Carak, Blade of Zyphus

Defense

Offense

Statistics

Description

Male unique allip (Pathfinder Bonus Bestiary 4)

Babble (Su) Carak constantly mutters and whines to himself, creating a hypnotic effect. All sane creatures within 60 feet of Carak must succeed at a DC 19 Will save or be fascinated for 2d4 rounds.

While a target is fascinated, the allip can approach without breaking the effect, but an attack by the allip breaks the effect. This is a sonic, mind-affecting compulsion effect. Creatures that successfully save cannot be affected by Carak’s babble for 24 hours. The save DC is Charisma-based.

Create Spawn (Su) If the Wisdom damage caused by Carak’s touch of insanity ever meets or exceeds a creature’s actual Wisdom score, that creature immediately drops dead—this is an exception to the normal rules for Wisdom damage. In 1d4 rounds, a regular allip emerges from the victim’s body—this allip spawn takes a –2 penalty on all d20 rolls and receives –2 hp per HD. It is under Carak’s command and remains so enslaved until his destruction, at which point the allip spawn loses its spawn penalties and becomes a fully-fledged and free-willed allip.

Madness (Su) Anyone targeting Carak with thought detection, mind control, or telepathy immediately takes 1d4 points of Wisdom damage resulting from contact with the insane undead’s tortured mind.

Touch of Insanity (Su) Carak deals 1d4 Wisdom damage with a touch. A successful critical hit deals this damage and an additional 1 point of Wisdom drain (instead of merely dealing double Wisdom damage). On each successful attack, Carak gains 5 temporary hit points.

In life, Carak was a deadly assassin-priest of Zyphus. Upon his suicide, the assassin’s faith brought him back as an allip, eager to continue his dark work. Calling himself the Blade of Zyphus, he wanders the back roads of Golarion, harvesting powerful souls by tormenting them until they commit suicide, only to rise again as allips under his control.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Undead Revisited Wight So cold. Fog—not just clinging but crawling inside my skin, swallowing every sound. My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t hear a sound, except for the rasp of cold steel and the rattle of dying breaths, echoing from everywhere and nowhere. Then, floating in the fog, I could see their eyes, burning like tiny stars in a frozen sky. They were coming. My fallen friends had already joined their ranks. Death could have been an escape, but too cowardly to take even the coward’s path, I knew I would join them soon. They were coming...

—Bran Stalwart, Wanderlust: True Stories for Brave Lads and Lasses Wight W ights are animate corpses, infused with a dire spirit of unlife and a hunger for the souls of the living. At first glance, they may seem no different from withered zombies or even slightly fleshy skeletons, save for the glowing pinpoints of light that burn within their vacant sockets. Many wights are partially dismembered, desiccated, withered, and horrible to behold. They sometimes prowl in the midst of lesser undead, emulating the lurching gait common to such creatures so those facing them may never realize the true danger until it is too late, as the wight’s very touch saps their life force. When wights hunt in groups of their own kind, however, they are far more dangerous. Their awkward lurching disappears as they creep, prowl, and lurk with a deadly cunning and terrifying stealth. Hunting singly or in packs, they slink through the shadows to ambush their prey, sometimes engaging in hit-and-run battles to inspire terror in their enemies and drain their resources even as they drain the living spirits of those facing them, slowly leaching the will to fight from their enemies until their prey are all consumed and absorbed into the pack.

As undead, wights no longer need to breathe, and indeed can exist in vacuum or on the ocean floor without a problem. Yet for unknown reasons, some wights still retain small habits and physical affectations from their lives, of which going through the motions of breathing is the most common. For some wights, the sound is like the gurgling croak of a man with his throat slit, drowning in his own blood. For others, it is the dry, rattling wheeze of a timorous lung collapsing. In all cases, however, the fresh air they draw in is exhaled again as a befouled, tainted effluvium—wisps of thin, tainted mist that drift out from their nostrils, mouth, and any gaping wounds on their tattered torsos. Those who have survived close contact with a wight describe these exhalations as the stink of death, air that has been stolen from the living and now fit only for the dead, musty like a long-sealed crypt or layered with the cold loamy, scent of a fresh-turned grave—all smells that some undead hunters have collectively labeled “the Black Breath.” Sadly for the undead’s victims, the stench of a wight’s decayed body and misty breath rarely betrays its presence prematurely, as it can prevent its rotted lungs from exhaling as long as it wishes, releasing its foul reek only when it is ready to make its presence known.

The same is true of the lambent glow of a wight’s gaze. The power of unlife burns within wights as a darkling fire, and the eyes of a wight mirror this unholy energy within. These glowing pinpoints of light are a telltale clue distinguishing wights from simple shambling corpses, but wights can suppress their glow when seeking stealth. When a wight attacks, however, its deathless rage and hatred cannot be extinguished, and the sallow radiance returns to their eyes once more.

Some sages theorize that those wights who still draw breath do so because they linger nearer to life than most of the undead, and that it is this very nearness to life that feeds their rage and hunger for life. The necromantic energies that empower them scour their bound spirits and compel them to inflict their torment on others in the hope that, in consuming others’ lives and souls, their own hunger can be slaked. Could they but sup deeply enough from the trough of others’ life force, they might rekindle their own, and their endless frustration in this quest only enrages them further and redoubles their obsessive quest for life. If the theft and consumption of a dozen souls is not enough, then perhaps a score would suffice. If not a score, then perhaps a hundred or a thousand. Yet it is never enough. Their existence is thus one of unending frustration and bitterness, as even when gorged on the lives of the fallen, their hunger is never satisfied for more than a moment.

Source: Undead Revisited, p. 58