The Dire GM's Bounties Run (Inactive)

Game Master Farol

This is the author run:
- PF2 Bounty 17: Sodden Stories
- SFS Bounty 2: Test flight

I created this thread to help with some organizational tasks, have no fear I will not be the GM here ;)

CanisDirus will share further details.

Hey gang. First, I'm sorry that I didn't get the campaign made days ago. When Farol and I talked about it, I had a good amount of time set aside.

...Then a bunch of (redacted) went down over the last three days. PaizoCon organization/prep is the least of it. I've pulled two all-nighters in the last three days with only some naps in-between, trying to stay on top of everything (note - I'm not actually behind on anything, just there is so much crap going on that I don't really have time to take a breather on some of it).

Long story short, thank you Farol for just getting things set!

I'll post my "standard table rules" here in a minute. In the meantime, everybody say hello and also let me know which bounty you'd like to do first!

Dire's PbP "Table Rules" -

0 - RL > Game. No other rules trump rule 0! :D

1 - I'd like it if everyone posted once a day Mon-Fri. Friday night through Sunday night is eh-whatever (I am in US Eastern Time, for reference, currently UTC -04). I'll try to post when I can over weekends, but I know people have lives and won't always be online, so no worries. My local lodge's "game nights" are Sunday-Monday, so my GM posts on those days won't be until very late in the evening.

2 - If you don't post in the middle of an "action" scene for a day, you get skipped once (or botted if your action would be super obvious or you leave a note to me or another player "proxying" your character). If you don't post a second time, you get "botted" by me to do something simple (usually just attack or aid another). If we get into the 3-5 range, I'll probably drop you a line off-list to see what's up. If it goes on too long...well, I hate dropping people from games, but it unfortunately happens :(

3 - When you've got a saving throw to make, please roll that first before posting any other actions/rolls (unless it can occur before the save).

4 - PF2: Feel free to roll perception whenever you want. If you want to spend hero points before learning the result of the roll, feel free to set conditional statements (i.e. "if that's a failure on X, I'll reroll"), and so on.

5 - Have fun! Rule 5 trumps all other rules! :P

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Thanks very much, and I look forward to running these games for you! :)

Starfinder: Just posting this for...no reason whatsoever
>.>
<.<

GM Instructions for Starship Combat: Because this is PbP and Ship combat can be somewhat slow, I'm going to allow everyone to declare actions and make rolls at once. However, in copying another great GM's idea that I've seen, I'm going to ask that all of your dice rolls be kept behind [spoiler ] tags. When declaring your actions, though, please write those so your companions can see them (to allow you to work together with what each other are doing), and also feel free to post as many contingencies as you'd like, using a similar format as below.
~~~~~

Example:

Phase: Helm
Role: Pilot
Action: If our ship is forced to move first, I will attempt the "Evade" maneuver to increase our AC/TL and then try to get around very wide to the "south" of target X, making sure our front arc is facing it. If we can move second, I will instead attempt to increase our maneuverability to accomplish the same thing while making sure to not end up adjacent to the enemy.

~~~~~

Exception:

Because you all know the DCs that you are rolling for, if you succeed at taking an action that has an effect for a crew-member in a phase of starship combat that occurs after the one you act in, you may edit your post (or make a second post if you'd rather do it that way) to indicate such.

Example 1: The Engineer successfully diverts power to the shields (let's say +6 shields). The Engineer can post this visibly so that the Science Officer knows how many shield points they have to play with should they decide to utilize the "Balance" action during the Helm phase.

Example 2: The Science Officer wants to move all your shields to one quadrant to fend off an enemy - they can either tell the Pilot that they are doing so or ask the pilot to set them up to do things that way. Alternatively, the Science Officer can make their post with a details on how they want to move the shields once they see the positions of the enemy ship(s) in relation to theirs.

I know this is a lot to take in all at once. If you want a more thorough look at the Starship rules you can find them on the Paizo SRD site:

Starship Rules

Starship Crew Actions

Ahh, two rules saying they trump each other! What ever shall we do?

Thanks for running a table of both of these and thank-you Farol for the invitation! I'm excited for this... I'm not sure which we should play first, but I have a leshy bard for the PF2 bounty and might have a Precog for the SFS one (the Precog might have leveled out...)

Hey all!

First thanks to CanisDirus for agreeing to do this author run of his bounties ;) I am super excited to do this!

Second, hey all! I am glad to play with you all. I think you all know each other, as we played with each other at a number of tables.

We have a team of 5, I offered 6th spot to three different folks and they couldn't make it. I could staff it but maybe we should go with 5 players, it is a prime number so obviously superior to 6 ;)

Regarding order, I do not mind, so I would leave that decision to GM.

For the PC's I shall play:
- Gnavy - orc warrior in PF2,
- Morlamaw most likely Envoy (I haven't played one yet ;))

Ahh, two rules saying they trump each other! What ever shall we do?

Thanks for running a table of both of these and thank-you Farol for the invitation! I'm excited for this... I'm not sure which we should play first, but I have a leshy bard for the PF2 bounty and might have a Precog for the SFS one (the Precog might have leveled out...)

I've had those two in my "table rules" for at least half a decade, and you may be the first person to actually make a note of the logic fault. You win a prize!*

* whether this prize is real or i=-1 remains to be seen

Hello all.

Thank you again CanisDirus for running these 2 bounties. I am interested in seeing what will happen in both.

For the characters...umm...depending on timing, this is what I might play.

I will have to work up my first 7001 for PF2.....if I can work it, it will likely be an inventor or an alchemist.

For SFS....probably I will bring:

Ivrokizolink (her name in traditional vlaka, which means Karmonic Beacon). Usually goes by Ivory for short. Vlaka (blind) Solarian Ace Pilot. Yes...she flies ships even blind. I have a data jack she uses to plug into the ship's sensors so she can fly. She also has a seeing-eye Squox to help when her senses are having issues. It depends on when the SFS game starts..before Paizocon I might bring somebody else (I want her a game there), if after Paizocon, I definitely will bring her

Hello everyone! Thanks to CanisDirus for running these and to Farol for setting it up.

The PF2 character I'm bringing is Illnore, a contented halfling summoner with a plant eidolon who's a childlike protector. These two wide-eyed innocents are off to explore the world together, and are a bit surprised at how dangerous the life of a Pathfinder is. But it's also great fun, so maybe that balances out? She's available now.

My SF character, Anock, is a shirren nanocyte who's currently on her first mission (a bounty, and combat has broken out, so it should wrap up quickly). She's a bossy, self-superior type who fancies herself quite the healer--"As good as those 'doctors', anyway. <haughty sniff>" Please feel free to put her in her place.

If both my characters are available at the start time, I'll suggest doing the Starfinder bounty first, to give Jim Crase more time to work up their PF2 character. (The blind pilot idea is great, btw. Kudos!)

Oh, don't worry...if we want to start by this weekend, I will have my PF2 character ready...I will be working on it today/tonight/tomorrow.

Hey Warah, good to see you at the table! Uhh Summoner with plant eidolon (I meet mostly ghost, psychopomps and such ;))

Hey Jim! We haven't played PBP for ages (ok almost a year;). Anyway I would love to see that vlaka, playing a creature using different sense always sound very intriguing. Like how do you recognize person in a bar? Do you use external help to augment for the fact of lacking sight, or do you actually use hear and smell to localize people. Would you get their voice sample? Smell sample?

How accurate are those, does it mean that vlaka would walk around the bar and use triangulation to localize the person by voice and smell?

Intriguing, and ramification can be super cool!

Okay, my time traveling Precog dwarf is definitely still level 1. It'll be fun to bring him on another mission!

Here's what I'm thinking - let's do the SFS one first. It gives Jim more time to get his PF2 character together, among other things.

I'll get a sign-in sheet together tomorrow.

If I had known then what I know now about everything that's been coming up, I would have delayed doing all of this another week lol, so thank you all for being patient with me!

No worries. Take the time you need.

At the cost of another night of lost sleep, I made some major progress on a thing today, so I'm comfortable saying that I'll have this game set up to begin in less than 24 hours.

We will start with SFS Bounty #2: Test Flight!

Stay tuned!

After some bashing of pots and pans, and such....I think I have my -2001 done.

With that...my Android Inventor "The W@NullD3R3R" will be ready when we start. Ivory is already ready ;-)

Right I forget you can use SFS AcP to get uncommon and rare races in PF2e.

Anyways, time traveling librarian dwarf ready to help whatever needs to be done for this bounty!

I'll let you know as soon as my SFS character is free from her bounty.

Might as well get this posted.

The Stunning all white Vlaka, with a cute (mostly) red and black Squox sitting on her shoulder is ready....

Bounty 2 Sign-in sheet!

Will have in-game intro prompt and initial music/art posted in the next hour or two, pending something else I need to finish first!

And away we go! :)

Because this is me, this bounty has a lot of thematic art and music. Make sure you heed my warning about Dropbox music links, but otherwise please enjoy the images I've found/edited/tweaked and the soundtrack I've assembled/edited for you!

Just an FYI....I have Ran this Bounty as part of CanisDirus's Playtesting it multiple times before release....and because of that (and the fact that the playtest is very similar to the finished product), I will be mostly passive in making decisions :-)

As I have said, my SFS character is currently in a game. I'll have to join in later. Hopefully I won't miss all the action.

Whoops! I could swear we were doing Pathfinder first. I'll get a 1st-level character ready to go sometime today.

(and despite being dotted in with a character, this campaign wasn't showing me new-message notifications :/ catching up with discussion)

PaleDim's ikeshti mechanic will be statted out and make a post in a short while today.

Feel free to retire Nikma from this game in the characters tab (that's from when I wrongly assumed we would do PF first).

Ok, Nikma is disabled, and just FYI, I added a link to the CanisDirus's slides above.

Hey. I'm either dealing with a new bout of food poisoning or my previous one mysteriously decided to give me a 2 day reprieve before coming back with a vengeance. Between that and PaizoCon prep, I'm very sorry for not posting in the last couple of days.

I am officially giving your characters the freedom to play during PaizoCon. This bounty has a virtually 0 chance of PC death, so I'm very comfortable doing this. If you were planning on having this game reported before PaizoCon started, please let me know.

Oh man @CanisDirus all the best, those can be horrible.

Oh no :/ No worries DireGM, get better very soon. That sounds rough.

Yikes. We all hope you feel better soon.

So sorry for the lack of posts, I got busy prepping for Paizocon too and then got news a few days before hand my 4 year old cat has a quick acting terminal illness and doesn't have much longer to be living. I haven't been handling it well.

Oh no! I'm so sorry to hear that.

*big hugs to Sedoriku*

I am finally starting to recover from PaizoCon, so look more speed on this after I wake up tomorrow.

Since I have insomnia...

The repeatable aspect to this bounty is that you have a lot of different ways to handle the space whales. Because I delayed you all so much, and because you were 1 success away from concluding the encounter after just the first round thanks to some amazing rolls and RP bonuses (and in my original draft I made an adjustment for 4-or-5 players not just 4-players, so you sort of beat it as I designed it already lol), I made a roll as if it were yours and found that you'd have succeeded at leading the voraijas back to their pod early in round 2, and so just nudged us forward to that point :)

PFS 2e Bounty #17 Sign-In Sheet

I should have this one geared up to start tomorrow, as well as your chronicles from SFS!

Bounty 17 Scenery & Maps

Bounty 17 Macros

Note: Because I am running stuff for PaizoCon PbP as well as here, our table link will be "Table 3 Maps & Handouts" in my by-line, and PaizoCon will be "PaizoCon Bounty X" etc.

I figure I'll start us off either when I see everyone signed in or tomorrow, whichever comes first :)

You'll have SFS chronicles by then as well.

Amazing what being a week past feeling crappy and a major convention does for productivity!

Looking forward in stretching their legs in this next bounty....

I need to have the 'Good, Bad and Ugly' Intro music for them when they first walk in....

I'll need to make up a new PC for this. My level 1 pf2 character got into a different bounty that is ongoing.

PaleDim will be playing with this monster-hunting ranger.

Huh. Made a post in gameplay and this character shows as "previous." Shrug.

@Dire - thanks a lot for runnig TestFlight bounty. I really liked it. THe idea to make a ship look like fly was something that I did not expect. The skill checks were cool. Nice music choices and good team. It was an awesome game, thank you! I will play this also GM'ed by a fresh GM (person begin to GM SFS ;)) so I would like to see how it goes.

======================

I added links to the campaign as well. My couple of next days will be hectic, as my trip to London got cut short, a friend at whos place I was going to stay tested positive. And I was traveling to see him mostly, so after 21 h I am going back :) => another short flight (2 h) but with trains to/from the airport Another fun day.

Darn. Hope your friend gets better soon.

I'll be playing with Illnore and her eidolon, Chiselnits. He accidentally looks a lot like the Ferrothorn Pokemon.

I'll be out of town this weekend. Please bot me as needed.

I'll tell you what...given some unexpected hecticness going on across the board that involves planning for international travel on my part, how about we start this Sunday, so Warah won't miss anything (and it'll give me a little bit of breathing room)?

No objections here. She'll be back somewhat later Sunday (US/Pacific time).

Threzlomn,

I actually just had in my Mummy's Mask (start of book 3) a Witchwarper Half-elf from Starfinder join the game. So I know how much fun it is to try to get that 'fun' of having a SFS come to a PF game.

And we all decided--with my wife who is a Linguistics/English major--giving hard evidence that 'Common' in Golarion PF1/PF2, not being 'Common' in Starfinder. She gave a good accounting that Elvish (PF1/2) would be understandable to SFS...understandable--but like Old English vs. now, and Draconic being more like early Shakespearean English. We also went to the Celestial/Infernal/Elemental, and because 'none' of them really age at all...that those languages would likely be the most stable.

And FYI...Owen K.C. Stephens did make a PF1 'Witchwarper'...and it has a very similar feel...though the spell list is (per my wife) weird. She is having fun with this character in Mummy's Mask...and yes I found a way to 'bring them in' that made sense (thanks hounds of tindalos and a certain SFS special)...and I have a way for them to get 'back'....

Fantasy Witchwarper by Owen K.C. Stephens

Oh that is cool! It'd love to be a fly on the wall for that game and how the witchwarper interacts with the scenario and world in general.

Well, fun thing is, Tibal is also from a distant time, pre-earthfall. I'm assuming that she was able to learn Taldane common now from Auran and her very old Elvish.