I don't know of another item like this. Does it crib off of AoMF - yes.

Well, that's what I meant. It's like it in mechanics.

Given the central idea, "what if this barefisted-enhancement could be used to enhance weapons?" is not an out-of-the-box question to ask, it's just not showing off your creativity.

That doesn't say you don't have creativity, it's just hard to see how much if this item is all we have to go by.

This is exactly what I was trying to do. I created an item where I saw a need. [goes on to explain need...]

Yep. And I saw you doing that. Really, I do think that there's a very important skill being shown off by the ability to notice those niches and then fill them. If someone else noticed this niche, doing what you do is exactly what I would want that person to do to fill it. Cribbing from that other well known item that does the parallel thing to your item is just what should be done. There are so many rules and spells and items in Pathfinder, by streamlining things with duplication where necessary you're being friendly to GMs and Players alike.

When I see situations like this I'm torn. You could be a really great designer, the kind of person with a sharp eye for these types of situations and a thoughtful approach to how you can provide solutions that require the least work on the part of players and GMs to understand and use.

OTOH you could be a player whose one favorite character happens to throw things and, lacking personal creativity, solved your frustration by copying and pasting from the item that did the thing that was closest to what you wanted to do.

I thought I saw things like the restriction to masterwork items, etc., that made it more likely you weren't just a frustrated player with a quick ctrl-v hand and a bit of luck. But given that these 300 words are the only 300 words in the universe as far as RPGSS goes, I will tend to down vote an item like yours because what if I'm wasting my vote on a designer with absolutely nothing to offer anyone in the next round?

Like I said, it doesn't preclude creative design skills, it just - by itself, as a singe item - doesn't provide evidence on which I'm willing to hang this old lesbian softball league hat I have here.

Now that your item has made the top 32 and people can see this isn't a fluke, they'll value your work. [Edited to add that your item didn't make it. Your mention of your round 2 map befuddled me for a moment] In fact, you did exactly what I realize now I spectacularly failed to do with my revealing ink. I personally love items that inspire and (even better) require role-play. The revealing ink is just that. But role-play can't easily be reduced to crunch. I've gotten feedback that people were scared of the open-endedness of the item. And yet, look at charm person or suggestion. What, exactly, they do is far less crunchy than revealing ink and no one has axed them from the game. I thought I was being more specific than those effects, so hey, wouldn't everyone appreciate that? But if I had cribbed more, people would have thought, "Oh, yeah, suggesting to a prisoner that the prisoner spill his guts. That's not an intimidating possibly-game-breaking new thing. That's just a special case of a spell we've allowed for a long time."

I think you've done some genius design work here. But during voting I was frustrated by having to judge only on those 300 words, and not being able to make a clear call between "Amazing designer working hard to reduce the learning curve and thus make the game easer, and thus make it more fun" ...and "frustrated gamer who happened to cut and paste just the right thing" I found myself down voting your item a lot.

I actually regretted doing it the first couple of times, because I knew there was a real chance you were doing thoroughly awesome design. But eventually I made peace with the fact that i was supposed to judge you on those 300 words alone.

Clearly you didn't need my votes. And I'm glad, because you obviously aren't a lucky crank. This feedback is very specific to the RPGSS context and not about game design generally.

....and of course it may not even be good feedback. This did affect how I voted, but I'm not necessarily anything like the average RPGSS voter.

Because I could not find a "Knife" on a weapon list, and this surpised me.

Well shiver me timbers and blow me down! ...a friend tells me this is Skull & Shackle speak for, "You don't say, my good man. Well, that information clearly is novel to me as well."

Obviously you did quite a lot of thoughtful follow through, taking your own idea very seriously and doing the legwork to track down all the game info needed to thoroughly understand the consequences of your design choices.

==========

Your thoroughness and the process revealed in this conversation shows you to be a good designer who designs with imagination but isn't too vain to cut the imaginative parts if that's just good for the game. That humility will also make you a joy to work with from an editor's perspective.

I don't know that I have anything to off you, really. But maybe leaving in a bit more of the imaginative stuff will help you next year.

Or maybe not. Hard to tell.

Rip this apart, please.

Oh, you know me. I'm to gentle for...

...aw, who am I kidding. Let's do this thing.

Chemist's Retort
Aura faint conjuration; CL 6th
Slot none; Price 12,700 gp; Weight 12 lbs.

Description
The bolt case of this +2 heavy repeating crossbow may, instead of five bolts, be filled with a single flask or vial. Chemist's retort will fire the flask or vial loaded in this fashion as if it were thrown, but the range increment is 50 feet and the weapon's enhancement bonus only applies to your attack roll. Once the bolt case is loaded into the crossbow, this weapon duplicates any flask or vial loaded in this manner with a value of 50 gp or less, and may fire up to five total of any such item before running out and needing to be reloaded. It may fire a similar item of a higher value, but its magic is unable to duplicate such items.

Any time the bolt case is removed from the crossbow, it is empty. Alchemist's bombs (and any concoction that must be used within a round after it is created) are too volatile and become inert once loaded.

Three times per day as a free action, the wielder of chemist's retort may elect to double all damage done by an alchemical item it fires. This choice must be made before the attack is rolled.

Construction
Requirements Craft Magical Arms and Armor, abundant ammunition; Cost 6,700 gp.

1. Name

No.

The names is NOT bad.

But I warn you: I've seen so many items named some variation of "alchemist's retort" that you've got a problem.

The good thing is that none of those items distinguished themselves in my mind that you're competing directly with another item for the name.

The bad news is that I can't promise you that there's not already something named the same thing (or close enough) currently published or soon-to-be-published in a supplement by a 3PP or even by Paizo.

Last thing, about themes.

The double meaning of "retort" here is always intended by the authors of such items (otherwise the item would be an actual bit of glass kit useful for separating dissolved volatiles from their solvents.

HOWEVER, what does retort mean?

It's a ***response***. That means other people have to go first. A sword is not a "retort" themed item unless you do something that makes it so that the wielder always goes last in every round, or so that the damage done by the "retort" themed sword is actually based on damage previously done to the wielder. Things like that.

If your item doesn't require you to be responding to something else that happens first, then "retort" is just a throw-away joke and not actually a theme.

Since you can't easily build an entire theme around "this is owned by a chemist" (especially since other people are going to own this item over time, hopefully - you're not making a one-class item, are you?) I really, really hope "retort" is a theme-word for you and not just a throwaway joke.

But since pretty much every single person who uses a variant of this name uses retort as a throwaway joke and not a chance to build an awesome theme, I'm not in a good mood.

(except there was one "retort" item that actually used the theme a little bit, wasn't there? A shield that held grenades that would then burst when the shield was struck? Okay, so it has been done at least once that someone got the "retort" theme right. Still the failures vastly outnumber the successes with retort-named items)

That isn't your fault, exactly. It's other people's failures that have put me in that mood. But you chose to duplicate a previously used name - at least previously used in RPGSS, even if there may not be a published item of that name (I don't know). So now other people's failures are dragging you down.

If you manage to use "retort" to do some theme building, but your theme building isn't consistent and good, starting in a bad mood probably means you won't get the full benefit of the middle-of-the-road credit you deserve.

If you completely fail to build around the "retort" theme, then you'll get all the docked points you deserve for choosing a throwaway joke over creating a real theme that benefits the item. And then you'll get docked some more for not being the first person to make this joke and fail to exploit the theme. Maybe that's not fair, maybe you should have learned from the last person who named something something like this, and given your extra chances to learn from others, it is fair. I don't really know. I just know that given this particular name, and how it has failed in the past, I'm going to be extra cranky if you chose not to take your own name seriously while repeating a bad joke that wasn't relevant in any way to your item (since it's neither a gas-separator nor an item that responds to others' prior actions).

......

But wait! There's a silver lining. If you're the first person to actually develop the retort theme, you will get my undying gratitude and you'll probably get more POSITIVE points than you would normally deserve for whatever good theme-building you do because you'll look so damn good compared to all those people who built something named "retort" that has nothing to do with "retorts".

Please be that designer. Please.

2. Glance top to bottom
Glance at the formatting to see if the entry pays enough attention to what Paizo wants that this item isn't throw-away worthy. Maybe glance at a couple of other things that seem like DQs to me - a CL of 21+, a cost of 200,001 gp or more (since that’s forbidden by Paizo), maybe something else I’m not thinking about right now.

Okay, the format looks good. I can see that all the information is in the right places and the bolding in the right places makes it easy to navigate around.

Quick checks - isn't 6th level the first level of "moderate" auras? Cost/price looks reasonable, though I don't know exactly what a masterwork repeating heavy crossbow costs. Is it really exactly 700 gp? Hm.

Oh, and the construction requirements are correctly done.

This is no throwaway item where the designer didn't attempt to do the work of making something for Pathfinder, or where the designer made a rod or a ring in a contest that doesn't allow those.

...but in doing my glancing around, I notice that the only spell used in construction is "abundant ammunition".

And now my hopes that you actually used "retort" in building your item are sinking. Oh, no. This is going to be yet another item that just used the entire item name as a joke, isn't it? And now we're going to have that joke that has nothing to do with what the item does on a character sheet for months if not years? How long until the joke becomes as annoyingly old to everyone else as it already is to me?

...PLEASE make me wrong. PLEASE. I'm begging you here.

3. Read for content
what does the item do? Is the item in an over-used design space?
Is the function understandable?

The item functions as a "grenade thrower" showering special liquids - magical or alchemical - on targets by shooting their flasks from a crossbow. This gives considerably more range than a hand-thrown grenade like weapon, but less than half the range of an actual bolt.

Additionally, one can load a single "grenade" but fire it 5 times, so long as the original price of the grenade was 50 gp or less. This saves a ton of money on the cost of buying special substances to fling around the battlefield. Of course, it's still more expensive to buy one grenade at 20gp than a whole passel of crossbow bolts, so it's not exactly the cheapest way out. It's just that if you're committed to the bomb-thrower concept, it saves you a lot of money, not that every character would buy this for the money savings since its generally cheaper to use bolts. (Magic +1 bolts are 40 gp each, for comparison)

Finally, 3x a day any grenade fired will do double damage - if they hit. The power is used before the attack roll. No clarifications/special instructions on critical hits when using this power.

NOTE: the grenade to be duplicated is destroyed even before the first shot is fired. Since you put it in the repeater-case, then load the case in the crossbow (rather than loading the grenade directly in the crossbow), the language of the entry is very important when it says

Any time the bolt case is removed from the crossbow, it is empty.

Note that expensive grenades - values far in excess of 50 gp - can be used with the weapon even if the weapon cannot duplicate them.

FURTHER NOTE - if you load a 17,000 gp vial of intensified, empowered circle of death gas and then decide that you'd rather use a different bit of ammunition, the vial is gone when you go to swap out the death gas for your new grenade.

Just gone.

Bye-bye.

Likewise, if you load 5 +5 greater slaying crossbow bolts, then decide you would rather use holy water, you better throw that holy water by hand, you know what I'm saying?

Think about that when you're choosing to load the thing.
....I'm not saying this is bad, I'm just making this design choice very, very clear. It's a completely legit design choice and even forces some role-playing about the risks of loading something expensive if you're not sure you need it.

4. Read for crunch
Is the crunch understandable?
Is it complicated?
Does it use effects that will be a pain around the gaming table?
Is it overpowered comes into play here if it would be a bad item regardless of price. Otherwise it's an underpricing issue. This doesn't mean that the item has to be worth more than 200,000 gp. An item can be overpowered if its fair market value is only 3,000 -5000 gp if the only characters who would ever want to use it are first level characters (who can't afford it - so they have to be given it - so you see the problem).
NOTE: I don't have to particularly like the approach to the crunch that you chose, so long as it works.

It's pretty understandable.

"May" at the beginning clearly signals that the crossbow fires standard bolts whenever you like. The duplication language makes it clear that we're talking about duplicating grenade items only. The bolts can be fired normally, but not duplicated. And the crunch language prevents any possible confusion on that score.

Really, the designer does an excellent job being clear with crunch. I don't see anything in here at all that might cause disagreement around the table. A player might really hate it if they forgot that all their expensive greater slaying crossbow bolts are disintegrated when the bolt-case is opened. It might cause upset. But it wouldn't cause disagreement. Everyone can point to the language and say, "you knew what you were getting in to".

There are no effects that would be a pain around the table. While some people might be concerned that it duplicates andy vial, not only those that are normally usable as a grenade like weapon, I don't have any problem with that. Just because it can fire a potion of lead blades made at CL 1 doesn't mean that anyone is actually going to be under the effects of lead blades if they get hit by such a vial (or such a splash). Nope. It'll just be a grenade that does 1d4-3 on a direct hit (from the glass), no damage on a splash. Easy peasy.

Awesomely easy crunch. No real painful issues unless the players get stupid and disintegrate their own valuables. Even then, with any reasonable player you'll just have 5 minutes of unpleasant griping. The bad players that would make your life hell for that will find a reason to make your life hell anyway. The problem in that case is the player, not the crunch in this weapon.

I do note a problem - well, really a potential problem - in not dealing with reloading times. Does it take more or less time to insert a grenade in the bolt case than a bolt? You can't have spare cases, only this one magical case. And the crunch under Heavy Repeating Crossbow only talks about the time to release and insert the case ...but not to fill the case before re-insertion. Part of this is Paizo's problem but it would be nice if you would make sure your item didn't suffer because of it.

As far as overpowered or not, well, all it really does is give grenade-like weapons more range and make them a bit cheaper to use. No reason to fret over that.

Good call in making volatile items ineligible for use in the crossbow, though it seems to me that by the time you create it and load it in the bolt case and load the bolt case in the crossbow and take a single shot, has it really been less than a round? I suppose with haste, or people operating in teams, you could do this.

I think a better way to do this would be something different, however. Your duplication is based on gp value, right?

Well, you can't sell alchemist's bombs, since they disappear in a round, right?

What if it can't duplicate anything with no market value? At best, then, you'd be able to string multiple characters together to fire that crossbow once - gaining a bit of range in exchange for using multiple persons in the creation-to-fire process.

Others could happily chime in if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem broken. I am not, of course, saying your way of doing things is wrong or mine is better, I've just heard other people call this out as a great design choice and I was curious as to whether, since you've already set up a system based on market value, there was a good reason to exclude based on "volatility" and not their inability to show up in the market (which, yes, is because of the volatility, but did you consider the advantages of basing all the rules on market value instead of creating what is, in effect, 2 different metrics?) Are there things which last more than 1 round but which nonetheless can't really be sold for being tied to a creator, etc. If so, you'd be giving these "0 gp" cost grenades the ability to be duplicated even if they're awesomely powerful 9-level-spell grenades. Worse, now the item is published...what happens when someone creates a spell specifically circumvent your restrictions by making a vial that lasts up to 5 rounds (justifying it to their GM as being delayed-blast-fireball-ish) and is normally thrown as a grenade? Is "no market value" the same as a market value of "0 gp."? That's what your crunch seems to think. I agree that the player who designs that spell just to get around your restrictions and get 4 free duplications of a 9th-level-spell bomb is being a jerk and should be shut down by the GM, but why not write the item to make that harder in the first place - especially since failure to participate in the market is a great test for those tenuous creations?

Finally, I want to generally congratulate you here on good crunch. You thought through potential problems, taking your items powers seriously and thinking of ways to make sure the item wouldn't cause problems around the table. Really good job on this. I disagree on how to handle volatile/temporary items, but the problems that might crop up are the kinds of things that would usually occur by someone deliberately trying to break the game. Although I think you can (and should) prevent that if it's too easy to figure out how to break the game with your item, you've done enough good design work that the people who are trying to break the game with your item will be pretty quickly revealed as trying to break the game, not trying to be a creative player.

Because your design exposes those efforts as dishonest, even if it doesn't prevent them it makes it fairly easy to take care of around the table. Again, I like that last little step to prevent the break entirely, but what you've done here is sufficient on that score and more than sufficient on every other aspect of the crunch that I can see.

This is very superior crunch.

5. Reading for creativity
Is this new?
Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?
Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

Is this new?
Um, no. I've seen other bows & crossbows that fire grenade like weapons.

There's a property "endless ammunition" in use for crossbows already. It doesn't function exactly like this, but it's close enough to show the design concept is no longer fresh.

Also, again though it has differences, there have been quivers designed so that they duplicate non-magical ammunition. They're quivers so this is about arrows and bolts, not grenade-like weapons, but duplicating ammunition is also shown to be other than new, other than fresh.

By using a repeating crossbow, there's a "bolt-case" which fits in the weapon, but isn't fundamentally different from bolt cases used to carry around bolts on one's person. If a quiver that duplicates ammunition would make a bolt-case that duplicates ammunition not "fresh," the fact that this is a bolt-case that loads directly into the crossbow separates it from those quivers by only a small amount.

Thus any way you slice it, there are multiple examples in the design space that are similar in function and/or effect to this weapon, save that they focus on missiles other than grenade-like missiles.

So you're filling an unfilled design niche, but this is the kind of item growth that is the natural outcome of applying existing ideas to similar but not the same weapon types. Someone has to write this item up eventually, sure. It's not bad to fill design niches that are empty, but happen to be close to other niches that have already been filled.

It's just that if you're trying to show off your creativity, this item doesn't tell me anything about how creative you can be.

Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?

Y'know, it almost is. Load repeating box with one item, the box acts as if it was holding the same number of grenades that it could hold bolts. Want to change ammunition or you've run out? Pop off the box and reload as normal.

The repeating box provides a very natural limit for the number of times an item can be duplicated. I feel like I know exactly why the magic fires 5 missiles before needing to be reloaded. And yet, it's magic. Magic can do anything. It could have been 17 duplications, right? right?

Technically yes, but because you've integrated the duplicating magic with the "repeating" function of the repeating crossbow, you've created the illusion that magic **can't** do anything, that the magic has to operate in just exactly this way.

That's really good design.

Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

See, the last bit, the bit about "repeating" grenades being tied into the "repeating" crossbow, that was good design. That was even thematic design. You had a chance to build around that. I would have loved to see something simply called, "the repeating crossbow".

hell, what about "the crossbow of experimental replication"? "experimental replication" is a thing in real life. I suppose people might even laugh at this use as a pun and a joke. Though those people would be wrong and have very, very sad lives. I say this as someone who has a friend who is a professional metallurgist and a brother-in-law who is a chemical engineer and who knows something about how bad science humor can be. But it's also an actual theme that ties into this weapon. Alchemists are spoken of as experimenters. Alchemical compounds - which are frequently used as grenade-like weapons - are supposed to be finicky to make, with people never knowing if they're going to get a useful product or a smear of stinky ooze.

I don't think that's a great name. I'd want something even better. But the only time I see good thematic design here is in the relationship between the "repeating crossbow" and the duplication of ammunition.

Chemist isn't any better referenced here than "experimental" would be referenced. Both refer to only a subset of grenade-like weapons. Obviously un/holy water wouldn't be considered "experimental" in any way by the priests involved. (Heck they might sick the inquisitors on your for suggesting it.) But it's also not the work of a "chemist".

I think the design should be even tighter than "experimental replication" if you want to get in the top32, but right now you only have 2 things that mutually support each other in a thematic way: the nature of the non-magical item you chose to build on, and the crunch (well, and basic idea, I suppose) of duplicating grenades. "Experimental replication" would at least tie in the name of the item, then you'd have 3-way mutual support, if imperfect, instead of 2-way. Obviously 2-way is the least possible amount of mutual support. Because your two-way support was done so invisibly, in a way that seems so natural most people wouldn't even notice because of course you reload after 5 shots, it's impossible that this really represents an accident. People aren't even going to think about why this is a repeating crossbow. Of course it's a repeating crossbow. You had to make it out of a repeating crossbow, right? Would the magic even work any other way?

See that's the sort of thing where even though we as designers know that you had to consciously think about ideas and put them together and that we as designers know you could have made this a repeating sling, by doing the work and doing the work you've gotten your item to a point where it looks to the average person as if were just impossible to make a sling that does this, that the only weapon anyone could ever enchant with this function would absolutely have to be a repeating crossbow, because how could even magic do anything different, right?

So this is better mutual support between these two item aspects than many people achieve with 3 item aspects, or even possibly 4 (though most designers don't even have 4 different aspects reinforcing a single theme, so it's much shakier to say how often those items have achieve a level of mutual support you've done with 2 aspects).

The question then, is why if you know how to make a thematic item, if you know how to use one aspect of an item to reinforce another in a way that makes both aspects and the whole damn item better, why in the world would you choose a name that has nothing to do with the only theme you've created, a theme on which you obviously worked at hard and successfully?

I feel crushed now. You've made the same mistake as those other designers who use "retort" while entirely ignoring the retort theme. You've reduced your item name to a joke, and one told too many times already to be funny anymore.

...and you did this despite obviously having some skill at theme building!

Oh, what could you have done if you actually cared about your item's name enough to give your item an identity instead of just throwing that away so you could use the space for this warmed-over pun.

I'm telling you I'm bitter over the waste of your obviously considerable talents.

6. Reading for audience appeal
The job is to design game products that gamers will buy. So a very legitimate question is, "Will gamers want to buy the supplement just to be able to use this item at their table?" If yes, that's a good reason to up vote.

Hm. Yeah, I think that people will want a grenade-thrower. There are a lot of people in the military (or who have been in the military) who play pathfinder, and I find that they are a little more likely than others to want fantasy-appropriate weapons that they can tie into experiences with modern day weapons. probably because they have more such experiences. If I'd had experiences being razzed for using my grenade launcher poorly in a training exercise and after serious work later got praise for using my grenade launcher well, I'd probably enjoy the experience of creating a character that can do something similar, allowing me to relive those good moments with friends.

I don't think this has as much general appeal as, say, a sword.

But here's the thing: a new magic sword has to compete in an industry constantly investing 1.21 gigawatts in new magic sword creation. Exactly how many repeating crossbows are there that can throw a grenade at all, much less duplicate one?

In truth, i've seen several efforts to create such grenade throwers, but nothing really memorable yet. So you probably are competing with home brew throwers, but I think most GMs would prefer one from a supplement by a respected publisher, so the competition among professionally published grenade-throwers is small.

So, yeah, I think this has market legs. Good job.

7. Reading for the joy of the word.
Did you write clearly?
I don't care about a typo or the misuse of a single piece of punctuation, but do you have errors or style choices that disrupt flow?
Do you have style choices that enhance the flow - are you creative with sentence structures and do you have the capacity to consider cadence when selecting from synonyms?
Does the mood of the writing reflect the mood of the item? Perhaps a droning monotonous rhythm would enhance certain items.
Have you thought through the theme of your item and made sure that every time you have an choice between two words or two phrases you select the one that furthers your theme and reinforces your imagery?
Do you add wondrous, unexpected depth under the clear surface, in which attentive readers may immerse themselves?
Most of the time this feedback will not focus on anything you've done wrong, but on moments where a designer misses an opportunity to do something amazing.

Should I say it again? People have made me hate the word retort. that's not really about the art of writing, but it's certainly affected my joy - or not- reading your item.

So here's the thing... I think you've mostly got this. Your writing is very polished. It's got flow. It's got rhythm.

I will also say, since it's my review, that your particular rhythm, your particular flow, your particular style is not to my taste. You're very Hemingway and I'm very Tolstoy.

But I'm more than writer enough to recognize that even though your writing isn't the type to make me sing, it deserves most of the same points that I would give for that. Your writing is the type to make **someone** sing, and I hold no grudge that you and I don't have identical stylistic preferences.

Your writing isn't abrupt - which is why I can say it's so good - but it is very direct and economical. It's very easy for someone with your style to sink into terse or slip down into curt. It's also easy to make your writing choppy as you focus on one idea, get it done, and it's left behind and a completely separate idea is the subject of a new sentence.

I know that I'm wordy. I know that has weaknesses and therefore I deliberately try to work against those weaknesses when I write for others and not merely for my own entertainment on a message board. But it also has some strengths. I remember the subject of the last sentence in this sentence and this sentence in the next sentence. Not always in writing like this, entirely unedited, top-of-the-head stuff for a message board, but yeah, if I have time to write and time to give at least 1 quick-but-not-drastically-quick edit I turn out prose that really considers flow and makes sure that many sentences carefully hands the reader off to the next. The rest of the sentences (if I've had time to edit) will very rarely create a stop, and most of those will be intentional stops to create an emphasis that feels important, natural, like speech.

My biggest problem is developing the relationships between my ideas so much that I end up wanting to put 72 different clauses all in the same sentence with complicated grammar, punctuation, and conjunction relationships to each other.

You ... don't have that problem.

But I don't want you to turn out something next time that does fall into terse or curt, that does create choppy seas for your reader, because I failed to do due diligence here.

So I' going to recommend that you read your writing aloud. I can't teach you to be more clear. You probably are going to write more clearly than I for your entire life. But I can tell you that your writing gives only minimal consideration to how your words sound, how they echo, how they resonate.

You can use cadences, you can use poetics, you can use art to make yourself clear. You don't have to be clear **only** by being Hemingway-esque. I'd really like to see your writing after you read it aloud a number of times and then edit it, then read it aloud some more, then don't edit, just tweak. Read it and tweak just one word or one phrase. Tweak one word or phrase every time you read it aloud.

Don't take on some huge job of rewriting your entry as a whole. Just listen carefully and make one tiny adjustment that favors your ear and not your word count. It doesn't have to make your writing longer. It can even shorten it, tighten it. But don't try for that outcome. You've obviously trained yourself to be a good writer of economical, clear prose. You don't waste anyone's time - and that's a favor to your reader. But you probably do that mostly automatically now. You've probably developed a style of thinking, a style of creating that lends itself to turning out such prose. This isn't to say you don't also use careful thought and conscious crafting choices in your writing, just that what you turn out without thinking lends itself to be polished into your economical, clear writing product.

So try doing some writing that doesn't make that a priority, make your only priority how the word sounds aloud - just as I sometimes try to write curt prose so I can turn out something that gets me within 3 or 4 range increments of economical.

Remember, this is after you've already turned out a good draft, so you're not abandoning your style for the entire piece of writing. You're just abandoning those old priorities temporarily. Just for fun. Just as an experiment.

With some people I suggest trying to sing things as well. With you I wouldn't. If you've seen me recommend that to others, know that I'm specifically not recommending it to you. I think you'd have to make too many adjustments to your writing and that it would take you too far from the style that you've developed. You know how to do your style well. If you move too far from it, when you take another look to edit the next /final draft you either won't like your own work (which is bad, not least because it discourages you from writing more/trying again) OR by using your editing skills as you've practiced them on one kind of writing product, your editorial instincts will serve you poorly in refining that new style of prose.

So, like I said, a word at a time. Several readings out loud before you do any editing/tweaking. Then, only when you feel you have several things built up that you just know are good tweaks, go do a number of tweaks or one good edit. At this point, it will start to have an actual different feel. It should be a new starting place. From here you can do one reading, one small tweak. If you feel like you've noticed more than one thing that should be tweaked, restrain yourself. Only make the most important tweak. You've got a style, if you're gonna shift away from it I wouldn't do it suddenly or speedily. If you still want to make those other tweaks you thought of all in one reading, you've got more readings to come and you can make them then. But sometimes you might here 2 sentence as each having something that would obviously make them better, but when you make one change the other sentence is in a new context and may not still have the same problem.

Okay? We good?

Fine then. I'll make one more substantive criticism.

You have no description in here. What does your crossbow look like? I don't know. Do stains build up from the grenades? Does the reloading mechanism click? What if the reloading mechanism echoed even when there was nothing off which the sound would normally echo? Would that help your theme?

I don't doubt that you could work a description into a theme in a good way, but there's no description at all here.

I worry a bit that it's because you don't have any practice writing description and that it might be difficult or uncomfortable writing descriptive text - even in an economical, direct, clear style, you can well and creatively describe an item or idea or action without metaphor or poetics. It's possible I'm wrong and that this item simply didn't inspire any strong imagery for you. That's good in a sense. It would mean that you probably already describe things well when you do describe them, since your general writing skill is high.

But it also tells me that your own mojo detector may be miscalibrated. If your own item isn't inspiring any imagery for you (and it doesn't have to be visual, remember when I suggested that your "repeating" crossbow be echoey?), why do you think it's going to inspire imagery in others?

Make sure, if this is the case and you weren't inspired by your own item with any good descriptive elements, that when you picking and choosing among which ideas to submit to next RPGSS you're only choosing an item that actually does inspire you.

8. Rule checks:
is the item over-priced or underpriced?
What about caster level? Did you use 1st when Bane or Craft Wondrous Item has a higher level requirement?
Although the entire point of magic is to do things one could otherwise not do, nonetheless Pathfinder must have rules and I can't interpret every single conflict between an item and Pathfinder rules as simply a case of the magic of the item overcoming those rules.

I think your requirements are wrong, and that your weapon is more like an "endless ammunition" weapon than like the spell "abundant ammunition". Remember that this is a missile weapon with a similar ability. Pricing is an art. There's a rule that material component costs have to be paid 50 times in the price of an item that's going to be indefinitely reusable. 50*50gp is only 2500 gp. You probably used something like that in your pricing.

But if you compare to endless ammunition weapons, those are a +2 equivalent cost. That is way higher than 2500 gp ...

...and this is true despite the fact that 50 crossbow bolts costs a heck of a lot less than 2500 gp.

Yes, the crossbow doesn't fire indefinitely without reloading.

However, unlike endless ammunition weapons, every five shots you can be firing a new type of ammunition. AND there is far greater variety in effect of different grenades that you can duplicate than there is between different bolts.

This ability to reset what type of ammunition is duplicated more than compensates for the fact that you still pay 20% of the ammunition costs (instead of 0% - but actually more than that because endless ammunition creates endless boring ammunition but the weapon still expects that occasionally you'll put in a special arrow/bolt. And when you do reach for that special ammunition, it can't be duplicated by those weapons the way your different, weird fluids and powders can be duplicated by your crossbow.

In the art of pricing, we use the best comparison available. The best comparison isn't the material component cost rule, it's endless ammunition.

That makes this item cost at least what a +4 crossbow does. (then you have to deal with the 3x day double damage and costing that). A +4 crossbow is 4^2*2000 = 32,000 gp.

If we're using endless ammunition as the closest equivalent, you should also change your construction requirements to include minor creation, exclude abundant ammunition, and up your CL to 9.

9. The extra mile
This is all about making things easier for me as your reader.

I won't add anything here. There aren't any formatting tricks or other things that are designed to help me as a reader, and though your writing style is designed to help the reader by not wasting their time on unnecessary words, I'm already giving you points for that in writing style.

===============================================

Overall verdict?

This is an item that contains no "mistakes" that are as simple as violations of a rule, misuse or nonuse of the format, designing the wrong type of item, etc.

This item is not creative in what it does, but it shows some creativity in the elegant simplicity of how it does it.

This item is likely balanced in most game groups if the price is more similar to endless ammunition.

This item has an audience who will want to acquire and use the item. The audience may not be large, but isn't especially tiny. Some uncertainty as to total audience appeal still exists.

The writing is wonderfully clear.

The crunch wonderfully clear, combining a description of what's going on that supplements the very clear crunch. House rulings on this item, if any, should be easy.

This item does not use formatting or hyperlinks to go the extra mile to make it easy for me to read and grok. However, the item does use a concise, direct, clear writing style that is very reader-friendly.

This item does not have a consistent theme that is synergistically forwarded by name, description, what it does, how it does it, and systematic creative choices. To the extent that there's a theme, it's really only the combination of two aspects. Some design choices fall weirdly outside the theme (double damage 3x day comes from where?) or sabotage it (you know what belongs here).

This item does not have writing such that simply reading its entry is a pleasure, but it probably would if I weren't such a grouch about you being the 78th person to do that "retort" thing and do it badly.

This item is in the middle of the pack items to me. It may or may not be below the precise middle, but it isn't much above, if any.

This item, despite being middle of the pack, shows that important skills, including writing and creativity, are well developed in the designer even if not well used in this item. This item feels to me like the item of a designer that will be in the top 32 sooner or later, and that's a major accomplishment given where I ranked the item itself.

Needlenose Arbalest
Aura strong transmutation; CL 14th
Slot none; Price 51,050 gp; Weight 12 lbs.
Description
This sculpture of a monstrously articulated mosquito functions as a +2 impervious heavy crossbow, gaining the seeking special ability when targeting creatures with the bleed condition or who are below half their full hit points.

Once per week, the wielder may speak a command word to launch the mosquito's head at a foe within 50 feet as a ranged touch attack. The head remains connected by a length of rope stored within the crossbow. As part of the weapon, the rope benefits from the enhancement bonus and impervious special ability.

A successful hit deals normal damage and 1 point of bleed damage and the wielder can attempt a combat maneuver check to grapple the target as a free action. Each round the wielder successfully maintains the grapple, the target is pulled 10 feet closer to the wielder and dealt 1 additional point of bleed damage. This movement does not provoke.

If the wielder begins their turn adjacent to the target and successfully pins them, they may drop the crossbow as it animates into a giant mosquito (see the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 2), but without the disease special ability. The wielder is no longer grappled as the mosquito is now pinning the target. The mosquito acts on the wielder's next initiative, feeding on the pinned target. The mosquito reverts to its crossbow form once the grapple ends, the target is killed, or it deals 8 points of constitution damage, whichever comes first. If slain while animated, the mosquito reverts to crossbow form and may not be animated for a full month.
Construction
Requirements Craft Magic Arms and Armor, bleed, blood scent, fabricate, make whole, true seeing, vermin shape II; Cost 25,700 gp

1. Name

Absolutely not. Although arbalest is a synonym for crossbow, and it's hard to make a theme out of a "crossbow" I would never hold including the weapon type against the namer of a magical weapon.

"Needlenose" is a word that I don't think I've ever seen written in an RPG rulebook. If I have, it's been rare and it hasn't been tagged in my brain as having associations you would have to either cleverly exploit or overcome.

So you've got nothing against you in the name. But "needle nose" seems specific and evocative enough that you could probably integrate that into a theme.

It's a bit short of the ultimate goal, though. It doesn't actually **define** the theme. While it's got uniqueness going for it, I simply have no idea where you're gonna go with that. That's not bad, it certainly means the name is fresh (which, yes, is good), but though the word "needle nose" feels evocative, I don't really know what it's evocative of.

I expect to learn that later, but the best of names would set the stage rather than take advantage, retroactively, of a stage set by writing that comes after.

2. Glance top to bottom
Glance at the formatting to see if the entry pays enough attention to what Paizo wants that this item isn't throw-away worthy. Maybe glance at a couple of other things that seem like DQs to me - a CL of 21+, a cost of 200,001 gp or more (since that’s forbidden by Paizo), maybe something else I’m not thinking about right now.

Template appears well used. A few problems, cost/price mismatch for instance, but not so that you can't find information and not so that it looks like the designer didn't pay attention to what Paizo wanted.

3. Read for content
what does the item do? Is the item in an over-used design space?
Is the function understandable?

The item is a crossbow whose bolts swerve to strike bloodied opponents who would otherwise be protected by a miss chance.

Additionally, once per week, the crossbow shoots off a portion of itself, trailing a rope. The crossbow uses grapple rules to try to drag a struck victim back to the wielder.

Finally, if the crossbow drags the victim back, the wielder gets a chance to pin the already grappled victim. If successful, the crossbow becomes a giant mosquito and sucks blood.

yeah, I think I got it. There's nothing about what this does that's unclear to me. I probably even understand it well enough to use this description to make judgement calls if the party runs into crunch corner cases.

This is not at all an overused design space. It has shades of Mortal Combat's "Get over here!" (Scorpion, right?) but it is different. Some items I've seen are crossbows that connect their bolts to the weapon, but none animate in this way, none drink blood in this way.

This is also not the perfectly logical assemblage of pieces that were always destined to come together because they just make sense. This is a collection of powers that demonstrates creativity, even if the design space isn't completely out of the box, what with other crossbows that trail ropes and chains, this is a niche that might never have been filled without this designer.

Good stuff.

4. Read for crunch
Is the crunch understandable?
Is it complicated?
Does it use effects that will be a pain around the gaming table?
Is it overpowered comes into play here if it would be a bad item regardless of price. Otherwise it's an underpricing issue. This doesn't mean that the item has to be worth more than 200,000 gp. An item can be overpowered if its fair market value is only 3,000 -5000 gp if the only characters who would ever want to use it are first level characters (who can't afford it - so they have to be given it - so you see the problem).
NOTE: I don't have to particularly like the approach to the crunch that you chose, so long as it works.

understandable?

Yep. Absolutely. This item manages to be innovative while relying for its effects mostly on rulesets that already exist (e.g. grappling), established special abilities (e.g. seeking), and other sources with their own established details. This item grants those powers under special conditions or with specific tweaks and additions that are easy to understand, quickly described, clear in crunch, and at least occasionally enhancing the theme.

more complicated than it needs to be? Too complicated even though it's all necessary?
You want to make a complicated item? This item shows exactly how to do it. Relying extensively on the established permits the creation of a complicated item without going near 300 words. Careful attention to theme means the fact that these established sources don't end up undermining the them, but instead are mostly used in ways that either don't detract from the theme or actively add to it. This item has some really good stuff in the crunch.

If you started this item from scratch, trying to explain everything, you probably couldn't do it in 600 words (even if the mosquito still had its own bestiary entry).

I often write complicated stuff.

I don't do it nearly this well.

By having a great knowledge of a wide range of pathfinder rules and thinking seriously about how this would have to change to fit the theme, but not sticking in things that simply might be cool for that theme, this designer makes the complicated-item space accessible in ways that other designers can't manage.

Will it be a pain around the gaming table?
Oh, all the grapple checks won't be fun. You'll get into problems where the wielder keeps the rope taught and walks in an ark to put a fire pit between the struggling victim and the wielder...and that may require some judgement calls. But honestly, this isn't going to be more difficult than a lasso. I may not prefer it for the complexity, but even with all it's magic powers it's not more of a pain than a weapon that any of my first level characters might use at any moment.

I dock it minor points here, but other people might not knock any off at all.

Overpowered?

Why is the grapple a free action?

It really shouldn't be a free action. This bugs me. THere's no reason for it. Your theme is "needle nose", not "giant ape that has the mass to take care of this grapple all on my own". I get it that the crossbow animated sufficiently to send out its head, but that was just to hit. You've got someone on the end of a rope who really doesn't want to be there.

Why should I be able to make a full attack while controlling the creature at the end of the rope who is trying to get away?

I just see nothing in the theme, the construction requirements, what the item is actually doing, or anything else that tells me why this should be a free action.

For such a huge advantage (this is normally a standard action every round that you can't avoid) there needs to not only be something in how the item functions that tells me this needs to be a free action, but in addition the theme of the item better absolutely require that it function in this unusual, standard-action-saving way.

I just don't see that.

Oh, wait - I had to come back to this section because I remembered: The mosquito turns back into a sculpture when it has done 8 constitution damage.

Okay, that makes sense, but...

the attack does 1d2 constitution damage. What happens if the mosquito has done 7, then on the next attack rolls a d2 and gets a 2?

Does the magical transformation back interrupt the blood drain so that there's no time to suck out that 9th point? Or does the 9th point of constitution damage happen? If it's about the belly filling up, it seems like the mosquito might very well voluntarily forego the last point of damage.

But I just don't know.

Get this detail ironed out in the crunch for me, would you? It's a relatively small thing, but I'd appreciate it.

5. Reading for creativity
Is this new?
Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?
Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

Is this new?

Yep, this seems pretty new. Crossbows-as-constructs hasn't been done before that I know. There's a lot in here that's new, even though, as I said, it relies heavily on well-established rulesets.

Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?

It's way to complicated for that...

BUT... it actually does get the points an item might get for that because even though I can't say, "Of course, it should just do this, and then this, and then this, and then this," I can say that each little detail, each change or addition to the established rulesets the designer references, each special tweak is simple, makes sense, and either prevents a conflict with the theme or works to try to enhance the theme.

Many of the little steps, then, each separately give me that "why didn't I think of that" feeling, even though there's no way i can say that of the item's mechanics or functions as a whole.

Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

Okay, here's the thing. This item could have been in my top 32, but wasn't. There's a lot that I like about it, and so many design choices were made because the theme demanded it, not because it would make the mechanics easier or the item more powerful or something else that isn't about the item itself.

Just yum.

But in addition to a couple of writing problems that I'll get to in a different section, there are two significant problems. The first is simply something that fails to connect with the them, but doesn't really clash. The second one is a HUGE theme clash.

So, first: grapple. Mosquitos aren't known for grappling. Yes, technically it's part of the giant mosquito entry, but there's no imagery there that makes me think, Oh, yeah, they would totally use grapple quite often! I also strongly suspect that most mosquitos would use their grapple to pin someone to the ground (as the arbalest does when it turns into a mosquito) rather than using it to drag someone along the ground. In the very-very best case, you could imagine a super-huge mosquito flying off with someone, but not really dragging them along the ground. The imagery just really isn't working for me.

Second, the super-huge problem.
The item's name is "needlenose". The item is given not merely a blood-seeking theme, but a *mosquito* blood-seeking theme.

And...

...the impervious.

What the hell?

When I think of a mosquito's proboscis I don't think, "Wow, if that thing gets stuck in me I'm never going to get it out!" I don't think, "Jeez, that crossbow looks like a mosquito-sculpture. Look at that tiny wire mouth thing on the front! Man, I bet that thing is just unbreakable!

So much of what you do is driven by the theme, but then this one design decision seems made entirely out of fear. It doesn't enhance the theme, it contradicts it. But if the weapon was fragile, and you only get to do this special grappling thing once a week, dammit you just might never get a chance to make the weapon do it's whole shoot-drag-pin-HulkOut-suckblood cycle. If it was fragile, there's just too much going on there for everything to work out perfectly with a super-fragile mosquito-head, right?

I really feel like I have a good idea of why you wanted to go with impervious, but it's a choice that just kills your mojo.

I could write a lot more about how you integrated this aspect or that aspect of your theme. But you obviously know how to do it. Oh, heck, let's do a couple anyway:

• the seeking ability only functions when creatures have the bleed condition or are under 1/2 HP.
  
• the weapon that's going to turn into a mosquito actually is sculpted to resemble a mosquito - including (I think, we'll get to this later) mechanical articulations that should be delicate, like a mosquito.
  
• the mosquito turns back into a crossbow if it's belly is full of enough blood
  

Actually, now that I look at it, it's not that there are so many things that cross-reinforce, it's just that the major ones all do ...except grapple and impervious.

With so much more tight integration than most of the other items, impervious isn't so dang frustrating here because now the item's horrible.

it's still well above average.

But you pine for what might have been.

No mosquito-construct should be "impervious".

Nothing that uses imagery that deliberately evokes the delicate (like "needlenose") should be "impervious".

If you want to go shooting people and having the bow drag them back for you, how about this:

Your new theme is Bloodhound.

The name of the crossbow doesn't even use "crossbow" or "arbalest". It's just, "The Bloodhound". Or, rather, in Paizo-style, the bloodhound. Bloodhounds track something down for you. They can grab it in a mouth and bring it back. You can still have the seeking on a bleed condition or low HP. And then make that short stocky dog impervious.

There ya go.

but there's lots you could have done with the needle nose theme as well.

What's really scary about those super-fine needle-nose probosces? The scariest part is when they slip inside you, but they're so fine, so sharp, you don't even notice.

You want a needle nose that uses the mosquito theme?

Instead of dragging back your prey like a hunting dog, a certain number of times a day or week you can shoot a crossbow bolt as normal, roll to hit as normal, roll damage as normal, but you add 10.

The bolt does no damage. The damage+10 total is the DC of the perception check to even notice you've been hit.

The hit deposits a 6" long needle proboscis in the body of your target. Every time the victim leaves one square for another the victim must take one point of damage that round (subsequent movement doesn't increase damage) per move action taken that round. Every time the victim casts a spell with a somatic component or makes a melee attack, the victim takes 1 hp damage, even if they've already taken damage from that source this round (yes, making a full attack is going to hurt you more than walking or running will).

As soon as the victim takes damage, the injury is obvious (no perception check) but there is no way to tell at this point where the needle came from.

Any heal check to remove the needle uses the same DC as the perception check, with a +1 bonus for every round since the shot was originally fired. HOWEVER, any failed heal check to remove does HP damage = to the number of points shy of the DC. Do you really wanna try it? Or do you wanna wait it out, hope that the victim can remain still long enough?

Ooh, that's dramatic tension that is.

The long and short of it is, your weapon acts like a cross between a bulldog and a bloodhound, has powers more fitting of a blood hound theme, and has at least one power that totally conflicts with the mosquito them.

If you want to stick with "needle nose," you're really going to have to let go of your fears about breakage. In fact, if you really want to stick with needle-nose, just embrace it!

If you really have to have the thing turn into a giant mosquito, do that without the long grapple first, so that there aren't so many opportunities for breakage. If you really have to do the long grapple, let it be easy for people to break the mosquito head and thus escape the grapple, but limit yourself to one SUCCESSFUL grapple/drag/HulkOut/Munch per week instead of one **attempted** sequence per week.

You have the potential here for a really sweet theme, but you abandoned it.

Trust yourself. Don't go out of your way to design defects and drawbacks, but if the theme is telling you your weapon is fragile ...well, make the weapon fragile. Let the theme decide. It might not end up supporting your original idea, but the final product will be so much better.

6. Reading for audience appeal
The job is to design game products that gamers will buy. So a very legitimate question is, "Will gamers want to buy the supplement just to be able to use this item at their table?" If yes, that's a good reason to up vote.

I honestly don't know how to evaluate this. I think people would like to be able to shoot something and drag it back. I don't know if the mosquito imagery takes it out of the running for too many folks.

Really, I'm not turned off by mosquito imagery. What got me was that you didn't fully embrace it. Create whatever theme you want, just embrace it, run all the way with it, don't leash it, that's what I ask.

But I'm not everybody. And I just haven't seen enough mosquito items to know how people will feel.

I wish I could give you more help here. I think strong and unique imagery helps to a point, but at some level when you're competing against other good items, will somewhat-strong, unusual-but-not-unique imagery win out if it happens to be different imagery, imagery that's not as creepy or that's more in fashion?

Damn, I just don't know. Sorry.

7. Reading for the joy of the word.
Did you write clearly?
I don't care about a typo or the misuse of a single piece of punctuation, but do you have errors or style choices that disrupt flow?
Do you have style choices that enhance the flow - are you creative with sentence structures and do you have the capacity to consider cadence when selecting from synonyms?
Does the mood of the writing reflect the mood of the item? Perhaps a droning monotonous rhythm would enhance certain items.
Have you thought through the theme of your item and made sure that every time you have an choice between two words or two phrases you select the one that furthers your theme and reinforces your imagery?
Do you add wondrous, unexpected depth under the clear surface, in which attentive readers may immerse themselves?
Most of the time this feedback will not focus on anything you've done wrong, but on moments where a designer misses an opportunity to do something amazing.

I have to be honest: sometimes your writing is great, other times it's not merely not a joy to read, it actively bumps me out of my reading groove.

Example:

This sculpture of a monstrously articulated mosquito functions as a +2 impervious heavy crossbow,

THere's more than one thing.

Did you really mean to say, monstrously articulated mosquito? Is the mosquito not monstrous, but its knee-joints are? In short, is this mosquito

an articulated sculpture whose articulations/joints are monstrous

or is it
a monstrous sculpture that is also - wait for it- articulated, which gives it fragility and instability, which creates an odd juxtaposition with the sculpture's monstrousness?

The first one is a "monstrously articulated mosquito" sculpture

The second one is a "monstrous, articulated mosquito" sculpture.

It's not that you couldn't mean just what you say, that the articulations are monstrous, but the mosquito isn't.

It's just weird that you would have something significant to say about the JOINTS of the mosquito, but not about the overall appearance of the mosquito. What's even weirder, is that you're naming this thing "needle nose" and you don't take any time to actually describe the proboscis, no words to make us feel the understated menace of the blood-driking spike on its face. You're making the "needle nose" your theme by including it in the name (and, remember, as the only theme-worthy word in the name). But then I don't get any description of the needle nose at all!

No gory description of the sounds as the needle-nose penetrates the flesh of victims, no casual mention of the brown stains on the mouth-weapon. I don't even know what the "sculpture" is made out of ...but I know that the joints are really, really monstrous.

See it's that that makes me think it's not actually the joints that are monstrous, that this was merely written wrong.

If you really want it to be the joints that are monstrous, that's fine, but your theme isn't "joints" so you better spend more time on the mouth and head then you do on the joints, eh? Otherwise I'm left floundering around over-analyzing everything I read trying to make sure I find the description of the proboscis when the description was never there.

In that same first bit, it says the sculpture functions as a +2 impervious heavy crossbow,

Okay, now I know for a fact that this isn't actually a crossbow, because the only time you give a description, it clearly IS a sculpture, but it merely functions as a crossbow.

So does it have a string or cable at all? Does the mosquito shoot the crossbow bolts out of its proboscis by like a blowgun?

You never even tell me if this thing is wood or coiled wire or what. Sculptures can be made out of a lot of things in a lot of different styles. Is this a neoimpressionist sculpture of a mosquito? Is this something Calder might have made?

Telling me it's a sculpture that functions as a crossbow, not telling me what it's made of, and describing its joints more than its needle-nose are all things that are making this first sentence pretty hard for me. I'm starting to get in the meat of your entry, but just as I start in on the text that has a chance to develop flow and rhythm and reading joy (you obviously can't do that will Aura, CL, and Slot), I'm wondering about what you haven't written instead of enjoying what you have. And I'm still confused about that one thing with the joints...it's making it so I don't really trust you to get your own vision down correctly on the page. I want to trust you, but that monstrous joints thing is pulling at me. It might not be a mistake. You might be writing exactly what you mean. But I'm just not quite sure. So now everything you write is going to be questioned instead of absorbed and accepted.

Having this passage that so troubles me near the end would have been better, because maybe I would have at least read some of your entry smoothly, with joy. But a 300 word item is not enough for me to get my groove back after the rocky beginning. I read to the end without ever feeling like I can simply enjoy your words without proactively questioning to make sure I'm getting it, that there aren't more (any?) weird misunderstandings.

You're doing many of the right things - changing up sentence structure not in chaotic ways that disrupt flow, but simply in ways that prevent monotony and use the sentence structure to subtly direct attention and interpretive focus. You really have the skills that would let you create an entry that is a joy to read.

This one, however, isn't it. This is another clear case of a designer that has all the skills needed to make the top 32, but didn't manage to turn out a top 32 worthy item this time.

8. Rule checks:
is the item over-priced or underpriced?
What about caster level? Did you use 1st when Bane or Craft Wondrous Item has a higher level requirement?
Although the entire point of magic is to do things one could otherwise not do, nonetheless Pathfinder must have rules and I can't interpret every single conflict between an item and Pathfinder rules as simply a case of the magic of the item overcoming those rules.

Nothing to say here, you know your stuff. You're good with crunch. Your crunch descriptions were clear. They were economical and quick without being too short or too choppy. And, important for this section, they were just right.

You get the rules right. That's a big deal.

Still, I'm going to remind you here that the free action was really inappropriate. If you're grappling something on the other end of a line, you better be paying a lot of attention to it or you're going to end up being jerked around a lot more than whatever creature is at the other end.

9. The extra mile
This is all about making things easier for me as your reader.

See that thing you did with the hyperlink to the giant mosquito but NOT linking to every single spell in the construction requirements?

That was awesome. Thank you.

As for the rest of the text block, I keep feeling like it could use some friendlier formatting, but I'm not seeing anything right away. So I suspect that I'm just feeling left over "reader unfriendliness" from my reactions to some of your writing choices, not actually your formatting choices.

Mostly good. Possibly excellent. There's something nagging at me, but I honestly can't say what it is and I'm not sure it would belong in this section, I'm not sure I haven't already dealt with it. So we're letting it slide. But I'll let it bounce around my brain and if I think of something that I believe has the capacity to be helpful, I'll post it later.

================================

Overall verdict?

This is an item that contains no "mistakes" that are as simple as violations of a rule, misuse or nonuse of the format. No mistakes that are DQable, such as designing the wrong type of item, etc.

This item is creative in what it does and how it does it.

This item is likely balanced in most high-level game groups.

This item has an audience who will want to acquire and use the item. That audience will probably be big fans. I can't say, however, that that audience will be large.

The writing is clear in most respects, but odd enough in some respects that I found myself reading clunky, as if it were less clear than most of the text deserved to be judged. .

The crunch is clear in almost all aspects. Although something struck me as unclear about the mosquito transformation, other people might think the answer was either obvious or too unimportant to bother worrying about. Given the complexity of the item, despite this one thing that seemed unclear to me, the crunch was much more clear than I would expect from most designers attempting an item like this.

This item goes the extra mile for my ease-of-reading in at least one place.

This item does have a consistent theme that is synergistically forwarded by name, description, and what it does. Unfortunately, despite more synergies than the vast majority of items, there was a very, very large clash that undid much of your theme building for me. I wonder if a bloodhound theme would be a good switch or if you should alter the powers to embrace the weapon's thematic fragility and hypodermic sharpness.

I feel torn on judging the art of the writing. obviously it can't be great if the first sentence was so confusing and jarring to me. On the other hand, the first sentence was so confusing and jarring that I'm afraid of subjectively downgrading writing later in the entry that would have felt quite evocative or artistic or just damn good had I not been previously distracted. I'll just say that this design's creativity shows enough promise, and the basic clarity of communication shows enough promise, that I think you probably have the skill to create the writing that is simultaneously clear, creative, and fluid that would make an item a joy to read. This item wasn't there, but I believe that you can do it. I'd actually be interested in seeing other things you write to see if I can make more constructive comments from those examples.

This item was not in my top 32, but might very well have been if you embraced the fragility implied by "needlenose". I say this despite reservations about the art of your writing. This is fundamentally good design. If you had trusted your needlenose theme, I really don't doubt it would have turned out to be great design.

good luck next year.

Belt of the Depths
Aura Moderate Transmutation; CL 7th
Slot Belt; Price 12,000 gp; Weight 1 lbs.
Description
This masterfully crafted belt emits a strong salty scent and is made of woven algae interlaced with golden merfolk hair. In guise of a buckle rests a large starfish-shaped piece of red coral.

While underwater, the wearer may break off one of the starfish's five limbs as a free action to activate the belt's powers for a period of two hours. At any time, the wearer may break off a second limb to end the effects prematurely. When the belt's powers are activated, the wearer is immediately granted the ability to breathe water as per the Water Breathing spell. One round later, he instantly starts sinking at a speed of 50 ft per round until he lands on a solid surface, such as a sunken ship wreck or the sea floor itself. Once on a solid surface, he is able to move about freely as if he were on land and carrying a light load. He, however, loses the ability to swim. If the wearer has to move over obstacles, he must use climb checks or acrobatics checks, although he ignores his armor check penalty. If he falls any distance, he lands harmlessly without injury. Finally, he may use any weapon without restrictions, ignoring the normal underwater combat penalties.

Like a true starfish, the Belt of the Depths has the ability to regenerate lost limbs, and does so at a rate of one limb per week. However, this regeneration is only possible as long as the starfish has at least one limb left. If all limbs are broken off , the belt loses all powers.
Construction
Requirements Craft Wondrous Items, Water Breathing, Freedom of Movement; Cost 6,000 gp

1. Name

No. But really, this is very nearly that bad. "Noun of the Noun" is formulaic.

Where in this belt are you setting up your theme?

Belts are a dime a dozen. It's not even a "girdle" or a "sash" or a whatever else. Just a belt. Can't hang a theme on that.

"Depths". Okay, that will get you something...but it's not a rare word. We use it for the deep underground, we use it for the bottom of the sea, one can even be "deep in a book".

This is a vague word on which to hang a theme. If you're doing theme building right, then the only reason you've chosen a vague word instead of a word more specific and evocative is because that's exactly the word you need because you plan to employ **all** the meanings of the word and even though the word has lots of synonyms, those synonyms share only one or a few meanings when you intend to use so many meanings of your vague theme-word that there simply is no other word it's possible to use that will cover all your thematic bases.

I'm expecting a water themed item, but I'll be disappointed in step 3 if you haven't started bringing in "depths of the earth" and "depths of knowledge/wisdom" and/or other meanings of the word. And if you don't hit the watery bits at all, then I'll really be disappointed in your choice of a theme word.

2. Glance top to bottom
Glance at the formatting to see if the entry pays enough attention to what Paizo wants that this item isn't throw-away worthy. Maybe glance at a couple of other things that seem like DQs to me - a CL of 21+, a cost of 200,001 gp or more (since that’s forbidden by Paizo), maybe something else I’m not thinking about right now.

Don't see anything that makes this throw-away worthy. A glance told me you're capitalizing aura information when you shouldn't, but you obviously can learn to use a template, so you'll learn that. It's nothing to cost you points.

3. Read for content
what does the item do? Is the item in an over-used design space?
Is the function understandable?

It grants water breathing + freedom of movement, while virtually guaranteeing the death of the character if used as intended.

Outside of crunch, there's not much to note the belt "doing". The Crossbow for instance, I wrote that it caused vines to grow over you ...and that provided the bonuses.

Here, it's just kinda the bonuses. Sure, you break off a starfish limb to de/activate it. Sure the starfish limbs slowly regrow.

But is that really "doing something" that other characters would notice? You are the one breaking the starfish, the belt doesn't do that. The growth occurs very slowly.

For an intents and purposes the belt doesn't "do" anything that isn't crunch.

That's too bad, because if the belt doesn't do anything, then there's no reason the belt couldn't be a Rod of the Depths or Ring of the Depths or Lacy Underwear of the Very Frilly Depths.

Okay, we've got crunch, but guess what:

The item itself may as well not even exist. If you used a wand to get this crunch, you'd still be wearing something to hold up your pants, right?

Remember that bit with the name about how "belt" wasn't strong enough to hold up a theme on its own?

We've sunk lower: "belt" is now entirely, utterly irrelevant. Before it wasn't evocative or them-invoking. But there might have been something that mandated it at least be around your waist.

Alas, not.

Why is this a magic item and not a spell? You obviously don't want the item.

4. Read for crunch
Is the crunch understandable?
Is it complicated?
Does it use effects that will be a pain around the gaming table?
Is it overpowered comes into play here if it would be a bad item regardless of price. Otherwise it's an underpricing issue. This doesn't mean that the item has to be worth more than 200,000 gp. An item can be overpowered if its fair market value is only 3,000 -5000 gp if the only characters who would ever want to use it are first level characters (who can't afford it - so they have to be given it - so you see the problem).
NOTE: I don't have to particularly like the approach to the crunch that you chose, so long as it works.

Your writing, including in the crunch areas is clear. It's not too complicated. The effects are not a pain to adjudicate around the table. It's not overpowered regardless of context (or any context in which it would still be useful, like something that only affects 1st level enemies but slays them with no save, so it's way too powerful to give to a first level character, but the 20th level character would never bother paying its price)

There are a few places where your crunch is weak, but you're doing much better than average here.

Using water breathing to keep your character alive under water may seem boring, but it's exactly what you should do. No point in spending a lot of extra words creating an effect that does the same thing as water breathing but hasn't been play tested to find corner cases or exploits, blah, blah, blah. This was the wise choice, a good choice. It's not exciting, but it's judicious design that has good, practical reasons behind it.

But the next bit is really, really problematic.

instantly starts sinking at a speed of 50 ft per round until he lands on a solid surface

So, just a question here, if I'm invading your country and manage to affix an adamantine chain on to the bottom of your navy's flagship, can I then attach it to me and drag your flagship to the sea bottom at 50' per round? But somehow the magic downforce ends once I touch the deck of a sunken ship?

This spell says that I can drag that flagship down. This spell says that's exactly what would happen to your flagship if I chained myself to it. I'm really thinking that's a bad power for this spell to have.

Here's what I think you want:

under the effects of the belt, its wearer loses buoyancy. Water resistance slows any fall to 50' per round, but if the character wishes to remain off the bottom buoyancy will not suffice.

If the character doesn't outweigh the flagship by several dozen tons, that flagship isn't going anywhere.

Also, the loss of buoyancy doesn't end when you touch a solid surface. It continues. That's going to be useful in a moment.

as if he were on land and carrying a light load

Okay, now I'm curious. Does that mean that the water imposes a light load? Does that mean the water lightens heavy loads to light? (like, my equipment is buoyant even if I'm not?)

Right now I would have to rule that no matter your encumbrance you move as if you're carrying a light load. Even so, I'd probably disallow carrying more equipment than your max press. The rules here are weird, because yes, you can't pick it up, so of course one would assume you can't carry it. But if your friendly neighborhood storm giant picks up a 3 ton boulder and places it on your back, you can carry it, because no it's part of your load and you never had to get it off the ground.

Things like tha are weird. I don't like them. The text shouldn't allow them.

Suggestion for new crunch?

he is able to move about freely as if he were on land. Heavy, medium or no encumbrance from armor worn or weight carried, has the same effect as light encumbrance.

There's a really big shift here. Because before you could move as if carrying a light load - period. If you're doing the staggering thing from carrying more than your max load, under your rule you (arguably, it's not entirely certain) still move as if lightly loaded.

With this it's also clear that spells and supernatural stuff that would cause you to suffer the effects of encumbrance aren't cancelled by this item.

Now, you're using freedom of movement, so maybe you want to cancel those things. But you didn't give a lot of clues that that was your intent in the text. In fact, you don't allow someone to jump over an obstacle, for instance, which sounds a lot like this isn't total freedom of movement. So there are reasons to make a crunch decision on the game effect either way.

I don't like that if you can't cover all corner cases in the crunch, make sure you're providing a rationale (like you lose buoyancy, but water still has frictional resistance, and your items haven't lost buoyancy). If it's explained to me that way, even if you don't provide a list of which spells are or aren't canceled, I'd figure it out.

Right now I have neither a comprehensive crunch that covers all the bases or any understanding of what's actually happening to me, non-crunch wise, that would give a GM a basis on which to make sound decisions.

Some items are going to be playing in areas where the crunch can't possibly consider all corner cases. In that case, it's much more word-efficient to give people a good idea of the practical effects that are only described vaguely by the crunch. If you're not sure how you would describe some weird magical effect in practical terms, cuz there's no good every-day experience that we can use as a basis of comparison, then spend the time on good, comprehensive crunch, even if it's long.

Right now, you don't really have either. Needs more/better.

It's not that what you've got is unclear. It's that you haven't considered everything.

On that note,

He, however, loses the ability to swim. If the wearer has to move over obstacles, he must use climb checks or acrobatics checks,

Really loses the ability to swim, or lost buoyancy, so if the character used levitation swimming motions with arms and legs would still propel the character through the water?

See what I mean here? You're just giving the mechanical effect in pure, undescribed, completely not grounded in an experience I can relate to crunch. Why do I lose the ability to swim?

Have I forgotten how? Am I deluded in to thinking I'm on dry land? Does water no longer respond to my touch? What?

And then this thing about obstacles. I must use climb checks or acrobatics checks? Levitation no longer works. Fly no longer works? Spider limb grants a climb speed - do I still need to make a check?

And why the hell can't I jump?

Stop telling people what their options are - because somebody is going to think of an option you didn't, like jumping. Remember when I said you haven't covered all the cases? yeah, this approach is just opening a can of worms. You probably just forgot the jump skill. But since I don't know what it is that's complicating my movement (like why will I never sink again after the first time I touch a solid surface? Why, if I sink down to the sea floor initially, when I walk around and find a rift that goes deeper, can't I jump off the edge of the cliff and sink again?)

What's going on here is you're simultaneously providing too much and too little.

By specifying which skills I have to use, and saying that I **must** use one of those skills, it clearly prohibits me from jumping or casting a spell or anything else. But I don't think you meant that at all. You canceled the swim skill, and then you wanted to give examples of how normal movement would still occur. But if you give a list of things I can do - even if you don't use the word "must", which you did - that strongly implies that I literally can't do anything else. When you use the word "must" you merely confirm this interpretation.

In fact, it's a bit bizarre that you bother canceling the swim skill. If you must use climb or acrobatics, then obviously you can't swim because swim isn't on that list.

We talk about fluff as if it's something completely apart from crunch. And in practice we can pretty consistently identify the things most people consider fluff from the things most people would call crunch. But that doesn't mean that mechanics don't appear in fluff form.

"Losing buoyancy" don't have any specific rule implementation or numerical modifiers to apply, but it tells you quite a bit about exactly what the character can and can't do. You don't have bouyoancy in the air at the surface which makes it rather impossible to swim as we understand it. You don't even have to say the swim skill is canceled. It's still there, everyone knows it. But it's not going to do you any good unless and until you find a way to keep yourself at consistent depth without resting bodily on something.

Telling someone how, and what's happening isn't a waste of space. It's not that the only reason to do that is if you wanna go purple on that bad prose. The imagery adds cool, sure, but if you're doing it right, the imagery already tells you lots of things about how a power/ability works mechanically. Given that, many corner cases and may table fights are eliminated.

if you were really methodical, and you were thinking about absolutely every possibility - and not forgetting about dealing with things like the Jump skill - then, sure, you could probably do the crunch without the description.

But that's not working for you right now. Why not put some thought into what the character would experience, what the character would feel? The right description of what's happening would make a lot of your lists unnecessary, ...and then you wouldn't even be taking the chance of leaving something important off the list.

Finally, he may use any weapon without restrictions,

I can throw darts? Fire a bow?

If he falls any distance, he lands harmlessly without injury

Wait, you can still fall? Oh, but you used the word "sink" earlier with the 50' /round figure. So you don't sink at 50' per round any more, but you do fall. I can jump off that cliff after all!

And you know what's really cool - I fall just as fast as I do in air, so I can shoot through thousands of feet in a few seconds. But then, at the bottom, I land harmlessly and without injury! Yay!

See what's going on if you use only rule making language and no language that tells us what's happening?

It's also weird that you're coming back to falling now, a whole paragraph after you covered sinking. Why aren't those next to each other?

You know what I think? It's because it's all rule making. There's so little description of what's going on, there's not even a good way to determine that sinking and falling are related. But if you think about what's going on - and again, I'm coming back to my suggestion of buoyancy, but I don't care if buoyancy is what you choose, just choose something - then all the crunch that describes that particular type of experience goes together. Falling, sinking, swim skill all have to be next to each other in my conception, because the reason those mechanical details are there is the same - the loss of buoyancy.

BIG FINISH ON THE CRUNCH

Remember how shocked you were earlier when I said that the item, properly used, guaranteed the death of the wearer?

So we've had our fun with the belt. 2 hours is either up or soon going to be. We can't swim. We can't get over obstacles with magic.

At this point, we either snap a starfish leg to end the effect "prematurely" - and instantly die from pressure, or drown if we're not deep enough to be immediately crushed.

OR
we wait, morose, for the effects to wear off, at which point we're either crushed instantly or we drown.

Sure, sure, maybe someone somewhere nearby has a wand of water breathing, right? But if we're just using the belt, we're dead. And if the wand user gets distracted at the wrong moment...we're also dead.

You very carefully make it super-difficult to get off the sea floor...so what happens when you're on the sea floor and the effect ends? Hell, in atmosphere the fly spell "fails slowly" so you're slowly returned to the ground as long as you're within a reasonable distance. Not the magic of this belt.

ugh. Now I want to start calling this "Belt of the Deaths". Just 2 though. It's either pressure or drowning. Maybe this item is for terminally ill people who are really, really afraid of disease, injury, and clerics?

I kid.

But making the item a death trap when used as you've written it got it a lot of down votes from me.

5. Reading for creativity
Is this new?
Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?
Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

Is it new?
No. It's not new. Putting water breathing together with freedom of movement is as old as first edition D&D. It's obvious you would want those powers together, and many people have done something in the past to put those spells together either by creating single items or just making sure that they have wands of each or maybe even use of contingency spells, I don't know. But the idea to put freedom of movement together with water breathing isn't original.

Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?
No.

We've already been through the crunch and seen that the way you go about writing the rules for the item actually creates serious questions as to what's going on and why.

BUT... I really liked the starfish. And I thought that it was great that you used a creature that naturally regenerates to play with the concept of charges. I think that actually has been done before, but rarely. It's hard to incorporate a living being into an item, but starfish are sufficiently sessile and look so much the same dried out and wet/alive that having a starfish on the belt that still manages to regenerate isn't weird in an "oh god, what if this starfish crawls up me" way AND SIMULTANEOUSLY isn't weird in an "oh, weird, why is this completely dead thing still growing arms as if it's alive?" way either. I don't really know how you came up with that idea, but it was one of those things where the sessile animal + regeneration made possible playing with living charges in a way that definitely made me say, "Of course, why didn't I think of that!"

This is a really good thing. Find the things that look obvious to everyone else in hindsight, but that no one is actually doing yet, and you're a genius. You've done it once. Now just do it a bunch more times.

[I say that not to sarcastically express lack of faith in you, but actually to joke with you about what a hard task that is. But it is promising that you've done it once already.]

Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

Um, no.

Putting a theme together, top to bottom, isn't easy. Here the powers were dictated by practicality, not by the theme. They weren't put together to tell a particular (and hopefully unique) story. They weren't put together because the theme demanded it. They were just put together because crunch demands certain things for humanoids to adventure in water.

I don't discourage you from making an item for a purpose. But all you have here is the practicality. If you really want to make a practical item (and remember, that will help you with audience appeal), set up the powers you absolutely have to have...and nothing else. Don't add something else because it's cool or because even though it's not strictly necessary, it would be useful. Then you're packing on functions and price without getting anything even half as cool as just paying a page to run through the town looking for a hireling sorcerer to cast those spells on you. At least the sorcerer can be drunk or funny or obnoxious or all 3 and give you character a fun interaction. The GM can roll a secretly diplomacy check for you after you pay to decide if the sorcerer liked you and slips you a hotel room key for later...which grosses you out because the key smells of 13 months worth of stale booze and gets your companions to laugh a bit, but also gives you an opportunity to, if you're motivated and you time it right, show up just before the sorcerer falls asleep so they don't feel blown off like all the other folk do, and now you have a sorcerer willing to cast spells at 20%off ... or the sorcerer "accidentally" blows nose on your for giving too small a tip - and your companions laugh at you.

If all you need are the spells, why not a hireling? Seriously.

Why would a character want to use up wealth to keep your item around permanently, even though not every adventure is the perfect adventure for this particular set of powers. That's the question you have to answer.

SO if you are going to do this "making a practical item" thing, put together only the powers you need, you absolutely have to have (you did a good job limiting yourself to these with the Belt, by the way)... and then set it aside. Do some creating of other items. Silly items, serious items, doesn't matter.

Eventually what's going to happen is that you'll have a thematic idea that either calls for that set of practical powers OR at least tolerates that set.

It will probably tolerate rather than demand that set of powers, but that's okay. Start tweaking the theme so it gets closer and closer to demanding the set of powers that you put together for practical purposes. Other powers will occur to you that would work with this theme. Write them ALL down. This isn't like the practical approach of sticking to what you have to have. Write them ALL down. When you have a really, really good theme going, start looking at all the powers you've listed. Are there any that don't just fit the theme, but make the theme better? Unless that's going to kill the item price wise, put it in. Try to make the number of powers you add because they make the theme work to be 0% to 150% of the number of powers you added for pure practicality. If you have to, remember to tweak your theme to explain why the items cost needs to be kept low - or needs to be higher - so you can accommodate the powers your theme demands and justify excluding those you leave out. The "number of powers" can be counted different ways, because some powers are minor enough or tightly entwined with each other enough that several different bits of crunch can be one "power". But you need some sort of guidepost for when you're going crazy.

How about this? If your construction requirements are going to require more than 4 spells, you need to stop adding and even think seriously about cutting back. If you're at 4 spells, stop adding, and think reasonably about cutting back. 3 spells and under, you're probably fine. Note that this is not an actual hard-and-fast rule. Maybe that Staff of the Magi needs 47 spells in its creation and still works. But that's the rare exception. There's way to much SAK stuff going on when the spell requirements expand. For RPGSS, keep it to a lower number and do those crazy rule-breaking things when you have more experience and more freedom.

Remember, even if you know you want to reduce the number of powers and/or price, ***do not do this unless you can absolutely justify it by the them*** - either the theme as you already have it, or the them as tweaked with this new idea you just had to make this thing work.

You know you picked powers first, but to people who didn't see you write the item, if the theme demands those powers, it will look as if the cool theme came first, and darn it you were just forced to put together those powers that happen to have great practical utility.

.....

There's lots more to be said about theme, but you really didn't have one. So it's probably better for me to move on and for you to read other items where I discuss this. I'd be inventing too much from scratch to be critiquing your work if I tried to discuss the belt's thematic possibilities and missed opportunities.

6. Reading for audience appeal
The job is to design game products that gamers will buy. So a very legitimate question is, "Will gamers want to buy the supplement just to be able to use this item at their table?" If yes, that's a good reason to up vote.

I think this item, ironically, actually has good audience appeal. there are reasons that everyone wants to put together freedom of movement and water breathing at some point. Add in the relatively low price point and the very cool starfish mechanic, and people who aren't having an adventure based under the waves would definitely find it useful to keep around for short sojourns...

...as long as you fix the auto-death thing first. It has no audience appeal until that's done.

7. Reading for the joy of the word.
Did you write clearly?
I don't care about a typo or the misuse of a single piece of punctuation, but do you have errors or style choices that disrupt flow?
Do you have style choices that enhance the flow - are you creative with sentence structures and do you have the capacity to consider cadence when selecting from synonyms?
Does the mood of the writing reflect the mood of the item? Perhaps a droning monotonous rhythm would enhance certain items.
Have you thought through the theme of your item and made sure that every time you have an choice between two words or two phrases you select the one that furthers your theme and reinforces your imagery?
Do you add wondrous, unexpected depth under the clear surface, in which attentive readers may immerse themselves?
Most of the time this feedback will not focus on anything you've done wrong, but on moments where a designer misses an opportunity to do something amazing.

So, I want to be supportive, so I'm going to recommend something radical:

don't do this.

Don't try to write something that's a pleasure simply to read. There's so little fluff and description in your item, it really feels to me that you either don't like doing that writing or feel bewildered about how to do it or both.

In that case, shooting for such a high bar as writing that is a joy to read will just make your designing a nightmare.

Instead don't shoot for anything but writing that stays consistently on theme, describes the experience the character is having that you're trying to represent with the crunch, describes the item itself, describes what a person would perceive or experience when watching the item operate, and describes the crunch.

Treat them as jobs and get them done. You can do that. Although not many people do pull together a consistent them for an RPGSS entry.

Face it: were not pros and we have lots of things to do besides designing items so even though you'd think we'd spend hours on it, the vast majority of us really don't. That's fine. We can enter for any reason we like and be satisfied with any result appeals to us.

So don't bash your head against the wall trying to come up with more description.

Let yourself write any description - short or small - that you feel inspired to write, and then spend your time not making it beautiful, but making sure that all your choices fit the theme. Check every word against the theme. Pull up an internet thesaurus and check out the synonyms for "a" and "the" if you have to.

But limit yourself to that one, three-part job:
1) making everything in the entry relate to at least one totally separate thing in your entry
2) without ever undermining your theme
3) while promoting your theme every place you see an opportunity.

You probably won't be the top item without beautiful imagery, but a tight theme and the kind of insightful creativity you showed with the starfish can get you into the top 36.

And with item design, there ain't no difference between #1 and #32, and not a whole lot between #1 and #36.

At that point, worry about your map.

I suck at maps, so ask someone else about that.

8. Rule checks:
is the item over-priced or underpriced?
What about caster level? Did you use 1st when Bane or Craft Wondrous Item has a higher level requirement?
Although the entire point of magic is to do things one could otherwise not do, nonetheless Pathfinder must have rules and I can't interpret every single conflict between an item and Pathfinder rules as simply a case of the magic of the item overcoming those rules.

I didn't see anything particularly wrong with your item. Aura matches caster level; cost matches price; caster level is sufficient to cast the highest level spell required.

You have to have themes that tie your thing together, that make it a whole item. But if there are rule violations in your entry, I'm not seeing them and that tells me that this is good enough that if you get everything else right, this doesn't need to improve to hit the top 32.

9. The extra mile
This is all about making things easier for me as your reader.

If you duplicate a spell effect, not merely use it in construction, hyperlink it for me.

Also note that even without special formatting, a shorter item is friendlier to the reader. You get points for not padding the words out to 299.
===============================

This is an item that contains only a very few "mistakes" that are as simple as violations of a rule, misuse or nonuse of the format, etc. There were no serious or disqualifying mistakes like designing the wrong type of item, etc.

This item is missing the crunch for how you end the effect without dying. I won't mention this again, but things like item "balance" are going to have to assume you've somehow fixed this. It would make no sense to talk, for example, about the game balance of an item that routinely kills its users.

This item is not creative in what it does and how it does it. I honestly do not understand what is going on, only that certain mechanical rules apply. Also, the fundamental design space is very well trod.

This item is likely balanced in most game groups.

This item has an audience who will want to acquire and use the item.

The writing is sometimes clear, going up to often or almost always in the crunchy bits. You know how to write directly and without clutter. Some writing is needlessly unclear, however. "In the guise of a buckle" is an example. Guise implies deceit - if the starfish is pretending to be the belt buckle, what does that mean?

The crunch is often clear, but sometimes a reader doubts that the clear RAW isn't a bad mistake and that maybe RAI should apply. Except, though the writing is short, not confusing in anyway, and otherwise "clear," there simply isn't anything that reveals intent, and thus even when the RAW seems like a bad choice, it's all we have. In this case, clarity works against you since having only one very clear interpretation disallows easy reinterpretations that would create a better outcome than RAW.

This item does not go the extra mile to make it easy for me to read and grok.

This item does not have a consistent theme. Different aspects of the entry like name, description, what the item does, and how the item does it, do not consistently support and reinforce each other's efforts to create a theme. This appears mostly to be a matter of not doing it at all rather than doing it badly. If this was something which you simply didn't know was a good idea, i look forward to your first real efforts at trying to create a theme that works this way.

This item is not close to having writing such that simply reading its entry is a pleasure. I have recommended focus on clear theme as it seems at this point only having read one item by this designer, that it's just not where the designer's interests and/or skills lie. Recommend not focussing on this area. Hemmingway, after all.

Ultimately I found this item fell short of middle of the pack. A serious part of this is the possibly lethal consequences of using this item as written. While that's a mistake unlikely to be repeated, it's not really a very forgivable one for the purpose of judging this item here and now. Even with fixing that mistake, however, the designer needs to pay attention to theme and finding ways to explain what is actually happening from the character's point of view and make sure that the character's view, the item name, item description, and crunch all support that theme. These two major problems were responsible for most of the points lost. Fix those, and you'll boost yourself quite a bit. The starfish-regeneration-charges portion of this item tells me that if you learn to use a theme, you have the potential to create something special.

The formatting got hosed because ...[reasons]...

Courtesan's Locket
Aura moderate enchantment and divination; CL 9th
Slot neck; Price 10,000 gp; Weight .2 lbs.

Description
Originally designed by a famously jilted countess, the courtesan's locket has since been replicated by a variety of individuals and groups ranging from hostile diplomats to bored noble pranksters.

This gold filigree pendant has a teardrop shaped emerald at the center. The emerald twists open to reveal a reservoir of poison sufficient for 1 use per day. The poison loses potency after 24 hours outside the pendant.

When the poison is ingested, the target must make a DC 18 Will save or have their surface thoughts broadcast to the wearer of the amulet for 24 hours, up to a distance of 10 miles.

At any time while reading the poisoned target's thoughts, the wearer may speak one of the following command words to overwhelm the target with the associated emotion:

Lust - The target is compelled to rush to the person or object they most recently thought about and passionately kiss or caress that subject for 1d4 rounds.

Hatred – The target is compelled to verbally assault the person or object they most recently thought about for 1d4 rounds.

Guilt – The target is compelled to immediately confess to 1d4 wrongdoings. If they are aware of the presence of any people they have wronged, they must confess to those acts.

Using any of these options allows the target a DC 18 Will save to negate the effects. After the compulsive acts have been completed, or if the target saves, the mind reading effect ends.

Construction
Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, Heighten Spell; Detect Thoughts, Unnatural Lust, Compel Hostility, Confess; Cost 5,000 gp

Before I start, I normally don't take into account text that wasn't submitted with your entry - because then I'm critiquing something that's not your actual entry and/or not critiquing your entry when I should. That's not productive for you.

In this case, I'll skip critique of formatting since you said your formatting got hosed. Note that if there were any mistakes in the original, since I'm skipping this I can't help you with any mistakes in that area.

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1. Name
Is the name so bad as to detract from the item?

Absolutely not. The name is simple, doesn't feel like you're trying too hard to give it a "D&D name" (as Noun of Verbing or Noun of the Modified Noun can both do), employs language that we flawed and biased contemporary speakers of english more readily associate with a monarchic, less technological past that suits many Pathfinder settings...

...yep, far from a bad name. No points for the name itself, this is just whether the name detracts. However, note the name will come up more than once in the analysis below. We haven't read far enough to really judge the name yet on things like how it evokes (or doesn't) your theme (if it exists).

For now, all we can say is you've given yourself a good opportunity for theme-building since you're using words that aren't in the title of must-have spells or the names of iconic monsters or the over-used descriptions of fantasy authors.

That means that people aren't immediately distracted by "courtesan" or "locket" with writing <i>other people did</i>. You aren't compelled to duplicate the effects of a spell or suffer from the disappointment of people who thought your title implied you would.

Nope, you've given your item the chance to have not only a good theme, but also to be judged entirely on your creativity, not others' expectations of an item or their feelings about someone else's spell, item, or trope.

We'll see how well you've done later.

2. Glance top to bottom
Glance at the formatting to see if the entry pays enough attention to what Paizo wants that this item isn't throw-away worthy. Maybe glance at a couple of other things that seem like DQs to me - a CL of 21+, a cost of 200,001 gp or more (since that’s forbidden by Paizo), maybe something else I’m not thinking about right now.

Hmph. This isn't at all throw-away worthy, but when it comes time to judge "that extra mile" at the end, I'll have to do the reverse: dock you points for the lack of bolding on "description" "construction" "requirements" and "cost".

***Edited to add*** oh, yeah. I was just writing about how you said your formatting was hosed. Okay. Forget this, but the formatting is on you next year, I can't help.

3. Read for content
what does the item do? Is the item in an over-used design space?
Is the function understandable?

It provides a "poison" that allows you to read a subjects mind for 24 hours or until you use one of the rider effects. The rider effects are all emotion spell effects, so you're reading a mind and playing with that mind's emotions.

The maximum number of minds you could ever be reading at once with this item is 3. Hmmm. I'll have to think about that. I'd prefer if it was a max of one at a time.

4. Read for crunch
Is the crunch understandable?
Is it complicated?
Does it use effects that will be a pain around the gaming table?
Is it overpowered comes into play here if it would be a bad item regardless of price. Otherwise it's an underpricing issue. This doesn't mean that the item has to be worth more than 200,000 gp. An item can be overpowered if its fair market value is only 3,000 -5000 gp if the only characters who would ever want to use it are first level characters (who can't afford it - so they have to be given it - so you see the problem).
NOTE: I don't have to particularly like the approach to the crunch that you chose, so long as it works.

Okay, most of the crunch is understandable. However, the crunch also falls down on the job.

How can both be true?

Well, let's contemplate lust for a moment, shall we?

Mmmmm, lust.

Okay, moving on: Your lust effect? It's pretty much exactly what is described by the spell unnatural lust in your construction requirements. Why don't you say that this is lust, as the spell unnatural lust? You're making me really, really wonder here. What FAQ or other weird detail of interpretation of the spell unnatural lust are you wanting to NOT apply?

Lust should be "as the spell" and hyperlinked to the spell.

Hatred (compel hostility): If the person last thought about is dead, is it sufficient to hike 10 miles to the gravesite and rant at the grave, or am I compelled to spend money to have a priest cast Speak With Dead?

If the person last thought about is overseas, must I immediately commandeer the fastest ship in the harbor, or is it okay if I wait 6 months for the hated person to come home and just berate them then?

As written, this just isn't thought through. Perhaps, "if the person is known to be unavailable (including by having died) a failed save results in immediate ranting to no one in particular about the object of hatred for 1d4 rounds. If the person might be nearby, a failed save results up to one full minute of searching. If the person is found within the minute, 1d4 rounds of ranting occurs beginning at that time, though the rounds of searching + the rounds of ranting cannot exceed 10 total. If the person is present with the courtesan's victim, a failed save forces 1d4 rounds of immediate ranting directed at the person. If the person attempts to flee, the victim must follow to maintain the rant for as long as the rant lasts."

Dang that's a heck of a lot of words, but you're making up your own spell effect, so getting it right requires contemplating all the possibilities. You can tighten it up by getting rid of some things. Maybe it just is 1d4 rounds of ranting whether the object of hatred is alive or dead, present or absent. You can choose how you wish to deal with these possibilities, but as currently written you haven't really dealt with them.

Heck, this can apply to an "object". How, precisely, does one "verbally assault" an object?

I really, really don't get that. I can rant about an object, but I can't actually verbally assault the object. Complete description fail. I honestly wouldn't know how to rule on this aspect of the crunch.

Compel hostility is a viable choice for construction requirements, but with this multi-function item by not choosing a spell that already does what you want, you put a burden on yourself to think about this hatred effect as thoroughly as if you were creating a spell just to cause this one hatred effect. In fact, it would probably be a good idea to do a whole write up of that spell, because doing that separately would help you figure out what you do and don't need to accomplish to get good crunch.

Now, you can't reference your new spell in the construction requirements, but you'll know what you need to do to spell out the effects of your item, won't you? I mean, seriously, if you were creating a spell to do that Hatred effect, you wouldn't consider your description of the hatred effect to be sufficient to make up the whole body of the spell's text, would you? Of course not. So this is not an adequate description of hatred in your item - unless and until you can hyperlink an effect hatred is supposed to duplicate.

Guilt
So your guilt bit is built around the inquisitor spell confess but doesn't operate in the same way. Would you build a spell from scratch to create your guilt effect and use your description here as the full text of the spell's body?

no, of course not. So you have development work to do here, as well.

First, I just want to note that all the spells you use as construction requirements are short range.

Although this is a wondrous item and not a wand or potion, using nothing but close range spells to create an item that reads every thought at a range of 10 freaking miles????

No. Just no. The range should probably be shortened anyway (though I will discuss ways to justify an increased range below) because the emotions of the item are all intimate emotions and 10 miles away simply doesn't fit with that. But even if there weren't reasons of theme and mood to shorten the range, you'd better find a thought-reading spell with a range of at least 1 mile if you want your magic item to have a range in miles. The fact that Detect Thoughts doesn't have a range of 1 mile or more is bad enough. The fact that it can't reach 100 feet for even a 20th level caster (and the CL on this is just less than half that, with a total range of 45') is just horrifyingly bad when you're trying to create a 10 mile range item.

As one example, what's with the bit about confessing sins committed against those present? Your text is:
"If they are aware of the presence of any people they have wronged, they must confess to those acts."

But surely if you've known anyone for a long time you've probably "wronged" that person any number of times. I have told my partner on the phone that the house was clean when it wasn't, then cleaned it up before she got home. That was a lie. i wronged her. But in the moment I was confident the house would be clean by the time it mattered, and I made sure I did that, and I didn't want to have a conversation about how I should prioritize my time.

What is one really expected to "confess" here? Moreover, although you start out by saying 1d4 sins, you never say how long that takes. I'm going to guess you intended it to be 1 sin per round for 1d4 rounds, but that's not what you say. If I committed a really big or hard-to-explain sin, do i sit there giving backstory for 2 hours so that people understand that this behavior that might not be sinful actually is, given the very special context?

Moreover, the sins against people present? Those aren't limited to 1d4 - or at least, they don't seem to be. You are changing the rules when you say, "If person of type X is present, then the effects aren't as previously stated: they are like this new thing." Why wouldn't that change not only the choice of sins to confess, but also the number?

I mean, I can think of reasons why it shouldn't, but the format of writing is too short to make me sure of anything. All you say is: First, the effect is this, but if X happens, the effect is different.

There's no limitation on how much different it is when in the presence of someone you've wronged. So inevitably what's going to happen is someone at some gaming table is going to point this out to the GM and make a stink over how this forces the victim to spend 72 hours confessing every sin against their mother they can even hazily remember. Then the GM (and the voter always fears they will be this GM when these types of problems crop up with an item) will have to rule and take personal responsibility for dashing the unreasonable expectations of this rules lawyer.

Again, the spirit of the item gives me good reason to rule on the crunch, but the situation is just no fun for that GM (and that GM might be me!) and can be prevented only by you, the designer.

So think through your item and prevent it.

It's really not that you're not clear about what you're saying, it's that there's too much you don't say. So many possibilities are left uncontemplated.

Take the time. Contemplate them. We're about to get into some things you've done really right, so don't get discouraged. Those things make me think that when you take the time to think things through you already have the skills you need to fix these problems and make a superstar item.

As a last bit, why does this item allow you to be monitoring the thoughts of 3 different people at the same time?

Remember: the potion is created 1x/day (not 24 hours after it's last been poured out.

The potion loses its effect 24 hours after being removed from the container.

So if it renews at dawn, I get up an hour before dawn (just to make sure) and rummage through my stuff to find an appropriate bottle, then pour out the potion.

15 or 16 hours later I slip the potion from the bottle into someone's drink.

1 minute later, I remove today's potion from the bottle and put that in someone else's drink.

10 hours later, at breakfast, I slip potion into the drink of a third person. The first 2 victims have more than 12 hours of thought-projecting left, each. The new victim will be going for 24 hours from breakfast, but for the first 12+ of that time I can hear 3 different victims all at once.

I always assume that an item works as the creator intended it to work, because look at the possibilities:
1) you wanted the item to do different things than I would want this item to do
2) most people would really prefer the item work the way I think is best, therefore I believe you really wanted it to work the way I think is best, but you simply don't have the skills to write what the item actually does in a way that equals what you want it to do.

The first is not an insult and can't reasonably even be interpreted as one.

The second really isn't *exactly* an insult - no one is required to play pathfinder and memorize its rules in order to get through life - but to a hell of a lot of people it sure sounds like one. Maybe I haven't said "you can't even learn" or "you'll never be good". And if you actually didn't want the item to do that, then it's even a factually correct description of the situation at hand.

But it feels yucky.

So I'm assuming that you carefully thought about this and you decided that listing to 3 people at a time was a good maximum, then engineered things that way.

This isn't something necessarily wrong with your crunch. But by being able to delay giving the dose for 24 hours AND THEN giving things a duration of 24 hours, a character who is worried about a particular event (royal conference, guild vote, whatever) can get up to 3 people at a time giving them multiple perspectives on the even and multiple possibilities to cause havoc at the event.

What happens, for instance, if two people experience Hatred for each other, under your effects, at the same time? Although the spell alone doesn't cause a physical fight, if you are feeling that emotion such that you just **have to** rant at the person...how would a good role-player reasonably respond to being ranted at back, when obviously you're the one who has the legitimate anger here, doesn't that horrible person realize?

you've costed this as a once/day item. But by "holding the charge" this is really more like a "3 times in 3 days, divided almost as much as you like" item. Anyone can tell you that 7 uses in a week is not the same as 1 use per day. Likewise the 3 times in 3 days, even though it's slightly more complicated than that.

The item isn't simply overpowered - it's not that there no character level and no campaign setting in which this item could find an appropriate and balanced home.

Thus we'll deal with that as an under-cost issue later. But the fix might actually be to change the crunch, not to change the price.

ooops - total postscript here. You've made this item a poison. This means that anyone immune to poisons is immune to this. This means all those special bonuses to poison saves that are lying around in the form of racial bonuses or items' bonuses all apply.

Is this really a poison? I don't think, as it currently stands, that you want this to be a poison at all.

That might change later, but really, think right now about why you chose "poison" instead of "potion" or "elixir" or even "brew". Did you mean to evoke all the crunch in every Pathfinder source that deals with poison?

If not, you shouldn't have chosen poison. I assume you did it for a reason, and that you intended it, but I won't actually come back to that until later when I discuss developing your theme.

5. Reading for creativity
Is this new?
Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?
Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

it's new enough. It doesn't strike me as blindingly creative. It's not off-the-wall, "how did someone get this idea" creative. But it's new.

The execution is not blindingly simple. It's simple enough that "how to use" issues shouldn't come up.

It doesn't evoke "why didn't I think of that?"

It's a bit of a swiss army knife, but the powers are related and you don't easily swap them out because you have to get someone to drink the stuff before you can use those powers. Swiss army knives are not items that wow me with creativity, and though this isn't an SAK, for the purposes of checking how much evidence of creativity we have in this item's creation, I can say that the way it works shows about the same level of creativity of a good SAK.

Ah, but utilizing themes????

here's where you start to climb the ladder...though hang on, there'll be some rough critique to help you make the most of this area where it seems your best talents lie.

What is the theme? Well, "courtesan" evokes intimacy, first and foremost, with high society and having many, many acquaintances and flirtatious, gossipy communication all evoked strongly, but less than intimacy itself. This item seems oddly to fail to do anything to take advantage of those things that are obviously attributes of the courtesan.

However, as we start going down our associations, right after public flirtations probably comes illicit affairs.

How do people respond to illicit affairs? Well, if you're a participant, first is the lust. After that, for a participant or someone betrayed, both anger and guilt would be common, perhaps the most common emotional responses.

You're really not getting the courtesan's main attributes here, but you do have a good, tight theme that revolves around illicit affairs. It was nice vision and nice creativity to get the theme this far.

The name isn't particularly on point, since the theme seems most closely related to illicit affairs and not to the courtesan's very public, very social, very flirtatious lifestyle (which may or may not include illicit affairs - maybe the courtesan likes honest, casual hook-ups with the unmarried? Or maybe the courtesan is married and both are swingers?). But even if the name isn't particularly on point, it's not far off point either, at least on the "courtesan" bit.

The description includes a perfect bit of language, "jilted". Even if there could be anger or guilt over an illicit affair without anyone trying to be a jerk, without anyone actively being spiteful, the undertones of revenge work very well for this item. Clearly you were thinking about illicit affairs and revenge. This theme isn't accidental, even if you don't focus on it as much as I'd like.

Then there's the selection of powers, and as noted these are where we first found the theme we're exploring. The selection of powers - often done without a theme with the them being built later to justify the particular choices - was clearly done with a theme in mind. Together they evoke this theme strongly and well.

The language you chose when writing your crunch will, with the best writers, still be evocative while not wandering from the path of explaining the rules of the item. However, all but the best writers struggle with this big time. Either they use purple prose throughout, which makes the crunch needlessly complex and confusing (I tend towards this error), or it simply doesn't occur to the designer that even when writing crunch you don't have to be boring and you shouldn't be forgetting about mood and rhythm in your writing.

I wouldn't put you with the best writers yet, but look at your guilt entry, that includes this language: "people they have wronged".

I've used "sinned" above. Coming from a Jewish background, i think of sin in the Jewish sense - missing the mark. It can be something serious or something minor. One can sin against God, but -unlike in Christianity- you can also sin against other people.

So any time you "miss the mark" by giving someone less than your best and/or less than that person deserved in a situation, you've sinned. I picked the word because I was just trying to be general - I didn't want to get too specific about what i assumed might be confessed by someone under this influence.

(in fact, that was the problem I was trying to explain, the language of the crunch doesn't have any good limits on which sins are too trivial to confess).

But this phrase, especially the verb form "to wrong" and how it manifests as "I have wronged" and "You have been wronged" while vague in the sense of severity actually evokes quite a specific mood.

The mood of this word is betrayal after sexual transgression. To really "wrong" someone doesn't absolutely require that the person knows they have been sexually betrayed, but the way the word is used strongly implies were talking about after the revelation has come out. Using it here in the guilt section implies the completion of this cycle. We're not expecting forgiveness, that's not what comes in the moment of confessing sexual betrayal. Although we **know** that the person deserves to know about our failure, we also know that our confession will cause that person pain.

And we confess anyway, because we want the relationship with that person to continue. Maybe we even want it to get better than it was before the sexual betrayal. But we aren't confessing because it will make the target of our betrayal happy, we're not confessing because it will make our betrayed one's life so much better. We kind of hope it will, in the long run, since if the relationship continues it's better it be honest. But the damage is immediate and guaranteed. At best, any benefit for that other person is a long way off.

And so the confession itself is frequently a selfish act.

>>In fact, that's how so many of us manage not to confess: we convince ourselves that it would be selfish and mean to confess...forgetting that it's also selfish to avoid our just punishments and it's also selfish to continue the illicit affair, which presumably wouldn't happen after confession, and it's also dishonest. For the record, selfish and honest is the right choice if the alternative is selfish and dishonest. Be honest in your relationships, everybody.<<

In fact, when discussing someone we have wronged, confessing to that person is how we complete the process of wronging that someone.

Oh, how deliciously cruel, spiteful, vengeful is this item! And what a perfect turn of phrase you've chosen to incorporate all these nuanced implications, "people they have wronged."

This is where you went really, really right.

Okay, so how do we take this item from "seems fresh, if not exactly truly 'new' or 'unique'" to something that really is new and unique?

How do we take the crunch from "yes, it's simple" in the sense of "i know the target has to ingest, then make a save, then blah, blah" to something fundamentally different: "This is simple AND intuitive AND yet I never thought of an item working like that - this is brilliantly, creatively simple!"

The answer to both of those is to refine the theme and take it more seriously.

Hang on tight, this might truly change how you think about your own item:

I like the name Courtesan's Locket. But it only evokes the theme with its tertiary associations as best. We now have to decide if we want to hold tight to the theme as we have it, and ditch the name Courtesan's Locket ... or if we want to take true advantage of the imagery in "courtesan," keep the name, and thereby obligate ourselves to change the theme.

I vote for changing the theme.

Why? Because your theme right now is "illicit affairs and their emotional consequences". This is all negative. Yes there are evil characters, but even more evil characters won't think of themselves as "bad". The theme as it is tightly groups the emotions you've chosen, but it really doesn't tell us enough about the rest of the item. Why is it a locket?

In fact, is it a locket? You've entirely failed to use any "locket-ness" anywhere in this item. It would be far better a "courtesan's vial" or "courtesan's ampule". Lockets don't hold liquid ad their thin sides don't really seem to afford any place to hold a liquid. And if it did allow some liquid in, it must be through a gem in the middle of the front of the locket, right? So the liquid would be contained in the front door of the locket? Where does that liquid go that doesn't prevent the locket from having the space to hold pictures and keepsakes when you actually open it on its hinge as one is supposed to do with a locket? This is really failing the locket-test.

Is a locket as jewelry somehow more connected to illicit affairs than other jewelry? No? Lockets might be more evocative of "emotion" than many other pieces of jewelry, but the emotions most easily evoked by the locket are love, separation, and loss. Since those aren't your emotion-powers, and since they don't easily conjure up "vengeful" which were speculating as a thematically appropriate motivation for using those powers ...
(even though the actual wielder needn't use them for those motivations, having that in the theme helps tell us why the original inventor created this item as it is)
...the "emotion" connection of lockets isn't presently of very much use to us either.

Does "illicit affair" tells us anything about what the range of the item's powers should be? Does "Illicit affair" answer our earlier question, "Should the liquid be a poison?" It makes it reasonable, but it doesn't provide and absolute answer. Also, I note that for a lot of low-level construction requirements, DC 18 is a pretty darn difficult save. Does "illicit affair" tell us why you're using such a difficult save when a lesser save would be appropriate?

What is our theme getting us, other than what we already have?

The answer is "not much".

That's why I want to broaden the theme, to really make use of "courtesan" in a way that helps us answer some of our unanswered questions and allows even the crunch to support our theme.

I take all this time because this is an item that I saw as not good enough to deserve the round of 32 but full of so much potential it's ridiculous.

I'm overtalking this. This feels a bit like an invasion, a taking of your baby. so i do it with reluctance, but it will be easier if I just rewrite the item and then talk a bit about why I did what I did. Ready?

Courtesan's Locket of Poisonous Whispers
Aura moderate enchantment and divination; CL 7th
Slot neck; Price 17,600 gp; Weight .2 lbs.

Description
Originally designed by a famously jilted countess later suspected of being the agent of a foreign power, the courtesan's locket of poisonous whispers has since been replicated by a variety of individuals and groups ranging from spies to diplomats to philandering-yet-jealous nobles.

This gold filigree pendant has a teardrop shaped aquamarine in its front's center. Most times the gem shines clear, light, and beautiful, but in other moments radiates nauseating, pale green. When first acquired, the locket bears no image. After enclosing an image or a bit of a humanoid, perhaps a lock of hair, the enclosed item disappears and that person becomes the object of the locket's powers.

The intimacy of the locket's connection permits the wearer to detect thoughts of the object at any range less than 10 miles if the object is on the same plane and one of the following: in the same building, in a location where the object has shared an intimate kiss with the bearer, in a location where the object was dosed with poison (see below), or in any case within 45 feet. Detecting thoughts this way requires full concentration, closed eyes, and reasonable quiet. If opened a miniature sculpture of light hovers between or above the locket's doors. If the object is in the locket's range, the image is so faithful that a DC 20 perception check allows any viewer to gain information about the object as the spell deathwatch. The object finds it hard to oppose the bearer, imposing a -5 circumstance penalty on the object during opposed skill checks between the two.

If the wearer whispers to the object's glowing figure words of faithfulness, lust, anger or guilt, the aquamarine immediately darkens to the hue of emerald venom and fills with distillate of that emotion. Held over a container and commanded, the gem releases a single dose of magical contact poison. The dose instantly loses potency if the locket's gem is filled with new poison, it otherwise lasts 1 week. The thick oil is nearly odorless, though hints of sweetness as long as it is potent, leaving traces of bile in the air when its magic is expended.

Used as lip lustre, the poison remains on the bearer's lips until the object's mouth is kissed as a full round action. Mind overcome by the kiss, the object must make a Fortitude save (DC 14). If the kiss is continued beyond a full round without the slightest interruption, the object must save again at the end of any second or third rounds. The results are the same no matter which save failed.

Used as massage oil, it loses potency if the first creature touched is not the object. After one full minute of massage, body relaxed, the object must make a will save (DC 14). The massage can be continued for up to 2 more minutes, forcing 1 save per minute if uninterrupted.

At any time before 24 hours has elapsed from dosing, while actively detecting thoughts, the locket can once cause the object to react according to its poisonous emotion. For lust, and anger, the bearer must choose a target of the emotion. Guilt may or may not have a target. When choosing a target of the emotion, the bearer must specify someone within line of effect and 45'.

• Faithfulness: from the moment triggered, the object is unable to feel or even feign romantic love or desire towards anyone save the bearer. Those expecting love or desire from the object perceive the object's lack of these. This lasts the full remainder of the 24 hours.
  
• Lust: The bearer chooses a target of lust. The object acts as if affected by unnatural lust toward the target, though for 1d4 rounds.
  
• Anger: The bearer chooses a target. The object rants in language as foul and spiteful as the object has ever used in life about the target. The object tries get or remain face to face with the target. This lasts for 1d4 rounds.
  
• Guilt: The bearer confesses one sin per round for 1d4 rounds. The sins confessed are always sins actually committed, and sins of betrayal, faithlessness, sexual immorality, or undeserved violence. If a target is chosen, the sins confessed are sins which would pain the target to hear aloud. Previously revealed sins are not confessed. Sins that do not risk others' revising their view of the objects' character are not serious enough to deserve confession, though the object may choose the order of sins confessed hoping the duration will expire.

If the compulsive actions would, on their own, be likely to cause the death, divorce, exile or imprisonment of the object or the object's spouse, a final desperate save may be attempted. The DC is 24, with a bonus of +2 if the object's original failed save came in the second round/minute or +4 if it came in the third. The object uses Fortitude or Will, whichever save was not previously failed.

For all saves the poison is considered mind affecting [emotion] magic.

When the locket is worn and has no object, the bearer gains a +3 profane bonus on diplomacy checks made while overtly flirting with the target. This bonus never applies to more than one person at a time. To purge the object, one must whisper to the open locket a vow never to see the object again immediately before sleeping 8 hours with the locket under a pillow. This vow need not be kept.

Construction
Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, deathwatch, detect thoughts, minor image, suggestion, unnatural lust; Cost 8,800 gp

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So, can you believe we're still on element 5, tying things together with creativity?

I won't explain all my choices, and I haven't counted words (though I'm sure it's too long), so there's a lot for you to think about and edit or play with.

But let me talk just a little bit about some of the things I chose.

Although courtesans aren't always engaged in vicious, backstabbing affairs, and although I still haven't managed to make the locket do anything at large parties that are often the heart of the courtesan's life, I've tried to incorporate a bit more courtesan flavor.

In the meantime, by alluding to the gossipy nature of the courtesan, I've given a good reason for us to use poison. Moreover, I've reduced the save DC but used a poison-like mechanic to force multiple saves over time. The save DC is the save DC of suggestion, which I've used as a good catch-all spell for inspiring behavior. Yet, dosing someone with the poison isn't easy. In order to get that chance to force multiple saves, you're probably going to have to do some good roleplaying.

The locket is now incorporated into the powers and the theme. Jealous spying, or even just the watchful eye of someone attuned to the dangers of high society, is an expected behavior of the courtesan class, and now it's facilitated by the locket using a non-magical locket's primary function: bearing an image of someone you wish to remember.

While the first paragraph could be cut entirely, look at the changes I made. The countess is suspected of being treacherous, but this isn't proven. Ah, and are these merely the poisonous whispers of the court which inspired her magic, or the horrible truths of someone who always had more goals than merely another sexual conquest? Which is more appropriate to the myth of the courtesan? Either! Both! ...note also that the diplomats no longer must be hostile, it's not evil for a diplomat to want to keep tabs on and even influence participants in a foreign government. It's expected - that's the job. The diplomat need not even be particularly sneaky or underhanded, provided one isn't using the Anger power. "Confess" can be used for noble purposes, no? Spies were added because they were clearly implied by your original. Lastly, the "bored nobles" aren't primary users anymore. No, the nobles who use this item are characterized by their sexual jealousy - a form of selfishness - not mere ennui. Those using this in service of a crown aren't necessarily evil, but let's be honest about the person who uses the powers of this locket for recreation.

In the second paragraph, the visual description joins the emotional theme. "Nauseating, pale green" - why would that be a color that flashed occasionally, but mostly hidden? For that matter, why is this no longer an emerald? Why is the color that most people see most of the time "clear, light, and beautiful"?

In who uses this and what it looks like we have two different elements both reinforcing the idea that this locket is an item with an attractive surface hiding ugly secrets. Possessive jealousy receives allusion in both paragraphs.

It's no longer possible to affect more than one person at a time with the locket. Detecting thoughts also requires blotting out the world for a time - and isn't that consistent with obsession (more than, say, love)? The range can be quite long in a large palace or if across the city from an object who is at home...where you have previously dosed the object. But the range is tied into the intimacy and emotional connections between bearer, object, and surroundings. In this emotion item, emotionally resonant places extend the range. Now your spy can do the 10-mile distant work you want to be able to do, but there's a thematic reason for allowing thoughts to be detected from so far away.

The deathwatch effect shows the complicated nature of the original creator: one can care for someone even as one is jealous or furious or envious or feeling betrayed. One can be in the habit of flitting from tryst to tryst like the woman of John Dunne's "Constant Lover" (and is she the "constant lover" or is the speaker? - that's the question that really makes that poem fun) and yet still fall in love...or at least develop a lasting obsession. The deathwatch hologram doesn't actually allow the watcher to spy on the object better. No. What it does is allow the bearer to moon over the object in private, and in moments of worry to reassure the bearer of health or to provide notice of the object's need. To moon over, to reassure oneself about, even to rescue the very object that the bearer is supposed to be callously using. Is this a violation of the theme, or granting the theme incredible depth and realism?

Dang, I so love this item.

Let's move on.

The poison once again evokes intimacy. In fact, it requires it. Despite being a contact poison by nature, to take control of the objects emotions you must engage in a full round - or more! - of passionate kissing, or massage the bare skin of your object for minutes. I left "bare skin" out of the massage description to save words and because as contact poison it already has to actually contact the skin, not the equipment.

How, exactly, are you going to get your object to smooch you ***before*** you gain emotional control? This item absolutely requires good role-play. Fortunately it also gives plenty of inspiration for good role play. The item does, also, make it a little easier: the opposed skill check bonus. This represents the fact that the object has not lost competence, and yet has this weak spot when it comes to opposing the bearer. Who among us hasn't failed to stand up to a mistake that a loved one was making? Though the crunch remains a mere numerical penalty, how the penalty is imposed in very particular circumstances implies all sorts of things that can inspire good role-play.

Now the poison. How often is court gossip described as "poisonous" or a courtesan's tongue as "venomous"? Oh, how that is so standard. But this item doesn't join a host of items exploring tired territory. No, this item takes hold of a stereotype that players will eagerly and easily believe and bends it to the creation of an item never seen before. The stereotype here is not old, it's not overdone, and certainly compared with these mechanics it's totally different.

Who hasn't spoken to themselves at night? Of course we all have. And though some of us just don't have it in us to think the worst of people, still sometimes people make the bad in themselves obvious enough that in our pain we complain about them in the dark. The locket, a piece of jewelry designed to keep your secrets, is now the place where you can whisper your complaints so that no one else will hear.

And yet, we don't pass out after our dark rants feeling closure - no. Talking in the dark lis an outlet, but it doesn't give us what we really want: the power to make things work out the way they SHOULD have worked out. To punish the person who hurts us, perhaps, but maybe also we just want the person back by our side -and loyal, this time?

With this locket, everything changes: our whispers in the dark, the words others call poisonous gossip, they aren't powerless anymore.

It isn't easy of course.

But we can use sex to overwhelm someone's will, bypassing it entirely, but the object may still be saved by unconscious strength and loyalty found in muscle and bone. We can tease the resistance out of the body, relaxing it until it is entirely subject to how we would manipulate it, and yet the object may still be saved by the mind if it stays clear, if its will is strong.

The dual nature of the saving throw presents great imagery, but also it presents interesting role-playing options. The temptation is to attack the weakest points of the object, though knowing that if we can manage it, it is better to overcome the strongest resistance first (if we wish to impose truly serious consequences later that might grant that second save).

The powers chosen by you were all kept, though I tried to think through the crunch a little more and make it less dependent on GM fiats later. But in addition to yours, I added Faithfulness.

Note how faithfulness is used in both literal and ironic ways. Is it faithfulness if the object no longer expresses love for a cherished spouse? Ah, but who cares what happens to the spouse who can see in the object's eyes the love lost? Me! The object clings to me! This is the locket's creator's twisted version of faithfulness, a faithfulness that is more about submitting to possessive jealousy than choosing to be honest and true and loyal - to anyone, really. Maybe others would dispense with the word faithfulness to name this power. Maybe it feels like we're being dishonest in the item description, when it is the characters who should be deceived, not the players.

Me? I still love how using "faithfulness" that replaces the love between spouses with estrangement and pain causes us to ask, "faithful to whom"? If the object can only find romance with the bearer, if the bearer doses the object day after day, will any rendezvous, any tryst truly be any evidence at all of "faithfulness" to the bearer? And yet, wouldn't a jealous courtesan be tempted to use this faithfulness poison, day after day, as often as possible?

The luck bonus isn't exactly an afterthought. I wanted to better incorporate the flirtatiously social. Noe that this is a profane bonus. Can you think of why this bonus would be considered profane even though neither the locket not the user are necessarily evil? yeah, I thought you could.

I also wanted that bonus to fail as soon as the locket acquires an object. That represents the failure of even the most experienced courtesan to flirt with the same skill when obsession takes hold. Nonetheless, if you have to cut something and you've already cut the first paragraph of fluff, axing this power may be the easiest way to reduce your word count a bit without sacrificing the core of the item. Yes, it does help flesh out the item by enabling the "hunting" that happens after the courtesan finally lets one object go. Yes it does call to an aspect of "courtesan" that is otherwise undeveloped in the item.

And if you want to use this item around your table or develop on your own a supplement of "magic items that tell stories" or some such that uses longer magic items that really focus on role-play potential ...well, then keep it all in.

But if you're going to submit to a publisher or to RPGSS, sometimes even a good idea has to go if it just makes the thing to darn long.

speaking of!

I'm really kind of exhausted here, so the next 2 elements get cursory attention.

6. Reading for audience appeal
The job is to design game products that gamers will buy. So a very legitimate question is, "Will gamers want to buy the supplement just to be able to use this item at their table?" If yes, that's a good reason to up vote.

I honestly think that you were hurt here. While women are a huge part of Pathfinder, it is still a majority men fan base. "Courtesan" is a femininely gendered word. I think it's a great word. I think it's got oodles of story waiting to come out of it.

But you are going to sacrifice part of your audience if you use femininely gendered imagery.

I am NOT saying don't use that imagery.

I AM saying that you should know your audience. Love the heck out of the items you create that are going to be seen by the fan base as feminine. There's a ton of psychological research about ethnical topics such as "priming" and "implicit bias" that tell us flatly: a huge number of men and boys that don't hold explicit biases, even ones that advocate for gender justice as best as they know how, will have an unconscious hesitation in various activities. Though obviously this particular contest hasn't been studied, the small time frame for voting, the frequent use of the criterion, "Would I use this item myself?" and other details of RPGSS put this contest squarely in the types of activities that are likely to be most affected by priming and implicit bias.

So you have a choice: when you know you have a good beginning - like this locket - and you know you're going to face implicit bias, you can either

1) save this idea for submission directly to a publisher auditioning talent who will see the talent without bias much easier because of the lack of time pressure and because the publisher has to be skilled at checking their own preferences so as to turn out books with broader appeal

OR
2) Love the hell out of the idea. Give it everything you've got for an entire weekend. Then set it aside. Then a month later pass it around for feedback. The time that has passed coupled with others' opinions will let you see it totally anew. Then love the hell out of the idea again. Don't let it go. Obsess over it. Take the idea with you. Check in on it often. Do a background check on the item and where it came from - could that spell really be its parent? What was its duration anyway?

Audience is a huge part of RPGSS. Although I really like where this item was headed, I suspect that audience factors don't help any version of a Courtesan's Locket.

If you want a good idea that isn't quite right for RPGSS to nonetheless represent you in RPGSS because you're proud of your work or for any other reason, your job isn't to compromise a good idea in order to please your audience. Your job is to polish your item so blindingly bright that the context around your item disappears and the voters have to look at your item on its own for a time.

The voters here are good folk, and more canny about the design process and other factors than you might expect from a random internet mob. They want to do the right thing. They want to pick the best items from the best designers. The effects of priming and implicit bias are simply an artifact of how the human brain works, it doesn't make anyone here ill-motivated. So if you polish up that item that isn't targeted to the most widely shared impulses of RPGSS voters, if you force them to really look at your item for a bit, they'll see the quality of your ideas and the quality and quantity of your work and vote accordingly. This is true whether you think you might push item outside easy reach of the most popular impulses by using feminine imagery, by designing for 15th + level characters, by riding the edge of what seems "fair play," or by any other design choice.

No, you're not designing to appeal to the broadest possible audience if you use feminine imagery ...but if you're a superstar, there isn't a regular poster here, and not a large percentage of silent voters, that won't recognize that in even the most outside-the-box item.

7. Reading for the joy of the word.
Did you write clearly?
I don't care about a typo or the misuse of a single piece of punctuation, but do you have errors or style choices that disrupt flow?
Do you have style choices that enhance the flow - are you creative with sentence structures and do you have the capacity to consider cadence when selecting from synonyms?
Does the mood of the writing reflect the mood of the item? Perhaps a droning monotonous rhythm would enhance certain items.
Have you thought through the theme of your item and made sure that every time you have an choice between two words or two phrases you select the one that furthers your theme and reinforces your imagery?
Do you add wondrous, unexpected depth under the clear surface, in which attentive readers may immerse themselves?
Most of the time this feedback will not focus on anything you've done wrong, but on moments where a designer misses an opportunity to do something amazing.

I'm pretty much entirely skipping this section. Things that might be said here somewhat overlap with using a consistent theme and making sure that different imagery and word choices develop and promote that them.

That was covered before.

Here I could talk about things like rhythm and cadence, but I'll let you work on that. I already talked about how to develop rhythm, cadence, and flow in another review. If you read all my reviews you'll get that advice anyway.

8. Rule checks:
is the item over-priced or underpriced?
What about caster level? Did you use 1st when Bane or Craft Wondrous Item has a higher level requirement?
Although the entire point of magic is to do things one could otherwise not do, nonetheless Pathfinder must have rules and I can't interpret every single conflict between an item and Pathfinder rules as simply a case of the magic of the item overcoming those rules.

Nothing was particularly bad here, certainly not bad enough to remember, though there may have been something.

I did disagree with the pricing. While I reduced some powers (like you can only listen to one mind at a time now, and there's no way you could ever manipulate the emotions of 2 different people at the same time), others that have a large and real monetary value stayed the same - plus I added deathwatch. By limiting the emotion to something you have to pick in advance, but by giving you 1 more emotion to choose from, I think that bit stayed the same or even got a little less powerful. When all that was done, I ended up changing the price by increasing it about 75%.

We weren't very close on pricing, but I doubt you would have gotten to many down votes for it. This item is different enough (whether your version or my version) that play testing might be necessary to get the best possible idea of the item's value.

There are reasons I think it was terribly undercoated: reading minds from 10 miles away for 24 hours at time kinda makes the "one charge a day" restriction irrelevant. Just an "always on" detect thoughts is pretty costly at CL 9.

9 * 2 * 2000 = 36,000 gp.

There are reasons that this is effectively worth less than that. That cost would be for an item that costs Detect Thoughts at will - which would mean you could change targets at a whim, etc.

Also, frankly, CL doesn't really add much value to detect thoughts. In that situation, you really want to think about bringing the CL down as much as you dare.

Craft Wondrous has a prerequisite of CL 3, but detect thoughts is a 2nd level spell so we couldn't go lower than that anyway. Using CL 3 we get:

3* 2* 2000 = 12,000 gp.

So this is the base cost of "always on" detect thoughts. Being able to go out to 10 miles when it's normally close range - that benefit is hard to calculate as a cost, but it's major. The fact that it's limited to close range unless certain other factors are present makes it even more fudge-y (but remember that you original item wasn't limited in that way). Given that you have to "attune" the item to one particular person and can't easily change it (It requires at least a night of sleep, and that's assuming you have someone else's body parts ready to go!) and that you must fully concentrate on that one task, entirely unable to do anything else while listening but that it's at will, etc. ...this really seems like a 8k - 12k power all on its own.

As a side note - it's hard to determine the exact value of an item, especially one that strays from the original functions and limitations of its source spells. But once I got in the ball park of 16-19k gp, I thought,

"How can I use the price to further my theme?"

Well, if you note, the price is 17,600.

One mile is 1,760 yards. Ten miles is 17,600.

I'm still not satisfied that I know where the 10 mile limit comes from - only you know that - but now, even if it was completely random and not something that logically fits the them, it at least ties in with something else in the item.

Note that if the item would be appropriately priced somewhere near 50,000 gp, I would have done the exact same thing. The price would be set at 52,800 - the number of feet in 10 miles. If I felt it was properly priced in some other range where it was really, really tough to to find a logical connection with 10 miles (which was the one thing that stood out for me as having no logical connection to the them, to the construction requirements, to anything) I would have changed the range as little as possible to get it work out in its new price range.

7 miles could be 36, 900 feet or 12, 320 yards. 12 miles, well, you get the idea.

My point here, is have everything tie in with something. Sometimes it's just the rule - you've used a spell in construction, and you're using that spell's range. But if it doesn't have an obvious connection, it's your job to create one.

No loose ends.

You will win RPGSS next year.

Do it.

9. The extra mile
This is all about making things easier for me as your reader.

First, about the bolding: I'm was going to dock you but then remembered that you said formatting got hosed (and implied I should ignore that). Okay. No points docked. I hope you remember to get the formatting just right when you submit for realzies, however.

Read this section in others' reviews. You didn't do much that really helped me out as a reader. By referencing specific spells for duplication of their effects and then hyperlinking, I've done a bit of work to try to help the reader, but there's probably more that could be done. I've just spent like 3.5 hours on this review already, so I'm not going to try to edit for that.

=================

Blah. I'm exhausted. Hope it was all useful and I never got too harsh.

Crossbow of the Embracing Vine

Aura Moderate Evocation and Transmutation; CL 7th
Slot None; Price 56450 gp; Weight 8 lbs.
Description
This +1 heavy crossbow is entirely created from deep, red wood. Vines are carved into the crossbow, twisting along all of its surfaces, enhanced with a light scattering of dim gold flecks in its leaves. Its string shares this golden sheen. Attached to the front of the crossbow is a small wooden grip.

As long as the crossbow is wielded in two hands, a red vine with golden leaves grows from the weapon and wraps comfortably around both of the wielder’s hands, giving the wielder an additional +1 on attack rolls with the weapon.

At will, the wielder can extend the grip and plant it into solid terrain. Taking root, the vines grasp the wielder’s arms and legs, stabilizing them. This whole process takes 1 minute of concentration without moving from the starting position to complete. The user can crouch or lie prone while using this ability.

When this is done, the crossbow’s range increment increases by 25 feet, the bonus to attack rolls increases to +3, and the crossbow gains a bonus to damage equal to half of the wielder's dexterity modifier. The wielder also gains a +2 bonus to their CMD against bull rush attempts. Finally, the wielder cannot move and loses their dexterity bonus to armor class. As a full-round action, the wielder can unroot the crossbow, returning the vines and grip to their normal position without affecting the terrain in any way.
Construction
Requirements Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Cat’s Grace, Control Plants; Cost 28050 gp

1. Name

Nope. I don't like names of this form (Noun of the Adjective Noun) because they feel overdone to me. Some names of that form are bad enough to detract if they don't have any evocative imagery (or at least no coherent imagery, or if the imagery created by part of the name conflicts somehow with imagery created by another part of the name).

That's not this item. The name's form feel tired, but the word choices themselves do not. Therefore name it as thou wilt.

2. Glance top to bottom
Glance at the formatting to see if the entry pays enough attention to what Paizo wants that this item isn't throw-away worthy. Maybe glance at a couple of other things that seem like DQs to me - a CL of 21+, a cost of 200,001 gp or more (since that’s forbidden by Paizo), maybe something else I’m not thinking about right now.

Commas missing from the prices stand out. I'd always been taught that if the thousands are in the single digits you can dispense with the comma for that 4 digit number ...but I've never been taught you can dispense with it in 5 digit or longer numbers. Therefore that looks more like a careless error than omitting a comma from a 4 digit number which might be generally acceptable but violates Paizo's style guidelines. I'd rather the error come from simply not knowing a specific piece of a specific company's style guidelines. A careful person will incorporate the new information and the mistake will only be made once. A careless person? Who knows how many mistakes they might make in the future and where those mistakes might turn up?

In general, however, this is well formatted. I make that point only to show that some types of errors are preferable to other types of errors. I do not make that point because I think you're particularly careless or that you're careless to the point of causing a problem.

This passes the glance test.

3. Read for content
what does the item do? Is the item in an over-used design space?
Is the function understandable?

The item converts someone proficient with a crossbow into a skilled sniper.

Sniping is definitely not an over-used design space. Even ranged weapon enhancements don't necessarily touch on actual sniping.

The function is clearly communicated. I have a solid idea of what it's supposed to do if a player wants a ruling on a corner case relating to the crunch of how it does it.

4. Read for crunch
Is the crunch understandable?
Is it complicated?
Does it use effects that will be a pain around the gaming table?
Is it overpowered comes into play here if it would be a bad item regardless of price. Otherwise it's an underpricing issue. This doesn't mean that the item has to be worth more than 200,000 gp. An item can be overpowered if its fair market value is only 3,000 -5000 gp if the only characters who would ever want to use it are first level characters (who can't afford it - so they have to be given it - so you see the problem).
NOTE: I don't have to particularly like the approach to the crunch that you chose, so long as it works.

The crunch is actually unusually clear. You've reduced "being supported in your sniper fire by a loving, symbiotic vine" to specific bonuses that apply in clearly defined situations. You also avoid swift and free actions, which isn't necessary but does avoid the pitfalls of those choices which frequently break the legs of unwary items. Frankly, I love the fact that you make uprooting the vines a full round action. Bold choice, and it very much works with your theme.

It's not a SAK, in my opinion, because it does one thing that has multiple effects (and the effects are greater or lesser depending on whether you allow the vines to root, but still, same basic effect of steadying the wielder). It doesn't do multiple different things that each have an unrelated effect.

5. Reading for creativity
Is this new?
Is it blindingly why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple in execution?
Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry all tie together well?

Yes. This is new. Even if another crossbow did "magic steadying" I can't remember any item using plant growth to steady a character for any reason.

Is it intuitive in its execution? Heck yeah!

Does it utilize themes in such a way that different aspects of the entry tie together well? Heck yeah!

Name: vines
Description: vines
Effect: vines grab you, sometimes root, and use their own plant-slowness/plant-stability to slow down and stabilize the wielder.
Crunch: I don't see anything. Your good use of clear, simple bonuses make it harder to integrate the language of the crunch itself into the theme. Remember that although this is crunch, and keeping it simple and clear is good, if you can use a broad vocabulary to express the rules in such a way that they remain simple and clear while still exploiting the imagery of your theme, that's even better.

One example? You say that the "bonus to attack rolls increases to +3" when the vines take root.

Why wouldn't you say that the "bonus to attack rolls grows to +3"? You've got a plant theme growing here. Keep it alive. Don't make your crunch a confusing thicket but do keep the language you use for the crunch as integrated with your theme as a branch to a trunk.

these aren't the best examples, but you see what I'm getting at. "Grows" is only a small part of the work you could do to make the entry more consistently evocative of your theme, but getting things to that level of detail will take time. Just having name, description, and effect all support each other as well as they do is much better than most of your competition.

Apart from the language in your crunch (like choices between synonyms), there was one other obvious way that you could have integrated the theme into the crunch.

Yes, you're getting steadied, and yes all your bonuses can be readily justified by that. But part of the job of a sniper is to become part of the environment so as not to be noticed.

How much more part of the environment can you get than having the vines literally grow from your weapon? I mean, dang. This weapon should grant camouflage bonuses in natural areas. It just should, dammit.

The takeaway from this section, even if I do have suggestions for some amount of improvement?

You are obviously creative, and it shows.

6. Reading for audience appeal
The job is to design game products that gamers will buy. So a very legitimate question is, "Will gamers want to buy the supplement just to be able to use this item at their table?" If yes, that's a good reason to up vote.

Oh, yes. There's definitely an audience that would like to ambush opponents from range. There's definitely an audience that likes sneaking to avoid risk. While some urban characters or other characters with a strong theme that doesn't work with entangling vines might choose not to try to acquire this crossbow even if they are interested in sniper's work...I swear that a ton of sneaky characters would be interested in tweaking their characters in order to make them more compatible with this weapon. Your imagery isn't the absolute most magical and compelling in the ever, but your creativity is very strong and your imagery is good and your theme well-connected. There are a good number of players who will see such a crossbow as enhancing their character's cool as well as their character's abilities.

i don't play snipers and am unlikely to. I know that I'm not the audience for this item in that sense. But heck yeah I'd be happy to have one of my NPCs use this when I'm game mastering.

I kind of feel like the cool factor of this item is a bit shy of outrageous or amazing. I feel like I've seen other items with as much cool and in a few cases even that bit more that makes them stand out for sheer cool.

But this item is nearly there AND it has good powers AND they are in an under-used design space AND the crunch won't turn off any DMs or players.

This is a very marketable item.

7. Reading for the joy of the word.
Did you write clearly?
I don't care about a typo or the misuse of a single piece of punctuation, but do you have errors or style choices that disrupt flow?
Do you have style choices that enhance the flow - are you creative with sentence structures and do you have the capacity to consider cadence when selecting from synonyms?
Does the mood of the writing reflect the mood of the item? Perhaps a droning monotonous rhythm would enhance certain items.
Have you thought through the theme of your item and made sure that every time you have an choice between two words or two phrases you select the one that furthers your theme and reinforces your imagery?
Do you add wondrous, unexpected depth under the clear surface, in which attentive readers may immerse themselves?
Most of the time this feedback will not focus on anything you've done wrong, but on moments where a designer misses an opportunity to do something amazing.

You write clearly. Moreover, you really think through your ideas and concepts, you think through the implications of your crunch, and you use that thinking to create an item that feels complete. Your writing also flows. It's not got the best flow ever, but it's above average. It never takes you out of your reading rhythm because of confusion with one thing or the mis-punctuation of another.

The imagery still feels a step shy of awesomely evocative, which is, of course, where you'd always like to be.

Nonetheless, its within a single range increment of awesomely evocative. You can get there from here. Really.

You've thought through your ideas, now step back from your writing long enough to see it afresh. Read it again. Are there any opportunities to wrap your theme more tightly around the item? Is there any language that doesn't work? Are there any conflicts between some things you say and other things you say? Even if they can be resolved by rereading, we don't want people to have to re-read.

We want people to want to re-read for the sheer joy of it.

So let's take one thing that I noticed:

This +1 heavy crossbow is entirely created from deep, red wood.

conflicts with

Its string shares this golden sheen.

It has a string? The string isn't wood? The string isn't red?

It seems like what you really meant, but unfortunately didn't say, was:

This +1 heavy crossbow is created from deep red wood, and golden vines (with green leaves?).

(as an aside, first notice that I removed the comma between deep and red. Yes, when you have two adjectives modifying a noun, you separate them with commas. But you don't separate an adverb from the adjective it modifies. Here, with the comma you're saying the wood is red AND the wood is "deep", whatever that means. Without the comma you're saying the wood is a deep red. That makes more sense.)

First, you don't want the "string" of the crossbow made of carved wood. So now you're in a position of whether it should be something like twisted bark or whether the string should itself be a vine. I vote decidedly for the latter.

Next, why should the vines be carved into the crossbow? When the crossbow was "entirely" wood, that made some sense. I mean, it didn't make sense why you'd said "entirely", but given that you had, it was absolutely appropriate for you to stick with the choice you'd made and describe the vine as a carving.

Now, however, we need a living, flexible vine to be the crossbow string, so we might as well make all the vines decorating the crossbow to be living vine.

I suggest the green leaves because the red wood you see only after stripping a tree of its bark, and sometimes not even until you cut in to the heartwood, isn't associated with the capacities of plant growth. How could it be when you cut deep into the tree before you can find that solid wood? Vines grow, and grow quickly, true. But remember that plants get the food for their growth from the photosynthesis of their chloroplasts. The vines themselves aren't green, so the energy for growth has to come from the leaves.

So make the leaves green.

I mentioned that nothing takes the reader out of the flow, but neither do you have a good intrinsic rhythm to your prose here. I suggest trying to read it aloud. Tinker with it. Make the flow and rhythm even better, even smoother. Then try to sing it. Fit it to any song you want. Change songs with the paragraphs if you need to do so, but not within a paragraph. Make the changes you need to make singing this entry as effortless as it is possible for you to make it.

Now you're approaching an entry that isn't merely easy to read, but joyous to read.

I'm suggesting you take on even more here than I've suggested for others in this section of my reviews.

Why?

You're doing well here, but you can do even better. i believe in you.

8. Rule checks:
is the item over-priced or underpriced?
What about caster level? Did you use 1st when Bane or Craft Wondrous Item has a higher level requirement?
Although the entire point of magic is to do things one could otherwise not do, nonetheless Pathfinder must have rules and I can't interpret every single conflict between an item and Pathfinder rules as simply a case of the magic of the item overcoming those rules.

Nothing about this strikes me as breaking the rules. I'd have to look into how big a difference +25 feet to range increment can really make. That sounds like it might be a bit much, but honestly I couldn't make that decision without play testing a bit, so you've done as much as you can there - the publisher can schedule some play testing if the supplement is big enough and important enough. In any case, it's not something that simply breaks Pathfinder. It doesn't violate their design rules.

In fact, the brilliance of your item is really the conservatism you bring to crunch, the respect you have for Paizo's work and rules and expectation, being combined with a truly new, uncontemplated effect. There's no spell designed specifically to help snipers that you could use as a template for the crossbow's powers. But you go ahead and design for the space anyway. You know that action economy is place of consistent pressure, and you design an item that makes the most out of being slow. Good snipers shouldn't be in a hurry anyway. Being able to see and then choose that design space that's new but that doesn't challenge Pathfinder's rules or spirit, and then exploiting that design space with a truly new effect that doesn't need more than a bit of description and some easily enumerated bonuses and penalties?

Dang, that's good.

There is a weak point, though. You consistently use untyped bonuses. This just should not be.

The range bonus should be an enhancement bonus. The CMD bonus should be a circumstance bonus.

You can do this, but you also need to do this. There's nothing prohibiting untyped bonuses, but you shouldn't use them unless you have a very good reason. Even choosing a bonus type that usually stacks with other bonuses of its type - like a circumstance bonus - is much better than leaving a bonus untyped.

9. The extra mile
This is all about making things easier for me as your reader.

You didn't exploit any hyperlinks or methods of organizing information visually or other tricks to make the text communicate more than the word count would imply.

This is another area you could learn to exploit.

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Overall verdict?

This is an item that contains only a very few "mistakes" that are as simple as violations of a rule, misuse or nonuse of the format, designing the wrong type of item, etc.

This item is creative in what it does and how it does it.

This item is likely balanced in most game groups.

This item has an audience who will want to acquire and use the item.

The writing is clear.

The crunch is clear in all aspects, but the failure to specify bonus types - while being clear in its effect - is probably inappropriate.

This item does not go the extra mile to make it easy for me to read and grok.

This item does have a consistent theme that is synergistically forwarded by name, description, and what it does. This could be enhanced even further by carrying the theme through the language of how the item does what it does, and by systematic creative choices (such as between synonyms).

This item is close to having writing such that simply reading its entry is a pleasure, but it's not quite there yet.

This item was in my top 32. I felt that in all areas you were just shy of "awesome". While never quite getting to "awesome" might seem bad, getting close to awesome every single time (except maybe for the name, which I don't really grade on unless it's terrible) creates a very high average. An item that gets to awesome in one or two areas but is only average in two or 3 generally loses to your item.

The really scary thing is that there's substantial room for improvement and evidence that you can make that improvement if given a chance. This was a very good effort and I really wanted to see what you would do in future rounds.

maybe next year.