This massive, shaggy beast uses long and muscular forearms to raise itself onto its hind legs and beats its chest like a gorilla. Despite its ape-like stance, its frame is far heavier and its features more primitive, its powerful muzzle and gnashing canines bespeaking terrible, bestial savagery.
Chemosit CR 4
Should a chemosit kill an opponent with a coup de grace attack, it breaks open the creature’s skull and devours what’s inside. If the creature killed is of one of the following classes or creature types, the chemosit gains the associated benefit. If the creature killed falls into multiple categories, the chemosit chooses a single benefit to gain. With the exception of healing, the effects provided by this ability affect a chemosit for a number of minutes equal to 5 times its Hit Dice.
Undead: The chemosit takes 1d4 points of damage and is sickened for 1d4 rounds. In addition, the chemosit detects as undead for the purposes of spells like detect undead, though it is in no other way treated as an undead creature.
The terrifying roar of the chemosit unnerves even the bravest souls. Any creatures within a 300-foot spread must make a DC 15 Will save or become shaken for 1d4 rounds. This is a sonic mind-affecting fear affect. Whether or not the save is successful, an affected creature is immune to the same chemosit’s roar for the next 24 hours. The save DC is Wisdom-based.
Environment warm forests
Organization solitary, pair, or troop (3–6)
From the time their children are young, tribesfolk tell them chilling tales of the savage, child-eating chemosit. While most believe these stories hold little truth and serve only to keep children from wandering too far from their villages, others know better. Few who have witnessed the gruesome work of the chemosit survive. Bearing terrible scars, both physical and mental, they recall the creature’s utter savagery and inhuman strength. Tribes living in close proximity to chemosits believe them to be the living embodiment of wrathful gods or nature spirits, and pay them grisly sacrifices. In such places, those who suffer the beast’s attacks are often blamed for the violence and exiled. In other regions, evil shamans capable of summoning or commanding these beasts gain great power and infamy. It is a common practice for warring tribes to pay such shamans to summon a chemosit to plague the villages of their enemies. Chemosits stand over 9 feet tall on average and weigh upward of 750 pounds.
“Chemosit” is an alternate name for a Central African cryptid known as the Nandi bear (named after the Nandi people of Kenya). Its numerous descriptions vary greatly, though in all accounts it is described as an ape-like beast sharing the features of other animals, usually a bear but sometimes a hyena, aardvark, or even humans. Though chemosits are documented primarily in the tales of indigenous peoples and dozens of written accounts by British colonists and explorers during the early half of the 20th century, modern cryptozoologists continue to pursue the chemosit, with many investigators suggesting it fits the physical description of a chalicothere—a large, knuckle-walking herbivore that lived during the Early Pleistocene era.
Section 15: Copyright Notice – Pathfinder Adventure Path #38
Pathfinder Adventure Path #38: Racing to Ruin. © 2010, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Author: Tim Hitchcock.