Dario Nardi's page

Chris Ballard wrote:

Print/PDF combo maybe?

I'll bring it up to Dario and get back to you on that.

Print/PDF combo now available!

I've been traveling and working and just got to event registration...3 hours late. :-(
Not registered for anything at the moment and have nothing to trade. Not picky. Just want to play Saturday and Monday. Besides standing around at the event board on the con, and praying, any suggestions?

As Alex said, Mana's legend was meant to be entirely tongue in cheek. I wrote it when 4E was in the design phase so there is a certain "thumb in the face" to 4E in there too.

Howdy folks!
AncientSpirits here.

Twice over the years I got to run a PC in a pact magic campaign using Secrets of Pact Magic and Villains of Pact Magic. The first PC was a warbinder (1st to 6th level) and the second PC was a pact warrior (13th to 16th level). Besides the unbound witch, these were my two favorite classes. It's ironic that these two classes were the ones that didn't quite make it into the Unbound series for Pathfinder.

The warbinder (SoPM, pages 58-61) is modeled after the marshall class from 3.5. It offers half BAB, good Fort and Will, binding up to 6th level spirits, and abilities flavored for someone who wishes to aid allies and deploy minions. The warbinder offers a spirit aura, similar to the marshall's aura but you can extend a bound ability instead. And starting at 5th level he gets summon warband, which summons a few least vivilors.

Vivilors (described on page 61) are the elementals of the Outer Darkness (aka Dark Beyond). They come in 4 tiers:
least (flit, CR 1, bind 1st level spirit, 5ft fly speed),
lesser (wright, CR 3, bind 2nd level spirit, 10ft fly),
greater (strand, CR 7, bind up to 4th level spirits, 20ft fly), and
grand (mural, CR 11, bind up to 6th level spirits, 30ft fly).

The reason I used names: rather than model directly after the typical elemental, I used whales as the inspiration and they have a certain hierarchical or ecological relationship to each other.

In RPGs, I usually play leader, detective, and tactical/strategist roles. Needless to say, sharing some bound abilities with allies, and summoning creatures with the right spirit for the situation, really fit my style :-).

I often felt really useful and solving difficult situations, such as extending Lady Jarah's alter appearance ability to my allies so we could sneak into an orc complex, or summoning vivilors with Aza'zati's acid gout to attack a nasty shambling mound from the air.

As for the pact warrior, the appeal for me was playing a binder gish. It really was enjoyable to bring in magical effects at just the right moment. In particular, the battle trance options were fun. At 13th level, I could combine a supernatural attack with a weapon attack 6/day, using battle trance 3/day (only one trance needed to fit the spirit I had bound), and I had some great fear and death resistance stuff. In high level campaigns, with a GM who loves Grimtooth's Traps, having abilities like warrior's mettle, death ward, and undying grace, were essential.

Finally, I liked the pact warrior because of the names of the trance options (page 47). The day I wrote that column, I felt more inspired than usual.

Looking back, I think that SoPM and VoPM were *slightly* darker than the Unbound series, with emphasis on the word slightly. After all, the unbound witch doesn't just have mutations. I love the picture of her as a troglodyte eating a beating heart... ;-)

Regarding anima, Alex and I left them out for several reasons. My main reason was that they could be used in broken combinations. I made a couple of mistakes in crafting a few of them, though of course those mistakes could be fixed. But overall, it was something to leave for later.

At some point, perhaps for a single adventure, I had a PC with the devil binder prestige class. It was definitely fun. However, I did a sort of cheat by condensing the entire set of 12 binding options into a single 1-page table. Same for binding angels and demons. I think we can do a little better than that next time.

Ultimately, there were tons of things from our campaigns that got into SoPm and VoPM like priest eaters, flame ghouls, the ironheart ghost, living nightmares, pact rajah, the gnostic vault (hello Isaac Asimov), and restoring spirits to life (SoPM pages 304-305). Many of these options reflect a database of science fiction ideas ported into an occult fantasy setting or places where the mechanics suggested an option (e.g. troglodytes, rakshasas, and hobgoblins as high Con folks who would be good at binding). Alex has in mind an occult bestiary as a separate product. And I agree there is enough potential, and a lot of pages of flavor already written, to appear separately from what will already be a 300+ page grimoire.

I don't normally post, but why not, as I taught university social science for 7 years.

Meatrace asked, where the cultural marxists? Where is their play-book?

I was 12 years teaching: 5 in physical science and 7 in social science (anthropology) in the USA at a top-name university.

As graduate students told me, and as I encountered among my peers, there were fair number of faculty -- mostly middle-age, well-to-do, highly-educated white women -- who orbited around the topic in question, cultural marxism. I use the word "orbit" to avoid getting bogged down (or is that caught up?) in semantics. Then there are their textbooks and lecture notes, which can double as play-books. Some of them really do have startling ideas, like saying physical/biological science "knowledge" needs to be radically adjusted in order to better conform to their worldview, or that physical/biological science departments need a racial quota system to balance their enrollment. Of course, these gentile faculty members can do email, but I wouldn't want to press them to design a working bridge, accurately measure the speed of a photon, or model insulin production. Their lives are rather easy in my opinion, which affords mental laziness and verbal diarrhea (aka critical discourse). They came of age in the 1960s and are still wagging that half-century-old cultural war, with its various actors and assumptions.

Some other thoughts...

In the vain of complexity theory, conspiracy-like phenomena don't actually require secret groups of people meeting and organizing. All it takes is a fair number of people, each acting toward their own ends with some awareness and adjusting to surrounding society, to cause the emergence of widespread changes.

Have humans always panicked about collapse? That's misleading. Societies have risen and fallen, in practical terms. Romans citizens in 475 were rightly concerned, and there were a lot of policy mistakes that lead up to that. Of course, those mistakes had different names, costumes, etc. The USA today is, objectively, in a bad way in financially, at least on paper, and many hold a general impression that a surprising number of folks are intensively engaged in expensive, non-productive activities. The country has been in such spots before, and there are a number of good reasons to think we'll recover from the stumble, but as the peoples of many a prior civilization have encountered, such is hardly assured. So I'm okay with the hysteria (oops, I'm not supposed to use that word). Perhaps we forget that the set of human civil rights we enjoy today is a blip in history. I can easily imagine multiple routes to totalitarian futures.

I like many of Sissyl's posts in this thread, but I believe there is some confusing of quantity with quality of educational content. There are a lot of misinformed students. For example, just prior to the 2008 election, I gave a general anonymous survey to my largest course, which is filled with university juniors and seniors from all different disciplines. It had questions like, who are you likely voting for, what news source do you access most, how much do you follow the election, how many senators are there, and so forth. They also had a pie chart to complete. On the objective portion of the survey, with those civics questions and pie chart and such, all 116 students failed. One had a pie chart that added to 175%. Many thought military spending constituted 75% of Gross Domestic Product (and yes, I defined GDP for them). There was generally a lack of common sense, as Asphere described. And no, I don't distain my students. I wouldn't have won 2 teaching awards if I had. The students are actually quite bright with a lot of potential, but innumeracy and lack of deductive skills are obstacles. Moreover, the more they followed the election, the worse they did. A sizable segment of them scored well below statistical chance. They had various qualities in common like watching the same news source--and no, not FOX, one of the other ones. Their heads were filled with other stuff, some of it quite relevant to today's society and some it just plain wrong factually.

Eventually I left social science and now do first-hand neuroscience lab research. Recently, I encountered an interesting article about "femens". Naturally, the discussion turned to feminism. There were a lot of concerning posts, from a neuroscience point of view. For example, many posters were confusing social conformity with modesty, two qualities that are mediated by very different parts of the brain, for whatever reason. After a while, I wondered if the majority of dialog and thought for the past century or two is basically garbage, even if it's well thought out garbage, because it doesn't take even the basics of human physiology or neuroscience into account. I wondered, perhaps in the 22nd century, people will look back on the thousands of books, articles, shows created today and think of those the same way we now think of medieval bestiaries.

Time to get back to work...

Thanks Liz!

As for Kevin's question:

The lower level purifiers are evil (as in, any evil) and the higher level purifiers are specifically neutral evil. The exception in that chapter is the oracle, which is neutral, because it's not a purifier per see. And among purifiers, the spinster is specifically neutral evil even though it's medium level because it is sent on missions to act independently, requiring a certain amount of trust from its superiors.

The notion might be slightly unfamiliar. This was a 3.5 product from 2008, not a Pathfinder RPG product, though it has an experimental layout for monster stats that looks a lot like a PF product -- great minds think alike? maybe! maybe? ;-).

Great feedback!
:-)
Thank you!

I really want to pull together a small Book of Lost Souls. Maybe I'll be lazy today and start that rather than answer those pesky business emails!

Howdy binder apprentices! :-)

Creating "Secrets of Pact Magic" etc. has been one of the creative highlights of my life. Alas, it was a d20 System product born at the transition to Pathfinder RPG. Though SoPM didn't need much conversion, the fact is Paizo and its fans have taken the system in new directions. After much pestering by certain persons (who may not remain nameless!), now is the time :-).

Alexander has done an incredible job spearheading this project. I've been extra-impressed and am delighted to stand by him now. This brand spanking new baby will be just as illustrated, professional, and orthogonal as the originals (I don't take credit for the orthogonal part; pact making from the real world is just that way).

Naturally, a 64-page circumscription presented a challenge. Alexander mainly translated the favorites. A second supplement can add a lot more :-).

I'll be making an effort to pop in every day to read and respond.

Thank you! And happy gaming :-).