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I recall hearing that in previous years the round 4 contestants would run a brief elevator pitch by Paizo in order to determine if they wanted to focus on topics that were okay for development (no you can't write about how Aroden died, and maybe lay off of Cheliax and Lovecraft because of upcoming APs, or something like that). Is that something we'll be doing this year, and do we know when something like that might be taking place?
The PCs enter Chillblight posing as foreign merchants in order to find Olesya Boykova, an important member of the Heralds of Summer’s Return they were hired to smuggle out of the province. They discover that two weeks ago, Olesya’s husband was arrested and imprisoned at the Trident Coliseum. Panicked, Olesya borrowed money to bribe the jailers to free her husband before he was killed in the games. Unfortunately, the only thing of value she had as collateral was her soul, and she has since defaulted on her payments to Essence Exchange. Olesya is now a captive at the Exchange, and the PCs must rescue her before Varvara sells her soul to settle the debt.
The top of the map points north and each square is 5 feet. The buildings are all 8 feet tall and made of wood, and all doors are unlocked, simple wooden doors. The western building is a well-appointed waiting area reserved for buyers. The northern building is Varvara’s office where she receives prospective borrowers. The small room is tidy and businesslike with a desk, tables and chairs; the large room is a nightmare of hacked-up bodies. The large room of the southern building is used as storage. It is filled with valueless junk except a helm of underwater action Varvara misplaced that can be found with a DC 20 Perception check. The small room is stacked with the frozen corpses of a dozen former borrowers. The sturdy wooden docks stand 10 feet above the 20-foot deep icy water, each with a ladder reaching down to the surface. A metal cage hangs beneath the last square of each dock. Above each cage is a trapdoor and an oversized winch that can lift the cage above the dock. A character standing adjacent to the winch can, as a full round action, raise the cage 10 feet, or, as a swift action, release the winch causing the cage to plummet into the water. All the cages are locked and made of iron (hardness 10, hp 30, break DC 24, Disable Device DC 25). The center dock’s cage is a Drowning Cage Trap containing a very life-like mannequin covered in furs. Succeeding at a DC 25 Perception check while inspecting the mannequin reveals the ruse. The water is very cold and deals 1d6 points of nonlethal damage from hypothermia per minute of exposure. Creatures: A night hag (Bestiary 1 215) named Nadezhda currently occupies the waiting room under the guise of a beautiful, white-haired Irriseni woman. She is here to buy, but Varvara recently doubled her prices to meet a new quota set by Bazza and Nadezhda is weighing her options. She is not interested in fighting on Bazza’s turf and simply turns ethereal and leaves if attacked. She is currently unfriendly to the PCs; if she is made indifferent, with a DC 23 Diplomacy check, she is annoyed enough at Varvara that she will divulge information about the Exchange if asked. She knows where the prisoners are held and what guards them but nothing about the trap. She can tell the PCs which cage is Olesya’s if they can describe her. The forlarren Varvara resides in her office when the PCs arrive. She fawns over anyone entering, assuming they are customers, but is suspicious of visible weapons or questions about her captives. She quickly calls for the redcap guard if she thinks there is danger; when threatened, she makes a Sleight of Hand check to hide a small ledger on her person. A redcap guard named Sevimbum waits in the backroom of the office. He half-heartedly hacks up corpses of old borrowers between fits of manic giggling, but he always comes if called or if he hears a fight break out in the office or at the docks. Varvara hired the twin fossegrims, Black Harp and Last Kiss, to guard the docks. One brother always invisibly patrols the water beneath the cages while the other rests nearby at the bottom of the river. They attack anyone on the docks they don’t recognize. Currently two human female captives hang below the docks waiting to have their souls collected, with Olesya in the southern cage. Both women are gagged, covered in furs, suffering from hypothermia and nearly impossible to tell apart without opening the cages. Forlarren CR 2
Redcap CR 6
Arctic Fossegrim (2) CR 4
Human Captive (2) CR —
Trap:
Development: If Varvara survives the encounter, she covers up the robbery out of fear of reprisal from Bazza; if Varvara dies then Bazza begins searching for thieves. Nadezhda does not forget the insult if attacked and begins plotting to steal the PC’s souls. If the PCs stole the ledger, they now have a list of people in debt to Essence Exchange to do with what they wish. Olesya is grateful if she survives, and has knowledge of a plot by the Cold Sisters to demoralize the Heralds in Irrisen. She implores the PCs to take her and her husband to Whitethrone to help warn the other resistance leaders. If Olesya dies, the Heralds will be caught unawares by a brutal series of executions of its members.
If I'm going to place a haunt or a trap in my encounter, how do I indicate precisely where it is on the map?
Two thin, gray arms slither out of a pile of filthy rags, ending in ruinous claws. A roughly humanoid form coalesces noiselessly from the refuse.
Naturally Ignored (Su) Living creatures are incapable of looking directly at a tatterghoul. Against the living, a tatterghoul has the hide in plain sight ranger class feature for urban terrain and any area of dim light, as well as concealment (20% miss chance). Living creatures are also considered flat-footed against a tatterghoul's attacks. True seeing negates this ability. This is a mind-affecting effect. Tatterghouls are spawned as a result of slow, preventable deaths witnessed by multiple indifferent onlookers. Given these circumstances, tatterghouls are most often found in large cities, especially in nations like Cheliax, Katapesh or Nidal. In these places the urban poor often succumb to starvation or exposure on the street while passersby pretend not to notice. As they were ignored and invisible in life, so are they in death. The eyes of living creatures subconsciously refuse to linger on a tatterghoul, making direct observation almost impossible. This is not true invisibility, however, and they can be seen in peripheral vision. Shrouded in dirty rags, the tatterghoul's ashen torso and limbs are unnaturally slender, but their claws are oversized and razor-sharp. Its head is featureless except for a gaping mouth and all-white eyes. Filled with rage at their unnecessary deaths and the callousness of the living, tatterghouls stalk the areas where they died looking for lone victims at night. They rarely kill in combat, preferring to stabilize unconscious enemies and keep them somewhere to watch them starve or succumb to the elements. When faced with multiple dangerous opponents, tatterghouls prefer to use isolate on physically weak enemies before employing hit-and-run tactics. Most disturbing of all are the unexpected relationships formed when tatterghouls encounter attic whisperers. Seeing attic whisperers as kindred spirits, tatterghouls form profane families with them, lairing together in abandoned buildings or sewers. A tatterghoul’s mournful brood multiplies through the abduction of children. The tatterghoul transforms them into attic whisperers to assuage its unending loneliness, often causing mass hysteria in cities as children go missing. Tatterghouls heading larger families sometimes advance by taking class levels in rogue, becoming devastating combatants.
A small portal to the River Styx in Abbadon grows larger in the sewers beneath Absalom. While not yet large enough for a Daemon, the portal spews filth and evil souls, mutating this area into a twisted hellscape. Four strange clerics of the Horsemen, transformed by soul-stuff, protect the portal.
Ebon Fury
Once per day, as a standard action, the wielder may drive the spike into the ground, converting a thin layer of the ground to magically slick volcanic glass in a 20-foot radius. Everyone but the wielder treats the area as if affected by grease (as the spell, save DC 16). The wielder may use a standard action to strike the volcanic glass with the hammer, expending the magic and creating an explosion that showers the 20-foot radius with obsidian shards. The razor-sharp stones deal 5d6 magical slashing damage and 1d6 bleed damage to all creatures in the area but the wielder. Any creature within the area who makes a successful DC 16 Reflex save takes half as much slashing damage and no bleed damage. The ground, now littered with obsidian shards, is treated as non-magical difficult terrain. After 24 hours, any obsidian created by the hammer crumbles into harmless black sand. Construction
I feel like getting feedback this year from people outside of my immediate family and my friends who don't play pathfinder. Is anyone interested in doing some mutually beneficial review of items via private messages? I assume that's a kosher thing to ask, right? Hit me up if you're interested.
I'm not sure if this is a different rule this year, or if I just don't recall it from previous years. So if I wanted to use a spell from Inner Sea Magic as a requirement to create my magic item, would I be up for disqualification?
So I made a map for round 2 long before they announced the top 32, and since I'll probably never use it for anything I figure I might as well post it and see what you guys think. My tastes tend to be weird and overly complicated, and this map is definitely that. I won't say much about it now, but I will leave these two links here. Mu Spore Info, Mu Spore Art. In the interest of full disclosure, had I made it to round 2 I would have entered a hand-drawn map colored with pencils instead of this computer generated version. It would have looked very similar (without the cool shading however), but my wife liked the map so much that she made this in Photoshop. Anyway, here is the The Slumbering Mu Spore. Anybody else have round 2 maps? Maps are great, and I don't know about everyone else, but I'm not tired of looking at new ones yet.
Hey RPGSS runners, Are there any plans on releasing the top 100 items this year? I know last year finding out what kind of items made the top and comparing myself against them really helped me figure out what to do differently this year (and hopefully perform better). I would like the opportunity to do that again if possible.
Anyone interested in spit-balling about what the rules for round 2 could be? Previous years have put the map and the encounter together, but this year with the rounds separate, it makes sense to me that the maps will be of a different type. I'm thinking perhaps they'll be more zoomed out so we're mapping a town instead of building, for instance. Wrap it all up with 500 words describing the region, and that sets you up for a monster round where you have to create a monster that lives in one of these new areas. Later the encounter round could also take place in a new region as well. Of course I could have it all wrong, we could still be doing small encounter areas. But a small map without an encounter to go with it seems like such a strange exercise to me. What do you guys think?
If I have a BAB of 6 and I'm wielding a weapon like a trident, can I use it as a melee weapon and then throw it with a full attack action? If I'm wielding a trident, can I throw it and then make a bite attack with a full attack action? I don't see why not, but I couldn't find any specific rules for or against being able to do both ranged and melee attacks with the same full attack action.
So I was wondering what kind of encounters you guys expected/wanted to see but didn't? What round 2 monsters should have gotten more love, or what would you have done if you were in the top 16? I really expected to see at least one chimney troll, and I was hoping for an encounter on some gothic rooftops in Caliphas. That would have probably been my entry. I was also looking forward to a really neat sewer encounter with everyone's favorite sharktopus. Maybe people though that would be too cliche. Lastly, while I didn't think it was likely, I wanted a social encounter with a filth dragon. On the flip side, I was surprised to not only see an imposter maw, but also have it be a favorite of mine, since I that monster wasn't my favorite. Congrats there Mikko. And congrats to all the top 16, great job all around.
Based on previous years, how long until the first cull? Do they generally do more than one?
The previous year's Beastiary entry rounds specify that you must create a Golarion monster. Does this mean the monster must be from the planet Golarion, or the campaign world Golarion? There are many other planets that we now know exist in the campaign world, could I legally make a monster from one of those? |
