PossibleCabbage's page

The way an evil person will make "forced labor" for the imprisoned seem not like slavery is by paying them a (very low) wage. And of course, during the course of the imprisonment it would be unfair for the innocent to pay for their food and lodging, so they will need to pay for that somehow...

For whatever it's worth, the Spire of Nex is supposedly 1 mile tall (5280ft or 1.6 km).

Assuming we're measuring from the base of the building itself, and not relative to sea level or some such, it's hard to imagine another mortal made building approaching such a height.

Just given Nex's ego, if there's a taller structure on Golarion than the Spire of Nex, it has to have been constructed in the last 4000ish years. Nex would just figure out a way to make the tower taller if he caught wind of someone else getting that high.

I think the specific pivot with Cheliax is that the systems of oppression were supposed to be subtler than straight up "chattel slavery." Things like "debt bondage" and "prison labor" and "you're paid in scrip you can use at the company store and nowhere else" seem legitimate for Paizo to use to indicate "Cheliax is a bad place where the strong exploit the weak."

Like you could contextualize the gnome thing via "this is a work gang from a prison, they were imprisoned for things other than 'being a gnome', and they were sent to the prison designed for small people." This certainly isn't good, but modern societies split the hair between this sort of thing and "the kind of slavery we all agree is bad."

Like we know in the past that Paizo has tried to alternate "conventional" and "experimental" in their various adventures, and this dichotomy extends across multiple orthogonal dimensions (e.g. a dungeon crawl with an unconventional narrative vs. a sandbox with a conventional one.)

So it's entirely likely that Hellbreakers is more of a simple "heroes save their home against bad guys" story because it was time to do something like that.

Particularly if we're going to have two adventure paths in the same general region (Isger and Cheliax) in back-to-back APs, you want them to feel pretty different.

I think one potential recontextualization that would be helpful is to underline that a trophy doesn't need to be anything from the creature you defeated, it can be something that you used to defeat the creature. Like you're not going to be able to take literal trophies from oozes, but the dagger rendered unusable after your fight with a gray ooze would serve as one.

I think a large part of why they're hesitant to set adventures in Nidal is because of some of the really icky Hellraiser stuff from an edgier era of Pathfinder is sort of canonically true about Nidal. Like "torture" is called out as a thing not to portray on screen in the Pathfinder baseline and the Nidalese make an art and a(n) (un)holy pursuit of it.

They could try to fix this aspect of Nidalese culture in a storyline, but somehow I don't think we get a "kinder-gentler Zon-Kuthon" any time soon.

It really just feels like the issue was that the way resistance/weakness interacted with one or two damage types was always clear from the jump, and "there are four or more types of damage in play" was the edge case. Paizo didn't feel the need to clarify this back in the PF2 playtest, which they could have, since it's an edge case and as time went on and more content was published the edge cases got a lot more common.

It's sort of a "if you don't address a small issue, it might eventually become a big one" sort of thing.

I'm pretty sure that Asmodeus does not own every soul of someone who lives in Cheliax. Since "where does that soul go" is decided by Pharasma in the end. While Hell could send someone to argue that this genuinely kind and decent person who never hurt anybody and quietly worshiped Shelyn should end up in Hell, they're not likely to win that argument in a neutral court all that often especially if their argument depends on Hell's contract with a third party.

I would think that Asmodeus would be more interested in "bending Andoran towards tyranny" (as is common with democratic states in wartime) than "preserving any particular political situation in Cheliax."

Which is to say, he probably wins either way here, which is generally how "deals with the devil" go down. If Cheliax is thoroughly thrashed in war, he can just point to "you should have asked for more from Hell, our prices are reasonable."

Asmodeus has irons in significantly more fires than Cheliax. He's already guaranteed to receive the souls of much of the Chellish aristocracy, what else does he want from Cheliax honestly?

Like a bunch of nobles who explicitly worship Asmodeus is one thing, but every politician anywhere who bends towards tyranny is serving Asmodeus ultimately.

Pages 119, 121, 126, and 127: The monk feats granting qi spells can be taken multiple times. In Qi Spells, Advanced Qi Spells, Master Qi Spells, and Grandmaster Qi Spells, add the following Special line. “Special You can select this feat more than once, choosing a different spell each time.”

KermitFlailingArms.Gif

I can finally stop asking about this!

Ng is impossibly beautiful but wholly asexual, which is part of why Ng never shows their face because it would just make things awkward. This is based on eons of weird interactions.

I mean, Arazni might be the most flawed god a heroic character could possibly follow (she's not good and isn't even trying to be good, but you can be good and follow her just fine), and also someone whose problems are mostly due to Aroden.

Well, the thing about the Legacy and the Remaster is that those are still the same game. The difference is because due to copyright laws, there were books they needed to change some things about in order to be able to sell, and instead of just changing what they needed to they also changed some things they wanted to. I genuinely don't think there's a need for us to separate those things.

I think part of the reason you don't use Nidal much for "you do not want to visit here" is that a lot of the *reasons* you don't want to be in Nidal is stuff that doesn't really clear the Pathfinder Baseline for acceptable content. So I can see wanting to have a more PG-13 version of that available.

I think a reasonable pivot for Cheliax in the setting is to pivot it away from "evil expansionist empire" and more towards "totalitarian state that you don't want to be a citizen of" since part of the problem with Cheliax as the former is that they take a lot of Ls in the metanarrative since we don't actually want to tell stories about "the evil country annexes this other country."

I'm very curious how Ravounel ends up on the side of the "Good guys" (which they were always going to, they're one of the "do-gooder" nations despite the presence of Vyre) given their treaty obligations.

Cheliax should crush Andoran in a war they have about even sized populations and Cheliax can call whole armies of devils to supplement their army.

I think at least some people in Cheliax are well aware that if they marched into battle alongside the literal forces of Hell, that will draw a *lot* of people into the war on the side of "the people who aren't with the literal devils."

There are other people in Cheliax who are aware that Asmodeus will not commit his forces to the aid of Cheliax because of various divine détentes that prevent direct intervention(i.e. why Pharasma hasn't sent Psychopomps to turn Geb into a crater), but will dangle "infernal aid" in order to set the hooks in deeper. Going down that route involves paying a lot for a little, as is standard for "a deal with the devil."

One assumes that there's no bulk for "your basic clothing" just like there's no bulk for your hair, even if you have Marge Simpson hair. Bulk limits are calculated based on carrying stuff above the threshold of "the way you'd be normally."

You can see how the "fly speed at level 1" thing is totally about "potentially you can break the game if you're fighting something that doesn't have a ranged attack" in how Starfinder 2e doesn't worry about that, since everything in that game is designed to be able to fight at range.

If you're playing a Sprite, or Strix, or the right kind of Awakened Animal in a SF2 game you should absolutely get full-powered flight right out of the gate.

I mean, I agree insofar as it feels to me that the Slayer is the most unnecessary class we've added to PF2 at this point. There's nothing that you can do with it that I can't really do with another class- this genuinely could have been an archetype.

One thing about "it's just magical resonance that keeping an arrowhead from that one bandit leader gives you abilities" is that the Slayer genuinely doesn't read as a particularly magical class. If the thaumaturge was doing this, then that's one thing since the Thaumaturge is doing explicitly magical stuff all the time like "teleporting" and "shooting rays out of a wand" and "having an endlessly refilling chalice", but the Slayer seems like an entirely mundane sort of class with the exception that "keeping that one guy's gold earring gives you something."

Could we maybe expand on this idea to get a handle on it? Since if "I'm keeping trophies from my victims makes you more capable because it gets you more excited about fighting" that feels very different than if you have tapped into something magical.

I think just the phrasing of "I am taking trophies from defeated enemies" kind of squicks me out, even if you're just taking their belt buckles or whatever. Like it's not the sort of behavior that strikes me that a person who's not serial-killer coded would do.

I understand wanting to play a monster hunter, but do I have to be one that collects mementos? Like why is this the basic class theme?

Fur, hair, claws. I don't see why you ever need to be grisly if you don't want.

But still "I'm going to keep a lock of hair of the vampire I just killed" is disturbed behavior. The sidebar tries to make a distinction between monstrous things and humanoid things, but there's a lot of fun real estate in fantasy to play with the middle ground between "human" and "monstrous."

I guess it's possible that "I'm going to take parts from things I killed that serve no generally practical purpose" isn't really a fantasy I understand at all. Like I'd appreciate a way to play the class as like "I am an expert at killing monsters because I take detailed notes after every one I encounter."

Yeah, I don't ever worry about "checking big bads off the list" since you can always create another potential world-ending terror that the PCs would be hard pressed to put a stop to literally any time you want. I think there's more of a risk of "your looming threats never actually pay off" making the world feel less dynamic than it could.

While violence is more or less necessary in this game, taking trophies from one's enemies has the potential to feel pretty gross sometimes. A number of the things you have to kill are things that you might have had a conversation with at some point, after all. If I kill someone and take their magic boots, that's just expected, but if I start cutting off toes then I'm going to feel like a weirdo (in a bad way.)

It's okay to play a character who is simply a maniac that skins their victims or whatever, but what if I don't want to play that kind of character? It can't just be a "the slayer is a better choice for a campaign where you mostly fight monsters" since one of the things you absolutely want to slay is "vampires" who are nevertheless sapient creatures; dangerous predators who might need to be put down, but I don't want to cut bits off to keep around.

Look, if you die you can't feel any more pain. The point is to get you healthy so you can suffer even more.

Healing doesn't have to be painless, like if a Kuthite puts a cast on your broken leg, that thing is going to be *really* itchy.

To be honest, I'd rather have "a dedicated primal martial or gish" than a shifter. It could maybe do some shapeshifting stuff, but that's a fantasy I enjoy. Like the Warden was my favorite D&D4 class.

The solution seems to be "no one in this town is selling clockwork macuahuitls or o-yoroi armor today". These would have to be commission pieces and you wouldn't get base materials for free.

This does raise a question to me. What would happen if all the petitioners just went to the good aligned planes?

And let's ignore that Hell and other evils would probably start an even bigger cosmic fight to stop that. What happens to the universe if that starts to happen?
Like we're thinking in terms of reward and punishment, but Pharasma is probably just thinking "this soul matches the energy of this plane".

But if what if we didn't do that?

My theory is that if there's a major imbalance in terms of "how much quintessence is allotted to each plane" Pharasma has the nuclear option to divide souls into multiple different petitioners each matching the energy of different planes.

So if everybody in the universe started being a decent person, you would carve off those parts of them that represent those times they were thoughtless, cruel, tyrannical etc. and send those parts of them to the lower planes. It's certainly not idea, since Pharasma normally wants to respect the dignity of the individual in this process, but a lot of things are better than "the planar order collapses."

Really, I think the reason that "you can get a full power FoB at level 10 through archetyping" was so egregious is that the main reason to play a Monk in the first place is "flavor". That's not to say it's weak, the monk is broadly stronger than martials outside of the Core set for sure, but it is also a clearinghouse for tropes and chief among them is "due to my training, discipline, and hidden knowledge I can do things with my body that others would need weapons and armor for" and it sort of runs against that when the Fighter can punch better than you. All of the high level monk feats you can never get through archetyping aren't so amazing that they are the envy of other classes, after all.

The Spirit Warrior is its own specific kind of flavor, and shouldn't bother anybody, especially since it's somewhat fighterproofed.

One imagines though that the Naval theater still largely favors Andoran, who didn't suffer any similar setback and has basically oriented their economy around shipbuilding.

Of course "Andoran is a naval power" is the reason Cheliax would invest heavily in rebuilding their navy.

I think the reason to avoid giving a lore justification as to why PCs of flying ancestries are bad at flying is that the number of PCs from flying ancestries in the world at one time might be 0 and will only climb to one when a player chooses to play one and in that case the player and the GM can come up with their own justification specific to that person.

I feel like most martials don't make 3 attacks in a given round with any regularity anyway.

Like how often are you hitting at -10?

BotBrain wrote:

Same with Norgorbor's name. The fact that the secret ceased to be interesting or valuable was so very clever. No notes. 10/10.

Where was this reveled? What is it?

This was the plot of the Curtain Call AP (which is great fun).

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I think one of the reasons that the Remastered Magus is going in a new book instead of trying to somehow hammer Secrets of Magic into non-OGL form, is so you have space to print a bunch of new spells to replace ones we lost in the remaster.

Probably the true reason is that the SoM had so many OGL things on its pages (including many pages explaining the concept of schools inside of Golarion) that just doesn't worth to try to save its original layout. It's similar to what happened to the Divine Misteries due the high number of changes.

The classes remaster will simply benefit getting more freedom due this.

But also when they remastered the player core a lot of the spells that previously had spell attack rolls (which the Magus wants, but nobody else does) were changed to targeting saves (e.g. Acid Arrow targets AC-> Acid Grip targets reflex.) This was a positive change since Wizards, Druids, Clerics, etc. don't usually want to be targeting AC. My understanding was always "when they get around to remastering the magus, they will fill in some of those gaps they created in the Magus kit."

Like it makes sense to print the spells that use spell attack rolls alongside the class that wants to make those.

I think one of the reasons that the Remastered Magus is going in a new book instead of trying to somehow hammer Secrets of Magic into non-OGL form, is so you have space to print a bunch of new spells to replace ones we lost in the remaster.

The "why do orcs have evil gods" is mostly explained by how orcish apotheosis works by "risking your soul to challenge an existing Orc deity for their spot." So sometimes the baddest MFer in all of orcdom isn't very nice, and they end up becoming a God.

Why it works this way for Orcs and nobody else remains a mystery.

I think one of the things Pathfinder accomplishes is that when "evil" gods claim to be one of the first beings in existence or the progenitor of entire species, there's a good chance that they are lying about this in order to manipulate mortals. Like Lamashtu's thing with potential new Goblin gods is that she tries to kill them before they get powerful enough to convince Goblins en masse to practice a different religion; it's pretty clear she's lost control of the orcs culturally, if she ever had it in the first place.

I mean, the fact that Lamashtu's divine realm is in the Outer Rifts and that she was previously a Demon Lord means that you probably should limit how much of the benefit of the doubt you give her. Of all the beings who call an abyssal realm home, she might be one of the least objectionable but that's a very low bar to clear.

People in the setting might get bamboozled by a rosy interpretation of what Lamashtu is about, but we shouldn't. She would be very happy if you just went around maiming pretty people whereas "good" gods should always object to random violence.

I think that if I was going to play a psychic, I would want to avoid Tangible Dream since my initial amps available are Shield, Figment (for flanking), and Imaginary Weapon (for melee damage). This might be worth it eventually, but playing a character one crit away from dying with that set of tools seems rough.

Like people regularly avoid the Sorcerer bloodlines that have focus spells that require touch, right? I've seen people avoid the Demonic Bloodline because of Glutton's Jaws, after all. I see no reason that's not going to happen with the Psychic.

I mean, Asmodeus is kind of just an extreme example of how cultural conservatives IRL invest heavily in hierarchy as the organizing principle of society. We just happen to know from the omnisicent rulebook perspective that this sort of thing isn't natural or trustworthy- people in the diagesis don't have access to that frame of reference.

I think the fact of the matter is that a lot of your more objectionable gods simply don't have many followers. Pathfinder has never participated in "a god's power or stature is proportional to their mortal following" and the whole "core deity" idea is about prominence (i.e. people know who you are) not about followers.

Like nobody other than a maniac worships Rovagug, but he gets talked about in the faiths of Asmodeus, Abadar, Torag, Pharasma, Desna, etc. so everybody knows who he is.

Pathfinder does set up a number of "evil" gods that do have significant mortal followings, but there's more of a case for following Asmodeus, Zon Kuthon, or Norgorber than there is in following Cyth-V'sug or Trelmarixian who might have precisely zero mortal followers.

In the broadest sense the "High Seas" meta-region should be the area you access by "sailing outwards" from the Inner Sea so I would expect the book to focus entirely on the Arcadian and perhaps a bit of the Obari ocean. We're not likely to talk about any of the large land masses on the other side, but we might talk about some of the associated islands.

The development of especially large, primarily wooden ships intended for combat on Golarion was probably impeded by the presence of both gunpowder and wizards, but one wonders what kind of ships that major economic powers use to transport large amounts of trade goods, since "I'm going to haul grain, textiles, and oil across the ocean" is something that benefits greatly from economies of scale but you still need to survive all the depredations of pirates and various magical hazards.

The High Seas are not just "the open ocean and what's beneath" it's also "literally every relatively isolated island" which is sort of the broadest fantasy palette you can paint with. Like if you need to posit the existence of something somewhere on Golarion "put it on a remote island" is just about the most frictionless way to fit in *anything*.

I think the story Paizo is lurching towards is that the original Razmir is already dead, and was already replaced (perhaps several times) with another figurehead pretending to be him.

It's just tricky to tell that story now, since the old trope of "we will bring down this prominent figure by revealing a scandal" is sort of laughable in the modern era.

This is my third or fourth time asking for this:

For Player Core 2 please add to the feat Qi Spells (also Advanced, etc.) a section that reads "Special You can take this feat multiple times, choosing a different initial qi spell each time."

Other classes that have a "choose a focus spell" feat (e.g. Ranger, Cleric) have the option to take the feat more than once, so it's strange that the Monk lacks this particularly given this was not how it worked pre-Remaster (where Ki Rush and Ki Strike were just different feats.)

Considering that there are exactly three weapons with Brace, I don't think it's likely to get another pass from the developers. One of the purposes of highly situational traits, I feel, is it gets players who end up with those weapons to consider alternative combat strategies. If you don't have the weapon that has Brace, you might never think about readying a strike. In that way, the Nodachi is functional, it doesn't really matter that it's not the weapon that someone with access to every weapon would choose.

Weapon traits being very niche is just a thing. Like how often does Disarm or Razing come up? Sweep and Shove are nominally useful on paper but I've never seen them used to good effect.