Kazim Serras's page

Phillip and I will be running a couple of modules the day after Christmas at the Dragon's Lair in San Antonio, TX. We are hoping to complete them in one day so we will be running all day, from 10am-10pm (with a couple of breaks for lunch and dinner.)

We will be running Masks of the Living God (lvl 2-4) and Carrion Hill (lvl 4-6.) Here is our Warhorn sign-up site if anyone wants to join in. Also feel free to email us at sanantoniopfs (at) gmail (dot) com if you have any questions!

With a growing number of people in San Antonio joining Pathfinder Society, we are expanding to a second day and location! Dragon's Lair of San Antonio wants to host some PFS games on Thursday afternoons. Our first game will be next Thursday, September 20, starting at 4pm. I will be running We Be Goblins! We will be using the same Obsidian Portal and Warhorn pages as our other San Antonio games for sign-ups. I am planning on running one table a month right now, but if we have enough interest, I may run a table every other week instead, so please keep an eye on the schedules for details! The schedule for the next game can be found here.

The address for this event is:
Dragon’s Lair
7959 Fredericksburg Rd Suite #129
San Antonio TX 78229

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to email me at sanantoniopfs@gmail.com.

The 4th level Bard spell, Virtuoso Performance, allows a Bard to maintain two Bardic performances at once. Is there any other way to achieve this? The last line of the spell says, "Virtuoso performance does not stack with any other method of maintaining simultaneous bardic performances." which suggests that there are other ways to do this, but I haven't been able to find any yet. 3rd party or 3.5 sources are (generally) legal in my game, if that helps.

So I have been running my group through Carrion Crown. We finished the first module over a month ago and have not been able to continue on because 1 person has been missing from our group. Why do we need her? Because I made a side-quest for the party to go on that revolves around her character.

In the first module, The Barbarian got cursed and has not been able to remove it yet. Rather than just give the party a random Remove Curse scroll, I decided to come up with a little side-quest for them to go on. I wanted a little something for them to do between modules to push them to level 4 anyway, so I figured this would work out well, until The Barbarian stopped showing up to our games. It's not that she doesn't want to play, but Real Life has been getting in the way for the past several weeks and either she's out of town, has too much schoolwork (she is taking college summer classes) or is just too tired.

This week she is finally available so I told everyone I wanted to run this side-quest so we could get it out of the way. I didn't want to scrap it to continue the main plot, since I had spent a lot of time working on it and thought the story behind it was pretty cool.

One of the other guys was introducing a new character, The Summoner, to the group. I talked to him (rather extensively) about how to introduce his character to the group. We could make up a generic excuse for him to be around, which would have been easy, but he wanted to come up with a backstory tied to the story of the side-quest we were doing, which, as it turned out, was pretty dang cool once he and I worked on it for a while. We figured out how he was tied to the curse that The Barbarian needs to break, how he would hear about and meet up with the group, etc.

Then he bailed on me, at 2:15am the morning of the game. I had changed the plot of the side-quest pretty significantly to include his character (and I think, it was better than what I had originally come up with) and now he's not coming. I am not going to postpone this game anymore, so I have decided to shove an NPC in The Summoner's place to fit the gap in the story, but it still really sucks because now we will have to introduce his character a different way and I'm sure it won't be as interesting as what we had come up with (particularly because I am not going to tie it extensively into the plot of anything anymore, so the game does not hinge on him.)

This was more of a rant, than anything. If anyone has any advice or similar stories, feel free to share. I think I am just not going to do player-based storylines anymore, since my group can't get it together enough to show up when their characters are supposed to be featured.

The Snare spell reads:

This spell enables you to make a snare that functions as a magic trap. The snare can be made from any supple vine, a thong, or a rope. When you cast snare upon it, the cord-like object blends with its surroundings (DC 23 Perception check for a character with the trapfinding ability to locate). One end of the snare is tied in a loop that contracts around one or more of the limbs of any creature stepping inside the circle. If a strong and supple tree is nearby, the snare can be fastened to it. The spell causes the tree to bend, straightening when the loop is triggered, dealing 1d6 points of damage to the creature trapped and lifting it off the ground by the trapped limb or limbs. If no such tree is available, the cord-like object tightens around the creature, dealing no damage but causing it to be entangled.

The snare is magical. To escape, a trapped creature must make a DC 23 Escape Artist check or a DC 23 Strength check that is a full-round action. The snare has AC 7 and 5 hit points. A successful escape from the snare breaks the loop and ends the spell.

Highlighting mine, to emphasize my question: Can the trap made with this spell only be detected if a character has the trapfinding ability? Magical traps in general can be seen by anyone with a high enough Perception check, but only disabled if a character has trapfinding. However, the second highlighted line seems to indicate that a character has to have trapfinding just to see the snare.

Also, the Perception DC is weird. This is a Druid 3/Ranger 2 spell, and the DC to locate most magical traps is 25+spell level, so the DC should be 27/28, however the DC on this spell specifically says 23.

I am playing around with a new PFS-legal character and am interested in the Vivisectionist Alchemist, eventually going into Master Chymist. Of course, the question comes up as to whether the Master Chymist would advance the Vivisectionist's sneak attack or not. It seems like the general consensus for home games is "yes" but I'm wondering if it will be legal for PFS.

Would a Vivisectionist 7/Master Chymist 5 have +6d6 sneak attack (as a 12th level Vivisectionist) or only +4d6 sneak attack (as a 7th level Vivisectionist)?

I used Hero Labs to build a druid with a wolf companion, and according to it, my companion has all armor proficiency feats for free by taking the "Fighting" General Purpose Training Trick.

This seems...off...to me. I couldn't find anywhere else on the SRD or in the CRB that supported this. Can animal companions really get the armor proficiency feats this way (essentially for free), or are they actually supposed to use one (or more) of their feats to do so?

...and the only character WITH a wand of CLW.

I hear over and over that one of the first things EVERY character should buy, is a wand of CLW, even if your character can't use it, so that someone who can use it, can use it on you.

But no one in our PFS group seems to do that. They seem to rely on the classes that can use the wands to have them and use them, generously.

In a game I played in recently, we had a very small group. Only 4 people including the GM, so the GM was running an NPC. It was a 1-2 game and I was playing a level 2 Druid. The other players were a level 2 Magus and a level 2 Ninja, and the GM played the NPC level 1 Fighter.

I was the only healer, and the only person with a wand. I blew through almost 20 charges on it in one game.

I sort of feel like I should tell the other players something like, "You get 1 free charge from my wand and any cure spells I have prepared (which, as a Druid, is 0), if you want more healing than that, you will need to buy your own, including potions or your own wand."

On the other hand, my Druid is Neutral Good so I don't think she would deny healing to a severely beat up character or, worse, a dying character.

So what's a "healer" to do? Suck it up and have to buy a new wand every few sessions?

So, as anyone who has GMed HoH knows, there is not a lot of Ravengro Trust to go around for the PCs. So, before my group began, I sat down and made up a bunch of side-quests for them to do to help build their trust. Some of them are very...side-questy. What I mean is that they feel like side-quests and not really "natural" to the story; they're just sort of tacked on. I admit to being an MMO (WoW) player so it was hard for me to come up with quests that didn't feel too forced, but I think a couple of them were (and will be, since they haven't done them all yet) very, very interesting and added a lot to my game.

While the party was exploring Ravengro the day after the Professor's funeral, I had them overhear a couple of townsfolk talking about how Jorfa (the dwarf blacksmith) wasn't contributing to the local food pantry lately. Curious, the party went to the blacksmith and asked Jorfa about it. Naturally, she wouldn't talk to them but they bribed one of her apprentices enough to learn that she has a large garden and that she normally donates a lot of vegetables to the church, but that lately she hadn't been because supposedly something had been destroying her garden.

The PCs talked to Jorfa again and with a couple decent Diplomacy checks, managed to get her to agree to let them examine her garden. The Ranger successfully identified Brownie footprints so the group decided to stake out the garden over-night. They got Kendra to bake a pie and left it in the middle of the garden saying something like, "We mean you no harm, we wish to talk to you, please take this pie as a peace offering." They waited a little ways outside the garden that night and saw two brownies come out from under Jorfa's porch and find the pie and the note, and the party managed to talk to them. They found out that the brownies used to live in an old hollowed out tree outside of town, but that something had driven them away from their home and they holed up under Jorfa's house because she had an excellent garden. And they didn't talk to her or offer her anything in return because they were afraid she would kick them out, so they stayed hidden and came out only at night to take food from her garden. The PCs convinced the brownies to help Jorfa restore her garden and talk to her, and then told Jorfa the next morning about the brownies and now they all get along.

Meanwhile, the PCs went to find the brownies' old home and saw evidence of undead in the area. They tracked footprints to a nearby highway connecting Ravengro with the next town over, where they found a small cemetery and a bunch of risen skeletons/zombies. They also found an abandoned wagon along side the road that was FULL of a ton of useful items for them (a +1 mace, various potions and scrolls, a partially charged Wand of CLW, etc.) The ranger determined that there were horse tracks leading away from the wagon toward Ravengro and that they weren't very old, probably only a few days. The paladin and a few other members of the party thought that the owner of the wagon might have escaped to Ravengro but had to leave his wagon behind when the undead attacked; the CN barbarian was convinced that the owner of the wagon was one of the zombies they had to kill to get to it, and that all of the loot inside was rightfully theirs, even without checking in town for the owner. The roleplaying was excellent and I kind of thought the paladin and barbarian would come to blows, but the rest of the party convinced the barbarian to at least go back to town and see if they could find out anything about the wagon. They found an inventory list with the name of the merchant who owned the wagon so they at least had that.

Well, as it turns out the merchant was still alive. He got attacked on his way to Ravengro and managed to escape by cutting his horse free from the wagon an riding into town, but had to leave the wagon behind. He offered them 1 moderately priced item for free (they got a piece of MW armor) and 20% off anything else he had. The barbarian was kind of pissed, but I had plans that if they kept the merchant's stuff even after finding him, their trust would drop so low that they would get railroaded out of town. Of course, she didn't know that...but I hinted at it out of character after that session.

Back to Jorfa. I specifically picked her for the brownie incident because I wanted the PCs to get to know her a little bit, because I am planning a pretty big encounter involving her soon. It hasn't come up yet, but...I am planning for a party of dwarves to come looking for her for the crimes she committed in the past. In her description in the book, it says she abandoned a patrol when she was part of a dwarven army and fled into Ustalov and ended up in Ravengro, but it never really gets any more detailed than that, and I didn't want to leave it at that. So I am planning for the brother of one of the other dwarves in her patrol, who was killed when she abandoned her post, to finally track her down and demand she return with him to their homelands to stand trial. Of course, the citizens of Ravengro (and probably at least a few of the PCs) will have a big problem with this. But, if they stand up for her and end up fighting the dwarves, they could have a bounty on their heads later on (and my paladin may have some code of conduct issues if he fights a band of lawful dwarves.) I am eager to see how the situation will go down and if the group can come up with a diplomatic solution to appease everyone (I honestly am not sure what that solution would be, but my group is very inventive so I would not be surprised if they come up with something on the spot.)

The whole brownie/abandoned wagon side story went really, really well and flowed smoothly into my game. My group had done a couple of other little side-quests before that, which were obviously side-quests and my players knew I had tacked them on, but my husband (the paladin) was very surprised when I told him that the brownie/abandoned wagon quests were ones I had made up. He thought they were part of the module. They played them out well enough too, to earn some trust from the townsfolk. Jorfa stood up for them during the town hall meeting and helped them evacuate everyone when the building caught on fire, and I might even have her become an NPC hireling for them if they either defend her from the dwarven party, or find a diplomatic solution to avoid her getting arrested.

Another thread got me thinking about this and I didn't want to derail that one, so here we are.

I'm curious as to how everyone handles nightly watches. In the other thread, people were talking about everyone in the party taking only 2 hour watches. I find this odd since characters need 8 hours of rest (at least to not be fatigued, per the fatigued rules) and with a party of 4, if each character takes a 2 hour watch, everyone is only getting 6 hours of rest. And arcane casters need 8 hours of rest to get their spells back (plus extra, if the 8 hours is not consecutive.) So how does a party (at least, a party of 4) get by with each person only taking 2 hours of watch?

In my group, we rest a total of 12 hours and everyone takes a 4 hour watch. If we have more than 3 people (which is almost always) we'll double up certain watch slots. We also try to let arcane casters not take the middle watch, since being awake in the middle of their rest cycle will add to the amount of time they need to prepare spells.

My husband and I have a regular gaming group that currently consists of 8(!) people. For a while, one of the other guys in the group was running Serpent's Skull. We got close to the end of the 2nd part when the GM decided to take a break and re-write the rest of the campaign, since the modules as written are supposedly pretty...lackluster. In the meantime, my husband has been running some random 3.5 scenarios that he converted to Pathfinder as filler.

However, in the couple months it's been since we stopped Serpent's Skull, we've gained several new players and the old GM doesn't want to GM with that many people so we're going to do something else instead. That's all well and good.

The characters my husband and I were playing in Serpent's Skull, though, were two of our favorites, and we don't want to just abandon them. The game we're going to be running next with our big group is not Pathfinder or even the right genre so there's no chance of converting them. So we thought we'd try running some 2-man games, with one of us GMing and both of us playing our old PCs.

Of course, this poses its own unique challenge, so I ask the Paizo community: Does anyone have any good modules for 2 PCs, or any advice for modifying modules for 2 PCs?

For reference, we are both level 6. I am an elven witch and he is a human cleric going for holy vindicator. For a 2-man group, we are pretty balanced; I specialize in debuffs and crowd-control while he specializes in buffs and meleeing with a limited amount of healing (he is chaotic neutral and channels negative energy.) I do not think we'd do well against undead; most of my spells and hexes would not affect them, and he has no way to channel positive energy against them. Aside from that, I think most things are fair game.

Thanks in advance. :)

So I have an evil witch who worships Calistria. Can she cast Waters of Lamashtu, or can only casters who worship Lamashtu use that spell? It doesn't say anything in the spell description, I just want to make sure I didn't miss something somewhere.

I was under the impression that to get a Wand of Cure Light Wounds (or any 1st level wand) as early as possible, you HAD to spend 2 PA to get it. You could not spend gp, unless/until you get to 9 PA. The Guide says that you can buy +1 weapons, +1 armor, +1 shields, 0-1 level potions, 0-1 level scrolls, and 0-1 level oils at any time. It does not say that you can buy 0-1 level wands at any time and since 1st level wands cost 750gp, you'd need at least 9 PA before you can buy them with gp.

Right?

We had some discussion about this at a game I was in this past weekend. One of the players has GMed a lot and he was the one saying that you do NOT need 9PA to buy a wand of CLW.

Played a scenario this weekend with a guy who was quite adamant about my character not completing her faction mission. I will admit that he was a new player (new to PFS, not to roleplaying) so I can cut him some slack there, but I really want to know how to handle this kind of situation. I can't really get into the details without spoiling some of the story, so see below if you've played Delirium's Tangle:

Sorta last minute, I know, but it recently came to my and my husband's attention that there is a group who shows up at A-Kon every year wanting to play PFS but no GM to run a game. So, we're trying to get a game or two together sometime during the con. We're thinking Friday night (around 7-8pm) but we're wondering when people would want to play. The tabletop gaming room is pretty full; all of the reserve-able tables are taken for the whole weekend, and there are a few first come, first serve tables, but there's no way to know when we'd be able to get one.

So, is anyone here interested, and if so, when would you be available?

So, I'm going to my first ever Pathfinder Society game tomorrow. I've played Pathfinder since it came out, and 3.5 before that, but have never played in Org Play. We also always roll for stats when we play with my home group, so the whole point buy system is new to me (I know how it works, just never actually used it before.)

I'm wondering how to best allocate my points for a Human Oracle. Obviously I want a high CHA; is it worth it to get it up to 18, and then put the +2 for being human into it to get it to 20 right away? Also, I want to be able to melee so I want a decent Strength.

Right now I've tentatively got:

STR 14
DEX 12
CON 12
INT 10
WIS 10
CHA 16
(+2 for being Human not added yet)

I have 1 point left over to use.

Is there a good dump stat? Should I dump Int? I play a Rogue in our homegame so I'm sort of set in the mindset of more skillpoints = awesome (my Rogue gets 11/level.)

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

So, I ran a fairly long Call of Cthulhu game once before. During it, I made lots of hand-outs and props for my players. Puzzle pieces, puzzle boxes, maps, star charts, etc. I took a number of art and design classes in high school and college, so I'm pretty decent at drawing and designing stuff. And I make jewelry out of polymer clay for a living, so I can sculpt things like puzzle pieces, etc.

I'm thinking of making an actual planchette for my players to use, after they find the planchette in the hidden crypt. I'd probably also make something like a ouija board for them to use the planchette with. The planchette would be pretty simple to make out of polymer clay, just a triange/oval/heart-shaped flat piece of clay with a hole in the center, and perhaps some symbols or runes carved around the edges. The ouija "board" I would probably make out of paper, either by printing the letters using a fancy font, or, if I got really ambitious, using some form of calligraphy to hand-draw the letters and some symbols. I'd then dye/stain the paper, probably with tea or coffee, and rip/burn the edges to make it look worn. Then when the PCs want to use the planchette, I'd have the player(s) set up the ouija board with them on one side and me on the other, and me directing the planchette to spell out answers as they ask questions.

What do you guys think? Would you, as players, be interested in props like this? Are there any other props in the Haunting of Harrowstone that you'd be interested in seeing? The planchette was the first and foremost one that stood out in my mind, although I might do something with the 5 criminals' cursed items (like making the holy symbol necklaces that are associated with Father Charlatan, although the players wouldn't be able to interact with that quite like they would the planchette.)

We have a good group of 5 people (1 GM + 4 Players, we alternate who GMs every 4-6 weeks or so) except for one person. I'll call this person "K".

Background info: K is about 30 years old and is not new to roleplaying. He's been in our group for a good 4 years now, and supposedly played D&D 3.0/3.5 in college before he joined our group. We play Pathfinder every Sunday at noon. We very rarely deviate from this schedule and when we do change the day or time, it's usually a group decision and everyone is aware of the change well in advance. We currently have two campaigns that we alternate between: Campaign "A" (party level 8) and Campaign "B" (party level 4.) We alternate between playing at my house, and the house of one of our other members.

Here are a few things that K does that have offended me or other members of our group, or are just generally annoying:

-He is always late (not just to our gaming sessions, but to everything in life.) If we're lucky, he'll show up 45 minutes late. He's often an hour late, and it's not uncommon for him to be 1.5-2 hours late. We have all learned to start without him, as soon as the rest of the group is available (usually by about 12:15.)

-He rarely participates. He is, frankly, a terrible role player. Getting him to talk "in character" is like pulling teeth (although he's perfectly happy making snarky remarks about what our characters are doing.) He spends about 90% of our gaming sessions playing on his phone, usually watching videos on YouTube or playing games. He used to interrupt the group with "Hey guys, you have to see this video!" and then try to show the rest of us a 10:00min video on his phone. We managed to put a stop to that, and now he just plays with his phone until someone gets his attention to tell him we're in combat, or ask him what his character's doing.

-When he DOES participate, he's utterly useless. Cases in point:

In Campaign A, he plays a neutral good cleric of Sarenrae. His domains are Fire and Healing, which personally I think says enough since he could have picked Glory and he didn't...but I digress. For his domain spells, he always picks the Healing domain spells, and ignores his Fire domain spells (remember, he's a GOOD cleric...so he can spontaneously cast Cure spells.) He also rarely prepares anything except Cure spells, Restoration spells, and Remove (Poison/Curse/Disease/whatever) spells. He has obviously never looked over the cleric spell list and when someone else suggests a spell that he could use that would be useful, he usually responds with, "Well, I GUESS I could prepare that," or "Do you want me to prepare that for TOMORROW?" as if it's a big inconvenience for him to prepare something besides what he normally prepares. He doesn't have a magical weapon, and refuses to participate directly in combat; he usually hides in a corner and channels positive energy to heal the party, doesn't buff/debuff, and if an enemy approaches and starts attacking him, he takes total defense until someone else in the group can save him.

In Campaign B, he played a half-orc Barbarian. In this particular campaign, we started at level 1 with basically no equipment. We were able to make some makeshift weapons like clubs, but until we got some "real" weapons starting at level 2-3, our Barbarian would stand behind the rest of the group and throw rocks at the enemies. He didn't rage and would turn tail and run if the enemies started getting into melee combat range.

-He doesn't know the rules very well at all, and argues with the GM when something is inconvenient for him. Case in point: Last week, his cleric cast Summon Monster for the very first time ever, and was summoning a Lantern Archon. The GM said the summoned creature would appear on the cleric's next turn. K grabbed a rule book, turned to the description of Summon Monster, and said, "But it says, "The creature acts IMMEDIATELY on the caster's turn!"" GM said, "Look at the casting time...it's 1 round." K responds, "But that doesn't make any sense! That's confusing! It looks like it should appear on the same turn that I start casting it!" When the GM said no, K slammed the book shut, uttered a deep sigh, and said, "Okay, fine, whatever, but I still don't think that makes sense."

-He gets completely butthurt and offended when anything bad happens to his character. He frequently does the whole dramatic sigh followed by "Okay, fine, whatever" in a sarcastic tone when anything from failing a skill check to getting hit during combat occurs. But the most notable example is during the last session of Campaign B, when we were up against the BBG. Long story short, my character put K's character to sleep, and one of the BBG's mooks coup de graced him, he failed his save, and his character died. This happened about an hour after we had started playing, and we normally play for 4-6 hours, so it was still early in the afternoon and we had a ways to go. Now, the way we handle a character dying is basically, if you have no means to bring your character back to life (which we didn't, at this point) then you can roll a new character that will start at the same level as the rest of the party. Most of us are perfectly happy with this rule, and we don't usually care about having our characters raised; we all have other character concepts as backups and we like rolling characters, and it's not like our GMs are so brutal that we die every other week. Our GM told K he could start making a new character while the rest of us finished this encounter, and that K could be back in the group in no time. Did K take a rule book and start making a new character? No. Did he say, "Okay, this sucks, I think I'll take the afternoon off and see you guys next week." No. No, K, in the ultimate hissy fit, grabbed his bag, marched over to the couch, plopped down, and started playing his Nintendo DS in moody silence. He stayed there for about an hour, at which point he came back to the table, made a nasty remark to me about how I'd killed his character, and continued playing his DS, occasionally throwing out other nasty comments to me or the group, for 3 hours while we kept playing.

If I had been hosting, I would have tossed him out on his a$$, but since we were at someone else's house, I didn't feel right about telling him to leave, and our host didn't do anything about it himself.

Okay, enough about how annoying K is. After the whole ordeal with his Barbarian dying and him being such a jerk about it, I resolved that I would not invite him to the next game that I GM. Well, I'm going to be GMing Carrion Crown this summer, and my resolve is being tested: Do I just invite him, or do I boot him?

I really want to boot him, or rather, just not invite him (we usually send out group emails every week confirming the time/location and that everyone can make it, so I'd just take his email off our list.) Here's my conundrum. K works with two of our other members, one of whom is my husband. K and my husband work very closely together at work, and there is not a day when my husband doesn't have to see and talk to K. Therefore, if I do boot him/stop inviting him, I'm sure my husband is never going to hear the end of it at work and K will probably whine, complain, etc. to him.

My husband is all for getting rid of him as he finds K just as aggravating and annoying as I do, and I KNOW the rest of the group is not exactly thrilled to have him along, but their general opinion is, "Well, he's not hurting anything, he just sits there and plays with his phone, and he likes hanging out with us, so just let him stay." I disagree and think that he does rather hurt the group by showing up late and interrupting us, making nasty remarks when something happens to his characters, etc. Point is, I don't have much support in my decision to boot him.

So I'm really wondering what to do. All my personal feelings aside, I really don't think he'd fit into Carrion Crown well anyway, since CC is rather roleplaying-focused and skill check-heavy, neither of which K is good at. If someone has a suggestion for how to deal with him without booting him, or what the best way to approach booting him without major repercussions on my husband's end, I'd really love to hear it.

Sorry if this has been asked/covered before, I skimmed the topics and didn't see anything like this that stood out.

I'm going to be GMing Carrion Crown for my gaming group starting in a few weeks. I just started reading over The Haunting of Harrowstone and it looks fantastic, it's definitely my kind of story. I love mystery/horror settings.

My husband (who's in my gaming group and will be one of my players) was telling me about a Ravenloft campaign he ran with 3.5 rules a long time ago, before we got married. In it, he used rules for Taint, which was basically a form of insanity. I've run a couple of Call of Cthulhu games and used various Insanity systems and this one is somewhat similar but tailored for a d20 system. Rules for Taint are found in the Heroes of Horror book, for anyone who's familiar with it.

As he was describing the Ravenloft campaign and the Taint rules, it occurred to me that they might be a fun addition to the Carrion Crown campaign. Now, I've only read about 18 pages into The Haunting so maybe they've already implemented something like this and I just haven't gotten to it yet. If not, I'm wondering what those of you who have run or are running the campaign would think.

Basically, Taint can manifest itself either physically (called corruption) or mentally (called depravity.) Characters who gain corruption gain certain physical disadvantages, such as a penalty to Perception checks due to ear scabs, or a penalty to Handle Animal and Ride checks due to a decaying stench that surrounds you. Characters who gain depravity gain certain mental drawbacks, such as having a mild phobia (must succeed on a Will save or be shaken whenever you encounter the object of the phobia) or being disoriented (if surprised at the start of battle, you spend the first round dazed.)

Taint can be gained by casting certain forbidden, evil magic; entering and/or spending prolonged periods of time in evil or haunted places (such as Harrowstone, in this case); or taking too long to complete a quest. Taint can also be resisted by successful Fort (for corruption) or Will (for depravity) saves, and it can be removed with certain spells or doing certain good deeds, but it's rather difficult to get rid of once you have it.

I would probably go easy on them in this first module, since the party starts out at level 1. There would probably be Taint for entering Harrowstone and if they spend the night in Harrowstone, and maybe if they take longer than a month to complete the module. (again, I haven't read through the whole thing yet, so I haven't determined exactly when and how Taint would be applied.)

What do you guys think?

So, I'm wondering what the next best advancements for my rogue are. I actually play a Sniper, one of the Rogue archetypes that increases the range of Sneak Attack when using bows/ranged weapons (my GM also allows this bonus to apply to all the feats I have that normally have a 30ft range, so I can currently SA, with Point-Blank Shot effect, from 50ft away.) I sometimes regret playing a ranged rogue, since I don't get my SA bonus as often as I'd like, but then again, the rest of the party currently consists of a gunslinger, a spell-focused druid, an archery ranger, and a cleric who refuses to enter melee combat, so I wouldn't have a flanking buddy most of the time even if I was a melee rogue.

Anyway, here's my build:

Half-Elf Rogue6/Ranger2

Str: 16
Dex: 22
Con: 12
Int: 16
Wis: 10
Cha: 10

Notable skills: Acrobatics +16, Stealth +22, UMD +16
Talents: Fast Stealth, Expert Leaper, Trap Finder
Feats: Point-Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Stabbing Shot, Rapid Shot, Deadly Aim
Notable items: +2 Shocking Composite Longbow (+3 Str Bonus), Slippers of Spiderclimbing (gives me climb speed 20ft 10minutes/day), wand of grease, wand of lightning bolts, wand of scorching ray, wand of shatter, wand of cure light, various scrolls including haste, fly, teleport, true strike, gravity bow, invisibility, see invisibility.

I'm really thinking about taking a level in Fighter when I hit level 9, for the bonus feat. My GM will allow me to take a feat from the 3.5 Complete Warrior called Improved Rapid Shot, which removes the -2 penalty to attack rolls when using Rapid Shot. I would take that for being level 9, and Manyshot as my Fighter Bonus Feat. That way I would get one attack at +7 that fires 2 arrows (Manyshot), a second attack at +7 (the second shot from Rapid Shot), and one attack at +2 (bonuses obviously don't include Dex, PBS, my magical bow, or the penalty if I use DA.) Even without Sneak Attack damage, that's still pretty good, if I manage to hit with the first two attacks.

As an aside, does anyone know if the +1d6 electrical damage from my shocking bow would apply to both arrows when using Manyshot? The feat says that precision-based damage, such as SA, is only applied once if Manyshot hits, but is shocking/flaming/icy/etc considered precision-based?

I'm also wondering what rogue talent to take next, once I get high enough level to take one. I sort of like the idea of taking minor magic/major magic, and getting Resistance (my Will save is in the gutter, at only +2) and True Strike. Then again, scrolls of True Strike are only 25gp and my UMD score is high enough that I almost never fail using a low level scroll. I also thought about taking Bleeding Attack, since by the time I get another talent, my SA bonus will be at +4d6 so I'll do 4 bleed damage when I do manage to land a SA.

I also REALLY want to find a way to land my Sneak Attack more consistently, so if anyone has any suggestions for that, I'm all ears. I'm probably going to pick up a scroll of greater invis next time we play, but obviously that's one time use only. My GM and I priced an item like a ring of greater invis 1/day, which would cost around 10,000gp to buy, I think, and I don't even start to have that much gp laying around. And the awesome bow that I have, I just got last time we played, from an enemy we've been hunting for a few weeks now. So my GM isn't exactly inclined to give me any more gifts any time soon.

So, suggestions, recommendations? Let me know if there are any important stats I forgot to include.

Greetings. My Pathfinder group currently has 5 dedicated players, although one of our strongest players is moving in August and one of the other players is not a strong role player. We are looking for 1-2 dedicated, responsible, mature players to join our group. We all range in age from 27-35 and we would not be opposed to younger members (21+ please) as long as you are mature. Two of us take turns hosting at our houses, we are both located in the northwest part of town. We meet every Sunday at noon, usually until 5-6pm. Occasionally we will meet on Saturdays or holidays but 98% of the time we play Sunday afternoons. We are a pretty laid back group and like both roleplaying and dungeon crawling, and to just generally have fun.

If you are interested in joining, please let me know and we can arrange for a meet and greet.

Is there a rule somewhere that would allow a PC to force someone to drink something? For example, if you have an enemy grappled and pinned, could you (or an ally) force their mouth open and make them drink a vial of poison?