PossibleCabbage's page

I really hope none of the Mythic Destinies involve becoming more like a non-mythic creature that already exists. Since if we're roughly mapping them to the 9 outer planes that used to correspond to alignment, making one of them like "the Lich destiny" is no use to evil characters that have no particular interest in being undead.

I strongly prefer that we focus more on "things that people would actually tell legends about" (like "apocalypse rider" and "eternal legend") and less on things like "Jim from Magnimar became a Lich" since Jim could do that without being Mythic.

I don't think the Guardian is there to step on the Champion's toes as a defender/tank class, I think it's there for people who want to play a defender/tank style class without any particular moral underpinnings.

Like my playtest Guardian character is going to be a proud son or daughter of Rahadoum.

I suppose Curtain Call works best as a sequel to Abomination Vaults.

The oddest pairing is probably Quest for the Frozen Flame, which will be my pitch for finally getting around to doing that one (so you can turn it into an opera!)

We never knew if Gorum had his stronghold in Elysium because he was nominally aligned with the forces of Good, or because he used it as a forward beachhead into enemy territory.

Gorum got incinerated by a rogue umpire.

RIV Gorum.

I'm hoping for a Warlord from the Commander, a proper aggro-drawing tank in the Guardian, and for this mystery book to basically just have the stealth subtitle of "Hey, 4e Actually Had Some Good Ideas" :p

I mean, Pathfinder 2nd edition identified all the same problems with 3.x that 4e did, it just went about solving them in some different ways (like focus points instead of encounter powers.)

But I figure the Commander is going to be the "smart martial" for those who find the Inventor and Investigator don't fill the thematic niche they're looking for. The Guardian is probably going to be the answer to "why do I have to be super-religious to get legendary proficiency in heavy armor?"

It feels like Gorum is one of the easiest of the core 20 to replace in terms of "how it affects normal people's lives." Since if you're going to be involved in a life-and-death battle over something you can always pray to someone who is related to the reason you're fighting rather than the actual god of fighting.

If you actually find yourself in a "gods, please let me survive this" sort of situation, well that's where Arazni coming into the Core 20 makes sense.

(We did not roll a d20 to see which god died.)

The secret is to roll the die, then decide which gods are associated with which number.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kortos.

Gorum picks a fight with the wrong kind of entity, gets the kind of death that Gorum wants.

Evil still exists, it's just not a metaphysical entity you can detect with magic. The current version is probably more workable because if you encounter an evil person who is buying fruit at the market, you are not obligated to just murder them in the town square because your evil detector pinged.

Now it just works like: If you become aware of an evil person or an evil scheme you should stop them or it.

I think if Iomedae isn't safe tomorrow, she may well be dead.

It would be a sad loss since it would be much more fun to see the relationship between Iomedae and Arazni when both of them are alive and they are peers, possibly for the first time ever.

Like the thing about polytheism is that it's not normal for most people to worship only one god. There might be one deity that is most important to you, but you will still do the rites for whichever deity is related to whatever the thing you want to happen is.

So like every smith is going to have Torag's hammer hanging somewhere in their shop. Most folks who find themselves on the defensive side of a siege have said a prayer to Torag, etc.

I think "a deity of crafting things" and "a war god who is about protecting things that are important to you, rather than killing your enemies" are more important to have around than "god of dwarves". Torag is much more those two first things than the latter, IMO.

I imagine that the AP tie-in to "War of the Immortals" is going to be a six parter. That's likely to be a big enough story to span six volumes.

I don't think Torag as an overtly-coded ancestral deity though. Like in a setting with a wide variety of different kinds of people, it's weirder to have so many of them read as human than to have one of them be a dwarf, or an elf, or any other non-human ancestry.

Like Iomedae, Cayden, Norgorber (probably), Irori, Nethys, Urgathoa, and Arazni are all ex-humans.

I think the reason they held back on announcing Wardens of Wildwood and Curtain Calls until late in the "War of the Immortals" build-up was not because they were tied into War of the Immortals in any real way, but because they didn't want to get people to hyperfixate on the idea that they are thinking that "obviously Wardens mean its Gozreh/Erastil" and "obviously Curtain Calls means it's Shelyn/Asmodeus/Norgorber."

I understand what they're trying to do, but why is it necessarily linked to an Archetype? It could have been a standard Way with its Feats added to the Gunslinger pool with the caveat that they require Spellcasting or something.

This feels like something easy to fix with homebrewing. The archetype as written is intended to accommodate an Arcadian gunslinger which is the place on Golarion that has had guns the longest but the quintessential Arcadian guns were "handheld metal tubes powered by magic that shot pellets of concentrated arcane energy". If you want to play a character in that tradition from level 1, you kind of want to have "conjure bullet" from the get-go. If you don't care about that you can just house rule that it's a regular way and the feats are just regular feats.

However there's a real possibility that Spellshot is a class archetype specifically to prevent other classes from poaching "thoughtful reload" through multiclassing. Since that ability would be potentially incredible on a class that gets more mileage out of recall knowledge than the gunslinger does. By making it a class archetypes ability, you can't access it with Practiced Reloads.

There are basically four reasons to make something a class archetypes.

-To carry forward the PF1 concept of archetypes as "what if I want a character without this part of the class chassis".
- To enable a character to have something that is difficult to subdivide into individual feats.
- To enable a specific concept to work from level 1.
- To provide a space for more additional feats to build on the concept than is standard (Spellshot has four feats that require the dedication as a prerequisite, the other Ways have only two related feats.)

So the Way of the Spellshot gives everything a normal Way does: a special reload, three deeds, and a related skill. But because of the nature of "where do magic guns come from on Golarion and who uses them" being motivated by people who live in places where black powder is hard to come by coming up with a different option for ammunition, the "conjure bullet" action being available from level 1 is essential to play like "an aspiring Beast Gunner from Arcadia who can't get their hands on black powder" so it's granted at level 1 and you pay for it with your level 2 feat.

You can see that the Way of the Spellshot is supposed to tie into the Beast Gunner archetype because of the specific carve-out to the "you can't take another dedication" clause in the Spellshot dedication.

I could see Gorum as the Core 20 deity they're the least happy with. Since he's basically an expy for the Cimmerian deity Crom from Howard, in Pathfinder he's less "overcome adversity, no matter what" it's more "fight anybody for any reason whenever."

Specifically because Crom is the god of Conan, then we get Gorum tied to the people who get read as "barbarians" even though said "primitive" people should be more concerned with like "the weather" and "agriculture" than "war." Like there should be no reason that tribal or nomadic people should be more interested in "war" than the most "civilized" people around.

Plus even though Arazni specifically isn't taking the job of the deity she's replacing, she's still a good choice for "struggling against impossible odds" and "winning a fight against those who have it coming."

There's also that old hook of "why did Gorum build his stronghold in Elysium" that is going to make less and less sense the further we get from "alignment" being a thing. So they might as well pay that off while they can.

We have ONE final reveal in store! Who is the final deity we are going to announce is safe before we let you stew in your own minds for about a week?

Sarenrae.

The "watch the sun go out" thing from Stolen Fate is a red herring, Golarion already did an "age of Darkness". The Goddess of the Sun and Fire not miraculously resurrecting herself would be inherently weird given the related themes.

The whole "Starfinder canon has no bearing on this" was technically true, but you've got to have a "Sun God" around and that person would automatically get elevated to "Core 20" prominence and nobody would tap Arazni to do that job.

I always figured Irori was safe, not because he's boring or anything, but because "the death of Irori" is a hard thing to loop like "ordinary people" and "low-level PCs" into.

Since if this prophecy were to come true, the hole in the universe isn't necessarily something that PCs are more equipped to handle than actual gods.

Still, part of the prophecy that seems odd to me is that I would guess that Pharasma would take it onto herself to patch the hole Irori bore in the fabric of reality since "maintain the universe" is kind of her job.

I think prophecy 9 is Torag, just to establish "okay, we just did a whole bunch of super-dwarfy stuff, the dwarfiness of this next event is going to go back to the baseline."

The issue with "more high tech PDFs" is two-fold.

- If the digital version of the book is clearly superior to the paper version of the book, that threatens to damage Paizo's relationship with FLGS, which is a bad idea because your FLGS is important for things like organized play and on-boarding people to the hobby/system.

- Making a digital version of the book have bells and/or whistles requires additional skilled work. You can't simply add significant work to the production of a book without also increasing the price. It's possible that Paizo has figured that they're going to make more money selling $20 PDFs with minimal features than they would selling $30 PDFs with more features.

We have not heard of any deity entering the new Core 20 except Arazni.

The "Core 20" is not a diagetic notion right? Like people on Golarion don't have a notion of "these 20 Gods are more important than other Gods.

It's entirely possible that if you set a Pathfinder campaign immediately after the Age of Lost Omens started, there would still be a "Core 20" but Iomedae, Norgorber, and Cayden aren't in it because they're not divine yet. There were just three deities who fell out of fashion in the intervening centuries.

"And it looks like Rovagug has Iomedae on the ropes and is powering up for his signature "God-Eater" routine, there, Bob, it looks like it's curtains for the young Inheritor. Wait, what's happening in the crowd? Is that? Oh my, it's Aroden and he's got a steel chair!"

"By gawd, that's Acavna's music!"

Am I the only one who thinks the PC1 version of Instinctive Obfuscation is a lot clearer than the APG one?

I think it's better when feats spell out exactly what they do rather than to refer to a spell that is hundreds of pages later in the book while making alterations to how the spell works in the feat text.

Like sure, a lot of people knew how Mirror Image worked and the assumption was that you read the CRB before you read the APG, but the Player Core 1 probably should assume you read the ancestries before the spells, since ancestries are in Chapter 2 and spells are in Chapter 7.

Wait, they're going to actually announce the impending death before the books come out? I thought they were going to keep it secret to maximize the gut-punch to the playerbase when it happens?

It's generally important to solicit periodicals (like Pathfinder APs) before they come out in order to get people interested in them. We generally know the titles and something about APs several months in advance. I imagine part of the "they're announcing it beforehand" is that it will be possible to infer which deity has died based on the titles and premises of the various tie-in books they want us to preorder.

I think the reason they're doing theme books with monsters in them instead of bestiaries is that something like Rage of Elements is going to sell much better because it has player options in it, since mostly just GMs will buy books that are solely monsters.

Hey, we already know the name of the God who's going to die.

We know the names of lots of other Gods too, but we definitely know the name of the one that's checking out.

Like the thing about the mimic, I think, is elucidating. It's not important to reproduce the actual monster, even if the image of "a chest with teeth" is iconic. It's more important to reproduce the niche that monster fills- specifically a predator that poses as a thing the PCs think is safe or interesting in order to ambush them.

Wall-hangings, furniture, or floor rugs that attack you is basically the same monster. You could make it different by not having it be the actual item be the monster transformed, but make it work like a magical sort of trap door spider that uses whatever it is as camouflage.

Like make it an extradimensional spider that hides in books, where when you open the book the spider emerges from the portal to attack you (as the monster assumes most people sit down to read a book when they are alone and *not* heavily armed.) Make it a monster with good saves so it's harder to fight off with magic.

If Gorum doesn't get one of the next two prophecies, I feel pretty damn good about his odds of dying.

They can finally pay off the "why exactly is his stronghold in Elysium" hook!

Since of all the formerly CN deities, he was the least "good" of the lot!

With so many star eating deities, Devourer is running out of stars :D

The Liberation of Night is increasing.

One of the reasons no one has ever seen Ng's face is that Ng is almost impossibly attractive and is also Ace.

I'm not sure the superstition barbarian needs to make it into the remaster. That's a thing that I think is fine to leave in legacy content.

Like it just seems weird that there's enough "magic hating" that's intense enough for a Barbarian instinct when magic is in fact just a fact of life.

I think it's specifically for creating new characters at a higher level, as a replacement character or because the campaign starts at a higher level. Like you can just say "I'm making a 6th level character so I get +1 armor, a +1 Striking Weapon, and since I want to do athletics stuff I'll get a Lifting Belt" Then you just have a few low level slots to fill which guides "which items you read and which ones you skip."

Honestly probably my least favorite part of building a new character of a higher level is "picking out gear" so I generally gravitate to the standard method.

It always struck me that Irori should be less about "what you wear or how you fight" and more about your dogged pursuit of self-improvement. He should be more concerned with whether or not you skipped leg day than whether or not you're showing off your calves to the world.

Eldritch Yodel wrote:

Shelyn. Easily my favourite core deity. She plays with the traditional Aphrodite-inspired tropes in a way which really just speaks to me personally. Sure, she's a goddess of love, but not just romantic/sexual, but also familial (I mean, her longest most notable connection to another deity is her one with her brother after all) and friendship. Sure, she's a goddess of beauty, but not just physical beauty, but inner beauty as well. She really does just teach to be the best person you can be and love others. I'm not really sure how to elaborate on my enjoyment of her properly--

For a moment I couldn't remember what it was that initially drew me to Shelyn (aside from the "Wait, did that say the beauty goddess wields a glaive?") but you've basically written my answer for me on this one.

I think part of the reason I love Shelyn is that she's decidedly not the Goddess of pretty things and being loved, she's less the Goddess of Beauty and Love and more the Goddess of Art and Romance- she's active not passive.

Like in her role as the Goddess of Art she's less about "celebrate beauty" and more about "cultivate beauty in the world around you"- the role of the artist is to turn the block of marble, pile of junk, paint and canvas into something beautiful, or alternatively to uncover the beautiful thing that was always present just harder to perceive. Her prohibition on "destroying art" is less about "the value art has intrinsically" and more in "honoring the work that an artist put into cultivating beauty in the world." It's similar to why Erastil doesn't want you burning farmland- it's just the sense of "somebody worked hard for that, and other people need it" is less tangible with Shelyn than it is with Erastil.

In her role of the Goddess of Romance it's less "make him/her/them love me" and more "cultivate the inner light inside of yourself so that you are capable of loving and being loved." Just like you cut away the parts of the block of marble that aren't part of the statue or you weed the garden so that flowers can grow, you sculpt or cut parts of yourself and you web of social interactions that stand in the way of your inner light blinking at the same frequency as someone else's.

For a Goddess that falls into the archetype of "extremely passive" just due to her portfolio of pretty things and happy people, Shelyn is uncommonly proactive, which is what makes her great.

I would look at giving the Barbarian a "flat check to negate crits" ability. Like if you're at -1 AC, you have a 5% better chance of getting critted, but if you have a 10% chance of negating any crit then that's not so bad.

I mean the "Horsepeople of the Apocalypse" is a joke from Good Omens, since War is a lady and Death is neither male nor female.

I think questions about "who or what can interbreed with something" are best handled at the table on a case-by-case basis.

In terms of mechanics, you probably want a Gnoll with the Beastkin versatile heritage.

Aren't those extremely specific creatures from a very specific family though? Like, it seems hard to use them to just add one or a couple of villainous shapeshifters, they have to be a sign of deeper plans and worse problems.

I mean the thing about the Algollthu is that they are schemers through and through, but their logic is fundamentally alien. So who's to say they didn't have "send a faceless stalker to impersonate one specific tailor" as part of some grand plan the PCs will never get to the bottom of since it's supposed to play out over a thousand years.

I feel like the "diagetic explanation for some difference in errata or edition" is best left to each individual table to figure out. That way one table can spin "what happened to X" as a exciting story but a different table that doesn't care about that sort of thing doesn't have to worry about it.

I have to say I really like APs that let you start out at a level that's not 1. Sometimes you just have an idea for a character that makes more sense as a "somewhat experienced individual." I don't need to have played the entire backstory of a level 6 character (or w/e) to play them.

Particularly if the backstory is something that would qualify you for several levels, but isn't something that normally happens in this sort of game. Last survivor of a mercenary regiment, marooned on a deserted island, etc.

I think generally best practices for implementing errata is to hold off implementing it in a specific game if it would dramatically impact a specific character.

Like all your pre-remaster PCs just work exactly like they used to. If you want to update your PC, since like the cleric is better now, then that's on the player to figure out.

There don't need to be any in-game changes. If you had Drow as a key part of your ongoing narrative, you have all the rules you need to keep using them. You can certainly use "there were drow, we met them, but now there aren't any" as a prompt for some kind of story, but you don't have to. Like if Paizo said "we're never going to set another story in Galt" it's not like Galt doesn't exist anymore and you can't set a story there.

In terms of "you character can/can't do stuff" that wasn't the case previously, that's no different from any other kind of errata. In your day 1 CRB alchemists weren't proficient with medium armor, then they were because of an errata.

I think it's interesting that Shyka was the being Luis confirmed safe before anyone else.

I think it's because "we killed Shyka" is the absolutely cheapest cop-out since you technically can "kill Shyka" by killing a single incarnation of Shyka.

It was part of a litany of stuff to sell the idea that "we're actually serious about doing this."

What we worry about if ZK dies is not "what will we do without Zon-Kuthon" it's "what is that Dark Tapestry thing that was incubating in the shell that was Zon-Kuthon going to do now that it has hatched?"

A god is a person in Pathfinder - if they get killed they die pretty much all at once. The only exception I can imagine in current lore is Norgorber and that'd probably be a reveal that he was 4 people in a trenchcoat the whole time.

The other exception is Shyka. It's conceivable you could spend the rest of your natural life killing Shyka every round, and it's conceivable you'd run out of hours before Shyka runs out of incarnations.

Not exactly, it's just the old dragons haven't been updated yet. Formerly Green Dragons are now Horned Dragons who happened to have green scales.

Specific NPCs don't need to fall into any specific bestiary category though. You don't have to put "[adjective] dragon" in Mengkare or Choral's statblock anywhere. Mengkare's existing statblock has three "as gold dragon" entries referring to the original bestiary, but if you were going to reprint him or do Choral you could just refer to something in the Monster Core instead (or just say explicitly how Draconic Frenzy, etc. works for this individual.)

Like the purpose of the Unique Tag is that you can do just whatever.

Howl of the Wild product description states that it contains "A menagerie of Golarion’s animals and beasts for GMs to unleash on players..."

Yeah, Paizo's plan is clearly to release mixed GM and Player-Use books like Rage of Elements, Howl of the Wild, Book of the Dead, and Dark Archive than straight up Bestiaries. This makes sense since everybody wants to own the book with a new class, most people are going to want to own the book with the new ancestries, but mostly the GM buys the bestiaries.