DJ Patch's page

DJ Patch wrote:

David knott 242 wrote:

I did a search for "darkvision" in the Lost Omens Character Guide PDF and came up with the following:

Human: 5th level feat for Nidalese ethnicity
Hobgoblin: Default ability
Leshy: Fungus Leshy heritage

Hellknight Signifer: 10th level feat

I found nothing about darkvision for lizardfolk -- but apparently they do have the only option I have seen so far (the 1st level Parthenogenic Hatchling feat) for making a character with no father. While they do not directly say so, they strongly imply that such a character must be female (as a character with this feat is an exact genetic clone of her mother).

You're definitely reading the implication that was indeed intended! To me, it was a nice intersection of really old Pathfinder lore (as far back as Classic Monsters Revisited), real-world biology, and game mechanics. That kind of detail really grounds a setting like Golarion for me. And it can be an adventure springboard: If you come across an iruxi settlement that is predominantly women because of many such hatchlings, you know they've been through a rough time. Maybe some adventurers can help them out?

BUT the text is just vague enough (and biology weird enough, especially fantasy biology) that if you really want to play a male parthenogenic hatchling you should feel free--maybe that's just how chromosomes work in your world, or maybe your character is one in a million (with interesting story/destiny implications--think Dune's Paul Atreides).

Do what's fun for YOUR table!

Real world biology is weird enough to cover this. Some species have a ZW sex-determination system rather than the commonly known XY sex-determination system. Under this system the female is the sex with both Z and W chromosomes while the male has two Z chromosomes. Under this system females reproducing parthenogenetically can produce both female offspring (ZW) and male offspring (ZZ). (The third type, WW, usually don't survive.)

Komodo...

Cool! Thanks for this! I also dig Deadmanwalking's comment as well. So there's lots of room to play within the text and explore beyond it, which is always the ideal.

I did a search for "darkvision" in the Lost Omens Character Guide PDF and came up with the following:

Human: 5th level feat for Nidalese ethnicity
Hobgoblin: Default ability
Leshy: Fungus Leshy heritage

Hellknight Signifer: 10th level feat

I found nothing about darkvision for lizardfolk -- but apparently they do have the only option I have seen so far (the 1st level Parthenogenic Hatchling feat) for making a character with no father. While they do not directly say so, they strongly imply that such a character must be female (as a character with this feat is an exact genetic clone of her mother).

You're definitely reading the implication that was indeed intended! To me, it was a nice intersection of really old Pathfinder lore (as far back as Classic Monsters Revisited), real-world biology, and game mechanics. That kind of detail really grounds a setting like Golarion for me. And it can be an adventure springboard: If you come across an iruxi settlement that is predominantly women because of many such hatchlings, you know they've been through a rough time. Maybe some adventurers can help them out?

BUT the text is just vague enough (and biology weird enough, especially fantasy biology) that if you really want to play a male parthenogenic hatchling you should feel free--maybe that's just how chromosomes work in your world, or maybe your character is one in a million (with interesting story/destiny implications--think Dune's Paul Atreides).

Do what's fun for YOUR table!

I'm curious to see if there are feathered lizardfolk, resembling the feathered dinosaurs (eg Ixalan cards).

That would be a super cool heritage!

Feathered lizardfolk aren't currently reflected in the rules, but you could certainly house-rule something! Or reskin one of the heritages...maybe frilled lizardfolk?

Shed Tail is genius. Can't wait to play that trick :-)

While we're on the subject...hope you like neck frills!

That Shed Tail ancestry feat is amazing. Exactly the type of flavourful but still useful feats I want to see in the future of this edition.

Now that the book is out, I can finally say that I'm super excited you're excited for this book. (And check out Parthenogenic Hatchling!)

I'm just hoping that the Lizardfolk don't get such a massive Intelligence penalty that it can't be overcome. I've wanted to play a Lizard-Wizard for a long time.

Now that the book is out, I hope you're pleased! Iruxi do have an intelligence penalty, but nothing that can't be offset by choosing the right background. And in terms of canon (and ancestry feats), iruxi culture has a strong emphasis on reading portents in the stars, with many lizardfolk working with their human neighbors to restore the city of Jaha--an ideal origin for lizardfolk spellcasters of all kinds!

CorvusMask wrote:

So does the negative energy and seal breakers articles have cool tidbits? And what is ersatz angel anyway?(ersatz means imitation, so is it angel that imitates thing or a fake angel?)

I have only skimmed the seal breakers article, but it already seems very interesting.

The Negative Energy Plane article is very good and has some mysteries of multiversal importance teased.

An ersatz angel looks like an angel, but certainly is not one. It's a fake angel. The bestiary itself uses the adjective "pallid" for them, giving you a hint how they're aligned.

Thanks for the kind words, Mimski!

Is there a steam powered giraffe?

EVENING

Ratfolk saboteur NPC: "If anyzing goes wrong, make a sound like a steam-powered giraffe."

LATER THAT NIGHT

PC: "Oh no! SSSSSSSSSSsssssssss..."

Guards: "Hey did you hear that? Sounds like a construct giraffe is venting steam over there."

DJ Patch wrote:

CorvusMask has it right, Nate. At present, reviviphages are a plot seed left for the GM to flesh out (pun absolutely intended). An easy shortcut would be to assume that these are powerful specimens (Advanced and/or with class levels) of the various flesh-eating undead types—think ghouls, ghasts, ghuls, etc.—who seek out and devour the revived (hence the name). What benefits they might gain when they've had such a meal is up to you...

Thank you for the clarification. :)

Anytime! (And thanks for checking out the article!) If your party's PCs make it to Nemret Noktoria, have them send me a postcard.

Question about the resurrection article:

It mentions a type of undead called "reviviphages" that feed pretty much exclusively on resurrected people. What the heck ARE "reviviphages"? I've searched the PF wiki, archives of N, and d20pfsrd, and gotten nothing. Even a straight google search gives me "no results." I didn't even think that was possible.

CorvusMask has it right, Nate. At present, reviviphages are a plot seed left for the GM to flesh out (pun absolutely intended). An easy shortcut would be to assume that these are powerful specimens (Advanced and/or with class levels) of the various flesh-eating undead types—think ghouls, ghasts, ghuls, etc.—who seek out and devour the revived (hence the name). What benefits they might gain when they've had such a meal is up to you...

Finished skimming, saw the Galluvix and that you can have it as improved familiar

I take my rating back, this AP is now THE best AP that has ever existed and will ever exist. It transcends the rating system, ascending beyond realms mortal can understand

But if you force me to put it in stars, 11/5 stars

I meant to reply to this *weeks* ago, but I hadn't gotten my copy of #128 yet and didn't want to write till I'd seen the finished product. I'm delighted the galluvix delighted you!

Crystal Frasier wrote:

CorvusMask wrote:

Finished skimming, saw the Galluvix and that you can have it as improved familiar

I take my rating back, this AP is now THE best AP that has ever existed and will ever exist. It transcends the rating system, ascending beyond realms mortal can understand

But if you force me to put it in stars, 11/5 stars

If you enjoy a product, I strongly recommend leaving a review to tell everyone about the elements you liked, to help them decide if it's for them

I skimmed the book very briefly, saw the gallivix, showed it to my pathfinder group, and the discussion has already been worth the price of admission. Particularly with my fox loving chicken raising friend.

I'm thrilled your group liked (or at least got discussion mileage out of) the galluvix! For what it's worth, it was inspired by a rogue taxidermy exhibition I attended. Definitely let me know if any of your friends are persuaded to adopt one as a familiar...

I still find myself amazed to see my name next to such talented folks.

Likewise. If anyone needs me, I'll be sitting next to the mailbox for the next week waiting for the print edition.

I, for one, welcome our new naga overlords. (Obviously.)

After much reading and reviewing, we have decided upon our articles. Authors that have had their submissions selected are...

Oh! Clearly I am a little behind on the news. This was a super-nice surprise over the weekend. Thanks to the reviewers and editors for all their hard work!

Gulp. There's an Occult Bestiary?

Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in.

Also: So excited for the Distant Shores Gazetteer!

For almost 3 years, I've written adventure seeds for nearly every Bestiary monster—in ABC order. Today I hit Z.

So yeah, I'm pretty excited.

Three adventure seeds for the zelekhut (and 700+ other monsters) are here.

Assuming you’re not in a Way of the Wicked-style game, one reason empyreals may oppose the PCs is out of simple disagreement. For example, Cernunnos could be fighting for nature a bit too hard, Korada could oppose whatever violence the PCs are up to, and Patch wrote a whole article on Vildeis.

Not to derail this really detailed thread, but thanks for the shout-out, AlgaeNymph! I'll get to Cernunnos and Korada when I swing back around to the top of the alphabet.

Also, as a being "who embodies the primeval force of nature as well as its wildness," Cernunnos might cross swords with PCs for any number of reasons. They might wander into his territory during a particular hunting season or a certain bloody liminal night, unknowingly marking themselves as fair game despite their intelligence and good intentions. Or he may have assumed the portfolio of some older, darker horned god of hunting (a Golarion analogue for Herne the Hunter for instance) and that aspect might sometimes need to be exercised. Or he might hunt the PCs to test their mettle or throw another Power off the scent (the Erlking does something similar to Harry Dresden in Cold Days). Plus, the description flat-out says "he occasionally lets anger overwhelm his better judgment"—so woe betide the PC who insults him or who has previously accepted the offer of aid (however temporary and mindful of the strings attached) from some infernal duke.

And combat doesn't have to mean "to the death." Korada "has a mischievous side and has been known to poke fun at or harass his opponents like a capricious monkey." He practically begs to be used as the great grandmaster in disguise who humbles the mighty high-level/ mythic PC in an informal bout. Odin was renowned for visiting homes in disguise to see that the customs of hospitality were maintained...why not also Korada asking PCs if they will share their fire (or at high levels, the comfort of their extradimensional hut)?

So yeah, there are lots of reasons you might need the stat block of even the goodliest empyreal lord...

Wow...I mean just...WOW. This is awesome and thank you.

Thank you for reading, Mark!

And if you feel so inspired, pass the Tumblr link on to your friends.

Still following your work Dj patch and I'm going to copy and print everything to be kept near my monster manuals. I suggest it to everyone.

Hey Italian FAN, I was traveling, so I missed your message. Thanks! It's a lot of work, but it's fun to do.

If you ever use one of my seeds in your campaign, be sure to tell us about it!

YAAAAAAY!

Wait, 300 more pages?

You're trying to kill me, aren't you?

Still, YAAAAAAY!

Sincubus wrote:

Are you aware of the Daily Bestiary? A Blog from a guy calling himself Patch.

...

Daily Bestiary

If you already knew, what is your opinion about his blog?

I didn't know about the blog, but it's an EXCELLENT idea for a blog!

Um, hi. That's me. (And thanks for the kind words, Sincubus!)

I actually recommend the less-clunky Tumblr version. (The original Blogger site is difficult to edit well, so I've had to basically throw up my hands and learn to live in permanent typo shame over there.)

And James, I'd be thrilled if you found the time to browse. Three adventure seeds for every monster. And this Monday your Nightripper was actually the very first Inner Sea Bestiary monster to make it into the roster. If you're curious, it's right here.

...but I want to congratulate the Riddleport Dire Corbies on their win last night in the arena.

Hi all! When I'm not suggesting music over at the Music threads, I do a blog called The Daily Bestiary. It's three adventure seeds every weekday for every monster* in the Bestiary books (in ABC order).

I've mentioned it here once before, but the reason I'm writing today is that we just hit the letter N. That means we're halfway through the alphabet and headed Z-wards...and I'm pretty excited about that.

If you love monsters or adventure ideas, feel free to drop in, browse, and comment. As an added bonus, I also post a two-hour radio show every week for your listening pleasure. The easy-to-read Tumblr is here; the older (as in clunky-and-impossible-to-edit, so mind the typos) complete archive is here.

Hope you enjoy!

*Bestiary 3 monsters start with the letter E. Inner Sea Bestiary monsters start in two weeks with the nightripper. We'll loop back around to catch the monsters we missed.

For those keeping track, The Daily Bestiary (full archive here, Tumblr here) hit a milestone yeterday: One full year of posts! Thanks for reading!

I was taking a look at graven guardians for my monster blog, and came up with this chart for picking their domains randomly or on the fly.

Just grab some d10s and roll twice on this chart:

Graven Guardian Domains
d% Result
01–03 Air
04–06 Animal
07–09 Artifice
10–12 Chaos
13–15 Charm
16–18 Community
19–21 Darkness
22–24 Death
25–27 Destruction
28–30 Earth
31–33 Evil
34–36 Fire
37–39 Glory
40–42 Good
43–45 Healing
46–48 Knowledge
49–51 Law
52–54 Liberation
55–57 Luck
58–60 Madness
61–63 Magic
64–66 Nobility
67–69 Plant
70–72 Protection
73–75 Repose
76–78 Rune
79–81 Strength
82–84 Sun
85–87 Travel
88–90 Trickery
91–93 War
94–96 Water
97–99 Weather
00 Bonus domain; roll twice more on this chart ignoring subsequent rolls of 00.

You can also use the same chart to come up with new deities. Just roll on the above chart two, three, or even four times and see what you get. Then roll on the below chart for your new deity’s alignment:

Deity Alignment
d10 Result
1 LG
2 NG
3 CG
4 LN
5 N
6 CN
7 LE
8 NE
9 CE
0 Deity has multiple aspects of differing alignments; roll twice more on this chart ignoring subsequent rolls of 0.

Don’t stress if your rolls appear to conflict with each other; instead, think of it as an opportunity for invention. An evil deity with the Sun and Repose domains might be a vengeful desert god who punishes both tomb defilers and the undead. A deity with the domains of Good and Evil might be a god of balance or a mad god with a split personality, etc., etc....

Hope that's useful!

If you like, you can check out the rest of my graven guardian post on Tumblr or Blogger.

Yikes, I go away for a couple days and you go all go crazy! :-)

Gark, thanks for putting up the track list! DA, I look forward to browsing your mix...

Thanks, DA! I'm at work so didn't have time to go hunting down links. (And that Pixies video is great--nice find!)

Full disclosure: I went to college with Ninja Brian.

I'm so, so, sooooooo late posting this, but here's a mix I made for you guys over Easter!

OK, actually I made you 16/19s of a mix.

Download it here.

The missing songs are:
Track 4: Laura Stevenson & the Cans "Master of Art"
Track 10: The Pixies "Gigantic"
Track 13: Ninja Sex Party "Dinosaur Laser Fight"

If you care, details on just why those songs are missing are here.

OK, actually I made you 16/19s of a mix.

Download it here.

Background: Every year I miss my show on Easter, so I make my listeners a mix, and I've been meaning to post it here for you guys.

What's missing? Three songs I can't share because they were bought and paid for from iTunes. (Everything else came from free legit sites, typically from Stereogum or the bands' websites themselves.)

So if you want the full mix, go out and buy yourself...

Track 4: Laura Stevenson & the Cans "Master of Art"
Track 10: The Pixies "Gigantic"
Track 13: Ninja Sex Party "Dinosaur Laser Fight"

...and you'll have the whole thing.

Look at me, all respecting copyright & stuff...

I wanted to rescue this from possible obscurity in the Good Covers thread.

You can't play the Donovan card and not lay down "Epistle to Dippy." :-)

But while we're across the pond in Scotland, how about a trip down to Manchester?

(Egads...singer in the second verse looks like a time-traveling Ron Weasley!)

And now, back to the present with an infectious pixie and her boombox.

The Allman Brothers Band do Donovan (here with Bobbie Gentry!)

Ah, Donovan. There's also a nice version of that track on a comp from Exotic Fever Records called Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again. It's indie rockers doing '60s music from around the fall of 2001 or 2002.

You can hear snippets at the above link, but the stand-out tracks are:

• Dame Fate covering Donovan's "There Is a Mountain"
• atombombpocketknife doing Led Zep's "Immigrant Song"
• The Reputation doing Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"
• And an absolutely dead-on cover from Death Cab for Cutie with Sean Nelson of CCR's "Fortunate Son."

[Shameless self-promotional bump.]

Alright, Patch, what'cha got?

Thrill us.

New/recent that I've got on repeat...

Django Django – Default

School of Seven Bells – The Night

Danny Brown – Grown Up

Big Baby Ghandi – Blue Magic (feat. Das Racist)

...and a classic:

Wye Oak – Warning (Live)

Enjoy!

I, personally, refuse to visit DJ Patch's website until he comes on over to WPZO's "What are you listening to as summin' summin' show" which should be, like, the other thread in this forum.

Challenge accepted, my goblinoid friend. Link?

Hi all. If you're looking for more tunes while you're browsing the archives, I do a weekly show called The New Indie Canon on 88.1 WMUC-FM at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Fair warning: My show has nothing to do with Pathfinder. It's an indie rock/pop/folk show, with a heavy bias toward playing new music.

The show gets archived on mp3 for a week for your time-shifting convenience. And I post the details most Mondays on my blog. So, for instance, you can 1) stream this week's show here or 2) download it here.

Or 3) you can skip my blog entirely and find the music most every week at the source here. Serves me right for being such a shameless self-promoter. :-)

(Oh, and if the feed skips, just save the file and play it in iTunes.)

Thanks for listening!

Thanks, Sneaky! I'll definitely be interested in what you think—this has mostly been a quiet personal project for me up till now. But I figured I'd better finally show some other people, if only to get me through the Giant Animal & Vermin doldrums of the next few weeks. :-)

Well played, Vuvu. Well played.

Wow, that was fast. Thanks Flak!

For those who don't want to click blindly, here's the kind of thing I post:

The trick for using ghuls best is to not just cast them as super-ghouls, but to play up their creepiness first. Have the PCs attend a funeral, only to have one hyena follow them all the way back to town. Have a crypt be opened, and have the body be gone but the grave shrouds arranged in a parody of table settings. Have a bride lose her groom to a poisoned wedding feast, then need the PCs to rescue her before a ghul makes her watch him eat the corpse…

As a young sailor, Ariashi Kenpo once mocked the donkey hooves of a ghul he spotted on a moonlit pier. Fortunately for him, he did this from the stern of his junk, just as it was leaving port. Ashamed and enraged, the ghul managed to follow him—back to the Land of Poppies and Light, north to Shogunate of Oto, and east to the lands of the Raven Clan. Now a translator for a pale-skinned tea merchant, Kenpo hears stories of missing corpses and fears the ghul has found him at last.

Like I said, enjoy!

Hi all!

I always enjoyed the "Monsters in Golarion" feature of the Adventure Path monster entries.

So I decided to write my own entries, good for any setting, in a blog. Three adventure seeds for every monster. In (because I'm crazy) alphabetical order.

It's been 10 months. I'm up to the letter G. And I've only missed a handful of monsters so far.

I call it The Daily Bestiary.

You can find monsters A-G on Blogger (bear with the odd typo; Blogger makes going back to fix a pain) and just G over on Tumblr.

Enjoy!