Appearance
An elohim is a winged, one-eyed being with a mix of features from insects, fungi and other creatures.[2]
History
The elohim are virtually silent about their origin. The prevailing hypothesis is that the gods crafted elohim as proxies to populate reality's first draft, the First World. When the gods hit upon a configuration they enjoyed, they abandoned the First World, freeing the elohim to continue their own designs in the Astral Plane.[3]
Ecology
Elohim create permanent demiplanes or change remote environments in existing planes, seed them with new life, then eventually abandon them. An elohim might return after many decades to observe how its creations have fared, and might allow them to live or eradicate them. Elohim rarely communicate with other beings, and always in a cryptic fashion.[2]
Elohim today predominantly live in the Astral Plane. They seem incapable of reproduction, and most shulsagas believe that elohim created them as a form of proxy children. Some shulsagas believe that they can metamorphose into elohim by attaining enlightenment. This idea is supported by tales of shulsaga paragons, but disputed by the elohim's dwindling numbers, suggesting that they are an endangered species.[4]
The elohim often come in conflict with the anunnaki, another extraplanar race that manipulates the fates of other creatures. Some sages believe that the two races are both working to prevent a possible future calamity, and that their conflicts stem from a disagreement on how this should be done.[5]
Looking for an explanation for that impossible dungeon or demiplane? Does your subterranean world need a maker? Do you long to recreate Marvel stories of beings like the Celestials, the Collector, or the Beyonder in a fantasy context? The elohim is your monster.
An elohim’s drive to experiment and tinker with environments almost inevitably means that it’ll come into conflict with adventurers, at least at first. And with an outlook so alien that the neutral alignment is only a rough approximation, getting the outsider to understand the consequences of its actions may be difficult for heroes stuck in the mortal good-evil/law-chaos frameworks.
One thing’s for sure though: any creature with the ability to terraform, create demiplane and create life(!!!) is by definition truly mythic…perhaps nigh unto a god. How will your PCs react to that kind of power…or brazenness?
Stellar explorers widely assume that the asteroid known as the Honeycomb is a formian outpost, given its hivelike appearance (and the fact that no ship to enter it has ever returned). In truth, the asteroid belongs to a quite different insectile being: an elohim. The mythic outsider has painstakingly constructed the asteroid as a base for its experiments, with each chamber of the Honeycomb featuring its own biome. Some of the lost ships’ crews may be found here as part of the exhibits.
A god is kept alive only by the prayers of his worshippers, who are in turn sustained in an artificial vault deep in the earth. A mythic xiomorn (see The Emerald Spire Superdungeon) has kept them there, preserved from the enemies that overran the rest of their culture millennia ago. But when a curious elohim begins to tamper with the xiomorn’s domains, the outraged earth creature threatens to destroy his works rather than seem them ruined. The weakened god begs a powerful band of adventurers to save his people—and by extension himself—before the mythic meddlers snuff them out altogether in their power struggle.
Island ecosystems are fragile. Flying island ecosystems, even more so. When creatures like azure gliders, tumblespikes, and dustshroud rabbits (see Pathfinder Adventure Path #85: Fires of Creation) begin appearing on Aerius, adventurers are inspired to seek the cause. Their travels take them to lands they never imagined—other flying islands, the dead-haunted surface, the Belowworld, the Great Sea, and even other planes. Each adventure they find stranger wonders and evidence of tampering, from owlbears and kamadans to worms that walk and worse. It is from some of these worms that walk—monks who perch decaying pillars of filth to test themselves against the baking sun—that they are pointed to the elohim whose grand designs are responsible…and who just might save or rebreak the world.
Did you think I’d be satisfied with just ONE huge monster to celebrate reaching my Mega Milestone? No, no! This event requires a bit more flare, and this flare will come in threes!
Fun fact I wasn’t aware of until recently: “ELOHIM” is one of the many names used for/by God in the Hebrew Bibles. These alien beings may as well be gods when compared to a typical mortal; they are definitely below an actual God, but their power and the sheer flexibility of some of their abilities can make an actual battle with one of these creatures feel like the party is actually fighting a god.
An Elohim isn’t really one to fight, though. They primarily play the part of a proper god, using their 1/day Create Demiplane to conjure an extradimensional space a little over 200 feet wide on each side. which it can freely enter and leave with a generous 5/day Plane Shift. Once its realm has been established, the Elohim tends to survey it for a time, perhaps altering it with its at-will Stone Shape or making grand alterations with its 5/day Terraform, before it gets to work doing what gods do: Filling its realm with its creations. The Elohim has a very, VERY powerful ability, one typically reserved for the truly divine:
That’s all there is, by the way. Just two sentences. It’s possible to completely overlook this ability because it’s so small in comparison to the rest of the Elohim’s stat block, and yet the implications behind it (and uses for it) are rather staggering. As a standard action, the Elohim can conjure ANY living creature, ANY plant, within the 4HD limitation. Do you know what that covers? Every playable race, for one. A wide variety of animals, aberrations, magical beasts, nearly every form of vermin, and even a generous handful of Outsiders. And don’t forget there’s no limit to what form of vegetation the Elohim can spawn (mythical, poisonous, beneficial, etc), in addition to whatever plantlife was created alongside its Demiplane, if any. There’s nothing saying the Elohim must create something that exists in your universe, either–it could very well conjure entirely new forms of life, either in the form of creatures and plants which do technically exist in Pathfinder but simply not in your campaign, or wholesale homebrew creations.
The Elohim will create their demiplanes (which, despite it not specifically stating in their statblock, are permanent according to the lore, which also means they can stack more and more 200x200 bubbles together) and fill them with life as they see fit, watching over them for a short time before abandoning them. Sometimes for days, sometimes for years, sometimes for centuries or even longer than that. Upon their return, the Elohim take silent record of how life in their little bubbles has changed, and if their creation is found wanting… It’s destroyed. Exactly how or why the Elohim judge some of their careful creations as not worth leaving up is anyone’s guess, but once they’ve decided, there’s not a lot the inhabitants inside can do about it.
Once per day, an Elohim can use Mage’s Disjunction (which they can use Mythic Magic to augment further) to instantly shatter their demiplane, and what happens to the lives inside is fully up to the godlike being which created them. Sometimes it will allow them to live, though perhaps they won’t survive in their new environment, but often it kills them right then and there rather than allowing them to die off from an inability to adapt to their sudden change. Elohim can cast (Mythic) Circle of Death three times a day to snuff the life from up to 20d4 (or d6) hit dice worth of living creatures, typically destroying lower life forms instantly and leaving only the stronger, sapient beings alive.
Dispatching hardier creations is typically no issue for the Elohim, capable of using (Mythic) Disintegrate 3/day to eradicate single targets or Power Word Stun to pin more interesting subjects in place while it removes the remainder. If met in full combat with whole groups of stronger targets (such as the party), an Elohim’s preference for single-target spells leaves it at somewhat of a disadvantage… But it can use the monstrously powerful Shapechange at will to turn into a creature better able to handle whatever the party can do. With its Natural Spellcasting ability, an Elohim can take on the form of any entity it desires while still having access to its own spell-likes.
Elohim make for powerful foes, final bosses in and of themselves with their seemingly detached disregard for the lives they’ve created and any life they encounter. Though not evil, an Elohim’s reasoning for creating and destroying lives are wholly ambiguous, essentially left in the hands of the DM, allowing the DM to come up for the What and Why if they’re so inclined.
My take on it, though? Every artist tends to feel some level of embarrassment when looking back over their earlier works.
An elohim is a strange being obsessed with creating miniature worlds populated with creatures of its choosing. It creates new permanent demiplanes or alters remote environments in pre-existing planes, seeds them with new life, then eventually abandons them. An elohim might return to its creation decades or centuries later to observe how its progeny have fared, and might allow them to continue or eradicate them completely. Elohim communicate with other beings only rarely, and always in a cryptic fashion.