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 Recent Posts
Kobolds, furry or scaley? Scaly. See all of our Golarion art for reference. If I preferred them furry, then our kobolds would be furry. I have that level of power.
What gods do the Ratfolk worship? For that matter, what gods are popular in the Darklands? Who do drow call their gods? Svirfneblin? The ratfolk, as with all other races, worship different gods depending on their region. We haven't done much with the ratfolk yet, so we haven't revealed much about their culture at all. As for what gods are popular in the Darklands—evil gods are more popular than most others. The drow worship demons (see Second Darkness). Svirfneblin mostly worship the Eldest of the First World. There's quite bit more about Darklands societies in "Into the Darklands."
1) A mix of empyreal lords, Shelyn, and as-of-yet undisclosed catfolk deities. 2) Not much, no. It won't have ANY Golarion-based info at all. It's more about the rules options. 3) Through fantastically rare and magical and epic unique events. 4) Low but not zero. 5) A powerful dragon or race of dragons associated with the outer plane of Nirvana—we've not done much more with this concept and in fact have deliberately put it on the back burner for now—it's one of those concepts we "tried out" in the first Pathfinder Campaign Setting hardcover but then abandoned in the "Inner Sea World Guide" since we're not sure we want to do much more with the concept of planar dragons. 6) As much as we can fit between the end of their stat block and the start of "Lashuntas as Characters" portion of the entry. Which works out to probably 100 to 200 words at most, and most of THAT will likely be talking about what the ones on Golarion are doing there. "Distant Worlds" will remain the best resource to go to for lashunta cultrue lore. 7) There are some of those among the Eldest.
Reign of Fire as a good movie? Seriously? I found that movie to be so terrible I fell asleep in the middle of it. If you can find a better dragon movie, I'll knock it off the list. The question wasn't "List five good moives." It was "List the top 5 dragon related movies." AKA: Most dragon-related movies aren't that good, in my opinion. Alas. Once the live action "Hobbit" comes out later this year, that might change (although it'd weird me out to have 2 Hobbit movies on that list). And it's certainly possible that I'm forgetting a good dragon movie. But until that point, Reign of Fire is better than most of the rest. Even if it is relatively mediocre. And the dragon effects themselves were quite fun.
There's a certain amount of vagueness built into the process, honestly, because we want death and what happens after to be kind of spooky and mysterious. But here's some answers... 1) Pharasma determines what the final destination of a soul is. Things that play into her decision include the soul's religion, the soul's personality, the soul's alignment, how well the soul lived up to its life goals, how the soul presents itself to Pharasma, and more. There's not really a precise formula you can apply to someone to determine where they'll end up. 2) If a mortal converts to a new religion but doesn't really follow the religion, they'll probably end up being sent on to that religion's outer plane but manifest as a petitioner and stay a petitioner for a long, long time... perhaps forever. If their failure to follow the religion actually caused harm and disruption, they'll instead be sent to Hell or some other place in line with that religion's punishment preference. 3) Atheists either end up in the Boneyard, or they end up transcending into free-roaming souls who are allowed to drift through reality and expand their knowledge or explore. Ending up in the Boneyard is kind of the atheist version of being punished in Hell, while being granted the freedom to continue on as a disembodied soul (this isn't a undead monster... it's something that exists beyond statistics) is the big reward. Some of them might be reincarnated back into new bodies as well... although that's more common for agnostics than for atheists. 4) Who gets sent to what plane for punishment depends on a lot of complex things—see #1 above. 5) It's closed to keep daemons from being able to easily raid the Boneyard of its souls waiting in line to be judged. A soul can still be sent to Abaddon though; Pharasma can certainly open the door long enough to let souls pass through without letting anything else come in. 6) Note that some daemons have specific abilities to feed on souls—it's those abilities (such as the lowly cacodaemon's Soul Lock ability, or the thanadaemon's Soul Crush ability) that specifically destroy souls. When a daemon just kills a creature normally, that creature's soul is pretty much ALWAYS able to escape into the great beyond. When they don't... it's because of specific storyline reasons, in which case the captured soul may need a caster level check to be resurrected, or it might not be ressurectable at all. Again... those are elements that drive stories and adventures, not typical results from combat with a daemon. 7) The Horsemen have plenty of daemons working for them. There's more people dying than just on Golarion, after all... souls come from ALL of the inhabited worlds of the Material Plane. AKA: even if only 1% of the souls who come to Abaddon survive to become daemons, that's still a HUGE NUMBER. And after all... if a petitioner isn't canny enough to avoid being eaten, what Horseman in their right mind would want such a weak-sauce soul working for them anyway? It's supernatural selection at work (as opposed to natural selection).
1) Probably not. 2) Yes. 3) Yes. 4) Haven't seen it. 5) The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Dragonslayer, Reign of Fire, Game of Thrones, The Hobbit 6) Yes. 7) Within the next 12 months there's very likely to be at least 1 page more of information about the other continents... but that may well be 25 sentences spread out over 25 books... or it might not... 8) Yes. 9) I'm not sure what you mean by "unique." Do you mean "dragons with stat blocks to themselves that no other dragon has?" There's a certain linnorm up north that would count...
Seriously? You actually have a sword with holes drilled in it? That is what a dogslicer is right, the goblin weapon? That's the one. It's from the play that Tom Beckett directed; they had more or less real weapons for the fight scenes. They were mostly dull, but still metal and still had points. Super cool!
Not sure what you're linking to there... if it's the new Prometheus trailer, then yes I have seen it. (Because what other trailer could possibly be as awesome?)
Wings. You can climb up and away from something with longer arms.
We give unexpected domains to deities sometimes because that's a great way to infuse personality into them when all we really have the room to talk about them is what's on the big table. Urgathoa's got war because her cult is at war with the living, because she wants her followers to use those spells to continue their battle against those who are not yet dead. Pharasma has Water because of its connotations with birth (the waters of a mother's womb) and death (the waters of the River Styx).
James what are the chances we could get a PFRPG update of Curse of the Crimson Throne, and Second Darkness? Very small indeed. Ask me again in a decade.
There was a version of Hellknight that went up till level 15, if I remember right. I think it was in one of the Council of Thieves books.]Interesting. Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that prestige classes should be either 3, 5, or 15-levels, with 10s being just plain annoying.15? I don't think I've ever heard of a 15. That said, I rather like the idea of 5 level prestiges. They're much easier to slip into a progression, they don't work quite as well as archetypes as the 3 level prestiges, and they make a certain amount of intuitive sense over 10 level prestiges in that they're easier to actually run to the end in a typical campaign (Which lets assume ends somewhere between level 10 and level 16). Yup... That was something of an experiment. Since then, though... we've moved on to doing full base classes. A 15 level prestige class that's got too much going on to be a 10 level class is better served by being a base class in my opinion.
Correct. Another way to keep track is that melee weapons who let you make reach attacks will list "reach" in their special qualities on the weapons table, while weapons that instead are thrown weapons (like the aklys) will have a range increment listed.
Well, I can tell you THAT right now. You'll need to be well above 20th level. The "robo-scorpion" is a pretty high CR creature... it's not really all that appropriate as a cohort. Maybe if and when we do a Mythic Levels book...
Fantastic! Even if it didn't make it into the book, it might work well as a blog post. Heck, if it doesn't make it in, I'd personally LOVE to see it as a teaser, once the time is right! Those types of things tend to actually be a fair amount of work, actually... to the extent that if we know it's not gonna be in the book, we generally don't do them at all. AKA: It's not really the type of thing we can easily throw together as a blog post.
So, just out of curiosity, is this book going to have a table with suggested levels at which you can take certain monsters as cohorts? Even though I haven't used them, I've always thought they were fun little tables to have. It's very unlikely we'll have the room to do that table in this book. But I'll see if I can make it fit.
That Human Druid sounds totally friendly and not at all menacing. On a totally unrelated Note, Can you tell us How the Evil All-Consuming deity Rovagug came about? How was it named and How was it conceived? Heh... Ruvagog was actually all about spiders, as it worked out. He was Neutral, if I recall correctly, so he was as friendly and not at all menacing as he was not. I made up the name Rovagug aobut 25 or so years ago when I was making up deities for my homebrew game. At that time, he was the god of nightmares, the underworld, and screams, and the "gug" part of his name is a direct nod to Lovecraft's monsters from "The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath," the gugs. In my homebrew, the big bad end-of-the-world deity was actually Obox-ob, but when I made him into an obyryth lord for the Abyss in D&D, I more or less gave up the rights to use that name for much else... which was fine with me, since I got the name "Obox-ob" out of the 1st edition Monster Manual II anyway from a list of "other demon lords." So when it came time to give Golarion a big bad end-of-the-world god, I used Rovagug's name and kind of melded the two deities from my homebrew (Rovagug and Obox-ob) into one.
For the most part, I think we've got more than enough animal-headed races already.
James is there any other way I can help support paizo? I am already a pathfinder superscriber and battles case subscriber. I have already converted all of my friends to Pathfinder and 1 gaming store. And I would subscribe to the gamemastery stuff but I am unsure I would use most of it especially with my proclivity for 3D Terrain over flip mats. I also go out of my way to answer any minis questions Erik asks on the blog, but I still don't think it's enough. Suggestions? The best way is to spread the word. Talk to game stores about carrying our products. Run games for friends in game stores and at conventions. Get involved in the Pathfinder Society organized play program. It sounds like you're already doing what you can do, frankly... so keep doing all of that, I guess...
I'm kept pretty solidly busy here at Paizo. I suppose there's a chance some day of me going overseas for a convention, but that'll probably be mostly work and not play, unless I extend it into a vacation... but then you get back to the fact that I'm busy here and I don't really like the prospect of taking a vacation only to have to work twice as hard when I get back. So... no plans to yet.
And a question: Since I'm in complete ignorance of something a previous question was about, what/who is a starpanda? An example of lazy monster design. Someone once asked me about bad monster design, and I said something to the effect of throwing together two random animals is generally a good indicator of lazy monster design. Sometimes, it can create cool monsters. But other times it's just lazy. And the example I used was a "starfish panda" which, to me, sounded ridiculous... but this being the internet... someone out there thought otherwise and latched onto it.
Ah. Yeah... with an aklys in particular, you can make attacks with it as a melee weapon or as a ranged weapon. The damage die you roll to determine the damage doesn't change. An aklys is a melee weapon so you can indeed attack melee targets... but it's also a throwing weapon (like a club or a dagger) which lets you throw it. Normally, a weapon's maximum range is equal to 5 range increments, but an aklys's maximum range is the length of its cord, which is usually 20 feet.
Q1) I guess so, but that would be silly. "Dinosaur" is already as perfect a word as you can have. Q2) Aklyses. Q3) Nope. I tend to prefer to leave aklyses in the hands of derros. There's a character coming up in the Shattered Star Adventure Path that uses them though, and she's a character I invented for Golarion, though, and she' s a half-elf, not a derro. Q4a) No, but I've been to renaissance fairs. Q4b) Never been. Q5) From my homebrew, there's an urdefhan weapon the name of which I can't recall. It's basically a spear with barbs sticking out all over it, and it has a big crank at the end so that you stick it in a person and then crank it to spin the shaft and spool up all their guts on it before you yank it back out. That one never made it into print, mostly because the way damage works in the game would make statting a weapon up like that take up way too much rules. Q6) Yes. Three times. A human druid named Ruvagog (in Jim Butler's campaign), a human cleric named Rowyn Tai'tesseril (in Julia Martin's campaign), and my favorite character Shensen (in Jason Nelson's campaign). Some of those made it higher than level 20, in fact. Q7a) Starknife or sawtooth sabre. Q7b) See above. Q7c) Nope. I only own two weapons—a compound bow and a dogslicer. Actually, I guess I own a fair amount of knives as well, but those are for making sammiches, not stabbin'.
We added one in Pathfinder #53 (the kijimuna), so yes. But we won't be doing it too much. The kijimuna are chaotic neutral.
The fact that you don't see many items like these in Pathifnder means that it's not a type of item we enjoy putting into the game. It shuts down too many tactics.
First step to realize—the more unusual and exotic you make your character, and the more rules you pull together from different sources (a ninja fighting with an aklys would be a good example)... the more likely it is that you'll hit on a combination that's confusing or needs someone to come in an make some rules decisions. As a result... that kind of character is really MUCH more appropriate for home games, where the GM can make those rules calls as he needs to without worrying about how those calls might affect thousands of other games. To answer your specific questions as they work in PFS... Q1) An aklys is an exotic weapon. It doesn't possess rules (like the bastard sword) that says you can use it using another weapon proficiency. So no, you can't use it as a club. You need a club instead to attack using club proficiency Q2) Trip attacks resolve as trip attacks, regardless of whether it's a melee or ranged attack. AKA: It's a CMB check versus CMD. Q3) I'm not sure what chain it is you're talking about here... if you mean the cord that the aklys is attached to your wrist by, then no. You trip with the aklys. Q4a) Again... not sure where the chain is coming from. An aklys is not a double weapon. The cord is not a second weapon. So, no, you can't attack with it. Q4b) See above. no. Q5) Yes. Q6) It's a melee weapon, so it's a melee reach attack. Q7a) It's a melee reach attack. Q7b) It doesn't depend. Q7c) Nope.
1) The monsters for the Inner Sea Bestiary were selected several months ago. So... yes. 2) Dunno. Probably not. 3) Probably so. I haven't read it in detail yet, but having chaos and law associated artifacts is a long tradition in the game. As is having artifacts that don't particularly serve specific alignments at all. Expect a good mix of all possibilities. 4) Sure looks like it should be, hmm? 5) To make more money, and to allow us the chance to cover more topics. 6) A ring that grants immunity to a specific energy would be, at minimum, twice the cost of the ring that grants resistance 30. Something that granted all of those immunities would be an artifact, and therefore not something to price in the first place. 7) Special attack: wish as a spell-like ability. Special defense: immunity to disease.
If you get a magic item to increase Perform, you increase your versatile performance skills. If you get an item to increase a skill directly, that does NOT increase your perform skill. In fact, only if that increase bonus bumps the actual skill modifier up above your perform modifier would it matter. A circlet of persuasion is an EXCELLENT item for a bard, but things like boots of elvenkind are increasingly not all that great (assuming you have a versatile performance that can be used for Acrobatics in that case). Same goes for feats and spell effects. You can't double up on versatile performance, in other words.
Question: I read through the bestiary and noticed that the Kuru are a new 0HD race. I am a bit confused on their origin however. Were the Kuru always a separate "race" from humans, or did they start out as a local ethnicity native to the isles, but which were later altered by the Blood Queen? One gets a vibe that at the very least, before the Blood Queen, the Kuru weren't an evil race. They're technically humans... if you want to look at them from a sciencey viewpoint, they're mutant humans. Before the blood queen they were plain-old humans.
The idea here is that because daemons are the most closely associated with death and undeath of the various fiend races, that their spawn would look gaunt and spooky.
The chance of that happening is possible, and increases dramatically the more cool and compelling the associated storyline gets.
The runelord polearms are indeed artifacts these days... but they're not gonna be in this artifact book. They'll need to wait for something in the future... ...well, except for Karzoug's glaive, which will be in full artifact mode in the upcoming Rise of the Runelords hardcover.
Tradition. It's been part of the game from the start. Paladins are not minions of the gods, though... a paladin serves law and good first. Many also serve gods, but most do not. If you're looking for an "order of armored casters" then what I would suggest is clerics.
First off... ALL of these have a strong dose of fantasy in them... but most of them do have additional real-world inspirations... 1) A mix of China and Korea
"Cabin in the Woods" has the official heart-shaped James Jacobs Stamp of Approval. It's VERY good.
I do have a question. There are a great deal of fiendish related bloodlines for the sorcerer, however, only the celestial for the good outsider blood. Why is that? Probably because the folks who designed the bloodlines so far are more interested in the evil side of things than the good side. We'll do more good outsider bloodlines some day.
I don't mean half celestial(half fiend) for every type but for each major type like Azata, Oni, Angel, Rakshasa, etc. But of course this would still take up a lot of space and I not sure were it would be put. OH! That's probably a lot more workable, and honestly is a lot more interesting to me than a version that would lead us to having stats for half-cacodemons, half-dretches, and half-lantern archons. Perhaps some day.
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