Alexander Riggs's page

Sad to hear about this. It won't be the same without you, Liz.

How embarrassing! This was, in fact, an error on our part. Since this is part of an ongoing series, the book descriptions use the same format. Apparently we weren't thorough enough in getting rid of all the elves to make room for the halflings. It won't happen again.

I toyed with the idea of having them find motorcycles. Maybe broken ones that can be fixed with Make Whole or something. According to Google and the Internet, motorcycles were used since World War I, and some makers like Harley-Davidson were quite famous. So now, I seek advice at a rather high level:

- Is this a good idea? Are there better alternatives? Should I have them find some crashed Fighter aircraft instead? Should I just stick with horses?

Sounds pretty cool to me, but be aware that it will come with some complications. The biggest concern I'd have at this point is speed: 60 miles per hour translates to over 500 feet per round (600 according to the text of wind walk, 528 according to my math). That's an unseemly amount of movement, and I know that it would cause me all kinds of headaches vis-a-vis mat size and the fact that someone would want to use ride-by attack to be virtually untouchable in combat. Maybe if you gave them a movement speed of 120 or 150, and treated them as being able to "run" indefinitely, you could let them get high overland speed without combat being too incredibly ridiculous, but it's something to be aware of.

Also, if they want to use them after leaving Russia, they may run into concerns about gasoline, which could be a plus or a minus, depending on your position.

- How would one make stats for such a thing? Should I treat it as a creature or follow the Ultimate Combat vehicle rules? Personally I'd like to treat it as a creature since my players and I are more familiar with those...

I'm not very familiar with the vehicle rules myself, but I don't see any reason you can't treat them as creatures, especially since a mount's stats aren't generally that important. You can probably build a reasonable approximation from scratch: construct, hardness 10 or so, I'd probably say 5-8 Hit Dice, but that's hardly set in stone. Obviously no natural attacks, but maybe figure out trample damage, because I guarantee a PC is going to want to run someone down with one.

If you assume the rider can set a kickstand as part of dismounting, and that the motorcycle can't take actions on its own (barring magical shenanigans), I don't see why they need to be handled all that differently from horses.

- How unacceptible is it for medieval fantasy heroes to spam composite longbow arrow barrages or do lance-spirited-charges on a motorcycle (with no hands on the handles)? How about for a fighter aircraft?

This depends largely on how much you value realism. I don't have much trouble envisioning someone using a lance while riding a motorcycle. A bow I think would be much harder. Perhaps a quick and dirty solution would be to make the DC to "Guide with knees" much harder on a motorcycle (perhaps also have it increase based on the speed they're going), and have failure by 5 or more cause them to veer off in a random direction and/or hit something, crash, and take a lot of damage (perhaps 1d6 for every 10 feet of movement they were going to make? Ouch!).

All in all, it sounds very exciting, but be prepared to houserule some weird situations.

I may be a bit biased, but A Necromancer's Grimoire: Secrets of the Witch was written more or less specifically to address the fact that witch "covens" don't really do anything. It's got a few rules for hag-style covens, but mostly it's got about 30 new spells that are specifically designed to be cast by multiple casters working simultaneously, and are more powerful when more members of a given coven work together to cast them. Something you might want to consider, if you're looking to make covens more relevant (I don't think they really come up in Reign of Winter at all).

Rasputin Must Die was one of the major selling points for me on the adventure path in the first place, so I'm entirely not in the market for a reskin...

...which is why it's so frustrating that going to Oerth and fighting Iuz sounds almost as cool, and I'm only vaguely aware of Greyhawk. I may have to write a short mini-adventure where the PCs have to go do just that between APs 3 and 4 or 4 and 5.

For anyone thinking about buying this product, you might want to be aware that as a result of a public challenge, Necromancers of the Northwest devoted a series of articles to expanding on Sutra Magic, which may be useful to you.

Included are archetypes that make sutra magic useful to a wider variety of classes, a number of utilitarian feats that expand on how sutras can be used, a special type of scroll designed with the classless sutra magic approach in mind, and three brand new flavorful sutras.

This is a stirring statement, a grand vision, and an inspiring challenge. I can't speak for other publishers, but as the head of design for Necromancers of the Northwest (www.necromancers-online.com), I've toyed with the idea of using content from other publishers, and always came to the same conclusion: I don't want to have someone buy a book that we make, and then find out that they need to buy someone else's book in order to fully use it, which is why we have tried to avoid that sort of thing (nothing would make me happier than if someone used our OGL content, but, as of yet, that has not come up).

That said, after seeing this post, and sitting down to politely point out this potential issue, I couldn't help but point out to myself that, at Necromancers of the Northwest, at least, we also produce free content on a regular basis, which neatly sidesteps this issue (it also occurs to me that I suppose you could just reprint the relevant material, assuming you only needed to reference a small section of it). So, I hereby take up your challenge. We produce our articles a ways in advance, so I can't promise it will be soon, but it will be happening.