Bloodless Vessel

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Goblin Squad Member. Organized Play Member. 1,023 posts. 8 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 1 Organized Play character. 1 alias.


Sovereign Court

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Any upcoming new novels?
The latest one was published almost one year ago.

Sovereign Court

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Hi there,

I intended to buy some PFS scenarios using the anniversary promotinal code.
The code was accepted, but it doesn't show any effect. According to the blog information about the code it is supposed to be cumulative with subscription rebates and should work with Paizo's own pdfs.

Could you please have a look into my shopping cart and fix things?

Many thanks in advance,
Guenther

Sovereign Court

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Bellona wrote:
swank76 wrote:
Believe it or not, I was trying to find 3.5 stats for Brownies. I ended up just making some up. As a bit of a joke, I plan on running an irritating encounter based on "Willow" for an upcoming April Fools game.

Tome of Horrors I (Necromancer) has Brownies, although in the 3.0 version. I'm not sure if that book (or a purchasable PDF version) ever got updated to 3.5.

If you just looked for brownies, I could have saved some work further above... :p

Seriously: The Tome of Horrors (3.0) was updated for (3.5) and re-named accordingly Tome of Horrors Revised. It contains hundreds of old edition monsters which were being updated for 3.5 rules.

And you can still get it for a very competitive price of 7.99 bucks e.g. here. It's a pdf and was actually never offered as a print version due to its size (> 300 pages).

If you are just keen on the 3.5 stats, you might be interested in purchasing Pathfinder module E1 which features stats of a brownie (an ice fey template was applied to that one, though). That module as well as the Bloodsworn Vale module contain quite some feys.

Kr,
Günther

Sovereign Court

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About translation quality in german and availability of german D&D material:

It's one of the most snobbish opinions I encountered in Germany and yet I heard it again and again: German translations are generally horrific and you can only enjoy the game if you use the original.

Most of the people expressing this opinion never layed hands on any german D&D book since 2nd edition (remember "Thac0" = "ETW0"? ;-) ). I can confirm that translations of that time were often unwillingly funny.

But have a look at the german 3.5 core books, at the FRCS and other books. They are well translated, don't cost considerably more and at least for my former D&D group they managed to sway them to D&D (all of them were RPG newbies and very hesitant about it, even worse 80% of them didn't understand english that well).

I never felt sorry for using the german books and favoured translating Paizo content during the preparation phase over having to translate rules expression during the game.

There is a following for german D&D. But there are trends (e.g. the one which made WotC virtually abandon adventure publication until Paizo's successful launch of adventure paths).

There are currently two companies publishing official german D&D (i.e. D&D and not d20) adventures:


  • Feder & Schwert, which publish WotC translations (unfortunately they currently only offer the 3.0 "blue" adventures): translation quality = good.
  • Games In Verlag, which publishes "Kingdoms of Kalamar" adventures. Their first adventure trilogy was very well translated and seemed to be a commercial success, too. In the meantime a steady stream of new translations was published. Actually these translations are in some way *better* than the original: some of the adventures were published with 3.0 rules. Games In Verlag updated the rules to 3.5 and felt free to improve the content, too.

    According to this text (scroll down the page: "(quotation of the above mentioned source: "Die jetzige 3.5-Version ist führend und zukunftorientiert, da machen wir mit! Um jeden Abenteuerband den nötigen Schliff zu geben, werden diese vollkommend neu layoutet und dem "Neuen Stil" angepaßt!
    Ergo, da gibt keinen alten AMI-Schrott und auf deutsch aufgewärmt, nein, es werden völlig neue Abenteuer, da staunte sogar unser Lizenzgeber und US-Herausgeber KENZER, und von WOTC wurden wir bereits für diese vorzügliche Arbeit belobigt."
    ) Btw. the (german) description of how quality checks by the licence givers are done is quite enlighting. In the case of Paizo any translator could be glad that only *one* company is involved! ;-)

You see, there are options and there is demand for high quality D&D/ d20 translations. Of course you are right that the translations have to be sound.

Greetings,
Günther

Sovereign Court

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Yes, I do.
You'll love this book if you plan your next campaign to be centred on political intrigue. Don't expect anything different from the book, though. ;-)

It is 160 pages (black & white). Graphics are beautiful and look very much like 19th century "medieval style" prints you find in old fairy tale or saga books.

The content:
Section I gives you a theoretical overview on what to consider when developing a political campaign. It contains a sample adventure lay out, general information on political systems, an overview of fantasy races and their political systems, and the use of magic in politics (i.e. spells usable in political campaigns)

Section II explores character development possibilities in political campaigns: Personality feats (statement about your PC's behaviour, following this concepts gives your PC action points you can spend on improving dice rolls), new uses for old skills (e.g. appraise for evaluating political topics), more feats, and new prestige classes. Tips on using existing base classes in political campaigns are included, too.

One chapter is about debates and political manouvers only. It is closely related to skill use, but you might feel that you move too far from the flavour of "normal D&D" (i.e. action and some role playing in contrast to e.g. exchanging political arguments). Another very special topic are voting systems and methods to deal with them - not everyone might be interested in this.

Section III describes political adventures and campaigns.
This section gives tips on how putting it all together: Plot ideas, tips on DM'ing political adventures, including humour, adding action etc.

All in all I like this book very much.
You might feel, though, that some of the proposed rule expansions are too specific and/ or reach too far.

If you are into politically themed adventures, look for tips on developping and DM'ing such adventures, and some fluff for it, this is the book for you.

Greetings,
Günther