Paizo reveals Usharak, a new iconic necromancer with a haunted quest

Paizo used a June 4 reveal to introduce Usharak, a new iconic necromancer whose story does as much work for Pathfinder’s Remaster-era mood as any rules preview. He is a young iruxi from a small riverbank village in the Graidmere Swamp, in northeastern Ustalav, and Paizo frames him around a hereditary bone-keeping tradition that binds a piece of each generation’s soul into bones so the next can keep the village protected.

That background gives Usharak a very specific kind of burden. He was apprenticed to the village bone keeper, Nishkim, after ancestral whispers marked him as the next keeper, pulling him away from the hunts and childhood friendships that once shaped his life. Paizo identified Wayne Reynolds as the illustrator, and the character’s defining flaw is just as pointed as the art: Usharak fixates intensely on a subject and will step up to help even when doing so hurts him.

The fiction then pushes him far from the swamp and into the wreckage of the Worldwound in the Sarkoris Scar. Usharak is searching for an ancient library devoted to Abraxas, the demon lord of secrets, because he believes its forbidden knowledge might lead him toward undoing a shame that has followed him for years. He does not move through the ruin like a power fantasy. He advances with patience and misdirection, sending demons toward false leads and slipping past danger whenever he can.

That restraint breaks when a swarm of vescavors finds him, and the attack becomes the story’s emotional center. Their bite and buzzing drag Usharak back to his village, where he hears imagined accusations from the people who depended on him and died anyway. The sharpest turn in the piece is not a spell or a kill, but a self-reckoning: the weight Usharak carries is not just guilt, but family, love, and purpose.

Paizo also uses the reveal to point directly at Pathfinder Impossible Magic, which the store says is expected July 30, 2026, in hardcover, pocket, sketch, and special edition formats. The hardcover is listed at $69.99, and the product page says the book includes four magical classes, magus, necromancer, runesmith, and summoner, plus more than 240 spells and new arcane schools from the Impossible Lands. Paizo’s release schedule also lists July 30 as the street date, while the Rulebook Subscription page says subscribers generally get 3 to 4 rulebook products per year and can receive an email reminder, then skip or cancel before being charged on Subscriber Day.

The reaction on Paizo’s own forums has already tracked with the character’s design, with readers praising the bone-and-glass look, the iruxi and Ustalav connection, and the tragic backstory. Usharak lands as a haunted quest, but also as a signal: Pathfinder’s necromancer can be about devotion, damage, and the people left carrying both.