Marusaia's page

I waited a while to buy my three day pass for the convention, but did it earlier than I had last year. I cannot find anything about buying into the banquet anywhere, however. Am I correct in taking that to mean that there aren't any more, that the banquet tickets are sold out? And if not, what's up with this?

It's great seeing the names of the winners, but I know none of them personally. I seem to recall that in years past the winners had their hometowns listed next to their names. Was that something that was added after the fact, or are hometowns just not being included this year?

I wanted to know if there were any hometown heroes from the places I live/that I have a connection to (Seattle metropolitan area, Bellingham WA, and central Pennsylvania/PA in general). In any event, congratulations to everybody, and especially those who come from the places I mentioned. Get out their and represent, fellows.

I've been gaming on a regular basis for about the last five years. I've had some good moments over the years, but nothing quite matches this one.

So all the characters are at the Swallowtail festival, and my character, Aly (short for Alison), is standing next to Ameiko Kaijitsu's booth keeping an eye on one of the other characters (Hope, Sheriff Belor's young half-elf daughter). The two of us make our spot checks to notice the goblins as they start to appear, and can act in the surprise round. There are several goblins on the ground with dogslicers and horseslicers, and one on the roof of a building across the street with a bow. We roll initiative, and I come up first. The DM asks, "what do you do?"

I assess the situation. My character has only one standard action. Aly could probably charge one of the goblins on the ground easily enough, and she has a dagger on her (she was using it to eat a piece of roast venison earlier that day). However, the goblin with a bow on the roof is going to be a problem, sniping civilians and party members from the roof top with near impunity for at least a couple rounds. Something has to be done about him. And then I remember that my character is standing next to a stall giving out mugs of beer. So I say to my DM with a smile on my face, "Aly reaches for the biggest beer mug at hand and lobs it at the goblin on the roof."

Naturally, I take a negative four penalty for difficulty since a mug is not particularly aerodynamic and was not made for throwing. I throw it anyway. Much to my surprise, the mug actually hits the goblin! The goblin, who was cackling and grinning, takes the mug right in the mouth. Several teeth break in the process, he gets a concussion from the inside out, and is knocked off the roof. Between the mug and the fall, he ends up dead by the time he hits the ground. Thus, not only have I gotten the first kill of the campaign, I did it with a beer mug. I did not plan on either of these occurrences, and did not conspire with my DM to make them happen.

I love my character. I also love my d20, and her kicking +4 strength bonus. XD I just wanted to share something that really made my day.

Soon I will (hopefully!) be playing in a Rise of the Runelords game, and I need some help. First, some background. I'm doing something rather strange with my character. She woke up, stark naked and with no memories of her past, in the vicinity of Sandpoint the night that Runewell of Wrath overflowed and kicked off the Late Unpleasantness. Like all present, she was affected. For some reason that she couldn't discern, as she wandered through the streets, she felt incredibly angry. It wasn't long before she got in a fight with a town guardsman. Being naked and without a weapon, however, she was subdued in fairly short order, and spent the next two months shuttling between the Guardhouse's brig and the Sandpoint Chapel; there was some disagreement as to whether she was simply a drunk or a garden variety lunatic, or if she had been touched in the head by an evil god or a demon. Father Tobyn, understandably, paid little attention to her at the time, and the two men who spent the most time looking after her and trying to figure out what to do with her were Tobyn's chief acolyte, Zantus, and a Shoanti guardsman named Belor Viskalai. She initially received a great deal of suspicion for Chopper's Murders, but as she had been under such close scrutiny to begin with and was almost always locked up somewhere or other, it was determined that she could not have been responsible. After the Sheriff was killed and the Chapel burned down with Father Tobyn in it, the two men who had been looking after her stepped up to fill the gaps. She, in turn, was taken charge of by Ameiko Kaijitsu. Since then, she has become a member of the community like any other.

My character is, in fact, a clone of the Runelord Alaznist. Alaznist had at one time been researching means of self-preservation in the unlikely event that she should fall in battle, and one of her spies brought her research on cloning magic. This magic was used to create the thing that would become my character. However, the magic was imperfect, and Alaznist decided that while it would work in a pinch, she wanted something better. Therefore, she had the clone boxed up and set aside at an out of the way border post which is now known as the Old Light. It turned out, however, that the clone magic involved was even more imperfect than she thought. When Alaznist went into stasis as all Thassilon was collapsing, the cloning magic took her consciousness's disappearance from the Material Plane as her death, and began to activate. However, instead of implanting Alaznist's soul in the clone body, the spell only copied Alaznist's thoughts and memories into the clone, and moreover, most of those thoughts and memories were severely jumbled up, hence why my character remembers nothing.

And so, now we come to the point. I am trying to decide what particular languages she should speak when she first comes out of the Old Light. She will be able to speak; the clone spell successfully copied that much without trouble. The question is what she will speak. Thassilonian goes without saying. Alaznist would surely have been able to read and speak Draconic, as a runelord and a first rank wizard. I think it likely that she also could speak Elvish, being that Bakrakhan bordered the old Elvish kingdom in the northwest of Varisia. I doubt that Common would have been spoken 10,000 years ago; if it were, then I doubt it would be recognizable today. It is possible that Alaznist also spoke Shoanti; while the Shoanti of that time were slaves, she might have bothered to learn the native tongue her soldiers. While less likely, the same is true of Varisian.

This whole process has gotten me thinking a lot about the development of languages in Golarion, specifically how quickly they age and change. Thassilonian, of course, is practically a dead language. It has been spoken almost entirely by sages, wizards, and researchers for the past ten thousand years. Likewise, I cannot imagine Draconic or Elven changing much since that time. Twenty generations at best have gone by among the elves since the fall of Thassilon, roughly the same distance between our own time and William Shakespeare, and since the works of Shakespeare are written in what is effectively modern English, I think the same can be assumed of Elvish of that period (besides, elves strike me as the kind to change their language very slowly). Dragons, of course, have had even fewer generations and are even slower to change things like their language than elves are.

But then there are things like Common, which I am assuming is at present a patois or creole based principally upon the working man's Chelaxian. I could, however, be completely wrong about this. If I am wrong, I'd be interested to know what exactly Common is, and also, if there was a Common tongue ten thousand years ago, and if so what it was based upon? Likewise for Varisian and Shoanti. They probably existed in some form or another ten thousand years ago, when the Shoanti and Varisians were still slaves in Thassilon, but would a Shoanti or Varisian today recognize the speech of ten thousand years ago?

... if Laori Vaus, the resident perkigoth in a chainmail catsuit, priestess of Zon-Kuthon, and temporary ally of the PCs, wound up being their ally later on in the story? I realize that the fact that she's a priestess of Zon-Kuthon and that Kazavon was a servant of Zon-Kuthon himself might put a damper on things, but she seems too interesting of a character to be just another opponent. Anyone see an alliance with the perkigoth cleric of pain as a possibility?

Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Laori is absurdly cute and that her chainmail cat suit is one of the hottest things I've seen yet this adventure path...

It's been alluded to on the PAIZOCON thread, but I wanted to actually ask the question... how many people on this board will be going to PAX this year?

Second, will there be a Paizo contingent attending PAX? Since a lot of the Paizo staff live in the Seattle metropolitan area anyway, I'd hope a few of them would be able to spare a weekend to come to the expo at least as regular members, if not as a dealer's room group. While PAX is a bit more focused on videogaming and computer gaming, board games and tabletop are fairly well represented as well. Not to mention that Tycho is a tabletop player in real life as well...

Third, and most importantly, is anyone going to be running D&D sessions at PAX? It'd be cool if there were. Anyone doing Pathfinder or Golarion stuff, or anything for that matter?

We know that Azlant was the oldest human civilization in Golarion, and that Thassilon arose after Azlant in what is now Varisia, Cheliax, and presumably much of the rest of that area (pardon me, my recollection of the specifics is hazy...). What then is known about Tian Xia, Vudra, and the lands of the distant east? Were all of these ancient empires united by a common culture once, or have they been distinct almost from the beginning?

Being a lover of history, of course I'm interested in the history of the worlds I play D&D in. So as you can imagine, I'm very interested in Golarion's history. How much will we see on this in the Gazetteer and the Campaign Setting?

So. I've been very interested in the world of Golarion and the Pathfinder adventure paths, and I was curious about a few things... specifically, what real world ethnicities and nationalities (if any) the various peoples of Golarion were modeled on.

My own theories so far: the Varisians remind me a lot of a combination between the Irish and gypsies... which I guess makes them similar to the Irish Travelers. I associate the Varisians with Irish music, and they frequently have Irish accents in my mind. The Chelaxians are a bit less obvious. Their culture seems to resemble some odd combination of the ancient Romans and the British Empire, from what little I know of it. The Shoanti are the ones that I have the least understanding of.

Anyone else have any ideas? I'm not even sure if this is the right place to post this, but nowhere else seemed fitting.