Axial's page

I think it's pretty cool that we're getting three hardcover books in the same year.

Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't comin back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can't take the sky from me.

There's no place, I can be,
Since I've found Serenity.

And you can't take the sky from me.

Things are going to be pretty exciting for Starfinder with this and Grimmerspace hitting in the same month.

Oh boy, Doom Eternal and THIS in the same month...maybe I'll end up making a Vesk Soldier who has a blood-oath to fight the Abyss and RIPS AND TEARS demons.

It'd be funny if Zemir actually opened a portal to the other side of the Gap and his friends are chilling on Golarion right now.

Looks like the SCP Foundation has taken over Paizo

The thing in part B3 of the final area reminds me of Silent Hill 4: The Room. I wonder if that's where the inspiration came from.

Since fighting her isn't going to come up (unless the campaign goes right off the rails), the player's seeing her stats shouldn't hurt.

This is probably how she'd react to the PCs fighting her.

Pretty sad how McBride was praised so much for Way of the Wicked and how it became probably the best 3rd party campaign ever, only for him to throw away all the goodwill and popularity he had because he decided to stop talking to his backers. Also, I find it really inspiring and a bit sad that kevin_video is doing more than McBride ever did to keep the WoTW/ToN community alive.

So, is our general consensus "A lot of cool flavor and awesome archetypes but the Shifter class sucks"?

Xenocrat wrote:

What is an Aeon Guard?

Basically an Azlanti storm trooper.

Do they have a -20 attack penalty on every ranged attack with a laser weapon?

Whoa, Lakeside, you've done a lot of research on this.

I'm just going to enjoy this book for the fact Orcus gets a bigger write this time around. ;)

Oh, definitely. And he'll have a new, different character design. Paizo!Orcus is gonna be awesome.

I was thinking of starting it with a short adventure where the PCs partake in a raid against Molthuni soldiers to rescue Nirmathi hostages. Essentially using the Molthune army as an "intro villain" before the main threat of the Ironfang Legion is introduced.

Essentially, this would show the larger context in which the campaign takes place and have the PCs establish themselves as skilled and effective warriors in a relatively triumphant attack on the Molthunis, before the grim and depressing fall of Phaendar and the party's desperate flight across the plains with the refugees in tow.

I do like that there are now good Drow (or at least the potential of them existing, however slim) and that the Lantern Bearers aren't genocidal anymore. Them being an organization dedicated to racially exterminating the Drow just didn't sit well with me.

I really like this idea, and I think it's something that the party should logically be able to attempt. I don't know of any reason why this couldn't happen, other then the devs just saying "You can't do that!".

The closest thing I can think of is the sidebar in book 1 that shows how bad the town gets if they stick around for too long, but that doesn't take later volumes into account.

1) What does the Armiger do?

2) Are the Hellknight and Hellknight Signifier literally just reprints, or are they altered in some way?

127: Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER attend a festival! Just DON'T.

Festivals are to Golarion what weddings are to Westeros!

129) He got killed by a Syntheist Summoner. Or rather, a Syntheist crit him so hard that he ceased to exist. But with his last breath, he declared that they were so overpowered, unfair, mechanically convoluted and Munchkin-y that they were banned from PFS forever.

http://leeshahannigan.deviantart.com/art/Havoc-Dragon-673370261

The problem with that, Douglas, is that according to lore Hobgoblins hate arcane magic and distrust everyone who uses it.

Maybe a Cleric of Hadregash?

In my campaign, the Hobgoblins worshipped Moloch as their patron-deity since his portfolio matched their culture to a T. They were a hideous army of diabolists, slaver, and conquerers who made sacrifices to Moloch in iron bulls and integrated devils into their armies. Clerics, inquisitors, warpriests, and antipaladins of Moloch served in positions of authority. Goblins were their underclass, and were more loose worshipers of Moloch due to their NE alignment being within one step of Moloch's LE; plus they liked the whole fire and violence aspects of his domains. Bugbears were essentially hired mercenaries.

So the adventure ends with you fighting an "army of Troglodytes"?

What do you fight after that, the Demogorgon?

Where is your citizenship now, you Molthuni @#$%&s!?!?

Well, the PG answered Axial's initial question : No, you can't play a hobgoblin.

Hey, I read the PG too.

And for the record, it basically says "You can, but you shouldn't."

I could see how this could be an interesting concept.

Basically, "The Rebellion Against The Winter Witches!".

But it will be very, very hard to modify Hell's Rebels into an AP set in Irrisen.

I recommend reading both and then using your favorite parts of each to form a hybrid homebrew campaign.

I understand.

I'd definitely not want the Molthune thing to be too intrusive, and I will try to fit it into the framework of the existing plot. I want to organically expand the narrative, not replace parts of it.

And there are many ways to do that.

I like how this book paints a more nuanced portrayal of the conflict. Nirmathas isn't all freedom fighting angels, they're angels with dirty faces who might just have gotten a little too far into the whole ambush thy enemy and slit his throat because freedom thing.

Likewise, the Molthunis aren't vicious, genocidal fascists who want to burn the forest down and wipe Nirmathas off of the map. Their army is actually pretty clean, doesn't kill civilians, and one of their general lords is even a Paladin!

This is why I SO want Nirmathas and Molthune to do a hero/villain team up against the Hobgoblins in Ironfang Invasion and collaboratively kick their asses, but apparently that isn't going to happen.

If it does, I think there will be a rogue/skill monkey Hellknight as speculated above (because Hellknights need spies and infiltrators to root out lawbreakers), and an Occult/Psychic PrC. Since people have asked for better integration of psychics and Hellknights.

The link for the Molthuni Captain is broke.

It seems a little weird to make characters in this since they're probably assumed to be from Nirmathas, but we don't have a whole lot of lore on that country besides their conflict with Molthune. And since Molthune is confirmed to not have a huge role in this AP, it's more a matter of "Be from Nirmathas but have backstory/goals not focused on Molthune" which is kind of a hard bargain.

I suppose you could have PCs who are from out of town or Nirmathi characters who have fought their "first battle" against Molthune before the true test of their heroics comes in the form of the Ironfang Legion.

But in my case, I will try to give Molthune a bigger role in the story. And I will include support for PCs who want to play as Molthuni characters: in the beginning of the game, they have been captured by the Nirmathis and are being held in the town jail of Phaendar when the Ironfang's attack begins. They will be released somehow and will form a "Join together or hang separately" alliance with the Nirmathi PCs.

Thank you, whoever picked that quote.

I think that might actually be from the Koran.

EDIT: Not precisely that, but the general sentiment.

You are most welcome! :D Since the short section explaining how to use the militia system in Ironfang comes early in the system's text, I didn't want folks to get the impression that the system is explicitly for that AP. It just happens to work really well with it.

I second the other posters in thanking you for elaborating on the inclusion of the militia system.

Could you address a a thread I made recently? I had a question over how relevant Molthune is to the AP, and the reveal of this militia system has me wondering whether Molthunis will be among those you can recruit.

Also, why would your Pathfinder campaign get turned into a Call of Cthulhu campaign? It doesn't make sense that level 17-20 living gods with colossal power and world-shaping magic would become feeble, human investigators who don't have any supernatural powers at all, need to use their wits to survive, and are in constant danger of going insane? It's a totally different kind of game!

Did they get de-powered or something?

So wait, once "We aren't evil, we are CN" party was actually CE? ._. I thought lying to gm is sort of faux pas, though I guess that oneshot ended as cool anyway?

Just to ask, which god the antipaladin claimed to serve? xD

Yeah, at the beginning I thought they were a "Chaotic Neutral" evil party. I think they erred just enough on the immoral but not openly evil side that I didn't call their bluff.

I could have just demanded that they tell me their actual alignments or reacted poorly to them concealing said alignments from me; but it was honestly a really well thought-out ruse and made the game so much more memorable. I would compare it to a "Twilight Zone" plot twist.

The Dhampir Antipaladin of Baphomet claimed to be a Paladin of Apollo or some nonsense.

I'm particularly interested in this book because I ran a one-shot where the PCs were soldiers of Molthune fighting for their citizenship. It turned out...weird. Message me if you want details.

What is revealed here about the privileges of citizens in Molthune? I.e what incentivizes soldiers to risk their lives in order to become citizens?

Also, how much moral ambiguity is there in the conflict besides "Free-spirited Nirmathi resisting Molthune's imperialism!"?

I bet the Winter Witches are behind this.

I anticipate a high volume of 3pp to account for the fact that there will be less Starfinder content released over time compared to Pathfinder (with just an AP line instead of AP, setting, and player companions). Plus, there are many, many writers out there who would love to take a crack at writing sci-fi content for Starfinder.

Will the ships featured in the game encompass everything from starfighters to capital ships?

Hmm, this AP will have the same "ancient alien weapon" plot as my Starfinder homebrew.

My setting will be called the Alpha Sector. It's divided between three distinct regions: the Core worlds, ruled by the militarist and authoritarian Federation, the Mid-worlds ruled by the democratic and prosperous Republic, and the Outer worlds, an anarchic territory ruled by warlords, pirates, and smugglers. Basically, the players will have to race across the Alpha Sector trying to find components of the alien weapon before the evil Federation admiral Joseph Cain can find them.

Hopefully this campaign will be different enough to where people don't accuse me of ripping it off.

KaiserBruno wrote:

So is there anything in here on slavery? Or more specifically, how the Keleshites are able to worship a NG goddess while running one of the bigger slave trades on the continent without some sort of moral/cognitive dissonance?

Also reading through the comments and previews has gotten me very interested in this, which is saying something since Qadira was never one of my favorite regions.

There is. In short, traditional Keleshite slavery is basically indentured servitude with a 7-year limit, and is understood as owning 100% of a person's labor during that time, but not owning them. The farther you go from central Kelesh, however, the looser that definition gets, and Qadira's continual war with Taldor has generated a demand for soldiers that has been one of the major drivers of the slave trade.

Qadira's agreement with Kelesh gives the satrap almost complete power over what happens within Qadiran borders, and he hasn't been particularly interested in stopping it. The Cult of the Dawnflower also wants war with Taldor, so they're not particularly interested in stomping it out, and the mainline church is too busy trying to rein in the Cult to be able to focus on it.

Essentially, one side (the imperial family or that satrap) would have to break their agreement about the satrap's rule for the status quo to change. Either the satrap would have to do something that violates his side of it, which then would give the Emperor an excuse to declare it void and step in, or the Emperor would have to decide to break it.

Given the priority Keleshites place on contractual agreements, that's not likely to happen any time soon.

That makes for a good PC origin story in Reign of Winter.

If you want to have a character from Qadira, you could say they were enslaved and sent to fight Taldor, but that they deserted the battlefield and settled in Heldren.

I hope that the Nirmathas and Molthune armies play at least some role in this.

The Annelidmorph is so weird and awesome! I imagine showing up to character creature with a GIANT PSYCHIC WORM.

So LG people bullied a tiefling into suicide?

Uhhh...

Maybe add some LN people, like Gray Paladins or just militaristic thugs, who help the Glorious Reclamation because they hate House Thrune but aren't actually good-aligned.

Maybe a racist Hellknight order that sees fiend/mortal breeding as a chaotic or unlawful act?

We currently know very little about the setting of Starfinder, but I've already begun to brainstorm what my first campaign will be like. I will either create my own setting or expand the official setting of the game (the galaxy is a big place after all).
Basically, the main antagonists of my campaign will be a militarized, imperialistic dictatorship called the Federation of Central Systems. Their inspirations include the Galactic Empire from Star Wars, the United Citizens Federation from Starship Troopers, and the Alliance from Firefly. The FCS is willing to use any method, be it magical or technological, to expand their empire and subjugate free planets. Their color scheme is grey and red.

The players are either rebels opposed to the FCS or are unaffiliated adventurers drawn into conflict against them. The players discover an alien superweapon hidden in another plane of existence and a star-chart containing the coordinates of several "keys" scattered across the cosmos required to access this plane. Of course, the Federation wants this artifact for themselves in order to achieve total galactic domination.

The BBEG is a Federation officer, Admiral Joseph Cain, who helms a massive battleship called the Accordance. The Accordance is too powerful to confront directly, so the players must avoid confrontation or use guerrilla tactics to destroy and disable other ships in Cain's fleet. Admiral Cain has legions of Federation soldiers at his command, along with hackers, spellcasters, robots and hired bounty hunters. He is a ruthless military leader who will stop at nothing to thwart the players, and at several occasions he either hails their ship or contacts them directly to deliver threats or demand their surrender. He might even attack or capture the PC's allies or friends to provoke them into confronting his troops or fleet. If the PCs play their cards right, they may be able to eliminate Cain once and for all; destroying the Accordance, boarding the ship to target him directly, or empowering his rivals within the Federation to supplant him are all possible methods. But he must be stopped before he is able to reach the hidden plane and seize the artifact, or the PCs may not be facing an admiral...but a god!

This AP is based on the Call of cthulhu game, in which it's understood that your character is going to die or go insane (or both). It's a question of When, not if.

In my humble opinion, the Strange Aeons campaign ought to reflect that spirit of the CoC game, rather than a watered down PF game, masquerading as a CoC game. I say wipe the party out, and let the chips fall where they may.

That does sound like something a "Killer GM" would say. :)

Ironfang Invasion's covers were just updated so I imagine the update on this one is imminent.

Axial wrote:

What is said about this deity in terms of lore and their cultists?

The write-up is kinda short, but here's my paraphrasing.

** spoiler omitted **

Interesting.