Theme Bestiary: The Great Race of Yith
CR 9
Lawful Neutral Large Aberration
Pathfinder Bestiary 3, pg. 286
The Great Race of Yith, or Yithians for short and Yith for shortest, are actually hasty replacements for the previous holder of this particular spot in Theme Week 4. However, due to my own idiocy, Mental Monsters week was becoming just a retread of Body Invaders week, and I could not have that. Thankfully the Yith make for excellent, theme-fitting replacements, though they are far from the cruel, callous, hedonistic creatures from the last two entries.
While not a race of scholars and explorers, a great many of the Yith serve that role, scouting out the cosmos for other sapient races that they may study… or replace. They are generally a gentle people, but they have been pushed into dooming entire worlds to save their own selves before and will do so again with little hesitation, using their Mind Swap ability to trade places with any living creature they can communicate telepathically with. Normally, they use this power simply to experience and study the lives of other beings on other worlds, but they have used this power on a grand scale in the past. The strange alien shape you see above isn’t the original form of the Great Race.
Because they can use Astral Projection at will, there is no limit–planar or otherwise–to the distance they can cross in order to find new beings to Mind Swap with. Creatures from whole universes away can find themselves suddenly Swapped onto the Yithian homeworld, wandering in a daze inside of their strange new body as guards oversee them. While they typically aren’t hostile to aliens wandering around in civilian bodies and allow them a certain degree of freedom, all Yithians can use Modify Memory at will to pick and choose what these “guests” actually remember of their time outside their own body, and the Yithian doing the Swap themselves can inflict a very careful form of amnesia as a free action when trading the bodies back, leaving the guest only with the memories the alien wants them to remember. Everything else about their otherworldly journey is glanced only in fragmented dreams, until some form of magic cures their mind.
Unlike the predatory Brain Oozes or the hedonistic Intellect Devourers, the Yith use the ability to subsume the consciousness of other sapient beings to explore and learn. This does not mean they are any less dangerous than either the Oozes or Devourers. The fact that they are an entire world/society of creatures also means that deviance is possible; An especially cruel or criminal Yithian can use their at-will Hold Monster to completely paralyze someone, striking with deadly pincers (which inflict triple damage on a critical) until they are no longer interested. Criminal Yithians may also Mind Swap onto beings worlds away to escape the judgment of their peers, leaving an unfortunate being in their place who, through clever use of Modify Memory and amnesia, may be convinced to take the fall…
