Get ready for three days of thriae! The Bestiary 3 serves up this race of bee-like Amazons and oracles. I was always a fan of 3.0’s abeils from the Monster Manual II, so the soothsaying thriae are a nice replacement, even if they lack some of the abeils’ elvishness.
On the other hand, what thriae gain is an insectile practicality that could lead to some interesting conflicts. Yes, they are oracles, but ones who are particularly protective of their secrets—which may not sit well with adventurers desperate for information. True, they encourage humanoid male company, but prolonged companionship comes with a price: drug-fueled slavery (and in some cases, consumption of the male by his thriae mate).
Also, there are plenty of New Weird fantasy opportunities with thriae as well. Fans of Perdido Street Station’s great set piece inside the Cactacae’s Glasshouse could easily replace the cactusfolk with thriae in their own campaigns for a similarly pulse-pounding caper.
Of course, buzzing at the heart of the entire thriae race are their powerful queens, who, while by no means malevolent, still place the value of their hives far above any other concerns. At CR 18, a thriae queen might even be the pivotal mastermind of a campaign, particular in a setting where law vs. chaos is the more important conflict than good vs. evil…
Sage Prester Sartan knew he was giving up the outside world when a thriae queen recruited him as a consort. What he did not know was that the safety of the Grand Duchy now hangs in the balance, with his knowledge of capital’s Undercity crucial to its survival. But the thriae queen he adores will not surrender him for such mundane concerns. Worse yet, since Sartan’s vigor is flagging she is already (unbeknownst to the sage) making preparations to consume him.
Stare too long into the void, and the void stares back. A thriae queen’s hunt to understand the Those That Walk Behind the Stars has perverted her into worship of the Great Old Ones. Now a bloated monster, she directs her tribe to abandon the order of hexagonal cells for the mystery of strange spiraling glyphs, and she drives them forth to collect humanoids for sacrificial rites.
A thriae queen regrets the overambitious expansion of her colony—especially having to share power with two of her offspring. Thus she hands a party of humanoid adventurers a surprising mission: “I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams. You only have to kill my daughters.”
—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 264–265
Lots of reader feedback to talk about (and that’s not even getting to my mail backlog from while I was on vacation!). Response to the Thin Man entry has nearly eclipsed my earlier “Best Of” post about pit fiends. Meanwhile, my joking reference to the thrasfyr as “Bondage Bear” actually spurred a pretty lively discussion among some readers—including discussion about the lack of good-aligned bondage/masochism themed creatures in Pathfinder.
I don’t want to get into a big digression about this—this is a relatively all-ages space, after all—but because of my Tumblr audience I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that a lot of BDSM tropes are invoked in negative ways in fantasy. So I endeavor to avoid adventure seeds that are simply, “This monster is evil because…it’s a sadist!”—I try to go deeper and be subtler than that (especially in my kyton entries), and I hope I succeed.
(I’m going to put the rest of this under a break. Because adult stuff.)
A colony of thriae dwells on Cannehr. Gleaming Reprisal tried to enlist them as his soldiers to fight the troglodytes and Rival Star’s Perihelion, but an attack by giant spiders had reduced their numbers too low for the hive to be of use. After the azkat were created, the thriae swore to deal peacefully with them. They trade honey from their tamed giant bees for manpower when they undertake construction endeavors. Their current queen is approaching old age, and she is currently raising up her successor.
Shores of Swords 