KarlBob's page

I had the same questions. With the Shackles in their official position on the map of Golarion, traders would simply sail around them. At worst, they'd make the long trip around the southern tip of Garund to reach Sargava.

I solved this problem by rearranging the islands of the Shackles into a Caribbean-equivalent chain off the coast of Arcadia. Cheliax fits nicely into the role of Spain.

It's incredibly easy to create a fairly mediocre or bad fighter as a new player simply because there are so many feats, and a great number of poor to awful feats. Experienced players usually know to avoid these feats, but a new player might not. Aside from certain feats being fairly poor, a number of feats just don't synergize well together and don't add to overall efficacy.

I'm hoping that PF2 can avoid the "useless feat" trap better than PF1. As more and more feats are introduced in future books, there will invariably be some that play out better than others. It would be great, though, if experienced players didn't have to steer new players away from feats that were presented in the core book.

I never even thought about bringing home all of the miscellaneous items like clothes irons and brooms until I found out about the magic forge in the college basement. Almost everything you can pick up has some use.

I've never quite understood going legendary. Do you lose the ability to smith all of the cool stuff until you level up to it again?

also, bats are adorable!

Yes, they are.

YouTube, Imgur, and the like have done a lot for bats' reputation. Baby bats wrapped in tiny blankets, yawning bats, and bats gleefully eating fruit are all much more positive images than the classic "vampire bat feeding on a large herbivore" pictures that were common a few decades ago.

If it stinks it's also biology.

Or chemistry. There are some powerful stenches hiding on lab shelves.

Years ago I worked for a chemical supply company, with a lab and a warehouse full of various chemicals. One day an employee knocked a 500ml bottle of a chemical related to pyrrolidine off the shelf, and it shattered. We evacuated the warehouse, the lab, and the office. We left every door in the place open overnight, with no fear of thieves. If they could get inside to steal anything, they would have earned it. That was the worst smell I've ever experienced.

I've got The Blight and Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos for Pathfinder coming in, and recently picked up a couple of bundles of smaller pdfs that I've barely downloaded, much less read.

Of course, there are much worse problems to have than an embarrassment of pdf riches, but there's definitely a lot of reading coming up.

I hope to use the 40% off coupon on some of the Blight accessories that I couldn't afford during the Kickstarter.

Crows, ravens, and great parrots prolly have the brainy bird market cornered, to add to Corvus's note.

Owls, sorry guys, you are stealthy and cool looking, but rank only in the mids for smarts LOL

That reminds me of the BBC Bird Brain of Britain videos I saw years ago on PBS (and their equally impressive squirrel obstacle course videos. It's pretty amazing what squirrels will do for a few calories' worth of nuts).

Here is the latest news, and it's good news, indeed!

- i thought it would eat out of my hand...

Please get my finger back so the hospital can re-attach it. It's in the big brown one.

It's in the Comments section of the KS.

Thank you

That rings a bell. It's not something from THE HERITAGE UNIVERSE books by Charles Sheffield?

It also sounds a bit David Brin-ian, but I don't think it's anything from the UPLIFT series.

I haven't read the Heritage Universe series, but I'll add them to my "read this sometime" list.

It could be a Brin story, but I agree that it's probably not from any of the Uplift books.

This is the latest news from FGG wrote:

Skeeter Green 1 day ago

Last file in layout now. PF and 5E complete. Still on track for physical book shipping in August. Next update will be when I know when the pdfs will be available to backers. Nothing until then.

Thanks, The Herald Frog. Where did you see this particular bit of good news? There hasn't been a Kickstarter update email yet this month.

One more detail that might jog someone's memory: The robot "shepherds" that accompany the animals occasionally leak wisps of vapor. It's possible that they might be using a liquefied gas as a coolant. The character who sees them speculates that these particular robots might be quite primitive (if they use components like vacuum tubes that produce a lot of waste heat), or very advanced (if they use low temperature superconductors).

Hmm. Not a CJ Cherryh book?

It could be a CJ Cherryh book, but it's not one of the Chanur series.

The never acquiring sapience thing reminds me of Blindsight

I ran across Blindsight while searching for the story. It's really good, but it's not the novel I'm looking for.

I like this concept. The kitsune appears to be scatter-brained or just tactically incompetent, then surprises any enemy who tries to take advantage of the apparent lapse in judgement. Fun.

Any rules for turning a longship into a submarine?

Well, there's the Dive! Dive! Dive! imposition from Skull & Shackles. It's temporary, but nice while it lasts.

Werthead wrote:

They sound a bit like the Inhibitors from Alastair Reynolds' REVELATION SPACE novels, but they don't enslave other races. They stop them from colonising other stars and try to avoid widespread genocide, but will do it when necessary.

Interesting. That could be them, if I'm mixing up two different universes. I'll look up the Inhibitors and see if that's it.

Nope,it wasn't them. That sounds like a neat series, though. Maybe I'll give it a try soon.

Related question: Are there any prestige classes that, on original blush, were only okay, but later class/archetype options improved the possibility of them?

Example: I'm looking into using bloodrager/blade adept arcanist to qualify for an Eldritch Knight. There are more synergies that can be had than with the traditional fighter/wizard combo.

If I recall correctly, some people were pretty excited about the Eldritch Archer Magus archetype, because it can transition directly into Arcane Archer without multi-classing.

The World Walker druid to Nature Warden progression that I mentioned earlier is another example. The flavor text for Nature Warden even mentioned that many wardens had started their careers as single-class druids, but World Walker was printed at least a year after Nature Warden.

Some people seem to feel that the Prestigious Spellcaster and Favored Prestige Class feats have "redeemed" prestige classes in Pathfinder. I'm not sure I would go that far, but they are nice.

I really enjoyed playing a Nature Warden in a Kingmaker campaign. (By starting with the World Walker druid archetype, I avoided the need for a dip into ranger to pick up favored terrain.) The campaign dissolved before I reached level 9 and Guarded Lands, but it was still a fun, flavorful class. Prestigious Spellcaster (which wasn't written at the time) would have made it even better.

They sound a bit like the Inhibitors from Alastair Reynolds' REVELATION SPACE novels, but they don't enslave other races. They stop them from colonising other stars and try to avoid widespread genocide, but will do it when necessary.

Interesting. That could be them, if I'm mixing up two different universes. I'll look up the Inhibitors and see if that's it.

The Barbarian charges up the ice hemisphere to get at the bird...

BOOM!! BOOM!! The barbarian punched through with his spiked guantlet, and the bird exploded in gore!!!

This sounds like the kind of fight your players will always remember (especially the barbarian and the alchemist)!

Whoops - wrong thread..

That's okay, "Flame Winds" sounds like a fun book.

I remember an odd alien species, but I've forgotten which novel they come from.

In the novel, a race of robots is moving through our galactic neighborhood, enslaving a series of other races as they go.

In one scene, one of the viewpoint characters witnesses the race that created the robots. They're small mammal-like creatures whose brains are roughly on par with rats or squirrels. They developed tool use, but they never evolved true sentience/sapience/"person-hood".

Over millions of years, these creatures built simple tools, then more complex tools. Eventually, their tools built even better tools, and the complexity increased until it resulted in a race of fully-sentient robots.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Edit: For some reason, my memory suggests that it might have been a C.S. Friedman book, but I could easily be wrong about that.

I'd be fine with dropping the raw scores in favor of the modifiers, but I'm also fine with keeping both scores and modifiers.

Trivia: Although THAC0 is strongly associated with 2nd Edition, it first appeared in the 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide.

Thanks, KarlBob.

You're welcome.

Ok--all ancillary books are at the printer...

Pathfinder and 5e books are laid out and being proofed.

SW main book is next in layout.

Staff almost dead. Delivery in August (finally). Just the cards to go.

Woo hoo! The stars are aligning, and the human sacrifices are coming along nicely. Soon the prophesied time will arrive.

I pretty much acquired most-to-all of The Blight products in the Kickstarter.

Just to make sure I'm up-to-date, I've received 5 module PDFs and 1 Tome of Blighted Horrors so far from Frog Gods. Is that about right with their current releases so far?

Loving everything so far!

Sounds about right to me. The update above gives the status of the remaining items.

Still on track for late July/early August is great news!

Cat-thulhu, perhaps the El-dog Gods hid it from you. This is a great time to find it, though. Not long to wait now, and several accessory pieces have already been released.

Any updates on the status of the book?

I believe this is still the latest news on when the main book might be ready:

Greg just posted an update. We have a date!

Perhaps these creatures are actually created as a side effect of spell casting, thus the same adventurers who deplete their numbers also inadvertently replenish them.

A wizard did it (unknowingly, by accident). An elegant, ironic answer. I like it.

Well, how many mid tier heroes capable of taking on these monsters are there? The population of any setting is not equally divided by level. And those higher level characters probably have other stuff to do than eradicate owlbears or bulettes around the world.

In some worlds , you could just check the census records. (In this series, everyone has their class and level tattooed on their forehead. Really.)

Ckorik wrote:

Thus our disagreement - the writeup is what's in the journal - which, as I understand it, would mean the stuff went to the island and the payment returned from there.

And even if that was the case (which I assume is not, since there are clearly Red Mantis agents in Varisia), the distance is maybe a couple of weeks by ship. Enough time to ship it, weaponize it and then bring the virus back to Korvosa. I just looked at the map of the Inner Sea again. The distance, if geography and distances parallels Earth's is approximatly the same as the distance between UK and the Canary Islands. That's not that long a travel. 16th century ships needed 65 days from Europe to the colonies in North America. Vasco daGama sailed from Lisbon to the Canaries from 8 July 1497 to 15 July. That's a week.

Not to mention the fact that the Red Mantis certainly have enough money and high level spell casters to teleport important people and items as needed.

Sounds like a potentially excellent AP to me! I hope it does use the rules systems from Ultimate Intrigue. I don't think it would be too hard to paraphrase some of those systems in sidebars to accommodate people who haven't bought Ultimate Intrigue.

CorvusMask wrote:

Can I at this point point out the fact that campaign settings books HAVE advanced the timeline before?

For example, RotR starts in year 4707(aka 2007 irl years), 5 years after 4702 when the thing happened, right? Well, Numeria's campaign setting books lists events for 4709 and 4711 and year 4714 as "Present year"(which was also Iron Gods'/campaign setting book's released year)

So yeaaaaah, they have been doing that all the time in campaign setting books for years by now. Its not just PFS that advances timeline.

*nods*

We don't have the Times of Troubles or Spellplague (thank the various gods and goddesses above and below) but the world of Golarion has been on a gradual advancement since the very beginning. Slow, but gradual.

Or the return of the gods and divine magic, followed in short order by the failure of both divine and arcane magic (and their replacement by two new types of magic), the theft of the world by an evil goddess, the death of said goddess and the demotion to mortality of the primary god of Good, and the return of primal Chaos to destroy the world. *cough* Dragonlance *cough* apocalypse du jour *cough*

Here's hoping the June update arrives soon, with an updated ETA!

I've really enjoyed playing a couple of halfling druids. One was an Osirian desert druid in the Pathfinder Society. The other was a world walker druid who later took up the nature warden prestige class in a Kingmaker campaign.

Something that I haven't tried yet that looks like fun is the mouser swashbuckler archetype. Facing big opponents? Dart in underneath them and wreak havoc from below.

One class that's particularly effective for halflings is cavalier. Since their mounts are generally medium sized, they don't need any special feats to ride in dungeons and other confined spaces.

As a GM, on more than one occasion I've told groups "You finished all the events I had planned for this session an hour ago. You were still role-playing, so I didn't announce that the game was over."

I've read advice books for GMs that rave about keeping the tension high and glossing over the "boring" parts of a story, but I'm happiest when my campaign world feels like something that persists between the adventures.

96. There was an old AD&D adventure where every room was linked to the other rooms by teleport gates, but with a twist. A doorway from Room A lead to Room B, but trying to return through that same doorway landed the character in Room C. There was a consistent pattern to the room connections, but it took some trial and error to figure it out.

entrails?

Viscera

The cast of The Canterbury Tales, some gender swapped to make the theft, I mean inspiration, slightly less obvious, singly or in groups, with Pathfinder class levels.

Townsfolk NPCs from old RPG books you happen to have lying around. (I find MERP books to be particularly helpful here.)

Here's another "Thank you for the guide!" message. I also need to introduce a group of new Pathfinder players (but experienced roleplayers) to the system, and concise guides to the classes will make it much easier.

Dominar Rygel XVI wrote:

If there's ever an inclination to do a Free RPG Day module for Starfinder, I'd be totally psyched for Ratfolk vs. Space Goblins.

AND WE WILL CRUSH THEM!

We be space-goblins,

Which genders are these iconics ? Did anyone take notes when they were individually introduced ?

If they introduce a fungoid alien species, that could become a very confusing topic.

"I'm sex #10,347. My pilot is sex #12,658, and the gunner is sex #4,502."

Raia's looking pretty good talking on her holo communicator with her friend who just played really nasty pranks on Londo Molari.

Not many fishes

I don't really have a favorite iconic yet, but I love the space goblins on the First Contact cover. Especially the one with his ears cramped up in a fishbowl helmet.

UnArcaneElection wrote:

From a couple of posts inspired by a really bad Star Trek episode: The Next Generation episode (Genesis, one of the last ones, but not the very last one) where the crew devolves into animals that aren't even in their evolutionary lineage is mindbogglingly bad. Yet the failure to grasp evolution properly extends well beyond Star Trek, even seeping not only into plenty of other science (or something) fiction, but even science education and reporting as well, and even parts of life science that do not deal primarily with evolution. Why do people (even among the better educated) have such trouble grasping the non-linearity of evolution? What's been your experience in the part of the scientific community you deal with?

I loved ST:TNG, but that episode made me so angry I was gritting my teeth the whole time. To this day I can't watch it.

There's a trope for that. (Warning: TVTropes.com may be hazardous to your productivity.)

TNG proved that Star Trek writers don't understand our evolutionary past, then the Voyager episode "Threshold" showed that they're equally clueless regarding the future of evolution.

To me, the most encouraging thing is that several auxiliary products (three stand-alone adventures and a bestiary) have been released. More news on the status of the main book would be great, of course...

On a personal note,

Apologies for resurrecting this old thread, but I am struggling with the very same problem and I found all the above discussion to be interesting and stimulating.

Basically, my problem is more plot-related than game-related. I will explain.

... (snip) ...

## Conclusion ##

Let us give for granted that I am not playing the game "as it was meant to be". We give roleplaying a priority.

Now, could someone help me come up for reasons to diminish/limit/etc. the insta-death spells "in game" (that is, within the world characters live in... not as a matter of tweaking the handbook rules)?

E.g.: some action-reaction mechanism that attracts Evil outsider whenever you use such a spell, etc...

Richard_Sharpe, you might get more responses to your question in another section of the Paizo forums. The discussion in this area is specifically about Pathfinder Online, the MMO that Goblinworks has been working on for several years now. I think that if you brought up these points in the Advice section, or in Pathfinder RPG General Discussion, it could spark a lively debate.

There are a few of us on this forum occasionally.

I'm not sure how many of the current players are in US and Aussie time zones. My subscription lapsed in April 2016.

As of the last I've heard, I'm afraid you can't roll a half-orc yet. So far, characters can only be dwarves, elves, and humans.

For more information on the history and current state of the game, check out Goblinworks.com

Adventure paths that start with a home base for the characters but end elsewhere are another symptom of the steep power curve across an AP. A place that contains threats to a Level 2 party is likely to be a cake walk for a Level 16 party. Partitioning the area can help to keep characters in appropriate surroundings without abandoning the starting zone altogether (for example: streets of Absalom at low levels, nearby siege towers at mid levels, then the Test of the Starstone at the climax).

Skull & Shackles provides a series of potential home bases as the characters progress, so they don't have to be wanderers all the time. As a GM, it's not too hard to add some local flavor to each of the bases, so the characters care about the places where they dock up between voyages.

KarlBob wrote:

Any news since July 2016?

See here for a pretty comprehensive update.

I guess I asked the right question on the right day!