Lord-Mayor Haldmeer Grobaras

Owen K. C. Stephens's page

Goblin Squad Member. Organized Play Member. 5,513 posts (5,517 including aliases). No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 1 alias.


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Scarab Sages

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"Skin Deep" is one of the most popular Eoxian holovid shows that *isn't* created in the Halls of the Living. In Skin Deep, undead compete in weird challenges, with losers being shifted on step toward being skeletal troopers... regardless of their beginning deathnicity.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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For home game use, i remain a big fan of creating any uplifted animal i want with this product (written by Alex Augunas and published in conjunction with my company, Rogue Genius Games) - https://paizo.com/products/btq01xdb?Star-LogDeluxe-Uplifted-Animals

For official Paizo creatures, I'd love to see something *very* different, like uplifted tashtari!

Scarab Sages

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Azlanti of the Star Empire are amused that other near-humans often have their appendix removed. The appendix is, of course, the organ that evolved from the rock-holding gizzard. It is thus the organ than connects to Aeon Stones, and therefor to magic in general.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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The annual Ghoran Festival of Rotting Meat People was originally a political satire designed to showcase how gruesome watching "the turning of the leaves" was to plantfolk. It's popularity was unexpected, but has provided good tourism revenue.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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It's certainly something we've been discussing.

The real question is, is that something you and other folks are interested in seeing?

- Owen K.C. Stephens, Producer, Rite Publishing

Scarab Sages

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Pahtra understand why some humans and other aliens offer them cream, or shine laser dots near them. A common tactic for dealing with such harassment is to feign ignorance, and ask for a detailed explanation as to why such behavior is considered polite or appropriate.

Scarab Sages

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I am SUPER excited by all these additions!

Scarab Sages

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Awesome job, Amanda!

Scarab Sages

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From the bottom of my third-party-publishing heart, Thanks Paizo!

Scarab Sages

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Most dragonkin consider being a starship pilot a post of great honor, and consider their "riders" to be their responsibility, who their fiercely defend but also give honest, sometimes harsh advice to on life matters.

Scarab Sages

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Within the Shadari Confederacy lies the Ataxxearol, the oldest and most well-known lyceum dedicated to the training and advancement of vanguards, though the local draeliks use the term Epiphators for those able to command the powers of entropy.

Scarab Sages

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#Starfound Computerized language translators that lack sapience are not just rare, they are illegal in many places. This is largely due to the Python Virus, that infected the AbadarAnyWord program of 104 AG to change jokes into deadly insults, which resulted in 142 deadly events.

Scarab Sages

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#Starfound: While other species often assume contemplatives do not engage in any physical sports, this isn't true. Contemplatives enjoy a number of combat and wrestling games performed with telekinetically-controlled marionette-stand-ins, which are often covered in sponsor icons.

Scarab Sages

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Phentomites engage in "Long diving," jumping off one of their floating land-masses to fall for days, through the empty gravity anomaly at the center of their ex-world, and allowing momentum to carry them up to a finish line. It's treated like a form of marathon.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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Nyerkh wrote:

We might get to see that first hand during the stream, but if not : a question.

During the playtest, people were worried about the Int-based biohacker outclassing its Wis-based counterpart, from the Scientific Method giving seemingly more to the Studious option and the supreme versatility of its Spark of Ingenuity feeling superior to the Instinctive alternative.
Any change on that front ?

That was one of the very, very clear pieces of feedback the playtest gave the Satrfinder team, and it absolutely resulted in changes.

Scarab Sages

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Though it is rare, some damai are born with an instinct of where infant kaiju are, and can communicate with them psychically. This is often seen as a mixed blessing, at best, though some damai do gain infant kaiju companions.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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I love this.
I especially love seeing some of the thematic elements we discussed when conceiving and writing the class become part of this very strong back-story.
Well done, Joe!

Scarab Sages

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Many half-elves born on Castrovel share a common goal to be "spectres," a kind of casual adventuring spy seeking to find proof of who betrayed the elves during the Gap, and thus give their home society the freedom to be more open and accepting.
Spectres are often interested in art, themes, music, and apparel disliked by elven society and thought of as "young punks," but they are also very inclusive--judging others by their actions alone, rather than sexuality, gender, species, religion, or appearance.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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Though my answer is totally unofficial, I certainly read "bonus languages" to mean those above and beyond the ones the rules give you normally.
So works as written.

Scarab Sages

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"Halflings are spectacularly well adapted for zero-G life. They never get space sick, never loose muscle mass, and find 3D navigation simple and straightforward. It's as if humans had been engineered to be better spacefarers..."
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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"No gnomish space explorer has ever succumbed to the bleaching."
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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FormerFiend wrote:
Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:

The humans native to Akiton, especially Arl, often refer to themselves as "thurok," to distinguish them from pale skinned "Golarites." Thurok dismiss Lost Golarion as a forgotten mote of human history, not worth trying to rebuild or memorialize.

#StarFound
So in your opinion would that make Hylki the Golarite term for Akitonian humans/thurok, or would thurok & hylki be two separate Akitonian ethnicities & hylki is the ones the golarites chose to slap on the whole bunch?

I'd likely go with the latter, but since it's all totally unofficial you can do whichever you like better. :)

Scarab Sages

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'Half-orc brutes' are mostly not "half" anything, or brutes. They are a viable, sustainable population full of as many geniuses, crooks, heroes, cowards, poets, & dullards as any other. But they are also characterized otherwise in millions of pre-GAP texts and stories.
#StarFound

Scarab Sages

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Elves do not consider themselves "Xenophobic." The elder statesmen of their nations remember waking up after the Gap, their entire lives lost to a blur, but confused warnings about allied races written nearby, or inked on their own skin, or branded in their flesh.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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Dwarves often feel pro-Golarion humans forget that while humans existed on multiple worlds, dwarves were native only to Golarion. Some fear the dwarven failure to find the promised land of "Sky" is responsible for the loss of Golarion and Torak, and seek to fix this.
#Starfound

Scarab Sages

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The humans native to Akiton, especially Arl, often refer to themselves as "thurok," to distinguish them from pale skinned "Golarites." Thurok dismiss Lost Golarion as a forgotten mote of human history, not worth trying to rebuild or memorialize.
#StarFound

Scarab Sages

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Ah, my last Starfinder baby. I am so looking forward to seeing it out in the world!

Scarab Sages

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Lord Fyre wrote:
Owen KC Stephens wrote:
Lord Fyre wrote:
Do you remember your work on the EverQuest Role-Playing Game by White Wolf?

I remember doing it. It was my first big set of projects when I left Wizards of the Coast.

I did a lot of the races and classes, for example.
I *don't* remember many details, though I DO have a few stories in my 'Books I Have Worked On' album on Facebook. :)
I find myself with a perverse desire to convert it to PF 1st Edition. I was an SOE employee during the period covered in the ruleset.

I mean, it wouldn't be hard to do. I might recommend ditching the weapon speed/reduction in iterative attack penalty thing, but overall it's a d20 engine, a lot of it would convert easily enough.

Lord Fyre wrote:


As to a question, what mischief are you up to now?

Well, I am currently the Game Design Expert for Lone Wolf Development, and the Fantasy AGE developer for Green Ronin. I'm also still producing material for Rite Publishing, and running Rogue Genius Games.

I also post to my website (owenkcstephens.com), and post on Facebook and Twitter, and all those activities are support by my Patreon.

Scarab Sages

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Due to their twisted, tripart history, Trox often grow small vestigial limbs or double chitin plates at some point in adulthood. These are often seen as omens from their deity that a major life change is due, and sometimes as warning of violence approaching.
#StarFound

Scarab Sages

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Wealthy androids near renewal sometimes set aside part of their wealth to make a Bond Bequest. This creates a secret society (funded by this pool of money) designed not to protect the next soul to use the body, but to keep the body itself from permanent destruction.
#StarFound

Scarab Sages

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The shirren sport of Fluxall is difficult for some to follow. Similar to basketball or rugby, the rules seem random, but in fact there are a specific set of 531,441 possibilities. Each time a player controls the ball of 9 or more seconds, they may change or add a rule.
#StarFound

Scarab Sages

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Swarmship Troopers!
That's awesome.
I would like to know more!

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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I am a huge fan of the show, and recommend it to all fans of Paizo in specific and d20 games in general.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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There is a distinction between a prosthetic limb, which replaces a missing limb you did once have, and a cybernetic arm, which gives you one additional arm.

Even though a cybernetic arm says it fuses to your spinal column, exoskeleton, or equivalent body structure, it should be available to a creature with no equivalent, unless that creature says it cannot use augmentations that require such systems.

However, a species that had no arms could not use a prosthetic limb to gain an arm.

By the same token, adding a prosthetic that enhances your vision is not going to give you vision if you don't already have it. It would be reasonable to have some augmentation that does that, but things that enhance sight don't give you sight if you lack it, unless they say so.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Page 4 of the Armory wrote:


While Starfinder has a preponderance of nonhumanoid aliens with strange morphology, any playable alien race can purchase and use the equipment in this book. A betentacled barathu (Starfinder Alien Archive 20) soldier can wield a hydra cannon and make use of hoverskates just as easily as a kasathan soldier.

This line is supposed to make it clear that yes, SROs can use biotech.

And yeah, that might mean they need to eat a peanut now and then to keep the "bio" part alive, but a GM can just as easily rule that the bio in question is from an electricity-eating species and works fine off the SRO's power supply.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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To be honest, the Starfinder team is doing herculean work to successfully produce the pages/year we are now. And even when Chris Sims and I are replaced, the two new people on the team are going to need time to get up to speed. Heck, I was with Starfinder from pretty near the beginning, and once we moved on from the Core Rulebook *I* needed time to get up to speed.

And while staffing is one reason the Sf APs are shorter, it's not the only one. Some people prefer shorter adventures. Some people prefer cheaper adventures (because, if they were bigger, they'd cost more--and a 50% boost in pagecount has to be made up somewhere). And some folks would want more adventure pages, and some would want more backmatter pages, and some would NOT want the adventures to be longer, and some are already annoyed there's rules content in an adventure at all...

Right now, Paizo can experiment with two different lengths of APs, and the SF ones are the smaller risk when we ask if we can try out 3-issue APs, or have an AP that doesn't start at 1st level. Since the SF APs are less of an investment, and experiment is less of a total risk. I think those experiments have been useful, and I encourage Paizo to keep some venue to try them out.

And if we DID get more staff, are more AP pages where we want that additional capacity to go? (And it's not *all* about the SF staff. Everything we do goes through the same editing and layout and marketing process and departments as all paizo products. So if we wanted more pages edited, we'd need more editors. If we want more pages laid out, we need more layout artists and graphic designers.)

Paizo tends to err on the side of not expanding too quickly, and having been laid off from a major rpg publisher once already in my career because they expanded too quickly, I'm in favor of that approach.

And it's not a simple 1 to 1. If we hire ONE full-time extra Starfinder person, they might (for example) only create enough extra content for 1/3 another layout artist. So if we want to offer someone a full-time position, we'd need to hire 3 new designers/developers, and that might create enough material to need 1.5 editors... but if we want 2 full time editors, that would mean 4.5 designers...

Now there are lots of ways to work around these problems, of course. Some people are double/triple/quadruple threats. Some tasks take more or less of different departments time. Some projects need extra capacity above the minimum as a buffer, and so on. And all the numbers I am using are just theoreticals, to explain the general point.

But the short version is, even if we knew for certain that making bigger, more expensive APs would make enough additional profit to justify hiring someone to do it... that is only one piece of a big, complex puzzle management has to look at, and it may still not make business sense to hire that person and expand the products that way.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Timothy Ferdinand wrote:
Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:

[unofficial]He's part of a fiendpunk movement among younger drow to mark themselves with the symbols of demon lords they don't worship, as a way to thumb their eyes at their opponents and prove they fear nothing."[/unofficial]

[unofficial]He is part of a minor house with a different demonic patron cult that was acquired by Zeizerer as part of a.... hostile takeover.[/unofficial]

[unofficial]He made a high-stakes power play to become a major manager within Zeizerer... and lost. He was marked with that demonic sigil to ensure he'd never rise any higher. Which is why he's a contact between the House and the Starfinder Society.[/unofficial]

Many thanks Mr Stephens, any one of those would work, and that's why we'll miss you so much!! Good luck for the future by the way.

Thanks!

Luckily, unofficial posts I'll still be able to do!

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

I just found out of about this.

Best of luck to you Owen and Lj ^w^

Thanks!

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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[unofficial]He's part of a fiendpunk movement among younger drow to mark themselves with the symbols of demon lords they don't worship, as a way to thumb their eyes at their opponents and prove they fear nothing."[/unofficial]

[unofficial]He is part of a minor house with a different demonic patron cult that was acquired by Zeizerer as part of a.... hostile takeover.[/unofficial]

[unofficial]He made a high-stakes power play to become a major manager within Zeizerer... and lost. He was marked with that demonic sigil to ensure he'd never rise any higher. Which is why he's a contact between the House and the Starfinder Society.[/unofficial]

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Tacticslion wrote:
Also, we’re you involved in Dark Matter at all?

Basically no (though I am a fan!). I may have been in some brainstorm meetings, but I didn't craft or write any of it.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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The timing of things -- PaizoCon, UKGE, shipping new books -- just means it's going to take some time to get the right person in, spin them up, and have shows again.

I miss them too, but I want everyone to have the time they need to make good shows return.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Pantshandshake wrote:
Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:
I HOPE to still be visible online in many forms!

Hear that gang? He's leaving Paizo, but we might finally get to see his fabled true form! Such a bittersweet day.

All right, goggles on, everyone.

The goggles do nothing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWFF7ecArBk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txFjpTX0v0E

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Kishmo wrote:
Goodluck and goodspeed, Mr. Stephens! My only request is that you leave a life-size cardboard cutout behind for use in future Starfinder Wednesdays as, statistically, we all know that the juiciest spoilers come when you and Rob are both in frame.

They can just drop me in with a greenscreen these days. :)

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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WatersLethe wrote:
I'll miss Owen's contributions on Twitch. Always my favorite guest on Starfinder Wednesdays.

THANK you!

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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David knott 242 wrote:

Maybe we will see more of him on Know Direction. Physical presence is not required for those podcasts.

I HOPE to still be visible online in many forms!

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Opsylum wrote:
Fare thee well, Owen. It's been really awesome seeing and interacting with you across these boards and media platforms.

Thanks!

I have enjoyed being part of this community very much, and while my interaction will inevitably change, I still expect to be posting.

Opsylum wrote:
I'll admit I'm more than a little nervous about where Starfinder will go what with your departure, James's, Crystal's, and several other big names happening all back-to-back, but I'm ultimately confident that the product everyone here helped to create was made to last, and is already in more-than-capable hands. Hopefully we haven't heard the last from you around these boards, and I look forward to watching what you do with Rogue Genius Games and whatever other projects you lend your, ahem, rogue genius to.

I certainly understand being nervous about change. but I really am leaving Starfinder in amazing hands. Rob and Amanda have had their hands on the tiller at least in part since before the game existed, Joe knows the rules at least as well as I do, and Jason Keeley has had his hands in most of the Starfinder projects, and will keep adventures coming and amazing.

Paizo is much more than one one or two of us, and while a lot of the employees are less public than I am, that doesn't make them any less skilled or dedicated.,

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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Zwordsman wrote:

I lack all context for all of this~ (paizo con event and all that. No clue~).

But thanks for answering and interacting a lot over the years.
Are you moving to a separate company or leaving the RP industry?

Most of the news was on my blog and social media, which I'll repeat here since folks seem interested.

"An Announcement: Change of Course
Well I don't like TOO much preamble before getting to the point of the announcement, so here’s the tl;dr version.
My wife Lj has gotten a job in Indiana, working as an Executive Assistant for Lone Wolf’s vice-president. As a result, she and I are moving from WA to IN.
In fact, Lj is flying out to our new apartment (if you need our new address and don't have it, drop me a line) on Saturday. June 15th. In 3 days.
I’ll be around for about a month in Redmond, and then go out to join her.
Inevitably some folks will have questions, so predicting them as best I can, and in no particular order:
Starfinder isn't going anywhere. Paizo has lots of amazing, hard-working, and talented people on that game line, and they have known I was leaving for a bit now. We don't know exactly how everything will get sorted out, but the game line and its products will continue.
I remain a huge fan of Paizo, Pathfinder (both editions), Starfinder, the Adventure Card Game, and even things I can't talk about yet. I was a freelancer for Paizo for years before I was a full employee, and I expect to be freelancing for them again in the future.
While Lj getting a job is the reason for this change, yes, I have plans that involve other companies. But I’m not announcing any of them just yet. Rest assured, I am not leaving gaming behind.
Yes, this is why Rogue Genius Games is taking a short break. But in the long run, it’s not going anywhere. I have plans and plans, yet, for my tiny little gaming company, and its partners and allies.
Yes, that’s why I will be at Gen Con this year. I had decided not to do any out-of-state conventions in 2019. But that won’t be out-of-state by August.
If you have more questions, let them fly!"

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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That language precludes ranged weapons having their max range extended by scopes.
It also, for example, prevents a blast weapon with a scope getting a cone 4 times as long as it would without s cope.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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At one of the conventions I ran Starfinder at last year, someone had a solarian with a giant hammerspace mallet as their solar weapon.

It was surprisingly popular when that was revealed.

Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

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The Beginner Box rules are designed for the Beginner Box. They should not be seen as either mistakes or signs that the Starfinder Core Rulebook has changed how it handles the same questions if they different from the Core Rulebook.

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