Concept art from Labyrinth © Brian Froud. Accessed at the Muppet Central forums here

[The last two books I do not have access to the original art for–the artist never uploaded them to her dA gallery, so my choices are finding new pieces or taking screenshots from the PDFs. In addition, I got the chance to add fey boons and banes to these, which are always fun. There is a boggart in PFRPG, but it has little to nothing to do with the original evil house fairy. Consider calling the official version a hobyah or tutguts instead]

Boggart
CR 2 CE Fey
A tiny man, no taller than knee-high, glares at you. His entire mien is shabby and filthy, and his hands and feet seem disproportionately large. He clutches a pair of sharp scissors and mutters nastily to himself.

A boggart is a wicked house-fairy that devotes all of its energy to making misery for whatever house it has chosen to haunt. Any family may find itself host to a boggart, although the homes of those who have angered other fey creatures seem unusually susceptible to such infestations. Boggarts hide out anywhere they are unlikely to be caught—inside walls, in cellars or attics or in outlying sheds and carriage-houses. In fact, most boggarts have several nests on their chosen property in case one is discovered and destroyed. A boggart’s tricks include spoiling food, breaking furniture, keeping its victims up at night with strange and frightening noises, crippling livestock and pets and generally making itself a nuisance. If violence is done to them, boggarts will respond in turn, using household items such as scissors and knives as weapons of terror. Boggarts rarely are dissuaded by such a simple remedy as moving away, and will stow themselves in furniture and ride to their victim’s new home.

Despite their tenacity and cruelty, boggarts can be convinced to make peace through bribery. Gold coins and fresh milk are their favorite gifts, but such payment rarely lasts long until the boggart gets bored and starts making mischief again. After years of harassment, a boggart will eventually tire of tormenting the same people and move to find a new host. Boggarts not found in a domestic setting are rare, but when they do they play violent pranks on travelers on the hills and moors. These boggarts are often mistaken for other types of fey, such as pixies or duendes. Boggarts are omnivorous creatures with a fondness for human foods like bread, cheese and milk, but they sometimes cultivate “livestock” in the walls of the houses in which they live—typically destructive pests such as mice, cockroaches or termites. Boggarts are typically solitary creatures, but manors or castles may find themselves host to an entire family of the monstrous little fey. The average boggart stands just over two feet tall and weighs 10 pounds, although they often make themselves look bigger using tall hats and thick clothing.

Boggart Boons and Banes (2^nd level, CL 3, DC 14)
On rare occasions, a boggart may bestow its boon on a particularly generous host, one that accepts its protection racket and is kind to it. More often, they inflict their bane on a sleeping target to further frustrate those it lives with.

Boon: Even the most foul food nourishes you. You gain a +4 bonus on all saving throws against the sickened and nauseated conditions, as well as ingested poisons and disease. This boon lasts for 1 week.

Bane: Once per day, a random object in your possession gains the broken condition. This cannot destroy an already broken item. This bane lasts for 1 week.

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“El duende” © Verreauxi Aquilae, accessed at their deviantArt page here

[Variations on the duende/duwende/dwende appear throughout the Spanish-speaking world. One of them is even officially in Pathfinder, as the nuno gremlin]

Duende
CR ½ CN Fey
This little man has pointed, feral-looking features, and his feet are turned backwards. His eyes are wide and owlish, and his face is split in a sharp-toothed grin.

Duendes are mischievous fey that lurk on the fringes of civilization, where nature is beginning to reclaim human works. Abandoned houses, dry wells, exhausted mines and fields left to fallow are all favorite haunts of a duende. Duendes are typically quite territorial, and mortal interlopers are likely to be the targets of tricks and scares. Duendes are usually more interested in startling their victims than actually harming them, but they will fight back if their targets respond with violence.

Not all mortals invoke a duende’s ire. Both children and musicians are beloved by duendes, and both are likely to walk away from an encounter with a duende with gifts of food or trinkets. Despite their backwards-pointing feet, duendes are excellent dancers; the surest way of gaining a duende’s favor is to dance with it.  If a duende is particularly fond of a mortal, it might follow it home, taking up residence in a cellar or tool-shed and helping around the house. The frightening nature of the duende’s appearance, as well as their tendency to view guests as intruders, makes these relationships a decidedly mixed blessing. A duende stands about three feet tall and weighs about 20 pounds.

Duende Boons and Banes (1^st level, CL 2, DC 12)
As duendes are territorial and puckish, they frequently use their banes to bewilder and annoy travelers who pass through their territory. Those that are friendly with a duende may gain its blessing, which is especially useful in the radius of the creature’s twilight aura.

Boon: You gain Blind-Fight as a bonus feat. If you already possess Blind-Fight, you gain darkvision 10 feet. This boon lasts for 1 month.

Bane: You cannot help but get lost, even on simple trails. You suffer a -10 to all Survival checks, and may only check to recognize that they are lost once every day, rather than once an hour. This bane lasts for 1 week.

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Knocker © Heather Frazier

[Definitely drew some inspiration from the Pokemon Sableye for the look of this one. The boons and banes are new, and gave me the opportunity to refer to the real world belief that cobalt and nickel were iron that was transformed or replaced by sinister entities.]

Knocker
CR 3 CN Fey
Skittering just at the edge of your vision is an odd little man, its body disproportionate to its overlong limbs and large oval head. Its skin is a uniform bluish-gray color and eyes that glitter like gems peer from an otherwise featureless face. The creature clutches a large pick in its clawed hands and smiles with wide, flat teeth.

Playful natives of the Darklands, the capricious fey known as knockers simultaneously pull pranks on miners and keep them from serious harm. Much as dryads are to trees, knockers are to the rich veins of gems and precious metals that run through the earth. Although they are not tied to any particular location of mineral wealth, knockers congregate wherever such treasures are found to appreciate their beauty and keep it for themselves. Jealous creatures, they do not feel that mortal races are worthy of the riches of the land, and thus do their best to prevent miners from reaching their goals. Voices and sinister sounds in the darkness, sudden extinguishing of light sources and a good old fashioned jump scare are among the tactics knockers use to repel intruders. Particularly persistent miners, or those who prove to be good sports, are often rewarded by being allowed access to gems or metals (although not the best, of course). Knockers do not wish any particular harm on their competition, and will often use lethal force against the monsters of the Darklands that do. After all, if the miners were dead, who would they have to play with?

Knockers are not particularly social creatures, but a particularly magnificent mother-load might attract a number of the creatures to bask in its magnificence and play pranks on each other. Due to their ability to swim through earth and stone, knockers have little patience for architecture, requiring little more than a pocket in which to keep favorite gems. Despite their physical appearance, knockers bear no relation to goblinoids, and those demented humanoids often find themselves on the receiving end of a knocker’s crueler pranks should they share territory. A knocker stands about three feet tall and weighs no more than sixty pounds.

Knocker Boons and Banes (2nd level, CL 4th, DC 15)
A knocker will bestow its boon on favored miners; those that tolerate the fey’s pranks and help them deal with threats like subterranean monsters. Its bane is more freely given. In fact, some knockers will give first their boon and then their bane to the same victim, claiming that their magical gifts need “refreshing” or otherwise making excuses. Some indolent miners have claimed to suffer from “the knocker’s curse” in order to get out of work.

Boon: You gain tremorsense 30 ft. This boon lasts for 1 day per Hit Dice of the knocker (4 days for the typical specimen).
Bane: Any metal ore you touch transforms into useless slag when exposed to sunlight. This effect lasts for 1 week.

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To catch a unicorn © deviantArt user Abend.

[It’s Flashback Summer! This page isn’t the first iteration of the Creature Codex. From 2010-2013,  I released six PDFs under the Creature Codex name, roughly one per six months, with a handful of monsters in them for sale. Reviews were good, sales were not. So since they haven’t sold any units for literally years, I’ve closed up shop and will be posting revised versions of these monsters here. Some of them will have the original art from the PDFs, some won’t.

First up, this creature was originally the “twilight unicorn”. Considering that this PDF was released literally the month My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came out, these days “twilight + unicorn” means something a bit different.]

Dread Unicorn
CR 4 LE Magical Beast
This powerful equine creature seems to absorb the light around it and its eyes gleam a sinister red. A single horn about two feet long grows from the center of its forehead.

A grim reflection of the magnificent guardians of the forest, dread unicorns instead seek corruption and the spread of their cruel philosophy of suffering. Unlike their exclusive, snobbish kin, dread unicorns will consort with any and all creatures, although they prefer the company of the undead, evil outsiders and the servants of evil gods. Dread unicorns are the size of horses, although they tend to reflect sturdy, muscle-bound breeds.

Dread unicorns are omnivorous, consuming plant matter and flesh in roughly equal proportion. Due to their love of inflicting pain, however, they often kill far more than they eat, littering their forests with rotting flesh and throwing ecosystems out of equilibrium. A forest inhabited by a dread unicorn will soon become twisted and overgrown, with many of the native animals having fled or been slain. For this reason, even evil druids tend to oppose the workings of dread unicorns.

Native to all manner of forests, dread unicorns prefer to establish themselves in lands that are already tainted by a history of evil. Former battlefields, temples to dark gods and woods used as hiding places for escaped criminals and madmen are soothing to the dread unicorns. Most dread unicorns are solitary or live in a mated pair—for all their wickedness, dread unicorns mate for life and form strong bonds with their partners. Unintelligent undead are strangely attracted to the aura of negative energy exuded by a dread unicorn, and a dread unicorn might be followed by a small army of skeletons and zombies. Dread unicorns are smart enough to take advantage of this phenomenon, using their mindless minions as cannon fodder to soften up travelers before striking. Due to their great wisdom, aspiring tyrants and despots often seek dread unicorns for advice on their schemes; the prices asked by the unicorns for this service no doubt draw these aspirants further into evil’s service.

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Fetch © Heather Frazier.

[The first of Flashback Summer posted with the original art from the Monsters of Twilight PDF. The inspiration was the Shadow Beasts from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. These were originally written for my run-through of the Council of Thieves Pathfinder AP, and I used them to make sure “Shadow Plague” encounters had more variety than just shadow mastiffs and shadows.]

Fetch
CR 4 LE Outsider
The darkness moves. Within the black sphere you can barely make out the outline of an immense ape-like creature, its body covered in a carpet of lashing tendrils. Its head turns towards you, a flat plate like a shield, studded with a dozen irregularly placed glowing red eyes.

Hulking brutes native to the Plane of Shadow, the fetch is a simple-minded creature concerned with little more than the spreading of pain. A fetch stands about nine feet tall, although their knuckle-walking gait hides some of that height, and weighs an average of 350 pounds. The fetches are composed of the very essence of shadowstuff—the only truly solid part of a fetch is its iron-like skull. A fetch’s body is an oily liquid that drinks in light, held into vaguely humanoid shape by a thick membrane. This liquid surrounds the fetch with its characteristic aura of shadows, and allows them to fit through tight places with remarkable ease. As a being of pure shadow, a fetch does not need food or drink. They seem sustained, however, by the causing of pain, at which they prove most proficient.

Fetches live on the Plane of Shadow in strictly hierarchical organizations somewhat like the associations of apes on the Material Plane. These fetch bands patrol a territory, which they defend aggressively from intruders. The largest and strongest fetch controls the group. Fetches have no language of their own, and are indeed mute, but understand the Infernal tongue. This innate knowledge, combined with their dim intellect and lawful tendencies, make them excellent followers. The kytons of the Plane of Shadow often use fetches as slaves and menial labor. Any offering of a live victim for the fetch to torture grants a summoner a +2 bonus on all Charisma checks to control a called fetch.

The Shadowshield
Although fetches carry little if any treasure, their iron-hard skulls can be useful in the right hands. With one day of work and a DC 20 Craft (armorsmithing) check, a fetch’s skull can be turned into a masterwork heavy steel shield. This shield takes very well to magical enhancements—a shadowshield can be enhanced with the slick or shadow armor special abilities, and only costs half as much as an ordinary suit of armor to bestow with these abilities. A shadowshield is worth 800 gp.

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The Imjarvi Encounter  © Richard Svensson.

[Commissioned by @wannabedemonlord, for @quirkybestiary. I hadn’t heard of this alien encounter before, which is a shame because it’s a great story. This uses the rules from Pathfinder RPG’s Technology Guide]

Gremlin, Imjarvi
CR 2 CE Fey
This gnomish creature has waxen skin, a hooked nose and clawed hands. It wears a strange outfit—a jumpsuit, boots and helmet—and carries in its hands a luminous box.

An imjarvi is a gremlin of advanced technology that delights in sabotaging and stealing powerful alien devices such as lasers, force fields and batteries. Their origins are somewhat mysterious—some say they were created as a natural reaction to the emergence of high tech items, whereas others believe they are transformed gremlins of a more common species. Whatever the case, they primarily exist in regions where advanced technologies are found, and delight in teasing and toying with its wielders.

All imjarvi possess a technological device called a “beam-box”. Such devices are not necessarily box shaped, and in fact do not work for any creature other than the imjarvi that made it—their power is to focus the gremlin’s own innate magic into weird and dangerous forces. These beams can injure, immobilize and even poison the gremlin’s enemies, with symptoms of the poisoning closely resembling those of radiation sickness. They are mean but cowardly creatures, like most gremlins, and typically flee from any sign of real resistance.

Imjarvis may sometimes disguise themselves as a gnome or halfling in order to blend into humanoid communities, but even then their intentions are sinister. Some technologists prize them for their ability to recharge technological items, but entrusting a prized possession to an imjarvi is a foolish errand indeed. An imjarvi stands about three feet tall and weighs 40 pounds.

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“Green Knight” © Malcolm Brown, accessed at his deviantArt page here

[The original Irish gaborchend was an elemental giant with the head of a goat. My artist on the original Creature Codex PDFs convinced me to change it to purely humanoid, because she thought we should have at least one pretty fey creature. So I mixed in bits of the Green Knight from the Arthurian canon. Doing the boons and banes let me emphasize that connection.]

Gaborchend
CR 15 LN Fey
A great man strides forth, beautiful but fierce. He is clearly a warrior, as he is clad in gleaming armor and carries an enormous axe. His eyes gleam with raw energy.

Mighty warriors of the fey race, gaborchends are relics of a bygone age, when the fey battled with one another to decide the features of the earth and the shape of the continents. Ageless and immortal, the gaborchends have since retreated from worldly affairs, waiting the time when they are again needed. Most gaborchends are solitary creatures who wander the most remote reaches of the planet, where they can be closest to nature in its purest state. A gaborchend’s body is a font of elemental energy, and they can tap into this power to unleash devastating attacks and command the forces of nature itself.

Despite their great physical power, gaborchends tend to be patient and philosophical creatures, more inclined towards discussion than violence with most creatures that intrude upon their solitude. Only in the case of great disrespect towards the natural world, or when called upon by great fey powers, do gaborchends take up arms to fight once more. In combat, gaborchends prefer to shape the battlefield with their spell-like abilities before engaging in brutal, destructive melee. They are especially fond of sundering maneuvers, and take great delight in smashing enemy fortifications beneath their mighty blades. A gaborchend stands 12 feet tall and weighs 2 tons. Gaborchends closely resemble humans, but their hair and skin are often bright primary colors.

Gaborchend Boons and Banes (9^th level, CL 20, DC 25)
A gaborchend is likely to bestow its boon on someone who can keep up with it in conversation, or someone who does a great service to the natural world. Their bane is often inflicted as a game, wherein a gaborchend invites foolhardy mortals to wound him, only to return the favor in time.

Boon: You gain regeneration 1. Cold iron weapons overcome this regeneration. This boon lasts for 1 day.

Bane: One day after receiving this bane, you take damage as if you had dealt a critical hit to yourself with your primary weapon. Upon taking this damage, you must succeed a Fortitude save or die, as if you were affected by a coup de grace. This bane lasts until the damage is taken or it is dispelled.

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Image © Paizo Publishing, accessed at Archives of Nethys here

[Sponsored by @justicegundam82. The penqual fits in with the tumblak as PF2E sahkils that are a bunch of humanoids squished together. As such, and because their foci (claustrophobia and agoraphobia) are often seen as “opposites”, I wanted the flavor text to include some reference to them both. The original stats make them a Huge swarm of Medium creatures; troop rules didn’t exist in PF2e yet, but that seems like the logical mechanical niche in both editions.]

Sahkil, Penqual
CR 15 NE Outsider (extraplanar)
This seething mass consists of a mob of humanoid figures. Each of them is subtly disturbing in appearance—they have dead black eyes, no noses or mouths, and their fingers and toes are long talons. The mob moves as a single unit.

Penquals are sahkils that represent agoraphobia and the fear of crowds. Although they resemble a mass of separate humanoid figures, each penqual is indeed a single entity, their bodies held together with thin fleshy appendages like umbilical cords. They tend to wear clothes and disguise themselves as a group of mundane humanoids when hunting on the Material Plane. Penqual attacks tend to focus around festivals, markets and other places where crowds gather, where the monsters can mingle unnoticed while on the search for those who are already showing signs of discomfort and anxiety. Penquals and tumblaks, the sahkils of claustrophobia, view each other as rivals, and debate the relative merits of confined versus open spaces in causing dread.

Penquals do not bother with individual attacks, instead attempting to devastate all opponents in their reach with a flurry of claws and fists. Their look of fear renders creatures slowed in addition to afraid, and penquals delight in prolonging a futile chase for a few rounds before grabbing an enemy and tearing them apart. Penquals enjoy making people edgy and uncomfortable in addition to overwhelming them with terror. A penqual might use nightmare and antipathy spells to stoke tensions for days or weeks before a scheduled mass gathering, where they abandon subtlety and indulge to bloody violence.

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