Ian G's page

I would like to note that he didn't say they are going to remove it, they just aren't going to mention it.

Like, Pathfinder setting has horrible real life crimes and discrimination in it, but after early edgy parts they don't really focus anymore on what ogres do in their spare time despite it still being canon. Its pretty much same principle, ogres never got changed in pathfinder, they just stopped being explicit about what they do.

Yeah, I keep waiting for an explicit retcon on that, because while I get that they had to make ogres worth hating and killing somehow, it's also super cringe to have an entire species of cartoon hillbillies.

It's the give and take, I guess, that comes when fundamentally as gamers grow they become less OK with killing thinking creatures because "they are from the bad species" and want a REASON to cheerfully commit fictional violence.

(this is why Hell's Rebels works so well, you're mostly fighting Satanic fascists, incarnations of evil, and literal serial killers, so no player will ask "wait, what about the baby orcs from that camp we just slaughtered?)

If removing slavery also means we can get rid of andoran and the eagle knights in one go that is a double win. Please get the andoran exceptionalism out of the fantasy setting…… talk about crappy inspiration.

...I'm going to have to hard disagree with you there, I have a vast headcanon built around Andoran and I would hate to see it go.

Ian G wrote:

MindFl*yer98 wrote:

Tarksun is especially interesting. He is a LE Asura Rana, with the liberation domain in 1E and both the freedom and revolution subdomains. His areas of concern are Anger, Dreams and the shattering of bonds. He is the perfect demigod to worship for a REALLY angry slave. I find the idea of a LE abolitionist incredibly interesting, and could give rise to some excellent characters and stories.

...so basically Moash from the Stormlight Archive?

I'm sorry, i have not read the stormlight archives, so i have no idea who that is. When i read that my mind went to the slave antagonist of The Sunbird by Wilbur Smith.

Sorry, I'm obsessed with that series lol.

Long explanation follows, some fairly large spoilers to explain what the Hell I'm talking about so beware (non-spoiler advice at the bottom):

TL;DR: On a windswept rocky dump of a planet where dudes put on invincible magic power armor and fight with giant anime swords that cut through anything, people with mental health issues can get magic paladin powers from being good people and learning to overcome their mental health issues.

Strongly advise you to pick up the series, book 1 changed my life, book 2 nearly killed me because I walked across a green light in Manhattan while reading it on my Kindle, book 3 I couldn't finish at first because the emotions hit me so hard (amazing payoff at the end though), and Adolin and his spirit-sword's plot in book 4 had me in literal tears.

I think pretty much everyone realizes that Paizo not covering the topic doesn't meant that you can't cover it in your own game.

I'd like to assume at least that people upset about it are more upset about the "we won't see abolition being completed in universe through several books" aspect?

My anger is coming from my lack of time and ability to write a good adventure, and my desire to have an adventure about torching Cheliax and freeing every slave while playing Legally Distinct From General Grant or Legally Distinct From Harriet Tubman.

Paizo made me happy when they announced an AP in the Realm of Mammouth lords, as i find prehistoric fantasy to be both beautiful and way underused. I simply love the idea of vast, untamed expanses of land where humans are still subjected to the harsh law of nature and need to rely on each other against an hostile world.

Other than that, i would love a planar-hopping adventure, something that makes the PC planar travel from the very start. This is a fantasy game, i want to be dazzled by the most fantastical and impossible locations from the start, without having to wait until later levels.

Lastly, and i know this is not going to happen, a story about a group of Darklands natives climbing from the Vault of Orv to the surface could be an interist inversion of a clichè.

All I want for Christmas is gay cavemen.

Like that Darklands idea, too!

Ian G wrote:

There's really three ways to handle slavery in this kind of setting:

Either it's ubiquitous like in the antique world, and while Good characters disapprove the average Joe probably accepts it, or it's only found in Evil nations and is seen by the average Joe as a bad thing, or it's nonexistent.

I would prefer #2 but don't necessarily oppose #1 or #3. I just think that since Golarion has traditionally been set up as between 1 and 2, deciding to not mention or deal with the repugnant practice again seems nonsensical.

Not only in antiquity, but slavery was pretty much everywhere until around the 19th century with some, often temporary, exceptions.

That includes many nations Paizo copied quite openly for use in Pathfider which is probably the reason why for example Qadira has slavery (and is still neutral as far as I know).

Yeah, and the forms of unfree labor (It's hard IMO to call Tawantinsuyu labor obligations "slavery" when it was part-time state-mandated unfree labor rather than full-time human bondage, and if you call medieval serfdom slavery due to the lack of freedom of movement and labor obligations you kinda get onto a slippery slope, so for my purposes I'm going to restrict the term "slavery" to mean permanent unfree labor where the state, church, or individuals own other sapient beings as property and those people are not allowed freedom of movement and are specifically socially recognized as property themselves rather than being tied to land that is the property of someone else) thoughout history have been extremely varied, ranging from the cartoonishly evil abuse of Sparta and the antebellum South to "Our tribe fought the neighboring tribe, this guy gave me a hard fight and I was impressed with him, so I spared his life and now he is my personal tracker and custom says I have to free him during my lifetime or his service ends on my deathbed".

The fact of the matter is that pretty much every significant polity throughout history has been repressive and morally repugnant by the standards of modern liberal America. You can address that, and model it in your game that draws from those polities and cultures for its cultures and polities, or you can do a strawman version of history where the Greece place is just columns and demigods with nary a slave in sight (the Greeks had a LOT of slaves even by antiquity's standards, and their citizenship definitions were insanely restrictive to boot, Sparta just took it to an extreme), the America is the land of FREEDUMB and Yankee Doodle, the Legally Distinct From Tawantinsuyu are just golden sun reliefs and llamas and cool outfits without the child sacrifice, imperialism, and mitma system, and the generic Darkest Africa standin that the developers are trying to make more realistic because the OG version is actually absolutely nothing like any real pre-contact African country, is just fancy masks, spears, dances around a fire and no slaves, castration, religious conflicts, or anything of the sort.

Obviously I'm not in favor of bowdlerizing everything into sanitized pablum. That comes off as whitewashing to me--I don't want my fantasy vikings to be just Thor, axes, mead, and toxic masculinity without the slavery, imperialism, and deliberate attacks on civilian targets. I don't want my fantasy antebellum America to be just manor houses and balls. I don't want fantasy Rome to be just ranks of bronze and men in togas debating in a forum. Be HONEST about this stuff, people.

The only way of going about removing slavery from the setting that I would approve of is having an in-story explanation, on the scale of an AP with the theme of "you get all the anti-slavery people together, burn every slave-holding nation to the ground, and throw a party on the bombed-out ruins of Egorian--er, Freedomia, sorry, and Cheliax is being renamed the Confederation of Libertopia."

I mean, doing that kind of large-scale societal change is difficult to do in an adventure, but it would be tons of fun. Get yourself a two-fisted lanky lawyer from Andoran in a stovepipe hat, a disaffected Molthuni alcoholic military genius who found owning a slave he was given so repugnant he bought the slave manumission papers the first chance he got, a former slave who freed himself and stole a Chelish warship to boot, and a veteran Bellflower organizer who knows the back-roads like the back of her hand, and go turn every regime that holds people in bondage into Georgia post-Sherman's march! That would be a blast.

There's really three ways to handle slavery in this kind of setting:

Either it's ubiquitous like in the antique world, and while Good characters disapprove the average Joe probably accepts it, or it's only found in Evil nations and is seen by the average Joe as a bad thing, or it's nonexistent.

I would prefer #2 but don't necessarily oppose #1 or #3. I just think that since Golarion has traditionally been set up as between 1 and 2, deciding to not mention or deal with the repugnant practice again seems nonsensical.

I am nostalgic for the old-school Paladin and think that it should've been expanded upon with CG equivalents and the like with different paladin oaths.

Not a great fan of the genericization of "Champion", and I think that class features should be even more centered around oath and alignment, but I'm not going to complain too loudly because it's not my biggest fault with the setting.

You can kind of crib from the Stormlight Archive for new paladin oaths--for example, a CG paladin order might have oaths like:

Darth Game Master wrote:

More to the point though, I'd actually rather Arcadia didn't pull from Latin American inspiration given that those cultures formed due to European colonialism which the central/south American, Mexican, and Caribbean inspired parts of Arcadia never would have faced. I suppose if one wanted that form of representation Anchor's End could maybe work, though it's a bit off geographically.

I want to contest this pretty strongly. While the cultures and nations of Central and South America are indelibly shaped by the impact of colonialism, it's nonetheless the culture of millions of people alive today, going back several centuries at this point. I think post-colonial identities are worthy of representation, whether divorced from the events of the real world (see: Vidrian) or simply existing because fantasy can be what we want (see: the Mariachi psychopomp from 1e).

Mexico is cool! Mexican-inspired content deserves just as much time to shine as those of indigenous peoples, and chasing some hazy threshold of cultural purity-from-external-context is foolhardy, IMO.

Mexico is cool, and crazy diverse, but it's something that came about from a very specific set of historical events and its history is irrevocably linked to its origins as a brutally-conquered Spanish colony, one that came to be well after the period that inspired the vast majority of cultures and societies on Golarion.

It'd be hard to juxtapose it, IMO, with the untouched vastness of indigenous Arcadia.

It's kind of like...there is no USA analogue in Golarion. There are two separate countries that include major elements of America (Andoran is the ideal of a free and equal democracy, Varisia is the real colonial and early-USA era's colonialism, invasion, and marginalization of the natives), but neither of them have America's history. Molthune and Nimrathas can be interpreted as satires of two trends on the American right wing, but they are even less linked to America.

I can see countries that include elements of Mexican history, internal diversity, weird crap (like that period when a bunch of prominent Mexicans were going on about breeding a superior hybrid race to solve lingering tensions from the old imperial caste system, which was bonkers complex), and culture, maybe, but not a straight up fantasy counterpart.

I don't think "Latinx" is offensive, per se; I believe it was originally devised by a Latin American person. But I do think "Latine" is preferred as a gender neutral term because, as you pointed out, it sounds much less awkward in Spanish and Portuguese.

More to the point though, I'd actually rather Arcadia didn't pull from Latin American inspiration given that those cultures formed due to European colonialism which the central/south American, Mexican, and Caribbean inspired parts of Arcadia never would have faced. I suppose if one wanted that form of representation Anchor's End could maybe work, though it's a bit off geographically.

All that aside, I am definitely going to have to second Sarkorian reclamation efforts. Some stuff with Razmir would be fun or something that explores the ancient Shory Empire (maybe an adventure path set in the Mwangi Expanse and Impossible Lands, with a detour to Shaguang in one adventure?). I hope the mystery around Jaha gets an adventure sooner or later. And something with Droon would be awesome.

I'm going by what is statistically considered offensive. I have heard positive things about "Latine" as a gender-neutral term but I also don't know what people outside of my far-left social circle think about it. And Hispanic people are SUCH a diverse group, the legacy of colonialism, mestizaje, and the ongoing waves of societies trying to deal with the Spanish Imperial caste system are rarely if ever talked about in Anglophone media despite being critical to understanding Latin American societies--it's borderline criminally oversimplifying to put the entire spectrum of Latin American people into one category.

(also, '30s racist Mexican "hybrid vigor" propaganda is a TRIP. Some of
the political cartoons from that era are fascinatingly weird, look them up!)

The thing I actually want the MOST most out of Arcadia is a Tawantinsuyu analogue, warts and all. The Tawantinsuyu was a fascinatingly weird empire, to the point that their recording system was developed to keep track of the empire rather than for religious purposes like most early writing systems were. They independently figured out state-sponsored forced resettlement for population control and refined it way beyond anything the Romans did, they set up a road network comparable in logistical effectiveness to that of the Romans, and they did it all without practically implementing the wheel, having an abjad, abiguda, logographic, or alphabetic recording system, or domesticating grain (their closest equivalent is an amaranth).

Sarkorian reclamation efforts sound cool! They basically have to rebuild their society and probably large elements of their religion (I bet that a lot of Sarkorian Kellids have converted to Iomedae or Sarenrae over the years due to social pressure if nothing else, to say nothing of the witch hunts likely killing lots of their religious leaders) from scratch.

keftiu wrote:

Ian G wrote:

Rysky wrote:

No one in particular: "We need slavers so we have someone to fight!"

Aaaaaaaand how many games have you been in that actually involve fighting slavers, none? One? Less than all of them?

That's what I thought.

Hell's Rebels has busting-up of slavers. Brief but it's there.

That Paizo hasn't had an "end the slave trade in the Inner Sea" AP yet is frankly quite frustrating to me.

I am bummed that we can't bust Okeno "on-screen." It would be a really satisfying win, I think, and mark a decisive turn against slavery in the setting to build on the 'Katapesh is realizing slavery is increasingly unpopular' bit in LOWG.

Agreed. There is Pathfinder Infinite, but that won't be quite the same.

If I could design adventures worth a good g*$$%!n, I would skip grad school work to go write a world-spanning campaign about ending chattel slavery in the Inner Sea region, starting as Bellflower agents fighting slave-catchers in Cheliax, blowing up the slave markets of Katapesh, and culminating in building an anti-Cheliax coalition, convincing the Molthunes to abandon slavery in exchange for a chunk of Cheliax, and destroying the Thrune regime for good, liberating every halfling in the land with the help of people like "Eulysis Grunt", a brilliant but alcoholic general, "Abram Longshanks", an Andoren lawyer and politician with long legs, long arms, a distinctive stovepipe hat and a magnificent beard, ethnic Zenji Andoren spy and slave-liberator "Haryet Tomane", and of course ex-slave turned privateer turned Andoran navy volunteer "Bobbin Small".

And I'd put it up for free for anyone to grab and play.

No one in particular: "We need slavers so we have someone to fight!"

Aaaaaaaand how many games have you been in that actually involve fighting slavers, none? One? Less than all of them?

That's what I thought.

Hell's Rebels has busting-up of slavers. Brief but it's there.

That Paizo hasn't had an "end the slave trade in the Inner Sea" AP yet is frankly quite frustrating to me.

Whatever is going on in Fallen Razatlan: Xopatl, Nalmeras, Innazpa, and modern Razatlan. As a gal who’s never lived outside the Southwest, the idea of seeing fantasy that whole-heartedly embraces Latinx and Southwestern/Central American indigenous inspirations makes my heart sing. Show me these nations, vibrant and awesome - and then show me what menaces them, and let my players make heroes from the region who thwart them.

I would be into some Flower Wars stuff or a deep dive into Puebloan or Dine mythologies, or maybe "white people show up and try to conquistador, get used as proxies in a war, humiliate themselves and look like morons" just to point and laugh at the dumb white people.

Mexica mythology is pretty well-attested and there's some good stuff to work with there. Their chief god, the "left-handed hummingbird" Huitzilopochtli, is inherently cool. I'd prefer anything taking place in Arcadia to be pre-contact focused, and yes I'm not a big fan of what I've heard about Wild West stuff taking place in the region.

Mayan peoples' mythology has an advantage in terms of drawing from it--there are a lot of Mayan language-speakers still around. Probably easiest to ask Yucatec people, there are more of them than of other Mayan peoples. Pay a consultant, put in a prologue talking about real-life marginalization of Mayan peoples and maybe a call to action?

The Dine are very well-studied by linguists, and they've been pretty politically active and relevant recently, asking them for advice and consultation in exchange for consulting fees and advertising for their struggle to secure water rights would be a neat way to go.

With Arcadia in general I want some reasonably accurate representation--I'm not culturally Native American in any way (though my mother's grandmother was Neshnabe, I'm as culturally white-bread American in just about every way except that I'm an atheist) but I'm sick and tired of stereotypes and mashups of Native societies and cultures, because the REAL societies are often really fascinating.

I wouldn't mind a renaming of the Mahwek to accompany a Haudenosanee-style worldbuilding chapter or something for them--the name sounds a lot like and is probably meant to deliberately evoke "Mohawk", an Anglicization of the Mahican (Algic-speaking) exonym for the Iroquoian-speaking Kanien'keha:ka people (lit. "people of the land of flint", the easternmost people of the Haudenosanee confederation, and traditionally the militarized guardians of the confederation against rival Algic-speaking peoples that dominated New England and coastal NY and NJ), and I'm always leery of using exonyms for people since exonyms can be super offensive. (e.g. the Ancestral Puebloans are commonly known by the Dine pejorative exonym "Anasazi", meaning "ancient enemies", possibly referring to some kind of conflict between Na-Dene speaking proto-Dine coming south from the northern Rockies and ancestral Puebloans during the later days of Ancestral Puebloan society; the Lakota and Dakota peoples are known as "Sioux" (likely derived from an Algic word roughly meaning "foreigner"); and the Numunuu are known as "Comanche" (from the Ute "kimantsi", lit. "enemy", "stranger", which is darkly hilarious because the cultures speak languages from the same damn family, it's like if the Norwegians and Swedes hated each other and called each other "enemy" in Norwegian and Swedish))

It might be neat to portray Haudenosanee-Erie, Haudenosanee-Wendat, and Haudenosanee-coastal Algonquian turf wars, but the problem is that a lot of the political and conflict history we have of early contact-era/pre-19th century Native American cultures is from when they were already being severely impacted by the economic insanity caused by European trade throwing the local economies way out of whack (not so much because of
direct occupation and ethnic cleansing early on, but because of insane price of pelts and the tech the locals didn't have the base to make themselves being offered as payment for fur). Perhaps delving into Algic and Iroquoian mythologies would be a better way to go? There's some cool stuff in there, you could have a sort of re-enact the legends kind of adventure?

Also Kanien'keha names are freaking cool, they have a beautiful rhythm (IMO all iroquoian languages have a beautiful rhythm in general, tbf) and cool meanings. So I would love an excuse to have characters with names like "Kanahstatsi" or "Onerahantsokon". A challenge there though would be that you're not supposed to have two people with the same name in Kanien'keha, and I don't know if using a repeated Kanien'keha name for a fictional character name would be offensive, so I'd have to do a bunch of research. Though a Kanien'keha:ka actress who was in one of the Assassins Creed games did apparently consent to having her character in the game (also Kanien'keha:ka) share her name, so it may be permissible.

Ooh, and the Cherokee/Tsalagi (they have multiple endonyms, it's weird, and I can only remember the transliteration of the one) have an oral tradition recounting their origins as a probable rebel movement that apparently overthrew a Mississippian priesthood they lived under and abandoned Mississippian city life for a more egalitarian tribal existence (TBF this is based almost entirely on their oral tradition but I'm inclined to believe it because Native Americans tend to be very, very good at remembering where they came from for extended periods, to the point that I've seen a convincing case made for the Anishinaabe culturally remembering ancestral journeys through the gap between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets in the uppermost Pleistocene). Mississippian societies, though likely linguistically heterogenous, seem to have shared religious human sacrifice of locals (based on analysis of Cahokian mass graves and records of the Natchez remnant), so you could play it as the population getting tired of a corrupt priesthood that sacrifices them arbitrarily with nothing to show for it. It could be like Hell's Rebels but with civilizational collapse/economic stress themes to go with it! Democratic revolution against a corrupt elite!

Unrelated to the above, can you please not use the term "Latinx"? It's considered an offensive term by about 40% of Hispanic Americans, and Hispanic Americans overwhelmingly (>90%) prefer other terms, probably because "Latinx" sounds ridiculous in Spanish.

(source: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017d-81be-dee4-a5ff-efbe74ec0000)

is Arazni learning to heal. Loving herself again and patching her soul back together. Maybe with friends, maybe with subordinates who support her. I'd want to play that.

I mean granted that's nearly every story I write (angry superpowered woman with mental health issues and trauma patches herself back together with support from friends and family), but it's something I want to see more of and roleplay.

What about you guys? What's the story you most want to see out of Pathfinder?

Another suggestion is to change the scope. If you are concerned about institutionalized forms of oppression, like fascism, then have the governmental or noble antagonists be terrible people in their own right. As the GM you are in control of what the party encounters, at least to a degree, so you have the ability to determine the scope.

And if your party has no qualms about taking on a bad government you can string more such individually terrible people together to make the campaign arc. I think whether such people are evil because of the system they operate in is a fun question to explore, personally, but I also haven't got any reservations about beating up fantasy fascists, myself.

Nobility with political power is kinda an institutionalized oppression in its own right, though.

At the end of the day my position is and will be that it's the DM and party's decision to decide what to keep and what to cut from a setting for their personal game.

Then again, my Sunday group had great fun humiliating and killing a fantasy Nazi who wanted to become a living continent, and my Saturday group is currently engaged in open war against a slave-owning empire. We pirated--I mean, PRIVATEERED--an enemy ship last week, it was a blast.

I am resolutely against censorship of difficult topics, but I'm also in favor of content warnings and (for RPGs) Session 0s to discuss what people are OK with.

For example, I write Star Trek fanfic. One fic I wrote (best story I've ever written IMO, the emotions are super raw and re-reading it is a gut-punch in a good way) is a three-parter that was basically me venting my frustration at the rebooted Battlestar Galactica's poor handling of sexual violence. In the first part, the protagonist (a genetically enhanced supersoldier passing as human to avoid draconican anti-genetic-augmentation laws) is graphically sexually and physically abused and tortured by a woman working for the bad guys who created the protagonist. In the second part, Rachel (the protagonist) suffers intense post-traumatic stress and self-loathing as she attempts to recover with the help of friends, family, therapy, and a supportive partner, and at one-point she self-harms by punching a wall with superhuman strength until her fingers break. In part three, she finally makes a breakthrough in therapy, has a fight with the rapist, Shaw (who tbh is a walking content warning of a sociopath), and burns her face off in the process of beating the living daylights out of her before verbally demolishing Shaw while Shaw is in a cell and walking out, ignoring Shaw's screamed threats.

I tagged the HELL out of that when I put it on AO3. I put so many tags and content warnings on it that you have to scroll damn near a PAGE of tags and an author's note saying in bolded all-caps READ THE TAGS!!!.

Because that is my obligation as a creative putting that kind of story out for public consumption. It is my responsibility and obligation as a creator to put appropriate content warnings on my work, and I stand resolutely behind this position as well as expecting it of others.

That said, I also wholeheartedly believe that I have the right as a creative to put this out for public consumption, just as I have the right to try to sell a book about a woman who has potentially triggering levels of anxiety from undiagnosed OCD as well as the inherent content warning of mind-control superpowers.

With regard to RPGs, my stance is similar:

--Game companies should publish settings that include challenging and/or potentially disturbing topics.

--These settings should handle these topics in a manner that is not offensive and takes the topics seriously. No Noble Confederates Fighting For States' Rights, please. Be cautious with sexual violence (I think that because of most players' desire to prevent such things that you can be a LITTLE more free with it than in prose fiction, but I'd still be careful and thoughtful).

--Cultures and states within a setting made to deliberately ape real-world cultures and states should do so respectfully and honestly. If you have a Legally Distinct From Showa Japan, don't whitewash the war crimes associated with that. If you have America, don't whitewash its crimes (Golarion IMO avoids this by splitting the ideal of America from the reality of America and making them different countries, which is kinda questionable I guess but I'm not instinctively opposed). If you have legally distinct from Africa, don't just say "this is black-people land and Egypt". Have the decency to go and research what important historical African states looked like!

--Cultures should not be homogenous across the setting on any issue more nuanced than "murder is bad". That's just boring.

--Players and DMs should always, ALWAYS have a session 0. This is IMO CRITICAL to a healthy play environment. Discussed should be phobias, what themes people are OK with, and goals for the game, AT A MININMUM.

It is the responsibility of the play group to decide what themes they want to play. It is the responsibility of a profit-oriented publisher to provide a variety of themes to play with, and to ensure that they are handling those themes responsibly.

(this is why I'm never playing Hell's Vengeance except as a deliberate sabotage run. I think that "you play the Gestapo" is an inherently repugnant concept and have ZERO desire to play it, even if the themes involved are handled responsibly)

And I keep forgetting Geb because its main theme is undead.

I've seen a convincing redemption arc for a mass-murdering war criminal and the greatest Civil War general (Ulysses S. Grant, one of the greatest Americans in history) was given a slave who he owned for about 6 months before he couldn't stand owning a person anymore and went out and bought emancipation papers he probably couldn't afford. So I am not COMPLETELY against the concept of Sorshen or any slave-owner getting a redemption arc.

But you REALLY gotta work at that, it's full of pitfalls, and it's not plausible IMO to pull that off within the scope of an RPG adventure or sourcebook. You NEED a novel at a minimum.

I do think that having Absalom be a neutral-aligned city while tolerating slaves was something that only works if the rest of Golarion is going to amp up the darkness of its dark fantasy and slavery is going to be practiced by many more cultures. As it is, that definitely was a WTF bit of older lore, and while I didn't see whatever they did to change that bit of lore, I welcome that change.

I'm not against portraying slavery in the setting at all. There's a lot of good fun in putting slavers and slave-owners to the sword, especially if you're playing a slave rebellion. (I've said it before but an anti-slavery AP where you start as Bellflower agents and work your way up to nuking entire slave-owning countries would be super cool) "de-emphasizing" it the way Mona words it sounds an awful lot like sweeping stuff under the rug rather than confronting it to my ears.

There’s also something to be said of how much slavery in the setting centers on Golarion’s equivalents to Africa and the Middle East. Why does a fantasy setting need to establish that most slaves and slavers are folks with black and brown skin? Why retread both lurid racial stereotypes of swarthy slave-taking monsters /and/ replicate the suffering of those who still endure slavery’s legacy today?

...huh? When I think slavery and Golarion, I think majority-white Cheliax selling halflings by the crateload. That gets the most focus and a big part of the adventure path where you play the Gestapo is explicitly about killing the halfling Underground Railroad.

The positive:

--THANK GOD there are much more limited opportunity attacks! The absolute insanity of not being able to move in combat without a whirlwind of steel that cranks the pace down to molasses levels is thankfully abandoned.

--separating culture and species is a great idea I've wanted to see for a long time but see below.

--I like the commitment to diversity and the part where Arcadia is full of powerful countries because there's no reason for it to be in full post-Mississippian warlord chaos but also with pandemics as North America was during the 15th through 18th centuries IRL.

--There doesn't seem to be AS much number-crunching complexity as in PF1e, which became a huge turnoff to some of my friends (see my Hell's Rebels thread).

The less positive:

--I'm having a hard time grokking the system, though since it's very similar to Starfinder I expect as I play both I'll grok them better.

--the heritage and ancestry system quickly becomes byzantine, and I don't think it handles planetouched and the like well.

--Worldbuilding nerd rant time:

--I don't like the redemption arcs for Sorshen and Nocticula. I can maybe buy one of them, but Sorshen seems too easily accepted for someone who every rational actor in the entire setting should never, EVER trust (I mean, 20th level enchanter with a buttload of mythic ranks? You do not trust a word they say and you buff yourself to the gills with mind blank whenever you're within 1,000 miles of them), and I'm not sure of my feelings on demonic redemption (though I'm coming around to "the more unique an outsider, the easier it is to redeem/fall", with your average dretch or erinyes or succubus needing a goddess's brain-jacking to be redeemed while a demon lord is at least in part choosing to be a jerk)

Also, it kind of feels like Paizo changing/retconning pulpy stuff to seem more progressive, which I find vaguely virtue-signally.

--As a corollary to that, I am not 100% sold on the move towards a more hugboxy Golarion and away from a grimy messed-up Golarion. But maybe that's because as I get more cynical about this messed-up world I live in I'm becoming more attracted to stories about good people fighting to improve a nasty world (god knows I'm a Stormlight Archive addict, and that's a setting where one main protagonist is a literal slave who has an almost pathological need to protect people, another is a former war criminal trying to make up for his past by being a diplomat and standing up for human rights, and they live in a horribly classist society where lower-caste people can be EXECUTED for saying that a lord did bad things).

--I have not yet seen a campaign book about a warts-and-all (or, child sacrifice and all) depiction of pre-contact South America, and I am disappointed because I am fascinated by the Tawantinsuyu and find their technology, agriculture, and means of imperial rule incredibly interesting. I'd love to play Legally Distinct From Incas and I'm sad that Golarion doesn't provide that opportunity yet.

In light of the latest theme that has come up in the "Paizo Leadership Team Update" thread, I will say that a properly done AP in which you finally smash the slavers in Okeno would be a fine addition to the repertoire.

So basically "some people complained that we portray bad things in our setting so we're going to pretend that was never the case and just not touch on the subject"?

that's hilariously tone-deaf and leaves a lot of untapped potential on the table. Especially since the coolest characters in the setting are Andoran's anti-slavery privateers and that kickass gnoll abolitionist from Lost Omens Legends.

I agree, a "free the slaves and do all kinds of violence to slavers" AP would be a total blast. Imagine starting off as Bellflower agents, hooking up with the Firebrands, and burning Okeno to the ground before helping Andoran hammer together a coalition ("Hey Molthune, we'll give you a chunk if you help us...Ravounel, we have mutual interests here...River Kingdoms folks, we are offering good pay and lucrative looting terms for mercenaries...Iomedan crusaders, are you still smarting about the Glorious Reclamation?") and liberating Cheliax. I would do it with a party consisting of someone who freed themselves by hijacking a boat, a depressed drunk who worked alongside a slave he was given for six months before freeing them because he couldn't stand owning another person, a woman who runs the underground railroad, and a tall axe-wielding lawyer/boxer with a beard and a stovepipe hat.

You know, for the historical references.

I think it's kind of unfair to compare the 1e and 2e APs because we haven't HAD many 2e APs and we've had a lot of 1e APs.

That said, I think something that could be a challenge for 2e is that a lot of the high-concept themes have already been done. For example, Curse of the Crimson Throne is "You're Batman". Jade Regent is "Marco Polo trip to Samurai Land". Ruins of Azlant is "explore Atlantis". Hell's Rebels is "You are the plucky resistance". Hell's Vengeance is "You are the Gestapo" for God knows what reason (I despise Hell's Vengeance). War for the Crown is, at least in basic concept, "The Game of Thrones one". Kingmaker is right there in the title. Wrath of the Righteous is "Queer dorks get together and beat the stuffing out of unspeakable evil". Strange Aeons is "the Cthulhu one". Carrion Crown is "the gothic horror one". Giantslayer is "you hunt giants". tyrant's Grasp is...well, insert Jem'Hadar joke here.

2e's had some with a high-concept theme, like Edgewatch ("You are victorian cops") and Strength of Thousands ("You go to wizard school"), but that seem more aimless like Age of Ashes and Extinction Curse.

I would like more Hell's Rebels, obviously. that one rocks.

Hey everyone,

Please keep in mind the original post was simply looking to crowdsource-compile a list of canonically queer characters. A deep dive into the pros and cons of having fiction that intentionally tackles thorny real-life prejudices as a way to explore through them VS fiction that intentionally writes them out so as to provide a utopian place to escape to is a good conversation to have but is beyond the original scope of the thread and clearly splintering off.

Fair point.

Anyway, other queer characters I can think of--

Baron Orkerra in War for the Crown is IIRC canonically bi.

Sosiel Vaenic and Aron Kir from Wrath of the Righteous are gay men.

The Iconic Shaman is trans but I think that she was already mentioned.

There was a halfling in Mummy's Mask who I think was trans. Or maybe that was in the worldbuilding bit at the end of the book? It's been a LONG time since I took a look at Mummy's Mask.

as a general rule, if someone is mentioned as having a romantic partner, odds are pretty good they're gay or bi. I can only think of about ten trans characters off the top of my head, though.

Here's one for Orcs, based off of a Klingon song from Star Trek: DS9:

Hear, sons of Gorum!
Hear, daughters too!
The blood of battle washes clean
The Warrior brave and true!

We fight, we love, and then we kill,
Then we die with honor, and stand tall with our forefathers
Battling forever, in our people's eternal fight!

I chose to not participate in this blog because I do not see my chronic, incurable disease as something to be celebrated. At best it has been an inconvenience, and at its worst it has been crippling. However, as has been stated in the comments, I do agree that there should be more awareness around the fact that there are many people suffering, not just from what we can see, but from things we cannot.

Thank you for saying this. I get really upset when people talk about my Tourette's, ADHD, and OCD and call them "neurodivergence" or "neurodiversity". I'm not "diverse", I have a crippling, incurable anxiety disorder that measurably hampers my ability to function and has left me here, today, with an 8 page paper due tomorrow that I haven't started on and can't bring myself to start because I am overcome with anxiety and perfectionism whenever I try. Every medication I've ever been on has either been ineffective, has treated one issue while worsening others, or in the cases of risperidone, Concerta, and Abilify has actively hurt me (Concerta gave me a black-box reaction that made me a violent monster, risperidone left me unable to think and sick with a cold for two months, and Abilify probably gave me tardive dyskinesia).

I really avoid modern disability rights activism as a result, both because I feel out of place as someone with a normal-appearing body and because I'm uncomfortable with the quasi-nationalistic identity focus that permeates the discourse, which I find hurtful and not representative of my daily misery. So it means a lot when somebody comes out and admits something like this, especially the first sentence I quoted.

My personal theory, which I'm probably gonna use if I ever have reason to do an adventure that focuses on such matters: Aroden spent his entire career ****ing Around with the laws of reality, and Finding Out, with increasingly severe consequences (Tar-Baphon being a warning that Aroden ignored). By the time of his death, he was tired, he was feeling guilty over Arazni, probably knew he wasn't a great dude all around, and knew that he was fighting a losing battle. The prophecies are clear: Aroden returns, his final ****ing Around, and a thousand years of glory later, he Finds Out and the entirety of Golarion is destroyed.

And Aroden can't stop thinking about that, because even though he's a god, half the reason he keeps ****ing Around is that he's still a person at heart and feels every single life he watches die. And he's exhausted, and guilty, and wants to do one last unambigously good thing in his life. Something that, even if it doesn't make it all worth it, can at least make a difference for the better, for everyone.

Then Iomedae dies in the Starstone cathedral. A trap left by Norgorber? Failed at the last step? Who knows or cares. But he sees it, and he thinks of how he failed Arazni, and how he will inevitably fail all of his people and every other thinking creature on Golarion if he goes on the path he's on.

The day is coming. Aroden's failed Arazni. He failed Iomedae. The ancient abominations that destroyed his people are going to destroy his adopted people and every other people on Golarion.

So, knowing that it'll really shake things up, knowing that it'll kill him, Aroden ****s Around and Finds Out one last time, by altering reality to make it so that Iomedae succeeded. He retroactively resurrects Iomedae and transfers his divine spark to her.

The backlash unmakes Aroden in an instant like balefire from Wheel of Time. Iomedae knows only that she got a momentary sense of deja vu and then she was a god, not quite knowing how exactly it happened, and Pharasma won't say anything for some reason.

In his last moment, as his body and mind and soul evaporate, Aroden smiles. Because yeah, he Found Out, but at least this way, Golarion has a fighting chance.

I would not necessarily mind a longer AP. But it heavily depends on the genre. Hell's Rebels was about the right length, but Wrath of the Righteous could easily be significantly lengthened IMO.

I have to disagree with you on "no bad adventure paths", I read Hell's Vengeance and hated every line of it. I'm so repulsed by the very concept of playing the fantasy Gestapo that I've sworn I'll never play or DM it except a pre-agreed deliberate sabotage game, played with the intent to "survive, but dramatically fail every adventure".

If there is a bad AP, IMO that's the one.

Anyway:

I've DMed Hell's Rebels and despite everyone's complaints about Shensen, that was an easy fix. In my game she was an Andoran CIA-equivalent agent undercover as a opera singer, so she pulled some Batman antics with the arcanist's dimension door scrolls to evacuate the arcanist's adoptive family, who were being forced at knifepoint to put on an opera about how Barzillai Thrune is the most amazing person ever, went to Heaven despite his sister begging him to have sex with her and showed the gods how to rule, then came down to bless the primitive peasant bumpkins of Kintargo with his infinite wisdom. She was well-received.

Overall, Hell's Rebels is damn near the perfect game considering its format. At worst, the middle of book 5 can be slow, and adventure 1 can be a killer. Books 3 and 4 definitely require a savvy, well-prepared party. The Thrune gifts at the end of book 2 I reworked to be gifts from the resistance after the heroes ruined Barzillai's birthday party and put an illusion on a 50 foot gold plated marble statue Barzillai made of himself. (as in, a Comrade Lenin Strides Towards The Progressive Future type statue)

Outside of that, it's a fun ride that can be run out of the box with no issues.

WRT. the rebellion having a known open base--that's only an issue in book 4, where it's become an open street war. Up until that point, you're implicitly or explicitly working in secret, and the party are just some local civic-minded do-gooders who caught a serial killer as far as the authorities are willing/able to admit.

Oh, and I turned the tiefling girl who guides you on the tooth fairy mission into the party mascot. She was always getting into the thick of events--she was murdered by the first serial killer after leaving an "I'm gay and I love you" note under her crush's door, so the party told Hetamon to use their Raise Dead scroll on her. She was at the masquerade of doom on a date with her girlfriend but escaped death due to the party's competence, then joined the Hellknights under Octavio to be a badass like the heroes. She helped the party fight off a squad of mooks that tried to retake the records hall, then her fiancee got killed by the second serial killer in a pretty horrible way, so the heroes had her fiancee resurrected. The whole campaign actually ended with their wedding. The barbarian walked her down the aisle iirc and the arcanist bawled her feline eyes out.

Ian G wrote:

mikeawmids wrote:

The adventure writing for D&D5e generally seems, at least to me, to be a lot more concise. I don't need pages on backstory and/or sexual preferences of an antagonist the PCs are likely going to steamroll without so much as a "How's your father?"

I generally agree that the reduction in complexity gives 5e a LOT of mass market appeal and makes it easy to learn, but I will add to this point a counterargument that I really haven't liked the writing of the 5e official adventures....

That said, with the upcoming massive rules patch expected for 5e, I fully anticipate that there'll be another bump in 5e popularity from the marketing and the game now being possible to play as a Ranger without feeling completely useless.

The movie, if done well and marketed right, will give things a boost too. Given the "rulings not rules" mantra with regard to 5e, I'm thinking the 50th whatever-they-do won't really change the game much.

I'm worried about the movie, it's really hard to do D&D movies right. Closest I've seen to good was Book of Vile Darkness, which was a hot mess of a film that was chock-full of "I cut myself on my own edge" levels of edgelord.

The rules patch is RUMORED, from what I've seen and heard, to be a 3.5-esque "patch the obvious holes" move, possibly including a Ranger update so that you can play ranger without Tasha's and/or have actual fun as a Beastmaster.

I am a huge nerd and am still obsessed with Hell's Rebels many months after finishing DMing it. So here, have some anthems that I made up after the fact for when Barzillai renamed Kintargo to "New Barzillai"!
--------

#1: Based on this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEO2VH8ekQo

All Hail Barzillai!
His cause is true and glorious!
All Hail Barzillai!
His armies are victorious!

What sustains us never dies...
Barzillai, ever at our side!
He guides us always, firm and wise,
His glorious might, seen far and wide.

All Hail Barzillai!
His cause is true and glorious!
All Hail Barzillai!
His armies are victorious!

Strong and brave, wise and bright,
We serve ever his glor'ious might!
Oh eternal envy of the gods!
Ave Barzillai, evermore!

AVE!

BARZILLAI IS ETERNAL!
HIS SISTER LONGS FOR HIM!
BARZILLAI IS GOD!

-----

#2: Based off of My Country, 'tis for Thee:

"Oh Barzillai, 'tis for Thee,

Great Lord of Eternity,
For Thee I sing!
I love Thy strength and might,
Thy honored visage, bright!
From every door in sight
Let our love ring!

My honored Leader, Thee,
Lord of the World, Thee,
Thy name I love!
I love Thy voice and mind,
Thy love for us in kind,
Loyal to Thee I find,
Myself evermore!

Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Barzillai's song;
Let lowly tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let gods weep and break,
Long live His song!

Our Eternal Leader, Thee,
Author of loyalty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright,
With Thy glor'ious, holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God and King!

Ave Barzillai! Ave Barzillai! Ave Barzillai!"

----

#3: Based off of Rule, Brittania:

When Barzillai first, at His own command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And His loyal servants sang this strain:
"Ave, Barzillai! Princeps Orbis!
"Rebels ever will be slaves!"

The nations, env'ious of His might,
Must, in their turns, to weakness fall;
While He shalt flourish strong and bright,
The dread and envy of them all.
"Ave, Barzillai! Princeps Orbis!
"Rebels ever will be slaves!"

Still more majestic shalt He rise,
More dreadful, from each foreign stroke;
Mighty Barzillai holding up our skies,
Alone and strong as our native oak.
"Ave, Barzillai! Princeps Orbis!
"Rebels ever will be slaves!"

Barzillai they ne'er shall tame:
All their attempts to bend Him down,
Will but arouse His generous flame;
But work their woe, and His renown.
"Ave, Barzillai! Princeps Orbis!
"Rebels ever will be slaves!"

Barzillai's is the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All Thine shall be the subject main,
And Thy sister's love none but Thine.
"Ave, Barzillai! Princeps Orbis!
"Rebels ever will be slaves!"

The Gods, jealous of Thy voice's sound,
Shall to Thy happy coast repair;
New Barzillai! With matchless beauty crown'd,
And loyal hearts to guard the fair.
"Ave, Barzillai! Princeps Orbis!
"Rebels ever will be slaves!"

All I know of BattleTech is the computer game, the story campaign is engaging enough and I like the pilot customization options, but I keep getting stuck and unable to win any missions above one-half of one skull (and even worse, the Internet tutorials make things even WORSE and following them makes me lose FASTER and harder) so I low-key hate it now.

Also Feudal Future is an overplayed trope that I'm not a huge fan of.

The adventure writing for D&D5e generally seems, at least to me, to be a lot more concise. I don't need pages on backstory and/or sexual preferences of an antagonist the PCs are likely going to steamroll without so much as a "How's your father?"

I generally agree that the reduction in complexity gives 5e a LOT of mass market appeal and makes it easy to learn, but I will add to this point a counterargument that I really haven't liked the writing of the 5e official adventures.

I mean, even the one I like the most needs a heck of a lot of work to make the redemption ending work. As-is it's just "give macguffin and pep talk, baddie good and shiny now".

And the Dragon Queen adventures basically need to be rewritten from scratch. Storm King's Thunder has some big plot holes and that and Princes of the Apocalypse have confusing layouts. Princes is also kinda bland, but it is a ToEE reimagine so it's chasing a particular kind of game that only a segment of players want.

Curse of Strahd is never going to be a part of my gaming table even after they fixed the racism. Just not my speed. I hear it's well-written though.

Dragon Heist has so many issues that my current Sunday group (I play PF 1e Saturdays) is playing a modified version because nobody wanted to do the original version.

That said, with the upcoming massive rules patch expected for 5e, I fully anticipate that there'll be another bump in 5e popularity from the marketing and the game now being possible to play as a Ranger without feeling completely useless.