Flying Polyp

This nauseating, tapered tower of flesh, eyes, and tendrils writhes midair, surrounded by a strange vortex of sucking wind.

Defense

Offense

Statistics

Ecology

Description

Deflecting Winds (Su) A flying polyp’s mastery over air and wind allows it to surround itself with blasts of precisely aimed gusts, granting the creature a +5 deflection bonus to its Armor Class and a +4 resistance bonus on Reflex saving throws.

Partial Invisibility (Su) A flying polyp’s body constantly flickers and shifts, passing from visibility to invisibility in a seemingly random pattern and often not wholly at once, leaving the creature’s body in what appear to be multiple sections. This ability, combined with the flying polyp’s amorphous, elastic form, makes it difficult to target the creature, granting it a 20% miss chance against all attacks. By concentrating, a flying polyp can become fully invisible.

Sucking Wind (Su) This attack allows the flying polyp to send an eerie wind out to slow and eventually stop a creature’s escape. The wind itself isn’t particularly strong, but it creates a peculiar sucking sensation as if it were attempting to pull creatures back toward the flying polyp. Activating this ability is a full-round action, and it must concentrate each round to maintain the effect. The sucking wind manifests as a 100-foot-radius spread, with the flying polyp at the center. Each round the polyp maintains concentration, the sucking wind’s radius increases by 100 feet, to a maximum radius of a mile. A flying polyp can detect creatures within this area via tremorsense. As a free action, it can increase the effects of the sucking wind on up to five different creatures within the area at one time. Each targeted creature must succeed at a DC 26 Fortitude save each round it remains in the area of the sucking wind or it is slowed until it leaves the area. A creature already under the effects of any slowing effect (such as from this sucking wind or a slow spell) that fails this save is held in place for 1 round—it is not helpless, but cannot move via any means. Freedom of movement protects against the effects of the sucking wind, and control winds negates its effects in the area of effect of the control winds spell. Natural windstorms or other powerful winds have no effect on a sucking wind. A flying polyp can activate a sucking wind once per day, and can maintain concentration on the effect for up to an hour. The save DC is Constitution-based.

Wind Blast (Su) Once every 1d4 rounds as a standard action, a flying polyp can create a powerful blast of wind at a range of up to 120 feet. This blast of wind creates a sudden explosion of flesh-scouring wind in a 30-foot-radius burst. All creatures within this area take 14d6 points of bludgeoning damage, with a successful DC 26 Reflex save halving the damage. In addition, these winds can check or blow away creatures as if they were tornado-strength winds (Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook 439). The save DC is Constitution-based.

A flying polyp is a nauseating mass of flesh, eyes, tentacles, and mouths. A typical flying polyp measures 30 feet in length but is unusually light for its size, weighing no more than 2,000 pounds. These creatures seem to have no maximum lifespan, but their violent, warlike nature ensures that death eventually occurs—even if it takes eons for the polyp to encounter something capable of defeating it.

A flying polyp is a physical being, but one composed of material strangely unlike the flesh that garbs most living creatures. While the stuff that makes up the exterior of a flying polyp’s body might seem similar to ordinary flesh, it often behaves in ways that should be impossible. The material seems to fade in and out of visibility, almost at random, at points becoming transparent enough that the nauseating inner workings of the thing’s body are laid bare. Although the polyp feels moist and damp to the touch, what might serve as blood in other creatures behaves more like strange vortices of wind within a flying polyp’s body. When wounded, its damaged flesh does not bleed so much as whistle and gust.

A flying polyp’s association with wind goes far beyond the strange storms that surge through what pass as veins and arteries in its massive body. These creatures have a remarkable ability to control the air around them, both via a wide array of spell-like abilities and through the use of potent supernatural powers. They do not wield tools or weapons as a rule, instead using their mastery of the winds themselves to wage war and build their grim cities, scouring towers and chambers out of basalt with precise blasts of sand-laden wind.

Although flying polyps display some of the features of other sentient races, particularly in their habit of building cities (although these towering settlements usually incorporate architectural features that most other races find awkward and unsettling), in other areas they seem strangely primitive or uninterested. They are as aberrant in mind and philosophy as they are in physical form. For example, they seem to have neither a name for their own race, nor a language to call their own. Their cities, while bewildering in their vast scale, seem to serve little purpose other than to unnerve, for flying polyps do not engage in trade or politics or other social constructs.

The primary exception to this, to the detriment of other creatures unfortunate enough to dwell in regions claimed by flying polyps, is war. Flying polyps excel at genocide, using their mastery over wind to scour clean entire cities and civilizations when they come upon them. Some among their kind can even travel to other planets by bringing with them a sizable sphere of purloined wind to carry them aloft and sustain them, and with this power they lead armies from planet to planet as necessary, relentlessly tracking their chosen enemies across worlds. Every so often, flying polyps encounter a race that is their equal in war, and on some worlds, they still endure the humiliation of these ancient defeats after being imprisoned in extensive underground chambers where they are cut off from the outside world. Yet flying polyps are long-lived, and should unforeseen tectonic events creates new exit to their prison chambers, lost in the forgotten corners of those planets’ depths, they emerge with unabated fury to seek revenge against the enemies who dared humiliate them so.

Flying Polyp Formian Giant, antlike interplanetary expansionists with an alien hive intelligence, formians are not evil, but they are aggressive in the propagation of their kind into new territories. The formian homeworld is a lush green jungle planet teeming with life both above and below ground level. Formian hives create vast tunnel systems, turning the subsurface of the planet into a honeycomb-like structure. After colonizing every habitable piece of land on their home world, formians looked to the stars for additional lands to infest.

This instinct to expand and propagate often causes conflict with their neighbors. Though the formians believe it is their right to annex into new areas, they have no patience for those who move into theirs. Formians claim and fiercely defend verdant areas of land around their hive because much of the hive’s nutritional needs are supplied by surface agriculture and hunting. In spite of this, intruders often don’t even notice they have entered formian territory. The ground above a formian hive appears unoccupied—formians conceal entrances to their hives and prefer harvesting fruits and berries in a way that leaves the land largely untouched. Meat that lands on formian tables typically comes from expeditions to drive off or hunt predators. Formians of the warrior caste organize these campaigns and these warriors have little patience for poachers.

Formian society is a strict matriarchy. Though each hive’s queen is theoretically independent and her rule absolute, allegiances are common between hives, and less powerful hives often grudgingly defer to more powerful matriarchs. Hundreds of worker and warrior formians serve even the smallest of hives. Larger hives number in the tens of thousands, and have complex tunnel systems with interwoven corridors connecting territories that might span over hundreds of square miles on the surface alone.

Each formian hive is designed primarily to protect the queen. Approaching the center of the hive can be exceedingly difficult. Paths are designed deliberately to lead encroachers away from the queen’s hidden lair. In addition to deceptive corridors, formians often build traps and place complex magical protections, decoys, and illusions to protect the queen’s inner sanctuary. Evolved to procreate on a massive scale, a formian queen is barely able to move under her own power. On the rare occasions she leaves her throne, a small army of workers assist and defend her, but formian queens are by no means defenseless. They are massive and powerful beings, and have the ability to possess any worker or warrior in the hive. A queen uses these thralls as her eyes and ears, and can cast spells through them. Creatures that invade a hive might find themselves the equals of the queen’s myrmarchs and taskmasters only to be laid low when a mere worker unleashes the queen’s tremendous magical power, employing the full force of her cunning and wrath.

Larger than typical warriors, formian myrmarchs are the chief guardians of the hive. They serve as trusted advisors to the queen and as generals of her armies. Warriors are the formians outsiders most frequently encounter. The warriors of the hive follow the orders of the myrmarch, and defend the hive from all encroachers. They also serve as hunters within formian lands and protect workers that venture beyond the hive.

Taskmasters serve the queen as overseers of projects that require greater intelligence and more liberated thinking than workers possess. Each taskmaster oversees workers bred with specific skills, directing tasks like expanding tunnels, repairing damage to the hive, or undermining the lands of dangerous creatures.

Workers are by far the most common formians, and perform a vast number of basic tasks, but they avoid interacting with those outside their hive.

interplanetary Expansionists After thoroughly occupying their home world, formians came up with a creative solution for alleviating population pressures. The most powerful queens coordinate their efforts to build dozens of massive asteroids, each loaded with a queen plus several myrmarchs and taskmasters, along with hundreds of eggs. The occupants are then placed in stasis, unable to wake until the asteroid crashes on a new world. The asteroids are then ensconced in layer after layer of magical protections and flung at nearby planets, serving as interplanetary seedpods for the species.

After years, decades, or even centuries in transit, an asteroid ship reaches its destination—or misses its mark entirely and continues off into the depths of space, the occupants safe though trapped in the asteroid until they reach a habitable planet. Most of these seedpods crash on their intended planets, though even then some of the seedpods meet with calamity. In rare instances, either the stasis or the protective magic fails, making the seedpod vulnerable to violent entry into a planet’s atmosphere. Other times the seedpod lands in an ocean or some other region of the planet inhospitable to formians, leaving them to drown, freeze, or meet some other calamity.

The safe arrival of a seedpod often creates a period of destruction and chaos for the natives of the formians’ new home. When the seedpod’s protections relax, the eggs hatch, and the formians move forward with ruthless efficiency toward creating their new hive.

Source: Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 4