Pathfinder Campaign Setting: "Darklands Revisited" [RPG]

 I’m not saying I’m preparing to run a major new campaign that will feature a descent below Golarion’s surface, but if I were, I’d find Darkland’s Revisited very useful.  This book, a 64-page full-color softcover in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting line, features a series of entries on ten different monsters that one is likely to encounter there.  Each of the six-page-long entries starts with a bit of in-game flavour text from Pathfinder Society explorer Koriah Azmeren before discussing the monster’s ecology, society, campaign role, treasure, and Golarion-specific themes.  Each entry also features a full-page stat block and artwork for a single named NPC of that race.  I particularly like the little sidebars like “Five Facts about . . .”  The monsters covered in the book are drow, duergar, gugs, intellect devourers, morlocks, munavri, neothelid, troglodytes, urdefhans, and vegepygmies.

The strong cover art is reproduced as the inside back cover sans text.  The inside front cover has a quick one-sentence summary of each of the ten monsters.  There’s also a two-page-long introduction that does pretty much the same thing but while talking more about their mythic or literary inspirations, though it also includes a paragraph on each of the three distinct layers of the Darklands (I’d suggest getting Into the Darklands for substantive overviews of them).  I’d label the interior art fairly weak.

Okay, on to the monsters!

 

·       *  The drow entry is solid.  It’s hard to see much if any difference between drow on Golarion and drow in the Forgotten Realms.  I liked the suggestions for the role they could play in different campaigns, and there’s a sidebar (and alternate racial trait) on half-drow.  The custom NPC is a mysterious drow slave-trader named The Surface Caller.  A multiclass sorcerer/swashbuckler, she could be a good hook if the PCs are trying to rescue a slave (or get captured and sold themselves).

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*     * I really learned a lot from the entry on duergar.  The entry emphasises their slaving culture, and makes a persuasive connection between their racial abilities and ancestral devotion to Droskar.  The Pathfinder novel Forge of Ashes is good on this topic as well, and features some of the locations discussed in this entry, like The Long Walk.  The custom NPC is a duergar warpriest named Almara Kazaar; she’s fine but doesn’t really stand out as particularly interesting.

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·      *  Despite their amazingly scary appearance, gugs are a monster type I’ve hardly ever used and never really thought of as more than mindless killers.  The entry is really interesting, though little of it could really be discoverable or impactful on PCs encountering them.  The custom NPC is Uchurah, a gug cult leader with a couple of barbarian levels.  He’d be good as a boss figure if the GM wanted to introduce gugs.

·      * Intellect devourers fill some of the void left by the inability of Paizo to use illithids.  They’re creepy as heck, as they crawl through your mouth while you’re asleep and eat your brain!  The entry showcases an interesting extraterrestial origin for them and the original premise that they take over humanoid bodies so that they can experience emotions that are otherwise foreign to them.  A pirate captain for a custom intellect devourer NPC is a crazy idea, but it works—and that’s one pirate ship I wouldn’t want to encounter on the high seas.

·       * For morlocks, I think it’d be really interesting to play up the theme of them being the devolved remnants of destroyed civilizations.  There’s some real pathos there.  They also don’t need to necessarily be hostile, though if the GM is looking for real hordes of enemies, morlocks can come out in the hundreds and hundreds.  The custom NPC is Eudranis, a cleric of Lamashtu, and he’d work well as a boss figure.

·       * I have to confess I’ve never heard of munavris before.  They’re unique as a generally good-aligned Darklands race.  An island-dwelling culture in the Sightless Sea, munavris could be a welcome refuge for PCs lost deep underground.  They’re really interesting, and I’d certainly like to learn more about them.  The custom NPC is a psychic swashbuckler named Captain Ignisco.

·       * Neothelids make for good villainous masterminds in a campaign, deviously moving pawns around in tangled plots that the PCs have to unravel.  Gigantic worms, they spawn other creatures called seugathi that travel to the surface on bizarre, sometimes inexplicable missions—which can be great adventure hooks to lure PCs into the Darklands to discover what’s going on.  The custom NPC is Thath-Malal, a young neothelid under Tian Xia.

·        * Troglodytes stink!  The entry has good detail on them, and it’s interesting that they can be bargained with for safe passage or even hired as bodyguards in the Darklands.  Although found in all three layers of the Darklands, they apparently only have one real city (far below the Mierani forest).  The custom NPC operates on the surface, however, and has 7 levels of the hunter class.

·       * I personally think urdefhans are by far the creepiest monster in the book.  Bred from the depravity of daemonic minds, they seek out other species to end their lives in as painful a manner as possible.  The custom NPC leads a rare cult that raids surface cities.

·       * Vegepygmies (plants with humanoid-like shells) are kind of goofy in my opinion, but they do constitute useful low-danger threats for PCs venturing into the uppermost layer of the Darklands.  I think the real danger is russet mold, and the entry has a nice sidebar on its variations.  I appreciated the little reference to The Tangle in Xin-Shalast—that was something I could have integrated into a certain AP.  The custom NPC is actually a new monster variant called a “Thorny”—a type of vegepygmy hound.   

       

         And that’s the book.  Overall, it’s certainly fit for purpose for readers interested in learning more about the dangers of the deep dark.