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I don't feel like anything connected to the O.R.C. is going to be especially newsworthy until a license actually exists to sign onto (it costs companies nothing to "pledge support" in the abstract), but I am curious about something.

One of the pillars of continued opposition to the Wizards' OGL is its inclusivity provision (or "morality clause" as the detractors reframe it). I think having a commitment to inclusivity and to confronting extremist attempts to produce licensed content is one of the unambiguously good ideas that has come up so far in that whole brouhaha... and I'm admittedly troubled that the "OpenDnD" and "DnD Begone" spaces are rife with over-the-top attempts to effectively call the provision the Real Racism or otherwise imagine Wizards using it to revoke the licenses of people who get caught jaywalking or something. A lot of that is sounding more like an excuse than a genuine reason for the continued outrage, and some of it is sounding like chaff from the actual people who provisions against "hateful" content are talking about.

Now, Paizo has had its own particular journey toward recognizing the importance of diversity and inclusion, and is doing a fairly admirable job of reflecting that in its product lines. So I think it should be an expected thing that this commitment will be reflected in the O.R.C. Is that the case? And if so, what form would that take?

Exaltation Day should probably happen in a season when it's easy to travel to Taldor from all quarters of the earth, as described in the fluff.

This puts it in early Sarenith in the year my version is set (4719 AR) but I think some of the resources I've been using are making different calculations, b/c we're nearing the end of Book Two and my timeline requires at least a little bit of fudging to strictly work at this point. Ultimately, as long as the dates remain consistent enough to roughly put you in the season you should be in, I wouldn't worry too much. Only the most A-Type of players will be really tracking the dates to that extent.

No updates on the Pump House Propaganda, one of the PCs was eaten by a fish so most scheming was put on hold for a couple sessions. However, I definitely wanted to let everyone know how the party delt with the Telus situation.

After learning that Mosle had stayed with his friend and keeping him alive all these years the party concluded that Mosle was Telus' true love. So they created a scheme to draw the Baron out so Mosle could plant a kiss on him. The hunter used his Boots of Spider Climbing to rush to the Baron's location, grapple him, and drop him to the floor, all so that Mosle could barge in and plant the kiss. It was a tough fight, and the hunter nearly died, but eventually they succeeded. The power of gay love won out!

I thought this was a fun solution, anyone else's players have a creative solution for Telus?

It's a funny thing. My players, also, happened across exactly this interpretation of Master Mosle and also went for the True Love's Kiss solution.

I decided to play the Baron as someone who had a fragment of humanity still fighting his curse (kind of like Locutus of Borg in Star Trek). And I decided to play his spidery half as sentient (but weird and deluded).

So it was possible to get the spidery half talking with some fancy footwork and high Diplomacy and Deception checks, and in moments of emotion to force the human half to the surface. The encounter stayed on the razor's edge of violence, but they eventually worked out a way to get Mosle into the room and to give him the chance to give the kiss in a moment of vulnerability where they'd lured out a remnant of the Baron's human side. Curse lifted and gay love triumphant! I was wowed that they pulled it off, it was by far the most forbiddingly difficult route available to them.

My own approach to acquainting the players with Oppara was to run a prelude adventure before Crownfall that took them to various parts of the city and gave a sense of its overall society and culture (and created a reason for them to be recruited as agents). That said, the events of Crownfall provide plenty of juicy material for missions in Oppara during the weeks in the wake of the Exaltation Massacre.

The flavor here depends on how much civil strife you want there to be. Canonical WftC keeps things relatively cozy for the most part, leaving it open for problems to be solved as much through social sparring as with the sword.

You could mix it up here, depending on your party. If there are social luminaries among them, they could head off problems in high society "at the pass," as it were, before they develop into street violence. OTOH, maybe sometimes it's like Paris during the Fronde (or certain American states during the Floyd Protests of 2020), where the violence is already in the post and the party is stuck with trying to mitigate it.

The book provides a lot of NPC hooks you can use. Check out Notable Locations starting on p. 67. There are a number of prompts here that provide immediate mission ideas for me:

The Basilica of the Last Man: The character of Cyr Amestin, who has fallen somewhat under the spell of a holy longsword with a vestige of the Starstone's power, might be in peril in a landscape of contending factions that would be curious about that development. Perhaps she'll need to be evacuated to someplace safer and more obscure.

The Cathedral of Coins: The Tare and their leader Veneranda Cain might draw hostility from Imperialists, for her departure from tradition, and attract the support of the Loyalist faction for the opposite reason. Coping with an Imperialist attempt to infiltrate the Cathedral and perhaps kidnap Cain herself would be solid mission material.

Grandbridge Vagabond Camp: There's an enigmatic Human cavalier here named Samrag Nezres who abandoned her career for mysterious reasons five years ago. Did she have some presentiment of the Exaltation Massacre and the coming succession struggle? Was there another reason tied to a plot point of your choice?

Gray Market: A pro-Eutropia smuggler, Captain Seferi, is operating here. She could gain some heat from Imperialist factions in the city, or could be tasked with smuggling people or goods out of Oppara derived from missions elsewhere. A colorful hive-of-scum-and-villainy environment.

The House of Dawn's Redemption: If your group wants to lean into Battling Bigotry, Dawnmother Zenaida Tandleos and her Sarenite temple could be the ticket. She's always been considered suspect as someone who "redeems" genuine villains and might draw direct attack from mobs of bigots or corrupt operations within the city guard from White Hall.

That's a scattering of examples: there are many more. You can use them as pretexts for everything from dungeon crawls to tense social encounters to RP or combat encounters in the streets.

I like Mothman's idea for using this as an opportunity to introduce the Persona system, too, but you don't need to. There's plenty of time provided in Book Two to work into that.

He might have tried. But Taldor's notoriously bureaucratic.

Possibly. And the scenario you present is amusing. :) But I have the distinct impression that Taldor's secret societies -- who are the real contenders in the succession crisis -- are a lot more efficient and disciplined than its official bureaucracy.

(Doesn't mean they're flawless by any stretch, of course, and a rogue Pytharean agent or cell might work. I think that's canonically supposed to be what winds up happening. I just don't think it feels right, overall, for overall motives lining up.)

Also, while we're on things that nobody knows about, how is it that the Mantle of Taldaris is going to convince the nobles to fall in line behind Eutropia when it's been missing for thousands of years and no one except a few Pathfinders remembers it even exists? It's a little convenient.

The Mantle is a legendary artifact identified with Taldor's golden age. I don't think remembering its existence is the problem: it would be comparable to Excalibur, only with powers that were objectively real. And the loss of the Mantle basically signals the twilight of Taldor as an imperial power (its last great undertaking thereafter will be the Shining Crusade). The Pathfinders are unusual in having found its location, not in knowing it existed.

I don't think its turning up would be enough to derail a succession claim in happier times. But as a way of verifying a candidate amid the snarl of competing claims and weird rumors that the succession struggle eventually becomes, it certainly would present a useful "out" and a way of stabilizing the realm.

Another point in support of this is that the Exaltation Massacre should be a big thorn in the side of anyone's legitimacy who is suspected of involvement -- which must unavoidably mean most of the Imperialists, and is the major reason that Taldor is never going to be able to really coalesce behind any of them. This was, canonically, the wanton murder of two hundred people from the apex of Taldan society and hierarchy, an act kicked off by the Grand Prince publicly slaying the Exaltation Day candidate after giving an insane speech about loyalty. Feelings should run extremely hot about it everywhere, but most especially among the nobility.

Yeah, I saw that (pg. 51).

I just can't figure out what the net gain to the story is. "Oh, I know you guys are really into Eutropia's right to the throne but YOINK! turns out no one actually has a right and it's only by force of arms and a magic artifact that anyone is Grand Prince."

Kind of makes me want to do a terrible peasant accent and say "We don't 'ave a king. We're an autonomous collective! Supreme power derives from the masses, not some farcical ceremony involving an old man's magic sweater!"

Heh. That made me smile.

"Aha! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!"

I honestly don't know who can be expected to still remember House Adella, since the last of them died before the current dynasty as far as anyone knows. Maybe that's part of the confusion that greets the reveal: having Adella blood really can't disqualify you outright, but it complicates the calculus for at least some of the nobles who do know who they were and what they did. Hence the Mantle's decisive role.

I can go with it, as I said, because there's an angle where with sufficient setup it can actually be about forcing Taldor to confront certain things about itself and I think that's actually a cool concept. But of course, I'm literally rewriting a whole book of the AP to make that a point of impact, and I can fully understand why one might just skip it.

Honestly, though:

Oh, by the by: Book 4 does in fact contain an explanation for That Certain Reveal, but it's basically lore attached to an item and/or stash that the players may or may not find and may or may not correctly interpret. I don't think it meets the mark as regards actually integrating the Reveal into the story, though.

Rakshasas can disguise themselves as humanoids, so I'm assuming they'd have to pose as agents of Milon's thus-disguised in order to get into the manor. Once there, maybe make it possible to find a self-portrait of Milon in his own human guise on one of the walls? The sort of self-portrait your average self-respecting Taldan noble might commission?

I'm really interested in fleshing out Alkenstar for my gaming group. I like the idea of a post-apocalyptic Weird West setting that also happens to be Steampunk Wakanda set in the midst of not-East Africa (the latter vibe is something I would really lean into in terms of culture, fashion, and language).

I'm trying to figure out how it "works," to some extent, practically speaking: all the focus of the official fluff is on cities, but there have to be hundreds of dusty, hardscribble little Sergio Leone-style villages and hamlets in between where saloon entertainers can ply their trade and the Shield Marshals and Way of the Drifter gunslingers can be steely-eyed enforcers of justice (not to mention Protectors from Mutants) and the whole Weird West vibe can really flourish. This isn't even about economic "realism," per se, more like about loyalty to the canon Paizo made-of-tropes setting philosophy.

I had an idea for an NPC party from Alkenstar that was going to appear in a later adventure (we're doing little interlude adventures from our current AP). I don't think I'll get to run them, since the moment I mentioned Alkenstar to my players they wanted to run a party from there, but I like them. They're a troupe of saloon entertainers -- think a cross between Harry Houdini, Ringling Brothers, and the Wild West shows Buffalo Bill used to do -- called the Alkenstar All-Stars, and to get a sense of them, I built them out at 12th level in Pathbuilder.

I would have had, of course, to pare them back and rebuild them using those concepts to use them as NPCs. Building them as PCs was just a starting point to figure out a guideline for what abilities they should have as NPCs. I'm honestly glad that I probably won't have to do all of that... but I do have a wistful longing for my beloved All-Stars. I think they would make a really cool party.

Making use of the Four Hoods is a really good idea, I like that. (Yeah, I aged up Selli, too. I figured she'd "canonically" be nineteen by the time of WftC.)

Considering Stavian himself has a beard I'm not sure how far you could stretch the ban and make it something anybody would take seriously.

Well, Stavian having a beard would fit, since the original law was supposed to forbid commoners from wearing beards: not the nobility or royalty. But certainly, a lot of the distinction would seem to have faded by the time of WftC, where most of the nobles we meet don't wear beards and calling commoners the "unbearded" could seem, perhaps, closer to a fossil term.

Human societies can get awfully weird about hair, though, facial and otherwise, which is what makes Taldor's old-timey beard law such an interesting setting touch. Present-day Tajikistan only allows clean-shaven men to apply for passports, for example, because the government associates beards with radicalism. Enver Hoxha in Albania had a strictly-enforced ban on both long hair and beards for men. Laws regulating hairstyles and facial hair are historically not that uncommon.

I think the Ordnance of Beards is a wonderfully weird piece of in-setting lore and I'm not keen to lose it.

My solution, b/c it's not in force by the time of WftC, is that it has transitioned from being an actual law into being an unevenly-enforced custom that mostly benefits the expanded barber profession that sprung up to enforce it. There is a particularly solid reason in my case to do this in WftC because Stavian III has toyed with reinstating the policies of the Great Purge.

I can't remember, now, b/c I've lived with this so long, whether that last is part of my homebrew or part of the core material. In my campaign -- and I think this might have inspired someone from my pre-campaign studies and gotten imported into my campaign -- the reason this happens is that the Sarenite clergy failed to revive Prince Carrius after his death (on account of his soul not wishing to return). I think that might just be a my-campaign thing. But having anti-Sarenite oppression in the picture does add a bit more spice to the whole question, and I've certainly gotten some in-adventure mileage out of it.

It occurs to me that the connection between the beard law and the question of Sarenite oppression isn't totally clear, and might also be a my-campaign thing. In my mind, the Ordnance of Beards is connected with the Great Purge b/c Sarenite clergy also wore beards (I think of them by analogy with the habits and aesthetic of Muslim clergy to some extent), and so the Ordnance was designed to deprive them of this right and to reserve that particular symbol of wisdom and authority for the nobility. Its impact on the general commoners of the realm was almost incidental to this purpose.

This is almost definitely a my-campaign thing, now that I'm thinking about it. But... well, I think it holds together. More or less. :)

I think the Ordnance of Beards is a wonderfully weird piece of in-setting lore and I'm not keen to lose it.

My solution, b/c it's not in force by the time of WftC, is that it has transitioned from being an actual law into being an unevenly-enforced custom that mostly benefits the expanded barber profession that sprung up to enforce it. There is a particularly solid reason in my case to do this in WftC because Stavian III has toyed with reinstating the policies of the Great Purge.

I can't remember, now, b/c I've lived with this so long, whether that last is part of my homebrew or part of the core material. In my campaign -- and I think this might have inspired someone from my pre-campaign studies and gotten imported into my campaign -- the reason this happens is that the Sarenite clergy failed to revive Prince Carrius after his death (on account of his soul not wishing to return). I think that might just be a my-campaign thing. But having anti-Sarenite oppression in the picture does add a bit more spice to the whole question, and I've certainly gotten some in-adventure mileage out of it.

Oh, that's a neat idea, thank you!

I'm pleased you like it. If you have any further requests for advice, I'll try to make any further responses more in the spirit of the improv commandment "Yes, and." :D

I read it as Stavian demands this crazy thing and he has sufficient, sufficiently amoral forces willing to carry out his order that it gets carried out.

Yeah, fair enough. The question that would come up for me is how Pythareus could possibly be kept out of that loop.

Perhaps, however, there's a possible candidate for that if you want to keep the full stench of the Massacre off Pythareus. My suggestion -- I keep bringing him up here because he's a big figure in Taldan lore but mysteriously absent from the AP -- would be the enigmatic maverick and canonical close advisor to Stavian III, Dominicus Rell.

(I just really like Rell as a possible villain, really. Is it partly the ring of the name? Yes. But he's also hyper-capable, he routinely outmaneuvers his fellow Masters from the Blades, he's in office when the Massacre happens, and he'd be someone who could coordinate an effort like that while successfully keeping it even from a highly-placed figure like Pythareus. And given how capable he's supposed to be, it beggars belief that this close advisor who had the Grand Prince's ear could not at least have caught a whiff of the whole thing. Just, y'know, food for thought. :) Enjoy.)

So I'm making Eutropia's position be "Sort out a byzantine mess of succession laws that don't make a lick of sense or have any standard, then repair the international reputation of our outdated joke of a country".

Those would make sense as long-term objectives.

(IDK where you got size of government angles?

My bad. I was somewhat misreading the passage "has a plan of byzantine complexity for social services once she’s done reforming the legal system to ensure more #girlbosses" and what followed. Thanks for clarifying.

I don't want Pythareus to be some moustache-twirling villain. He should be the most legitimate and respectable possible figurehead of the militarist/imperialist faction.

I mean, the basic issue is that if you have the Exaltation Massacre -- which needs a big operation to make happen -- then the faction responsible for it isn't that likely to be particularly legitimate and respectable. That whole part of the scenario is pretty much purpose-built to evoke protofascism.

(Yeah, I get that this calls up uncomfortable echoes of recent history for some, understandably so. But it's worth remembering that Pythareus was originally an analogue to a reasonably common breed of would-be military dictator and any other resemblances are likely incidental. We also do get to see in Book Four that Pythareus is not inherently evil so much as being driven to the edge of madness and paranoia by the Circle, so I wouldn't be too concerned with his moustache-twirler status? That applies to the people manipulating, and most of them do get to have actual character motives, too.)

As for Pythareus being able to rally a nation: it's Eutropia who is swimming upstream and really needs the extraordinary charisma, the Strategos has the benefit of inertia on his side. Analogous figures manage to rally political support despite not necessarily being all that personally impressive, there's no reason Pythareus shouldn't. But basically there are just a lot of moving pieces attached in the AP to Pythareus and his motives and actions, I would just be wary of messing with them too much: you might find there are unintended side-effects.

I want both main candidates to be elite aristocrats in an organ-waving contest that does nothing but hurt the common people at the bottom... [remainder snipped but not ignored]

Okay. Well, I just think be forewarned that when introducing even the potential angle of a PC heir, that caution in the AP is probably there for good reason. Given that the AP is already structured to provide a contrast between an imperfect option and a worse one but also to give the players' actions specific input into what the "imperfect" option actually winds up looking like, I'm not sure there's much benefit to be had from further complicating the picture given the potential pitfalls.

Of course you'll have to do what you feel is best. Of all the "things not to change" flags that went up for me, that does happen to be the biggest one, is all I can say. Good luck!

IDK how helpful my suggestions would be given that some of the things you suggest here seem already baked-in to what your players will have agreed to. But I'll give them. For reference, I'm running a 2E-adapted version of the AP and we're about midway through Book 2. (We're presently on a break as we're alternating this campaign with a long-running Starfinder campaign.)

That's not to say that there are things I wouldn't edit or change myself. The AP is contending with a lot of prior lore from Taldor, not all of which totally makes sense, and there are specific story beats that I am considering changing, or explaining in different ways.

Hope that's some help. Good luck.

The problem is that I'm struggling to find Taldan emperors that are not relevant to the AP that would be a good choice for a vengeful spirit. Does anyone here have a good idea of who the spirit could be?

This is a cool idea.

If you don't want to go the route of simply inventing your own Grand Prince (although I think that's a fine idea, too, and there's plenty of blank canvas in the sweep of Taldan history to work with -- I invented my own Grand Princes for the Shining Crusade era), there are a couple of figures from extant Pathfinder lore who might work.

Micheaux the Magnificent is the emperor who is supposed to have fathered the first Stavian. He makes no direct appearance in the AP but is definitely relevant to certain events and figures in it. His reign went from 4499 AR to 4526 AR.

Beldam II was Micheaux's predecessor and adoptive father. The lore originally proposed him as the figure who expunged House Adella and he is in a way a direct Stavian ancestor, so if you chose not to use Micheaux's lore, this earlier Grand Prince would still have some of the same motives.

Uirtamon II reigned sometime in the 28th century AR and has a connection to the Mantle of Kings, which is also relevant to the AP. He is the emperor who hid it, some suspected because he was a disguised imposter. A spirit version of him might repent of the instability that act has now made possible and might even remember the original hiding place. He would also possibly have been quite familiar with intrigue and backstabbing, both literal and figurative, during his mortal life.

Goscelyn II is the most ancient potential figure with a WFTC connection, this one more distant. He reigned from 1592 to 1622 AR and is credited with founding the Lion Blades. Since this organization is now playing a role in current events, perhaps he has some loyalty to it. That connection can become more important if you choose to give some play to Dominicus Rell, who isn't actually mentioned in the AP but is prominent in other Taldor-related lore and one of the Lion Blades masters at the time of WFTC.

A figure like Rell, who was canonically a close advisor of Stavian III, might either have warned the Lion Blades about the Exaltation Massacre or conspired to make it happen; if the latter, it would align him with the Immaculate Circle and constitute the grossest betrayal of the Blades' mission perhaps ever to occur. That's something that could motivate vengeance from the spirit of the Blades' founder.

(Rell also potentially offers an opportunity to spice up the ranks of the Immaculate Circle baddies a little bit, if that's something you're in the market for.)

At any rate, most of these figures will be obscure enough to most players that you can probably use them without the risk of spoiling anything. Using Micheaux might be especially useful if you can get your hands on a copy of Tomb of the Iron Medusa, because he actually appears in a flashback in the module which you could use to help build a sense of his character and mannerisms.

Oh, there's one other thing I should cover. A sidebar to a sidebar, see the spoiler text titled "Making this make sense" in the last major post:

Thanks to any readers for reading all this guff.

Hello, everyone. I'm actually running a 2E adaptation of this AP, pretty heavily modified, but I still think these observations might of use to the odd person using either system who wonders what all those names on the "Succession Loyalty" maps in Books 2 and 5 are about. Are they just set dressing? Do they matter at all beyond conveying a super-general impression? I ran across a similar question in an archived Reddit thread so at any rate I know someone out there somewhere has asked themselves this question, as I did when I encountered those maps.

Before we get started: Of course, all sorts of spoilers in the below for the AP. I'm not going to trouble too much about spoiler tags unless I relate something specific to my game that my players might read.

And a stipulation: Also of course, you technically don't need to worry about any of this. The broader details of the struggle in Taldor aren't part of the AP. The only reason I became interested in it is that I wanted to have ways of conveying a broader sense of a large-scale crisis happening in Taldor to my players (who are in the second chapter of Book Two) that comes from news seeping in from outside their current frame.

I was curious if those maps might actually be resources for that. Or at least have some worthwhile Easter Eggs. Turns out, they are. And they do.

So, if you've ever had the question: "What the heck are all those names on those succession maps? Are they just random? Do they refer to anything in canon?" The answer is that they're not just random, at least not all of them, and quite a lot of them do call back to references in prior Taldor-related products (or just earlier modules). They also, it turns out, are set up -- and if this was accidental it's an amazing accident, but I don't feel like it is -- to evoke stories, or at least the building blocks of stories, that the AP text doesn't make explicit.

Having dug into this a bit, I might as well pay it forward. Here goes.

I feel like saying or forcing all ancestries to be the same is being disrespectful to their uniqueness and culture.

And sure enough, elves, halflings, dwarves and gnomes, half-elves and (in the somewhat-more-progressive now-about-time) even goblins and half-orcs can all be distinct from each other and possessed of their own particular ranges of characteristics and flaws with none of them having to read like Christian Identity fanatics writing about the darkies. Which is because there's a long way between "races shouldn't be canned racist stereotypes" and "fantasy ancestries shouldn't have any differences," and it's never necessary to defend or tolerate racism for the sake of variety.

I feel like when every single book takes the more nuanced approach except one, the one in question is the exception rather than the rule, even if that one is the Bestiary.

Well. Except for the part where it's absolutely not the exception to larger fantasy RPG tradition. Those problematic Bestiary entries don't exist in isolation; they have the weight of long tradition pressing in behind them. The trope "Orcs are literally and truly everything your Fox News-watching uncle thinks is Just Facts About the Ghetto" has been reproduced ad nauseam for decades, with the major exception being the odd "Blizzard-style green Klingon" orcs (who are kind of a Noble Savage trope with its own issues, but that's outside the scope I'm discussing here).

It's asking a lot of exceptions to this appearing in a couple of other setting books and player guides to do the work of dispensing with the massive inertia of that tradition. So you'll forgive me if I can't give a lot of weight to protestations that "I think you're reading way too much into a single page of a single book here." Whether or not it's just a mistake or deliberate cowardice I guess is kind of a side issue; it significantly confuses the supposed mission of the game to pursue a diversity-friendly approach. Esp. with its appearing in a fairly basic-utility book like the first Bestiary for the new system, as opposed to arguably more optional content like World Guides or Advanced Players' Guides. (In the sense that you really don't need the Lost Omens World Guide to build adventures for a PF2e campaign; doing without the Bestiary content is a bigger ask.)

Expecting better than this does not, by the way, require the orcs to be retroactively made into misunderstood Good Guys, that's something of a strawman. You don't have to do that to make a people into something more than a litany of crude, vicious, venom-spitting racial stereotypes. Other peoples have complicated societies with good and bad actors that aren't "mostly" any one thing. Implementing a similarly diverse standard for "monster races" just has to hold out the possibility that different events and conflicts might have different interpretations and complex causes, for instance. That there might be layers to events or personalities or peoples previously touched upon that we haven't previously seen. That even your existing history, even if it once subscribed to Tolkien Orcs But Cruder, still admits of possibilities for better, more nuanced storytelling.

That's a good thing, I think. It's surely one of the reasons you build a fantasy setting with millennia worth of often ambiguous and deliberately obscure history to play in and with.

Paizo has already started down this road, so I'm a hard sell that Pathfinder is painted into a corner by its prior stories here. They've essentially committed to retconning the previous standard position that Goblins are baby-eating raiders who cannot be good... even if the current version is still only the minimal concession that there might be a few "good" ones. There is, as you've correctly pointed out, already some confliction of the stereotypical Orc going on in PF2e material. Which tells me there's plenty of room for the proposition of taking Goblin personhood beyond that limited concession, and likewise for (say) making Drow into something more potentially interesting than cruel, soulless sadists, or for simply not reproducing the Standard Orc in anything they publish, be it by "mistake" or not.

@Deadmanwalking: I quite agree that the game has made some strides in not reinforcing certain stereotypes *mechanically* for certain "ancestries" (although I also agree with the OP that some approaches to, say, Human Backgrounds undercut that achievement in a way that suggests Paizo as a whole isn't on the same page about what a "game for everyone" really means). That description of the approach to the Orcs seems promising.

That said, *opens Bestiary*:

And the Bestiaries tend to be focused a bit on those of the group in question that are likely to become adversaries. In fact, going to your goblins comparison, the goblin description in the Bestiary is actually pretty similar, because many goblins are still very unpleasant culturally.

*Most,* in fact, according to the Bestiary entry. Which sort of raises other questions, e.g. why the Bestiary continues to assume goblins and orcs as likely enemies and doesn't assume anything similar for most other playable races. And even setting that aside, why the Bestiary actually can manage nuanced, non-derogatory descriptions of, say, Catfolk adversaries but won't do the same for certain others, despite their getting more sympathetic treatment in other supplements that demonstrates Paizo is capable of hiring writers who don't basically rely on adjusted Eighties Monster Manual copy.

This... yeah. Feels like trying to have it both ways, basically. Goblins are *mostly* evil but you can play as one of the "good ones." Orcs are *mostly* subhuman sword-fodder filth and you have to buy the right supplements to get a different picture of them (the Bestiary includes *no* qualifying language about this or that group of orcs, for example, a courtesy it at least manages to extend --albeit in incredibly dubious "there are a few exceptions" fashion -- to the goblins).

If you've recognized that "monster races" as-received actually tend to reflect and reinforce at-the-table racism (which factually, they do, and of which the baby-steps toward playable "monster races" that aren't stereotypes are a tacit recognition) that would also have to involve recognizing that these kinds of "exceptions" are already native to racist discourse. Basically they provide scope for your PCs to say "hey, my best friend is a [goblin or orc or whatever]" but still indulge most of the standard laundry-list of stereotypes and D&D cliches.

Committing to diversity is going to have to mean committing fully to diversity at some point, hopefully soon. They've already got the basic track on how to do this: you can have people in the game have stereotypes, false beliefs and/or genuine grievances with and about each other without having the game world simply side in both fluff and mechanics with one group or the other. You can still tell rich stories about cultural conflict without having your game declare the racist interpretation to be the correct one; in fact, the game is generally enriched by avoiding that. PF2e still seems to want to dance on either side of the fence, which should've stopped being a thing a long time ago.

Someone mentioned above that there have been changes to orcs in Pathfinder 2e. Have there? I'm just dipping my toes into the new system and I see there have been changes to how half-orcs are handled (and implications that the stereotypes of them are unjustified), but it's rather undercut by the fact that orcs themselves seem to obey the same shit "collection of things white supremacists say about 'savages'" pattern they always have, for example: https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=324.

This is particularly weird with Goblins now getting to be actual people in 2e.

I've been wondering recently whether the exclamation point in "Zo!" is pronounced or not.

Little-known fact: due to an obscure quirk of Eoxian, all visible letters of the name are silent and it is actually pronounced "fan-shaw."

So what if another player is better or just as good as you at something? Roll the check anyway! You want it, then get it. If you don't want to be caught in a perpetual aid another situation, then just don't aid another. Surprise, there are other ways of playing than the optimum. Just relax, and play the game.

This.

The thing I've kind of refrained from mentioning but is kind of important at Starfinder tables I think is: "don't let mania for optimization get out of hand." Personally, I find the mentality that stews in resentment of another character getting to be as good at something as mine... rather on the petty side. And needlessly so.

I mean, I play a Solarian at a table where she's consistently competitive with our Cha-focused Envoy at certain social skills (b/c I built to maximize my key stat and powers). I have never once had to field complaints from that player when I "beat" him at a Bluff or an Intimidate check. Because, why would I? We've both got plenty of other space in the system to expand out and strut our stuff.

For me, a jack-of-all-trades is someone good in all skills, but specialist in none.

Yeah, and here's the thing: I don't believe there's a big market for playing someone who has a bunch of skills but basically sucks at all of them. What you have then is a character whose skills are marginally useful in any context but probably constantly outclassed by at least one other specialist party member on any given occasion. The "master of none" in this sense seems to me to be rarely seen at tables for just this reason. It's uselessness. It's the opposite of getting to play a heroic character.

The point of being an Operative with a skills focus is being Space James Bond. You have a wide skill set on which you can consistently deliver. An Envoy or an Operative focused on being a "skill monkey" will inevitably become this kind of character. If you have people at the table who are going to resent that character or feel like they're overshadowed, then aside from planning and communication, it may also be worth remembering that skill checks are only a small subset of the class powers and abilities that make up the game.

Honestly, a better solution for my money instead of ripping the guts out of one of the classes is just to have some pre-consultation about people's builds and roles.

One of Starfinder's best features is that you can produce a wide variety of character concepts using many different classes (and you're allowed to be competent in combat and good or even better at other things), which means you can be one of the galaxy's bestest hackers with an operative, a technomancer, an envoy or a mechanic equally easily. But this does mean that if someone is going to be upset if someone else's character is going to be able to compete with an ability they wanted to be exclusive in, that's going to take some planning and some clarity about concepts and niches.

Or not. :)

But I've come upon a stumbling block that I can't get around, which is the basis for the game.

And that is technology in the the science fiction role playing has to be severely limited to allow for character interaction but that's not realistic for that universe.

A lot of things are taken care of by Starfinder's being a science-fantasy setting. You can have en-souled AIs, cyber-enhanced organisms, robots, androids, extra-planar scions and star shamans and straightforward meatsacks with extraordinary capabilities all inhabiting the same space. The game is deliberately Made of Tropes for this very reason, to allow you that freedom. You aren't bounded by Science alone. It's one of the game's most basic and IMO most profound features. In that sense, the simple answer is not to try to play it all as Hard SF. You're missing out on one of Starfinder's most basic benefits if you ignore that advantage.

(That said, when questions about technology come up, I generally tend to favor the solution that most favors tech we have today or can plausibly imagine having The Day After Tomorrow. For example, I generally let players in my game do anything with a comm-link that a present-day smartphone could do.)

I've found what's best is not to get hung up on those minutiae and to treat science-fantasy as a gateway drug to the kinds of stories (sci-fi or sci-fantasy) that fantasy roleplayers would not normally encounter. This can be very rewarding. I've introduced my players to:

- A far-future-cyberpunk story featuring an alien ship whose governing AI was infinite iterations of the consciousness of a slain Starfinder;

- A one-shot on a deep space rogue planet inhabited by "monsters" who turned out to be the lonely descendants of a long-destroyed civilization who had lived for the last 21 million years under their planet's crust;

- An intricate long-arc quest that involved an ancient interplanar war between factions from a far-off star situated at the very edge of "the Vast" above the galactic disk, a world that had once been run by Humanoids but was now being run by a rigidly-programmed android descendant society that had replaced them;

- An ecological parable about corporate greed and counter-corporate extremism on Castrovel;

- (more science-fantasy style) A one-shot on Eox that showed an undead society living endless Unlives of Quiet Desperation in which the party's objective was to stop an illicit "Samsara Ring" that was reincarnating the undead as living slaves;

And so on. Most of them aren't accustomed to stories that go beyond "Dark Lord blah blah find an artifact blah blah Defeat Evil blah blah," and the rewards of sneaking in more strictly sci-fi story arcs (or unorthodox fantasy ones) under the science-fantasy coating have been inspiring. It's worth not sweating the smaller details to have those larger opportunities.

Okay, December 23rd and January 6th. :) We had to reschedule the session on the 30th to today.

We got a fourth member on this outing: a Wis-based human Biohacker (and Xenoseeker) to complement our existing (Int-based) Biohacker.

First off, we wrapped up the end of our 8th level session which had the original party of three in battle with a young blue dragon and his Dragonkin "Stepsons." The dragon came pretty close to killing them, but they prevailed: even at eighth level, the Vanguard can dish out some obscene damage with just a little lucky break on the rolls (or even without it), the Witchwarper can be very hard to lay a claw on, and the Biohacker's healing, buffs and debuffs are less spectacular but come in undeniably handy.

We then embarked on the last leg of our playtest journey: 14th-level play. We tried the party out in starship combat, running a Tier-appropriate Explorer ship against a trio of starfighters, on their way to investigate the hulk of a lost Starfinder ship.

This was a little more straightforward than starship combats I usually run, but even though a couple of our players were inexperienced with starship combat we had a fine outing full of fly-by strafing, close calls, creative use of Engineering and clutch Captain and Gunnery actions. Our Int-based Biohacker ran Engineering, our Witchwarper made a fine Captain, our Vanguard was a strong gunner and our Wis-based Biohacker... forgot to build for starship combat and drank tea. :) All in all, though, pretty solid.

Afterward, aboard the hulk, we faced a set of undead opponents and then a rogue faction of Jinsul (not yet known by that name, here they were "Unsubs"):

1) The Vanguard at 14th-level inhabited their super-tough tank role ever-more-perfectly and delivered some nasty surprises for opponents with their Vanguard Disciplines.

2) The Witchwarper had a cornucopia of fun toys to play with. Their Infinite Worlds and Alternate Outcomes powers were just a few that got a solid workout. They proved untouchable in the first combat encounter and close to it in the second, even when specifically targeted by a powerful enemy Technomancer.

3) The Biohackers were very effective de-buffers, especially in the second combat, who degraded the enemy's capabilities dramatically the longer an encounter went. It reached a point where they had the opponents in the second encounter afflicted by so many simultaneous conditions at once that they could no longer mount a serious offensive, despite having plenty of HP and other resources left.

The Witchwarper on balance proved the most single impressive class for our group. The Vanguard was next, though getting some of its abilities into play frustrated the player at certain points. The Biohackers had fun but overall felt like they had the shortest menu of available options in our scenario, and felt the class' abilities were often more "situational." (This is partly a function of running short, combat-focused one-shots; I feel like in longer and more story-oriented adventures they would have had more opportunities to shine.)

In all our group enjoyed the new classes and the adventures we had with them quite thoroughly. Thanks to the Paizo team for the chance to take part in this playtest.

Just wrapped the first of two planned playtest sessions for the new classes.

We're running a group of Starfinders composed solely of new-class characters; it would've been nice to have some more "traditional" characters to compare and contrast, but unfortunately we don't have enough players free in this time-frame in our regular group(s) to accommodate that.

The adventures are a series of short scenarios at the low, mid and high levels of play: 3rd, 8th and 14th levels respectively. I wanted quick snapshots of how play runs at each of these levels. The premise is a retrospective on the career of a Starfinder group that drops into and out of the major scenes in a long story arc.

Our characters were an SRO Vanguard (Momentum Aspect), a human Biohacker (Pharmacology field) and a human Witchwarper. Today's session covered the entire 3rd-level adventure and part of the 8th-level scenario. Takeaways:

1. In terms of class abilities and features, the Witchwarper was probably the MVP and really impressed at both 3rd and 8th levels. Interestingly enough, the Infinite Worlds ability didn't see use in either scenario. However, the Paradigm Shift "Lessen Injury" proved extremely useful in both outings, as did the "Summon Creature" spell. Charming Veneer was helpful in the low-level encounter. 8th-level play saw clutch uses of Alternate Outcome, Augury and Displacement.

2. The Vanguard was a very tough tank and effective melee fighter. Thus far, aside from the protection afforded by their shield, we've seen their Aspect Insight and I think the Accelerate discipline in action: both were effective, but I have the feeling we're going to see much more of their class powers in play in the second session as the player gets more familiar with the class (and has a clearer head -- they were a champ today and were fighting through sickness to be with the group).

3. The Biohacker's scientific skillset saw lots of non-combat use, and they're also the party face. Their other class-specific abilities saw less frequent use, again probably because the player is still getting used to them, but their Field Dressing and Counteragent abilities have seen clutch use in the 8th-level scenario already.

I'm thus far pretty impressed by this small party's performance overall, both in and out of combat -- the encounters I've thrown at them have ranged from Challenging to Epic and required solid teamwork and creative play -- and the glimpse I've gotten of the Witchwarper's class abilities has been both impressive and flavorful. I think I'll have a fuller picture of each class after our second session, when our Vanguard and Biohacker players have gotten more comfortable with their class abilities. All the classes seem really fun and interesting thus far, though.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just that a lot of it seems to just be different for the sake of being different.

It's simplified. Pathfinder's system of bonuses in particular was kind of a trainwreck.

It's also broadened to include scenarios that weren't commonly part of Pathfinder, like starship combat and vehicle chases.

The math is tighter so that it at least marginally makes sense to be rolling d20s to decide anything at mid- to high-level play.

The magic system is rebalanced so that magic-using classes are effective at low levels and don't vault above everyone else to godhood at high levels.

It's different for the sake of being an improved system that can run science-fantasy effectively.

Yeah, Roll20 isn't that complex. If a techno-peasant like me can use it, anyone can. Believe me. :)

I do highly recommend using the "basic" Starfinder sheet. The "officially-sponsored" sheet has so many weird, elliptical and counterintuitive assumptions built into its design that in practice it's close to useless. Someone else is going to have to come along and design a new sheet from the ground up with the end user actually in mind. (Apologies to the creator if they should happen across this, I wanted to like it and I don't say this with malice. But it's true.)

For a more "local" example of enigmas from the Gap: there are still Elves, dragons, and of course Eoxian undead and various extraplanar beings old enough to have lost memories to the Gap. In fact, it's perfectly possible that Bone Sages exist whose unlives actually span the Gap, before and after. (Though probably no such figure will ever appear in official materials.) The Gap didn't wipe out all information evenly and there are pockets or "caches" of data that survive and can be reconciled with each other.

In light of this, one interesting character-driven hook could be discovering such a "cache" within the memories of several immortals at once: perhaps a particular intense shared memory of a spot on a certain world where the various entities interacted that could provide a clue to a major interplanetary war, or a summit of great powers, or clues to the origins of a specific threat that survived into the post-Gap universe. How this particular "memory cache" could come to light would be a story unto itself.

In the meantime, such entities still retain memories from during the Gap that would hint at *possible* events, but those memories would be fuzzy and indistinct and would change on any attempt to recall them, much like dreams. That could be a source of countless contradictory but suggestive and compelling accounts of events during the Gap which might well provide all sorts of fuel for archaeological attempts to verify one narrative or another.

One day, I hope some devs in Paizo can create some examples of the contradictory and nonsensical information that made it out of the Gap so players (who care to) can internalize the same things as people living after the Gap.

Technically, contradictory and nonsensical information is always making it out of the Gap. Any view of any star from more than 317 light-years away is a view of that star before the Gap. This means the Gap would have to be constantly "present," in a sense, randomizing or confusing data whenever it's observed at that distance.

This would play serious havoc with astronomy. In fact, astronomy as we know it would be impossible, since in this universe you cannot get consistent readings on the planets orbiting stars at any significant distance in light-years. Maybe the data varies every-so-slightly for different observers at different times; likely the stars look "normal," but closer investigation reveals that you're looking at a foam of quantum indeterminacy that never resolves into a single picture.

That would be the primary (and most alien) example of contradictions coming out of the Gap. It would add a whole other layer of enigma to Ibra the Inscrutable in particular, who may be directly responsible for randomizing or confounding information about distant cosmological phenomena. It would be why Ibra's "followers worship through appreciation of the cosmos, and disregard all notions of moral alignment in place of simple questions about the patterns and properties of celestial bodies — questions Ibra's followers must simply ask, as the answers themselves are immaterial."

"Historical records are mixed up and contradict each other" is pretty small potatoes by comparison (and not all that different from normal-universe history as Raving points out).

The Aeon Guard was designed by someone like you who didn’t understand the rules.

While I'm certainly amused by the singular qualities of "you clearly know nothing about the rules, just like the designers of the game" as a riposte... it's not really a good look, mate.

Anyway, the very passage you quote as supposedly proving Armor in class grafts doesn't affect AC says this:

you can skew the creature’s gear by a few levels, though you might need to make other adjustments to its statistics if you do so.

Because the class grafts affect the creature's statistics. All of them. As if it was wearing gear. Which, sensibly, is the reason gear would be part of class grafts. Your highly esoteric reading of the towering importance of one use of the word "attacks" is at odds with all other evidence of how class grafts work. Which strongly suggests that your highly esoteric reading is mistaken.

The armor and underlying dex bonus determining AC as with a PC calculation?

It's pretty clearly not "as with a PC calculation" since PC calculations aren't based on the stats in creature arrays, and class grafts are. But hey, if you're happy applying every element of armor except its AC bonuses to your NPCs, you do you. Just don't try to tell the rest of us we're wrong for following the clear intent and actual application of the rules as written.

Xenocrat wrote:

Getting armor is part of the graft. Adjusting stats is not. Only damage from weapons selection is adjusted. The Aeon Guard was designed by someone like you who didn’t understand the rules.

Alright, no need for anything personal. CeeJay does have a point in that the RAW of class grafts say you do adjust things with armor and weapons as well. However, I would still argue that this adjustment is large wnough to warrant a CR change.

Hey, everything is optional. :) One can always house-rule them.

That said, I've been designing NPCs "wrong-according-to-Xenocrat" (e.g. by the actual rules) for more than a year of weekly SF sessions and have yet to run into the class graft adjustment that breaks CR. (I have effed up CR in other ways from time to time, mind you... but not that way. :D ) That experience has left me fairly sure that the CR system has already been designed with class grafts, gear and their results in mind, so FWIW it's not something I'd worry about.

Very good. Bones rolled, as it were.

Scummed all the applicable gear, 'ware, etc. from the 5th ed shadowrun books and pasted it into a big 'ol word doc.

Well, this is remarkable. I'm not sure how the balance with Starfinder's economy is working out, I'll have to check in more detail when I have the chance. But the level of detail is certainly impressive.

Be interesting to see what you wind up doing with Essence.

I'm more familiar with Starfinder than Pathfinder 1e, but I'm willing to learn and this seem like an interesting opportunity.

I'd actually be really interested in reading the consolidated advice thread at the tips link, but at the moment none of the links indexed in the first post of that thread seem to work. Just FYI.

I think we need to move this all to the Homebrew section soon. We're getting down a rabbit hole at this point and it's rapidly turning dystopian on us.

Although arguably any setting that treats Hellknights as normal is already dystopian. The ideas here are really just logical extensions of what they could get away with in such a setting.

...for feat prerequisites. Like I keep saying.

In point of fact I used my Theme bonus on a Solarian character to position them for the Connection Inkling feat in precisely this way.

(I mean, the Theme bonus applied to my key stat and freed up a point to spend on Wisdom. Point being the resulting stat arrays are not functionally equivalent.)

I wouldn't expect it to be relevant very often at lower tiers. When you have a total of twenty SP to work with, you either have someone tasked to keep the shields up or you're dead, pretty much. There's not a ton of wriggle room.

It could quite easily become relevant at larger scales, though. I can easily see constructing race-against-time scenarios for a ship with SP in the hundreds. It might well not be the players' ship at issue.

For instance:

"The crew of the Sunrise Maiden are glumly waiting for spaceport clearance on Verces after a rather officious Steward frigate pulled rank on them, claiming urgent business planet-side. A few minutes later, though, they're watching in horror as an internal explosion shakes that very ship and its systems seem to go dead... all save a desperate distress call from its burning bridge, pleading for help.

"A scan by the Science Officer shows the situation is dire. The vessel's shields, engines and life support appear to be down and it's headed fast toward Verces' atmosphere. A quick conference with its captain confirms their chief engineer is not responding and shields will not recharge themselves quickly enough to keep the vessel from burning up on entry.

"Swallowing his pride, the Constable-Captain grits his teeth and says: 'We need your help, Starfinders. Please.'"

Et voila. You have an orbital rescue encounter with a nail-biting time limit. Just one possibility.

Heck, I might actually use that one. ;)

Report-back, for the sake of completeness: I actually did run this very encounter with my group in our last session, with the ship in question being an interplanetary luxury liner.

It was super-fun. They got to use the Interstellar docking music as they boarded the ship :) -- our Captain player had it all ready to go, he'd apparently been waiting for a scenario like this for months -- struggled their way through a panicking crowd and did battle with a group of terrorists on a heavily-irradiated engineering deck as they tried to restart the ship's engines (they had five turns total to get it done) all while the ship was in a flat spin, its "inertial dampeners" inoperative and its spins throwing all the combatants this way and that from turn to turn, with more Bludgeoning damage each turn.

Incredibly tense and satisfying, I recommend it.

Part of the attraction of being a Solarian or a spellcaster.

I put together this document about "dress code" and weapons etiquette informed by what I learned from running my first (still-ongoing) campaign.

(What I learned being basically to adopt some clear guidelines upfront that seem consistent with the setting as presented. I like being able to challenge my players with situations where they won't always be bristling with weapons and armour but didn't think to make this part of our pre-game campaign discussions, something I would do if running a fresh campaign.)

I don't know what your experience level with non-DnD-based systems (as PF and SF are) is, but what I'm trying to express might be more difficult to explain if you haven't played any "talk-focused" systems like World of Darkness.

No, it's not difficult to explain. It's just I think you're mistaken.

I mean yes, obviously, the tactical rules are a major part of the system. I'm not saying otherwise. They suck up a lot of detail even after much of Pathfinder's excess has been trimmed out -- indeed "combat" now also means three distinct sets of sub-rules, one of which is radically different from the others and favours completely different character abilities. Whether or not this means they're the "primary draw" of the game is questionable (I'll come back to that) but certainly there are large tracts of the system that are tightly designed around tactical detail.

But OTOH, look at what you do here:

Imagine taking a thick, black marker and crossing out everything that applies only to combat: health, weapon proficiencies, primary class features, talents that improve damage, etc.

No. Class features don't apply "only to combat" unless you're a Soldier. Health doesn't apply "only to combat." It also applies to survival scenarios like coping with disease and hostile environments. And it is not a minor detail that Starfinder allows characters to be built from 1st to 20th level with minimal emphasis on combat powers.

I mean, there's a reason certain sorts of Pathfinder players can be found on Starfinder forums complaining endlessly about, say, the Envoy, or about the profusion of Tricks and Revelations and other class features that aren't relevant to a dungeon-crawling combat grid. The tactical detail is there, but substantial chunks of the CRB are also devoted to environmental and hazard rules, starship building, computer construction, and all manner of things with only tangential combat relevance or potentially none at all.

Now yes, I've played systems that aren't descended from the wargame like DnD and its many brethren and children, and aren't designed to simulate tactical detail or particularly concerned with combat. You know what I notice? You don't really need much in the way of rules to simulate something like social conflict. I mean I've seen many systems that try to use "social combat" rules -- Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits, stake-setting systems, certain forms of PBtA "Moves" and "Playbooks" -- and they all have advantages and disadvantages, but the more elaborate systems are not in fact particularly more useful for social roleplaying. Often they tend to confuse roleplaying as much as anything.

Devoting "design space" to something can therefore be misleading as an indicator of emphasis -- much less of effectiveness -- and for my money it's a mistake to conflate the two. For example, you can largely ignore the elaborate weapons and equipment lists and play a group focused on wilderness exploration, diplomatic encounters with strange aliens, scientific problem solving and hacking strange alien computers in long-lost ruins if you want. You are not "wasting" all the "design space" devoted to combat if you do this, it's still there for you on those occasions when you might need it; you are just leaning in to different parts of the system that are also there for that purpose.

The system falls apart if you compare it to real world laws.

Well, there's no part of Starfinder that's designed to be compared with "real world laws." That much is certainly true. :D

I dunno. Presumably people always knew what Tusken Raiders looked like under those masks, but the masks were cooler and more iconic than whatever they concealed. I feel that way about Kasatha, a little.

. . . which allows the rest of the group to escape with the information and a couple of doggie bags.

This right here. This is what it's all about.