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Vescavor
The Abyssal Chorus (swarm CR 5; queen CR 9) demonic vermin
Home Plane: Abyss
- Layer 90, Ahvoth-Kor the Guttering Grove
- Layer 25, Ic’Vnign the Swarming Jungle
- Layer 87, Demozg the Screaming Jungle
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Themes: Nightmarish infestation of wicked voracious insects
You never just get one vescavor, cutter. See one, and you know that the rest of the swarm is not far behind—and you have seconds to get out of there, or regret it. Because on its way is a terrifying swarm of demonic insect-fiends resembling acrid green wasps. They’re little more than jagged teeth around glowing green maws. They manifest as ravenous, gibbering swarms numbering in the hundreds—or thousands. Each swarm is led by a grotesque Vescavor Queen, whose bloated abdomen leaks unholy pheromones that enslave her vile progeny to obey her every whim.
Natives of the Abyss, these swarms infest dark, shrieking jungles and stinking crevices, but often spill out into other planes through rifts. They have a preference for festering battlegrounds, perilous ruins, and Underdark caverns—anywhere that’s rich in carrion and chaos. Their incessant hunger knows no bounds, and they’ll consume virtually all organic and inorganic matter they encounter—except adamantine, which seems to be their only true weakness. The vescavor’s screeching chorus is more than a sonic onslaught; it’s a maddening psychic assault that confuses and destabilizes those nearby, and chant goes it can cause lasting insanity if a berk remains trapped for too long. Their capacity to swiftly dissolve weapons, armour, and fortifications makes them fearsome siege creatures despite their small size, and tanar’ri have been known to release hordes of them in Blood War incursions. Chant goes the Doomguard have tried to harness the entropic power of vescavors before, but found that they were impossible to reason with, garnish or intimidate, and given their voracious appetites, expensive to contain for long enough to get them to do anything the faction considered useful.
Philosophically, vescavors are living embodiments of rapacious, destructive entropy. Their eternal, maddening chorus has earned them the sarcastic moniker of the “Chorus of the Abyss” from planewalkers unlucky enough to encounter them (but lucky enough to survive). Vescavor queens only amplify this chaos with their corruptive auras and absolute control over their broodswarm, transforming dangerous vermin into a unified force of devastation. The vescavor epitomize the ruinous onslaught of ceaseless consumption, spreading unmaking wherever they go. Rumours of a vescavor swarm on the prowl are enough to get burgs battening down the hatches and calling in favours from planewalkers with experience dealing with this menace. Ideally, ones with adamantine.
Canonical Sources: Bestiary 5 [PF1e] p266-267; Monster Core [PF2e] p338
Source: Jon Winter-Holt
