Whizbang Dustyboots's page

You gotta like it when the "throwaway" setting has enough hooks to run multiple games in, instead of the towns in modules from multiple otherwise-excellent companies that are pretty much devoid of all hooks, and just serve as a rest and refuel station for adventurers.

It's nice to see a product with this sort of optional-but-appreciated polish!

You officially have too many things I want to purchase for me to afford at one time. A wishlist would let me buy affordable chunks while still keeping the list of all the other goodies I want to buy ...

Oh MaxSlasher - thank you for that. I just relived a bit of my youth, though the animation quality was somewhat less than I remembered :-)

Rankin-Bass will break your heart that way. Every combat scene from the Hobbit seems to be "zoom in on a still picture, zoom out of a still picture." :(

Mmmhm. There just aren't enough capybaras in day to day roleplaying.

I've been watching No Reservations on the Travel Channel this summer and had actually been thinking that very thing.

I haven't heard the song in years, I'm most likely remembering the closest reproduction of the actual words my brain can come up with.

According to this fansite for the Rankin-Bass "Return of the King," the lyrics are as follows:

Where there's a whip there's a way
Where's there's a whip there's a way.
Where there's a whip,
We don't wanna go to war today,
There's a way,
Where's there's a whip,
But the Lord of the lash says nay nay nay.
There's a way.
We're gonna march all day, all day all day.
For where there's a whip, theres a way.
Where there's a whip, there's a way.
Where there's a whip There's a way.
Where there's a whip There's a way.
Left, right, left, right, left.
Where's there's a whip, there's a way.
Left, right.
The crack on the back says we're gonna march
Says were gonna march all day all night
And more.
For we are the slaves of the dark lord's lore
Left right, left right, left right.
Where there's a whip there's a way.
Where there's a whip there's a way.
Where there's a whip,
We don't wanna go to war today.
There's a way,
Where's there's a whip,
But the Lord of the lash says nay nay nay
There's a way
We're gonna march all day all day all day
Where there's a whip there's a way.
Left right, left right left right left right
Left right Left right, left right, left right,
Left right, left right, left right.

So much love for the Internet.

Looking forward to bugbears that are interesting for the first time ever.

At the moment, I've totally removed bugbears from my game -- sort of. They aren't called bugbears and they look like owl-headed men with the same crunch. Much spookier and they're the servants of an extinct (?) group of eeeevil shadow/mirror wizards.

For whatever it's worth, Hollywood can't even get Los Angeles right. The only two television shows that routinely seem even halfway correct to Angelenos are The Shield and The Closer. It's especially ironic with the former, since it's not a view of LA that the rest of the world really needs to see (since it's so accurate -- check the Rampart Scandal on Wikipedia for a shocking amount of Shield spoilers). ;)

Whenever I see a movie that takes place in a city--any city--I get all excited and try to name the city before they tell me which one it is.

Nowadays, it's pretty much Vancouver, no matter what city it's supposed to be. ;)

The treatment of Berlin and Germany was marginally better. At least if you are ready to live with two famous landmarks being two frames of "Matt Damon running" away from each other or with the geography being totally jumbled up. ;-)

We do it with our own cities as well. Kevin Costner in "No Way Out" runs around a Washington, DC that makes no sense geographically, capped off by him jumping onto a Metro in a part of town that famously does not have Metro (Georgetown).

So, yeah, it's a good thing you guys went with the Jersey Devil, because the even more provincial ghost stories are a little less compelling. You go up the coast and the creativity wanes a little.

Or down the coast. In Northern Virginia, we had a serial killer called the Bunnyman. (No known relationship to Echo.) Yes, he would kill kids while dressed up as a bunny, either at Halloween or Easter, depending on the story. We even could drive past his "abandoned" house.

Please skip this particular urban legend, Paizo.

This is something we have talked about specifically. We have some interesting ideas floating around for halflings. Might be worthy of a blog post.

Good ideas for post-hobbit halflings would definitely be worth a blog post.

I've been agitating for this for years, so yeah, I'd buy it. Nice shiny new art would just be the icing on the cake.

Hey! But I thought that Dire Weasels were the official mount for Kobolds!

I mean nothing against changing that and having the much cooler Slurk, but why does the blog entry say that there was nothing for Kobolds to ride so far??

I think the weasels-as-mounts thing is only found in one paragraph of the DMG. They might have blinked and missed it. And, frankly, it's hard to picture riding a weasel effectively.

LOL Mystara was my favorite setting :)

I'm a big fan as well, but of the countries that weren't just pastiches.

But if you don't have a cultural description, then you have no culture, and then no country.

That doesn't equate to "make them like vikings," which is what I thought you meant. If that's not, I apologize. :)

And BTW Mystara did not have real world countries just dropped in. They did have countries influenced and patterned off of real world countries, which gave them a sense of reliabilty and identifiable to the players.

The Arabs next door to the vikings and the American Indians sandwiched between Renaissance Italy and India were pretty painful elements and, unfortunately, pretty major.

I loved the Five Shires (I was the only one on the MML who felt that way, it often seemed), Glantri (of course), Karameikos and several other countries.

But the pastiches ... ouch. The setting never needed them and they were a mistake, IMO.

The Shadar Kai concept is definately one tied to D&D and its quirks, but surely Red Caps, being "traditional" fey can be "reimagined" for Pathfinder/Paizo, without loosing too much of what makes them fun for D&D.

Ah, Red Caps . . . I can still remember my step son laughing at them, a few rounds before he and his sister were down to negatives with only my friend, playing the party cleric, left standing to ward them off . . .

Goodman Games has reinterpreted them in one of the Dungeon Crawl Classics. Very nasty customers.

And I agree that JS&MN is a great fantasy novel, especially for looking at a non-cutesy (but still somewhat traditional) fey.

Very interesting. They seem more powerful than worgs, unless they have very low hit points or other restrictions. Are they able to venture out into light? If not, that might suggest giant weasels as pets/daylight mounts for those rare daytime missions.

I think an identifiable cultural description would help moe than a list of names.

Ugh. Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians in the Forgotten Realms and, well, nearly every interesting nation in world history being dropped into Mystara makes me cry.

If I want to play in ancient Egypt, I'll just play in ancient Egypt.

Besides, "identifiable cultural description" gives us wildly insulting and vaguely racist gypsy stereotypes as halflings. Just say no.

I devoutly hope that halfling names in this setting won't sound anything like hobbit names.

Excised from their hobbit roots, I'm not sure what the "hook" for halflings even is any more, unless it's just being less annoying SRD kender.

I'd favor a single Hell with the devils ruling the Infernal cities and the demons mostly being in the wilderness. It'd separate them out and make some clear distinctions between them without having to deal with the address, ZIP code and phone number of a zillion different planar locations -- most of which can just be walked to by taking a trip through Sigil, anyway, negating most of the value of "layers," IMO.

To combat the ever-looming "Fred the Fighter" phenomenon, I like to provide my players with sample names and surnames that NPCs use in a campaign. (I even submitted one such list for the Ptolus game world to the Delver's Square Web site. Hopefully it'll show up in a few weeks.)

Any chance of seeing such a list -- or at least naming conventions -- on the blog or in the first issue of Pathfinder?

The Underneath!

RE Setting Book: Each Pathfinder product will be a setting book, detailing a little bit more about the world. For the actual adventure paths, the Player's Guides should suffice.

I have to disagree. Looking through a dozen books to double-check what the names of each type of coinage is isn't something that I look forward to dealing with.

Centralized basic information belongs in a separate book. More detailed information about each AP's setting more appropriately belongs in the Pathfinder issues themselves.

They've been alluded to, but I'd like to see a real look at these guys in the blog soonish, and maybe even some crunch related to them in one of the first few issues of the not-magazine.

Please. :)

It won't be the Great Wheel, but it'll be similar in most manners.

New name: The Impressive Circle

Call it gold, and it's obvious: he's the black sheep of the tribe -- a kobold paladin.

Poor bastard.

I concur. All those chromatic dragon-colored kobolds are evil. A gold one (any metallic one, for that matter) has to be good.

Poor bastard.

I'd love to hear more about the Pathfinder organization itself. Give us non-annoying Harpers!

They cannot withdraw the OGL. The horse is out of the barn. If WotC wants to jump forward to a totally incompatible system to screw over all the D20 publishers, they can do that, although that seems like a recipe for pissing off customers who find all their 3E stuff obsolete.

In addition, it wouldn't be at all difficult for Green Ronin or Paizo/Necromancer to come out with their own OGL core books at that point and say "fine, everyone who wants to continue playing 3E, we've got your game supported right here."

So, I have a question for you regarding Pathfinder minis. Would you (and anybody else can chime in too) be interested in minis if they were the traditional metal, unpainted sort? I can get that kind of mini done MUCH faster than trying to go the prepainted plastic route.

Yes. I love my Ptolus dwarven rifleman from you guys, in all his unpainted glory.

I want to see bugbears and hobgoblins, see how they get along with their new, meaner, bretheren.

Bugbears are so dull in D&D, I'd love to see them get a more fey/childhood nightmare flavor.

Former Zork players out there? You guys have Grues, too?

My Midwood campaign just had an encounter with a Shadow Grue, complete with Knowledge (Arcana) giving the classic warning about them.

I just tweaked the Ethereal Marauder with shadow flavoring and had it flee light and used the Wikipedia description for the character with darkvision (minus the glowing fur mistake).

If I were creating a Monster Manual-type book, I'd certainly dump the Ethereal Marauder in favor of my Shadow Grue.

As was said before not all OGL products are created equal, the same goes for monsters in a single book.

This is hardly an OGL thing; most monster books are filled with far more misses than hits, IMO.

I intend to stick all the U modules into Ptolus, but I agree with the others: Having Lothian and the Tarsisian Empire, etc., in the module to begin with (along with gunpowder) would really be the icing on the cake.

Heathansson wrote:

The nine hells can't be copyrighted; or if so belong to Dante.

Actually, the "Nine Circles of Hell" was definately Dante, but the whole idea that there is a heirarchy among devils and ranks below the Adversary was very much Milton's Paradise Lost. D&D has pulled a lot of great ideas and combined them with a lot of other really great ideas . . .

Medieval Catholic Church, IIRC.

How about that extraplanar creature with four tenticled arms and a tube used for siphoning your brains the protrudes from its torso? Oh, lets add that it has strange psionic abilities that eminate from it's derrier :) Those aren't ok, right?

There are a ton of OGL mind flayer alternatives created to specifically fill this need. Ari Marmell has created a pretty well respected on in his PDF The Iconic Beastiary: Classics of Fantasy (available from Paizo in addition to the usual PDF suspects), the phrenic scourge. They're what Wolfgang Baur is using instead of illithids in the newest Custom Adventure module, Empire of the Ghouls, in fact.

It sounds like they're going back to myth and legend for a lot of the Pathfinder world. So I'd expect a Heaven and a Hell, and maybe a purgatory/limbo like place. I wouldn't be surprised to see a spirit world, a Happy Hunting Grounds and more.

The nice thing about the core cosmology is that it's a really big place, and most anything Paizo does can either be added into existing planes or be made a set of demiplanes.

And the Far Realm isn't off-limits, just the name. It's the same sort of mind-blasting alien reality that's shown up in countless novels and more than a few movies. If Paizo wants to use the Far Realm, they'll give it a new name (or no name at all) and use it.

I really was blown away by all the fun fluff for Pathfinder goblins. I'd love to see a book compiling all the monsters used in Rise of the Runelords -- after it's done, or before, whichever -- with all the fluff, the stats and Wayne's reimagined looks, all in one volume, an alternative Monster Manual, as it were.

Failing that, just a book collecting all the fluff between two covers (including sketches or paintings showing the reimagined looks) would be well-liked.

At this point in D&D's history, I'm ready for a new fresh look at a lot of these monsters, and if the goblins are any indication, your take on things will be one I'll want to incorporate into my regular game.

Ptolus, Savage Tide, Castlemourn and other settings have something comparable. But yeah, it's a pretty great idea and one that every setting ought to have, in my mind.