Temperate Climate

Goblins prefer to dwell in caves, amid large and dense thickets of thistles and brambles, or in structures built and then abandoned by others. Very few goblins have the drive to build structures of their own. Coastlines are favored, as goblins are quite fond of sifting through junk and flotsam in an unending quest to find treasures among the refuse of more civilized races. Goblin hatred runs deep, and few things inspire their wrath more than gnomes (who have long fought against goblins), horses (who frighten goblins tremendously), and regular dogs (whom goblins regard as pale imitations of goblin dogs). Goblins are also quite superstitious, and treat magic with a fawning mixture of awe and fear. They have the habit of ascribing magic to the mundane as well, with fire and writing both taking on mystical power in goblin society. Fire is much loved by goblins for its capacity to wreak great destruction and because it doesn’t require size or strength to wield, but written words are hated. Goblins believe that writing steals words out of your head, and as a result of this belief, goblins are universally illiterate. Goblins are voracious and can eat their body weight in food daily without growing fat. Goblin lairs always have numerous storerooms and larders. While they prefer human and gnome flesh, a goblin won’t turn down any food—except, perhaps, vegetables.

The Nature of Goblinoid Evil
Goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears, despite having superficial similarities, each represent a different face of evil. Hobgoblins are ordered and methodical in their evil, forming vast armies, warbands, and despotic nations. Goblins are the primal evil, seeking only cruelty and petty victimization as they can find it, be that among their own kind or against their neighbors. Yet the evil personified by the bugbear may be the most terrifying, for they actively seek to inflict pain and suffering in the most destructive ways possible. When a hobgoblin kills, it’s because of tradition and order. When a goblin kills, it’s for fun. But when a bugbear holds its blade, it kills only when it can be assured that the murder will cause maximum pain and suffering to those its weapon does not touch; to a bugbear, the true goal of murder is to strike not at the victim, but at those who held the victim dear.

Atomies perceive themselves as larger than they actually are. Like pups standing up to a full-grown cur, atomies never back down from aggression, and take tremendous pride in defeating and humiliating foes larger than themselves. Atomies find great pleasure in shoring up the odds in a fight against larger foes. They make use of their reduce person spell-like ability as an offensive measure, hoping to shock and humiliate humanoid opponents, giving them a chance to make a killing jab. Atomies employ their invisibility spell-like ability to get in close and make sneak attacks before darting back out of reach. In lands thick with fey, atomies often serve as border sentries or bodyguards to nymphs, dryads, or other more powerful fey creatures. While atomies prove only passable in their ability to defend such creatures, other fey accept their fealty out of respect and perhaps with a bit of mirth as well. Atomies enjoy their time as honor guards, but often grow bored and leave their posts in search of adventure. These nimble creatures adore swordplay and practice with their blades endlessly. Atomies often travel their lands seeking adventure tinged with mischief. Sensitive to bullying and oppression, atomies revel in turning the tables on a cruel mayor or tormenting dishonorable mercenary bands. Atomies, enamored with tales of epic duels and the defeat of great evils, sometimes follow adventuring parties and eavesdrop on their nightly tales by the campfire. If a warrior in the group tends to boast of his swordplay, an atomie rarely resists the urge to humble him by sabotaging his equipment or invisibly reducing him and challenging him to a duel. Atomies get along well with grigs, and it is not uncommon to see the two types of creatures banding together for defense or companionship. Some sages claim the two creatures share a past link, pointing out their similar insectile wings. Anyone questioning an atomie or grig about this theory is greeted with bouts of shrill tiny laughter. An atomie stands just under a foot tall and weighs 2 pounds.

Some ravens can reach astonishing sizes, making them a threat to foxes, raccoons, and on occasion even larger animals. Like their smaller cousins, giant ravens are omnivorous, able to subsist on nearly anything, though they favor large insects, small mammals, and other birds. They are also consummate scavengers, often feeding on the remains of creatures left behind by larger predators. These large corvids share the keen and vengeful intellect of smaller ravens.  Giant ravens grow to be nearly 5 feet in height and weigh 45 pounds.

Countless species of poisonous snakes dwell in the wild, their bites capable of bringing down creatures much larger than themselves. Snakes of the size presented here are thankfully rarer than their smaller kin, but many species of rattlesnake, cobra, and similar reptiles can grow to this size. Venomous snakes are generally far more aggressive than constrictor snakes, and even larger variants do exist: you can create stats for a king cobra, for example, by applying the advanced and giant simple templates to the stats given above.

Most oozes are mindless, existing only to consume. Even those rare oozes that do possess intelligence still tend to prefer the consumption of other creatures over their company. Occasionally, however, an ooze in the presence of a powerful psychic spellcaster becomes infused with some measure of both sentience and personhood, and yearns to join the company of civilized beings. When a spellcaster completes a particularly stressful ritual or powerful mental feat in close proximity to the right mixture of primordial slimes that make up a nascent ooze, a piece of the spellcaster’s mind breaks off and infuses the ooze, creating a being called an apallie.  A newly formed apallie is typically convinced that it is a member of its creator’s race. Its greatest desire is to join the society of its progenitor, and it alters its form to insinuate itself into humanoid settlements. Such impostors are easily discovered, however, as an apallie’s true nature reasserts itself as soon as the sun begins to rise. An ooze discovered in this way often finds itself run out of town, forced to try its luck in the next settlement, though some particularly stubborn apallies simply assume a new form and return the next night under a different guise.  Apallies are nocturnal creatures, for any contact with the rays of the sun forces them to return to their true, amorphous forms. Even when its form is forcibly reverted, an apallie insists it is truly a member of its creator’s race, and that it has somehow been subjected to a terrible curse. Despite the ooze’s relatively high intelligence, this unreasonable attachment to its self-image persists even in extreme circumstances. If the apallie’s creator was a different size from the apallie, the apallie still tries to imitate that creator, attempting to pass as a small elf, human, or member of another race to which its progenitor belonged, and refuses to acknowledge the size difference. Apallies are more common in large cities that provide sewers and other enclosed venues to hide in during the day and a healthy nightlife scene in which they can pose as humanoids when it’s dark. Some apallies find acceptance, and even success, in such environments, though the small oozes never stop trying to prove themselves to be humanoids, and any relationships in which they engage (whether platonic or romantic) nearly always end in a predictable disaster.  In its true form, an apallie weighs about 40 pounds and stands about 3 feet tall.

Worgs are oversized, evil, intelligent wolves often found dwelling amid goblins or other savage races. A typical worg has gray or black fur, stands 3 feet tall at the shoulder, and weighs 300 pounds. Worgs hunt in packs, running down and surrounding their prey like common wolves, but their intelligence and ability to speak make them better at coordinating their attacks. They sometimes use one packmate as a decoy, pretending to be a humanoid calling for help in order to lure intelligent prey into an ambush. Worgs that travel with goblins often allow them to ride on their backs, but in such situations it is usually the worg that is the master, not the rider.

Adherers look vaguely like embalmed and mummified corpses wrapped in dirty linen, but they are in fact otherworldly beings of an entirely different nature. Transformed by hideous processes on the Ethereal Plane, their bodies are riddled with tiny, adhesive strands that can stick to anything, allowing adherers to bind their enemies’ weapons and capture living creatures for their depraved rituals. Though once human, adherers have forgotten all traces of humanity, and now hunt their former kindred with gleeful abandon. Adherers digest food unusually slowly, and as such can feed on a single creature (humans are their favorite meal) for days or even weeks, taking only one or two bites a day and forcing their living captives to endure a hellish, drawn-out death.

This abnormally aggressive flock of ravens forgoes scavenging in favor of more active hunting for food. Multiple swarms of ravens make uncanny use of strategy, with one swarm flushing out prey and driving it directly into the onslaught of an allied swarm. The statistics for a raven swarm can also be used to represent any large, aggressive flock of flying birds.

Many thousands of years ago, the solemn cyclopes ruled vast kingdoms, yet today their glories are long forgotten. What few cyclopes survive seldom aspire higher than protecting their lairs and seeking out their next meals. This latter task occupies a great deal of their focus, for the monstrous appetites and vacuous hunger of the cyclopes control the race’s destiny and may have led to their original downfall so long ago. The average cyclops stands 9 feet tall and weighs 600 pounds. Both males and females are almost completely bald, with stringy patches of dark hair occasionally hanging down from above the ears. A bushy, expressive brow couples with a cyclops’s massive eye to make the creature’s attitude easily known. Cyclopean history is a vanishing thing inscribed on the crumbling walls of vine-choked lost cities that fell long before even the rise of the elves, when dragons and giants ruled a landscape unspoiled by the petty ephemeral races that rule today. Because things have fallen so far, a given cyclops is less likely to know the near-mythic triumphs of lost ages than even a semi-educated human. Ancient records, the oral traditions of other giantish races, and the scattered accounts of tribal natives of the southern jungles speak of much larger, more primal “great cyclopes,” imposing titans with shaggy legs and a massive horn above an inquisitive eye. These creatures are thought to have been either the leaders or the war beasts of the ancient race, and modern cyclopes honor them as elusive, destructive living gods.

This eerie, vaporous ooze slips silently through the air, a roiling cloud of green fog within which dance the indistinct shapes of twisted, spooky ghosts. Despite its haunting appearance, and despite the fact that hungry fogs often dwell in old graveyards or hunt battlefields, a hungry fog is not an undead creature. Rather, it is a form of gaseous ooze infused with negative energy. Thus, while a hungry fog is not an undead creature, undead gain considerable boons by fighting within a hungry fog, for its mists heal them as surely as they drain vitality from the living creatures caught within. Within a hungry fog, the ooze’s mists interact strangely with fragments of those it has consumed, creating eerie phantasms of its past victims. Periodically, one of these shapes might flash with light as if momentarily holding a lantern aloft, but as soon as the figure is approached, it fades away into the surrounding mists, often giving the observer a quick and unsettling glimpse of a skull-like countenance. These shapes, like the fog itself, are not truly undead, but the fact that a hungry fog is hurt by positive energy as surely as if it were helps to blur the distinction and spread even more confusion about its actual nature. A hungry fog is instinctively drawn to areas where negative energy is strong. These nocturnal creatures are particularly fond of sites that are haunted, such as old houses, abandoned graveyards, or shipwrecks along shorelines—although their vulnerability to high winds means that they are rarely encountered in areas where storms are common.

When the clouds turn gray and the winds pick up into a howl, wise travelers pray that the cause is only a natural tempest and not a storm hag. A storm hag resembles an old woman with a thundercloud of hair. Her mouth hangs open, revealing thin pointed teeth with small arcs of electricity jumping across them. Black talons sprout from her fingertips, likewise crackling with electricity. A storm hag weighs 70 pounds and stands around 4 feet tall, though if she stood up straight she could easily reach 5 feet.

STORM HAG COVENS
A storm hag is haughty and views her way of doing things as the only proper approach, forcing coven members to ride a fine line between flattery and submission. Coven members gain the child-scent ability as long as they are within 100 feet of the storm hag. In addition, a coven with a storm hag as a member has access to the following additional spell-like abilities: call lightning storm (DC 18), plague storm (DC 19), quench (DC 16), whirlwind (DC 21), and wind wall.  

Fastachees are mysterious, wise, and generous fey who foster the growth of nearby plants. Many communities who interact with them revere them as bringers of food and medicine, as well as protectors of crops. These fey have a particularly strong connection to corn; they regularly project their senses through corn plants to monitor the health of the field and search the local area for threats. They prefer to avoid direct confrontation if possible, using their ability to originate their spells from corn plants to harass those they wish to chase away.

Civilizations across the Material Plane fear many disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues, and more— but few things spell doom for a settlement with such insidious certainty as a flourishing zygomind. These massive fungi float through space as ethereal spores, spreading their cloying mycelia wherever creatures of intelligence thrive. The presence of a young zygomind is at first innocuous and difficult to detect, as animals and other creatures of low intelligence begin to disappear. Eventually, more intelligent creatures track their prey to the site and become lost themselves, wandering back toward civilization days or even weeks later as infected undead, dominated with the instinct to bring ever-greater intellects into the zygomind’s power. Over the course of only a few months, a growing zygomind can decimate a small city, rapidly accelerating its growth into a 500-foot monstrosity.  By the time a zygomind becomes visible above the treeline, it is likely too late for the intelligent life of the region; the zygomind’s insidious psychic trap defeats any resistance that most such creatures can mount. Frequently, those investigating the zygomind slip seamlessly into an alternate reality without realizing that they’ve fallen under the power of the very thing they sought to destroy. A zygomind’s mindscape only becomes more convincing as it subtly enslaves more and more minds—the fungus can reconstruct whole cities, even as the real-world inhabitants of those settlements proceed somnambulistically into the zygomind. Entire armies have marched upon mature zygominds, intent on ridding the region of the scourge, only to halt their assault mid-charge and plod calmly, rank by rank, into the zygomind’s physical and psychic grasp. The cruel irony of the plant’s trap is that these soldiers likely live the rest of their lives believing themselves victorious, forming memories of defeating the insidious fungus, returning home to their loving families, and eventually dying after a long and productive life, while in the real world the zygomind’s mycelium sucks the nutrients from their helpless bodies and transforms them into undead minions.  The wide-ranging habits of a zygomind’s minions make the fungi relatively easy to track for those who know of the obscure creatures. Stories of zombies or other virulent undead can sometimes point toward a zygomind’s inf luence, especially if the undead’s victims tend to wander off in a certain direction after infection. A particularly dedicated adventurer could follow one of these enthralled creatures for the entire journey back to the fungus, though the pace the victim sets often proves excruciatingly slow to all but the most patient individuals. Subtler clues could hint at a zygomind’s inf luence as well, such as a sudden rash of sleepwalking in a nearby town or whispered rumors about a logging camp whose workers all disappeared into the forest together without a word.  Those with the wherewithal to follow the clues to the zygomind invariably encounter a horde of slowly shuff ling, mindscape-bound victims on their way to offer themselves to the fungus. Attempting to shake these victims out of their torpor produces no effect, and forcibly restraining them is a temporary solution at best. Occasionally, certain brave or foolhardy adventurers submit themselves willingly to a zygomind’s mindscape, hoping to free the minds of those trapped within. This is a path fraught with peril, though, for the adventurers’ bodies approach the zygomind at the same rate, and the adventurers’ consciousnesses face the monumental challenge of trying to prove to a city of people that their world is a false construction. Powerful psychic spellcasters have had some luck helping victims escape by using spells such as mindscape door, but such forcible egress from the zygomind’s mindscape draws the attention of the zygomind itself, and it lashes out instinctively at these psychic invaders. Depending on how long a zygomind has infested an area, a creature who is able to avoid being trapped in the mindscape could find a veritable hoard of weapons, armor, and magic items within the cage of its body, discarded as the bodies that brought them withered away, then rose as undead. Of course, a canny adventurer must always be aware that the discovery of such a trove within the fungus could simply be one more illusion imposed by the zygomind’s mindscape. Once a creature has had contact with a zygomind, it can never again truly be certain that the world it inhabits is the real one without the aid of powerful psychic magic or of those familiar with the logic and perils of mindscapes—yet even then, the zygomind smoothly creates the illusions of such individuals and abilities to reassure victims that they are indeed free.  When fully grown, a zygomind can reach a height of 500 feet, and its mycelium can stretch for 10 miles in all directions, comprising hundreds of tons of biomass. The main cage is usually 25–40 feet in diameter and weighs around 40,000 pounds.