Guarding portals to the Shadow Plane is one thing. Having a miniature portal to the Shadow Plane stitched into your mouth…well, that’s
another thing. Welcome to the world of the sacristan.
Picture the gimp from Pulp
Fiction. Pierce him a bunch more. Actually, no—cut him into pieces and
reassemble him with bits from a dozen other failed experiments, like Joker’s
ruined girlfriend in the 1989 Batman. Drive him insane over decades or
centuries. And then make sure that when
he unzips his gimp mask a literal otherworldly scream emerges. Fun, right?
Sacristans are slaves and eager submissives for the worst
masters in the universe—but to your PCs they will be the brutes and heavies
standing between them and the real villains.
While intelligent from a stat block perspective, they have no free will,
so if sacristans find themselves without masters they will likely try to attach
themselves to the cruelest sadist they can find…or worse, reënact the tortures
that were inflicted on them upon new victims in dull, meaningless, and
excruciating rites.
Speaking of which, I’ll take it as a given that you know how
to use sacristans in a kyton-focused encounter, and instead give you some odder
scenarios:
The duke of
Thronehold bargained for aid from a kyton evangelist. For once the kyton
didn’t come out on top of the deal. He
gifted the duke a pair of sacristan bodyguards, expecting their shadow screams
would swiftly convert him—but the duke’s iron will and utter deafness (he used
lip-reading to treat with the evangelist) have so far left him immune. One sacristan now works in the duke’s
dungeons, the other remains with the duke at all times to protect him from harm
and stand as a symbol of his cunning.
Formerly a remote resort
spa sacred to the goddess of pleasure, the Delectatium collapsed when its
clerics listened too long to the honeyed words of an ostiarius. It took a knight sworn to the pleasure in
chastity to slay the kyton, and she died in the act. Masterless and unable to return to the Plane
of Shadow, the ostiarius’s kyton bodyguards are forlorn and insane with lack of
purpose. Visitors to the now-dilapidated
spa are captured and forced to act as priests and unholy torturers in rites
they don’t understand. Most of these
victims soon kill themselves in revulsion or succumb to the sacristans’ shadow
screams. Adventurers who manage to slay
the kytons will also have to deal with a moral quandary: what to do with an
innocent but still kyton-blooded shackleborn tiefling (see Blood of Fiends) born from one of these ghastly rituals.
Adventures discover
an upasunda creating an abholy war blimp out of an entity that can be best
(but barely) understood as the miscarried fetus of a god. After defeating the asura, they must somehow
return to their home plane. A glowing
duct deep in the corpse contains a portal, but the way is a tumorous tunnel
through the Plane of Shadow, guarded at both ends by sacristans that greet
visitors by tearing out their stitches and howling in outrage.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
177
Once again, I try to avoid lazy “kytons are evil
because they’re sadists” logic. Sure,
sadism and evil often go hand in hand, no question. (And before any S&M fans rise to protest,
hang tight for a second—we’ve already covered both positive and negative
portrayals of BDSM in a pretty involved post.
Check out that and then swing back here.
This is a blog that makes RACK jokes, after all.) But where kytons are really evil is in their
selfishness, ruthlessness, and the disconnect between what they sell and what
they actually deliver. Kytons are always
operating at an informational advantage over those they bargain with and/or
seduce—an advantage made wider by the drugs, intoxicants, addictive pleasures,
and unwinnable games of chance they employ, plus their own maddening
presences—all of which make a mockery of any notion of true, informed consent. That’s the truly evil part—the chains and
scourges are just a symptom.
Speaking of fan comments, I failed to point out yesterday that
the rukh was inspired by The Seventh
Voyage of Sinbad, and holy Shelyn did I hear about it from readers. It’s all good, guys—sure that one went right
past me, but I can’t catch ’em all…plus I haven’t seen TSVoS since elementary school
(and I’m not even sure if I’ve ever seen it all the way through, or just
pieces). Seriously, I’ve seen Ivanhoe (which came out the same year,
incidentally) more recently.
The worst part is TSVoS was actually playing in my neighborhood a few weekends ago, and I was going
to go until I realized it was the weekend I was up in MA seeing Wilco. Sigh.
(Still worth it though.)
Sacristans are the most commonly seen kytons in Senksen, acting as bodyguards and torture assistants to more intelligent superiors.
Shores of Swords 