#quickling

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

On the left, the Stone Giant Dreamwalker! 18 ft (5.5 m) tall artists devoted to thier craft and known for thier wisdom, but these are special! You see, to a stone giant anything aboveground is "the land of dreams." These are ones who brave and embrace this "hallucination", but thanks to latent magic the world starts changing around them like it's actually a lucid dream. They turn things to stone, magically charm people, random errant thoughts make favorite objects become part of them. They think they're in a dream world without consequence, so they act on errant emotion and whim.

On the right are Quicklings, the speedsters of the fey realm! 2 ft (61 cm) creatures, they essentially experience the world in slow motion. They move and think so fast they look like a blur, and just cannot stop moving in some way. They're like if the flash was also extremely ADHD and a bit of a dick. Like they don't kill people or whatever, but they do mess with people to instigate fights and drama out of boredom. I don't think I need to explain how "vibrating so fast they're a living blur" could be a benefit.

[dailycharacteroption]

Lich (Pathfinder Second Edition Archetype)

(art by MitchGrave on DeviantArt)

Ah yes, the lich, considered by many necromancers to be the pinnacle of necromantic study, turning oneself into a perpetually renewing undead being so that their study of magic and accumulation of personal power never has to be stopped by a silly little thing like death.

In the previous edition, becoming a lich was something that was less governed by class options and more by personal investment in terms of downtime research and monetary expenditure, and that’s technically still true in 2E, but today’s subject lets you gradually claim the powers of that transformation rather than go through the arduous task of the GM adapting those powers into your power set.

While we’ve covered a handful of these undead archetypes before on the blog, the lich is a little bit different in that unlike the others, the lich is guaranteed to be something that the character willingly did to themselves, putting their soul into a receptacle to that their body and mind could persist as a powerful undead wizards and simply regenerate a new body whenever slain as long as nobody finds the soul cage and destroys it.

Oh right, yeah, 2E made the call to rename the object that serves as the vessel for their souls from the old “phylactery” to “soul cage”, as the latter is a much more evocative name, and also because the former is one of the names for a bit of religious paraphernalia from the still-living Jewish religion, making it kinda icky to use. These are sacred things, not a toy box of terms for any RPG or writer to just use whenever. (This is the same reason that the upcoming Remastered version of 2E is doing away with the term “golem” and making all of those constructs a moderately related group of created creatures without a unifying name.)

But that’s enough of that side tangent. Another way that the lich archetype differs from other undead archetypes is that it’s not one that can be taken in a reduced form at first level, or early in the character’s career at all. After all, liches are masters of magic, and while they are no longer limited to arcane casters, they still require a good deal of mastery in magic to fully grasp the concepts of the lichdom process and research their own personal path to dark immortality.

The dark powers of a lich are many, and we’ll soon see exactly how they can provide for your amoral casting character.

The base dedication for becoming a lich requires you to be a skilled craftsperson and have upper-middle casting proficiency, and for it the lich gains the basic undead benefits and their soul cage, which returns them to unlife when slain.

Those liches that started out as wizards can choose to make their soul cage their focus item, allowing them to drain reserves of magic from it to cast spells as usual. However, unlike other bonded items, it need not be on their person, and once per day (even if they are able to drain multiple times per day), they can use the drained power to cast any spell they know, even if they didn’t prepare it that day!

Given it is the key to their continued unlife, the soul cage is a lich’s most prized possession. As such, many weave a complex and layered series of abjurations and illusions over it to make the vessel extremely hard to identify as anything but a mundane items, as well as alert the lich if it is damaged at all.

While not quite as powerful as the touch of the monstrous lich stats, many do learn to charge their touch with negative energy to sap the life of their foes, and even potentially making them more sluggish.

Many of these undead mages also develop a natural sense for magic, helping them to notice spells and items nearby.

The efforts to further bolster their soul cage often bear fruit, with the item becoming especially durable and able to regenerate a new body for the lich at a much faster rate on average. Truly masterful liches can even be regenerated in a matter of hours.

Though most every lich dreads the fate, some liches do take inspiration from the crystalline demiliches by infusing a gemstone into their own flesh, usually the forehead, to cast a warding or divination spell, allowing them to draw upon the magic of the stone to cast said spell.

Meanwhile, some of the more powerful exude an aura of dread that strikes fear into the hearts of mortals, driving them away.

The fact that this archetype doesn’t come into play until midway through the levels means that your character will have plenty of identity beyond the archetype before you take it and can be built however you like with the lich feat being barely obtrusive. On that note, this archetype is exclusive to casting classes, so which one you choose will define your build as much as anything else, though it can be hard to justify any sort of primal caster becoming undead, unless you flavor them as being a perversion of nature or homebrew some modifications to make the archetype more like a druid undead like a siabrae. If there’s anything I’d say the archetype lacks, it’s the lack of feats tied directly to the abilities of other casting classes the way it does for wizards specifically.

The story of lichdom is one of both hard work and dedication, but also of hubris and an arrogant inability to grasp the consequences of one’s selfish actions. Sure, you may persist far beyond your mortal span until finally being slain for good, but is any of it actually worth it if you forget what it meant to be mortal, to be kind and understanding? Many liches are twisted into monsters unable to conceive of what they lost even before they’ve gone through with the process, while others may realize far too late how alienated they’ve become from the life they tried to preserve.

Faster than some traps can spring and hard to spot even when visible, quicklings like Zephyrtoes make for excellent thieves. However, when the young fey snatches a pretty bauble from a hidden vault, he soon realizes that his latest trinket is none other than a lich’s soul cage, and the undead mage is as relentless as Zephyrtoes is quick, possibly even more so.

The Rasinstar family has long been plagued by bouts of weakness and nausea that seem hereditary, but many a noble family has such quirks due to how such lineages are maintained, so nobody bats an eye, but their malaise is more than just a result of their breeding, but rather their ancestor: a familial lich who doesn’t wait to be destroyed to take advantage of the many able bodies in his lineage, sapping away a little bit of their life force at random when casting certain spells.

Emulating The Tireless, dark dwarven deity of undeath that values constant labor towards an endgoal, The Forgotten King Bolkgaard achieved lichdom late in life and began conducting experiements in undeath and construct crafting techniques to make his people as tireless as he was. Though he was destroyed, the abandoned factory-palace he once ruled from still lingers, and some have heard an echoing ticking coming from it’s depths recently.

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Quickling by Clint Cearley

[spidermilkshake]

AND YET MORE FARMERS OF ANCARDIA

Ogres are often unfairly characterized as cruel brutes who capture folk and fatten them up for slaughter. It's perhaps more accurate to say they take part in forms of agriculture that the very humans, elves and dwarves that revile them have boiled down to an impartial process long ago--in many ways, learned from humans, though catered to the ogre society's preference for both an avoidance of mess and of good optics and ethics. Many of the different ogre communities are known to keep various animals in contained pasture for eventual meat slaughter--though getting the full years of the animals first and the various byproducts (largely wools, milks, and sometimes eggs) in the process. Once the various deepmara, dire rats, cattle, boars, giant arthropods or birds are old and hobble about under their ponderous weight and old age, ogre farmers tend to put them down via heavy crossbow or heavy axe in darkrooms, and utilize every part of the well-aged meat in roasts and especially sausage-making. Ogres are full carnivores, and so they have a special kinship with a select few tame cave bears... these beasts also quite like a succulent aged sausage, and so special measures must be taken to ensure their greedy pets do not demolish their winter's stores in a day or two!

The Orcs have a wide variety of farming traditions to their name--though here is shown the Orcish method of mushroom farming in the deep places of their world. Orcish engineering fixes hooks into the walls of certain areas of lower light, and straight lengths of wood from either nearby Underforests or imported Surface woodlands if there are no neighboring forest zones are laid in them in rows and drilled to introduce fungal threads of edible species. As each log breaks down, new logs are slotted in, producing a deep, moist layer of compost behind the current logs. Aquaducts were built to channel water below the layers and down the rock walls to keep the humidity up enough for optimal mushroom fruiting, but as a side effect the common Deepwhisker catfish among a variety of alga and aquatic invertebrates of the Underground end up infiltrating these cool, shallow channels. Alongside this orc farmer is a loyal tamed timber wolf--as orcs are strong enough and independent enough to provide a wolf with a beneficial partnership.

Many would not understand the concept of a Pixysh farmer, strictly due to the highly decentralized and anarchic manner in which Pixies operate. Individual Pixie family groups and small communes, however, do very much engage in care and encouragement of various tree and herbaceous plant species within their lands--most especially the fruiting shrubs, which provide sugary berries and fruits which can be more easily preserved for their high energy in winters. Here, a defensive Pixie farmer fights away various large birds and other threats from the family's rowan berry tree, grabbing up as many fruits as can fit in his satchel as possible at a time.

Quickling society is as far removed from the remainder of Surface cultures as can get--isolated to their canopy cities in the southern Heartlands and the Nechola woodlands. Within these equatorial climes, they are known to engage in a number of farming techniques both high above the forest floor and down amongst the trunks--most notably, mushroom farming, such as the Quickling farmer shown here atop his silver wolf mount checking upon the new growth of Elm Oyster mushroom below the lowest basements of his people. Quicklings in the canopy are more known from taming various small falcons, parrotlets, and songbirds, as well as cultivating light-greedy crops such as tomatoes and sour-gherkins.

[cal-kestis]

i love arm

[lemon-lyman]

THE WEST WING → 4.03 'College Kids'

[guildfordd]

— MANNY JACINTO as QIMIR in The Acolyte, 1x06, "Teach / Corrupt" (2024)

[horrorgameanalysis]

Greyhawk Monstrous Compendium Review [A to C]

I’m currently preoccupied with the design of the RPG I want to make – when I’m not busy being stressed! To relax, then, I’ve been reading old Dungeons & Dragons monster manuals, trying to find ideas I could leverage. There’ll be an upcoming post that discusses in further detail monster theory and culture in relation to the monsters I’m thinking about. But I came across a compendium in my search,…

[blueskiesandstarrynights]

Dimension 20: Fantasy High Season 3, Episode 10: Cursed Out

[pavlmescal]

☆2024 Pride Celebration☆ Day 6: Favorite LGBTQIA+ Media [2/10] ⤷Sense8 (2015-2018)

[televisiongifs]

Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000) The Diary (S01E10)

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

Quicklings, the speedsters of the fey realm! 2 ft (61 cm) creatures, they essentially experience the world in slow motion. They move and think so fast they look like a blur, and just cannot stop moving in some way. They're like if the flash was also extremely ADHD and a bit of a dick. Like they don't kill people or whatever, but they do mess with people to instigate fights and drama out of boredom. So you need something to entertain them, but I don't think I need to explain how "vibrating so fast they're a living blur" could be a benefit.

...also I love that the lore is just "Their archfey got mad that they kept showing up late and wasting her time, so she shrunk them and hit the fast forward button on thier existence." Like they didn't used to be 2 foot tall with a 15 year lifespan, she apparently just has life's remote control.

[starwarsblr]

THE ACOLYTE – 1.05 "Night"

[imogens-temult]

CRITICAL ROLE: CAMPAIGN 3 Episode 113: Assault on the Malleus Key

[filmtvtoday]

GAME CHANGER - ‘Second Place’ 6.01

[cal-kestis]

happy april 30th!