These monsters were detailed in the mini-bestiary that comes with Hell’s Rebels Adventure 01. A single one of them, Yiliv, appears in the entire campaign, in the first dungeon room of Scene 14.

The Lore

Scrivenites are chronicler spirits that, in Pathfinder, hail from the outer planes of absolute law. They have perfect memories and an obsession with chronicling and preserving history. When they appear on the physical world, they’re usually performing some sort of field research or hunting down an obscure text. They can also be summoned and bound by people with the knowledge of the appropriate rituals.

A scrivenite looks like a book! Its cover has a pattern that kinda looks like a face or helmet in it, and they can open up to project a diffuse “body” made out of swirling pages and long, undulating bookmark ribbons. They fight by slashing at people with those pages and ribbons. The paper cuts aren’t that bad by themselves, but they also deliver a magical curse that extracts some of the target’s memories and creates a magic book out of them. This is known as a “soul tome”. Subsequent cuts steal more memories and make the soul tome more elaborate and complete.

Soul Tomes: How do they work?

Each hit from a Scrivenite inflicts a cumulative -1 penalty to all IQ-based tests for the victim (Per and Will are unaffected). Someone who accumulates a penalty equal to their IQ has all of their memories drained goes into a coma. The penalty persists until the memories are restored. Any level of Magic Resistance prevents the effect.

Victims can restore their memories by reading their own soul tomes (which takes 30 minutes per point), or via the Dispel Magic, Remove Curse, or Restore Memory spells, which are resisted with skill 15. Either of these methods cause the book to crumble to dust if successful.

Soul tomes aren’t any tougher than mundane books and can be destroyed in the same ways. If a book is destroyed before the victim regains their memories, magic can still restore them. If it’s the victim who dies first, the book remains, and becomes entirely mundane. The original adventure makes sure to emphasize that the soul of the departed regains its memories and goes on to its usual destination.

Fighting A Scrivenite

When fighting a scrivenite, the most important thing is to not get cut. The Diffuse nature of their bodies makes them nearly impervious to physical weapons. Their book-cover heads are still solid, though, despite being armored, and might be better targets. If you don’t have the skill to consistently hit their Skull or Face hit locations, though, you should use fire.

Restoring memories lost to their curse is not particularly hard, but it’s kind of annoying and time-consuming unless you have ready access to one of the three spells mentioned above in the field. So you might end up having to endure that penalty for a while until you can spare a few hours for reading your biography.

The Numbers

ST 10; DX 14; IQ 14; HT 10;

HP 10: Will 14; Per 14; FP 10;

SM 0 (-5 in book form); Speed 6; Move 6 (flight with Hovering);

DR 5 (head); 0 (elsewhere);

  • Bookmark Slash (15): 1d-2 (2) cut plus linked Soul Tome.

  • Soul Tome: See above for how this works.

  • Turtle Up: The scrivenite retracts its “body” into its head, becoming a sturdy SM -5 book with DR 5, and gaining a +2 to Camouflage to pass as a mundane tome.

Relevant Traits: Fragile (Unnatural), Injury Tolerance (Diffuse, not vs. fire, not against head hits), Photographic Memory, Vulnerable (x2, Fire).

Relevant Skills: History-18, Camouflage-14, Stealth-14.

Tweaking The Numbers

Scrivenite are relatively weak melee combatants compared to most delvers, which is why I decided to make their Soul Tome curse take effect automatically on any hit. The greatest danger here isn’t that it will kill you, but that it will saddle you with a long-term mental penalty that will get in the way as you delve the rest of the dungeon.

If you want to make them stronger, you can increase the skill level and damage of their attacks, perhaps even to Sword Spirit (Monsters, p. 55) levels. To make the curse weaker, you can make it resistable (15 vs. Will). Combining both makes it a primarily physical combat threat despite its brainy lore.