Demonic Mohrg

Defense

Offense

Statistics

Description

Possession (Su) A demonic mohrg’s fiendish spirit can attempt to leap into another host when it is destroyed. At this point, the demonic mohrg can attempt to possess any one creature within 30 feet to which it has line of sight as an immediate action. The targeted creature can resist being possessed if it makes a DC 23 Will save. If it fails, the demonic mohrg possesses that target as if via magic jar, but with no duration for the effect and without the need for a receptacle. Typically, the demonic spirit lies low if it successfully possesses a new host, waiting until the right moment to seize control of the host and start a new chain of horrific murders. In this way, a demonic spirit can jump from host to host, for each time its host is executed, it rises anew as a demonic mohrg. The possessing spirit can be driven from a living host with a successful dispel chaos or dispel evil spell, instantly destroying the spirit and ending the cycle, but such tactics have no effect on the creature after it has animated an executed body as a demonic mohrg. The save DC is Charisma-based.

In a few tragic cases, a mass murderer or serial killer pursues his vile compulsions not due to psychological reasons, but because he is possessed by a demonic spirit that forces him into the role of a killer. Disembodied demonic spirits like these are fond of using mortals as hosts in this way, for if the host is captured and publicly executed while still being possessed by the demon, it can arise from beyond the grave as something more than a mere mohrg—these creatures return as demonic mohrgs, and once returned from the dead, they quickly renew their murderous goals, their fiendish nature apparent in undeath in the form of batlike wings and distorted, fiendish skulls.

Note that, although the variant mohrg presented here is called a demonic mohrg, you can use these stats for a mohrg that was possessed by a devil, daemon, or any other form of evil spirit at the moment of its execution—just change the mohrg’s alignment as appropriate.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Undead Revisited Nightshade “Nightshades are creatures beyond categorization, things made from darkness and malice, yet not truly natives of either the Shadow Plane or the Void. Born of a corruption of both planes in the lightless reaches where the planar boundaries break down, they are twisted and warped by evil. Their species comprises four iterations of abomination, all of them massive, ravenous, and drawing the unliving to them like flies to a corpse. “My best advice when facing such a creature? Be bigger than it. While suitable for me, this is unfortunately not an option for most of you.”

—Argrinyxia, the Shifting Lady of Ebon Scales Nightshade N ot a single class of creature but a multitude, nightshades encompass four distinct subtypes: the nightwalker, nightcrawler, nightwave, and nightwing. Each form fits a distinct ecological niche within its own inhospitable plane of origin, granting it virtual mastery of that domain, with each type uniquely adapted for conquest, and the race as a whole capable of ravaging worlds and leaving nothing intact. The nightwalkers stride across the land at the head of armies of undead, nightcrawlers burrow beneath the earth to rot it from below, and nightwings prowl the clouds and spread both shriek and shadow across the land. The greatest of nightshades, the nightwaves, reign as undead leviathans in the sea’s crushing depths, and should they choose to leave their favored domain, they swim through air just as well as any liquid.

In many ways, the nightshades stand at the apex of undeath, yet they are not conventional undead creatures. Whereas most undead began as living beings that were animated after death, arose again spontaneously after death because of some great emotion or unfinished business, or, while still living, willingly embraced undeath to stave off the looming hand of oblivion, nightshades deviate from this rubric in a major way. More akin to outsiders, they are composed of a warped mixture of shadow and evil, empowered by negative energy in the same way as normal undead. They form from the twisted souls of those fiends and outsiders who, seeking greater mastery over negative energy and the dreaming gulfs of darkness where the Shadow Plane and Negative Energy Plane meet, are themselves overcome and twisted beyond recognition, turned into servants of the planes’ own nihilistic ends. From their bizarre composition arises the nightshades’ greatest and perhaps only true weakness: a gross aversion to bright light, and an even more severe reaction to natural sunlight. While this vulnerability is not as severe as the death sentence that sunlight pronounces upon vampires, a nightshade’s shadowy essence causes it to retreat from offending light. Such is their painful aversion that during the day they hide below ground, sheltered in any structure they can find, or in the ocean’s deepest chasms below the sun’s reach.

Beyond their personal abilities for destruction, each variety of nightshade channels negative energy with a ferocious power, and each can summon specific types of undead. As a result, nightshades gather undead servitors like moths to a flame; these thralls act almost like heralds to the nightshade’s presence, encountered well prior to their masters. In addition to those undead under the nightshade’s control, intelligent undead often willingly follow nightshades’ commands, either for their own shared aims, or simply to scavenge off of the spoils of the nightshade’s conquests.

Given their nature, the nightshades’ urges and disposition come not from a hunger borne of negative energy—mindless and unwilling like the hunger of zombies—or from a hatred of the living resulting from agonizing loss during life or the painful transition into undeath. Their antipathy toward the living, other undead creatures, and even the natives of the planes of Shadow and Negative Energy derives from something more callous and less prone to rationalization: they despise and destroy because they are physical embodiments of darkness and entropy. For all the evil of liches and vampires, these undead creatures still retain desires, needs, and motivations understandable by mortals, while nightshades in many ways hew closer to their fiendish roots, being as much abstracts as creatures.

Thankfully, most nightshades remain in the depths of the Negative Energy Plane and its borders with the Shadow Plane, hunting and scheming in the dark trenches that spawned them, but they’re not confined there by any means. Nightshades possess an innate ability to plane shift, though thankfully most of their kind are so repulsed by the light of other planes that they’re more often encountered as a result of being summoned than because they were crusading far from their native shores.

Nightshades see themselves as the enemies of all light and life, and they seek to destroy the living and their worlds at every opportunity. Each nightshade harbors in its heart the desire to snuff out the sun and all that bear the spark of life, turning the Material Plane into a cold land of ash and ice. Eventually even their undead servitors and onetime allies fall into the eternal silence of death, leaving them alone. Understandably this outlook leaves nightshades in an isolated position even with respect to many intelligent undead and the other inhabitants of their native planes. As such, they seek few allies and no friends, believing that all other creatures are merely tools to be commanded, destroyed, or flung screaming into the same pits that spawned the nightshades, in the hope that they will eventually be reborn as more of the nightshade kind.

Source: Undead Revisited, p. 34