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Card caster magus with guns instead of cards? With the swashbuckler arcanas you can have all three ideas in one class.


Honestly I'd reskin Dynasty Warriors and start off there. Maybe try to bring in a little more customization but that's about it.


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equinoxmaster wrote:
UNNECESSARY BEHEADINGS HAVE INCREASED IN GALT!!!

"BGN found to be full of slander and agenda, necessary beheading to increase in Galt."

-Galt Post


Just declare the wizard your favorite, become their patron, invite them to all your parties, have them live and dress luxuriously. Spread rumors the wizard is on all the drugs, but only the most costly, goes through prostitutes and so on to explain where the money goes.

Have the wizard dedicate any writings etc to you and you've got it.


Since you ruled out the two most useful pieces of advice, I'm at a bit of a loss here.

The idea of running the path all passive aggressive is nice if you want to make being unhappy a team sport. But, that's never a good idea.

It looks like you're planning on having no fun doing something you don't want to do. That's called a job, not even a good or decent job but a bad one.


It's up to the GM but they should tell you before the game starts.

Or just summon some good creatures to balance the scales and you're fine.

Then again if I'm a good caster, I always summon devils/demons when using them to check for traps or be meat shields, I'd feel bad doing anything else.


Man am I glad I didn't leave my adolescent gaming thoughts on the net.


The blob called itself "Twelfth" but didn't know why. It asked them why they were following the other eye to another world.

They didn't know what it meant.

It explained that it was okay, it still had two eyes on this world.

Things were not clearer.

It didn't know where it came from, it's memories were oddly constructed, it was aware that it had been "activated" and that it had followed others of it's kind but they were not it's kind, but tools.

Then it found the sunlight and drifted, unsure. It had seen them twice and they seemed to be in good order and were excellent eyes.

They at this point realized that listening to it wasn't going to get them any answers (they were right, it's alien) and asked why it attacked Tin Holes and the Tharie hive.

It said that it was not truly aware when it attacked the Tin Holes area but that it felt threatened. It attacked the Tharie because it felt things watching it through the protections it had woven about itself.

The players told it that it should not have attacked Tin Holes/the hive and it asked them if they would like the damage undone. They said yes and a lot of skulls appeared. Then five of them turned into naked dwarves and vanished back to Tin Holes. This kept happening, sometimes humans or tharie or others but over around an hour the pile of skulls shrunk and the resurrected were teleported back.

As it was doing this it asked them again why they were going to the other world. They learned a bit more about it (it didn't know much about anything but seemed to be able to both read their minds and build knowledge to answer questions as they asked).

As they came to the last few skulls, but before Rush could ask for a +5 to everything, something else walked into the room.

Two ghaele, one blue and white the other black and orange walked through the frozen time and began to move closer to the blob. The time stop spell stopped working.

The witch identified them as the Steward of Skein who serve the goddess of death. The PCs didn't know what they were doing there but then the teleport gate activated and they started to fade out as one of the stewards fired a bow at the blob. Rush yelled at the returned people that he was totally the one behind the resurrection and everything went black with swirling lights and a feeling of both being out of body and great vertigo overwhelmed the party.

And then they were in a red walled cave where the air was thin, it was cold and the wind did not move.

They made it to Akiton and got a level.

More or less, thus ended game 13.


The temple glowed and inside was lit by lightning elementals circling the ceilings of the domed rooms. Each of the nine rooms was a large dome laid out in a 3x3 grid and connected with covered walkways all made from the odd red stone. Through each walkway and chamber ran lines of gold in the floor crackling with electricity The central dome was sealed and they could see that the electricity flowing along the floor wasn't going into the central dome.

They checked out the three first rooms and found them the same. Also finding some fallen stones blocking the flow of electricity to the center dome. A bit of damage to Batu later they had begun unclogging the power flow. But then they arrived in a new room where the elementals were fluttering oddly and flickering. As the party removed the blockage here the elementals swarmed down upon them.

And thus began one of the hardest fights the players had. The elementals were an appropriate challenge rating and the three on three seemed fair but poor Batu kept getting tripped and op attacked and Rush wasn't taking things seriously so he tried to stab them with his scimitar "Senior Burn" instead of shooting.

Rush figured it out when the alchemist stabilized at -4 hp and switched to his gun, Batu was already in rage killing his but down to all sorts of low hp. Being a giant softy I let the witch (player was off gallivanting the world) to give each of them a cure light wounds spell/hex.

The party went nova, spending most of their surges/spells/bombs to limp away from the fight. And now I have a new favorite summon.

The rest of the temple was pretty empty, just the occasional lightning elemental looking scary to make them jump and that's about it. After a bit more they repaired or at least unblocked the paths for the electricity to reach the middle and found the tunnels clear.

Cautiously following the paths into the middle chamber they found it vast, possibly vaster than the outside. The center was a large platform carved of grey-white rock and covered in Azlanti glyphs.

Then they were set upon by a very mummified Lamia matriarch and two copper automatons. The Witch translated the mummy as asking for tickets but the party didn't have any so they just had to fight her. She even had two magic swords, a lawful and a a human-bane sword because it was funny.

But the fight wasn't as pitched as I'd hoped. Even with her spells, the players were better placed and more concerned with focus fire and so the caretakers of the place finally fell.

From some of the glyphs and the tattoos on the lamia's corpse the Witch figured that the place had been some kind of transport station but was built to be hidden, they figured that hooking to to the light of the full moon meant that it could only be detected once a month giving people less chance to find it in a random or even focused sweep.

Figuring that Sam the red man had been this way the month before (they found some debris from his battle*)

The party stepped on the platform which started to glow softly, a magic mouth spell told them (in Azlanti) they had one minute until departure.

As they began to fade, time stopped. Not from the platform but just stopping. (Mythic Time Stop spell). Batu and Rush didn't notice for a moment that the mists had stopped moving or that their companions were frozen but then the giant blob appeared in front of them.

*He just used his stealth and UMD with some scrolls of dimensional door and exponential retreat.


So the alchemist showed back up and the party headed into the swamp to find the temple. They did swap their wagon for a swamp boat, for which they paid two gold and got the promise that they could switch back when they came back.

Moving through the swamp, the party was on guard and thanks to some 20's on perception spotted the nagaji (spelling?) watching them. Well, Rush and the alchemist did. They spoke in hill giant for a moment and then bombed and shot the dude dead. Batu and the NPCs were surprised.

Looting the body they found one of a kinsight goggle set. Rush put it on and saw another part of the swamp and an ambush party in it. As they figured out what it did, like the beginnings of tacnet, the alchemist stood on the corpse and gave a thumbs up. Then they saw the other goggle started moving.

The party moved on extra wary for an ambush. Which happened. The alchemist went nova pretty quick and the fight wasn't as hard as I had wanted.

They pressed on and after a day of floating along with mosquitoes and mangroves everywhere they found a totem pole like thing which was identified as a warning sign, apparently the locals didn't want to go past this point. More searching found another about two hundred yards off, they ringed a place.

The place was a giant flat slab of red stone, perfectly flat and empty, a good place to find such a temple. The party settled down and waited for the full moon that night.

And as the light of the moon moved across the water to strike the stone, the temple appeared upon the slab. Not huge but holding nine rooms connected by sealed walkways in the Wat style and all made from the strange red rock.

Ordering the NPCs to hold the door, the players stepped inside the first room.


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I used up my desire for narrower options a long time ago. I mean in the home game anyone can allow/disallow what they want but as far as options go, the more the better.

I loved watching The Hobbit last week but it'd be on the bottom of the worlds I'd want to do anything in.


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I just want them to play dress up with the iconics. I'd like to see, in no particular order:

Ezren in a straw hat and overalls.
Seoni in a sundress.
Harsk in formalwear.
Etc.


Sounds like you've got a good game going. I do like the idea of different androids built for different purposes. But to an extent, the android race is just one race, and they're kind of already a new race and not just a body choice from Eclipse Phase.

Having had the spring festival to think about this, I'm not sure what Paizo is going to do with it but I suspect it won't be too similar to our home games. On the other hand, I'll mostly just grab what I want from the whole.

I'll go back to the original question, now that the article's been written I assume, and add in, do androids have a culture? Are they trying to build one? Do they want one? How important is the mystery of their origin? Would they care if a bunch of space whales showed up and said "We built you to explore the land masses of this planet." Would they feel compelled to do what their creators told them?


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Bellona wrote:
"Orcas". Was that a result of spell-checker tyranny? :)

It's more of a tic.

And now I'm all for the land of awakened cetaceans. Because a sperm whale with ten levels of blood rager sounds pretty good.


Meh, what is a soul?

Empirically it's the part that lets you be brought back from the dead, targeted by spells such as trap the soul and food/currency for various outer plains.

I guess humans/elves/orcas get them because of their innate human/elf/orca-ness or something but I'm not seeing as much interest in that beyond a tiny sidebar about souls in a larger thing.


Orthos wrote:
In that case I am 100% with Kruelaid in my great distaste for any setting or houseruled table that has sapient creatures without souls.

Pathfinder is the only game I play where the concept of a soul is important or covered by rules.


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Change not needed. But then again, monks did have something cool, so I guess that had to be taken away.


What purpose were the androids built for in general. Not some kind of spoiler-y thing but, were they built as servants (my home game), as a quick build army, as companions for a dying race (I suspect not being all unemotional) and what purpose do they serve now? I want this because it tells us a lot about them and their interactions with the world.

Other questions are "How 'sci-fi robot' are they?" I've already gone past this in the home game but, since arm cannons and mechs and every other trapping of random sci-fi pop up. So something about how they're more like some random bit of pop culture would be nice to cut down on a lot of the robot stuff.

As for the soul thing, they have one because they can be raised from the dead, so I guess the process that makes them gives them a soul, maybe it's a magic thing?

Ezakim wrote:
What does android taste like?

Electric sheep.


The letter told Rush that Sam had found the temple he had woken up in, a wat style place that only appeared during the full moon. It was in a giant mangrove swamp and he was off to see what it was. That was a month ago but the party decided they wanted to go check it out.

They set up the city a bit more, promoted Lee to marshal(?) I forget the UC term but the lawman, because he had a gun and stogie so he seemed like a good sheriff idea.

Batu declared free religious worship and Astl brought a small blob cult to his attention He was uninterested but Rush went to their shrine with great haste, waited for it to be empty and carved his face on one of the alters.

A few preparations later they set off with a wagon full of NPCs so the PCs didn't have to stand watch.

The trip through the East of the River Kingdoms was pretty uneventful and the party skipped Daggermark because who cares?

Then they found the swamp and we ended game 12.


Yup. Also It doesn't work for slumber in my home game, since the players don't get an "I win" button that easy.


Irnk, Dead-Eye's Prodigal wrote:
Snorter wrote:

"Neither a vole, nor a buzzard, not a beaver, nor an isopod, nor a platypus, nor an anemone, nor a panda...."

Yes, yes, we get what it's not, but can you tell us what it is?

.

Nope.

Your mind can't handle the description.


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I'll just hit up the older editions for a Cat and say "kills 1d4-1 people a round."


But won't the clerks in the City of Brass notice when nobody shows up to defend/justify the wish granted?


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Jaelithe wrote:
Zhayne wrote:

Why not? Gods, assuming you use them, are not perfect in most game worlds. Especially not in Golarion, where most of them are idiots. They're fallible, they make mistakes, they might have this wrong.

And then there's always the loophole approach. "I have to guard this room at all costs!" "Well, we're not going to damage the room at all, just take that thing inside it." Angel follows orders to the letter.

You'd have to be the minion of an idiot to fall for that.

Or a highly intelligent being who weighs the options and decides that this party needs into the vault more than you need to guard it.


I was thinking about the CoC books, there were some dual stat books but the stats are such a minor part of the books. There are a lot of things not integrated in Pathfinder directly or officially, but that isn't a big deal.

Taking my example of the Dreamlands book, there are some monsters therein as well as a few spells. both of these things are rules under BRP and not PF so you'd have to do the work or just turn emerald dart into magic missile. However, the book itself is more or less easily turned into a PF book just by saying so. If a game starts with the PCs walking up thousands of stairs into a magical forest, well, that's pretty Pathfinder sounding, even more so when they get to the village of cats.

Though Glakki is indeed untranslated until it becomes public domain, so I guess we don't have an evil puffer fish and his zombie minions yet. Though he'd be a great boss for a mid-level party.


Greylurker wrote:

what if Nethys is Nyarlathotep already?

or rather what if he's been slowly co-opting the church of Nethys for himself and nobody noticed. Using it to slowly introduce more dangerous, sanity breaking spells into the world little by little. The real church of Nethys could already be officially condemned as a Heresy.

There are a lot of fictions that have the power of a god tied to how many worshiper they have. By siphoning off worship to himself, he weakness Nethys's.

Heck you could start things off by sending the PCs to hunt down a "heretic" cult of Nethys

Isn't Nethys already nuts? I mean he's called the mad god after all. Maybe instead he's an extension of Azothoth, much like Thoth, also credited as a source of magic.

Kthulhu wrote:
Journ-O-LST-3 wrote:
By now most of the cthulhu stuff is converted to pathfinder.

Wow, really? REALY?

You seriously think that?

I don't get your meaning.


Sure, plus two nat 20s in a roll (.25% chance I think) is exciting.


Eben TheQuiet wrote:
Conceptually, the answer is Fighter. But you can get a whole lot of more fun class abilities out of Inquisitor, Ranger, or (when it comes out) Slayer.

It sounds more like flavor than anything else so build anything you want and then just channel Frank Miller, which you do by chanting "whore, whore, whore...."


By now most of the cthulhu stuff is converted to pathfinder. If you want more info, the Dreamlands book is pretty good, the monster book is also good for monster reading. And the old adventure, The Dreaming Stone would convert pretty easy.


So the first thing I thought was that imma gonna smash the s*+# outta the witch's headband of intellect. I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. -3 to slumber DC seems like a good counter.


You may be in luck as for the painting, while a print and not oil upon canvas as is proper such a thing is available possibly:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1388023634/dogs-playing-dandd-full-colo r-poster

Leads to his the artist in question.


Nah, he's more likely to slip ideas to people or show everyone a new trick if it'll spread some chaos.


Could also be a term for people who've gone past the basic four machines and on to more advanced tech. Alkenstar being kind of a country of genius and vision and all that.


How far past "I flirt with the cute stable boy" are you planning to go?

The main problem is that most PFS games go by too fast to do anything else.

That's why I use my version of this in the home game, and he's a cleric of a philosophy, hedonism, not a god.

Also remember the trait "charming," I think, for flavor and bonuses.


Game twelve started with Toad Boy gone and Rush back in. Which turned bad quickly because he wanted to murder the drow and take their stuff and the rest of the party had told me they were negotiating so while the players bickered I was frantically stating up some drow for a fight. Then Rush wandered off to loot corpses while Batu stayed and talked with what was left of the drow council and got the story on the place.

A bunch of months ago one of their tunnels to the surface had been blocked off by a shiny metal and then their scouts all died (they assume, no one came back) and then a bunch of blobs drifted into their city and ruined the hell out of it. One of the survivors identified the blobs as casting powerful spells over and over (disintegrate, flesh to stone, anti-magic field, chain lightning, earthquake) there was a really big glowy white one that kind of did anything and just drifted through obliterating anything that got in its' way. Then the water came, it didn't stop, so now that it's stopped the city is only under a few meters of receding water, but it was about fifteen meters at the height of the flood.

They were haughty and smug and didn't warn the party about why you leave the dead alone here. They did eventually agree to give the party the lair of the Minotaurs and their king but didn't have an opening to ask for the crown back. Batu decided that it would be a trading post like thing with the drow once they got their s+~! together again. They said they were going to, that a massive force of settlers and soldiers were on their way.

So Rush was making a nice mithral mace his when the corpse he was looting rose as a ghost. You see this was a problem here because not all of the blobs did immediate damage, some left surprises.

he fled the tower, used his big old acrobatics roll to go through a window on the main tower and run topside where he could make the ghost everyone's problem.

Batu raged at it, the alchemist bombed it, toad boy sat out and the drow all hunkered down until the party killed it.

Rush whined about wanting to kill the drow some more and the party got bored of the idea of fighting dozens of ghosts and went off to the lair of the minotaurs to kill them all.

At the lair they met the chief, a newly mythiced Ettin with an attitude problem. They started talking until Rush shot him in his right head and Batu charged up to get the other one. Then they slaughtered the minotaurs in the room (what a difference a few levels make) and they ran amok in the little place.

The raid over they found a thing of interest, a drow matriarch sans legs. She was a (higher than the ones in the city) drow but was also pretty scared because she had been captured and now her underlings would likely kill her. The party decided to take her back to their keep, with Rush coming up with the solution of strapping her to Hurlom the blind minotaur to make life easy for both.

Back at the city there were nebulous building materials bought from seven towns/outposts/merchants to spread the shopping around and keep a low profile. Also a letter to Rush from the Red Man Sam.


Or just straight up immortal, but no one will figure that out for a few hundred years.

At some point the psychology of their creators will become both important and evident in their design and function but there isn't enough now.

As for the souls/sentience stuff, Pathfinder is expressly not the game for that question. It's answered in part with they have souls because they can be raised from the dead. While sentience seems to be beyond the philosophy and idea space of the setting.

[In my home game they are part of the big mystery and a lot of it is about them learning from the PCs and NPCs what "people" are supposed to do. Since the androids have access to a creation vat, one of the possible endings is them assuming they should make an infinite army and attack everything because they have bad teachers.]


They can breathe and must in fact. Otherwise they would have one of the various ex/su/xptl abilities that says "Haha, oxygen is for silly fleshbags."

Same thing for smell, unless the rules say it's so good as to grant Scent or so bad as not to exist it's more or less baseline human.


I'm used to it and all but if we're voting I'll vote metric no questions.


Ashram wrote:
Set wrote:

A.I., in Golarion, could be short for 'Arcane Intelligence' and refer to those sentient magic items!

The problem arises when a long-lasting spell becomes sentient, or some unlucky wizard or sorcerer happens to prepare / know the exact configuration of spells that will combine within her to form a self-aware being of pure arcane power...

In Soviet Golarion, spell casts you!

Wasn't there a monster in 3.5 that was literally a spell made sentient?

Living spell as said, no int unless awakened.


The witch hex ice tomb might work as stasis, as would enough sepia snake segils.


Cevah wrote:


Being a SciFi fan, I can probably give you a PF conversion of nearly any weapon in the literature. Suggest away.

/cevah

I'll take a bowel disruptor.


And here you go:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2pqmo?Pathfinder-in-space


Zhayne wrote:
Mudfoot wrote:
You don't actually need a god, just a philosophy.
This. You could even anthropomorphize your philosophy and name it if you want a name to invoke.

I'd do this with religion being the opiate of the masses and all.


A lot of this was in the space station thread, but you can also go big or home with a wish spell. Or the cheaper more horrible version where you ask a genie.

Otherwise use wall of iron and polymorph any object and then fabricate to build up your asteroid a bit.


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Yo mama, based on all the jokes.


Well, a bit of it is tribalism in that "fantasy" is generally invoked to dismiss things I like.

The other thing is Golarion is post-apocalypse, it's been a while but the ruins of the ancient more advanced civilization comes up all the time. Technology is all over the place developmentally speaking, horrors left over from the various peoples who came before wander the earth etc.


It needed work as it was two campaign boxes more than a proper setting. There was some neat stuff about more or less being a barter economy and coco beans being currency when you needed it.

By and large the local classes were too weak (the adventure literally has one mage more or less killing most of them with magic).

Otherwise it suffered from not having enough culture flavor and not enough monsters, with orcs running around being all evil and stuff.

I'd assume it was a trial and didn't get enough interest to expand.


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I brought him into my game as The Royal Pant when it was time for mythic ascensions and one of the dudes says he worships the outer gods.

Otherwise I've always seen him as more of being a dick to people while waiting for his master to awaken and consume him as is right and proper. In that time he has been given (granted? burdened?) jobs but mostly he's entertaining himself.

I think that here in Pathfinder, I'd play with the other idea I had for him that would have been too much trouble in CoC.

So Nyarlathotep isn't an entity as we'd assume. It is instead a piece of Azothoth that is accessible to things in existence. There are primal chants and words of power, if you use them you tie into the mind of the slumbering mindlessness. What you get is kind of what you want, not like you're given a choice but it uses your mind as a connection to this world and picks up shape from there, which is how you account for all the odd forms.

The resulting spawn are loyal to their parent idea and able to recognize each other but otherwise more interested in playing around in the world, some as tricksters, some as genie style wish ruiners and some as strangeass murder things, because sane, happy and well adjusted people don't recite urspells to see what happens.


nighttree wrote:

I for one am glad to hear that.

As I said, I'm not a Sci-fi fan...I would loose all interest in seeing them at my table if they went all "terminator".

I'm more interested in understanding how they relate to things like worship (I have a hard time picturing an android cleric for example).

I can see them approaching wizard style magic...as just another science, but have a really hard time imagining an android sorcerer.

I guess I'm looking for more of an understanding of how they relate to a fantasy setting world.

I feel a rant coming on.*

I'm lumping this in with your OP but how do you have trouble with this as opposed to other things? The monster block in the ISB gives almost nothing on them except that they're around six foot, 200 lbs and don't remember where they were built/born. Also they either kind of pass for human or are the pale metal looking lady we see (my avatar even.)

That's it.

Beyond that, they can be whatever you want. There is not much to wrap your head around because there isn't much there unless you make it.

I guess we can get into a discussion about what makes a mind or identity or person and what makes them different but otherwise they're just people. Just like the ratfolk are rat shaped people etc. There are races that exist because someone's great-great-gram got her freak on with an angel/demon/rock/bonfire/lake/strong breeze who remain, people.

Maybe they go for divine classes because they want to understand more about the gods, or maybe because they see that gods exist, their classed followers are granted useful abilities in exchange for worship and that seems like a good deal. Or they find one who appeals to them and follow it because that's what everyone seems to do.

They become sorcerers because there was a storm or fire elemental nearby when they were born or whatever the standard reasons are. (Common ones include, "a seer told my great-great-great-great-great-great grandpa his descendant would be a magus and so he went about seducing a blue dragon, their child seduced an orc and then they went back to making babies with whatever race he was to begin with.")

If they pop up in your game, you've got to figure out in broad strokes what they are but that's pretty easy for the surface. In my game they're child-like in learning about the world and how to act** or they can all be the computer like leftovers from oodles of anime/comic/TV show/Eclipse Phase like things that seem to come up every time they get talked about.

I don't know why that happens, there are better games to play sci-fi with where design was done to handle those kinds of questions and ideas.

*Pathfinder is post apocalypse, not fantasy.

**Sadly the three big influences on them are a murderhobo, a psychotic child and an oft disinterested barbarian. By the end of the game androids will be an odd race.


Ashram wrote:


GameMastery Guide, pg. 237, there's a sidebar on drunkenness as an addiction. It says that in general, a character can drink 1 + double their Con modifier before being sickened for 1 hour for every drink above this maximum. Really strong booze like elven absinthe is considered a legitimate drug, and those who drink a ton can develop a moderate addiction.

So they're saying I had a CON of over 20 back in college? (Now apparently it's around 12.)

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