LauraBow's page

Good news, Paizo fans!

Pathfinder Chronicler is pleased to announce that we will be bringing our newly printed (and long-awaited) Pathfinder Chronicler Anthology Volume II to Norwescon in Seattle this weekend!

We are also happy to announce that our remade forums are now fully operational.

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Laura Bow
Pathfinder Chronicler Anthology Editor

*PathfinderChronicler.net is a proud member of Paizo Fans United*

Hi.

I wasn't sure how to go about this, but I wanted to get a misspelling corrected. James Sutter misspelled my name in his most recent Paizo blog post about the finalists in the Pathfinder Chronicler contest.

He has it as "Laura Bowly" and it should be correctly spelled "Laura Bowlby."

Thank you very much for your assistance! :)

I'm a fairly new GM, and I have a question that I'd love the community's help with: does a grappled creature get a reflex save when Grease is cast on the ground underneath the grapplers?

Specifically, here's the situation that came up in my game the other day:
a Shambling Mound had grappled the group's paladin using Grab (the Mound has control of the grapple). The group's wizard had Greased the paladin's armor to grant the +10 to the paladin's escape artist/grapple escape attempts. The pally wasn't having any luck squirming out, so the wizard decided to cast Grease again, this time under the shambler. Now, the Grease spell specifically says "any creature in the area when the spell is cast must make a successful Reflex save or fall." So, the Shambling Mound gets a reflex save and fails. Does the grappled paladin get a save if the wizard only targeted the 4 squares under the Mound? Also, what happens to the grapple at this point? Is it automatically released, as the Shambling Mound falls prone? Does the paladin fall prone too, as he does not have control of the grapple? Should there be a grapple check at this point to see if the Shambling Mound pulls the pally down with it?

We spent a good 10-15 minutes discussing it and I eventually had to pull GM fiat just to get the game moving again, but I'd really love some opinions on this one! Thanks!

If you were going to allow a character in a Pathfinder home campaign to have a Winter Wolf for an Animal companion, what stats would you give a Winter Wolf at Starting/Level 4/Level 7 advancement, and would you require the player to take an "Improved Animal Companion" type feat?

I'd really appreciate some advice, so I don't unbalance/overpower it! Thanks!

I'd love some advice from some experienced GMs on tips for running a successful adventure path.

I have several years experience running Society-type games under Living Greyhawk 3.5 for a home group, as well as about a year's worth of experience running Pathfinder Society home games, but at Christmas I started running a Kingmaker campaign for a group of 4-7 mostly novice players. This is something completely new to me and I'm finding the long term focus and broad boundaries quite a challenge to my developing skills - the whole experience is for me both incredibly freeing and nerve-wracking!

One of the main challenges that I see myself having to overcome in this campaign is my tendency to want to "save" my PCs. In my GM career thus far, I have yet to kill a PC, though in reality I can think of probably 3 or 4 situations where I definitely should have. I'd appreciate some advice on how to embrace lethality in a long running campaign, preferably without alienating my players. I want the world to seem "real" to them, and death is certainly part of the real world, but I find myself balking when it comes too close...

Case in point:

Also, with so many of my players being brand new to Pathfinder and tabletop roleplaying, I'm not sure if I can trust them enough to know enough about the rules to be able to save themselves!! I like to employ Knowledge checks to allow their characters to become more informed about possible threats, but how far should I take this, especially when it comes to knowing the rules behind battle tactics? Any resources or suggestions that have worked for fellow GMs out there would be greatly appreciated, especially when it comes to dealing with novice players!