2019-02-23

Monsters: Serviles, Petty Servants Of Evil

Serviles (sing. servilis) are petty fiends formed of excess spiritual residue of the lower planes, shaped by cast off thoughts, malice, laziness, and toxic dependence.

They are submissive, groveling cowards that can, in a terribly fascinating way, combine laziness and desire to please powerful masters in an unpredictable degree—their toadying is even known to spark a dominating streak in people who wouldn't expect themselves to enjoy bullying lesser creatures. They seem to enjoy bickering between themselves to become the favored servant of a strong master, often trying to outdo each other in the thoroughness of their servitude, and yet, when their master shows weakness, lack of attention, meekness, compassion, or are even simply protective of them, they quickly grow lazy, insubordinate, and haughty.

Serviles are receptive to bribes and prone to malice and petty vindictiveness when not subdued with strength or terror. They tend to show contempt to others regardless of the stance of their master, and are quite willing to switch allegiance to entities clearly more powerful than their current master as well. When properly coaxed to work, they can be quite competent in their narrow field of expertise, though, despite all their complaints and attempts to evade hard work.

Serviles do not normally form from condemned souls as such, unless some powerful entity deliberately forms a weak soul into one, or more likely a whole bunch of them.

Servilis Subtype
Serviles are petty fiends serving those who would treat them with proper contempt and force into vassalage with an iron fist and binding spell.
Traits: Serviles posses a number of shared traits (unless otherwise noted).

  • Immune to disease and poison.
  • Resistance to acid 5, cold 5, electricity 5, fire 5, and sonic 5.
  • Damage reduction penetrated by good.
  • Serviles speak Abyssal, Celestial, Draconic, Infernal, and Protean.
  • Constant tongues spell-like ability.
  • Serviles natural attacks are treated as evil for purpose of penetrating damage reduction and regeneration.
  • Serviles are easily bound with various planar binding spells and occult rituals. They suffer additional –4 penalty to Charisma checks made to resist being bound or commanded by a master that is stronger than them.

New Feat: Patron Of The Vile
You have learned many ways to coerce serviles into submission.
Prerequisite: Evil alignment.
Benefit: When you use planar ally, planar binding, or their variants to conjure serviles, you can ignore the usual limit on number of creatures called as long as their total HD does not exceed the HD limit. You can bind serviles to your service with planar ally and its variants. When you bind serviles to your services, you can pick them as your followers if you have Leadership feat (treating them as if their NPC level was equal to their CR +2 steps, so scribes are 1st level followers, garcons are 2nd level followers, and so on), and they remain in your service until killed or dismissed. You add serviles to list of monsters you can conjure with summon monster spells and spell-like abilities (using their CR +2 steps to determine level of summon monster spell needed to summon specific type of serviles), and if you have summon spell-like ability, you can use it to conjure serviles with total HD equal to half your caster level with 100% chance of success.

You can use your caster level in place of Intimidate ranks when you coerce serviles into obeying you. You can also use your primary spellcasting ability bonus in place of Charisma bonus when you determine your total Intimidate bonus while doing so.

If you are an outsider with an evil subtype, you can sacrifice a captured soul and create 1 HD of serviles per 250 gp of the soul value, with a maximum number of HD created not exceeding half of your own HD (excess HD are lost, making it wasteful to use more powerful souls). Serviles created in this way are not bound to serve you, though what kind of petty fiend you would have to be if you couldn't force serviles into obeying you?!

If you are a mortal, you can try to sacrifice a captured soul to create serviles as well, though you would need to design and perform a lengthy occult ritual in a place tainted with evil to attempt such task.

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