|
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Paizo Pathfinder® GameMastery® Planet Stories® Paizo Games | |||||||||||||||||||
| About Paizo Messageboards News Paizo Blog Help/FAQ | |||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Posts
 Recent Posts
I like to believe that the gods don't grant spells; divine magic is sympathetic magic. A cleric's (or other divine caster) abilities come from emulating a deity's behavior, from attuning themselves to their god's desires and character, until the cosmos "sees" the priest as a tiny version of the god and consequently gives the priest a tiny version of the god's powers. Do something that is unlike the god, fail to act in accordance with the "right" way of doing something, and that sympathetic link is broken, and the cleric loses their powers.
Remember, unlike Terra, the northern pole of Golarion is NOT icepack floating on ocean. The Crown of the World is a continental plate, like Antarctica on Terra. It's ground under that glacier - you've even got a big-ass mountain range right next to the pole!
I love these boards. Where else can I get a discussion on Lovecraftian Mythos and quantum physics in the same thread.Lovecraft himself was, for an amatuer, pretty up-to-date on scientific theories for his time. And it often shows in his writing. Ken Hite makes a decent argument that "At the Mountains of Madness" was less a 'scary story' than a cutting-edge techno-thriller - more Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy than Stephen King or Dean Koontz.
They'd have to do more than change the name and some stats. Geometric biomechanical beings of logic without sanity arranged in specific form-based castes charged with maintaining a mechanistic plane - which is kind of the essence of Modronity - is really kinda mostly unique to TSR/Wizards/Hasbro IP. It'd be a looooooooooong row to hoe for Paizo, when they've already got Axiomites.
Had the wrong spell name. Original post edited. Thanks for observing the wording of my post rather than the intention. Still says fog cloud.
Goblin adjustments are in the Bestiary, but they're -2 Str, -2 Cha, +4 Dex Gartle Crazyface, Imaginary Friend Summoner Gartle smiles disturbingly big and imagines bigger. He gets along with everyone in the tribe, including the imaginary members. This is a bit weird, but when he screws up his face, sticking his tongue out and crossing his eyes just so, everyone can SEE the spooky dead imaginary dwarf that follows him around, so the chief assumes everything he imagines is true. and Belthur Ordukr, Eyed... eedoo... GHOST DWARF A ghostly-blue colored dwarf with an axe in his head, smoldering pits where his eyes should be and spiked chains wrapped around him. Gertle says he used to be an “adventurin’ theaf”, and nobody in the tribe really can be bothered to argue about it, especially since Belthur tends to hit them with his chains if they do.
Specifically, the study and dedication required to become a cleric granted access to 1st level spells, continued service as a loyal cleric allowed access to 2nd level spells. At 3rd, 4th, and 5th levels, the cleric only received his spells via intercession by the supernatural servants of the deity (Heralds, anyone?), and 6th and 7th level spells were granted directly by the deity. I believe the intent with the supernatural servants restriction was that they only taught spells they had access to in their statlines or that duplicated their inherent abilities - so clerics of Asmodeus would be contacting different types of devils depending on their spell load out. Paladins and Rangers had the same deific access restrictions. Some questions arise, if we wish to use these guidelines (which I love), given Golarion's cosmology: Can clerics of Aroden still wring low-level spells out of the cosmos just by virtue of having gone to Aroden Bible College?
Of course, back then, Clerics were on a 1-7 scale for spell levels, as opposed to the 1-9 scale for Magic Users. I'm not 100% on how to convert 1e scale to PFRPG scale.
This is an issue. Goblins don't really think big. Fireworks are a major treasure. They worship stumps that kind of look like monsters, for cryin' out loud. They have oddly-specific gods of killin' Dogs and settin' things on fire. Adventure Paths have, by definition, a broader scope. They don't necessarily need to be world-shattering, but they need to think big. If someone can really justify an escalating threat that starts goblin-level and then gets to the kind of crap 15th-level characters get up to, while still remaining something goblins are interested in, then we might be able to sell Paizo on a goblin AP in, like, 2015 or so.
3. The game above 15th level is a superhero game using mechanics that are already wobbly by 10th level. It can take more time to create a single NPC or high level monster than it takes to create an entire low-level adventure. High level play is a time sink into which I pour precious time I could better spend doing things that are actually fun.
So now we have the First Ancient Time, a world dominated by Aboleths and Elder Things, with a cosmology of qlippoth and... angels? Qlippoth and Proteans. No real deities to speak of, really. Or at least the dominant races of this era are all famously atheists. And that cosmological order was replaced with a new order, one of archons, devils, agathions, daemons, azata, demons, axiomites and their inevitable servitors, and proteans? If you hold to the Protean belief system the Axiomites came next, and their infection of order led to the Devils/Axis of Good, then the Daemons, then the Daemons made Demons. The Chaotic Good and True Neutral realms gets short shrift in the Protean system. If you're an Asmodean/Sarenraean adherent, who believes that anything those two can agree on must be true, it all starts with Angels and Devils, then some other stuff happened. Couple'a swollen-headed egomaniacs, if you ask me. Note that we haven't even begun to discuss the Dark Tapestry. Well, that's just more Material Plane, y'know?
Giants? Dragons? What? The Cyclopes ruled most of Casmaron, Avistan, and Garund before the rise of Azlant. The giants are spawn of the gigas who are spawn of the titans who, self-reportedly, predate any mortal race. Troglodytes had vast late neolithic empires (Think Sumerians and Akkadians) while the mammalian races were still huddling in caves and trying to master fire. The Serpentfolk ruled most of the world and had outposts on other worlds before that. Aboleths and Elder Things had the place to themselves before that, and are, between the two races, probably responsible for most other life on Golarion.
A devil is born of the infernal hierarchy of Asmodeus, and knows nothing except the kind of petty political struggles that define corporate and academic life, but with extra murder. Devils obey the rules to the absolute letter, often at the detriment of the spirit, and lesser devils will ignore the rules if a superior isn't looking. The devil prefers sins of the mind. They also tend to be built on a humanoid template, in terms of appearance. The demon is born in the savage filth of the Abyss, and from the moment it comes into existence until the moment it is destroyed entirely, it knows nothing except the savage struggle of all against all. It wants nothing more than to rend, rape, and ruin everything it comes across. The only laws a demon obeys are those backed by the fist and the lash. The demon prefers sins of the flesh. They tend to have a more bestial basic form in appearance. The daemon is nihilism incarnate. It exists to see the end of all things, and to cause as much existential suffering along the way as it can. It will do whatever needs to be done to see these goals fulfilled, be it obeying the rules of a superior, or becoming a maverick loose cannon. It has no preference for the devilish sin of causing a paladin to fall from hubris or the demonic sin of killing and then raping an orphanage - neither holds much explicit interest except as a means of obtaining souls. Daemons prefer the sins of the soul, those that specifically debase and wear upon that most precious of commodities. They're the most alien of the three Ds in form, but still built on the same two legs, two arms, one head basic body plan as the other two.
Elf Gate, duh.
Of course, I am of the firm belief that we gamers are too quick to accept as gospel, unvarnished truth the ravings (and carvings) of madmen that are virtually the definition of unreliable narrators.Then why even bother reading Lovecraft's stories in the first place? I mean, if you can't "trust" the stories themselves... what's the point? I think you're overthinking the whole thing. That's like asking why even bother to read the Chronicles of Amber because Corwin is an unreliable narrator, Mr. Jacobs. The unreliability or not of a character in a story is irrelevant to its quality as a story. I'm not even disputing that, in the context of the story, the events we read about happened - exploding Cthulhu and all. I am disputing, and I believe we've gone around on this before, that the madman Old Castro reciting, essentially, the catechism of his faith about stars coming right; and holocausts of killing, and reveling, and joy; and the God-like power of Cthulhu is any different than an old Catholic priest talking about the blood of the lamb, and the Ascension of Christ, and the 2nd Coming. Sure, it's what he believes, but what makes Old Castro more reliable than the bas-reliefs of the Elder Things or the reports of Yiang-Li from 5000 AD, neither of which seem to think of Cthulhu as any worse than a cosmic Saddam Hussein or Xenu? And even if we *do* accept the reliability of the narrators in Call of Cthulhu, we know that the mere sight of the High Priest of Yog-Sothoth will drive men mad or kill them from fright. Their idols and carvings can be nothing more than sidelong looks, glimpsed in a mirror, darkly. My opposition, Kthulhu (to switch to another post mid-stream), stems from the standardization of Cthulhu, reducing it to a marketing icon, as stereotyped in appearance as Santa Claus or Charlie Brown.
Granted. Of course, I am of the firm belief that we gamers are too quick to accept as gospel, unvarnished truth the ravings (and carvings) of madmen that are virtually the definition of unreliable narrators. Old Castro's degenerate Cthulhu Cult is the primary source of the idea of End Times and Stars Coming Right, but those have been writ large in the secondary and tertiary sources as the inevitable future of humanity for decades. Sources such as The Mound, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow Out of Time paint a picture of a very different universe than the one those Louisiana cultists see. I expect Cthulhu itself isn't quite the squiddy horror of the idols or Johansen Narrative, either. That said, taking The Call of Cthulhu as a whole does present a certain template on which we might project, royalty free, a big fat green dude with an octopus for a head. Even if he is trapped on Earth and has no right to be mucking about on Golarion. ;)
Cthulhu in the 'popular' imagination is green, has a big round head, has bat-wings in addition to two arms and two legs, with two eyes and tentacles instead of a mouth. That is because that is how he is depicted in the Call of Cthulhu RPG Not ONE of those traits is to be found explicitly in that description. Later in the story, it is described as green, having flabby claws, a squid head, and
Still awfully vague. Popular Imagination Cthulhu is Chaosium's baby. Cthulhu himself is not. Paizo's smart enough to walk that line, thankfully.
Wasnt there some sort of historical papal ruling that forbade priests to use edged weapons? Heavens no. Knights Templar and other monastic Knightly Orders used the s**# out of swords. Its from that the inital mace wielding cleric came from for all those still able to remember basic-expert and 1st Ed AD&D. The iconic mace-wielding cleric stems entirely from Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror's half-brother, and more of a political bishop than an ordained priest. He was depicted in the Bayeaux tapestry wielding a mace, and apocryphal tales have him talking about how a man of the cloth is forbidden to shed blood, so he used a blunt instrument. I say apocryphal, because anyone who was William the Conqueror's half-brother has seen some battles in his time, and would know that bashing someone with a mace makes just about as much bloody mess as a sword. It's mostly some nerd fanon created by the Gygaxian Founders to give some flavor to their priestly troop-type in their fightin' game.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
