Buy me a coffeeFlying Polyp — The Invisible Terror That Hunts Through Air and Stone
“Before the air learned to carry life, it carried them.”
Appearance
A Flying Polyp is never seen clearly, and perhaps never seen whole.
When it is perceived at all, it is by interruption rather than appearance: dust dragged into impossible curves, rain striking something that should not be there, ash or mist clinging for a heartbeat to a vast and shifting outline. What the eye catches never agrees with itself. One instant suggests coiling depth, another barbed or tendril-like extension, another a surface that seems to bend inward and outward at once. No witness gives the same account twice, and none can describe it without contradiction.
There is no reliable anatomy. No stable outline. What can be known of a Flying Polyp comes less from its form than from its effect upon the world around it.
Air stirs where no wind blows. Pressure changes without warning. Loose matter lifts, flattens, or turns around something unseen. Sound carries wrongly. Distances seem uncertain. A man may feel watched, pressed upon, or quietly displaced before he understands that anything is there at all.
It is not merely invisible.
It is only imperfectly apprehended, as though the world itself cannot fully hold its shape before mortal senses.
Behaviour
Flying Polyps do not hunt as living predators do. They move with direction, but not haste, often in slow arcs or tightening spirals, as though tracing the memory of structures no longer visible to mortal senses.
They show no sign of ordinary perception. Light, sound, and motion do not draw them in any familiar way. Instead, they seem aware of disturbance on a deeper level, as though they sense strain, intrusion, or irregularity within space itself.
When they encounter living beings, they do not strike at once. First comes pressure. Wind circles without weather. Sound stretches and arrives wrongly. Breathing becomes laborious. The air thickens, and the world begins to lose its distances.
Only then does the Polyp act.
Its violence is not impact, but alteration. Those caught within its reach are compressed, twisted, displaced, or simply removed from where they stood and forced into where they should not fit. It does not rage. It does not pursue in panic. It merely continues its passage, and living things suffer for being within it.
Habitat
Flying Polyps manifest where the world feels strained, worn thin, or insufficiently settled. They are most often associated with high mountains, deep deserts, primordial ruins, and places where magic or planar force has weakened the ordinary rules of matter and air.
They do not lair, nest, or build. They recur.
Some places draw them again and again across centuries, as though marked by an older geometry. Such sites are known less by history than by atmosphere: ground where sound will not carry properly, ruins smoothed in ways weather cannot explain, horizons that seem subtly wrong, valleys where birds refuse to cross.
These are not haunted places in the common sense.
They are places reality never fully sealed.
Modus Operandi
A Flying Polyp does not enter battle. It imposes a condition.
Its presence first disturbs the environment. Air pressure shifts. Sound loses direction. Distances cease to behave honestly. Escape becomes uncertain before danger is even understood.
Then the distortion narrows.
Space compresses or stretches in localized pockets. Paths fail. Objects seem to leap closer or slip farther away. Those within the affected ground find themselves trapped in invisible gradients of force, unable to trust motion, footing, or direction.
Only at the end comes collapse: bodies crushed inward, limbs bent at impossible angles, stones driven into earth as if by pressure from every side at once. The Polyp does not need to close with a victim. It lets the world close instead.
Motivation
No mortal motive can be safely assigned to a Flying Polyp.
It does not appear to feed. It does not defend territory in any recognizable sense. It does not act with cruelty, hunger, or hatred. If it has purpose, that purpose lies outside the scale by which living minds judge intent.
The best guesses are bleak ones: that it remembers an older world, that it preserves conditions invisible to us, or that it moves according to laws reality no longer obeys.
What can be said with certainty is simpler and worse.
A Flying Polyp does not regard life as special.
To it, a man, a tree, a wall, and a current of air seem equally subject to rearrangement.
Ecology
Flying Polyps do not belong to ecosystems. They leave damage in them.
Where one has passed, the aftermath is never clean. Ground lies flattened without impact. Vegetation grows in warped symmetry. Air remains unreliable for days or years afterward, carrying whispers without source and pressure changes without wind. Animals shun such places. Birds turn aside. Insects fall silent.
Sometimes the disturbance lingers more deeply. Sound arrives before its cause. Movement feels delayed. Objects seem fractionally misplaced when seen twice.
These effects diminish, but they do not wholly vanish.
The world remembers being pressed.
Flying Polyp
Flying Polyp, Pathfinder
Flying Polyp
This nauseating tapered tower of flesh, eyes, and tendrils coils through the air, surrounded by a strange vortex of sucking wind.
Flying Polyp CR 14
XP 38,400
CE Huge aberration (air)
Init +6; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +26; Aura frightful presence (90 ft., DC 24)
DEFENSE
AC 29, touch 16, flat-footed 26 (+5 deflection, +2 Dex, +1 dodge, +13 natural, –2 size)
hp 207 (18d8+126)
Fort +13, Ref +12, Will +16
Defensive Abilities amorphous, deflecting winds, partial invisibility; DR 10/magic and slashing; Immune acid, cold, sonic; SR 25
Weaknesses vulnerable to electricity
OFFENSE
Speed 30 ft., fly 60 ft. (perfect)
Melee 4 tentacles +21 (1d8+9/19–20 plus grab)
Space 15 ft.; Reach 15 ft.
Special Attacks constrict (1d8+9), sucking wind, wind blast
Spell-Like Abilities (CL 14th; concentration +19)
At will—alter winds, gust of wind (DC 17), whispering wind, wind walk
3/day—control winds (DC 20), river of wind (DC 19), wind wall
1/day—control weather, whirlwind (DC 23)
STATISTICS
Str 28, Dex 15, Con 24, Int 19, Wis 20, Cha 21
Base Atk +13; CMB +24 (+28 grapple); CMD 42 (can’t be tripped)
Feats Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Flyby Attack, Improved Critical (tentacle), Improved Initiative, Mobility, Power Attack, Vital Strike, Weapon Focus (tentacle)
Skills Fly +27, Knowledge (engineering) +22, Knowledge (history) +22, Knowledge (nature) +22, Perception +26, Spellcraft +25, Stealth +15, Use Magic Device +23
Languages Aklo
SPECIAL ABILITIES
Deflecting Winds (Su)
A flying polyp’s mastery over air and wind allows it to surround itself with blasts of precisely aimed gusts, granting the creature a +5 deflection bonus to its armor class and a +4 resistance bonus on Reflex saving throws.
Partial Invisibility (Su)
A flying polyp’s body constantly flickers and shifts, passing from visibility to invisibility in a seemingly random pattern and often not wholly at once, leaving the creature’s body in what appear to be multiple sections. This ability, combined with the flying polyp’s amorphous, elastic form, makes it difficult to target the creature, granting it a 20% miss chance against all attacks. By concentrating, a flying polyp can become fully invisible.
Sucking Wind (Su)
This attack allows the flying polyp to send an eerie wind out to slow and eventually stop a creature’s escape. The wind itself isn’t particularly strong, but it creates a peculiar sucking sensation as if it were attempting to pull creatures back toward the flying polyp. Activating this ability is a full-round action, and it must concentrate each round to maintain the effect. The sucking wind manifests as a 100-foot-radius spread, with the flying polyp at the center.
Each round the polyp maintains concentration, the sucking wind’s radius increases by 100 feet, to a maximum radius of a mile. A flying polyp can detect creatures within this area via tremorsense. As a free action, it can increase the effects of the sucking wind on up to five different creatures within the area at one time.
Each targeted creature must succeed at a DC 26 Fortitude save each round it remains in the area of the sucking wind or it is slowed until it leaves the area. A creature already under the effects of any slowing effect (such as from this sucking wind or a slow spell) that fails this save is held in place for 1 round—it is not helpless, but cannot move via any means.
Freedom of movement protects against the effects of the sucking wind, and control winds negates its effects in the area of effect of the control winds spell. Natural windstorms or other powerful winds have no effect on a sucking wind. A flying polyp can activate a sucking wind once per day, and can maintain concentration on the effect for up to an hour. The save DC is Constitution-based.
Wind Blast (Su)
Once every 1d4 rounds as a standard action, a flying polyp can create a powerful blast of wind at a range of up to 120 feet. This blast of wind creates a sudden explosion of flesh-scouring wind in a 30-foot- radius burst. All creatures within this area take 14d6 points of bludgeoning damage, with a successful DC 26 Reflex save halving the damage. In addition, these winds can check or blow away creatures as if they were tornado-strength winds. The save DC is Constitution-based.
ECOLOGY
Environment any
Organization solitary, pair, or storm (3–10)
Treasure standard
A flying polyp is a nauseating mass of flesh, eyes, tentacles, and mouths. A typical flying polyp measures 30 feet in length but is unusually light for its size, weighing no more than 2,000 pounds. These creatures seem to have no maximum lifespan, but their violent, warlike nature ensures that death eventually occurs—even if it takes eons for the polyp to encounter something capable of defeating it.
A flying polyp is a physical being, but one composed of material strangely unlike the flesh that garbs most living creatures. While the stuff that makes up the exterior of a flying polyp’s body might seem similar to ordinary flesh, it often behaves in ways that should be impossible.
The material seems to fade in and out of visibility, almost at random, at points becoming transparent enough that the nauseating inner workings of the thing’s body are laid bare. Although the polyp feels moist and damp to the touch, what might serve as blood in other creatures behaves more like strange vortices of wind within a flying polyp’s body. When wounded, its damaged flesh does not bleed so much as whistle and gust.
A flying polyp’s association with wind goes far beyond the strange storms that surge through what pass as veins and arteries in its massive body. These creatures have a remarkable ability to control the air around them, both via a wide array of spell-like abilities and through the use of potent supernatural powers. They do not wield tools or weapons as a rule, instead using their mastery of the winds themselves to wage war and build their grim cities, scouring towers and chambers out of basalt with precise blasts of sand-laden wind.
Although flying polyps display some of the features of other sentient races, particularly in their habit of building cities (although these towering settlements usually incorporate architectural features that most other races find awkward and unsettling), in other areas they seem strangely primitive or uninterested. They are as aberrant in mind and philosophy as they are in physical form. For example, they seem to have neither a name for their own race, nor a language to call their own. Their cities, while bewildering in their vast scale, seem to serve little purpose other than to unnerve, for flying polyps do not engage in trade or politics or other social constructs.
The primary exception to this, to the detriment of other creatures unfortunate enough to dwell in regions claimed by flying polyps, is war. Flying polyps excel at genocide, using their mastery over wind to scour clean entire cities and civilizations when they come upon them. Some among their kind can even travel to other planets by bringing with them a sizable sphere of purloined wind to carry them aloft and sustain them, and with this power they lead armies from planet to planet as necessary, relentlessly tracking their chosen enemies across worlds.
Every so often, flying polyps encounter a race that is their equal in war, and on some worlds, they still endure the humiliation of these ancient defeats after being imprisoned in extensive underground chambers where they are cut off from the outside world. Yet flying polyps are long-lived, and should unforeseen tectonic events creates new exit to their prison chambers, lost in the forgotten corners of those planets’ depths, they emerge with unabated fury to seek revenge against the enemies who dared humiliate them so.
Section 15: Copyright Notice
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 4 © 2013, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Authors: Dennis Baker, Jesse Benner, Savannah Broadway, Ross Byers, Adam Daigle, Tim Hitchcock, Tracy Hurley, James Jacobs, Matt James, Rob McCreary, Jason Nelson, Tom Phillips, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Tork Shaw, and Russ Taylor.
Flying Polyp
“Before the air learned to carry life, it carried them.”
Large aberration, chaotic evil
Armor Class 18 (distorted presence)
Hit Points 168 (16d10 + 80)
Speed 0 ft., fly 50 ft. (hover)
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 (+5) | 14 (+2) | 20 (+5) | 18 (+4) | 16 (+3) | 16 (+3) |
Saving Throws Con +10, Int +9, Wis +8
Damage Resistances bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
Damage Immunities poison
Condition Immunities grappled, prone, restrained
Senses truesight 120 ft., passive Perception 13
Languages Deep Speech, telepathy 120 ft.
Challenge 12 (8,400 XP)
Proficiency Bonus +4
Traits
Partial Presence
The Flying Polyp does not fully exist within the same space as other creatures.
- It cannot be perceived directly by normal sight.
- Creatures perceive it only through distortion (moving debris, pressure, magical effects).
- Attack rolls against the Polyp are made with disadvantage unless the attacker has truesight or is within 10 feet of it.
The Polyp can move through creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain. It takes 10 (3d6) force damage if it ends its turn inside an object.
Field of Distortion
A 30-foot-radius area around the Polyp is warped by its presence.
- The area is difficult terrain for creatures other than the Polyp
- Ranged attacks that pass through the area are made with disadvantage
- Creatures inside the area cannot take reactions
At the start of a creature’s turn within the area, it must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or:
- its speed is halved until the end of the turn
- it has disadvantage on its next attack roll
Actions
Multiattack
The Flying Polyp makes two Spatial Crush attacks.
Spatial Crush
Melee Spell Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature
Hit: 22 (4d8 + 4) force damage
If the target is Large or smaller, it must succeed on a DC 17 Strength saving throw or be pulled up to 10 feet in a direction of the Polyp’s choice and knocked prone.
Collapse Geometry (Recharge 5–6)
The Polyp distorts space at a point it can perceive within 60 feet, creating a 20-foot-radius sphere.
Each creature in the area must make a DC 17 Constitution saving throw:
- Failure: 36 (8d8) force damage and is restrained until the end of its next turn
- Success: Half damage, no restraint
Terrain in the area is briefly compressed or warped.
Bonus Actions
Vector Shift
The Polyp repositions itself without traversing space.
It teleports up to 30 feet to a location it can perceive.
Reactions
Pressure Reversal
When a creature hits the Polyp with a melee attack, that creature must succeed on a DC 17 Constitution saving throw or take 10 (3d6) force damage.
Treasure
Flying Polyps do not gather treasure, but sites touched by them often contain:
- 300–800 gp worth of valuables fused into warped terrain
- 1d4 damaged or distorted items (weapons, tools, or relics altered by pressure)
- 25% chance of a functional magic item tied to force or displacement, such as:
- cloak of displacement
- ring of telekinesis
- wand of fear
Encounter Role
The Flying Polyp is not fought in the usual sense.
It:
- controls space
- breaks movement
- disrupts coordination
Players should feel: disoriented first, threatened second