Daemon, LapsudaemonThis grotesque and malevolent creature appears to be a crushed ball of broken humanoid body parts spraying blood.Lapsudaemon CR 14Source Pathfinder #106: For Queen and Empire pg. 88
XP 38,400
NE Medium outsider (daemon, evil, extraplanar)
Init +10; Senses blindsense 200 ft., darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +26
Aura frightful presence (30 ft., DC 22)DefenseAC 29, touch 24, flat-footed 18 (+3 deflection, +10 Dex, +1 dodge, +5 natural)
hp 199 (19d10+95)
Fort +11, Ref +21, Will +15
Defensive Abilities amorphous, vertigo’s grace; DR 10/good; Immune acid, bludgeoning, death effects, disease, poison; Resist cold 10, electricity 10, fire 10; SR 25OffenseSpeed fly 200 ft. (perfect)
Melee slam +23 (2d6+6 plus momentum/19–20 and grab)
Special Attacks momentum, must come down (DC 22)
Spell-Like Abilities (CL 14th; concentration +16)
At will—greater teleport (self plus 50 pounds only)
3/day—quickened gust of wind (DC 15), reverse gravity
1/day—fickle windsUM, summon (level 7, 1d3 suspiridaemons [Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Book of the Damned, Vol. 3 56] 80%)StatisticsStr 18, Dex 31, Con 21, Int 13, Wis 18, Cha 16
Base Atk +19; CMB +29 (+31 bull rush or trip, +33 grapple); CMD 43 (45 vs. bull rush, can’t be tripped)
Feats Acrobatic, Agile Maneuvers, Combat Expertise, Dodge, Improved Bull Rush, Improved Critical (slam), Improved Trip, Mobility, Power Attack, Quicken Spell-Like Ability (gust of wind)
Skills Acrobatics +32, Bluff +21, Escape Artist +28, Fly +35, Knowledge (geography) +14, Knowledge (local) +14, Knowledge (planes) +14, Perception +26, Sense Motive +26, Stealth +23 (see below)
Languages Abyssal, Common, Draconic; telepathy 200 ft.
SQ constant motionEcologyEnvironment any (Abaddon)
Organization solitary or storm (2–11)
Treasure standardSpecial AbilitiesConstant Motion (Su) Lapsudaemons never cease their falling motion. They must move their full movement speed in straight lines every round, making their slam attacks and grabs without stopping. A lapsudaemon doesn’t lose altitude or speed for aerial maneuvers and makes no Fly checks when changing directions. It “falls” vertically, horizontally, or diagonally and attacks any creature in its way, regardless of the number of creatures in its path. It can change directions each round to maximize the number of creatures it can slam, moving through other creatures’ spaces without the need for an Acrobatics check regardless of their size, but it still provokes attacks of opportunity, and it can only attack a particular creature once per round. It can fall at its full speed while grappling a single creature without needing to succeed at a check to do so; while grappling, it can make slam attacks only against the grappled creature, and it can’t use its grab ability.
Lapsudaemons are immune to effects that change their movement speed or alter their flight ability, even if the effect would be harmless or beneficial. Lapsudaemons don’t take damage from falling or from bludgeoning attacks. The only exception is that any lapsudaemon somehow prevented from moving takes 1d6 points of damage each round for every 30 feet it doesn’t move. So great is the creature’s supernatural propulsion that forcing the lapsudaemon to remain still eventually tears it apart.
Because lapsudaemons shout in horror as they fall, if a creature can hear, it can always notice the sound of a lapsudaemon’s presence with a Perception check DC of –10, regardless of the daemon’s Stealth.
Momentum (Ex) When a lapsudaemon makes a slam attack while moving into a creature’s square, the attack deals an additional 1d6 points of damage for every 10 feet that the lapsudaemon moved since the last time it made a slam attack or struck a surface, to a maximum of 20d6. This damage isn’t multiplied on a critical hit.
Must Come Down (Su) Any flying creature struck by a lapsudaemon must succeed at a DC 22 Will save or lose its ability to fly for 1 round. Such a creature falls until it regains the ability to fly or it hits the ground, whichever comes first. This affects both natural and magical flight. This doesn’t dispel magical flight effects, but instead suppresses them (functioning similar to antimagic field) for 1 round. When a lapsudaemon dies, it unleashes this ability a final time on all creatures within 30 feet. A creature falling for 1 round generally falls 200 feet. The save DC is Charisma-based.
Vertigo’s Grace (Su) A lapsudaemon’s constant motion protects it from attacks. It gains a deflection bonus to AC equal to its Charisma bonus.DescriptionA mortal that dies hopelessly after a sudden fall may eventually serve the Four Horsemen as a powerful lapsudaemon. On the bleak plane of Abaddon, these awful creatures exist in a state of perpetual plummeting, never ceasing their movement. Even when addressed by ranking daemon lords, lapsudaemons never stop their falling motion or incessant screaming. Their lieges frequently must teleport to some great height and fall with them to maintain telepathic conversation. Lapsudaemons always shriek as they fall—a residual impulse taken from the last moment of their mortal lives. Loud cries and cold blasts of wind herald their approach as they teleport into combat mid-fall and continue their merciless assault.
Lapsudaemons attack their victims by falling into them, whether they approach vertically or horizontally. They frequently employ spell-like abilities before attacking as many enemies as possible in melee, colliding for one mighty strike against each target until every foe is dead. When not outnumbered, they prefer to murder their nonflying targets by pushing them from ledges or carrying them to great heights before releasing them to their doom.
A lapsudaemon appears as a crushed human—often an amalgamation of the parts of several victims of such terminal tumbles seamlessly fused together. Its limbs protrude at awkward angles and strike out as it collides with its enemies. A lapsudaemon is between 5 and 6 feet tall and weighs 150 pounds.EcologyUnlike other daemons, lapsudaemons actively reproduce their own kind by searching out vulnerable creatures and dropping them from cruel heights. Longer gambits involve the daemons tracking down a gullible adventurer and offering the victim a deeply desired prize, high atop a mountain or spire. The desperation of the climb, combined with the hopelessness of a fatal fall, launches the dead soul to the volcanic peaks and stone towers of Abaddon. From the new lapsudaemon’s perspective, the fall never ends. It slips out of the mortal realm only to land in its new, tortured afterlife, and then commences an eternity of perpetual motion.
Calling lapsudaemons is a difficult and sadistic affair. They prefer a sacrifice of wings cut from a living celestial being, bound to, and then born aloft by, a willing intelligent creature, who must fall to his or her death as part of the calling ritual.Habitat and SocietyWhile most daemons have at least a modicum of subtlety and manipulative savvy, the average lapsudaemon falls far short of the mark in that regard, and so lapsudaemons are primarily employed by ambitious harbingers as killers for hire. Powerful mortals bring lapsudaemons to the Material Plane to engineer fatal “accidents” that kill their rivals while avoiding any suspicion of foul play. When a lapsudaemon finds itself without a task assigned by its liege, it typically retreats to some lofty aerie and spends its time ceaselessly falling toward the ground and teleporting high into the air just before impact. In the highest places of their home plane, storms of lapsudaemons fall from the sky like an apocalyptic rain. These screaming storms can last for months or years before enough lapsudaemons are called away to work elsewhere and the maelstrom subsides.
While on other planes, lapsudaemons display an immediate grasp of local climate and geography. They naturally hide themselves far from civilization, where their constant falling and shouting goes unnoticed. They favor abandoned ruins and uninhabited wastelands that resemble their blasted home.
Lapsudaemons are intelligent and cruel, but their plight allows them little opportunity to focus on studies or more advanced machinations. As such, they focus almost exclusively on tasks assigned by more powerful daemons. They frequently serve immortal harbingers such as Uaransaph or Geon, evil deities like Zyphus, or the Four Horsemen as assassins or insane heralds of an imminent military force. Where legends speak of a storm of falling daemons dropping mortals from the sky, they also speak of the ruin of entire city-states shortly thereafter.Creatures in "Daemon" CategorySource Bestiary 2 pg. 62
Harbingers of ruin and embodiments of the worst ways to die, daemons epitomize painful death, the all-consuming hunger of evil, and the utter annihilation of life. While demons seek to pervert and destroy in endless unholy rampages, and devils vex and enslave in hopes of corrupting mortals, daemons seek only to consume mortal life itself. While some use brute force to despoil life or prey upon vulnerable souls, others wage campaigns of deceit to draw whole realms into ruin. With each life claimed and each atrocity meted out, daemons spread fear, mistrust, and despair, tarnishing the luster of existence and drawing the planes ever closer to their final, ultimate ruin.
Notorious for their hatred of the living, daemons are the things of dark dreams and fearful tales, as their ultimate ambitions include extinguishing every individual mortal life—and the more violent or terrible the end, the better. Their methods vary wildly, typically differentiated by daemonic breed. Many seek to infiltrate the mortal plane and sow death by their own taloned hands, while others manipulate agents (both mortal and immortal) as malevolent puppet masters, instigating calamities on massive scales from their grim realms. Such diversity of methods causes many planar scholars to misattribute the machinations of daemons to other types of fiends. These often deadly mistakes are further propagated by daemons' frequent dealings with and manipulation of other outsiders. Yet in all cases, despair, ruin, and death, spreading like contagion, typify the touch of daemonkind, though such symptoms often prove recognizable only after the hour is far too late.
Daemons flourish upon the plane of Abaddon, a bleak expanse of cold mists, fearful shapes, and hunted souls. Upon these wastes, the souls of evil mortals flee predation by the native fiends, and terror and the powers of the evil plane eventually transform the most ruthless into daemons themselves. Amid these scarred wastelands, poison swamps, and realms of endless night rise the foul domains of the tyrants of daemonkind, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Lords of devastation, these powerful and unique daemons desire slaughter, ruin, and death on a cosmic scale, and drive hordes of their lesser kin to spread terror and sorrow across the planes. Although the Horsemen share a singular goal, their tactics and ambitions vary widely.
Along with mastery over vast realms, the Horsemen are served by unimaginably enormous armies of their lesser brethren, but are obeyed most closely by retinues of daemons enslaved to their titles. These specific strains of daemonic servitors, known among daemonkind as deacons, serve whoever holds the title of Horseman. Although these instruments of the archdaemons differ in strength and ability, their numbers provide their lords with legions capable of near-equal terrorization.
More so than among any other fiendish race, several breeds of daemons lust after souls. While other foul inhabitants of the planes seek the corruption and destruction of living essences, many daemons value possession and control over mortal animas, entrapping and hoarding souls—and in so doing disrupting the natural progression of life and perverting the quintessence of creation to serve their own terrible whims. While not all daemons possess the ability to steal a mortal being's soul and turn it to their use, the lowliest of daemonkind, the maniacal cacodaemons, endlessly seek life essences to consume and imprison. These base daemons enthusiastically serve their more powerful kin, eager for increased opportunities to doom mortal spirits. While cacodaemons place little value upon the souls they imprison, greater daemons eagerly gather them as trophies, fuel for terrible rites, or offerings to curry the favor of their lords. Several breeds of daemons also posses their own notorious abilities to capture mortal spirits or draw upon the power of souls, turning the forces of utter annihilation to their own sinister ends.
The Four Horsemen
Four dread lords, infamous across all the planes, rule the disparate hordes of daemonkind. Risen from among the ranks of their terrible brethren to displace those fiendish tyrants before them, they are the archdaemons, the End Bringers, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In the blasphemous annals of fiendish lore, they are the prophesied architects of multiversal ruin, destined to stand triumphant over cadaverous cosmoses and infinities of silence before also giving way to absolute oblivion. Undisputed in his power among their kind, each Horseman rules a vast realm upon the bleak plains of Abaddon and a distinctive method of mortal ruin: pestilence, famine, war, or death from old age. Yet while each archdaemon commands measureless influence, daemons know nothing of loyalty and serve only those they cannot overcome. Thus, though the Horsemen stand peerless in their power and manipulations among daemonkind, they must ever defend their thrones from the machinations of ambitious underlings and the plots of other archdaemons.
Upon the poisonous expanses of Abaddon, lesser daemonic peers carve petty fiefdoms and posture as lords, but despite their world-spanning intrigues, all bow before the Horsemen—though most do so only grudgingly. Ancient myths also tell of a mysterious fifth Horseman, the Oinodaemon, though nearly all mention of such a creature has been scoured from the multiverse.
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