow quickly in the body of a dead vermin, eventually bursting from its head to form disturbing, antler-like growths. At the same time, the spores animate the vermin as an intelligent undead creature.  “Spore zombie” is an acquired template that can be added to any vermin.In certain wilderness regions, strange corruptions of nature fester and grow where the boundaries between this world and the Abyss grow thin. Dangerous and evil fungal creatures rise to power in these blighted reaches, such as sinister fungus queens or legions of undead spore zombies, but when fey creatures become infused with this corruption and are themselves blighted, the resulting monstrosities are particularly vile. Zombie Spore Spore Burst power.Giant Ant Spore Zombie: ?Medusa Animus Shade, Spectral Woman: ?Animus Shade, Spectral Undead: ?Bloody Bones, Blood-Drenched Human Skeleton, Particularly Gruesome Skeleton, Gory Undead, Violent Undead Monstrosity, Childhood Terror: ?Combusted, Shambling Horror: ?Exiled Shade, Humanoid Figure, Wretched Undead Remnant of an Evil Organization: ? Giant Cockroach Exoskeleton, Tattered Remains of a Dead Insect: ?Exoskeleton, Animated Carapace of a Vermin, Undead Monstrosity: ?Exoskeleton, Animated Carapace of an Arthropod: ?Exoskeleton, Intentional Creation: ?Fallen, Ghostly Crusader: ?Herecite of Asmodeus, Decaying Man: ?Herecite, Particularly Blasphemous Form of Undead, Human-Sized Creature: ?Herecite, Curiosity: ?Herecite, Guardian: ?Hupia, Undead Woman, Frightening Undead Monster: ?Llorona, Ghostly Woman, Vengeful Spirit: ?Lovelorn, Sickly Pulsating Heart, Glistening Organ, Vicious Creature, Distressing Undead Monster: ?Psychic Stalker, Horrific Ghostly Skull, Undead Mind of a Psychic Spellcasters Who Suffered Unexpectedly Violent Death, Incorporeal Creature Composed Entirely of Thought: ?Siabrae, Petrified Skeleton, Powerful Undead Guardian: ?Trailgaunt, Filthy Pallid Figure: ?Unrisen, Grotesque Tangle of Twisted Bones Decayed Flesh and Rotted Organs, Affront to Life: ?Vrykolakas, Twisted Barely-Humanoid Monstrosity, Reanimated corpse of a Wicked and Vengeful Soul Denied Even the Most Basic Burial Rites, Unreasoning Vampire-Like Creature: ?Yurei, Pale Woman, Twisted Horrific Undead Creature, Restless Spirit: ?Zombie Spore, Intelligent Undead Creature: ?Giant Ant Spore Zombie, Large Black Ant: ?Undead, Undead Creature: Undead are once-living creatures animated by spiritual or supernatural forces. Desert Undead: ?Undead Ally: ?Undead Minion: ?Undead Horror: ?Sentient Corporeal Monster: ?Intelligent Undead: ?Diseased Undead: ?Undead Soldier: ?Mindless Undead: ?Undead Foe: ?Corporeal Undead: ?Incorporeal Undead: ?Undead Animal: ?Hungry Ghost: ?Ghost: ?Ghoul: ?Lich: ?Mummy: ?Free-Willed Mummy, Desert Undead: ?Giant Skeleton, Undead Minion: ?Skeletal Champion: Up to three times per day, a nekomata can turn a dead body into an undead creature by licking it as a standard action. A skeleton rises as a skeletal champion, while a body with flesh animates as a juju zombieB2. Vampire: ?Zombie Giant, Undead Minion: ?Zombie: ?Zombie Lord: Creatures slain by Dispater’s mortal gaze rise again 1d4 rounds later as zombie lords (Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 4 286) under Dispater’s control. Swamp Mummy: All humanoid creatures that die within a swamp blight’s cursed domain rise from death as mummies. Creatures with 7 or fewer Hit Dice rise as swamp mummies, while creatures with 8 or more Hit Dice rise as mummy lords. Mummy Lord: All humanoid creatures that die within a swamp blight’s cursed domain rise from death as mummies. Creatures with 7 or fewer Hit Dice rise as swamp mummies, while creatures with 8 or more Hit Dice rise as mummy lords. Advanced Bodak: When a deathsnatcher kills via negative levels, negative energy damage, or a death effect, the body immediately rises as an advanced bodak under the deathsnatcher’s control. Necrocraft: Tomb giants can cast make whole as a spell-like ability, but only for the purpose of creating undead creatures. For example, a tomb giant can use this ability to aid in the creation of a necrocraft, to restore armor to be used for the creation of a phantom armor, or even to repair the armor of a graveknight. Phantom Armor: Tomb giants can cast make whole as a spell-like ability, but only for the purpose of creating undead creatures. For example, a tomb giant can use this ability to aid in the creation of a necrocraft, to restore armor to be used for the creation of a phantom armor, or even to repair the armor of a graveknight. Graveknight: ?Juju Zombie: A creature slain by a gravesludge animates as a free-willed juju zombie 1d4 rounds after it is slain. Up to three times per day, a nekomata can turn a dead body into an undead creature by licking it as a standard action. A skeleton rises as a skeletal champion, while a body with flesh animates as a juju zombieB2. Huecuva: The ritual to create a herecite often focuses on the torture and slaughter of young, inexperienced priests while a captured leader of the same faith is forced to watch the cruel torment of his flock. The overwhelming pain and anguish experienced by the high priest as his acolytes are forcibly converted into undead serves as the ritual’s catalyst. High priests driven mad or forced to lose their faith after they have witnessed such a ritual often rise again as huecuvas who then go on to gain levels as oracles of the ritual’s profane deity. Nightshade, Notworthy Denizen: ?Spore Burst (Ex): Once per day as a swift action, a spore zombie can spray a cloud of spores through the area. This deals 2d6 points of damage to the spore zombie and creates a cloud of spores that fills an area equal to the spore zombie’s reach. Any creature in this area must succeed at a Fortitude save or be nauseated by the spores for 1d6 rounds. Vermin that fail this save become infested for 24 hours. If an infested vermin dies during this time, it rises as a spore zombie 1d6 rounds after its death. WELCOME THE BLIGHTED SOUL School necromancy [evil]; Level 9 Casting Time 9 hours (only during a new moon) Components V, S, F (ring of standing stones empowered with necromancy that cost 25,000 gp to create via Craft Wondrous Item), sacrifice (18 living intelligent beings of the same type as the caster, sacrificed every 30 minutes during the ritual’s casting time) Skill Checks Intimidate DC 31, 2 successes; Knowledge (nature) DC 31, 3 successes; Knowledge (religion) DC 31, 4 successes Range touch Target caster Duration instantaneous Saving Throw none; SR no Backlash The caster is reduced to –1 hp. Failure The caster is immediately slain. EFFECT After sacrificing 18 lives (traditionally, these lives are those of unwilling druids who would have tried to stand against the blasphemy the caster is attempting), the caster sacrifices himself and immediately rises from death as a siabrae.</blockquote>

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