Bone sage

Bone sage

(Creature)

Type

Undead

Source: Distant Worlds, pg(s). 28

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Bone sages are highly intelligent undead spellcasters native to the planet Eox. Both in appearance and ability they are very similar to liches.

History

The bone sages were once a human-like race known as the Eoxians. Though relatively frail, they were uniformly brilliant, and their magical and technological achievements were some of the greatest Golarion's solar system had ever seen.

However, with these achievements came a pervasive sense of superiority and drive to dominate, and somewhere along this path Eox was stricken by a world-shattering calamity. It is possible the gods sought to punish the Eoxian's hubris, but most believe this tragedy was self-inflicted, possibly recoil from the weapon that destroyed their greatest rivals—the Twins, Damiar and Iovo—and created the Diaspora.

Either way, Eox was left burning, shattered, and stripped of its atmosphere. Most Eoxians were killed instantly, and the few thousand who survived in self-contained environments were left to slowly succumb to radiation poisoning. Desperate, these survivors turned to undeath, transforming en masse into the lichlike beings that became known as the bone sages.

Society

The bone sages maintain little in the way of recognizable society. Most have carved out holdings in remote parts of Eox, and spend their time further isolating themselves with complex traps and magical wards, believing others of their kind to be the only real threat to their existence. Even those who occupy the Necropoleis, the closest structures Eox has to cities, carefully maintain the boundaries of their territory, from which they rarely venture.

Despite their paranoia and misanthropy, the recent revelation that other races in the solar system may be in the process of developing reliable space travel has convinced some bone sages that cooperation and urgency may be necessary in the coming centuries.

Technology

Much was lost in Eox's ancient calamity, but the bone sages have had eons to rebuild. Though their paranoia prevents them from sharing discoveries with one another, they have slowly come to surpass their predecessors in the physical sciences. Their creations often blur the line between science and magic, and their skeletal designs and rune-etched surfaces seem to be modeled after the bone sages themselves.

Perhaps their greatest of the bone sage's technological achievements is the creation of gravitational fields that resemble stable, miniature black holes. Matter is fed into these fields and the resulting radiation is then used to power the bone sage's other devices. On Golarion these black holes are known as spheres of annihilation.

When bone sages deign to leave their home world, they do so upon their macabre corpse ships. Crews of constructs and undead minions ensure these slow-moving ships have no need for pressurized atmosphere.