This week we hop over to Pathfinder 1E's Adventure Path, Strange Aeons. As a big lovecraftian horror fan, Strange Aeons tickles all the right things for me.
The Oneirogen is a cursed individual who has a tiny planar tear inside of them. This curse rots away their personality, leaving only a husk of a being behind. Basic survival instinct kicks in for these creatures, and they mindlessly wander around, spewing yellow fog from their mouths and orifiaces. So lets get right into what they can do.
The Oneirogen isn't technically a challenging monster, with a CR of 2 and a small HP pool, your party could, in theory, take them out pretty quickly. However, Oneirogens have a few tools in their belt to make them creepy to your party and also give them a little resistance.
The Oneirogen ACs are 12, 12 touch and 10 flat footed, so relatively easy to hit, with immunity against mind-affecting effects and a weakness to planar splits (as they dwell or contain the power to be within the realms). It's basic attack is 2 slams it can do (1d4+2 damage each), which is pretty much all these thigns can do. However, in addition to this, it hosts a few ability score bonuses, but most notably has the Blind-fight (re-roll a missed attack during concealment, no advantages when being attacked by invisible creatures) and Great Fortitude (+2 to Fortitude saves) feats. These are particularly useful when you see the Oneirogen's special abilities.
The Oneirogen has 2 aura effects, obscuring fog, and veil of mists. Both of these are a pain for players and may make them a little more intimidating to players.
Obscuring fog literally pours from the Oneirogen's body and floods a room with sickly yellow fog. This makes it harder for players to hit it, suffering a 50% miss chance for creatures further than 10 feet away and also cannot locate the Oneirogen by sight, and for anyone within 10 feet having a 20% miss chance as they are fighting in it's thick mist. Funnily, Oneirogens actually suffer the same penalities to sight.
Veil of mists is much scarier. Channeling power from other planes, the fog that discharges from the Oneirogen can have additional effects on players depending on what plane they are linked to. This is where Oneirogens become really cool, and there is quite a level of customisability here, whereever you want to 'link' an Oneirogen to, you could have a unqiue effect for them. However, for Strange Aeons, the rule of thumb is that they are connected to the Dimension of Dreams. Spewing a sour yellow fod, a creature must succeed on a DC 12 Will save or fall asleep. In addition, the affected creature cannot recieve natural healing from resting for 24 hours. Every round a creature can try a Will save with the same DC to wake up. If anyone succeeds on the inital save, they are immune to the Oneirogen's veil of mists for 24 hours.
While a CR 2 creature may sound a little trivial as Oneirogens are scaled for levels 1-3 players, however and having the risk of falling asleep could be crippling even to the bravest of parties. The appeal to me with these creatures is that they are very thematic with Strange Aeons 'dreamlands' influence, but also with that of the King in Yellow. A cool threat doesn't always need to be 'boss level', and Oneirogens are able to show players the haunting cosmic threat that lurks nearby, and maybe even show them their fate if they are to fail their quest. I particularly like how an Oneirogen's Veil of Mists could be customised to give it a different flavour. I won't type them all (as you should definitely check out Strange Aeons!), but one alternative is that the Oneirogen is connected to Hell, where anyone caught in their mists take 2d4 damage (half is fire, half in untyped).
So that's the Oneirogen, a creepy creature from the amazing Strange Aeons Adventure Path for Pathfinder 1E. I'm looking at running this for a couple of groups as there are multiple nice segments in the first part of the Adventure Path that I've read so far. This Pathfinder campaign seems to me to be a little more 'horror' themed which would be perfect for my Call of Cthluhu players who tend to favour something more cosmic in nature. Once we eventually run it, I'll maybe drop a post about it, but until then, thanks for reading and catch you next time!
-KJ
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