Ernest Mueller's page

The S&S Player's Guide notes that Control Winds doesn't move with you; its area is "a cylinder." Control Weather is "a circle, centered on you." Does it move with you? Most other things that move with you are called emanations, like antimagic field - the only other spell I can find that uses "circle centered on you" is locate object and neither spell clarifies whether it moves with you or not. The S&S PG is silent on the subject. So does Control Weather move with the caster?

Not technically S&S, but I've been running a Pathfinder piracy game in Golarion for a while and my PCs are scouting the Sallow Coast for towns to raid. I figured it would be a good resource for all and sundry to list some good resources for random towns to use in this circumstance!

I'm lazy, so I thought I'd take advantage of the RPG tendency to always put a fully detailed village in half the extant adventures. What are some good premade towns (and what are they from) that I or others could use as a detailed source for our PCs to hit when they are feeling reaverlicious all of a sudden? Doesn't have to be from a PF product, just anything people are likely to have at hand (popular 3/3.5e modules lines, whatever).

My specific need is for one that 6th-level PCs and a crew full of L2 pirates can hit, but feel free and list more with likely magnitude ("Here's a coastal city described in LC2 Loons of the Coast, but you'd want to have leve l 10 PCs and at least 5 ships to do it.")

Previously they raided a town that was in a 3.5e module ("Mansions of Shadow" by Green Ronin) and having a fully detailed town made it a lot of fun for them (let's steal that colorful inn sign!).

My gaming group in Austin is going through Jade Regent currently. We write up extensive session summaries for each session - like 10+ page PDFs full of adventure and hilarity. Give them a try, you'll never go back to boring summaries again!

Here are our doughty PCs (character sheets posted on our blog):

• Yoshihiro Kaijitsu, the reckless Tian archer-knight (Ernest) - a samurai
  
• Harwynian Fallingleaf, the elegant elven transmuter (Bruce) - a wizard
  
• Jacob Frostfang, the ale-loving Kellid battle mage (Matt) - a sorcerer
  
• V’lk, the feral mute elf (Chris) - a rogue/oracle
  
• Gobo Samarillian, the blind gnomish fortuneteller (Patrick) - an oracle
  
• Bjorn the Unlucky, the hapless Ulfen woodsman (Tim) - a spirit ranger
  

Yes, we make sure and put the blind guy and the mute guy in a fire-team together as much as possible.

Well, got my samurai archer nailed down for Jade Regent, thought I'd ask for review and I have two specific questions. Here he is - switch hittery, but I want to focus more and more on archery as I level. With PA/DA/RS enabled since I plan to always use 'em! No clever gearing, as I'll be at the mercy of the AP there.

1. What's the best order to take the archery feats in? I know what I want eventually, but I'm a bit feat started, is it more important to get in there with the deadly aim fast, or the rapid shot/multishot thing first, or weapon focus/weapon spec first... Also, I fretted over starting with 17 str/16 dex or 18 str/15 dex.

For the feats I was thinking as an order maybe power attack, pbs, rapid shot, deadly aim, weapon focus, weapon spec, multishot, point blank master, greater weapon focus, greater weapon spec.

2. My horse. Mounted feats are so confusing... So if the horse takes improved overrun and greater overrun and charge through, then I can run over some poor bastard on the way to my real target, have the horse kick him, and do an AoO of my own on him, right, without me needing any mounted feats? I was looking at that, and even mounted combat doesn't seem to great because his AC will be above my Ride most of the time.

For an upcoming Jade Regent campaign I was looking at an archer type character, with a slight mounted flair (but not too much, as I understand mounts won't be viable for large chunks of the action). I figured I'd use Hero Lab to throw together the four likely candidates - fighter/archer, zen archer monk, archery ranger, and cavalier - and just spec them to level 11, a place I'd expect we'd spend a lot of time. I was pleasantly surprised at how close they come out.

20 point buy, no crazy min/maxing like dumping stats or being an archer to the exclusion of being able to do anything else. Core and APG allowed only, our group has decided not to use the Ultimates.

Damage output (with Deadly Aim, Rapid Shot/Multishot and Power Attack going):

cavalier

• bow +12(x2)/+12/+7/+2 1d8+11
  
• sword +12/+7/+2 2d6+17 (4/day +11 dmg from challenge)
  
• + horse and other cav stuff
  

• bow +15(x2)/+15/+10/+5 1d8+15
  
• sword +13/+8/+3 2d6+19
  

• bow +11(x2)/+11/+6/+1 1d8+11 (up to +6/+6 from favored enemy, gravity bow for 2d6+11 dmg)
  
• sword +13/+8/+3 2d6+17
  
• + wolf, spells
  

• bow +13/+13/+8/+8/+2 1d8+13 (perfect strike, ki for extra attacks or 1d10+13 dmg)
  
• unarmed +9/+4 1d10+9
  
• + ki powerz
  

The builds are not all geared up, on the theory that gearing will give approximately equal benefits across the board.

It seems like there's a lot of overland travel in Jade Regent and I was considering playing a cavalier or another character heavily invested in mounted combat.

I almost never do that, because inevitably there's chapter-long screwjobs where you can't reasonably bring a horse and you get to put a large chunk of your feats and your animal companion away for a couple months of play.

What's the read on how much of the time a mounted character would be able to participate? I'm going to be a player, so I have not read the adventures and don't want spoilers. I know three chapters aren't out yet, so thoughts from the Paizo folks would be welcome - are any of those chapters spent exclusively in a city, dungeon, or other location a mount won't be welcome?

In my current PF campaign, I'm using some AP installments and some Gamemastery modules - and some older 3.5 modules, and a bunch of Dungeon adventures for filler. As I was riffling through my Dungeons in preparation for running Tammeraut's Fate, it got me to thinking that I'd really like to see more smaller adventures coming out again for Pathfinder, like unto Dungeon Mag format.

Dungeon adventures were great - you weren't in for a huge thing, you could fit them in an existing campaign or play them as one night one shots.

Maybe the Pathfinder Society adventures could be used for this, but I have to say, not being a Society member, I have no idea what their quality is or how I'd figure that out... They seem kinda inaccessible to normal non-Society folks, and it seems they have all that faction stuff and whatnot - maybe it's a misperception but I haven't been tempted to buy any to use in my game.

Is there some deal with WotC where you promise never to do that again, or would you consider doing collections of short format adventures for "normal" Pathfinder games? I think it's a big missing niche, and it also allows you to onboard new authors without having to give them a full module or whatnot.

A question was posed over on RPG Stack Exchange that led me to some confusion. In the Brew Potion feat it states the creation time to be 1 day/1000 gp or 2 hrs if it's under 250.

But in the Magic Item Creation section it says that it takes one day to make a potion, period.

Which is correct? I looked at the FAQ, errata, and searched the forums to no avail.

So what if Ydersius was actually a Lawful god before he got his head chopped? And all the Big Chaos he's associated with was just from afterwards?

It always seemed odd to me that the god of the very organized, intelligent serpentfolk was a ravening beast. I could definitely see the degenerate worship of the god, like the degenerate serpentfolk themselves, being a reversal of his initial nature.

Maybe they could be trying to rejoin the god's parts:
- Because they want order (maybe Nazi style take us over order, but anyway)/removal of degeneracy to return to the serpentfolk?
- Because Vyr-Azul is a deluded Chaotic heretic - he dates from after the beheading, remember.

He allegedly is working with thawed out serpentguys from before the beheading but really he's keeping them on ice - maybe because once he thawed one out he realized they disagreed with his doctrine? I am not sure which serpentfolk in the AP are supposed to be these ancient ones, it's not clear that the major serpentfolk NPCs in the final two chapters are at all. Heck, the ancient serpentfolk might end up being allies of the party in the short term.

Anyway, in my mind this is a more interesting hook and outcome. Maybe Ydersius isn't really even all that LE, more LN but, you know, serpents are the master race... (Like Wastri the Hopping Prophet in Greyhawk.)

I don't know, from the previous fluff on the Gorilla King, the savage and violent effective ruler of a huge jungle, I expected a bit more. Maybe Boomer's "The Blood-Slicked Mantle" in Wayfinder #1 is leading me on. Anyway, it seemed kinda weak to me that he was just

Anyway, for all the buildup, I really wasn't impressed with Ruthazek's depiction in Vaults of Madness. How could it be something very special? How would you change how the Gorilla King is employed in this adventure so he doesn't seem like a random mob?

OK, so we just playtested the guns, not the gunslinger. If people don't like that, ignore this - but you shouldn't have to have a special class to make a new weapon useful.

Our game has been using guns for a while, and we have one character, a cleric of Gozreh, who uses them as his primary weapon in our Riddleport Pirate campaign. Up until last session, here's the gun rules we were using:

Pistol 250 gp 1d6 2d4 x3 50 ft. 3 lbs. P

Musket, short 500 gp 1d10 2d6 x3 100 ft. 8 lbs. P
Musket, long 750 gp 1d10 2d6 x3 150 ft. 10 lbs. P
Blunderbuss 500 gp 1d12 3d6 19-20/x2 15 ft. 8 lbs. B and P
Exploding dice of damage
Misfire on 1
Two full round actions to load
Full rules if you really care about more details

We haven't been completely happy with the results; he misses a lot and deals very low damage amounts when he does; he often just uses his icicle ability instead (touch attack, 1d6+2 damage).

He's a fifth level cleric (+3 BAB) and has put all his feats into guns - Exotic Weapon Proficiency, Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Weapon Focus. +3 Dex, +2 Str. Last session we switched to the playtest gun rules. He has a musket, a pistol, and a blunderbuss so that he can get some kind of rate of fire going. Anyway, he got to fight a variety of bad guys (mainly from Carrion Hill - humans, summoned demons, Great Old Ones) with the new rules.

Our findings:

1. The touch attack was a nice addition, and it meant he could hit more. We felt that it was too distorting on highly armored opponents, though, and decided flat-footed AC at all ranges was probably a better approach.

2. Damage was still weak. Rate of fire is low so that x4 crit never came up. Other PCs that did not specialize in ranged combat at all way outclassed because of STR bonuses, especially at short ranges (which is the only place you get the touch attack benefit).

3. Reload time means you never reload in combat. And we're fine with that really; our group likes the "black powder feel" of the guns. It does provide a significant DPS differential though - if our cleric got quick draw then eventually when he gets iterative attacks he could put a couple in a round for like one or two rounds; meanwhile any goon with two feats and a bow can pop off two attacks at level one. He was the least effective combatant in the party as a result. He could do

round 1: 1 touch attack at 1d12 (musket)
round 2: 1 touch attack at 1d12 (blunderbuss, we treated as another musket)
round 3: 1 touch attack at 1d8 (pistol)
and then that's it. Find something else to do or reload a couple rounds.

Meanwhile another fifth level character could not spend the feat on the exotic prof and put it into Rapid Shot instead, and put less money than the guns take into a masterwork STR bow, and do:
round 1: 2 attacks at -1 for 1d8+2
round 2: 2 attacks at -1 for 1d8+2
round 3: 2 attacks at -1 for 1d8+2
and repeat forever.

Let's take an example where the touch attack really, really helps - say you're fighting ogres. AC 17, touch AC 8. That's as good as it gets, the guns have an effective +9 to hit. If your guy has a +6 ranged attack bonus, then with the gun he only misses the ogre on a 1. And let's also be super generous and say that the combat only goes three rounds so he's firing every round.

dps of the gun guy - missing only on a 1, 1d12/1d12/1d8 - is 5.17. dps of the bow guy, needing a 12 to hit (-2 rapid shot, +1 masterwork) and a +2 STR bonus, does 5.2 dps. So even with the most favorable gun setup, it underperforms the bow, and if you ever have reload rounds then it drops way, way, way under. And the problem gets much worse with iterative attacks, multishot, etc.

4. The guns are too pricey. The PCs already were eager to kill some gendarmes and sell their muskets; this doubled that incentive. You'd have to only put them on like level 6+ NPCs to make the wealth not totally disproportional. And you're pricing guns out of low level characters, which means they're even less likely to put feats into them.

In the end, everyone was pretty "meh" about the new guns. You can't put STR or other common damage boosts on them, you get a very low attack rate, and they do as much damage as any old sword. Or in his case, less damage output than his stock icicle power (by .33 dps).

I was reading the new Pathfinder Guide to Freeport and noticed the gun rules there do 3d6 (pistol) and 4d6 (musket), x3 crit. And at first that seemed high to me but once we looked at it, it's really not... As I actually use guns in my game and this isn't just an academic exercise, I plan to move the touch attack to flat-footed and boost to 2d6 (pistol) 3d6 (musket) immediately and then reevaluate. Doing the math in the ogre example, the guns then get up to 9.3 dps, which is still much lower than any of the actual fighty types are doing at level 5 but is at least something.

Now sure the gunfighter will push guns past this, but the various archer p-classes push bows way past this too. And if it takes an exotic prof (and is expensive and has misfire) then it should at least be somehow useful to Joe Character who decides to invest heavily in them but not be superspecialized or take a special class for it.

Hey, as usual the new content looks great, there's a lot of good stuff here.

I wanted to talk a little about the firearm damage for the Gunslinger though. And maybe it's too late if these rules are already baked into the campaign setting. But I've been using firearms in my Pathfinder group for a while. My rules are very similar to yours (you can see them here on my blog, they're OGL and were picked up by LPG. And the problem with them is the damage output.

Heck, mine I was using the old "exploding damage dice rule" and doing 2d4 (pistol) and 2d6 (musket) which is a bit higher than your 1d8/1d12. But players are tending away from them because the damage is bad - sure, the base damage looks OK, but it can't be enhanced by Strength, can't be rapid or multishotted, can't use iterative attacks (unless you have a lot of them, and they're expensive) and except for magic or Point Blank Shot basically can't have their damage enhanced in any way. (Trading touch attack for exploding damage dice is fair enough, I don't mind that.)

The exotic proficiency, high cost, and misfires are appropriate (I use those too), but even without those limitations firearms become undesirable. The only reason all that would ever be worthwhile is if there was a high one-shot damage output. After a bunch of playtesting of my very similar gun rules, I have come to the conclusion that my damage numbers are too low, and these are lower still.

I was reading the Freeport Companion: Pathfinder RPG Edition and their firearm damage is a lot higher, like ranging from 3d6 to 4d6. And though that seems really high at first blush, I have to say after running Pathfinder with guns for more than a year, I am thinking about adopting those new higher damage values for my game so that the one player who still uses guns doesn't abandon them (they are too expensive and feat-requirey for level one, but then their damage limitation makes them even more worthless post about level 4, especially once you get iterative attacks). I would go at least to 3d4 pistol/3d6 musket without hesitation.

I'm fine with firearms being something you don't necessarily shoot five times a round, instead being "option weapons" for characters who don't usually do ranged but every once in a while need to pop something - I like the realism of the long reloads and all - but if they cost $1000 + $10 per shot, require a feat, and can only shoot once every other round, there has to be damage to compensate. Even a non-optimized low level shortbow wielder with a modest 14 strength and rapid shot is going to be tossing out 4d6+8 damage over two rounds, and that's without all those other drawbacks. Compare to a two round damage output of 2d8 for a pistol or 1d12 for a musket? That's 24 vs 9 points on average. Should bows be 2-3x better than guns AND not have all the additional costs and drawbacks? Even if ou argue the touch attack at close range makes up for all the drawbacks, you're still left with that huge raw damage differential.

Thanks for listening! (Oh and thanks for getting rid of percussion cap weapons that was just way too anachronistic.)

Welcome to the continued adventures of our bunch of salty dogs in Riddleport, the Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

Season One, a year-long combo of Shadow in the Sky, the Freeport trilogy, many of the Green Ronin Bleeding Edge and Goodman Games Wicked Fantasy Factory modules, and much more, finished with a bang as the PCs stopped a serpent man posing as Elias Tammerhawk, Speaker of the Order of Cyphers, from opening the Cyphergate using the Jade Serpent of Yig from the Riddleport Light. "Tammerhawk" fled, as did part ally Samaritha Beldusk, also unmasked as a serpent person. But success was not without price, as a tsunami hit Riddleport and left it in shambles.

Into this gap step our fierce and mostly-evilly-aligned party... And so opens Season Two!

I'm DMing a group that just finished with Shadow in the Sky (mashed up with the Freeport Trilogy and a bunch of other stuff) and is now level 5. Here's details on what's gone before if you really want them.

Anyway, I'm running next Sunday. I don't have a lot of time to plan the next major plot arc of my campaign, and don't want to kick into CotV yet, so I was looking for a one shot, and since it's Halloween I was thinking horror.

Any good ideas? I have so much Paizo stuff (just about everything) and loads of 3e/3.5e stuff including Dungeon Mags that there's too much to root through just looking.

Good features would include:
- easily fit into Riddleport/Freeport
- horror theme
- for levels 4-6
- flood/water/disaster elements
- shadows and/or voodoo elements
- pirate elements
- short or could be reasonably pared down to run in one 5 hour slot
- adult content OK

Thanks...

I wanted to mention and invite everyone to a new roleplaying expert Q&A site, RPG Stack Exchange.

The Stack Exchange sites are a novel new format that have been rampantly popular in the computer field - Stack Overflow for programmers was the first, and others followed (Super User for users and Server Fault for sysadmins). They've opened it up to other fields, and a proposal for an RPG-based one quickly got enough votes to go into open beta.

SE differs from a normal online forum in that it is for questions and answers only, and the community votes answers (and questions) up and down to determine which are the best. Users with enough "rep" can edit questions and answers, wiki-style. Thus questions can get asked only once, and the answers refined over time (as opposed to in forums, where "it's off the front page, it's like it never happened"). The site then serves as a permanent knowledge base - Google a technical question, and the SE sites are now generally ensconced well at the top. It doesn't compete with forums like this one in terms of being a community and having discussions, but the format makes it way better for organized gathering of knowledge.

It's great for authors/publishers/editors - though pure product promotion in and of itself isn't allowed, you're the kind of experts that people love to get answers from, and you don't have to deal with the signal to noise or get caught in flame wars. RS Conley from Bat in the Attic is already using it to good effect. It's a very efficient use of your time, you can subscribe to tags you want to see, the site can email you about answers. Questions like this one looking for steampunk supplements for d20/D&D3.5/Pathfinder are perfect questions to answer with links to your products.

Anyway, just wanted to encourage people to come check out the site, I think you might like it! (It's free, and you don't even have to register unless you want to gain rep.) And I personally want to see more high quality Pathfinder Q&A there.

CONGRATS!!!! Awesomely well deserved, Pathfinder has been the best game line in a long, long time this year. Keep up the great work!

What books (or, optionally, movies, but preferably books) did the AP authors use for inspiration for Serpent's Skull - or can others recommend?

I just got done reading The Lost City of Z, which while about South American exploration hits a lot of the relevant high notes. What are some other good ones about jungle exploration, especially African jungle? I figure I'll look up something Livingstone related... List your favorites here!

I did also recently read King Leopold's Ghost, which while excellent only hits on the actual exploration experience a little.

Many many months ago, Erik was talking about an awesome-sounding Pathfinder iPhone app... A long time has passed with no word. Is it cancelled/indefinitely on hold? Coming soon? What up? Us iPhone users want to know!

(Yes yes Android users, you all beg for one too...)

Now that it's a level 0 spell and usable effectively at will, I am having a problem with PCs wanting to detect magic all the time, on everything. They expect it to show things that are illusions, whether people are under alter self or other disguise magic, whether people are charmed or dominated, invisible stuff, etc. (Of course they can't get the exact spell, but they get school easily enough, and if someone has an enchantment or illusion or whatnot there's a pretty limited set of options). And monsters with transformation powers and whatnot, too, since anything Su/Sp detects as magic.

Do I just say it doesn't detect spells that are meant to be kinda secret? Create a Secret Spell metamagic feat that makes a spell not detect as magic for a 1 level bump? Make the caster do a dispel magic-like check to see it? What?

The Adventurer's Armory has a nice load of new weapons. Sadly, due to space restrictions, information as to where these weapons come from was cut. I've complained about that in the product thread, but now let's try to do something constructive about it. I'll list the weapons - if there's a documented Golarion origin, let's note it, and if it's a cultural analogue, let's figure out where it might be found!

Aklys - derro (classic horrors revisited)
Arrows, Whistling
Bardiche
Battle Poi - Katapesh (Legacy of Fire Player's Guide)
Bayonet - Alkenstar, I assume
Bec de Corbin
Bill
Blade Boot
Boomerang - Mwangi (Zenj, I would think)
Brass Knuckles
Bullets, Groaning
Butterfly Knife - With the butterfly/desna link I would propose Varisian/Sczarni
Cestus
Chain Spear
Chakram
Combat Scabbard, Sharpened
Dueling Sword, Aldori - Andoren.
Dwarven Maulaxe - dwarves, natch
Earth Breaker - Shoanti (campaign setting)
Falcata - Taldor (campaign setting)
Flambard
Garrote - common, probably
Glaive-guisarme
Hanbo
Hunga Munga - just saw this on Deadliest Warrior where they called it a Kpinga and it was used by the Zande.
Klar - Shoanti (campaign setting)
Lasso
Launching Crossbow
Lucerne Hammer
Madu - Katapesh (Legacy of Fire Player's Guide)
Mancatcher
Mere Club - Maori, also featured on Deadliest Warrior. Are Bonuwat Mwangi the closest analogue?
Meteor Hammer - Katapesh (Legacy of Fire Player's Guide)
Pilum
Rhoka - the urdefhan in the Darklands.
Rope gauntlet - Katapesh (Legacy of Fire Player's Guide)
Scarf, Bladed - Varisian (RotR player's guide)
Scizore - Taldor
Scorpion whip - Katapesh (Legacy of Fire Player's Guide)
Shotel
Sica
Sling glove - Katapesh (Legacy of Fire Player's Guide)
Stingchuck - Katapeshi gnolls (House of the beast)
Switchblade knife
Swordbreaker dagger
Syringe spear
Temple Sword - Vudrani (PF9)
Terbutje - Polynesian. Bonuwat Mwangi again?
Terbutje, steel
Throwing shield
Urumi - Vudrani (PF9)
War razor
Wooden stake - Ustalav (PFCS)

Kinda like that! Chime in, note if it actually appeared somewhere or you're just making a logical proposal. Maybe we can get the PFwiki updated with the results.

I made an NPC with a Nisrochi shadowforged rapier - and now I can't for the life of me find where that's defined. Anyone know what product?

I, and it sounds like other folks, would be happy to subscribe to the Pathfinder Chronicles line if only the map folios weren't mandatory parts of it.

Please consider a "Chronicles without Folios" option or splitting the two up.

I know I could cancel and restart the subscription time and time again to skip them... But that goes over my hassle threshold. (An option where you could specifically opt out of items in your subscriptions would be even better).

My group of PCs needed a little help with a juiced up version of Death in Freeport set in Riddleport, so I thought I'd have an inquisitor give them a hand. Here she is:

http://mxyzplk.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/salvadora-beckett.pdf

She's a half-orc fourth level inquisitor of Iomedae. She fought with the third level party against foes including CR5 degenerate serpentfolk, undead, and an evil priest.

She did well, and the players thought she was helpful but not overwhelmingly so. Her scouty kind of focus helped them; the tracking, Perception, init boost, knock spell, that sort of thing, in fact she was stepping on the party rogue and ranger a little. She was decent in combat, although bad hit rolls (not her fault, just dice luck) held her back. The bane power at fifth level would help out immensely.

Her spellcasting was nice, it was a good mix of cleric and wiz especially for people going into a hidden evil temple with undead in it. And since her spellcasting is not really for in combat, she was freed up to do support stuff and put buffs on PCs. She put Prot from Evil on the monk (saving his bacon on poison saves) and then later did an Acrobatics to get over and do a Cure Light on him while he was badly wounded. He actually gave her a big hug when the dungeon was over! Sure, a paladin could have done the same, but the pally is usually more focused on kicking ass himself and not taking time to heal others in combat; the inquisitor's more scouty and less front line so they would exercise that more I think.

The clerical domain is almost pointless since they don't get spells from it. Domain powers are suckily weak. Once, I had her waste a round by using a standard action to touch someone to give them a +2 to damage for one round. The PCs were like "We tell her to stop screwing around and do something!" I didn't do that again, and neither would a PC (it pretty much always is worse than "shoot your bow"). That's more of a complaint about the horrible clerical domain powers but also a request to not saddle another class with them and pretend it's a perk.

The teamwork feats were meh. I gave her Lookout to capitalize on the high Initiative and Perception bonus, and it did kick in once, but it was complex to use. It was hard and fiddly to figure out who all was getting the benefit from it at a given time, and it was also a strange fit for the general inquisitor "monster hunting loner" kind of image. I mean, I could see an inquisitor taking a teamwork feat because that's what they want to do personally, but as a core part of the class? Seems like it would fit way better in other classes. Read the class description. "Often travels with others as a cover" is not "master of teamwork." Also, they get so many of them and there are so few that at high level you basically have "all the teamwork feats". And if all the other PCs have them too as a result - the complexity would be insane! Can you imagine? It's not like one is active at a time, it means that your four buddies in melee with you all suddenly have a big ol list of bonuses to everything - CMB, CMD, Reflex, flanking, sneak attack, AC, concentration, etc (that kicks in and out as people 5' adjust around). As a high level party I'd want like a halfling inquisitor strapped into a papoose pack and put on the back of the barbarian just for the unlimited buffs. Even if you keep these, you need to change solo tactics to specify that the inquisitor has to choose one specific one to be sharing.

I felt like she suffered from having "too many little things." She has a bunch of different (and not individually that overwhelming) powers that can be used an extremely limited amount. If I were a PC playing the inquisitor I'd be like "Can I give up the domain to get a couple more judgments, or double the rounds of bane?" or the like. It made her complex to run (this one is for 2xlevel rounds a day, this one is 2 times a day, this one is 3+WIS times a day...) and less effective. Given the arguable but I would say almost universally true premise that most play happens in levels 1-10, I'd narrow down the broadness and give more of a couple things. Frankly I'd swap the domain and solo tactics for more judgments and bane rounds and switch the teamwork feats to a custom combat feat list.

OK, I'm updating the serpentfolk from Into the Darklands to PFRPG. I am working up the 'degenerate' version of the serpentfolks and so far here's what I have.

Degenerate Serpentfolk CR4
NE Medium monstrous humanoid
Init +1; Senses Darkvision 60 ft., scent; Perception +10
Defense
AC 18, touch 17, flat-footed 17 (+1 Dex, +7 natural)
hp 47 (5d10+20)
Fort +9, Ref +8, Will +8
Immune mind-affecting magic, paralysis, poison; SR 15
Offense
Speed 30 ft.
Melee spear +10 (1d8+7, x3) and bite +8 (1d6+2 plus poison)
Statistics
Str 20, Dex 13, Con 19, Int 4, Wis 13, Cha 6
Base Atk +5; CMB +10; CMD 21
Feats Great Fortitude, Multiattack, ??
Skills Perception +10, Stealth +6
Languages Aklo
Special Abilities
Poison (Ex) Bite - injury, save Fort DC 20, frequency 1/round for 6 rounds; effect 1d2 Str; cure 1 save.

Does this look right? Man, it's pretty buff. I'm taking the ability scores from the 3.5 version, and the degenerates there have +4 poison save DC, +4 Perception (well, Spot, but whatever). They get upgraded with more feats, skills, hit points, etc. per the PFRPG monstrous humanoid changes. They're huge combat monsters and the immunities and poison make them really hell on wheels.

I chose Stealth as an additional skill because it seems like they skulk around underground a lot and otherwise they'd have like +13 Perception.

It needs one more feat. I thought about Power Attack but damn... Using a spear two-handed, as is their wont, that makes them spear +8 (1d8+13, x3) and bite +6 (1d6+6 plus poison) - that's a lot of frickin' damage. Toughness maybe, not that they're short on hit points either? Well, and the monster stats by CR table says 16 average damage for a CR4's main attack and 12 for a secondary is good... Without PA it's only 11.5 (with it's 17.5). So I guess Power Attack it is. Thoughts?

[Edit: Oh wait that's supposed to be for all their attacks together... These guys either need their stats nerfed hard or need to be higher CR I think. The superstats and SR make them tough; I think one would totally rape a CR4 minotaur for example.]

In an attempt to offer constructive other options...

The Inquisitor. A class with an unclear focus. When I hear "Inquisitor" I think Warhammer 40k/Fading Suns zealots who police the church itself. But the class is about 50% Slayer (as in Buffy The Vampire), which with bane, track, etc. has more of a hunter/slayer kind of feel. But then it has a 25% pally/cleric kind of angle with the spells. Holy Slayer? And then there's the tactical feats... Ooo, I know, Crusader!

Inquisitor has a much more investigation/root out heresy in the faithful kind of vibe to it. I propose "Crusader" if you're serious about the church angle or "Holy Slayer" if you're not and want them to be more of a Batman/Buffy/Van Helsing type loner as the class name. You don't want to step on "inquisitor" because that is a separate iconic kind of character that a different class would probably fill better.

Then there's the "judgement" problem, where they're mostly not the kind of bring-down-on-your-enemies kind of thing you think of when you think "judgement." All of these affect and empower the inquisitor and not harm a target. If you want more religiony words, ones that come to mind for these holy powers are "imbue," "inspiration," or even "justification" (more inwardly focused than judgement). If more slayery, I'd think "fortification" maybe. Or you can go more lyrical with "Avenger's Gift" kinds of things.

The Alchemist is a bold design choice. It's a lot less traditional alchemy and more like the "alchemists" from World of Warcraft and other computer games (some Western game I played was a lot like this) what with the bombs and mutating and all. It'll be controversial; I like it OK but wish it was less on the "powered by the alchemist's magical aura" thing, to me one of the reasons to have an alchemist character is to lay on the pseudoscience.

My main concern with the alchemist is that it seems weak. The limited number of bombs a day and limited extracts mean he's like half a spellcaster. And the mutagens (I agree this needs to be renamed - how about elixir?) just don't work enough - the cleric BAB/HD plus the mutagen boost still doesn't quite make them a useful fighter even when juiced. I'm afraid that over the course of an entire adventuring day, and especially as they go up in level, they will be quite weak.

On the Inquisitor - this class seems like an odd mishmash to me. It's partly trying to be Buffy, but seems like it's also trying to be a paladin of any alignment and also trying to be a marshal. It seems unfocused and also very close to/redundant with existing classes - seems like a little bit of multiclassing in the pally/cleric/ranger area would step on its toes pretty hard. My recommendation here is to very strongly clarify the vision for this class and then tweak it to fit that vision, as it's definitely not coming across in the current version.

Kinda a Campaign Setting errata question. In the text of the Land of the Linnorm Kings entry, it says:

"Situated on the Ironbound Archipelago, Halgrim is led by a female king
(the term is used for both genders) named White Estrid, an albino warrioress with snow-white hair and pale blue eyes. Estrid does not possess the traditional linnorm head hanging over her throne,
but instead has a live linnorm coiled up behind it. The linnorm does not speak, save to confirm that yes, it had been defeated fairly by Estrid, and has traded its service for its life. The creature is rarely referred to, but when mentioned, it is called simply “Estrid’s Pet.” Estrid herself led a fleet of 15 longships in a raid against the Nidalese port at Nisroch 4 years ago, slipped through a Chelaxian blockade at the Arch of Aroden, and put in triumphantly at Absolom with her plunder."

But then her entry in the timeline at the end of the book seems to contradict it on at least two and maybe three points:

"4704 White Estrid slays Boiltongue and becomes a Linnorm Queen; her use of strange weapons she claims were gifts from “earth spirits” enrages other rulers of the Land of the Linnorm Kings."

The first quote implies a) she's a King not a Queen, b) she hasn't killed a linnorm (no head), and that c) in 4704 she was a little busy. I'm tempted to say the timeline entry is to be deleted in its entirety, but any thoughts there?

I really like the Summoner and Witch both, very flavorful. I have one concern that came up in the Cavalier/Oracle playtest too, which is not using the standard existing rules for stuff.

The summoner's eidolon. Its progression chart is *almost* exactly like the animal companion one. But different. With a weird BAB progression nothing else has. Similarly with the witch's familiars. Adding the cool "spellbook ability" is fine. But why is the familiar list slightly different than the wizard's; is a pig more witchy than a weasel for some reason? And why are there slightly different abilities and wordings of abilities?

These kinds of really subtle differences are hell for players and especially DMs to keep track of. Please keep it standard. The eidolons should use the standard animal companion progression, and if you think they need some better BAB, have a couple evolutions that'll boost it.

In general I love the new classes but the thought of trying to DM a game with them in it has me tearing my hair out.

"The Bonuwat people of the Mwangi Expanse worship a variant form of Gozreh, a janiform amalgam with Desna, whom they call Shimye-Magalla."

So what do y'all reckon this looks like in Mwangi depictions? It's a little confusing in that Gozreh already has two aspects, the female water aspect and male air aspect, which I could see representing in janiform fashion (definition: like the Roman god Janus, a face on either side of the head like this). But adding in Desna makes it a little more confusing, as potentially there's three faces involved.

I have a couple kind of art concepts in mind:

1. Two female faces, female body - a "water" female face with waves for hair and an "air" female face looking more like Desna. Of course it's hard to say what "looking more like Desna" means in this context since they doubtless represent Shimye-Magalla as black. A potential visual inspiration.

2. One male face, one female face - a "water" male face, swapping the usual M=air,F=water Gozreh aspects, and an "air" female face with butterfly wings or whatnot to indicate Desna. Interestingly, here's a janiform African mask with one white/female and black/male aspect, and another with some interesting writeup attached. I suspect this may have been the inspiration for S-M because as I google it looks like this is a common thing in Nigeria and related regions.
So is a body represented? Male, female, or both? (Seems like the African masks are just masks so don't answer the body question... Maybe just "never represented with a body in particular except some big straw-costumed dancer" makes sense.)

3. Don't take janiform too literally. The Bonuwat are a seafaring people and more travelled than the peoples of the interior, we could go more of a voodoo route. This brings to mind some depictions of Papa Ghede, the voodoo loa, where half of the face is a skill and half is normal. S-M could have "half" a female and "half" a male face.

And then what would religious practice be like, more traditional African (which is hard to map since they had lots of gods and it sounds - implied but not clear - like the Bonuwat are mostly about S-M) or more like voodoo or more like "generic made-up RPG religion"?

I have a character playing a Bonuwat in my Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign so I'm trying to develop this out a bit... He was actually wandering around Riddleport trying to find a shrine or whatnot, he found one to Gozreh and it was close enough that he used it, but it got me to thinking...

Or whatever you want to call them - Action Points, Fate Points, Karma Points, Plot Points, et cetera. For reference here's a good but somewhat dated summary of a bunch of hero point mechanics by John H. Kim.

Here's the deal. I want to use something like this for my new Pathfinder campaign. We've been pretty constantly using the Eberron "Action Point" mechanic (Eberron Campaign Setting, p.45) in all our group's campaigns since we saw it. You get 5 + 1/2 character levels of them, and they let you add 1d6 (or best of multiple d6 at high levels) to a roll before you know whether it's successful or not. They work pretty well. But I've begun to be dissatisfied with them.

I noticed it some in Rise of the Runelords and even more in Curse of the Crimson Throne that we'd end a level with a lot of action points left over. There were a couple reasons.

1. You would hoard them "just in case." This was somewhat mitigated by them refreshing every level, but you didn't know when you were going to level.

2. They didn't do all that much - you wouldn't use them unless you were ultra desperate or thought you were within 3 points of the DC you needed. As levels get higher and numbers range more widely, a lot of the time you knew there was no point in using the action point on a given miss.

3. Because of the inconsistency of the core D&D mechanic in terms of what is a d20 roll you are making and what isn't, you could use them to make a save but not to not get hit in combat, so their utility in saving your bacon was reduced. Though you can use an action point to stabilize when at negative hit points, again as levels get high it's rarer a shot lands you in that magic 10 point range; it's more likely to overkill you by like 30 points when it comes. D&D 3.5e number scaling past level 10 is a cruel mistress.

4. The APs tried to give hero points of their own, like Crimson Throne had Harrow Points that gave bonuses to a different stat with each chapter. This was frustrating in and of itself when the stat was a poor match - as a priest, fighter, and ranger was the party most of the time, I was the only one to use the Wis and Cha boosts. But it also created a "too many different boost points" problem and they got totally forgotten most of the time.

5. It was a buzzkill when you used one and still didn't make the roll.

We're also playing Alternity, which has Last Resort Points. These points are better in some ways. They're worse in that you get from 0-2 of them and they don't regenerate with level, you have to buy more with XP, which means they're too scarce. They're much better in that they just flat turn a failure into a success (or boost a success to a higher level of success).

Also, some systems (like PDQ Sharp's Style Dice) let you use such points to make actual narrative plot changes with points. "A Chelish warship appears on the horizon!" "Our old ally Vincenz shows up!" "The dungeon passage collapses!"

So there's a couple different axes that a hero point mechanic can work on.

* How do you get them/how do they regenerate? (Buy with XP, when you roll a crit, when you roll a fumble, when you do something cool, when you act according to some character trait, when you level, every game session, per adventure)
* What can they do? (Reroll, small fixed bonus to roll, small variable bonus to roll, large fixed or variable bonus, automatic success level upgrade, change plot/world, activate powerz, make a save/get missed/soak damage, get init or an extra action)
* When can you use them? (Before you roll, after you roll but before you determine the result, after you determine the result)
* How many does someone get and how often can they use them (anytime, once per scene, once per session, something else)

Here's what I'm thinking about doing.

First, I want the points to "do more" - ideally fully turn a miss into a hit or whatnot, not add on a small bonus. Seems to me that the mechanic's not worth having unless it does this much; otherwise it's a lot of fiddliness (and worse, a breaking out of immersion) without enough punch to justify it. So one option is that the points are fairly rare, but can:

* Turn a miss into a hit
* Turn a hit into a crit
* Turn a hit into a miss (usually, if you're the one getting hit)
* Turn a crit into a hit (same)
* Make a save
* Make a target fail their save (maybe... but maybe not. With save-or-dies seems too powerful. Maybe make a target reroll their save.)
* Bypass SR
* Override a bad condition (possessed, feared, paralyzed, etc.) for a round
* Otherwise "save your damn life" somehow

However, one of our group has an interesting alternate proposal - that the points go up in efficacy as you use them. First point you use is a +1 (or -1 on an opponent's roll). Second point, +2. And so on. This is a clever way to both ramp up effectiveness over time (I'm neutral there) and to discourage hoarding (I'm very on board with that). It does mean that eventually the points become worth +20 or more, at worst that reduces to auto fail/success but in higher level 3.5e play it may still not be enough sometimes. It is a little more fiddly though, they have to be strongly paced at about two per level.

I'd also like them to be usable to make narrative changes, with DM oversight. Any kind of hero point is already stepping outside the simulation for an explicitly narrative concern, so in for a penny, in for a pound, I figure.

In general you should give them for behavior you want to promote. I don't really like giving them for crits or whatnot, that seems too random and also generates undesirable interactions with crit feats. I'm doing slow advancement in this campaign, so there'll probably be a couple adventures per level. I plan to call them "Infamy Points" to match the pirate theme. Perhaps give one per level and one per adventure, to semi-reflect the character becoming more bad ass and feared and... infamous. Maybe bonus points whenever anyone does something spectacular that could rightfully be said to raise their infamy level.

I'm also considering having the Infamy Point total be used as a bonus to certain Intimidate/Bluff/Diplomacy rolls as a kind of raw fame and deadliness bonus, though the problem is that if you get 2-3 per level that bonus gets out of control. Maybe a bonus equal to unused Infamy Points?

What do all of you think? Do you use any kind of hero point mechanic? Do you like lots of them with wimpy bonuses, or fewer with more guaranteed results? Have any clever ideas for me?

Our group is starting a new campaign, and this time I’m the gamemaster! It’s a homebrew adventure path called "Reavers on the Seas of Fate," and is using the Pathfinder RPG rules to tell tales of piracy and horror on the high seas of the world of Golarion.

As usual, we’ll be posting session summaries, character writeups, etc. on the campaign home page. Since I’m GMing, I’ll also be sharing "behind the scenes" reports on how I design and run the game.

Expect a wild mashup of the first bit of Second Darkness, the Freeport Trilogy, Sinister Adventures' Razor Coast, and more!

The Characters:

• Melako "Ox" Chaalu, a barbaric Garundi slave from Rahadoum (Bruce)
  
• Tommy "Blacktoes" Burrowbank, a halfling rogue from "around" with an attitude (Kevin)
  
• "Serpent" Ref Jorenson, an Ulfen druid with a pet constrictor snake (Paul)
  
• Sindawe H’Kilata Narr, aka "Freak", a Bonuwat Mwangi (Chris)
  
• Wogan, a cleric of Gozreh from Cheliax (Patrick)
  

I'm getting set to run a pirate-themed Pathfinder game set in Golarion, and I was looking at the firearm rules. My players were nervous about the inclusion of firearms, because "gun rules usually either make guns totally suck and nerf them past where you'd ever use them, or make them too good to where you'd always be using on." The Pathfinder rules definitely err on the side of sucky nerfdom. So I canvassed the firearm and cannon rules in the 3.5e DMG, Stormwrack, Pathfinder Campaign Setting, Skull & Bones from Green Ronin, Broadsides! and Pirates! from Living Imagination, Seas of Blood from Mongoose, and others. Here's my amalgamated firearms rules! Comments are welcome.

Gunpowder Weapons In Golarion

The current state of the art in personal firearms is a smoothbore weapon with a wheellock firing mechanism. Earlier matchlocks, which required a lit match held in a “matchlock” to fire, and the even earlier hand culverins, which required manual application of a lit match, are still in circulation but no regular forces use them. Though most firearms come from the mass production gunworks of Alkenstar, there are skilled craftsmen in other locations that can and do build firearms.

The smiths of Alkenstar have just developed snaplocks, but have kept the innovation to themselves so far. More reliable and inexpensive flintlocks are doubtless not far behind. A couple artisans have made rifled hunting weapons but these are still unique curiosities.

One-Handed Ranged Weapons
Pistol 250 gp 1d6 2d4 x3 50 ft. 3 lbs. P
Blunderbuss pistol 500 gp 1d10 2d6 19-20/x2 5 ft. 5 lbs. B and P
Two-Handed Ranged Weapons
Musket, short 500 gp 1d10 2d6 x3 100 ft. 8 lbs. P
Musket, long 750 gp 1d10 2d6 x3 150 ft. 10 lbs. P
Blunderbuss 500 gp 1d12 3d6 19-20/x2 15 ft. 8 lbs. B and P
Explosive Weapons
Bomb 150 gp 1d10 2d6 x2 5 ft. 1 lb. B
Smoke bomb 70 gp Smoke x2 10 ft. 1 lb. -

Proficiency: All wheellock weapons require Exotic Weapon Proficiency (firearms) to use without penalty.
Reload: All wheellock weapons hold one shot and take two full round actions to load.
Inaccurate: All non-rifled firearms have an inherent -1 to hit penalty.
Exploding Dice: Whenever you deal damage with a firearm and roll maximum on any damage die, reroll that die and add that roll to the total as well. If you roll maximum on rerolls, continue to reroll, adding to the damage each time.
Misfire: Whenever you roll a natural 1 on an attack roll made with a firearm, your firearm might misfire. Immediately roll 1d20. On a 1, the firearm is broken and the powder explodes out the breech, dealing the weapon’s damage to you; on a 2–7, the firearm is broken; on a 8–18, the firearm misfires and is fouled; and on a 19–20, it simply misfires. A fouled firearm requires 2 full rounds to clear before it can be reloaded.
Melee: Pistols may be used as saps and muskets as clubs in melee combat, but they are reasonably fragile and whenever you roll a natural 1 on the attack roll the weapon is broken.
Pistols have a hardness of 10 and 10 hit points; long weapons have a hardness of 10 and 20 hit points.

Pistol: a single shot wheellock pistol.
Blunderbuss Pistol: Also known as a dragon, this is a large pistol with a bell-shaped barrel. A blunderbuss pistol’s damage suffers a -2 penalty per range increment beyond the first.
Musket, short: A wheellock musket with a short barrel suitable for use in close quarters. Also known as an arquebus.
Musket, long: A wheellock musket with a 4 foot long barrel. The long musket must be braced on something or else suffer a -2 penalty to hit. Many such muskets come with a inherent pintle mount so that they can be braced while standing; it requires a move action to set up the pintle.
Blunderbuss: This is a heavy musket with a bell-shaped barrel, also referred to as a musketoon. A blunderbuss’ damage suffers a -2 penalty per range increment beyond the first.
Bomb: A bomb, also known as a grenade, is thrown as a splash weapon. It explodes and does damage to everyone in a 5’ radius from the target or target square. Bombs do 2d6 damage to a directly targeted creature and 2d4 splash damage.
Smoke bomb: A smoke bomb is thrown as a splash weapon, and puts out a 10’ radius cloud of smoke.

Analysis:
I kept the "exploding damage" from PF but brought the damage up to something decent - even the DMG rules had 1d10 for pistols and 1d12 for muskets. And I brought costs down to something more logical; guns are still 5-10x more expensive than any normal weapon and I felt thousands of gp was out of line. And a little tech was OK but Alkenstar actually having percussion cap weapons was way out of order. Golarion tech is early 1500s in general so I kept to that.
With the two round reload time (maybe have a feat that drops it to one full round action to reload) most engagements that have guns will either be a gunshot and then melee, or will have pistols used as holdout weapons for when you need a quick short range punch. With the inaccuracy and unreliability as a damage tradeoff, I would think this hits the sweet spot of some players wanting one and others not bothering, and as they go up in level they'll mostly abandon them.

Next time: field grade weapons and cannon on ships!

I'm starting a pirate-themed campaign and wanted to put together some new traits, mostly to let people get relevant skills regardless of class, but I came up with a bit of a variety. Thoughts?

Cabin Man (Campaign): You have spent significant time in your childhood aboard waterborne vessels. You gain a +1 trait bonus on Profession: Sailor checks, and Profession: Sailor is always a class skill for you.
Man From Azlant (Campaign): You have spent a lot of time in the water. You gain a +1 trait bonus on Swim checks, and Swim is always a class skill for you.
Connected (Social) – in town, you know who to ask and how to ask them. You gain a +1 trait bonus to the Gather Information use of Diplomacy and Knowledge: Local checks, and Knowledge: Local is always a class skill for you.
Derobement (Combat): Your weapon work is exceptionally wary and you keep your blade out of contact with your opponent’s as much as you can. You gain a +1 trait bonus to your CMD to resist disarms, binds, and sunders.
Rigging Monkey (Campaign): You are at home above the deck of a ship. You gain a +1 trait bonus to Climb and Use Rope checks, and Climb is always a class skill for you.
Freestyle Runner (Campaign): You are remarkably nimble and can move fast in difficult terrain. You gain a +1 trait bonus to Acrobatics checks and Acrobatics is always a class skill for you.
Bounding (Combat): You are skilled at shooting and then taking cover, even when on the move (or spending your move action to reload). After firing a missile weapon, you can spend a swift action to take cover or partial cover, if such is available wherever you’ve ended your movement.
Baller (Combat): from a youth spent playing games, you are pretty good at lobbing something where you want it to go. Whenever throwing a splash weapon or attempting other kinds of indirect fire throwing attacks, you gain a +1 trait bonus to the attack roll.
Good Soil (Faith) – Your faith makes you fertile ground for the works of the gods. Whenever you have a divine healing spell cast on you, or are healed by a channel energy or lay on hands, you heal one extra hit point per die of healing.

Over the last several months, there have been a number of bad Adobe Acrobat JavaScript bugs, resulting in a number of patches and the recommendation to keep JavaScript turned off in Acrobat. At work, like many companies, we've actually enforced that via policy now.

For some reason, whenever I open Paizo PDFs, it tells me they use JavaScript and would I like to turn it on now? I say "no," but I am wondering what the JS is being used for. Something useful? Something like "tracking when the PDF is used," which would be of grave concern to the privacy of users? Or maybe the message is spurious?

Hey, I just had an interesting experience where I forwarded the link to the new Wayfinder to my gaming group. Sadly, though many were interested, the number who successfully downloaded it on the first try was low (and pretty much all of them work in tech!).

First, you have to "add to my downloads" rather than just download it. Annoying but they all got that.

But then, the My Downloads page tripped them up. They report, "Download is greyed out, and there's some message about 'An Important Notice Regarding Wizards of the Coast PDFs!' I don't understand." Several of them interpreted "Personalize this file" as some option they didn't want; maybe choosing what chapters to put in it, or, in the words of one guy, "add a smiley face or some crap to it." For new users it's not very clear that personalize means "we want to watermark it before you download it, this is a mandatory step."

I would suggest that you change the personalize/download step somehow. I know it says you have to personalize first in the text at the top, but that's not working on all users, and you don't want abandons on freebies that can get future customers.

Why is "download" separate, why not have the first download click personalize? Or why not have a mouseover, or maybe when you click download it says "personalize first!" (Or maybe just run the personalize...) or change the "Personalize" word to "Prepare file for download" or something. "Personalization" usually has an implication of usefulness for the user; really you're just watermarking to prevent piracy so it's a bit of a mental stretch.

Anyway, my experience indicates that you may be having substantial dropoff for first-timers trying to download a PDF, and some reengineering of the page might help that.

Dragonrest Isle got dumped on for not being Golarioney enough, but then Mammoth Lords and Boiling Beast tried to be Golarioney but apparently lack the encyclopedic knowledge of the setting needed to make an adventure "fit."

This makes me a little worried about the future of writing adventures for Pathfinder. Is the world getting too detailed for people to easily slot it in? "There can't be storm liches!" "There's already a Lost World!" Makes you want to just make up a new little village somewhere (even though even really small villes are already on the main Varisia map...)

Especially as all this setting info is not in one place like the main setting book, but is in every AP and adventure... Seems like this is going to get Forgotten Realms Disease mighty soon. Isn't a "lighter" more Greyhawk approach healthier long term?

So forget about their merits. I'd like to discuss villain names. We got a wide variety in this round.

Naming is a difficult thing. You want names that are:

* plausible
* not wuss-sounding, if an overt villain
* not suspicious, if it's supposed to be an undercover villain
* at any cost - not easily corrupted and mocked

Plausibility - To paraphrase a Tick episode (I consider it a failing of the Internets I can't pull up the exact quote in Google),
"What kind of a name is that?"
"Uh... French. We're from France."
"That's funny, it sounds more made up to me."
Also in this category are people named strangely appropriate things. Did their parents really name them "Arcano Necrophage?" And then they turned out to be a necromancer? I guess those pop psych studies about your name affecting you when you grow up are true. Good thing he didn't grow up to be manager of a day care or something, that would be embarrassing.

Not suspicious - Often, your subtlety isn't as clever as you think it is. In Rise of the Runelords, there's a traitor named Kaven. The second my character met him, I thought "Kaven = craven = coward = traitor, time to interrogate him." Annnnd sure enough.

Or a sci-fi game I played in where we kept getting rumors and hints about a space pirate captain called "Rojo Beluga." I humored the GM by not mocking him, but again, "rojo beluga = red whale = big red herring = false rumor." Annnnd sure enough. "I wondered why you all never bit on those rumors." "Because we're not retarded?"

So some comments from the Top 32!

Names With Issues

1. Volner Tain. This guy immediately becomes "Volner Taint" and the players laugh like Beavis and Butthead every time his name is mentioned.

2. Gulga Cench. Gulga Stench. Being a poo-beast in the bargain - nuff said.

3. Archibald Graveleaf. He's supposed to front as a benevolent protector, but that doesn't last long with "Graveleaf." And what, his last name was Graveleaf and ironically he grew up to be a killdruid?

4. Paradigm Theoguard - apparently his parents were both prescient and sadistic? Many groups will find this name high on the mock-factor and call him "Synergy Godbuddy" or the like (changing the exact name each time).

Now, there's names that ride the line. Mockable, or just appropriate for a one-liner?

1. Father Avon begs for an "Avon Calling!" line. Might be OK, depending on how often the players do that.

2. Bracht Darkhouse, when defeated, might be deprecated with a "More like a dark *room*!" from a player. But they're stretching, so it's probably OK. Same deal with Gale - if they really are pushing for an Schwartzenegger-style kill one-liner that's their problem.

3. Sharina Legendsinger, being a bard, is going to be treated to many a rendition of "My Sharina," but as she is spending a lot of the time being the party's "friend" this might just be played as a fun bonding experience/inside joke among friends. And a nice positive "Legendsinger" name; hopefully an appellation and not an actual last name.

Then you have your standard spread of "sounds like a made up name from a fantasy novel" names. Which isn't that bad.

Is Christine's adventure on track for January?

The whole contest was awesome and got all kinds of excitement up, but since then it seems like it's just all water under the bridge. Will there be anything else coming from it? Work for Boomer?

I would have liked a blog or something form Christine abou tthe development process, as part of a "view into becoming a 'real' game author".

Anyway, RPG Superstar was bad ass and it'd be a shame for so little to really come of it in the end besides the temporary traffic/interest boost.

I don't mind getting some weak powers per se, but the problem is that these cannibalize things the wizard will be wanting to do.

Let's take the conjuration ability. +2 armor bonus. But if you're a smart conjurer, you're casting Mage Armor. You could not, and have an extra spell - but until you're level 10 it won't be as good as that level 1 spell, and you'll be tempted to cast it to get the best AC you can.

If it just stacked on top of mage armor or something - then yes.

Same deal abjuration bonus. OK, so if you're not expecting fire, th en the bonus is fine. But if you are, unless you're a retard you'll cast the real spell anyway.

I feel these should stack with their "obvious" spells or otherwise give benefits that don't cannibalize the usefulness of the spells you'll need to cast...

Hey, so in each Adventure Path installment, there's a batch of articles in the back. Each product description mentions them (though a bit more vaguely than I'd like, though this seems to be improving in the Second Darkness product descriptions...) OK, so now that there's more than a dozen of these things, any thoughts on starting to keep up an index of articles, and even maybe a forecast of what's upcoming? Since people looking to flesh out Golarion and get all the bits hidden away here and there need these articles, it'd be great to have a wiki or whatnot with them listed with a little more detail than the product descriptions (1.g. in #15 - "Four new monsters by Jason Bulmahn, Hal Maclean, and Rob McCreary." Later in life that'll be a pain trying to figure out what's where.

In fact, this could extend to the AP adventures and Pathfinder modules too. the use cases are simple - "I'm looking for info on Osirion," "I'm looking for all the new Pathfinder spells," "I'm looking for monsters that might be in the Cinderlands..." Just need to tag the high level "proper nouns" from each.

Y'all are getting encyclopedic very quickly, and have surpassed probably all the historical settings except Greyhawk and FR already - a great way to make it more usable (and friendly to noobs, who might already be intimidated by the amount of "back lore" if they started now) is to have some kind of master index/encyclopedia. If it were wikied I'm sure plenty of people would keep it up without y'all having to mess with it. As I look around I find this independent pathfinder wiki - http://www.pathfinderwiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page - maybe it's as simple as linking to that and encouraging people to use it...

Well howdy! Our gaming group brought you the tales of our battle through the Rise of the Runelords in Mxyzplk's Rise of the Runelords Campaign. Now our doughty band is taking up the challenge of the Curse of the Crimson Throne, using the Pathfinder Beta rules. I'm keeping up a separate thread on the playtest board for the rule playtest commentary and issues; this thread will be "story only."

As usual the writeups will be links back to my blog. This isn't because I'm a click whore, it's because our session scribe (Bruce the Mighty) composes these honkin' huge 10-20 page PDF session summaries (with diagrams if necessary!). I could cut and paste the text into the forum but I'm pretty sure it would make the PostMonster cry.

I have a main Curse of the Crimson Throne page where I link all the character sheets and other relevant info. Then there's a page for each chapter in the AP, with the session summaries linked into it and my commentary below. So if you ever get lost, just head to the main page:

Curse of the Crimson Throne Campaign Home

I really like the new channeling rules. There's a couple items that I'd like to talk about, though.

1. Selective Channeling = feat tax. You pretty much have to take it if you'll be channeling in combat. Most spells, except for direct damage, "magically" know to benefit friends and not enemies. If channeling needs a little nerf, I don't think this is the way to do it. (I don't think it does, but ymmv. Try a d4 round cooldown like a breath weapon instead.)

2. Negative channeling = hell on wheels! I don't mind evil clerics having a bad ass power, that's fun. However, a problem is that positive and negative energy are not treated like the other energy types. With no way for a low level party to resist channeling damage it's going to be easy for a smart evil cleric to get TPKs. You have to use a fourth level spell, Death Ward, to get any resistance to negative energy. And Selective Channeling doesn't dissuade them much - a) they often have undead instead of living around and b) even if they don't, theyre evil and don't mind killing their ogre bodyguards or whatnot.
If positive/negative energy will be very common, I think that Resist Energy etc. should also apply to them. Or at worst some L3 cleric-only "resist planar shenanigans" spell. But I think it's poor form to have no way to avoid channeled damage until level 7. (I know you can save for half, I'm just saying that there are spells to mitigate all other energy types at lower levels.)

3. Action economy. As mentioned in other threads, the lame part about clerics healing is both spell economy and action economy. Channeling helps with the spell economy but not actions, and especially in high level play it's often a case of "what can you whip out in 3 rounds!" Now, Complete Divine has Quicken Turning which makes turning a swift action. Some think that's too overpowering since channeling >> turning. But I suggest a Quicken Turning (actually, call it Quicken Channeling to avoid copyright problems) that makes turning a move action.

I didn't see a thread on it, but it bears mentioning. At-will orisons are good. I never bothered with orison/cantrips except to load up on detect magics before. But now, my cleric I'm running with Beta through CoCT is using them a lot. About to go into the crime lord's hideout? Everyone bow your head for the blessing of the Dawnflower. <Guidance for everyone>.

Some of the orisons don't scale well (Virtue? Please.) But most are lovely. There should be more to choose from!

Hey all, we just started playing Curse of the Crimson Throne using the Beta rules and I'm playing a cleric of Sarenrae. I'm posting in general about it [url="http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizoPublishing/pathfinder/pathfinderRPG/playtest/curseOfTheCrimsonThronePlaytest1u75d"on the playtest board[/url]. So far, the short form is:

1. Orisons at will, yay, I routinely put Guidance on everyone before we head in somewhere and it's a nice "bow your heads" RP moment too. Except for detect magic, I seldom used cantrips/orisons before because they are so small that the overhead of trying to select the right ones was annoying. With anything at will there's always the cheese possibilities (create water until the floor collapses!) but I applaud adding cool and letting DMs worry about abuse rather than dumbing down so everything's nice and padded.

2. Channeling, yay (except for the Selective Channeling feat tax). Frees up my very short spell list to do more entertaining things. In higher level play, the problem is time in which to do things, so I plan to use Quicken Turning (Complete Divine), making channeling also not waste an action. This extends our party's adventuring day a lot, as otherwise I have two spells to burn into Cure Light Wounds. Even at level 1 we were fighting dudes doing 12 points of damage a hit, on average 2 cure light wounds don't even heal one hit like that!

3. Domains, boo. There are a couple good ones (elemental d6 touch attacks!), but mostly they're not that exciting. The level 1 and 2 abilities are the real distinctives, as the others are all just a bonus spell you can already cast. And many of those are not too interesting. "touch an undead to do 1d8 damage!" Yeah, it's called "caryring a mace." Which leads us to...

4. Holy Warrior YAY - from the Golarion Campaign Setting book, you give up both domains for fighter BAB, d10 HD. Nap time for the paladin. When I saw this and saw my domain powers I immediately jettisoned the domains. No, this isn't Pathfinder core per se, but one of the things you have to keep in mind when designing is what classes will look like with allthe inevitable tweaks. The cleric and paladin are very close together, so a buff-the-cleric's-fighting tweak makes them better than a pally, which means a pally needs more work and cool distinct things unto themselves (same applies to multiclassing; if multirules make a cleric/fighter better than a pally you have problems.)

5. Backwards compatibility - not so much. Because of the change in domains and turning, the vast majority of old prestige classes, cleric feats, etc. are either busted so they're not usable or are just sucky choices now (anything that burns a turn). And I'm OK with that. Long as monsters and adventures are easily converted, I think trying for character option back compatibility is both a vain hope and an undesirable constraint.

More on each of these in separate threads, but I thought there was some value to an integrated overview.

Our group just finished with Rise of the Runelords and decided to use the Pathfinder RPG beta for our next campaign, which will be the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path. We'll be doing our usual session summaries and posting those to the Campaign Journals board, but here's where I'll talk about our interaction with the rules. All the players are experienced D&D (and many other RPG) players, late '20's, early '30's.

Here's the starting rules from the DM on character creation.

Books allowed:

* Pathfinder RPG Beta, 3.5e DMG
* Player's Handbook II
* Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords (Crusaders and Warblades only)
* The first "Complete" series (Warrior, Divine, Arcane, Adventurer)
* The second "Complete" series (Mage, Scoundrel, Champion)
* Spell Compendium
* Magic Item Compendium
* Frostburn, Sandstorm, Stormwrack, Cityscape, Dungeonscape

25 point spend on ability scores, per the Pathfinder RPG.

Pick one trait from CoCT Player's Guide and one from the Pathfinder Companion books (Second Darkness is the only one out now, but more will come I'm sure).

Special DM rule to help with the 3.5e "multiclassing problem":
If a caster multiclasses into a non-caster class (this does not include any class that gives caster levels or spellcasting advances), for every 2 non-caster levels he will gain CL and new spells per day as if he had advanced 1 level in one of his caster classes. He doesn't gain any other bennies like domain or school powers. The above rule replaces other multiclassing band-aids like Practiced Spellcaster feat and the Mystic Theurge class, so those things will be unavailable. (Slow casters like rangers/pallys count, and warlocks/invocations count.)

My take - I like this rule "kinda." It helps not nerf spellcasters who take some levels in a non-caster class. However, it doesn't address the opposite (losing too much BAB if you're a fighting type who dips into casting). Also, we argued about one aspect of this - I think it should also apply to classes/p-classes that give limited spellcasting. For example, if you are a caster and take a p-class that only gives casting progression at every other level, you should get one more CL for every two "skipped" levels. Otherwise you nerf all of the existing p-classes. If you can just take, for example,fighter levels and get 1/2 spellcasting with it, then all of the p-classes that give 1/2 or worse casting in exchange for some but not all fightery powers suck in comparison, and there's a lot of these "class-blending" p-classes out there. The DM disagreed. But I'm right.

I started thinking about character concepts and came up with a couple.

1. I know that Crimson Throne is more urban and that there's a Batman-like "Blackjack" character in there that seems cool and James Jacobs mentioned that PCs might be able to "step into his mask". So I thought about a tough rogue, acrobatic, maybe specializing in thrown weapons and intimidation. Possible implementations include Avenging Executioner, Master Thrower, or Tiger Claw school from Book of Nine Swords. But, the character I played in the campaign we did right before RotR, set in the City of Sigil (see the session summaries!)

2. I haven't played a cleric in a while. I considered a cleric of Pharasma, and then go Ruby Knight Vindicator, or even a paladin and go Shadowbane something - I've wanted to do a Wee Jasite cleric or pally for a while and Pharasma's very similar. I also thought about a cleric of Sarenrae; on the one hand she's very Pelor (too similar IMO) but I like her "up with commoners" take. Maybe mix with monk for a Sacred Fist.

Our group got big enough we actually split it for this campaign into two groups of four. It turns out the rest of my group were looking at fighter/rogue/ranger and warlock/sorcerer kinds of things, so I figured "OK, I'll go cleric." I had hoped to not be the primary caster, as I was the primary caster (wizard) in our RotR game, but we need what we need. And the new channeling rules in Pathfinder intrigue me.

Also, I wanted to play a more positive character, and the pic of the cleric of Sarenrae in the Paizo books (cover of "Fortress of the Stone Giants" - Kyra, the iconic cleric from that AP) really intrigued me. So I figured I'd do the cleric of Sarenrae, even do a female one. (I do a female character every once in a while, as we're all grown ups it's not a problem... In fact I hear the other group is 3/4 female by some odd coincidence!)

So, a cleric of Sarenrae it is. Next post, her build!

This was discussed in alpha but not taken up, so...

The worst thing about turning is the whole "run away" concept. It sucks for fear spells too. It is a nightmare for the DM to adjudicate (pull out the map...) Usually DMs just handwave it off rather than worrying about where they run off to. And with undead, they're just coming back anyway, so effectively it's just a delay of game. Unless you corner them, and get the heroic feel of shooting something in a corner. It's just not fun, flavorful, or easy to run.

And there's so many more ways to handle it. Make them "shaken" or "cowering." Treat it like a mass Sanctuary on the group. Or a Repulsion effect. Decide on a cool effect you want and there's probably something to make it identical to. But stop the running. It's lame and hateful.

Then fix it for fears on people, too...

I understand the laudable goal of being 3.5e back compatible. But as I've been putting together a character for Crimson Throne using the Pathfinder beta, I wonder if that ship has sailed.

I'm building a cleric. As usual in 3.5, I start planning out my build progression, because to get into prestige classes etc. you have to plan from level 1 (I don't like that, but that's the game).

So I start going through Complete Divine, the other Complete books for feats, PHBII, etc. Many of the feats and p-class powers don't make sense any more (like anything referring to domain spell lists). Others don't make sense because of the changed turning rules. Even ones that might make sense, my DM thinks are unbalanced in Pathfinder - in cases I disagree, but anyway. (And some now suck to where I consider them unbalanced in the "don't take this!" sense.) Most prestige classes really suck now in that they don't advance your turning/channeling. The net result is that my 3.5 resources, except for the raw spell lists, aren't all that useful.

And you know, I'm OK with that. Frankly the 3.5e prestige classes seemed mostly to come from someone's diseased mind with little to no regard for what classical archetypes someone would want to build a character to. After having some hands-on time I wonder if more deviation from 3.5 to make a better system is merited, because the "cost" of losing back compatibility is IMO already being incurred. Don't go for 3.75e, go for "4e the way it should have been." Y'all have a super aggressive publishing schedule coming up, seems like you could easily fill the need for feats/p-classes quickly and, I dare say, in higher quality than D&D did in 3.5e.

I'll save specific change thoughts for other posts, this is more for discussion of how much value there is in cleaving to 3.5e too tightly when so much if it can't really be used RAW now.

One of my favorite features of forums is the ability to subscribe to a thread and get emailed when there's a response. Needing to go manually check threads I've posted on is a drag. So here's one vote for getting that! TIA...