Mathmuse's page

I prefer simplicity that avoids an excessive number of die rolls. The character can push off the rock wall with their legs, so they can jump. Or they can pump their legs like on a playground swing for momentum if hanging from a rope. If their destination is only 10 feet away, they can Leap. They will need an Athletics check for Grab an Edge to grab onto their destination rock wall.

On the other hand, they cannot use Long Jump because they cannot Stride 10 feet--unless they have Quick Jump. A quick Long Jump has its own Athletics check for distance.

I returned to this thread when answering Ravingdork's question How do I leave a product review? So long as I am here, I should point out that I have not received any more emails about leaving reviews. Perhaps that is because I did write a review.

logsig wrote:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the product page in the store (past the bit where the social media icons are) there is a section titled "Customer Reviews" and a big button which you can click to add a review.

Where exactly is that "big button"? I don't see it anywhere on any of the product pages. I've checked in a number of different browsers and all I see are the little "Write a review" links for OTHER products at the bottom of the page; and clicking on them doesn't seem to do anything.

Could my ad block be censoring it maybe?

When I go to that Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscription page, I see the same thing as Ravingdork's image, except that above "Your Account" is "Hello! Erin" meaning that I am signed in. I have no ad blocking.

On the other hand, I do not have a Lost Omens subscription and the reviews are supposed to written by people who have purchased the item. Could that be the factor? I went over to the product page for Lost Omens Firebrands, one of the few Lost Omens lore books that I have not purchased. Nope, below the product description is the customer reviews section:
Customer Reviews
picture of stars
We’re looking for stars!
Let us know what you think
Black rectangular button with text, "Be the first to write a review!"

I have clicked that button for Pathfinder Society Scenario #6-03: Godsrain in a Godless Land, and written a review there. That page under Customer Reviews now has a star rating, a chart of star ratings, and a black rectangular button to the right of the chart that says, "Write a Review". I wrote about my review there in Paizo Plus Email Invitations for Reviews. I repeat the warning I gave: the product reviews don't use the BBCode markup language used in the Paizo forums, so my markups just clutter the review.

I have altered my curriculum spells to use Loreguard's idea of not restricting them to curriculum slots but instead enhancing them in curriculum slots. Which means that I had to diminish them so that their original version becomes the enhanced version.

* Very Short Gate now transports only the caster, except in the curriculum slot. Since a wizard going into a room alone would be terribly risky (except at the College of Dimensional Studies), the spell would be mostly used for a Step onto difficult terrain. I renamed it Gated Step.
* Coax Monologue gained the incapacitation trait, except in the curriculum slot. Not only can it substitute for Recall Knowledge, it can deprive strong opponents of an action.
* Liberating Step now no longer triggers against attacks; instead, it triggers against area of effects and grabbing. In the curriculum slot, it will trigger against attacks. I renamed it Emergency Yank.
* Share Skill no longer grants proficiency in the skill required for the skill feat, except in the curriculum slot.
* Spellsurge takes two actions to cast, but still only one action in the curriculum slot.
* Workday now only doubles the duration and can affect only the caster's own spells, except in the curriculum slot. I renamed it Double Duration.

Gated Step [one-action] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Teleportation
Based on PF1 Time Flicker
Tradition arcane
Access Wizard in School of The Boundary only.
You step through the ethereal plane. You Step through an ethereal gate to an adjacent square, bypassing all obstacles, such as walls, except for force effects. Treat the destination square as flat terrain unless the square cannot be safely occupied. This square can also be 5 feet up or down from your current level. If the square cannot be safely occupied, such as filled with solid rock, occupied by another creature, atop a fall, or the square is blocked by a force effect, the spell fails. If you prepared Gated Step in your curriculum slot, you can cast this spell with two actions so that the gate endures for 1 round and you could retreat or others could follow through the gate.
Heightened (3rd) The destination square can be 10 feet away rather than adjacent. Stepping or otherwise moving through the gate still counts as one square of movement.

Coax Monologue [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Incapacitation, Linguistic, Manipulate, Mental, Subtle
Based on Suggestion Player Core pg. 360
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Defense Will; Duration 1 round
Access Wizard in Emerald Boughs branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
A simple query leads a creature to talk more than it intends. The target attempts a Will save against responding. The target will respond in a language you understand, if they can. If you prepared Coax Monloogue in your curriculum slot, the spell loses the incapacitation trait.
Critical Success The target is unaffected.
Success The target spends one action on its next turn on Demoralize.
Failure The target spends one action on its next turn describing information that you would have gained from a successful Recall Knowledge check to identify it.
Critical Failure As failure, but the target provides critically important additional information.

Double Duration [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Manipulate
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets One arcane spell you cast with duration of at least 1 minute and at most 1 hour.
Access Wizard in Rain-Scribes branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You reinforce a spell to last twice as long. The duration of target spell doubles. If you prepared Double Duration in a curriculum slot, you can target spells cast by anyone and the duration lengthens to the next common duration longer than or equal to double duration: 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours.

Emergency Yank [reaction] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Liberating Step Player Core 2 pg. 92
Tradition arcane
Access Wizard in Tempest-Sun Mage branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Range 30 feet; Targets one target creature
Trigger Your ally is in an area of effect or has been grabbed or restrained by an enemy
You nudge an ally out of danger. The ally can attempt to break free of effects grabbing, restraining, immobilizing, or paralyzing them with a +1 status bonus. They either attempt a new save against one such effect that allows a save, or attempt to Escape from one effect as a free action. Whether or not they needed to escape, the ally can then either Step as a free action if they are able to move or else gain resistance 3 to the damage of the triggering effect. If you prepared Emergency Yank in a curriculum slot, an enemy damaging an ally with an attack can also trigger this spell, and the ally can both Step and gain the damage resistance.
Heighten (+1) The status bonus to break free increases by 1 and the damage resistance increases by 3.

Share Skill Spell 1
Uncommon, Linguistic, Manipulate
Based on Share Lore Divine Mysteries pg. 259
Tradition arcane
Cast 1 minute
Range 30 feet; Targets up to 3 creatures
Duration 10 minutes
Access Wizard in Uzunjati branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You tell a story that provides temporary enlightenment about a skill. Select a skill feat you know that requires a skill proficiency in its prerequisites. The target creatures who satisfy the prerequisites of that feat gain that feat for the duration of the spell. If you prepared Share Skill in your curriculum slot, the spell also grants them your proficiency rank in a skill required for the skill feat.

Spellsurge [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Haste Player Core pg. 335
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Duration until the end of your next turn
Access Wizard in Cascade Bearers branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Your research enables more flexibility in spellcasting. The target creature gains the quickened condition on their next turn and can use the extra action for only a Sustain action or in a Cast a Spell activity. If you prepared Spellsurge in a curriculum slot, it takes only one action to cast.

If curriculum spells become more desired, then wizards might want access to curriculum spells from other schools. I myself attended three different universities in earning my Ph.D., so if those were wizard schools, shouldn't I have the curriculum from each of them? Thus, we need feats to gain a second school. Golarion lore has some people, such as Kassi Aziril from Lost Omens Legends and Izem Mezitani from Secrets of the Temple-City, who attended more than one university. I am surprised that the Remastered wizard feats did not already include any feats about attending multiple schools. In the pre-Remastered schools of abjuration, conjuration, divination, etc. I can understand schools being exclusive, but the Remastered schools are institutions that take in students.

Additional Curriculum Feat 4
Wizard
You study the curriculum at another school of wizardry. Select an arcane school other than your own. You gain access to all spells from that school's curriculum, and you learn one spell of each rank that you can cast from that school's curriculum. As soon as you gain a new rank of spells, you learn one additional spell of that rank from that curriculum. You can prepare curriculum spells from that school in your curriculum spell slots. This does not increase your number of curriculum spell slots.
Special You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you do, you must choose a different arcane school.

Additional Schooling Feat 4
Wizard
You study the unique magic of another school of wizardry. Select an arcane school other than your own. You learn the initial school spell of that school. You can take Advanced School Spell feat more than once. Each time you gain the advanced school spell of one arcane school for which you know the initial school spell.
Special You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you do, you must choose a different arcane school.

Breadth of Schooling Feat 8
Wizard
Based on Bloodline Breadth Player Core 2 pg. 181
Prerequisite You have Additional Curriculum and Additional Schooling for the same arcane school
Your continued studies have expanded your magical capacity. Increase the number of your curriculum spell slots by 1 for each spell rank other than your two highest wizard spell ranks.

Ok, by saying it can only be prepared in a curriculum slot you are sort of creating something akin to a daily use focus spell tied to particular spell schools.

My intention was spells that act like an old-fashioned once-per-day ability, nothing related to focus points. This is a first draft of the notion, so I expect to have to alter it in more drafts until the flavor feels properly wizardly.

I love the idea of more spells, but more spells with them only being usable by a small subset seems like something people may feel isn't good use of Paizo's time.

It is an interesting potential however if you had the spell be uncommon tied to the school, and had a 'heighten: Curriculum spell slot" entry that gave the spell a boost if cast from a curriculum spell slot? Alternately I'd considered having it have a trait that if present needed to be cast in a curriculum slot for full effect, and if cast in a different slot, gave a result as if a spell a rank lower, making the spell still usable by others, but less efficient/desirable.

What if you added a Curriculum heighten to some of the summon spells which allowed a Summoner school to change the spell's duration 1 hour sustained. This could allow them to pre-summon a creature in a tight exploration environment which they expect to encounter combat situations. And giving them something akin to a shields up exploration activity that is named something like Direct Summon.

Spells that are stronger if cast from a curriculum slot is more elegant than spells that can be prepared only in a curriculum slot. However, an improvement of heigthening beyond their actual level would be confusing and might be lackluster if heightening does not seriously improve the spells, such as with Spellsurge. I should instead write a sentence about an additional benefit.

I need to alter these spells to no longer be troublesome, since any wizard whose GM lets them fudge access (I myself have done that repeatedly in Strength of Thousands) will be able to cast them. Then I have to add an additional benefit if cast from a curriculum slot. The redesign will take at least a day. Well, Spellsurge is easy to modify. Since it is about action advantage, making it require two actions to cast makes it less troublesome.

Spellsurge [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Haste Player Core pg. 335
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Duration until the end of your next turn
Access Wizard in Cascade Bearers branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Your research enables more flexibility in spellcasting. The target creature gains the quickened condition on their next turn and can use the extra action for only a Sustain action or in a Cast a Spell activity. If you prepared Spellsurge in a curriculum slot, it takes only one action to cast.

Giving uncommon (because exotic, not because troublemaker) spells to schools is an easy way of making the school offering a bit more special. Jealousy between wizard academies for each others' special techniques is a strong trope.

I have some recent thoughts about these uncommon spells, inspired by Loreguard's comment. But I am going for troublemaker spells, bwahaha.

I'm one who thinks the idea of having new additional Arcane (non-focus) spells that are uncommon and unlocked by specific schools.

I think in the past I actually suggested that one thing that could get tied into school spells would be having certain schools have 'variant' versions of a spell in their domain. Wizards of the school can prepare the spell and can cast it as normal, or cast the variant as a choice at casting time.

These variants would otherwise be uncommon spells. And guess what, these uncommon spells, as they are created, also provide additional content that Spell Tricksters can choose to pick up. ...

I mixed Loreguard's ideas with a little implausible detail about the College of Dimensional Studies and a realization that I could make an arcane school spell especially powerful if I added the restriction, "This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot." Except that I am not going for raw power; instead, wizards as masters of reshaping reality need game-breaking options but not too many of them.

Pathfinderwiki's entry on the College of Dimensional Studies says that Dark Markets, A Guide to Katapesh, said,

One of the most unique features of the college is its lack of doors. All students are expected to possess an array of travel magic and are expected to be able to teleport between rooms. Students of the college are also expected to create scrolls of transport magic as part of their payment for the college's unique education.

When I read that, I thought that that must be awfully tough on the 1st-level students, who have no teleporation spells. They would have had to take their lessons in an outbuilding with doors. But what if the wizard School of the Boundary provided a 1st-level teleportation spell?

Very Short Gate [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Teleportation
Based on Magic Passage Player Core pg. 342
Tradition arcane
Range touch; Area 5-foot-wide, 5-foot-tall, 5-foot-deep ethereal passage
Duration 1 round
Access Wizard in School of The Boundary only.
You can step through the ethereal plane to bypass obstacles. You create a gate through the ethereal plane to an adjacent square. You can see through the gate to that adjacent square and then you may Step through the gate. The gate is flat terrain for Stepping regardless of the terrain on the adjacent square. If the square cannot be occupied, then you remain in the gate and are returned to your original square when the gate expires. The gate remains open until after one more person, including you making a return Step, passes through it.
Heighten (+1) One additional person can pass through the gate before it collapses.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

"Prepared only in a curriculum slot" is a tough restriction. 1st-level students at the College of Dimensional Studies would use a buddy system: one student wizard would open a very short gate for both to enter a doorless classroom and the other student wizard would open another very short gate to exit the classroom. A 1st-level adventuring wizard and his barbarian teammate could gate through a barred door and unbar it to let the rest of the party in, messing up a simple obstacle in a 1st-level dungeon. So the spell is troublesome but it would be troublesome only once per day until the wizard gains a 2nd-level curriculum slot.

Nonetheless, a wizard of the School of The Boundary being able to pass through the ethereal plane at 1st level is very flavorful.

I am very familiar with the Magaambya due to my Strength of Thousands campaign, so let me try creating a special spell for each Magaambya branch.

Coax Monologue [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Linguistic, Manipulate, Mental, Subtle
Based on Suggestion Player Core pg. 360
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Defense Will; Duration 1 round
Access Wizard in Emerald Boughs branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
A simple query leads a creature to talk more than it intends. The target attempts a Will save against responding. The target will respond in a language you understand, if they can.
Critical Success The target is unaffected.
Success The target spends one action on its next turn on Demoralize.
Failure The target spends one action on its next turn describing information that you would have gained from a successful Recall Knowledge check to identify it.
Critical Failure As failure, but the target provides critically important additional information.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Liberating Word [reaction] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Liberating Step Player Core 2 pg. 92
[b]Tradition arcane
Access Wizard in Tempest-Sun Mage branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Range 30 feet; Targets one target creature
Trigger An enemy damages, grabs, or restrains your ally.
You free an ally from restraint. If the trigger was an ally taking damage, the ally gains resistance 3 to the triggering damage. The ally can attempt to break free of effects grabbing, restraining, immobilizing, or paralyzing them with a +1 status bonus. They either attempt a new save against one such effect that allows a save, or attempt to Escape from one effect as a free action. Whether or not it needed to escape, the ally can then Step as a free action if it's able to move.
Heighten (+1) The damage resistance increases by 3 and the status bonus to break free increases by 1.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Share Skill Spell 1
Uncommon, Linguistic, Manipulate
Based on Share Lore Divine Mysteries pg. 259
Tradition arcane
Cast 1 minute
Range 30 feet; Targets up to 3 creatures
Duration 10 minutes
Access Wizard in Uzunjati branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You tell a story that provides temporary enlightenment about a skill. Select a skill feat you know that requires a skill proficiency in its prerequisites. The target creatures who satisfy the prerequisites of that feat gain that feat for the duration of the spell.
Heightened (2nd) The spell grants them temporary trained proficiency in a skill prerequisite to the feat to help satisfy the prerequisites.
Heightened (3rd) The temporary proficiency is expert.
Heightened (4th) The temporary proficiency is master.
Heightened (6th) The duration increases to 1 hour. The temporary proficiency is master.
Heightened (8th) The duration increases to 1 hour. The temporary proficiency is legendary.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Spellsurge [one-action] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Haste Player Core pg. 335
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Duration until the end of your next turn
Access Wizard in Cascade Bearers branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Your research enables more flexibility in spellcasting. The target creature gains the quickened condition on their next turn and can use the extra action for only a Sustain action or in a Cast a Spell activity.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Workday [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Manipulate
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets One 1st-rank arcane spell with duration 1 hour.
Access Wizard in Rain-Scribes branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You reinforce a spell to last through the entire workday. The duration of target spell increases to 8 hours.
Heightened (any) Workday can be cast on a 1-hour arcane spell of Workday's rank or lower.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

The 1-hour 1st-rank arcane spells are breadcrumbs, charm, fashionista, glowing trail, illusory disguise, instant pottery, invisible item, item facade, negate aroma, nudge the odds, reed whistle, tailwind, and unbroken panoply.

Thanks for the summary of schools, Mathmuse. Did “Rival Academies” list all the current schools at the time of its printing? If not, that is long overdue, especially if any future Paizo publications have a significant amount of spells or added schools.

No, Rival Academies did not list all the schools.

After the first chapter "Welcome to the Convocation," the lore book had one chapter each devoted to the main sponsors: Academy of the Reclamation, Cobyslarni, Kitharodian Academy, the Magaambya, Monasatery of the Unbreaking Waves, and University of Lepidstadt. The next chapter "Invitees" listed individuals attending from other academies: Acadamae, Academy of the Sublime, Arcanamirium, Bloodstone Conservatory, Dacilane Academy, Divine Conservatory of Magic, Hall of Lambent Oaths, Halls of Revelation, Indraracha Institute, Kimanéz University, Proving Grounds, and Synostosis Academy. The Sidhedron Spires had their own chapter next to highlight the Runelord archetype and the wizard school of Thassilonian Rune Magic. The last chapter provided guidelines for running an adventure at the convocation.

Put Player Core had mentioned other academies as inspiration for the wizard schools. The School of Ars Grammatica is taught at Pathfinder Society's School of Spells. The School of Battle Magic mentions no individual academies. The School of the Boundary is taught at the College of Dimensional Studies in Katapesh. The School of Civic Wizardry is taught at Manaket’s Occularium or the Academy of Applied Magic. The School of Mentalism is taught at Farseer Tower and the Stone of the Seers. The School of Protean Form is taught at Kintargo’s Alabaster Academy and the Fleshforges of Nex. And the School of Unified Magical Theory mentions self-study. Comparing the lists, none of them are invited to the Convocation of Rival Academies. Nor are the Player Core wizard schools mentioned.

The backstory of the rogue PC Roshan in my Strength of Thousands campaign is that her mother works at College of Dimensional Studies in Katapesh. Roshan was borh a kitsune and became a fleshwarp with ifrit versatile heritage and an embedded Gelid Shard due to a lab accident involving the Elemental Plane of Fire. I had the mother, Setareh, visit the Magaambya campus once. She simply teleported over. Another semester, infamous medical researcher Kassi Aziril from the Occularium in Manaket, Rahadoum, served as a visiting professor at the Magaambya. So the College of Dimensional Studies and the Occularium are significant in my campaign but snubbed in Lost Omens Rival Academies.

I am returning to the original topic to respond to a good comment by Ascalaphus. I replaced their bullet marks with numbers for easier reference.

All that to say, curriculums really need to be published with a good starting set of spells in order to get off the ground, because they probably don't get a lot of extras later on.

I think the curriculum class feature had a lot of potential. You could write a bunch of generic, fairly setting-independent curriculums and then also make some really specific ones for specific guilds in your setting. All you had to do was make sure you put a good selection of spells in it...

What makes for a good selection of spells?

(1) They need to be broadly useful during an adventuring day. If you aren't regularly using your curriculum bonus slots because all the spells are terribly niche, then they're dud bonus slots.

(2) You need spells that age well in low-rank slots. A damaging spell doesn't age well in a low-rank slot because they need to be heightened to do enough damage to justify the action economy. Nor does a counteract spell from a low-rank slot. So you need some of those spells that stay relevant, like Sure Strike or Laughing Fit.

(3) You need the curriculum to be special. Other wizards from different schools, and even other spellcasters, should be curious about the secrets of your school. So "uncommon because it's exotic" spells (not "uncommon because it pulls the rug out from under your plot", please). Or maybe spells that aren't normally on the arcane list. I mean, sorcerers get out-of-tradition blood magic, clerics get odd spells from their deity, oracles have a way to dip into other lists, and so forth. It's an easy way to make the other wizards envious of your school's curriculum.

I feel like this has largely not happened. Some vaguely thematic spells got shoved into a curriculum with little attention paid to usefulness or excitement value.

The D&D/PF1 wizard schools of adjuration, conjuration, divination, etc. were designed to offer specializations to wizards. I remember the gnome illusionist in AD&D, a wizard that specialized in illusions. A wizard would have a specialty school and lacked two forbidden schools. Their justification is that different schools of magic required learning different magic. But as D&D advanced into new editions and into Pathfinder, the exclusivity of the schools faded, and the specialty school just became a line of bonus spells. Fortunately, since the bonus spells covered one seventh of all arcane spells, it was easy to satisfy Ascalaphus's first two points. The third point about curriculum feeling special was mostly satisfied by that curriculum being a fundamental division of arcane magic.

In contrast, the curriculums in the Remastered Player Core wizard schools felt generic to me. They failed the third point.

I presume that that was a deliberate design choice to allow the Player Core wizard to fit into many different campaigns, but the result lost a lot of flavor about attending the school itself. Furthermore, the spells chosen for many schools often often had only a loose connection to the school's theme, diluting the impact. This might be because of the limited number of spells in Player Core alone, but the designers could have made more effort to include the arcane spells that are best for each school.

School of Ars Grammatica had verbal spells, either speaking such as command or writing such as runic weapon. This theme was not a playstyle based around effects, but more an academic style about a minor feature of the spells.
School of Battle Magic is about spells for war. This is a coherent theme that any damage spell will fit into. Good for a blaster wizard.
School of the Boundary had spells built on teleportation and extraplanar travel. This was a coherent playstyle, but the 4th-level translocate is the first spell that is solidly in that theme. The lower rank spells feel like filler.
School of Civic Wizardry has a construction and demolition theme. But most of the curriculum spells did not fit the theme, so the list has lots of filler. What do 2nd-rank revealing light and water walk have to do with construction?
School of Mentalism focuses on mental spells. This theme is coherent, but bards and other occult casters feel better at it.
School of Protean Form has a transformation theme. This is a coherent theme with some good representative spells, such as pest form and enlarge. But the self-only transformations lead the wizard, with only 6+CON hit points, to risk themselves in melee. The 10 temporary hit point of 5th-level elemental form don't last long against 9th-level damage.
School of Unified Magical Theory gains a 1st-level feat and extra uses of Drain Bonded Item instead of a curriculum. This is a nod to the previous universalist wizard, but its theme is a lack of a specific flavorful theme.

My Strength of Thousands campaign began in March 2024, so those were the Remastered options available for playing a student wizard at the Magaambya Academy. Instead, the player of wizard Idris chose a pre-Remaster divination wizard. Idris has used his free archetype for two Magaambya-centric archetypes: Magaambyan Attendent and Halycon Speaker. Idris has been roleplayed as a dedicated student who spent most of his time in the library learning new spells. His spellcasting favorites have been divination, hour-long buffs, and illusion spells for his theater classes. Idris also learned a lot of self-protection magic because he had fewer hit points than the bard/druid's animal companion. None of the Player Core schools fit Idris.

The first new school was Red Mantis Magic School from standalone adventure Prey for Death August 2024. I don't own that book, so all I know about it is its Archives of Nethys entry: "While any thug can commit a murder, proper assassination requires finesse and guile. Deep within the Crimson Citadel, the Red Mantis assassins have developed a specific selection of spells they teach to all magically capable members. These spells complement the assassins’ clandestine and deadly methods." The spells in its curriculum fit that assassin theme.

Paizo released Lost Omens Rival Academies in March 2025. This lorebook tells of a convocation of six magic schools at Nerosyan, Mendev: The Academy of the Reclamation from Sarkoris Scar, Cobyslarni from the First World, Kitharodian Academy from Taldor, the Magaambya from the Mwangi Expanse, the Monastery of Unbreaking Waves from Jalmeray, and the the University of Lepidstadt from Ustalav. Some less prominent school participated, too, such as the Bloodstone Conservatory from Irrisen, the Academy of the Sublime from the plane Axis, and the Sidhedron Spires from New Thassilon.

The book is very flavorful about the many academies, but it provided only three new wizard schools.

The School of Rooted Wisdom for the Magaambya is split into five branches. I am very familiar with those branches from my Strength of Thousands campaign. The Cascade Bearers focus on arcane research, and their wizard school forces on telekinesis. That is a mismatch, but the telekinetic theme is coherent. The Emerald Boughs focus in studying culture and society, and that includes serving as spies. Their wizard school goes for the spy theme with illusion and scrying magic. Rain-Scribes are the experts in exploration and logistics. Their wizard school focuses on staying equipped and comfortable on the road. The Tempest-Sun Mages are the defenders of the Magaambya and their wizard school offers combat spells. The Uzunjati are the storytellers and historians. Their school has two new buff spells designed specifically for them: Kgalaserke's Axes and Ibex's Harvest. The rest of the Uzunjati curriculum spells are mostly telepathy.

These five curriculums have coherent themes, despite two mismatches with the branch themes.

The Academy of the Reclamation offers the wizard School of the Reclamation. "Your study of magic in the service of rediscovering lost knowledge for the Sarkoris Reclamation has taught you that much that was once lost can still be found,..." declares a theme of archaeology in hostile territory. And its curriculum gains the four new spells mental map, overwhelming memory, bridge of vines, and restore ground. They and the other spells fit the theme.

The School of Thassilonian Rune Magic is associated with the minor academy Sidhedron Spires, but Thassilonian sin magic is well established in Golarion lore and I am unsurprised that Paizo developers granted it a school. Like the School of Rooted Wisdom, the School of Thassilonian Rune Magic is divided into branches. These branches conver the seven cardinal sins. The common curriculum offers some scrying and combat spells. Envy offers debuff spells, including the new thief of fortune. Gluttony offers ghoulish spells on a devouring theme, including the new devouring void. Greed is less focussed in its theme, offering illusions of treasure, ways to carry real treasure, and the new spell chrysopoetic curse, which hinders weapons and armor by tempoarily transmuting them to gold. Lust's curriculum is loaded with charm and suggestion spells. including the new spell love's sacrifice. Pride's curriculum is loaded with illusion spells. Sloth's curriculum offers sleep-themed debuff spells, such as the new indolent haze, and spells that summon creature for work and comfy shelters for rest. Wrath's curriculum offers damage spells.

The Archives of Nethys currently lacks the branch details of the School of Rooted Wisdom and School of Thassilonian Rune Magic.

Imagine Idris built with School of Rooted Wisdom. Idris joined the Rain-Scribes branch in my campaign. The player explained to me that this was to represent Idris being a small-town anadi who was more comfortable in the countryside than in the city. Idris is largely a Boy Scout with the motto, "Always be prepared," so Rain-Scribes fits.

Common Magaambya Curriculum
cantrips: detect magic; 1st: alarm; 2nd: dispel magic; 3rd: safe passage; 4th: mountain resilience; 5th: control water; 6th: truesight; 7th: energy aegis; 8th: quandary
Rain-Scribes Additional Curriculum
cantrips: light; 1st: mending, summon animal; 2nd: shape wood; 3rd: cozy cabin; 4th: liminal doorway, unfettered movement; 5th: magic passage, summon dragon; 6th: chain lightning; 7th: planar palace; 8th: earthquake; 9th: metamorphosis
School Spells
initial: halcyon mists; advanced: call the ten

Detect magic and light are commonly-used cantrips, though light assumes the character lacks darkvision. At 1st level, alarm represents camping out--odd that it comes from the Magaambya curriculum rather than the Rain-Scribes curriculum. Mending is useful for repairing non-magical gear in the field, but fails Ascalaphus's point #2 because it ages out since higher-level gear is magical. Summon animal does not fit the Rain-Scribes theme of exploration, because explorers discover native animals. A Rain-Scribe could use a good pack horse, but not one that lasts for only one minute. 2nd-level shape wood could make a ladder or a shelter, but the shelter usage will be superseded by the 3rd-level cozy cabin, which in turn will be superseded by the 7th-level planar palace.

Ascalaphus's point #2 is hammered home by the Rain-Scribes curriculum. We have a nice chain of getting better spells for shelter on the road, but what would the Rain-Scribe wizard do with the lower-level slots afterwards?

Practicality is best measured in actual gameplay. Currently in my campaign the 9th-level party is chasing 8th-level bandits. The exploration and logistics of Rain-Scribes should be good for such a quest. In a homebrew scene, the party used a bard's Umbral Journey to get ahead of bandits in a stolen boat and ambushed them on the river. Idris provided divination on their location and buffed the party as the boat arrived at their location. Only two 5th-level curriculum spells, control water and summon dragon, would have helped. Maybe an alarm spell planted upstream would have warned of the boat's approach, but the chance of false alarm would be high. For the other group of bandits on foot, Idris could summon a tracking animal such as a bloodhound to follow their trail. mountain resilience does fit Idris's self-protection needs. Utility is there, but less than I hoped.

June 2025 saw the release of two more sources of wizard schools.

School of Gates from Lost Omens lorebook Shining Kingdoms is inspired by the elf gates of Kyonin, but it is basically a teleportation school like the School of the Boundary. It was newer spells, some new ones along side it in Shining Kingdoms. One of those new spells, 2nd-level warping pull is what I would expect from a solid teleporation curriculum.
School of Kalistrade also from Shining Kingdoms is about putting on a good show as a wealthy mage. The spells are good choices for the theme, but I suspect that few player characters will find that theme to be practical.
School of Magical Technologies from To Blot Out the Sun in the Shades of Blood adventure path I know only from its Archives of Nethys entry. The curriculum spells on the theme of magical technology are merely conjuration of objects, but they are reasonably useful spells. They also include mending, which would be useful at high levels if the wizard used non-magical technology.

The more recent schools are closer to satisfying Ascalaphus's three points, but they do not meet the mark.

I wrote up my experience in playing the Pathfinder 1st Edition Beginner Box with some 10-year-old children at Beginner Box in Sunday School. The Beginner Box has changed for 2nd Edition, but perhaps you can gain some insights from my report.

Trip.H wrote:

The issue is unavoidable at times; adventures will take you into regions where these trees exist, as in Strength of Thousands.

Our GM read the info on the screaming jungle, then a few seconds later, the recognition dinged for us to check the price.

I just read that part. Unless I missed it Duskwood is not mentioned at all.

In my childhood I played in a forest in Michigan, and I know that trees are hard to identify. I can distinguish between a maple and an oak, but most fruit trees I would fail to identify unless the fruit is hanging on them. Fortunately, a Strength of Thousands party is likely to have a druid who can identify trees. The party will be 14th level when they enter the Screaming Jungle, so a druid is likely to have Nature +25 (14 level + 6 master rank + 5 wisdom). I would view a duskwood tree as an 8th-level identification challenge, with +5 adjustment for rarity, so DC 29 to identify. No problem.

Secrets of the Temple-City says, "The trip through the Screaming Jungle takes several weeks on foot, and even with their adventuring prowess, the heroes are still bound to encounter a few notable dangers along the way." Several weeks means lots of opportunity to encounter a rare duskwood tree, even if the party is not searching.

The module does not mention duskwood nor darkwood (I word-searched the PDF). It does mention Kilia Mwibo trees, so those odds of encountering strange trees works against the party, too. Lost Omens The Mwangi Expanse also does not mention duskwood (or darkwood). In contrast, Lost Omens Shining Kingdoms mentions Darkmoon Vale as a source of duskwood five separate times (no mention of duskwood in the Verduran Forest). The Pathfinderwiki page on Duskwood credits Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, published August 2008, as the source for duskwood trees in the Screaming Jungle. That was back in the days when Paizo adventures set in the Mwangi Expanse treated the expanse as unexplored territory to be exploited for its natural resources and ancient ruins, based on 19th-century European tales of Africa. Nevertheless, a precious material mentioned in the GM Core should have a source on every continent, so I favor finding duskwood in the Screaming Jungle.

I asked my wife, who plays in my Strength of Thousands campaign, what her character would do if the party found a duskwood tree, whose branches could be sold for 500 gp. She said she would mark its location and report it to the Magaambya for future research. My Strength of Thousands campaign has a weird attitude toward loot and wealth. I have all their gear, except for a few personally-owned items, on loan to them from the Magaambya Academy for their mission. They will be fully equipped with 14th-level gear for the trip through the Screaming Jungle without having to spend a copper piece of their own. They will be carrying a 14th-level item costing 4,200 gp and some 12th- and 13th-level items costing 1,600 gp and 3,000 gp, so a duskwood branch worth 100 gp (I will correct the price) will look minor to them.

Upon further thought, the Magaambya has had sent researchers into the Screaming Jungle for millennia. They probably harvested seeds and have their own secret duskwood grove somewhere near Nantambu. Xhokan in the supply center will ask the party in advance to collect seeds and cuttings if they find a duskwood tree in the Screaming Jungle to compare the Magaambya's domestic variety to the wild variety.

shroudb wrote:

... The way I would "handle" PCs trying to harvesting it for profit would be fairly simple: Earn Income, of a sufficient high level Task, with maybe a big circumstance bonus on the roll due to the availability of the rare material to begin with, and then the result would be simultaneously how much "usable" wood is both harvested and you found a buyer for.

also do note that the "branch" is not a small twig, given that a 1 bulk object (which is alredy processed) is only 350gp, it's safe to assume that the "branch" refers to one of the main branches of a tree at least.

If I came across a whole g++$#*n dusk wood tree and cut off some seven foot long hunk of branch, I would just quit if you told me I somehow only harvested 28gp worth of duskwood. If you’re going to b@*&~*@% that hard don’t have the f@!!ing tree in the first place. Don’t jangle it in front of me like shiny car keys and joink it away with some b+$!+@!$ subsystem roll that doesn’t model the in world situation in the slightest.

I had to improvise mechanics for harvesting raw materials in my campaigns. One factor that shroudb overlooked is that the Earn Income downtime activity is for a downtime job that typically spans weeks. Imagine someone with a job as a duskwood lumberjack. Duskwood trees are rare. Their locales are guarded: the Verduran Forest is tended by druids who make treaties with lumbering companies, Darkmoon Vale is inhabited by kobolds, dire wolves, and werecreatures, and the Screaming Jungle is a deadly jungle flanked by natives who dislike outsiders. Thus, seeking duskwood as a job would involve a great deal of time negotiating with the natives and then searching for a duskwood tree. Finding the tree is a jackpot, a payoff for weeks of work, say 5 weeks. Thus, 34 days of no harvest followed by one day of 35-fold harvest. An 8th-level master of Nature would earn 3 gp per day, so multiply that by 35 to get around 105 gp, about one branch of duskwood (the druids wouldn't let the lumberjack cut down the entire rare tree).

But if an 8th-level adventuring party ran into a duskwood tree as part of their adventure, such as the tree serving as a landmark on a treasure map they had obtained at great risk, then they get the 105 gp each (420 gp total) in a single day without spending the 34 days prospecting the forest.

The math breaks down in that a tree can have its location recorded and a lumberjack can be sent out once per year to cut off a branch. With 52 trees known, the lumberjack could harvest one branch every week (mostly travel time). That comes to 105/7 = 15 gp per day, which is 13th-level income on the Income Earned table. This does not happen with precious metals mined out of the ground, since ore does not grow back. I won't worry about the re-harvesting flaw in my math, because adventurers have to finish their quest and won't return. And the rules are for adventurers rather than for lumber companies.

Yesterday, I wrote:

A duskwood branch can be used to make a duskwood shield, an 8th-level item, so the branch is an 8th-level item, too, costing 500 gp.

Today, I realized that Paizo's math is wrong. 500 gp is the price of an 8th-level permanent item. The duskwood branch is a consumable item, since it is consumed in making a shield, armor, weapon, or other object. (It can also count as a trade good, which affects resale price.) Consumables are cheaper by level. An 8th-level consumable item costs only 100 gp.

So part of the shocking price of a duskwood branch is an error.

Ironically, this error does not affect crafting with duskwood. Duskwood is not measured by bulk for crafting. Instead, the duskwood items measures duskwood by price, such as "The initial raw materials must include duskwood worth at least 200 gp + 20 gp per Bulk [of the armor crafted]." If a duskwood branch cost 100 gp instead of 500 gp, then the crafter would need 2.2 branches for one-bulk armor rather than 0.44 branches.

The Duskwood material entry in Archives of Nethys leaves off the size of a duskwood branch and duskwood lumber, but the GM Core says on page 254: Type duskwood branch; Price 500 gp; Bulk L; Type duskwood lumber; Price 5,000 gp; Bulk 1. Needing 2.2 branches for a suit of armor does sound more realistic. Otherwise, we have as shroudb said:

also do note that the "branch" is not a small twig, given that a 1 bulk object (which is alredy processed) is only 350gp, it's safe to assume that the "branch" refers to one of the main branches of a tree at least.

The other precious materials in the GM Core are metals sold in light-bulk chunks and one-bulk ingots. Adamantine and dawnsilver are also 8th-level materials, and they have the same 500 gp for a light-bulk chunk error. Cold iron and silver are 2nd-level materials, and they cost 10 gp per chunk. 2nd-level consumables typically cost 7 gp, but 10 gp is closer to that 7-gp consumable price than the 35-gp permanent item price. 17th-level orichalcum is the other precious material and costs 1,000 gp per chunk. 17th-level consumable items typically cost around 2,500 gp, and 17th-level permanent items typically cost around 13,000 gp.

I deal with the issue by never using precious materials in Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

This is in contrast to my PF1 Iron Gods campaign. The seven skymetals--abysium, adamantine, djezet, inubrix, noqual, orichalcum, and siccatite--are important in that story. The PCs soon acquired adamantine weapons in order to cut through the hardness of robots. They never had to worry about the price of those materials, because the metals could be found in the crashed spaceships that they explored and the PCs could craft the items themselves (Iron Gods has a lot of downtime between modules.) Later, my NPC party member Val Baine eventually made herself a mithral armored coat for weird rules reasons discussed at PF1 Bloodrager Val Baine Converted to PF2.

PF1 Val's armored coat was a weird story that lost its weirdness in PF2. She decided to try a technological scatterlight suit for armor against energy weapons. The suit was merely +1 armor against physical attacks, so she wore a PF1 armored coat over it for its +4 armor bonus. But an armored coat was medium armor, and her PF1 sylph's Wings of Air let her fly only while wearing no armor or light armor. So she would take off her coat and carry it in her arms for non-combat flight. She gave up on the scatterlight suit and switched to a Robe of Arcane Heritage under her armored coat. And she made a mithral armored coat that counted as light armor for movement purposes, such as flight. PF2 Val kept the armored coat to maintain her style, but had no reason to make it out of mithral.

The ridiculous price of duskwood comes from the ridiculous economics of Pathfinder, which were copied from the similar economics of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. Magic items and precious-material items are level capped. We don't want a 1st-level wizard becoming overpowered by casting 3rd-rank spells from a wand nor a 1st-level fighter becoming especially hard to hit with +2 fundamental armor runes. But rather than making a blatant rule that player characters cannot buy items higher than their level, the rules hid the restriction by making those items too expensive for the low-level characters to buy.

The price of items from 2nd level and up is based on their level, not on the difficulty of crafting them or the cost of materials. 2nd-level permanent items cost 35 gp, 3rd-level permanent items cost 70 gp, 4th-level permanent items cost 100 gp, 5th-level permanent items cost 150 gp, 6th-level items cost 200 gp, 7th-level permanent items cost 300 gp, 8th-level permanent items cost 500 gp, etc. The prices vary within a band of prices, and consumable items have their own cheaper price schedule. The prices roughly double every 2 levels, just like experience points from defeating a Level+2 enemy, except that the developers like round numbers for prices; therefore, over 6 levels the multiplier is 10 rather than 8.

A duskwood branch can be used to make a duskwood shield, an 8th-level item, so the branch is an 8th-level item, too, costing 500 gp. Strangely, an 8th-level duskwood shield requires only 55 gp of duskwood, so that branch provides enough material for 9 shields. Equally strange, an 8th-level duskwood shield has the same stats as a 0th-level steel shield rather than a 0th-level wooden shield.

But why is a duskwood shield an 8th-level item? What marvelous advantage does it give? Its only advantage over the 0th-level steel shield is lightness, bulk L rather than bulk 1. If we go back to PF1, the Darkwood entry says, "The armor check penalty of a darkwood shield is lessened by 2 compared to an ordinary shield of its type." And as a reminder about PF1 armor check penalty:

Armor Check Penalty: Any armor heavier than leather, as well as any shield, hurts a character’s ability to use Dexterity- and Strength-based skills. An armor check penalty applies to all Dexterity- and Strength-based skill checks. A character’s encumbrance may also incur an armor check penalty.

Shields: If a character is wearing armor and using a shield, both armor check penalties apply.

Duskwood is 8th level because it reduces a shield's armor check penalty that does not exist in PF2. An equivalent bonus in PF2 would be, "Duskwood is so light that Raise a Shield with a duskwood shield is a free action," but no-one wrote that rule.

In contrast, PF2 duskwood armor does offer a real advantage in a very narrow niche: "It’s easier to wear than normal wood armor, reducing the Strength modifier necessary to ignore its check penalty by 1 and reducing its Speed penalty by 5 feet." Thus, a character trained in light and medium armor but with low attribute scores of STR +1 and DEX +2 could upgrade from Studded Leather Armor (+2, dex cap +3, STR req +1) to Duskwood Wooden Breastplate (+3, dex cap +2, STR req +2) to increase their AC by 1 without an armor check penalty. I don't know why anyone would build a character with such stats, but it might be plausible for an Inventor or Thaumaturge.

Your PCs should talk to their dorm-mate Strands-of-Golden-Dawn Tzeniwe and learn friendfetch. That spell is one of my players' favorites because it is great at getting an ally out of a deadly situation. For example, I added a battle against five Giant Hermit Crabs to Spoken on the Song Wind, and whenever a crab grabbed a person in their big claw, the party friendfetched them to safety (Virgil Tibbs, Playtest Rune Smith comment #16). friendfetch has a range of only 30 feet, but that distance enough to move an unconscious party member away from the enemies for safe Battle Medicine.

My players frequently used friendfetch before our Strength of Thousands campaign and they were delighted to discover that the spell had been invented as a flavorful spell for Tzeniwe.

Repositioning an unconscious ally can also move them 10 feet away from an enemy. I have an example of that at River Into Darkness Revisited comment #3.

My tactically-savvy players know to retreat their character when their hit points fall one critical hit away from unconsciousness, so we seldom have an unconscious party member on the field. Occassionally, an opponent delivers a critical hit and a regular hit on their turn, so the party has to deal with unconsciousness. Then the party springs into action to distract the opponent while a spellcaster casts Heal or Soothe. In a pinch, the cantrip Rousing Splash can get a PC back on their feet for 1 minute.

Whenever my players plan an encounter against tough opponents they also plan a retreat. In Strength of Thousands adventures they sometimes rescue people in danger and get them to safety via their retreat plan. One bard is fond of Cyclone Rondo to discourage enemies from closing in on the party.

But the biggest aid to a party's retreat is the enemy's true motives. Only two enemies in the first two modules have had the death of the party as their goal:

A few weeks ago, on a jungle road in Hurricane's Howl, the bard cast Phantasmal Protagonist to aid in a battle against a single large monster. The monster, by lucky rolls, defeated the phantasm and then dragged off its illusory body to eat, leaving the rest of the party behind.

The teacher of the Escape class can illustrate the value of prinal wall spells and arcane illusion spells. (The two bards in my campaign are unusual as occult spellcasters attending a school of arcane and primal magic.) So the lessons of the class could be:
1) Protect the injured before they fall unconscious.
2) Distract the opponent while rescuing the injured or unconscious.
3) Rescue with minimal risk, such as by friendfetch. (Maybe have Tzeniwe as a teacher's assistant for this part.) Waking up an unconscious ally is easier than dragging them.
4) Cover the retreat with walls, illusion, difficult terrain, or other obstacles (Castilliano suggested closed doors.)
5) Judge how relentless the enemy will be in pursuit.

All I know about Paizo Plus is from two web pages: Paizo Blog: Introducing Paizo Plus and the Paizo Plus page itself. I was surprised when I received emails from Paizo Plus reminding me of my purchases and suggesting that I could write reviews. Those two sources had said nothing about email invitations suggesting that I write a review.

The first one was Wednesday, November 19:

Your Recent Paizo Purchase

Hello Erin!

Thanks for your recent purchase of Pathfinder Battlecry! PDF. We'd love to have you review that product for other players!

If you are a member of the Paizo Plus program, you will earn 5 gold for each review you complete (up to 5 gold/week). If you're not a member yet, just click the Paizo Plus link on the main store page.

Thanks again for supporting Paizo!

followed by an interactive form for submitting a review.

I have not yet read through my copy of Battlecry!, so I did not write a review. The second email was on Monday, November 24, and it suggested that I write a review for my purchase of Pathfinder Society Scenario #6-03: Godsrain in a Godless Land.

I did write that review. I tried to submit it via the form in the email, but the next page glitched. It demanded that I fill out the number of stars, but I had already done so. But I had written the review in a separate text file, an old habit from relying on buggy computers. So I submitted the review on the purchase page for Godsrain in a Godless Land. Soon I received an email, "Please verify your review," and I did so by clicking a button.

Nothing happened for a day. The next day, the review appeared and my Paizo Plus page displayed that I had exactly 5 gold. Technically, having exactly 5 gold was a glitch, too, since some of my other actions should have provided more gold. That has been repaired and now I have 245 gold in Paizo Plus.

I have also learned that the reviews do not apply the BBCode markup used in the Paizo forums, so my review has gratuitous i's and /i's instead of italic text and b's and /b's instead of bold text. And it lost all my line breaks, so the paragraphs run together into one big block of text. Can anyone tell me how to format text in Paizo product reviews?

I will write reviews in the future. My reviews will be odd for Pathfinder Society materials because I bought them to supplement my Strength of Thousands campaign rather than playing them as is. I wonder how far back the email reminders will track my purchases and whether they will mention my purchases of especially old materials such as GameMastery Module W2: River into Darkness.

It's just nonsense that spell attack rolls start of kinda great thanks to Gouging Claw, TK Projectile, etc, and slowly get worse and worse across the game.

There is no reason for that kind of "creeping failure" and we all know exactly why it happens, once upon a time playtesters didn't like the lack of magic weapons affecting core math, so the Paizo devs reworked their system to add weapon runes. Unarmed attacks were thereafter blursed with needing Handwraps; even if it's an ancestry spit attack, gotta wrap those hands.

But oops, Paizo forgot about spell attacks.

No, the original Pathfinder 2nd Edition playtest included runes.

RUNES

Some magic weapons and armor gain their enhancements from potent eldritch runes etched into them. These runes allow for in-depth customization of items.

Runes must be physically engraved on items through a special process to convey their benefits. They take two forms: potency runes and property runes. ...

In fact, the potency runes in the playtest went up to +5. Furthermore, extra weapon damage dice was an automatic effect of the weapon potencty runes.

The spellcasters never had a PF2 item to improve their spell attack bonuses or spell DCs. I think that the playtest was experimenting with spells that have a short-lived result on a Failure, so the developers wanted the spell DCs to stay low for the playtest. I guess they were satisfied with the experiment and decided that low spell DC were fine.

Mathmuse wrote:

... After 2 pages of establishing this plot hook, the scene jumps 75 miles north to deep in the Fangwood. My players objected to that, because that 75 miles would be heading through territory conquered by the Ironfang Legion and they wanted to fight the legion on the way north. So I wrote new material for that journey.

Perhaps author Amanda Hamon Kunz skipped that journey to reduce the page count. Or maybe she skipped it because she would have had to review the first three modules and the overall invasion plan in order to write material that fits the main theme of the adventure path but would be only a side theme to Prisoners of the Blight.
...

It was handwaved on p8 "At this point, the PCs likely have access to magical means of transportation, such as greater teleport or overland flight."

Expectation IMHO is that if the party didn't have access to that sort of magical transportation, that Karburtin could play Uber-driver for them.
But yes it did seem like a big assumption and side quest.

I converted Ironfang Invasion adventure path to Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules, which has more restrictions on teleportation. Teleport, spell 6, can transport only 5 people. The party had 7 PCs and 2 animal companions. Furthermore, both full-rank spellcasters had primal tradition, which is worst at transportation. They typically summoned Phantom Steeds for long-distance travel.

Nevertheless, I did provide alternative transportation for reaching the Fangwood. After the players negotiated peace between Kraggodan and Molthune, General Cadmius Ortho offered the party a ride on a Molthune ship down the Inkwater River to the Fangwood. The party accepted the offer, except that they asked the ship to make a side trip up the Platter River so that they could free some villages from Ironfang control. They wanted to fight the Ironfang Invasion on the way north rather than effortlessly reach their destination via a spell or a ship.

I have noticed that Paizo modules assume that the PCs seek adventure for the sake of adventure. The modules skip the mundane stuff, such as routine travel, or spice up the routine with random encounters. My own players, in contrast, adopt a goal, Adventure is only the means. Their goal in Ironfang Invasion was to free Nirmathas from the invasion. Their goal in Strength of Thousands is to apply their growing skills as students and researchers to help common people. Their goal in Starfinder's Skitter Shot series was to run a successful salvage and rescue business. They immerse themselves in the narrative and find excitement in pursuing a theme that is not pure adventure.

exequiel759 wrote:

Aristophanes wrote:

Trip.H wrote:

I'm still having to explain here just how bad Gaze really is, because Exemplar's spark mechanics obfuscate that travesty that much more than normal.

Because Gaze is a Trans ability, it triggers the 1 per turn lockout.

If an Exemplar instead spends 1A to Shift the spark back to a weapon, then they could then pop the weapon's Trans ability that same turn, and that Trans itself is a damage boost far more potent than Gaze.

Geez Trip, stop with the wishy-washy ambiguity!

Tell us how you really feel.

Just spitballin' here: What if it were 1d6 per damage die, then at 10th it goes to d8s, and 18th to d10s?

I doubt nerfing it would make it better.

How is 1d6 precision per damage die as opposed to a flat 1d6 for Trans Gaze nerfing?

Gaze Sharp as Steel's Transcendence currently starts with an additional 1d6 precision damage to the next successful Strike. This damage increases to 2d6 at 10th level and 3d6 at 18th level.

Aristophanes' sentence is easily misread by missing the "per damage die" part, especially since the usual phrase is "weapon damage die." That misreading would be 1d6 to start, increasing to 1d8 at 10th level and 1d10 at 18th level. That would be a nerf.

I think Aristophones' intention was start with 1d6, increase it to 2d6 precision damage at 4th level by putting a Striking rune on the weapon, increase it to 2d8 at 10th level, to 3d8 at 12th level with a greater Striking rune, to 3d10 at 18th level, and to 4d10 at 19th level with a major Striking rune. That rate of increase seems awfully irregular, so perhaps the d8 should be moved to 8th level and the d10 should be more to 16th level to even out the gaps between increases.

I myself am disappointed that the precision damage in Gaze Sharp as Steel as written does not increase until 10th level. For comparison, a rogue's Sneak Attack Damage starts as 1d6, increases to 2d6 at 5th level, to 3d6 at 11th level, and to 4d6 at 17th level.

I am still embarrassed that I missed the line, "You can Spark Transcendence only once each round," in the Transcendence trait sidebox. I checked the War of Immortals playtest document and the sentence is there, too. I just did not notice that my playtesting player was following a rule that I had missed. Paizo gave redundancy in the playtest document because Spark Transcendence also said, "Frequency once per round" there.

And now I agree with Trip.H. Limiting Transcendence to once per round makes Gaze Sharp as Steel a lot less attractive. I considered redoing my calculations under the correct rules, because I noticed the word "successful" in Gaze Sharp as Steel, which makes the Transcendence less likely to fail when used alone.

But Exemplar now seems less fun, so I lack the enthusiasm to go over the numbers again. Being able to combine Transcendences in a single round was more playful. In Pathfinder design, limiting Transcendence to once per round makes it easier to analyze. Fast-paced combinations are harder to balance. On the other hand, a great moment of fun of Pathfinder combat is setting up a situation for a decisive blow, such as a rogue moving into flanking position for a Sneak Attack. Preferably, the setup and the payoff happen on the same turn, because letting a round pass between the setup and the payoff is likely to change the situation enough to deny the payoff, such as the opponent Stepping out of the flank.

In a basin between two mountain ranges, where the wind blows from one range to the other, the clouds seldom rain. Nevada in the United States between the Sierra Nevada range to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east is an example of this. Belkzen has this geography, too, resting between the Mindspin Mountains to the west and the Tusk Mountains to the east.

In addition, Belkzen is fairly far north. Its northern edge is the frigid Algid Wastes. Such a location often means a short growing season, though in real-world geography warm trade winds or warm ocean currents can extend the growing season. The mountains around Belkzen prevent such warming.

The river down the middle of Belkzen is called the Flood Road because it is dry 10 months of the 12-month year. And its banks are unstable for the wet two months, which makes irrigation of adjacent land via water channels difficult.

You can Spark Transcendence only once each round.

I had missed that. The once-per-round restriction is not mentioned under the Spark Transcendence feature nor under the descriptions of the Ikons and their Transcendence abilities. Instead, it is mentioned under the Transcendence trait.

Thank you, Zalabim, for clarifying the rule. Other people were criticizing my ideas as infeasible without mentioning that rule, so I could not see what I had done wrong.

Mathmuse wrote:

It does look like you might have gotten close to finding the breakpoint.

I had assumed before the calculation that two Gleaming Blades would come out half a damage point ahead rather than half a damage point behind. When two options are that close, other considerations such as roleplaying drive the decision.

Your example uses a 15% accurate max MAP attack, which seriously skews the result to favor Gaze. That detail alone is getting close to dishonest territory, TBH, as that's too unlikely a scenario.

And it lacks any other damage source, such as runes or weakness...

I wanted minimal additional effect both for my convenience and to keep the analysis short. I put the exemplars at 1st level, so no striking runes.

However, I did make a mistake. I forgot to add the damage from critical hits. Adding in the critical hits gives two Gleaming Blade swords 13.3 damage on average and Gleaming Blade and Gaze Sharp as Steel 13.5 damage on average, much close to each other.

And it is a 1 turn comparison, when the whole point of double weapon Ikon is that the 2 turn rotation keeps the offense up...

I set up both exemplars with a 1-turn rotation for simplicity. I am inexperienced with exemplars, so I don't know the rotations that most people use. I saw exequiel759's comment, "The exemplar I want to play is going to take Gleaming Blade, Gaze Sharp as Steel, and Scar Of The Survivor," and decide to go with those three ikons.

I am unlikely to gain experience with exemplars this year. I am in the 3rd module of the Strength of Thousands adventure path, which was written before War of Immortals, so it has no exemplar NPCs. I have not yet found a reason to add one. I did add Mkosa, a 5th-level halfling druid with Mythic Sage's Calling, for a little practice with Mythic Callings.

Basically, I'm saying that yeah, if one needs that kind of unrealistic comparison to get Gaze to appear as one single 1/2 a dmg point higher, then Gaze is very much trash.

(still can be worth it for the RP, but it's numbers really are joke-level horrible)
____________________

The more realistic white room would be 2A for offense across 2 turns.
Gleaming Blade & Gleaming Blade |versus| Gleaming Blade & 1 Gaze + Strike.

I also failed to notice that Mathmuse used Gleaming's & Gaze's Trans effects for their example, which already required the previous turn, and makes that example that much more inaccurate/non applicable, lol.

The Exemplar class says under Shift Immanence, "In addition to the above usage, you can also Shift Immanence as a free action triggered when you roll initiative." So the exemplar can start with their ikon where they want it. I suppose in an actual game rather than a white room, both exemplars would start with the spark in their Gleaming Blade ikon. On their 1st turn, they would Stride and Flowing Spirit Strike. The exemplar with two Gleaming Blade ikons would end his turn with the spark on his other Gleaming Blade. The exemplar with Gleaming Blade and Gaze Sharp as Steel would end his turn with the spark on his Gaze. That sets up their 1-turn rotations, assuming that they can stand still rather than chase after opponents.

Is this unrealistic?

The third ikon has a cost, its power budget. I don't see exactly why you seem to think that if the exemplar lacked a third ikon that its power budget wouldn't be spent on either a new combat feature or buffing an already existing combat feature. Ikons are where most the budget of the class is located, and all ikons are designed to be used in combat, thus they are combat features. This isn't like taking away all the extra skill feats and skill increases from the rogue to double their sneak attack or something like that. If anything, it would be closer to what barbarians got in the remaster when they lost deny advantage in favor of furious footfalls.

Pathfinder does not have power budgets. It has selection budgets. For example, in character creation the player can select one Background. Different backgrounds, such as Laborer boosting Strength or Constitution and training in Athletics, offer more power for a particular class, such as Fighter which loves Strength and Constitution. Seeing a Fighter with Street Preacher background, which boosts Wisdom or Charisma and trains in Religion, would be unusual. Likewise, at a level when the character can gain a skill feat, the character can select only one skill feat, but some feats are more powerful for that particular character than other feats.

Instead, Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a power cap. Class feats are generally increase power, but none will suddenly make the character 50% more powerful. If a spellcaster takes Cantrip Expansion, then the caster could become slightly more powerful by adding a long-range damage cantrip that they had passed up before, but that cantrip was sixth on their list of cantrips they wanted. And during a particular very dangerous combat, the spellcaster would probably be casting spells from their spell slots rather than cantrips. Maximum power inches upward constrained by PF2's tight math.

As far as I can tell in reading over the Ikon rules, an Exemplar could chose Gleaming Blade ikon twice. Imagine an exemplar wielding a pair of agile swords. He selects Gleaming Blade ikon twice, one for each sword. The Gleaming Blade Immanence does not double, because each Strike is only with a single sword. The Transcendence does not double, because the exemplar can make a two-action Flowing Spirit Strike only one per turn. The only two advantages of two Gleaming Blades is that the spark moves to the other blade, so the Immanence can be used on a third-action attack with the sword in the other hand, and the other-hand sword is ready for Flowing Spirit Strike on the next turn without having to Shift Immanence.

But is that better than taking Gleaming Blade on one agile sword and Gaze Sharp as Steel? With one sword and both Gleaming Blade and Gaze Sharp as Steel ikons, the exemplar could start each turn with his spark on Gaze Sharp as Steel and spend one action for A Moment Unending for 1d6 precision damage on their next Strike. A Moment Unending transfers the spark to the sword for Flowing Spirit Strike, and Flowing Spirit Strike transfers the spark back to the body for A Moment Unending. That is also a useful combat routine.

Let's crunch the math. I assume a 1d6 weapon with 55% chance of hitting on an unpenalized attack and STR +4. Two Gleaming Blades would deal (55%)(1d6+6) + (55%)(1d6+6) + (15%)(1d6+6) = (1.25)(1d6+6), average 11.875 damage. A Gaze Sharp as Steel and a Gleaming Blade would deal (55%)(2d6+2+STR) + (55%)(1d6+2+STR) = (1.65)(1d6) + (1.1)(6), average 12.375 damage. And the Gaze-and-Gleaming exemplar also has a free hand and could apply A Moment Unending to a ranged Strike with a bow.

The player of an Exemplar in my playtest did tell me that Exemplar relied on knowing how to play PF2 well.

I also feel its not honest compare the heal spell to Gaze Sharp as Steel when heal is one of the best spells in the game that just happens to have a less useful secondary use while Gaze Sharp as Steel was designed to be a backup option. I think it would be much more fair to compare the healspell with the victor's wreath ikon since the latter its mostly used for its immanence effect but it also happens to have a fantastic situational trascendence effect as well.

I making an analogy matching the individual effects of Heal to the individual effects of an entire Transcendence rotation, not directly comparing Heal versus Gaze Sharp as Steel as if an exemplar had a choice between the two. Casting Heal to heal is the analog to Flowing Spirit Strike and the side effect of also hurting undead is the analog to gaining the benefit of A Moment Unending by using Transcendence to move the spark back to the Gleaming Blade weapon instead of simply using Shift Immanence.

You said it yourself. The steamer in your kitchen is there because you sometimes want to eat steamed vegetables, but why would I choose Gaze Sharp as Steel for a reason other than flavor when I could choose two weapon ikons that do the same thing but better? You don't even need two weapons AFAIK since based on the exemplar's feats a single item can have multiple immanence and trascendence effects. This is why I think Gaze Sharp as Steel is bad, because its only use case is totally situational and even in those sitautions there's still other ikons that can do pretty much the same thing but way better.

A "totally situational" use of Gaze Sharp as Steel, such as using it with a non-ikon bow, is the match to me cooking steamed vegetables once a month. Situations come up about once a month.

I'll explain my rationale with an example.

Imagine you go to a restaurant where you must choose three different dishes for them to prepare for you. After a short wait, the dishes arrive and you start eating. The food is great, but you’re already full by the time you reach the third dish, so you leave it untouched. You enjoy the place so much that you keep coming back at least once a week. However, every time you visit, the same thing happens: you can never finish the third dish because you’re always full by then. The restaurant has a policy of throwing away any leftovers, so each visit ends up costing them money since that uneaten dish is wasted every time you go.

With that said, I want to ask; why does the restaurant keep preparing three dishes for every customer if most people only end up eating two?

This is a bad analogy because the aspect that makes the three dishes bad is not an aspect of the three ikons. The third dish has a cost to prepare, so ignoring that dish wastes money. The third ikon has no cost, so ignoring it merely means you would rather use other ikons.

Let me change the analogy. Suppose I have three pots in my kitchen for cooking on my stove: a pan, a pot, and a steamer. I use the pan every day for frying eggs and cabbage for breakfast. I use the pot often for making soup and stew and mashed potatoes. I seldom use the steamer, because I use that only for steaming vegetables about once a month. Should I complain that I own a steamer?

In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, the spell Heal is used primarily for healing allies. But it can also damage undead opponents. I almost never use Heal to damage undead, because my weapon does that job just fine and I want to save my Heal spells for healing. Should I complain about the extra feature on Heal that harms undead?

I suppose someone could imagine that if the Exemplar lacked the third ikon, then the Exemplar could get a new feature to replace it. That would give the ikon an opportunity cost. But that is not how Pathfinder design works. Each class is designed for an exact degree of combat effectiveness by level. If the alternative feature would make the Exemplar more effective at combat than the standard, then the developers won't give the Exemplar that extra feature.

The steamer in my kitchen is there because I sometimes eat steamed vegetables. The harm-undead feature in the Heal spell is there because the heal font cleric has twin themes of preventing death and defeating undead monsters that represent death. This is about flavor of my meals or of a Pathfinder class, not about power.

The flavor of the exemplar is that they are empowered by a spark of the divine. The ikon represents that spark mechanically. Due to the power cap by level on all character classes, the ikon is limited in its power. Transcendence lets the exemplar exert a little more power in a carefully limited fashion to give the ikon more drama. Making transcendence more convenient would require putting a different limit on the effectiveness of transcendence, and that different limit might diminish the divine-spark theme of the exemplar class. Having a third ikon that is not used as often as the other two does not increase power, yet it still highlights the spark, so it plays to the theme of the class.

I haven't had to fix too much in PF2. But I do have a handful of house rules that fix some abilities. We did the same fix with Nimble Dodge as Ectar.

The character Roshan, who uses Assurance, also learned Nimble Dodge. I posted in our Discord group asking whether we should use Ectar's houserule. She replied, "We've already been doing it that way."

Roshan's player is my elder daughter and has played in my Pathfinder games since I began gamemastering in 2011, until she moved to Seattle. She rejoined my Pathfinder games when we went online in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I guess I lost track of my houserule decisions over the 6 years since we began playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

So, the concept is kind of silly.

They are a group of young women who do pagents around Avistan (and northern Garund). One of their friends is missing, and her mother dead, so they set off to find their friend. Hence no one is too bulky or overtly defensive, and why there is probably a bit of an emphasis on Charisma without a bard.

That party reminds me of my current Strength of Thousands party. They are students at the Magaambya Academy, and due to the two bards in the party they act like Theater majors. The champion Wilfred in the party is bulky and defensive, and the rogue Roshan is strong (though a Eldritch Trickster racket rather than a Ruffian racket), but the other five are spellcasters and a kineticist. Their theatric style means that they usually try to befriend opponents, but they are also good at manipulating the battlefield.

What are the theatric specialties of the party members? The leaf druid could have their familiar perform with Accompanist or Skilled familiar ability, the thaumaturge could train in Performance to benefit from their charisma, the cleric and swashbuckler gain Performance from their divine skill or swashbuckler style, and the monk can dance and tumble with Acrobatic Performance.

Okay, so

Cleric (Cloistered) of Shelyn
Druid Leaf Order
Swashbuckler battle Dancer
Thaum definitely has the tome
Monk as an acrobatic performance skill feat, and Reflective Ripple stance.

The cleric is unarmored with 8+CON hit points, the druid and thaumaturge have light or medium armor and 8+CON hit points, the swashbuckler has light armor and 10+CON hit points, and the monk has unarmored expertise with 10+CON hit points. The cleric should avoid the frontline, but the others, especially the monk and swashbuckler, are reasonably well defended. And a few domain spells, such as Darkness domain's Cloak of Shadow, Luck domain's Bit of Luck, and Trickery domain's Sudden Shift can help the cleric protect themself, but that would require the cleric to worship a different god, such as Grandmother Spider.

The party can defend themselves by staying mobile rather than by a front line protecting squishy characters. Anyone too hurt can retreat. Therefore, the party does not need a tank.

I worry about damage dealing. Dexterity-based martials gain little damage from Strength bonuses. The swashbuckler is designed to make up for that lack with panache, so that will work. But the monk will need a boost from other party members, such as a Runic Body spell from the cleric. The thaumaturge and druid have their own ways of dealing damage. I think a cloistered cleric of Shelyn should save their slotted spells for buffing the party and throw 60-foot-range cantrips, such as Needle Darts, for damage.

Two questions:

1 - Which party member is providing the Deception/Diplomacy/Intimidation type skills?
2 - Which party member is providing Stealth/Thievery?

You can do ok without Deception, Intimidation and Stealth, but a lack of Diplomacy and Thievery will probably bite you on the butt.

I'm not familiar with Druid orders, but maybe replace him with a primal Sorcerer?

Thaumaturge class has key attribute Charisma, so they can do well with Charisma skills, such as Deception, Diplomacy, and Intimidation. Also, leaf druids are trained in Diplomacy.

Swashbuckler and a lean Monk have key attribute Dexterity, so they can do well with Dexterity skills, such as Stealth and Thievery.

Many players have pointed out that gaining an advantage out of Assurance is difficult to manage. Gaining a 10 instead of a d20 roll would be nice and assuring, but losing all bonuses except proficiency (which includes level) means that the attribute modifier bonus no longer applies. Ordinarily, Assurance could worth using only when a really low roll would be a disaster or to ignore a very heavy penalty, because Assurance is worse than rolling a natural 7.

Assurance Feat 1

Fortune General Skill
Source Player Core pg. 252 2.0
Prerequisites trained in at least one skill
Even in the worst circumstances, you can perform basic tasks. Choose a skill you’re trained in. You can forgo rolling a skill check for that skill to instead receive a result of 10 + your proficiency bonus (do not apply any other bonuses, penalties, or modifiers).

[/b]Special[/b] You can select this feat multiple times. Each time, choose a different skill and gain the benefits for that skill.

On the other hand, the rogue Roshan in my current campaign took Assurance in Athletics because she was maximizing her Athletics proficiency. She added Assurance and Automatic Knowledge in Nature, Society, and Arcana so that she can tell which creatures are better to Grapple and which creatures are better to Trip as a free action if their level is low enough. So not all players are disappointed with Assurance.

The feat Seasoned perplexes me as written, but maybe I just don't understand the rules.

Seasoned[/b] Feat 1

General Skill
Source Player Core pg. 262 2.0
Prerequisites trained in Crafting, Alcohol Lore, or Cooking Lore
You’ve mastered the preparation of many types of food and drink. You gain a +1 circumstance bonus to checks to Craft food and drink, including elixirs if you have Alchemical Crafting and potions if you have Magical Crafting. If you are a master in one of the prerequisite skills, this bonus increases to +2.

The perplexing issue is what are the Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules for Crafting food and drink? The usual Craft downtime activity takes "2 days of work setting up, or 1 day if you have the item's formula." Using that method to Craft food would have everyone waiting at least a day for dinner. I presume most people simply ask for a Crafting check after an hour, but that is a houserule. My own houserule is to make a Survival check for preparing food and drink, since Survival already has a Subsist activity to feed oneself.

Furthermore, even with quick Craft for food and drink, does a player character who qualified for Seasoned based on Alcohol Lore or Cooking Lore have to roll a Craft check or can they roll their Lore? I would just replace the word "Craft" in Seasoned with "make."

Culture as defined by Schien is made of Artifacts, Espoused Values and Basic Assumptions. Artifacts are the physical aspects one notices, music, stories, sporting games, clothing, food, manner of speaking, etc.

Espoused Values are the direct morals and teachings that make up a culture.

Basic Assumptions are the deep unwritten and often unspoken shared zeitgeist members of a culture have.

I looked up Edgar Henry Schein and found descriptions of Schein’s Model of Organizational Culture.

I used to work for a United States government agency and we had subcultures inside the bureaucratic culture to protect our people from the flaws of bureaucracy. No culture is monolithic.

As an example I would point to the Aztec Indians. We can talk about the brutality of their sacrifice but from their perspective their culture demanded this. They felt there was a need for wide spread bloodshed through human sacrifice or the world would not continue.

From this they justified raids and forced tribute of slaves and the sacrifice of slaves as required for various things.

Now based on critical deconstruction we must accept this as their culture and somehow not judge it against other cultures. I would submit this overlooks the reality of where that culture drove them.

My players and their characters judged the culture of the Ironfang Legion and found it wanting. The halfling rogue/sorcerer Sam had grown up as a slave in Nidal. The Bellflower Network rescued him and relocated him to Nirmathas. The others followed Nirmathi espoused values about independence.

What I am getting at is what shorthand can I use to define the basic assumptions of the culture of each group that is shown in the game.

This is because trying to write up each individual culture for every race and monster would be overwhelming

It would be overwhelming for a single person, but Paizo has teams writing the Lost Omens lore books that describe cultures for regional groups on Golarion.

Currently I am running the Strength of Thousands adventure path, in which the PCs start as students of the Magaambya Academy of Arcane and Primal Magic. The 1st module occurs on campus, the 2nd module moves out to the city of Nantambu surrounding campus, the 3rd module is an archaeological expedition to Bloodsalt that ends up visiting other nations, too, etc. The 1st module sends the PCs on many service projects, because the Magaambya has a culture of study and service.

In the Magaambya, it’s said that a wizard learns both by reading and by doing—a philosophy sometimes termed “the Word and the Way”—and thus to shut oneself off from the world in perpetual study is at best counterproductive, and at worst miserly. In [founder] Jatembe’s tradition, study is ultimately less important than using what you learn to serve others.

The Magaambyan emphasis on service is the source of Nantambu’s strength, with the resident mages ensuring that no invading force has ever managed to come within 20 miles of the city.

Descriptions of the Magaambya can be found in the Lost Omens World Guide, Lost Omens Character Guide, Lost Omens The Mwangi Expanse, and Lost Omens Rival Academies.

Nantambu has a separate culture, since they are not a college devoted to the study of magic. Instead, they are a cosmopolitan democracy reaping benefits of working with the Magaambya.

One the other hand no short hand what so ever means a lot of work to classify it ahead of time. Creatures will have a cultural set of beliefs which define them. Even if they break from the norm it would define that break. Maybe the best way to handle this is have the gods each have their own philosophy tied to the religion they preach and this formulates the ideologies which then defines the enemies and allies of each god.

The edicts and anathema of each god serve as a shorthand for their philosophy.

For example, at the moment Uvuko (The Diamond Ring) is important in my Strength of Thousands campaign. His edicts are, "Embrace change and the future, master adversity with flexibility, foster freedom and progress for others." His anathema are, "Allow yourself and your surroundings to stagnate, crush an egg, use vile or cruel language." The party met some Mbe'ke dwarves whose great-grandparents migrated from Cloudspire and one is a cleric of Uvuko. The party is studying the ruins of Bloodsalt, a dead city that once had several Dragon Disciples. An archaeological secret I am adding is that the city was settled by human and cloud dragon worshipers of Uvuko to embrace a future in which dragons and humans work together. The city is in an area of natural disasters, which spelled its doom, but they were hopeful that the interspecies cooperation could overcome the disasters. The anathema against crushing an egg is symbolic, because to dragons their eggs represent the future, but it resulted in the weird custom that followers of Uvuko do not eat eggs, not even chicken eggs.

A bigger plot about the philosphy of a god was my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign. The Monster Division of the Molthune military, led by hobgoblin General Azaersi, rebelled against the Molthunes, who treated them as third-class citizens, and sought to carve their own nation of monstrous humanoids out of parts of Nirmathas and Molthune. Most of her hobgoblins followed Hadregash, the Lawful Evil barghest hero-god of tyranny and slavery. The other three hero-gods and their boss Lamashtu were Chaotic Evil, but tyranny controls through lawful authority. The campaign was supposed to end with a treaty between Azaersi and Nirmathas, but my players rejected any truce while the Ironfang Legion still held war captives as slave labor. I had to enact cultural change on the Ironfang Legion by letting the party defeat Hadregash himself to strip slavery from his domains. Amusingly, the Remastered PF2 version of Hadregash is no longer a god of slavery, but still has chain and manacle as his holy symbol.
Edicts Conquer everything you see, rule with an iron fist, fight tactically
Anathema Bow before others, let others control your actions, permit insubordination
Areas of Concern Conquest, invasion, war
Domains ambition, might, pain, tyranny

PathfinderWiki has a list of the Lost Omens lore books at https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Lost_Omens. And PathfinderWiki is also a good source of lore.

The Lost Omens World Guide is the first of the Pathfinder 2nd Edition lore books and a solid introduction to the most familiar countries of Golarion and a review of its history. Its nine chapters divide the continents of Avistan and Garund into nine regions.

The ninth chapter "Shining Kindgoms" and the book Lost Omens Shinging Kingdoms covers the nations of Taldor (old empire that is the source of the Taldoran common language), Andoran (democratic nation), Druma (mercantile theocracy), Five Kings Mountains (dwarven kingdom), Kyonin (elven kingdom), and Galt (permanent French revolution).

Three other books that cover the same territories as chapters of Lost Omens World Guide are Absalom, City of Lost Omens, Lost Omens Mwangi Expanse, and Lost Omens Impossible Lands.

Lost Omens Tian Xia World Guide amd Lost Omens Tian Xia Character Guide move to a third contient, Tian Xia, based on Earth's Far East.

The Remastering of Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules renamed the terminology borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons so the lore books published before 2024 use different names for mechanics than the lore books published 2024 and later. This matters more for rule books than for lore books, but some lore books have new ancestry and background options, so they present mechanics for them.

Lore books written for Pathfinder 1st Edition have valid history but their presentday is set a decade in the past. For example, Wrath of the Righteous adventure path closed the Worldwound, but PF1 lore has it still active and PF2 lore has the location rebuilding itself as Sarkoris Scar.

Vital Earth costs 30gp a pop for 24 hours of not needing to breathe. Sounds like the best solution for your players.

Ah, I had searched Archives of Nethys on the Air trait. I had not imagined to check the Earth trait for a breathing solution.

My experience with an Exemplar is from the playtest, in which my younger daughter played a leshy exemplar named Nightshade: Playtesting in a Fistful of Flowers with 7 Leshies. She predicted the not-best-at-anything that Ravingdork describes.

Mechanics: The ikons are fun. It's a very flexible class for what specific build you end up with since you are picking three options out of their respective pools. It generally seems to fall as DPS with the ability to off-tank and/or support as well. You can build more pure DPS with your choices, but it's likely that you won't be quite as good at DPS compared to a class like barbarian, which is all about that. Instead, you get more utility and flexibility. ...

Thus, it is a martially flexible class rather than a martially powerful class. That makes it strong in my campaigns, because my PCs alternate between playing the spearpoint of the party in which their abilities are exactly what is needed to defeat the enemies and playing the haft of the spear in which their abilities serve to support the spearpoint characters.

My daughter's views were that playing an exemplar felt cool. And "mechanically, it's a middle complexity martial fighter class with tank/support options. Enjoyable to play for people who know what they are doing and not going to suck completely even if you don't since none of the options are bad."

Let's look at the dragons in the first Monster Core.
Page 108 "Adamantine dragons are typically steadfast and loyal. Once they commit to a certain purpose, changing their minds is nigh impossible."
Page 110 "These dragons are schemers, always looking to manipulate and control others, either for personal gain or simply for the thrill of watching their machinations play out. Conspirator dragons see themselves above others and typically speak with infantilizing tones and words."
Page 112 "Whether this is true or whether diabolical dragons are simply the reborn souls of dragons sent to Hell, the fact remains that these dragons are powerful, cunning, and tyrannical. Every diabolic dragon’s goal is to further Hell’s will, though how this happens can vary."
Page 114 "Using the blessings of Heaven, empyreal dragons protect others and intercede against wickedness. Empyreal dragons are wise, considerate, and compassionate. When speaking with others, empyreal dragons are patient and understanding."
Page 117 "Fortune dragons are seekers of novel experiences. This desire for originality leads fortune dragons to approach visitors of other ancestries with curiosity, though this initial interest quickly wanes if a visitor lacks exciting qualities."
Page 119 "They are generally contemplative and have a fixation on knowledge and self-discipline, traits belied by their bestial appearance. As a result, horned dragons are generally more open to speaking with outsiders."
Page 121 "Mirage dragons are vain and egotistical figures. They ultimately care more about themselves than others."
Page 123 "Omen dragons have a natural compulsion to share the futures they see. These dragons have no compunctions about what the visions show and share their knowledge equally with innocent villagers as they do with wicked tyrants."

Those descriptions provide more roleplaying information than alignments did.

In Monster Core 2 we find:
Page 118 "Among the largest and fiercest dragons, cinder dragons are typically volatile, demanding respect—even deference—from lesser creatures. Cinder dragons’ appearance evokes their flame, often in scales with mixed patterns of red, orange, and yellow. Many cinder dragons dwell in active volcanoes and similarly fiery locales. Cinder dragons prefer treasures that can withstand the heat of their bodies and lairs, with gemstones, gold, and silver common among their hoards."

The description outright states that a cinder dragon is fierce and volatile. Are they selfish? Their demand for deference probably means that they like gifts from supplicants, but the description does not label them as selfish. Are they kind-hearted? Even if a particular cinder dragon is kind-hearted, their volatile nature means that their anger will often overrule their kindness. They may apologize later. Are they stern yet fair? No, too volatile for that. Are they reckless? That is one way of roleplaying volatile. Are they passionate? That is one way of roleplaying fierce.

Culture matters especially in fantasy because it is about the great conflict Good vs Evil, Law vs Chaos. Alignment was a shorthand that helped to flesh all of that out.

Cinder Dragons are CE, Ok the are cruel and selfish like a red dragon, LE ok then they are ordered and believe in discipline and conquest, N, they are balanced and react as mother nature, their personality dormant until they erupt.

Culture matters less in Pathfinder because most dragons are opponents to defeat. But my players like to interact more, often negotiating with hostile creatures, so I do have to consider culture.

For example, in my Strength of Thousands campaign, the PCs will soon fight a Graveknight. They are students of the Magaambya Academy and will likely recall, "A graveknight can only be permanently destroyed by obliterating their armor (such as with disintegrate), transporting it to the Forge of Creation, or throwing it into the heart of a volcano." One PC took a Magaambya course named, "Making the Undead Stay Dead." Fortunately, they are near the Shackles, which has volcanic islands. Imagine they headed to a volcanic island and encountered a young cinder dragon.

The cinder dragon would fiercely demand that the party explain their intrusion on his volcano. The party is good at Diplomacy and if they roll Recall Knowledge well they will learn, "Cinder dragons are fierce and volatile, demanding respect—even deference—from lesser creatures." The Diplomatic members are also performers (Theater majors), so they might offer the dragon the gift of songs that praise dragons, altering lines to make the songs specifically about cinder dragons. They will point out that only the power of a volcano, which reflects the power of the cinder dragon living there, can destroy the cursed graveknight armor (leaving off the other two possibilities).

And if Diplomacy and Performance fail due to bad dice rolls, then the fierce dragon will declare that his volcano is not a trash dump and he will destroy the party for the insult. Yet he will plan that if he is victorious, he will dump the graveknight armor into the volcano himself rather than deal with a graveknight rejuvenating nearby. The 9th-level party will be able to defeat the dragon. If they spare him (they hate killing intelligent creatures), he will keep his humiliation secret, never telling another dragon and never seeking revenge.

My campaign is only in the 3rd module of Strength of Thousands, but we will need the answer to this question ourselves in about a year real-time.

I searched the 5th module, Doorway to the Red Star, on the word "acclimate" to see when the PCs would eventually acclimate to the thin atmosphere. The only two instances of "acclimate" are in the Atmosphere section that SayPikaPika quoted behind a spoiler mask. This means that no-one except PCs legendary in Athletics will acclimate until the GM grows tired of fatigued PCs.

I also searched for "atmosphere," "atmospheric," "pressure," "pressurized," "suit," and "seal" and did not find anything helpful. I guess the module does not provide a method for, "This fatigued condition ends after the character gets a full night’s rest in a familiar atmosphere." The text mentions that the air bubble spell and bottled air item only delay the fatigue from thin atmosphere. Well, air bubble lasts only 1 minute regardless.

I am familiar with air bubble and cleanse air because my PCs regularly prepare those while they are performing archaeology in Bloodsalt, which has waves of poisonous gas from volcanic Terwa Lake on rare occasions. I added such a wave in last week's game session, for the excitement of using their preparations.

I searched for other solutions. Gas Mask of Clean Air merely filters out poison gases. On the other hand, Everair Mask says that it enriches the air with oxygen pulled from the Plane of Air, so it should compensate for the thin atmosphere. The Everair Masks have limited duration but can be used once a day. The greater Everair Mask, item 10, price 160 gp, creates breathable air for 8 hours, enough for a good night's sleep to remove fatigue. The major Everair Mask, item 14, price 625 gp, creates breathable air for 24 hours, so the wearer has breathable air all day. These are invested magic items, but a PCs who can afford to invest 3 more items could just rotate 3 greater Everair Masks, total price 480 gp. The 5th-level uncommon arcane, divine, primal spell Lashunta's Life Bubble creates a replenishing protective bubble of fresh air around one creature for 8 hours, and heightened to 6th level it lasts all day.

As for Breath Control general feat 1, its effect on holding one's breath underwater or against inhaled poisons won't matter for Akiton's thin atmosphere. But it indicates training in breathing. The module says that advanced training in Athletics helps a PC breathe the thin air, so by common sense dedicated training in breathing itself should help, too. I would add a houserule for my players that training in Athletics plus Breathe Control would add up to master proficiency in breathing for resisting the fatigue for 24 hours (great to combine with greater Everair Mask or 5th-level Lashunta's Life Bubble), and master in Athletics plus Breath Control would add up to legendary proficiency in breathing for instant acclimation to the thin air. My excuse is that one paragraph on Atmosphere is too short to cover every case, so it ended with a statement about GM’s discretion. We GMs have to rule on the cases that the paragraph skipped.

At the risk of suggesting an unwelcome change in party composition... perhaps the Gunslinger could become an Archer of the Fighter or Ranger type. Instead of Crit Fiashing when "our dice rolls suck", go for a class/weapon with 0 action reload and higher steady-state damage flow?

I don't see anything wrong with the gunslinger. I admit that my experience with gunslingers is from Pathfinder 1st Edition in my Iron Gods among Scientists campaign, but I skimmed the rules for PF2 gunslinger and the chassis seems solid enough.

"Our dice rolls suck" is a temporary condition unless the reason the rolls suck is that the build depends on rolls of natural 15 or higher. Most classes can hit an average opponent on a roll of natural 11 or higher. The gunslinger has expert proficiency with firearms and crossbows but only 1d4 precision damage from Slinger's Precision beyond the weapon dice rather than a +4 Strength bonus, so they will depend on critical hits to enhance their damage to martial-character expectation, but a regular hit is good enough against Moderate Threats.

Gunslingers rely on their Gunslinger's Way to deal with the action-economy cost of a Reload 1 weapon. What is the way of the gunslinger in gourry187's campaign?

we are fairly new to PF2 (PF1 player here) how do we survive?

3 PCs (as above) all first level ...

a majority of our combats involve fey, ghosts and phantasms

the gunslinger always stays 50-60 away leaving the other two to take the brunt of incoming attacks

I feel like every fight is 2 players against everything...

Why is the gunslinger staying so far back? Fey, ghosts, and phantasms typically lack Reactive Strike (formerly known as Attack of Opportunity) to take advantage of the gunslinger's Interact action to Reload. The gunslinger would be safest staying only 15 feet back within range of the champion's protective reaction. The gunslinger ought to have Dex +4 and light armor, giving them AC as good as the monk's AC, so they do not need the distance because of fear that an enemy will charge them to take advantage of low AC.

Given that no-one in the party is squishy, I recommend a skirmishing style of combat rather than a front line and back line formation. Finoan's advice not using blitz attacking is correct. For example, the monk does not need to stand next to the enemy. Instead, the monk could Stride to the enemy, make two Strikes with a Flurry of Blows action, and then Stride away from the enemy, like a PF1 Spring Attack. That forces the enemy to Stride themselves, losing an action. Next turn the monk can pull a trick such as Demoralize rather than the first Stride and have an action-economy advantage over their opponent. Champions are not as mobile, but they have heavy armor and can afford the Raise a Shield action. The champion should move keep both other PCs within range of Champion's Reaction (which one do they have?) if possible, even if that means one fewer Strike.

With the party working hard on avoiding damage rather than soaking up damage, the gunslinger will become a target more often, but they can bear being a target, especially with a champion nearby.

no reliable in game healing source found (found 1 NPC who got mad at us for putting ourselves in danger and gave us 1 minor healing potion). no battle medicine, only the potential of 2 castings of lay on hands (6 points each) from the champion which are used generally in round 2 and 3 of any combat.

My players view a need for in-combat healing as sign that they are not defensive enough in combat. Defense is never perfect, so a single Lay on Hands or Battle Medicine can be necessary, but needing two per combat shows either a high-threat battle or a lack of defense. My PCs typically heal between encounters, even when it takes 20 minutes.

I'm not sure if the GM is altering encounters and I don't want to try to look it up because that's a crappy thing to do.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition (and earlier editions) give 1st-level characters fewer hit points than they need. 1st-level humanoid opponents, such as Bloody Blade Mercenary and Dwarf Warrior, typically have 19 or 20 hit points. This shortage is mostly corrected at 2nd level.

If the GM is not altering encounters, then an encounter that would give 4 PCs 60 xp each would give 3 PCs 80 xp each. The extra 33% experience will have the party at 2nd level sooner than expected and temporarily correct the unaltered encounters. If the GM uses milestone leveling rather than experience points and is not toning down the encounters, then the GM ought to give the party an extra level.

Meanwhile, what I'd describe as heroic play is more the gameplay of PF2e, where even level 1 adventurers are a distinct cut above average and often engage in overt heroics (or villainy!). At the same time, the party at those levels isn't necessarily doing massively over-the-top things either, which I think is what starts to define epic or superheroic play. Mythic I think goes a step even beyond that, where your actions effectively redefine the setting. This creates different considerations for canon and West March-style games as well: although it can be possible to run even superhero adventures alongside each other in a shared canon, mythic play I'd say ought to need accommodation as their own canon for each given adventure, simply because any given party could create, destroy, or irreversably change entire nations, worlds, or planes of existence.

Level 1 NPC townfolk have almost the same ability scores as Level 1 PC adventures. We had a thread about that in April 2023: Is 10 in a stat still the basic human average? Instead, the difference is that the PCs trained in adventuring abilities while the townsfolk trained in non-combat abilities.

The adversaries of the PCs seem even more impressive. The monster's hit points, AC, and attack bonus numbers are typically higher than the numbers for same-level PCs. This is to balance that the PCs have a wide variety of combat tactics but the monsters have only two or three different tactics. The more an opponent resembles a PC with more tactics, the lower the numbers, except for dragons.

I had a recent example of that in Hurricane's Howl. The 8th-level party confronted 9th-level Thiarvo the Quick and his four 5th-level Mudwringer mercenaries who use Tomb Raider stats. The Mudwringers have Melee [one-action] kukri +15 [+11/+7] (agile, trip), Damage 1d6+9 slashing (average 12.5 damage) and Ranged [one-action] hand crossbow +15 [+10/+5] (range increment 60 feet, reload 1), Damage 1d6+6 piercing. In comparison the 8th-level champion Wilfred has a +17 to hit with his +1 striking longsword and deals 2d8+6 piercing damage (average 15 damage). Rather than chasing off the Mudwringers as the module intended, the party allied with them against an undead monster. Despite being 3 levels lower, the Mudwringers contributed well to the combat.

Opponents of the PCs have to follow the same power curve as the PCs so that we GMs can properly judge the threat of the encounter. But this means that the PCs are not a distinct cut above average of any potential opponent of the same level. Level 1 PCs are more powerful than Level -1 commoners but not more powerful than a level 1 barkeep, who in a bar fight against the party hits almost as well as a level 1 fighter and has a whopping 25 hit points.

Game balance keeps Pathfinder 2nd Edition more grounded.

I think some of the elements you mention are more differences in genre and flavor rather than power: cozy fantasy for instance is something you could apply to any power level, because opening a coffee shop at your local fantasy village and becoming a barista to the gods themselves are both valid expressions of that. I also think what you describe as wonder tales and heroic play fall into the more grounded tier of power I was thinking about, in the sense that those kinds of adventures are about ordinary people whose abilities an average player could conceivably see themselves having (plus whichever level of magic would be considered ordinary in a high fantasy environment, if that is indeed the setting).

I like Teridax's wording, "the more grounded tier of power," so let the starting tier of power be called "grounded." Then comes heroic, which includes power fantasy. I have heard the phrase "epic" for the superheroic level, but that also means above 20th level, so I am going to call it "saga."

That gives a list of grounded, heroic, saga, and mythic.

Let me give an example of grounded play from my Discord server. I used the Tree Stump Library as an earlier example because I had been talking about it in Discord. I replaced player names with character names.

November 1, 2025
GM — 3:19 PM
The Forgotten Map
The upcoming encounter with the A8 egg-shaped tower [in Hurricane's Howl] has a note that some items will be handy, including "The map of area B6 from page 36 of Kindled Magic." I don't think I mentioned that map, because the party had their own spin on the adventure in the Tree Stump Library.

Room B6, The Reading Nook, in the Tree Stump Libary is the room with three spellskeins. I believe you adopted those spellskeins and added them to the two spellskeins in Cara and Jinx's room. I guess someone else in the Spire Dormitory is caring for them now. However, the room also said:

The piles here contain several books relating to the ruined city of Bloodsalt, whose long-vanished inhabitants supposedly sprouted wings and flew away. Also among the scattered stacks are ancillary works on Mwangi residents and dragons, bookmarked for useful cross-referencing. Both Studies on the Habits and Migration Patterns of Birds and Drakes of the Continent of Garund and An Expanded History of the Lesser-Known Peoples of the Mwangi Expanse are here. A slim folio contains a partial map of the ruined city; though this cartography might not seem of much interest now, note whether the heroes take it (whether to keep or to give to Takulu), as it proves helpful in Pathfinder Adventure Path #171: Hurricane’s Howl.

Unless you have a better idea, I rule that copies of the map were given out in the class A Tale of A Triply Lost City, and both Nhyira and Cara have a copy.

Jinx Fuun — 3:43 PM
ooh! Migration Patterns of Birds!

Idris — 5:22 PM
Makes sense. All of those books were sorted, but Idris had no reason to pay them particular interest over the other books and certainly wouldn't have been taking anything away

GM — 6:45 PM
The modules were written with the assumption that the PCs loot like adventurers. I am enjoying that I do not have to adjust or point out the loot, and can just provide appropriate gear from the Magaambya.

Jinx Fuun — 7:12 PM
I think you can assume that Jinx read the bird book if Idris mentioned it. Granted, she may have read ONLY the bird chapters.

November 2, 2025
GM — 10:45 AM
I speculate that Studies on the Habits and Migration Patterns of Birds and Drakes of the Continent of Garund might be old, predating the permanent hurricane called the Eye of Abendego. That hurricane would have changed the migration patterns of many birds. Someone (hint, hint) should research how those patterns changed.

Jinx Fuun — 1:03 PM
Studying the local birds was indeed her favorite part of the research

... One thing that I'd like to flesh out, which in a development pipeline would likely be much farther down the line after any sort of MVP, is the differences between power tiers: what are the essential qualities of a grounded, more OSR-style adventure that make the characters feel vulnerable and forced to resort to cunning over heroics? What are the quintessential aspects of mythic play that allow the party to feel like demigods? Heroic play I think is easier to conceptualize, as that's the foundation for PF2e's gameplay, so that could make for a solid starting point.

What are the tiers of play?

I searched the Internet for "heroic and mythic" and found that World of Warcraft uses normal, heroic, and mythic for raid difficulties. I play Elder Scrolls Online which has the difficulty levels of normal, veteran, and veteran with hard mode, which don't sound as exciting. I don't think that a label of "normal" fits fantasy roleplaying games.

My Strength of Thousands campaign has a lot of gameplay below the heroic level. My players told me that they wanted to roleplay as students rather than adventurers. They had as much fun participating in an annual sailboat race (which I added myself) as they did battling giant insects. One mission in the 1st module, Kindled Magic, had the party sent to a forgotten archive called the Tree Stump Library to fetch some old reference books, and they fought an infestation of giant insects and swarms of insects there. But the PCs were most aghast that the insects had destroyed or damaged many books! Two players advocated that their characters wanted a project to repair the damaged books, so I created such a project under the guidance of archaeologist Izem Mezitani. That is a different tier of play than heroic.

I am currently reading the novel Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree. It falls under a category called cozy fantasy. I have read 100 pages so far, and except for the prologue of the protagonist's adventuring days before she retired to open a coffee shop, the story has had no combat nor danger. I suggest that the bottom tier of play could be called "cozy."

Coming of age stories fit into the tier between cozy and heroic, but "coming of age" is too narrow a label for an entire tier. That is the tier that my players wanted for the first two modules of Strength of Thousands, except that the module adds many moments of heroic gameplay. This tier includes fairy tales and the part of the Hero's Journey before the heroism. The Wikipedia entry on fairy tales says, "Some folklorists prefer to use the German term Märchen or "wonder tale"[10] to refer to the genre rather than fairy tale," so let me dub this tier as "wonder tale." The protagonist does not need to be any more powerful than an ordinary adult but must encounter fantastic elements.

I view heroic tier as the tier in which characters are in danger and forced to resort to cunning and daring to overcome that danger. If the character can overcome danger through sheer power, then that is power fantasy. In mythic the characters go beyond power to reality bending to accommodate their theme or destiny.

So far my list is cozy, wonder tale, heroic, power fantasy, and mythic. Is that too many or too few?

The game clearly tell us all the types of actions:

[quote}There are four types of actions: single actions, activities, reactions, and free actions.

That sentence came from the Player Core, Chapter 8 Playing the Game, Actions, page 414. It is part of a larger description:

ou will need to track your actions carefully in an encounter. At the start of each turn you take in an encounter, you regain 3 actions and 1 reaction to spend that round. (Regaining your actions is described in detail here.) You can spend your actions in many different ways.

There are four types of actions: single actions, activities, reactions, and free actions.

Single actions can be completed in a very short time. They're self-contained, and their effects are generated within the span of that single action.

Activities usually take longer and require using multiple actions, which must be spent in succession. Stride is a single action, but Sudden Charge is an activity in which you use both the Stride and Strike actions to generate its effect. ...

Note that the last sentence that I quoted called the Strike subordinate action in Sudden Charge an "action."

Further down the page, it gives the Action Icon Key for Single Action, Two-Action Activity, Three-Action Activity, Reaction, and Free Action. That section skips any icon for one-minute activities, since those actions are not part of tracking actions during Encounter Mode. It also skips any icons for subordinate actions.

My interpretation is that subordinate actions are actions, but they are not tracked as part of the 3 actions and 1 reaction gained per round. Thus, the section of the rulebook that describes how to track actions skipped them.

Further down the same page is a section called Activities, which has the first mention of subordinate actions.

Activities

An activity typically involves using multiple actions to create an effect greater than you can produce with a single action, or combining multiple single actions to produce an effect that's different from merely the sum of those actions. In some cases, usually when spellcasting, an activity can consist of only 1 action, 1 reaction, or even 1 free action.

An activity might cause you to use specific actions within it. You don't have to spend additional actions to perform them—they're already factored into the activity's required actions. (See Subordinate Actions.)
...

It calls subordinate actions "actions," too.

The Subordinate Actions in sidebox on page 415 says:

Subordinate Actions

An action might allow you to use a simpler action—usually one of the Basic Actions—in a different circumstance or with different effects. This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects, but it's modified in any ways listed in the larger action. For example, an activity that tells you to Stride up to half your Speed alters the normal distance you can move in a Stride. The Stride would still have the move trait, would still trigger reactions that occur based on movement, and so on. The subordinate action doesn't gain any of the traits of the larger action unless specified. The action that allows you to use a subordinate action doesn't require you to spend more actions or reactions to do so; that cost is already factored in.

Using an activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions. For example, the quickened condition you get from the haste spell lets you spend an extra action each turn to Stride or Strike, but you couldn't use the extra action for an activity that includes a Stride or Strike. As another example, if you used an action that specified, “If the next action you use is a Strike,” an activity that includes a Strike wouldn't count, because the next thing you are doing is starting an activity, not using the Strike basic action.

SuperParkourio pointed out that the Sneak action contains a subordinate Stride, yet this Strike does not break the hidden condition from Hide. My interpretation is that Sneak modifies the subordinate Stride so that it also does not break the hidden condition.

Mathmuse wrote:

Nevertheless, remember the main issue of this thread is the relationship between power level and game complexity. Complexity is a cost because managing the mechanics can slow down player enjoyment. The influence system was an additional complexity that reduced intensity. And it had little to do with power level.

I am the originator of this thread; I do not need reminding on what the subject matter is.

I apologize for my poor phrasing. I meant, "Tying this comment back to the original discussion about the relationship between power level and game complexity. ...," rather than implying that anyone might have forgotten.

Are "narrative scope" and "the narrative" the same thing to you? Because that seems to be the only way the conflation you're making here would make sense.

No, but "narrative scope" was been used with a meaning unclear to me, so I did not want to say "narrative scope."

Your personal grievances of how influence was implemented mechanically is different from the adventure itself featuring high stakes and giving the party a high level of importance among people in the in-game world, which it does.

Have you heard the quote, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."? The stakes in the 1st module were 20 refugees, in the 3rd module were 4,000 city dwellers, and in the 6th module around a million inhabitants of Nirmathas and Molthune. But once we passed the number in which the PCs could meet the people face to face, the emotional stakes simply became lots and lots of people. Saving four thousand people is as urgent as saving a million people, so the stakes hit their cap.

In a few weeks in my Strength of Thousands campaign, bandits will kidnap some villagers and the PCs will ride off to rescue them. It does not matter whether the bandits kidnap 5 villagers or 25 villagers, the party will try to rescue them. But it will make a difference that some of the kidnapped people are I'boko their classmate, Koinoku her father, and Mamo her grandmother. The emotional stakes are more important than the numerical stakes.

The level of stakes has mattered in my Strength of Thousands campaign, because I have been finding excuses why the powerful Magaambya teachers are letting low-level PC students handle important matters. In the 1st module, the teachers were fooled by the villain and underestimated the danger. In the 2nd module, I changed the story so that the students were deputized into the police force of the city as a work-study job, so they had authority that the teachers lacked. In the 3rd module, the bandits are going to cross the border into another nation, which will politically restricts the Magaambya response. If the PCs were full-fledged powerful Magaambya wizards, they would be under the same restrictions, but instead they count as friends rescuing a classmate.

I asked my wife, and she compares Pathfinder power scaling to E.E. Smith's Lensman series. It starts with space battles between interplanetary spaceships. By the end the galactic space battles are throwing planets around as weapons, yet the battles felt the same just with bigger weapons.

For sure, adding a subsystem to an adventure introduces more complexity, but if done right it can also add depth and a worthwhile new form of gameplay. The problem with that [influence] subsystem wasn't that it existed, but that it sits in a framework that prevents it from offering any particularly deep or exciting gameplay.

I agree.

Mathmuse wrote:

This example illustrates that higher level does not give wider scope or higher intensity. The stakes become more important to more people, but the personal stakes of the party are always the risk of death to them and the people they protect. What truly increases with level is the difficulty of the challenges.

Forgive me, but I don't think anyone here is discussing concrete mechanics for roleplaying personal stakes. That's quite beside the point when the subject of discussion is how making the party more powerful tends to entail greater levels of influence over the world, and how that is balanced by higher external stakes, greater dangers, and a larger world altogether in the adventure. That personal stakes stay fairly consistent throughout is a quality of all stories that has very little to do with the crunchier, mechanical aspects of tabletop games.

Yet I have seen people arguing that having more power, the ability to defeat stronger enemies, is the narrative. Teridax said, "power level is narrative scope," though he might have been arguing about PF2 as is rather than hopes for the future.

I also don't think the examples you listed really illustrate your point at all: convening with a war council may not seem intense to you, but the stakes are certainly very high when the future of entire nations rests in your hands. Similarly, preventing an alliance between two nations in a potentially all-consuming war is a similarly high-stakes challenge that a party of commoners would be unlikely to even attempt. It seems to me like you're conflating your level of personal interest in what seems to be mainly out-of-combat challenges with the scale of an adventure, which I don't think makes for a very reliable yardstick when the standard is this subjective.

At the beginning of Vault of the Onyx Citadel the PCs received a message from Weslen Gavirk, Forest Marshal of Nirmathas, saying that he wants to convene a war council in their name. The heart of the message said, " The people of Nirmathas ... need more than an elected officer to unite them against the forward march of the Ironfang Legion: they need legends, and yours are the legends being told around soldiers’ campfires these days. More practically, your forces have been at war with the Ironfang Legion longer than anyone else’s, and you have won more victories against them than anyone else. I would like to meet with you and, if you indeed measure up to your legends, offer you command of the Nirmathi forces until the Legion is turned back or destroyed."

The PCs never directly commanded Nirmathi forces. They kept operating as a party instead, though the module said, "The adventure assumes the PCs use whatever forces they’ve collected to harry the other three Ironfang fortresses while they approach Fort Phaendar."

As for the intensity of the war council, the headings of the seven pages describing the council are: Gaining Influence, War Council Guests, EVENTS AT THE WAR COUNCIL, Day 0: The Council Opens, Day 1: Politics as Usual, Day 2: Uninvited Guest, Day 3: Edge of Civility, Day 4: Boastful Proclamations, Day 5: Tragic News, and The Summit’s End. Six days of talking to gain influence with a little betrayal-induced combat for excitement. The Boastful Proclamations event was emissary Gossamer from the Fangwood Forest announcing that fey were taking action against the Ironfang Legion entering fey territory--and the module expected the party to spend another day talking while this happened. No, my PCs teleported over to the incursion, along with some council observers, and fought back in person. I had to create the battlemap and enemy forces myself.

The stakes were high during the war council, but the influence mechanics had no intensity. The players had more excitement in a side quest breaking into the decades-old secret records of the Forest Marshall's office to find the fate of PC Zinfandel's missing-in-action sister (groundwork for a 20th-level Continuing the Adventure quest).

This is not about my level of personal interest. This was about offering my players an enjoyable game session. I used the influence notes on the delegates to give them personalities and interests, so that the players could find enjoyment in roleplaying, though I asked for the influence skill checks after the roleplaying. The others who did not care for roleplaying had the heist of breaking into secret records and the combat in the Fangwood Forest.

Nevertheless, remember the main issue of this thread is the relationship between power level and game complexity. Complexity is a cost because managing the mechanics can slow down player enjoyment. The influence system was an additional complexity that reduced intensity. And it had little to do with power level. The PCs needed a high enough level to be viewed as legends, but that could have happened back at 8th level (it did happen with the city leadership of Longshadow) rather than at 15th level.

On topic this idea of power without narrative scope and narrative scope without power is at odds with the core of what D20 fantasy is. Most players enjoy gaining more ability to impact the world as they level and can handle the added mental load that comes with that.

Yep. This is a power fantasy game at the end of the day. That's what levelled scaling proficiency is, after all: you grow rapidly in power as you level and simply outclass things that weren't a challenge for you before.

I have repeatedly recommended that people who play roleplaying games for a power fantasy stick with PF1 rather than switch to PF2. PF2 gameplay caps power level tightly enough to break the power fantasy.

I'd say what I'm discussing is the polar opposite of this: power level is narrative scope, such that it is impossible to discuss a character's power level without also discussing the impact they can have on the world and the story, as well as the scale of adventures suited to them.

I have been sticking with the phrase "narrative control" when talking about my campaigns, because "narrative scope" has a different meaning in discussions of stories. And I assume that whenever players say "narrative" they are talking about the campaign as a story rather than the campaign as a game.

I searched for online definitions. Greenlight Coverage, a business that analyzes screenplay scripts, gives the following definitions at What Are Scope, Scale, and Stakes: Key Factors Explained.

Scope, scale, and stakes are key elements in screenwriting that shape your story’s narrative and emotional depth. Scope defines the story’s boundaries—time, place, and characters involved. Scale refers to the intensity level, from grand events to intimate moments. Stakes generate tension by creating urgency and consequence for characters. Understanding and balancing these factors can elevate your screenplay’s impact and keep your audience engaged. Explore how these aspects intertwine to craft compelling stories and captivate viewers.

Fiveable, an Advanced Placement test study site, gives the following definition at Narrative Scope.

Narrative scope refers to the extent and boundaries of a story, including the range of events, characters, and themes that are covered within a narrative. It shapes how a story unfolds and influences how deeply readers engage with its elements, impacting their understanding of character motivations and the broader thematic implications. In the context of epic poetry, narrative scope helps define the epic's structure and the significance of its various plotlines and character arcs.

In terms of narrative, a love story between two peasants and a love story between a lord and lady are both love stories. The scope is the relationship and the forces that bring the pair together or pull them apart. The peasant farmer might be worried about his fields and the lord might be worried about all the fields in his county, but the scope of the story contains the worries not the extent of the fields.

Likewise, a 6th-level party fighting an 8th-level Young Horned Dragon is the same as a 10th-level party fighting a 12th-level Adult Horned Dragon.. The narrative scope is Man versus Dragon. On the other hand, 10th-level party has 4 times the power as the 6th-level party and so do the dragons, so the fights will have different details, such as the 10th-level party can cast fly for aerial combat.

The 10th-level party facing an 8th-level Young Horned Dragon would be a different story. The relative power between party and dragon does matter. Yet even them, the scope does not change. It is Man versus Dragon, but the dragon is a pest rather than a challenge.

The dictionary definition of "scope" alone means the focus, range, or extent, not the intensity or power. So this discussion seems to be misusing the word "scope."

Looking up the definitions has gotten me interested in how scope, stakes, and intensity (called scale by Greenlight Coverage, but let's reserve "scale" for scaling up) of a campaign vary with character level, so I looked at the six modules of Ironfang Invasion. (It is the most recent adventure path that I finished.)

Trail of the Hunted (levels 1-4) The party helps villagers escape the invasion of their village and protects the refugees as they hide in the Fangwood Forest. The scope is one village and one band of refugees. The personal stakes are high, because the party and the refugees could easily die, but the global stakes are small, because the loss of one band of refugees won't affect the war. The intensity is high during the invasion but slows down during the hiding.

Fangs of War (levels 5-7) The party searches for the secret forts of the Chernasardo Rangers, the protectors of this region, and discovers their fate. The scope is wider, because they investigate an entire region of the Fangwood Forest and interact with strange fey inhabitants. The stakes are lower, because the people they seek have already been defeated. Likewise, the intensity is low, except during combat.

Assault on Longshadow (levels 8-10) The party warns the city of Longshadow about the invasion, conducts missions to secure the area and gather allies, and finally, defines the city during the assault. The scope here is also a region, the Hollow Hills area and its major city. The stakes are protecting an entire city, but mostly the city has to protect itself with the party only aiding in a big way. The intensity is low during the preparation, but is combat after combat during the assault.

Siege of Stone (levels 11-13) The party retraces the route by which the enemy leaders found the magic relics that give them an advantage in war. The scope drops down to the party and the single path they take through the Darklands and into Kraggodan. The stakes are so low that one player asked, "What is our mission here?" The most intense part is more a cleanup than a victory, but it does offer the interest of solving a mystery.

Prisoners of the Blight (levels 14-15) The party probes into the Blighted Region of the Fangwood to prevent an alliance between the Ironfang Legion and Blighted Queen Arlantia. The scope is the Blighted Region. The stakes seem very low, because Arlantia is not interested in an alliance, but the final reveal about goddess Gendowyn has higher stakes. The creepy dangers of the blight do raise the intensity of this low-stakes mission.

Vault of the Onyx Citadel (levels 16-17) The party joins a war council of many provinces and nations to unite against the Ironfang invasion, but they travel alone to a vault in the Elemental Plane of Earth to fight the leaders of the Ironfang Legion. The scope here has an important council meeting and a new region. The stakes are high because they will end the war. The intensity, on the other hand, suffers from a lot of talking during the war council, and trying to keep under the radar (technically, scrying spells) of the Ironfang Legion. The intensity flares up when the party invades the Onyx Citadel itself, the headquarters of the Ironfang Legion.

This example illustrates that higher level does not give wider scope or higher intensity. The stakes become more important to more people, but the personal stakes of the party are always the risk of death to them and the people they protect. What truly increases with level is the difficulty of the challenges.

And notice that the party levels up faster in the earlier modules than in the later modules. That is because PF1 combat slows down at higher levels, due to greater complexity. When I converted Ironfang Invasion to PF2 rules, I expanded it to cover all levels from 1 to 20. This decision has greatly influenced by the party gaining an extra level on their own due to additional side quests to rescue people, because I gave them narrative control.

In other words, the powers really need to revolve so closely around the adventure the GM is running that the GM needs to be pretty hands on with setting the players up to have mythic powers that fit with the adventure enough not to completely trivialize the entire campaign or create so many artificial restrictions around when the mountain cutter can and cannot cut open the mountain that the player feels like they don’t even have the ability. Having a party choose amazing mythic powers that have nothing to do with each other can really exacerbate the whole angel summoner/BMX Hero dilemma if some powers are getting used all the time and others never do.

I feel we should have a link to the Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit skit.

Unicore's point is supported by the mythic veins in my campaigns. Those campaigns grew mythic only around themes that the players had established.

In PF1 Jade Regent the players were really big on Japanese-based Minkaian tradition. Several players created characters who grew up in Tian Xian culture: ninja Ebony Blossom was from Minkai itself, kitsune Nathan/Nuriko was from the Forest of Spirits, fighter Jao was descended from an exiled Minkaian general, and samurai Lu was from the Jade Quarter of Karlsgard. Their change in the plot of Tide of Honor was to rely on that tradition rather than war.

In PF1 Iron Gods the players wanted to play with the alien high technology. Dwarf Boffin was a gunslinger with Experimental Gunsmith archetype who took every technological feat, magus Elric was the field agent of the technologist-wizard Khonnir Baine, fighter/investigator Kheld mastered mundane crafting and founded a workshop, and they recruited Khonnir Baine's daughter Val as a party member and crafting assistant. Restoring a small spaceship to flight condition was fully in line with their hopes for the campaign, which is why I enabled it.

In PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion at the end of the 4th module, the players insisted that they had to remove slavery from the territory conquered by the Ironfang Legion. We had a delightful heist adventure where they rescued the war captives from their starting village Phaendar. I wracked my brain trying different ideas to get the hobgoblin worshippers of Hadregash, barghest hero-god of slavery, to change their culture. The party rescuing the goddess Gendowyn and PC Honey expressing hope of becoming like Gendowyn opened up a mythic subplot that would change pro-slavery culture by defeating Hadregash himself.

In my PF2 A Fistful of Flowers mini-campaign, I kept up the theme of basing chapters on classic movies. Cinematic elements are a lot like mythic elements.

In PF2 Strength of Thousands the PCs are not yet mythic, but I have been emphasizing that the Magaambya Academy is a mythic organization. For example, when players ask me for permission for an uncommon or rare spell (mostly Roshan's player who is sticking to a fire-and-ice theme), I said to roleplay asking the librarians at the Archhorn Library on campus to find a copy and then apply Learn a Spell to study it. If in the future they trivialize a plot with a rare spell, well, they are Magaambya mages, so that is to be expected.

2e Paizo does not, and from the start of this system has NEVER, wanted players to be able to have serious narrative control over the flow of the campaigns they're running unless the GM wills it. All of that stuff you brought up, Mathmuse? The examples of the heroes of myth who engaged in physics-breaking acts of heroics, like Hercules changing the course of a mighty river in order to clean those stables? Even with Mythic, those kinds of feats would be entirely too narrative and world changing (and thus giving way too much power in the hands of players) for Paizo in its current form to give the idea ANY credence or thought.

Breaking the narrative was standard policy in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign, Iron Gods among Scientists. In the 1st game session the three PCs tracked down the power broadcast hidden in a warehouse when the warehouse encounter was on page 42. In the 2nd session they recruited a teenaged NPC Val Baine as a fourth party member. She was supposed to be a sympathetic but helpless innkeeper managing some living space for the party during her father's absence. I statted her as a bloodrager, and she stayed with the party at the players' request all through the adventure. They entered Scrapwall, a former bandit camp turned shantytown, in the 2nd module by pretending to be refugees in hiding from the law, which derailed the "scrapworth" reputation system in the module. Instead, they gained their reputation by hosting a concert. And so on.

For the impossible tasks I let them accomplish, they renovated a buried shuttle-sized spaceship in Scrapwall called "The Haunted Wreck" even though the module called it irreparable. Then they flew off in it. In the 6th module, The Divinity Drive, they flew their spaceship past the crashed mile-long spaceship The Divinity and the final boss Unity contacted them over ship-to-ship radio. The party's technologist Boffin asked for a job and Unity hired them as repair crew. They were supposed to sneak into the tail end of The Divinity and fight their way through monsters and robots to reach Unity for a final battle. Instead, they befriended half of Unity's minions while making major repairs using technology I invented on the fly. In the end, they broke an unbreakable lock on a control system by communing with the goddess Desna and asking her for the code after Boffin read the manual and learned that Desna had designed the system.

My players love narrative control but they are polite enough to not end the campaign with their changes. They make suggestions and I improvise from there. They could have suggested altering the course of a river if they had a way to dig a new channel. They did repair a canal and its locks in my Ironfang Invasion campaign. And the nation of Oprak does not exist in my campaign world. Instead, the Ironfang Legion settled in the new province of Oprak under Nirmathi rule.

I don't need control as a GM. I run the setting not the outcomes. My players rewrite outcomes. And that seems a good template for mythic games.

Is the OP DMing your group? That is what I was asking.

8 hit point frontliners with few defensive abilities don't work very well as a frontliners against hard encounters unless you weaken them. They way crits are set up, it's very hard to withstand crit hits for soft targets.

The advice to weaken the encounters with an odd composition group is the best advice anyone can give to new group that built an odd group.

The OP benwilsher18 has their campaign and I have my campaign. But the parties in the campaigns are sufficiently similar, such as having a frontline kineticist, that I figured that descriptions of how my players handle the party composition might enlighten benwilsher18's party.

The kineticist Cara in my campaign cannot stand adjacent to opponents and soak hits for several rounds. That is the job of the shield-raising champion Wilfred, except when Wilfred needs to stand 15 feet back closer to the spellcasters to protect them. But even then, he stands within 15 feet of Cara to protect her. Thus, Cara is borrowing Wilfred's defensive ability. A warpriest lacks a champion's reaction like Wilfred, but instead has a divine font to heal damage. The roles are similar. And a warpriest does not become expert in light and medium armor until Divine Defense at 13th level, so the warpriest's only defensive advantage over a high-dexterity kineticist is Shield Block. The kineticist in benwilsher18's campaign might be a frontliner because only the kineticist, the rogue, and the warpriest can survive the front line, not because any are good at it. They are all 8-hit-point classes.

Which elements does the kineticist wield? An earth kineticist had defenses such as Armor in Earth.

Other commenters have recommended skirmishing, in which the party does not have a front line. Instead, they scatter and move away after engaging the opponent in melee or always stay away and use ranged attacks. Nevertheless, other more obscure strategies fill the spectrum between front line protecting the rear and full skirmishing. One might work well for the party in benwilsher18's campaign.

I make frequent use of GM discretion in the rule, "If you do anything else, you become observed just before you act unless the GM determines otherwise." For example, I told my players that Recall Knowledge actions do not make the character observed because they are purely internal with no external effect that could give a character's presence away.

The external effect of Double Slice consists solely of making two Strikes. All the rest of the feat is requirements, penalties, and combining damage after the Strikes. Thus, the character becomes observed during the first Strike and also catches the target off-guard because that is how becoming observed during a Strike works. The Double-Slicing character is fully observed for the second Strike and that Strike does not catch the target off-guard.

Since this relies on GM discretion, other GMs might treat this differently.

As for the Spellstrike case, I have a houserule that I developed back when a rogue with sorcerer dedication took the pre-Remaster Magical Trickster feat, which allows sneak attack with a spell attack. My houserule says that spell attacks get the same off-guard privilege as Strikes if begun while hidden.

Mathmuse wrote:

]Everyone except Wilfred's player is experienced in Pathfinder 2nd Edition and good at tactics. Most chose weak starting classes to roleplay being students of magic at the Magaambya Academy. The writers of Strength of Thousands anticipated this and put in several non-combat tasks that earn experience points at low levels to avoid the especially harsh weakness at 1st level. The free archetype has had little effect, except for Roshan's deliberately weird build.

Is this a different DM for your group? Your group is all experienced with PF2 and a very large group. They run with weaker characters and do ok because they understand how things work together and have a lot of room for failure with seven characters or so.

I am the usual GM for this particular group of players. My wife (Jinx's player) and younger daughter (Idris's player) are also in an online Tyrant's Grasp campaign with another GM named Tom. My players don't need to optimize their characters because those characters achieve victory through teamwork, and because I adjust the campaign to suit their style (see Common Sense versus The Plot for an adjustment in which they acted like students rather than adventurers).

Rather than viewing seven PCs as room for failure, I view it as seven individual weak points. If a Moderate Threat focused on just a single PC, then that PC is going down. The party will rescue that PC, but it breaks the flow of the combat. A single PL+3 enemy counts as a Low Threat against a party of seven, but that enemy's attacks automatically focus on a single PC each round and can take them down. Therefore, I avoid PL+3 enemies, except for a dramatic final boss.

That why is because that group composition is not strong. Their abilities don't synergize well.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition tactics are quite flexible, so almost every party can find a style that lets the characters synergize their abilities. I had mentioned Roshan's initial plan to use Grapple to make enemies off-guard, because she knew that the party composition would not synergize with a rogue's flanking routine for sneak attack. However, that plan turned out to be more useful for the spellcasters than for Roshan herself, so it became her contribution to teamwork. The wizard Idris has no good focus spells, so at low levels in the 1st module he carefully learned spells of 1 hour duration so that he could buff the party in advance and then cast cantrips during combat itself. Thermal Remedy for 5 temporary hit points was such a good spell for that tactic that Idris now casts the 4th-level version for 10 temporary hit points. The two bards work together so that whenever Stargazer has to drop her Courageous Anthem for other spellcasting then Jinx will start singing Courageous Anthem so that the party is never without the +1 bonus. Usually Jinx sings Triple Time, but the party can handle a turn without Triple Time better than a turn without Courageous Anthem.

Synergies exist. The weirder party compositions have to invent their own rather than copy standard practices.

1. There is no such thing as a frontline kineticist. 8 hit point classes that don't get Master Armor until level 19 will never be a frontline class unless you really weaken the encounters.

Cara in my campaign is a fire kineticist who fights close to the enemy. Her class gives her only 8 hit points, but her key attribute is Constitution, so she has CON +4. Most 8th-level martials have only CON +2, so Cara gains an extra 2 hp per level from her extreme Constitution. She knows that she can take a few more hits than her spellcaster teammates, so she risks herself to reduce the risk on them. And that way she can use Thermal Nimbus in her kinetic aura for extra damage that totally ignores enemy AC and saving throws.

I had fun two weeks ago when the party battled a Dezullon, a 10th-level plant creature with regeneration 15 (deactivated by fire). When it felt the fire of Cara's Thermal Nimbus it instinctive fled from the fire that would negate its regeneration every turn. It ran into nearby shallow pond. From the party's viewpoint, the dezullon wasted an entire turn moving instead of attacking, and it removed its sickening Stench aura from their vicinity, too. They kept casting fire spells at it to suppress the regeneration, but they blamed the occasional unlucky dice roll resulting in a miss or save on the pond water (which had no mechanical effect. This was just roleplaying to reduce the annoyance).

Oh, that is a bit of advice for benwilsher18: sometimes the enemy's own instincts or habits will interfere with the most effective use of their abilities. A cowardly enemy with a nasty aura might chose to stay far away from enemies despite the effectiveness of its aura. An angry enemy with a good ranged attack might prefer to get up close and personal with melee attacks. Enemies are not always great tacticians. Roleplaying a strong enemy as overconfident or overcautious based on their personality can be fun for us GMs.

For reference, my group has 5 player characters; three casters (warpriest, occult witch, wizard) a single full martial (scoundrel rogue) and a frontlines kineticist. They started at level 1, and they are just about to reach level 8 next session.

That reminds me of my Strength of Thousands party, who are currently 8th level. We have:

If these are all new players to the PF2 system, they chose some of the weakest starting classes in the game with an odd party composition. That's going to make the game feel bad.

Everyone except Wilfred's player is experienced in Pathfinder 2nd Edition and good at tactics. Most chose weak starting classes to roleplay being students of magic at the Magaambya Academy. The writers of Strength of Thousands anticipated this and put in several non-combat tasks that earn experience points at low levels to avoid the especially harsh weakness at 1st level. The free archetype has had little effect, except for Roshan's deliberately weird build.

To explain how I balance my encounters; I tend to only use creatures and hazards in the range of PL+2 to PL-2 when possible. The party have only ever faced Extreme encounters twice, both of which they went into with an in-game day of preparation and knowledge gathering in advance, and both of which they were allowed to prebuff as much as they wanted before the fight commenced. Every other combat encounter I have ever run has been Severe at worst, and never more difficult than Moderate if the fight was against things with a lot of resistances and/or immunities.

In theory, an Extreme-Threat encounter has a 50% chance of a Total Party Kill. In practice, the party has some trick to improve their odds of victory. My players like a divide-and-conquer strategy of splitting the enemy into two back-to-back Moderate-Threat encounters.

My party faces PL+3 enemies only as the final boss at the end of a module. Otherwise, the enemies' levels fall into PL+2 to PL-4. In other campaigns I have thrown Severe-Threat challenges at them about twice a level, but I am going a little easier on the Strength of Thousands party with only one Severe-Threat encounter per level.

1. The warpriest and scoundrel often get knocked unconscious in hard fights, and the action tax of getting back into the fight (standing and picking up their weapons) is not very fun for them.

My players mastered tactical teamwork back during Pathfinder 1st Edition. One of the principles of teamwork is to make sure fellow party members do not drop. This is usually accomplished through retreating: if a PC realizes that they can go to 0 hit points in a single turn, then they back away from the enemy to a safe distance. The bard Jinx, the party's primary healer, or the wizard Idris, the secondary healer via Battle Medicine feat, will probably patch them up as soon as possible, but sometimes the healers are out of reach. And the champion Wilfred needs his Lay on Hands for himself.

A frontline kineticist can move out of melee and still attack fine with ranged Elemental Blasts. A warpriest can take a Step back and self-Heal. Don't risk being knocked unconscious.

2. Status conditions that come up a lot in boss fights (Concealed/Dazzled, Frightened, Sickened, Slowed) are frustrating and lead to a lot of wasted actions and bad turns.

Usually an opponent's ability that inflicts a debilitating condition deals much less damage than their primary attack. So my players don't worry about debuffs. Afflictions are the exception--those can hurt a lot. The party carries consumables that give bonuses against afflictions.

3. Strong enemies that don't stay close to the party can be a chore to fight, as their mobility is far higher than the melee players and everyone else does pretty low damage to single targets. They don't find plinking away with ranged weapons, cantrips and elemental blasts very compelling.

The spellcasters in my party have spells for 60-foot range and often longer. Most occult spells are 30-foot range, but the Needle Darts cantrip provides medium-distance attacks for occult casters. And we have a starlit-span magus who always wants to be at long range. Enemies are usually not as prepared to deal damage at range as the party, so they are only plinking away, too. Trying for range favors the party.

Don't disparage cantrips. PF2 is designed so that the spellcasters handle the low threats with cantrips and save their slotted spells for worse threats. Cantrips deal reasonable damage.

4. A lot of passive effects, hazards, auras, area-effect damage abilities, etc. happen in difficult fights, and it can make for a lot to keep track of and it can feel a bit overwhelming.

Enemy auras that frighten or sicken are a pain, but they usually have a requirement that the PC start their turn in the aura or move into it. If the party is properly spread out to avoid area effects, the enemy can usually catch only one PC in their aura.

Typically in my game, the rogue Roshan and the kineticist Cara close into melee, the bards Jinx and Stargazer stand 30 feet away, the champion Wilfred tries to stand 15 feet away from as many of those as possible for his protective champion's reaction but often ends up in melee, and the magus Zandre and the wizard Idris stand at the very edge of Stargazer's Courageous Anthem 60-foot emanation.

The other bard Jinx plays Triple Time to give everyone the speed to keep out of the auras,

5. They all get hung up on how many times (not actually that much) that bosses have critically succeeded on saves against their spells and abilities and how useless it makes them feel when they have sometimes multiple turns in a fight that amount to pretty much nothing.

Yeah, the defenses of PL+2 bosses are hard to overcome. But with your party the boss is outnumbered 5 to 1, so if only 40% of the attacks deal full damage, that is still full damage twice a round. The key is avoiding damage via teamwork while nibbling the boss down.

6. Resistances and immunities are annoying (mostly mental immunity, precision immunity, "resistance to all damage except XYZ", and Construct Hardness as a concept are the ones they get annoyed about.)

This week my players fought a Screaming Sulfur, 10th level, precision immunity, incorporeal resisting all damage 10 except force, ghost touch, or positive, and with a 30-foot frightening aura. It counted as a 40-xp Trivial Threat against the 7-member party plus NPCs, but it felt more like a Moderate Threat in combat given the way it could incapacitate PCs while resisting ordinary attacks. But the party had two ghost-touch weapons in the hands of the heavy hitters Zandre and Wilfred, and Idris threw force spells, so they took it down. And the Screaming Sulfur's aura was auditory, so the bards used Counter Performance to negate it. The setting did not warn of incorporeal creatures, but the experienced players knew to be prepared for incorporeal regardless.

Another point to make is debuffing. The rogue Roshan, realizing that her spellcaster and archer friends would seldom provide flanks, trained in Athletics to put enemies off-guard by Grapple or Trip. She is now a master in Athletics. The true merit of off-guard by Grapple or Trip was not Roshan's sneak attack damage; instead, it lowered the AC of the opponent for all the spellcasters tossing attack spells at it.

exequiel759 wrote:

I didnd't say it was a useless skill for bards. In fact, its the only class that I think would ever want to ever use it (besides those that take it for flavor ofc). I said it was a useless skill. Period. Arguably more useless than Survival which is the one most people mention being the worst skill.

You know it's a useless skill because the only reason it's good on bards is because they're forced to use it for their class features. Take that away and it's got very little, for bard or anyone else. Bit of an artificial "usefulness"

My Strength of Thousands party uses Performance regularly. The seven-member party contains two bards, but other party members trained Performance, too. An interesting case is a service project called "Forced Migration, Moderate 6" in Spoken on the Song Wind.

Currently, in Hurricane's Howl the party is on the road in a field expedition. They Perform plays at the villages they visit in order to generate goodwill.

Survival was also mentioned as a useless skill. If a party uses Survival only for foraging, then it is of marginal use, since rations are cheap. But my party most recently used Survival to properly butcher a pair of Krooths to recover their alchemical ingredients at full value: "Krooth Guts In addition to naturalists, the strange enzymes and other chemicals found in the internal organs of male krooths, particularly the liver, pancreas, and kidneys, are of great value to alchemists who seek to concoct elixirs and potions with transmutation effects. A single male krooth's organs, properly harvested and preserved, can be sold to an interested alchemist or naturalist for as much as 80 gp."

I did say that my players like to use their skills outside of combat.

The ability for the GM to handwave any encounter into a single die roll is always a tool in the GM’s tool kit that can be helpful (even for combat encounters!) but it is also something that can hit the players hard, especially when it feels arbitrary and like it is undermining choices the players made to be prepared for those kinds of encounters. It is important players learn what things a GM tends to ignore/handwave/house rule around before committing resources to it.

I already talked about how many of the out of combat feats fail because they are not designed around the kind of situations in which players would actually use them, but a huge part of that is that because no skill feats are designed to work around social encounters, chases, races, research, infiltrations or investigations. They are instead designed around specific actions/activities that have turned out not to be the way most GMs (and adventure writers) handle those skills in the kinds of tense moments we break out into encounter mode around. When the game was being developed, those skill activities were imagined to be a bigger part of the game than the adventure writers have ended up using and that is a big part of why out of combat skill feat options keep missing the mark.

My players love using their character's skills outside combat. Thus, I try to create opportunities for those skills.

On the other hand, the out-of-combat feats don't necessarily fit the opportunities I provide. For example, my players seldom use Gather Information, because they would rather roleplay talking to some interesting townsfolk rather than make only a Diplomacy check. Therefore, Hobnobber, Streetwise, and Discreet Inquiry skill feats are useless to them, except for Streetwise being a feat tax to gain Criminal Connections. I sometimes create secondary uses for feats that fit the players' styles better, "Since you are streetwise, you find a safe inn to spend the night."

Pages 74 and 75 of War of Immortals are a section called "Telling A Mythic Story." The steps are Calling, Trials, The Final Approach, The Ordeal, and Immortality. Let me illustrate this with Johnny Appleseed. Most internet pages about him tell of the real man under the legend, but I want the legend here, such as the one at the USC Digital Folklore Archives.

The Calling: Working in an apple orchard, young Johnny Chapman heard the call of the frontier, packed light, and headed west to Licking River, Ohio. The call of the frontier is not specific to Johnny Appleseed, but it is well supported in the tales of the American Frontier. He brings apple seeds with him and plants an orchard.

Trials: Johnny Appleseed did not fight, but he did face challenges. He had to clear land for apple orchards. He sold most of his orchards and made others, so he had business dealings. He was on good relations with both the Native Americans and the U.S. settlers, and resolved disputes between them. One story is that he took shelter from a snowstorm in a gigantic hollow log and found a family of bears there, so he retreated safely.

The Final Approach and The Ordeal: These don't exist for Johnny Appleseed. His victory was that He planted apple orchards across several states and was said to be welcome in every home.

Immortality: Johhny Appleseed died of old age. His story lived on, becoming more legendary until scholars realized that the real story of John Chapman was just as interesting as the legend. His apple orchards are gone, because his variety of apple was best for alcoholic hard cider and banned during anti-alcohol Prohibition, but new apple orchards replaced them.

Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and most other tall-tales characters lacked The Ordeal. They had continuing adventures until they died. A mythic warrior could have a greatest battle of their life, but that is not necessarily at the end of their tale. For example, Odysseus fought in the Trojan War, but the Odyssey came afterwards. Odysseus's final confrontation against the suitors of his supposed-widow Penelope was a small battle rather than The Ordeal. We could view George Washington as a mythic hero in U.S. history, but he went on to become the first president well after the battles of the U.S. Revolutionary War.

The Final Approach and The Ordeal are more about Pathfinder campaigns than about mythic stories. So let me try this with a mythic player character from my campaigns, Gold-Flame Honeysuckle Vine.

The Calling: Gold-Flame Honeysuckle Vine joined my campaign at 6th level along with the catfolk monk Ren'zar-jo. I gave them a mission: they were escorting refugees from the destroyed town of Redburrow to the supposed safety of Fort Nunder (Honey grew up in the Fangwood Forest and knew the locations of the secret Chernasardo forts). The other PCs had just liberated Fort Nunder from enemy occupation, but an empty fort was a poor refuge. The party learned from the Redburrow refugees that an army of the Ironfang Legion was next going to conquer Radya's Hollow, the home village of the ranger in the party. This gave the party a new mission: stop the conquest of Radya's Hollw. Honey and Ren joined the party for this mission.

Trials: The rest of the Ironfang Invasion adventure path.

The Final Approach: In the last module, Vault of the Onyx Citadel, the party had traveled to the Elemental Plane of Earth where the Ironfang command was based in the Onyx Citadel, tapping the geomantic power of the region to open mystic gates to move their armies. Honey had already met gods, Gendowyn and Alseta, and had expressed interest in godhood. On the way to the citadel the party fought an Immortal Ichor, a creature that grew out of the shed blood a dead evil deity. After their victory Grandmother Spider appeared and told Honey that to start on the path to godhood, she could absorb divine essence from the Immortal Ichor. She did so, and Honey retrained to the first of the godhood feats that I had invented.

The Ordeal: In the assault on the Onyx Citadel Azlowe, greater barghest warpriest of Hadregash, cast Avatar to directly tap the power of his god. Instead, Azlowe disappeared and a real avatar of Hadregash appeared. Hadregash wanted to destroy Honey before she achieved immortality. The 19th-level party fought the 23rd-level avatar and won.

Immortality: The party leveled up to 20th level, and Honey gained a feat and retrained others for a total of 4 godhood feats to become a very minor immortal god in the new Fangwood pantheon. In my next campaign based on the leshy adventure A Fistful of Flowers, many of those leshies worshipped Honey.

Now, let's try to apply the Mythic Callings to these pre-War of Immortals mythic characters. Johnny Appleseed could have the Demagogue's Calling because he once prevented a battle with words, but he is more suited for a Pioneer's Calling. Honey could have the Caretaker's Calling, because she was the party healer, but she was quite bloodthirsty in battle. She became the god of familiars and subordinates not a god of healing.

Not only are the selections of Mythic Callings too few to fit our sample mythic characters, their benefits don't fit the mythology. The Paizo developers wrote them to fit combat. But the mythic aspects of the characters are seldom about combat. Even with a warrior like Hercules, his famous Twelve Labors had killing in only three labors. He also had to capture and bring back several beasts, but one of the labors was cleaning the Augean stables in a single day (he rerouted a river for this labor).

Thus, I imagine Mythic Callings build around the pace of mythic stories rather than the pace of combat.

Pioneer's Calling
Uncommon, Calling, Mythic
You seek the frontier, lands to explore and tame. Whenever you Make an Impression in a place new to you, if you offer a heartfelt gift, such as a product of your labors, you can make the check with mythic proficiency. Growing crops also uses mythic proficiency.

Minion's Calling
Uncommon, Calling, Mythic
You serve others of your free will. You can Aid without a preliminary action to prepare. Select a skill or lore specialty. When you become expert in that skill or lore, you may select an additional skill or lore, and repeat this whenever you become master and legendary in the original skill or lore. Whenever you use one of those skills or lores in an activity that takes at least one minute and helps another person, you make the check with mythic proficiency.