Lapsudaemon

Lapsudaemon

(Creature)

Type

Outsider
(daemon, evil, extraplanar)

CR

14

Environment

Any (Abaddon)

Alignment

LG	NG	CG
LN	N	CN
LE	NE	CE

Source: For Queen & Empire, pg(s). 88-89

Lapsudaemons are daemons who embody death by falling.

Appearance

A lapsudaemon appears as a crushed human, often the parts of multiple ones seamlessly fused together. Its limbs protrude at awkward angles. A lapsudaemon is between five and six feet tall and weighs 150 pounds. Lapsudaemons never stop their falling motion or incessant screaming, a residual impulse taken from the last moment of their mortal lives.

Ecology

Lapsudaemons actively seek out mortals and drop them from heights to create new lapsudaemons. Longer gambits involve tracking down a gullible adventurer and offering the victim a prize high atop a mountain or spire, causing them to inevitably fall to their deaths and launching the soul to Abaddon. From the new lapsudaemon's perspective, the fall never ends: it continues from mortal life to afterlife and then commences an eternity of perpetual motion.

When being called, lapsudaemons prefer a sacrifice of wings cut from a living celestial, bound to and then born aloft by a willing intelligent creature, who must fall to death as part of the calling ritual.

Society

Lapsudaemons are summoned to the Universe to engineer fatal accidents for their summoners to avoid any suspicion of foul play. In its idle time, a lapsudaemon spends its time ceaselessly falling and teleporting high in the air just before impact. In the highest places of Abaddon, rains of lapsudaemons falling from the sky can last for months or years.

Lapsudaemons display an immediate grasp of climate and geography on other planes. They prefer ruins and wastelands and hide from civilisation, where their constant falling and shouting goes unnoticed.

Lapsudaemons are intelligent and cruel, but their plight makes it difficult to study or plot. As such, they focus almost exclusively on tasks assigned by more powerful daemons. They frequently serve harbingers, evil deities like Zyphus, or the Apocalypse Riders as assassins or insane heralds of an invasion. Their lieges frequently must teleport to some great height and fall with them to maintain telepathic conversation.