Perpdepog's page

I'm hoping so, so desperatly that we get power armor rules in Tech Core.

Crouza wrote:

OP really did the equivalent of setting down two towers mid-read to write "Whose replacing aragorn now that he fell off a cliff and died?"

Aragon dies!!??

It's OK; he gets better.

Thirding for shabti as a versatile heritage. That just makes a lot of sense to me.

moosher12 wrote:

Absalom, essentially the metropolis of the world, where people congregate from every continent to trade, from every plane, even. The most obligatory cantina location in Golarion.

Population: 306,900

That's not a bad population for a pseudo-medieval city. Small compared to some of the great centers, but an understandable underestimation.

The problem being that Golarion stopped being pseudo-medieval a long time ago (if it ever was).

World designers need to stop working off old D&D books.

What makes it even funnier is the fact that number, to my knowledge, has grown by, at most, around three thousand people in the fifteen-ish years since Golarion became a setting and started advancing with our own timeline.

Makes you wonder how grim things are there if they haven't even cracked a 5% population increase in almost two decades' time.

Fresno nightcrawlers are FAR too niche to ever be a heritage for that ancestry, especially since Golarion doesn't HAVE a Fresno...

I think that most worlds have a Fresno. It's just that the nightcrawlers are better at hiding those other ones than they are at hiding ours. It's why you keep hearing about schools of phrenology in fantasy worlds; they're supposed to be schools of fresnology, but the mind-muddling power of Fresno makes them come out wrong, and then everyone starts touching skulls or whatever.

You kids and your fancy ancestries... pah! In my day we had humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, and halflings, and by thunder, that was more than enough! Now get off my lawn before I hit you with my +5 vorpal cane of "back when games were simple."

Canes aren't swords, or deal slashing damage. They aren't eligible to be vorpal weapons. Your argument is therefore invalid; CHECK AND MATE, OLD MAN!

It is annoying in books to have a generic class feat section but also have each class have unique ones that are listed elsewhere where. Choosing class feats without being able to see all of them in one place is less than ideal.

I feel you, and this is where I think resources like AoN really come in handy. By and large I'm not a fan of "you can solve this issue digitally, so it's not a problem" arguments, but the fact is that unless Paizo reprints all the feats for each class in later supplements as they are printed you're going to have this issue no matter what you do. New books are going to come out over a game's lifecycle, and some of those books are going to print new feats for extant classes. Cross-referencing book pages is just part and parsel of dealing with print media.

I'd love to see an unchained-style book try its hand at the "Words of Power" magic subsystem from PF1. That one kinda flopped, quicker summons and cheese with the "Wrack" word aside, but I think you could do some cool things with it in PF2's three action system.

It's a big reason why I'm excited for the Runesmith; if it goes over well then it should open the doors for possibly seeing such a subsystem in future.

I actually like the different names for the features for each class. They provide a little extra flavor for each class that I appreciate, even if it does come with a cognitive load.

Edit: Come to think, that is the downside to the standardized feats that is a bit of a bummer, but is also unavoidable. You lose a little bit of the flavor baked into the ancestry's or class's feats because they're not being described in full and lack the flavorful preamble that each feat tends to get.

moosher12 wrote:

As for the attribute conversation, I've got something to ask, but I'm not sure if it has already been said, so I'll ask, with apologies if it's been explained before.

Out of curiosity, are there any Player Character-facing games that do not use attributes (or an attribute equivalent) that are well tuned for both roleplay and combat that we can make reference to to gauge feasibility? (I know technically Lancer didn't have attributes, but PCs aren't the main focus, and they are played super fast and loose as they are secondary to the mechs, so I would not count those, but I mean one where you're expected to play a character as your default unit)

So as not to reinvent the wheel, I'm curious who else has experimented with no attribute to relative success.

I earlier mentioned Call of Cthulhu as a half-example because, while it certainly does have attributes (or characteristics, as they are called in that system), they don't contribute to skills but are used to calculate other statistics. That's really the only example I can think of since other systems I could use as an example have stats but don't have skills, like Fabula Ultima and (AFAIK) Draw Steel, though IMO these should count because they effectively solved the problem but in the opposite direction.

Also, I feel most combat-heavy TTRPGs tend to draw heavily from D&D 5e in that they prefer to keep the numbers as low as possible, so for those systems it makes more sense to keep attributes since there a +3 or +4 is huge at every level, unlike PF2e where the numbers can skyrocket into the 30s and 40s late game.

Draw Steel has been on my mind as well because it solves some of an issue folks are talking about here with attributes; it removes the perceived false choice of not maxing your core ability all the time. Your character is going to wind up with a +5 in the stat you want at the end of the game, and will get bumped at pre-defined points in the game, so you instead focus on raising the attributes you care about for other reasons. I believe that your stats also don't contribute to things like passive defenses, though they are each connected to a possible save a` la 5e, so while there is pressure to raise your attributes, it's at least distributed across all the abilities more or less evenly.

As for games that go attribute-less, the main one that comes to mind for me is Fate. You can hack Fate into whatever shape you feel like, and fractally dig down more and more to introduce as much complexity as you desire, but the baseline game uses no attributes and instead treats everything like a skill, including things like the amount of damage you can take in combat. I suspect that this is because combat is not the default assumption of Fate's gameplay loop.

Note: I'm talking about classic Fate here, not Fate Accelerated, which effectively takes the six D&D attributes, calls them "approaches," and has a character rank how good they are at each in a sliding scale. Even then attributes are really de-emphasized for the purposes of mechanics because they don't inform how hard your character is to hit, or how much damage they can take, or anything like that.

I would love, love, love lists of standardized class feats. I get why they weren't there initially, it's hard to guess which feats classes are going to share until you're pretty far into the game and can look back and see patterns. It saves so much space for the Starfinder 2e ancestries though, and like others have said it'd give the designers so much more room to create new feats for new classes, even if they're functionally similar to earlier feats but with small tweaks. They also help save on page space for those feats and features that may need more text to explain them, which IIRC is one reason why some feats or character options look a bit strange or feel incomplete; it's because the page space required a squishening.

I think I'm fine with the fact that Paizo is still slowly releasing Cantrips on a regular basis.

Though if there is one cantrip I want, I sort of want an equivalent to D&D5E's updated True Strike cantrip, which I suppose Pathfinder's equivalent would be a 2 action cantrip to perform a Strike, but letting you use your spell attack modifier instead of your ranged or melee attack modifiers. doubt it'd add spell attack modifier to damage for melee, but applying spell proficiency to accuracy would be a nice bonus for the extra action spent.

I think you'd need to limit that another way as well, such as making it melee only or something, otherwise it'd be stepping on the wizard's Hand of the Apprentice. I mean, yeah, Hand of the Apprentice has a hilarious range ... and not much else going for it, but it would be stepping on its toes regardless.

And count me in the camp of wanting more Will save cantrips. Some that deal Spirit damage, which is less frequently resisted, or maybe another Vitality/Void cantrip.

I could even see a spell that deals physical damage but still goes off Will, call it "Clash of Wills" and flavor it like a brief psychic contest resulting in a telekinetic blast, but that may be a bit much for a cantrip.

Thanks I will give that a try. My hope was there would be something that addresses the outer planes and what differences there are regarding the fact that we no longer use alignment. Are Angels and Azatas all just part of the Heavens. What is the difference between Elysium and Heaven if it is not the Chaos / Law spectrum.

I am assuming they will eventually have to make the outer planes for Golorian work in line with edicts and anathema as opposed to Chaos / Law or Good / Evil. That might be a major project that is down the road I guess. The 1e stuff is useful but to get away from the alignment system I imagine changes will be made. Who knows?

Ah, if that's what you're wanting I suggest checking out Monster Core and Monster Core 2. Most--I think maybe all--of the major families of celestials, fiends, and monitors were re-introduced and given some setting lore and discussions on their relationships with other outsiders.

By and large, no, there wasn't all that much need for any rejiggering of the planes. They're not overtly referred to as lawful good or the like anymore, but the goodly planes are still goodly, and the fiendish planes are still fiendish. Celestials and fiends are still along a lawful-chaotic spectrum, though it's not as explicit and it's not in the mechanics, and they still fight each other with monitors doing their own thing in the middle.

A few outsiders had some lore changes to fit with the Remaster and breaking away from the OGL though. Inevitables no longer exist, at least by that name, though there are new aeons that look very similar and fulfill similar functions. A few fiendish outsider families, like the assura and the oni, were re-imagined as spirits instead so they'd better fit their cultural inspirations. (I think assuras are especially cool now, seemingly able to flip between Holy and Unholy.)
Oh, and archons were changed to look much stranger, more like what people mean when they use the term "biblically accurate angel." Their new lore is that they are essentially the counterparts to qlippoth, predating the other kinds of outsider formed from mortal souls, but unlike qlippoth and demons, when angels and the rest made contact with archons things went pretty great for everyone involved.

Hi,

Just wandering about material that can help me understand what is out there for the planes. My focus is on the Outer Planes but I am interested in the inner planes as well.

I have the GM Core and have read the sections on the planes there. Is there other source material that has been published which could be useful either in further expanding the planes scape in its entirety or individual planes themselves.

Just wondering. IF not is there a book/books on this that will be coming out in the future.

While it covers inner planes rather than outer ones, 2e's Rage of Elements is a real good primer on the Elemental Planes, including the two new ones, Metal and Wood.

Past that you'll probably need to look back at 1e material; 2e seems more focused on fleshing out the various cultural zones of Golarion itself.
I'd suggest checking out the books Chronicle of the Righteous, Concordance of Rivals, and Book of the Damned for info on the goodly, neutral, and fiendish planes, respectively. There's also the 1e book Planar Adventures which may have some useful material in it for you, as well.

And never underestimate the power of the Pathfinder wiki, either! Lots of handy stuff there collated from across multiple products and releases.

Unicore wrote:

WatersLethe wrote:

10. Enshrine "Automatic Rune Progression" into text

11. Adjust wealth chart to make sure players have enough money to spend on fun items and sidearms.

Since you made the OP and I am still a little confused about what we are talking about in this thread, I wanted to ask about number 10 especially:

My understanding of an unchained book is that it is a book of variant rules. Are you asking for a different version of ABP or more like an AP where it was fully built in, with considerations for how to not have ABP penalize casters who don’t want to use a weapon and would otherwise use that wealth on spell casting items like scrolls and staves?

I ask because I am not a fan of the ABP variant rule myself because it takes choice away from players on how to spend their gold and what to prioritize. I love casters and typically don’t spend any gold on weapons at all and will use spells to cover item bonuses to armor until pretty high level so ABP is pretty punishing to my play style.

Automatic Rune Progression (ARP) is a variant of ABP that gained popularity when a Foundry module implemented it. IIRC, it grants fundamental runes automatically and does nothing else.

So unlike ABP, it doesn't break large swaths of Alchemy and doesn't grant all the skill boosts and such. It has a much smaller effect on the game but does remove the need to keep upgrading fundamental runes on weapons & armor.

I'm thinking of implementing a varient of this varient of a varient in my next game, or maybe my current one. My players like shopping for and buying stuff, and some of them like saving up their gold and then getting to spend it on a fundamental rune, so I'm thinking of having them pay for runes, but then having those runes automatically applied across any weapon or suit of armor they put on. I think a couple of my players had also expressed interest in getting to switch up their weapons, and that feels like a good way to do that while still letting them have those big spender moments, and also saves me the headache of having to recalculate treasure in the AP we're playing.

We've been dealing with counteracting for I wanna say the first time in my Strength of Thousands game, and we ran into precisely those headaches. It took me way longer than it felt like it should to figure out the DCs my party were supposed to shoot for.

And I'm not even sure I used the counteracting table for that anyway; I think I just used the "Level-Based DCs" chart. If I have a favorite table in PF2, it's got to be that chart.

Of cantrips that haven't been mentioned yet I'm quite a fan of Warp Step. More movement is always nice to have in a pinch. Also glad someone mentioned telekinetic hand; that's a real handy one.

I'm just so tired of electric arc and spamming it at lv1 because it's obviously the best choice. Even just a few elemental arc variations with different damage types would be a gigantic improvement.

I'm not so convinced it would be, myself. That'd functionally be doing exactly what we do now, just with different colors of arc. It definitely wouldn't make cantrip loadouts feel more interesting or bespoke to a given caster; the new strategy would be to take two or three of those cantrips for a breadth of damage types, making the picks feel more homogenous.

The Jistka Imperium

There's also The Azlanti Empire with the mezlan, at least I believe it used to be more explicitly the Azlanti and was then broadened out. There are also Hell engines which animates a construct with the power of a hellish contract, and arguably the mortal's own soul.

So I have a player who loves D&D changelings. But Astrazoans are not quite their jam, and I just learned about Endiffians, which fit their ways pretty well. Those sound fun to bring back at some point.

There's also Battlezoo's doppelgangers from Classic Creatures if you're open to 3P in the meantime.

I'm down for more cantrips, especially utility ones. I don't think we necessarily *need* them, but they'll be coming out anyway, which is great in my books.

Not so sure on a cantrip-building system, though. Those kinds of systems tend to homogenize very quickly once people identify the most effective way to deliver the spell.
Like, if you make it possible to affect two targets with a cantrip then suddenly all you're going to see are Burning Arc, Chilling Arc, and Corrosive Arc in addition to Electric Arc. That's an obvious example, but the same rule applies for pretty much whatever options you make available for cantrips. It may not be one option that dominates, it could be two or three if we're lucky and the system is especially robust, but it'll effectively be printing one-to-three cantrips rather than a system come the finish.

graystone wrote:

WatersLethe wrote:

Bulk is vastly preferable to whatever nitty gritty weights and measures systems most armchair game devs have got cooking up.

I wind it worse in just about any metric. If I'm with people that care about tracking all equipment it's vastly preferable to track weight. if I'm with people that don't care about tracking, we just don't do anything unless it's clearly out of bounds. Bulk is a 1/2 measure that doesn't really meet either sides needs IMO.

WatersLethe wrote:

Also, I am super happy to no longer have to google the weights of random crap in-world all the time.

Given that doing so takes very little time, I can't see where it takes much longer than trying to guesstimate what you think the bulk of an unknown item is. It's FAR easier to just ignore bulk and just say 'you can move it' or 'it's too heavy to lug around'.

Just going to have to respectfully disagree. I have actually used bulk in PF2 when in PF1 I wholly ignored weight, and everything was wishy washy, hand-wavy, and any mechanic referencing weight was pretty much useless because I couldn't be bothered. The proof is in the pudding for my games.

Same here. I mean we don't put a lot of emphasis on weight in my games, as a general rule, so we don't need to use bulk much ... but we pay more attention to it now than back in PF1 when you had to look up specific charts and weight limits. We just go off general size and vibes now, with most handheld stuff being one or two bulk, stuff that's larger than that but not person size being three or four, and then person-sized stuff being around five or six.

It's worth noting that in PF2 Create Demiplane was not mythic until War of Immortals changed it. My answer there amounts to "mythic rituals are bad design and I'm reverting it."

The PF2 ritual version of it is still too difficult DC wise relative to the PF1 version without further adjustment, but at least its possible to do it.

Create Demiplane, when looked at across the Premaster and Remaster, is how I wish they'd done mythic rituals. By that I mean that you've got a version of the ritual that non-mythic characters can perform, and then you have a mythic version that is better than the non-mythic one. Create Demiplane's area is both larger and more shapable if it's cast as a mythic ritual.

It'd also mean that the rituals fall in line with the design philosophy behind making the mythic destinies usable as both mythic and non-mythic archetypes, which is one of the major strengths of PF2's mythic system in my opinion.

Do we want it written from the POV of the citizens, much like more current books such as for Mwangi & Tian Xia? I'd like some of that, maybe at the top levels w/ sociable races, but not for the more hellish, aberrant levels where shining a light too bright spoils the mystery. How then to illuminate those while retaining the sense of dread & dark depths? Hmm.

"Down below stretch the depths of Orv. We don't travel to Orv, we don't explore Orv. I hear that those who live on the surface look to the skies, sometimes in awe, sometimes in fear, wondering what could reach down from the vaults of the heavens to pluck them up. We do not need to wonder, because we have our legends. Stories of hungry things left abandoned by those who ruled this world before we had crawled out of the mud. Stories of monstrous worms possessed of terrible wills that eat your mind along with your body. Stories of great vaults filled with burning light and terrible life where even the plants will make a meal of you. Stories of the spiteful dead who live in a poisonous desert and scheme and plot ways to bring all life into undeath's embrace. It is not to the heavens that surface-dwellers should be looking, but beneath their feet, because that is where Orve waits to swallow them."

Some things I want from a possible book?

1. Darklands ancestries, especially Caligni, and heritages to darklands-ify some ancestries from the surface. I really like the opportunity to play a native of the place we're learning about, so I feel like ancestries are a must here, one way or another.

2. Darklands archetypes. No idea what these would be, but I'm eager to see what Paizo folks could cook up here. I guess I'd also use this point to mention the obligatory Darklands-themed items or magic ... and especially animal companions. There are loads of weird animals and creatures down there and it'd be great to befriend some.

3. Some hot spots for travel in the Darklands. I know we likely need adventuring sites, so they'd likely be formatted that way, but I'd really, really love something closer to Mwangi Expanse or the Tian Xia books, with cultural zones written out more as places where people live than places for adventuring parties to visit. How are their cultures going to be shaped by living underground? Have they got any special farming techniques, ways of living or building, special holidays or unique forms of worship? That kind of thing.

4. An overview of some of the major movers and shakers in the Darklands. I imagine this is where most of the adventure hooks would go because Golarion, as a planet, tends to get more dangerous the further you get from just above sea level. I'd really like overviews of some of the major factions or players in the Darklands. What does the Black Desert and its city look like now? Are there any especially notable sekmin or urdefhan settlements? What about down in Orv; are there any especially neat vaults, alghollthu enclaves, or giant worm-haunted deeps that would make good adventuring fodder? What're the derro doing? That kind of stuff.

Copaxi's Armored Shell:

Ignoring the weirdness about upgrades being split into another feat, this is not given an armor category and thus you never can get this better than trained.

It's also really bad as starting armor, granting a maximum of a +4 to AC rather than the typical +5. I don't know if that improves, I've just started reading through Copaxi, but even if it does ... that's weird, right? Pretty much all ancestry armor feats give you some equivalent of medium armor, not chunkier padded armor that'll be outclassed by wearing anything heavier.

It also feels weird that you can't etch runes on the shell from the jump given the cpaxi lore about being able to reshape their bodies and having connections to mystical forces.

Just wanted to voice my desire for Paizo making this scenario publicly available for purchase. As all my games are digital I have no desire to pay $60 for a set of miniatures, but I'd love to run this scenario for my group as an introduction to Hellbreakers.

Not to mention, some of us literally cannot read physical print; I either have to find a digital copy somewhere, or that content is just entirely inaccessible to me.

Perpdepog wrote:

I'd personally nix the Holy/Unholy weakness. No other sanctified class has that stipulation, IIRC, and I'm not sure the barbarian's greater amount of damage as compared to the other sanctified martial, the champion, really requires the downside.

I'd be more than happy to, if you're willing to also nix the aforementioned access to an 8th-level feat, or the 1st-level general feat, or some combination of the above. That's already a lot of stuff you get for free without even needing to Rage.

That's fair. And I'm not too upset about losing either or both of those feats, personally, though I'm also thinking of this more as a barbarian instinct rather than a class archetype, so being heavily armored doesn't matter as much to me, and folks who want that heavy armor experience have Invulnerable Rager as an 8th-level feat in any case, even if it's not included.

I'd also probably restrict sanctified striking to when raging, though that doesn't really matter a ton, since you're likely to be raging every combat.

I do like that the extra damage from raging is so low, around where Spirit's is. That indicates that the instinct/archetype is meant for smashing Holy/Unholy foes, and fits best in those style of campaigns.

Are you implying that restricting religious freedom is okay?

Like even in fantasy context, its basically saying "You can't idolize or be fan of someone" since fantasy religions are kind of glorified celebrity fandoms

Pretty sure they were making a joke there. That's how I read it, anyway.

Oh hey hellfire dispatches' pdf is now available finally

Yee, and so far it slaps! I'm so happy what they did with the Hellknight archetype, it's so much cleaner now. Several feats got buffed (though the Signifer dedication did catch the obligatory caster nerf, lol.). They also removed the requirement for heavy armor training, making it a requirement for becoming a Hellknight or the new Knight-Errant, while Signifers only require you be trained in the Hellknight breastplate. There's also a feat that grants you this armor training in the archetype at last, hurray!

My biggest hoped-for change is going to echo what others have already said; I don't think we need the Simple/Martial/Advanced divide, at least not as it is now. I'm more in favor of something akin to 5e's, or other games', expertise systems. I like the idea of characters getting to use whatever weapon they want, for aesthetics if nothing else, but their expertise with that weapon changing how it functions.

Someone using a shortsword without expertise still doing d6s of damage and being Finesse, but needing expertise with the weapon in order to make it Agile, for example. This would need rejiggering of weapon values and traits, so this isn't a perfect example, but I hope it gets the idea across.

Armor is also a bit dull, I rarely find reasons to step outside the most popular armors unless I like the mental image of a particular suit, but I'm not sure that necessitates a reworking of how armor works as much as it asks for more armor traits and armors to get made. One of the big reasons everyone ends up in full plate is because it's a +6/+0 armor with Bulwark, meaning you don't have to worry near as much about Dex. I think there's a fair amount of design space in lifting that profile and placing it on other types of armor, make "greatscale" as a composite armor clone for example, or giving out other fun armor traits akin to Bulwark to make other kinds of armor more interesting to wear.

I am also a fan of armor-as-resistance and armor-as-soak systems though, so if a hypothetical PF3 went in that direction I wouldn't be upset.

Weaker overall defenses feels like an interesting internal design choice, because in the monster creation rules for GM Core, they didn't modify defenses at all. I wonder if the weaker AC is budgeting for assumed ranged over melee. But they didn't touch those numbers for the Saving Throw and AC charts. I guess a higher proportion of them were designed toward the high ranged, lower AC balancing as if it was a ranged PF creature?

It could be some leftover design habits from Starfinder 1E, as well. SF1's stats were purposefully skewed so that PCs were overall tankier and more defensive while doing a bit less damage, while enemy creatures tended to be more aggressive but fragile. In practice what that meant was the two sides pretty much matched up. This also had the added benefits of summons and controlled enemy creatures not clogging up the battlefield because you were matching glass cannons against each other, and conversely any player who was unlucky enough to be mind controlled or whatever wouldn't be quite as dangerous, or as likely to go down from getting shot by their former friends.

Lost Omens: Darklands needs to be a thing. To echo my post from the Vaultlines thread in the adventure path subforum:

When I started my Sky King's Tomb campaign it was a real pain in the ass to find information about the Darklands in Golarion. It's especially bad now that we live in a post-OGL world where drow, neothelids, and intellect devourers are no longer a thing. Sure, the adventures tells you enough about them to let you run them as is, but I am a GM who loves to expand the story as we go. And the lack of Darklands material has really given me a headache when I was trying to do that for Sky King's Tomb. Especially since the most prominent ancestry in all the old lore books have been erased from the setting. Sure, I could go the suggested route from the Book 3 Darklands Gazetteer and say "It's all snakemen now!" but one of my players really wanted to play a Darklands Elf, and I have no lore about the Ayndilar to share with them for that.

So please, John Paizo, put a Lost Omens: Darklands on the docket.

I know this isn't the main point of your post, and I too really, really, REALLY want a Darklands book--mostly because I love the Darklands, and also want playable Caligni--but intellect devourers do still exist in the setting. They're called xoarians now, with the epithet of "corpse rider," and have been folded into the Dominion of the Black more fully.

IIRC neothelids are going to be returning as well and renamed something closer to the seugathi they spawn, rule over, and eat. The Pathfinder neothelid is pretty different from the D&D neothelid, aside from the name, which to be honest never quite fit them in my eyes.

Creator of Darknoth Chronicles wrote:

I appreciate everyone's response. When writing your own world there is a stopping point on what new or recycled content one can add in before the pages are no longer in order, so I was checking the opinions of others to get a feel of what people expect to see down the road for Remastered Pathfinder. Given that Player Core added more dragons are we likely to see more dragonblood lineages and if so how is Paizo likely to handle updating that content? In the previous editions how many dragonblood lineages have been available?

I think the trick is to try to avoid using exhaustive lists, and use thematic groupings instead.

Instead of saying "this is how each spellcasting class fits into my world", try something like "this is how arcane spellcasters fit into my world". It's more future-proof because when Paizo makes a new kind of arcane caster, in your setting people could just go "wizard, magus, that's kinda the same, one just spends more time in the gym than the library". And then when Paizo releases the runesmith (is that arcane? I don't remember) you don't really need to rewrite anything.

Runes, at least as portrayed with the runesmith playtest, stretched across traditions. Different runes were from different traditions and you sometimes got feats that gave you bonuses for using runes from complementary or conflicting traditions.

Why do you need to buy the books to incorporate them into your setting's lore and denote page numbers? Archives of Nethys notes pagenation for all of the game's options on their site; can't you just use those as reference points when writing up your own world's lore?

It occurred to me yesterday that I've actually been using these new "resist all" rules for a while now. I knew the old rules, but just forgot them in the heat of combat and it made everything go more quickly and smoothly to lump all the damage together and then subtract resistance from it as opposed to having to split out each damage type and do the calculation for each.

As a side note, if there was a RoE remaster, I doubt it would come until after Geniekin were remastered, because as we are, they have not been.

And with Fetchlings, Fleshwarps, Sprites, Strix each confirmed for remaster books, that means despite errata, Ancestry Guide is still strictly Legacy.

Alternatively a remaster of Rage of Elements could be done to essentially be the same book, but adds the remaining 5 geniekin types for 7. As, given the Nephilim treatment, there is a fair chance that geniekin might be combined into one heritage in the remaster.

I don't really see geniekin being combined into a single heritage, myself. The ardande and talos are already split apart in RoE, after all, and while the majority of geniekin heritages grant darkvision as their inclusion, some, like the naari or undine, do give a different ability for picking up the heritage.

Mark you, I do think it'd be a good idea. I'd either like to see the heritages all folded into one mega-heritage, or have the heritage abilities you get be more radically different from one another. Most geniekin feel real similar around level 1-4. I just don't think that's what we're going to see, unfortunately.

Oh, and there's the issue of copyfit to consider, too. If they remaster the geniekin in RoE, even just combining the ardande and talos into a singular expansion for the heritage present in another book, that's going to require more time and work to make fit the page as opposed to just changing out the few names they need to change to make RoE remaster-viable.

(throw feasibility or practicality to the wind!)

Been thinking on this for a bit, and I think my most out there ask would be a Pathfinder TCG. I know there's been a card game already, but from what I was able to glean it's not quite what I'm thinking of.

To be honest, Drow always felt distinctly disjointed in the setting to me, so I can't really fault knocking them aside. Admittedly I don't have the long-term experience to be committed to them, I more or less jumped onto this game during the OGL crisis.

But like Arcaian alludes to, out of everything incorporated into the setting from earlier sources, Drow felt the most awkwardly plucked from someone else's game world and randomly stitched in. Especially since they never had Lolth, a relationship which is kind of defining across D&D settings, instead just worshipping a haphazard collection of demon lords with no real thematic thoughline. The tragedy and intrigue of traditional Drow -- the worst impulses of an otherwise noble people, driven out rather than reformed and caricaturized by a singular dark god who demanded their total allegiance (perhaps, depending on the edition, one of their own ancestral gods likewise fallen to corruption and dragging some fraction of her own people with her) -- never actually carried over to Golarion, and couldn't. So all the worldbuilding that was specifically downwind of that -- the matriarchal social structure and female priestly caste, the spider aesthetic, not to mention the Driders -- was left just sort of sitting there weirdly orphaned, clearly and distinctly a reference to something else minus some core part that tied it all together.

This is interesting to read because I, never having been much interested in D&D worlds and not knowing the drow from their setting, never noticed this mismatch; the elements all made sense to me. The elves who became the drow were in a new, dangerous place, and demon lords offered them the chance to survive, which they took. Elves are highly reactive to their environments, however, and so what could have been a simple deal necessitated by the desire to survive became an opportunity for demonic influence, and whatever radiations are present in the Darklands, to alter the drow into what they were over multiple generations. The demon lords not having any kind of unifying theme also fit for me because they were simply opportunists, and all of the justifications for the demons' importance to drow society comes after the fact with the creation of the various houses jockeying for their various niches.

The matriarchal society thing didn't bother me because, to be honest, it makes as much sense to me as a patriarchal one, which is to say, not much.

I would definitely have been confused by the spider motifs in drow art, but I'm blind and can't see drow art, so that just never came up for me, haha.

And finally, I sorta dig how driders are seen as lower status in drow society. They reinforce the drow's survival-based mindset, as well as highlight how toxic it's become, by reserving the fleshwarping of a drow into a drider as a punishment. It combines the brutally practical mindset of "you will be made useful" which I can see echoes of in their original pacts with demons with the acretion of their ideology of eugenic purity present in creatures like the drow noble and their inate spells. A drider is physically more powerful than an individual drow, but socially they become an underclass.

I'd really love a random encounter generator of some kind, the sort of thing you saw in Monster Codex and in the backs of lots of AP volumes in PF1E.
Related to that, I'd love some charts or tables or whatever that suggest what sorts of monsters you're likely to run into in which kinds of terrain. The first, and so far only, time I tried running a purely homebrew campaign I got lots of use out of those sorts of tables; a single random encounter against a doppelganger ended up becoming an entire evening's session, for example.

I might even go more modular with dungeons than the OP; a big book of rooms would be cool for stringing together your own dungeons, particularly if, like WatersLethe said, you're not really caring much about the history and backstory and more grounded elements of your dungeon. They'd be real handy for making up a one-shot hack 'n' slash-style adventure, or whipping something together for a playtest.

I've seen a couple homebrewed Worm that Walks/Swarm Strider archetypes floating around, though I can't remember where offhand at present, unfortunately.

There's also the swarmblood ancestry from Roll for Combat's Living Legends. It is an ancestry, so it's not going to pack quite as much oomph as an archetype would, and it's more like you're a swarm in a person trenchcoat rather than a mass of wriggly bits, but that's the closest I've come across to a Worm that Walks from a 3P seller as of yet.

I'm also really hoping we get a Swarm Strider archetype soon. Really, really hoping we get one in an eventual aberration-focused book ... also that we get an aberration-focused book.

The stuff we got in WoI was really tantalising and I hope it gets acted upon by someone down the line. The giant creatures just sorta milling around reminds me of Shadow of the Collosus and I am very pleased about that.

I'm hoping the Living Plague, a sort of magical "disease" afflicting Geb where undead spontaneously return to life, gets brought up in Impossible Magic. It's such a cool idea!

So "Resist All X" has become more like "Resist Any X", where the creature choose X amount of damage to resist from any of the incoming damage, but no longer all of the incoming damage. This weakens many higher level creatures so their hit points might need calibration. That or create a "Resist Any Two X", though I don't think that'd be received well. Would some simply need to list out more damage types to reflect the designer's intentions? Hmm.

I'm gonna borrow this turn of phrase, thanks; "resist any" makes a lot of sense to me as a way to think of "resist all," now.

I really like how all the dragon types got a couple pages of nothing but lore on their behaviors inDraconic Codex. I still chuckle thinking about adamantine dragons becoming obsessive fans.

Also really glad to see how breath weapons got experimented with, like the time dragon's breath weapon switching from just electricity in the previous edition to being slow-based now, and able to blink enemies who crit fail out of the fight for a turn.

Darkorin wrote:

I would love some clarification about what is really supposed to be a gun for Operatives.

The current definition of all ranged weapons with the analog or tech trait covers pretty much everything, including melee weapons with the thrown traits when they are thrown.

Is that intended?

I think the only ranged weapon that is currently excluded from that definition of gun is the Shobhad Longrifle, which feels more like an omission than true intent.

Like a thrown knife is a gun but that sniper isn’t… something feels weird.

Seconded. For one, while it is easy to assume that the shobhad longrifle is analog due to the fact Starfinder weapon's must include a trait of Archaic, Analog, or Tech, of which the shobhad longrifle has neither. The definition of gun is often troublesome. Things that are not guns are considered guns (a knife is a gun when thrown, and a shuriken drone is a gun), and things that very much are guns are not considered guns (a dwarven scattergun is not a gun). And while we don't have a bow yet, bows had the analog trait in Starfinder 1E, and if a bow comes to Starfinder 2E trait with any trait except archaic, then a bow will be a gun. When the GM Core suggests giving Operatives the training in all ranged weapons in a Pathfinder game, it raises question on why this cannot just be a default.

NGL, shobhad longrifle bugs me more for breaking the upgrade system. It gets two extra slots for a scope and a silencer when no other weapon seems to get the same. I first assumed this was how "specific magic weapons" would be introduced to the game, and that could still be the case in Tech Core, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced it's a side-effect of the longrifle being ported over from an AP volume to a different supplemental product.

keftiu wrote:

BotBrain wrote:

Yeah the runesmith is definetly not a jistkan automaton. Either there's a lore expansion coming detailing modern automatons or we're getting some flavour of awakened contruct heritage.

I'd previously thought/hoped they might be a Wyrwood, but the art's looking less and less like that.

A generic construct ancestry could have a wyrwood heritage added down the line. (Lost Omens: Arcadia next year trust me)

I hope that's not the case. (The wyrwoods being a heritage as opposed to their own ancestry, I mean, not Lost Omens: Arcadia coming out.) I'd rather see wyrwoods become their own ancestry with their own heritages that reflect things such as the reasons they were originally built, what generation of wyrwood they are, or different things their aeon stones can do than try to squish all of their culture and uniqueness into a singular heritage and perhaps a qualifying ancestry feat or two.

I feel pretty similarly, though less strongly, about awakened constructs in general, to be honest. Battlezoo's golemborn ancestry, while cool, did show me what happens when you try to squish a bunch of only somewhat connected construct types into a single ancestry, and the result is that none of those types get as much room to breathe. Admittedly that ancestry is also trying to navigate capturing the feel of playing a golem at the table while having to remove many of a golem's abilities, chiefly their immunities, for the sake of table balance, which I don't envy.

Im fond of the idea that once a body has been dead long enough, it loses some of its 'affiliation' to its original soul (presumably this takes about as long as for the soul to be judged) and at that point you can stuff any old scrap of a soul into it to animate a mindless undead. Same with spontaneously risen undead in areas with enough ambient void and some wayward soulstuff not quite strong enough to form a haunt or independent spirit creature.

We've seen that happen in an AP, actually. Heck, it happens pretty fast from an in-universe perspective, too. Spoiler for Tyrant's Grasp.

The circumstances are about as extenuated as circumstances can get, but it's still cool that it's happened at least once to my knowledge.

I really hope we get an awakened clockwork construct ancestry; constructs are one of my favorite creature types, and clockwork is one of my favorite varieties of construct.

James Jacobs wrote:

In 1E, elementals and outsiders are among those creature types that can't be raised from the dead or resurrected. That's not the case in 2nd edition Pathfinder, where those effects are limited by the level of the dead creature and the time they've been dead and not by what KIND of creature they were.

Off-topic question but reading this got me curious: RAW can you resurrect an undead who has been destroyed?

I know that PC skeleton characters can be resurrected as skeletons, as per Book of the Dead. I don't know if that same rule applies to other undead PCs though.

Edit: And I've got no idea if a mindless/soulless undead could be resurrected. I agree with JJ that it'd be a cool spell/ritual to include.
That, or you could reintroduce necrocrafts from PF1 back into the game, and fold some lore about "resurrection" of undead servants into their lore.

That'd be cool. Grioths never had a whole ton going on, so I could see someone wanting to fill in the corners to make them an ancestry in a weirder, more cosmic horror-y mold.
On the other hand it could just be the new trend, one which I like, that we've been seeing in bestiaries where the authors add a little texture to a monster by showing they won't all attack you, always, all the time.

Us ground-bound creatures don't think about it much, but there's winds on Earth as permanent as rivers - the trade winds and the polar vortex, for example. El Niño should be a suitable binding for a nymph, surely?

And if we want a Golarion-based example, you can't get much more permanent than the Eye of Abendego. It's been raging for, what, a couple hundred years now?

(Incidentally, I really hope we get nymphs tied to the Eye as monsters if not ancestry options; that'd be real cool.)

This same argument is valid for D&D too. I don't consider the changes from 5e to 5.5e like a fully incompatible edition in the same way as the remasters aren't either. I can even extend this to 3.5 and 3.0. In the end, all they are glorified errata that are due to have a bit higher number of balance and improvement changes and to the desire to try to earn a bit more selling as a “new edition”.

I like the term subversion with a period because it clearly and directly indicates that “look, it's the same game, compatible with the same material, just with several improvements”. Even though the term “remaster” conveys a similar message, it still causes confusion because it can still seem like a new edition to laypeople, especially when they see the term “legacy” elsewhere.

I have to admit I'm confused by these two paragraphs. You start off by saying that using the ".5" designation is a way to market "glorified errata" in a way that "can earn a bit more selling as a 'new edition'," but then say that you like it because it it clearly communicates that it is the same game, but with some balance changes. Those seem like two contradictory positions to hold; either the .5 designation is intended as a marketing tactic, and it's confusing to players because companies are trying to pass off errata passes as new editions, or it's a method for clearly communicating that the .5 edition is the same game, just with some errata changes.

The big problem with this terminology is that many players on 3.5 considered it incompatible; for that reason, they thought they had to buy the new material, and many players stopped accepting 3.0 material because “it was poorly balanced” (as if 3.5 ever was) or similar excuses. But in most of the games I played, it was normal to accept 3.0 material that hadn't been reprinted, especially adventures and material for the DM to use, and we simply reinforced that the “repeated” material that should be prioritized was the 3.5 material, as it was considered a kind of errata.

This bad reputation of 3.5 as being “a D&D 3.0 with a big errata that WotC made to make more money from players” is precisely what kept D&D and PF2e from using this nomenclature up to now. But it was always very efficient in simply showing what it was about.

It is precisely in this aspect that I can't see differences in the approach of 5e and 5.5e and Pathfinder 2e legacy and remaster. For me, they are all just big errata with a new cover, and nothing is better than a versioning nomenclature to indicate this. They only avoided it because, for some players, it created a kind of bad reputation (although PF1 greatly benefited from being called D&D 3.75).

A couple points I want to make here.

Firstly, doesn't this work more as a mark against using the .5 designation, though? Your playgroup aside, if common consensus is that .5 edition stuff encourages people to stop using the old material and buy the new stuff, and Paizo's goal with the Remaster designation is to communicate to players that they don't have to do that, then that sounds like a black mark against switching the designation now, doesn't it? I don't mean to negate your own opinions or experiences here, and largely agree with you that such designations can be confusing, but you talk about both your personal experiences and how they ran counter to the more public narrative and discourse. If public discourse sees a .5 designation as an invalidation of the old material, and Paizo isn't looking to invalidate their old material, then using the .5 designation wouldn't serve them.

I also want to push back on the "D&D 3.75" nickname for PF1E being a positive, or at least an unalloyed positive. This is my own anecdotal evidence, but I generally heard that term thrown around more as an epithet or as a derogatory term used to highlight how similar Pathfinder was to D&D 3.5. The connotations shifted over time, particularly as people became less and less satisfied with 4E, but it wasn't how the term was used initially. The negative impression would be reinforced if Paizo suddenly decided to change their edition naming. The Remaster has been out for, what, a couple years now? We have to consider things like institutional memory when thinking of rhetorical changes like renaming; if people have associated a .5 designation with trying to sell errata as a new edition in the past, as you do, or if it risks invalidating materials without that designation, as you've pointed out, then switching from the term Remaster to 2.5 this late in the game would risk associating Pathfinder 2E with both of those trends, and for not all that much benefit.

Anyway, for me it only complicates things. I was happy that WotC finally simplified things a bit on their side; I think it would be great if Paizo also simplified things and called it something clear that reduces doubts.

I'm not sure it would reduce doubts. Name changes are going to confuse people pretty much no matter what, and at this point you're asking for a second name change on top of the name change you are already pointing out is confusing. That sounds like it's just going to lead to more confusion to me, not less.

The store page for Feybound is up!

I really like the narrative conceit of the book taking place at an all-included Firstworld gala, that feels very apropos and fun ^_^

The narrative frameworks and emphasis on the narrators' authorial voice are probably my favorite changes we've seen out of PF2E books, and I love that they're getting more emphasized as we go along.

I hope our narrator for this book is super catty, dishing out dirt to the reader on the various characters they spotlight.