Ghostly pooka
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The most stunning thing about the appearance of a ghostly pooka is the odd illusion surrounding this pitiful equine which seems to absorb all the color from everything around it. The ghostly horse appears to be weighed down by some heavy chains which cover its entire body. The sight of its obvious torment tears at the souls of all who lay eyes upon it.
Hunting strategies
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Other information
Ghostly pookas have a depression maneuver that affects those who use defensive stances in their presence. This maneuver is also level based. Offensive stances will help avoid this maneuver. This maneuver can be prevented with the use of Corrupt Essence (703).
Two examples of a ghostly pooka's depression ability:
A ghostly pooka stares straight into your eyes. A wave of sadness washes over you as you stare at a ghostly pooka. You are stunned for 2 rounds!
A ghostly pooka stares straight into your eyes. The sight of a ghostly pooka touches you somewhere deep in your soul. Your arms and legs feel leaden and your eyes begin to well up with tears.
Behind the Scenes
Pookas are shape shifters who in Rolemaster usually take the form of smaller animals and are not undead. However, the trickster pookas of Celtic folklore are sometimes represented as black horses covered in heavy chains, which is where their premise originates for Shadow Valley. Pookas and knockers (the spectral miners) originated in fairy mythology, which is a connecting theme to related areas such as Castle Anwyn. Their Slow (504) warding attack works by making the air more viscous, which is related to the strange dark mist of the valley. The valley also has a subtle theme of temporal distortions. Their sorrowful state is likely tied thematically to other allusions to "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. The shape shifting is relevant because of the heavy basis on "The Mound" by H.P. Lovecraft, which had a telepathic race of phasers who synthetically morphed life-forms as they wished. These would be in fantastic shapes for their own amusement, or as beasts of burden out of conquered races.
The color draining illusion in their creature description (and the skeletons by the well near the old shrine) comes from "The Colour Out of Space", where the ground-water is contaminated by an alien life form, which causes everything to glow but eventually become grey and disintegrate into a powder. This story features stampeding and dead horses, explains the mist color variations, and has "the colour" on an anvil like the Glaes Caverns.
This unnatural mist of the valley has a basis in multiple stories, but also appears once in "The Colour Out of Space": "He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn’t right—it was against Nature—and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, 'It come from some place whar things ain’t as they is here . . . one o’ them professors said so. . . .'"
References
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