Touc, on "that Excel thing [you] mentioned," I tried following that link, but it glitched on the receiving end, and even they don't know what happened. :-/ I do have Dropbox, but I doubt it even got to the point of my being able to download anything? :( LB
Good to have some free 2025 Skull and Shackles Campaign Materials stuff out there, Touc, drsparnum, and DM_aka_Dudemeister. ;) Amen! :D Where does Salvage Operation come from, again? And if it's now out of print, is there anything similar you can recommend? LB
Hey, as long as no one's allergic to squid on board (/raising_hand), they should be fine. :) And I hear that poor Fishguts is actually quite the artiste with ingredients... :) (No, our version does not -- insult -- the ingredients, just to get back at his tormentors; if he has nothing else, he has his culinary pride. And his chickens.) LB
O.M.G! :D Bless your sweet butt to Besmara, me lad! :D Here I was, a mere Level 2 GM, trying to run six characters, run by four Level 99-100 players, through this mess in Part 1 (usually, I'm among the 99-100 player chorale meself, but they're all like Level 99-100 GMs as well. Luckily, they're very nice, and we've all been gaming since the 70s and together since the 80s. Very forgiving, but only to a point...). "Sandboxes" can be my most favorite thing to play in, and my LEAST favorite to run. I'm tearing my hair out, and I vaguely remembered seeing YOUR POST specifically, somewhere...taken awhile to find it. But, THANK YOU! :D You may just have saved the day! :D LB P.S. One of my biggest bugaboos was in convincing my 25 point build PCs that no, they can't just take over the Wormwood right now (for one thing, they have no weapons beyond rigging tools and maybe sail needles and no armor; all of that stuff of theirs is in the ARMORY, not the Quartermaster's store (there's no armor or weapons in the Store at all; that's not where that stuff belongs, but at least one of them got almost all his other gear back by dealing with Grok)), so what I need is more encounters, preferably showing off how bad-arsed the NPC officers are, rather graphically. I'll see what I can find...but thanks again for suggestions like that, and the whole "blow off days when nothing's going on" bit in general! :D --LB
In my game, we recently ran across a problem with these cantrips. According to Jason, because they are "rare cantrips," they don't automatically become available to casters who gain access to all cantrips when they gain first level spells. But how does that apply to sorcerors, who only have a limited number of cantrips that they can know? Taken explicitly, Jason's wording seems to suggest that a 1st level sorceror, at character creation, could just as easily choose one of these special cantrips as they could a standard one, and that's how my player is interpreting it. To me, though, it seems that the intention is that there is supposed to be a more meaty story to how they obtained these cantrips, as opposed to the standard, "I'm a sorceror, I can choose four cantrips, and I want this to be one of them." It seems to me that the intention is for these to be akin to quest items, something that is to be found in-game, either by finding it in some obscure text, or finding an experienced caster who knows the cantrips and can teach them to you, or in the case of a sorceror, finding some place where their connection to whatever bloodline triggers the ancestral memory of the spell is unusually strong, such as a place infested with undead for a sorceror with an undead bloodline. Does it seem to anyone else to be a bit of a cheat to just simply allow a newly created sorceror to have one of these special cantrips right out the gate? In our games, with our groups of GMs/players, we let Sorcerers find scrolls of spells they don't have, but could learn someday (i.e., by swapping out spells when they get that chance, or more often if they have the Arcane bloodline). They get their favorite Wizard to make a copy of it, just in case, so they don't nuke the scroll in trying to learn it (and maybe "pay" him in the chance to copy a copy of the copy into his spellbook?). So, no, it wouldn't have to just be a matter of being in the right place at the right time even for a Sorcerer, if it were on some "moldering old scroll" in a "forgotten library." Arcane casters have their own forms of treasure, yeah? ;-> All the more reason to go poking about in old ruins! :D
Awww, I had Jolt pegged as an evocation spell.It absolutely should be. I'd agree with that, but someone later suggested it's Transmutation since you're rubbing air molecules together 'til they "catch on fire" (i.e., spark due to static electricity). At any rate, the d20pfsrd.com folks have it as Transmutation, so maybe they agree?
I'm surprised it's only sorcerer/wizard. Several of these make thematic sense for both druids (drench, breeze, jolt) and witches (drench, penumbra). Well, heck; if The Powers don't want them any more (sigh; poor Misfit Spells! :-/), then by all means, tweak them as you want in your games. :) I intend to; I can see them coming in handy. :)
If clothing isn't free encumbrance anymore, there is an obvious solution. ROFLMAO!!! :D The oots0029 I recall, but for some odd reason, I hadn't remembered the previous four... X-D LB
Muleback cords take up a Shoulder slot. You can either have that or a Cloak, apparently. :-/ But isn't there a Feat or something like that, that can help? Right now, we're a low-level party (not even in the high single digits yet!), out in the middle of FREAKIN' NOWHERE, with no MagicMart or the equivalent to buy said goodies at. X-P LB
Very cool start! Just one little kvetch:
Shouldn't that be bronze instead of steel if we're talking about the usual metal used? ;-> And yeah, the use of iron definitely depended, often, on what you had available where you were. From what I understand, Chinese iron was so awful on such a regular basis ([and still is, to this day] they'd tried an Iron Age not long after everyone else, but quickly went back to bronze for quite awhile), and it was so much easier to simply smelt and mold things like 1,000,000 arrow or crossbow bolt heads out of bronze, for example, that they stayed with bronze much longer than anyone else and did amazing things with it. I've also heard that in the sub-Saharan empires of Africa, they had copper, but hardly any tin (Egypt was well-placed to send expeditions to the tin miners, or at least trade with others in the Fertile Crescent for it), so they basically went from the Stone Age to the Copper Age (very briefly, if at all, since copper weapons sucked without tin to harden them) right to the Iron Age, probably before anyone else on the planet (some sources think as early as the 3rd millennium BC). Inter-kingdom rivalries probably prevented a lot of "let's mount an expedition to sweep up the Nile or the coasts and nuke everyone else" fun during the Bronze Age for everyone else (and Nubia actually had quite a Bronze Age, since they traded a lot with the Egyptians). One attribution of the collapse of the Bronze Age was a temporary shortage of tin (or maybe just access to it; the volcanic eruption of Thera [Atlantis? ;->] around 1300 BC kind of threw everyone off), making people look more to iron and figure out better ways of working with it. By the time more tin sources were available, the iron and steel stuff was much better and cheaper, so hardly anyone went back to bronze. ;-> During the New Hittite Empire (1400-1200 BC), there were quite a few steel implements, weapons, etc., but they were mostly just for the rich nobles. Masterwork (or even "magic," say +1 or +2) stats might be for steel, whereas the common, cheap stuff could be bronze. LB
I know how this will sound, but we have more than a few house rules, and we have the books. So, we will always be in the market for the books themselves (which we would have by our sides to refer to), but we too have a distance from our old gang and real life time issues. Apparently, there are some decent VTTs out there that have just about everything but the kitchen sink, but I for one would actually like to have a Paizo-related VTT that actually DOESN'T come pre-loaded with the rules (yeah, I know, heresy ;->). There are a ton of games that Paizo does, and more in addition that they want to look into coming out with, and I'd love just a bare-bones thing that would enable us to play remotely without needing numerous different forms of the VTT (one for each game), or that would be complex enough to enable us to plug in our own interpretations, but would have a really annoying learning curve. And yeah, yeah, we wouldn't be "legal" for PFS play, but we don't generally do that. If we ever do get into that, we'll have our own, separate set of characters for that. We even have our own character sheet system, thanks, so that wouldn't even be something to worry about having to include. :) Maybe the various other third-party sites could charge players and GMs for all the bells, whistles, rules, character sheets, etc., but if they would also offer a freebee no-frills version that would just display the map (and let us use Paizo AP maps for that), let us show our characters and my NPCs/monsters, and I dunno, maybe let us roll dice (though we have bags and bags of those, too ;->), that would be awesome...oh, and work with some voice chat thing, too. Not all of us type very quickly. :) EDIT: And if that simple version could be guaranteed to come out sooner, that would be ideal. ;-> LB
Aw, Fyre, you've been sipping from the James Jacobs Kool-Aid again, haven't you? ;-> I completely agree with Orfamay Quest's point: the proof is in the pudding, and your alignment will be reflected (and vice versa) by the choices you make. ;-> And just remember: pragmatic don't mean evil (or even neutral, necessarily). It means thinking like a successful hunting critter and/or businessperson. Pirate = Rogue on the water, and you've known some CG Rogues; heck, you proposed to one at the end of Curse of the Crimson Throne. ;-> LB da GM
Nope, they were SAILORS of some sort, not necessarily pirates, and not all of the traits even imply they're that. But even if they were "typical" adventurers, it's unlikely they would've been wearing their backpacks, unless they were really suspicious about the security of the place (in which case, why go there to drink, other than hey, not much choice of places that might be "secure"). If they're sailors of some sort, they'd have a sea bag, and if they're paranoid enough to not leave it behind in the room, they'd have it with them under the table or chair at their feet or something. At any rate, it'd be considered "plunder" (even if it was in their room, I'm sure the owner of the place has an "arrangement" with press gangs to let them know what room they had, to get full value of their efforts) and taken with. And not all of the traits presume you'll actually be in the taproom of the place when you get shanghaied, so yeah, they'd grab your stuff, too, whatever the circumstances. LB
Ah! Just checked the date...hopefully, everything has gotten resolved to everyone's satisfaction after all this time, especially the OP! :) LB
In many cases, if there's something included in a timeline without much else expanding on it, it's us setting a seed for a future story we want to tell. That's not to say we'll ever do an AP or novel or whatever picking up those threads, but we at least know internally what it's pointing toward. That said, there's nothing stopping folks from picking up the plots and running with them in the meantime. I'll take that as an, "Okay, you can run with it for your own campaign" nod. Thanks! :) LB
EDIT: but now that I have you here...the Andoran book(s) (both the 2010 and 2015 editions) lists the House of Thrune victory in the Chelaxian civil war and takeover of the empire as 4660 AR, and the Inner Sea Guide as 4640 AR. Who's correct, and why the disparity? Was it simply a carried-over error, or Andoren opinion? ;->
What I'm hoping for, is it's one of those things that we don't have all the relevant details for, other than when it was found; that way, we can fill in the gaps ourselves. Personally, I would like it to be lost either late 4669 AR or early 4670 or later, for my own nefarious backstory purposes. ;-> With the Eye of Abendego being involved and a name like that, I figure it would definitely be post-4606, probably post-4640; post-4670 would work very well. :) LB
Well, our group (especially me) doesn't have all the latest and greatest books and sources, nor do we use all the fancy stuff; we're really old school (Core Rulebook, APG, some ARG and Ultimate sources), but I've been working on some conversions (I've been wanting to do Batman since 2nd Ed. ADnD): Batman: currently in the Council of Thieves AP as Lord Bruno Leroung, half-elf son of a Leroung scion and an elven paramour. Richest guy in Westcrown; only 3rd level still, but Rogue (Investigator) 1/Monk 2 (LN), and likely to stay Monk the rest of the way. Finally got at least one rank point in every skill that was previously Not Useable Untrained, since that's the way he rolls: La Conoscenza e Potere ("Knowledge is Power"). ;-> Oh, and as he's going after the Shadows plaguing the city (they slew his parents in front of him when he was a child...), he's not going to impress them as a Creature of the Night, but just exactly the opposite as Il Angelo del Notte (complete with fireworks, everburning torches, whatever else would create light, fire, brightness [and he could make with Craft: Alchemy], and give the impression that the good deities have sent one of their servants down to deal with this situation personally...just before he deals with them using whatever special material weapons he can afford [yes]). This angel of the night loves Handy Haversacks and Sleight of Hand. ;-> Also played in CoT: Thordis Odinsdottir, Ulfen-born, Cheliax-raised, NG Stormborn Sorceress (3rd). Seems human (and would "test" as such, if we had that ability), until you realize she can see pretty far in complete darkness and can blast foes with daylight once a day as well as with sonics and electricity. Spent her first level feat on getting Martial Weapon Proficiency: Warhammer; it's only 5 pounds, so she can "call it to her" with Mage Hand. Her Profession is Carpenter; her Craft, Woodcarving...it's a bit big for a mere tool, but she likes it. ;-> I was contemplating playing a very young (like, 1 XP into 1st level) human Cavalier in CoT: LG, of the Order of the Star, of Aroden's faith, youngest Captain in his generation, one Stefano Rogeri, from 100 years ago. His group wasn't in a position to save the deity, but he got caught in a time-warp of some sort at about the same time...after emerging into present-day Cheliax, he would finally come to grips with Aroden's loss, and would then go into the Order of the Shield... ;-> Soon to be played in Legacy of Fire: Talib (Scholar) Butrus Ben Nur, a healer-type Alchemist, seemingly human, but can occasionally get to be a very mean, very ugly drunk at times, especially around gnolls...they don't want to make him angry. Especially not at higher levels... ;-> I may shift the good Captain over to LoF somehow; we're still looking at tentative character selection there. ;-> LB
And let's not forget that blindness/deafness is dismissible! By whoever cast it...on an enemy. :-/ "Kid, I've been roleplaying from one side of this galaxy to the other since 1978, and if you're the only one having fun in your games, you're missing the point." --paraphrased somewhat from Han Solo, Star Wars: A New Hope For those that have the idea to make it 1 day/level, I agree, it's brilliant; it's still scary that way, yet it gives the 5th-level clerics in town some revenue streams, and a party can either sit it out for a while, deal with the issue, or not worry too much if they have a 5th-level cleric in the party, who can ask for that spell the next day. "Easy," unless the situation that day would call for other spells entirely, and something that may be vitally important could get shunted aside to get the deaf (or blind; fireballing while not being able to see is scary, yeah) spellcaster back up to snuff; in which case, depending on the situation, a trip back to town could be in the cards. :-/ Or, if players know their GM is the sadistic type, have the 5th-level cleric write up a ton of scrolls in advance, for that, for remove curse, etc., because the gods are controlled by the GM, who can always just refuse to approve that spell request... X-P
Actually, even the Greeks and Romans had some (according to _Ancient Inventions_ by James and Thorpe), but they were rare, and usually the work of a few geniuses: in the 3rd c. BC, Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the first keyboard instrument, a "water-organ" complete with pipes and keys. Heron of Alexandria made a wind-powered version 200 years later, and near the end of the first century BC, good ol' Vitruvius described further refinements. So, perhaps in a city like Absalom, or in the old imperial capitals, Golarion "ancients" might have left mosaics or examples behind from the really old days. As for modern Varisians (and sailors, too!), concertinas (smaller accordions, with the bellows in more of a tube-shape than a "radiator" and the buttons on the end cap) work very well. There's a sailor NPC-type playing one behind Kirk Douglas and his guitar early on in Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" movie (playing the song, "Whale of a Tale"). ;-> |
