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A 5-mile-diameter dome contains around 4.8 trillion cubic feet, not 172,000. If there are 2 million people in Absalom station, then each of them would have roughly 2.5 million cubic feet to stretch out in. I think they're fine.
Most of the complaints about the Barricade feat are coming from people who have not read the rules closely enough. As a move action, you can stack and reinforce objects that are too small or too fragile to provide cover into a single square of adjacent cover. Anyone can spend a standard action to kick over a wooden table with 5 hardness and 15 hp and take cover behind it. You don't even need a skill roll. The presence of the Barricade feat does not prevent you from doing this. Someone who has the Barricade feat can spend a move action to create cover that is just as sturdy out of a roll of aluminum foil, or a pile of foam beer cozies, or a couple of discarded plastic cafeteria trays, or literally any old crap that happens to be lying around. I don't understand why people keep claiming that the latter is "something anyone could do before they made a rule defining it."
No, because what you're seeing is not a fault, nor an accident, nor a glitch. It's purposeful and intentional to prevent art theft. Is that really what's going on? Because every other image in the PDF extracts just fine.
In all previous Adventure Paths, the cover art was extractable from the PDF, at a size and resolution that was just about perfect for laptop wallpaper. With Strange Aeons, unfortunately, this is not the case. The only extractable version of the cover art is the small version inset above the table of contents, which is fine for reading but too low-res to make nice wallpaper. This makes me sad. I have always enjoyed collecting the covers of all the APs. Is there any chance we could get updated versions of the PDFs with the cover images made separately extractable?
Ooh, I wonder if his means we get an updated Korvosa sourcebook in the Campaign Setting line.
Firm stance. Your character is breaking the game please do something about it. There that is it that is what I want him to say, to do, to do something like that. I am making that offer in good faith and how did I break character concept before hand. It was supposed to be an evil party! What character class is more evil then an Anti-Paladin! You wrote: we all agreed that were were going to be a questionably moral party not straight up evil, but not good ether ... I however went all in playing an Anti-Paladin (emphasis mine) Unless I drastically misunderstood what you wrote, or unless you wrote something other than what you meant, the group (including you, and your GM) agreed to play morally questionable PCs that were not straight-up evil, but not entirely good, either. You, however, decided to roll up an anti-paladin, which I think by any reasonable definition would be considered straight-up evil. I think it's clear from your wording that you understood that your choice was contrary to the intent of the group agreement. Let me be clear: I agree that your GM should be more up-front with you about not liking your character, and about why he doesn't like it. But I also think it's actually pretty obvious what his feelings are. You don't need him to say a special magic sequence of words out loud to you, and sitting around waiting for him to do so just makes you petty. You could try to be the bigger person in this situation; instead you seem wed to the idea of just being the more passive-aggressive person. If you know that remaking your character would patch things up, then do that. If you don't care and intend to keep your character regardless of how your GM feels, then say that.
I offer to remake my character if he doesn't like it, he doesn't respond. I offer to play a different character, he's like meh about it. All he says is it's overpowered and keeps complaining about it. I want to bring a character to really drive home the point that no it's not over powered. He is being annoyingly passive-aggressive about this, but then so are you. It really doesn't take a genius to figure out that the GM does not, in fact, like your character. I could be wrong, but it seems pretty likely that the reason is not because it's overpowered, but because you agreed to a certain set of character concepts beforehand and then went and deliberately blew off that agreement, and now you're pretending that it's his problem, not yours. You say several times that you want your GM to "take a firm stand," but I don't really understand what that means. What is it you want him to do? Do you want him to make it clear that he's unhappy with your character? He's already done that. This "firm stand" business is just being deliberately obtuse. When you offer to remake your character, are you making that offer in good faith? If so, then just remake your character. If you just want to keep your character and don't care what he thinks about it, then you need to tell him that, explicitly. Constructing elaborate schemes to "teach someone a lesson" is something that only works in sitcoms and cartoons, not in real life. It is childish. It will not make your GM suddenly see things your way. It will just make you look dumb and him more upset.
Other things your corpse-in-a-closet cannot provide: - leather
Sorry if I misunderstood; you also said: You are only looking at the situation from a single time. As in, you have to feed the people, so you kill 45 cows. ..which seemed to imply that you thought farmers buy a bunch of cows, slaughter them all at once, and have a big steak party. But that's not how cattle ranching works -- you slaughter some, you breed the rest. Sure, growing a calf takes time, but you're never starting from zero. You always have groups cattle at different stages of growth, and you hold back studs over multiple generations. But where do those animals come from? Um, from all the herds of cattle that many, many people are breeding all over the place in a rural economy, all the time? You do realize that the normal, non-magical way is how it works in the real world, right? Large populations of humans have been using self-renewing herds of cattle to feed themselves throughout history. Do you wonder where all those cows come from, too? Yeah, you could drop 2,700 gp on a couple of command-word items that cast the necessary spells at will. But if you have the cash to make an initial investment like that, you're not a farmer. You're an adventurer, and you have better things to do than sit around in a village casting purify food and drink over a hundred times per day so that the villagers don't have to work. And even if you didn't, there are more villages than adventurers in this world. Which is why the farmers of Golarion aren't scrimping and saving to buy a ring of the rejuvenating pig carcass; they're just raising cattle the normal way, which can be mastered by any 1st level commoner and requires a far smaller initial outlay of cash.
Actually, the really funny thing is, the whole argument about cows is moot, because herd animals are Large creatures, and restore corpse only works on Medium or smaller creatures. You could do it with a pig, I guess, but that makes even less economic sense. You still have to cast purify food and drink the same number of times, because the amount of food that the population needs to consume stays the same. But you have to cast restore corpse many, many more times per day, because the pig has less meat on its carcass. Your daily spellcasting costs have just gone up by a factor of 10. Meanwhile, the price of a fresh, living pig is just 3 gp per head. For every 10 gp you spend on a restore corpse spell, you could have purchased 3 pigs (1 boar, 1 sow to slaughter, and 1 sow to breed), with change left over for feed.
I'm not talking about a single time, actually: I'm specifically addressing the OP's scenario of feeding an entire population (of 300-500 people) forever off of a single carcass. Disregarding the fact that a single 1st-level cleric would not be able to prepare enough restore corpse spells to give all of those people 3 square meals for even a single day, there is just no way for this to be more cost-effective than a farmer breeding cattle and selling the meat at market prices. And yes, by RAW, 450 gp is more than enough gold to build a barn (also a one-time cost, by the way), hire a team of unskilled labor, and purchase enough cows and feed to start a business. You slaughter some, you breed the rest (you seem to be ignoring the fact that cows reproduce), and you turn a profit on the meat and leather you sell so you can cover your ongoing costs. Look, I'm not suggesting that your PCs should take up cattle ranching. But the question implied by the OP is, "Why don't we just use magic to grow magic meat and feed everyone with it?" And the answer is, "Because you don't use skilled labor when unskilled labor will do the same job for cheaper."
You still have to purify every cubic foot you cut off and eat. Spreading it out over time doesn't make it cost less per unit. Even just doing enough to cut off one steak costs 15 gp, minimum. Congrats, that steak is more expensive than a whole, live cow. And for the price of making that wand, you could have purchased 45 head of cattle. Like, you could set yourself up as a cattle baron. I'm just saying, you are putting a lot of resources into a task that ordinary farmers pretty much have locked down at 1/10th the cost, all for the privilege of eating meat that was literally rotting just a few minutes before.
As a desperate attempt to fend off starvation, maybe, but I just can't see it as a viable way to mass-produce food for a population. The economics (wonky as they are in this game) just don't work. A cow is roughly 40 cubic feet of meat. Purify food and drink affects one cubic foot per caster level, so your village cleric will have to cast it multiple times to make sure the carcass is safe to eat. In the cheapest possible scenario, you're paying a 1st-level caster 10 gp to cast restore corpse once, then 200 gp to cast purify food and drink 40 times in a row. For that kind of money, you could have purchased more than 400 steak dinners (a good meal is 5 sp). For that matter, you could have purchased 20 live cows.
Better hope they have 10 levels of another class that lets them be completely invisible and undetectable then... Kinda part of the point of the Red Mantis assassins is that my neighbor could be one, and I wouldn't know... until he pulled out his mask and put it on... and then he kills me. That is the point of Paizo's Red Mantis. This is a thread about the stuff you do differently.
Restore corpse only restores just enough flesh to allow the corpse to qualify as a zombie instead of a skeleton if it's reanimated (that's what the spell is explicitly for). The spell also specified that the restored flesh is partially rotten.
Just a couple of things: * There is no such thing as a "good" Hellknight order. Taking a queue from the words of Kurt Vonnegut: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be," my version of the setting posits that you cannot accomplish good by emulating Hell, nor can you establish justice or peace through tools of terror and oppression. There are individual hellknights who might believe that they are upholding good principles by dressing up like devils and enforcing laws without regard for nuance or mercy, but they are deluding themselves. * On a related note, it is official canon that the Hellknights were originally founded by a man emotionally devastated by his son's suicide. He became obsessed with the idea that his son had been consigned to Hell for his sins, and spent the rest of his life searching for a way to set his son's soul free -- which is to say, for a way to cheat Hell. And at the end of his life, the founder of the Hellknights set fire to his library and rode out into the night, never to be seen again. To my knowledge, Paizo has not published an official explanation for this mystery. In my Golarion, the explanation is simple: the founder of the Hellknights went mad when it was revealed to him that his son had never been in Hell, but that he had readily sold his own soul by creating the perfect tool for corrupting authoritarian-minded dupes, and Asmodeus was eternally grateful. * As a member of the Red Mantis gains more and more levels in the Red Mantis prestige class, he removes his mantis-helmet less and less often. By the time the assassin reaches level 10, he never takes it off. By that time, it might not actually be a helmet any more.
Here's my shot at a Midwich-Cuckoo-style monster. Based on the dark empath from Occult Bestiary. I'm not enough of a monster-builder to know whether I should adjust its CR or not. Flaxen Child CR 2
If you substitute rapeseed, or alfalfa for the flax you could make them beekeepers and have some encounters with bee swarms. Perhaps have them command the bees. Perhaps even have some encounters with the Thriae. Not a bad idea, but the players already went through some bee-themed encounters several sessions ago; I don't want to retread old ground. I'm thinking I just might reskin the dark empath from Occult Bestiary and give them a <i>suggestion</i> supernatural ability to replace the explodes-on-death power. This is intended to be a minor, along-the-route-to-somewhere-else sort of encounter, so I'm okay with there not being an actual boss monster behind it all. Just being forced to hack their way through and/or flee from a crowd of psycho hive-mind children will be disturbing enough for my players.
My players will soon be traveling in the vicinity of Langitheath in Ustalav, which sports the following delightful little blurb in Rule of Fear: Thirty years ago, when the Loslimor family sold their rural estate, the manor and its 900 acres passed hands several times in quick succession before being forgotten by any single landowner. Left with no lord or income, the dozens of peasant families occupying the land gradually drifted away, abandoning the estate—or so most believe. Every spring, new rows of flax grow in spiraling fields surrounding Langitheath, interrupted by vast runes or circles of flattened plants. Some travelers tell stories of passing near the estate and seeing small figures capering amid the fields, or of encountering strange children with eyes as cold and blue as flax flowers. Based on this description, I'd like to set up an encounter in the vein of Children of the Corn / Village of the Damned / Midwich Cuckoos, with creepy hive-mind children slowly drawing the PCs in, overpowering them with psychic magic, and then sacrificing them to the Flaxen Man idol in the center of town, something like that. Does anyone have suggestions for a creature that would fit that idiom? Or something close, that I could reskin?
I just noticed something about the charge maneuver in the Unchained action economy rules: the charge action seems to no longer impose a -2 penalty to AC. Is this correct? Have I missed something?
If you actually extrapolated the Stealth penalty for the moon's actual size instead of arbitrarily capping it at -128, it easily overcomes the -126,139,200 penalty to Perception. Like, 50 times over.
Oh, whoops, didn't realize this was a necro'd thread.
A 6th-level wizard's scroll is a major magic item, not minor. So by RAW, no thorp will ever have one lying around. Also, the purchase limit of a thorp is 500 gp. So by RAW, no, the villagers cannot or will not sell all their s+!! and pool all their money to buy a 1,650 gp scroll. They would arguably not be able to hire a spellcaster to just cast it, either, since the wizard's one-time fee is also over their purchase limit. You need to be in at least a large town (pop 2001-5000) before you have any chance of finding a scroll of anti-magic field. And you need to be in a small city (pop. 5001-10000) before you'd find someone powerful enough to cast it.
To be fair, the coffee pot description does sound rather arcane if you don't already know what a percolator is.
Once you realize that Paizo is coyly describing a coffee percolator, you can google "antique coffee percolator" to find pictures that look old and beat-up enough to have come out of some adventurer's handy haversack: * percolator
How does this gel with the oh-so-common trope of a skilled assassin/ranger/stalker/whatever following behind a trail of enemies and picking them off one after another from behind without their notice (at least for a while)? Take 6 levels of Assassin, acquire the "quiet death" class feature.
Just a few questions about how consolidated skills are meant to work, that weren't directly addressed in the book. When using the consolidated skill list: 1) Do humans still get 1 extra skill rank per level? 2) Does favored class bonus still provide 1 extra skill rank? 3) When adding 1/2 a character's INT bonus to skill ranks/level, do you round up, round down, or do you carry over fractions across levels? 4) If you are also using the background skill rules from unchained, do characters still get 2 ranks/level to spend on background skills?
The consolidated skill rules reduce the number of skills in the skill list, and also reduces the number of skill ranks you get per level. If you are also using the background skills rules, would you also reduce the number of background skill ranks (from 2 ranks/level to 1 rank/level)? It's worth noting that if you use consolidated skills, the number of skills that are considered "background" drops from 13 to 5 (Handle Animal, Linquistics, Perform, Sleight of Hand, and all of the Knowledges except engineering get folded into one of the consolidated skills). So the list gets much shorter. So it kind of seems to me that reducing the number of background skill ranks/level from 2 to 1 seems appropriate. Does this make sense? Anyone think of any arguments against?
So grappled he could "call" and stab most likely. What if he was pinned. :) What would you rule? A pinned creature can attempt to free itself (with a CMB or Escape Artist check), take verbal or mental actions, and cast spells that do not require somatic or material components . . . and that's it. So you could call your blade to hand, but not attack with it.
The Azlanti culture is meant to have a Mesoamerican/South American vibe, I think.
The only reason Caromac survived as long as he did is because Waxwood was sneaking him water and tiny bits of food through the mouthhole. The WW actually expected him to die a lot sooner.
If you want to start with something cheaper and not quite so dense as the Inner Sea World Guide, you could also check out the Inner Sea Primer, which is basically the TLDR version of the World Guide. Also worth noting that all core rules are available for free online at www.paizo.com/prd.
To elaborate a bit further on my previous setup, the one thing I DON'T use PDFs for is looking stuff up during a game session. I agree with most of the posters, Adobe is to cumbersome for that, especially if you have to find something in more than one book. During game sessions, I use one of the online resources (usually www.pathfindersrd.com) for rules lookups. Adventure material is all either printed out or ported into the VTT. The PDFs are usually only for my own reading, research between sessions, or prep work. But between that and the web, I've never once found myself wanting or needing a physical book.
I've always thought a good rule of thumb should be: use the same amount of frankness and detail when describing sexual encounters in-game, as you would when describing your actual, real-life sexual encounters to someone in a non-game context. If you're not comfortable relating all the ways you and your girlfriend like to get down, in graphic detail, to Bob, the guy who plays the half-orc ranger in your gaming group, then there's really no reason why you should have to roleplay in-game sex to that level of detail, either. Likewise, if Bob isn't interested in listening to you go on about sex in the real world, then you have no business forcing him to listen to it in the game world.
My entire library of Pathfinder material is PDFs. I extract the images, and import the maps into a virtual tabletop; drop pics of major NPCs and monsters into a folder so I can put them up on the big screen TV during the session; use the decorative page borders and fonts to create handouts; print out pages, chop them up, put them in a 3-ring-binder interleaved with my own notes and any relevant chapters from setting books. When I want to read them, I load them onto a tablet. Pretty much the best GMing setup I've had in 30 years of gaming.
Navigating awkward and delicate social situations, where a direct answer would not be politically expedient but outright duplicity is not an option, is pretty much the dictionary definition of Diplomacy.
Stuff on my wishlist that they haven't done yet: * Urban/political adventure in Absalom
The "creatures closest to the point of origin are affected first" clause applies to the number of targets affected (1 per level), not to the total amount of damage inflicted.
I don't know if Paizo has a specific house style, but in my own notes (which I do try to keep typographically consistent cuz I'm like that), I use [bonus] [traits] [material] [weapon]. I also *only* italicize the magical traits, which I realize is actually a slight departure from Paizo's style, but I think it looks better. Thus, in my game it would be a +1 keen spell storing adamantine longsword.
Or buy the flipmats twice. Cut your extra copies into room-sized pieces, and lay them out like a jigsaw as the players explore. You get the fog-of-war effect without having to fuss about with a million sticky-notes, AND you get the thrill of ruthlessly taking a pair of scissors to an $80 gaming purchase. :)
Oh, don't get me wrong, the serpopard is great. I love the serpopard. I love that Paizo plunders real-world culture and mythology for their bestiaries. I wouldn't have it any other way. Even if I never end up using it, it makes me happy that the game has one now, all statted up. But, yeah. "Serpopard". Say it out loud.
Although I understand and appreciate that it comes straight from real-world Egyptian mythology, and that it is a perfectly serviceable CR 7 encounter... There is no way on God's gray earth that my players would be able to keep a straight face if I told them they were attacked by a "serpopard". No, showing them the picture will not help.
The monster in question is a Barrow Hound, a one-off monster introduced specifically for that module. Here's the relevant text of its special abilities:
The howl is explicitly described as a sonic effect, so a silence spell would certainly shut that down. The dimensional bark is less clear. It is not described as sonic or language-dependent, and nothing in the text suggests that the targets have to be able to hear it to be affected. A strict reading suggests that the dimensional bark is not a sound at all -- the dog is literally "barking" out a cone of pure dimensional energy. Almost more like a breath weapon, really. I would probably rule that silence does not affect it.
I'm not sure you understood the gist of my post. If you physically cannot manage to stand like that, then I can only imagine you must have some kind of serious injury or skeletal condition. The woman is facing forward. Her shoulders are in line with her hips. Her right hip is not "twisted" sideways and back; it is cocked slightly upwards, as is natural, because she is taking a step forwards with her left leg. The second thing I'd do to understand is to try and imagine her standing like that in a room with other people, and ask myself "what situation is this?" Will someone stand like that while talking to friends? perhaps while in combat? or while casting a spell? I think you'll find the answer to all of these potential questions to be "no" - this is simply no way for a human to stand. Again, I have to disagree. Respectfully, but unequivocally, I disagree. It's the pose of a woman walking. It's perfectly normal. I linked to a picture of a normal woman in a nearly identical pose (minus the staff) in my previous post, for illustrative purposes. Here's the link again, in case you missed it. There are obviously sexual elements to the art, and she is clearly intended to be a sexually attractive woman. But that is not a sex toy pose.
Could someone explain what's so contorted about the woman's pose? Because I sincerely, respectfully, do not see it. She is not twisting at the waist in that ubiquitous "butt + boobs" pose; her shoulders are pretty much inline with her hips; one hip is cocked up at, what, about 15 degrees? Which is normal, because she is clearly in the act of taking a step forward. It's not a combat pose, but it's not a stripper pose or even anything like typical comic book cheesecake. It's hardly contorted at all. It's almost the exact same pose (minus the staff) as this.
I have physical copies of all of the hardcover books, the beginner's box, the bestiary box, and the NPC box. couple of card decks, too -- Harrow cards and condition cards, I think. I have PDF copies of just about everything. All of the Adventure Paths, Player's Companions, Campaign Setting, and Modules, for both 3.5 and Pathfinder rules. A couple of seasons' worth of PFS scenarios. About half a dozen books from the fiction line, in ePub format.
I am not crazy about the change. I enjoyed the fiction when it was tangentially related to the theme of the AP, but was otherwise just a good story on its own merits. The new format reads like most mediocre gamebook fiction -- its aim is to showcase a bunch of people, places, and elements of the setting, and the quality of the story is bent out of shape to accommodate that. Now it's possible that I just don't care for this particular author's writing style, and the new format is secondary. But at this point, having read the first chapter, it really seems that the new format is part of the culprit.
I wondered because I remember Kingmaker mentioning First World creatures don't have souls.That's a bit of flavor that might be in error... since no soul = can't be resurrected, and soul & body being one = only true resurrection works. The latter is what affects outsiders. Fey, the primary things from the First World, can be brought back from the dead normally, and therefore they have to have souls. Hmm. This might end up being one of the very few setting details that I have decided the developers are just plain wrong about.
I noticed it and I like it. It's easier to read.
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