ewan cummins's page

Dear Customer Support Team,

I don't use the forums or buy anything from Paizo's online store.
I dislike leaving a zombie account roaming the interwebz, eating brains. :) Privacy concerns.

If you could delete my entire body of posts, I'd be grateful.
But I realize your setup might not make that so simple.

Thanks,

-Ewan

Does anybody know any good children's books about adventures on the high seas? I mean to say, besides the well-known classics like Treasure Island.

To whom should I address my concerns, if I think that a particular moderator has engaged in unfair or unprofessional actions?

I'd like to make helmets somewhat more important in game mechanics. Same thing for shields.

I'm not happy with the stats for crossbows. They are too fast to reload and too weak in effect. I'm think that I will slow the reload time while increasing the damage and adding an armor penetration ability.

My campaign has gunpowder tech at a late medieval level. Some soliders carry hand cannon. I'll need to find or make (probably make, as most designs I've seen make guns either worthless or way too potent).

simple hand-gonne=

• less accurate than a crossbow

• not slower to load than a crossbow

• does NOT have a touch attack, but does get better penetration than the heavy crossbow gets.

• does good damage but lacks exploding damage die

• misfires on a natural 1- but I'm going to use fumbles for other weapons, too.

• NOT hellishly expensive

• simple weapon , but may require a week or two of training/practice to obtain familiarity

I will follow this post up with some crunch, but first I'd like to get some general feedback from the community. Am I reinventing the wheel? Has someone already addressed these matters in PF optional rules?

I've posted about this on Dragonsfoot, but I thought it might be a good idea to get opinions from PF fans, too (not that there aren't any over there). It's the beginning of a homebrew I'm cooking up before classes begin anew for me. I think I'll run it with B/X or maybe AD&D 2E, but it will definitely use some PF elements, probably including monsters. I'll definitely be adapting parts of Kingmaker, but not the whole AP.

Here's the rough continental/coastlines map:

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg12 ... aft001.jpg

I drew it freehand. Afterward, I adjusted the coastlines a bit so it didn't look too regular or just sized to fit the map. Roughed up the coastlines, and added a few islands.
It should be read with the open ocean to the right, or East. The continent ‘faces’ east.

Looking at it, I have some half-formed ideas about where the plate boundaries might be. Next up will be mountain chains. That central sea probably flooded as the northern and southern portions of the continent began to pull apart. The landmass in the west is probably pushing into the central/eastern mass, and I expect I'll place high mountains at the 'seam.'

Now, I'm not concerned with getting all the geographical details exactly right. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just plausible and reasonably self-consistent. There will be some fantastic geography in the mix.

I have lots of ideas for kingdoms and cities, as well as some bits of published settings that I plan to swipe/assimiliate into this one. It's not intended for publication, so I'm not going to be shy about borrowing things.

I've run off a few copies of the rough map, which I will make into physical, climate, political, even historical maps. Again, all at a sketchy , low res level. I want to build a good framework.

Feedback so far? Any comments on the map?

It can be argued that the primary reasons why guns beat out bows, knights in armor, etc were as much economic as tactical. Guns ended up being the cheaper, more efficent option for projecting force. It takes years to train a good archer, weeks to train an effective musketeer. Bullet proof armor can be made, but it's heavy and expensive.

IMO, the designers did not need to gimp guns or made them so hard to learn to use. They didn't even need to make the guns so outrageously expensive. No, all they needed to do was to limit the availability of powder/gun cotton. A good rule to adopt would be that the PROCESS of creating these explosives is very dicey anyplace with magic- the 'mana' interferes. Workshops blowing up, dud batches, excessive waste, etc will tend to make powder or gun cotton quite rare and thus quite expensive outside the magic-dead zone of Alkenstar. Other nations won't bother to invest in the technology, as it's just not good economics for them to do so. Within Alkenstar, creating the exposives is easy and cheap, and guns are much more common.

Make guns simple for natives of Alkenstar and martial for others, perhaps.

Paizo guys reading this- please give this idea consideration. I think that it would go a long way to explaining in a logical and internally consistent way why Alkentsar looks as it does, in contrast to most of Golarion.

Other posters, what are your thoughts?

Having recently been given a bunch of Pathfinder stuff for Christmas, I've been looking through the books. Golarion is a pretty nifty setting! It reminds me of the World of Greyhawk and the 'Gray Box' era-FR, and that is good. The setting has depth, variety, and a little grittiness in the mix.

So much for the lavish praise, now on to my complaint:

The art quality is quite good, but there are too many cheesecake illos. I'm tired of seeing so many sexy female characters in RPG art who wear skimpy outfits, 'armor' that exposes the kill-box or the abdomen, etc.

I would like to see more variety with the looks of women in Golarion. Give us some gals who look plain, scarred, ugly, plump,frumpy, mousy, etc. I'm not saying that all the female characters have been 'too pretty', or that I object to the occasional odalisque, but dialing down the fanservice would certainly please me. Give us more hard-bitten adventuresses who look the part, and not like swimsuit or lingerie models.

The iconic paladin is a big step in the right direction. She actually looks like a credible threat and not like some fanboy's dream girl. She's wearing armor that looks designed for protection, not sex appeal. The Battle Herald illo looks really good, too. Hell, she's even got a scar on her face! Imagine that.

Does anybody else have thoughts on this one?