Archmage_Atrus's page

Ascalphus - Check out Moorcock's Stormbringer/Elric of Melnibone series at some point for the backdrop on how D&D alignment came to be. Indeed, Chaos was the antagonist - although the protagonist was an agent of chaos himself, so it naturally gets kind of muddy. (Though that goes back, I would argue, to the concept that Chaos does not equal Evil.)

Don't give yourself a headache trying to come up specifically what words you need to say to get a proper "description." In 18 years of gaming, I've never had to do this.

Generally speaking, if you've been there, you can teleport there with greater teleport or teleport, or if you've studied the area you can teleport there with regular teleport relatively more safely. If you haven't been there, it's up to the GM to tell you whether or not you can get a reliable enough description to greater teleport there (or at least attempt it). Usually reading a book like a travelogue has been enough in our games to get us to a particular city. (If you must have a specific example, think of what the description would be for a travelogue - specific enough to avoid vagueness but without meandering into lavish detail.)

That being said, I would never allow a player to teleport to a place where the only description is "where Charles is currently located." Because Charles isn't an aspect of the place. You actually have to have some description of the location itself before you teleport there.

Edit 1: Cleared up some wording issues.

Edit 2: The problem with your descriptions for me is you're not describing a place - except, arguably (maybe?) the first one - you're describing a thing inside of that place. I'm not sure I'd let either of the latter two fly, but I might give you the first "complete but vague" description, unless there's more than one such location in the world.

Elibdis Killstrokian wrote:

Hmmmmmm....I'm trying to level up an Arcane Scorcerer right now. Anyone use Empower or Maximize? I thought they sounded pretty cool. Of course I'm definitley going to get Extend and Quicken.

If you don't have magical lineage or Wayang Spellhunter then Empower and Maximize aren't with it at lower levels. Some good Low level metamagic feats are topple spell, silent, and Still.

Yeah, empower doesn't really become fully useful until 8th level for sorcerers, and maximize until 10th (and even that's questionable - I'd wait until 11th or 13th level to take it as a sorcerer.)

Still spell might be your best bet - I get grappled a lot more often than I get silenced - and at +1 level it's pretty versatile for a sorcerer.

Metamagic rods are pretty much a spellcaster's best friend. Why a spellcaster won't get a lesser rod of maximize as soon as they can afford it is beyond me.

That said, feat-wise, I've always taken Quicken Spell as soon as it becomes viable (which is right around level 9 or 11), and as a wizard or sorcerer I take at least either Maximize or Empower. Clerics/Druids/Oracles can get a ton of use out of Extend. I ended up using both Empower and Maximize quite a bit with my last character (an air-specialized wizard) to wonderful effect. Scorching ray goes wonderful with empower spell (especially since the vast majority of 4th level offense spells blow), and maximized fireballs are always useful (though to be fair, I was using a lesser metamagic rod to maximize them.)

My analysis goes like this - slow really hurts 1) casters who want to move away, and 2) people with iterative attacks or multiple attacks. Casters tend to have decent will saves as do creatures with multiple attacks (lower HD animals being an obvious exception).

At +2 it is moved out of the zone where it is clearly overpowered (low level) and ok where it is likely to show up, mid level.

I will disagree with your analysis, for a couple of reasons:

2) The ones that are affected worst by this weapon are exactly the targets this weapon is meant for: fighters with iterative attacks. Good luck being useful when you're stuck with one attack per round in almost every fight.

I don't know if +3 is too powerful or too cheap - my gut says it's going to end up on the overpowered end of things at +3, but might well be underpowered at +4, but I honestly haven't playtested it. But personally, I would take slow over +2d6 damage against evil targets any day of the week, unless I'm specifically playing a paladin.

Actually your math is wrong.

The whole "multiply for duration" bit is actually only for spells that affect the wearer constantly.

You want a weapon that casts slow on the target - you don't want a weapon that casts slow on the bearer constantly, so the 120,000 number is... incorrect.

Alright - so the first thing you want to look at is weapon equivalencies. Haste and slow are pretty much siblings - same level, diametrically opposed effects, they even cancel each other out. So we can assume that a weapon that has a slow effect on a target is essentially as powerful as a weapon that casts a haste effect on a bearer.

The speed property is +3, so that's a good place to start. Now, speed doesn't actually grant the full benefits of haste - you just get an extra attack, which is arguably the most powerful of haste's bonuses, at least for certain classes - at least those classes that would be using such a weapon anyway.

A slowing effect at +3 could cast slow on a target at the minimum DC (14 for a 3rd level spell) for the minimum duration (5 rounds). It doesn't quite grant the full effects of slow (since it affects a single target instead of an area). The minimum cost of such a weapon would be 32,000 gp (for a +4 weapon), meaning that characters could get access to it at... 8th level, assuming they've sold all of the rest of their gear. At this level, you're still looking at quite a few enemies that will fail a DC 14 Will save - most CR 8 creatures' will saves are around +6 - +7, which means they're still failing their save about 30% of the time.

That's pretty good - maybe too good, in fact. However, consider that a wand of slow only costs a third of that, and still affects an area...

Let's consider a separate way of calculating the effect. The item you want mimics use activated, but it's really not - because it's actually a free effect on top of an action you're already taking. Let's keep the math simple for now, though, and pretend it's use activated.

That's 3 * 5 * 2000 = 30,000 gp. I'd be willing, as a GM, to cut that in half, because you're only affecting a single target instead of a bunch of targets - 15,000 gp. However, you're also not using up a body slot with the item, so that doubles the price back up to 30,000 gp. You can cut that price down by limiting the number of charges per day - at 3/day, that's 18,000 gp.

I would actually be pretty okay with that property as a GM - slowing, 3/day can slow a target that is successfully hit, target gets a Will save (DC 14) to negate, duration 5 rounds. You must declare you're using this ability before making the attack, but a miss does not waste a charge. +18,000 gp.

Alternatively, I'd let you playtest the more general slowing property I discussed above, at a +3 enhancement, with the caveat that, as a playtest, it could very well be adjusted (or downright taken away from you) if I deem it to be too problematic.

Either way - it should definitely not cost you 120,000 gp. Consider that at such a price, you can buy a headband of intellect +6 that has ranks in Use Magic Device, and then buy a wand of slow that will allow you to be far more effective at slowing people, and still have over half of your GP left over for more goodies? It's a bit much to pay. The holy avenger costs just over 120,000 gp, and it's a far better weapon than the one you calculated.

Also, your invisible NPC is an idiot if he doesn't realize there are people around who can detect the residue of spells.

Remember, too, that detect magic only detects the invisibility spell (and similar spell effects.) It does not actually counter invisibility - which means if the creature is invisible due to other means then it does nothing for the PCs.

While I haven't read through your analysis in depth, the Aldori swordlord archetype is really primarily meant to be great at one-on-one fighting. I pit one of my Kingmaker PCs against a swordlord NPC (who was one level lower) on a one-on-one fencing match, and he got his behind handed to him, not in terms of damage dealt, but just in general fighting sense. The PC could barely hit the swordlord (although he dealt easily twice as much damage per hit), and the swordlord's disarm and maneuvers easily bested the PC's offensive.

So in my experience, the Swordlord archetype is much like the monk; more of a harrier and a trick fighter than a straight up DPS.

I encourage my players to come up with their own homebrewed stuff (as well as almost constantly pumping out my own homebrewed monsters, items, spells and feats.) In the case of feats or spells, I try to let the players know about them long before NPCs use them (with some exceptions - if it's meant to be a secret in the game world, I won't reveal it until its use, and then let the players learn about it.) In the case of stuff my players come up with, I work with them to make sure it's balanced enough, erring on the side of weaker-than-standard to be sure.

Most Pathfinder PrCs are pretty specific. If you're archetyping a PrC, you're talking about a niche so tiny that your character is likely to be the only one in the world to have it.

Alternatively, you're talking about a PrC so broad that it might as well not have been a PrC in the first place (I can think of many in the 3.X splatbooks that fit this definition).

Jodokai wrote:

Starbuck_II wrote:

Well, Gygax hated 2E. He never played it. So It depends on what you liked about 2E.

Actually I'm pretty sure you're thinking of 3rd Edition. He wrote 2nd ed. Unearth Arcanna, was editor for Dragon Magazine, and played Mordenkainen in a campaign. I'm also not sure that's much of an argument though because Gygax universally hated anything that wasn't his idea.

Um, Gygax wrote 1e, he was tossed out of TSR four years before 2e was released.

Yup. He actually came back and wrote for 3rd edition - a third party publisher, mind, but he actually liked 3.0 much better than he did 2nd.

I still don't see how this really helps you much at boosting lower level spells. Lower level spells will still have lower damage caps, smaller ranges, smaller AoEs. Why would I cast fireball when I can cast delayed blast fireball? Why would a wizard even memorize it?

A difference of less than five points to a DC isn't a character-defeating weakness by any stretch of the imagination, and most of your spells will be within that range (unless you really want to cast that burning hands at 17th level... which if you're memorizing a 1st level blaster spell at that level why aren't you memorizing magic missile?).

This is a solution in search of a problem, and that's asking for balance issues where everyone else is concerned.

2. How do you determine if an enemy gets away when fleeing? I posted this question in the pathfinder RPG->Rules Questions board but didn't really get a straight forward response. Many of the monsters in the AP have a moral section which dictates that they flee after they take a certain amount of damage. How do I determine if the monsters get away or not? Does this simply constitute getting off the board, or is there a more sophisticated mechanic that you are using?

The real question here isn't "does the enemy get away" but rather "do your players follow?" If your PCs follow the enemy, then you can do one of two things:

1) Turn it into a Chase encounter, or;
2) (The simpler method) Whomever has the highest speed wins (with the possible exception of ranged attacks/spells that might be the difference between flight and death). If everyone has the same speed, you can call for opposed Dexterity checks - the winner either manages to get away (if he's the quarry) or catches his target (if he's a PC) and combat starts all over again (and nothing says the enemy can't attempt to flee *again*). Alternatively, you can call for opposed Constitution checks (representing a long chase); again, the winner either flees (quarry) or catches his enemy (in which case, the enemy is probably fatigued or a similar condition).

Regardless of whether or not your PCs follow, if the enemy gets away, they should always be able to Track them later with Survival checks. I had my players chase a few beasts back to lairs that I had to create for them.

You're essentially correct. Makes for a great assassination tool - lace a person's food with a lot of doses of a mild poison, and lace their drink with a potion of delay poison. They won't even notice they're dead for several hours, and you're safely out of the way...

In all seriousness, I've never seen anyone cast delay poison out of anything but desperation (ie, "We're knee deep in this dungeon and poison's running through my system!"), never as any kind of preventative.

Pretty epic!

Probably the most under-CRed thing ever is an Orc Cleric1/Barbarian1 with a greataxe.

I'm of two minds on the Will'o'Wisp. A 6th level party should have enough resources to be able to make that electricity zap completely meaningless, so now you've got an invisible ball just floating around being annoying, rather than threatening. You might not be able to hurt it, but it won't be able to hurt you either.

Sadly, the rules I finalized and used were lost when I suffered a hard drive failure. I thought I had posted them on the boards but perhaps they've been lost to time.

Essentially, they broke down like this: The PCs were given a number of "Festival Points", which I calculated somehow (I believe it was the number of BP spent over the course of the year - at least so far - on Festivals for the kingdom, divided by the number of Festivals per year, then multiplied by 4, because I gave them the option of converting BP to FP at 1:4.)

They then had to set a specific level for Food (I gave them four or five choices), Security (again, three or four choices), Location (single city, all cities, or entire kingdom), and Propaganda (how to drum up excitement for the festival.) These were set costs of FP, with each option varying the cost from 0 FP (almost all low-level options were "Enh, we're not really going to need that are we?") to... a lot of FP (the best Food option was like 10 FP).

After deciding their "Settings", they then chose Activities, like Banquets, Contests, Menageries, Bazaars, each costing different amounts of FP. Each district could host only a small number of activities - 2 or 3 per district, I forget specifically - so the number of Locations determined how many different activities could be had.

The rules were meant only for a single day of festivities, but could easily be fitted to multiple days. I'll see if I can find a copy somewhere, but those are as best as I remember them.

It's been made pretty clear that in Westeros the seasons last for several years, with the Spring/Autumn being more interim periods than considered actual seasons. More importantly, the seasons vary in their length, with some seasons being relatively short (a year or two) and others being ponderously long (the books so far all have dealt with the transition of the last Summer to the next Winter, and that summer has lasted for the better part of a decade.)

I did this, and even wrote up some rules on how much they could spend on the tournament based on the kingdom's Festival budget. With that they had to provide food (choices were from BYO to finger food stands all the way up to inviting the greatest chefs in the land to cater the thing), security, decide how much of their kingdom was going to be taken up by the festival (whether it was a single district in a single city to it being nationwide), and the entertainment and events that were available (including prizes.)

I then divided their "audience" into a number of different groups that they were attempting to satisfy: The Common Folk, their Nobility, a group of visiting Aldori swordlords, Mivonese traders, etc. And each group had different tastes and likes and were affected differently. Then each event gave a chance for the PCs to interact with one of the groups somehow.

Then at the end of the festival, each group that they impressed gave them various temporary bonuses. It was fun.

Going into book 5 right now the campaign has taken 6 years, which has coincided with the expected growth.

They almost definitely are the IP of WoTC. So don't blame the GoblinWorks/Paizo folks for no warforged in your MMO - blame WoTC!

Actually, I don't see vetting user-created content for the game at all the same as Paizo vetting 3rd party published goods.

Paizo does, in fact, vet all freelancer created material that's created for their campaign setting. That's a brand and product that Paizo is (correctly) trying to protect. You can't just publish something, call it Golarion canon, and sell it on the website, for a number of reasons - not the least of which is Jacobs will rage out and eat a lawyer.

Vetting player-created modules within the game is, effectively, the same thing. Goblinworks would be protecting the user experience - a task that should be done actively, not passively. (Prime example: the Apple Apps Store. Those apps are tested to death to make sure they don't interfere with the user experience that Apple wants you to have.) I can't imagine that everyone who joins PFO will be wanting to create their own module anyway; only a small percentage of those joining will be module creators, so the "testing" of modules - to at the very least avoid the whole "open a chest and get 1,000,000 XP" problem that plagued NWN's own module-creation - should be a (relatively) uncomplicated task. (Especially if you only allow a limited toolbox to begin with.)

Can I just say that the chance to create our own modules is A-MAZE-ING, if you can pull it off. This blog, more than any other, has actually pushed me - a guy who just doesn't do MMOs - from "on the fence" into the "cautiously optimistic" category.

I wouldn't do the last bit of replacing the big bad with the PC and his patron. A LE diabolist isn't going to like the big bad in Kingmaker (she's sort of almost diametrically opposed to such a character, actually) so it's a natural fit.

I could foresee a number of things going wrong here, though, but they're all the same "Evil parties/games are a bad idea" tropes that have been rehashed a million times.

Hey, thanks for answering the questions, Ryan!

I do have a question unrelated to the looting issue:

At what point is the "Criminal" flag raised?

If A attacks B in a (relatively) "safe" zone, is A automatically a criminal?
Can B defend himself from A without fear of being labeled a criminal?
What if B kills A after provocation - is B now a murderer who can have bounties put on his head by A?

Somewhat related - could we have nonlethal duels in "safe" zones to settle disputes?

Okay... I lied, I have many questions. I figure the answers to my first set should be that you're only a criminal once you actually kill someone, since if you fail to kill them it's sort of a no-harm-no-foul scenario. Self-defense should of course be an absolute defense to murdering someone.

And I would love to see nonlethal duels.

Remember, she's chaotic, insanely, blithely chaotic. If your PCs do somehow link up with her, she'll still leave a trail of devastation behind her (thus I would leave the events of RRR, VV and BFB pretty much as written.) This might make them begin to question their allegiances.

Once they get closer to Book 5, she should start making more direct appeals and appearances. And that means turn on the fully crazy. And then there's the final reveal, which is Book 6, and if they truly are Lawful, they should realize what a huge mistake the alliance was, and attempt to defeat her.

I for one think the time limit is backwards here. I think the notion should be that a corpse does not become lootable until a certain amount of time passes - I'm not suggesting I have any clue whatsoever what that time period should be, but it should average out to "However long it would take the average player to go to the soulbinding spot and return to the corpse" given an average distance. (I'm not suggesting scientific accuracy or even that this time be variable - if you were silly enough to be 6 hours from your soulbind spot - although I'm presuming you can change your soulbind spot easily? - you should pay the price for that foolishness. But if, on average, it would take a person from hex A - the closest soulbind point - 5 minutes to get to hex B - being a reasonable "danger" zone where you're likely to start getting killed; say the border of the NPC Marshal zone - then your corpse should not become lootable until the 5 minute mark passes). Once a corpse becomes lootable, then you're in complete danger of losing your stuff.

(This makes murder-to-rob/loot, something that is already being actively discouraged, down right impossible, or at least impractical. You can camp a corpse, and I've no doubt the truly dedicated will do that, but I would still hate to lose all my stuff because a minute passed and I was 10 minutes from my corpse.)

The idea is to make losing all of your stuff* not an immediate punishment, but rather a punishment if you don't make getting your stuff back your priority. I suppose you can call this an "abandonment" theory.

*Yes, I know it's not all your stuff, but only that which you choose to carry with you; but whatever. If you're out there mining precious resources, you're going to have a pack full of precious resources at the end of the day which you have to lug home; perfect target for poaching.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I love the idea of player-run bounty hunter guilds that have a direct game mechanic for posting/receiving bounties. I hope there's a way you can "register" the guild (or if you're a freelancer, yourself, as a registered hunter) so that if you're killed you don't have to personally know of a guild/bounty hunter in order to post bounties for them.

I had a similar idea, except it's a percentage modifier instead of a flat d6 + bonus increase. The percent growth is set by the Promotions edict, and modified by the Taxation (negative, unless there's none, in which case it's +.1%), and Festivals (all bonuses, unless there's none, in which case there's a penalty.) Unrest also applies a penalty. A negative modifier means people *leave* the kingdom. This growth rate is a kingdom stat in my game, although it is applied to Rural areas and each City individually (which creates slightly larger urban populations than the more spread out rural areas).

I like the idea of having city structures affect that for individual cities, too.

My issue with placing a limit on the number of buffs you can have is that it's an arbitrary and capricious ruling based on GM fiat. Normally, I have no problem with GM fiat - except when it screws with people's characters, which this is exactly doing. (And it's not for the sake of balance, as many monsters assume your party is using buffs - try fighting a dragon with nary an energy protection spell around - and NPCs have access to the same buffs for a reason.)

If you're going to limit buffs for some reason, you have to equally allow players the opportunity to rebuild their characters. (Bards would be all but useless in your campaign. I suppose he can work on his Bluff/Diplomacy to the detriment of all of his other abilities...)

Aside from that, I agree with Dark_Mistress' summation.

Buffs mean that catching an enemy unaware becomes even more unbalancing. If your rogue sneaks ahead and spots the boss monster, instead of "sneak attack and a surprise round" it's "we spend five rounds casting rounds/level buffs, followed by sneak attack and a surprise round on the boss who has no buffs up". This is annoying. And the converse is just as bad -- if the enemy party spots the PC campsite, takes a few rounds to throw buffs, and then attacks, the PCs are screwed. I had exactly this happen in a recent session and two PCs got killed fast and I ended up having to throw the fight (by having one NPC do something totally stupid) to avoid a TPK. And I hate throwing fights.

I guess my question to you, Mr. Muir, is what are the bad guys doing while the party sits there for 30 seconds buffing? You're aware that the DC to Perceive someone talking (IE, casting a spell) is 0? They should be able to, at best, get off 1 buff during their surprise round before the bad guys realize they're about to be ambushed. (If the PCs retreat a safe distance away, have the NPC leave the area he was in. Or have a different group of NPCs surprise the PCs as they're in the middle of their buffs.)

The ideas I gave above are meant to discourage their metagame behavior. That being said, the PCs are supposed to win. (Also - why do you hate running hasted combats? You really dislike rolling that extra attack?)

If your PCs are asleep at their campsite, why would the NPCs stop and waste two minutes just outside of it to buff? (And again, same question to you as before - what the hell are the PCs doing? Did they not set a watchman?)

Generally speaking this is how I solve the buffs problem: Your character sheet should already calculate all of your hour and 10 min/level buffs. (All of my players include a "Buffed" section of their AC/HP/Saves/Attacks.) For minute-per-level stuff, the PCs have to do the bookkeeping, and I tell them when 5 minutes are up (based largely on guesswork, or if I want a tougher challenge.) Round per level buffs don't survive the first combat (I only keep actual track of their duration until around level 5 - most combats won't last longer than 5 rounds.)

Similarly, your NPCs should be written with their hour and 10 minute buffs written up (unless there's very specifically a good reason why those NPCs aren't on high alert with a bunch of home invaders prowling around.) For boss fights include even minute per level stuff. Your PCs are neither going to know nor particularly care exactly when the guy cast that shield spell; for all they know he cast it from a 20th level scroll 10 minutes ago.

(Also - say it with me - dispel magic is your friend.)

I am pretty excited about this. The more I hear about the sandbox style of play, the more enthused I become. Sandboxes are what drew me initially to MMOs - when they went the way of WoW, I lost all interest. With this focus on small, incremental, meaningful growth... I'm for it.

Ideally if you want to cater to casual craftsman and hardcore craftsman then have a diet craft for people that feel they have to do it but don't enjoy it.

You brought up a bunch of good points, and though I agree with most (and disagree with some), I felt I actually needed to speak out about this one: Personally, if I'm reading what the developers want to do correctly, I would much rather they *not* have a "diet craft" for people who "feel they have to do it but don't enjoy it."

Crafting in a skill-based MMO should be left to those who do want to do it. That way, you ensure that people don't just power-level crafting and become totally isolated and self-sustaining without detriment. If you want to be a blacksmith - learn the blacksmithing trade and merchant and crafting rules. If you don't like them... don't be a blacksmith. Let the player who actually enjoys such rules play it - they'll enjoy the game more for it, and (presumably, at least,) you'll still benefit from it because you can buy stuff from them.

You guys do sound like you're severely underequipped for your level. Talk to your GM about that - the Stag Lord's fort was supposed to bring you guys up to 4th - 5th level equipment, and if he just shrugged and said "you don't find any items", then he's definitely boning you big time.

Also, you're falling into the trap that a lot of people do and forgetting that... well, to put it bluntly, your PC is just one man. Even if your entire party were composed of Erastil worshipers, it's likely that the thousands of colonists that come from all around aren't. They'll demand larger - and safer - cities and communities.

It should also be noted that the population figures given in the kingdom building rules are pretty ludicrous. Build a house and immediately get 250 people! Right...

That looks much better size-wise, although I've only seen the zoomed out JPG.

I'm gonna be starting up a Pathfinder-ized Planescape game soon, and one of the things that's bugged me about 3.X Planescape is that the planetouched races are not only slightly more powerful, but they're also immune (by virtue of being Outsider (native)s) to the lower level charm and dominate spells. We're talking a good chunk of the NPCs/PCs of any given Planescape game being that much harder (by at least 4 spell levels) to enchant.

I'm considering either: A) changing the target type of Charm/Dominate Person to be "Humanoid or native Outsider", B) changing the description of the (native) subtype to say something to the effect of "these creatures are treated as Humanoids for purposes of enchantment effects", or C) simply changing the type of Aasimar/Tiefling/Genasi to Humanoid for that game/future Planescape games.

Which, in your opinion, is the more elegant solution?

The textures and the like didn't properly upload so the map looks funky on my end, but one thing I did notice is that you made Brevoy... a lot smaller than it should be.

The area of the Stolen Lands should be about 1/5th the size of Brevoy as a whole according to the Golarion map. You have it about equal, if not a little smaller.

At the area you're looking at, Brevoy should dominate about 2/3rds of the upper-right corner of the map, with the Stolen Lands (and a little past, into Mivon) should cover the full lower third and Pitax/Numeria the left third.

BigNorseWolf wrote:

What exactly is the difference between being denied your dexterity bonus to AC and being flat footed besides the attack of opportunity? A great deal of effort seems to have gone into separating the two terms that appear to be otherwise synonymous.

Flat footed means you're able to be sneak attacked, I believe, while simply being denied your dex bonus does not. It's almost 2:00 AM though and I'm pretty sleepy so I might be misremembering.

I hate to correct the big chief, but I think you got it backwards, sir. Rogues can sneak attack only if you're denied your Dex bonus (and/or are flanked, of course.)

Flat-footed means you haven't yet acted in a combat round, cannot take actions until your turn comes up (such as immediate actions or, with the exception of the combat reflexes feat, attacks of opportunity), and are denied your Dex bonus. I have never heard of an ability catching you (or causing you to be caught) flat-footed outside of the first round of combat.

Being denied your Dexterity bonus just means you don't get your Dex bonus to AC for that attack or round. Plenty of effects do this. But you can still act (theoretically, anyway. If you're unconscious, not so much.)

And don't forget the whole Carrion Crown adventure path. As an old Ravenloft fan from way back, that was very Ravenlofty.

The end troll wasn't but getting to him was.

In a funny twist, both of the groups I've run through Kingmaker have caused Hargulka to fumble a save against fire, and subsequently fail the save for the necklace. The first time through at least Hargulka had used the biggest of the orbs, but with the second group it was on the very first round.

It makes for quite a dead troll.

The problem with your system is that unless you're starting at a very low number - -10 for example - buildings contributing to city statistics will grant your PCs massive bonuses to skills.

Instead, I've done the inverse - a settlement's six statistics influence the kingdom's Econ, Loyalty, and Stability. (With the statistics growing as detailed in the GMG.) An excerpt from my (still being tested) houserules:

"ECONOMY, STABILITY, AND LOYALTY
Like a kingdom, a settlement has an Economy, Stability, and Loyalty score. These scores are added to the scores of the larger kingdom, modifying those scores. A settlement’s Economy, Stability, and Loyalty scores are determined by a combination of factors, from the buildings that make up the settlement, to the settlement’s modifiers (see above), and the settlement’s leadership.
Economy: A settlement’s base Economy score is equal to its Corruption modifier plus its Wealth* modifier.
Stability: A settlement’s base Stability score is equal to its Law modifier plus its Society modifier.
Loyalty: A settlement’s base Loyalty score is equal to its Crime modifier plus its Lore modifier."

*In order to avoid confusion, I renamed the GMG's "Economy" into "Wealth".

How the heck did the mites, as statted, kill a coward who can cast invisibility 4/day? That's about the only thing I would change is have Tartuk still kicking around somewhere. (Though to be fair, Tartuk is one of my favorite villains in Stolen Lands and has become a recurring villain in one of my games.)

I just wanted to add my own "HOLY _______ THIS IS AWESOME" to the interactive maps idea. As a guy who has a couple times had to make some crude adjustments to use your maps on a virtual tabletop, I love that you can switch to player view and have all of the hidden doors just go away.

So - 'athankye.

So a dog can't smell when someone moves away from him? Seriously? No offense, but that's not something that I can really swallow. >.>

Sure *I* can't smell that well, I'm only human. But just because I can't do it does not mean that I can't imagine that some other creature could do it...

To me, that seems to at least be grounds for admitting the possibility that dogs could smell well enough to be entitled to AoO potential against invisible targets.

Now you're arguing science, not game rules. Science doesn't belong in the game. The scent rules only allow you to pinpoint within a 5 foot square - definitely *not* enough to tell when someone is moving (At least, not before it's too late.)

Though my riposte would be that the simple act of moving away doesn't draw an AoO - see Withdraw and 5-foot step. It's doing something *else* and moving that draws an AoO.

I would posit that the reason that creatures with Scent don't get to make AoOs is because you can't *smell* when a character is doing something that would *provoke* an AoO.

(Does farting draw AoOs? Perhaps a discussion for a different thread.)

Creatures with finer "extrasensory" perceptions, however, could - see blindsight, as opposed to blindsense.

Would a Sending Spell

** spoiler omitted **

Sending requires that you be familiar with the person you're sending messages to. So unless your PCs have been spending an inordinately long amount of time in Varnhold, it's incredibly unlikely that they'll be able to use sending to communicate with any of them, regardless of whether or not the spell would actually work.

That being said...

When selling magic items it says you do so through "the cities markets", Does this mean that before you can sell ANY magic items you MUST have built the rather expensive market building?

No, you can just sell one per city district.

Although that would be an interesting house rule...

Unless something has changed from 3.5, I recal that a buckler is only effective against 1 attack per round whereas a small shield is effective against all attacks.

edit: now that I look I no longer see that restriction. I wonder when it went away?

That was never a restriction.

Buckler

This small metal shield is worn strapped to your forearm. You can use a bow or crossbow without penalty while carrying it. You can also use your shield arm to wield a weapon (whether you are using an off-hand weapon or using your off hand to help wield a two-handed weapon), but you take a -1 penalty on attack rolls while doing so. This penalty stacks with those that may apply for fighting with your off hand and for fighting with two weapons. In any case, if you use a weapon in your off hand, you don’t get the buckler’s AC bonus for the rest of the round.

You can’t bash someone with a buckler.

(Browser is Firefox 5.0)

If you go into Focus mode and then open a thread there in an alternate tab (so you have the Focused message boards on one tab and the thread you want to read in a second tab), and you clear a dot from the focused message boards, that tab will refresh into the open thread, so you end up with two tabs open to the same thread.

(No idea what would happen if you open multiple threads on multiple tabs...)