Sibelius Eos Owm's page

Echoing Perpdepog here, the Outer Planes dont seem to have revealed any major lore changes, either from Godsrain (to my knowledge?) or the remaster, yet. Its possible they are still forthcoming, but speaking to the remaster changes, there doesnt need to be alignment for there to be a war between cosmic order and cosmic chaos, with dedicated realms for each. We had to lose a handful of old celestials and fiends, but we had enough in various different roles that there should still be no shortage. Its worth noting that while we lost inevitables as a category, the concept of mechanical guardians defending the walls of order persists in different forms.

Teridax wrote:

ScooterScoots wrote:

I bet that if I offered 10 string theorists unfamiliar with shakesphere 5% of their yearly income if they memorized and recited a few sonnets within the next couple days they'd do much better than 10 randos unfamiliar with shakesphere I pulled off the street. And even better if it was a comprehension task instead of pure memory.

You're most welcome to test that theory at your own expense.

No need, all you have to do is look at all the firms willing to pay a lot of money for physicists to do work that has very little to do with physics (and train them to do so), and compare that to how often they source talent by interviewing a random sample of the population, let alone attempting to train them.

Unfortunately what people believe anf want to be true is somewhat distinct from what is actually true. Is it likely that physicists are very smart? Certainly, if theyre any good at it. But this just means they're probably going to be better at picking up other numbers related skills, not necessarily that they're innately good at any skills

A thought I've been having with Attributes: If we're going to keep them, I would like them not to be directly tied to primary combat stats anymore. If hitting things with a sword keys off your Strength and hitting things with a fireball keys off Intelligence, then any attempt to engaging with arguably the most sizable gameplay loop is asking that you make those numbers the highest, regardless what else you do.

As it stands, it doesn't mean anything if I want my character to be "the Big Guy" when her strength stat is exactly the same as everyone else--and conversely, if I want to make a Fighter who is cunning and agile, I have to choose if its worth it to lose all that damage for intelligence.

If I don't need a +3/+4 to be maximally effective in combat, then it can be a more meaningful trade-off whether I choose to be big and tough or subtle and charismatic. Being big could still make you innately better at throwing your foes around the room while being smart makes you innately better at most knowledge-based skills, and you could do a Fighter who is either without it ruining your main combat effectiveness

Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:

Gortle wrote:

Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not.

Gentle reminder that Pick a Lock is still a trained-only skill.

It is pretty common for people to make simple logic mistakes. Less so when directly quoting text.

I think it was very obvious I was aware it was a trained skill.

Ach, for some reason I misread 'ability' in the general sense of your character's capabilities, and not the much more obvious game mechanical 'ability/attribute score' sense. In that case, yes, it was obvious you were assuming two equally trained characters... I remain unconvinced that the distinction between a high and low attribute is meaningfully threatened by greater implementation of fail-forward mechanics (even accounting for needing to repair one of your picks), but I'll not rehash that bit.

I appreciate that you don't want (simple) failure to be eliminated, but I suspect I must have missed where any of the recommendations here or in the Fail Forward entry in the GM Core suggest that this was ever in consideration. The most stringent advocate for Fail Forward here doesn't seem to want to eliminate failure--not even simple failure. It's clear that some adventures would profit from thinking of success/failure not as 'did the thing happen' but 'how badly did doing the thing go?' and also that a well-written adventure may include both those types of check and the type where failure merely remind or enlightens you about other ways into the building that you might not have believed possible.

On this we seem largely to agree, failure should not be eliminated.

--

On that note, I do think that exponential backoff can be an excellent solution to checks where there logically must be an obstacle but which would generate nigh-meaningless rerolls until it was gone. And it's easy to explain why in the lockpick example the second check might take longer than the first--each failure jams or damages the mechanism just enough (or even set off an internal protection) that the job just got more complicated (if not more difficult) and time consuming to pull off.

I wonder if there are other checks which could benefit from this? Treat Wounds already does to an extent (lockout for 1 hour instead of takes 1 hour, but it doesn't seem productive to escalate beyond that).

Tridus wrote:

That's still a generic rule that can fit in the rulebook, except it's now one check that advances the narrative immediately in one way or another unless it's literally a lock to an empty room.

A couple of issues here.

Often the difference between Success and Failure just doesn't matter. There are many situations where time is not important. So as a generic rule it is problematic.

You are, of course, correct, however this issue was not introduced in Tridus' example. In the case of no time pressure and a locked door which will eventually open, it doesn't really matter if a Fail result means "it takes you longer to open the door" or just "cross your fingers and roll the die again". If Tridus' version is doing anything, it's reducing the number of times you need to roll the d20 before you're allowed to continue.

Now, keying the result of Pick a Lock to a time penalty isn't the version I would personally advocate for, but it's no worse than what we have and if nothing else, it at least creates a concrete unit of time rather than a random number of rounds. If you have to gauge how long before guards show up, it's simpler to weigh the difference between two windows (say, 3 rounds on success, 1 minute on failure) than to pick an arbitrary number of rounds and wait to see if they will fail enough times to hit the number.

Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not. So suddenly the wizard can become good enough at wrestling and the cleric at lock picking. What is the difference between a +2 and a +4 in this scenario? Are stats really that important anymore?

Gentle reminder that Pick a Lock is still a trained-only skill. There is no particular reason why a cleric of Lao Shu Po should be much less capable of cracking a locked door than a rogue, save for differences in manual dexterity given that both would be skilled in the task. The difference between +2 and +4 in this scenario is negligible without time pressure, which is already how it is.

Further, this line of thinking continues to ignore the fundamental premise of Fail Forward by assuming it would cause a fail result to become identical to a success, and even somehow imagining that it would necessarily apply to every roll made, or less, a majority (wrestling?).

If offering interesting consequences for a failed roll is "spoon-feeding", perhaps I should wonder what we're doing with all these soup bowls? Fail Forward is a useful tool for situations where "You fail, nothing happens" and there's no damage to be done to the game by employing it where it suits.

There is nothing particularly unique about a game where "you fail, nothing happens... try again?" grinds play to a halt. Why be afraid to let failure carry consequences which don't stop play sometimes? Please understand that, Fail Forward does not say "you failed, I guess I have to open the door for you anyway so you don't have to find a different path forward", it says "sometimes failure can be made more interesting if something happens, including but not limited to, succeeding with meaningful consequences, finding a clue about a different path forward, or even just the situation changing in a way that renders this course of action untenable, do something else."

Fail Forward in discussions often gets mistaken for "the party can't fail" or even "failure has no consequences" but in my experience other TTRPGs, the main purpose of Fail Forward is to build appropriate consequences into failure that might not otherwise exist.

Not every locked door needs to embrace Fail Forward--some can just be locked doors that aren't directly relevant to the plot. If you fail the roll, the door doesn't open and you just have to try again or do something else. But if we were to consider an example that embraces consequences for failure, perhaps what happens on a "failure" is that our thief does manage to trip the lock, but with a hideously loud thunk that immediately alerts the guards around the corner. Had our intrepid picklock succeeded, perhaps they would have handled the lock more deftly and prevented the noise.

It may seem strange to some that our picklock 'failed' a skill test to unlock the door, but still succeeded in getting it open. On the other hand, while PF2e now has up to 4 degrees of success, it's a bit weird that most rolls are still harshly binary in the success/failure. Fail Forward takes a failed roll that would otherwise have nothing interesting come of it and offers the suggestion of a partial success--the results when you were just good enough to succeed at part of the task (getting through the door) but not enough to get away with it clean (slipping the latch and causing a noise)

A common principle in games that use Fail Forward (and which I have seen cropping up in PF spaces) is that a roll where failure wouldn't be interesting shouldn't be a roll at all. If the party needs to pass a check to succeed, then either the GM (or the adventure design) needs something interesting to happen on failure besides "try again" (and let's be real, a token amount of damage isn't interesting) or the party should just bypass the obstacle without a roll--or even the obstacle shouldn't be there in the first place.

The main function of Fail Forward isn't to coddle the party against the chance that they might not get what they want, it's to prevent scenarios where the game grinds to a halt because there's already no consequences for failure except rolling the dice until the numbers agree to let the adventure continue.

It's not always easy to come up with good Fail Forward scenarios, but personally I'm a big fan of "you only get some of what you wanted," and, "you get what you wanted, but with consequences." Sometimes this "partial success" can show a character's skill investment better than binary pass/failure. A binary pass/fail may need a specialist just to get through the obstacle, but with partial success it might be that anybody can get through, while only the specialist can get through without encountering a hitch.

The main thing which seems to separate Beasts from Animals is that the former tend to be already sapient, with intelligence attributes of at least -3 (maybe theres a -4 out there) well up to typical human intelligence. In other words, they wouldnt need to be awakened, however if one wanted to hack out a way to play a beast character concept they had (playing as a Carbuncle, for example?) then it seems like a good place to start. It would probably take some amount of homebrew though, since it would be strange for a beast to gain the ability to be treated as an animal when it wants when it never was an animal to begin with.

Much though I have enjoyed OwlCat's kingmaker, it's also clear to me that there are a few places where their approach to Golarion's lore has leaned more toward relying on first assumptions rather than the actual meat of Golarion lore. Most offensive to me was depicting Shelyn (or at least her followers in good standing) as petty and shallow and more than a little bloody-minded.

Calling Desna a moon goddess is not as flagrant an oversight as that, but I still consider it largely an error that slipped in while glossing over the richness and nuance of the lore (excepting of course in the case of those cultures where Desna is treated as a designated lunar deity)

I associate Desna with the stars and night sky, and the moon is in the night sky but I dont think of her as the moon goddess in the same way Sarenrae is the sun goddess. Theres too much more going on there for "moon goddess" to encapsulate it. The most clear moon goddess probably would have been the one that died in Earthfall (Amaznen?)

I'm not particularly concerned that Resist All has become Resist Any. I did rather like it better as "All" but knowing that ghosts were not designed with the assumption of their resistance knocking the wind out of multi-type attacks, it doesn't bother me that much. As long as Foundry automates it, I won't even think about it again.

That said, I do feel like Resist All should apply to the total damage of the attack, not to only one chosen damage type. It just seems a little messy and unclean to have to pick a specific damage type to resist when you could have resisted any of them individually. I don't like that, round to round, a ghost might be resistant to either the fire or the slashing damage of a flaming sword, depending which is more useful to resist this round. The ghost should simply resist all of the attack up to the limit. Since at this point, weakness is already applied, it's not usually going to matter which damage type gets 0'd first, and if it does you can edge case.

Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:

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.

** spoiler omitted **

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.

Amusingly, I was referencing the first book in that AP in my previous post, but since most of my reading on that AP has been localized to The Dead Roads, I forgot how the events mentioned applied to the other things I was thinking XD

The text of most resurrection magic puts specific time limits on bringing someone back, proportional to the power of the magic. Planar Adventures also states:

Planar Adventures pg.66 wrote:

In her capacity as the goddess of fate, Pharasma knows which souls are and aren’t done with life, including those destined to be called back to the Material Plane via magic. These souls are not judged or transformed into petitioners. Rather, they’re left to wait in the Boneyard until resurrected and allowed to progress toward their true deaths.

So there's just a crowd of…I guess Phantoms would be the appropriate stage?…hanging around the Boneyard.

This would not be that strange, there's possibly thousands of pre-judgement souls wandering the Boneyard at any given time, most of them without even a particular cause like impending resurrection. That they are specifically held aside doesn't necessarily mean that the souls awaiting judgement are getting judged any faster--it's heavily implied that it can take decades to centuries to get judged for some souls. And then again for others, it can take no time at all, which is what makes it worth having those awaiting resurrection kept out of line.

I guess a more cohesive system would be to link the rankings of resurrection magic to the stages of the afterlife, rather than arbitrary time limits. It takes a 5th Rank ritual to bring someone back from the Etherial/River of Souls, 7th from Pharasma's Court, 8th once they're a Shade, 9th once they've ascended to another Outsider status, and 10th if their outsider form has dissipated.

While there is a certain poetic simplicity to this, I feel like it might only be the way we have it now, but with extra steps. This requires us either to nail down exactly how long it takes to go through each stage of judgement (say, 1 year for the River, a decade in the Boneyard, etc) which we've already seen contradicts the intentionally variable nature of the afterlife and is not meaningfully different from the arbitrary limits we already have, or they're purely GM fiat, in which case it's just a second way the GM declares a soul impossible to resurrect.

Besides which, the only meaningful stages you've listed are being in the Ether and being in the Boneyard--currently, being judged and becoming a shade is intended to be a hard limit on a soul's resurrection, because they enter a fundamentally new existence no longer metaphysically tied to their mortal life. I'm sure we could come up with additional stages, but again that's just trying to nailing down the ocean when the fluid and inconstant nature of the afterlife is a feature, not a bug.

...

As for how it interacts with the Age of Lost Omens, probably the same as everything else--with margin for error. While it's in Pharasma's nature to have knowledge of life and death, and to know which souls are destined to be resurrected and which not (as a sense subtly distinct from prophecy, same as a person might know it should rain today by seeing dark clouds, even without receiving a weather forecast) I'd bet that in all the resurrections that happen across the Universe, there's probably at least a few that should have happened, but never do because the predicted conditions that should have allowed them to come to pass simply don't.

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.

Surely the most obvious answer to "this legacy creature needs to be weak to sanctified damage" is that its not immune to spirit? It wouldn't be the first construct thats not immune to spirit, and narratively if it had a weakness to Good damage in the pre-master, it makes sense it might have enough spiritual aspect to be worth attacking.

--

As for this hypothetical, while it feels strange that a spirit immune creature should take a holy weakness from a spirit attack, I have to admit if I imagine holy as akin to silver, it does seem strange that one material rider can hurt a target by touch but another wouldn't, just because its immaterial. Perhaps these two *shouldn't* act analogously to one another but that seems to be the only guidance we have.

Speaking personally, tube is an excellent shape for a fox to be

'Course not, I'm wearing my handwraps, ain't I?

I feel like there's potential for a nice middle ground between "My level 1-4 filled out all the types of trophy I'm going to need until 16+" and "I just levelled up, so I need a full suite of new trophies to remain relevant."

For one, making larger, broader tiers might be an option so that the 'tier' of your trophy matters enough to keep you hunting for better trophies but also make it so that they don't do the magic item thing of being unreliable or useless two levels after you outgrow them.

Just drawing numbers out of a hat, what if a monster that's level 8-14 allowed you to create a "master trophy" and likewise 15+ offers you a "legendary trophy". Or, to make it even more intuitive, you gain access to a class feature at 7 and 15 that allows the creation of master and legendary trophies respectively. Since you'd already need to hunt an equal or higher level foe, it pre-bakes the need for higher level foes into these new trophies' requirements.

(sure, it could also create a scenario where suddenly at these levels a Slayer might be motivated to dump their trophy case and go off into the woods to find 5-8 specific monsters, but the class as written already has that as a level 1 motive, this just recreates it)

... Meanwhile I don't think the difference of power would be too great. Enough to add a slight edge or other quality of life tidbit, but not enough that your old trophies feel bad to use until you get a chance to go hunting again.

(Of course this comes with a downside that every signature and secondary tool would need to come with some way to improve over 3 tiers of trophy, which might be a lot of page space and design to toss in unless it was something simple with purely numerical bonuses)

So you'd prefer the class be named Buffy Van Hellsing Bloodborne Witcher?

How did you guess the name of my OC do not steal Slayer character? /silly

Yeah, back in 3.5e i had locked hard on the idea of the Ranger as being the martial nature class for the Druid as Paladin was the martial deity class for the cleric. It really wasnt hard to compare the two especially because of how their got their respective divine spells.

It was coming into Pathfinder that it clicked for me that the Ranger was more suitable as a "hunter" type character with nature themed abilities largely because thats where they did most of their hunting, with a separate option for building a Ranger who did most of their hunting in urban environments.

My preference would be to acknowledge that Ranger is a hunter of anything anywhere anytime, and whom can suit either a woodsy, urban, or entirely other vibe beyond the one with the bow in the forest. We can do that, certainly, but the support does rather weaken outside of that environemnt.

Even so, while narratively I see considerable overlap in the aesthetic of the Ranger-hunter and thr Slayer-hunter themes, I dont know that they would necessarily be the same class if not for this. Perhaps the trophy hunting mechanic could have been folded into an archetype, but I don't know if it would have come out all that functional

For my money, without making up rules justifications, the wisp damage being bundled into the strike is the simplest and most consistent. If we need a narrative justification, since the wisp only adds damage to Strikes (and doesn't just trigger on anything) we could augment the narrative with the idea that the flame wisp wraps itself into the strike or otherwise uses the strike as a bridge to connect to the foe. Its just a ball of fire, not a creature, anyway.

Why do I get the feeling that if this thread goes on long enough, where going to see a "softer side" of Zon from Paizo?

It wouldn't be without precedent. Zon Kuthon was already one of the few evil deities who didnt lose their non-evil clerics in the shift to 2e, and furthermore doesn't require unholy sanctification. It would not be so strange to catch a lighter shade of grey from a god who has a complicated relationship with his love goddess sister.

That said, with Zon-Shelyn in Starfinder, I don't know that the writers would be that interested in just telling the same in Pathfinder. Still possible, but if anything we're more likely to see that Zon is evil with depth and facets rather than just not actually all that evil.

My take from various myths is that in the beginning there was the Maelstrom and the Seal. Either immediately after or simultaneously, Pharasma steps into this reality from her own (there is a suggestion that Pharasma may have been riding the Seal through the inter-cosmic medium even before this, but for now let's start our story with the currently existing features of this reality). The text is not explicit, but I believe that at this point there is a hollow void in the centre of this reality that is/will become the Universe, and outside of this whole reality lies Yoggy. In this void (but not Void) drift a bunch of outer gods.

Now, despite the fact that the Maelstrom is the first plane in this reality, I do believe that the Abyss is older--but it's not in this reality yet until the rifts open up. Probably during the same sequence where the rest of the outer planes are manifesting. In this way it can be technically the oldest (and biggest) plane, but wasnt actually present on Day 1 of the multiverse because it hadnt properly breached in yet.

Then the last of the outer sphere planes to exist is probably the Boneyard, since it seems like the growth of the spire was the last step in pharamsa's walk.

Then at some point the gods turned the hollow at the centre of thd cosmos, playtest the First World, and finally create the version of thd Universe as we know it by coalescing stars out of space dust and linking them to Creation's Forge and eventually opening the font of souls to flow though it.

(Incidentally, nothing that I know suggests when or how the rest of thd Inner planes come into being, so its entirely possible we just have to assume the energy and elemental planes just happened at some point, either as an unremarked feature of thd early cosmos or as a discreet but unimportant stage of sorting the rest of the Universe out.)

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 first instinct is that this would not go well, although it's an open question for what specific reason.

I mean, of course, there's no reason we couldn't decide it should work, it's all fantasy metaphysics so any sufficiently crafted explanation can create any justification--but also it just feels like the setting is deeper and more robust if there are layers of reasons why the way things are the way they are.

So proposed reasons why it doesn't work:

First thing that came to mind is that unbalancing Heaven and Hell (well, Heaven/Nirvana/Elysium vs. Hell/Abbadon) would fundamentally destabilize the cosmos. Even as Heaven grows with the influx of souls, Hell weakens to the point that it collapses, tearing a hole in the cosmos. Basically it's "What if you diverted all power to only one side of a shield that needs to be omnidirectional" - it cracks at the weakest point.

But then, let's handwave the process and assume that the holy planes grow instantaneously or at least at a fast enough pace to reach a new stable state.

In this case, I would propose that there's a reason that like-souls go to like-planes, and it's not just because that was the sorting plan agreed on in the beginning. Leaving aside the probable social/political conflicts of evil souls flood into Heaven, if the planes are fundamentally made of the same soul-stuff, it seems likely that a bunch of evil quintessence flooding into a place made of good quintessence would destabilize the whole environment. I bet good and evil quintessence don't mix very naturally, so the plane itself might be torn asunder, and even if that didn't happen, as these shades break down over time, the ratio of quintessence would inevitably reach a new, tepid equilibrium. Heaven would cease being a good-aligned plane and become an unaligned plane.

Now, we don't actually have any specific reason to believe that one giant neutral plane can't keep the universe going just as well as a diverse panoply of differently aligned planes, but that strikes me as both realistic and satisfying to assert. Plus, with only one giant neutral plane left, all divine forces suddenly become neighbours, and the War in Heaven was already destructive the first time the gods had an ideological smack-down across the multiverse back when they had different strongholds to retreat to. It doesn't seem like this time would be different.

I'll be honest, I suspect that the idea that a shade doesn't remember any of its former life and is functionally a different person is relatively esoteric knowledge. I don't know that we have evidence that the common person on the street, or even most aristocracy are ever fully aware. If a typical priest/cleric or theologian knows about it, I still wouldn't expect it to be a part of any church service or teaching. Not even out of attempting to hide this information.

It just seems like a finer point of the transmigration of souls that isn't wouldn't make it into the basic curriculum I expect of most faiths--that being "Do good and go to Heaven, do evil and go to Hell, now in more practical matters here's a bunch of parables and teachings about how to live a good life according to the teachings of our god/dess(es) because the application is the real tricky part here" (or maybe do X if this faith isn't as interested in the rewards of a good life, or is otherwise invested in you not thinking about what the kind of life you've been leading earns)

Albeit, I actually do really like the idea of some evil faiths tempting mortals with the idea that it's not even 'them' who is going to be around to be tormented in Hell, so why not live it up now? Although that strikes me as closest to Urgathoa's line of reasoning when her bag is not ever going through judgment in the first place.

Asmodeans might, though I feel like they might want to give you your own illusions about the rewards of 'good' behaviour in terms of obedience to Asmo than tempting you into wantonness. They want you to believe that you're totally going to be important enough in the hierarchy of Hell to attain a middle management position if you are well enough behaved in the here and now.

Absolutely, Raven Black and Perpdepog. Healthy, happy people do not typically willingly worship evil gods without some angle. Somebody could be driven toward it, but the same things that might drive them into it are also the things that drive them toward an ignominious death. I really like the idea of Rovagug's presence being toxic on a level akin to heavy metal poisoning. "It makes you insane and being insane is the same thing as being evil" is dull and tired, but "it poisons your mind toward destructive impulses" has a kernel of something more interesting.

It would certainly agree with the situation in Gormuz back in the day. But Gormuz is also an example of the way these things go--it was already a thriving community of Sarenites, and the introduction of Rovagug worship would have spelled decay into collapse even if Sarenrae never smote it.

Of course, meanwhile for most of the other traditionally 'evil' gods, I don't expect you generally see entire societies worshipping them on a basis of their values. As discussed, Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon have functional monopolies on a couple regions, whether the people want them or not. Meanwhile, I expect Urgathoa worshippers aren't the type who were turning up to church because of the community--they are probably already in positions of enough status and entitlement that they don't mind joining a secret society dedicated to their own hedonistic pleasure at the expense of others.

It seems clear that not every god is worshipped in the same ways across the board. Even the same god might have a different kind of faith from one region to the next.

Meant to drop in this thread much earlier. I used to struggle with the idea of people following Objectively Evil Gods and their role in the setting, but real life events have made me much less optimistic. Don't get me wrong--I am very much here for a conversation about, "What if the evil gods as we knew them just had bad publicity?" and/or, "Let's imagine a version of this evil god that sounds totally reasonable on paper, even if they're less than amicable." But for me the question of whether it's realistic that people might follow a blatantly evil entity, often despite the complete lack of any tangible reward toward themselves is no question at all.

BUT I'm not here to stray into IRL examples (both macro and micro). I think first and foremost, this question overestimates how much the average person on Golarion knows about world religions. You know and I know that Asomodeus is an objectively evil entity that wants all life to be subservient to his will, and for church-goers in most regions that's probably as much as they know about him, too... but those people aren't the ones who tend to become Asmodeus worshippers, either.

To the people of Cheliax, Asmodeus isn't Pure Evil Incarnate, he's the only thing standing between you and the chaos and uncertainty of the world. In his world, everyone has a place, and it's better to be in that place than at the mercy of the cruelty that lies outside his care. And that's if you even had a choice--whether your believe Asmodeus will reward you or not is irrelevant if you're caught not paying enough lipservice.

Then, for the ambitious, Asmodeus' church is full of places for people willing to stab their fellow in the back for personal gain. Having just enough personal power to have somebody to look down on is a popular foible of middle management, and I imagine Asmodeus' church is no less. I feel like Asmodeus' clergy is full of people who believe that will be the exception while pain and punishment is doled out to their lessers, and I don't think the church offers many opportunities to confront these assumptions.

--

That said, there are also places I just don't buy the evil god cult. I dislike 'insane' cultists of every stripe--I far prefer rational people who have convinced themselves into heinous, possibly even irrational positions because they can't or won't acknowledge the disconnect. For this reason, I don't really acknowledge things like cults of Rovagug. I maybe allow for laity who invoke its name for power and call on its aid to help destroy their enemies, but a Rovagug worshipper to me is an inherently anomalous creature, created from exceptional circumstances and doomed to burn itself out in short order.

And of course for that matter, even as far back at 3.5e I've never been a fan of reading up a monster entry and finding out that they actually have their own bespoke evil god separate from the main list of deities in the setting. On the one hand, it seemed strange that humans had like 10 gods and each other species had one to themselves, but also why shouldn't Maglubiyet or Blibdoolpoolp not also be listed with the others? This of course is a pattern Paizo has done a lot to walk away from in fleshing out both the 'monster' ancestries and the gods they worship. We know for example that to the kholo, Lamashtu is a feared and respected goddess who is typically only turned to for aid in hard times--someone to propitiate, but not the default example that all kholo venerate.

Kalaam wrote:

I meant you can do relatively big changes to the magus without upsetting the hybrid studies that's been released. I didn't need to touch them much in my changes. At worst it can be 2 lines of errata.

And they could easily release an errata alongside the book to update the hybrid studies from other books as well. It happened before with the deity statblocks and Divine Mysteries, so it could happen here as well.

While this is true, I feel like these are two very different kinds of 'bonus material' - publishing a supplement that includes a dozen extra deities (or minor changes to niche deities) doesn't really break anything for the people who don't have those web supplements, and producing it is only a matter of taking what material that couldn't fit in the book and making it into a pdf. On the other hand, changing the way a class works enough that recently published material is already out of date and doesn't work with the new version anymore is asking every one who bought those books to both know about and find online errata in order to continue playing their content.

It's by no means impossible, and not technically much different from regular errata (although we know regular errata is a whole process on its own), but I don't think we should expect one thing because a different, much less fraught thing was done before.

In the same way we can survive the basic environmental effects of the Universe but not breathe underwater, I would expect that the "basic environment" of the outer sphere is mostly not places without oxygen. Elemental Water is not an outer sphere plane, and I would assume the outer sphere otherwise has enough diversity that each of its planes has both more and less hospitable environments, such that any outsider can survive there as its home habitat, but may not be immune to every potential danger.

Like I said earlier, if you decouple accuracy from stats but leave them in for most other purposes, you've already done most of the job people seem to think removing stats achieves.

I don't think quite everyone understood what you were saying, but this also happened to be my first thought. The accuracy of attacks and spells is kind of a hard line in this game where using attacks and spells to reduce enemy HP to zero is the number one bread and butter tool of engagement in combats.

It seems like it could be a lot more interesting if a Fighter had the choice between being naturally super charismatic or being incredibly strong without that affecting their core combat competency. One might argue that this is just one step removed from deleting attributes entirely and only using skill training, but I think maybe there are plenty of people who would agree that "My character is super charming, and thus has a flat bonus to all social skills before accounting for her Intimidation specialty" could yet still be a desirable mechanical expression.

... Of course, this idea would probably want to add at least +1 skill for Strength, since at that point, the only reason to max Strength would be to further bump your grappling/tripping abilities. And Constitution as a stat is gone entirely unless we keep Save attributes (which is just accuracy from the other end unless saves changed to be only about resisting conditions etc)

I've gone on record a couple times now, but marut regeneration was one of the things that convinced me that alignment damage didn't belong in the game. I love the image of the nigh-invulnerable arbiter of inevitability that cannot be slowed or stopped except by it's pure antithesis... but it seriously harshes my vibe that it means that stopping this creature is a matter of character creation choices or running to the corner store to grab a niche bomb type. To me it's like a monster that can only be defeated by the Heat Metal spell. There's no counterplay, there's just already happening to have the right answer, or going to buy something that only exists for this purpose.

Anyway, I love our new holy/unholy and I'm a little sad we're probably never going to see a remastered marut. It might be cool to see if they would have just thrown in a stock regeneration defeat, or if they would have created a custom weakness that players could attempt to pull off in play.

Secrets of Magic pg. 21 wrote:

For much of my career-though it must seem like ancient history to readers of this almanac-practitioners disputed whether summoned monsters were created facsimiles that lacked true life of their own, or whether they were being drawn from somewhere else: an alternate dimension, or a unique potentiality housing the thoughtforms representing the idealized concept of a creature. Though this debate is now settled, and modern scholars agree that summoning creates facsimiles, it illustrates the stakes: are the conjurer's inventions truly real, or is it only hubris that makes them imagine so?

But I think it is an important note to add that this is Secrets of Magic, a legacy book, that is about to be replaced with Impossible Magic, the book of this subject. And as far as I know, this isn't mentioned in any Core or Lost Omens books, unless it was mentioned in some Adventure or Adventure Path. So this is a case that it is canon until proven non-canon, but given that this was a treatise on Conjuration as a spell school, a concept that was scrapped in the remaster, there is a real chance these concepts could be retconned and replaced with another explanation with the release of Impossible Magic.

Yes, I am aware of the way Summon spells worked in the remaster, but at the timebthat book was written, Animated Dead was neither a conjugation spell, nor a spell that had "Summon" in its name. It would not be remotely surprising if it was assumed to follow the same guidelines, but it does little to confirm that the yet new Create Thrall cantrip also works that way. Its possible, and even likely, but this assumption relies on a somewhat infirm bed of speculation, especially to be basing further opinions of yet unpublished lore on.

And of course, your advice to hold assumptions with a grain of salt is wise, especially as new books often introduce lore that fills in the corners of the map with exceptions to rules as we knew them because we mistakenly assumed those rules to be more universal than general.

The playtest Necromancer was already weird with the lore, given the "undead" that it conjures never had enough of a soul to count as actual undead in the setting (so that followers of Pharasma and most of the Holy deities don't automatically kill on sight) and they're not using any matter that was formerly alive (because its necessary to be able to create thralls anywhere for the class to function, even if you don't have any bodies to do it from). This is the diet coke of necromancy in class form.

True, but imho, Necro being able to create thralls in the same way as the existing Summon Undead (formerly Animate Dead) spell is a lot less of a jarring adjustment to the lore than the idea that you could animate corpses with vitality just as easily or effectively as with void. One side is, "I understand that bookkeeping corpses to use my main class feature is tedious, so we don't ask" and the other side is "Why would anyone have invented using spooky void magic to animate the dead when you could do it using only clean-burning energy?".

If the lack of a corpse bothered me, I would carry around bundles of bone fragments and/or organs to serve as the 'anchor' for the magic to build the superweak thrall body around. That to me would probably be consistent enough with any other example of undead 'healing' to get a pass. (Spirits of course could be drawn from the Ethereal plane at any time, or perhaps from lingering fragments too weak to start a haunt themselves)

Although...

never had enough of a soul to count as actual undead in the setting (so that followers of Pharasma and most of the Holy deities don't automatically kill on sight)

Curious, was this ever confirmed? I know many speculated that Pharasma et al might be chill with thralls, and that this may well be a reason why (I was in the trenches myself at the time) but to my knowledge it remains purely in the field of speculation. Besides which, given that existing fully-formed skeletons barely have enough of a connection to a soul to bother mentioning, I would hardly disqualify thralls on that basis, either.

Will the Necromancer class feature options similar to the Hallowed Necromancer archetype (aka focusing more on eradicating undead and manipulating both positive and negative energies instead of having the ability to create undead)?

I don't know if you're aware of the shape of the class during the playtest, but I would wager it unlikely? The Impossible Necromancer is a class about mastery over life and death, but seems to be much less styled after the "wielder of life and death energy who can also conjure undead" concept of that word and much more "conjurer of undead thralls to overwhelm foes who can also wield life and death energy on the side".

I can't say it's impossible (heh) for there to be a version of the IM Necromancer that only focuses on hallowed necromancy and never conjures undead, but it does seem rather the opposite of what the core of the class is about, and if they don't conjure undead they would have to slap in some kind of sacred corpse art where they can create minions out of vitality energy and corpses instead of using void or just resurrecting them...

It would be weird on the lore, is all I'm saying.

- Shifter? that's the only class I can think of...

Pff, too bad iconics tend to be iconic about showing off their class fantasy rather than ironic. A plant being representing the class that transforms into animals and/or monsters might not be at the top of the list of options, but it would be pretty hilarious.

I suspect one of the reasons we see more stream updates is that, even leaving modern engagement factors alone, for many types of reveal its just simpler to drop somebody in front of a camera for an hour or two with Maya and have xe ask them questions than it is to have that same person take likely the same or greater number of hours writing and editing a blog post. Especially for something like the Impossilbe Magic reveal, which was at most 100 words of content saying that its a thing and confirming the remastered SoM classes.

People have been champing at the bit for Impossible Magic reveal because the playtest was so long ago, but the book's release is still far enough out that a blog post might be considered overkill considering there are plenty of other things that need to be released between now and then.

(Of course, I'm sure someone out there probably knows or can readily check the numbers how long before releases we normally start seeing detailed information and esp blog posts.)

There are a couple passages in Book of the Dead where Geb writes something to the effect of "Whispering Tyrant? Sure hes powerful but anyone can blow stuff up. He's a juvenile upstart who has no class. I don't respect him."

Is there any idea on which book they will be included in? Perhaps a Book of the Dead Remaster?

I would not look for it in a BotD remaster unless it turned out to be a much more extensive update than just a "remaster" implies.

Necromancer and Runesmith are speculated for a future unannounced book that folk have been clamoring for news about, but which to my knowledge remains speculative.

Its been a long time since the playtest, probably owi g to the playtest coming much sooner after the previous one, and so relatively sooner in the production cycle. Still, we should probably be hearing anout it sometime pretty soon one expects.

The unfortunate reality of tariffs continues to exist. At this point I don't think it even matters how far the books have to travel. Incidentally, book tariffs are set to rise by the end of the year, as well as 'games and toys'

I have come to think of the rune magic anathema as more the result of a frame of mind. I would regard it not so much that runelords aren't allowed to cast opposed schools (who would even enforce this?), but rather that the singular focus on a specific rune/sin in this system of magic creates mental barriers to the two opposed branches of magic such that you lose your focus if you stray from the path. You might describe this as something fundamental to magic itself, but I'm more inclined to say its a quirk of the runic approach to magic than anything. I dont feel like your personal rune goes "incompatible magic detected" and locks up, but rather you've learned to categorize certain types of magic to certain philosophies so closely that it breaks your attunement to use magic in certain ways that are diametrically opposed to your own.

If I were to throw my 2 cents in here, it would be that the fights with a modest surplus of under-leveled foes have been some of the most memorable I've run (or at least I hope my players would agree).

One was a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath for a boss with half a dozen mi-go running around. I designed the Dark Young to be a fairly serious threat, while the smattering of mi-go were just dangerous enough to act as a mass of minions worth swatting out of the way to get to the boss and easy enough that taking them out gave a sense of momentum to the fight.

The other, by far more fun fight was against what I ended up calling the "Himbo Brigade". The adventure specified that the guards in the area were chosen for their attractiveness and susceptibility to charm magic. Since this was an adventure in the higher level range, I wasn't terribly convinced of there being very many elite-level warriors just laying around, so I let their level range stray a bit below the CL-4 and doubling their number, with some truly atrocious Will saves.

They were a blast to roleplay leaping into the fray for their beautiful patrons, and even funnier once the party sorcerer noticed the will save issue and blasted them with Phantasmal Calamity. Though the fight as a whole wasn't a serious threat (even if the himbos did manage nearly to KO the monk when he opted to surround himself with 6 of them far away from the rest of the party), it was a great time.

Proficiency gates were a cool idea that have some notable flaws in their execution, and I feel like one of those flaws is that theres not a lot of consistency in what makes those gates feel real. In many cases it seems like the gate is there because the design guidelines suggested it, not because the specific thematics of an element (whether a hazard or other) actually suggest it. Like, ine of the highest level core hazards has almost no chance of missing the hazard because its job is to be a big obvious bomb threat. It doesnt need a level 20 DC with legendary proficiency just because its a top level threat.

Likewise I agree that proficiency gating in something you cant train for sucks. If included at all, it should progress slower than any other gating. Gating seems like it would work best in terms of rewarding you for your training by opening up what you can do, rather than punishing you for not predicting something you couldnt have known you'd need--esp of that something belongs only to a couple classes or doesnt come until a higher level than you are.

Or perhaps. If a disable is going to require a high proficiency, make it only one convenient way to disable the hazard while another narratively appropriate method is available but requires backtracking or finding the bypass. (Unfortunately this doesnt work for detecting hazards still).

Let's rephrase this... why can't this weapon trait allow you to strike enemies as a reaction? I feel like the answer to that should be quite obvious to anyone familiar with how dominant Reactive Strike seems to be for 6th level feats for non-Fighters.

And again, I hate to break it to you, but if you feel that readying an action to attack an enemy as they approach can't capture the feel of reading your weapon to strike an enemy as they charge you because you can't hide that you're readying from the GM, you may be playing a different game than the designers intended. If you can't hold your attack for an enemy charge because the GM never lets enemies try to charge through your defences, that's a conversation you might want to have with your GM about what's fun for your character.

Not every enemy will charge you, but the majority of enemies still need to get up to you to do damage, so if they're either dumb or confident enough that they risk ploughing into you anyway, setting up moments where you can brace a weapon with a readied action only takes a good initiative roll and standing at the front or near a choke point.

I kind of feel like at least the bracing trait might allow you to get an action discount specifically for bracing at weapon. One action to brace instead of two. Maybe it negates the MAP penalty, but then we're getting closer to installing Reactive Strike as a weapon trait again.

Also, I know what you meant, but I feel it bears mentioning that a good reason why using a reaction to 'brace' a weapon seems like a bad idea is that once you've used your reaction to brace it, you don't have any reaction leftover to attack with the braced weapon

Personally, "this monster is abnormally susceptible to toxins" seems like a perfectly valid justification for a weakness to poison damage (after all, we're already operating at the level of abstraction where all toxins deal the same 'poison' damage) but at the same time, I don't think weakness to poison would ever be a broad enough category to excite poison users. It strikes me as a much more niche thing that would have to be on a case-by-case basis rather than 'these types of monster burn more easily, these general traits make you weak being frozen'.

I don't think there's any broader category for 'these monsters are allergic to peanuts' that can be multiply applicable, and the categories we might think (plants, insects) are only that way because we specifically employ poisons to kill them.

If you need to hide what you are planning to do from the GM in order to make use of your abilities, you are playing with a level of adversary player-GM relationship that is almost certainly outside the range accounted for by Paizo designers. If this works for you, more power to you, but it doesn't seem to be the assumed default.

That said, for me the main problem with the brace trait is that I can't see most people choosing to trade an extra action for 2 precision damage on a MAP attack that may never trigger. There are rare situations where readying an attack is necessary, in which case it's a nice bonus, but these situations are rare enough that this trait has almost no meaningful power behind it.

Deadly often adds ~4.5 damage on a crit, which feels like a much more common (if less controllable) situation that happens with no additional cost to actions or MAP

This, too, was the position of the Druman economist wizards when consulted. However, experimental data shows that, in this case, the direction of value is not absolute. Most leading researchers are now convinced that breaking the -100G barrier (sometimes called the negative rat wall in theoretical circles) will be most effectively achieved by developing techniques to increase value, but in the negative direction, rather than by decreasing traditional value ratings.

Of course, it is well known that increasing value with magic is a notoriously challenging field to broach, as for reasons unknown magic often refuses to interact with higher value materials (see the kineticist gold paradox)

Leading researchers are hard at work breaking one of the last true barriers in the thaumaturgical arts: seizing the soul of a common giant rat.

To the uninstructed, this task seems like it should be easy--trivial, even. Surely a priest who can manifest miracles on behalf of their god should have no difficulty, yet there's a twist to this conundrum. While anyone familiar with the broad strokes of soul trapping can name one or two of the most infamous cases--such as the countess imprisoned within her own, fabulously expensive self-portrait--therein lies the rub.

The quality of the host item must be in line with the quality of the captive soul, and as it turns out, the soul of a giant rat (or other, similarly weak creature) requires a vessel whose value is actually less than zero. The task for these researchers, then, is to contrive some way of creating an item such that it has less than zero--and indeed, considerably less than zero--value.

While the fabrication wizards over at the mage's guild have had some recent breakthroughs producing less-than-zero objects with with their Arcane Iconoduly (or "AI") generation techniques, the -100G wall yet stands defiant.

I dont know exactly how long the dwarf Sky Citadel at Urgir was inhabited, but its plausible if it was almost any length of time that they attempted agriculture in around that area for a while. This doesn't necessarily mean they succeeded (dwarves obviously seem to have subterranean food sources) and even if they succeeded it doesn't mean the climate was any different, but 8000 years ago things might not have been entirely the same.

Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:

{. . .}

And of course, it's fair to say that this is a fantasy setting, so people who consciously devote themselves to evil causes and unholy powers exist,{. . .}

You don't even need a fantasy setting for that.

Yeah, you know what? 5 years ago maybe I'd have quibbled about the difference between evil for short-sighted personal gain and consciously choosing evil for the sake of evil but... well, the last 5 years happened. I don't have those bones in me anymore.

Absolute kudos for the double meaning in the title of this blog XD

Berselius wrote:

Not very fond of the Silver Dragon's replacement. I'd like to think Oath Dragons should be far more benevolent than that.

Or those known as Silver Dragons were actually the most benevolent of Oath Dragons.

Maybe some misled student of Dragons lore thought that moral bent (like good vs evil) was actually defining of a Dragon species.

The way I see it, most typical silver oath dragons are probably more likely than not to swear oaths in the name of righteous causes than intentionally commit to villainy. To me, the text of the blog referring to oath dragons who turn despicable is a cautionary tale of what happens when a well-intentioned but short-sighted oath goes wrong and the dragon whose essence is fundamentally dedicated to the oath turns tragic. The upshot of that is that it strikes me that most oath dragons are extremely circumspect about what kinds of oaths they swear, which is why the story of the rash or hastily sworn oaths are noteworthy in contrast.

And of course, it's fair to say that this is a fantasy setting, so people who consciously devote themselves to evil causes and unholy powers exist, and likely there are oath dragons doing that, but in my mind this only makes them remain the most 'paladin' of the new dragons. They are shining beings of oaths and dedication who are superhumanly dedicated to their cause, but like most mortals, they are not born inherently good nor evil, and must consciously choose. Then, when the oaths they've sworn conflict with what is the right thing to do, they face a dilemma. The only difference here is when it happens to human or elf, their choice is whether doing what they think is right requires a breech of conduct, but when it happens to the dragon, the only option is the tragic one for maximum drama.

So even if some silver dragons can be bent toward evil (technically not new, they always had that potential like any living creature) and now there are probably a few silver dragons whose idea of a worthy cause is consciously evil, I feel like it means more that those oath dragons who are good and choose goodness are even nobler than those that were simply born biased to do good.

...

And now I'm picturing a foolish, evil oath dragon who swore an oath to increase the amount of suffering in the world, and in this pursuit, has created cutting-edge life-saving medicines and magical techniques because a person who recovers from a disease suffered from it for a longer time and still has the potential to suffer more in the future... not to say their hospital is a nice place to visit; they've certainly never heard of painkillers there.