Nostri's page

Seriously, what chain shirt weighs 25 lbs? Full plate could be as light as 33 lbs if it was of good craftsmanship. You're telling me that something I can wear under my shirt and nowhere else weighs that much? Does no one else think its a bit silly that a character with no below average stats is barely able to carry anything around? People keep saying that average strength isn't enough for a hero, I'm saying that if the armor weight wasn't trumped up to absurd degrees, most people could handle that equipment layout in real life.

Well here's a "chain shirt" from Kult of Athena which is fairly accurate (for the level of accurate D&D and Pathfinder go for). It weighs in at 20lbs if you've got a chest diameter of 44", so only 5 lbs under weight. If you add on the kind of padding you'd need to wear underneath it you're adding 5-6 lbs. So, that actually covers it quite nicely.

Not going to lie, finding the weights of a suit of "full plate" is damn hard but the breastplate that my friend owns and jousts in comes in at about 15 lbs and he's something of a tight a** when it comes to historical accuracy for his kit. With everything else that's listed as being part of a suit of full plate I think 50 lbs is either accurate or low balling it a bit.

As for wearing it under your shirt you can't. You just straight up cannot wear real mail armor under anything except a cloak or tabard. It's only possible with stuff like mithral because mithral isn't real. Yes you can get those chain mesh shirts but you can't make that stuff by hand without modern methods. Or magic, which brings us back to the whole not real thing. Honestly if you want something to complain about as far as weights in Pathfinder are concerned look at the weapons, those are crazy.

Oh, I almost forgot. Is there a document/website/forum post spelling out the basic gist of the various countries, ethnicities and races anywhere? I'm willing to read multiple books on this setting, I'll be lucky if I can convince most of my players to read much more than a paragraph or two on the place they want to be from, let alone all the rest of them.

I've been thinking about starting up a new game with my F2F group and Golarion is in the running for consideration for what setting we'll be using. While I'm not completely new to the setting I've been out of touch with it for a few years (Kingmaker was still an AP or two away I think) so I was wondering what new setting material was out?

To be more specific I'd like to get a list of everyone's top 10 books for fluff on the setting. I'm think of doing the game in the River Kingdoms/Numeria so stuff related to them or the surrounding regions would be really great. Though to be honest anything informative would help out a lot.

Nostri wrote:

The spheres I wrote up are indeed core only though I have an updated version with Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat (I think?) in it. If anyone wants an updated version I can update it with the rest of the spells in the pfsrd too.

An updated version would be great. Your old file is saved in my "Work in Progress" folder for a reason.

Updating it as I type this. Might be a few days though, work's killing every free hour I've got and I still need to plan for the game I'm actually running using a different system. I'll start a new thread when it's done and post a link up here.

The spheres I wrote up are indeed core only though I have an updated version with Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat (I think?) in it. If anyone wants an updated version I can update it with the rest of the spells in the pfsrd too.

Prestidigitation is amazing. You can completely clean yourself which is nice for anything from not catching filth related diseases to making yourself presentable for a surprise visit from the king. Temporarily change the color of an object. Clean house. Influence the flavour and aroma of food. An almost complete stage magic show including small lights, floating objects, and making small fake coins appear from behind someone's ear (along with anything else you can think of as long as it looks cheap and obviously fake). Hell you can even preserve food or keep it warm indefinitely as long as you're willing to recast the spell every hour, on the hour. Nothing too impressive by itself but when combined with other cantrips it can make for an impressive entrance, or aide a bardic friend's performance enough to get you out of that port town before the pirate captain you snubbed figures out which dockside inn you're staying in.

I hope this amounts to something other then random tidbits thrown around. Coincidently there's more from the source code-

<!-- Shadowy Figure- Raise Dead : Infinity Engine -->

<!-- "She left me to die. YOU left me to die. But Shar... Shar wanted me to live." -->

And then at the bottom of the page-

<!-- "If you wish me dead, brother, it must be by your hand. No one else." -->

I get that they are more organized than most low cr challenges, but it seems as though most people have this idea that they are some kind of tactical savant race that design intricate traps, I know they're good at making traps, but I don't see them as being all that intuitive, I don't think their mental stats are anything very high are they?

Well they don't get any penalties to their mental stats [ability modifiers are -4 Str, +2 Dex, -2 Con] and while an average one has a lower Wisdom then a human [Wis 9] they are as smart and charismatic as a normal human [Int and Cha both 10]. They also get a +2 to all Craft (Trapmaking), Perception, Profession (Miner), and Stealth skills and Craft (Trapmaking) and Stealth are always class skills for them. So one with any class levels , even in an NPC class, would benefit from putting ranks into Craft (Trapmaking) and Stealth which pretty much means that they are as a race sneaky and crafty little buggers with a penchant for well made traps. If you get one with rogue or expert levels with a focus on those skills it's a very likely a scenario like Mark Hoover's could arise.

Very nice. I'm echoing the request for a copy in Word format if you wouldn't mind.

I'm going to second (third?) the Percy Jackson series for teen readers, and just about anyone else too to be honest. There's lots of good stuff in there. Rick Riordan's started two other series' set in that world, one a continuation of the Greek gods theme and the other focusing on Egyptian myth.

Most anything by Mercedes Lackey is good. I'd start with the The Mage Wars trilogy with "The Black Gryphon" being first for that series or Dragon Jousters with "Joust" as the first book in that series.

Diana Wynne Jones is good too. She's written "Howl's Moving Castle" (the book that the Studio Ghibli film was very loosely based off of) "Dark Lord of Dirkholm" which isn't nearly as scary as it sounds like it should be.

Okay on second thought I'm not sure I'd want to play in a game where the players sex the head back on a body. It's what I get for posting without proofreading though.

As for what's stopping people from making funky hybrids with the raise dead? The person's spirit/soul/what-have-you that you're stuffing back into the body. The spell specifically says that the subject's soul must be willing to return and most likely your buddy's not going to be coming back to his head stitched onto a kobold body or the other way around. Also I'd say that the mega-powerful, near omniscient being granting you the power to bring the recently dead back to life is what's preventing the magic from raising a random pile of body parts.

To me it'd depend on how the character was decapitated. If it was flavor text for a crit (e.g.- "The orc got a 47 point crit on you, how many hit points do you have max? 14? Yeesh, alright let's say he just charges in close and chops your head clean off.") then I'd let Raise Dead work. If it was something like a vorpal sword that removed your head or some kind of monster special ability then I'd say you'd need to prepare the body somehow at the least, either having a mundane surgeon sex the neck back together or using magic some type to seal the wound, before I'd allow the Raise Dead spell. Because while some descriptions are just "fluff" sometimes the descriptions are really important. If they weren't we might as well be playing cards or Monopoly.

SmiloDan wrote:

I think one of the problems with the magus is that it doesn't seem to be designed to fill a particular role. Sure, it's a nifty combo of arcanist and melee combatant, but it doesn't seem to fit one of the main party roles.

Why does a class have to be pigeon holed into tank, healer, arcanist, thief? I am no fan of the scared cows of alignment or Vancian casting, but I would rather keep both if it means these restrictive class roles get confined to a firey pit forever. This is one of the things I detest most about MMOs. I tend to take it personally when I am playing my character the way I want to and am told I am "doing it wrong" because I am not playing the class "to role".

You will excuse my going into rant mode, but this is something that really grinds me the wrong way.

It's not that a class has to only be able to to fir into one role it's that there should be something that the class is good at. I'm going to be the last person to say "you're playing class x wrong" and I'd think most people here wouldn't be likely to say so either but if your class doesn't have a role in mind when it's designed it's harder for someone to play well mechanically. Roleplay has nothing to do with it since I can make the same character from an rp standpoint and be any number of classes.

Disenchanter wrote:

Right now, all the Apple policies are doing is helping un-informed consumers ignore the vulnerabilities of their devices.

:) Yep, that's us. The poor, misguided, uniformed Apple consumers. Oh woe is us!

You should really stop painting with such broad strokes, y'know.

Greg

I don't think he was saying that all Apple users are misguided and uninformed. Just that Apple's fairly loud policy of "We don't let anything unapproved by us!" makes people who actually aren't sure on the hows and whys of computer use more susceptible to malware because they think that an iWhatever is immune because Apple and Jobs said so.

So I was wondering what game effect allowing BAB to stack would have on game balance. Well stack differently then it does now.

Currently BAB stacks straight up, as a Fighter 5/Monk 3/ Rogue 1 you'd have a BAB of +7. What if instead different BAB tracks stacked with themselves instead? So full BAB stacks with itself, 3/4 BAB stacks with itself and 1/2 BAB stacks with itself; then you add the results together. So in the above example the above character would be at 5th level in full BAB and 4th level in 3/4 BAB thus having a +8 to BAB instead of the +7.

Would doing this screw up game balance a lot? Or would it make combat a little easier for multi-classed characters and not really have a large scale effect?

EDIT: I'm fairly certain I didn't explain this as well as I'd hoped but unfortunately it's a side effect of trying to type this before running out the door, sorry.

I don't know if there's a rules specific way to hide armor under clothing but speaking from experience of wearing armor I'll tell you it would be bloody difficult. Most of the heavier armors are just too bulky and restrictive to be able to hide effectively against someone that knows what to look for- which would be pretty much anyone in a normal D&D world that either makes their living fighting or around armored fighters.

I'd represent it by applying double the ACP of the armor to all Sleight of Hand checks to conceal the armor. I know that may sound like a lot but it still gives you a decent chance to hide a chain shirt but makes hiding the more bulky armors next to impossible to hide. Which they should be, I don't care how voluminous your cloak/robe is if you get one big enough to hide the fact that you're wearing plate armor you'll look like a fool and not be able to move.

Now once you get to higher levels magic and special materials are the way to go. In 2nd Edition one of the cool things about elven chain was that it was so light it could be worn under a shirt with no one the wiser of you wearing it. At higher levels I'd recommend magic and mithral as was said above.

@ Set: In defense of my argument for multi-classing to achieve the feel of different specialty priests one could do the arcane and divine casting priest of Nethys by going cleric/wizard/mystic theugre and the warrior priest of Gorum by multi-classing cleric and fighter or barbarian.

However your descriptions of the specialty classes and examples from your old Realms game has got my creative juices flowing. I might have to make specialty priests now just to satisfy the curiosity as to what they'd end up looking like.

@ Majuba: What specifically about barkskin doesn't fit priests other then druids or ranger getting it? It's a bonus to AC via a boost to natural armor. If it's just the thematic elements that bother you when it's not a plant or nature deity granting the spell, change it. Nothing in the spell's rules is inherently nature themed except that it's a druid and ranger only spell.

For Iomedae the spell's not barkskin it's virtuous bulwark, a spell that gives the caster's skin the sheen of steel and is used by clerics and paladins of Iomedae to harden their flesh against the ravages of those that bring harm to others.

For Abadar the spell is now goldskin, the spell gives the priest's hide the appearence of gold while at the same time thickening it to turn back attacks. In legend the spell was granted first to a merchant priest of Abadar who was willing to give his life to protect his caravan, in a show of support to his cleric Abadar granted him the ability to cast goldskin to save his life from the bandits waylaying the caravan.

Bloody post monster cutting part of my post out, good thing I was writing it up in Word first...

As for the differing HD, BAB, skill access etc that would come with making true specialty priests in the vein of the suggestion in the 2nd Edition PH I think to some degree Pathfinder already does this. It's not as obvious since we've lost the four class groups that were in place then but they're still there in a vestigial kind of way. Clerics are the traveling priests doing their god's works out in the world. The itinerant priests that lordzack mentioned. Now I know they aren't exactly what was mentioned since the cleric class has weapon and armor capabilities beyond a true "cloth priest" but if you're going to be wandering around by yourself talking about a god that the people you're talking to might not like I'd certainly want something more then a robe and a stick between myself and them. The cleric also fits the "invoker" and "zealot" types that lordzack mentions assuming careful feat and skill selection and even multi-classing. Another type of "invoker" is the oracle class from the APG, this class could also fit the zealot and even the itinerant if you change a bit of the flavor around for them. The crusader type is filled by the paladin or a multi-classed cleric/fighter or cleric/barbarian. The paladin will fit this archetype even better once the APG comes out and the rules for the differently aligned paladin classes are out

That's one of the beautiful things about 3rd/3.5/Pathfinder in my mind, if you're willing to multi-class and not necessarily make the "optimal" choices you can make just about any archetype out there.

As for the domains FallingIcicle I touched on it a couple times without actually coming out and saying it. Clerics keep their domains access as normal for a cleric. You get everything from your domain that a cleric using the base rules would- bonus spells, domain powers etc.

Ah cool, and I thought this thread had died. I guess that's what I get for giving up so quickly. I'll try to address everyone's questions.

Now first off, I understand that a number of people would cry fould at the thought of loosing power as a cleric. This would in turn make people have certain favorite deities to serve when they play clerics in order to optimize their available power and various priesthoods would be ignored as "sub-par" choices. To honest though it would kind of make sense, you don't get any good adventureing spells as a cleric to the goddess of the hearth so instead you play as a cleric of the god of war. Seems ok to me.

One of the reasons I'm keeping domains rather then go back to the sphere related powers (which I thought about) was actually to partially expand the spell list of a cleric. It doesn't come up that often but there a few spells that are on the domain list of a cleric that they might not otherwise be able to get as a cleric of that deity. This is especially true if the spell in question isn't even on the cleric list. Also I like the thought of powers being tied to domains rather then spheres. It means that different branches of the church can specialize in different things.
For example a god of craftsmen gives major access to the spheres of All, Combat, Creation and Summoning and minor access to the spheres of Astral, Guardian, Necromantic and Protection and gives access to the Artifice, Destruction, Knowledge, Law, Luck, Protection and Strength domains you could have a cleric of that deity worship his creative aspect and choose the Artifice and Knowledge domains whereas a different cleric could worship him as a deity of fortifications and get the Law and Protection domains. To me tying the "domain" powers to the spheres would cut down on this.

In the Dugneoncraft articles in the old Dragon Magazine there was a lengthy series by a guy called Ray Winniger. He discussed something he called "the Rules of Dungeoncraft" in them and they were essentially essays on how to make campaigns. (If you thought they were worth anything is another question, I like and use them but I've had a number of heated debates over if they were good as anything but fire starter.)

Anyway over the course of it he made two campaign settings. The first was for 2nd Edition and was a living world. The basic idea was that the whole planet was the setting's only true divine entity and hat all the living things on it were part of the goddess. Also it was something like 95% covered in various kinds of forest and there were various other goodies. The other campaign setting was more like what you're asking for, it was a low-tech setting with civilization just getting off the ground. Most of the animals that people use for common labor and food and such were replaced with various kinds of dinosaurs. If I remember correctly the gods were dinosaurs that had become divine just by sheer dint of staying alive long enough, the elves had a symbiotic relationship with pterodactyls, etc. It was a fun setting and if you look around you can find most of the articles online in one form or another.

I think I've also seen an actual Dinotopia setting on the net somewhere but I don't think it was for D&D in any incarnation. Possibly GURPS.

Pretty much like what Laurefindel said. If you can find a good LARP where people stay in character and the props and costuming are immersive it can be amazing. A lot like being in the middle of a D&D game where you act out what your character does.

On the same token though a LARP with bad immersion and poor costuming can really kinda suck. It'd be like if in the middle of a really good movie one of the actors just stopped doing what they were doing and starting talking about WoW. Or if in a high budget fantasy/historical movie someone walked on set in a pair of tennis shoes, a hockey jersey and a baseball cap and started asking people if they watched the football game. It kills the experience.

I'm fond of the Storyteller system (as well as the Old World of Darkness games which I think have a better storyline/fluff but that's a completely different debate) for more roleplay intensive games. The check resolution rules need a bit of work in my opinion but that's easily fixable.

Mutants and Masterminds and True20 are both amazing in my opinion. They might not be what you're looking for though because they are essentially the d20 system boiled down and simplified and then given different functionality. M&M for example is a classless point buy version of d20 geared towards super heroes and other high powered games. You buy everything with points- your skills, feats, ability scores and even you attack bonus. True20 is similar in that you buy your abilities with points though if I'm remembering correctly there are classes in that system to cover the three basic archtypes- warrior for the...well warriors, adept for the various caster types and expert for the sneaks, faces and other people that don't fit under the other two types. Both are very fun games though I'll warn you that in my experience M&M has a tendency to fall apart at the extreme low end of it's power level, you just don't get enough points to build really interesting characters. There were other restrictions on powers and such in place in the game I played that time though so those issues might have been unique to that game.

If you're looking for a fantasy game I'm very fond of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I use the 2nd Edition of it and am having a blast running a game of it. It is very different from d20, using a percentile system to resolve pretty much everything in the game except for damage. It's also fairly deadly, a good hit from a starting character could believably knock out or even kill a much more powerful person.

I also like Shadowrun though I've never played it so I can't really say how it plays.

Hope that helps some, I could go on but I'm going to quit before my post gets too much longer.

This is something that's been bugging and confusing me since 3rd edition started- the loss of priest spheres. Back in 2nd Edition priests could only cast from spheres that their deity granted access to. This always made a lot of sense to me, it meant that the spells that could be cast by a devotee of a war god looked different then the spells of a goddess of hearth and home who's spells were different from the cleric to a god of magic.

Now I know what some of you are going to say- that spheres were replaced by domains. I like domains, I think they're a good idea and a nice way to quantify those special gifts that a deity grants to his or her clergy that serve different purposes. But why would a deity that rules over healing and and care for the sick access to the Storm of Vengeance spell? Or Plane Shift? Or even Holy Word?

The other argument is then that clerics without access to the Healing sphere wouldn't be able to heal their party members. But 3rd edition fixed that. Any cleric that can channel positive energy can spontaneously switch out a prepared spell for a cure spell. And now with Pathfinder channeling positive energy does direct healing in a burst as well.

So I've split all of the "priest"* classes spells up into spheres. All priests get either major or minor access to a sphere depending on their deity for a cleric but on their class for the rest of the divine caster classes. Major access to a sphere allows a priest to cast all the spells in a sphere, while minor access only allows access to spells of up to 4th level. Spell access is still limited by the spell progression for each class (so a cleric would still need to be 5th level to cast 3rd level spells and a paladin would still need to be 4th level to cast any spells at all).

*: A priest class is any class that casts divine spells regardless of actual role.

There are 17 different spheres, listed in alphabetical order they are-

So what does everyone think? Obviously this system requires some thought about the various deities and other divine spell granting powers for a world but I think it adds a certain verisimilitude to the game. The purpose of domains would change slightly to represent either the practices of different sects within the church of a deity or even the individual gifts granted to a single cleric (or druid for that matter). But I am concerned about balance. Are there any glaring balance issues that I should be made aware of? If so how would you suggest I fix them?

So a friend of mine wanted to play an arcane archer. He looked it over decided on a concept and all that but then read that in order for the Enhance Arrows special ability to work it needs to be used on a nonmagical arrow. Because of this he tossed the idea and made a different character.

His reasoning is that with the way it's worded the arrow cannot be effected by any other magic in order for the ability to be of any use. Now I'd agree that he can't try to use +1 arrows with the ability but he thinks that none of the other arcane archer abilities will stack with it (citing them as giving the arrows magical ability and thus making them magic arrows) or even fire them from a magical bow (again the bow imparts it's abilities on the arrows making them "magic arrows").

I think that they all stack. For example if a 3rd level arcane archer shot a nonmagical arrow from a +3 bow they could fire a +3 flaming arrow (+3 from the bow overlaps the +1 from the Enhance Arrow ability but grants flaming from the elemental part of the ability) and have it be Imbued with a fireball spell.

I think that this works my way because the bow (or even the Imbue Arrow ability) doesn't make the arrow magical but simply gets magic "on" the arrow so to speak. Like coating an arrow with poison makes it deliver magic the same way shooting it from a magic bow makes the arrow deliver the magic of the bow. My friend thinks that shooting the arrow form the bow makes it a magic arrow because it gets the +3 enhancement bonus form the bow.

Which one of us is right? If I could be pointed in the direction of an official ruling that would make this that much better. Thanks.

Or Eric here can beat me to the punch. That's what I get for going to make food before doing a search on the internet.

For a good long while there was a fairly large project to make the benders from Avatar over of the GitP forums. They looked really good from what I remember, I'll post a link as soon as I can find it.

The only thing I can really see wrong with it is possibly the duration. All the other walls with a duration longer then 1 round per level was 1 minute per level. Well that and permanent.

Honestly the damage is fine (by 9th level 25 minus AC isn't that much), the fact that you can walk through it at all is nice even if it is really hard. As for it not going away in combat neither do most of the rest of that wall spells. They only go away when you spend an ungodly amount of time chipping away at them or you wait for the spell's duration to run out. With wall of stone and wall of iron that doesn't even happen. They stay there until you break through them.

450 degree ovens just make the skin on one's hand go *sizzle-pop*. You don't get any time to think about it or go "jeeze that hurts".

That is just awesome. I really don't have any other words to describe it.

It's best not to bring physics and things like momentum into it all. It only opens up a big can of ugly little worms like "how come teleporters don't go splat"--the earth moves a hell of a lot faster than any horse.

Well surely you remember that the normal spell formula for a simple point to point spatial translocation includes the calculations that take into account the lateral and horizontal rotations and orbits of the planet one is currently on. Otherwise a wizard would just go flying off the edge of the world, or possibly bury his or herself into the local "ground". :-P

As for the OP- I'd allow teleportation onto a moving ship though if they tried to teleport to the deck I might give them a penalty to the accuracy roll. And if they fail like some other people said, there's a whole lot of other ships out there- along with deserted (or not so deserted) island and a lot of open water. Sounds like a plot hook to me!

I think they look good Lokie. I like the flavor and think that the abilities they grant are a good way to represent various actual battojutsu and iaijutsu manueuvers (especially with the lines spacifically allowing the Cleave and Vital Strike feat chains) from real life in the confines of the game.

That said if it were me designing the feats I might change the names from including battojutsu to iado if only to step back from the Ruroni Kenshin association. I know that that's where the inspiration came from and I know that the words are basically synonyms but I also know a buch of people who wouldn't allow the feats specifically because of the association with the dreaded anime. There might not be any here but I've had a number of feats and class ideas shot down not because they were unbalanced or didn't work but because they reminded people of Dragonball Z and other animes that protrayed similar abilities.

Also a quick question- can you do this with a two bladed sword?

I'd say they get extra skill points for an increasing intelligence modifier since it says in the description of skills under the Familiar rules in the core book-

"For each skill in which either the master or the familiar has ranks, use either the normal skill ranks for an animal of that type or the master's skill ranks, whichever is better."

I'd say that pretty heavily implies that familiars have their own skills, skill ranks and the skill points to spend into them which would also mean that that they get extra skill points when their intelligence goes up. Though it may be important to note that in the same section in the core book it says that familiars treat Acrobatics, Climb, Fly, Perception, Stealth and Swim as class skills. That may or may not change what they'd get as "class skills" as normal animals of their type.

For me it depends on how and why the PC dies. If it was just bad luck then character level -1 just like if they got raised.

If they went out in an amazing or particularly heroic way they may even come in higher level then they went out at or with something cool to represent that their paladin jumped down the red dragon's throat so he could bypass it's natural armor and protective spells.

If they were being idiots ("I attack the king!" "Why?" "Because I can! RAAAAARRRGGH!") Then they'll come back in lower level then level-1, possibly even at level 1 if the rest of the PCs aren't too much higher then that.

Which pdf are you using? The old ones where the classes were released separately or the most current version where all the classes are in the same document?

Ah I hadn't even thought about the Extra Channeling feat. That would throw it off then. And I hadn't thought about having a negative energy channeler going nova on a crowd to wipe out a huge mass of people. Thanks for pointing those things out.

As for why there are two reasons. The first was I've seen too many times where a cleric wanted to heal someone just enough to keep them afloat till they could get over and stabilize or use a more powerful single target spell on a downed party member/friendly NPC but didn't dare to because the Xd6 healing would get the enemies nearby too. Even with Selective Channeling it sometimes just doesn't make sense to heal everything in a 60' radius (sans two or three enemies). The other was to see if I'd read enough to actually start fiddling with Pathfinder rules like I did with 3rd & 3.5. Not a good reason I know but there ya go.

Any suggestions on how I could make this work?

I'm going to be doing a Caransil Fighter with the Healer path. Going for kind of a paladin-y feel with him though leaning more towards Micheal from The Dresden Files then a stick-up-the-arse as a class ability one if anyone knows the book reference.

I'll post with his profile as soon as I figure out how to do it exactly. I'll look over traits from Iron Heroes and the Pathfinder document just as soon as I'm done perusing my new copy of the Beastiary.

So no thoughts at all on this? Alright, I guess I'll just talk it over more with my gaming group then.

What are your changes to the elves? I'm thinking of playing either a Caransil or Erunsil fighter with the Quickened heroic path.

Ok cool, "normal" high fantasy with a Celtic-y twist in my opinion is actually better then trying to make a "historically accurate but with magic" game out of D&D. It doesn't scale or settle very well in my experience unless you change a whole lot of rules and then you end up with a different game system and not D&D (or Pathfinder as the case may be).

And sorry about the misreading of which classes you're allowing and which ones you weren't. It's 2 or 3 hours past when I usually go to bed and my reading comprehension is starting to go downhill.

Of the sorcerer bloodlines the only ones I can't really see working are the Elemental and Undead ones. the rest I can think up ancestors for from Celtic myth.

I could definitely see the Oracle class serving in the mystic role of the Celtic druid and the bards taking the law keeper aspect. Heck some sorcerers might even be described in-game as druids depending on their bloodline and disposition. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to make a trait or feat called "Druid" that indicated the social connotations that such a thing brought with it in the culture.

~Nostri

I've got two main thoughts other then "that sounds very cool".

The first is would you be aiming for more realism in your setting or would it fairly "normal" high fantasy with a Celtic-y twist?

The second is why no sorcerers? For that matter why no clerics? Neither class has anything inherently literacy focused like the wizard (which I can understand ditching. (Though I'm fairly certain the Iron Age Celts had writing it just wasn't very wide spread, Ogham did exist after all.) In fact as far as the I'd say they fit quite nicely. There are a number of legends about the gods and the fae having children with mortals and the resulting kids being not quite human which sounds very sorcerer like to me. As for the clerics they've always felt more like the Celtic druids to me then a D&D style druid. For example Celtic druids were often described as being lawgivers and lore keepers in addition to leading their communities spiritually and being priests. Which to me sounds like the bard could fall under the "druid" heading for a Celtic style setting as well.

I was thinking about the cleric's channel energy class feature and thought of a different way to approach it. What it boils down to is that instead of having a set number of times per day that the channel energy ability can be used with an amount of dice rolled determined by your level you instead have a dice pool that you draw the healing from.

To determine how many dice you have in your "Energy Pool", or whatever it would be called, is determined by taking the number of dice you would normally roll in a single channel attempt (1 at 1st level, 2 at 3rd, etc) and multiply that by the character's Charisma modifier plus 3. So for example a 3rd level cleric with a 14 Charisma would have 10 dice to spend on channeling instead of the normal five channel uses at 2d6 a piece. Everything else about the channeling (Will save to avoid damage and it's DC, the fact that it's a standard action that provokes and anything else I'm not thinking of) stays the same for channeling.

For feats that require the cleric to spend "one use" of their energy channeling they now require the expenditure of a number of dice equal to what one use of the channel energy feat would normally be for their level.

So I'd just like to know if this would be balanced? How do you think it would effect the game or would it really matter?

If you've got the room I'd like to play. I know the setting fairly well (I've got the 2nd edition of the main book and I've read most but not all of it). Don't know what I'd like to play but if there are any gaps in character types I'd be happy to fill them.

I am curious about the Summoner - 'eidelon' is usually a term referring to the 'higher self' of an individual. Is the Summoner's eidelon a manifested aspect of their own psych or a summoned being? If the former, it would be unchanged unless the summoner was failing Powers checks, and if the latter it will be a Dread Eidelon.

The Summoner is a new class from the Advanced Player's Guide. As to if it's an actual summoned being or a manifestation of the summon himself I think it's left to the individual player or DM to decide that. Apologies if you already were aware of this but it sounded like the class was new to you. Paizo's actually got a copy out for playtesting right now.

Now to the rest of the thread. Very cool all around. I've always liked Ravenloft as a setting (I think it's because I enjoy freaking out, scaring and just generally unnerving my players). This is very nice. Well thought out and well balanced. I do have a question though, what 3rd edition book are you referencing for this project? The only Ravenloft book I can remember being put out was the remake of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft that Wizards did.

Powerful curses cast by one of the local BBEG's are a good stand-by for situations like this. I suppose that it boils down to "DM Fiat" but it does make for the basis of a good plotline and give something for Moz to do in addition to wander around and harass the locals (or whatever derivative of that is the dwarf's normal MO).

Fixed the Link for you.

How many varieties of dragon do you need? Create a base template of 'Dragon' and then add on abilities and powers as you see fit, no need to have write ups on 30+ dragons when they are all basically the same stats.

That's how they did it in Arcana Evolved. There was a single Dragon in their monster write-ups with a few tables that you could roll on to determine breath weapon energy type and whether it was a line a cone or something else. They got some other abilities as well if I remember correctly.