Wycen's page

I'm thinking about Spell Penetration or spell focus (conjuration or evocation).

I remember in 3E (maybe not 3.5, I can't remember) you could take Point blank shot and apply it to spells that required a ranged touch attack, but I don't think Pathfinder lets you do that unless individual DM's approve.

Otherwise maybe Empower Spell, which I wont be able to use until I have a few more spell levels under my belt.

I'm about to level up and I'm wondering what feats might be good for a sorcerer. We are still in the first module, clearing out the haunted prison though I'm also interested in feats which might be useful in the modules to follow.

I plan mostly to blast things, but might take a few defense spells.

Thanks

Why not Almah?

You could have a crazed wizard who's been searching for the scroll confront the party when they get into town. He or she should have an obvious means of knowing the party has the Scroll, like an artifact floating in the air pointing at whoever is carrying it. Like Kuroth's Quill or some other minor artifact: http://www.canonfire.com/wiki/index.php?title=Kuroth's_Quill

So this is a class for the Advanced Players Guide. What does advanced mean?

1. For older players?
2. For maturer players?
3. Power gamers?
4. For smarter players?

Whatever your pick(s), I have to hope the Extracts remain a personal form of magic, rather than the spell in the form of a potion. I am playing Pathfinder, not 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. To borrow Melan's phrase (or whoever if my memory fails), please don't impose your tyranny of fun on me. Not all classes have to be "fair" or balanced.

And don't make infusion a first level ability. In fact, remove it from the list and turn it into a feat if you really need to have it. Even a feat you can take at first level will be ok.

I have no problem finding ways to be useful to the party without buffing them. I can provide flanking bonuses. I can provide Aid to others, or pour a healing potion down someone's throat. I can stand in the back and wave my hands and hope the wand triggers or I bluff the goblins into thinking I'm about to lob a fireball. Heck, if I'm really selfish I can wonder around the terrain or throne room looting or looking for secret doors while my cohorts do the heavy lifting.

I think the Discoveries should come maybe a level sooner.

I think a few of the zero level spells would be appropriate as extracts, but as they'd be horrible as first level extracts, I don't know what to say about them. I almost want some sort of "unlimited" ability like a magic user, but don't know what to suggest.

Also, the mutagen is great for the DEX or CON boost, but STR doesn't seem to me the field an alchemist is going to excel in. Maybe throw in Improved Unarmed Strike or Natural attack. I'm not so worried about this, when I used it I wasn't thinking ahead so while I made a great flanker, I couldn't hit anything.

Alright, that's all I got off the top of my head, I have to get back to studying for a midterm, but I hope Extracts don't turn into a buff for everybody.

I had a wizard in my high level game with multiple permanent spells and for me, Detect Magic was the pain in the butt.

My trick to making it less useful was information overload. Not in terms of "you get blinded or a headache" though I did alude to such a case, but instead I literally listed a page a spell effects. It was when I introduced Warduke (yes, THE Warduke) and I didn't want a party of 16th level adventurers taking him on, just using him for intimidation. So I rattled off a dozen "official" spell effects, and then started making things up.

Of course that was a miscalculation because once the wizard realized he'd never heard of some of the spells he wanted to start researching them, but it didn't matter cause the game died a month or two later and they never met Warduke again.

If the party has no cleric, you have to worry about killing them all with the mummy rot, unless you want them rushing back to civilization to find a shaman/cleric/potion before they die.

Perhaps make the mummies "deathless" like the elven ancestors from Eberron or like those positive energy undead, the name escapes me, from Forgotten Realms lore.

You can link the winged serpent to the sun and positive energy, which is still dangerous in large quantities.

I'm looking for pictures posted here a few years ago, specifically the macaquitl or maquaquitl sword used by the Aztecs. There are other pictures online of course, but these were really wicked looking.

I'm playing an Atzlanti character in a Scion game, weilding one of these and I'd like the other players to see the visciousness of the weapon.

Thanks

I think it is more likely they would want it as a spell component, in which case you can easily say, 'you'll never need any powdered quartz or blah blah blah, for the rest of this adventure.'

Don't forget that there is a Scarlett Brotherhood team on the Isle of Dread. Being a player I don't know the details, and I think they were left pretty barren as far as information and background, but the island goers might be another opportunity to bring the SB into the picture. Maybe even as good guys.

All they have to do is hack off the head and Speak with Dead suddenly doesn't work. (in 3.5 at least).

You should dig up an old TSR novel by Rose Estes, that had harpy-human-wolf hybrids. It was the Mika Wolf-nomad series.

But consider this. This is 3E, (if you are using 3rd edition or a relative). 3E is all about half-everything. Multiple templates make monsters memorable, (or bizarre).

In a game that actually labels the sex of mindflayers in stat blocks (do you really think they are male or female?) there is no limits on what kind of freaky things you can allow.

This reminds me, we found a necklace with a symbol on it in the lost village and never made our skill checks to identify it.

Can anybody spoil the beans? Our game died an ignominious death last year and reading this thread reminded me about it. Heck, it might not even be an official part of the adventure now that I think about it.

Who's the cool looking evil guy on the cover?

Somewhere on this forum, not sure if it is this sub-category or elsewhere, that I think maybe two of them are named. One is Tyralindi Scrimm (if I recall correctly). She's the cleric with the mace and pointy-ish crown. Actually she's a cleric/binder/homebrew prestige class.

James Jacobs or someone even posted her stats, (he played her).

Beyond that I can't recall if any of the iconics got special treatment.

We never got this far sadly, but as a player I see a problem.

After maybe 6 encounters with savage creatures I'd be annoyed.
After maybe 12 encountes I'd be frustrated.
More than that and I'd start day dreaming or thinking about my next paper for school.

Obviously at this level you hopefully have access to teleport, rope trick, stuff like that, but even then too much of the same thing eventually becomes boring.

Have Harliss find the PCs. Instead of being caught in a cave, have her doing a fighting retreat and she happens to back into the PCs, while fending off the savage pirates.

I have friends who were gamers before they met and married and thus are now a married gaming couple.

They have an issue that the others notice but I don't think they realize bugs us, (we probably have never mentioned it).

They have a shared world they built and use for their DnD games. Thus, in the middle of a game, he will say the name of an NPC and she'll pipe up and ask, "Oh, is he related to BlahBlah?!" and they'll laugh and pat themselves on the back for whatever bit of their shared world history the rest of us aren't privy to.

I also game with people who don't share the hobby, but that gets more complicated.

This is interesting, about the rope trick use.

My ruling if a player tried these ideas would be to praise their ingenuity but then tell them "no", specifically for the swallow whole reason.

I totally love the idea of using a rope trick spell to escape being swallowed whole, (of course casting it before or while swallowed is another topic) but I would not say the monster gives them a free ride someplace else.

Of course, I'm talking about the 3E version. And I just reread the spell and nowhere does it give me the sense that the extradimensional space moves. That's the kicker, for me at least. Also consider it is a 2nd level spell. Perhaps "Improved Rope Trick" would move around.

Having played through most of HTBM I say take 1 or 2 portions and skip the rest.

Introducing some dinosaurs is ok. But if you run the temple of Demogorgon through as written, unless you change things on the fly or have more fluid interpretations of the traps, challanges, can be an exercise in futility.

The mirror/candle test, to get into the temple proper was a huge time sink for us. We basically waisted an entire session trying to figure it out. Partly it was the DM, but he admitted that. Everytime he was ready to throw in the towel one of us would say 'hey, I have another idea' and we'd try a bunch of crap all over again.

Olangru and the teleporting/grappling is a pain. Kidnapping more than one party member, NPC or not, means less resources for the party to use in the later fight with the lemurian golem. My suggestion is just Olangru and a few consorts, then a Large size animated statue that looks like Demogorgon, not the lemurian golem.

The attack at the end with the pirates as they arrive in Farshore is ok, because it gives them an idea that something big is going to happen later on.

Just my suggestions.

When we killed Temauhti-tecuani I was going to animate the corpse. Unfortunately the rules of the zombie and skeleton template wouldn't allow something with so many hit dice to be animated. We chopped his head off instead.

I had a long and informative post for you, but these lousy paizo message boards ate my post again, so here is the short version.

My interaction with Rowyn ended like this:

"You had plenty of opportunities to kill me while I was sleeping. You singled me out for poisoning. Why not kill the others? I think it is because your attracted to me and your feelings are conflicted."

That might help your motivation for Rowyn.

Our DM made it seem like they were given some background info.

We had: male wearing armor with a holy symbol.

Female human wearing leather armor.

Female elf wearing robes.

Another guy we didn't give much thought to.

The guy with the holy symbol, I think it was St. Cuthbert, caught my attention because I was playing a cleric. The women caught our attention because we thought "hey, what'll they do if we free 'em?!" Except the druid, don't know what she thought.

We ended up returning the elf wizardess back to flesh. Urol had used one of the salves to bring the druids animal companion back to flesh and blood. Since it was his treasure I didn't think it would be fair to force him to do something else. This was one time out of perhaps 3 that Urol was useful during the campaign.

So for a while we had 'Inari' travelling with us on the Sea Wyvern. Unfortunately she disappeared when we crashed. Later, I got the idea of using Scry and Sending to try to find missing people and she was apparently in a cage in a cave, (probably in one of the shadow pearl locations). But our game died shortly after so we never finished Tides of Dread.

Well, on the one hand, HTBM is a rough adventure, the potential for character death is high. And finding a replacement in the middle of the jungle is hard.

On the other hand arriving at Farshore intact might help party cohesion, but it is HTBM that helps establish the Isle of Dread as a dreadful, dangerous place. I think if they get to Farshore without experiencing a morale shaking experience, they are less likely to face the rest of the Isle with any sort of dread or apprehension.

Or that 2 of the same hand? Whatever :P

This is of course my opinion. I was a player, not the DM.

Well, in our game the DM gave us a choice of items. He handed us cards with descrptions, said we could each choose 1 and then gave us a time limit, "lest Zotzilaha decide he's hungry again".

If I recall correctly our choices included a Flame Tongue sword, amulet of natural armor +3, mithral breastplate +??, luck stone, plus some other stuff I can't remember.

Would this make a good side trek for a Savage Tide campaign? Specifically if they've already reached the Isle of Dread? If our group has levelled according to the STAP layout, I'd have to up the challenges in Blood Waters, but that isn't a problem for me.