Aakir Al-Haram's page

​The campfire's embers crackled, spitting sparks into the night. She poked at a log with a stick, watching as the orange glow reflected in her eyes. The road was quiet, just a dark line stretching out in either direction.

​It was in these quiet moments that the world seemed to shrink to just this small patch of light. The familiar weight of her mithral armor felt different here, less a suit of protection and more a second skin she wore for comfort. She ran a hand over the hilt of her blade, a habit she'd developed long ago. The cool metal was a steadying presence. She wasn't a stranger to herself when she sat here; she was Tessaria Moondown, a half-elf with a sword and a handful of spells, watching the fire die down.

​A lone owl hooted from a distant tree, its call echoing through the darkness. She looked up at the stars, a blanket of silver dust against the black. She was just a small part of a larger, epic story, yet in this moment, under this vast sky, the only story that mattered was her own. She sighed, a wisp of breath in the cool night air, and soaked in the peace of the wilderness.

Out of character goodess goes here, or in the Slack channel.

Where we will play...

Discuss please

A test campaign

New land has been found, untapped and unexplored. The grand nation of Taldor wants a return to their shining days of exploration. But Empress Eutropia has decided to take a different approach from the Armies of Exploration of old: Use adventurers.
 
Establishing the Cartographer's Guild as an arm of her government, she put out a call for brave individuals to sail and explore the far away land. The mission is travel this new land, chronicling and mapping out a new world. And because of the distance from the Inner Sea region, it's only the most desperate, the most brave, and the most idiotic who sign up.
 
Really, there's not a lot of people. It's not been the success she has hoped for.
 
So now this new and unexplored land has slid from the empress' attention. But that hasn't stopped the slow trickle of adventurers, who hop aboard a boat to explore this new land. Who knows what they'll do?
 
You are 1st-level adventurers who traveled by boat for over a month to a new continent, and have just arrived in New Ridonport, a small but fortified village where the Cartographer's Guild originally set up. There are basic amenities, but you know that surviving in the wilderness will be very important.
 
Headquarters for you is an inn called The Broken Sling. The patrons are a smattering of locals, and any adventurers that have made the trip. Bells & Whistles is a general goods store run by Bellis, an absentminded man who outfit teams. The mayor, Kaleb Ashrun, collects reports of each adventurer's findings shares what's learned to each group that goes out into the wilds. He genuinely wants them to succeed… because he's afraid he'll lose his job.
 
You'll travel the land via hexploration. Most adventurers have met grizzly deaths or fled back to the Inner Sea. The land is very dangerous. There are many rumours of roving goblin bands, giant spiders, and fantastic beasts. One or two groups did uncover old ruins though, hinting at the potential of treasure. The question is: will you survive long enough to find it?

A new land beckons...

Please post your pertinent bits for chronicles.

Player:
Character:
Organized Play #:
Faction:
Downtime:

The tribe arrives in Iceferry, a district of Kalsgard located on the northern banks of the Rimeflow River. Kalsgard is the de facto capital of the Lands of the Linnorm Kings located on the opposite, namely southern, bank of the Rimeflow. Iceferry is where many of the gnomes of Kalsgard live, who like to think of Iceferry as more of an independent township.

The trip has been a long sea voyage, one with a starting goal of meeting with Venture Captain Bjersig Torrsen. As a group you make your way towards the Pathfinder Lodge.
Please take a moment to introduce your PC IC as you walk through the small town.

Discussion thread, if needed. Mostly I expect communication via Slack.

My first 2E GMing experience... Here we will play

Discussion thread. Feel free to chat among yourselves OOC, but I'd also appreciate the usual details. Namely,

Your Name/Handle:
PC Name:
PFS #:
Faction:
Any random bits that I should know as a GM:

Also, please fill in your details in the signup for this game. Just search for GM JChapman, and scroll to the right.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TGx0mxGIKDd0t7U4jZgG58l_mdOQRKTXOQQ ajumxn3w/edit#gid=1099840171

Thanks!

Gameday VIII - Tier 10-11 of the Hao Jin Cataclysm. Feel free to add a your mark.

Based on a tweet made by John Compton that discussed/encouraged writing reviews for products, I took the liberty of examining the user experience in submitting a review.

My reason for this is because, as a regular user of the website, I've noted some... well, I can only call it odd behavior. It seemed to me that this user experience might directly impact a persons desire to submit a review. If it's easy and painless, people will generally feel okay to submit reviews. But if it's even a little bit off-putting I would expect that someone would just not bother.

My conclusion? I found the process clunky. Here's the step by step on my process:

Step 1) Navigate to paizo.com. No problem :)

Step 2) Search for a scenario using the top search bar. Since I'd recently run The Lion's Justice, I searched for it.

Step 3) I get search results. Sort of. The first thing I see are all the filters I can apply to the results, and they take up a significant amount of screen real estate (my screen resolution is 1920x1080, so I know it's not that). This is odd because I very rarely even need these filters. A better approach would be to have them on the left-hand side of the screen, or have them collapsed/hidden. This way the search results show near the top of the screen, where a user expects to look. I had to actually scroll down to see the link for the scenario. Anyhow, I then click the link for The Lion's Justice.

Step 4) The product page for the scenario loads, but I am again given a strange starting place. Instead of the page loading at the top, showing the scenario name and synopsis, it loads mid-way down the page at the Product Discussion section. This is probably one of the least pertinent places for a user to start at. Not only that, but I don't actually see anything at this point that tells me I'm at the right page. I need to scroll up first. Once I verify that I am at the right page though, I click on the Product Reviews tab.

Step 5) Ok, time to write a review. I go looking a button. None at the top of the reviews. None at the bottom of the reviews. Maybe I need to be logged in? I login to my account and navigate back. Still no "Write a Review" button. I'm about to give up, because this shouldn't be hard but I don't. I ask a buddy of mine, and he tells me there's a "Write a Review" hyperlink embedded in a sentence. I'm at first embarrassed because I missed it, but... why isn't this a more prominent button? If you want to encourage people to submit reviews, you want this to stand out. Embedding it as a hyperlink in text is subtle. In my mind there ought to be a big button at the bottom of the page as well, especially because if someone takes the time to look at the reviews, it's possible that they'd be willing to submit one too. In any case, I click on the hyperlink.

Step 6) The page for writing a review appears. This is simple and straightforward, which is nice. I quickly write up a review and give it a rating.

This was my first product review, and I want to reiterate that the process to do this was just difficult enough that I felt disinclined to write it. You might feel that this is a harsh assessment. If so, I'm sorry. But I do feel that if you want to increase the number of reviews (a metric people look at when buying products) that it's incredibly important to make that process as simple as possible. The user experience for me did not reflect that.

TL;DR - Search results show huge list of often unnecessary filters. Product page loads mid-way down unhelpfully. Write a Review hyperlink on product page is hard to spot. These three things make writing reviews clunky for a first time reviewer.

Discussion thread, for out of character shenanigans.

Morvius stands ready.

This is the spot where we can post out of character things. Y'know, like any discussion thread.

Feel free to chat OOC here.

...

Feel free to discuss/post whatever OOC stuff here. Or use Slack. I like Slack.

Strange Aeons...