Jed Roach's page

How do alchemical bombs work underwater?

The rules appear to be silent on the subject.

Here are some possible rulings I might use at my discretion:

1. The water interferes with and/or dilutes the chemicals to the point of being ineffective even if you do hit and the flask breaks. Basically, treat it like a bludgeoning ranged attack. Auto miss and no splash.

2. They can only be used to attack creatures within your reach and they don't splash. (Ever try to throw a baseball under water? Even a bullet is slowed to non lethal speeds in 3-8 feet) It's almost a melee attack, but you release just before impact so your hand doesn't get caught in the effect.

3. They take the halved range increment of piercing ranged weapons, but otherwise work as normal.

4. Water breathing creatures are also sickened 1 because they are breathing the water full of hazardous chemicals.

5. They work as though on land with no penalties or modifications.

6. Due to mentioning "exposure to air" in the description, alchemist's fire, bottled lighting, and frost vials do not work underwater. Tanglefoot bags explicitly do not work underwater.

7. Thunderstones do double damage, do splash damage, and deafen within 30 feet. Water conducts pressure waves (i.e. sonic damage) much better than air. Try googling "hydraulic abdominal concussion", unless you're the squeamish type.

The rules say I have the discretion to say that some things don't work, not that they work different. So, for PFS 2,4, and 7 are probably not defensible.

How would you rule?

For the purposes of vision, is the cloud effect created by metalmist spheres considered non-magical mist or something else?

This sphere contains small fragments of thunderstones within a colloidal suspension of a precious metal. When you twist the sphere, it creates an opaque mist in a burst centered on one corner of your space. Creatures within that area are concealed, and all other creatures are concealed to them....

In the real world the vision obscuring effects of mist and smoke are essentially the same. Small particles suspended in the air scatter light between the object and the observer. In the case of mist those particles are tiny droplets of liquid water and in the case of smoke those particles are solids. However, the pathfinder world makes a distinction between smoke and mist allowing some creatures to see through one or the other. Smoke worker hobgoblins can see through smoke and witches with murksight can see through mist.

The description of these (colloidal suspension of a precious metal) suggests to me that the mist is made up of both the liquid of the suspension medium and the solid particles of the metal. In which case the effect is both mist and smoke. Though one might argue that it's not mist because the suspension medium isn't water. Or one might argue that it's not smoke because it wasn't caused by fire. Or one might argue that it is mist and only mist because it says mist.

In an attempt to do a better job of slotting my boons I thought it would be a good idea to print them out on trading card sized cards and then keep them in a 9-pocket trading card page. I GM some games and I thought my players might appreciate getting boon cards along with their chronicle sheet. My first draft was built using google sheets and attempts to emulate the style of stat blocks from the core rule book while still being easy to share and modify as more boons are released. See the links below for the early results of that process.

Envoys' Alliance Boon Cards.

Boon Cards Template.

But then I stumbled across the card templates for the Adventure Card Game in the community use resources. So I figured out the basics of how to use Inkscape and made this:

Envoys' Alliance Boon Cards (ACG Style)

It takes a lot more work making them in the ACG style, but I think they are way cooler. At this point I'd like to get some feedback from the community and once I settle on a style I'll start uploading the completed boons and templates to pfsprep

So, please let me know what you think. Would you appreciate receiving these as a player? As a DM would you bother downloading, printing, cutting, and handing them out? Should the text be as literal as space allows or be paraphrased for brevity? Anything else?