LBHills's page

I'm pretty sure he meant multiple characters, not players.

I hope!

We're all tired of fighting giant rats. Bring on the pygmy elephants!

I don't advise a TPK.

But I do want to let Valiant know - if he hasn't figured this out already - that the deck of many things is in the wrong chapter. It should be in Hazards, not Magic Items. Those little imaginary cards have been shattering campaigns, and sometimes breaking up gaming groups, for 40 years now.

Referring to the 10th level version of the ritual (CRB 413), I note that the character is in suspended animation, far beneath the surface of the ground, 'out of tune with reality', and invisible to divination. The character can't act, so the ordinarily-super-awesome "know any answer" ability sadly can't help. The only forms of rescue are (1) finding a way to do the freedom ritual as a 10th-level spell, probably by doing a favor for a high level NPC, or (2) direct divine intervention - I hate even having to recommend it, but owing a huge debt to a deity is not as miserable as having the character indefinitely out of play.

Besmara: I bet I'm not the goddess you expected to save you, eh? I hear twelve is the usual number for divinely ordained labors - shall we get started?

You could also make it a plot point and cannibalize the drive from an old Shory city.

Or something similar.

Used Castle Salesman: Is flying castle. Cheap!
Rich PC: I was thinking something with turrets, not so... pyramidal...
Used Castle Salesman: No, no, is not haunted pyramid! Is castle!
Rich PC: Those aren't even windows! They're... they're stickers!
Used 'Castle' Salesman: Is castle! Not cursed at all! Very cheap.

I feel that if the castle is merely hovering, it's just an unusually placed headquarters and the PCs shouldn't be charged if they have already taken the trouble of clearing out the prior occupants and reassuring any local kings/mayors that they won't be using it as an artillery base.

Whereas if it can move (under PC control, that is, not just drifting with the wind), you'd want to look at the highest flying vehicle price and multiply it generously, based on its speed, amount of storage space, and potential to destroy entire adventures through saturation bombardment. It could become a real pain in the butt to the GM.

Well, the first 10 years of D&D were full of genre-mixing. Attempts to enforce genre only came in the mid-eighties, after ten years of shooting robots* with six-shooters*, using the power armor you found in a wrecked starship* to fight King Kong*, and discovering to your horror that the Mad Hatter and March Hare were 8th-level monks*.

*: Module DA3, City of the Gods
*: 1st Ed DMG appendices discussing crossovers with the BOOT HILL game
*: Module C3, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
*: Module WG7, Isle of the Ape
*: Module EX1, Dungeonland

...I think I just figured out what inspired 'Samurai Jack'.

...as a cleric you're basically a servant to your deity's edicts, which already kind of sucks but then when you die you go from servant to full on slave, it seems... all your power aside from basic class things like hp actually belongs to someone else. You have power not because you personally are powerful but because your god is powerful... while I get why people in universe would worship then... I don't get why someone would want to make a character who does so.

Starting with your first point: That's a bit reversed. Nobody on Golarion is born a cleric. They accept the edicts of their deity freely, because they believe in them. And then they decide to become a cleric. It only seems 'restricted' because we create characters that have already made all those early choices in life.

I'm not sure what 'you go from servant to full on slave' means at all. As far as I know, a cleric's afterlife works much the same as the afterlife of any other class. So I'll set that one aside.

Your third point is that clerics only have their power 'on loan'. That's valid. But you're only seeing the downside, not the upside. Unless you deliberately set up your PC to fail, your deity's trust is a resource that can never be taken from you. When we GMs deprive the players of all their toys (by robbery, shipwreck, jailing, whatever) we have to plan for the simple fact that the cleric will bounce back up, fast. That 'loaned' power is insurance.

As for why people might want to prefer clerics - it's a combination of elements. Some people enjoy the moral or ethical aspects, some people enjoy the combination of weapons and magic, some are in it for the healing. I've run several because a cleric comes with built-in 'immersion' - you instantly have links to the setting, you're automatically in a cool club, and - unlike RL - you actually like your boss.

Players aren't generally interested in rules that give them less agency.

Left Leg Guy: Let's use our full movement speed this turn!
Head Guy: Who gave you a window? I'm in charge here.
Right Leg Guy: I'm with you, brother! RUN FOR IT! Fight the power!
Enemies: Where's he going??

A similar argument was put forth during the D&D Satanism scare of the mid-eighties. Church groups who regarded Satan as a real and active threat were worried that their children would embrace demonology because D&D had demons in it.

That 'scare' was largely manufactured outrage so that the religious would keep tuning into The 700 Club. Many devout parents lost a great deal of their concern when they observed a few games in play and realized that the point of putting evil monsters in the game was so that the players could engage in guilt-free simulated violence.

So - to the point - if including the W-----o in an adventure would make anybody at the table uncomfortable, excluding it is a good GM decision. But you probably shouldn't expect the general Paizo community to razor-blade that page out of their Bestiary. Their comfort level is theirs to decide.

Ultimate Campaign has rules for research (as part of an adventure). Assuming your GM uses those rules, you could spend your days between ghost attacks trying to scrape together enough Research Points to learn who it is and how they died - that'll usually be a good start.

If your group uses Occult Adventures, you may want to have a look there for spells that affect haunts/ghosts. An NPC spiritualist might be able to make peaceful contact and get some questions answered.

...I would have loved to hear about, say, some of the gods of the skittermanders...

All I know about Skittermander Heaven is that anybody else who happens to end up there considers it a hell.

I'd like to see a product describing the religious scene in Starfinder. We tend to see more attention on the tech end, and less on the fantasy end of this space opera.

1. The CRB has a mere short passage about each of the 'surviving' gods. More could be told - to say nothing of explaining which of the missing are really missing, and which are simply reduced to minor faiths, long dead, or in stranger situations.

2. Who heads these churches in the Pact Worlds? How are they organized? Some churches have their own fleets - how do the rest attend to their flocks on many worlds? Which churches are sending out missionaries or armies of zealots?

3. And how have things changed in the Outer Planes? Which of those realms have adopted mortal technology, rejected it, or transformed it to meet their own needs? How are the legions of Nirvana armed now, and are the contracts in Hell kept in digital storage? What changes has the Gap made in their politics and their goals?

Personally I think it'd be hilarious if the Flumph Fleet was not only numerous, but more technically advanced than the other Starfinder races.

Science Officer: Captain, we have four Flumph destroyers materializing behind us.
Captain: Holy-! Okay people, everybody think Lawful Good thoughts. Remember, their sensors can read minds!

Yqatuba - Up until AD&D 2nd Edition, the thicknesses of earth/stone/lead was only specified for spells that detected magic - not divination spells in general. Enchanted items had a 'dweomer' - as you said, a field of "radiation" that was ordinarily harmless and imperceptible. So your analogy holds up pretty well with that model.

When 3rd Edition D&D was designed, they decided to extend the 'blocking' qualities of matter so that all divination spells were affected. Since then, I think of the divination spells more like active sonar, not Geiger counters - any divination spell sends out pulses of magic, which only return if they make contact with whatever they're seeking before they reach the range limit (or are blocked by the matter in their way).

Personally I still regard lead's great density as the reason for it being the most effective material at blocking divination. But that's just head-canon: I don't think the rules as written ever gave a reason.

If you want the characters to feel attached to the starting location (wherever you decide it to be), you may want to start the campaign by telling the players that they've inherited shares in a piece of property.

It could be anything from a farm with orchards or pastures, to a storefront. That gives the PCs a reason to gather, and to form a team: it also allows you to develop a few NPCs - neighbors or delivery people that can regularly interact with the players.

They're probably not for sensing doorways...

I agree with several other posters - relics are about thematic powers, and their combat powers needed to be distinct. If the damage is a half-notch behind that done by a spellcaster with a similar cantrip, where's the harm? It keeps your party's Thunder Wizard from feeling like she's being upstaged by your Concertina of Chaos (or whatever).

New relic themes and powers are bound to pop up in future PF2 publications, too, so it may be a bit too early to make a general conclusion based on a specific example.

Behold the mustache of peril!

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-ad-d-2e-monstrous-compend ium-appendix-vol-ii.766602/page-18

Some (not all) males having facial hair was specified in the earliest monster descriptions. However, when the drow were borrowed for the Forgotten Realms (in, what, 1984? I think?) they appear to have lost this amazing superpower. In exchange, they seem to have gained the ability to make a lot of money for their publisher.

Do not be alarmed! Dark elves have a special exemption. Part of the standard boilerplate in every demonic pact is "If male, must grow a goatee, no exceptions."

Here's some gamer trivia for you: the original male drow, back in the days of Descent into the Depths of the Earth / Vault of the Drow, almost always had sideburns and mustaches. We're talking the big, luxuriant kinds of mustaches that you grow when you intend to fight crime, win the disco competition, or co-star in naughty films.

But even then, no beards.

You have a definite point: it doesn't make a lot of sense for Broken Rock to have been 'undiscovered' for 319+ years... but all the text tells us is that 'only Free Captains and those they vouch for know the exact location of Broken Rock.'

The text doesn't mention how this secret is guarded in a world where hackers, telepathy, charm spells and interrogation drugs are all found. Here are some rough stabs at 'how the secret is kept', although I'm sure there are other possibilities:

1. Every time any ship's computer receives a navigation update, the locations of forty asteroids in the Diaspora are entered incorrectly, so that a course set for any of them ends up at an entirely different asteroid. One of these is Broken Rock: the others are chosen at random. This has escaped notice because there are tens of thousands of rocks in the Diaspora and nobody in authority has the spare ships to waste on double-checking that every pebble is still where the computer says it is. (The Free Captains may be using hackers, or simply paying bribes to the right people in the companies that provide navigation software.)

2. Even Free Captains don't get told where Broken Rock is - just to fly to a rendezvous point where a pilot will be transferred to their ship and complete the flight. (Who meets them at the rendezvous, how that pilot determines whether they're faking, and how these pilots' absolute loyalty and silence are ensured are all left up to you.)

3. The goddess Besmara doesn't mention it, but Broken Rock is shrouded by her divine protection. There's some sense to this: Broken Rock is the center of her worship in the Pact Worlds (just as Nchak is for the goddess Hylax). Without a worshipper of Besmara aboard who is actively looking for Broken Rock, a ship would simply fly on by, regarding that large asteroid with all the activity on and around it as 'not interesting'.

When you mention playing 'from the Azlanti point of view,' I'm reminded of something that came up in my campaign, which may be useful to other GMs who want to use the Star Empire in their games.

We (as players) know that nobody knows why Golarion was "edited out" of the SF universe. But the Azlanti, from their human supremacist point of view, probably regard the removal of Golarion as an attempt by aliens (of some kind) to destroy humanity - basically a second, bigger, more successful Earthfall. From that point of view, it's only a matter of time before these secret enemies try to hit the Azlanti Star Empire too.

If you as a GM go with that, the Azlanti won't just be some threat off in the Vast: they'll have secret agents all over the Pact Worlds, trying to identify the destroyers of Golarion. They'll have spy drones, human agents, carefully 'conditioned' androids, hired guns, etc.

If you decide the Azlanti aren't the main threat in your campaign, they might be red herrings, or allies of convenience. Or they might claim neutrality and wait for the perfect moment to double-cross both sides.