Black Gate

If you’ve played fantasy roleplaying games for any length of time, you’ve no doubt fought your fair share of goblins, orcs, and trolls. They can certainly begin to blend together. If you’ve fought one, you’ve fought them all, right? One of the jobs of the Dungeon Master is to find ways to keep things interesting. As I said in a post last week, “A fantasy roleplaying game is defined as much by the caliber of the villains and monsters as it is by the caliber of the players and heroes.”

One way to mix things up is to introduce more monsters, and certainly fantasy roleplaying games have no shortage of supplements that outline new and varied types of monsters.

But another way to keep things interesting is by varying up the existing pool of common monsters, giving them rich backstories and cultures, motivations and plots. In short, finding ways to really make what should be a common monster into something completely new. If you take a basic goblin template and add on 12 levels of barbarian, you have something decidedly more challenging to face!

Of course, creating all of this variability takes time and planning, which seems to be in ever-shorter supply these days. And this brings us to the Pathfinder RPG‘s newest solution: Monster Codex (Paizo, Amazon)

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If you’re one of the generation of gamers who cut their teeth on 20-sided dice, you know that the mythology around the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy settings often hinge upon the machinations of deities, at times capricious and petty, at times aloof, at times all too ready to lend a not-particularly-helpful hand. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Fizban.)

The gods also play a central role in the D&D-stepchild game of Pathfinder RPG, produced by Paizo Publishing. Their setting of Golarion puts an interesting twist on the gods, by featuring a number of deities that were once mortals who ascended to godhood. The gods of Golarion are controversial and the cause of much conflict, with the desert nation of Rahadoum going so far as to outlaw the worship of any deity under penalty of death. (The atheism of Rahadoum is a central theme in James L. Sutter’s fantastic novel, Pathfinder Tales: Death’s Heretic.)

But the gods are not the only otherworldly beings that have designs on Golarion. In their recent Pathfinder Campaign Settings release, Chronicles of the Righteous (Amazon, Paizo), Paizo dives more deeply into the Empyreal Lords. These are supernatural beings from other realms who have ascended to prominence in the Outer Planes, becoming almost like lesser gods who focus on their domains of interest and gather smaller groups of dedicated followers and servants to further their interests on Golarion.

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Magic permeates fantasy settings, but even in these realms, there is a type of creature that typically embodies these magical forces in a more fundamental way than anything else. I am speaking of the ubiquitous fey, creatures who are often depicted as being born of magic .

Now many of the major fey races have been collected together into the Pathfinder Campaign Setting supplement Fey Revisited (Paizo, Amazon). The fey creatures in Pathfinder are natives to the First World, which was the gods’ first draft of reality, and as such they have only a tenuous grasp on mortality … and, often, on morality, for that matter.

The timing on this supplement is extremely good for me personally, since I’m running a campaign that is set in the Pathfinder world of Golarion, in Nirmathas. The forest in Nirmathas, the Southern Fangwood, currently has a situation going on where there’s a fungal disease that infects only fey. So having a sourcebook that outlines various different types of fey is extremely useful.

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