Belkzen War Alchemist

Greatbear's page

Organized Play Member. 147 posts. No reviews. No lists. 1 wishlist. 1 Organized Play character.


RSS

1 to 50 of 147 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | next > last >>
Liberty's Edge

Bump

Liberty's Edge

This sounds a lot like C. S. Friedman's Magister trilogy. In this world, power their spells with their long life force, so every spell brings them closer to death. Magisters, on the other hand, get their power from the life force from a random stranger, slowly killing that person.

It's an interesting idea. I'd suggest allowing the spellcasters to regain all hit points lost from from spell casting after a period of rest so they're not dependent on the cleric blowing all of her hit points to save the other part members.

Liberty's Edge

The warpriest is already a hybrid of the fighter and cleric. Merging it with the cleric would make the cleric what? 3/4 cleric and 1/4 fighter?

Does the cleric need to be more warrior like? What niche would that fill?

Liberty's Edge

Looking for feedback.

Go to Wereape-Kin

Liberty's Edge

A swarm of nanites in an orbit that intersects with the home world every 500 years. Every time they make contact with the planet, they rewrite the DNA of random groups of people and animals, creating whole new species of magical beasts, monstrous humanoids, and aberrations.

Liberty's Edge

207. A gas giant with a narrow layer of breathable air created by air elementals. Populations live on floating continents made up of gargantuan earth elementals. Water elementals create spherical seas that drift through the air. Fire elementals live below, destroying anything that falls out of the sky.

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Sounds interesting.

Are there any other Non-PC races? Orcs, goblins, etc?

What about dragons? How do they fit into a world of dinosaurs?

Liberty's Edge

My suggestion:

Two levels of Expert with maxed Knowledge (Psychology) and Acrobatics for her "pre-corruption" stage. Then, she starts taking levels in Bard (Court Fool archetype). This gives her a bonus to Acrobatics and Climb equal to 1/2 her Bard level. Multi-class with Alchemist to gain poison resistance and bombs.

High Dex, Cha, and Con, really low Wis.

Feats: Acrobatic, Bludgeoner, Exotic Weapon (clown hammer), Goad, Nimble Moves, Weapons Focus (baseball bat), Weapon Focus (clown hammer).

Baseball bat uses the same stats as a great club.

Clown Hammer stats:

Two-handed exotic weapon, Damage (Sm): 1d6, Damage (Md); 1d8, Critical: x3, Weight: 8 lbs, Type: B, Special: Sunder

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of artificial worlds like Dyson Spheres or Ringworld. The idea I'm currently working on is a binary planetary system: Two Earth-sized worlds tidally locked. I haven't decided on names for either world yet, so for now I'm calling them Alpha and Beta

Alpha was designed by the gods to be a perfect global garden/hunting ground. A massive geodesic sphere has been erected at about 10 miles above sea level. This crystal sphere acts as a literal greenhouse, trapping heat and keeping the lower atmosphere at a constant, warm temperature.

However, as gods are always likely to do, they feel into conflict and one of them transported a second planet into the system in hopes of causing the two to collide. The other gods barely managed to avoid the destruction of both worlds, but only by trapping Alpha and Beta into being locked together, spinning around their common centers of massive.

As a result, Beta's tilt has been altered, putting it into the beginnings of an ice age while Alpha has begun to experience rising temperatures.

Meanwhile, the beings who could fix the problem, the gods, have been stripped of their power and forced to live on one or the other world as immortal wanderers.

Liberty's Edge

Simple question: Which would you prefer to play: Starfinder or Starjammer?

Liberty's Edge

Malefactor wrote:

I don't know why everyone here thinks becoming a vampire turns you Chaotic Evil; The Template clearly says any Evil.

You are correct, so it would most deities, it would depend on how far your alignment shifted away from theirs. So, any good deity and any neutral ones like Pharasma that hate undead on principle would disown a priest that became a vampire. Evil gods would probably be delighted.

The other question would be what happens to the priest's soul? Did the soul escape upon death or is it trapped within the body of the undead creature? If it's the former, than a good deity could still welcome the soul of their priest into their plane even as their body is still walking around doing evil things.

Liberty's Edge

ghostunderasheet wrote:
To become monsters. Say a priest is forced by a kiss of vampires to become an undead. Does the priest's god reject their fallen follower even though it is not thier fualt that thier condition was forced on them? This includes other smart monster types.

You could say that about anyone who was turned into a vampire against their will. Becoming a vampire turns one's alignment to chaotic evil, so any member a class that requires them to be within one step of their deity's alignment would immediately lose all spellcasting abilities and other class abilities unless their deity was CE, CN, or NE.

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

I'm working on the background details of a sort "post-Ragnorak" world where a newly ascended god kills off all of the old gods to create a Lawful Evil theocracy. The only ones left to oppose him are the demigods like the Empyreal Lords, Demon Lords, Horsemen, etc, plus a few non-theistic religions.

My big concern right now is the lack of diversity in the domains, so I may tweak that a bit.

Liberty's Edge

Has anyone ever done a conversion of the shadowcaster from Tome of Magic to Pathfinder?

Liberty's Edge

FormerFiend wrote:

So I'm considering adding Darkseid from DC comics as a god to my home campaign to act as a bit of an iron fist counterpart to Asmodeus' silver tongue approach to lawful evil. He's going to be a full deity, 5 domains, 6 subdomains. Thing is I can't quite make up my mind on his 5th domain.

I'm set on evil, law, strength, and void. For the fifth, though, I'm torn between destruction and war.

Any suggestions?

I'd go with darkness, evil, strength, travel, and war.

Liberty's Edge

Most divine spell casters can be played as worshiping a pantheon or even a nondeity specific religion without any changes in mechanics. Druids and Shamans can worship nature or nature spirits or they could worship a pantheon so long as most of deities aren't hostile to nature.

Rangers and hunters could easily worship pantheons that support tracking down and slaying monsters.

Paladins would tend to favor pantheons that were mostly lawful and/or good in alignment. If there are evil gods in the pantheon, a paladin might view them as "rogue" members or forces that need to be appeased in order to stay their wrath.

For oracles, mysteries could be associated with a pantheon as a whole.

The three classes that might need adjustment are those that depend on domains, inquisitions, and blessings: cleric, inquisitor, and warpriest. These are also the classes that are required to have an alignment within one step of their deity's. These were designed to be classes that are deity-specific.

Clerics could worship an entire pantheon. The only question would be how would they choose their domains? I wouldn't open up to letting a cleric choose any two domains associated with any deities in the pantheon. Instead, give each pantheon a short list of domains available to a pantheistic cleric based on what the overall culture or theme of the pantheon.

For example, if the pantheon is closely associated with a particular alignment, give them that alignment domain. If the pantheon is similar to the Norse pantheon, their worshipers might be seagoing warriors. Domains like war, water, and weather might be appropriate.

Warpriests and blessings could work exactly as domains do for clerics.

For inquisitors, either pick a domain from the list of pantheon domains or an inquisition that best fits the role or archetype the inquisitor is following. Perhaps not all inquisitors search for enemies of their religion the same way.

Liberty's Edge

If you allow psionics, the soulknife makes a good Jedi, especially if you select the gifted blade archetype.

Liberty's Edge

LMPjr007 wrote:

I said it before...

Normally, we don't like to do MORE classes for Pathfinder, but then hybrid classes were created and I became REALLY interested it what we could make. And then this idea popped up, and you can guess what happened next.

Yep, we did it again...

Headhunter = Barbarian + Witch

Interested yet? Coming soon from LPJ design and BEST of all we will be releasing playtest version that you can use and test out.

Witch doctor?

Liberty's Edge

Weirdo wrote:

How about

1) Everyone gets a familiar.

2) Characters that would get a familiar from a class instead get Improved Familiar for free. They can stack it with whatever archetype they want, and apply class-derived benefits normally (like the duettist bard's performing familiar abilities). I personally would give them a 3rd level familiar right away and then let them upgrade to the 5th and 7th level choices if they want when they reach those levels - you want them to benefit from the class familiar ability right away and the 3rd level familiar abilities shouldn't be unbalanced at level 1 but the 7th level abilities might be.

3) Characters that would get an animal companion can instead have a combat-ready animal companion, adding the familiar benefits to the animal companion as Daw suggested. Remember that some of the animal companion values might be replaced by the master's BAB, saves, etc.

4) Characters that don't get an animal companion can upgrade their familiar's form to a level 1 animal companion by spending a feat. This gives you more flexibility in building characters that have exotic daemons (like if you want to model Lord Asriel as an investigator instead of a ranger). The daemon's HP, BAB, saves, etc will still scale as a familiar, so the result should be comparable to a mauler familiar. You could potentially scale it to a full animal companion with a second feat.

5) Remember that you generally don't have to take your class's familiar/animal companion so if you want to be a druid with a raven daemon and a domain, that's fine (and balanced against the vanilla bard with the songbird daemon).

6) Consider whether you're going to keep the taboo regarding people interacting directly with other peoples' daemons. This would potentially make it very difficult for those with typical daemons to deal with the stronger daemon varieties, but also limits those daemons' ability to directly protect their people.

7) You could certainly model races with different kinds of souls by ignoring these rules,...

I like these suggestions. Do you think there should be restrictions on what types of animal companions characters should have based on their class? For example, a rogue with a woolly mammoth doesn't make much sense.

Liberty's Edge

I'm kicking around the idea of world that is sort like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. If you're not familiar, this is a world where people's souls exist outside their bodies in the form of animals called "daemons." It's more or less a world where everyone has animal companion/familiar.

The question is, how to balance it in Pathfinder where certain classes have animal companions and others do not normally gain them. There are several archetypes like the homuncultist (alchemist), the carnivalis (rogue) and the mad dog (barbarian) that grant certain classes animal companions or familiars. There's also a few options like the animal domain or the familiar bond feat which requires characters to use up two feat slots. But I'm looking for a way to make having an animal companion or a familiar the default for every character.

Basically, I'm thinking what needs to be done is either taking something away from each class that doesn't have some kind of bond feature or adding something to those that do. For example, letting the druid have both an animal companion and a domain. Is that overkill? Would it make the druid too powerful?

Liberty's Edge

Why don't familiars gain feats as their witch/wizard gains levels but animal companions do?

Liberty's Edge

I have a question where the names of the various Empyreal Lords in The Chronicle of the Righteous. Were they invented by the author(s) or were they based on any particular culture or mythology?

Liberty's Edge

It looked like they just kind of faded away after Rogue Genius broke off from them.

Liberty's Edge

Dot.

Liberty's Edge

Greatbear wrote:
Skylancer4 wrote:
"Cleric" covers A LOT of ground. And being a versatile class with spheres and spells, they can do quite a bit besides "heal bot". You might get a better response if you qualified the specifics of what it means to you.
I'm just looking to see what classes people like for flavor reasons.

The cleric has its roots in a certain Medieval holy knight and it's always struck me as still too rooted in that archetype. I like the priest with its more focus on spell casting and divine gifts is kind of more how I would envision a servant of a deity being.

I do have a couple of thoughts.

One is, what about switching the priest to being a Charisma-based caster with a limited number of spells known like the oracle or sorcerer? I like the idea of a priest who is very persuasive and actively seeking converts.

Also, has anyone tried combining the priest with the variant channeling rules in Divine Favor - The Cleric? Or any other variant channeling rules?

Liberty's Edge

Skylancer4 wrote:
"Cleric" covers A LOT of ground. And being a versatile class with spheres and spells, they can do quite a bit besides "heal bot". You might get a better response if you qualified the specifics of what it means to you.

I'm just looking to see what classes people like for flavor reasons.

Liberty's Edge

Which 3rd-party divine caster makes the best replacement for the party's cleric and why? Right now, I'm leaning toward the priest class from Kobold Press, but I'd like to hear other suggestions. Which is more customizable for particular deities/religions?

Liberty's Edge

What is the relationship between the gods and the various outsider races in your campaigns? Some are easy to describe. The devils all work for Asmodeus. The angels serve various good deities. But what about the proteans or the inevitables? Is there an ultra-lawful deity who commands the inevitables? Are the demon lords subordinate to or rivals of the chaotic evil gods?

Liberty's Edge

DungeonmasterCal wrote:
I've thought of just creating a pantheon of 9 gods, one for each alignment, but I don't know how to best assign the domains, so that idea just sits on the burner.

My usual pattern is to go the opposite direction. Decide on what role each god should play, what their portfolio is, and what domains fit them best, and then figure out what alignments fit them best.

But then, I'm not a huge fan of the alignment domains. I'd rather elevate the planar faction subdomains to full domains. In other words, instead of giving the lawful evil god either the law or the evil domain, give him the devil subdomain as one of his domains.

Liberty's Edge

For some fluff, check out the Pathfinder Tales novel, The Redemption Engine. I think it's the first one where the main character travels to a number of planes.

The cosmology of Golarion isn't tremendously different from the 3.X D&D cosmology of the Great Wheel. There are planes associated with each alignment that souls are naturally drawn to after death. The goddess Pharisma is in charge of making sure the souls make it to the right afterlife. Asmodeus is not just the king of the devils, but a fully-fledged god. The slaad have been replaced by the proteans.

There are three supplements, The Book of the Damned vol. I, II, and III that cover the denizens of the lower planes in pretty good detail. Another supplement, Chronicles of the Righteous cover the good-aligned outsiders. Nothing for the elemental planes or for the inevitables or the proteans beyond their entries in the various bestiaries so far, though.

So, while there isn't a single book by Paizo describing the planes, there are a number of supplements covering at least some of them. But since it is so similar to the 3.X cosmology, you could use a lot of the fluff from the Manual of the Planes and Planar Handbook and incorporate it into your campaign without much difficulty.

Liberty's Edge

Got mine. Thanks.

Liberty's Edge

Very nice. What spells would a wizard from one of these schools focus on? Maybe allow a wizard from the familiar school to Beast Shape on his familiar. Turn your cat into a panther!

Liberty's Edge

Wolfwaker wrote:
I have been curious about Adventuring Classes: A Fistful of Denarii.

Lots of great ideas in there. It's all non-spell casting classes if you're interested in running a low-magic campaign.

Liberty's Edge

Ooo! I've been dying for the Sorcerer Bloodlines PDF.

Liberty's Edge

I have a question about the Hive Master's Summon Nature's Ally spells. The entry in the wiki seems to have two lists of vermin. Why is that?

It also lists options for the 3rd, 6th, and 9th level versions of SNA, even those spells aren't included in the class's spell list?

Liberty's Edge

If you run a campaign where guns are common, then the gunslinger becomes pretty redundant. There are a couple of gunfighter archetypes, one from Kobold Press and another from d20PFSRD.com. These turn fighers into pretty effective replacements for the gunslinger. The one from Kobold Press grants fighters the ability to acquire grit feats in place of their combat bonus feats.

As for rangers, an easy option to create a gunfighter combat style for rangers. Rangers who choose that combat style can perform deeds and gain grit feats as their bonus feats.

Liberty's Edge

I don't really see the need to reconcile them. Occult/Psychic Magic is a different flavor altogether. If you want to use them both in a campaign, just say they're different traditions of magic, much like arcane and divine are different traditions.

Liberty's Edge

Dot

Liberty's Edge

Orthos wrote:
Gilarius wrote:
I was merely pointing out that the OPs original question had an easy answer within the game.
Well, that's my point. I would be 99% sure that isn't what the OP is looking for.

I was actually thinking outside of the whole "spell slots" system. Sorry I wasn't 100% clear.

Dreamscarred's psionics point system is cool, but it's based on the idea that the powers don't scale with the character's level. If you want to do more damage, you have to spend more power points. Whereas with Pathfinder spells, the damage increases automatically with the caster's level, ie, a fireball cast by a 15th-level wizard always does more damage than one cast by a 6th-level wizard. My feeling is that a spell point system would have to work the same way, with wizards having to expend more spell points in order to do more damage.

Liberty's Edge

I know Rogue Genius came out with their spell point system. Are there any other examples of Non-Vancian spell casting rules in Pathfinder, 3PP, homebrew, or otherwise?

Liberty's Edge

2 people marked this as a favorite.

My impressions is that the Occult classes have a more Victorian/Steampunk feel to them. The names of the classes, occultist, mesmerist, medium, originated in that time period. If you're doing a campaign around gypsy fortune tellers or psychic detectives, then the Occult classes are perfect.

On the other hand, if you're looking for classes with a Jedi-like feel, then Dreamscarred's psionic classes are perfect.

They aren't incompatible. Not any more than either would be alongside the core classes. They're different flavors, that's all.

Liberty's Edge

Little Red Goblin Games wrote:
Got your Lone Ranger Right Here.

Thanks. I picked that one up now.

Liberty's Edge

I'm working on a campaign styled on a frontier. Humans are moving into an area where, up to now, they have not occupied. Other humanoids, such as orcs, goblins, and centaurs, already live in this region in small tribal groups. Naturally, there is going to be friction as humans encroach on their territory and start fencing things in. It's analogous to American western stories, but it's not a direct copy. Land is used either for farming or mining. Most cargo is transported by skyships, so piracy is also a big factor. Think Lone Ranger meets Pirates of Caribbean. So far, I have the following products:

Avalon's Homestead Guide to Frontier Life
ICOSA's Pure Steam Campaign
Green Ronin's Freeport Pathfinder Edition
Kyoudi's Thunderscape the World of Aden
Frog God Games Razor Coast Campaign Setting and Freebooter's Guide to the Razor Coast.
Rogue Genius Game's Fight Like a Pirate

Any other third party products that could be used for inspiration for frontier and/or pirate based campaigns?

Liberty's Edge

I've thought about a few other skinwalker types I'd like to see:

Trihorned - Were-triceratops
Featherback - Were-Deinonychus
Raptorclawed - Were-Hawk/Eagle/Owl
Serpenttongue - Were-cobra
Shellback - Were-turtle/tortoise
Silverback - Were-ape

Liberty's Edge

Dot

Liberty's Edge

Mythic Evil Lincoln wrote:

I don't know if I can let this go.

I'm considering a replacement.

Will post back here if anything comes of it, be ready to re-submit whatever you had up there.

Sounds great. I really miss that site. There were some really great ideas there.

Liberty's Edge

Are the Amazons a separate race or are they considered a subrace of humans?

Liberty's Edge

Darksun
Spelljammer
and Eberron.

I see those three as having the best flavor for Pathfinder.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder now has over 20 base classes. If you include third party material, it's over a hundred. The number of PC races is about the same.
So, when you're setting up your campaign, how do you decide which ones to say no to? Is it based on your personal tastes? Thematic reasons (for example, if there is no Asian-themed society in your world, the ninja and samurai would be out)? Balance? Have you ever excluded a whole category of spell casters, such as no arcane or no divine casters?

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Any chance for the Talented Templar? Gotta give some more love to that class, Owen.

1 to 50 of 147 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | next > last >>