PariahDog119's page

The only reason feinting would be anathema to a paladin is if their deity specifically disallows deception, not lying and cheating.

An example: I played a Liberator. Liberators are specifically forbidden to make people do things against their will. Because of this, I could not use Intimidate to coerce. I could still use it to demoralize.

Deception has the following uses:

Create a Diversion
Impersonate
Lie
Feint

I would rule that paladins can create diversions and feint. They could impersonate, so long as they never lie, but maintaining an impersonation would be very difficult without lying, so that would require Aes Sedai levels of "I'm not telling the truth but I'm not lying either."

The item in question is a tattoo. It has a negligible effect of allowing the user to move it around the body, either to display it or conceal it. The primary effect is that it allows the user to teleport back to the place they got the tattoo, as if they'd used Word of Recall. In order to reduce the price, I'm willing to make the tattoo "consumable," so that it has to be recrafted to teleport with it again.

The lore behind the tattoo is that it serves both to identify members of an order of wizards and to allow them to escape if they're captured by an inquisition.

If I were to use the scroll price as if Word of Recall were a spell and not a ritual, it costs 600 gp. This seems high. But then again, Word of Recall itself costs 5,000 gp to cast as a ritual. On the other hand, this tattoo would affect only one person, not seven, and the place it's going can't be changed. 8th level Teleportation also works as a model, giving a much higher price of 1,300 GP, but Word of Recall is the closest spell I can find that does what I want. Return Beacon with no range and no passengers also works, but no range heightens that spell to level 9, and I'd like to get the cost lower, not higher.

The item in question is a tattoo. It has a negligible effect of allowing the user to move it around the body, either to display it or conceal it. The primary effect is that it allows the user to teleport back to the place they got the tattoo, as if they'd used Word of Recall. In order to reduce the price, I'm willing to make the tattoo "consumable," so that it has to be recrafted to teleport with it again.

The lore behind the tattoo is that it serves both to identify members of an order of wizards and to allow them to escape if they're captured by an inquisition.

If I were to use the scroll price as if Word of Recall were a spell and not a ritual, it costs 600 gp. This seems high. But then again, Word of Recall itself costs 5,000 gp to cast as a ritual. On the other hand, this tattoo would affect only one person, not seven, and the place it's going can't be changed. 8th level Teleportation also works as a model, giving a much higher price of 1,300 GP, but Word of Recall is the closest spell I can find that does what I want. Return Beacon with no range and no passengers also works, but no range heightens that spell to level 9, and I'd like to get the cost lower, not higher.

Yeah exactly.

By comparison the black plague killed 20 million people just in medieval Europe.

In my campaigns I often take the population for metropolises and just add a zero at the end to make more sense.

A 310 000 population Absalom is nonsensical for such a big city. That's the population of a middling sized town at an advantageous positioning, not the city at the center of the world.

3 010 000 makes a lot more sense, specially when you consider how big it is.

9-10 million worldwide is near extinction levels. A much better, and more reasonable, count would be near a billion.

Constantinople peaked at about half a million population, in 1000 and 1500 AD (considerably lower around the 1300s, both from plague and war.)

Paris in 1000 has about 20,000, climbs up to 300k before the Plague, drops to 200k after, and doesn't hit 500k until the 1700s.

Rome had a population of about a million during the Empire, which plummeted to 20,000 until the 1400s and didn't break 100,000 until the 1600s.

A 310,000 population Absalom makes sense, given that it's a medieval metropolis without an attached continent-spanning empire. A manorial economic system where 5 out of 9 people have to be agriculturalists to prevent mass famine simply can't support high population densities.

One thing to keep in mind is that the entire population of cities is supported by about an equivalent population of small villages surrounding it - that's where the food comes from. So while Paris in 1000 has about 20,000 residents, there's at least another 20,000 people in the surrounding countryside whose economic activity (i.e., farming) is required to support Paris. You can double the population of any given non-agricultural settlement in outlying farms, fishermen, huntsmen, and herders producing food.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_cities_in_history#Ti meline:_Roman_Empire%E2%80%93Modern_Age_(1%E2%80%931800_A.D.)

I did not add any settlements, but I did sort them by population and level.

Here's the results:

https://imgur.com/YD1068M