I find myself in the unique position as a recent Pathfinder 2e convert to properly explain to you the most terrifying creature in all of tabletop, a being of absolute and unfathomable violence, contained within the body of a humble boar.
It all starts on Archives of Nethys, an officially-sanctioned repository of PF2e’s material that Paizo generously supports. The Bristle Boar, originally intended to be a level 3 monster, is accidentally listed as level 83, making it by far the highest-level creature in the entire system.
Some context, in case you only have knowledge of D&D: Like D&D, Pathfinder 2e’s max level is 20. As such, the highest-level monster listed on Archives of Nethys is level 27. The system itself also has a unique quirk, in that your level is basically added to everything you’re proficient with. Creatures don’t have a proficiency bonus, but they operate off very similar math.
Take PF2e’s version of the Tarrasque, a monster it shares in common with D&D—this bad boy has an armour class of 54, meaning you need to roll a 54 on an attack to hit it. High-level players have big, stonking bonuses to their attack rolls, which makes this possible, but it’s still a big ask even at endgame levels of godhood.
But because we know how a creature scales from levels 1 to 20, we can also do some mathematical extrapolation to scale a monster from level 20 to 83, if we want.
Which begs the question, what would a biblically accurate level 83 bristle boar look like? Like a thorn wedging itself in the brains of PF2e’s community, one player dug deep and found the answer. “I took the creature building guidelines and fixed the statblock,” writes user Lawrencelot on the Pathfinder 2nd edition subreddit, before presenting this monstrosity.
I fixed the stats of the Bristle Boar from r/Pathfinder2e
A level 83 bristle boar with actual, level-appropriate stats is horrifying. It has an armour class of 138. It has 7,931 hitpoints. It hits you for 4d6 + 158 damage—a bonus so large you have to wonder why you’re rolling 4d6 to begin with, and let’s not forget, because of how PF2e’s critical hit rules work (you crit on a roll of 10 above an armour class, and double your damage) it’d actually be dealing 344 damage on every blow, because it’s always gonna crit unless it rolls a natural one.
In a toe-to-toe fight, a single attack from the Bristle Boar would cleave away half of a Tarrasque’s health. A second hit would put it in the dirt. Even if it rolled one on the die to attack, PF2e’s rules would simply downgrade a critical hit to a normal strike: Enough to make the monstrosity quake in its scaled boots.
Some of the extra touches from Lawrencelot are fun, as well—unless someone rolls a 20 on the die against its Fortitude save of 129(!), they’re going to critically fail and suffer the Dazzled condition for 10 years. All because the Bristle Boar (which I must stress, is the size of a regular boar) kicked some dust at you. The horror.
If you face down this terror, however? The rewards are great, not just for you, but for every player in existence. User hungLink42069 (nice) figured out that the Bristle Boar would award 87,960,930,222,080 exp, or as they put it: “Assuming there are about 50 million Pathfinder players, one boar should be able to easily bring every character that has ever existed up to level 20.”
I’m sure the good people running Archives of Nethys will fix this in short order. Please. I don’t want TTRPG’s most powerful pig tearing a hole through space-time and dooming our world, too.
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