Zhentarim
2018-12-09, 09:24 PM
This is the pathfinder wiki page for Shyka:
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Shyka
I will be an undine (rimesoul) sin magic wizard with the Transmutation (Enhancement) school and the Chronomancer Archetype in lieu of an Arcane bond. As an Rimesoul Undine, I’ll also have the Amphibeous, Mostly Human, Hydrated Bitality, Cold Resist 5, and +2 int, +2 dex, -2 cha. My starting stats are 7 str, 18 dex, 14 con, 20 int, 7 wis, and 5 cha. She is supposed to neutral evil since she is in the Hell’s Vengeance campaign, and since the rest of the party is either lawful evil or neutral evil and most of the enemies are lawful good. She has the student of philosophy social trait and honest faith trait, so at level 1, she has +11 diplomacy and +5 bluff. Since she is a thrune informant and has the thrune informant campaign trait, she also has +10 knowledge (local).
Shyka the Many is not just a name but a title, one granted to the Eldest with mastery over time in all its forms. Over the millennia, many different entities have held it—and continue to do so.
Long ago, the original Shyka called a convocation stretching across time, contacting all those who would eventually bear the title. There, in a place beyond time’s boundaries, they made a deal: rather than restrict themselves to given eras, with one replacing the next in chronological fashion, they would instead share their reign in fits and flickers, that each might experience a representative sampling of eternity. As part of this arrangement—necessary to keep the fabric of time and causality from unraveling—there is never more than one Shyka present at a given time, yet that specific Shyka can change without warning. A single incarnation might remain present for days, only to give way to a dozen others in the space of a single conversation. While the various incarnations retain slight differences in personality, all of them pool their knowledge with the others, and have spent enough millennia living each other’s lives that they see little point in maintaining any individuality. They are Shyka, and when they speak, it is with the blessing and insight of all of them, past and future.
Though they seem mostly humanoid and default to wearing similar blue and gray gowns and robes, Shyka’s incarnations range from ordinary-seeming humans of various ages, genders, and ethnicities to creatures without known analogues, such as a green-skinned woman with mandibles or a rarely seen entity made entirely of light. With their mastery of time comes a large dose of perspective, for all of Shyka’s incarnations have seen both the multiverse’s early days and its end, yet the Eldest remains strangely interested in comparatively small events, especially those related to what they call “perceived causality” — their term for the continuum of time.
Many of Shyka’s worshipers believe that the Eldest quietly shepherds existence along the best possible timeline, away from those branches that would be disastrous, and that the Eldest has already prevented the destruction of reality too many times to count. Shyka, however, claims to simply watch, and in fact remains on speaking terms with some of the time dragons (Bestiary 4 70) and bythos aeons (Bestiary 2 10) that have attacked them over the ages for perceived infractions against causality. The Many are fond of aiding less powerful fey and mortals in exchange for future service, and while all of the other Eldest seek them out for knowledge or companionship from time to time, none are truly comfortable in their presence, knowing that Shyka has undoubtedly seen when and how their reigns will end.
Access to Shyka’s mountaintop lair requires either the ability to fly or the willingness to climb one of the many treacherous staircases that twist up the mountainside, slowly flowing together across rock faces and up narrow chimneys before finally forming a single path leading into a narrow courtyard at the foot of the Eldest’s palace. Like Shyka, the House of Eternity holds a single position in space, but not in time. The palace is usually a series of narrow spires connected at the base by a castle that seems to grow organically out of the mountain’s stone, yet the exact design flickers and changes to reflect its various incarnations, usually when no one is watching. Some petitioners have reported the spires floating free of the ground as crystalline spikes, others as seeming to writhe like living things. Legend has it that some guests have even found the palace ruined and abandoned—a vision of some calamity either long past or yet to come.
Below are some of the house’s most notable locations.
The Archives: In addition to a vast library of books by other scholars, Shyka also maintains this private archive consisting solely of journals and manuscripts penned by their incarnations, both past and future. (When asked about the absurdity of consulting books that they will someday write, Shyka notes that it makes the task of writing a lot easier.) Since reading records of the future would likely cause problems in the present, the library is bisected by a shimmering line of force, with the other half dimly visible beyond. On the far side rests the portion of the library populated with future documents, and only Shyka is able to cross over to this— though rumors hold that a book from the future side occasionally gets “forgotten” in the ordinary section. The rest of the archive’s contents shift regularly according to which incarnation of the palace is currently ascendant.
The Branching: Shyka may be able to manipulate time on a whim, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Sometimes, when petitioners convinces the Eldest to aid them in some temporal matter, Shyka brings them to this star-shaped chamber, its walls a dizzying array of perfectly mirrored surfaces displaying infinite copies of anyone within the room. At the center hangs a strangely fractal object like a 2-foot-long silver nugget, each facet of its metallic form acting as a mirror. When activated, the object hums softly and seems to warp the air, creating a window through which the operator can scry on a point in space and time, no matter how distant. Viewers can travel there by stepping through, though getting back is far from assured. While the scrying is supposedly undetectable to those observed, the chamber is hardly safe. The artifact often attracts hounds of Tindalos (Bestiary 2 158), and those who remain in the room too long find their reflections beginning to take actions that no longer match their own—some of them aggressive— or else become suddenly unsure whether they’re in their native reality or a slightly divergent timeline. As Shyka is fond of pointing out, “The distinction between original and reflection is entirely a matter of perspective.”
The Communion Hall: This palatial chamber looms just beyond the ornate metal front doors. Totally devoid of furniture or hangings, the room is itself an artistic masterpiece, the walls carved with 1-foot-tall humanoid figures that snake their way single-file across every surface in a grand loop. Above, beneath a circular skylight of gleaming crystal, the chamber’s ceiling is embossed with four robed figures, their shapes swirling clockwise as they reach for the window at the apex. Though their bodies appear gendered—two male, two female—their faces are smooth and blank beneath halos of runes.
If Shyka chooses to greet guests personally, it is usually here—yet not every petitioner is deemed worthy of the Many’s notice. For all others, opening the doors reveals Yael (N female First World* gnome), Shyka’s seneschal. Almost as great an enigma as Shyka, Yael always appears to be the same person, yet her apparent age, personality, and magical or physical abilities can vary wildly between visits. Those other Eldest who’ve looked into the matter theorize that Yael may actually be a number of different versions of herself, rescued from alternate timelines that ended poorly for her and given a new life in exchange for service. Whether or not this is true, her loyalty to Shyka is absolute, and her skills are usually more than enough to deal with uninvited guests.
The Trophy Room: Though they claim to only watch events, Shyka nevertheless seems to enjoy observing great events of history, and isn’t above taking souvenirs, perhaps to show those incarnations who couldn’t bother to be present. Within this massive hall stand plinths and plaques of all shapes and sizes, bearing trophies from significant events from across the planes. From a shard of the Starstone to a scale from the Tarrasque, Shyka’s trophy room holds thousands of items both labeled and mysterious, most of them priceless and some immensely powerful. To fill this room, Shyka often hires adventurers and agents from other worlds, sending them out to collect pieces of which they may or may not know the true significance. (Shyka has admitted that, in some cases, the collection mission itself may have been a key component in making a given item historically significant, but such are the ripples on the pond of time.) Payment for these adventures usually takes the form of glimpses of the future or the chance to undo past mistakes. While the Trophy Room no doubt holds enough riches to make a thief wealthy for a thousand lifetimes, no one has ever successfully robbed the place, presumably because anyone who did so was later “retroactively unconceived” by the irritated Eldest.
Stunningly beautiful, Matrioshka Rimesoul she stutters when she speaks and is constantly apologizing for what she does. She shrinks away from direct confrontation, and seems to completely lack a backbone. She is also an avid daydreamer, constantly turning her philosophical notions over and over in her head or thinking of the current spells she is researching. When she does enter combat, she is a competent spellcaster, and her uncertain demeanor belies her true skill with arcane magic. Her amber eyes are often hidden by her brunette hair, and her introversion means that despite being constantly apologetic and polite, she is hard to really get to know. She shares little information about herself, and speaks very little, choosing to often stare at the wall or at her feet. Her dedication to the empire of devils means that while she is noticeably less evil than those she works with, she will say “I’m sorry, but I serve my country right or wrong” before apologetically blasting you with the force of 10000 suns using one of her signature evocation spells or using her trademark baleful polymorph spells to turn you into a chicken. In the adventuring party, it is only a short amount of time before she politely asks for time to be alone, as extended time “in the real world” exhausts her. She also avoids doing the talking in the group because while she is good at smoothing over boiling tempers, she is painfully shy and tends to stutter. Being amphibious and able to tolerate the cold, she often will allow herself to sink to the bottom a babbling brook while she contemplates what she plans to do and what she has done that day. She also enjoys how the flowing of water is like the flowing of time, and she thinks it fits her well since she is a 5th generation worshipper of Shyka. Her great great grandfather was an ice mephit who married a first-world gnome who served Shyka the eldest and all of her descendants also came to serve Shyka because the gnome was a good step-mother to the Ice-Mephit’s half human children. When the Chelish civil war surrounded Matrioshka’s ancestors, they “went with the flow” in typical undine fashion. Cheliax never harmed their family and the family never harmed Cheliax once the country turned to Diabolism, so not much changed. She serves Shyka as well, and believes so long as the needs of herself are weighted equally with the needs of others, and the weight of neither is placed above the needs of Shyka the eldest, Shyka shall look upon her and her brief moment in time with favor. She has an idiosyncratic desire to one day join The Many, and she thinks that it would be nice to merge into a greater consciousness like Shyka’s and add her knowledge to her great experience. Beneath her apologetic, unassuming exterior, however, there is a constant hungry greed for more knowledge, more books, and more resources that she finds difficult to express directly. What she does to feed this hunger for knowledge, money, power, and solitude is use her sweet, unassuming nature to trick others into small-time con jobs. For example, she may go door to door collecting alms for “the needy” when she really just uses the money to buy a scroll she can copy into her spellbook or to bribe somebody to stop bothering her. She often fantasizes about having a palace all her own one day where she can be all alone in her library all day, reading books and expanding her knowledge. It is this hidden greed that led her to excel at Sin Magic, especially Greed magic. Though she is now unable to cast spells from the enchantment or illusion schools, she was rewarded for casting out those “impure” magics by being gifted with the ability to cast 2 extra transmutation school spells a day instead of just 1 more. With further studies of the arcane arts, which she did just both out of curiousity as well as an excuse to avoid being out in public having to do work she hated with people who bothered her, she also learned the secrets of Chronomancy. Already having been raised on Shyka’s wisdom regarding the nature of time and how the nature of time can apply philosophically to benefit one’s life such as saying “this too will pass” and “the only constant in life is change”, Matrioshka was pleased to learn she could now recall lost spells and speed herself up without necessarily expending more effort, as well as get second chances to avoid being embarrased when she is about to lose her cool or made to look stupid so long as it wasn’t too long ago that whatever triggered her happened. In a way, this control over time makes Matriosha feel like a better servent of Shyka the Eldest, and she feels like this would make her ancestors proud. When not being a slothful yet quietly avaricious homebody in her underwater home in the whispering river, Matrioshka walks the streets in the nearby town of longacre, listening for seditious rumors and reporting anything seditious to the government. She does this because was hired as a paid informant by the Chelish government and she helps law enforcement track down rule breakers. She mostly works as a roustabout for the government—sometimes her superiors want her to infiltrate a local resistance cell so she can gain information. Sometimes she needs to be a tax collector, using her mastery of evocation magic to ensure compliance. Despite this, its all just a job to her and she cares little one way or the other about what the effects of her work are so long as the status quo is maintained. Even as she does this, she still does petty crimes, though it still surprised her when Cmiri Staelish, a longtime accomplice on the wrong side of the law, asked for help retrieving taxes from a local businessman. She’ll get the money, of course, once she palms a few coins for herself.
Based on the above, am I playing her right? As the title suggests, she will multiclass into feysworn as she levels up.
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1761858
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Shyka
I will be an undine (rimesoul) sin magic wizard with the Transmutation (Enhancement) school and the Chronomancer Archetype in lieu of an Arcane bond. As an Rimesoul Undine, I’ll also have the Amphibeous, Mostly Human, Hydrated Bitality, Cold Resist 5, and +2 int, +2 dex, -2 cha. My starting stats are 7 str, 18 dex, 14 con, 20 int, 7 wis, and 5 cha. She is supposed to neutral evil since she is in the Hell’s Vengeance campaign, and since the rest of the party is either lawful evil or neutral evil and most of the enemies are lawful good. She has the student of philosophy social trait and honest faith trait, so at level 1, she has +11 diplomacy and +5 bluff. Since she is a thrune informant and has the thrune informant campaign trait, she also has +10 knowledge (local).
Shyka the Many is not just a name but a title, one granted to the Eldest with mastery over time in all its forms. Over the millennia, many different entities have held it—and continue to do so.
Long ago, the original Shyka called a convocation stretching across time, contacting all those who would eventually bear the title. There, in a place beyond time’s boundaries, they made a deal: rather than restrict themselves to given eras, with one replacing the next in chronological fashion, they would instead share their reign in fits and flickers, that each might experience a representative sampling of eternity. As part of this arrangement—necessary to keep the fabric of time and causality from unraveling—there is never more than one Shyka present at a given time, yet that specific Shyka can change without warning. A single incarnation might remain present for days, only to give way to a dozen others in the space of a single conversation. While the various incarnations retain slight differences in personality, all of them pool their knowledge with the others, and have spent enough millennia living each other’s lives that they see little point in maintaining any individuality. They are Shyka, and when they speak, it is with the blessing and insight of all of them, past and future.
Though they seem mostly humanoid and default to wearing similar blue and gray gowns and robes, Shyka’s incarnations range from ordinary-seeming humans of various ages, genders, and ethnicities to creatures without known analogues, such as a green-skinned woman with mandibles or a rarely seen entity made entirely of light. With their mastery of time comes a large dose of perspective, for all of Shyka’s incarnations have seen both the multiverse’s early days and its end, yet the Eldest remains strangely interested in comparatively small events, especially those related to what they call “perceived causality” — their term for the continuum of time.
Many of Shyka’s worshipers believe that the Eldest quietly shepherds existence along the best possible timeline, away from those branches that would be disastrous, and that the Eldest has already prevented the destruction of reality too many times to count. Shyka, however, claims to simply watch, and in fact remains on speaking terms with some of the time dragons (Bestiary 4 70) and bythos aeons (Bestiary 2 10) that have attacked them over the ages for perceived infractions against causality. The Many are fond of aiding less powerful fey and mortals in exchange for future service, and while all of the other Eldest seek them out for knowledge or companionship from time to time, none are truly comfortable in their presence, knowing that Shyka has undoubtedly seen when and how their reigns will end.
Access to Shyka’s mountaintop lair requires either the ability to fly or the willingness to climb one of the many treacherous staircases that twist up the mountainside, slowly flowing together across rock faces and up narrow chimneys before finally forming a single path leading into a narrow courtyard at the foot of the Eldest’s palace. Like Shyka, the House of Eternity holds a single position in space, but not in time. The palace is usually a series of narrow spires connected at the base by a castle that seems to grow organically out of the mountain’s stone, yet the exact design flickers and changes to reflect its various incarnations, usually when no one is watching. Some petitioners have reported the spires floating free of the ground as crystalline spikes, others as seeming to writhe like living things. Legend has it that some guests have even found the palace ruined and abandoned—a vision of some calamity either long past or yet to come.
Below are some of the house’s most notable locations.
The Archives: In addition to a vast library of books by other scholars, Shyka also maintains this private archive consisting solely of journals and manuscripts penned by their incarnations, both past and future. (When asked about the absurdity of consulting books that they will someday write, Shyka notes that it makes the task of writing a lot easier.) Since reading records of the future would likely cause problems in the present, the library is bisected by a shimmering line of force, with the other half dimly visible beyond. On the far side rests the portion of the library populated with future documents, and only Shyka is able to cross over to this— though rumors hold that a book from the future side occasionally gets “forgotten” in the ordinary section. The rest of the archive’s contents shift regularly according to which incarnation of the palace is currently ascendant.
The Branching: Shyka may be able to manipulate time on a whim, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Sometimes, when petitioners convinces the Eldest to aid them in some temporal matter, Shyka brings them to this star-shaped chamber, its walls a dizzying array of perfectly mirrored surfaces displaying infinite copies of anyone within the room. At the center hangs a strangely fractal object like a 2-foot-long silver nugget, each facet of its metallic form acting as a mirror. When activated, the object hums softly and seems to warp the air, creating a window through which the operator can scry on a point in space and time, no matter how distant. Viewers can travel there by stepping through, though getting back is far from assured. While the scrying is supposedly undetectable to those observed, the chamber is hardly safe. The artifact often attracts hounds of Tindalos (Bestiary 2 158), and those who remain in the room too long find their reflections beginning to take actions that no longer match their own—some of them aggressive— or else become suddenly unsure whether they’re in their native reality or a slightly divergent timeline. As Shyka is fond of pointing out, “The distinction between original and reflection is entirely a matter of perspective.”
The Communion Hall: This palatial chamber looms just beyond the ornate metal front doors. Totally devoid of furniture or hangings, the room is itself an artistic masterpiece, the walls carved with 1-foot-tall humanoid figures that snake their way single-file across every surface in a grand loop. Above, beneath a circular skylight of gleaming crystal, the chamber’s ceiling is embossed with four robed figures, their shapes swirling clockwise as they reach for the window at the apex. Though their bodies appear gendered—two male, two female—their faces are smooth and blank beneath halos of runes.
If Shyka chooses to greet guests personally, it is usually here—yet not every petitioner is deemed worthy of the Many’s notice. For all others, opening the doors reveals Yael (N female First World* gnome), Shyka’s seneschal. Almost as great an enigma as Shyka, Yael always appears to be the same person, yet her apparent age, personality, and magical or physical abilities can vary wildly between visits. Those other Eldest who’ve looked into the matter theorize that Yael may actually be a number of different versions of herself, rescued from alternate timelines that ended poorly for her and given a new life in exchange for service. Whether or not this is true, her loyalty to Shyka is absolute, and her skills are usually more than enough to deal with uninvited guests.
The Trophy Room: Though they claim to only watch events, Shyka nevertheless seems to enjoy observing great events of history, and isn’t above taking souvenirs, perhaps to show those incarnations who couldn’t bother to be present. Within this massive hall stand plinths and plaques of all shapes and sizes, bearing trophies from significant events from across the planes. From a shard of the Starstone to a scale from the Tarrasque, Shyka’s trophy room holds thousands of items both labeled and mysterious, most of them priceless and some immensely powerful. To fill this room, Shyka often hires adventurers and agents from other worlds, sending them out to collect pieces of which they may or may not know the true significance. (Shyka has admitted that, in some cases, the collection mission itself may have been a key component in making a given item historically significant, but such are the ripples on the pond of time.) Payment for these adventures usually takes the form of glimpses of the future or the chance to undo past mistakes. While the Trophy Room no doubt holds enough riches to make a thief wealthy for a thousand lifetimes, no one has ever successfully robbed the place, presumably because anyone who did so was later “retroactively unconceived” by the irritated Eldest.
Stunningly beautiful, Matrioshka Rimesoul she stutters when she speaks and is constantly apologizing for what she does. She shrinks away from direct confrontation, and seems to completely lack a backbone. She is also an avid daydreamer, constantly turning her philosophical notions over and over in her head or thinking of the current spells she is researching. When she does enter combat, she is a competent spellcaster, and her uncertain demeanor belies her true skill with arcane magic. Her amber eyes are often hidden by her brunette hair, and her introversion means that despite being constantly apologetic and polite, she is hard to really get to know. She shares little information about herself, and speaks very little, choosing to often stare at the wall or at her feet. Her dedication to the empire of devils means that while she is noticeably less evil than those she works with, she will say “I’m sorry, but I serve my country right or wrong” before apologetically blasting you with the force of 10000 suns using one of her signature evocation spells or using her trademark baleful polymorph spells to turn you into a chicken. In the adventuring party, it is only a short amount of time before she politely asks for time to be alone, as extended time “in the real world” exhausts her. She also avoids doing the talking in the group because while she is good at smoothing over boiling tempers, she is painfully shy and tends to stutter. Being amphibious and able to tolerate the cold, she often will allow herself to sink to the bottom a babbling brook while she contemplates what she plans to do and what she has done that day. She also enjoys how the flowing of water is like the flowing of time, and she thinks it fits her well since she is a 5th generation worshipper of Shyka. Her great great grandfather was an ice mephit who married a first-world gnome who served Shyka the eldest and all of her descendants also came to serve Shyka because the gnome was a good step-mother to the Ice-Mephit’s half human children. When the Chelish civil war surrounded Matrioshka’s ancestors, they “went with the flow” in typical undine fashion. Cheliax never harmed their family and the family never harmed Cheliax once the country turned to Diabolism, so not much changed. She serves Shyka as well, and believes so long as the needs of herself are weighted equally with the needs of others, and the weight of neither is placed above the needs of Shyka the eldest, Shyka shall look upon her and her brief moment in time with favor. She has an idiosyncratic desire to one day join The Many, and she thinks that it would be nice to merge into a greater consciousness like Shyka’s and add her knowledge to her great experience. Beneath her apologetic, unassuming exterior, however, there is a constant hungry greed for more knowledge, more books, and more resources that she finds difficult to express directly. What she does to feed this hunger for knowledge, money, power, and solitude is use her sweet, unassuming nature to trick others into small-time con jobs. For example, she may go door to door collecting alms for “the needy” when she really just uses the money to buy a scroll she can copy into her spellbook or to bribe somebody to stop bothering her. She often fantasizes about having a palace all her own one day where she can be all alone in her library all day, reading books and expanding her knowledge. It is this hidden greed that led her to excel at Sin Magic, especially Greed magic. Though she is now unable to cast spells from the enchantment or illusion schools, she was rewarded for casting out those “impure” magics by being gifted with the ability to cast 2 extra transmutation school spells a day instead of just 1 more. With further studies of the arcane arts, which she did just both out of curiousity as well as an excuse to avoid being out in public having to do work she hated with people who bothered her, she also learned the secrets of Chronomancy. Already having been raised on Shyka’s wisdom regarding the nature of time and how the nature of time can apply philosophically to benefit one’s life such as saying “this too will pass” and “the only constant in life is change”, Matrioshka was pleased to learn she could now recall lost spells and speed herself up without necessarily expending more effort, as well as get second chances to avoid being embarrased when she is about to lose her cool or made to look stupid so long as it wasn’t too long ago that whatever triggered her happened. In a way, this control over time makes Matriosha feel like a better servent of Shyka the Eldest, and she feels like this would make her ancestors proud. When not being a slothful yet quietly avaricious homebody in her underwater home in the whispering river, Matrioshka walks the streets in the nearby town of longacre, listening for seditious rumors and reporting anything seditious to the government. She does this because was hired as a paid informant by the Chelish government and she helps law enforcement track down rule breakers. She mostly works as a roustabout for the government—sometimes her superiors want her to infiltrate a local resistance cell so she can gain information. Sometimes she needs to be a tax collector, using her mastery of evocation magic to ensure compliance. Despite this, its all just a job to her and she cares little one way or the other about what the effects of her work are so long as the status quo is maintained. Even as she does this, she still does petty crimes, though it still surprised her when Cmiri Staelish, a longtime accomplice on the wrong side of the law, asked for help retrieving taxes from a local businessman. She’ll get the money, of course, once she palms a few coins for herself.
Based on the above, am I playing her right? As the title suggests, she will multiclass into feysworn as she levels up.
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1761858