Grimcleaver's page

Roll the dice to see if I'm getting drunk!

I really don't know, man. I think that definition of "realistic" is a tad more hardcore than anyone would ever mean. You can do the same thing with believable. Do I believe that a guy with faith in the Sun can touch a guy and heal his wounds? Well, no I don't. Do I believe in unicorns and dragons? Do I believe in arcane formulae and psionics and elementals and all that stuff?

Does that make the term unusable? I don't think so. I think folks just need to take a deep breath and realize how the words are being used. Honestly people can henpeck other folks' vocabulary until there's not a single word that anyone can ever use to talk about anything with ever.

It's pretty clear what I and others mean by realism. They mean simulating the reality of the setting as loyally as possible. Making it feel real. That's where the real comes in. You try to make the experience as close as possible to if it were really happening, get the players to invest in it. The opposite of this is game-mechanicky clunky weirdness. I mean I think that's gotta' be pretty straightforward. Sorry if it bugs you, or if it throws off your chi when I use the word like this--but I really think its a heckova' lot easier to just talk about what I mean rather than have to jump through a bunch of semantic hoops just to avoid getting flamed by folks who should know what I meant in the first place.

The only landmarks in terms of size are in the Mini Gazeteer in Hook Mountain and the blurb on Turtleback Ferry in the adventure in the same issue. Basically Turtleback Ferry is the same size as Ilsurian, more or less, which has a population of around 500. Officially the DMG lists this size as a "village". Sandpoint has closer to 1200 and thus falls right in the middle of the "small town" population range.

It seems likely that Wartle is smaller than any of these, a swamper settlement with a couple hundred folks--mostly gnomes mucking out a living by either trapping, hunting, or rooting around the swamps for mushrooms and the materials to make "bog grog". Conditions are likely pretty gross, people spattered or layered in gray-green mud most of the time. Buildings are likely built up on pontoons and have the look of shanties, made from scrap wood and hide flaps. Defense is also probably something these guys take seriously--though considering things like swamp giants and black dragons are the sorts of things that share their habitat, I'd imagine a lot of the strategies for defense involve hiding or at least holing up somewhere hard for big scary things to get into.

I echo the raptorian sentiment. They're the most "core" PC race (rather than having to retool a monster) and they are usually ignored by people, which is sad.

They tend to be a cliffdwelling people who construct communal nest cities.

There's a background article on them at Wizards, an excerpt from the book they're in.

Take a look

I'm looking to go, pretty much whenever and wherever the meet is at. So you can pretty much take that as my RSVP right there. Seattle is actually pretty doable, looking at it, and the opportunity to take a poke around the Paizo headquarters isn't something I'm likely to miss. I'll shop it around the game group, we might even travel down as a big warparty.

I think a few of the folks who are going will probably have kids and whatnot. I certainly will. I can't really conscience leaving them with a sitter, or even with family for the four day conference plus two more coming and going. I figure my wife and I will probably just take turns at the table while the other one handles kid duty. That should work fine.

Anyhow just let me know when there's a finalized date. I'm good with whatever but the more notice I have the smoother it'll go getting time off and whatnot.

Was the trip to Magnimar a one-off or do the Turtleback ferries routinely make that trip?

I imagine they ply the rivers in both directions, but the upriver trip is SLOW, since it's just the golemwork paddlewheel fighting the current--so they probably only offer to take people downriver (about 9 days to Magnimar) rather than the horrifically long backjourney which would just be faster to walk.

Y'know I really wonder if the authors are even going to do the timewarp, or if they will split the setting Star Wars style into eras of play--with the Year of Rogue Dragons era and the Year of Crazy Crap Falling Out of the Freakin' Sky era.

I think something like that would be fun for a lot of reasons. Foremost of which is that there are a LOT of fun eras in Forgotten Realms--thousands of years and tons of Empires past and present. It might be fun to break it open and start getting some love for parts of the setting long neglected.

That said, yeah it's weird that all the signature characters are going the way of the dinosaur. Weird stuff.

Bleh. I like a lot of the stuff for 4e, but I'm really having a problem with how mechanical consistency was a big design error in third edition. I like having everything on a pretty even playing field, being able to sink or swim on my own merits. The whole "mook monster" thing just bums me out. That said, there's other stuff that's been said that frames it in a way I don't mind--that rules exist to give NPCs as much or as little detail as they need.

What I hate is the idea that in a week's time a PC gains six levels and balloons into a swollen mass of HP rich flesh, while everyone else: hordes of maurading hobgoblins, evil archmages, ancient dragons, city guards and retired adventurer bartenders, alike stay exactly the same and have no special abilities whatsoever. The idea that PC's are special just by being PC's stinks.

The idea that monsters just die at 0 and PC's die at -80 is just another one of those dorky things.

The thing of all this that I object to most though is the idea that they had to make death inconsequential in order to make the game playable. Blarg! No. You make death death. Dead characters are dead.

Maybe, maybe you come up with dramatic, chancy magic that allows PC groups to go on quests into the Shadowfell to recover the lost soul of their dead friend, risking life and virtue to perform the necromantic deed.

But better than that, have a nice tear-filled funeral and write the character's deeds in an epic poem in red marker on the character sheet and then lovingly put it away.

I think I'll probably have to go with a dragonborn. I like the backstory for them, that they are inheritors of a fragmented spark of draconic essence from the dragon god. It gives them a neat spin that I think would be fun to try out.

Likewise I'm thinking warlock. I love those classes, like the cleric or the old specialist wizards, that let you tinker with what flavor you are. I like the idea of him having pacted with the fae. That could be fun.

Granted that's just off the top of my head right now. Give me the core book and a few months to think it over and I'll probably do something completely different.

Also, like most folks, I'll most likely be doing the running of games.

It says these Pathfinder minis are going to be available in February, but not yet. Is there an ETA for when we can get our hands on these yet, or are there unforseen difficulties. Hopefully everything is still going smoothly, cause I'm really anxious to get a hold of some of these and would hate to see anything happen to the line before I get to buy any!

And yeah, I'd still love to see a painted version of these two. They look awesome, but I like to see what the finished product might look like.

Thanks a bunch! You're awesome.

Concerning the possible ancestery of a certain featured dragon:

I would totally love a gnomish bard. That would so rule, what with Golarion gnomes being the colorful sorts they are.

I didn't even actually buy it. It's just sitting in my shopping cart and I still can't get rid of it. It's getting a little crazy because there's a lot of good Pathfinder stuff coming out and I can't buy it without having to buy the subscription too. I think something's seriously broken.

Although not stated, I think the Abomination Dragons are based on the chromatic parent: Hoarfrost (White?), Rot (Black?), Ruin (Blue?), Rust (Red?), and Suffocation (Green?).

I have to imagine it's a matter of viable pairings, that only certain metallic/chromatic crossings can result in viable offspring.

Hoarfrost (White+Silver?)
Rot (Black+Copper?)
Ruin (Gold+Red?)
Rust (Green+Bronze?)
Suffocation (Blue+Brass?)

Still a lot of these pairings aren't based on much besides trying to find a slot to plug things into. Ruin makes good sense because the Golds and Reds are both such paragons that the corruption of all of that power and majesty just seems to link nicely with ruin. I couldn't think of a match better for hoarfrost than white and silver. Black is a sure bet for rot, and with Golarion coppers having such a bent for excess and hedonism, rot made sense. Greens are water dragons, as I believe are bronzes, plus bronze rusts--well patinas, which made me think that would be a good pairing. Suffocation can be a heat thing, and the blues and brasses are, if I'm not mistaken, desert dragons by nature so I could see that heat gone wrong as suffocation.

The presumption, supported by the low viability mentioned in the article of cross clan mating, is that there's a specific formula for creating one of these five Abomination types though. So while the specific combinations might be way off I think the basic idea is pretty well supported.

I dunno. I looked at Worlds and Monsters and was actually very pleased by what I found there. I don't get that the new cosmology is "skewed" so much as that they dropped a lot of the weird planes that are all one thing, like all air or all water that tended to not make much sense (why are there earthburgs in a place that's supposed to be all air?) when you stopped to look at them. Take the transitive planes for example. You have the astral, etherial and shadow planes. Mostly they were murky versions of the game world and that's it--except the astral plane, which was all murky foggy stuff. Why? Hard to say other than that was what the first writers came up with.

Now things like the Feywild and Shadowfell aren't wildly original (okay they're direct ports out of the old World of Darkness) but the descriptions sound fun, easy to imagine and describe, and like the sort of place I'd like to explore. The Elemental Vortex likewise, with it's lightning clashes in smokey skies over tumbling earthburgs dribbling rivers of lava sound a lot more exciting than the "all air place" and certainly a better backdrop for the kinds of elemental hatreds and warfare that were supposed to be going on all the time, but couldn't (fire elemental army invading Plane of Water = really funny). The Astral Sea allows different divine planes to exist without a lot of the weird alignment groupings. St. Cuthbert, by alignment, should be in Mechanus (but he isn't because that's stupid). Now he can be in his own realm without having to figure out why his alignment doesn't match his domain. In fact, the less mapped out nature of the astral sea gives you a lot more sandbox to play in and create realms for whatever god you want. I don't see how any of this is skewed.

Okay, yeah, applying the loose alignment thing demons and devils of would be cool like crazy. Even if they don't go with it in the actual print of the game, I certainly might use this idea--after all if everything else gets to be morally ambiguous, why not righteous devils too? I like that.

Personally I admire them for taking a step away from the comforting genericness of Tolkien to branch out and carve out their own flavor for themselves, to make D&D have its own taste and style rather than being the chicken of fantasy that everything else tastes like. I think some of the moves were gutsy and risky, but I think they pay off largely. I kind of have to admire it.

And best of all. And I mean A#1 with a bullet. This new D&D doesn't have a worldmap. There's good backstory reasons for that, with the collapse of empire and a new dark age--and I appreciate that like crazy. But more than that, what it means is that there's gonna' be no more of that goshawful churning out of cool adventures, societies and locations that don't actually belong anywhere. Now they all do, even retroactively. Loved Cityscape, but I hated it twice as much because as much as I loved all the places and groups they came up with they just floated out in limbo land, unattached to any of the fully mapped out settings out there. I hated the idea of having to just blorp them into an established world where they didn't belong, which just seemed tacky, but more I hated having this cool material that I could just never ever use. Now in 4e it all has a home. I've been buying tons of these books now that I never would have touched before, because now I know where they're supposed to happen. I can't wait to pick up my core books to go with them.

Well...wow.

Another session in the can and from the aboleth stargate found in the depths of the mushfens to the climatic and much anticipated defeat of the Child of Oblivion and Longtooth amid the burning ruin of a werewolf village, the story has risen to another level. Man-oh-man! Lovin' the Pathfinder campaign! Anyway Sel should be by sometime soon to give the full details, but that was one awesome session. I love our group! The characters are wonderful and try as I might to kill them with challenges that are totally out of their league they just keep rising to the occasion and do this epic, crazy, heroic stuff and totally running away with these awesome, insane victories. Cool cool stuff.

In our campaign the twin riverferries of Turtleback Ferry had a role of special importance--they conveyed the PC's and iconics back to Magnimar en route to Sandpoint to stop the Stone Giant invasion.

Thus I've had the opportunity to flesh them out a bit. Since it's unlikely any developers have notes lying around to contradict this I thought it would be fun to toss out for any other detail obsessed DMs to include as they see fit.

The two ferries, as mentioned in Hook Mountain, are fashioned from the shells of giant turtles slain by one of the town's founders and made into riverboats. I imagine them as well polished luxury ships like the paddleboats of Mark Twain, each with a soot burping golemwork engine crafted by visiting engineers from Janderhoff, turning a paddlewheel far below decks. There's a fat cargo hold on the bottom tier and two balconies facing front for passengers to watch the river float by. Atop and toward the front of the turtleshell is the wheelroom and captain's quarters and a small balcony for a couple of people to look out from the topmost point of the ship. Within there are a variety of accomodations from shared bunkrooms to lavish staterooms. The main dining hall features various nautical accoutriments hanging from the walls and a long banquet table for special guests to enjoy fine meals.

The Meandering Heart is captained by Ernell Snoka, a weathered old leatherfaced man with a hardworn face, bulbous nose, and downward jutting spike of a beard. He dresses in a shoddy version of official captain dress uniform with a big leather button across coat with eppulets and tassles. His wife serves as the hostess and runs the galley and her many kids, all near carbon copies of one another in decending age serve as bellhops, waiters, and whatever other polite manual labor as required.

Her sister ship, the Sonorous Run was up until recently captained by a hefty dark-skinned man named Hamrin Valest, however with the destruction of the garrison at Fort Rannick, he has taken a post with the new staff as Bailiff to oversee reconstruction and to keep order amongst the peasantry. In our game, he was promoted temporarily to Constable when the group left to defend Sandpoint due in part to his close friendship with the iconics, but also his stern ruggedness and proven dependability. Now his young brash daughter Lavia has taken over as captain and everyone is a little worried.

Anyhow these are just my own thoughts, but I'd love anyone else to run with them if they're interested. I thought it a little meat to the intriguing little bits of detail offered in the town overview.

Between mating dragon breeds, the physical traits (such as breath weapon, coloring, and head shape) are carried from the dominant parent (females for metallics, males for chromatics) almost without exception, while the other mate determines a lot of the foundation of personality and intellect, and to an extent alignment.

The mating of chromatic and metallic dragons results in a third kind of dragons, known as Abomination Dragons, a rarity since many such hatchlings never make it to term. These breeds are: Hoarfrost, Rot, Ruin, Rust and Suffocation.

I've gotta' say, I've never heard of this Rodney guy until today--but that said, I clicked his handle and read all of his recent posts. After having done so I gots to say I like the man. He's welcome at my table anytime.

Just so he knows too, not everyone here is a 4e hater. I actually got sold on the new game from the things I read here on these boards. From day one, when I heard there was a new edition in the works, this was the place I came to hear the scoop, to talk about and discuss it. I figured if there was a place out in the world where I could hear every possible viewpoint it'd be here.

That said, there have been some posts I've had to put the hotmits on for, and others I've gone redfaced and pounded my desk over. But, on the whole, there's been as much genuine interest and excitement about the game as there has been fire and brimstone.

Honestly I'm really excited. Our whole group is. The new Realms era sounds awesome like crazy. I might even finally pick up Eberron this time around. For once there's a solid wide open setting for the modules to live in (and from what I've read about it in the Worlds and Monsters book) it looks great. I love that flavor and story seem to be getting a big hit in the new edition. I love that D&D is taking some fresh steps into a different and more original kind of fantasy (love Tolkien to death and all, but it's nice to see D&D come into it's own and openly draw from more different diverse sources).

Now granted I'm gonna' Grimcleaver the heck out of it when I get it. No edition is safe from that! But I really am looking forward to getting it in my hot little hands.

Ooh! I've got it! Chocolate minis! Any monster you kill you get to eat!

This is one of those "grant my wish before it even forms in my mind" kinda' things. If it happens that would be wonderful. Cool stuff! I can't wait to see what materializes from this.

I'd guess the request for a whole new set of iconics anytime soon is unlikely to happen. I too like the variety, but putting the pregens in the back is probably the least important use for the iconics to Paizo. The main reasons to have them are branding, and more important, a consistent look-and-feel to the art. If they always cast the same dude for the role of fighter, say, it is much easier for the artists to produce any given scene that calls for the fighter. This effect is at work in the interior art; most if not all of the action scenes have at least one iconic, most of the rest are maps, landscapes, or portraits of enemies.

I'm feeling you, I just wish there was some third alternative to go with other than a reboot of the iconics we have, which seems a terrible disservice to them as characters in the setting, and something else, which would cause inconsistancy issues or whatever.

I don't have problems seeing any of them in the art. I likewise don't have any problem getting fiction or whatever with their continuing exploits post Runelords (or whatever AP they're from). Novels, especially would be awesome--as we've been chewing over the past few months.

Clicked a Pathfinder Subscription by accident (meant to just add the one specific issue, but the picture's the same for both). Now it's sitting in my Shopping Cart and I can't delete it. No big deal, but I can't really buy anything from Paizo now until I can somehow remove it--or else I'll end up with the subscription.

Anyhow if you fine folks could just disintegrate the thing for me, I'd much appreciate it! Thanks a ton.

I've got the Pathfinder game in the morning and find myself in need of a few suggestions for guards and lackeys for a minor green dragon. There aren't a lot of creatures, it turns out, to fit the roll of lair guardian...weird.

But basically I'm thinking two things, first that green dragons would like to be invulnerable to the special abilities of their agents, shifting things toward acidy beasts, and second that they seem to be into lizardy things like themselves as guardians, so maybe scalykind allies. Aren't hobgoblins supposed to have a special relationship to dragons? Seems like I remember that too. Also it bears mentioning that with greens being huge into lore and numerology it might be something weird too--Cthuluoid even.

Anyway I'm looking for classic stuff mostly--less oddball stuff like Dracotaurs and Szvaklors from the latter MMs, and more like things from early old school modules like Keep on the Borderlands. Pathfinder does best with a classic feel. Anyhow I would love any suggestions. I'll probably be searching this periodically in the hours before the game starts so I look forward to seeing what gets mentioned. Thanks!

I know how it is. I'm forever painting myself into corners while gaming and having to scheme frantically later to patch in the holes.

I was mulling over your situation and thought rot reavers (MM3) with be a nice fix. They're a favorite of mine, hairless lumpen humanoids with twin tongues that can animate the dead, which is the food they like best--undead meat.

Granted there's still some slight descrepency, since the greatest joy of a rot reaver is said to be killing a creature and then raising and devouring it. It doesn't SAY they're scavengers of the dead, but it certainly makes a lot of sense. Besides, rot reavers are just so flavorful and seem like exactly what you're looking for. It should work, I mean I just can't imagine they'd turn down a perfectly juicy dead body if they came across one. Seems like a free lunch.

So yeah. Hope it helps. I love these guys and it'd be nice to see them get used more.

Yeah, I love the idea of the seven sins as corruptions of what were once virtues, but the actual virtues did seem a tad weird--often feeling like an attempt to turn a vice into a virtue rather than searching out a genuine related virtue.

Here's what I've been working on in that regard, trying to stick as close to the main ideas as possible:

Sloth-Peace
Pride-Confidence
Envy-Zeal
Wrath-Justice
Greed-Wealth
Lust-Fertility
Gluttony-Abundance

I like these, though a few are still a little less "virtues" and more "stuff that's good when it happens to you" ie. Wealth, Fertility and Abundance. It's hard to be Abundant--and while you can be Wealthy or Fertile, it's not like it's something you do or have tremendous control over.

Hey! Now here's an idea. Have SEBASTIAN write up the reviews, and when he's challenged to a fight--name Jade to be his second!

Anything written by Sebastian is worth the price of admission.

Well the critical threat has passed (it looked for a while there like we were going to be getting a different constellation of Saturday players, thus requiring a game jump--but nah, it turns out things are stable) and we've gotten the next game of Pathfinder in the can. The PC's had to help the iconics defend Sandpoint from the stone giant invasion...at 3rd level. Heh. Things were awesome, but I won't steal Sel's glory by sayin' much.

But yeah, things have taken an interesting twist in their departure from the AP--the iconics have gone one way, and the PC's another with their newest NPC buddy. Longtooth! I kid you not...

Which one is Steve Prescott? I'm still trying to tie names to peices of art. Which, as an aside, is something I absolutely never paid any attention to until I started following Pathfinder. But yeah, the art is so much of a part of everything, and you guys just feel like such a team, y'know. Anyways just askin'.

Sorry, Billzabub. No harm meant. I figured it was a well meaning request, but yeah there's a lot of talk about how draining all the contests are. Mostly I just wanted to acknowledge all their hard work with things like Red Raven and Superstar. Anyway sorry if it felt like I came down hard on you. Really didn't mean any venom in it at all. Sorry.

Likewise sorry if my request will be harder to impliment. I certainly am not looking to contribute to everyone's stress. I know how hard you all work. I'm just...y'know, REALLY into continuity stuff. That's just my thing. That said, I always really appreciate the new iconics as they come up, and am always super excited to read the writeups on the blog. I'd love to see that keep going forever, but hey whatever you all can do for me is great. You all do awesome work.

Heh! Awesome post! Yeah, basically the one thing that I would step in to correct is that they were actually Giant Geckos (kindova' staple of Pathfinder).

Oh, and for your edification, the official name spellings:
Merisiel
Seoni
Valeros (though I think I pronounce it Valereos--which I kind of like better)
Kyra

But yeah, good stuff! I can't wait for the next one. Always fun stuff.

I guess my issue is the declaration that the 4E core mechanics are less flexible and less generic. I worry about that too but I just don't see it as something that can't be overcome.QUOTE]

I think the main causes for concern here come from the races and classes. A fighter is a fighter, a rogue is a rogue. You can have those in any setting. A warlord? A warlock? Will those even fit into other kinds of fantasy? I think it's those kinds of questions. Fighters with a "power source" that lets them pull off magical wu shu. Hard to port that into some worlds. The spin on the races is another part, I think. In 3.5 a guy who knew nothing but Tolkien and other fantasy novels could look at D&D and immediately knew where he was. Not so much with tieflings and eladrin and dragonborn. They don't plug and play so intuitively. I think that's an issue.

It's gone from the 3.5 cosmology where every setting had their own, back to an earlier design where every D&D world is connected to the same planar structure. Hard to go back through that door for a lot of people. It used to be that you could read any fantasy book and catch the little in references. Oh that necklace is really a "this", or that race is really a "that". I think 4e is not going to feel so comfortable or familiar.

Ultimately yeah, I think 4e is a more inflexible design than 3.5, but I think the huge influx of new ideas and flavor makes up for that, for me anyway. But I do see it.

Oh I definitely think there's deliberate design changes to bring the Realms cosmology and whatnot into line with the concepts of 4e, but I think they're being done by a lot of the same people who have always written for the Realms, and I think they're being tied into the history in fun and exciting ways (well and 10 years in the future to boot).

I think you can add a Feywild to Faerun without ruining it. That said, I think the themes and gameplay of the Realms will pretty much stay the same. It will still be gorgeous and magical, the map can't change too much, so you're going to have a lot more light in the world than in the Core Setting, with all the familiar countries and power groups. The main conflicts will be the same. The gods will probably get thinned out from what I hear, but the ones that are left will be ones we know well. The races will probably feel a bit more evenly spread out since "humanity in charge" is one of the things they wanted to get rid of.

I guess my point is that when the rubber hits the road, the people who love these settings are gonna' be the guys writing for them, and they'll probably look to the "template" as a model--but ultimately I think they're going to make their settings as much what they are as they can, if for no other reason than they know no other way to write them.

How many items would have been "a reduction of the christmas tree effect"?

I'd say it would be a system that didn't REQUIRE magic items, where magic items were a condiment rather than a staple. I'd like a system where the guy with the magic gloves can spider climb up a wall, or can have a clay pidgeon that turns into a real pidgeon to deliver a message for him. They'd provide new and interesting options, but wouldn't become a hangup. I could see magic weapons, but they'd be like the magic rings. A guy with a magic sword would be a legendary figure of Paragon or Epic status.

Now, in all honesty, there's nothing in 4e (or even 3.5)that suggest you CAN'T use magic items like that, but it certainly isn't their intent.

I think if we're not careful with this contest stuff we're gonna' kill somebody. ;)

Seriously, the guys here at Paizo have been killing themselves pouring in the hours and hours required to do all the contests and stuff they've been doing. I love 'em for it, but they need a vacation from that sort of thing for a while I imagine.

That said, apparently the origin of the iconics we have is more or less the fruit of James sitting in front of a word processor for twenty minutes before the blog entry is due and hammering something out. That's where these big awesome backstories come from. I personally wouldn't even need THAT much work, just the little blurb each character has on the little strip of stats at the end of the book. Likewise we usually get these lavish full body image suitable for the cover. Don't really need that either, just the head and shoulders shot we usually get on the pregen sheet would be fine.

I just really look forward to every six months getting a new window into some of the folks who inhabit Golarion. I just don't think it'll be the same if they start recycling them.

Here's what I don't get. You want a setting where most of the hu-wah comes from class special abilities right? Why not just dump the stat boosting gear entirely! No more +# weapons or armor. Just make everything a novelty. Yeah you've got a ring that makes you jump really high, or a bag full of dust that can make you look different. It's all flavor and tactics that way.

Certainly that would seem to go a lot further down the road toward un-christmasing D&D, while preserving it's magical feel and flexibility. Making magic weapons a necessity to break the max damage crit ceiling? That isn't helping. That's making magic items necessary--but more so.

I'd like to just wave off a lot of that game mechanicky junk and say, "look, wear whatever magic items you've got. You can't wear two sets of gloves at the same time, or three different hats at once, or any of that counterintuitive stuff, but no more chart breakdowns of what magic items can be worn on what body part!"

You want magic rings at lower levels? Make them do less omnipotent stuff.

Honestly I would love magic items that were higher on flavor and lower on power anyway. I just don't see this road leading there.

What I mean: there is not only a difference in setting when playing in Ebberon, the Wilderlands or FR but also in playstyle. Can we deduct a "Core" playstyle that 4th edition will support from this book?

Actually they go into a lot of depth. The whole point seems to be to try and figure out what the core underpinnings of D&D are that separate it from other fantasy RPGs out there. The attempt is to come up with the X-factor that makes D&D what it is regardless of setting. That said, it seems they are at least interested in spreading D&D out to different styles of play, so it doesn't just offer the straight up dungeon-hack for everyone. It seems like they're trying to offer people more variety in game feel rather than maps and minis and a dismissive hand-wave to folks who don't game that way. I appreciate that.

That said, I don't know if their idea of "What is D&D" is exactly mine. I don't know if it will work the same in the established settings. I kind of get the opinion that ultimately their pontifications will have to take a back seat to the reality of what the Realms and Eberron are. I don't think either one fits their model really well and it'd do a big disservice to the settings to try and cram them in.

Who knows though. They could screw things up so bad I end up ripping out clumps of my own hair. At least I can say I respect the endeavor a ton more than I did before I thumbed through the book--and I trust them to do something new and fun.

The feywild is in this(default D&D world) where exactly? I don't understand that part of it, even after reading the whole book in borders something about being in a ruined castle in the material world then somehow gettin jacked by formorian giants? I was more baffled the more I read..I felt no guilt placing it on the shelf...it did have pretty pictures.

They're the new transitive planes, and overlap the Prime. Basically the Shadowfell replaces the Plane of Shadow, and the Feywild replaces the Ethereal. Basically they took all the misty murky places that look just like the Prime on a foggy day or at night and replaced them with fun stuff from Legend and Pirates of the Carribean (under the full moon that is!)

Mwa-hah-hah!

This just in. Ultra gritty new version of 4e Grimcleaver, where the armor you wear does its encumbrance value in damage to you per turn! Yay!

Um, and how is resting up a swift action? Wouldn't catching your breath be a full round action? Maybe you can do it as a swift action once per day, but any other time at the cost of a full round...that would give people a chance to take a round recouperating from all the sweaty armor liftage!

Took some time and perused it, but it's just vast and not terribly well organized. Good site though. It's nice to see what was done with all the various viral ads and whatnot. I love that kind of thing!

I think they're just using bits from old settings they're no longer using, to sorta' give a nod to the folks that love them without having to ressurect a dead game line that was fragmenting the product. So the Realms stuff, hopefully, should stay in the Realms. Likewise I'd imagine with Eberron that it's stuff should stay pretty intact. With the cancelled lines like Ravenloft, Mystara, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Spelljammer I would imagine they might be pulling some things from them and porting them into the Core Setting, much as they've done with bits of Greyhawk and Planescape.

As for the new planes like Feywild and Shadowfell I can't say I dislike them. Yeah, they seem a bit like ripoffs of World of Darkness cosmologies but at least they're a bit more plush and fun than "a big misty place". So many of the old transitive planes were just dull like crazy. Elemental Planes too. I totally dig the idea of making them more textured, interesting places where folks can go and do stuff.

I guess what I'm dreading is in a few AP's from now after Second Darkness and we've got our four pregens, but they end up being retreads of Seoni, Seelah, and some other guys. Yuck. Just let them have their six months in the spotlight and then have them around as featured NPCs in the setting. I'm really not fond of the idea of them being stripped back to first level characters--it's a continuity mess and it makes them feel less like they're a real part of the setting.

I'd suggest either to keep coming up with interesting fun pregens (heck, it's been a great way to get to know the setting) or if that gets too hard, to just have some generic starter templates for a Fighter or a Wizard or whatever.

I'm afraid just having 12 and recycling them is gonna' be a little cheesy.

So there was a great suggestion last time, when I asked how I could be signed up for a Pathfinder Subscription by a friend. Basically it was to have him give me a prepaid debit card for the amount of the subscription, and then sign up using it as payment. Awesome idea and we're planning on doing it.

One possible snag though. Eventually you guys are going to bill me and the card will have run dry. Is that going to make you guys mad at me? Do you have some awful mechanism for dealing with folks that default on their subscription payments? I'd hate to incur your wrath, and am in fact hoping that it will just automatically deactivate my subscription. Last thing I want is the Paizo Police sending me to collections.

Just thought I'd make sure. I mean I am planning on dropping a line to drop my gift subscription when I get my last issue...but my archtypal sin is Sloth (well, and Forgetfulness if that's a sin).

Okay I got my first chance to look at the preview book I really care about--Worlds and Monsters. Not buy, mind you. Yuck. But I did get the chance to flip through it and read the key stuff.

Subject number one on my head has been what has been said regarding the fact that the core D&D setting is a nameless blob. That's not as true as I thought. There's tons of nations and old empires that get described, so there's some bones to the place. Likewise the idea that the world is nameless doesn't imply they don't care, so much as that the world is fragmented enough that different cultures have different terms for it. They suggest The "Middle World" and the Exalted-eque "Creation", but at least it seems like a real place that is grounded and detailed. Whew.

That said, they seem hip on the idea of using their "core setting" as a product identity--a "template" to borrow a 3.xism that gets slapped onto every other D&D product. The expectation is for players to make their own worlds according to the D&D core model, rather than have the one setting be the whole tamale (which, as they say, would be to deny the flexibility of D&D worldbuilding--one of the franchise's key strengths). So it's a world, but it's more of a model for worlds. Interesting.

Anyhow yeah, some stuff from Greyhawk is going to get recycled. The Temple of Elemental Evil is here. I just read that Sigil is going to get a spot in the DMG as well. Not as terrible as it could be, since in order to really do a Greyhawk game justice, I'd probably run it with the 3.0 rules anyway. 4e, for me is about doing new things.

Well this is it, the day I've strived hard never to see, where the wheels finally come off and the disconnect between hitpoints and actual damage is complete.

That said, once it's out there under the harsh sunlight, it doesn't look so bad.

So, hitpoints are your ability to bravely soldier on despite the rigors of battle and whatnot. Okay, fine I'll accept that--but then there should be a couple of differences. Fatigue and sickness should cut down hitpoints, for example--heavy weapons and armor bleed your hitpoints over time, though to get them back you just need to take a breather. Not terrible.

That said, the damages for weapons and such are just unbearably weak sauce. Unless a good guy NEVER gets hit with an axe, it's going to really take the spring out of his stride. Not by 1d8 points--but more like 20. Hard to keep going after that. There's the argument I guess, that direct solid hits are a fiction unless the character actually dies, even a critical hit being just a hard thump to the armor that leaves a character winded lying on his back.

I dunno. Now that it looks like the mechanics are embracing fully the idea of hitpoints as endurance, I really might take the plunge and accept it this time around.

My players are gonna' lynch me. Heh.

We usually call it our "Pathfinder Campaign" even though it has neatly folded into the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, despite my every imagination. Ironic, huh? They're in Sandpoint with the Iconics protecting it from stone giants. One of the PCs and Valeros teamed up to take down one of the Northgate attackers AT-AT style with chains and harpoons. Wow.

To be honest, when we talk about our campaign it's more like "DUDE! Pathfinder!!! Woo-hoo!"

AAAAHHHHHHHHH!

That beast is like 73 pages long! Most of it is people being irritating and nitpicking each other.

Is Mike Mearl's comment even on there? Or are folks just funning me?

Do I have to read through every page, trying to find his response? Argh. I don't even know his screen name.

No links or nothin' needed. Just that his post is halfway down on page 48 would be plenty. Thanks.

...wow I think my eyes are bleeding from having read that.

...I love Paizo.

To which I suggest...

This is FUN!

Okay for those of you still curious as to what the critter is...

Here you go!