It must be hard to be a high school sophomore in a
Pathfinder world. Can you imagine taking
chemistry in a reality where any
mistake you make has, let’s be honest, a base 50% chance of becoming an ooze? (The other 50% probably become haunts.)
So gunpowder oozes are what happens when gunpowder and magic
mix. (Throw in some alchemy and you get
admixture oozes.) Like other oozes,
gunpowder oozes seek to absorb and devour other living creatures. Unlike other oozes, they can blast gunpowder from
their bodies. (I presume this arose as a
defense mechanism or waste byproduct. I
say “arose” because “evolved” doesn’t seem very accurate for creatures that are
probably pretty new to most worlds, depending on how long the society has had
gunpowder.)
And of course, even if you survive a gunpowder ooze’s
initial blast, the gunpowder residue leaves you vulnerable to a subsequent
fiery death. One can imagine some inquisitors
interrogating a party of PCs suspected of having robbed a gunpowder
ooze-protected vault. Checking for
gunpowder residue in that scenario wouldn’t be an NCIS-style swab; instead the inquisitors would just brandish a
torch and see who explodes!
So all in all, gunpowder oozes are signs of progress run
amok. When magic and technology collies,
sometimes it explodes…
The Titan Wall
separates Newland and the Reaches—a mile-wide, monumental structure that
splits the world between the realms of Man and the realms of Magic. But along the wall itself (particularly in
the dungeons that riddle its core) exist chimeric creatures that could not
survive in either realm, including dracolisks, girtablilus, and the notorious
gunpowder oozes.
Master Qui-Sen has
been making fireworks—an act forbidden to all but the emperor’s
alchemists. He has been careful to hide
his wares and dump his waste products deep in the sewer. Unfortunately, this has led to the creation
of admixture oozes with strange abilities.
Adventurers get involved when one of the admixture oozes slithers up a
drainpipe and sets a granary alight in the Ratfolk Quarter.
The inhabitants of
the Seventh Age know nothing of gunpowder—to them, gunpowder oozes are
“flash terrors.” But the ubiquity of
flash terrors in the Seventh Age is a legacy of the Fifth Age, when gunpowder
and alchemy were commonplace.
Adventurers who study gunpowder oozes may be able to reëngineer some of
these lost technologies…providing the inevitables of the Sixth Age’s Great
Cleansing don’t reactivate to stop them.
—Wardens of the Reborn
Forge 63 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5
139
Gunpowder oozes first arose in the firearm factories of Vedzeva, but their numbers in Gladia have been increasing since the introduction of firearms to the continent. They are most common on Dwas’kin, which manufactures more guns than any other nation of Gladia.
Shores of Swords 