I'm starting a new campaign tonight spanning a dozen modules, multiple adventuring parties, and years of in-game time. The one common tie between the various groups and scenarios will be the Umbra Carnival; all of the PCs will be members of the carnival, and each adventure will take place when the carnival travels to that location.

As such I want the carnival to be a living, breathing thing...more of a small, dynamic city-state than the settlement statblock presented in Murder's Mark allows. I like the idea of the PCs taking on more responsibility and growing the carnival as they go, with the end goal of eventually making it so large and so famous that it finds a permanent home.

I remember having a really hard time with the caravan rules when I ran Jade Regent, and the carnival already seems too big for those rules to accommodate. But the Kingdom building rules are too broad and seem hard to apply to a single settlement.

I'm guessing I'll need to create a hybrid of the two, but I was wondering if anyone had advice on either system as I go. If you were me, would you start with the caravan rules and build on with kingdom building rules, or vice-versa? Is there a third option I haven't considered yet? Any ideas I can steal would be greatly appreciated.

Today while passing through a city out of state, we stopped at an independent game store and purchased the Bard Class Deck. The packaging was legit and sealed, but when we got home and opened the cards we found that they were defective to the point of being unplayable. They were cut incorrectly and the text/pictures are badly blurred. All of the other products we purchased were fine (we...um...may have purchased ALL of the class decks *shifty eyes*) so I'm certain it was the individual product and not something shady going on with the store.

I wanted to check here before we make the long drive back to the game store just to be told that we needed to address the issue with Paizo directly. Do we need to make a special trip (or, more likely, eat the cost of the deck, since we'd spend just as much in gas to get back) or is it possible to do an exchange via mail?

I'm building a witch (Cartomancer), and ran across a point of confusion with the Spell Deck ability.

The ability replaces the witch's familiar with a harrow deck, through which she communicates with her patron. The text says of the deck that "it's ability to hold spells functions identically to the way a witch's spells are granted by her familiar," and that "the cartomancer must consult her harrow deck each day to prepare her spells and cannot prepare spells that are not stored in the deck."

That's all well and good...but how does a cartomancer learn new spells? Aside from the base 2 per level, a traditional witch can have her familiar commune with another witch's familiar, or she can burn a scroll, make a concoction out of the ashes, and feed it to the familiar, right?

If the harrow deck truly functions like a traditional familiar, does that mean a cartomancer's deck can somehow commune with another witch's familiar? How on earth do you "feed" a deck of cards? Magic or not, I don't think my witch is going to want to slather a "special brew" onto her hand-painted harrow deck in the hopes of somehow learning a new spell.

I'm playing in a Shattered Star campaign tonight, and I have a *really* big decision to make before then. Would ya'll please help me choose?

When last we left off, my level 12 Fetchling Sorcerer had just died from a strength draining poison. His strength is normally 13, but he'd taken 13 points of Str damage and 1 point of Str drain. He also had 3 points of Con drain and a severed hand. The hand was lost before he was poisoned, and he disintegrated it himself, because we've been running into examples of why it would be a really bad idea to let some of the baddies get a hold of our flesh. He wasn't happy about it, but he intended to pay someone to cast Regenerate on him when we got back to Magnimar.

Except now he's dead. Smack dab in the middle of a dungeon that we don't feel we can leave for any real length of time.

Am I correct in thinking that, mechanically speaking, Reincarnate would be better than Raise Dead in this situation? Both are available to me via the rest of the party, and we have the material components on hand.

We're using a modified table which has every 0 HD race released so far, so there's really no telling what he'll come back as.

Mechanics aside, there's the story to consider. If that's your kinda thing, then would this situation change your choice?

TL;DR: I'm bringing a PC back to life at the start of the next session. Reincarnate would (I think) be less detrimental to the party's survival. Raise Dead would be less detrimental to his personal story arc. Both are available right this second. Which should I choose?

I know there have been tons of discussions about what to do with Tsuto and Nualia should they live...I've gleefully borrowed from LOTS of them. But I've had something of a unique opportunity come up, and I'm curious as to how you guys would handle it.

The PCs managed to subdue and arrest Orik, Lyrie, Tsuto, AND Nualia. I've had them all sent off to Magnimar for trial, and will have news of their verdicts make it back to Sandpoint midway through book #2.

I'm sending Orik to Fort Rannick, and Lyrie to the Hells. Tsuto is going to be found "not guilty" by Justice Ironbriar (who is in fact his father) and will be encountered a final time as a skinsaw cultist.

But...what do I do with Nualia?

If she had no connection to the events in book 2, I'd have her locked away as criminally insane. I'm tempted to send her to Habe's, even...I think that opens up some interesting possibilities later on.

But would Ironbriar let that happen? She got caught, true...but not before proving herself to be a fairly valuable asset. Would she be sentenced, but then sprung by the cultists?

Because I only have two players (with two pcs each) I have the luxury of really tailoring hunks of the AP to their characters. That said, this isn't the Andrezi AP, and that player's done almost too good of a job integrating his backstory into the material...between being a Valdemar, the thing with Nualia, and the way he's made himself into the perfect scapegoat for the murders in book 2, I run the risk of boring my other player to death if I do too much more with Nualia.

Ideas? Pretty please?

I'm slowly prepping to run the anniversary addition of RotR in a few months, when my group finishes up Shattered Star. We're all fairly new to Pathfinder - Jade Regent was our first AP - and we all agreed unanimously that we wanted to go back to where it all started.

Unfortunately, I've run into a bit of a problem with Ameiko. According to her write-up in the back of The Brinewall Legacy, she was born in 4689, became an adventurer in 4706, (which she spent a year at before returning to Sandpoint) and, after "some months," cashed out her earnings and bought the Rusty Dragon.

All well and good, except that that puts a 17 year old Ameiko buying the Rusty Dragon *in* 4707, whereas RotR says she's been the owner for six years as of Burnt Offerings.

I know there are probably a dozen ways to handle this, but I can't decide on what's best. We've so carefully tied our characters into the setting (with lots of cameos between APs) that I don't really have much leeway with my time line. What would you do?

I'm playing a very young PC in a RP heavy Shattered Star campaign. Right before the start of the first book, she lost her entire family in a pretty terrible way (and picked up the Alabaster Outcast trait as a result).

She's *barely* old enough to be an adventurer (she's a human rogue who turned 15 just weeks before the start of the AP) and the strain of the first book is taking its toll on her.

Apparently we all got the memo that this was the "bring out your most flawed PC EVER" campaign...so the group she's traveling with has plenty of demons of its own. Nevertheless, she's been adopted as the "little sister" of the party. Clara hero-worshipped her older brother, but he abandoned and later betrayed her before he died. In the short time the group has been together, she's come to see one of the other PCs as a sort of stand-in for that particular brother. They've become fairly close, but the other PC has serious issues, too, and has flown into fits of rage and almost walked out on the group (the PC, not the player). Clara, as a result, has started to sort of confuse the two of them in her head.

At the end of the last session, that PC was killed by sinspawn right in front of Clara, while she was helpless to do anything about it. One very badly flubbed Will save later, she now "officially" has Schizophrenia, as outlined by the Gamemastery Guide. Her slightly erratic behavior before the incident acted as the "onset" time for the disease, and she's now officially cracked.

I get, mechanically, how it works, but what I'm not really sure about is how to RP the effects, especially in stressful situations like combat, when the confusion kicks in. The dead PC *will* be raised, and I'm also not really sure how she should react to that. I know she'll continue to confuse him with her actual brother (probably calling the PC by the brother's name sometimes, or using the PC's name when talking about her brother.)

I guess I'm also worried about pushing things too far, because she *will* get well again. I've already talked to the GM, and he's promised that there will be enough "downtime" and enough people who care about her well being to make sure that she receives treatment before she's assigned any more missions. But we still have to finish the job we're on right now, first...and while I think it could be fun to play with the insanity rules for a session or two, I don't want to do anything that would irreparably damage her relationship with the other characters later on down the road.

TL;DR:

My character failed a will save against insanity, and is now schizophrenic. The catalyst of the insanity was the death of a PC whom she closely associates with the brother she lost just a few months ago. That PC will be raised from the dead shortly and rejoin the party. If you were me, how would you RP that? And how would you RP the mechanics of the disorder (namely the confusion in battle and stressful situations?)

What would the DC be to identify a spoken language that you don't speak?

A member of our party has the tongues curse, and speaks in Infernal during battle. He doesn't feel like explaining himself to the rest of the group, and my character has been trying to piece his backstory together on her own. She has a base score of 12 in linguistics and 10 in Knowledge (Planes) but doesn't speak Infernal. Would she be able to recognize the language, or at least the type of language it is?

Like, for example, the way that someone who doesn't speak Italian (me!) can still go "Oh, hey! That's Italian!" when I hear it, or the way someone completely unfamiliar with the languages would be able to hear the difference between one of the romance languages and a Germanic language.

It mentions in Blood of Fiends that a divorced tiefling would cross-hatch the scars from his/her wedding ceremony. Would it be considered common practice for a widowed tiefling to do the same, perhaps after a period of mourning?

Our little group of three completed the final battle and a satisfying wrap-up late last night. Ameiko is empress, all of the characters (NPCs included) found love, *eye-roll* and Minkai is saved. It took us seven months in real time and two years in-game, but we finally made it!

To everyone involved in putting together this AP and getting it into our hot little hands: Thank You. A million times, Thank You.

This adventure (which we started with We Be Goblins) was my first time behind the GM screen, our whole group's introduction to Pathfinder, and only the second tabletop campaign my DH and I have ever played. I have little to compare it to, obviously, but this has been an absolute blast.

Good luck to everyone else as ya'll make the trip over the Crown of the World! We're off to be pirates, now ;).