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To my mind, even if Aubrey allows these ‘left field’ races in the game, they don’t really seem to fit with the campaign style. As I understand it, the idea is that the PCs, over the course of the campaign, become the rulers of their own nation. I think you’d run into a lot of problems with the good people of Brevoy if you tried to set up a dragonborn as the king or a tiefling as the nation’s chief spiritual adviser.
Given that we’re going to be in a human-centric part of a human-centric campaign setting, I’ll probably stick with human (says the guy who’s playing one of the few non-humans in our other Golarion game).
I think that is a reasonable approach (though the Players Guide, available as a free download, does tell you how other races can fit in). If you really wanted to be one of the wacky races you would need one hell of a good backstory. Although a tiefling would be actually pretty easy considering Cheliax crawls with them and they are treated badly.
4e has elves and eladrin; elves are the wood elf-y types, and eladrin are the grey elf-y type. Or, in FR-speak, moon elves and sun elves are eladrin, and wood elves and wild elves are elves. You could handle it either way in Golarion, and just consider yourself an elf with maybe a bit of a different background depending.
So Ezreal bought some scrolls before the flight back to Sharn.
Read Magic will cover the Deciphering part. Then studying them is DC 15 + Spell Level. That is an auto-pass for the 3rd level ones (Spellcraft is +17) and for the Enervation he'll need to roll a 2 or better. Hah. That'll do.
So that is one hour per spell for the studying = 5 hours.
Time-wise it takes 16 hours to inscribe them to the spellbook.
Space-wise it takes 16 pages which requires Ezreal to start Volume II of his books.
Coin-wise it cost 520 gp.
So as long as the flight from Valaes Tairn to Sharn was 3 days or more he is finished.
I can’t believe those Kalashtar. They just expect us to go into one of the harshest environments in Khorvaire, evade its dangers, and eliminate their enemies without so much as a simple thanks.
“Here’s some goodberry wine and a decanter of endless water to help you on your journey.” Would have been appreciated.
;)
So who are these Riedrans? I'm drawing a bit of a blank here.
Enemies of the kalashtar, friends of the Inspired and the Quori!
The Riedrans are ruled by the Inspired, who are human vessels specially bred to host Quori spirits. The kalashtar are persecuted by the Inspired, fled Riedra to escape them.
All this is FAR from common knowledge, but we got some of the goss on this from our kalashtar friends after we dealt with Karile and her Inspired secretary / assassin.
Not sure exactly how much of this our characters know, but I thik we know at least the basics.
So who are these Riedrans? I'm drawing a bit of a blank here.Enemies of the kalashtar, friends of the Inspired and the Quori!
The Riedrans are ruled by the Inspired, who are human vessels specially bred to host Quori spirits. The kalashtar are persecuted by the Inspired, fled Riedra to escape them.
All this is FAR from common knowledge, but we got some of the goss on this from our kalashtar friends after we dealt with Karile and her Inspired secretary / assassin.
Not sure exactly how much of this our characters know, but I thik we know at least the basics.
I'm not sure how much Gil and Rolund would know about even that encounter -- didn't we come on board after that?
By the way, "inspired choice" made me groan. Just sayin'. ;)
It's a mess of course, though we will basically have to wait to see how much it impacts us personally. Certainly our taxes will be increased as you would expect. It is unfortunate that tax evasion is such a deep rooted way of life here. We actually pay our taxes so we will feel that part. The majority of people do everything they can to avoid paying. For example... I read the other day that only 300 homes in Greece claim and pay the property tax associated with putting in a swimming pool. Aerial photos show around 11,000 of them. (I'm not sure if that was just the greater Athens area or beyond). Add to that things like all professionals nudging you to pay them cash and not get a receipt- that includes, doctors, lawyers, architects and so on and you get the idea of how much of Greece's economy is unrecorded under-the-table transactions.
The most austere measure that would impact people personally is the removal of "bonus" pay. Wages in Greece are quite low, but you get an extra two months of pay per year (1 month at Christmas, 2 weeks at Easter and 2 weeks for summer vacation). Initial plans involved state workers losing 100% of that and private sector jobs having the option to pay it or not (with some provisions that I never really understood). Given the option my job would absolutely cut it because they have been (barely) treading water financially for two years or so now. (I'm leaving that place regardless to get out before the ship goes down.) In the end what I have understood is that state workers will have their bonus pay reduced to a max of 1000 euros per year and private sector jobs will be unaffected as far as bonus pay goes. We'll see what happens in the end.
The frustrating thing about it is, the country is in the s$%& and you see all these people crying about "don't take anything from me" "no more taxes" and so on while they try to make sure they aren't paying anything of consequence to begin with. That isn't how it works and it makes everyone look like a bunch of a*!#*$*s to those loaning the money at the same time. Everyone has to share the burden to get things back on track- it might suck, but the alternative sucks a lot more. I can tell you that leading up the the bailout people were starting to get nervous about having their money in banks here. And not to get too political on you all, but I worry that the US is has the same problematic mindset. People shouting "pay down the deficit" while at the same time wanting lower tax rates and unwilling to give up any thing. How does that work? (I'm not trying to start a fiery discussion there, just making an observation. I honestly hate reading all the political bs on paizo so- apologies. It was a one off.) ;)
I wonder if any of you saw the people fighting police in the streets on Saturday and throwing molotov cocktails? It seems like the news wanted to tie this all into the protests against austerity measures, but these guys really have nothing to do with that. It was May Day. They would have done exactly the same thing economic crisis or no. Any time the police are organized for crowd control they go to fight them. It's just what they do. Dummies. So we woke up Saturday morning and could smell the tear gas blowing through the streets from the 5th floor (4th floor for Europeans) and turned on the news to see it presented as if the general protesters were the same as the anarchist dummies who were out looking for a fight. Btw> no disrespect for anarchist in general. I've known some very smart people in the US who identity with and as anarchists. These are not those type of people.
No, it was a full reply and I guess we didn't have much to add. Greece is a funny country in that the national character is probably not well-known outside of the country itself. Their response seems illogical but they have also had a fairly recent experience of totalitarianism and the role of the state in looking after people is fairly large, corruption appears endemic and I guess the unions and other bodies are traditionally wary of government intentions. But at the end of the day, they are up a creek without a paddle and striking isn't really the way out. I guess some people think a default is a good idea (one in the eye for those damn capitalists) but of course it would probably made Greece a pariah for years, they can't devalue (which normally happens with a default - see Argentina) and so would end up having to put in austerity measures anyway. It looks like a really bad situation - but at least the weather is nice.
I know very little about the situation in Greece, apart from what I hear from you and the occasional headline in the international or (more usually) business sections of the paper. Sounds bad though.
It’s funny what you say about the Greek character, and the avoidance of taxes though ... most of the Greek people I know here (which is a pretty small sample set I admit) come across as really generous, but we’ve got a client at work who is Greek, hell of a nice guy, but he will come up with any excuse to avoid paying Council fees, taxes, rates, avoid complying with Council notices and orders etc. A large part of our work for him comes when he gets himself into trouble with Council and needs to put in a retroactive development application for building works he did years ago without consent, or when he gets a final notice from Council threatening legal action if he doesn’t undertake necessary repairs on property he owns. His attitude is very much, ‘it’s my property, who is the government to tell me what I can or can’t do with it – they just want my money!’
Actually Greeks are very generous and have a culture of gift giving. The thing with taxes goes back to Turkish occupation for 400 years or so. During that time it was considered your patriotic duty to cheat the occupiers out of every dime possible. Part of the terms that enabled them to get help in the revolution ended up with them getting a new king imposed on them who was German so it continued. There hasn't been any king for quite some time, but the general attitude is so ingrained at this point that it is just part of the national character.
In their defense- the government /is/ incredibly corrupt. Every politician offers jobs in the public sector in exchange for election support. Thus the system is completely bloated and byzantine to make work for people who are unnecessary. Here's an example> If we order something over the internet and it gets flagged by customs for taxes we have two options. Pay the tax AND 90 euros to have it delivered from the airport to us, or go out to the airport and do all the paperwork ourselves and pay there to pick it up. Paying the customs tax on a package involves going to 11 different offices to get 40 some odd government stamps on various documents just to enable you to pay the tax. Wtf?
I think everybody hates taxes.
Sure, but most people realise that if no one paid their taxes, we’d all be living like Mad Max. You may not agree on what the government chooses to spend your tax dollars on, you may feel like you’re paying more than you should, and you may have a government that is incredibly wasteful and / or corrupt. All valid reasons for not liking to pay tax, but if you choose to cheat on your taxes, or not pay them, you are causing others to shoulder the burden and (typically) still getting the benefits.
Driving the last of the V8 Interceptors through the post apocalyptic desert would be cool though ...
It's pretty freaking Mad Max out there right now. People are firebombing banks and managed to kill some people doing it. Others are trapped inside flaming buildings. Everything is on strike so trash is piled up in the streets which will give the anarchists plenty to burn tonight. Our neighborhood is blocked off with riot police everywhere. The news is also on strike so I imagine only foreign correspondents are reporting this.
No public transit, schools, hospitals, govt offices, all ancient monuments, news broadcasts and tons of shops are closed. I'm not sure how you manage to close a hospital during a strike. Maybe only emergency services are working?
Here's a short article about the culture of Greek tax evasion from the nyt a few days ago:
Playing Rod freaks me out.
"I gotta get out of the car so I don't get damaged, so I can heal everybody later. Really! It's not to save my own hide!"
As opposed to Hudak:
"I have to charge Xanesha AND Lucretia, take an AOO, and hack away as much as I can at them until my h.p. total fails me and hope I don't die so the squishier ones with all the spells can frag the s%+% out of them!"
Playing Rod freaks me out.
"I gotta get out of the car so I don't get damaged, so I can heal everybody later. Really! It's not to save my own hide!"
As opposed to Hudak:
"I have to charge Xanesha AND Lucretia, take an AOO, and hack away as much as I can at them until my h.p. total fails me and hope I don't die so the squishier ones with all the spells can frag the s*@@ out of them!"
LOL. Here's hoping you can reach my squishy a** before it's too late to patch it back together.
I really balled this one up -- but it somehow feels very realistic this way -- she would have hopped in the driver's seat if she could, and she had the initiative to move second, which she did... so I guess I'm sorry as a player for less-than-ideal choices, but as a character, I'm pretty sure I'm about to die doing the right thing. And I can die satisfied with that.
There you go, there's my exit speech, should I need it.