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Because dressing up like Apostles of Pain, kidnapping Belimarius's corrupt tax collector, burning down their home as their guards flee, interrogating them, killing them, then burying their body on the cultist's campus in order to frame them for the murder, so it would provoke a confrontation with the Emerald Guard and draw out captain Xoxl so that we could ambush and kill him in order to obtain the cooperation of the rune giants all seemed like the obvious course of action to me.

(Our GM suggested that we had, perhaps, taken the AP somewhat off the rails.)

Mid-afternoon, just as the gorge gives way to jagged hills, you receive word that your advanced scouts have returned. Irabeth sends messengers up the line to bring the column to a halt, and on the way back they ask you to follow for a quick meeting with her commanders and specialists.

Her retinue is pitching a quick tent to shield everyone from the stark sun, which seems more orange than usual. As you approach, she unfolds the table, the tent still rising around her, and watches as Aron unrolls a charcoal map. It's a quick tracing of one of the army's maps of Drezen and the surrounding lands, intended for marking up. You see ink in both red and blue where he had done just that.

>>> Scouting map here <<<

"As you can see, we have our first report on Drezen, which is just beyond that ridge." She points to the hills ahead. The road curves to the northeast, passing through a rugged, tree-covered landscape. The trees are thick and seem to be thriving but not unaltered, their trunks and branches are twisted and heavily scarred. "I want you here for this, so we can develop a strategy for taking the city."

You see four paladins, all captains in the army, join in the conference. They give Nurah a long sidelong glance, but don't seem alarmed by her presence.

"Specialist Kir. Whenever you are ready."

He looks up to Sosiel, and then a little longer over at Nurah, before beginning. "The only approach to the city is along the road. It was built to be defensible. These hills," he says, pointing to the approaches on the south end of the map, "are rugged. You could bring a handful of people in on foot, but armored infantry would be a challenge, and the supply wagons would never make it.

"They know this, and have placed two armies here, just ahead of Southbank." He points to the southern edge of the city where there are two red boxes, one with an X and the other with an oval in the center. "Light infantry, mostly tieflings, here. Armored infantry of humans and humanoids here. Both number about 200, give or take. They are staged along the edge of the tree line, close enough to support one another, but not immediately. You could take on one, and you might have a few minutes before you'd be facing the other. 

"Right now, these two armies control the south bank of the Ahari--hence the name. But, there's also an army of what appear to be a couple of hundred undead here. Probably ghouls, but I didn't get close enough to tell for sure." He points to the southwest edge of the map. There's a box inked in here, too, only with curved lines. "This is the Drezen cemetery, so I guess that's fitting. A deep ravine separates them from Southbank proper, though, so they can't really come to the aid of the main forces. There's something odd about them, by the way. They are clustered around what looks like a large crypt, which I've circled here.

"Anevia?"

Anevia steps up to the table. "This area up here is Paradise Hill. It has a number of fortified buildings, and is hosting a large number of goat-headed demons, maybe schirs or brimoraks. Most likely the former. They are dug in, so they'll be at an advantage. But, like Aron's ghouls, they aren't in a position to reinforce the main armies. They'd have to march across the bridge here to do it, and that takes time to organize."

You hear Nurah speak up. "Those buildings were originally warehouses, plus some general storage. Silos, and the like."

Anevia nods in response. "Looks like they mostly still are, but we'd need more time to watch their activities to know for sure.

"Last, there is the citadel itself. It's across the Aharia, or what was the Ahari, here." She points to the large structrue in the center of the map. "It had seven watchtowers in its prime, but today three have crumbled, leaving only four." She's circled the four that are intact, and put X's over the others. "There's a catapult in each, and each is guarded by a goat-headed demon. They are too far away to see, but I'd put my money on brimoraks. I saw them teleport in and out. We'd need more time to watch them, but it appears there's always one on duty.

"They could use the catapults to hit our army, but not once we're in the city proper. We'd be too close. But they'd still function as watchtowers."

Aron takes over again. "As for the Ahari, its banks are steep. It was down a steep incline even before it dried up, but it was dredged for ship traffic and that makes the dry riverbed even more difficult to traverse. It'd take a long time--hours at best, a day or two at worst--to get an army across by climbing, and they'd easy targets while they did it. So to get to the citadel, we have to cross the bridge here." He points to the bridge in the center of the map, which has been circled. "They know it, too, and have a small force guarding it. Mostly human or tiefling."

After 57 monthly, and occasionally twice-monthly, six-hour game sessions over four years and three months, or Jade Regent campaign came to an end in December of 2019. Since then, I acquired the books and skimmed through them, and talked with our GM a bit about some of the events around the AP, and used that to create this writeup: my final thoughts on the AP as a player.

Overall, I enjoyed this AP thoroughly.

What we changed

Very little. Most of us have families and multiple commitments, so playing even as infrequently as we do can be a challenge. GM’ing is a lot of work so to keep that gaming/real-life balance he runs AP’s mostly as written, and any tweaks tend to be minor or fixes for things that are obviously broken.

The biggest change we made: dropping caravan combat. I did just enough research before we started to learn this much. Our GM simply replaced caravan encounters with regular encounters and tweaked numbers accordingly. This let us focus on the caravan management and enhance it for overland travel instead of wasting resources on offensive/defensive capabilities.

We also tweaked some of the caravan rules that didn’t make sense (see “What worked due to heavy lifting”).

What worked

The biggest boon of the Jade Regent AP was, IMHO, the setup. The campaign traits established a world where the PC’s and NPC’s knew each other, and in most cases had known each other for a very long time. In some cases, our characters grew up together and in others we simply crossed paths frequently. The big exception to that was characters who chose Sandru as their NPC tie-in because he didn’t spend time in Sandpoint. For the most part, though, we had rich character histories that were intertwined both with each other and the NPC's, going back several years.

Crossing the Crown of the World was very cool and I think everything the authors wanted it to be. We felt isolated. We felt like one mis-step could be a TPK. Light and darkness were almost characters of their own. We were forced to throw a lot of resources into basic survival: Rings of Sustenance, cold-weather protection (including custom crafted items), bags of holding, and on and on.

This AP is a crafter’s dream. If you’ve ever wanted to play a campaign where you had time to craft magic items, this is the one. You are so isolated for so long that you have to craft. I can’t imagine playing in this AP without at least two crafters in the party.

The growing a rebellion story was a blast, especially in book 6 where you are expected to be a thorn in the JR's side, and incorporate a mixture of psychological warfare along with the pre-written encounters. We got really into these, sometimes taking the adventure a bit off the rails. The last two books were what the AP was building up to, and the build-up was worth it.

Overall, the AP had a near-perfect balance between RP and combat. It felt like there was something for everyone, multiple times, across all the books.

And last, but not least, the diversity of encounters, environments, monsters, combat, etc. was pretty amazing. It felt like the world-crossing journey that it was.

What worked only due to heavy lifting

The caravan rules were a huge burden. I managed our caravan and the amount of work involved here was insane, and that’s coming from someone who loves creating elaborate spreadsheets in Excel with macros for automation. I had a sheet dedicated to projections for range based on our provisions, consumption levels and travel speeds. I optimized our feats, our character roles and balanced and re-balanced our stores. And on and on. I have no idea how “normal” people run a caravan. In fact, a little Web searching suggests that most people don’t, and just hand-wave it because...it’s too much work. Way too much.

We learned early on how poorly-thought out the caravan rules really were. And I’m not just talking about combat. Some of the “jobs” made little sense. For example, “Spell Caster” is not a job: it’s a job that lets you perform other jobs. “Wainwright” also isn’t a job. You don’t fill your day on the caravan “wainwrighting”. It only comes into play when something breaks. Same goes for “Trader”. You aren’t trading while you’re traveling, you are trading when you stop somewhere. There were other little issues here and there.

Dropping caravan combat let us focus on the caravan as mobile basecamp. When crossing the Crown of the World, speed and consumption are king and queen. Our caravan had enhanced undercarriages and we maxed out both the Efficient Consumption and Enhanced Caravan feats. That was possible only because we didn’t have to worry about caravan hit points and other nonsense.

The AP also waits too long to reveal the specifics of crossing the Crown, including distances and cold weather rules. The players need to know this stuff up front because caravan planning is a burden. Holding the rules back until just before they are needed, like it’s some big secret, is pretty rude.

What didn’t work

NPC relationships. We tried. We really, really tried, but this subsystem was half-baked and the idea was all but abandoned by the AP after book 2. It felt like an idea the book 1 designers had but that no one else bought into or cared about. This is a problem in general with all of Paizo AP’s: they are consistently inconsistent in everything from tone to execution of subsystems. I could list all the little things that were wrong with NPC relationships, but it all boiled down to this: as a player, I felt let down by the AP. It set up expectations that it didn’t deliver on, and as a result it wasted my time and my game resources. That really, really sucks.

The AP struggles to keep the NPC’s relevant past book 2. And even in the first books it doesn’t do well. Even Ameiko, the most important of them all, is unconscious in book 1, exists only to be kidnapped in book 2, has no role in book 3, and does...what...exactly in book 5? The GM has to do a lot of heavy lifting.

The uninspired, overly long, boring, repetitive dungeon crawl through the House of Withered Blossoms in Book 4. Talk about a grind. This thing had “we need more XP” written all over it. We spent 8 months playing in this location and by the end I just wanted it to be over. The real kicker though? It wasn’t even challenging. It was just a chore. Ugh. Normally, I'd save this for the "by book" summary, but it was That Bad that I bring it up here.

What was a little uncomfortable

The AP has a “Western savior” theme that is difficult to ignore. It helps a lot if Ameiko lives, of course, but you’re still a bunch of foreigners who come into a new culture and then save them. That’s a little icky.

Renshii Meida being pregnant was one of those, “What was Paizo thinking?” moments. It’s dropped in solely to be used as leverage without even acknowledging that, hey, this means killing a pregnant woman. Seriously, this was just gross. I personally found it to be in exceedingly bad taste. We ended up turning Meida to stone and hand-waved that we'd "deal with it later" because there was not an OOC appetite for it.

My commentary on the individual books of the AP coming shortly.

Hello, everyone! This is the thread for tracking the progress of mapping Golarion. The goal is to obtain a reasonable latitude and longitude for Paizo's campaign setting maps. This is a continuation of the original thread that was focused on the Pathfinder 1st Edition setting. If you want all the gory details of this process and how we got to where we are, that is a great place to start!

In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, there are some significant changes to the Inner Sea region: we have regional borders (Saga Lands, Broken Lands, etc.) and some new nations. We were also given our first official, to-scale world map in the Core rule book. The goal is to build a 2nd edition data set, and incorporate new campaign material into that data set as it's released.

What can you do with this stuff, and why does it matter?

Once you have latitude and longitude, you can do a number of things that are useful in a game:

* Determine what time the sun rises and sets
* Calculate great-circle distances between far-away locations
* Build interactive maps
* Make reasonable guesses about climate and local weather patterns

Caveats

One thing to keep in mind is that Paizo's game designers are designers and illustrators first, and cartographers second. Their goal, rightly, is to help GM's and players tell stories not produce precision maps of the world. In fact, precise maps actually work against them because they limit options. So there are, and will continue to be, situations where two maps do not agree with one another, or line up perfectly on the globe. That's OK. This project aims for "close enough", and close enough is good enough.

How can you help?

You don't have to help, but if you want to, help is welcome! I can't keep up with every AP, module, campaign setting book or player guide because I don't have that kind of time, much less that kind of money. So, if you see a new region that expands our mapped areas, let me know! Anything that covers the other continents in particular is helpful.

If you want to provide more direct assistance, then you can help by doing any of the following:

* georeferencing maps (see below)
* tracing boundaries and features of georeferenced maps (see below)
* compiling data sets, such as population and demographic breakdowns of major cities
* reporting data errors and tpyos

The first two items on that list will require you to use a Geographic Information System (GIS) software package. If you have used GIS software before, then great! You already know the drill! If not, you can get started with QGIS, an open-source and feature-rich GIS package. Be warned, however, that GIS has a steep learning curve and its own terminology. It's not like drawing maps in Illustrator: GIS software is using complex mathematics to project a 3D world into 2D coordinates. Understanding map projections, map scales, and spatial analysis procedures are the foundation and learning this stuff takes time.

Feel free to post here or reach out to me directly via PM!

First off, I am a player in this campaign so, no spoilers please. I am just here to rant.

We killed the ninja assassin that was stalking us (pro tip: don't scry on people who are paranoid enough to always have Detect Scrying running, as they'll get a good look at you and eventually their own scrying will succeed and figure out where you are) and discovered this coin he was carrying. With enough Spellcraft rolls and enough castings of Legend Lore we got a lot of info on this thing and...what were the authors thinking here? I mean, this thing is seriously a dick move.

You have an item that:

• You can't use, unless you want your party to have an evil PC in it
  
• You shouldn't sell/use for bartering as it makes a sketchy, dangerous ninja clan just that much more dangerous
  
• You also shouldn't sell/use for bartering because legend says it is one owner away from armageddon
  
• You can't destroy because how many sovereign dragons have you come across so far?
  
• You can't keep out of circulation because it will apparently circulate on its own
  
• You can't destroy "later" because there's a time limit on the above
  
• You shouldn't put off dealing with until "later" because see armageddon
  

I mean, seriously, what are players supposed to do with all that? I am all for moral dilemmas, but not Kobayashi Maru scenarios. That stuff is great in movies and literature, but it's a big <insert lewd gesture> in a cooperative game.

A request for future AP's: please don't do things like this.

I've made some updates to the online Golarion Calendar on Dungeonetics. The major changes are:

* More events and holidays in a more compact format.

* Click on a day in the large calendar to bring up a full list of that day's events and holidays, with more detailed information about observances. Helpful for days that have too many events which get cut off (I'm looking at you, summer solstice).

* You can adjust the starting day of the week independently from the starting day of the calendar. This is a request that dates back to when the online calendar was first published.

* Mouseover text where it's useful

* Expanding calendar layout if you want a wider view.

The new layout doesn't work will with Internet Explorer and other archeological curiosities. If you are on a prehistoric web browser, I provide a link to the original calendar.

Edited to add: These changes have not been propagated to the mobile version yet. But they are coming.

Back in late December, the new BBC miniseries adaptation of Watership Down was released on Netflix for international distribution the (trailer is on YouTube). As someone who both grew up reading the book and saw the 1978 film as a kid, I can safely say that if you haven't seen this latest adaptation then you are missing out.

It's a 4-part miniseries and each episode is just under an hour. It is very well done, and quite faithful to the book. I can't get enough of it.

Obviously there are some changes but not many that I would call significant. The overall structure of the story is intact with all of it's major subplots, and all but one of the major events in the book survive intact, though as with a lot of film and TV adaptations they alter portions of the timeline for dramatic purposes. Most impressive, though, is how many of the small details from the book are there, everything from lines of dialogue, to the mythology, to Lapine, to background stuff that you'd not notice unless the book was fresh in your head. I went back and re-read the story, and re-watched the '78 movie, and walked away even more impressed with this miniseries.

The biggest changes are making Strawberry a doe instead of a buck (this helped condense part of the story), expanding the story of the does in Efrafa, and altering a chase sequence. I didn't miss the latter, and greatly appreciated seeing the does become something more than just objects needed for breeding. They are given agency with actual roles to play in the story, the only real shortcoming in the book and one that needed fixing.

There's been some talk about the quality of the animation. It is definitely uneven. Most of the time it is beautifully rendered, but there are moments when it degrades to a video game quality. It may or may not pull you out of the story. I noticed it when it happened, but quickly forgot about it as the scenes progressed. The high moments, though, are very high. There are times when you could swear you're watching a camera following real rabbits, and when the rabbits fight, it is disturbing (and if you've seen real rabbits fight, you'll recognize it as disturbingly real).

Pathfinder (current version) and it's cousin 3.5 are pretty cool systems, but it just feels like there's something missing from the whole gaming experience that needs addressing. Something that can help prevent player burnout, so your long-running group that's on it's 7th campaign doesn't break down into that jaded grognard state where everyone's just secretly complaining to themselves or their GM while putting on a brave face.

We can fix that with just a few more rules. Here's what I propose:

Grief Points. There are lots of points in PF. There's experience points (XP), hero points (HP), hit points (also HP, for clarity), and a bunch more that come from the various subsystems like Relationship points (RP, not to be confused with role-playing, which is RP), Rebellion Points (RP, not to be confused with RP or RP), Reputation Points (RP, not the same as RP, RP, or RP) and so on. But what's really missing are GP, which is not the same as gp.

Grief points (GP) are awarded to the player that maintains the spreadsheets and loot database and all the other accounting details that PF and 3.5 are famous for. They don't come automatically, though: only when other players start arguing about whether or not something has been recorded correctly, or how to divide up the loot, or any other exchange that makes the player with the bookkeeping duty recalculate everything, add columns to their spreadsheet, build Pivot Tables or macros, or (worst of all) convert things to a Wiki format which they then have to maintain.

The GM awards Grief Points when they've had enough of the email exchange. Grief Points can be exchanged for XP or magic items at the GM's discretion, with the understanding that bookkeeping is a thankless job, and the player is suffering because no good deed goes unpunished.

Rules Lawyering Cards. Like Soccer, you hand out penalty cards to players that bring the game to a halt with rules minutiae that no one else cares about. The GM can hand out yellow cards and red cards, and when a player collects enough cards of a certain color their character develops spontaneous game conditions. Like nauseated. Or fatigued. Or dead.

Retcon Points. These are RP (not to be confused with RP, RP, RP, or RP) that players can use to do that thing their character would have done had they not been distracted by that player at the table that is always distracting the other players with unrelated social conversations. Because nothing is worse than realizing "I totally meant to cast that spell/activate the special ability on my sword/don my armor/change to my bow" and that your character would actually have done that but you, the player, forgot because that person just won't shut up.

Punctuality Bonuses. I would name this Punctuality Points, but that would be PP which would be confused with pp, and besides, no one wants PP on their character sheet. But there are those players who are habitually late, and ones who are habitually early, and they should be rewarded and punished accordingly, especially since the latter delay the game and the former are probably the first ones to set out the food. PB are used to modify XP earnings.

Pizza Points. This one is self-explanatory.

Hosting Points. Recorded as HP, not HP or HP. The host has to do things like vacuum the floors, clean the toilets, and clean up after the game by dealing with the dirty dishes, tossing out the garbage, and disinfecting everything anyone touched. They also may have to herd cats (real cats; try it sometime), fence off dogs, and establish a guest WiFi network. HP can be exchanged for HP but not HP.

I am sure there are more things the game can do to help, but this is what comes to me off the top of my head.

I've created a random spellbook generator for PF1E wizards.

Yes, there already are spellbook generators out there, but my goal was to produce practical, realistic spellbooks, and not a spellbook filled with a random assortment of spells that no one actual has or uses. The intent is help GM's produce NPC spellbooks, as well as determine what spells might be available for trading when players visit a town.

You enter a spell caster level and specialization school (optional), and it will spit out a list of spells. It favors the "staple" spells that most wizards tend to have, the most common spells, and spells in the caster's specialization school. It then adds a smattering of the less common/rare spells for fun and flavor.

The caster level determines the spell levels as well as the number of spells, though you can influence the latter (and there's some randomness to that, as well).

The spells are pulled from the following hardcover books: Core, APG, and Ultimate *. As a convenience, spell names are links to full descriptions at the d20PFSRD site.

Sample output:

3rd Level conjurer

Level 1: Abundant Ammunition – Comprehend Languages – Expeditious Retreat – Floating Disk – Handy Grapnel – Identify – Ki Arrow – Mage Armor – Mount – Obscuring Mist – Open And Shut – Ray Of Enfeeblement – Shield – Shock Shield – Unseen Servant
Level 2: Blindness/Deafness – Callback – Darkvision – Levitate – Mirror Image – See Invisibility – Spectral Hand – Summon Swarm – Web
Level 3: Conjure Carriage – Halt Undead – Haste – Protection from Energy – Sleet Storm – Summon Monster III – Water Breathing

3rd level illusionist

Level 1: Alarm – Auditory Hallucination – Burning Hands – Color Spray – Comprehend Languages – Cultural Adaptation – Endure Elements – Enlarge Person – Feather Fall – Floating Disk – Mage Armor – Magic Aura – Negative Reaction – Silent Image – Wizened Appearance – Youthful Appearance
Level 2: Blur – Darkness – Fox's Cunning – Ghostly Disguise – Invisibility – Levitate – Locate Object – Mirror Image – Misdirection – Symbol of Mirroring
Level 3: Daylight – Displacement – Fly – Gaseous Form – Lightning Bolt – Phantasmal Affliction – Protection from Energy

13th level evoker

Level 1: Ant Haul – Anticipate Peril – Aphasia – Burning Hands – Chill Touch – Color Spray – Comprehend Languages – Feather Fall – Flare Burst – Floating Disk – Mage Armor – Magic Aura – Mount – Open And Shut – Shield
Level 2: Acid Arrow – Arrow Eruption – Bull's Strength – Burning Gaze – Continual Flame – Fox's Cunning – Gust Of Wind – Invisibility – Languid Venom – Levitate – Resist Energy – Scorching Ray – Spontaneous Immolation
Level 3: Chain of Perdition – Dispel Magic – Fireball – Fly – Haste – Heroism – Iron Stake – Lightning Bolt – Major Image – Matchmaker – Suggestion – Tiny Hut – Tongues
Level 4: Ball Lightning – Dimension Door – Enervation – Fire Shield – Hollow Heroism – Remove Curse – Shout – Volcanic Storm – Wall Of Fire
Level 5: Break Enchantment – Cloudkill – Companion Transposition – Lightning Arc – Overland Flight – Sending – Teleport – Wall Of Force – Wall of Sound
Level 6: Analyze Dweomer – Chain Lightning – Contingency – Control Water – Dispel Magic, Greater – Leashed Shackles – Mage's Decree – Sirocco – True Seeing
Level 7: Banishment – Forcecage – Grasping Hand – Limited Wish – Mage's Sword – Prismatic Spray – Shapechanger's Gift, Greater – Teleport, Greater

Obviously one of the big changes in the PT has been AoO's are no longer a global capability. This has increased mobility and made combat more dynamic, but it's also led to some quirky side effects like:

* You can drink a potion while in combat with (most) opponents
* You can walk around (most) hostile enemies with impunity

I have a suggestion for tempering this without abandoning or changing the AoO rule:

* Distracting actions in an enemy's threat range cost an extra action (and still trigger AoO's)
* Moving through a threatened area is difficult terrain (and still triggers AoO's)
* Spellcasting is unchanged, since it's already two actions (most of the time)

Adding an action to things like drinking potions and fetching things out of your pack tones down the silliness while still allowing much of the flexibility of movement in the new system.

Yes, this is late because we've been a PbP game (though not hosted here since the site was too unstable when we started). I will hopefully get the rest summarized and posted later this week.

I am sure we made some mistakes in all of this.

The players:

Amarcus - half-elf Varisian ranger (no animal companion)
Lira - halfling rogue
Samin - human Kelishite cleric of Sarenrae
Sefora - human Chelaxian wizard (conjuration)

Day 1

I noticed this while creating a conjuration specialist.

Augment Summoning is your only Conjuration school power at Level 1, and it can only be used in conjunction with a Summon Monster spell. With an Int of 18--and under this system, what wizard wouldn't have an Int of 18?--you have 4 spell points, and as a specialist wizard you have 3 (1st level) spells.

And there's the problem. The only way you can use all of your spell points is to prepare Summon Monster in all three of your 1st level spell slots, and then use your Drain Arcane Focus ability to cast it a 4th time.

Obviously this situation gets better at higher levels, but for a mandatory power at level 1? This is really problematic. It's the only Level 1 school power that requires you to expend other resources, and a highly circumstantial resource at that, to use it and you don't get enough of those resources to make that practical.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Augment Summoning in general, but making it your mandatory power at Level 1 effectively means your 1st level Conjurer has a circumstantially usable pool of spell points, and in normal game play they probably aren't going to be able to use all of them. That makes it underpowered at level 1, the level where the consequences are the most severe.

Matt Groenig's new animated show Disenchantment landed on Netflix today. It's a medieval fantasy that follows Princess Bean and her two companions (an elf and her personal demon) after she escapes an arranged marriage.

The Netflix format means it's more of a serialized story told in episodes rather than the individual, gag-packed nature of The Simpsons and Futurama. I've watched the first episode and am already hooked. The gags aren't packed as densely as they are in Futurama, but the latter-style of humor is clearly on display in everything from intricate jokes to throwaway gags that you'll miss if you aren't watching or listening closely. There are 10 episodes in the 1st season.

I've put together a database of the Pathfinder Playtest spells.

I know there are already a couple DB's and such out there. The intent of this database is to make it easier for programmatic parsing: the data is presented in multiple tables/sheets to normalize it so you aren't dealing with multiple data values in a single field. I also provide metadata information so that you don't have to guess at which each table and column means.

For the most part, I am using the data as-is in the playtest doc (including source errors, of which there are two). I also provide a couple of convenience columns: one that indicates which saving throw a spell uses (if any), and a casting time field that lists the number of actions used by the spell (or the casting time if it's measured in minutes). I also add heightened spell levels to the spell lists for each tradition.

I don't have spell descriptions yet, but they are coming (spells beginning with "A" are done). My intent here is to provide the minimum HTML formatting needed to match the source material without any CSS.

Tables:

• spell_info Spell, power and cantrip data (excluding traits and heightened level). NOTE: Spell descriptions are not complete at the current time.
  
• spell_traits The traits associated with each cantrip, power and spell. There is more than one entry per spell since a spell can have many traits.
  
• spell_list The spells and spell levels for each magic tradition. Spells that can be heightened are listed at their base and heightened levels, with a flag indicating the latter.
  
• cantrip_list The cantrips for each magic tradition.
  

The spell descriptions section of the playtest document is, to put it kindly, kind of a mess. There are a lot, a lot, of issues here for which "it's a playtest" is not really an excuse. What I see is a fundamental issue with how spells are being organized and described. Given that we've had over a decade of PF1, even more time with 3.5, and a few months of Starfinder, all with a standard way of formatting and describing spells, this doc is inexcusably sloppy.

It's really the header blocks that are the big problem, since they serve as the summary information for a spell. As-is, these are hard to read, have glaring inconsistencies, and are lacking key information.

• Spell schools and traits are mixed together. You shouldn't mix distinct buckets into one bucket. Spell school has been its own bucket since 1E and it really should stay that way. Every spell has exactly one arcane school associated with it (OK, there was literally one exception in PF1 in thousands of spells, but I consider that a terrible idea and the exception that proved the rule). That's an important enough distinction that it should get its own field, like every other edition of D&D since literally the beginning.
  
• Bring back the saving throw field. This is a deal-breaker. Quick selection of spells based on whether or not a save is required is a thing during game play. This needs to come back. Yes, it's more complicated now with critical failures and successes, but just showing that the spell offers a saving throw is very useful information.
  
• Casting field is messy. I get what you're trying to do here, but the current implementation is messy. So far, all spells seem to be: 1) one or more actions, 2) a single free action or reaction, or 3) multiple rounds of V, S, and/or M actions. This field is trying to do two things (time and components), and that's bad. Instead, break it up unto Casting time and Components as before. In Casting time, list one of the 1) action count (e.g. "3 actions" or "1 reaction" or "1 free action"), or 2) the casting time required when it's longer than a round. Then put the Components in the components field. Trust me when I say we are smart enough to figure out that the component actions correspond to the action counts. Part of the issue here, I think, is that the field is trying to accommodate the action/reaction icons. Ugh, those icons.
  
• Durations use inconsistent language. What is the difference between a duration of "1 round" and "until the start of your next turn"? What is the difference between "concentration" and "concentration or until dismissed"? I suppose the latter implies that you can dismiss a spell as a free action when it's not your turn? If the intent really is to draw distinctions between these things, then it feels like there's a lot of unnecessary hair-splitting going on.
  
• Areas have some inconsistent language. Look at Dread Aura: it's a "30-foot-radius aura centered on you". That really just sounds like a 30-foot Aura. Compare that to Divine Aura which is a "10-foot aura". Is it necessary to say "centered on you" when there's no Range or Targets for a spell? Probably not, though regardless it should be consistent. Then look at Dragon Breath with the area of "30-foot cone or 60-foot line originating from you". Is "originating from you" necessary for spell with no Range? Probably not, and no other spell uses this added language.
  
• Mixing Areas and Targets together. See Entangle which has an area of "squares in a 20-foot-radius burst that contain plants". The Area should be 20-foot burst", and there should be a Targets field with "all plants in the affected area".
  
• Using headers in sentence form. This is harder to explain, but look at the Grease spell. It says "Targets one object of 1 Bulk or less or Area four contiguous 5-foot squares". Notice how the spell headers are used in a sentence? That's bad. Think of this being a database with fields. The field for "Targets" should not end in "or".
  
• Targets using 1 and one. Sometimes it's "1 creature", sometimes it's "one creature". Pick one form and stick with it.
  
• Duration using 24 hours and 1 day. Again, pick one. Is it 1 day or 24 hours?
  
• Duration of "unlimited" and "permanent". Again, pick one. I think "permanent" is the better choice. "Unlimited" should be for range.
  
• Heightened spells and effects due to saving throws are described inconsistently. Usually, the headers for the spell describe just the baseline result, but sometimes the headers try to account for heightened effects and saving throws, too. And this isn't done consistently. Take, for example, Flesh to Stone. The duration for the spell is "Varies", presumably because...the duration varies based on the saving throw. Now compare that to Slow. Here the Duration is "1 minute". But, if the target succeeds on their saving throw the duration is 1 round. So, the duration varies, too, which means this is inconsistently described in the Duration header. Is the Duration for Slow "varies", or is it the baseline effect of "1 minute"? Back in PF1 and 3.5, the answer would be: duration is 1 minute, and there would be a Saving Throw field for "Fort partial".
  

What this really comes down to is a lack of standards for how you describe spells. I find this a little surprising given how long the game has been around.

I love the Merciful Spell metamagic feat, but I've always felt it should work with Save-or-Die spells and spells that cause, say, ability damage instead of hitpoint damage. The idea of having a knockout spell is, I think, too awesome to pass up, but I can understand why Paizo limited the feat to just hitpoint spells: you can't have a feat description that is several paragraphs long with complicated rules.

What you can do, however, is look at individual spells and modify their text so that they have a "merciful" variant. And that's what I've done. For your consideration:

House Rules for Merciful Spell: applying the metamagic feat to high level SoD and ability damaging spells.

Comments are welcome!

I have produced a name generator for Starfinder.

It produces random names for the alien races, using the same general approach as my Pathfinder/Golarion one. (For the humanoid races, I suggest you just use the latter).

Yes, there are spell databases out there already, but this is the raw data arranged into a series of tables (sheets in a Google Sheets doc) and normalized to ease computer parsing, particularly if you want to import the data into your own relational DB.

Specifically, I give you multiple tables so you don't have to parse strings to extract multiple values from a single data field. Because I hate doing that, and you probably do, too.

I also include HTML structure with the spell description to aid in formatting, so you can pretty-print your spell descriptions.

--> Starfinder Spell Database <--

I am pleased to announce that my Pathfinder Spell Card Generator is ready for use over at dungeonetics.com. The culmination of a month-long programming effort that consumed the souls of a thousand men, the spell card generator is designed to give you high-quality, printable spell cards that fit the Avery Clean Edge Business Card pre-cut paper (for an economical 10 spell cards per sheet).

This spell card generator is bigger, faster and more absorbent than anything that's come before it. Features include:

• Full, formatted spell descriptions on the card back (or as much as will fit).
  
• Color coding by spell level, respective to the target character class, to allow quick sorting of cards by spell level (e.g., Continual Flame is a 2nd level spell for occultists, sorcerers and wizards, but 3rd level for clerics, oracles, inquisitors and psychics).
  
• Support for domain, bloodline, and patron spells (e.g., Continual Flame is a 2nd level spell for the day subdomain, and a 2nd level spell for witches with a light patron). Corrected from earlier, see below
  
• Color symbol coding by spell school, to allow wizards to quickly identify specialty and opposition schools.
  
• Spell text shrinks to fit available space to prevent information from being cut off. (Within reason: some spell descriptions are very long, and the system makes a best effort to get as much of the spell on the card without making text too small to read).
  
• Blank spell cards templates.
  
• Placeholder cards to represent spell slots (sorcerers) and open slots (prepared casters).
  
• Card templates to represent metamagic applications.
  
• An easy-to-use spell query system to let you choose an initial spell list by class, level, source book (by product line) and domain/patron/bloodline. This turns into a text field that just lists spells so you can whittle down to just what you want, or just paste in a list of spells directly.
  
• Some template pages to let you make test prints on your printer in order to adjust your print margins without wasting color ink.
  
• Template pages to help you get your paper path set for front-and-back printing.
  
• It's fast. For those who care, it's backed by a MySQL database and optimized for speed.

A few samples are shown on the site, including this photo of the cards I use. These have been laminated (info on how best to laminate your cards is also provided) and they are a dream to use. If I may toot my own horn.

Enjoy!

Jula, Sodden Lands 3-day Forecast

Wealday: rain
Oathday: rain
Fireday: rain

Extended 10-day outlook

Starday: rain
Sunday: rain
Moonday: rain
Toilday: rain
Wealday: rain
Oathday: rain
Starday: rain

Hourly

11am: rain
2pm: rain
5pm: rain
8pm: rain
11pm: rain
2am: light rain
5am: rain
8am: rain

I'm organizing a game for some old friends that I used to game with back in "the day", specifically 1st Edition. A couple of them have played PF and know the system, while others stopped with D&D either in 2nd or 3rd Ed.

I'm looking for suggestions for a canned 1st-level adventure that can help players learn the system. An additional catch is that we are scattered across the country so we'll be PbP. I'd prefer something that has a balance of combat and RP opportunities so that we aren't bogged down in a dungeon crawl.

What do you suggest?

I have been working on a spell card design for Pathfinder to streamline spell management for my wizard in our current campaign. First, I know: there are a handful of these things out there. I wasn't satisfied with what I saw. I recognize this is equal parts a matter of taste and organizational strategies. What works for me isn't necessarily what works for others.

With that out of the way, here's a PDF with a few pages of samples showing the front and back of a handful of cards. This was my thinking:

1. Color-code the card backgrounds by spell level, not by school. To do this, the cards have to be printed for a particular class. This is both a plus and a minus. I think its more of a plus because spell level is the most significant attribute for a caster.

2. Also include a color-coded symbol for spell school. This is particularly useful for specialized wizards, where you need the specialized school for the extra slot and want to quickly spot the opposition schools.

3. Include blank cards (there are two at the end of the PDF). The point of these should be obvious. :)

4. Don't just replicate the printed spell texts onto a card.

5. As a follow-on to #4, condense the text to get things to fit. Standardize units and abbreviations, remove wordy text and replace it with condensed text or symbols. Resize text that's too big for fields.

6. Recognize the limits of #5. Sometimes, a full spell description doesn't fit.

7. Get the full description for a spell on the card, too. Or at least what will fit.

8. Use a US Business Card size for economy. The 2x3.5" size gives you 10/page using the Avery Business Card sheets. This also allows for cheap lamination using laminating pockets and a $30 heat laminator.

9. Keep it legible. Minimal decoration, no text smaller than 6pt. Primarily use Verdana because it's easy to read.

I tried an earlier prototype of these in the game and they were a godsend. I know what I think I need, but I'd love to hear from others.

Here's my problem: it takes too long to select spells from my spell book, track them, and pass those spell lists off to others in case I have to leave a game early (e.g., this weekend, the power went out at home).

Let's assume that I already know what spells I want. The issue is not selecting spells, but getting those selections recorded in seconds rather than minutes. This includes completely changing out spells that were memorized the previous day, which means I need a system for un-marking previous spells as well as rapidly marking new ones.

I am serious about seconds. I can easily delay the game and I don't want to do that. To date, I've been working with general-purpose spells and only a handful of change-outs for specialized needs because that is fast, but we're at a point (CL9) where that is not a good strategy because our encounters require spells tailored to what we are doing and facing.

Right now, accounting is the barrier to game success and I am making mistakes.

Here's what I've tried that doesn't work for me. I recognize that what does or does not work for me is not the same as what does and does not work for other people.

1. Pen and paper. Too slow. Too much flipping. Takes too long to review the list of what I have memorized. Gets messy fast. Checking boxes requires erasing. Re-writing from scratch takes too long.

2. HeroLab. It's awesome in general and I love it. But spell management is DOA. Too many mouse clicks, too much clicking and flipping between tabs and screens, and too much scrolling. It takes too long.

3. Spreadsheets. Marginally better than #2. It's a great hammer, and a lot of the world can be forced into nails, but this isn't one of them. I've not found a good way to automate spell selection in a way that I can do it quickly. But, I don't think I've exhausted this yet.

1. Spell cards. This would solve just about everything. If you use these, how do they work for you? What are the drawbacks? I don't want to pre-judge based on my assumptions.

2. Another program that isn't HeroLab that does spell management better. I don't know what that program is. Maybe you do.

3. That thing I don't know about that you are doing. Tell me about the thing!

Help!

How does the Merciful Spell metamagic affect the Cloudkill spell? The text of the feat is that all damage inflicted becomes non-lethal damage.

You can alter spells that inflict damage to inflict nonlethal damage instead.

It doesn't restrict itself to hp damage: it just says damage. But Cloudkill is a weird case because it either kills you or causes Con damage.

These vapors automatically kill any living creature with 3 or fewer HD (no save). A living creature with 4 to 6 HD is slain unless it succeeds on a Fortitude save (in which case it takes 1d4 points of Constitution damage on your turn each round while in the cloud).

A living creature with 6 or more HD takes 1d4 points of Constitution damage on your turn each round while in the cloud (a successful Fortitude save halves this damage).

I think you would change "slain/kill" to "knocked unconscious", but there's no such thing as non-lethal ability damage. Would that mean if you made your save, you suffer no effects? Or do you still lose Con, only the lost hp are non-lethal damage?

I recently joined a campaign under my alias Nico Tegustus, but that PbP game is not showing up in my campaign tab under my main account/alias (this one). It does show up under Nico's campaign tab, but that of course, is not helpful. I also am not getting post tracking/dotting for the game play thread.

The GM believes everything is set up correctly for me.

Did you know that you can do indentation? You can't do it here next to your avatar image, probably because of a quirk in the CSS.

    Unless you use unicode to do it (see below).

But if the text spills over
past your image and down
to the main body, another
quirk kicks in and totally
lets you indent things. Of
course, the problem there is
that resizing your browser
reflows the text. But if
you force it like this...

You can indent text using the [list] tag.

[list]Just wrap the text in tags with nothing else, like this.[ ̸ list]

[list]You can even us this to span multiple lines and it all
still works.

Even if you put blank lines in between the opening and closing tags.

You can't next it, though. Only one indentation allowed!

• And you can also start your bullet list in the middle of it

  And when you stop, see what happens?

  Basically, the [list] tag acts like <ul>, and the [ *] tag acts like <li>. For you HTML types.
  

Of course you can accomplish the same thing using Unicode characters, too.

    For example, add a few non-breaking spaces in front.

    But you have to do that in front of every line and the text won't wrap right...unless what you want is an indentation at the start of a paragraph. Which is pretty cool, though it may not be what you want, and it may also be too much like work. But I am not your dad. I am not here to tell you what to do or which was is better. Just that there are ways to do it.

Of course, I think we'd all be a lot happier if [ul] and [/ul] existed. Which they don't. :(

If you're a rebel, you can even do a bullet list without a list.

There are a handful of spells with the "Harmless" descriptor that still allow saving throws. My question is, if you target a creature with a spell that is harmless, do they "know" (meaning, is it imparted somehow) that the spell effect is, in fact, harmless before it takes effect?

Here's what the PRD says:

(harmless): The spell is usually beneficial, not harmful, but a targeted creature can attempt a saving throw if it desires.

This states outright that a targeted creature chooses whether or not to make a saving throw, but it doesn't really explain how they would know to do so.

I see a couple of interpretations of this:

1. Harmless spells impart some knowledge to the target that the spell effect is, in fact, harmless. The targeted creature can then decide on their own what they want to do, knowing that the spell will not harm them.

2. The targeted creature just knows they've been hit with a spell, and knows nothing about the effect. Since targeted creatures generally attempt saving throws, they will act depending on what it knows about the person casting the spell and what they've been told. If you say it's a harmless spell, and they trust you, they would be inclined to not attempt the save. If they are hostile or don't otherwise trust you, they would be inclined to attempt the save.

This has implications for attempting, say, unexpected healing of NPCs and the like. There have been a few discussions about this and Spell Resistance, but in the end I think it comes down to whether or not targeted creatures "know" somehow that the spell effect is harmless before it hits.

The Harrow Deck is loads of fun...until you actually go to interpret the cards, because the listings in the divination/rule book are not alphabetized. This mind-boggling decision is the greatest source of frustration in my mind, but Harrowings themselves are also more than a little complicated in general: there are three kinds of matches, and the potential for misaligned cards, all for the interpreter to watch for. Yuck!

Presenting:

The Harrowing Spreadsheet, a PF game aid
(implemented in Google Sheets)

Of course, plenty of other tools have sprung up around the world to try and get a handle on all of this. Here's why mine is different:

• You can either have it automatically draw for you, or you can enter the card names yourself. The former is good for quick and easy readings, and the latter is good for rapid interpretation of a spread from a physical table reading. No more flipping through a book that lacks a proper index.
  
• Automatically highlights the True, Opposite, and Partial matches in the spread. This is almost as good as the above.
  
• Uses a colorblind-safe color palette for the above (for you red-green folks; those of you with tritanopia are out of luck, sorry)
  
• Clearly identifies misaligned cards, and only prints the misaligned meaning when the card really is misaligned (this follows the "quiet cockpit" philosophy of UI design: only show people what's relevant). What's not to love?
  
• Supports all the alternate spreads presented in Pathfinder Player Companion: The Harrow Handbook
  
• One word: automation
  
• One word: protected sheets so you don't enter data into the wrong cells or delete something important and break it by accident¹
  
• Doesn't require Excel (personally, I love Excel, but I'm a weirdo). Alas, won't work in Excel², either, because it does require a bit of scripting. Sad face. :(
  
• You'll smell better³

You'll need to copy this to your own Google drive to use it because it's not a static spreadsheet. You have to enter values into it to make it go, and of course that wouldn't work as a shared document. Alas, that means giving up a small bit of your privacy to the Google Collective, but let's face it: they already know about that thing you did, so what else is there to lose?

Comments, feedback, fan mail, and constructive criticisms are always welcome. Hate mail and trolls > /dev/null 2>&1

¹Claim may be more than one word.
²Excel version is coming soon.
³Claim has not been verified.

This was inspired by another thread where there's a discussion of summoned birds being used in essentially kamikaze attacks: dive-bombing enemies to literally collide with them and cause falling object damage.

The question is, exactly how obedient are summoned monsters? Specifically, will they obey obviously suicidal commands?

From the description for Conjuration spells in the PRD:

Conjuration

[...] Creatures you conjure usually—but not always—obey your commands.

Summoning: A summoning spell instantly brings a creature or object to a place you designate. When the spell ends or is dispelled, a summoned creature is instantly sent back to where it came from, but a summoned object is not sent back unless the spell description specifically indicates this. A summoned creature also goes away if it is killed or if its hit points drop to 0 or lower, but it is not really dead. It takes 24 hours for the creature to reform, during which time it can't be summoned again.

From this we know two things:

• Summoned creatures don't always obey commands
  
• Summoned creatures don't die.
  

It's not clear if summoned creatures know they don't really die. Intelligent ones might. But, even if they knew their destruction would not be permanent, would they still treat their summoned existence as disposable?

Animals probably don't know that they aren't going to die. Because they're animals.

Moving on to the Summon Monster description:

Summon Monster

[...] It attacks your opponents to the best of its ability. If you can communicate with the creature, you can direct it not to attack, to attack particular enemies, or to perform other actions.

From this we can imply that a summoned monster:

• Inherently knows who your enemies are, and attacks them
  
• Can be directed to attack, not attack, attack specific targets, or perform "other actions" (assuming you can communicate with it)
  

That is it for guidance on summoning from Core. The Monster Summoner's Handbook doesn't offer any additional insights. There are some snippets from the Bestiary that are specific to some creatures. Air Elementals, for instance "resent being summoned or doing the bidding of mortals". Demons are options for summoning, but this suggests that's actually a very bad idea:

Demons view such summoners with a mix of hatred and thanks, for most demons lack the ability to come to the Material Plane to wreak havoc on their own. They depend on the mad to call them up from the Abyss, and while they gnash their fangs and rail against the commands and strictures enforced, most demons find ways to twist their summoners' demands so that even the most tightly controlled demonic slave leaves a trace of ruin and despair in its wake. More often than not, a foolish spellcaster makes a fatal mistake in the conjuring and pays for it with blood, unwittingly releasing a terrible blight upon the world as his conjuration breaks free of his control.

It's pointed out this reads mroe like calling than summoning.

So there are clearly some creatures that are not going to just blindly obey orders from a mortal that has summoned them. An air elemental might resist if you push them too hard, and demons might even undermine you given the chance. This suggests that creatures with intelligence and will are being compelled, but they know it and can resist.

There's no such guidance for animals, though. They are just animals that were "there" and are now "here", and suddenly have targets that they are compelled to attack.

So what happens if you try to communicate something outright suicidal? How strong are these compulsions to obey your commands?

There's perhaps some guidance from Dominate Animal, which is about as forcefully as you can directly control an animal in the game:

Dominate Animal

[...] Suicidal or self-destructive commands (including an order to attack a creature two or more size categories larger than the dominated animal) are simply ignored.

Digesting all of this, my interpretation is:

• Summoned creatures will faithfully attack your enemies, except...
  
• Obviously suicidal orders will not be obeyed
  
• Animals view attacking something one or two size categories larger than themselves as "suicidal"
  
• Intelligent creatures decide for themselves what is suicidal/self-destructive 
  
• Demons and devils may find ways to indirectly harm or harass the summoner if treated poorly
  

Other thoughts?

In our current campaign, we have a need to craft a handful of talismans, made from remorhaz scales. We already have the scales (go team!) so it's just a matter of figuring out a reasonable DC and total value so I can determine how long each one will take. I'll be doing the crafting, and have ranks in Craft (sculpture) and will be picking up Craft (jewelry) for this.

This wouldn't be anything sophisticated or intricate—just a sort of tribal talsiman—but it should look good, be difficult to reproduce, and the assembly process should not damage the scales beyond what's needed to hold everything together. My gut tells me that this would be a "high quality item" using the crafting table, so a base DC of 15. So that just leaves a base value.

I'm thinking it might make more sense to tackle the problem backwards, since this isn't really an item that has intrinsic value. By working backwards, I mean, make a rough guess at how long it should take to make one assuming you succeed on all your crafting checks. The Craft skill writeup doesn't specify how long you work each day, but I would assume that it's an 8-hour day.

I want to say a week sounds right. But maybe that's too long, since 40 hours is a lot of time.

Anyone want to offer an opinion?

Have you ever wanted to know when the sun rises or setrs in your PF game? Or how bright the sky is and whether or not you can see? If so, then read on...

Announcing the Golarion Solar Ephemeris calculator

This is based off of the ongoing efforts to map Golarion and put specific latitude and longitude coordinates to known locations on the globe. The Golarion solar ephemeris calculator uses earth solar ephemeris equations to obtain the same data for Golarion, only mapped to Golarion-local times.

It can tell you:

• When the sun rises and sets at a given location
  
• When the various twilight phases occur
  
• How bright your lighting conditions are based on the above (dark, dim, normal, bright)
  

There are still some quirks. You can enter invalid data and it will still try to make sense of it. If you enter data at the poles it will still correctly calculate that there may not be any change in lighting, but it doesn't print a meaningful message as a result. There's also no cool mapping integration, though there is a nice lookup table for all known cities and landmarks on Golarion. You'll also find Garrett's Interactive Golarion maps (two options: a vector version which shows more of the poles but is slower, and a tiled version that is faster and better for mobile devices but a little less feature-rich) to be useful tools for finding the latitude and longitude of arbitrary points on the globe.

Building off of the work we've been doing in Mapping Golarion: Putting What We Know to Latitude and Longitude, I am pleased to announce that my GIS data layers are now available for download. Data layers are being distributed as ESRI shapefiles and KML.

There are still more layers coming, but what is up there now is enough for people to start building their own map and geo-related projects. The first of these is Garrett Guillotte's Interactive Golarion Map.

First off, I am a player so, please, no spoilers on the Adventure Path. (If it helps, we are in the Storm Tower right now, but not finished with it.)

I have already started this conversation with my GM, but I am curious how other GM's and players have handled this, if it has come up.

I am playing a wizard in this AP, and have noticed that it is not very "wizard-friendly". To my knowledge, or GM hasn't altered the AP significantly. At 2-1/2 books in we've not encountered a single wizard NPC, which means no spellbooks to copy, and while there have been some arcane scrolls it's not exactly been a boon. (At the opposite extreme is RotR, which practically throws spellbooks at you.)

The issue I have now is that we're at the Crown of the World, leveling, and by RAW a wizard only gets 2 spells/level for free. All other spells have to come from another spellbook, a scroll, or be independently researched. Given that we are in the middle of nowhere, literally a thousand miles from civilization of any size, there are no other sources of spells at a time when our party needs them. I am starting to feel like I have the limitations of a sorcerer in terms of spells known, but none of the benefits. :)

I have asked for a little temporarily relief from our GM. Either in upping the number of spells/level that you get for free, or reducing the independent research costs and time for duplicating existing spells, until we get out of the arctic. Do you think this is a reasonable request?

How did you handle this in your games?

A few years back there was an effort to take the Inner Sea map and put latitude and longitude boundaries on it so that we could have a rough idea of where cities lay on the globe. There was some rough guidance from James Jacobs to help place key features: Absalom should be at longitude 0, Magnimar roughly at Seattle's latitude, and the Tropic of Cancer above the Mana Wastes.

That effort was mostly successful, but...the maps that were put online are now gone, and we've had some additional regions of the world join the party since then.

I've tackled this problem, starting from scratch and using a GIS application to georeference the maps of the Inner Sea, Tian Xia and the Crown of the World. Interested in what the globe looks like? Check out my Golarion Geography page.

OK, so far it's just Golarion topography, but there's no need to be pedantic, right?

It's not all perfect. To maintain the scale on the Inner Sea map it wasn't possible to satisfy all the constraints, and there's some funniness up where Tian Xia meets the Crown of the World, but it's all darn close. "Darn close" is good enough, I think, considering that the cartographers at Paizo are artists and illustrators, not GIS, geography, or map projection experts.

Note that the maps I am putting up are really small. I don't want to be infringing on Paizo's IP here, so I've made them large enough to let you identify features, but small enough to prevent them from being useful in a game without buying the content yourself. Hopefully that flies.

If someone at Paizo is listening and objects to this use, please contact me so we can work out an alternative.

What might a follower of the various deities of Golarion say to another person as a short salutation or saying when greeting them, or when taking leave?

These tend to be short, pithy sayings that sound like little blessings. For example, in the real world, you might hear a Christian say "May you have blessings at home and for everyone in your family". (Disclaimer: I am bringing that example up only because I know it, and I am not trying to make any larger point than that).

Originally I was going to ask this just for Shelyn, since my tabletop group's character is a Shelynite and I am running out of ideas. I figured I could shamelessly tap the collective creativity of the forums. :) But then I thought, why limit what could be a generally useful discussion to just one deity?

The quotes from the deity's holy texts, aphorisms, and paladin's codes presented in Inner Sea Gods are a pretty good starting point for getting ideas. The holy text quotes are the easiest. For Shelyn, you can derive "Fill your heart, eyes, and mind with the beauty of the world" though it's a little long. Sarenrae gives us "May your inner light be a guide for others".

It's a little tougher with the deities on the evil end of the spectrum just by nature of how the sayings end up sounding, but...even evil characters have friends, companions, and people they respect. So it still works, it is just a little harder. You might hear "May your soul be reshaped in his design" in Cheliax, for instance. A Zon-Kuthon cultist writing to another might end a letter simply with "Yours in pain." (As I said, I am not terribly good at this. My brain doesn't work in these directions. Hence the thread.)

What else might you hear from the various followers on Golarion?

Our group has been playing together for over a decade, and this month marks our 1-year anniversary on the Jade Regent AP. Half of us have been keeping game journals, and I decided to start sharing mine here as well.

Sarenith 22, 4712 (Brinestump Marsh, Night)

I am not sure what I have gotten myself into here. Besides the obvious, that is, which of course is a swamp. Certainly this is not how I envisioned that the day would end, even after we made the decision to come here. I don’t know why—maybe it was Qatana’s confidence—but I just assumed we would be done before nightfall. In retrospect that was pretty naive of me.

Am I in over my head? Possibly, but I feel like this is a tipping point in my life. I could spend years scribing scrolls in the guild and researching and copying dusty tomes in some library in Magnimar, basically growing old and dull. Or, I could be like mom and dad, and take a chance on something more than safe. And, honestly, how much safer would that “safe” life be? The worst thing that ever happened to me was just a stone’s throw from my friends. There are no guarantees anywhere, certainly not in Magnimar (and when did I ever feel safe in Sandpoint?).

I almost didn’t even come here at all. When the letter from Ameiko arrived, suggesting I come back for a few days to visit, I was more than a little apprehensive. For one, our friendship had been fading even before we moved away and I had long since come to terms with that. I didn’t know what it meant that she wanted to see me. And for two, this town had been hard on me growing up. Most of that was already solidly in the past, too, but it still brings back some unpleasant memories and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see some of those faces again, even in passing. But in the end I said yes, and here we are. I guess curiosity and a glimmer of hope won out. I am not exactly sure what I was expecting from Ameiko, but if she reached out that meant she wanted to try and reconnect in some fashion, right? Maybe she’d be less distant, and maybe time had helped her—deal with? heal from? come to terms with?—whatever it was that happened out there, and that the walls would come down a bit.

They did a little. It wasn’t the same as when we were kids, but maybe that is too much to ask of anyone. It doesn’t matter. It was good to see my friend.

After Ameiko took over that inn years ago it became the de facto gathering point for travelers, thrill-seekers, explorers and their ilk, and it’s also one of the few places where you can go in Sandpoint if you and your friends want to meet your friends’ friends, and their friends in turn. It was the latter that had me there for breakfast (though I was visiting Ameiko, I chose not to pressure both of us by also staying there) and some time in the common room. It had been years since I had seen Anavaru—that running gag about her “horse” never seems to get old—and though Qatana and I have been in touch off and on in Magnimar it seemed wrong to not get together while we were both in town.

Speaking of Qatana, I am actually growing concerned about her. Obviously, what happened in Kaer Maga all those years ago was deeply scarring and I wasn’t surprised to see it affect her as it did. No one should have to adjust to life as an orphan. When I learned she was going to Magnimar to study under clerics of Pharasma I thought she might finally be healing those old wounds, and after we moved there ourselves I was able to see her from time to time. But then she became obsessed with Groetus and the end times, and her life took a radically different and dark turn. Certainly, it has given her great strength and resolve, and at the core there is still the Qatana I know—she even started a bakery of sorts in Magnimar, which doubled as a soup kitchen—but it colors her thinking.

At times she does not seem to be connected to what’s around her. She seems uninterested in taking care of her appearance. Her actions can be random and occasionally they show a lack of understanding of basic social graces. I am almost certain she hears voices and there are moments when I think I see her talking back to them. But mostly I am concerned because I don’t know what this means. Are those voices real spirits or beings? Is this a part of her relationship with the deities of old? I suppose all things are possible. But where will it lead?

To be fair, she is more…functional than most followers of Groetus, and I use that term “followers” loosely. Groetus does not really have followers so much as he has recluses, fanatics, and lunatics (and sometimes all three at once), and they tend to be doomsayers or obsessed with the dying and the almost-dead. But there are rare exceptions, and Qatana is one of them. “The world is going to end,” she told me once. “It could be today, tomorrow, or next week.” Her life has a sort of immediacy to it. Time is not to be wasted.

It was Qatana that first spoke up when she heard about the bounty that had been placed on goblins from the Licktoad Tribe (I don’t know for sure how goblins choose their tribe names, but I think it is safe to assume that they are not ones for metaphor). Of course, we all knew about the attacks on travelers and caravans which were mostly nuisance affairs, but lately they had taken to scaring horses with, of all things, fireworks that had been stolen from somewhere. That was news to me, as was the bounty had been placed on them once before and then quickly pulled. Apparently, some kids with more courage than sense got killed trying to collect on it, and Sandpoint didn’t want more would-be bounty hunters going off to the swamps and not returning. But now it was back on again, which means the fireworks had upped the both the seriousness of the situation and the urgency along with it.

Qatana was ready to go right then and there, simply declaring “I need money,” as if that were the only explanation necessary. It’s the sort of awkward thing Qatana does.

She started asking “us” if we’d join her, and so the interview process began. And who, exactly, was “us”? The aforementioned friends of friends. A few people I’d seen around before we’d moved away, a few I’d heard of but didn’t know plus some faces that were entirely new. The interview process was mercifully short, with Qatana’s qualifying criteria being one of either “carries a large stick” or “casts spells”. (She can be refreshingly simple.)

When she asked me, I didn’t answer at first. My hesitation came from thinking about the kids that went out there before us and died for their trouble. That was a reminder that you don’t just go kill a few goblins as a means of minting coins: they may be the butt of jokes around this part of Varisia, but that does not mean they aren’t vicious and dangerous, especially in numbers. In a way, it sounded both cliche and naive to declare that we could just walk out to the swamp and “take care of it”, especially since many of us had met one another for the first time not just that morning, but that hour. But as I said earlier, I felt like I needed something big to upset my life so that I could find a new course.

Ameiko watched this all with interest and amusement (and possibly more the latter than the former), but she’s not in the habit of seeing people get hurt so she did wander over and offer some practical advice from her own experiences. That advice boiled down to: get to know everyone’s skills before you set out and put your lives in each others’ hands. Fair enough, and so we did. Though, I do have a note for Ameiko: the next time you give that speech, specifically add “and what languages you speak” to the list.

We set out a couple of hours later for the Brinestump Marsh (who comes up with these names?), taking a fishing trail along the river delta to the shore. Ameiko told us of a halfling man who had set up a little home out there and established himself as the self-proclaimed “Warden of the Swamp”. If we wanted to get some information on the goblins, then perhaps that would be a good place to start.

It’s from his home, in fact, where I am writing this currently, and he has been gracious enough to offer us food and lodging for the night. But I am getting ahead of myself.

When we first arrived at the house we had been following two sets of footprints: one roughly child-sized (or halfling), and one human-sized. They led right to his home, and that is where events took a bizarre—and later, frightening—turn.

Qatana, Anavaru and Ivan approached the door (gods, Ivan is just a kid…what is he doing out here?) and, surprisingly, the Warden answered when Anavaru knocked. I couldn’t hear what was said, but I could see him and he did not look good: very ill, very tired and seemingly wounded. There was a brief exchange that ended with Ivan pushing his way forward to give some unsolicited healing. And then it got weird. Very, very weird.

Qatana…she just barged in. Literally. She just pushed her way in the door, without asking to come in, and without being invited. She walked right in his home and started poking around.

Everyone was in shock, especially the poor Warden. Except there was something about him that didn’t seem to fit. He was injured, and grateful for the healing, but he was also evasive and alarmed. Not because of Qatana or us, but because of something else. I like to think that this is what Qatana sensed and the reason why she did what she did, but I don’t know. Whatever her motivation, though, it set the right events in motion and it made me suspicious and the Warden increasingly uneasy.

So I cast a spell to search for magic, outside where I was out of earshot so as not to raise suspicion, and joined them in the Warden’s entry, under the pretense of helping to get a handle on Qatana and put the poor man at ease. What I was really trying to do was get a look around, myself, and what I saw gave me a bad feeling. There was no magic anywhere in the house except for the Warden himself. Not on him, but him specifically.

He was going on about being bitten by snakes, and having been poisoned (all of which clearly appeared to be true), and being afraid of snakes, and yet he lived in a house that was a habitat for snakes, and he kept feeder mice and birds. For snakes. And it did not add up. So we pretended to help by searching the house for more snakes while we kept the Warden under watch and stalled for time. I even asked Etayne to come in and look him over since witches know something of poisons and remedies, and thus she could put on a convincing show.

Eventually, I was able to determine that the magic around him was a faint transmutation of some sort, but I could not identify the source. So I called up to Qatana, who was searching the upstairs (“for snakes”). In Elvish, I said, “Qatana, I need you down here. I am detecting a faint transmutation aura on the halfling.”

And I was taken aback when our halfling friend replied, also in Elvish. “I am sure it was just the lingering effect of your friend’s healing spell”.

I felt a chill running through me. Any one thing on its own would be perfectly innocent, but all of this together created a picture that was just wrong. I could also feel the Warden’s unease growing, and it seemed we had started a dangerous game of us knowing that something was up, and the Warden knowing that we knew, and we knowing that he knew that we knew, and so on in that fashion. But neither side was ready to make the first move.

Then Etayne became severely spooked by something she saw, and she stepped out to call Olmas in. Under the guise of “you should stay down; you’ve been poisoned” and so on, he ensured that the halfling was sitting down and staying that way. This worked for a little bit but the Warden’s patience wore thin and Olmas had to get obstinate about it, and that is when our halfling host went from agitated to angry to hostile to violent. He leapt from his chair, ran upstairs with Olmas on his heels, and within seconds a lethal fight had broken out in the hallway.

We were not, in fact, talking to a halfling. We found the real Warden of the Swamp, one Walthus Proudstump, in a secret room on the second floor of his home after the fight was over. What we were facing was something called a “stalker”: a being capable of assuming the form of others, and both speaking and understanding any language. There are spells that can accomplish the latter two effects, but it would appear that these creatures do this continually. According to the real Warden, who we healed and tended to, they were created by the Old Ones. (Possibly as spies? I can think of no better purpose for shapeshifters who are instantly fluent in any language. But the Old Ones are long gone, so what is their purpose now?)

This one attacked Walthus and took his form. It’s not clear why. For the most part, Walthus says the snakes help keep them away (which means there may be more than one of them) but somehow this one was able to get to him when his guard was down—while we were playing cat and mouse with the stalker inside, Radella was searching the grounds outside and she came across signs of a struggle—and Walthus was nearly killed. He was able to get back into his house unnoticed and conceal himself in the secret room that the stalker did not know was there, ultimately saving his own life. The stalker, in the mean time, found that the snakes could tell the difference between the real Walthus and a copy, and he suffered numerous, venomous bites.

And that is how it came to be that I am spending the night in a small house in the Brinestump Marsh along the Soggy River. Walthus Proudstump, the halfling man who calls himself The Warden of the Swamp, was so grateful for our timely intervention that he served us dinner and gave us the use of his home for the night. He’s a good man. Perhaps a little eccentric, but a kind and generous man who is happy where he is and surrounded by the marshlands that he loves.

Sarenith 23, 4712 (Brinestump Marsh, Morning)

Last night was uneventful. Sparna, Radella, Anavaru and Olmas each took a two-hour shift on a watch. I had trouble sleeping, and spent the couple of hours writing. Nihali was uneasy as well, and I’d see her fidget and stretch her wings nervously. There was nothing specific bothering me so I guess I was just anxious about everything.

I don’t know Sparna well though he is a frequent visitor to Sandpoint. He has worked as a caravan guard for as long as I have known him, though whether he has done anything more than this I don’t know. Being a caravan guard is mostly about appearances and deterrence (something Ameiko taught me, and which I put to good use in Magnimar to keep the riff-raff at bay) and I suspect this outing is a welcome change for him. Perhaps a chance to actually use what he carries instead of putting on a show.

Radella is one of the new faces, a half-elf woman whose skills tend to towards tomb-robbing and thinking on your feet. Note: I am being diplomatic here. I have nothing against her, but I suspect neither mom nor dad would be likely to invite her to dinner.

I’ve always liked Anavaru and she was never unkind to me. It’s terrible what happened to her and her family. First her mom, and then her dad. Niska practically adopted them, and then Ana lost her, too.

Shalelu seems to know everyone in Varisia and Olmas is another one of her strays, this one a half-elf man. He seriously considered bringing a horse into a marshland. We actually had to talk him out of it. Where does she find these people?

Ivan, as I have said, is just a kid, too young to be properly concerned for his own safety. Another new face to me, but apparently close to Koya.

I remember seeing Etayne from time to time when I was younger. She’s a half-sister to Shalelu but I don’t know the circumstances (and it is not my business, anyway). She was not comfortable in town then, and she seems to be even less so, now. I can understand that. Witchcraft just isn’t trusted, especially in Varisia where superstitions flow like water.

This morning we are going back out to the Lost Coast Road so we can come in along a different path that leads to the goblin village. Walthus advised us against a more direct route through the marshlands. Apparently the “monster in the swamp” is real, and not someone’s imagination made legend through oral tradition. We saw a footprint yesterday—three toes in an alien arrangement—and Walthus said it belongs to it. “It has claws for hands and feet and its legs bend the wrong direction for a man,” he explained. “It’s jaws also open wrong.”

He said it was a fearsome creature that first appeared here maybe five years ago. And it sounds like something best left alone.

Good news, everyone!

To make my life easier in the online/PbP campaign I'm in, I've created a WYSIWYG editor that implements most of the special, BBCode-like syntax used here on the Paizo forums. In particular, it supports OOC text, inserting dice roll expressions, and spoiler blocks, along with the usual BBCode goodies like text formatting and quoting. You simply write and format naturally, then switch to the source view where you can copy the BBCode source back here to the forums. (And of course you can also go the other direction when replying to a thread: copy the forum code to the source view, switch to WYSIWIG mode, and go).

This is not exactly super-convenient for day-to-day posting, but when you are composing long posts in, say, a campaign thread with lots of formatting, offline composing starts to make a lot of sense. And it's less frustrating, especially since the Paizo forums tags have some quirky behavior.

It's based on SCEditor, which is itself a bit quirky. So it's not perfect, and if you bend it too severely weird things will happen, but they are quirks I'd rather deal with than [ ] code blocks all over the place. YMMV.

• The editor: https://www.dungeonetics.com/ppbpeditor/
  
• A screenshot
  

FYI. I used it to compose this post offline.

Here's something I have been experimenting with, and have opened up for people to play with (Note: it's not complete and is still very much under active development, and constructive feedback is welcome!):

A random character name generator for Pathfinder/Golarion

Right now, I only support the human ethnicities (and haven't gotten to all of them), but I am making progress. I also only generate first names, but maybe someday I'll get more adventurous.

For the geeks in the crowd, it uses Markov chains, seeded from real, ethnic names. I lined up real-world ethnicities to the Pathfinder ethnicities as best as I could, but I may not have always made the best decisions. As I said above, always happy to have constructive feedback here.

The beauty of Markov chains is that you get names that are "real-ish". Meaning, they are generally pronounceable and follow the same rules as their seeds, but what they output is mostly made-up. I chose this method because the example names Paizo provides in their campaign guides are very much like this. The downside is that they can also produce some silliness, even when tuned properly. :) And occasionally you get something that is just wrong, or even "real". Nothing in life is perfect, so just consider that free entertainment.

Building off of the fantastic work of Nick Russell and his fabulous Excel-based Golarion Calendar, I have created an online implementation that is similarly configurable and works for all dates into the future etc. etc.

Online Golarion Calendar (http://dungeonetics.com/calendar/)

As a bonus, if you change the settings from the defaults you can also create a bookmarkable link so that you don't have to recreate them every time from scratch.

Note that I am not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination. While the layout is responsive, the styling is what I call "just get it working", and the widgets aren't real mobile friendly. :-P

Right now it just shows a small annual calendar alongside a single (selectable) month with details. There's no MxN display as in Nick's spreadsheet, but it's still a work in progress.