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This answer is one year too late, but Reaper Miniatures has most of the JR NPCs in miniature form (use Jade Regent in their search bar). Ameiko, Sandru, Shalelu, Koya, Jade Regent, Ulf, O-Sayumi (unlisted as JR for now), and a couple of monsters (goblins, sinspawn, etc.)
Wait... are you implying that Paladin's must show discretion and good judgment? BLASPHEMY! /smite It stands to reason that a powerful class like the paladin does have a higher degree of responsibility. i.e. They're not expected to act like murder hobos. My basic argument for the paladin to fall is not that he acted evil or not, but rather that he didn't even try to act good and just. Quite unprofessional really. As for the wizard, if his intent was to get the girlfriend killed, then it's totally evil. If the intent was to teach the paladin a lesson without really giving much thought to what happened to the girlfriend, then I'd go with not evil, but quite a chaotic act. As I read it, he half expected her to get killed, then it doesn't matter if the paladin killed her, the paladin will be justifiably right to
So the paladin's first reaction is to go for the kill on the unarmed non-aggressive bugbear with poor communication skills? No Detect Evil? Doesn't matter if it gave no result, didn't even try.
Replace bugbear with non-evil poor rambling smelly drunk hobo in a dark alley, and you got something similar. It *may* be a high-level assassin with a poison dagger. Who knows? Better slay it! If the paladin's deity is cool with that, then he doesn't fall. But usually, I expect more out of my champions of good. Refusing to accept any part of the blame nor show any sign of humility is not very exemplary. He may not fall because of it, but it will be a black mark on his record. Yes, the wizard has his share of the blame and will have to answer for it, but it's still the paladin who gave the killing blow. What's the girlfriend's reaction to being slain by her lover in a fit of holy wrath? There's some good role playing opportunities here.
Too risky, I'm imposing a new rule where all paladins are required to get fixed at their nearest More seriously, unless the paladin's deity specifically calls for celibacy, there should be no problem. In many mythologies, gods have lots of sex with mortals. They don't go and smite or punish their lovers afterwards. The gods themselves often have looser morals than the mortals. However, if this half-god is not on the paladin's deity's approved list (Thou shall not fraternize with that tramp/hoodlum), there might be a conflict of interest.
I *demand* a huge CMB bonus for cow Got to offset those four legs and Large size somehow .
Golarion goblins started to make sense to me as soon as I imagined them as evil Muppets. Their style of evil is very impish in nature.
If I ever use the Immortal Ichor in my games, I'll one up a particular feature of it. Notably the "immortal" bit. Calling it immortal when high level adventurers (or any other powers that be) can whack it to death is too simple. My version of the ichor will be closer to "evil essence in liquid form", where the ancient gods trapped it so as to not release any more evil in the universe (or more competition to other evil gods). Any group of heroes actually defeating it will unwittingly raise the global level of evil in the world. Of course, putting that evil back into the jar is its own adventure idea. And *no*, I wouldn't make a paladin lose his paladinhood if he really was unaware of the true nature of the ichor (a classic trope); unless the paladin shrugs it off and doesn't try to fix the mess they created.
(nobody said you had to have a high Wisdom to be devoted to a god). This is one of those times where the standard rules for clerics get wonky. Wisdom is their primary casting attribute, and it's not exactly intuitive to think that a high level priest of Rovagug is a "very wise" yet quite insane at the same time. It would be hard enough to keep a cult of Rovagug from destroying themselves within a week. My approach would be a group where the members hate the world/universe for personal reasons and Rovagug offers the promise of destruction and suffering. Not just nihilism that destroys all, but where the world will pay again and again for whatever "unforgivable crime" it's done. It could even give a touch of tragedy to individual members, mostly if ignore the sadistic pleasure they get in accomplishing their goals.
Now if we were talking about different amount of speeds, say 30ft walk and 20ft climb? I'd probably scale everything to the nearest 5ft increment. So if there's a 50-50 split between walking and climbing, I'd go with 15ft walk with 10ft climb leftover.
Also, no deaths this past game but those dread wraiths in the shadow maze are NASTY. Doesn't help that the party hasn't figured out the relation between the inro and the gates yet... I know what you mean. Of all the times, my dice decided they suddenly really hated the PCs. That was the closest the party ever came to a TPK in the whole AP.
We can say a lot of things about races/aliens in those settings, but in the end they tend to fall in a general category: Humanoids which act like culturally different humans. The key element here is, "Still acts like a human". Race/alien heroes that act significantly different than humans are much less common in those stories. Normal habits to them, bewildering to humans. Like dogs sniffing each other; we know they gather a lot of information doing it, but are at a loss at explaining what exactly is happening in their minds. Reversing this, dogs are colorblind, so an intelligent dog would still have a hard time grasping a human's view of the colors of the rainbow. Heck never mind playing the convincing alien, I've rarely seen a male player play a convincing female PC.
Well there's instinct, and then there's Intelligence/Wisdom checks. In animals, you might have a mammal who soon realize that a natural tactic may or may not work, but vermin types who often have "- Int" might just keep doing the same thing over and over again in spite of any consequences.
Though I already answered that I wouldn't mind, I can also understand why other people, especially those familiar with all the options, would be bummed. It's like if a mother takes a child to a candy store, and he's only allowed to take from the black licorice whips, peppermints, ribbon candy (all stuck together in one lump) and circus peanuts bins (on sale!) while every other kind of candy is on glorious display behind them. Now if you can *only* see the black licorice, peppermints, ribbon candy and peanuts, then you'll be plenty happy to have whatever you get. Otherwise, you feel like you're constantly missing something greater. A similar comparison can be made for the novice group who only has the Core Rulebook and Bestiary 1, but have one player who has all the books and years of knowledge. That one player may feel much more limited than the others.
Of course I would, and I have. A lot of RPGs don't mechanics for races or classes like PF/D&D, yet my group has always managed to have fun, even if we were "mere" humans with a bit of training. We might start off looking pretty similar in abilities, but the characters grow and become as unique as anything else in PF. A good GM is as much a part of the game as the rules themselves, and I find that the story weaved is much more interesting than the size of the bonus on my character sheet. Sometimes KISS works remarkably well, and narrative trumps simulationism.
- Dwarf Inquisitor of Angradd 6/Marshal 1 (LG), Wrath of the Righteous. Intimidating and carries a big axe. Currently at end of book 1.
Of course there have been plenty of other characters, but they're for numerous other RPGs of all genres. Next PF character is expected to be a half-elf summoner in Shattered Star.
Note the components bit[and lack of a cost]. The runes themselves are free. So, since you are supposedly casting this on sheets of paper, 1000 costs 400gp[4sp a piece]. Halve that if you settle for parchment. Have you no imagination? He *obviously* uses a single large sheet of paper, enlarges it, then polymorphs himself into an Elder Witchlight (Tome of Horrors 4) which is a Fine size fey, then casts Reduce Person on himself to be ridiculously small, and then proceeds into casting and inscribing explosive runes at microscopic scale. So you end up with a sheet filled with dot sized explosive runes. It doesn't matter if they're too small to read since they only exist to be badly dispelled. He could even "connect the dots" into a drawing of himself flipping the bird at
That's PFS First Steps part III: A Vision of Betrayal. The PCs have to make a Fortitude save every hour because the temperature is below 40 F. I guess if it ever snowed in Absalom the entire city would be wiped out. If they're like regular people, they'd go "It looks chilly outside, I'll put on a scarf and mittens. Or better yet stay inside more." Cold-Weather outfits grant +5 Fort save on cold weather. Lighter appropriate clothes could offer similar bonuses. Alternate rules could just reduce the weather conditions severity by one step. The environmental rules are more of an abstraction for the unprepared adventurer in full gear instead of the average local commoner already used to the environment and conducting doing his daily business.
Extra detail we haven't covered yet: Greater Dispel Magic's range. Spell range is 100ft + 10ft/lvl
There's 60ft missing somewhere (80ft-20ft size from center of Cthulhu)
I just had a thought. Has anyone considered the idea that Cthulu casts mythic version of his spells? You mean like his Mythic AT WILL Control Weather that will guarantee there's a 4 mile wide storm surrounding him 24/7 that will blow away any paper runes the very instant they're not in a Timestop? Any effect on visibility and ease of travel to people hanging around at 300ft? Also, Cthulhu is usually depicted as favoring aquatic environments. Are the runes water proof? What am I saying. Of course Anzyr already thought of everything. It's *so* simple. Everyone does it. Haven't you been reading? Use your head! The runes are obviously written on hundreds of tiny steamships.
BTW, what does Cthulhu do during all this time before the Almighty-Wizard-Who-Always-Has-Everything-Perfectly-Prepared arrives? Fiddle his Ultimately, do we have a lazy GM or not?
Hey you got your ranger in my druid! You got your druid in my ranger! "You got my attention!" barked the animal companion.
Couldn't we keep things simpler and simply send a sacrificial lvl 0 commoner with Fly in low orbit and dump a Portable Hole filled with enough acid to bypass the resistance on Cthulhu? He'll come back a mythic lvl 20 commoner!
Also, Explosive Runes are permanent. What GM wouldn't let you stockpile them? A DM that knows the trick and has a surprising amount of enemies who "poorly" cast Greater Dispel Magic at stockpiling wizards.
Step 9. Use Staff of the Master to Quicken Time Stop. Fly into range and toss out the individual runes (think it as "making it rain"). Move out of range. About that bit. Time Stop has a maximum of 5 rounds duration. Overland flight is 40ft/round, Big C's aura is 300ft... or a minimum of 7 rounds equivalent travel, and this isn't even counting the distance back. If you roll poorly on Time Stop, you'll get 2 rounds top. A "safe" distance regarding Cthulhu is quite subjective. My choice of safe distance is "on another planet".
For now, I'm filing this spell in the "You don't abuse it as a player, I won't abuse it as a DM!" category.
Still trying to make sense of it all. To kill Cthulhu:
Question: How do you teleport the Nalfeshnee? Being a summoned creature, the Nalfeshnee's teleport/dimensional powers are disabled, and if the wizard casts teleport, he *has* to follow to ground zero. Which from his POV is a bad idea.
@ Cranky Dog - This caster is hardly built solely to defeat Cthulhu. This is just typical level 20 Caster stuff. There's quite a few tactics listed and that's not even mentioning the actually overpowered stuff. It's only typical if you built him to be a lvl 20 caster from the get go and give the absolute best goodies with no bad choices. If you show me his organic evolution from lvl 1 to 20, there would be some levels where you'd wonder why he'd take that route at that specific moment. He's spending a big chunk of his build on bypassing spell resistance in a game where the vast majority of monsters don't have any SR to speak of and a huge part of his income on preparing Explosive Runes.
Ah right, missed that part, I was thinking of something else WRT dispel magic. Back to the point, any PC specifically built for any encounter will normally win. But that wizard must've sucked for a ton of levels before he became the almighty Cthulhu dispeller (that Immortality power is pretty convenient).
Question: How does Cthulhu (or demon carrier) read 100s of explosive runes at the time to set them off in a single round? Would not someone *read* a single rune at a time per round?
i guess i shouldn't be using technobabble to justify things. One reason to technobabble it is if you want to expand on the idea behind it. If vampires or humans did research to discover that it's specific amino acids that are needed, then that means that someone is interested doing something with that knowledge. Either by discovering the perfect recipe for artificial blood; or using gene therapy on animals to reproduce the same blood types; or finding a way for humans to produce more of those amino acids so not as much blood is required; or produce some concentrated "super" blood that's more powerful than regular blood; etc.
Honestly, it's for the best. Just saying "vampires need blood for sustenance" is fine enough. The more detail you get into something, the more people will try and poke holes into it. Agreed, go ask around regular people into why they eat. Sure, scientifically speaking it's because you need the nutrients only available through the consumption of select organic matter; but most people will answer "Because I was hungry and felt better after eating something tasty." Vampire hunger and feel much better afterwards, and their tastiest select organic matter happens to be the blood of a still living humanoid. Like animals, they don't even need to understand why it happens. It just does.
valero There's more than one Valeros on Golarion?! This is the most offensive thing I've ever read on this board! It affronts all of my values and sensibilities. No setting can contain the awesomeness of more than a single Valeros! Though it would explain how he and his fellow iconics keep appearing on so many covers and adventures across Golarion at the same time.
It's oddly worded, but it's not unlike the Duelist's Canny Defense ability, but with Charisma instead of Intelligence. The key wording here is that it is treated as a DEX bonus instead of a Dodge bonus. Mechanically, not much difference.
One important thing to keep in mind is that in the anime itself, Jojo and company are already the equivalent of high level characters with advanced "eidolons", or at the very least characters with high stats and maxed Intimidate. From a PC point of view, it'll take a while to reach that level of awesomeness. Also, concerning anime with summoner/eidolon themes, Shaman King is even closer in concept. From beginning to end, you see the growth of the character and spirit's powers.
Stil I question the sanity of your GM giving everyone max stats, not because it makes you more powerful, but it makes his job that much harder. He basically needs to treat the party ECL as being 2-3 levels higher, and either rebuild all the monsters with max stats, or just throw a wall of monsters at you. Just a lot of extra work for him... I know the pain. In my Jade Regent AP, everyone rolled and I readjusted the low rollers to be in line with the highest roller, so it gave them stats far above average and made them extremely powerful. So I had to add more monsters, or make them tougher, ending with more XP, which made the PCs stronger sooner, which needed tougher encounters, which gives more XP, vicious cycle. And in WotR, our DM said he might as well go all the way and give us a 18-16-16-14-14-12 stat spread, and even before becoming mythical we were dominating most encounters. He had to double/triple the number of foes to get close to a challenge (we were six PCs too). At least with WotR, he's ignoring XPs and we level when the adventure recommends it.
Looking closer at Shardra's picture, her eyes seem to be partly looking up, and partly as if she's rolling them back as if to say "It's one of those threads* again..." and sighing. Either that or her headdress is slipping. It does looks heavy enough. *: Paladin alignment; Fighter/rogues/monks underpowered; Is this evil?; Summoner OP!; Sex and sexuality in Pathfinder/Golarion; Do these feat/powers stack?; etc.
I was wondering when we'd finally get a new dwarven iconic. My shoulders and neck ache just looking at her gear.
For generic mythic adventures, there are a lot of possibilities. But for WotR, a common mistake would be to only focus on the combat aspect. One of the major theme of that path is redemption (J.J.'s words), so a subtly powerful mythic ability is Display of Charisma. When you need to absolutely succeed at that diplomacy/intimidate/bluff check, you'll be very happy for that +20, and it happens more often than you'd expect. If no one else in the group has it, GET IT! Also a great defensive ability is Beyond Morality. For all those Smite Good/Evil/Law/Chaos, Detect G/E/L/C or Protection from G/E/L/C or whatever alignment based spells that get slung around, it is the ultimate in defense since you will always be of the best alignment possible for the situation. Especially if you go plane hopping in the Abyss.
Undead... hunger... human... cattle... Welcome to Geb, we have all your unliving needs covered!
Does it have the "bow-chika-wow-wow" evolution? Otherwise, like other eidolons, it sort of looks like a regular creature, but isn't. Can we even define eidolons as male/female? They feel gender neutral. Concerning that player, it looks like he wants to shock people for the reaction; essentially a troll. As for the PC, the eidolon might be just as horny as the summoner... or not; there's nor real answer. The summoner is the least common class in the setting, so the very existence of eidolons already must freak out a lot of people; so from other PCs view it could range from "true love" to "this is as wrong as the paladin getting freaky with his mount times 1d20, better burn them to the stake".
The magus are the ones who can get some serious mileage with cantrips. With Arcane Mark they can go all Zorro with a secondary attack. With the Close Range arcana, they can channel Disrupt Undead into their weapon into an improvised Undead Bane weapon or Ray of Frost into a poor man's Frost Weapon (great against fire creatures).
I've been a fan of semaphore tower lines for years. It's the sort of non-magical communication that "modern" countries like Cheliax, Andoran and Taldor could have to link major settlements to their capitals along main routes. It's the sort of communication device that would alert everyone along the way. And unless you have the codebook, the symbols could mean anything. Now enhance the principle with magic (Silent Image FTW!) and you can have an early warning system that can quickly span a kingdom. Re-reading the OP, for a king to communicate with heroes... use local spies who were contacted by magic or other means. Otherwise, use magic.
Yes, let's ignore the bit where the dragon will go through a raging rampage that will destroy half the town after we bring attention to ourselves for shooting an arrow at it. Why wait to plan a dragon hunt that is safely away from civilization?
About evil undead: It's not that being an undead creature type makes you automatically evil, it's more the fact that a lot of undead are created after doing something quite vile, distasteful and atrocious (without much regret) and just have the evil cling to them. With that reasoning, I would also argue that undead spawn, those who become undead after being slain by a master-type undead (vampire, wight, etc.) will not be automatically evil (though still under control of a master). But often those undead are the "suck-the-life-out-of-everything-to-survive" kind that *eventually* turn evil.
Drow seem to be pretty much universally reviled in lore. I imagine that in the Underdark, where they are a dominant known force, killing them on sight *may* not be a bad idea. But at the same time most denizens there also know that there might consequences such as having a drow raiding party the following days razing your settlement.
Some elves turn Drow due to extreme evil and demon worship, though most do not. This is the sort of moral ambiguity situation that must drive elves nuts. It's their own racial version of turning to the Dark Side of the Force. To an elf, Drow are the literal example of falling from grace. An elf archer sees a lone drow who hasn't spotted him and he has a chance of conveniently immediately slay him. But is killing him out of the blue without warning any different than what a drow would do? If I do it, am I becoming more drow? I now see the elf-drow relation as something like the paladin/anti-paladin relation. Most are natural drows, but some are elves that just went to far and snapped.
oraoraoraora is a flurry, a syntethizer/monk gestalt comes into mind, just the notion of it gives me chills D: scareeeh! Definitely a flurry of blows class feature. ...ORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAOROARAORAORAORAORAORAORAORA!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's a lot of d20s! But do you confirm your critical hit?
it may be as simple as he just can't draw feetNah, Wayne Reynolds always draws weird feet. Go look at all of the other iconics, they've got weird feet. Considering the amount of details he puts into something he "can't" draw, I'm inclined to disagree. I just say it's his "thing" that distinguishes it from other artists. Many artists have styles that are often instantaneously recognizable. Wayne Reynolds is well drawn small dainty pointy feet. Rob Liefeld on the other hand is a case of foot phobia, a fear of body proportions, a love of intense frowny faces and big pouches.
A big party with no healer (primary or otherwise)? It's the usual gamble no matter what adventure you run. Potions and wands of cure wounds can only take you so far. In exchange, the offensive power you get can make most fights end much sooner, limiting the damage you receive. Now as to what to do after a near TPK. There's no single correct answer, and it depends more on your group wants to do.
I always thought water elementals functioned similarly to water benders from Avatar. Their are a lot of scenes of water benders removing water from wet clothing and leaving it as dry as a desert. You'll also recall that when they *were* in the desert, they had practically no water to speak of.
I've decided of my version of the ending to this backstory:
Zadim charged the old man who quietly awaited his punishment with his arms open offering no resistance. Zadim kicked him in the chest and the old paladin fell on his back. As Jevantus closed his eyes and awaited the final strike, he felt the slice of two blades across his palms, the sudden warm dampness of his blood, almost without pain, and then silence but for the sound of his still beating heart. He opened his eyes to see Zadim standing over him. "In the name of Sarenrae, I declare that Gordreth Chrysolian of Yanmass — Gordreth the BUTCHER! — is dead and I have my blades stained in his blood as proof for my masters. And I have you Jevantus of Abadar as sole witness." The paladin silently nodded. Zadim slowly turned and walked away, fading into the darkness with his final words: "If by some happenstance the Butcher should return, so shall I. And there will be —no— witnesses." |
