Vashkiyan

Defense

Offense

Statistics

Description

Female ancient green dragon ravener (Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 97, Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 2 230)

Cowering Fear (Su) Any creature shaken by the ravener’s frightful presence is also cowering instead of shaken for the first round of the effect, and shaken for the rest of the duration. Any creature frightened by the frightful presence is instead cowering for the duration.

Energy Drain (Su) On a successful critical hit, a ravener’s natural attacks inflict 1 negative level. It’s a DC 29 Fortitude save to recover from this negative level.

Soul Consumption (Su) When a living creature within 30 feet of a ravener dies, that creature’s soul is torn from its body and pulled into the ravener’s maw if the creature fails a Will save (DC equals the save DC of the ravener’s breath weapon). This adds a number of hit points to the ravener’s soul ward equal to the dead creature’s Hit Dice. Creatures that have their souls consumed in this way can only be brought back to life through miracle, true resurrection, or wish.

Ravener Soul Magic (Sp) A ravener retains the spellcasting capability of the base creature, adding three levels to the dragon’s caster level. This increases the number of spells known by the ravener, but the ravener loses all spell slots. Instead, whenever the ravener wishes to cast any one of her spells known, she consumes a number of hit points from her soul ward equal to the spell slot level necessary to cast the spell (including increased levels for metamagic feats and so on). If the soul ward has insufficient hit points, the ravener cannot cast that spell. Casting a spell that reduces her soul ward to exactly 0 hit points does not harm the ravener (though most are not comfortable without this buffer of soul-energy and try to replenish it quickly).

Soul Ward (Su) An intangible field of siphoned soul energy protects a ravener from destruction.

This ward has a maximum number of hit points equal to twice the ravener’s Hit Dice, but starts at half this amount.

Whenever a ravener would fall below 1 hit point, all damage in excess of that which would reduce her to 1 hit point is instead dealt to her soul ward. If this damage reduces the soul ward to fewer than 0 hit points, the ravener is destroyed. Each time a ravener uses her breath weapon, she adds 1 hit point to her soul ward for each negative level bestowed. Each time a frightful ravener strikes a cowering, frightened, panicked, or shaken creature with a natural weapon, she adds 1 hit point to her soul ward.

With each year, the green dragon Vashkiyan’s prized intellect declined, victim of a wasting disease that no spell could manage to cure.

Death she could face, but the loss of her faculties filled her with unreasoning terror.

As even her inborn magic began to fail, Vashkiyan turned toward planar evils rather than resign herself to death. One by one, she severed her ties with her mortal life to please Charon, the Horseman of Death. At the last she hunted down and slew her 15 living descendants, vivisecting each and feasting upon their organs. The archdaemon was pleased, and guided Vashkiyan through a ritual that saw her die in writhing agony, only to arise as a frightful ravener.

Vashkiyan was an ancient green dragon in life. See page 96 of the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary for rules on her camouflage, miasma, trackless step, water breathing, and woodland stride powers.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Undead Revisited Shadow “The light of our torches flickered in the musty tomb, many days’ trek into the Osirion desert. The flames seemed to make the shadows dance on the ancient stone walls, carved with timeworn hieroglyphs. The illusion began to get to all of us, making us terse and snappish. Even Orus, the normally even-tempered wizard, started to feel it. At last he cried ‘Enough!’ and brought a globe of magical light into being, its steady glow allowing us to snuff our torches. “Yet still the shadows danced. As we looked on in horror, our own shadows began to move, encircling us. And in that horrible instant, we knew our instincts had been right all along...” —Joyanna Daso of Daso’s Salvage Company (Retired) Shadow L ong, dark fingers stretch out across the wall, reaching toward light, life, and all that they do not have, but long to possess. The shadows move and hunger, for their very essence is gluttony and greed. Rampant covetousness and grasping greed lead some people down the dark path of evil and betrayal, eventually ending in a reprehensible death scene or a lonely expiration. While most such petty and despicable souls travel on to their final rewards the same way everyone else does, in some cases gluttons, misers, and thieves waste away into nothing but shadows—undead things that reach and grab, but cannot hold. Over time, spellcasters have discovered that these avaricious souls make perfect servants and guardians, immortal creatures doomed to watch over “their” treasure for all eternity.

Shadows are incorporeal undead, distorted like their namesakes and able to float or slide silently along surfaces, blending in among the true shadows there. This allows them to approach unnoticed, and those trespassers not caught completely by surprise rarely get more than a glimpse out of the corner of an eye—a flicker of movement and the sense of something out of place—before they strike.

In addition to guarding the haunted ruins they lay claim to or serving more powerful undead capable of cowing them, shadows devote themselves to attacking any living creatures they encounter, draining their victims of all vitality with their chilling touch. Victims become weaker and weaker until they finally perish, but their suffering is only beginning. For as the victim of a shadow’s touch expires, its own shadow detaches from the corpse, taking on the same half-life as its killer, hungry for the essence of the living and operating under its killer’s command. Like all undead, shadows are timeless creatures. As they have lost all concept of their previous life in the transition to undeath, the passage of centuries means almost nothing to them, and no one can say what shadows may do or think in the long wait between victims. However, unlike lesser undead, shadows do appear to “grow” over time. A shadow that has fed on the lives of many victims, or that dwells long enough in a place suffused with sufficient negative energies, may grow in power, becoming a greater shadow. These “shadow lords” often command swarms of their lesser kin, typically spawn of their own making. Rarely is more than one greater shadow found in a particular place, as the creatures compete fiercely for prey. Some believe that in especially fallow times, shadows even consume their own, but this is almost certainly false, as consuming other undead would grant a shadow neither the energy it seeks nor a new spawn, and gangs of shadows have been found that survived sealed into lost tombs together for millennia. What awaits powerful shadows is a question even the sages can only speculate about. Some believe shadow lords may eventually become shadow demons (Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 67), drawn down into the Abyss by the weight of their sins to drown in the eternal darkness. Torn apart by the forces of chaos, they emerge as malevolent monsters of pure envy and avarice. Others claim shadow lords steal the vitality of the living to become more corporeal, eventually transforming into other undead creatures or half-real shades.

Source: Undead Revisited, p. 45