Going Wild with Technology


Iron Gods


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In the thread, What Happened To Magic Itens? Are They Useless?, Gulthor said,

Gulthor wrote:

Our group just finished Iron Gods and I just started running Jade Regent this last weekend (I was a player in IG.)

One of the great disappointments for our group was that as fantastic an AP as Iron Gods was (we *loved* it), we got very, very little use out of the technological items. We kept a ton of them because we *wanted* to use them, but the fact was that basic magic items and our standard build strategies were just *so* much better. Not just a little bit, but enormously so.

The technological items have several built-in disadvantages:

1. The technological items are frequently more expensive than their magical equivalents. For example, Eyes of the Owl grant low-light vision for 4,000 gp and the gray veemod strip grants low-light vision for 6,000 gp, plus the 1,000 gp for the veemod goggles. Other examples at The Wires Behind The Magic.

2. Technological items are either single use or consume charges. A 1-pound battery for recharging costs 100 gp for 10 charges.

3. Most technological items are timeworn, causing them to occassionally glitch and preventing recharging.

4. Most technological weapons require exotic weapon proficiency: firearm, heavy weaponry, whip, or bastard sword.

5. The powerful Technic League has a monopoly on technological items in Numeria. Anyone else using technology is an outlaw in their eyes. Outside of Numeria, advanced technology is extremely rare.

6. Making technological items has its own feat set and requires special technological laboratories that are rare and often heavy guarded by the Technic League. For a silly example, constructing grippers requires Craft Technological Item and a production lab, when they are simply modern vise grips that a Golarian blacksmith could make out of high-quality steel.

7. The list of technological items is much smaller than the list of magic items, so they don't fill some obvious niches.

The advantages of technological items are that they are not magical, so they don't take up magic items slots except physically, and have some abilities not found in magic items, such as touch weapon attacks at long range with a laser pistol. While wands can duplicate some technological effects, wand use often requires heavy investment in Use Magic Device skill.

Crippling technological items from the Technology Guide is understandable in the overall Pathfinder game. It would ruin the flavor of non-Numerican games if a trickster in Varisia pulled out a hologram generator for a non-magical illusion or a gunslinger in Galt was armed with an arc pistol. In Pathfinder, rare means too expensive to buy.

But in Iron Gods, letting the PCs freely use technology without all the restrictions lets them immerse themselves deeper into Numeria. I removed many of the restrictions.

Here is how I did it.

1. I did not change prices, because found items are essentially free. High price merely increases the temptation to sell the item. And selling the item can lead to an exciting trip to the black market, so it works for roleplaying, too.

After the PCs cleared the supernatural energies out of the haunted valley in Scrapwall, they searched for good scrap there. It was the one place in Scrapwall that had not been picked clean. So, they found a few more technological items than the module had set out.

2. I made a mistake about batteries that worked out well. Numerians call the batteries "silverdisks" and use them as coins, so I erroneously assumed that they weighed the same as coins, fifty to a pound. That let the PCs carry plenty of batteries. Furthermore, I let them charge batteries in the reactor beneath Torch (the torch above Torch would sometimes shut down for a few hours after the mysterious period when it had shut down for a week--until the party became so good at engineering that they figured out how the reactor could charge batteries and maintain the torch at the same time). Since Torch residents used silverdisks as money, the party could find new uncharged batteries in their change from shopping. If the silverdisk was unchargeable, then they used it as money instead.

I also let them salvage the spaceship from the haunted valley in Scrapwall, which gave them a mobile recharging station.

3. Timeworn was the biggest problem. I made a house rule that Greater Make Whole could remove timeworn. Friendly NPC Dinvaya Lanalei could cast that for them. In retrospect, I should have made removing timeworn more challenging. For example, first a Knowledge(engineering) skill check at DC equal to the crafting DC of the item to diagnose which part failed over the centuries. This check could be retried once a week. Second, with the proper knowledge, Greater Make Whole could remove the timeworn condition.

My houserule had a cascade effect. If timeworn could be removed by a 4th-level spell on the cleric and sorcerer/wizard lists, then what use was the recondition ability from the Technomancer prestige class? I declared that a technomancer could repair a reconditioned item at a minor cost with no skill check, removing the timeworn or broken condition, yet the Technic League technomancers preferred to leave their favorite items merely reconditioned to prevent theft.

4. No change to weapon proficiencies. My game had two party members with firearm proficiency and a third took Exotic Weapon Proficiency(heavy weaponry). The players were willing to sacrifice a little to fit the milieu.

5. My players also roleplayed around the Technic League's ban on technology. They maintained dual identities. In towns, such as Torch and Iadenveigh, they were ordinary smiths, fighters, wizards, and bards who showed no visible technology. In isolated places where outlaws roamed free, such as Scrapwall, the Choking Tower, the Tarnished Halls, and the Scar of the Spider, they adopted false names and pulled out their technology. Their spaceship was always parked miles away from curious eyes. They built a warehouse 3 miles outside Torch for long-term concealment of the spaceship during downtime.

6. I dropped the laboratory requirement for repairing technology. Technolgical labs were needed only for building technology from raw materials. The gunslinger/rogue in the party took the technological crafting feats, and the skald could fix parts with Greater Make Whole, so they could repair any found technological item. I also invented a feat for this PC, Leadership of Robots, that let her repair a limited number of robots the party defeated as follower robots with 1st-level abilities. She wanted a crew for her spaceship.

7. The lack of variety is still a problem. Thus, the party has more magic items than technological items. I invented a technological toaster oven, +2 for Craft cooking and alchemy. The gunslinger/rogue in the party loved it.

Sovereign Court

Very interesting. I've been staring at more or less the same issue for a while now. My players had been worrying about WBL. Not because they were really weak, but probably because they'd been hearing so much about it.

Turned out they were way above WBL, but a considerable portion of the wealth was in the form of things like timeworn emergency shelters (9000gp).

I'm strongly considering a variant of ABP going so far as to basically drop the entire assumption that you need magical wealth to make it through combat. I.e. built-in bonuses high enough that you can scrap all items that provide bland numerical bonuses; and then expect the combat system to be robust enough that having or lacking a flaming sword doesn't break things in either direction.

Since my players haven't got a lot of Big Six items yet, this would be the last clean moment to do it; they're now looking for a place to sell the loot from Lords of Rust so after that they'll have money to spend on items.


Ascalaphus wrote:

Very interesting. I've been staring at more or less the same issue for a while now. My players had been worrying about WBL. Not because they were really weak, but probably because they'd been hearing so much about it.

Turned out they were way above WBL, but a considerable portion of the wealth was in the form of things like timeworn emergency shelters (9000gp).

My players taunt me by passing up wealth. At the end of Fires of Creation they gave their technology (except for access cards and e-pick) to Khonnir Baine, for free. Though if I count the value of their spaceship, they are millionaires.

Ascalaphus wrote:

I'm strongly considering a variant of ABP going so far as to basically drop the entire assumption that you need magical wealth to make it through combat. I.e. built-in bonuses high enough that you can scrap all items that provide bland numerical bonuses; and then expect the combat system to be robust enough that having or lacking a flaming sword doesn't break things in either direction.

Since my players haven't got a lot of Big Six items yet, this would be the last clean moment to do it; they're now looking for a place to sell the loot from Lords of Rust so after that they'll have money to spend on items.

I had the same problem about opening opportunities for the party to sell technology. In theory, the Technic League buys technology, but they ask questions and demand answers. The best alternatives are Hajoth Hakados, pages 11-13 of Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars, or the Tarnished Halls. The Tarnished Halls did not exist in detailed form, so I created them: The Tarnished Halls, Numeria's biggest black market. The fourth and final post in that thread is Herbatnik pointing out that I had reconditioning wrong. Actually, I had carelessly slipped back into my houserules in the preceding comment.

One visit to the Tarnished Halls was fun, but later I wanted more convenience. The party had left Scrapwall with an NPC hireling, a 4th-level brawler named Dewey Baros. After The Choking Tower they purchased Silverdisk Hall, up for sale because Garmen Ulreth was dead, and put Dewey in charge. I gave him a level of vigilante with underworld connections to the Tarnished Halls. Now they can sell any technological contraband through their friend Dewey.


Mathmuse wrote:
2. I made a mistake about batteries that worked out well. Numerians call the batteries "silverdisks" and use them as coins, so I erroneously assumed that they weighed the same as coins, fifty to a pound. That let the PCs carry plenty of batteries. Furthermore, I let them charge batteries in the reactor beneath Torch ...

I love this, and I'm totally stealing it if I run Iron Gods again.

Mathmuse wrote:
3. Timeworn was the biggest problem. ...

One of the ways I got around this was to let players pick the glitch that occurred on a glitch roll of 50 or higher if they used a non-pharma timeworn item regularly over more than a week or so. I figured if a character used an item enough and got a good-enough feel for how it worked, they could anticipate a glitch even without skills and make it work for them. It kept some of the spirit and risk of using something timeworn, but greatly expanded the rewards, which made the items' usefulness more in line with their value and battery recharging less necessary, which meant players held onto them longer and used them more frequently until they could get around to reconditioning them (or simply didn't recondition them, since it turns out Chaotic characters love high-risk/reward glitch rolls).

Mathmuse wrote:

4. Most technological weapons require exotic weapon proficiency: firearm, heavy weaponry, whip, or bastard sword.

...

7. The list of technological items is much smaller than the list of magic items, so they don't fill some obvious niches.

For my second run of IG, I built an augmentation system to let crafters take apart and bolt pieces of tech gear onto mundane weapons and armor, which effectively turned tech into enchantments. This let them do all sorts of stuff with much of the gear they found that in a lot of ways was better/cooler/more unique to their characters than cash. That system's at the core of what I put into Fantastic Technology.

I also worked around 6 (lab requirement) and 7 in that run by putting a busted lab under Torch and having the PCs and Torchfolk repair and upgrade it over the course of the campaign. When I cooked up new tech items for the party, I just made them inventions of someone in Torch messing with the lab while the PCs were running around that they sold, traded, or gifted to the PCs.

Scarab Sages

Here's a question, but my party has raised it:

The spell 'Salvage' targets a shipwreck, and is basically "True Resurrection' for ships. From what I've read Spaceships are considered a type of 'ship' for magical purposes. Thus a wrecked one would constitute a 'shipwreck'.

What are you guys thoughts on this?


Baron Iveagh wrote:

Here's a question, but my party has raised it:

The spell 'Salvage' targets a shipwreck, and is basically "True Resurrection' for ships. From what I've read Spaceships are considered a type of 'ship' for magical purposes. Thus a wrecked one would constitute a 'shipwreck'.

What are you guys thoughts on this?

Ninth-level spells are pretty miraculous, so I would allow it to work on spaceships, such as the Haunted Wreck in section P of Lords of Rust or the Aurora buried beneath Iadenveigh in The Choking Tower.

However, some of those ships are tremendous. The Divinity is a mile across. The ship buried beneath Torch in Fires of Creation is perhaps a quarter of a mile across intact. The crash of the Chrysallis formed the town-sized scrap heap called Scrapwall. They could fit a galleon, the biggest ship mentioned in the Salvage spell, into an interior room. They seem beyond the size limit of the spell, except that the spell has no stated size limit.

It does have a stated time to reassembled, however. A 8-foot rowboat takes 1 minute to restore, a 50-foot keelboat takes 10 minutess to restore, a 160-foot galleon takes 4 hours (240 minutes) to restore. I would guess that the reconstruction time is proportional to the amount of material to reassemble, which is proportional to the volume of the ship. Thus, the 5000-foot Divinity would take 10,000,000 minutes to restore. That is 19 years. I suspect that some incidental magic would dispel the Salvage spell before it finished reconstructing the Divinity. The Divinity is haunted, after all, and many of the haunts would object to restoring the ship.

Also note that Salvage would not provide fuel or supplies for the spaceship, since a new ship would not necessarily have those yet.

Salvage mentions that it forms an air bubble to raise a sunken ship from the seabed. It might also dig out a buried ship like the Aurora, though I imagine the spell would look more like the spaceship rising out of mud than an underground bubble breaking through to the surface.

Scarab Sages

Mathmuse wrote:


However, some of those ships are tremendous. The Divinity is a mile across. The ship buried beneath Torch in Fires of Creation is perhaps a quarter of a mile across intact. The crash of the Chrysallis formed the town-sized scrap heap called Scrapwall. They could fit a galleon, the biggest ship mentioned in the Salvage spell, into an interior room. They seem beyond the size limit of the spell, except that the spell has no stated size limit.

It does have a stated time to reassembled, however. A 8-foot rowboat takes 1 minute to restore, a 50-foot keelboat takes 10 minutess to restore, a 160-foot galleon takes 4 hours (240 minutes) to restore. I would guess that the reconstruction time is proportional to the amount of material to reassemble, which is proportional to the volume of the ship. Thus, the 5000-foot Divinity would take 10,000,000 minutes to restore. That is 19 years. I suspect that some incidental magic would dispel the Salvage spell before it finished reconstructing the Divinity. The Divinity is haunted, after all, and many of the haunts would object to restoring the ship.

Also note that Salvage would not provide fuel or supplies for the spaceship, since a new ship would not necessarily have those yet.

The one they looked at was the haunted wreck at Scrapwall. and your math is off. A galleon weighs up to about 500 tons, where as our eyeballing the haunted wreck was about 75k tons, which would take, given the galleon, approx. 31 days, six hours. You were working from dimensions wheras the spell seems to work on actual material (compare longboat to galleon).

Also, that one ran off a Fusion generator, which runs on water, according to the technology guide.


I know the haunted wreck in Scrapwall is smaller than a galleon. My party has been flying around in it for a few months. I had to guess the full wingspan, since the wings are not entirely shown in the diagram on page 28. I kept them short.

The haunted wreck, which I dubbed the Caterpillar and my party renamed The Rock, was a scout ship (see page 31) used as a launch by a much bigger ship, the recycling module Chrysalis (see page 7). The last surviving crew of the Chrysalis tried escaping in the scout ship, but they crashed along with the Chrysalis.

Using weight as a stat for a spell is difficult, because the source material seldom gives weight. Nevertheless, a good guess should be adequate.

Scarab Sages

Mathmuse wrote:

I know the haunted wreck in Scrapwall is smaller than a galleon. My party has been flying around in it for a few months. I had to guess the full wingspan, since the wings are not entirely shown in the diagram on page 28. I kept them short.

The haunted wreck, which I dubbed the Caterpillar and my party renamed The Rock, was a scout ship (see page 31) used as a launch by a much bigger ship, the recycling module Chrysalis (see page 7). The last surviving crew of the Chrysalis tried escaping in the scout ship, but they crashed along with the Chrysalis.

Using weight as a stat for a spell is difficult, because the source material seldom gives weight. Nevertheless, a good guess should be adequate.

Yes, but it's not hard to look it up when it's a real world thing. Most galleons averaged about 500 tons, but some of the big Spanish ones could exceed 2000 tonnes. I chose to use a more 'average' specimen to use as a rule of thumb. Broadly the spell seems to work with about 100 tonnes per hour of material given the examples.

According to the map and text, the map shows about half the ship, so figuring the 105 feet shown is part of a 210 foot ship, that appears about twice as wide as it is long.

Hmm... went back and reread my notes:

Based on comparisons to a marine forensics study of the wrecks of HMS Hood and the DKM Bismarck, Chrysalis would not have been very large, and frankly, I'm a bit confused, as there's no obvious, mile wide craters that the town sits in. Based on what we're told IIRC, she came down relatively intact, and exploded on impact. Bismarck fell 9k feet, and made a 1200 foot across crater before bouncing and sliding to a stop, and is relatively intact. Hood's debris field is much larger from the massive explosion and then breaking up as she sank. Scrapwall, as a debris field, is smaller than Hood, but bigger than Bismarck. I think it save to compare it to a modern fleet aircraft carrier in size.


Look at the volume of Chrysalis' cargo:

Scrapwall is an intimidating sight. Towers of rusted
iron and hills of rubble and ruin, long ago divested of
anything of remote value by tech-hungry scavengers, loom
from the dusty surrounding plains. Immense lengths of
chain, coils of jagged wire, giant clockwork gears, and old
corrugated metal cargo containers riddled with gashes,
bullet holes, and the telltale pockmarks of laser fire are
piled high, forming a jagged and intimidating hill-like
wall surrounding the interior. Scrapwall is 3 miles across
at its widest point, and the walls of junk enclosing its
interior are an average of 30 feet high. These walls are not
vertical and can be scaled, but the rubble shifts dangerously
at times....

(After I read that description to my players, their characters climbed over the perimeter hill rather than go through the entrance. One PC had a mountaineer trait and another could fly.)

The hills that surround Scrapwall are made of the Chrysalis' cargo, 30 feet high, 800 feet wide (according to the map on page 15), 9 miles in perimeter. Sections R, S, and T show that the rubble goes deep, so it is not a thin layer over dirt hills. That is 570 million cubic feet of cargo. Assumed 30 pounds per cubic foot, the density of household garbage, that gives 8,500,000 tons. The Bismark weighed only 41,700 tons.

No-one will be able to distinguish the wreck of the Chrysalis itself under all the junk it carried, so we shouldn't worry about anyone casting Salvage on the Chrysalis.

None of the crashed Androffan spaceships left a crater. One is buried under Black Hill in Torch, the Chrysalis became shifting piles of rusty debris, the Aurora is buried under the central rocky spire and flat fields of Iadenveigh, some ship might have scattered debris across the valley called Scar of the Spider, and the Divinity is buried nose-first in a mountain. I tease that they all crashed with their inertial dampeners still running. The writers messed up the physics badly, so we cannot base deductions on physics. I still facepalm at how Nicolas Logue, the author of Lords of Rust, left a dam standing with a hundred-foot break in Hook Mountain Massacre.

RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32

Has "WBL" ever been a problem for your campaign? (... specifically some big ticket technology items skewing the wealth distribution between your party members?)


Lord Fyre wrote:
Has "WBL" ever been a problem for your campaign? (... specifically some big ticket technology items skewing the wealth distribution between your party members?)

In my campaign, oh yes. The PCs are terribly far below standard wealth by level. They keep giving away their wealth to the needy. I have to plant extra treasure to give them some interesting technological goodies.

My players refuse to worship in the cult of magic items. They prefer to win battles, or better yet avoid battles, through their characters' skills and class abilities. They are outstanding at preparation and teamwork, so I have to raise the CR they face despite their under-equipped state.

In the Jade Regent adventure path, my wife's ninja character finished the AP with gear she had claimed off a respected enemy in the 2nd module. Her current Iron Gods character, the gunslinger Boffin, is the most tech inclined. She uses a +1 autograpnel, two sonic pistols, her starting bunderbluss, a +1 adamantine pick made by party members, a +2 mithril armored coat made by party members, a portable hole, mark II wirejack tendons that she installed herself with the aid of a medical drone, and mark III dermal plating installed by Doc Hellbroth. That last one was partly to distract the Doc while the rest of the party secretly sabotaged his alchemy lab. That sums to 130,000 gp. WBL is 185,000 gp for a 14th-level character and 240,000 gp for a 15th-level character. And they reached 15th level in the last game session.

On the other hand, if I count the value of their spaceship, they are all millionaires. They have been careful to not abuse the spaceship, using it only as a traveling base and a recharge station.

One player does like heavy-duty gear. He is currently wearing Powered Armor, a technological artifact, lent to him by security chief Bastion of the Divinity. He is overpowered in battle, and he likes being overpowered. The other players think he is missing the point of having challenges, but let him have his fun.


I was thinking about allowing timeworn items be recharged. But what I was thinking that every charge would have a random roll to the results, as well as each charge cost double the energy to charge it, so a battery that would give it 10 charges it would only give five charges. If the item dropped to zero charges it then can’t be recharged.

What are your guys thoughts?


Joey Virtue wrote:

I was thinking about allowing timeworn items be recharged. But what I was thinking that every charge would have a random roll to the results, as well as each charge cost double the energy to charge it, so a battery that would give it 10 charges it would only give five charges. If the item dropped to zero charges it then can’t be recharged.

What are your guys thoughts?

The appropriate changes to timeworn depends on your goals. I had left the effects of timeworn the same, but made it easier to remove with technical expertise. My goal was to let my PCs show off their technical skills.

Reducing a recharge to 5 charges instead of 10 makes recharges twice as expensive. If the timeworn item can still hold 10 charges, then the PCs will simply use two batteries instead of one. The expense will make the party slightly less willing to use the timeworn item, but only slightly.

If recharging caused a glitch, either a momentary glitch while recharging or a new permanent glitch, then timeworn items will feel more dangerous and less reliable. Of course, allowing recharging made them more reliable, so it essentially makes them more dangerous to the user. That gives a dramatic flavor to the game, which your players might like.


I like the idea of them being recharged and not getting rid of the timeworn flaw cause I think they are a lot of fun.

Do you think a permanent glitch would be cool or a momentary glitch?

What could be some of the glitches


The standard glitch tables (see Timeworn) mostly apply. They just need to be adjusted a little so that the glitch occurs upon recharging. Roll a different result for each recharge.

For example, the weapon glitch table is:
01-02 Weapon does not function. All remaining charges are drained.
Recharge glitch: The character puts a battery into the weapon to recharge it and both the battery and the weapon lose all their charges.

03-24 Weapon does not function, but still consumes the normal number of charges.
Recharge glitch: The weapon ceases to function until the next recharge. Testing the weapon consumes charges even though it does nothing.

25-39 Weapon consumes twice as many charges as normal and deals 1d6 points of electricity damage per charge consumed (minimum 1d6) to the user.
Recharge glitch: The battery provides only 5 charges to the weapon, and the other 5 charges deal 5d6 electricity damage to the character.

40-65 Weapon consumes twice as many charges as normal.
Recharge glitch: The battery provides only 5 charges to the weapon.

66-75 Weapon functions normally but flashes brightly, blinding the wielder and adjacent creatures for 1 round (Reflex DC 15 negates).
Recharge glitch: The weapon flashes brightly and buzzes loudly during the recharge, blinding and deafening the wielder and adjacent creatures for 1 round (Reflex DC 15 negates) and alerting nearby enemies.

76-84 Weapon functions normally.
Recharge glitch: Recharge functions normally.

85-92 Weapon functions better than anticipated, granting a +2 bonus on attack rolls made with that weapon for 1 round.
93-96 Weapon functions much better than anticipated, granting a +2 bonus on attack and damage rolls made with the weapon.

Recharge glitch: Weapon enters a mode until its next recharge where it consumes two charges per shot and deals double damage.

97-98 Weapon functions normally, and this use does not consume any charges.
99-100 Weapon functions normally, and a power surge restores 1d6 charges to the item (up to but not exceeding its capacity).

Recharge glitch: Weapon gains 15 charges, even if this excceds the normal charge capacity of the weapon.


That is perfect thank you for a great starting example


Bumping this back up cause I need to create the recharge charts and building on the house rules from what you guys used.

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