This creature has a split-jawed mouth, a hood-like growth on its head, and two hideously elongated fingers on each hand.
Caulborn CR 7
XP 3,200
N Medium outsider (extraplanar)
hp 76 (9d10+27)
Fort +6, Ref +10, Will +13
Melee bite +13 (2d6+3), 2 claws +12 (1d6+3)
Special Attacks consume thoughts
Spell-Like Abilities (CL 7th; concentration +11)
Constantâdetect magic, detect thoughts (DC 16), read magic
3/dayâcharm monster (DC 18), daze monster (DC 16), hold monster (DC 19), hypnotic pattern (DC 16), vampiric touch (DC 17)
Base Atk +9; CMB +12; CMD 30
Feats Combat Casting, Combat Expertise, Combat Reflexes, Iron Will, Weapon Focus (bite)
Skills Acrobatics +12, Appraise +12, Bluff +14, Intimidate +14, Knowledge (planes) +14, Knowledge (all others) +14, Perception +15, Sense Motive +15, Stealth +14, Use Magic Device +12
Languages Abyssal, Aklo, Aquan, Celestial, Common, Draconic, Giant, Infernal; telepathy 100 ft.
Environment any
Organization solitary, pair, or colony (3-12)
Treasure double
Caulborn are a race of telepathic prophets and historians who subsist on the psychic energy of others. They wander the planes in search of new facts and concepts to add to the pulsating brain-sacks that serve as their collective memories. When a band of caulborn find a particularly interesting site, they settle down to dwell there for many years until they feel that they have learned all there is to know about the location.
A caulborn is literally a creature of the mind. Its body is self-sustaining, and it exists solely to record and catalogue new thoughts. While they are not evil, caulborn have little interest in alliances or friendship with other races.
A race of telepathic prophets and historians, the strange creatures known as the caulborn wander the planes in search of new ideas, memories, and concepts to add to the pulsating, bloated brain-sacks that serve as their collective memories.
While extremely rare, caulborn can be found all across the planes, towing their fleshy memory banks through the Astral and Ethereal realms or setting up colonies on inhabited worlds, studying the native inhabitants for millennia before moving on. This seeming lack of a native home has given rise to numerous theories about the creaturesâ origin, from conjecture that they come from yet-uncharted worlds on the Material Plane to speculation that theyâre actually angels from the far future, come back to survey and catalog the multiverse before its eventual destruction. If the caulborn themselves know their origin, they refuse to weigh in on the matter.
Caulborn interactions with outsiders vary wildly. Though their alien thought processes and apparent transcension of morality make them unnerving and dangerous, their vast wealth of information and knack for prophecy position them as oracles of the highest orderâ provided the petitioners can offer something in return. Similarly, though the caulborn feed on sentient creatures, this feeding does not need to be harmful, and most caulborn prefer symbiotic relationships to predatory ones.
The caulborn are literally creatures of the mind: their bodies are self-sustaining, and they exist solely to record and catalog new thoughts, concepts, and experiences, no matter how trivial. Yet because of some evolutionary fluke, their own thoughts and experiences are unable to fill this need, as they lack the nourishing psychic energy possessed by other creatures.
To this end, the caulborn have grown into perfect parasitesâmaster scholars with no work of their own, only the aggregated knowledge of a thousand sentient meals. A caulborn cannot even learn a new skill on its own, as its neural pathways are designed to receive information pre-digested by another mind. All caulborn have two mouths: a human-sized, mostly vestigial mouth for respiration and vocalizing, and a terrifying, fanged set of split jaws for fighting and feeding.
When a colony finds reason to split, or a small group becomes large enough to warrant it, the caulborn construct a new brainsack and seed it with every fact and record the creatures have collected since the dawn of time, usually copying knowledge over from previously established brainsacks.
These protoplasmic data centers are made by dismantling the bodies of several caulborn and melding them together into a single blob of fluid and curd. This process robs the brain-sacks of any senses or traces of identity but vastly increases their capacity for storage and information processing. Itâs through these strange god-minds, fed by regurgitated psychic energy and left with nothing but the ability to store and analyze information, that the caulborn are able to extrapolate from trends and make connections that result in the uncannily accurate predictions other races see as prophecyâa foresight challenging that of the gods themselves.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 3, © 2011, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Authors Jesse Benner, Jason Bulmahn, Adam Daigle, James Jacobs, Michael Kenway, Rob McCreary, Patrick Renie, Chris Sims, F. Wesley Schneider, James L. Sutter, and Russ Taylor, based on material by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams.