Tirapheg
Image © John Meszaros, accessed at his deviantArt here
[The tirapheg is one of those monsters that, like the flumph, was tarred with the brush of "stupidest monster ever" by the irony-poisoned mid 2000s internet. However, unlike the flumph, it's never gotten much of a critical reappraisal. The reason for that, I believe, is that the tirapheg never made it into the Tome of Horrors. Paizo's editorial staff always had a soft spot for the flumph, having given it an official 3.5 D&D conversion with the Dungeon Magazine adventure "Box of Flumph", and so happily adopted ToH's OGL flumph into their setting, first through Misfit Monsters Redeemed, then Bestiary 3. WoTC copied Paizo's homework in making their flumphs kindly but endearingly pathetic. And now the flumph is on Magic cards and plush keychains and the like. Where's the love for the tirapheg? Perhaps the closest is Paizo's quelaunt, which is similarly faceless and has trilateral symmetry, but is much more powerful and explicitly malicious.
As @bogleech correctly pointed out, the tirapheg is inscrutable and horrifying. There's never been a canonical explanation for why the tirapheg is Like That, so I wanted to leave mine similarly vague, but seed a few possible explanations and add additional creepy details. I decided to tie it to Leng out of all Pathfinder's various Cthulhu Mythos homages and horror settings because most Leng denizens are pretty high CR, and so this could be used to seed the Plateau into a campaign from the start.
If you'd like to support what I do, see bonus monsters and maybe even sponsor your own creations, check out the Creature Codex Patreon here]
Tirapheg CR 3 N Aberration This shuffling thing is taller than an average man and roughly human shaped. It has three human-like heads, only the middle of which has eyes, nose and ears, the other two having indentations faintly resembling those sensory organs. None of the three heads has a mouth, but an oversized mouth with thin tentacles growing above it sits in the creature’s midsection. It has three arms, the exterior ones ending in a sharp spike and the central one having an articulated hand. The situation is similar with its three legs—the outer two end in stumps, while only the middle leg has an entire foot.
Tiraphegs are strange scavengers found deep within the Plateau of Leng, from whence they emerge into the Waking World. Their origins are unknown and perhaps unknowable. Many sages believe they are merely the living manifestations of nightmares, whereas others whisper that they are perhaps the tortured victims of the denizens of Leng, or even their malformed, rejected offspring. They tend to follow adventurers in the caverns where they dwell, shuffling slowly behind them while shying away from direct contact. Tiraphegs eat decaying flesh and fungi, and will gather the slain victims of a party to cache and let properly decompose for later. If a tirapheg is interrupted in their looting, or if something said or done by a party member startles them, they lash out violently.
In combat, a tirapheg attacks with its two spiked arms and grabs with its third. Tiraphegs instinctively go for the throat with their grips, preventing opponents from casting spells or crying out. The bizarre physiology of a tirapheg protects them from harm—they have a third eye in the back of their head, and their internal organs do not follow any sane pattern, making them very difficult to strike critically and impossible to flank. If they are surrounded or badly injured, they can create phantasmal duplicates of themselves in a flash of blinding, maddening light. The original tirapheg then typically makes a slow, hobbling retreat while its two duplicates battle to cover its escape before evaporating.
Tiraphegs usually make their dens in tight places inaccessible to larger predators. They appear to be comforted by the number 3—triplicate patterns are often scratched into the walls of their den, and multiple tiraphegs found in the same area will organize themselves into triads. Tiraphegs do not intentionally collect treasure, but small items like coins and jewelry may still be found on corpses they carry back to their lairs. It is unknown how they reproduce; tiraphegs have no discernable sexes, and young tiraphegs have not been observed. They cannot speak, but do understand Aklo; on the rare times communication has been successful, the tiraphegs merely scrawled into the dirt single words such as “cold”, “hunger” and “empty”.
