David knott 242's page

This death has interesting implications for the Starfinder setting.

Previously, Rovagug and Torag were the only deities positively identified as being absent in the Starfinder setting (but probably alive on Old Golarion, if I have read the clues correctly).

Many of us mistakenly assumed that all of the other deities were still alive and present, just a lot less popular. Clearly that is not the case -- we cannot assume that any deity not mentioned in Starfinder material is alive or dead at that point. But I guess that matters less in a setting with no clerics receiving their spells directly from deities.

I wonder how long it will take to incorporate all this new material into the Archives of Nethys?

Has anyone bought this new Flip-Mat Classics edition and been able to compare to the older, original release that had extra, unusual creases to the map? If the new edition doesn’t have the unusual, extra creases, I might consider buying it.

My copy of the original map didn't have those extra creases in it.

Why is the pdf for this thing nearly 20 times the size of the pdf for the other pfs scenario this month?

The PDF is actually of reasonable size -- but the ZIP file contains some absurdly large map (PNG) files.

And they are closed today, so they won't be doing anything else until Monday.

Is that also why my subscription order got so badly screwed up this month? It not only didn't ship until Monday, but I lost my Tier 2 and Legacy advantage and was not granted by PDFs. I have never seen my order messed up this bad in all the years that I have been dealing with you.

Not only a minimum character count, but the ancient arts of 'sentences', 'paragraphs', reasonably proper 'punctuation' and 'spelling' would not be too far afield as a reasonable ask.

Just placing a minimum character count will get

........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ..........................................................................

Style reviews that do not help the buyer.

The trick is coming up with something that is easy to program into a system that is meant to detect such things but hard for a human being to deliberately subvert without adversely affecting people attempting to post good faith reviews. I suspect that would be fairly difficult.

Raelysk wrote:

Still waiting, despite payment authorization on Wednesday (I don't actually remember ever having more than one day between payment authorization & shipping before) :(

Weirdly I got charged about half an hour ago and nothing shipped. Never had that before but it's good to know it does happen sometimes?

Hopefully it's not some weird issue this time since you are having a long one

It should mean that your order is about to ship, as the original authorization has undoubtedly expired by now.

I am worried about my order, as there has been no re-authorization on it yet.

Rysky wrote:

Rip Tanner, formerly Desna’s Avatar, formerly Stunt Monkeys (note the extra s), formerly a half dozen other aliases has been banned multiple times from the Paizo forums for repugnant views and attempts to impersonate other posters. They have the telltale sign of spam-liking every single salty or horrible post on the site, unnervingly right after it was posted usually, which definitely feels like bot behavior.

Back when they actually wrote reviews they were blatant in their misogyny, queer phobia, and racism, and would also blatantly lie about wording and events in the books in order to justify their reviews (a common refrain from their reviews was “minus 1 star for Paizo’s usual brand of feminism”).

Good God.

Now the posts I made that they favorited feel tainted.

There is a logical fallacy there. This poster's opinions obviously should be considered worthless (having no information value), not 100% guaranteed to be wrong. Otherwise, I could get anyone following this logic to commit suicide by pointing out that some repugnant person is in favor of breathing, eating, drinking, and other activities that keep a person alive.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

Yeah, they also have a habit of favoriting every post that is remotely critical of Paizo and PF2 in particular UNLESS those are posts that criticising Paizo over doxxing/Alvarez/Tonya/HR failures, in which case they favourite anybody *supporting* Paizo, because probably in their mind there's a straight line between trans black feminism and Paizo publishing PF2.

Back when Paizo had serious people moderating the forums, their sock puppets would go down quickly, but now that there's been a complete turnover of people the institutional memory got lost and here we are.

I feel like I haven't seen a mod in weeks. Stuff I flagged forever ago has gone nowhere.

I saw a spam post that I reported earlier this week disappear immediately after I reported it but before I clicked on the author's name to see if he had any other spam posts that required reporting, so somebody is doing some moderation work on these boards.

Tectorman wrote:

So this book, advertised as a core rulebook and including revised class options from the Core Rulebook, will also feature eight ancestries, none of which were Common rarity before. Are they going to be Common rarity now? Is Paizo doing away with rarity-based gating for ancestries?

Or are players going to read those options at the back of the book, get excited about playing a catfolk or a hobgoblin or a kobold (just like their fellow players excited for an elf or a dwarf or a gnome), only to find that they still need to negotiate, bribe, catch-the-GM-on-a-good-day, etc., when their fellow player can just pick elf or dwarf and legitimately not expect to have to defend that choice?

Has this ever actually happened? Is there some draconian GM out there saying "no you cannot have fun with your build grumble grumble"?

This question should only matter for organized play, but I would be surprised if too many GMs handled this particular issue differently. If ancestries that were not in the original Core Rulebook were added to this book (which basically replaces the old Core Rulebook), it would only make sense for them to be Common and freely available. I trust they did not remove or make Uncommon/Rare any ancestries from the original Core Rulebook? That would be far more of an issue.

P. 24 are the damages in error? The medium are doing less damage than the small for all these weapons. Is there an official errata for this book?

aonprd.com has the correct weapon damage values.

Update: The problem appears to be fixed for me.

keftiu wrote:

Ravingdork wrote:

Are dromar not orcs or half-orcs? Seems I misinterpreted some of the earlier thread posts.

Dromaar and Half-Orc mean the same thing.

I suspect Dromaar is the replacement for the term "Half-Orc" (which is pretty OGL, and also a bit squicky) but is a superset of literal "half orcs".

Since it also includes someone who's like 7/16 Orc or 3/8 Orc. It's just "you are conspicuously a mixture of orc and human ancestries" but the exact percentages don't matter.

One of the good things about dropping Half-Orc is that your 7/16 Orc is not a "Half-Orc".

That certainly helps with some of my character concepts, many of which have been half-elves or half-orcs whose parents were also of the same mixed ancestry, rather than one pureblood member of each of the ancestral species.

I remember having one half-elven clan whose women mated with visiting human sailors but tried to retain the benefits of mixed ancestry, so every few generations they went on quests to find elves who could up the elven percentage enough to prevent their children from having their ancestry diluted to basically being fully human.

I have been able to get to these links from the front page, by remembering key words that auto-complete to the direct links, and using MS Edge. Using Chrome to click on these links from a non-front page still does not work.

With Netflix closing down its DVD by mail service today, I did a Web search for any surviving DVD by mail services and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple. One was CafeDVD (which seems to have a rather limited selection, which is probably why I never joined up with them in the past), and another was Scarecrow Video in Seattle, which appears to be a non-profit video store that is located in Seattle and (the part that makes it of interest to someone like me who live on the east coast) they have started up a rent by mail service that apparently offers a good portion of their tremendously large DVD selection.

So -- Does anyone from the Seattle area have anything they can share about Scarecrow Video? Apparently James Jacobs loved the place as of about a dozen years ago.

I must admit that I am having a tough time wrapping my head around their business model, but it does look like something that I should look into further if their prices are reasonable and they can stay in business as they are.

is it just me or does that half-orc Dromaar look a bit more elvish than expected?

I think orcs are also supposed to have pointed ears, but the artwork of the orc and the dromaar is inconsistent on that point.

At one time, starting a subscription would remove one copy of each upcoming book in that subscription from your sidecart. Maybe that isn't working that way any more?

David knott 242 wrote:

Aristophanes wrote:

If it is Asmodeus, was he wise enough to put contingency clauses in all his contracts, or was he arrogant enough to believe he was invincible.

What deity would plan for his own demise? He certainly would not want to make things easier for the survivors if something did happen to him.

A deity who knows (or has sufficient reason to believe) that their demise is unavoidable and has goals they want achieved even if they cannot see it done themselves.

I mean, it's easy enough to imagine a good deity defending some dangerous artifact to put plans in place to have said artifact moved to the protection of an ally in the event of their death, or kept out of reach of those who would misuse it, at a minimum.

If the deity in question is well known as a Machiavellian schemer and they don't have plans specifically designed to go into motion upon their death, then what are they even doing?

I didn't mean to say that Asmodeus made no plans for the possibility of his death -- but I am sure that any such plans would be to screw over the survivors, not ensure a smooth transition of power.

If it is Asmodeus, was he wise enough to put contingency clauses in all his contracts, or was he arrogant enough to believe he was invincible.

What deity would plan for his own demise? He certainly would not want to make things easier for the survivors if something did happen to him.

Of course, a natural thought would be whether consistency with the Starfinder setting would require the removal of Torag and/or Rovagug, as they are the only two deities specifically absent from that setting. But I have always assumed that they went wherever Golarion did and thus are most likely still alive.

Or can dead deities be brought back to life? The loss of power by some of the core deities in Starfinder could be the result of a temporary death.

David knott 242 wrote:

Asmodeus is the core deity whose death would most strongly affect the setting, as he is the patron of Cheliax. The confirmed death of Asmodeus would obviously rock that nation to its core, much as the death of Aroden did in the previous century.

From the gods' side, who would be brave enough to try to take over as the patron of Cheliax? With two of these patrons dying in a little over a century, which deity would try to take over as the next patron? And which of the remaining deities would the people of Cheliax turn to? Iomedae might want to press her claim as the inheritor of Aroden, but I doubt that a nation where people have been worshiping Asmodeus for several decades would be willing to make such a radical change from evil to good, especially with that recent war against followers of Iomedae.

Zon-kuthon.

The patron of Nidal? Best choice in terms of closest alignment match among the top 20, but otherwise many issues (as is the case with nearly every other candidate).

The first candidate I thought of is whoever comes out on top in the power struggle to become the leader of Hell, but the issues for that devil would include the following:

1) That struggle could take a while.
2) The winner would be considerably weaker than Asmodeus was.
3) All contracts made with Asmodeus would be null and void and would have to be renegotiated with the new guy.

Asmodeus is the core deity whose death would most strongly affect the setting, as he is the patron of Cheliax. The confirmed death of Asmodeus would obviously rock that nation to its core, much as the death of Aroden did in the previous century.

From the gods' side, who would be brave enough to try to take over as the patron of Cheliax? With two of these patrons dying in a little over a century, which deity would try to take over as the next patron? And which of the remaining deities would the people of Cheliax turn to? Iomedae might want to press her claim as the inheritor of Aroden, but I doubt that a nation where people have been worshiping Asmodeus for several decades would be willing to make such a radical change from evil to good, especially with that recent war against followers of Iomedae.

Sorry If missed this elsewhere, but if I'm a rulebook subscriber, and would like the special edition (with PDF) as opposed to the standard version, what would be the appropriate way for me to achieve that?

Since there are in fact two separate rulebook subscriptions (one for regular edition hardbacks, the other for special edition), you can do half of the process yourself, but I would guess that you would want to wait until Paizo has done their part.

So part 1 would be to simply cancel your standard rulebook subscription by sending an e-mail to customer.service@paizo.com as Dancing Wind suggested. Mention in your e-mail that you are canceling that subscription because you want the special edition subscription instead.

If they don't start up your special edition subscription at the same time they cancel your regular rulebook subscription, you can still start the special edition subscription yourself at that point. The place where you originally signed up for the regular rulebook subscription now has two buttons, one for each of the two types of rulebook that they have subscriptions for.

Which iconics package were you trying to download? All of the packages I checked in my downloads seemed to have reasonable sizes, although one of them did take several attempts.

Definitely click on "Problem downloading this file? Click here." if you can get that to come up at any point in the process.

If all that fails, send an e-mail to customer.service@paizo.com and let them know exactly which item has the problem.

And a posting that the end of shipping has been delayed could save them some e-mails/tickets. I have gone with (and suggested that others go with) assuming that end of shipping happens on time and thus lack of an order by the end of the last scheduled day of shipping indicates a problem and thus send an e-mail to Customer Service at that time if I haven't received a shipping e-mail. Obviously, if there is a posting in the appropriate thread in the Announcements forum about a delay in shipping, I would hold off on doing that as long as the revised end of shipping date remains in the future.

And you should have sent e-mails to customer.service@paizo.com a long time ago about your missing shipments. Since you were apparently willing to let it go for so long, I would recommend sending an e-mail to them canceling all of your subscriptions with the reason that they haven't shipped anything to you in over a year. After all, you probably don't want them to suddenly and all at once catch up on all those shipments now.

There appears to be a problem with the digital downloads of this product, both the JPG and PDF archives are broken. Could you please check?

Send an e-mail to customer.service@paizo.com if you want to trigger some action here.

I can confirm that Customer Service is aware of the problem and have passed that information on to the people who can do something about it, according to their reply to my e-mail to them.

What's especially curious about this one is the final line, no longer mentioning the OGL or The World's Oldest Roleplaying Game.

Given recent events and announcements, I take it this one might no longer be under the Open Game License (but presumably not under the ORC yet either)?

I seriously doubt that part 3 of an adventure path would be licensed differently than parts 1 and 2, so almost certainly this one would have to still be under the OGL (as I think someone would have said something if part 1 was under ORC or no license).

At least it is predictable now.

3. Neutrality as balance. This is the Gygaxian approach, and as such is pretty much axiomatically a bad idea. This is the "I saved three kittens last week, so I need to kick a puppy tomorrow or I'll become too Good." These are the people who sign on to promote Hellish invasions in order to serve "the great balance between good and evil". This is dumb.

I would agree about neutrality on the good/evil axis -- actively balancing good and evil is really just a complicated version of evil.

But actively balancing law and chaos to some extent is absolutely necessary for the survival and sanity of sapient beings.

IIRC, Michael Moorcock called what is being called "neutrality" here "balance". I like "balance" better in this context. Even after we get rid of "alignment" as a rules element.

The two concepts really should be differentiated. Actively trying to maintain a balance between order and chaos is a very different thing from being indifferent to that conflict.

Send an e-mail to customer.service@paizo.com about this problem.

The updated file is only 159 bytes in size, so you will need to get in touch with the Paizo folks tomorrow to get the issue fixed.

So does that mean that the old polymorph effect prevents the new one (at least without reverting to "true" form first), or that the new one supersedes the old one? It obviously can't mean that a creature capable of assuming one form can never gain the ability to assume a different one.

I'm starting to think my order has gotten lost. Tracking shows it has been at the step where it's being taken from the destination UPSMI facility to my local USPS office since the 24th.

Remember that those days between the 24th and today include a weekend.

My order is only a little bit ahead of yours -- it also left Washington state on the 24th and just reached my region today.

They do also have to prioritize the reported problems. I would assume that canceling a subscription or removing an item from an order that is about to be shipped would take priority over getting an order or subscription initiated, which in turn would take priority over a problem with completing a preorder for an item that is still a few months out from being released.

Hilary Moon Murphy wrote:

How available are hotel spaces for this convention? Is it one that is difficult to get hotels for?

I can't make any promises but I did a quick search and it looks like there are a fair number of hotels available currently for "reasonable" rates in downtown Philly. Obviously that will change as time goes on but right now it looks like it wouldn't be too difficult to get a place. I think Philly also has a decent (by American standards) public transit system downtown if you're a little outside walking distance.

And the hotel where they hold this convention is near the hub of this transit system. If you know what you are doing, you can avoid having to drive into Philadelphia by getting a room near one of the suburban train stations. The last time I went there, I drove to one of the PATCO High Speed Line stations in southern New Jersey and took the train to center city Philadelphia.

Parking in that part of Philadelphia is something I try to avoid if possible.

It looks like they had a good PDF of Highhelm at one point but replaced it with a new empty version. I hope they fix it soon.

keftiu wrote:

William Ronald wrote:

Will the panels that some employers are participating in be available on YouTube after Gen Con? They sound very interesting as well.

The VODs are all up on Twitch.

On YouTube as well.

Where are they? I haven't been able to find recordings of any of these three panels:

ORC License—Q&A ft. Erik Mona
Learn about ORC License! We'll explain how game systems are licensed and evolve under the ORC, answer questions about implementation and limitations, and speculate on the future.

WTF Happened With Dungeons & Dragons’ OGL ft. Jim Butler
Journalist Lin Codega and a panel of experts (including Jim Butler and Ryan Dancey) break down what happened with the OGL 1.1 and the fan backlash around Wizards of the Coast.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Tabletop Media But Were Too Afraid To Ask ft. Aaron Shanks
A panel of media creators from both board games and tabletop RPG discussing how we got into our areas, how we work with publishers, and some of the challenges we deal with in the industry. Plus a Q&A.

That is weird. As a subscriber whose order has shipped, I still have the PDF for this book in my downloads. It appears that the size hasn't changed since I originally downloaded it, so my guess is that they are working on a revision that isn't ready yet. Anyway, I did not see any serious problems with the PDF that I downloaded (although I must admit that I did little more than skim it). I do hope they fix things and make the PDF generally available soon.

Update: Paizo responded by generating "replacement" orders for me. They did not seem to know enough to establish whether the problem was general or limited to a few of the subscription orders. I assume that if the problem were obviously general, they would have told me that the general order generation had been delayed and not generated orders as they did.

Did anyone receive their OrgPlay scenario subs yesterday? Trying to figure out if its a general delay or if I need to pop a note to custserv.

I didn't get my order e-mail either, and there is no pending order for it in my order history. I am definitely sending an e-mail to customer service since I couldn't find any sort of announcement from Paizo about a general delay, and the scenario PDFs are already available for non-sub purchase.

Paizo and not WotC came up with the names for the geniekin heritages, so they should be okay with continuing to use them. It is the genies who took their names from the 3rd edition SRD.

And it appears that the only geniekin that Paizo are renaming is the ifrit, as they decided to use that name for fire genies for some reason.

They didn't announce an early end to shipping, so tomorrow remains the day we should hold them to.

Is anyone else still waiting? I'm hoping the sidecart isn't messing my order up.

We would have heard about such an issue by now. The only glitch I noticed in this month's subscription orders was the escape of a bunch of mini boxes from the sidecart even though they weren't in the warehouse yet.

I have noticed that prior failed attempts to download a PDF can interfere with getting the corrected version even after the problem is corrected. My shipment went out yesterday and I had no problem with the PDFs. What is needed is to somehow break the link to the bad copy, which is the general intent behind all that advice to clear your cache and so on.

If I weren't using my regular subscription to keep my GM supplied with game books, I think I would prefer a pocket edition + PDF subscription to my current hardback edition + PDF subscription. The pocket editions are obviously better for hauling to other people's places for game night.

Have a ticket in, but have a feeling my watch will be extended with the 'back ordered' ruby phoenix mini's attached to my sub auth :P

That one proved easy in my case, as they got back to me on Monday (I submitted the ticket late Friday) with a corrected order. So you should get a quick turnaround on this one.

Not exactly a book, but this seems to be the closest to the right place to put links to a nice short story about a girl orc who moved into a modern human neighborhood. Or would Off-Topic Discussions be better?

Reddit version

Youtube version, narrated by Agro Squirrel Narrates.