Did you miss an artifact in "The Scribbler's Rhyme?" You have the Anathema Archive in "Into the Valley of the Black Tower," after which the running total includes "1 Artifact" until "The Scribbler's Rhyme," where you list one more artifact, the Revelation Quill, but the running total changes to include "+ 3 Artifacts."
One way to handwave the idea of there being a market (other than ogres) for +1 Ogre Hooks, and more generally for magic items that you wouldn't think anybody the PCs should want to deal with would buy, is to decide that your version of Golarion includes the Pathfinder-compatible version of Eberron's Artificer class, published in one of the very first third party Pathfinder supplements: Adamant Entertainment's The Tome of Secrets.
If artificers exist in your campaign, they have a use for any magical item the PCs could ever find, as they can salvage the magic from a useless item and imbue it into a useful one.
Amaya was introduced briefly in volume one of Council of Thieves as one of eleven members of the Children of Westcrown who the PCs might recruit as allies or cohorts; they each have level one of either commoner or expert, but each have a potential character class they could become if mentored by a PC of that class (between them, they cover all eleven core character classes, so which ones become important will likely depend on the makeup of the PC party). It's up to the GM to stat them up and develop them more fully at their discretion. Amaya (CG female Tian human expert 1): Amaya is a well-mannered glassblower and an incredibly beautiful woman who’s somewhat self-conscious about the effect her appearance has on others—she dresses plainly as a result. She hopes someday to visit her distant kin who still live in Magnimar and Sandpoint. (Potential: bard.) They retconned her into Ameiko's half-sister in the introduction to the first volume of Jade Regent:
Ameiko either not knowing that Amaya exists or believing her to be a cousin rather than a half-sister is not inconsistent with any of the canonical information about her.
In fact, [Laori Vaus] has both tattoos AND piercings. We just won't ever illustrate them. I was going to ask why Paizo would ever pay anyone to illustrate Laori again at all, since as I recalled you said after the RotRL Anniversary edition came out that you probably wouldn't be doing revised hardcover editions of the other three OGL APs because of how much it disrupted the schedule for other product releases... but now I see on the front page that either I remembered wrong or you changed your minds, as the hardcover of CotCT will be hitting shelves in September -- YAY! So instead I'll just ask this: do you realize that by saying that Laori has tattoos and piercings in places that won't ever be uncovered in an official illustration, you're waving catnip under the noses of the various fan artists who apply Rule 34 of the Internet to the Pathfinder iconics and major NPCs?
GM_Beernorg is banned for publishing a Vogon translation of GoatToucher's poetry.
I recently got a chance to look over the new classes introduced in the Advanced Class Guide, and what do you know, Paizo went ahead and built a class around this mechanic: the Investigator, a rogue-alchemist hybrid class whose unique combat abilities, Studied Combat and Studied Strike, are pretty clearly what Sherlock Holmes was doing in those scenes.
It's fairly obvious for constructs and other beings whose DR comes from having an exterior made of exceptionally tough material -- the weapon that fails to penetrate the golem's DR just bounces off its hard surface. But what about flesh-and-blood beings whose DR is a magical property that doesn't make their skin look any different from that of a humanoid or animal with no DR, such as lycanthropes, fey and outsiders? For example, let's say Merisiel throws a dagger at that succubus that's draining Kyra* on page 52 of Demons Revisited. Say her player rolls a 20, then confirms the critical hit, and rolls two fours on the damage dice, but unfortunately it's not a cold iron dagger, just an ordinary steel one. The succubus has DR 10/cold iron, so she doesn't lose any hit points, but if I'm GMing and trying to be a good, dramatic storyteller, how do I describe what Meri sees happen? With a roll like that, attacking from behind, I'd say the dagger hit the demon in the lower back, just below the ribs, and (if it were an ordinary humanoid with no DR, or a cold iron dagger) sank in to the hilt. With DR, does the dagger fail to break her skin (similar to natural armor)? Does it penetrate, then fall right out again, spilling no blood and leaving no wound (like super-fast regeneration, similar to Wolverine's healing factor)? And how does the succubus react? Did she feel it as pain comparable to a real wound, as slight pain like a pinprick, as a painless impact like a pat on the back, or does she not feel it at all? (Is there anything more intimidating than a monster that doesn't even notice your attack?) Obviously, this is ultimately going to be up to the individual GM, but I'm interested to hear how other people handle it. *Kyra, seriously? I would think she'd have more sense than to get into a situation like that. I'd have chosen Valeros or Alain for that illustration -- they seem just the type to fall for a succubus's wiles. I suppose it might happen if the succubus disguised herself as Merisiel, though...
Oh, one more question: do you think you'll ever do another Adventure Path centered on the Darklands? It's been quite a while since Second Darkness, and of course that one was done with the OGL 3.5 rules instead of PFRPG. Apart from the forays into Ilmurea in Serpent's Skull, the realms of Nar-Voth, Sekamina, and Orv haven't played much of a role in the AP's since then, as far as I've seen. I wouldn't expect to see another one with the drow or the serpentfolk as principle antagonists, but I would think the derro, duergar, skum, ghouls, gugs, morlocks, urdefhans, and especially the Ether Court, neothelids, and aboleths could easily get up to an Adventure Path's worth of mischief .
I'm going to go with Walter Slovotsky, from Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series. Oh, and also: Haley Starshine!
The Golarion pantheon doesn't really allow for this to work very well; the good deities and their followers are tolerant of one another, and to be otherwise would mark them as not "good" as it's understood in this work (Pathfinder and D&D morality being informed by modern, rather than medieval, ideas of right and wrong). If we look at medieval morality, the picture of good is very different. Saint Thomas More was canonized not despite, but in part because of, the vicious zeal with which he pursued heresy (he was personally responsible for burning at least six Protestant theologians at the stake, and torturing or otherwise persecuting many more). Or, for a more recent example of that kind of morality, check out Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan under the Taliban; the Muslim theocrats who stone rape victims to death for "unchastity" and massacre Baha'is and Hazara Buddhists regard themselves as the epitome of goodness, and their atrocities as evidence of their virtue. Now, even in the polytheistic setting of a Pathfinder game, it's certainly possible to imagine a god who would command his followers to behave like Crusaders or Mujahedin: such a god would deny the divinity of all other deities, regardless of how similar or different their creeds were to his own, and declare them all demonic. His cult would follow a strict "convert-or-be-killed" policy toward followers of other faiths. According to the standard rules, such a god would be Lawful Evil, but he and his followers would regard themselves as the definition of Lawful Good. He might even empower his clerics to channel positive energy, heal spontaneously, turn undead, etc., and his messengers might take the form of angels or archons rather than demons or devils. All it requires is a slight modification of the rules, which of course is any GM's prerogative in her own homebrew setting.
Not necessarily; if Thieves can become Rogues and Magic-Users Wizards, it's not impossible that Barbarians could transform into Berzerkers. However, it's too late to do something like that in the context of Pathfinder RPG; that's the kind of change you make in the transition from one edition to the next, and the whole point of Pathfinder RPG is not to make any huge changes that would invalidate much of what was already in print for D&D 3e/3.5/D20/OGL. Changing a class name might not seem all that huge, and maybe they could have done it if they'd wanted to when the Pathfinder core rules first came out, but it's done now, and I don't see Paizo creating a new edition of the rules unless virtually all the company's leadership is replaced by people with very different ideas of what their game should be.
It's a breastplate, but the artist took a LOT of artistic freedom (that, and he had, if I remember correctly, about a week or less to do the piece before we needed to ship the book). A LOT of the art in Burnt Offerings was last-minute. Am I right in recalling that a lot of the last-minute art in RotRL that doesn't meet the standard of quality set by later APs is being replaced with new and improved art in the anniversary edition, or was that wishful thinking on my part? And then, back to back with my hibernation time, I got sent out on a job in the field. It was a cow field. They were delicious. But now I feel a food coma coming on......zzzzzzzzzzzzz Heh. That reminds me of something.... The relevant part is right at the beginning of that clip.
Whatever it may or may not imply about PFRPG archery, the video is awesome. It amused me that the way her hair hangs over her ear at the beginning makes it look as though she has pointed ears.
The moral of the story is "any monster can be used well". It is also likely the reason that kobolds are, to this day, the sneaky, crafts-loving, trap-making do-whatever-it-takes-to-win humanoid, rather than just being cannon fodder. Yeah. I recall a session last year where our party was investigating a mine from which all the human miners who worked it had failed to return at the end of the workday, a week or so before our party came on the scene. At the first intersection, we triggered a cleverly-designed falling-rocks trap -- it didn't crush anyone, thanks to a couple of good Reflex saves, but it did make an ungodly amount of noise, presumably alerting every living thing in the mine of our arrival. My character and the other member of the party with Knowledge:Dungeoneering looked at one another and said, "Kobolds?" "Yup, kobolds." While it didn't approach the level of horror described in the editorial above (the kobolds hadn't been in the mine long enough to turn it into the kind of trap-fest a long-standing lair would be), it was pretty hairy.
I'm planning a game to start around the end of January or early in February, hosted by a friend of mine who has a projector mounted over his gaming table. The GM for the game I played in there before used MapTools, but I wasn't terribly impressed with its interface or its stability, so I'm considering one of the non-freeware VTT programs, such as Battlegrounds RPG Edition, Fantasy Grounds 2, or D20Pro. I'd be very interested in hearing from people who've used one of them in this context, especially if you've used more than one and can compare their performance. I'm leaning somewhat toward D20Pro, for its system specificity and ability to interface with Hero Lab, but I don't like the lack of the dynamic fog-of-war feature that all the others, even MapTools, offer.
Read the article you linked; it's not about false reports by alleged victims, it's about one bureaucrat making up reports that never actually existed in the first place in order to justify her office's budget. It provides no evidence whatsoever for the popular "Men's Rights Movement" slander that half of all women who report they were raped were lying. I recently read about two other studies that shed a good deal of light on the prevalence of rape from a completely different angle: it turns out that quite a lot of men are willing to admit to rape as long as you don't actually call it that, just describe actions that indisputably meet the legal definitions of rape or attempted rape and ask if they've ever done any of those things, and if so, how often. In a sample of 1882 adult males ranging in age from 18 to 71, with a median age of 26.5, the first study found that 120 (6%) admitted to rape or attempted rape, of whom 76 (4% of the whole sample, 63% of the admitted rapists) admitted to repeat offenses; these 76 committed a total of 439 rapes or attempted rapes, for a mean of 5.8 each (and a median of 3, meaning that there were a few who admitted to numbers in the teens or twenties, dragging up the average). Read the article -- it's fascinating, in a horrifying sort of way, and sheds light not only on the prevalence of rape, but how both women and (especially) non-rapist men could go about about reducing that prevalence.
"Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of [their] women." For ten points of geek cred, tell me who Conan was quoting. (The quote may be apocryphal, but it's popularly attributed to a real, historical figure.) Oh, and here's a favorite I'd forgotten:
And then there's this one, which really is a battle cry in the strict sense of being shouted at start of combat to inspire allies and intimidate enemies: "Shall we dance?"
A further thought: one cool thing about my Napoleon-inspired Galt scenario is having high-level Cavaliers as the BigBad and some of his lieutenants (or Field Marshals, as the case may be). I don't think that's been done yet. Cooler still if part of the reason for his success is heavy use in his army of Alchemical weaponry, along with Summoners and their eidolons acting as shock troops and and order of Inquisitors maintaining security in conquered lands -- the relative rarity and obscurity of the APG classes would make them a challenge for nations whose spell-casters are mostly clerics, wizards and bards, and who are used to thinking in terms of those types when defending against magical threats, to cope with.
My wizard (see my profile) was romantically involved with Ameiko. Unfortunately, our campaign went on hiatus when the GM was laid off in July, which now looks to be permanent, with two of the players unable to return and the GM wanting to run something else. We'd gotten up to the opening chapter of "Fortress of the Stone Giants," in which the giant attempting to carry Ameiko off discovered that pissing off an Evoker with Overland Flight and a CL 11 Wand of Scorching Ray is far more painful than any prisoner is worth, and "Put her down -- gently -- and you get to live" is excellent advice. The GM worked the relationship into my character's reaction to the Suicidal Compulsion haunt. The party had determined fairly quickly that the best way to deal with haunts is to make the squishy wizard you scout -- he has a good Will save, and is easily grappled by the huge Shoanti fighter when he does succumb to one. I wrote up our experience of the Glassworks fight as a short fan-fic, which you can read here in the unlikely event you're interested. I'll have to revise it if I ever get around to expanding on it (something I'm seriously considering now the campaign's dead -- I really like that character, and don't want to let him go just yet). Jade Regent apparently ret-conned Ameiko and Tsuto's relative ages to make him her older brother, and her only thirteen at the time he hit her -- all the more traumatic. The Shayliss incident went nowhere in our game -- she did get the Shoanti ranger into the basement, but he made the Perception check to hear her father coming, and managed to bluff his way out. (He muttered something about a "dire minx" when the cleric inquired about the size of the basement's rats.) There's a bit more about the party and early incidents in our game here, here, and here. The second one provides a bit more context to Kavren's relationship with Ameiko -- I'm rather pleased with the reply I composed to the Goblin Song, which just happens to match the tune of Heather Alexander's The March of Cambreadth.
So here's a question to which I'm rather hoping the answer will be "Hell, NO!" You guys wouldn't ever subject Golarion to the kind of massive rearrangement of damn near every premise of the setting that seems to happen to Krynn every time the writers feel the need to juice things up a bit, would you? I like the Chronicles and Legends, but I'd rather they'd just left the Dragonlance setting alone than kept trying to top what had gone before with Dragons of Summer Flame, then the invasion of the Dragon Overlords, then the War of Souls, then the "Dark Disciple" novels... yeesh. "Ages" should last more than a single generation; after the War of the Lance and Raistlin's attempted apotheosis, that world ought to have been relatively stable for a few centuries, and in Golarion, the death of Aroden wasn't nearly as long ago as the Cataclysm was in Krynn at the time of the original books.
The analytical martial arts technique employed by Sherlock Holmes in the new Robert Downey movie gave me an idea for a really nifty new combat feat: Perceptive Dueling. It would allow a character to add his Intelligence bonus to his attacks, damage rolls, and armor class (in the form of a dodge bonus) against a single enemy once he's had a chance to observe that enemy's fighting style. On the third round of melee combat against an opponent (defined as the opponent making at least one melee attack against the character on each of the previous two rounds, while the character either attacked that opponent or fought defensively, wasn't flanked, and neither attacked nor was attacked by any other creature), the character could add one point to each of the three affected stats; on the fourth round, he could add two points, and so on until he was applying his full Intelligence bonus. Note that these bonuses would be applied in addition to, not instead of, the normal bonuses from Strength and/or Dexterity. They would only apply only against the one opponent on which the character focuses his powers of observation, and should he attack or be attacked by another opponent, or be flanked, all the bonuses would be lost until he had a chance to concentrate for two rounds on a single opponent again. Since it's a fairly powerful feat, I'd also give it some fairly strict prerequisites. To take it, your character would need a Base Attack Bonus +6, Intelligence 15, Combat Expertise, and at least one of the following feats or class features: Weapon Focus, Weapon Finesse, Weapon Training, and Improved Unarmed Strike. The Perceptive Dueling ability could only be used in conjunction with the weapon(s) associated with the prerequisite(s). I might also use it as a class feature, without prerequisites, for a Pathfinder upgrade of the Swashbuckler core class from The Complete Warrior, in place of the original Swashbuckler's Insightful Strike feature. We could even make it a feat tree: Improved Perceptive Dueling would require Perceptive Dueling, BAB +11, and Int 17, and allow the character to maintain the feat's bonuses while flanked by one creature in addition to the opponent on which he focuses, ignore any attacks from other creatures that don't hit him, and begin adding the bonus points on the second round of melee instead of the third. Greater Perceptive Dueling would require Improved Perceptive Dueling, BAB +16, and Int 19, and allow him to ignore flanking and all attacks by any number of creatures, and begin adding bonus points on the first round. Finally, Epic Perceptive Dueling would require Greater Perceptive Dueling, BAB +21, and Int 21, and allow the master duelist to apply his full perceptive dueling bonuses (of at least +5, given the prerequisite) to all creatures engaged in melee with him from the first round of combat. I might restrict it further by having the bonuses for the original feat apply only to the first attack made by the character and his opponent (for the AC bonus) each round. The Improved version would apply them to the first two attacks each round, Greater to the first three, and Epic to all attacks. Given the requirements, I think this feat sequence might be most valuable to an Eldritch Knight whose core arcane class was Wizard or another Intelligence-based class, to the aforementioned Swashbuckler update (which could have these feats as its core class features), or perhaps to a Pathfinder version of the Factotum class from Dungeonscape -- the latter's combat-related class features are already based on the same essential concept. (I hope I don't start a flame war by mentioning the Factotum; it always struck me as one of the most broken of the 3.5 splatbook classes, and if that makes it taboo on these boards, please accept my humble apologies and forget that I brought it up.) What are your thoughts? Too powerful? Too esoteric? Too many prereqs? Do your one-on-one duels at level 6 often last long enough for a bonus that starts to kick in on the third round of combat to be worthwhile? Does this sound like something you might use in building a character you'd actually want to play, or is it too impractical? I'd love to hear any input the readers here may have.
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