Kingmaker

Game Master Rackal28

Ah that is fair >.>' I got confused with the DC to break free of the net and the save DC for your entanglement but yeah... he dead now so I suppose all's well that ends well.

Updating the loot sheet. As always, if you want something that we pick up, please go ahead and change it from marked to be sold to something you're claiming.

Also, since we keep on picking up more arrows and trail rations, I figure that we're not tracking them religiously: just assuming that we have enough.

That is, we have found 333 arrows so far and came in with 60 of our own. We have found 44 trail rations and came in with 12 of our own. With that kind of refresh rate, I figure I'll mark what we find and then use them in the background.

Makes sense to me.

Hey all, just a little clarification if you don't mind. Are you heading due west? Or are you going to the south-western hex?

It looked like we had a relative push by at least two (Lina and Brental) for southwest, and the other two didn't counter.

Southwest it shall be~

My recommendations this time:

Meneas' fey bonus comes from his Fey Friend feat, just so we're clear. I'm not sure whether it matters, but I wanted to share exactly why he's got the +2 bonus.

Hope everyone is enjoying the fey! My first time playing them :)

Love it! Fey can be so delightful!

Your fey are fantastic! Lina has only the foggiest idea of what exactly is going on, but she loves it.

Yeah, fey are a hoot! Except for redcaps...

Yeah, fey are a hoot! Except for redcaps...

They're a scream.

Hey, all! So I'm back. Things have gotten a little easier for me, and Rackal very kindly issued me an invite to return. I'll try to, uh, get settled back in without too much fuss.

I'll be putting 1 rank in Diplomacy, 1 rank in Disable Device, 2 ranks in Perception, 1 ranks in Sense Motive, 1 rank in UMD, 1 rank in Survival, 1 rank in Stealth, 1 rank in Heal, 1 rank in Knowledge (geography), 1 rank in Lore (First World) for my skills. I'm trying to avoid too much extra overlap with what others invested in last level while also shoring up some weak points.

Okay, Wisp is fully leveled! I'd planned to level dip into Rogue, but I'll do that next level purely because I only remembered when I was halfway done leveling and I don't want to slow things down. :P

Oh, also, sorry, I just realized me saying Brental is on watch implies there's been a timeskip to, like, 8pm. If that's not okay, just scratch the part about him being at watch.

Hiya Wisp! I'm glad you're in a better spot. Good to have you back!

Welcome back! Glad to have you again.

Welcome back, Wisp!

Also, Meneas, I just now got your crack about redcaps. Scream. I love it. The redcaps would approve.

So good to have Wisp/Kobold back! Ya'll were sorely missed!

Thanks, all!

Watch as Wisp manages to inadvertently miss every fey encounter the party runs across and her Drawback never comes up.

I actually missed the whole detail about Tyg coming up and prodding Wisp, as well as Tyg's description. If Wisp hadn't been so distracted by everything going on, she probably would have had a somewhat more pronounced emotional reaction to a tiny half-naked fairy appearing and jabbing her in the side. The question becomes, is "flustered Wisp" any different from "socially overstimulated Wisp"? Only time will tell.

Man, you guys post like crazy. xD

My wife left for a trip yesterday and I was putting around the house after dropping her off at the airport. Rather than writing more of my work stuff, I hopped on here and had some fun.

Re: strategy! Since Signy, Brental, and Lina have all succeeded at a check, the remaining unrolled checks are:

Yeah, this particular challenge isn't Wisp's best friend. She's about as athletic as a rock at the bottom of a river. I posted my skill rolls for whatever I can really attempt - if Diplomacy and Perception are off the table, she'll try her luck with the straight Dex check, or the Acrobatics check if absolutely necessary.

Even if she puts away her buckler (which she generally doesn't like doing), Wisp's Swim is a handsome -4, and her Climb is a -2. Wisp can find a way to drown in a koi pond.

On the bright side, if we are allowed to take another stab at Diplomacy, well, allow me to introduce Wisp's new fiance...

Better start memorizing Touch of the Sea for any river days!

I'm not sure if the same holds for this sill challenge, but previously we've been doing one roll at a time, with only one party member able to attempt a given skill roll. That may be different now that we have five.

Fingers crossed.

Wisp has had some pretty bad experiences with water, so even accepting the mere possibility of falling into the river will probably take some time on its own.

Also, sorry! I wasn't sure how these challenges worked. So do we not each need to roll for this encounter?

Yeah, his Str is probably the most reliable choice here. Dex is also fine, but it's not quite as good.

Meneas: Perfectly (if coldly) courteous to other noble houses. Outright rudeness to members of his own. He's not exactly showing off his nicest sides lately.

Ack, I know that Golarion's lore is really based on the two-dimensional morality for monsters, and that the whole point is to have guilt-free fights with large numbers of intelligent humanoids, but killing a lot of fey is really going to be a hard sell for Wisp, spiritually if nothing else. The last thing I want to do is disrupt things, but her reverence for (and fear of) beings of the First World is one of her defining characteristics.

If absolutely necessary, the options I can see her accepting as a reluctant compromise:
- She won't buff or fight anyone except in self-defense, but will provide healing to both sides (obviously only acting to stabilize mites' wounds, not putting them back on their feet).
- She will help fight the mites as long as the party only uses lethal damage as an absolute last resort, and always offers surrender or flight as options.
- She will help the party seek another riskier way to drive the mites out, like destroying the tree (we all know how that could backfire, of course).

Wisp's ideal, mind you, would be to try to intimidate the mites into vacating the premises, or at least to make a good-faith effort at negotiating terms before resorting to violence. But I think a compromise is a more likely option.

Wisp isn't naive to the nature of mitflits, to be clear. She just sees fey in a very particular light. She wouldn't blame a fey for nearly drowning her as a child, so she's not going to blame the mitflits for being demented little spidergremlins. She sees fey as beings to try to sort of work with, or work around. You might as well ask her to destroy a river or chop down a forest. She'll consider it as a last resort, but it's an inherently disturbing concept on a spiritual level.

Like I posted in-character, I don't think anyone's suggesting we offer no quarter. But from the bodies we've seen strewn on the way here, it's obviously a hot 'war,' so asking for the kobolds' stuff back is likely not going to be met with equanimity and a non-lethal response.

If Wisp wants to restrict herself to non-lethal strikes herself, I think we'd all be OK with that, but the rest of us are likely to go dagger-to-dagger, and that just naturally gets messy. Flight is tricky, too, especially with hit-and-run tactics and (especially) magic, but apart from a slew of AoOs and maybe arrows in the back, I don't think we're planning on chasing anyone down. (Though what's more fey than the wild hunt? But that's another matter.)

I don't know. At the end of the day, are the mites any more than bandits themselves, just fey? If not, they can hardly complain that they're being treated as such.

If this can be talked out, great! However there are certain things Signy simply will not agree to:

She will not side with the mites against the kobolds. She's already made promises that preclude it unless it's self-defense.

She will not be using non-lethal damage. We will probably be squeezing and they have DR. It will be tough enough without tying one hand behind our backs.

Signy is an inquisitor. Her view of the situation is much akin to Meneas's. They might approach it with different styles, but she views her job much the same, make the area safe. She's comfortable using whatever means it takes. Unless the mites will change their behavior in general going forward there will be conflict, which Signy will pursue without waiting for personal provocation. Signy is perfectly fine with Whisp sitting this out, no problem at all.

Satisfactory outcomes for Signy:

The mites are dead.

The mites stop acting like mites.

The mites exit the region.

Like I said, it's less that Wisp thinks the party is being anti-mite bigots or whatever and more that Wisp's religion and character backstory make her very reluctant to kill a couple dozen fey without attempting another approach. She would actually prefer to slaughter bandits - she simply doesn't see fey the way anyone else in the party does, and that's fine.

Signy's tone put Wisp on-edge because her especially provocative attitude gave Wisp the impression that Signy had basically made her mind up on it. It was a very blunt way to introduce the idea to Wisp, which is fine, because the impression I get is that Signy is meant to come across as a fairly brusque and blunt person.

I'm really trying to avoid party conflict right now, especially since I literally just got back. I won't get in anyone's way. It's been a long day for me. Wisp goes quiet and accedes.

As always, I'm happy for some inter-party conflict over this! We all have different motivations, and I like playing that out instead of going lock-step with the consistently best tactics.

I have been playing a CG bard in a War for the Crown campaign, very focused on diplomacy and subterfuge instead of martial combat. He has no problems when the party faces evil outsiders and undead, but has nearly gotten sick when the party has had to fight humanoids. There was a situation with bandits at one point where he was trying very hard to negotiate before talks broke down and he took three arrows to the chest. He ran around to hide behind a statue and try not to die while the rest of the party murdered everyone else in the room. He was frankly traumatized from that, which was rewarding to play out with my table. My GM wrote in an amazing scene where he goes to meet with a Shelynite priest where he talks out his complicated feelings about following his deity's mandates of protecting beauty in the world with the violence he has been a party to.

Please play Wisp however you are happy to play her! That's the integrity of TTRPGs for me.

No, Signy's not a subtle thinker. She's not exactly dumb, but she isn't going to have a lot of patience with complexity if it's reducible. You could consider her views to be more or less a 'good neighbor' model. Could (insert here) ever be a good neighbor to others around them?

If the answer is no, she's not going to worry about hypothetical scenarios where such a thing could be possible. If there are ghouls in the graveyard on the edge of town, you eliminate them. They really can't be good neighbors. This is exactly her thinking in regard to the mites. They have a particular nature that can't be negotiated or reasoned out of them so they have to go. Even if the mites could be convinced to make peace with the kobolds, or to be friendly to the party, what about other traveler's, etc.?

Do warning signs get put up telling everyone not to come too close because there's a mite preserve and straying into it risks life and limb? Nope, not going to happen in Signy's view. She's very much 'live and let live', but with the corollary 'and you better do the same'. She's very hard nosed about that corollary. There are no taxonomic exceptions, so fey being fey means nothing to her.

For example, Signy feels Vlad is redeemable and has gone to quite a bit of trouble to keep him alive and set up circumstances under which he has a chance to turn his life around. But recall the warning she gave him here: Screw This Up and You're Dead

While she was exaggerating the party's abilities, that was to make sure Vlad understood how serious she was about him not screwing up even one more time.

Really the best one word description of Signy's views is she's a pragmatist. If negotiation can work, she's happy to try. But she doesn't adhere to a generalized principle that it should always be tried simply because that's the better way.

For those curious, I use Portuguese as Undercommon because of the first post I read that made me think of using real languages for pathfinder languages.

It was a post about a DM who started using Spanish as Elven so that a player at their table who only spoke Spanish could feel included.

I loved the idea so much I use it in my games so Elven is always Spanish to me and since Undercommon is derived from Elven the same way Portuguese is derived from Spanish I just thought it would be a perfect fit~

I haven't decided on many set languages since they haven't tended to come up very much for my characters in the games I've played. I do use Finnish for arcane spells, which I think means it's also Draconic. But I'm not completely sure it's canon that arcane spells use Draconic for casting. I'm using Sudanese for Divine casting.

I use Icelandic for Skald. I use Turkish for Kelish speech, but for written Kelish I use either Arabic or Persian, whichever comes out prettier for a specific case. I've used Basque for Elven but don't consider it set. Oh, I used Dutch for Dwarven once.

I tend to use languages for which Google Translate will render a transliteration into the Roman alphabet so the reader can sound it out if they want. Finnish is nice this way because it sounds like it spells.

I also tend to avoid languages that have too many English cognates since recognizable words tend to break the illusion.

Ohh that's really smart Signy o.o One language I enjoy is using German for Abyssal because... well have you ever heard German death metal?

Do we still have the Blessing of Erastil? Or was that yesterday?

You still have the Blessing of Erastil~

German is super interesting because it sounds so different regionally. Most people tend to think of German as harsh sounding, but it depends. Most Americans tend to think Arnie's Austrian accent is representative, but southern German is actually quite soft comparatively. I had a friend who was from Munich and people couldn't place her as German because her accent was so soft, almost musical.

Northern German also tends to be rougher sounding. And of course there are those particular letters that must involve some throat clearing no matter where in Germany they're being made...

This video is hilarious. It's a sketch by Italian comic Adriano Celentano from way back in the '70s about how American English sounds to non-English speakers. Aside from the occasional "alright" the words are gibberish, but it sounds so right. Funny how nasal American English sounds when you can't understand any words.

Prisencolinensinainciusol

Kellish is a little tricky for me, since I feel like the Kellids don't necessarily have a clear ethnic allegory like other groups do. Actually, I kind of always thought their whole shtick was, like, "cavemen/Conan barbarians". I think we actually discussed the language earlier in the thread, though.

When I do use real languages, I like to default to using older languages for the more mystical or older creatures. Draconic is often Hebrew or Sanskrit or Arabic, for example. I generally try to mess with the translated result, though, so it can't literally be translated back and more has the "feel" of the language than anything. For other fantasy languages, Welsh, Swahili, Icelandic and Russian are handy for their sort of connotations - Swahili historically got spread around a lot due to the great success of Swahili sailors, Icelandic is a remote and very challenging language, and so on.

EDIT: Whoops, I was thinking of Hallit, not "Kellish".

I do love using real-world analogues as much as possible. It makes my linguistics side very happy. I'm more involved in the biomechanical side of speech than language production in my research, so this helps me stay connected.

Also, yes re: German. You're much more familiar with different German dialectical presentations than I am. But back in undergrad I sang a lot of German love songs and they are beautiful.

I do love that video :) I've shared it with students several times in the past.

I won't be able to post in Gameplay for a bit, so please NPC me if needed. :)

I will note that Wisp does not speak Undercommon, so she might be of limited utility anyways until a translator is found.

I won't be able to post today. I'm very sorry; I know that people are waiting on me. It's been a rocky one.

Signy, were you telling Meneas to keep out of the way? It wasn't quite clear to me.

It was meant for everyone Meneas. Signy is holding a flask of acid which she intends to throw if things go south. She's telling everyone to avoid being within splash range of it.

Has anybody here read any Frances Hardinge? I've always really enjoyed the scene of Fly By Night where a mellifluous conman talks the leader of a gang of highwaymen into fixing a noblewoman's cart and returning their purses by promising to write a ballad about "Captain" Blythe's generosity and chivalry. It's a very funny, hammy scene that comes back later in the story in a more serious way when it turns out that the ballad turned Blythe into a totally unwilling folk hero and basically forced a redemption arc for a guy who was, up til that point, basically your standard professional bandit.

I'm pretty sure that conman rolled higher than a 4 on his Diplomacy check, mind.

Meanwhile, in another room, Wisp is rambling to the GM about how weeell technically, all living creatures are 'animals', and these mitflits live in 'burrows', so really

As lovely as the speech was, I'm not sure Brental will be able to translate it in its full majesty. :P It does really look good, though.

This is what I get for not putting points in my Perform (interpretive dance) skill...