The muhuru is cryptid from Kenya, joining the mokele-mbembe
as yet another Lost World-type magical beast/super dinosaur you can put in your
game. Wikipedia’s description points to
a stegosaurus with an ankylosaurus’s club tail, but Pathfinder went further
back in the fossil record, giving us more of a dimetrodon-type beast (still
with the club tail!) with a magical sail that can store up sunlight and blind
opponents.Whether your muhuru looks like a dimetrodon, a stegosaurus,
a parasaurolophus, a
spinosaurus, or even something wholly original is up to you. Similarly, you might treat the muhuru as a
magical dinosaur, an offshoot of the drake family, a never-before-seen species,
a magical creation, or any other ecological niche. For such a big animal, it is stealthy, able
to avoid detection in most cases, and blinding, knocking prone, or staggering
the few hunters savvy enough to track it.
While muhurus are probably not true nature spirits, despite how rumor
labels them, they are certainly representatives of all in nature that is secret
and defies easy discovery.A new Butterfly Queen
is to be crowned. Part of her ceremonial raiment is a set of costume wings
made from the blinding fin of a muhuru.
Successfully delivering the sail of a full-grown muhuru will earn the
party entrance into a machine valley forbidden to outsiders.An army needs to pass
through the Hissing Jungle, and that means negotiating with a powerful
kapre. If negotiations are successful (ideally
helped along by the gift of some particularly fine cigars), the plant creature
allows the army to pass, providing that they use no axes during the trip. Should this stricture not be obeyed, or if
negotiations fail outright, the kapre looses a pack of muhurus on the scouting
party.Sir Teveral of the
Thorn and Shield has organized an expedition to hunt the fabled muhuru in
Xogana. He invites along a group of
adventurers recently returned from this vast continent. (If they are reluctant, he induces them with
the promise to use his influence to get back a piece of treasure that was
confiscated from them by the colonial government.) Actually, though, the entire expedition is
nothing more than a complicated scheme to get Sir Teveral’s wizard sister away
from the many-layered magical defenses of her tower. He thinks her diary implicates him in a
murder, and he intends to ensure that she is not an obstacle to his plans—even
if it means feeding her to a magical dinosaur.—Pathfinder Bestiary 6
196Lots of great responses to my mountain giant post, including
a couple people pointing out that the mountain giant did indeed appear in
D&D 3.0, courtesy of Monster Manual
II. Thanks for the reminder—clearly
my Google skills were not up to par that day!
You can see most of the comments and follow the conversation here.One of these days I need to really jot down some notes on MM II, because man, it is a mess and I have thoughts.
Looking for the muckdweller?
It’s back here.
Records from the Kingdom of Kown-Dam discuss the muhuru and its strange abilities, which the Kingdom’s scholars were very interested in the alchemical potential of. None have been sighted since the Kingdom’s fall, however, as they lair in only the most remote jungles of Gladia’s mainland.
Shores of Swords 