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This order was supposed to have been automatically cancelled when I shifted to the subscription, but I just got charged twice and got two separate shipping notices. Given that this dropped my checking account into the negatives, I'm a little upset that the order didn't cancel like it should have. Can someone lend me a hand, here? The order that shipped as I understand it was supposed to is 4354655. The order that was supposed to be voided due to the subscription is 4236682. I'll be perfectly happy to send the second book back, but can y'all refund the one, since it was your system not working as intended, and I did ask about it here when the subs became available to try to keep this from happening?
It started off as a regular day in Shallamas; a haul of numenera brought in a few days before that still needed sifted through and split into piles of useful devices, useless oddities, and potentially valuable relics, consuming everyone associated with the ruin scavengers. The sun was high overhead by the time Til, Yel, and Olly got a chance for a break; even then, there was no time to go far when there were still several crates of junk to sift through for treasures. The first sign that they wouldn't be getting back to work came when an Echo - one of the phantom events that repeat the past within the walls of Shallamas - began to play out around them; or at least that's what they all assumed at first, before swirling sparks of silver-blue energy began to flare off the ground, rapidly building into a storm of strange energy that tore a hole in the world, with a powerful wind dragging them in. Yel and Til stood no chance against the sudden pull, caught off-guard and off-balance, sending them both tumbling into the breach. Olly held firm a few moments, until it overcame his strength and dragged him after the other two. Falling in brought a flare of silvery light, and then darkness and a sense of impossible speed, whipping through an utterly lightless void. It came to a sudden end, spilling the three out into the middle of a field of thick green plantlife, something between grass and moss, with vibrantly colored flowers cropping up here and there, and no other creatures nearby. In the distance - north, if the oddly blue-tinted sun is in the early afternoon rather than the late morning - rises a wall of white stone, wrapped around what might be a town and some kind of a castle. Farms cling to the outside of the walls, as if hesitant to go far from the promise of safety. Movement suggests humanoid figures, although the distance is too far to tell exactly what they might be. To the west, a smudge of heavier green smears the horizon; to the south and east the plains extend into the distance. Til, Yel, and Olly seem to be unhurt, if somewhat shaken by the sudden change in scenery. What do they do?
To those who played in either of my games - including everyone who joined in when offered the chance, bringing my final table tally up to ten for Continuity - I'd like to express appreciation that you came to game, and I hope you all had a good time. Given what I've heard - one fellow was so thrilled with Continuity that he came to join Ego Hunter the following morning - I'd say the games were a success! My attendance next year is going to depend largely on being able to defray costs, but if I can make it, I certainly will. (Maybe I should put up an indiegogo or something, see if anyone wants in my games badly enough to help me get there in the first place. ;p ) I'll note that any future games I run, if you've been in them before you're certainly welcome to come see if I have an opening for you at any given table. I know that the couple who were at my 2013 Doom of the Cobra King game were disappointed not to get in on either of my games, and if they'd shown up to Continuity they may well have found themselves in on the dark comedy that took place. As a person who enjoys GMing, I thank you all for playing. 
The sun rises over a city that has seen a massive party the night before. Sweet End has revelers who passed out from exhaustion, intoxication, or both scattered across the streets, most of them wrapped up in heavy blankets courtesy of the kindness of some of the business owners. Most of those now snoozing in the heavy, warm blankets have otherwise been 'Kissed' - their belongings taken and left in a charity box for Charchee to be annoyed by, since she'll be getting visitors looking for their belongings all day now. Most of the rest of the city is in better shape, with warm houses holding back the winter cold. Even in the Hatchet district of the town, people are well-off today, glutted on donated food and drink, wrapped in fairly new blankets, and in a good mood.
Aneon Kanbe has already been awake for over an hour, his employer and trainer, Flyte Dubois, having woken him up with a bucket of water that he left outside all night dashed right across Aneon's head. It was a rudeness compounded by how late Aneon had stayed up, working on another attempt at crafting a journeyman's tools. The shock is somewhat mitigated by the relatively rich feast Flyte has had brought up from Kir's Bakery, with savory and sweet pastries as well as sweet wine on the table. "Well, lad, it looks like this might finally be the year you improve enough to get out from under my thumb. That hammer you made was well-done, for once. Fix up the rest of a kit as good as it and I'll have to name you a journeyman - and finally teach you the trick you've been after these last few years. Today, though, you should eat up - I'm needing you to run a few bits over to Mylian's office so he can kit some folks out." Aneon:
Your thuman keeps trying to snatch some of the savory pastries off the platters, meanwhile. Jacinthe jolts awake at the break of dawn, startled by some faint and unfamiliar sound outside the door of the room she's been renting. She's on her feet, rapier drawn and ready, before her mind catches up to her and she realizes that she's threatening a door with a sword. Checking the other side, she finds a tray of meat and bread waiting for her, part of the service paid for with her rental of the room. It's accompanied by a note. Jacinthe:
The note is from Mylian, the former Aeon Priest who leads the town. "Jacinthe, it has comme to my attention that you have been doing much more than the basic training of our guardsmen in the style of combat that you utilize. After consulting with the council, I'd like to offer you a permanent job here in Guran. If you're interested, please stop by my office in Midmarket." It's signed with a scribble and a wax seal that shows the symbol of a stylized rose. Yel hasn't bothered to sleep. She's spent the night toying with a broken buzzer she scavenged from her mother's junkyard, and she's finally gotten it working after a fashion as the sun crawls above the horizon. Of the five discs she tries to fire, four neatly spit out and chew into her chosen target - an old synth barrel of some kind, wiring visible inside. She knows the thing is dead, since she can't hear anything from it. The fifth disc gets spun off-balance and ricochets through the junkyard, nearly hitting her mother when she steps out to look for Yel. She gives the young woman an irritated glare for the near-miss before waving her over. "I need you to take this to the mayor's office for me, my dear little synth flower. Here's a shin for your trouble - drop past Kir's Bakery and grab yourself something to eat on your way. Wouldn't do for you to fall asleep now that there's something for you to do." Yel Iandao:
The package from your mother is an oddly-wrapped bundle. You can hear something inside it, muttering about math that you're not familiar with. The shin you get handed is a smallish piece of some golden metal - nothing 'alive' about it at all. You know the way to the Mayor's office in Midmarket easily enough - when she's not ignoring you, Mecky often has you running errands for her. It's not bothersome - you meet the most interesting devices that way, and it does put some shins in your pocket. Zith wakes up on the roof of the Downy Dossi, with no memory of how he got up there, although the half-dozen empty tankards around him give some clue as to why he can't recall. He's woken up by someone banging on the roof under him, followed by the voice of Hepter, his erstwhile employer, shouting through the wood and synth barricade. "ZITH! GET UP! You need to get over to Mylian's office as fast as you can, he's inducting some new guards this morning and I want you to be there to record how he does it!" There's a thump as a sack gets flung up onto the roof from below, with a rich, meaty smell wafting out of the sack. Some mouth-watering savory pastries from Kir's Bakery are inside, along with two shins as advance payment on the story. Zith: You've heard a bit about the thing Hepter is talking about, and you're pretty sure it'll be stone dull to attend - but he'll want the shins back along with the price of the food if you don't get him something interesting for a story from the Mayor's office. It wouldn't be the first time you've made something interesting enough for a story happen, if it comes down to it.
Posting to set up the relevant PC Hive Mind thread for players in my soon-to-commence Numenera PbP.
Starting player lineup:
Wiki-ish information can be found on the Obsidian Portal site. Yes, David, we know that Aneon really, really likes baubles.
Location: Pillar Station, geosynchronous orbit over rogue planet Pinnacle The marking of a new year is cause for celebration for most of the galaxy, but for the inhabitants of the Pinnacle 'system', it passes by almost unremarked upon. In the wake of the Sith War, there is too much to do, too many threats left facing the galaxy, for time off for something so common to even be considered. Here, in the secretive stronghold of a little-known branch of the Jedi Order, there is only vigilance and industry. Not only Jedi dwell here; numerous specialists also live in the station, on the frozen world below, or in one of the small orbiting stations or starships. Pilots, shipbuilders, engineers, scientists, and all the minor details that make up the response teams of the Jedi Sentinels live in the eternal dark of the interstellar void, ready to respond to the call of the Masters of the Sentinels, should the Seers detect a disturbance in need of correction. So it is that one such small response team is aboard Pillar this day, waiting for their sponsoring Master to contact them with a mission. The game opens in one of the station's cantinas, a place subdued and peaceful compared to the usual rowdiness of stationside cantinas...
Mainly just checking - when I put this in, it was expected to ship in 4-to-11 business days. It's been a /bit/ longer than that. Did it get delayed due to the Paizocon chaos, something else like a supply shortage, or just get lost in the shuffle (which would be understandable, given the con!) Thanks!
Um. My subscription, as it should, is 'UPS ground' for shipping. But the shipment notification I just got said it's going by USPS. Is i possible to change this to UPS, and to find out what's causing the UPS/USPS problem? (Shades of service queries past! Does the shipping system just hate me or where I live?)
To quote the email...
The problem is... The shipment linked, and all my subscriptions, are supposed to be UPS Ground shipments. Since this has happened before, I know you fine folks can patch it up for me - USPS has a habit of 'losing' things sent to me, after all, thanks to our miserable local post office. Does the shipping software just hate me or Nevada or something, guys?
It appears that rather than the Collected Book of Experimental Might, I have somehow wound up with Gus and Duncan's Comprehensive Guide to Star Wars Collectibles. While I'm sure this would be great as a gift for an obsessive Star Wars fan, I don't know any of those, and was really hoping to get the CBoEM for something to read on break and lunch at work over the weekend. Can we rectify this problem, please?
A silly game; the object is to be properly nonsensical yet relatively comprehensible. The list you can find on the various sites around The Internewt is as follows: Fnord is evaporated herbal tea without the herbs.
So, what've you got? Fnord is a reverse entropic enclave.
I can't believe I didn't notice this for almost a month, nor that I didn't notice it until after I noticed the same thing with #975294 (which you guys promptly corrected), but this order was also sent via standard postal delivery rather than UPS, and never arrived (useless primates at the post office, you just can't trust them to do things right). I don't suppose you could do something about this shipment having gone astray? I wish I'd noticed in time to bring it up with #975294, alas. And I really, really hope the rest of the orders go to the correct shipping group, since UPS *can* find where I live even if the Postal Service can't.
So, is there a reason this order got shipped via Standard Postal Service? I checked my subscription page and it is still set to UPS delivery... I can promise that this particular order is never going to arrive at my residence; the USPS has no bloody clue how to find my physical address, and is unreliable even if I use the billing address instead, losing about 2 of 5 shipments. I really don't like costing Paizo with mis-sent shipments; you guys are pretty much the only company I seriously order anything from on a regular basis anymore.
First, as noted elsewhere, there is still a trend toward the '15 minute adventuring day'. There are a number of proposed solutions, but the one I like best is doing away with the 8 hours of rest needed to refresh spells; keep the hour, but do away with the camping. Let the wizard spend an hour reading his spellbook, the cleric (and paladin, etc) an hour of prayer and ritual, the sorcerer an hour of meditation or pipeweed smoking or whatever, and the bard might be strumming some simple tunes or the like. If the hour gets interrupted by something like a fight it has to be restarted, but it can be done 'on the move' if the character can sit still - riding a horse, sitting in a wagon, or the like, as long as conditions are reasonably favorable. This should only refresh spells; daily powers such as cleric turning, barbarian rage, wildshape, and the like shouldn't refresh. Second, differentiate the sorcerers and wizards. Give them distinct spell lists; sorcerers are innate spellcasters, wizards are learned. Sorcerers should have a primal feel to them, because they're tapping the raw wellspring of magic. I'm not sure exactly how to do this, but something between clerical domains (sorcerer bloodlines?) and spontaneous casting might do the trick. Third, skills: I can definitely see how the changes dramatically speed up character creation and take the fiddly work out of tallying different skills at each level. I personally think that Open Lock belongs with Disable Device, but I can see the arguments for it as a part of Theft. Perhaps it could be used by either skill. I would honestly prefer to keep class/crossclass skills, but if each class gets to choose a skill or two 'extra' as Class Skills at the beginning, it could allow some wider range of character concepts - a fighter with Spellcraft to represent someone trained as either a Mageslayer ("Fall back, he's preparing a fireball!") or a wizard's bodyguard ("Best move to the side, the boss is setting up a Lightning Bolt..."), a necromancer with Stealth ("The better that no one see me in this graveyard, of course."), or other oddball ideas that strike a person's interest. That said, seriously consider removing the Fly skill; while it's a good concept, it adds paperwork that we really don't need; instead, if need be, add a maneuverability chart to the spells, and limit the flying creatures based on their maneuverability. Fourth, magic; I really like the way the specialist wizards have been differentiated, and I like the domain powers. However, both Wish and Miracle have no business being involved in a 'granted ability' chart, particularly not once per day. Based on the universalist trait, I'd actually expect to see things along the lines of the 'artificer feats' from Eberron, letting the universal mages develop the ability to make magic items for a bit less time, XP, and gold than specialist mages; failing that, I could see them developing more free metamagic feats or item-creation feats (actually, while we're at it, can we ditch that absurd plethora of feats? Why do we need specialized feats for multiple item types? Shouldn't Knowledge (arcana) and Spellcraft suffice if you know the spells you need?) Fifth, the feats: I sincerely agree with those who advocate dropping the array of skill feats and just creating a single Skill Affinity that lets the player choose any two skills to get a +2, or maybe make it a first-level feat that lets people gets CC skills as class skills, which would solve the idea mentioned in #3 above. If the one-hour-reset idea isn't viable, then maybe develop the idea of 'reserve feats' for casters - let them have lesser at-will magic as long as there's a more potent kind of magic prepared (or have a sorcerer sacrifice a spell slot in order to 'charge' the ability for the day). These are just the ideas I've had since reading the book; make of them what you will.
It's one thing to be asked what I want for my birthday. It's something else entirely to have my mother go by whilst I am browsing Paizo, only to have her hand me a credit card and inform me that my birthday gift is up to $150 of material off the website. If I didn't already have subscriptions to everything, I'd have had a gleefest preordering things. As it is, I picked up some books I'd normally never bother with because they're quite a way down my list...
I have a confession to make. I genuinely started the game with 2e (although my first-ever material was with the black box; I still have the D20 from it...); as such, the Realms were the setting I discovered first. I have never had much of a chance to lay my hands on genuine Greyhawk material. So, my dear fellow gamers, I am requesting help. I have found the Canonfire! site, but I also want to find 'official' materials. If they can be found via a PDF site, in issues of Dragon and Dungeon, or if anyone knows someone willing to sell me some reasonably decent-quality tomes, please speak up. I do indeed lament not having collected any material any sooner than this...
Your apology for not being able to deliver a few things from the Green Ronin sale has translated into a nearly $250 hit to my wallet when I went to use the code you offered. I am honestly not sure if I should praise the lot of you or vow vengeance for the exemplary customer service that has led me to shop here over most anywhere else, at the price of 'Ooh, shiny! Oh, hey, it's tax refund time, I can afford it...' I can only conclude that if certain larger gaming companies had this degree of customer service and attention, scaled up to match their larger size, they would be up for a Nobel Peace Prize by now. I can only hope that someday this company qualifies for it, instead. And now, off to hide from the other things I wanted to buy but talked myself out of.
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