NoxiousMiasma's page

Host dragon is delightfully gross, and I am absolutely going to use it against my players at some point (Letting me say the sentence "alright, so the dragon's going to use its Covered in Bugs reaction" is pretty great - genuinely impressed at how evocative the names for abilities are in this book!).

I was a little surprised that the abysium is an arcane dragon, because MC1 was talking up "skymetal dragon" in a way that made me think that was a primal-only category, but I really do like the Cartoon Radiation Dragon, and it's ability to mess with what damage types it deals is a fun trick. Also like the ability to supercharge it's breath weapon - I'm picturing some Monster Hunter-esque chargeup animation there.

Akashics are also fun - the ability to "eat" knowledge about a creature by biting them is a fun trick, and their RK-focused toolkit is both thematic and makes a fight with them feel unusual. Also, they look like a Metroid boss, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

Honestly I like all of the new dragons (Cosmic Dragon, you are literally a giant lizard Solarian and I love that), and I really really hope we get some Space Dragonblooded rules in Galactic Ancestries!

Forums haven't got an update yet - the downtime last month was because putting the new store up required the whole website to go down for a while.

Hopefully we'll get a forum update soon, though!

My suggestion is that the Orcs were forced to change the environment during their servitude to Tar-Baphon for 600 years. Severe deforestation could easily lead to desertification, soil that gets easily washed or blown away by the regular flooding. Wind conditions would become more harsh without the trees cover leading to that also exacerbating the instability of the River Road, carrying moisture away. and it could be something that future books in the series show them combating, trying to re-green Belkzen, like someone said, a project that could take centuries.

The mountains would still be in their current location, so it's not like the region really every got, like, rain, but considering it still gets the springmelt off the Tusk Mountains every year, there was probably more growth once. Then Tar-Baphon made the orcs cut the forest and scorch the grasslands (remember, prairie's got real deep roots that holds the soil in), so the floods went from a slow seep to a rushing torrent, and that's really bad. (Best way to reduce flood danger is to slow that water down, so removing everything that could do so was a real bone-headed idea.)

Belkzen-that-was probably looked a little like parts of the Australian Murray-Darling Basin, but minus the eucalyptus? Like, slowing that water down from a flash flood to a proper river with seasonal temperate wetlands around the base of the foothills (and proper forests up on those foothills to hold the dang things in place), and then a bunch of drought-and-flood-tolerant plants along a much more meandering course than the current Flood Road, with the whole ecosystem shaped by that high-water mark of the peak of the floods (late spring or early summer probably, but I don't think the people there counted their seasons like Europe). In current Belkzen, the waters don't slow till nearly all the way to the Fangwood!

Belkzen is categorised by nutrient-poor soil that holds water very poorly, as well as seasonal flooding rains. That's not a combination that gets you fertile floods, that's a combination that gets you twisting ravines that are prone to landslips carved anew into the earth every g@!*#%n year. Maybe Belkzen could one day be an agricultural hub, but that's going to take a hell of a lot of earthenworks and soil improvements (like, actual, literal, <i>centuries</i>) of work), and frankly nobody's even been in a position to <i>consider</i> such projects until like five years ago, and they probably won't have the administrative and logistics ability to even start such a project for another fifteen years or so (and that's assuming the local Lich doesn't get them!)

I'm pretty happy we got new alghollthus - the loss of the aboleth meant that there's a very awkward level gap in the MC1 options - how exactly am I supposed to use a level 4 and level 14 creature in the same fight? But the new ones fill in that level gap nicely (one's the right level to be a boss with ugothol minions, and the other's got some cool tricks it can do with an ugothol)

Other than that, they took the opportunity to get weird with a lot of the new celestials in a way I really like - interesting inspirations from real-world mythology, so there's a cherubim/putto, a bodhisattva, and an Asian-style Heavenly Maiden in the angels, while the archons have an Buddhist-style aescetic monk. Unfortunately all the agathions are reprints, but you can't have it all.

And the dragons are all great, of course!

I have a character who wields a scythe, hes got Marshal Dedication for Topple Foe. Im wondering if there is any way I can also somehow be able to Grapple. I dont think their are any weapons that have both the Trip trait and Grappe trait, so is their any way to be able to grapple while wielding a two handed scythe? A talisman, or a long term duration spell that could allow it or anything else?

If you're high enough level (7), the Constricting Whip Tail graft allows characters of any ancestry to do a hands-free Grapple. Alternatively, if you can get access to region-locked Uncommon equipment, the Zhuazhi Bang from the Tian Xia book has both grapple and trip.

I mean canonically fey o come from the First World.

So do gnomes and sprites. Could you elaborate a little on what you mean by "as some form of Fey"? Because if the two ancestry options that straight-up have the fey trait don't count, then I'm confused by what you mean.

Ok, but does the Despair Dragon have a pair of small dot like eyes or a trio of big vertical eyes?

Looking at the full-colour pic in MC2, it appears to have both, for a total of five eyeballs! (incidentally the finished art looks creepy as all get out, and I mean that as a very sincere compliment! Lovely colour scheme, too!)

Nothing against the art so far, but I hope we get dragons that have sleeker and more regal looks and not so craggy. To me scales are about smoothness, all snakes are extremely smooth and most lizards are as well. Some feathers could be nice as well.

Unfortunately there's no feathered dragons in MC2, but the Phase Dragon is pleasingly sleek.

Virellius wrote:

the one where you're the child of a previous runelords adventurer.

The WHAT!?!? Is that an actual adventure, if so, what is it called????

Clarification: you are not the kid of a Runelord. You are instead the offspring of a PC from one of the previous Runelord-related APs, probably Rise of the Runelords or Shattered Star (seeing as Return of the Runelords took place only seven years ago)

There's a lot of reasons why an apparently flighted character would be unable to actually take off - for characters who aren't intending to ever pick up an ancestry feat for flight, just having them be too dang heavy to fly would work (not necessarily from being fat - though it certainly works! - I could also see a particularly tall, buff, or heavily-armoured character who's simply not flightweight for their wing proportions). Alternatively, a character with a permanent disability, who's left their homeland for accessibility reasons makes a lot of sense ("Don't strix stay in their aeries usually?" "Yeah, but I'll never fly again, and basically everything in an aerie except the nursery areas is built for flight, and I'm really bad with children.")

Alternatively, for low-level characters who are going to get flight feats as they progress, a wing injury a little before campaign start will handily justify a temporary grounding (and if getting to 5th-level is taking longer than you'd expect, maybe your character is a rubbish patient who keeps aggravating their injury?)

That video also shows it's not just Paizo having problems. For some of the other games I play, I have to buy things from out of the country, and some places are simply refusing to even ship the the US anymore.

Another video I don't have saved, unfortunately, was about several small manufacturers trying to source all of their parts from the US, and they couldn't do it.

A lot of places are refusing to ship to the USA because, uh, the current tariff thing is so poorly implemented that there isn't actually anywhere or way to, like, pay the new tariff? Or even a way to send the customs information about the package so everyone knows how much it's going to cost? So a bunch of countries' postal services can't actually send stuff without possibly violating USA customs law, which is why they aren't shipping to you guys. It's not a refusal so much as the current administration making it logistically impossible. Here's a citation.

All hags are Humanoids, both Remaster and OG. Premaster Night Hags do have an additional trait, but it's Fiend, not Fey. Changelings are fun, but they're not a fey heritage.

The Starstone no longer makes gods.

It is a infinite power source and the best drift beacon in the universe (followed closely by the Aeon throne). So there is plenty of reason that conquering empires want to get their hands on it.

Nobody actually knows if the Starstone still makes gods, because as far as anyone can tell, nobody's touched the thing since well before the Gap. It's a heck of a lot harder to get to now, because it's sealed inside the bowels of a colossal space station that's only partially been mapped.

I’ve always wanted something vaguely like a Nephilim but fae focused.

We've kind of got the Fey Ancestry feat line, as universal ancestry feats. They can kind of give a fey versatile heritage vibe, I guess?

Really dislike this change. Feels like a big blow to Solarian identity that they no longer have any unique action at level 1. Their core kit is now just only Strike related, and they aren't even great at it.

Despite the logic about wanting to make Solarians feel less defined by a specific attunement I think this change makes it worse at low levels, because there are now no base features that interact with cycling at all.

Your base feature that makes you want to change states is your Solar Manifestations and their effects, and half your first level feat options have cycle.

People reacted badly to this sort of thing in Tyrant's Grasp. Players want their PCs to win.

I dunno, getting sent to Hell end of Act 2 and getting to bloody a Duke's nose for the final boss could be pretty fun?

The other thing that makes just using the gauntlet part of the gauntlet bow for your melee is that you can have a gauntlet made out of an unusual material. Triggering silver, cold iron, or adamantine weaknesses can be very useful, depending on the campaign. (though, uh, don't underestimate the impact of saving all that money either)

I'm not understanding why this is shameful.

PF2 Core Rulebook isn't exactly packed with ancestry-specific weapons either. The content will fill out once there is more than one rulebook and one setting book in print.

It's the second part of the requirements: the fact that it also works for uncommon cultural weapons, rather than just ancestry-trait ones, means there's even more stuff that the feat can't be used for. There are currently no options at all in SF2e that can even be selected with Unconventional Weaponry. It's a very odd inclusion in a Player Core so clearly trimmed to fit the page count

Yeah, that's future-proofing, considering that right now there is all of one Uncommon weapon in the whole game, and I don't actually think that one's culture-linked at all.

I do wish the feat was phrased differently, because right now there's several martial or advanced weapons that would qualify, if they were Uncommon (Skyfire sword, shobhad longrifle, and aeon rifle all look interesting. Alas, Unconventional Weaponry requires your choice to be both Uncommon and ancestry or culture locked.)

This gives me an idea for a two shot.

a big space battle where, yeah, the players are bridge officers commanding the ship, with a mention early on of a hull breach, and dispatching a group of officers to investigate. at the end of the ship to ship combat (end of first session) you reveal that hull breach was actually a boarding party, the group of officer who went to investigate... well we find out about them next week.

Then based on how the ship-to-ship battle went, certain hazards get introduced as the players now take the role of the officers investigating the breach/boarding party. hazards and events feeding back between one and the other.

That sounds like the perfect set-up for a pair of co-GMs to run in adjacent rooms - I'm at a table that does something similar for a different system.

I'm gonna be honest, I just straight-up tell my players what RK skills would be appropriate. I'm pretty generous with Recalling anyway, because the conservative reading of the rules is kinda bad.

Actually, basing your character off of an obvious gap in the hero-god lineup would also be pretty fun - could you even get a whole reasonably functional party out of it?

The big blank spots right now in the Ibyldonian line-up are: agriculture (both farming and herding - olive trees are an important cash crop!), words/writing/knowledge (could also tie in with legal or astronomical knowledge), the aforementioned hospitality, any sort of psychopomp (in the mythic sense, not the creature type!), thievery/trickery, and maybe a more conventional artisan deity? (there's also the bigger archetypes like sky-fathers and such, but they seem a little too... celestial? for a hero-god. You're always going to be a bit more down-to-earth than a true deity)

After someone brought up RWBY in another thread, I'd like to see some Combination weapons. Let us bring upon the age of sniperscythe.

Yeah, give us back the maze-cores! (I had some fun in 1e with a biohacker running a maze-cored injection gun, where one mode was longer range and chip damage, for shooting friendlies, and the other was big damage.)

None of these quite fit though. Any thoughts?

You don't actually have to use the backgrounds in the Player's Guide, if none of them fit. If you can talk a GM into allowing a Rare background, the Cursed one from PC2 seems appropriate, or you could just select a background based on what you were up to before you got cursed, which could be just about any of them. Maybe a Noble, for a Heracles-style backstory, or the classic shepherd boy as a Farm Hand or Animal Whisperer (why is there not an actual shepherd background?)

The "Core 20" aren't necessarily the strongest gods or whatever, they're just a list of 20 (living) deities that are particularly relevant to the Inner Sea region. Arazni's star is rising for metaplot reasons - a goddess who's patron of those unwillingly cursed or death-touched is going to resonate with a lot of people right now, between the Godsrain scattering curses, blessings and things that are both all over the world (especially Ustalav), and a goddess of the abused, vengeance, and hanging on to your dignity in the worst circumstances has a lot to do when there's a war on.

I wonder why people think it is a redemption story then?

Because people saw her previous alignment and then her current edicts/anathema, and didn't have the media literacy to realise that leaving Team Evil doesn't mean that it's a redemption story. (I'm very firmly in camp "Arazni's "redemption" is about getting yourself out of an awful toxic situation that was constantly pushing you to be your worst self, and then trying to figure out what to do next." It's a very relatable arc!)

Crack idea: Scout, the Iconic Evolutionist?

Edit: Actually, this is a good place to ask a question I've always had: If you have unarmored defense, it states that it counts as light, medium, or heavy armor... are you proficient with it if your class doesn't give you that proficiency?

Nope, if your ancestry/heritage gives you innate armour of a category you aren't proficient in, you're just stuck running around with bad AC.

I hope we get osharu in this book. They're another of the ancestries I've always really loved, science-loving slug people.

Yeah, osharu have both a cool look and interesting characterisation hooks, so I hope we see them in 2e soon. What sort of heritages and feats do you think they'll get? I'm expecting a feat chain for the slime stuff, and probably some stuff for taking emotional support from a trusted partner

If we're making it a question of biology, somehow I don't think an izalguun has a particularly stable gait for a passenger, seeing as they look to move kind of like a gorilla... Humans ride horses because their spines don't change shape while they're walking or running, so they make a good stable platform (this is why basically nobody rides cows outside of rodeo events). I'd rather they spend the ancestry power budget on stuff more tied into their theming and backstory, like their ancient tech stuff.

(Dragonkin get rules for carrying someone because "dragonrider" is such a common fantasy thing. Centaurs are literally horse shaped, so they also get feats and features for that.)

I'd hazard a guess it'd probably go something like this. Spend an action to change between a four legged and two-legged stance (though not actually a Stance trait stance, more like a toggled mode?). While in two-legged stance, you have four arms. While in four-legged stance, your speed would go from 25 to 30 feet and you'll probably get the Mount ancestry feature from the centaur.

1e izalguun got reach while biped, but their bipedal speed was only 20ft (their quad speed was 40ft). Going between 20ft speed and four arms, and 30ft but only two hands seems reasonable? These days large ancestries generally seem to get reach as a 5th-level or later thing, so that's probably gonna be an ancestry feat (maybe like sarcesians Large Reach, or like minotaur's Stretching Stance, but it just upgrades your "being bipedal" into a proper Stance? An ancestry that gets Stances at higher levels could be interesting...). I'm a little dubious of izalguun getting Mount, because unlike centaurs they don't seem to have a cultural opinion about the whole thing?

So I forgot that the cover got revealed as well, and that has a space goblin, izalguun Solarian, and bantrid probably-Witchwarper, so it seems pretty safe to assume that both bantrids and izalguun will be in.

I'm wondering how izalguun's variable limb count and speeds are going to be handled (probably not like dog kholo, almost certainly not as a stance thing), and hoping for some interesting heritages between the ruin-delving izalguun of the Scoured Stars and their more rural settlements on Izalraan.

Not sure what bantrid heritages will end up looking like - their 1e alternate options are a lot about movement, with options like a speed boost, a piloting boost, or having a magnetic wall-climb option.

What we know so far, from people's Gencon recaps:
- there will be at least one entirely new ancestry,
- core ancestries are getting new options
- there will be Starfinder-specific content for PF Player Core ancestries
- Formians (the ant-people from Castrovel), and Azrinaran elves are gonna be in there,
- we're getting a playable ooze ancestry, which could be selamids, thyr, maybe entu colonies, or something entirely new,

There are also still a lot of ancestries of Lost Golarion still running around the galaxy, so we could also see some options for those (canonically-present in 1e options: ghoran, hobgoblin, kholo, kitsune, kobold, samsaran, strix, tripkee)

My longshot hopes are a Xenometric Android Versatile Heritage (it would be so cool!), and the astriapi (not having their ancestry stuff is the only thing stopping me from starting a big campaign of the Colveare Emergency Response Team.) More plausibly, I'd expect to see space dwarf options (asteroid mining?), a Castrovel elf heritage, some cobbled-together tinkering stuff for goblins, and maybe some frontier survivalist stuff for halflings? Also hopefully Space Leshy options, as they are core now.

Hang on a sec, is that space station in the trailer Outpost Zed? It certainly looks to be a very similar shape... maybe it's another Azlanti station?

Technomancer and Mechanic interact with gear. The Starfinder team wanted to have some time to get some basics for gear nailed down first.

Yeah, they learned from Premaster Alchemist that gear-based classes generally need a bit longer to cook, so they can get more than one book's worth of equipment options (see also: how lean inventor's gadget-based stuff is)

Well, sun worship becomes a little passe when 99.99999% of the suns you are dealing with aren't Sarenrae's (as she is very specifically the deity of the Pact World's system's sun, her worship is much less popular now that easy space travel and FTL are a thing).

She's still worshipped in the Pact Worlds (Burning Archipelago sun-churches, Fullbright scimitar dancers, Eos's still-living population defending themselves, etcetera), but if you're, say, a system-hopping Starfinder, her faith may not be super relevant to your life and work, so she's not in the core. Same with a lot of the PF gods, really - everyone except Rovagug is still around, but their faiths aren't necessarily super popular or relevant to the lives of contemporary people. (Would still really love to see a book that's just a bunch of details for Golarion options in the far future - like, does Erastil have a following amongst first-gen space colonists and historical re-enactors? Are the churches of Nethys now the most hazardous magitech R&D in the galaxy? How's Torag doing with the Second Quest for the Sky?)

I'm not familiar with the Magus + Psychic combo.

Get amped Imaginary Weapon off psychic dedication, use that to Spellstrike. It's not super complicated, but it hits pretty dang hard.

Well, I don't think there's a spelled-out canonical answer, but there are people occasionally going back and forth (eg that 1e AP where you go to WW1 Russia and fight Rasputin), so some of them might have got transferred across that way? Alternatively, the gods do have favourite animals, so maybe they just spread their faves out a bit.

(I reckon the weirdest Golarion-Earth transplant is probably the kangaroos - why are they in Casmaron and Garund? Makes no damn sense)

I would love for Iron Gods 2 to have some amount of support for playing as an alien (one of my dream pairs of books for PF2/SF2 is a set of ancestry options for each's ancestries in the other's time period - give us some Space Elves and pre-Gap Kasatha, please!)

Beyond that, I think a climax where you ram a cobbled-together, salvaged rocket (that maybe you've spent the previous book building for some other reason, and are now hastily repurposing to repel an alien invasion) into an orbiting Dominion ship in order to do a big horrifying dungeon and boss fight, and then have to flee back out of the crashing starship could be fun.

For an oddball option, perhaps something like the mantling that shows up in TES: Morrowind? Golarion's got enough occult stuff that "walk like them until they walk like you" doesn't feel any more implausible than, say, a thaumaturge's weakness thing. And that sort of thing has a heck of an inbuilt plot - are you echoing a legend on purpose? By complete chance (at least at first)? Or by the agenda of someone else?

(Showing up to a higher-level adventure with a character who's done the whole "mantling a local legend" thing already and is now trying to figure out what to do next could be fun, too - new PC for 11+ AP idea, I guess!)

I wonder what ancestry is best for the Satyr?

A (PF2e) satyr is a medium fey creature with a knack for magical songs, low-light vision, and a higher-than-average movement speed. Disregarding the fey bit for the moment, it wouldn't be unreasonable to model that using an elf, and seeing if you can get access to some of the fey-touched universal ancestry feats - Fey Influence and Fey Ascension both have appropriate faun-themed picks. As for class, fey sorceror or any bard are obvious picks, but I could also see satyrs as druids, or maybe even a barbarian (ligneous, elemental wood, or animal instinct seem most appropriate)

I was having some more thoughts about emulating various Greek Mythological creatures, in order to play as a sphinx or dryad or whatever, so I thought I'd share them here:
Dryads: I'm going to suggest hitting up the Tian Xia books, because both Yaksha and Yaoguai work surprisingly well - yaksha have a heritage that makes them plants as well as spirits, and grants a primal cantrip, as well as ancestry feats to ignore vegetation-based difficult terrain and cast Protector Tree as an innate spell (plus it heightens!). A born of vegetation yaoguai is a plant person who can grab a feat to turn back into their original tree form, which is also pretty dryad. Because Golarion's nymphs are all fey, perhaps a fey bloodline sorcerer, or filling out some ancestry feats with the Fey-touched options?
Other Nymphs: yaoguai are actually just quite good at "spirit of geographical location," particularly with a versatile heritage to add some extra mechanical heft (undine is perfect for a naiad, nereid, or oceanid, oread works quite well for the, well, oreads, while you could use the glowier bits of ifrit or nephilim to model the evening nymphs)
Sphinxes: Large or medium flying (for Grecian) or running (for Egyptian) awakened animal, and pick a class to suit - as well as the obvious lore oracle or enigma muse bard, perhaps a tome thaumaturge, or you could get Classical with it and make more of a temple guardian.
Giants: there are so many giants in Greek Mythology, and we're getting the jotunborn at the end of the month, for a Big Guy option that isn't half horse or bull. Lots of fightery guys in the legendry, here.
Automatons: not sure who'd be building them in Ibyldos, as Aerekostes doesn't seem to be the sort of crafting god who makes the wonders themselves, but presumably there have been other hero-gods of smithing or stonecarving or woodworking who could have made a wondrous machine that thinks and speaks and walks (in the Greek set, they're usually made by Hephaestus). Great excuse for including an automaton or android who's a native.
Dracaena: creatures with the top half of a human woman, and the bottom half of a dragon, but in the mythological sense, so at least some of them had snake tails (apparently two rather than one, though) - sounds perfect for a Sacred Nagaji!
Lykos of Athens: so this guy is kind of a one-off, but he's great, so I want to mention him anyway. Lykos was a, and I quote, "wolf-shaped hero with a shrine next to the jury court, and the first jurors were named after him." The sudden vision of an awakened wolf investigator becoming a hero-god of the legal system struck me, and that sounds like a lot of fun!

QuidEst wrote:

{. . .} I'd certainly enjoy less feat-intensive drone customization too, but minibots (... Please stop autocorrecting to "mini boys"...) sound like a great addition. {. . .}

Off-topic, but related in a back-handed way -- this reminds me of an ongoing problem: I am Entertainment Chair for the Boston Street Railway Association, and I take notes for the Entertainment, which as you might imagine often features the buildings where streetcars are stored, which are often called "carhouses" . . . and AutoCorrect in Apple Pages (competitor to Microsoft Word) keeps changing this to "cathouses". Very embarrassing when I send one of these in for review and missed an instance of where this happened.

Slightly ridiculous idea for a Starfinder Affliction: something (virus or curse) which causes you to involuntarily replace words with similarly-spelled substitutes. At first it's just frustrating and inconvenient, but as the aflliction worsens, more hazardous words are used instead... there's a lot of things in the world that don't like it when you say their names...

I made a Borai Barathu for the playtest, who I ended up calling Sings-This-Dream-Again. They're a Rhythm Mystic, because I saw that connection and my brain immediately cross-referenced a bunch of stuff about electron shells and string theory (everything sings.), and also because I was trying to test out how Barathu went if you didn't take the land speed feat (pre-taversal trait, very poorly!). Backstory is a little fuzzy, but they were a Dreamer, or they sought the Dreamers, and then something went very wrong, and they awakened as a mystic as they were dying, and that's why they're a borai now.

Considering how they gave us textual evidence that there are vanaras around Ibyldos in the Player's Guide, specifically so anyone who wants to do Monkey King Jr. gets to do so, I think bringing in inspiration from other pantheons will work just fine.

Your shard of Old One-eye sounds very interesting, and just the sort of being to seek out information on the Hero-Gods to get embroiled in Plot. (You've now got me thinking on how to do an Odin myself - I think a Thaumaturge could be interesting, or a Warrior of Legend Fighter comes with a nice built-in Doom to try and dodge. Honestly, the Gallows-god's got so many versions you could probably populate a whole adventuring party just with him!)

Other grand mythologies could also be good inspiration... how about a Samsaran archer who was born a noble of Jalmeray? Bring a little Ramayana to the AP.

Funniest bit about Golarion seasons is that somehow every nation apparently counts them Solstice to Equinox (citation: Travel Guide). That's certainly not true of Earth (where I am we just count them in three-month chunks, so June-July-August is Winter). And that's not even getting into the huge amount of real-world cultures that don't use the standard four seasons at all!

But yeah, Golarion is both hotter and colder than you'd think - Numeria is more like the Eurasian Steppe than the American Wild West in climate (not what you'd think at all from some of the 1e art!), and there's a reason a number of 2e Sarkoris art pieces show distinctly Inuit inspired fashion - unless the Abyss is messing with the climate, it is cold!

I think the Xenometric Android should definitely be included, but should be a heritage of android, which basically gives you the adopted ancestry general feat, but you CAN take feats connected to body parts.

That seems like somewhat awkward workaround, when we've already got the rules examples of the hybrid heritages to work from - having Xenometric Android work like Aiuvarin or Dromaar, where you use it on the non-android ancestry, would be much more efficient. No need for new rules to be large or have claws at first level, that way.

That is coincidentally the stats for a halfling sling staff. :)

Ah, the halfling sling staff - really should be a weapon that lets you use it for melee or range (sling staves are a real thing, and their major advantages were that 1) a sling on the end of a stick makes your sling circle wider, so you can huck your bullet even further, and 2) if an opponent gets up in your face you have a nice study stick to hit them with - if it's loaded it can serve as a flail as well!

It is unfortunate that we get very little sling support - they were historically a very popular form of ranged infantry in a lot of the Mediterranean, to the point that several different places would literally hire out slinger mercenaries as specialised troops.

Also, like, historically speaking, a sling does actually take longer to loose multiple shots than a longbow does - an actual sling (not a slingshot, that's a totally different weapon) is a long loop of cord or rope, with a pouch in the middle that you wrap a bullet (the original origin of the word - a round bit of lead, clay, or stone, often with something insulting to your opponent carved on it!) up in, and then spin it around and release one end of the rope to throw the bullet way further than an unaided human can (there are also many reports of slingers routinely outranging archers IRL)

But yeah, the reload is both a game balance and a historical accuracy thing! (A truly historical sling, without any concern about being balanced as a simple weapon, would probably look something like 1d10 propulsive, reload 1 with an 80ft range increment.)