Update time! The player manual has bumped up to 43 pages so far. There's a few more things I want to touch on in the document as well. It's looking like it will be about 45-50 pages altogether.
I'm a huge fan of Final Fantasy 8! It is probably the most underappreciated of the modern Final Fantasy games and was, to me, one of the better ones in the series. Since FFd20 was more or less based on Pathfinder- with many classes being identical except for one or two features and the addition of Limit Breaks- can we use FFd20 classes? I can drum something up using Pathfinder classes if not.
Since I am done with the player's document for the day and I have about half an hour before I go over to my grandmother's house to have our Christmas movie marathon, I want to touch on a few changes and additions I have made in this write-up. It's not a huge list, but here it is. More things might be changed or added as I get closer to finishing up the player document. Changes - Technology is more prevalent in the setting. Most nations have access to firearms. That doesn't mean that other weapons are phased out. Far from it. Just like the people of the Sengoku and Tokugawa Eras in real-world Japan, most people adhere to the more traditional ways of combat. Firearms are much more common in segmented military units, the setting expy of the Yakuza, and among more daring "adventurer" types that shun tradition in favor of flair or utility. - Changed the layout of Tian Xia some. It now resembles a true world more than a single continent. This makes more sense given the massive changes that happened during the Great Sundering and the expansion of the broken shards of Golarion during the Making of the Spheres. - Changed my stance on races. I am adding in a few extra races because they fit the setting. Androids are the biggest new race being allowed in because of the Lands of Ice having much higher technology in this write-up. - Made a few tweaks to the character creation rules. Nothing major, but they are there. Additions - Added a few new player races, including the Leaf Children. The Leaf Children are based on Nioh and Princess Mononoke's Kodama and will be one of the few races of a different size. - Added in two more continents to Tian Xia's world so I could add in more cool stuff. - Made a list of all the holidays in Tian Xia's world. - Made individual timelines of general history for each nation's top ten most important events since the Great Sundering.
I'm back up to roughly 20 pages of the player guide for you all. Just keeping you in the loop while the holidays roll by.
Hey guys, just letting you know that Black Friday was a bit busier than expected. I just got sat down to eat my dinner, so the recruitment will go up today or Sunday since things were so busy.
The recruitment should go up the day after Thanksgiving assuming there are no hang-ups. I am holding firm on racial restrictions. This is not vanilla Golarion and the entire point of me making the Great Sundering a thing was to turn the admittedly-good kitchen sink setting into several settings. If something goes against the flavor of whichever setting is used, I'm not allowing it. Races I will allow:
First-Party
Human Elf Half-Elf Catfolk Hobgoblin Ratfolk Vanara Aasimar Dhampir Tengu Tiefling Changeling Kitsune Merfolk Nagaraji Samsaran Wayang Third-Party
Homebrew
All class changes for locked gestalt options apply even if you take them on the non-locked side. Alma the Soulborn
Einhander seems to be inspired by the sword art of the same name. As such, I will rule that it does not apply to unarmed strikes. Hayato Ken
Warforged are not allowed. The full race list is in the spoiler on this post. Redblade8
caster4life
I have ran games before offline and gestalt was my specialty. I read up on Doomed Hero and Painlord's guides on play-by-post, so I think that I have things more or less figured out. If you have any extra advice outside of those, please message me so I can be as informed as I can be. leinathan
That said, this is a fantasy world and Golarion has long since ceased to be as a singular world. If you want an in-game explanation on why some races aren't in the game, they have just went extinct in Tian Xia. Most of the normal fantasy races had such low population numbers that millennia without outside access to the rest of Golarion ended up with too low of a viable population to reproduce. Jereru
It's a good thing that people mentioned the class-restricted gestalt side so I can clear this up before the recruitment. I did not edit in a few of the options because of the hour-long edit window. Those options are: *Psion, Wilder, Psychic Warrior, Soulknife, Marksman, and Vitalist from the Psionics books. * Wizard, which must specialize in an Elemental School. Wizards must also list four Taboos. If you violate a Taboo, you cannot prepare spells until you ritually cleanse yourself at a shrine with a rite that takes eight hours and offerings equal to 2,500 GP for every five levels you possess. Taboos must be reasonable things that actually restrict you as a character. You may have to wear red or wear anything but red, refrain from touching or being touched by corpses, have a restricted diet, et cetera. * Oracle, which has limitations on what Mysteries can be selected. The Mysteries I am allowing are: Ancestor, Bones, Dragon, Elemental, Flame, Heavens, Life, Lore, Lunar, Metal, Nature, Solar, Stone, Volcano, Waves, Wind, Winter, Wood, Moon, and Void. Oracles also have to list four Taboos like the Wizard. Please refrain from making an Oradin build. That combination has been done to death in gestalt. I'm not disallowing it, but that combination is really low on my interest and you'd have to sell it real hard since I have seen it in all but two gestalt games I have ran or played in. * The Omdura class from Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Niobe. I was just reminded that this class existed after I browsed d20PFSRD looking for the list of Oracle Mysteries and saw it there. * Spiritualist is an option for the locked gestalt side if you are a Mantled Shinigami. * I am willing to entertain the idea of other classes, but only if they have a clear Eastern archetype. I did say that I would entertain the idea, not that it's a 100% sure thing I will allow it. A lot of the archetypes from Legendary Games Asian Archetypes line fit the bill for what I am looking for along with many from Heroes of the East 1-4, Heroes of the Jade Oath, and Dragon Tiger Ox Wuxia/Wushu Source Book. Hayato Ken No extra feats. You don't get DR from your AC or AC Bonus, you get DR with armor. It's my way of balancing things since I added in a class-based unarmored AC bonus. It makes heavily-armored martials as effective as those who are unarmored. They just play differently because unarmored characters will- in most cases- have higher AC, but armored characters will have decent AC and DR/- to reduce any damage they do take. Here are two samples of how DR is calculated with armor. Full plate is +8 AC. 50% of that is translated into DR as DR4/-. A +5 Haramaki has a total AC of 6, 5 of which is granted through the enhancement bonus. In most cases, it will give DR3/-. If the magic in the armor is negated through antimagic or effects that ignore enhancement bonuses, that DR bonus will drop to 1- the minimum DR/- possible from armor. Storm Dragon DR is only gained if you are wearing armor and it's equal to 50% of the armor's AC bonus, rounded down. You lose the innate class-based AC bonus while wearing it. Forgeborn are something I might or might not allow. There is some tech in the setting and I can appreciate characters that are part machine in anime. I'm not so sure that a fantasy cyborg is to my tastes for this game though. Want to try and sell the idea? It's a longshot, but you can try to.
Will everyone be able to access Google Drive? I'll be putting maps, lore, and whatever else is too big or able to be posted here on there. I'm almost done with everything and want to know if I need to try and help accommodate applicants who would be crippled by this.
I've got some more information on the game and setting for you all that will hopefully keep interest up until I can get the recruitment going. * The Haiiro no Shinigami are a group that worships the deceased goddess of death and fate, Pharasma. Each member ritually brings themselves to the brink of death and an unquiet spirit is bound within their body to bring them to a unique state that exists between life and death. They perform the old duties of the Pharasmin faith and maintain the sanctity of death in the land. Members of this cult almost always have levels in Spiritualist due to their ties with the spirit bound to them. They also belong to one of the new homebrew races I made for the setting, the Mantled Shinigami. * Jinin is known as the Time-Frozen Kingdom. During the apocalypse before the Great Sundering, the elves tried to save their kingdom through altering their nation's place in the timestream. This failed, but did produce something unique: a land where time slows to a crawl. The land exists in a state of eternal dusk. * There are fully-detailed ninja clans, samurai orders, and Primal Kami faiths. * Races are restricted in this setting. Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, and all types of Orcs do not exist in this Tian Xia at all. * There are new races, two of which I will mention. Mantled Shinigami are a race of deathless stewards created from one of the other mortal races by the Pharasmin cult. Spiritfolk are the fey children of a union between a kami and a mortal and have powers based on their parent kami's nature: Fire, Wind, Lightning, Earth, Wood, Water, Ice, Metal, Void, Beast, or Stars. *Some old races have new options. Aasimar get options for Celestial Dragonblooded and Kami-Blessed racial variants for example.
Welcome one and all to what is, hopefully, the stepping stone to something awesome. I'll try not to lore dump everything at once and only list things which are immediately relevant. Let's get to it then; there's a lot to go over. If you are familiar with the prophecies of Golarion's apocalypse, some of this might have a little more context.
The entire premise of the campaign is to have an Eastern campaign set in Tian Xia. But this isn't vanilla Tian Xia; this is Tian Xia set two millennia after the fated apocalypse of Golarion was thwarted. The campaign is going to be very anime in concept and eventually go into crazy land with mythic later down the road.
* Golarion as it was is no more. It was broken during the apocalypse known as the Great Sundering two millennia ago. During the Great Sundering, the architect of the apocalypse- Pharasma- was slain by heroes who possessed shards of the primordial god Ihys and the multiverse was spared annihilation. *In the aftermath of the Great Sundering, the gods that were not claimed by the Darkness Beyond bound their essences to the broken shards of Golarion. This created entire new worlds and cosmologies. These worlds are known by their inhabitants as the Spheres. * The Tian Xia Sphere is the one that will be covered in this campaign. That particular world was created when the traditional Tian deities did their part in trying to piece Golarion back together. The entirety of Tian Xia, the surrounding ocean, Sarusan, the Crown of the World, and a large chunk of the Land of the Linnorm Kings are all components of the new Tian Xia Sphere. * The deities of Tian Xia's pantheon, sans the old "primary" gods of Golarion, are the primary gods of this world. The Primal Kami are the equivalent of the world's demigods and lesser deities. * The powers of those who saved what remained of the multiverse occasionally crop up during history. Those who are born with a shard of Ihys within themselves possess what is known as the Eyes of Ihys. The name is not just metaphorical since the power is tied to an eye, which glows when it's power is activated. The Eyes allow one to look forward or backward in time and can allow one to break the bonds of fate. In the two thousand years since the Great Sundering, no one has inherited more than one Eye. * There are nine primary Outer Planes that exist around Tian Xia. * Mundane substances have gained supernatural power in this new world. Salt, for example, can burn fiends much like holy water and can be sprinkled to ward off possession. * Some places were tainted by the Darkness Beyond during the Great Sundering. These areas hold an unfathomable evil that can twist the body and soul. While these areas are rare enough that they can be counted on one hand, they remain as reminders of the apocalypse that nearly destroyed the world. * Resurrection is near-impossible in any of the Sphere. Only the darkest of necromancy or the most powerful of sacred rituals can bring back the dead. * Technology exists in the setting to some extent. A wandering Numerian Technomancer was visiting for the Ruby Phoenix Tournament when the Great Sundering occurred. In the aftermath of the apocalypse, he founded a school for technological research in the Lands of Ice - formerly known as The Crown of the World. Technology has caught on slow and firearms are rare, but it still exists. The Lands of Ice, Hongal, and Kaoling incorporate technology fairly heavily. In the trade city of Goka, technology is nearly ubiquitous and exists alongside the more traditional architecture and technology of the land. * In the aftermath of the Great Sundering, great advances were made in the understanding of Ki and Chakras. This led to the founding of monasteries dedicated to the Twenty-Seven Disciplines, mystical weapon arts that draw on both Ki and one's own martial prowess, and the Akhashic Paths, a rediscovered art that allows one to force their essence through an open chakra to accomplish superhuman feats.
* Gestalt level eight, but with exceptions. One side of the gestalt must be one of the following classes and cannot be multiclassed out of: Monk, Unchained Monk, Legendary Monk, Samurai, Legendary Samurai, Ninja, Kinetic Shinobi, Kineticist, Legendary Kineticist, Gnostic, or one of the Akhashic Mysteries, Heroes of the East, Heroes of the Jade Oath, Path of War, or Spheres of Power/Might classes. Players must pick one of their gestalt side saves; they do not gain both. * Automatic Bonus Progression. You can stack ABP attunement bonuses on any magic weapons and armor that you find. If you gain a companion from a class feature, it gains this at two-thirds of your progression (Limit: one companion). Any weapon and armor attunement bonuses get applied to their natural attacks and natural armor respectively. * Background Skills, but with three extra skill points for them instead of two. If you choose an extra skill point as your Favored Class Bonus, you gain an additional skill point, in addition to your normal skill point, that can only be used on Background Skills. * 16,500 GP. * Hit points are treated as being rolled maximum every level. Selecting HP as a Favored Class Bonus grants two hit points instead of the usual one. * Armor grants half of it's AC bonus in DR. Wearing no armor grants the benefit of your role-based AC bonus (see below). * Wearing no armor grants you an AC bonus determined by the BAB of your "locked" gestalt side and your level. The lower the BAB, the lower the bonus. Link to the rules. * Raise and Resurrect effects are confined to class abilities and rituals. * Everyone gains a Ki Pool equal to 1/4 class level plus their highest mental ability score modifier. Classes with a medium or high BAB progression also gain a Stamina Pool as per Combat Tactics. * Everyone has seven Hero Points from the start of the game. If you receive a fatal blow, you can spend a Hero Point to heal 50% of your max HP and gain a random injury. * If you confirm a critical hit with a natural 20, you inflict a random injury on an enemy. * There are no race restrictions on Favored Class Bonuses and you get one for each side of your gestalt. * Firearms will use the Emerging Guns rule. I would suggest carrying something else quieter for use in some portions of the game. A gunshot in a complex/dungeon/whatever is likely to draw everything to you at once or at least put everything on alert within earshot. * Mythic will be a part of the campaign later on. I will be using the Mythic Fixes to scale it down to less madcap levels. Any of the first party Mythic Paths can be used, plus select Paths from Legendary Games and Lost Spheres.
Well, that's two favorites you get from me in one day Painlord. That was a good read. |
