Daemon, NixudaemonThis four-armed fiend has blue-green skin covered in white scars. Its two upper arms end in long, barbed whips of calloused flesh.Nixudaemon CR 7Source Pathfinder #96: Shadow of the Storm Tyrant pg. 88
XP 3,200
NE Large outsider (daemon, evil, extraplanar)
Init +5; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision; Perception +15DefenseAC 20, touch 10, flat-footed 19 (+1 Dex, +10 natural, –1 size)
hp 95 (10d10+40); fast healing 2
Fort +7, Ref +8, Will +9
DR 10/good or silver; Immune acid, daze, death effects, disease, exhaustion, fatigue, nonlethal damage, paralysis, poison, sleep, stun; Resist cold 10, electricity 10, fire 10; SR 18OffenseSpeed 40 ft.
Melee 2 slams +12 (1d8+3), 2 +1 deadly merciful vicious whip arms +13 (1d8+4 plus grab)
Space 10 ft., Reach 10 ft. (20 ft. with whip arms)
Special Attacks constrict (1d8+4), damning scourge, dead tired, enslave (DC 18)
Spell-Like Abilities (CL 10th; concentration +13)
Constant—deathwatch
At Will—greater teleport (self plus 50 lbs. only)
3/day—heroism, waves of fatigue (DC 18)
1/day—temporary resurrectionUMStatisticsStr 17, Dex 13, Con 19, Int 14, Wis 14, Cha 16
Base Atk +10; CMB +14 (+16 disarm, +16 trip, +18 grapple); CMD 25 (27 vs. disarm, 27 vs. trip)
Feats Combat Expertise, Combat Reflexes, Improved Disarm, Improved Initiative, Improved Trip
Skills Acrobatics +12, Bluff +16, Diplomacy +14, Heal +13, Intimidate +16, Knowledge (planes) +11, Perception +15, Sense Motive +15, Stealth +10
Languages Abyssal, Common, Draconic, Infernal; telepathy 100 ft.EcologyEnvironment any (Abaddon)
Organization solitary, pair, or corps (3–5)
Treasure standardSpecial AbilitiesDamning Scourge (Su) Each of a nixudaemon’s upper arms functions as a Large +1 deadlyUE mercifulUE viciousUE whip. Attacks with these whips count as natural attacks for the nixudaemon, have a reach of 20 feet, and don’t provoke attacks of opportunity. The whips can’t be disarmed or sundered, nor can they be dropped to allow the nixudaemon to avoid being tripped because of failing a combat maneuver check to trip. The nixudaemon decides before each attack roll whether to apply the weapon’s merciful special ability, its vicious special ability, both, or neither.
Dead Tired (Su) A nixudaemon’s attacks drain every bit of vitality from its victims when they die. Raising a creature killed by a nixudaemon (via raise dead or another effect that restores life) requires a successful DC 20 caster level check. The restored creature gains the exhausted condition, regardless of the spell used to raise it. The DC of this caster level check is Charisma-based, and includes a +2 racial bonus. A nixudaemon can use its temporary resurrection spell-like ability without attempting this check, even if another nixudaemon killed the subject.
Enslave (Su) If a nixudaemon successfully uses its grab ability to grapple a foe with its whip attack, its tendril wraps around the victim’s throat. The daemon can forgo its constrict damage and instead attempt to dominate the subject, as the spell dominate monster (Will DC 18 negates). A creature dominated by a nixudaemon is immune to fatigue, exhaustion, and pain effects. At the beginning of its turn, a dominated slave automatically receives a new saving throw to end the effect. The nixudaemon can dominate only one creature at a time per whip arm it possesses (typically two). The save DC for this ability is Charisma-based.DescriptionNixudaemons, or “toil daemons,” epitomize death by exploitation and extreme exertion. These fiends savor the moment when a desperate scholar collapses while putting in long, unappreciated hours, or when a galley slave finally succumbs to the lash. They drive burdened subjects before them to great effect, even resurrecting fallen servants for a brief time to complete vital tasks. Their skill for squeezing the last bit of energy from those under their supervision makes them invaluable to slavers, who pay the daemons in coin, information, and souls for their aid.
Nixudaemons exemplify the cruelty and disdain all daemonkind display toward the living. They lash out at their subjects, whipping the life out of them slowly. If it serves the daemon’s purposes, or if time allows for another game of torture, a nixudaemon will revive its subject for another day. Typically, a nixudaemon uses this ability to incite a band of slaves to work harder; it dominates the weakest members of the workers to temporarily bolster them, then saps their last ounce of strength before discarding them as spent husks.
Most nixudaemons stand 10 feet tall and weigh 600 pounds. Sages report that the fiends grow larger and stronger as they age, absorbing the weariness of their victims over centuries. The greatest toil daemons are said to tower over their younger cousins, growing additional whip-arms and learning powerful spells that exhaust or even kill those who dare offend them.EcologyNixudaemons roam the shores of the Styx. The daemons use their impressive reach to press new souls into service as soon as the doomed arrive on Abaddon, throwing the ill-fated souls into enormous slave pens and hauling them to the realms of wealthy customers. Nixudaemons frequently visit the Material Plane, where greedy despots and desperate commandants pay high prices to the daemons in exchange for providing additional labor.
Rituals designed to call nixudaemons must be conducted while an intelligent, mortal creature labors physically, and the daemon’s preferred sacrifice is working that creature to death as part of the ritual. One ancient story alleges that a mighty hero among an oppressed people worked for weeks, dragging great stone blocks to build a grand ziggurat. When he finally fell, the story claims, his death summoned a nixudaemon over 30 feet tall that lashed out with a dozen whips.
Nixudaemons despise laziness in both mortals and outsiders. They work their subjects past the point of exhaustion or death as suits their current needs. The nixudaemons view other creatures as weak or prone to sloth, challenging even other daemons they perceive as less than diligent.Habitat and SocietyNixudaemons occupy the role of merchants in daemonic society. They buy and sell the hunted, as Abaddon petitioners are known, when not outright capturing or stealing them. Powerful mortal slavers sometimes increase the value of their wares by hiring a summoned nixudaemon to drive slaves to maximum efficiency, but such arrangements still benefit Abaddon in the end. While summoned to the material world, nixudaemons obtain multiple forms of currency for the Four Horsemen’s coffers. They engage in a dark form of proselytization, beating those who grow weary in their work and spreading the belief among the oppressed that there is no hope of recognition or rest. More discerning nixudaemons assail the mortal merchant classes, driving entire firms to adopt competitive climates until the stress of achievement reveals itself in the form of failing health, or pushing lone inventors to complete magical theories with their dying breaths. Because soft, wealthy mortals rarely succumb to the temptation to work themselves to death, some nixudaemons have been known to engineer the sale of wealthy scions into slavery, as their nightly sobbing and rapidly developing sores are music to the toil daemons’ ears.
Nixudaemons understand the value of teamwork and work tirelessly together to great effect. In service to mortals and greater daemons, they have driven hordes of slaves to erect legendary monuments. They revel in the misery they cause, and the crack of their whips against backs and around necks.
While their industrious natures and affinities for mortal business make them useful to each of the Four Horsemen, most of nixudaemons serve Szuriel, Trelmarixian, and the daemonic harbingers that scheme below them. The Horseman of War uses them as morale officers—a most effective paradox during the heat of battle. She also maintains special units of indentured prisoners under nixudaemon care, always breaking her promise to send her weary combatants home after a costly battle. The Horseman of Famine offers mere crumbs for sustenance to his legions of soldiers and slaves. He takes delight in using pet nixudaemons to drive his legions past their limits, accelerating their spiritual and physical starvation.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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