Perpdepog's page

Perpdepog wrote:

I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure exactly how many of the alghollthu are workable in ORC from either PF1E or 3.5, but I do really like the idea of presenting them in a book as some kind of society block or faction. It's just that they're a faction in a war, political struggle, land dispute, whatever you want to call it that doesn't really factor in most playable ancestries as worthy of consequence.

It's a specific subset of cosmic horror that focuses on alien factions battling each other and not really caring about the everyday people who get ground up in their machines of conflict. I think presenting an aberration-focused book in the style of raving reports about these factions--the Alghollthu, the Dominion of the Black, the Old Cults, whatever wormy faction neothelids are part of--would be an awesome way to introduce lots of themed aberrations to new players, and give them a new coat of paint, or slime, while we're at it.

The only alghollthus we lost to the OGL are the aboleths and the skum. All the rest are ones we invented, and we can make replacements for those two pretty easilly.

Awesome to hear! I'm guessing you wouldn't be able to re-use the name ulat-kini, though? I know that's splitting hairs to ask; I just like the name and like saying it.

The Alghollthu play an important role in Golarion’s history and it is my hope that we will see this creature family explored in greater depth.

...it is my hope that we will see this creature family explored in greater depth.

...explored in greater depth.

... greater depth...

I see what you did there.

Also I second the Big Book of Aberrations with loads of lore about our favorite slimy overlords.

Really excited for the rune dragon. I like how its method of fighting feels really similar to the runesmith class; hopefully there is some acknowledgement of that connection in either the dragon's or runesmith's lore, like the first runesmiths being disciples of rune dragons.

I'd personally lean more to a level +1 creature and throw in a few more baddies rather than a level +2 creature. Having more guys on the field does mean they aren't as likely to get swept through sheer action economy. Then again, if your campaign is going on long enough, why not try both? Varying the kinds of encounters you throw at your party, which it sounds like you're already planning on doing, has two great benefits; you get a feel for places where your party struggles, and where they do well, and it gives you more interesting things to play with.

I'd also suggest being a smidge looser with the encounter budget. Not a whole lot looser, but if you go 10 to 20 points over I don't think it'll hurt too much. And yeah, I think introducing a hazard is a good way to liven up a fight against a singular enemy. I'm not really up on how 5E works, but what I heard about lair actions sounds like a great idea; I say steal it.

I think it's more the fact that one of your players is a life oracle, and another is a champion. Those two classes are going to have an easier time against undead foes, for sure.

There's also the fact that, while you have more enemies than your party, they all appear to be lower level, which lets the abilities your oracle used really shine, making damage and crits more likely.

I'm with you in saying this isn't a bad thing, but it's something to keep in mind going forward. Consider having one higher-level boss, who is a few levels above your party's level, and perhaps more crappy little gribblies who are a few levels below to help with your encounter budgeting. Your oracle may blast through them with Heal spells, but that's OK. I imagine they picked that setup so they could have cool moments like that, and it's nice to let them. You can also have more intelligent undead and baddies clock the oracle as a problem and go after them, forcing the oracle to move or get womped, meaning they won't have the actions for a three-action Heal.

There's also the fact that you just haven't got a ton of big-ticket abilities on monsters at that level. If you really need to stick with your undead theming you could always reskin a creature you like, give it the Undead trait and most of the typical undead immunities, and be good to go.

Once again, "it's not as bad as it used to be" is being used as an excuse.

Then it's one that carries a lot of weight for an excuse. Drawing attention to the kinds of games "ivory tower game design" was coined to describe, by the guy who had a hand in making those games, seems like a pretty apt tactic in figuring out how ivory tower game design manifests itself.

If anyone is interested in a system of template-based summons I'd recommend Magic+. It has a pair of linked systems, Aspect Morphing and Aspect Summoning, that pull from a series of templates and features to build battle forms and summons. It looked pretty fun and functional from the read-through I did, though I haven't done a deep dive. IMO still worth checking out, though.

I agree, but the fact that summons can be buffers and roadblocks is a problem in a game where buffers and roadblocks can be incredibly powerful. I think part of the problem here is that we expect summons to be more than just a big wall of HP that gets in the way, but aren't necessarily acknowledging that spells like wall of stone are amazing precisely because you're creating this wall of HP that gets in the way. Even if we put aside the edge cases, that's still very strong.

This is why we're not allowed to summon troops, I suspect. They take the concept of "wall of HP" to a whole other level with being able to shape their area, and with the thresholds of damage that mean they can't be defeated in a single hit.

Off the top of my head, if the cap were raised by even just one level, then you could summon Lesser Deaths with summon undead and completely wreck certain encounters with their Aura of Misfortune. Even for a 10th-rank spell, an automatic -5 on average to all d20 rolls I think is quite strong.

That's a good catch, yeah. Lesser Death is at least Rare, so I don't think that you could select it as a possibility without GM buy-in, but it's exactly that kind of stuff I'm wondering about.

I feel that's a fantasy that would probably be better-served by giving that versatility to the Wizard, rather than the arcane spell list: while Wizards are meant to be versatile students of magic, they're also not the only users of the arcane tradition, as we also have arcane Sorcerers, Witches, as well as Maguses and Summoners. The more power you pump into the spell list, the less power that leaves for those classes' unique features, which would make it especially hard to balance choose-your-own-tradition casters. This isn't to say that the arcane tradition couldn't use a bit more love right now, and I think it could do with many more tradition-exclusive spells, but I'd personally want the arcane list to have a sharper identity, rather than be the do-everything or do-everything-but-heal tradition.

I think we're seeing this become the case, too. At least, if I am recalling correctly Rival Academies has a few wizard schools that grant spells from outside of the arcane tradition. I want to say the Magaambya wizard school and the schools for the Runelord do? It'd be a nice trend to see continue.

Placing out-of-tradition spells into the curriculum has the twin benefits of making the curriculum stand out more, and feel less like a limitation of the wizard class, while also keeping access to extra-arcane spells sharply controlled. Yeah it'd basically make them indistinguishable from a cleric's granted spells or a sorcerer's bloodline, but those features work for a reason; it's a good formula.

Glad to hear the mythic destinies are fun, and also they're in this book. I'm surprised the description doesn't include them; you'd think that would be a big selling point.

I really want a planar witchwarper with the primal tradition. It seems like such a natural fit and fun concept space that for a short period of time I gaslit myself into thinking it already existed and that witchwarpers were anything-but-divine in the same way mystics have three traditions.

Funnily enough my hypothetical planar witchwarper is divine rather than primal, with your paradox being that you are, somehow, simultaneously, both dead and judged by Pharasma and alive at the same time, so you can open portals to the outer plane your soul is supposed to be in.

When I think of primal witchwarpers, which I also agree make total sense as a possibility, I think of a witchwarper perhaps tied to the distant past of the universe who summons up areas of ice age frost, or ancient volcanos, or prehistoric plantlife. That or there is something funky and paradoxical with your genetic code, like you somehow evolved so perfectly with other versions of yourself that you metaphysically touch, and that gives you access to the "nature" of another universe.

I could see a primal planar witchwarper, naturally tied to something like the Elemental Planes, I'm just not sure what the paradox narrative would be, and that's what I tend to focus on with the witchwarper when I think up hypothetical subclasses.

I get the limited staff argument but we are now getting a second book of ancestries before another class. With 20+ out already, that would not have been my call. The prioritization seems off.

Depends on who you ask. This is personal experience, but I've seen many more people concerned with SF2E nailing the cantina, "play as the alien" feel than class selection. The priority may be to give the majority what they're asking for.

Which doesn't surprise me. SF1E had fewer classes than PF1E did as well, but also many more playable species as options, and IIRC a lot of the people worried about losing the cantina were SF1E players intending on jumping into the new edition.

"Untapped potential" sums up my feelings on solarian pretty well, honestly.
It looks really cool, I certainly don't think it's bad, but I keep looking at the later levels' lack of class features, places the Stellar Arrangements used to go, and wondering what could go there instead. Then I start thinking about how, because Stellar Arrangements were removed, the solarian could have a lot more room to play with other aspects of their kit. A solarian who specializes in their Solar Weapon, granting it more features as they level, or one who bulks up the Solar Nimbus into a meatier nod to the old armor feature, or a solarian semi-caster, or one who goes all in on their flare through class features. They'd all fill out the class features really nicely and help the solarian broaden its niche.

Admittedly, none of my musings really focus on the level 1 experience.

I think a concept within Pathfinder is that worship can grant a being divine power, but worship isn't required to maintain divine power. And also the amount of worshippers doesn't translate to amount of divine power.

That's definitely how it seems to work for the goblin gods, at least. Lamashtu and the Bargast Hero-Gods aren't happy about it, either.

Note that, in Golarion, souls do not contribute directly to a deity's power.

I think it's more accurate to say we don't know of a deity who works this way in the Golarion setting. Divine mechanics are very blurry and wibbly-wobbly, purposefully so. That way people can make up the stories they like.

An example from Iron Gods here, spoilered.

We've talked about if she were to play her Paladin char again in 2e, since narratively the option for non-religious Champions has been elided, and deity is somewhat more present in the mechanics than it was. She is open to playing her as a religious character and I am open to finding an alternative, as much as anathema appeals to me. We havent had to decide what actually is going to happen since the opportunity has yet to arise, but maybe this shows how the conversation happens at the GM level. Now that the Guardian is out, maybe the character is simply no longer a Paladin period. We'll find out when we get there.

Slightly ninjaed by somebody mentioning it already, but I'd suggest covenants to your friend if she wants to play a champion. I'm also pretty irreligious, and don't gravitate toward religious characters either, but covenants have interested me since they came out. It could be the term they use, or the fact that your "deity" is actually a group of entities affiliated with a concept, but I see covenants as more of a mutual understanding or veneration, which makes it much more amenable to me. Maybe your friend would agree with that.

If she does, but none of the current covenants sound good, you guys could always take some deity's or covenant's abilities and rework them as a covenant, as well. Though I guess at that point you may as well take that small extra step and allow them to embody a concept, which IMO is also a great route to take.

I like the idea of Taxing. You could even give it a value, Taxing 2/ Taxing 3, to show how many attacks it counts as.

Wait... the flowing of souls extends the life span of the current universe, and thusly I would assume, Pharasma's existence too.

I've never heard of Pharasma's and the current multiverse's lifespans being tied in that way, so I think your premiss is flawed.

Pharasma is a god of fate, so her staff would organize your eligibility to be resurrected. If she chooses to keep you, the spell would actually fail. And your buddies would not even have the power to bring you back. So it's by her blessing you are revived.

Yeah. Most, if not all I haven't checked, spells that revive a PC have a line stipulating when revivals don't work, and part of that line is always, "If Pharasma has decided that the creature's time has come (at the GM's discretion), or if the creature doesn't wish to return to life, this spell automatically fails..."

Wait, Pharasma's NOT all-knowing?! I thought she was the closest thing the Pathfinder universe had to a Supreme Being, which is why the gods HAVE to respect her judgments (unless you're Urgathoa). And that that's how and why she knows how the Universe will end and (assuming all things go according to plan) is setting up her daughter to be the Survivor to go on and midwife the new one.

She arguably was all-knowing once, given her powers of prophecy, but with prophecies no longer working that's no longer true. She's still likely closest to being all-knowing, deities and their specific domains of knowledge--like Nethys and magic--aside, but my guess is she's now running more on her uncountable eons of experience than anything else.

Edit: Ninjaed.

Nah, necromancy is a fun fantasy staple. "Pharasma says you shouldn't" is what makes Urgathoa fun. Sure, it's evil, but evil characters are enjoyable for a lot of folks. Sometimes, you want to be carried around on a throne held aloft by skeletons.

(And no, nothing indicates necromancy is clawing petitioners, or chunks of them, back from their post-judgement afterlives.)

Not to mention that removing necromancy, the fantasy staple that it is, cuts off all the character concepts people have been thinking up in this thread about how to reimagine, reconfigure, and recontextualize someone's relationship to necromancy.

A Pathfinder conversion of a level 1 Dragonkin would have access to a Jump Flight feat that allows it to fly 10 or 15 feet, but falls if it is not on solid ground at the end of the movement.

You know what's humorous? This is how SF1E dragonkin functioned. Your flight was effectively jump flight until level 5, when it became full flight. They got a buff in the flight department when they came over to 2E.

The main difference here, however, is that IRL fascists don't openly worship devils. They still think they're the good guys.

I think what would really help here is the historical context of the Hellknights. Maybe it's because I'm more used to Pathfinder Hellknights, but I still see the Hellknights as thinking of themselves as the good guys. It's just that their self-image isn't so much "we are good," as "we are necessary," which has always been the cry of the authoritarian enforcement apparatus.

It's also worth noting that Geb already is the relatively stable, ordered society which accepts regular practice of necromancy and the background context behind the lore factoid that even mindless undead are known to spontaneously attack living things that get too close to them in direct contradiction to their orders. That society already exists and it's where we learned about the inherent danger of being near the undead

--

But a more important point, I think, is that of course it will be trivially easy to come up with any number of arguments why creating and controlling undead is both morally neutral and completely reprehensible. It doesn't exist in the real world where we can study its effects on the trajectory of the soul or negative consequences of its use. Any in-universe argument why it should or should not be considered evil is fundamentally based first on whatever aspects about it we've made up or decided to be true in support of our argument.

The reality is that in this setting, creating undead has traditionally been an inherently evil act (with the unholy tag!) likely because controlling the dead is a classic dark magic trope to have shadowy villains enact to show that they're evil and preying upon innocents. Soon we will have a Necromancer class, which is very likely not to be restricted to unholy. Only time will tell if the lore of the setting is receiving a slight adjustment to fill in a previously unexplored corner, or a major perspective shift on the nature and function of undeath and undeathly magics.

To build off these points, there are other corners of undeath which we frankly don't know about either. There are a handful--not many, but a handful--of undead that weren't considered evil in the Premaster, for example, and we've got no idea whether they interact with the Cycle of Souls/the degrading issues surrounding souls in the same way. These are generally culturally relevant ttutolary spirits in the fiction, like the iruxi ossature, culturally relevant tutolary spirits of real-world cultures, like the nightmarchers, figures tied to practices of ancestral veneration, such as the iroran mummy, or spirits with a very obvious wrong they need to correct, like the revenant, as well as many ghosts.

Incidentally, another of my examples, the last guard, flip-flopped a little; they were LN in the Premaster, but appear to have gained the Unholy trait in the Remaster. This brings another wrinkl into how we view non-evil undead; it's possible that the stats for the last guard were adjusted because you fight them in the context of Claws of the Tyrant, where I can't imagine they're very nice ghosts.

So 1e weapon Solarion also would not have had to spend nearly as much on weapons as other characters (yes the weapon crystals cost something but never as much as the churn of weapons upgrades on my other characters), I haven't seen enough of how that scales in SFS 2 to see if there is a similar hidden benefit to factor in.

You likely won't see a difference. While solarian weapons scale slightly differently in terms of when they can get property abilities, basically upgrades, the actual cost of improving your weapons' direct statistics, to-hit and damage dice, cost you the same as any other weapon.

It's also possible the Lady of Graves is just wrong. That also has some fun narrative implications. If she's wrong about that, then what else might she be wrong about? We already know her knowledge is no longer perfect thanks to prophecy breaking.

From a Doylist perspective I kinda like that the games are different and may approach things differently. For one thing, trying to keep their lore and implications matched is going to be a really skewed relationship in favor of Pathfinder, since it came first both narratively and chronologically IRL, and it's nice that Starfinder can approach the universe how they will.
For another, I just like diagetic ambiguity. I've liked it ever since I started seeing it in The Elder Scrolls' in-universe books. The fact that people inside of a fictional universe will argue and debate how it works just as much as people outside of it makes a fiction feel more alive to me.

It's surprisingly hard to think of a name that captures both the indefinite stretch of time, and also the nature of the particular triviality that it represents. "The Forever-Tedium" is the best I've got so far.

What's interesting is that we now have borais, who are apparently an exception to a lot of these ideas about undead. They aren't strengthened by void energy, for one thing, but vitality energy. They also still very clearly have their souls, and those souls don't seem to be damaged, that we can tell, from living as a borai. Granted, borai do seem to give out sooner than other undead, their bodies breaking down after a couple hundred years or so.
That might be where their "cost" comes from? I haven't re-read their SF2E entry so I forget if it's the void energy in them that is expressly linked to breaking their body down.

Perpdepog wrote:

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

Driftbourne wrote:

The origin story of the Hellknights in Starfinder is in Era of the Eclipse. I'm only on chapter 10, so I'm not sure yet how that lines up with how they are in the Galaxy Guide, but from what little I know from Era of the Eclipse so far, I'm not expecting Hellknights to remain unchanged from the PF2e timeline, Hellknights waking up from the Gap is frightening...

I gotta get my hands on that book.

It's a good read; I'm basically necro-ing this thread to say that, lol.

Though I wouldn't use it as any sort of accurate depiction of the Hellknights. Characters at multiple levels of the story question the reliability of Tyrcell, the primary source of information in the text; Tyrcell themselves is pretty open about making up dialogue for events they didn't personally witness, for example.

Yup although it is pretty clear he was not totally off base either in what he was saying. Honestly the hellknights reaction to suddenly they no longer remember the laws they are supposed to be enforcing going well if we don't remember the law then the law is what we say it is and enforce it seems to be pretty in keeping with that kind of organization.

Yeah. Even if we accept that some of the Hellknights were worse, and better, than others, that "better" doesn't extend to not trying to take over the station and declare martial law.

Also, I've never found it super hard to imagine a good-ish, if not exactly goodly, Hellknight, at least on an individual level. The Stormlight Archive's Skybreaker order of Knights Radiant are a good pattern for how I'd imagine a schism for more goodly Hellknights might go.

Driftbourne wrote:

The origin story of the Hellknights in Starfinder is in Era of the Eclipse. I'm only on chapter 10, so I'm not sure yet how that lines up with how they are in the Galaxy Guide, but from what little I know from Era of the Eclipse so far, I'm not expecting Hellknights to remain unchanged from the PF2e timeline, Hellknights waking up from the Gap is frightening...

I gotta get my hands on that book.

It's a good read; I'm basically necro-ing this thread to say that, lol.

Though I wouldn't use it as any sort of accurate depiction of the Hellknights. Characters at multiple levels of the story question the reliability of Tyrcell, the primary source of information in the text; Tyrcell themselves is pretty open about making up dialogue for events they didn't personally witness, for example.

I can't really see much of an issue with it either. We've had basically the same functionality in PF2E with the shifting rune since the game's inception, and it's not upset anything.

I suppose that the solarian, under this paradigm, would be able to also swap their solar weapon's handedness, but ... eh?

And if you're concerned about the game being stretched by someone gaining access to a level 6 rune at level 1, don't forget that the champion's Blessing of the Devoted class feature grants them ability to apply a shifting rune to their own weapon starting at level 3.

Honestly my best guess as to why the solarian doesn't copy other weapons is more to do with damage types. The Starfriends may not have wanted the solarian to have access to the energy types SF2E weapons can utilize, and the vast majority of the melee weapons solarians would be using are in PF2E, which I could understand them not wanting to lean too hard on. Though their omition does feel extra strange considering solarians use the PF2E rune system in all but name.

Paizo's sourcebooks have a PDF file by chapter option for download. Hopefully that will be an option for the new AP hardcovers as well.

I'd be shocked if they didn't. File-per-chapter downloads are also available for the Pathfinder Adventures, which are single books.

Mangaholic13 wrote:

9) Oh, I just remembered: Weapon in Starfinder use upgrades rather than runes, unless the weapon is Archaic (i.e. from Pathfinder). You can still upgrade a weapons item bonus to attacks and bonus dice to damage, you just need to use a somewhat different upgrade system.

I would also mention the upgrade slots on weapons. I'm not entirely sure what those are equivalent to. But since you get them as early as level 0 items, they are at least faster to access than Weapon Property Runes.

Same goes for armor.

The upgrade system is equivalent to Pathfinder's. It is just given as a package rather than having to get two separate runes. The difference being that you can't create a +0 Major Striking weapon like you can in Pathfinder. The Starfinder upgrade system forces the typical PF2 rune progression.

The upgrades are a half-step between PF2E's runes, and firearm accessories from Guns & Gears. Some of them, particularly the hybrid magical/technological ones, act a lot like what we'd think of as runes, this is where you find the extra damage upgrades, for example, while many of the purely technological upgrades offer more utility and are often, but not always, lower level.

There's also the swappability to consider. PF2E's runes require a day to swap and transfer between weapons and armor, while SF2E's upgrades can be swapped with ten-twenty minutes of work.

My main guess is because Ricochet was originally more of a Destructo Disk-like attack, and dealt force damage rather than bludgeoning or slashing. They must have decided that force damage was too good for a cantrip to deal, given how infrequently it's resisted, so they changed it and forgot to have another look at where it would thematically fit.

According to Redrazors, the person who makes Pathbuilder, Starbuilder 2E's current estimated release window is some time this September. IIRC you can find more on their Patreon.

As has already been said, trying to directly port a character from 1E to 2E is a huge headache. I speak from experience that trying to help my players do such just results in a lot of friction on both our ends. If your GM wants to try PF2E, you're probably gonna have the most fun time trying to take it for what it is, and not try to put PF1E square pegs in the PF2E round hole. I'd recommend trying new characters, searching the game for something that appeals on its own merits, and playing from there.

I've had some moderate success converting characters when I ask myself what their absolute core gimmick or feature is. Sometimes it's in their mechanics, and sometimes it's in their high concept. Then I'll try to make a character in 2E that fits that specific thing as closely as possible.

My 3.5/PF1e dry lich cleric, Drybones Jones, wound up being an elemental sorcerer with the mummy archetype in PF2E, for example. His core thing was blasting people with gnarly spells, and hating water. I made him a sorcerer with the primal list, which has the most on-theme blasting spells, and asked a GM if I could convert the mummy's fire weakness to a water weakness, perhaps increasing that weakness because Water is a less frequent trait to put on damage than Fire. The Remaster has thrown a rench into that character concept because I don't know how to poach Harm anymore--Crossblooded Evolution works very differently now--though Drybones may work better as a mystic now, instead, or possibly an oracle. I'll have to revisit him sometime.

Soldier is a really interesting class. The way it plays is really simple, "make enemy save against big weapon, don't fall down," but it's got lots of interesting little complexities under the hood that I am appreciating more and more as I learn more about it.

Like the fact that, while it doesn't advertise it super strongly, a soldier is a great switch-hitter. Only your Primary Target feature requires that you use Dex to hit, so a strength soldier who mixes it up with a big melee and heavy ranged weapon is super viable.
Likewise, soldiers can kind of ignore weapon proficiency, I think? If I'm remembering correctly your DC with Area weapons isn't affected by your weapon proficiency, so soldiers can use all the advanced Area weapons and just be concerned about their Primary Target attack. I mean, I'd obviously prefer that they had some method of being proficient with those weapons and it's a bit weird they're not, but it's still cool that soldiers have that flexibility.

I think I might have accidentally helped given OP the impression that they weren't coming back, I made a big post about it a few weeks back.

Justnobodyfqwl wrote:

I think Greys are in a kinda awkward spot right now for Paizo. They're a very classic alien archetype, exactly as tropey and archetypical as Lashunta or Vesk. But in 1e, they kind of don't have any lore or culture. They're hardcore, explicitly leaning into the adventure they were made for, and their role as "spooky mysterious evil guys". That's already kinda limiting for roleplay in itself, but...

The adventure they're made to tie into...is NEVER going to be revisited by Paizo in ANY way whatsoever at all. A tropey throwback to genre fiction and schlock that just so happens to be entirely built around two simultaneous conspiracy theories that have had VERY RAPID cultural turnovers in perception.

So....what do you do with them now? The obvious answer is just "Idk, make new lore for them unrelated to Threefold Conspiracy, it's not like THEY'RE the part people have a problem with". But I think the fact that doing anything with a Grey would involve just making up a whole new ancestry... probably means they'll be on the backburner for a while.

And it's a shame! There are very few universal pop culture aliens the same way people will immediately understand an Elf or Dwarf, but Greys are one of them. They're honest to God cattle abducting, UFOs and Lasers, disappearing little big headed freaks. Who DOESNT want to play as one?

If I have to guess what'll happen to them, I think the current SF2E team really likes quirky and funny stuff. I think we'll probably see a reimagined Greys that leans into the idea that they're harmless and quirky, in a way that makes them seem off-putting and strange to Pact Worlds aliens. Maybe they have big eyes and abduct people because they're naturally inquisitive and curious, but don't know that studying people without speaking freaks out other aliens.

The point about quirky is well made, I think. Narrative Declaration had a grey as one of their PCs when they ran through "Junker's Delight" in SF1E.

His name was something like Ulioo--or something like it, I can't find it written down where I can read it--and he was a silly lil guy who flew into Pact Worlds space from a distant mothership to prep the solar system for invasion.

Then he landed his ship in a no-park zone, got it impounded, and adventures with the others to stump up the cash to pay off the fines.

He's a very silly and fun character, and I think something of a fan favorite. I could see the Starfriends trying to thread the needle of greys in that way; representing and playing up this cultural divide and friction between the greys who really only know their own society, and buy into their own hype, and the greys who communicate with other species and adjusting to the wider galaxy as something more than spooky pairs of eyes looking out of the dark.

Dash of Herbs (Rage of Elements pg. 34)

Dash of Herbs can grant new save attempts against diseases and poisons, similar to another kineticist impulse, torrent in Blood (Rage of Elements pg. 38), except that Dash of Herbs can potentially cause the affliction to worsen.

I think Dash of Herbs should have the same clause as Torrent in the Blood where "on a failed save, the condition doesn't worsen."

Not germane to the thread, but it always makes me smile when I randomly hop into a thread, see a post from PlantThings, and they're talking about plant things.

Are they going to keep the Adventure Path branding, I wonder? I mean, if they are releasing APs in a single volume then they are functionally similar to, if longer than, the Pathfinder Adventures line of modules.

I'd also be interested in finding out whether or not reptoids and grays are coming to SF2E. I've been looking forward to both. Grays because, well, I think grays are neat aesthetically, and my first and only SF1E character was a gray, and reptoids because I was looking forward to seeing how Paizo might try divorcing them from those antisemetic routes.

Also I like the apparent cultural trend of reptoids connecting more with their cover identities than their distant leaders, flipping the middle claw to whatever nebulous plans they have, and having wholesome families.

Presumably it'll be cheaper to ship one larger book than three to six smaller ones though.

I'm not sure how I feel. On the one hand, I like that an entire AP can be in one book, something that is much more doable with the new three-part format. On the other, it feels weird thinking of Paizo not having an AP releasing every month.

Why would you think this when the only reason to redo these books is to make substantial changes?

That's not actually true. The reason to redo these books is to get them into the ORC and out of the OGL. Changes are nice, yeah, but like everyone is saying, this isn't going to be like Player Core; they are still going to be constrained by the original book's page count and copyfit. Expect changes on the level of the gunslinger and inventor, not the oracle and witch. Whether or not you consider the gunslinger's changes substantial is up for personal interpretation, but that's about the level of alteration we can realistically expect from a book that is functionally a reprint rather than being compiled wholesale.

I'm super down for a chronomantic spell school.

Might I recommend Summon Irii as your 8th-rank Incarnate spell instead of Clockwork Devotion? Irii are beings expressly tied to the timestream, and it's also a rare spell, which makes it feel a bit more special.

Also, have you considered looking at SF2E's spells at all? Cantrips like Injury Echo would really fit a spell school like this; there are a few other time-based spells in SF2E's Player Core, though I can't think of them offhand.

Basically what the title says. Has anyone heard what happened to the solarian's Stellar Arrangement class feature and why it was removed? I mean, they seem powerful enough without it, and I know the former arrangement abilities are now feats, but I did like how they let you personalize your solarian a bit more and choose which aspect of the Cycle you enjoyed most.
I especially liked how they gave you things in the mid levels. Solarians don't really see any expansions to their core gimmick in the midgame and it makes their progression feel, not weak, but a little light on sauce, if that makes sense? Like most martial classes have some feature that shows up around levels 8-9, and sometimes another that shows up around levels 14-16, that expands their core feature a bit.

Player Core, p. 377, the Eldritch Bond and Wild Bond Epiphany Spells grant new unarmed attacks, and increase the damage dice of those attacks, but never increase the Tracking value of the attacks. This creates an odd situation where, to gain the full benefit of the spells a character needs to be wearing hardlight handwraps with maxed out Tracking upgrades but no damage dice-increasing upgrades.
(Admittedly, if they did have damage dice-increasing upgrades on it would still enhance the new unarmed attacks.)

I want to see an archetype that interacts with wands in a big way.

A maybe useful framing device: Alkenstar clockwork mechanisms are milled; Thassilonian clockwork mechanisms were something closer to 3-d printed (perhaps "grown?").

This is how I've tended to imagine it, too. Thassilonian clockworks were likely assembled via magical processes, while Alkenstari clockworks were constructed because magic was unreliable. That design philosophy is going to trickle into the finished products, with a much greater level of complexity allowed for in Thassilonian clockworks, I imagine.

I like the imagery of them looking almost grown especially. Cracking open a clockwork from Alkenstar probably looks super confusing and complicated, but still recognizably a machine. The mechanisms in a Thassilonian clockwork, in contrast, are probably packed in so tightly and with such intricacy that you could mistake the movement of gears and cogs for the rise and fall of living tissues.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

zimmerwald1915 wrote:

Spamotron wrote:

With the asterisk that Deities are influenced by their worshipers in some fashion.

For example Baba Yaga figured out how to ascend to godhood millennia ago but refuses to do it because she wants nothing to do with a worshiper connection.

Pretty sure that's just because she finds supplicants annoying at the best of times, and imagines/hypothesizes that prayers would be worse. Not because she's afraid of worshippers affecting her personality.

It's also part of Baba Yaga's style that if you come to her to make a bargain, if she vaguely approves of what you're after she will offer you what you want for a price that is fair from her perspective and astronomical from anybody else's (and if you pay it, she keeps her word). But having to do this for a very small number of people who have the temerity to ask Baba Yaga for something, and having to do it for a potentially unlimited number of worshipers is something entirely different.

Part of her likes rendering incredibly cruel vengeance on a party who has wronged someone who is paying her an exorbitant rate, and she'd be sad to give it up entirely. Like it's a core part of her role in folklore that "sometimes she helps."

Also, the people who approach her generally risk a lot just to do it. People that resourceful and/or desperate might actually be worth the trouble. If she ascends, people can bother her whenever they like. She's not obligated to respond to any of them, but the flood would be a pain to manage.

Besides, she's at a point where she can play on a basically divine level without being bound by those rules. Why surrender most of the freedom if you already have most of the power?

Insert Lex Luthor Quote, "Do you know how much power I would have to give up to be president?"

I've never really considered Arazni's arc to be a redemption story, mostly because I question just how much agency she had in a lot of the bad stuff that happened to her, and the bad stuff she consequently did as a result.