Mavrickindigo's page

They're not removing slavery from the setting (except as just part of the natural way things might change in the background). They're putting "slavery" below the Pathfinder baseline, so they're not going to put the spotlight on it without being very careful.

Like there are all sorts of awful things that can and will happen in the setting, but not all of them are going to be talked about in books that Paizo prints. Like there might be a Demon Prince of "Autocannibalism" down there in the abyss but we're not going to put that one in an adventure.

So, we aren't getting books about the Grey Corsairs or the Bellflower Network or anything like that anymore?

Considering Asmodeus is the official state religion, I would think at least devil-born tieflings would be revered, rather than hated. What's the deal?

Cheliax thinks they are ABOVE devils. They worship Asmodeus thinking they are getting the better deal out of the contract. Devils are beneath Chelaxians, and so devil-born are beneath humans.

So, it seems Paizo has decided to do a blanket-ban on slavery, but it is my understanding that Lost Omens/Golarion is a rather dark setting and slavery is a big part of the darkness of the setting.

It seems to me that such a blanket ban/change would change a lot, so what exactly is affected and how shall we see the setting moving forward?

I haven't gotten too into the 2nd edition stuff, but there seems to be enough of a change that 2nd edition Golarion and beyond is a bit more "all ages" than 1E. That got me thinking about the 3.5 adventures and sourcebooks, which all had this sort of terror and horror and overall "edginess" that wasn't available in 1E. 3.5 felt like a setting where Folca could conceivably exist.

What are some darker aspects you liked about the old-school days?

Heyo, everyone. I just found out that Paizo has said that if they reprint "Book of the Damned" that they would be removing some content.

I haven't yet purchased a copy, but when I actually do go to add it to my collection, I need to know if I need to search for first editions, or if it's safe to just buy any particular copy.

(Yes, I know why Paizo wants to edit it upon reprinting, and no, I'm not interested in a book with less content. I'm a fan of obscure stuff that is technically in the lore but isn't touched upon anymore. I won't say any more, because I don't want to make this a thread about that content.)

Isn't it a little restrictive to make paladins HAVE to worship a deity? Why not paladins of personal ideals, or those who follow the code?

Wouldn't this also make it harder for there to be Hellknight paladins?

You know what would be really nifty? A bonafide Darkmoon Vale Adventure Path, perhaps taking on the Sixth King of the five kings mountains

Will this game be built to not punish players for picking something. I know retraining is a core rule now, but will Paizo make it so there are inherently inferior choices for feats/class abilities that characters will be forced to retrain when they find out?

I certainly hope not.

Every option should be fun and effective. I want to avoid water balloons.

Just stuff like:

•Gambeson (ie: padded) armor was actually really good protection and much better than something like hardened leather. Maybe have the stats reflect that?
•Call an arming sword (currently longsword) an arming sword and a longsword (currently bastard sword) a longsword? Ya know, like they're supposed to be?
•Can a dagger not be completely terrible? It's probably responsible for more battlefield kills than any other weapon, after all.
•Can a falchion be a falchion and not a scimitar?
•Can you explain how tricking the senses (Illusion) is fundamentally different enough from tricking the senses (Enchantment) that they deserve to be entirely separate schools of magic?

Ya know, just some basic common sense type stuff? :)

Selective realism was one reason why being a martial character sucks in PF. Developers claiming the action economy of feats and the like based on what they could personally do instead of what would make for cool and fun characters really throttled possibilities.

So please, put gameplay over realism.

As someone who enjoys converting monsters from 3.5 to PF, this unique monster reaction rule has me a little worried. 3.5 to PF means i have to just alter the skills and add/change a couple of feats to convert. Now, I need to come up with balanced reactions for every monster?

Oh hey, someone doing the timeline stuff. Maybe you can use my old timeline stuff I did?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5gwq90umyhpp8vy/Golarion%20Timeline.aeon2?dl=0

A lot of these are estimated. I used a range to determine "generations" and I made "eons" equal 1,000,000,000 years, but I don't think that's quite accurate. I also include a few novels, adventures, and comics, assuming release date or release month as the starting time, unless it is otherwise noted.

Earlier, I had asked if there was any information on what date Aroden actually died. I assumed when he died, crap went down everywhere, the worldwound opened, the eye of Abendego formed, a similar storm formed on a distant planet, the angels had a concordance with one another.... yet, no publication and no character has made reference on what date on the calendar it was.

That got me thinking: was the death of Aroden and all the surrounding unpleasantness something that happened over a period of time? If the hurricane formed at a different day that the wound opened up and a different day Aroden was set to return to Cheliax, that would make the date itself seem less noticable for people. I ask about this because there are player character races since the very beginning of pathfinder who could be old enough to have been alive when all this went down, yet we don't have information on what day on the calendar it happened on.

The Mad Comrade wrote:

I must have missed "soulless elves" somewhere along the way.

"Soulless Elves" are actually from first edition. Back then, it was decided that Elves only had spirits. Which is probably why 1st edition Elves didn't sleep. Probably.

I'd like this thread to be about elements from Golarion that were around back when Pathfinder Chronicles was a supplement and adventure series for 3.5, instead of being the official setting for Pathfinder, you know?

Did Paizo ever have Soulless elves? Seems to be a very different flavor than their alien origins.

We can't forget the Sloor being a thing, but no longer being a thing, because copyright reasons.

"Guide to Darkmoon Vale" is full of some interesting things
*a few humans in the setting have been retconned to Dhampir or Changelings
*Thuldrin Kreed went from a rapist and cuckold-maker to a man whose only vice is greed
*The Diamond Regiment, which is a branch of the Eagle Knights that patrols the vale, seems to have been absorbed into the Golden Eagles.
*There are dragons who like to hang out among humanity under the guise of being human, instead of lurking behind the scenes, like the one who gets really drunk and wants to start barfights.

Early Golarion material makes a lot of references to thi gs that are either never picked up again or contradicted in later works. For example, some books mention psionics and psionic characters, and i use that to justify using psionic characters.

one retconned element is Dragonfall, the dragon graveyard where all Dragona go to die

what are some of the weird and crazy things from those old books that you like?

Am I the only one here who is disappointed in the huge number of reprinted monsters in this book? When I got into Pathfinder, i bought up a lot of the books, even picking up used copies on ebay. Now that the new bestiary is out, I'm a little annoyed that so much of it is material I already have.

EDIT: And what really annoys me is that its just reprints of stuff from Pathfinder books. Where are the pathfinder updates for crazy monsters from old 3.5 adventures Paizo wrote, like the Hoary Muntjak?

So, a couple things have made me question how the world of the Pathfinder campaign setting works.

1.) During one of my campaigns, I had to create a 17th level caster to justify how a character could buy a scroll of such high power as he did. I made this character a CN guy who just was into spellcasting for the money and had multiple business ventures throughout the multiverse. Being a 17th level wizard, he used his abilities to be a one man army and basically a god, pal-ing around with extradimensional beings, kidnapping people for business ventures, creating infinite factories of time-distortion demiplanes to ramp up production of cheap, but wanted, magical items to support his wealth...

2.) Reading "Lost Treasures," the book talks about specific magic items that are not artifacts, and have creation rules tied to them, meaning any wizard who can think of a need for a "planes compass" or a "strip of wood that turns you into a beast man" would be able to recreate such treasure, and at a reduced price, because they're crafters.

So, my question is: where are all of the HIgh level shenanigans in Golarion? Where are the people who game the fundamentally broken economy to pump out thousands of gold pieces a day? Why isn't the pathfinder society, an organization created for the purpose of kicking down the door and looting treasure, filled with munchkiny "power gamers"

I once had a player use his ability to make and sell poisons to start an empire that involved him making clones of himself, setting up Wall-mart style super centers in every metropolis, building a ship larger than any preset ship in fleet rules, and eventually craft a magic item of infinite wish granting, and all of this follows RAW.

I can really only think of a couple examples of characters who are like this in the canon. Razmir uses his high level sorcerer abilities to convince people he's a god.

There's that one castle that came into being when a bunch of people decided to draw from the Deck of many things and hope for the keep card.

And, I guess, Baba Yaga.

But really, that seems to be such a pitifiul amount of characters. It just seems with all the adventure there is to have on Golarion, that there would be more people who will "game the system" than just 2 characters

According to Archives of Nethys, Tiefling is, and it replaces Fiendish Sorcery, which you'd be unlikely to want anyway.

Can you play a tiefling without it dieing of old age in PFS?

I just picked up a copy of "Classic Monsters Revisited," and I'm curious why the trolls in that look like lanky dudes with pointed ears and long hooked noses, yet the trolls that Paizo eventually went with have that distinct look that has a weird beast face. When I look at the trolls in this book, I see a Humanoid (Giant), but the ones in the actual game look much more like a monstrous humanoid, to me. Where did the idea for the first design come from? And what was the design process to change it?

I think you can't be an evil PC in PFS, so you probably couldn't own slaves.

The Cult of the Dawnflower (Worshipers of the Good Goddess, Sarenrae) own slaves.

I don't know if this is correct or not, but I'm looking at the scale in "Mythic Realms" for the Black Desert, and according to my calculations, the place is over 7000 miles from one end to the other, that's much bigger than the land of black blood, which is below 400 miles from one side to the other. The book says that the land of Black Blood. The book describes the Black Desert as having "Miles" of sand and being under Osirion, but at the scale I calculated, the thing would be underneath most of northern Garund. Is the scale off? Did I do something incorrect in my calculations, perhaps?

How is a god who prefers a traditional male/female procreation family life a bad thing, if the setting is chock full of sexually liberated deoties already? Its not like it is 3vil for an agrarian society to want a lot of farmhand children or anythibg right?

Well, according to Reign of Winter, the Russians and Baba Yaga herself have the same human racial traits as humans from Golarion. Theynare at least mechanically the same as each other.

Aboleths created humans IIRC, they were an experiment of the aboleths.

How does that explain human life on Earth? Considering the Azlanti fell in 8,088 BC and the first Homo Sapiens Sapien was born on earth anywhere between 197,984 BC and 187,984 BC, if the Azlanti were created by Aboleths and somehow humans migrated to Earth from there, Azlant would have been around for nearly 100,000 years!

Let's not forget that HP Lovecraft stuff happened. According to "At the Mountains of Madness," humans evolved on Earth from the Great Old Ones' (Elder Things) leftover life-creation experiments, which would put the origin of human life on Earth, which means they would have had to migrate to Golarion at some point.

From what I could tell, there are indeed sexualized males in Pathfinder products. Off the top of my head, there is the Veela from one of the Bestiaries, which shows a male version of the race instead of the female version. They also had the "Blacksmith's Son" in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game to be an alternative to the "Shopkeeper's Daughter".

Also, that shortpacked comic made me think of this image in rebuttal to it
http://i.imgur.com/an49Sr9.jpg

Don't know how much this adds/detracts from the discussion, but I've always wanted to see someone point out the flaws in the argument.

Time travel. Unless it's implemented as a one-off backstory thing to explain retcons. Though once it gets used, it's never a one-off thing.

Well, with the Scepter of Ages a thing in the setting, Time Travel is always a thing.

So, I enjoy reading through the lore of Pathfinder, and I have come to wonder just how "Good" the alignment of "Good" really is. Throughout the history of Golarion, there are some points where the alignment doesn't seem as shiny as it should be, and this is mostly evident when it comes to Good outsiders.

1. Torag breaks a chip off of Rovagug's prison to punish people with it
2. Iomedae pretty much kills PCs if they don't do what she says
3. The Celestial host wants to kill the guy who wrote the Book of the Damned because he did what they told him to do.
4. Angels have stolen souls to create new angelic soldiers

I'm sure there are more examples of the "Goodest" of "Good" deciding to use not so good tactics to do what they think is right. In an objectively moral universe, it seems weird that they would dip into subjective gray areas.

If Paizo doesn't do it, I might think of a "sailor senshi" of the golarian star system. Sailor Eox, Sailor Castrovel, Sailor Triaxus...

So, now that we have the magical child archetype, I'm now intrigued what sort of "magical girls" exist on Golarion, canonically. I doubt that there's anything out there right now, but I'm interested in where they might come from and what themes they may have

I guess I'm just looking at Galt compared to the Pathfinder Tales series, where Pharasma sends an inquisitor when one soul is stolen from the river of souls

So, Galt has guillotines that will store the souls of those they kill inside of them. What defenses does Galt have in place to stop things like Inevitables, Psychopomps, and clerics of Pharasma from kicking their butts and taking the souls back? I mean, it's not like they have a stable government or anything, so would they really be able to organize a good enough defense against such gross violations of the Death Goddess?

I can't really think how the practice of basically stealing the souls of almost everyone in their country has gone unpunished for so long.

So, I'm wondering if there's a way to make something like the Pillar Men from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. What do you think would be good for that? They might make for good high level monsters.

Distant Scholar wrote:

Because, in the game, wizard > fighter?

That reason makes sense from some players' perspectives but would have to be considered unacceptable when examining the motives and productions of the folks at Paizo.

Considering Paizo employees have showed a willingness to find every way to make martials "realistic" while giving casters amazing powers at the same time, I doubt they are very much concerned with making an "epic" swordsman

Been reading through "Death's Heretic, and it mentions, as I recall from a first meeting, that each major city in Thuvia takes turn hosting the auctions, but I don't think there's a mention of when the auction takes place or if it takes place the same time of year each year.

Is there a specific time that the auction takes place?

and failed souls that never exhibited faith or passion in life never progress. Pharasma dispatches them to a dormant existence in the Graveyard of Souls

So does that mean that the Rahadoumi character from "Death's Heretic" was mistaken when he believes that all of his kinsmen rest in the graveyard portion of the boneyard and that is the final and best reward for those who reject the gods?

I suppose with the Boneyard being the de facto Neutral plane, that's where neutral atheists go?

I have been reading Beyond the Vault of Souls and I noticed that it says an atheist Soul will crystallize and become part of the Vault of Souls. now I was reading one of the Pathfinder tales and it described how The Souls of atheists go into a great graveyard in the Boneyard . are these both true?

You know, a lot of people like to bring up the fact that Asmodeus is apparently a misogynist (yet its never really elaborated upon). Are there any villains/evil deities who are explicitly labeled as being misandrist? I could see the Drow not quite being misandrist, as they could probably see the use of men as breeding stock and soldiers, but what about some kind of demon lord or something that wants to wipe out all men or a class of demons specifically made to kill men? Is there anything like that?

For the same reason Nethys, Gozreh and aeons get away with Neutral: Non-mortals don't really follow the PC rules for alignment. ;P

They do the whole "good and evil, law and chaos in equal measure" form of neutrality. As far as I can tell, the Hanspur clerics in those early books don't do enough "good" things to offset the random acts of murder

Hanspur is intended to be a deity who "rides the line close" as far as being evil. He's definately more evil than good, but he's still, for now, neutral. That does mean that he has evil worshipers, and it's those who do the drowning. In theory there would or could be an oppositional sect in his church that tends toward neutral good and opposes the evil side with a schism type thing... but that's not yet something that's happening in his faith. Yet.

(IF we wrote it as "all worshipers of Hanspur are expected to drown someone now and then as proof of faith" or something like that, then that's an error in the writing that should have been caught and corrected in development, and I apologize for that.)

Thanks for the response!

Guide to the River Kingdoms and the Pathfinder Wiki

The description didn't seem to have any sort of reason to kill them other than to kill them. Most good deities that order their people to kill explain stuff like "Kill undead because undead are evil" or "kill villains because villains are evil" stuff like that.

But with Hanspur? Nope. It's just "Travel with someone, then murder them one night because I said so."

So, Hanspur, the river rat, is a patron deity of the river kingdoms, and has a morally neutral alignment that seems to fit well with the six river freedoms. However, there's one tenet in his faith in which a faithful travels the river with someone else, only to drown them when they least expect it.

That sounds pretty evil to me, so why isn't Hanspur evil?

I enjoy what we have of Garund. It's a much more adventurous place than Avistan. Avistan seems so gloomy, you know? It's got a lot of that "crap is bad up here, you need to fix it." while Garund is much more "this stuff is cool! Go explore it!"

I have been reading a couple Pathfinder Tales and noticed something interesting: they treat classes like witches and wizards as if thre future spellcasters had some sort of spark. But shouldnt those casters ne sorcerers instead? What is particularly weird is that one novel, children are kiddnapped from ulfen lands because they have been maked as jadwiga. But in every campaign setting book ive read, jadwiga was treated as an ethnicity

If he wants to play a melee character who isn't constantly being crapped on by enemies who are more powerful than him, he shouldn't be playing Pathfinder

I think it would be fun to see a timeline that puts all of the events in order, just in case you want to play a world where everything happens. I personally had the idea of a grand campaign that involved every adventure, Pathfinder Tales, PFS, and adventure Path in chronological order, playing out each day as multiple groups,a nd if someone fails, that has drastic repercussions.

According to one of the Pathfinder Tales, she wrote a political story that put the protagonists' family in a bad light, which inflamed the shame they went into after one of their members assassinated someone. She also wrote the forward of one of the revisited books. Classic Horrors Revisited, I think?

They do note advanced races by saying their CR is higher than normal.

So, Reborn Samsarans would be normal races and Munavri and Duergar Tyrants would be Advanced?

I thought the first set were the virtues that Thassilon represented, and the bottom set was the virtues players can use to offset the seven deadly sins?

https://i.warosu.org/data/tg/img/0333/12/1405032200107.png

so apparently, Jason Bulhman thinks that Martial characters need to adhere to real-life, while wizards can do whatever the heck they want because "magic." It is stuff like this that makes me see why people think Martials are no fun in Pathfinder