Intro

There are some projects that when you come up with them feel like they will really change how you approach doing everything. My idea for a 3rd Party SRD type page is one of those ideas. The problem is that my personal life has a lot of flux going around eating up my spoons so by the time I”m thinking about wanting to really show off some great 3pp material, I’m too exhausted to put together a website and write articles. This upcoming Guest Blog takeover has me excited because my personal life is calming down (hopefully. I know I could slap-dash a quick HTML page together with minimal navigation that strictly shows the information that I want it to, but I truly do want to do this particular project justice and have something out there that I can proudly point to as an open-source project that I started. 

With all of that being said, that means I will yet again not be finishing my corruptions, but instead, I’m going to continue piling on the love that the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Lost Omens:Mwangi Exanse has been getting from KDN. I’m also going to return to the basics for myself and do some monster conversion here! I’m going to convert the Biloko family of fey into Starfinder!

A Tool to Use

In all of my previous Rakshasa conversions, I hand-created the stat blocks and did all of the math and looking at tables myself. However this time, I used Starfinder RPG tools to help build these Biloko. Their monster builder takes you through all of the steps of creature creation and at the end spits out an editable stat block. The fact that the stat block is editable at the end makes customizing creatures beyond the basics of creature creation fairly easy. Especially when you need to create some of your own special abilities. 

Learning about Biloko

Before doing the conversion, I wanted to check to see if there was any additional mythology about Biloko I should be aware of before converting them into Starfinder creatures. So, I did a Google search. While by no means an academic literature review, it was enough to tell me that the origins of Biloko come from the Central Africa region, particularly the Mongo people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Based on the information in this Face2Face Africa article, and repeated in a few different websites in the aforementioned Google search, biloko are known to charm wandering humanoids into letting themselves be eaten and that the biloko are fairly aggressive and will attack humans as well to get the meat that they need to sustain themselves. 

Moving the Biloko to Space

In Lost Omens:Mwangi Exapnse, the biloko family of fey have constructed a city, Elokolobha north of Lake Ocota. As far as I know, this is one of the few fey settlements that we know about in Golarion. If the biloko and eloko sustained the city long enough for space travel, there is no reason they could not be out in the stars like most other ancestries from lost Golarion! Now they have settled on many lightly inhabited worlds, typically stealing upon colonization vessels to start their own settlements to slowly pray upon the settlers! As an aside, maybe these creatures can be included in your own Horizons of the Vast game! 

All the Statblocks!

Adjustments in Conversion

The biloko warrior was fairly straightforward to convert. It is almost your standard CR 1 combatant stat block with the added Inspired Feast ability that may or may not come into play, depending on circumstances in your campaign. 

The biloko veteran was only slightly more complicated in the fact that in PF2, they have the Swipe ability that lets them attack two enemies with a single attack roll and then compares it two both ACs and then rolls damage once as well. This reads fairly similar to a Line or Blast effect in Starfinder, but for a melee attack. I almost wrote up the entire ability to be similar to that. However, instead of reworking the wheel, I gave the biloko veteran cleave & great cleave to attack multiple foes around them. 

The eloko was a little more complicated. In PF2, they are melee attackers that can change their size to large and they have a sneak attack. To me, this meant that they should have the operative class template to ensure they had the proper trick attack damage. This does make them statistically different than the biloko warrior and veteran. However, I’m personally fine with this dramatic change as it really helps amplify that after eating magical humanoids an eloko has a lot of changes happen to it! 

Charm Person is likely my biggest letdown of all three of these. Simply put, with the way DCs are calculated in Starfinder, especially the eloko with a charisma of 10 has a woefully impotent charm person. If I was working with a developer I would probably see if there were any workarounds we could use to have a similar ability in this family of fey that would allow for the ability DC to scale upwards. 

Conclusion

I’m in a time of my life where I am having a lot of big ideas, but I’m not able to do all of them at once. That means knowing when to ask for help and or when to take a step or two back. I have to thank Ryan for noticing when the network is starting to straggle some and get our Guest Blog takeover happening again. As much as I love writing, it is also a welcome respite.

We also might see a format change occasionally in the coming months on my blog posts. With Alex stepping back from his blogs, for the time being, it has come to our attention that I’m the only regular Starfinder blogger! I’m likely going to start doing some ‘written’ reviews of the Starfinder rulebooks as they release.