Regarding the requirements for the prestige class in PF#27, one if that the character must be proficient with all martial weapons. Yet, in the listings of the various orders, some of the NPCs are listed that would not seem to fit the requirement.
Examples:
Spoiler:
Order of the Gate, Vicarius Giordano Torchia (LE male human wizard 11, hellknight 2)
Order of the Nail, Paravicar Acillmar (LN male human sorcerer 7, Hellknight 1)
Order of the Scourge, Paravicar Orlayn Khorelos (LG female cleric of Abadar 7, hellknight 2)
Is there some ways these three could qualify for the class that I am missing or is this just an oversight?
Since our Cheliax fix is done now, I'm sure we won't see it anytime soon, but it would be cool if there was another variant PrC or two, namely Hellknight Signifier, which could replace the Hellknight levels for these NPCs.
The other issue is minor...in the article in PF#28, the history laid out make it clear that the Order of the Scourge is the first Hellknight order established, though previous products (the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting & the Council of Thieves Players' Guide) attribute this honor to the Order of the Rack. I assume that PF#28, bring the newer and more detailed treatment of the subject is correct. If any Paizo folks are reading, it might be something worth noting down to be corrected for the revised campaign setting when it comes out later this year (the reference appears in the timeline under the year 4576, on page 203).
Fake Healer's post (fourth one down) in this thread reminded me that I had been meaning to start a thread about poisonous animals.
Though I also found it convenient to have pre-statted zombies and other creatures of various sizes, I can handle having to advance them myselves without too much problem.
However, for the poisonous creatures that typically are encountered in a wide range of sizes (i.e. centipedes, scorpions, snakes, spiders, and probably some more that I forgot), I found that the little cheat sheet advancement chart in the monster's entry is insufficient because it doesn't address the creatures' signature ability...it's poison. It would be very helpful to have some better guidelines about these guys. The DCs I guess can be calculated closely enough using the monster creation guidelines, but it's not clear to me on if the poison damage is supposed to change, and if so, by how much, as you advance the creature.
I think the Bestiary is great, but to me, this seemed like the most glaring omission.
I would like to suggest that in the product downloads, for the "one file per chapter" version of your products, that the names of the individual files within the zipped folder be clearer. A chapter title would be much more useful than a page range. For example, with the Bestiary, "Pages 54-69" is not a useful indicator of what part of the book I'm dealing with, whereas were the same file called "Dark Stalker - Demon, Vrock" I'd know right away whether or not it was what I was looking for.
For another example, compare the page only file names for the chapters in "Book of the Damned, Vol. 1: Princes of Darkness" to the file names on the various volumes of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths. The latter is far more useful than the former.
Generally I prefer the chapter by chapter downloads for the more manageable file size, but often times I end up downloading and then realizing what a hassle it would be to use (Bestiary again being a great example) and then wasting time (and bandwidth) downloading the product again as a single file.
One of my the PCs in my game wields an urumi (PF Campaign Setting, p. 209-211). For those not in the know, this is a bladed whip, or a flexible sword, much like the weapon wielded by the girl in the Soul Caliber game.
Anyhow, the player is arguing that when he makes a trip attack, he should be doing weapon damage, point out that the rules (PF Beta, p.151) state "you can attempt to trip an opponent as part of a melee attack. Though I agree that logically, a creature being tripped by the weapon would be taking damage, I'm not sure that the above reference to melee attack really implies damage. Furthermore, I feel that if a trip attack can do damage, it's unbalanced as why wouldn't the urumi-wielder anyone not use the trip attack every time.
I'll use spoiler tags in this post just in case but I suspect that the thread will have enough spoilers later on that we won't need to keep using them...just don't read on if you're playing in a Rise of the Runelords campaign (especially my players).
It's a pretty long post, but if you're of limited attention span, you can skip the details...the important thing is that Nualia has escaped and I'm trying to decide what happens next.
For those who want the details, here is how we got there...
Spoiler:
Upon arriving at Thisteltop, the the heroes captured Gorgmurt (sp?) the druid outside, and interrogated him, finding out the shortest path to the first dungeon level. Sneaking into the stockade, they took out the guards in the east tower, then went straight downstairs. Busting up an uncomfortable scene, they took out Bruzthamus and the goblin wives. Orik heard the commotion and came to investigate but wisely backed down from the five on one fight. The party agreed to let him go, without his weapons, on the condition that he was going to get the hell out of Dodge a.s.a.p. (which he did).
Continuing on, the heroes explored the rest of the bedroom wing, prison, and temple (defeating the yeth hounds), and finally the tentamort in his cave. At this point, the spellcasters were out of spells so the group decided to bed down in the tentamort's lair. Not wanting to let the group get away with a full night's sleep, on-site, in the middle of a fortress invasion (which I feel is almost always a total stretch), I had the alarm raised when the goblin corpses in the tower were found at the changing of the guard shift.
Ripnugget, upon hearing the news, sent his goblins to comb the place for the intruders. One group of six goblins found the party and were defeated by them. Still not getting the hint, the party decided to try to complete their nights rest.
At this point, when the goblins failed to return from their foray into the tentamort's cavern, Ripnugget organized the bulk of the tribe to deal with them, while sending a message to warn Nualia of the developments. Waking to the barks of six angry goblin dogs invading their "bedroom" the heroes were soon immersed in a battle that carried out into the other part of the cave, where they encountered Ripnugget and most of his goblins (excepting two commandos and their dogs that had been sent to bodyguard Nualia and Lyrie). Despite the numbers, the five heroes (3rd level Beta PCs) defeated Ripnugget's force...then went back to bed.
Finally sleeping through the night (and raising to 4th level), they woke to find Thistetop empty. Searching the floor, they failed to find the secret door to the lower level (which had been closed by Nualia's crew as they took off, seeing which way the wind was blowing). Going back upstairs, the party explored the rest of the stockade (failing to find the treasure room), then went outside to further interrogate Gorgmur, who they had left tied up in his clearing. He too was gone (freed by Nualia on her way out).
The party tracked Nualia's posse through the Nettlewood and down the road up until the point where they headed up onto the Devil's Platter (a large limestone escarpment). At this point, the party abandoned the chase and returned to Thisteltop, determined that they had missed something. They finally found the secret door to the lower level, and after an unpleasant run-in with the trap in the hall, made their way as far as the hall just beyond the coin pillar (outside Malfie's room) where we called it a night.
I haven't really decided what Nualia's current course of action will be and am open to ideas as to what people think what is likely, or what would be fun. She could hide out in the wilderness, possibly returning to Thistletop after the heroes move on, or setting up shop in a new hideout. Alternately, she could abandon the area entirely, or perhaps head to Magnimar to regroup (in which case I could possibly tie her into The Skinsaw Murders of the group doesn't track her down right away). She's got Lyrie, Gorgmurt, two goblin commandoes with goblin dogs with her.
Orik has fled to Magnimar on his own, and will likely continue on to Korvosa. I am not opposed to a further encounter with him, but I probably won't make him rejoin Nualia...based on the development section in his encounter, it sounds like the party's involvement (and willingness to let him go free) was just the push to get him to abandon a job that he had already soured on considerably.
Ok, in the unlikely event that any of my players are reading this, please stop now.
I just started running Runelords, and two of the characters in my group are gnomes from Whistledown. In fact they are brothers, Twiddlemitt Jumberdolt Roselduggin and Nimbledorf Blumpkin Roselduggin. The Roselduggins, like many gnomish familes, have a strong tradition of fey influenced sorcery, and Twiddlemitt is no exception. Unfortunately, his younger brother Nimbledorf was born without the spark and had to turn to the study of wizardry (shudder) to master the arcane. The two brothers have an ongoing rivalry on which form of arcane power is better.
Even though in general I plan on sticking fairly close to the AP as written, given the interesting interlocking background of these two characters, I was thinking that a short side-trek highlighting gnomish culture might be an interesting diversion at some point in the campaign, most likely
Spoiler:
on the journey from Magnimar to Turtleback Ferry at the beginning of Hook Mountain Massacre.
We're still months away from that point now, but I am just kind of brainstorming some ideas and I was wondering if anyone else here on the boards had done anything with the Whisledown/Sanos Forest area, or have any fun suggestions they'd like to share that might work well with this background.
I don't want to waste a lot of time on this tangent, but I am thinking that one or two sessions along these lines would be a fun way to reward this unusual character backgrounds.
We just finished a sixteen-month campaign that began fully in D&D 3.5 and transitioned slowly to Pathfinder. I ran Red Hand of Doom for a party of four players that consisted of an elven necromancer, a barbarian (first half-orc, replaced by a human), a human monk, and a human cleric (first of Pelor, replaced by a cleric of Pharasma).
It took us 17 sessions to complete the campaign. We began transitioning to Pathfinder Alpha between sessions 8 and 9 at the end of April, though I did not enforce complete transitions. Basically, we immediately adapted CMB to replace grapple etc., and a few other minor changes, and I gave the players the chance to switch over their PCs or not as they desired. At this point, we were at the end of Part II of Red Hand and the cleric of Pelor was killed...
Spoiler:
The party chased off the black dragon Regiarix from the Ruins of Rhest. The cleric donned the suit of plate that was in Regi's horde, then proceeded to stand as night guard in plain view in said armor on the roof of the town hall that served as the dragon's lair. Regiarix returned and wreaked his vengeance upon the cleric before the rest of the PCs woke up, got up there and finally brought him down.
At this point, the player rolled up a replacement cleric using PF Alpha, choosing to be a priest of Pharasma. Even though we began the campaign with the D&D pantheon, the players had not been to Brindol yet so I simply handwaved the temple of Wee Jas to be a temple of Pharasma instead. At this point the players were just under halfway from 8th to 9th level and I switched over to using the PF XP system.
By the time of the release of the Beta in August, the players were just about to hit 10th level, and were just beginning Part IV of the campaign...
Spoiler:
...the climatic siege of Brindol.
Though I still did not enforce a complete conversion of PCs to Pathfinder, from this point on I used the Beta as the primary rules reference during play, for adjudicating spell effects and anything else that came up.
A few additional PF rules were adopted over the next two months, including adopting the CMB bonus for the monk (who was otherwise a 3.5 monk), and a complete conversion of the barbarian when we lost his character sheet and had to draw him up from scratch (it was a human before and after; the half-orc barbarian had come and gone before PF was ever announced).
We finished the campaign this Wednesday on our 17th session. The party did well against the big bads.
Spoiler:
All PCs were flying as they made their way up the shaft into the inner sanctum, though Trellara (the NPC bard) and the necromancer's undead minions were climbing. The necromancer flew up first, invisible, and learned of the silence effect without being noticed. So the party was able to gain surprise, with the necromancer getting off a fireball from his staff (shooting from within the shaft where he could speak freely), then the barbarian rushed in, reaching Azarr Kul before he could get his antilife shell up, and keeping him from doing so by hammering him down within a couple of rounds. When the Aspect of Tiamat showed up afterwards, the barbarian was the only one in its melee range, and was nearly shredded in one round, but a timely use of a heal scroll by our cleric saved him, and he was able to survive the battle, though he was savaged again pretty thoroughly.
Has anyone started a thread (or some other location) to track various easter eggs or other connections between the various Pathfinder APs and Pathfinder/GameMastery modules?
For example, I thought that there was someone in Sandpoint that had a sibling in Korvosa, but I haven't been able to find the connection flipping through the old issues.
Also, there was the connection...
Spoiler:
between the two diseases; Vorel's Phage in Foxglove Manor (Skinsaw Murders) and Blood Veil in Seven Days to the Grave, in that the latter is a variant based off the former
.
So, what else have we seen in the way of connections?
In the secrets section of Guide to Korvosa it states
Spoiler:
that the burial place of Sorshen, Runelord of Lust, is in one of the vaults beneath Castle Korvosa
.
However, in the Thassilon article in Pathfinder # 1 (Burnt Offerings), it states that modern site of Korvosa was
Spoiler:
the location of one of the other Thassilonian sub-nations (the domain of Gluttony, if i remember correctly, though I don't have the book handy at the moment).
So I'm curious if anyone has noticed this discrepancy, assuming that it is one. Anyone from Paizo care to comment on whether or not this was a ret-con or if the situation is just unclear because of the limited info that has been released on this era so far?
I just wanted to throw out there that I would love to see the spells assigned to their schools in a way that makes sense for the school's themes. In my opinion, this was the way that 3.0 and prior editions handled it, but in the 3.5 revision there was what I consider to be a misguided attempt to reclassify spells into different schools to balance the schools.
A good example of this is the orb spells from the splatbooks. In Tome & Blood (3.0), Acid Orb was an evocation spell. In Complete Arcane (3.5), it was recast as a conjuration spell. If the primary effect of a spell is to create and deliver energy damage, that spell should be an evocation spell. Trying to balance the schools is probably futile, but if it is necessary, I suggest that a better way to do it is to add new spells that fit the theme of their school. After all, if I play a conjurer, I'm looking to have a wizard whose primary schtick is summoning creatures to do his bidding. If I'm looking for straight up damage, it's evoker all the way. This mixing and matching blurs the lines between the schools and works against the flavor of having specialists at all.
Ok, Alpha release 1 is 65 page, Pathfinder Beta currently listed as 300+ pages, while the final hardcover rulebook is projected to be 420 pages. With a page count hovering in the middle like that, I was curious, do you expect the Beta release to be a self-contained rulebook, or will it be more like the Alpha, in which you still use the D&D core books, substituting Pathfinder rules where applicable?
As the subject indicates, I'm a little confused about the various shipping options.
I've been an early adopter of both Pathfinder and GameMastery subscriptions. Originally I had selected the option to have my GM modules held to ship with Pathfinder. At some point in the fall, due to some delay in the printing schedule, I had a few items ship that shipped separately.
At that point, the "hold items for one monthly shipment" option appeared so I switched to that. However I still find things are shipping out separately. I received GM module Crucible of Chaos sometime last week and then Pathfinder Vol. 7 this weekend.
Why aren't things shipping once a month? I'm not clear on whether or not I should switch back to the first option. My top priority is not to waste money on multiple shipping charges, though given the choice I would rather have Pathfinder given priority over GM modules. So in an ideal world, there would be one monthly shipment, and it would happen whenever the new Pathfinder was ready.
Finally, I will probably purchase quite a few of the Pathfinders Chronicles line but maybe not every one, and considering the price differences between various items in the line, I would prefer not to subscribe and have everything shipped right away. Is it possible to hold non-subscription items held to ship when the next subscription item ships? Presently the added cost of shipping items separately is holding me up from placing orders, and unfortunately, I have yet to see any of the Chronicles line appear in local game stores.
I hope I'm not coming off as too demanding here, it just seems like these subscriptions options aren't working as smoothly as they could.
I noticed that D0: Hollow's Last Hope was released as OGL compatible but without the d20 logo. As far as I can tell from the press announcements, it looks like this will be the case for the other modules and Pathfinder too. It doesn't bother me at all, but just out of curiosity, why not use the logo for these? I can't see what the advantage is that offsets the presumed sales hit you'd take by not having the logo.
I noticed in Eric Boyd's conversion notes for "A Gathering of Winds" (online supplment for issue # 129), the opening line states that "conversion notes for Mintarn (Alhaster and Redhand)...have already been mentioned in conversion sidebars for earlier adventures".
In the "Age of Worms Overload" download, Starmantle is identified as the Realms equivalent to Alhaster. Was this switched to Mintarn at some later point that I missed, or is this reference I mentioned above the first we've heard of it?
I kind of prefer Mintarn, since Starmantle is so far removed from Daggerford/Diamond Lake and Waterdeep/the Free City. What do other folks think?
First off, I haven't read the whole AP yet. I started with "Thirteen Cages" and "Strike on Shatterhorn" and then went back to the beginning and read "Life's Bazaar", "Floor Season", and "Zenith Trajectory", and have just started on "The Demonskar Legacy."
As the thread title indicates, my question relates to the end of "Zenith Trajectory". Spolers below...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay, so Celeste and the dwarfleganger hire the party to rescue Zenith Splintershield, but he isn't really captured, he's gone bad. That's fine. The encounter with Zenith seems to assume that the PCs end up fighting him (which they most likely would do). Yet the wrap-up talks of rewards for the rescue and does not mention the possibility that Zenith might be dead.
So what do you think? Does it matter if he's killed? How would that effect the reward?
Is whether or not he dies relevant at all further into the campaign? I'm guessing not because I think I might have read something in one of the later modules that implied that as long as the Cagewrights had the Shackleborn, it didn't matter if they were dead or alive? Is that right?
Either way, it seems odd that Celeste would reward the PCs for a rescue when in fact they've killed the person that they were supposed to rescue and just dragged back his corpse. For that matter, even assuming that they haul his body back seems like a stretch. I bet my players would just kill him and then return and explain what happened, possibly relying on Zone of Truth or other spells to verify their story if necessary.
To me this seems like the first major point where things could break down in this campaign. Does anyone have any thoughts or experiences to share?
Posts
