ShadowChemosh's page

I have a community created add-on for Hero Lab for the ARG play test rules. This add-one will allow you to create races without having to use the HL Editor. The creation rules follow the ARG play test rules exactly.

For the full details please see the ARG playtest add-on post over at the Hero Lab forums. The post includes a step by step guide for the install which is very easy to do.

This is created by the community for the community so it is 100% free. The add-on *should* not require any data sets past CORE but that is hard for me to test so I am not 100% sure actually.

Thanks

We are looking for new players for a new campaign just starting out at level 1. We are using the Pathfinder RPG rules with just the Core Rules and Adventurer's Armory allowed currently. We are 30+ age group that game every other Saturday from 5pm to 11pm in Romeoville, IL.

This is a brand new campaign(first session was 11/6/10) with level 1 characters. The module is Crypt of the Everflame from Paizo. It will be a pretty standard game using the rules as written as they are new to the group as a whole. So this is a great opportunity to learn the new Pathfinder RPG with a fun group.

If interested or have questions please email me at ShadowChemosh(at)yahoo(dot)com.

Wanted to share my place test of the witch. As I have been my groups main DM for over 5 years I have little chance to be a player. So I took Jason's idea and created a witch as a villain. So this play-test will be from the DM's perspective of the class. Though probably not as helpful as when its a PC as NPC's simply don't last long enough to really get a feel for the class. Also many of the abilities are tailored for PC use and not NPCs.

I was inspired to use the witch when I read the Coven hex ability as my group was about to run into the three hags of Hook Mountain in the Rise of the Runelords AP. So I replaced one of the Annis hags with a little sister elven witch. She is a level 8 witch meant to take on a party of six 8th level PCs. The hags also had a Graveknight(PF26 pg84), 4 advanced ghasts, 3 advanced Dolgaunt Monks (Eberron Campaign Setting). The combat took place on a frozen swamp terrain that covered 120 squares by 150 squares. I used the frozen map from the D&D Gargantuan White Dragon(Icingdeath) mini for the terrain.

We are still mostly using 3.5 rules with many Pathfinder changes. So in example the fighter class is pretty much pathfinder and we also allow many extra books including Book of Nine swords. The group consists of the following: Half-orc Fighter(Orc Double Axe), Hadozee Scout 6/Ranger2, Gnome Warlock, Goliath Spiked Chain Fighter, Dragonborn Favored Soul(with Houserules), and a Human Warmage. The half-orc fighter is what I have to balance against most as he is +18 to hit and does a base damage of 1d8+16 plus 1d6acid damage. Not including what he does vs giants. The funny part being he was doing so much damage with Power Attack he actually removed it from his character to take Improved Two-Weapon Fighting.

The witch stats are as follows:

I found the hexes to be nice and very flavorful, but not as powerful as her spells. Having an unlimited ability to off-set limited spellcasting is very nice for a PC. As a NPC villain I didn't think I would have many chances to use them actually. This turned out to be true as the only ones I ended up using where the Coven hex and the Ward protection hex which she gave to one of the annis hags before combat started.

The spell selection of the witch I thought fit very well with the theme that I wanted to build. They have a good number of control or combat hindrance spells, but very little in direct damage. Where I think they really need help is some better protection spells. At 8th level her whole list of protection spells was mage armor and cat's grace.

In comparison at Fort Rannick the group took on a ogre sorcerer who had a large number of protection spells. She had so many protection spells that the party spent almost a minute(10 rounds) taking her down. So I was very worried about a witch with a low AC of 19 and no significant hit points.

To help make sure the hags and witch lasted a little while longer I put up a modified wall of force that allowed the hags to cast out of, but prevented spells and a people in. The wall required a skill challenge to take down and the party easily handled doing this once they got near it.

The Combat
This combat lasted a total of 14 rounds and took six and half real hours to play through. So not going to go into full detail of it all. The witch's spells turned out to work like I hoped for and caused numerous slow downs to the party as they traversed the frozen landscape. She had little in the way of actually stopping the party or causing significant amounts of damage. Some of this was hammered by the range of many spells as the party stayed both spread out and far away from the hags and the cauldron while they mopped up the minions.

Once the shield wall was taken down the Half-orc fighter charged in ignoring the annis hags completly and went after the witch. The half-orc used Dual Strike(CAd) and easily hit the witch doing 49 points of damage(as both ends of the double axe hits) and are witch is left with 5hp. At least the party felt threatened by the witch as the half-orc player started yelling for someone to kill the sticky elven b***. When the warmage went he hit with four magic missiles and down goes the witch.

So no real chance to use any of the hexes as she didn't last long enough at such close ranges. Not that I think she would have lasted much longer provoking AoO's. I also think that sense she had a Maximized Ray of Enfeeblement ready that she would have used that over a hex as it was better at taking the fighter down a peg and could be cast defensively.

In hind sight I should have added the 8 levels of witch to the annis hag to give her more survivability or at least more than one round when directly confronted. Though it was fun to build her as if it was an actual PC.

Hope the above helps in some way.......

Going try this one more time as I think maybe I miss worded my other post. This FAQ document I put together is all about the RULES of Pathfinder Core Book similar in style to what WoTC did with their FAQ document. I politely ask paizo to leave it in the RULES forum and not move it to the general forum. This document has nothing to do with anything other the RULES of the Pathfinder Core Rule Book.

I put together some of the more common RULE questions I have seen on the RULES forum into a single pdf document. I used this format instead of just posting them as you can't go back and edit old posts at paizo. I did my best to find any RULES questions that had an official answer by a paizo staff member and included them even if its not a very common question. This single document covers Frequently Asked Questions about the CORE RULE book can be found on my website using this link Unofficial Rule FAQ v2009.8.27

I have done my best to condense questions and answers, unless from a paizo staff member, into hopefully a more readable question/answer style. So if you see something that should be re-worded don't hesitate to let me know and I will try and correct it. The rules document is still a little rough, but I think its a good start and as I go along I can improve it.

If this not actually helpful to anyone than so be it, but I started to see many of the same questions over and over again. I thought a single location for such a thing would be nice, but I could be wrong....

I know I have seen a bunch of posts regarding extracting the images from PDF files. Their appears to be a big difference in how Adobe 8 vs Adobe 9 handles this.

I wanted to share that I found a free utility that extracts all the images from a PDF in one go. Just used it on Chapter 3 and it worked great and all the maps came without any room numbers.

Its called the Some PDF Image Extract tool.

About the only bug I found with it so far is that the Directory you ask to extract the images to needs to be one folder deeper than you actually want. For example C:\FolderA\FolderB\FolderC if you have it extract to FolderC it will actually put the images into FolderB.

Other than that it makes getting all the images really fast and easy. Hope this helps others.

I have compiled pretty much everything from the Burnt Offerings(GM Reference) thread and the Skinsaw Murders(GM Reference) threads into a pair of unofficial Errata documents. I sorted them by page number to make it a little easier to find what you need. The documents also have James Jacobs's answers to specific questions from the threads. I plan to hopefully put one of these together for each chapter as I get time.

As I have no artistic ability to create maps or other cool visual addons so I am doing what I can to help other DMs out. Its also my way of saying thanks to Paizo for another great adventure path for me and my players. As my players get to each chapter I plan to compile a Unofficial Errata, but my players are slow and are just finishing Burnt Offering.

Unofficial Errata - Burnt Offerings
Unofficial Errata - The Skinsaw Murders

I also have Monster Cards, which are 3x5 index cards meant to hand out to players. Currently available are Burnt Offering Monsters which are in OpenOffice.org format and pdf. These have useful information to players including a picture, but don't have any actual combat numbers.

My main site where these and a few other things are available is SGW - Pathfinder DM's Reference.

A group of gamers in Romeoville area is looking for a couple of more players. We try and game every 2 weeks from 5pm to 11pm on Saturday's. The group is 30+ with guys and gals.

As a group we do are best to create and run interesting fun games that consists of roleplaying, combat, puzzles, mysteries, politics, and overall mix style of games. Some sessions may be more roleplaying then combat, and some sessions maybe more combat than roleplaying. On average we tend to lean a little more towards action, but that does not mean pure hack and slash just that we try and keep things exciting and moving forward.

Currently we are running through WotC's Slaughtergarde campaign which is a very dungeon crawl intensive module. In the past we have played Eberron campaigns(high magic), paizo adventure paths(lots of roleplaying), and a homebrewed Darksun world that was very low magic. These past campaigns have lasted as long as 15+ months while others as short as 2 sessions. So we would like a gamer that will be happy with different style games and having more than one character.

We play using 3.5 D&D with a good number of extra books and we have made some fun enhancements to improve game play. An example of a enhancement is giving wizards and sorcerers classes a d6 instead of d4 hit points and changing some abilities or feats to actually be encounter based instead of daily based. At the same time if you wish to play using pure core 3.5 rules you would have no issues being able to do so in our games. Any and all such enhancements are fully documented on the groups wiki website.

We are looking for fun gamers who are interested in playing cooperatively with other gamers. This group enjoys working as a team while having a good number of laughs, but at the same time everyone is interested in both their characters and the story line. If you enjoy creating effective characters with interesting character backgrounds then this is the group for you.

If you are interested in playing evil characters, having inner party conflicts, or wanting to spend hours each game arguing over rules then this is not the group for you. If you have no interest in the campaign setting or storyline and only worry about your next power then again this group is not for you. I am not saying those are bad ways to play the game, but only that you will not enjoy the play style of this group.

If you're interested or have questions please send me an email: shadowchemosh(at)yahoo(dot)com