Sibelius Eos Owm's page

The sidebar strangely only refers to fortune and misfortune effects, so Sense the Unseen doesn't apply.

It does, however, set a useful precedent when adjudicating how to apply triggered abilities to secret checks where you might not know there ever was a trigger, of which mis/fortune was likely the first in dev minds considering that everyone has hero points.

The Sneak action is necessarily a very complex beast with ball thr moving parts (relative degrees of awareness, tracking different creatures' awareness, relative cover/concealment), which unfortunately leads to the description being not particularly straightforward to read.

Since you can technically attempt a Sneak in an open hallway surrounded by guards, there's no prerequisite, even if the results Won't be favorable unless you bring your own means of concealment (ie invisibility).

Since Finoan already answered for the question I was going to, let me try the next: Legendary Sneak indeed only removes the cover/concealment requirements. It otherwise functions as before regarding levels of awareness; you have to be at least hidden to become undetected when you sneak, even though you can now attempt to hide yourself in the middle of that open hall from before.

Edit: damn, too slow twice. This is what I get for trying to sleep in

As long as you're okay with the chosen ikon glowing or otherwise humming with power, it seems to be an intended interaction that you can have your ikon empowered whenever you want and for as long as you want, provided you don't need to hide your power for any reason.

Depending on context it might be somewhat like having a weapon drawn--wandering the dungeon it's no problem, but in a tense diplomatic showdown, it might get awkward if somebody sees your shoes or belt radiating divine power. In these cases there may be cause to keep the spark away, but otherwise most of the time it's only natural to keep it around.

Moreover, if somebody tells you that a word you use makes them uncomfortable, they haven't actually taken that word from you. They can't physically stop you from saying the word! What's happening is that they're trusting you enough to tell you that they have a bad experience with the word, so they'd like to avoid it where possible.

If enough people do this, it turns into a Thing, but even then, it doesn't change whether you can say the word. What changes is that the hurt that used to be private is now public, so when you choose to say the word knowing that the word might upset some people, you will look like a bit of a wangrod for it.

So when somebody says "I want to say the word, don't take it from me," what is more accurately being said is "I would rather people not tell me when the things I say upset them."

Like, sure, this thread struct me as strange, too. I've never had any reason before this thread to associate the word 'crusade' with islamophobia... but you can bet there's a little checkbox in my head next to the word that says "muslim people might not like this one, further awareness needed" which is good enough for me because I am not a gaming company with a host of muslim fans (although several muslim coworkers).

Although I knew well of several rather famous crusades waged against islam, I tend to think of a generic word for a mission with a devoted purpose that happens to contain the word 'cross' in it because of its religious origins, and has connotations of war or fighting. Evidently, that isn't true for everybody. Isn't the diversity of the world exciting?

As sad as I would be to remove such an evocative sounding word, if it indeed causes so much upset, it's not worth keeping. If Paizo chooses to drop it in the future, that's between them and their sensitivity consultants to decide--and if not, too. Sometimes the group that feels most strongly about a word is actually quite small (see the pushback against the word thaumaturge a few years ago)

This thread is going off topic.

I don't know, "where did Zon-Kuthon actually go?" strikes me as highly pertinent to the question of "what did he bring back from there?"

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It’s the Dark Tapestry that corrupted him! The section about it in People of the Stars directly states that Dou-Bral was transformed into Zon-Kuthon there.

Oh, it most certainly does! Which is funny, because it seems like there is a conflict. The Windsong Testaments: On Family Bonds story from 2019 is quite explicit about the place Dou-Bral went being beyond the edges of reality:

Unknown to the gods or the faithful, Dou-Bral had not only abandoned his family and followers, but reality itself. He had traveled to the very depths of the Outer Rifts, pushing beyond borders held in fear by the most ancient dwellers in those unknown Abyssal depths, to emerge into the Beyond Beyond. And what he found there destroyed him. And what he found there reincarnated him. A cycle of death and rebirth taken place outside of the auspices of Pharasma herself, Dou-Bral ended and Zon-Kuthon began.

This is corroborated by his description in Player Core 2 and Gods & Magic. It could be an error, or it could be a sign that the "Beyond Beyond" is indeed connected to the Dark Tapestry in some tangible way.

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My question still stands unanswered.

Of the two possibilities I posed, which did Zon-Kuthon bring back? Primordial Darkness or Primordial Shadow?

Well, neither, his obsession with shadow and/or darkness feels like it could easily have come from his millennia in exile in the Netherworld. It's possible it came from whatever entity took over him from Beyond, but we don't really have any information about that.

Meanwhile, perhaps it would help if you could describe what the difference is in your theory between Darkness and Shadow? I'm not aware of any special distinction between those in this setting that would make the answer to your original question particularly meaningful.

... Or perhaps are you referring to the First Shadow which Abadar gave Zon-Kuthon from the First Vault as his trade for willingly going into exile? This could be described as a primordial shadow of a kind, although not in a way that disambiguates the parameters you've set forth.

Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:

Wait... didn't Zonny go beyond the multiverse? I thought he brought back an eldritch entity from outside the boundaries or reality (I think implied to be an evil entity surviving from the previous reality actually)

Pretty sure the Dark Tapestry is pretty much "beyond."

It would be interesting if the Dark Tapestry had more than thematic links to the inter-cosmic medium that exists beyond the edges of the multiverse, but my knowledge of it suggests that it exists not only within the Great Beyond, but within the Universe, one of the inmost parts of the multiverse.

(Fair to say, the beings of the Dark Tapestry are heavily implied if not outright stated to be eldritch entities that were already there when the multiverse formed around them, but if one goes to the Dark Tapestry today, they remain firmly within the bounds of the Universe. Even if establishing some kind of direct connection between Tapestry and the "Outside" would further support the thematic similarities between qlippoths and the alien entities of the Tapestry...)

Question: For the sake of my theory, when Zon-Kuthon came back from the Dark Tapestry, he brought something back with him. What would he have brought back? A chunk of primordial Darkness or a chunk of primordial Shadow?

The Dark Tapestry sounds REALLY dark to me, so I could see him bringing back a chunk of Darkness which he could have used to spread some of over Nidal.

But his divine realm is on the Shadow Plane and it would seem to me that since so many of his adherents are shadow creatures, shadow lords, and the like that his affinity is with Shadow, not Darkness.

What would he have brought back with him then? Darkness or Shadow?

Wait... didn't Zonny go beyond the multiverse? I thought he brought back an eldritch entity from outside the boundaries or reality (I think implied to be an evil entity surviving from the previous reality actually)

Also, it’s be nice to have another maritime adventure, but maybe one in a different region than the Shackles.

There are other places to do high seas adventures and while a return to the shackles would be fun, I’d like to explore other coastal cultures and environments as well.

Ooh perhaps a Tian high seas adventure, set in and around Minata, perhaps visiting Xidao? I haven't really had any ideas for themes myself, but I'd love to see another Tian Xia adventure (even though I'm still waiting on my chance to actually run Season of Ghosts... one day soon I hope!)

An excerpt from the description of the Abandoned zealot monster : "Abandoned zealots are most commonly associated with the church of Razmir, which upholds a mortal wizard as a god—a truth unknown to most worshippers."

I think even most Razmiran Priests do not know this truth and have a strong heartfelt faith in their god.

Oh, fair and true, although I feel like "most worshippers" could easily be covered in bulk by the laity, and still have room for folk of the cloth to have a mixed bag of true believers and cynics without disrupting the lore text in the abandoned zealot description. No doubt your average citizen of Razmiran is a believer in the Living God, even if they don't cast divine spells.

I shouldn't wonder if some of this can't be attributed to a certain level of caution--not knowing what the state of that NPC will be after the events of a whole book--whether they perished dramatically/ignominiously, whether the party adopted them or loathed them, and any other thing that might have popped up that could have left them in a position where future plot hooks relating to them are rendered jarring by events the writer couldn't know happened at your table.

I mean, there are ways around this, and main-line NPCs can be signposted to the GM to play them a certain way, but there's plenty of significant but not critical NPCs that this could be a relevant factor for.

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I haven't done a survey of which NPCs in Season of Ghosts reappear as significant to the later plots, but I know there's at least a few of them, even outside the 'main' NPCs. This is only natural, since the majority of the AP is spent within one small town.

Pfff, while I am, personally, in favour of paying my taxes to the benefit of all those social services above mentioned, it still strikes me as a somewhat funny take that Milani of all deities should care about things like the ability of a state to fund police or military forces or really function. Milani, the (formerly) chaotic good goddess of resisting oppressive, unjust rule.

(I also feel it's a bit weird to assume that guards wouldn't exist without state funding--the people who have the money that needs guarding have the money to fund guards to protect that money, and the people who don't have the money, don't historically benefit all that much from guards existing at all... but the job of the fantasy guard is a lot closer to modern cop than would be good for avoiding political discussion, and I'm not sure a strictly historical discussion of guards is very pertinent to this thread)

Since a Razmiran Priest with Cleric Dedication treats all divine cleric spells as occult spells, does this mean that an occult spellcaster (such as a bard, sorcerer, witch, et al.) with Cleric Dedication could use wands and scrolls of divine spells since they are on his occult tradition list, despite not yet having Basic Spellcasting?

Don't they just gain this ability from Cleric dedication?

A spellcasting archetype allows you to use scrolls, staves, and wands in the same way that a member of a spellcasting class can. [,,,] Spellcasting archetypes always grant the ability to cast cantrips in their dedication, and then they have a basic spellcasting feat, an expert spellcasting feat, and a master spellcasting feat.

This seems to describe the Cleric multiclass adequately.

I gather that PFS has a note about gaining the basic spellcasting feat counting as having spellcasting for the purposes of items--I don't know if this is meant to be a way to clear up cases where other archetypes grant basic spellcasting but aren't formally "Spellcasting Archetypes" as defined above, or it's simply intended to be an additional restriction on when exactly spellcasting archetypes grant the ability to use those items, but outside of PFS this seems pretty cut and dry on first blush

(which is of course where all things seem easy and intuitive before further information proves me wrong, but that's the way it goes)

I don't feel like believing that a specific god is real (or at least really a god) doesn't play all that significant of a role in whether you can gain powers from them. Certainly it would be strange not to--you're still obeying their doctrine and performing their rites perfectly and communing with their power, which would be rather strange to do for an entity you don't think actually think has divine power.

On the other hand, this could just be the reading I've been doing on historical polytheistic religions lately. The focus on "My god is real and I believe in them" seems to be a bit more of a modern concern compared to "I did the ritual correctly/incorrectly and the god was/wasn't pleased and I did/didn't get what I wanted out of it" that seems to dominate the practice of polytheistic religions. It doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what you do, and that you do it correctly.

... Of course, this is D&D/PF religion, not historical polytheism, but I don't think you can't use one to benefit your understanding of the other. In Pathfinder religion, the moral outlook of the deity, and whether or not that lines up with the cleric, certainly matters a lot more than in history, but when it comes down to it, it's most important to obey your deity's tenets (and presumably perform the off-screen rites that get handwaved as a part of being a cleric).

That said, Razmir does specifically have an anathema against questioning his truth. Personally, I'd be focused on the act of questioning--i.e. openly doubting or asking questions--over the questioning, doubting thoughts.

I can see where you can make a reasonable argument that Razmir would punish anyone who thinks he is not a deity if it were up to him (although it's not, since he's not), but to put it another way: You're not questioning the truth of Razmir if you don't doubt it's a lie. This may seem like legalistic word-wrangling around the anathema, but it strikes me as actually very appropriate for this deity specifically. After all, being skilled at 'wielding the truth' with subtlety is a feat in this archetype that grants you bonuses to Deception.

Unless we're to assume that Razmiran priests are exclusively made up of those worshippers who truly believe (whether out of zeal or for personal gain)--which admittedly is very possible--we have to assume that 'questioning the truth' is not incompatible with a certain amount of lip-service.

Without really thinking about it, I kind of always assumed the Mordant spire was named for the way it sticks up out of the water like a giant, twisted tooth--mordant meaning 'sharp' or 'biting' (which can be seen metaphorically in most other definitions, whether biting sarcasm or the sharp, biting effect of the musical mordent).

I don't know if this has anything to do with the actual name, it's just an assumption I never noticed I was making until reading this here.

Funnily, I don't think we know when Nethys ascended..? All I can find is that humans, and Golarion, were created (and thus existed) during the Age of Creation... and that he was already a deity around the time of the Age of Anguish, before the creation of Osirion. So he ascended during this roughly potentially infinite span of time. xD (Infinite, as the Age of Creation have no set times coordinates, and could as much be 10 million years before recorded history or 1 million billion trillion (etc) years before. xD ... heck, with deities, could be both.)

Interestingly, this might imply he's ascended more than once... the story of Nethys' ascension that I'd first heard was that he appeared more or less out of the desert to Azghaad as a purple-skinned, golden-eyed stranger, declared himself the latter's "god and king" and granted him power that led to the founding of Osirion... and only then after being the shadow ruler of Osirion for several years did he actually ascend to divinity.

On the one hand, the fact that he granted Azghaad power might imply that he was already a god at this point, but on the other, things like the godling mythic destiny and the nature of witch patrons show that this is not necessarily the case. Of course, any source that shows Nethys acting as a god before -3470 AR would suggest that this might not have been his first outing, if the information is reliable.

This may come a bit late for you to be checking still, but maybe this will find its way to you eventually. I don't know a whole lot about 5e encounter balance, but one thing I've heard a lot about is that because of the way its math works, adding more enemies can dramatically alter the threat of the fight. In particular, the moment that there are more foes than there are PCs is a tipping point where the enemies have more total actions than the heroes, so the heroes have to play catch-up.

An unfortunate reality of 5e is that CR is only a loose guideline at times, and random chance can alter the feel of a fight a lot (if more than half the goblins hit and less than half the PCs do in any given round, it can turn the fight into a struggle.

In the case of the fight with the goblins and bugbear, I feel like it would have been better to either increase the numbers or add the hobgoblin, rather than both. I can see why it might have felt like both were necessary for a challenging fight when 4 goblins were a cakewalk, but at low levels fights can get really swingy.

Good news is, the swinginess eases up a little bit as you go up in levels. The only other advice I have is to find and watch Matt Colville's Running the Game series on YouTube. I think his first video uses an example specifically about how the number of goblins in a fight can turn an easy fight into a struggle just because there's more creatures on one side than the other.

Good luck and have fun!

Personally, I don't find it a compelling argument to say that a table in the Movement section of the core rules listing "typical reach" has much to do with an feat that takes your Shifting Faces (when you shapechange, gain Illusory Disguise for 1 hour--a spell which under no normal circumstance would affect your reach) and grants you the ability to take the form of a Large or Huge creature.

Then again, Shifting Faces still requires a remaster errata, since there is no longer a transmutation school, and Larger Than Life technically only calls out your basic Change Shape ability. Even so, Change Shape does not normally change your statistics, and this feat does not mention your Reach even though it does mention your Space changing with your Size.

Incidentally, regarding the example of Miniaturize, while that doesn't mention Reach, the counterpart feats Hulking Size and Towering Size both do, suggesting that Miniaturize may not be intended to reduce your eidolon's reach while the others are intended to increase it.

... But this isn't an argument I want to get stuck in. By all means, play to your preference and have all the more fun doing so.

I think I agree with something that was said up page, if somebody comes in to Razmiran and accuses the clergy of Razmir of being false priests, you don't disappear the priest lying about the source of their powers, you disappear the person lying about what tradition of magic the priests are casting. Do this a couple of times and the people will start to realize that badmouthing Razmir's clergy and doubting his divinity displeases him, and shut up about it. Not like the majority of people would know the difference between occult and divine spells, especially not when Razmiran priests can cast spells from the divine list using occult. Those jealous of that their gods don't hang out and bless them personally by living with them will say anything to badmouth the Living God, you need not pay any attention to their words, and if you've noticed anything amiss yourself... we'll no you didn't, the priests of Razmir are always watching.

Correct, your reach does not change unless specified. This fear is not to make you a stronger fighter necessarily, but to give you more flexibility what you can shapeshift into.

One of the example potential Apocalypse Riders in the book is a druid who burns people's farmland and pits small communities against each other in order to fend off the encroachment of civilization.

That seems like "angling for the Horseperson of Famine" to me.

Oh, how neat! Yeah, that seems like the very kind of thing that an evil druid rider of the apocalypse would do. Oppose the encroachment of civilization by brute force and razing settlements like clear-cutting a forest. Strikes me as very "the leopards would never eat my face" in a way, except it's the leopards eventually being eaten by omnicidal monsters they teamed up with to get rid of all the humans.

I don't know at all who the druid Apocalypse Rider we're talking about is, but it strikes me that decay is also nature, right? One of my pet peeves about typical druid depictions is that nature isn't just forests and edenic paradises. Nature is also decay and destruction, nature is also deserts (with its own forms of life and abundance that are just as important). I think it's fair to say that the majority of druids want to preserve the ecosystem (just like the majority of non-daemons don't want to destroy all life), but nature isn't just one thing.

If Nature indeed has interests (yes, it's a quasi-magical force that gives life to spirit-like entities, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything), I would be extremely skeptical of assigning it any singular and self-compatible set of goals. Nature wants the wolf to eat the deer and the deer to escape the wolf and the gut parasites to feed off both of them and the detritivores to feast on their bodies. Nature will happily destroy nature, and it's only that nature finds equilibrium between growth and decay that it doesn't.

Druids are often painted as stewards of this equilibrium, but they're also free not to care about it (beyond their anathemat against 'despoiling natural places') and simply focus their power on the destructive aspects of nature just as a storm druid focuses on elemental forces rather than living cycles. Fair, sooner or later one assumes that an omnicidal goal would eventually require despoiling natural places at some point (however fine that definition may be) but that strikes me as a matter for the druid to square off should they ever actually get far enough. Even if we never see anything like the blight druid--equally capable of acting as a steward of ravaged lands and as a bringer of creeping rot to end all things.

In the meantime, there's a lot of non-natural places to despoil, regardless what far-off future clash may come of the druid's values.

Personally, when magic is a fact of life in the world, and while not exactly a common technology, common enough that a typical town will have a handful of people with some kind of magic capability (or even somebody with full on trained magic skill), I don't see how most people's first reaction would be immediate gripping fear of a dominate spell or fireball. Most people's typical impression of magic will be things like the village priest's heal spells, or the local witch's speak with animal spells.

This is not to say I would never have a group react to a sudden spellcast with hostility--context is key here. I just don't think most places are going to put a blanket ban on spellcasting in public. Most people don't go out into public and drop fireballs in town square, it's just not likely those people would have reason to expect it.

In any case, I feel like it's entirely reasonable that if you encounter some random creatures in the woods that they'd react to the sudden casting of a spell as if you'd drawn your sword on them--but also I wouldn't spring combat on my players for not just knowing out-of-character how their actions would be received. I don't assume they and I are always picturing the same thing in every case. Even so, there's a line before jumping immediately to initiative, even if you don't want to tell them.

It seems to me, if I wanted to reinforce the idea that random spellcasting could provoke a fight without necessarily tipping my hand whether the PCs should think of the foes as hostile, I'd just have the creatures get startled and grab for their weapons. No initiative is rolled, when the casting player presumably pauses, the creatures likewise freeze, hands on weapons, then through nonverbal means the groups sort out that the spell is not harmful or decide to come to blows regardless.

(especially since it's entirely possible these foes are here for a fight, although that being the case one would expect initiative to come before attempting to talk and cast spells in most cases)

It was a struggle, but the furthest I've ever gotten in any of my groups is completing all of Carrion Crown using 2e rules (although technically we started during the playtest, so it wasn't until the beginning of book 3 that the final version of the 2e rules published). In terms of level range, I extended things just a bit to level 17. Prior to that, we'd only ever made it to book 2 of any published AP.

It took 3 years, and by the end only like 2 original players made it to the end without having dropped out (although I did gain 2 players, and one of the dropouts managed to return with her character for the final dungeon). I attribute sheer stubbornness in the face of numerous delays and hiatuses. Also perhaps pushing myself to keep going a little harder than is safe for avoiding burnout, but that wasn't mostly the game's fault itself. Finally, most of the last book ended up being played in text games since I temporarily lost my Tuesday time slot, so I just posted screencaps of the Roll20 maps and wrote up turn-by-turn combat summaries after DMing everyone.

Before that the longest running game was a homebrew in 3.5e that went from 1-11 and broke down when the GM ran out of stock quest ideas (like finding the elemental orbs). That we can almost definitely attribute to being teenagers willing to play until 3am every weekend. Aside from that, a play though of Tomb of Annihilation made it to I think level 8 before collapsing from GM burnout (incidentally this game ran concurrently to my Carrion game, with almost all the same players but a different GM).

More recently the only d20 games I've played in have been 2e and 5e one-shots, which has actually been a really refreshing change and a chance to play more different character concepts, although I do kind of with that one 5e game hadn't fizzled at level 3. (also I really wish somebody else would start a 2e game so I could be a player in this fine system for a change).

I wonder if Achaekek knew about what was in the armor (aka Nothing) and tried to kill it before it grew into true divinity.

I am not so sure he was utterly blindsided by Calistria's trickery.

After all we are talking about one of the primordial deities who spent the last 10 000 years rebuilding his mind back from pure savagery.

Achae being "tricked" but having it be because he sensed something wrong thanks to Calistria pointing his attention at Gorum would certainly make for an interesting story and add some colour to the course of events... we'll have to see! Or maybe just headcanon if this happens to be intentionally left as a divine mystery

Actually this does bring a question I've always wondered. Why did the knights of Ozem bind Arazni? If she was Aroden's Herald, and they were presumably allies with the Knights of Ozem against the whispering tyrant, why did the knights do that? Seems scummy.

Officially I believe that they bound Arazni so that she couldn't be subverted against them by Tar-Baphon's magic. I don't completely get it (I suppose it's fair that they believed Tar-Baphon might have some magic that could take control of a god?) but it's always struck me as a little weird binding your boss, who is presumably more powerful than you in the first place? There is unfortunately not quite enough information on how the binding went down currently released to the public.

Having GM'd a grappling dwarf monk in the upper levels (I think approx 8 to 15) I can confirm that grappling can absolutely shut down spellcasters, but not necessarily because it renders them unable to act. Even when my bosses were the twin witches of Barstoi in a ruthless fight where minions held back part of the main fighting force, Ballarun Stonefist ripped through the room and pinned the surviving witch, consistently maintaining pace with her despite her attempts to escape. It was not realistically likely she would succeed the Escape check, so she used other tricks to get out of the grab, but when you're a fragile spellcaster, just getting stuck in one place can be a death sentence, never mind whether you lose a spell. They can choose to try to escape (and not cast one of their powerful spells for one round) or try to throw something powerful at their attackers and hope that enough of them aren't still standing by the end of turn.

I suppose in the situation where the caster is only maintaining their most powerful spells already up, it's a different story, but my witches had several minions they didn't have to sustain and still got bodied by a dedicated grapple rush. (also a different story if the spellcaster is in some way exceptionally tough, but that's another matter)

For Skyborn my instinct is that if you could carry them (and their gear) while flying, you can also slow fall with them. For other sources of fall immunity where it may not be that you fall slowly but that you simply absorb impact on landing (for example, Unbreakable-er Goblin) I might be forced to review what I feel like your falling buddy should be able to get away with, but I don't inherently see a game balance harm. If you can't fly, it's a one-way trip for you and one person, and if you can then you'll just ferry the party down regardless of slow fall options.

...There's no actual limits on how much you can carry while flying in this edition, is there? I might be inclined to say that your companion must not be more than your light load (5+Str) to avoid having small, weak characters inexplicably cushion the fall of much larger, heavier characters, but then again I might leave it purely up to max load and let it go.

I don't really have a blanket ban on anything, I think. Rare options are generally "tell me how you plan to fit it into your character and the adventure we're playing" unless explicitly made open for the purposes of a particular game. I suppose I technically ban Unique content, but I hardly feel it counts given the way unique this are inherently lore-laden content that should be a significant part of the story, not something a character buys at the market or picks up in character creation.

Overall there aren't really any character options I would consider a major problem. I don't feel like I would ever ban something because I didn't like the way people played it--if I'm having that problem, the problem I'm having is a player, not the options they chose, and it wouldn't sit right with me banning somebody who loves those character options from playing them to keep them out of a problem player's hands. Although then again maybe I've just never found an option consistently played in such an annoying way to give me the GM trauma yet.

I guess if alignment were still a thing, I'd ban evil characters, but that's not really a mechanical thing. No wangrods in the party, regardless what initials your alignment says, but OTOH I'm cautiously open to designated-evil/unholy options remaining available if they're not inherently antisocial by nature, but I've never in-practice had to reflavour an antipaladin option to give to a 'dark but still vaguely heroic' knight character up to this point so that remains purely hypothetical.

Although cool and evocative, I felt like this anathema of the caravan's was an overreach. Back when Luis Loza called for people to submit edicts and anathema that made adventuring unusually difficult, I brought this one up. It's fine for a niche deity like the Eldest Ng, but for a pantheon that is supposed to be increasing in popularity, it's hard to imagine how these people live unless they all happen to be travellers who never pause on their journey for any reason, or unless it's intended that bed surfing from one side of town to the next is a reasonable interpretation.

So my first advice is perhaps the least satisfying: ditch that anathema or it's exact wording and come up with a new, perhaps thematically similar one, like not staying in the same place for a month, or never taking a permanent residence.

If trying to play exactly as written, I feel like you could do worse than establishing that the CC character has a couple places in town that they bounce between every night. This can get inconvenient for night attacks where the adventure assumes the party is together, but it's not impossible to work in the idea that these scenes only come up when the characters happen to be together (I don't know AV) or perhaps coming up with a creative way to incorporate the fact that one is missing without leaving them out (maybe the attackers had to split up, etc). Technically two inns in a town would adhere to the letter of the anathema, but to feel like you're not abusing thr spirit you might want to bounce between three. If Otari doesn't have three separate inns, could be on nice nights you camp out under the stars in town somewhere, borrow somebody's barn, or simply stop in at somebody's home and ask for a place to sleep for the night.

This doesn't work as well in the dungeon, since there are a lot fewer safe places to rest unless the entire party agrees to bounce between two safe rooms each night or else leave the dungeon entirely until you have a second safe room. At ths most extreme I'd say picking opposite sides of the room Is probably your only viable option to meet the technical requirements, but thus is also a situation where you might add a "unless doing so risks your life" clause like so many were asking for on other anathema. After all, a traveler caught in a cottage in the middle of a blizzard in the mountains can be killed by this anathema, having nowhere else they can stay until the snow clears and they can safely continue their journey. I don't feel like this anathema should compel the faithful to travel unsafely, so this seems like a fair compromise.

My memory is hazy right now, but I feel like there was a thread asking about whether you could rescue any lost NPCs and James Jacobs weighed in with an answer of one way you could do it, if you wished. Might be worth checking around if you haven't already.

It seems to me like if a person feels they can't talk without espousing bigotry, or worse, can't have fun unless they're allowed to be a bigot, there's no reason to be sad about the loss. The reality is, for as long as I've known them, no one has been kicked off the forums for accidentally saying something offensive. If we're going to talk about the loss of activity due to the bans, we should also discuss the loss of activity due to the people driven from the forum by how long it took for those bans to come down.

But then, we might not have much longer to do so depending how this topic continues...

If it helps, you might imagine precise hearing looking something like echolocation for bats, albeit without the need to make a high pitched ping every few seconds. It's basically as good as looking at people to see their features.

Additionally, to help picture what a noppera-bo version of a non-human would look like, there is a faceless tengu art in one if the books of this AP. I can't remember which one, but I suspect it's book 2

Additionally, if Shinzo's interplanar teleport (i.e. plane shift) doesn't suffice as explanation (for example, you can't figure out how he might have come by an anchor), there's always the Dead Roads. He may not be a psychopomp himself, but it seems likely that, especially in the company of a psychopomp, he may be permitted to use them to make his way as a monitor of death.

The adventure Ashes At Dawn, part of the Carrion Crown adventure path, treats a vampire being destroyed as being reduced to ash. Certainly, any vampire destroyed by sunlight would become a pile of ash in my game. A head anointed with holy water should also, but I'm on the fence about whether anything happens to the rest of the body in this case--I'd treat a decapitated body with a destroyed as mechanically identical to getting dusted, but I don't feel it necessarily reacts to the head's destruction automatically. Albeit, it begins to decay on its own and will still turn to dust if exposed to sunlight.

Well, that confirms my sense of what the legal situation is with the SRD 5.1 - but I'm still perplexed why Paizo didn't just use the SRD and CC-BY themselves to avoid having to get rid of chromatic dragons, spell schools, alignments, magic missiles, owlbears and the like. It seems as if it would have avoided a lot of confusion.

(Yes, I appreciate that not everything OGL in PF2e would have been usable via the SRD 5.1, but a huge amount would have been.)

I don't know the full reason, but bear on mind that WitC didn't release anything to CC-BY until after there had been some intense and ongoing backlash, and even then some believe it was a hasty job and that WotC would definitely pull a similar stunt the moment they thought it was profitable.

Meanwhile, Paizo had been faced with an existential threat yet again from the same company. I think they quite reasonably were tired of letting WotC have any power to collapse their business, even if it means not getting to play with some of their toys anymore. The loss of drow was painful, but not living under that gun I think many Paizonians would say is quite worth it.

Unless the geniekin ancestries get grouped into nephilim, I wouldn't expect the scions of a more inner plane to fall under that umbrella. It feels like nephilim are a "demons and angels" outer sphere type heritage where demi-fae "changelings" of a sort feel like they should belong to a distinct category unless every extraplanar bloodline is considered nephilim.

I don't have a strong opinion here except to echo that I'd love to see more Tian Xia adventures.

On that note, one might argue that an example of a 'direct sequel' might be seen in certain adventure paths where the gap between book 3 and 4 is especially wide, or happens to fall on a natural stopping point. I believe I've heard some say this about Carrion Crown where you could treat the primary villain of the first three books as the mastermind until you discover that there is an even bigger evil genius behind him and three more books of adventure. Similarly, I've heard Iron Gods described in terms of 3 two-book sub-arcs but I don't know enough about this to say more.

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On a separate note, I don't really get these comparisons to George RR Martin. Surely writing for a campaign setting is somewhat different that writing a single series? Planting more seeds than one can resolve is a problem in a book where narrative satisfaction demands that loose ends be tied off by the end, but the same is necessarily a virtue when planting adventure hooks for a living world where any given GM might spot an idea and build their own story around it. If we wanted every plot hook to be resolved in a single narrative, traditional books and video games already exist. I get if you're getting tired of certain plots, but when I'm not interested in the hook for an adventure I just don't pay attention to it. I don't need to tell the creative team that they should stick to the adventures I want more of instead of catering to the diverse crowd out there who have been waiting just as long if not longer for their turn for a feature.

It seems like a lot of people have the impression that Gorum's suicide is because he doesn't want evil worshippers. This is at odds with the story as I understood it, and although I don't have a copy of that story in front of me, I wonder if that's not a potential source of confusion.

Gorum, under the prescripts of alignment as they existed prior to the remaster, is Chaotic. He is neither good nor evil, which can be seen both as not caring between one or the other (obviously offers power to both holy amd unholy worshippers) but also should be taken to mean that he doesn't particularly favour or want to belong to one side, either. If Gorum is War, then War is not Evil, just Chaos, yet there is a rot in his church. To many, War is Evil, and this includes a large number of his worshippers who drag War further away from the purity of violent struggle and deeper into atrocity. He didn't care that he had evil worshippers, he cared that the way the long arm of history was going, soon he wouldn't have anything but evil worshippers. Soon War would be evil, and either he would join it, or be standing there at odds with his own portfolio.

I'll grant, I don't know what specifically he hoped to achieve by taking himself out of the picture... it might be he simply decided he'd rather die a hero than live long enough to become the villain etc. Maybe he saw the way the wind was blowing and decided to check out early, or maybe this is part of some 5D chess strategy where his death inspires enough non-evil war gods to make enough noise that the net position of war remains firmly a broad spectrum domain

I check daily, but I go through periods of lower activity where I skim and the go on to a writing project or something else. My favouritevthreads to respond to are lore topics that I know something about or particularly interesting hypothetical about the cosmology, of which there are generally few threads regularly, and my least favourite are rules discussions where two or more posters treat a minor ambiguity in the text as a clear and obvious support for their interpretation, of which there seem to be many. (Actually, my least favourite should probably the cycling "Wizards? 546 new posts, started three days ago" threads but I mostly avoid engaging those so don't get as exasperated as when watching rulewars.

I've only been here for like 3-4 years now though so I can hardly speak to the downturn in activity over all. I'll grant, I did notice a drop off in certain schools of toxic poster, but I hardly lament that loss.

OK but what's to stop him from gaining a taste for the blood of gods? Or being tricked into killing Torag or Iomadae next? Him even being able to kill Gorum from behind, without warning, is a huge deal. Why would the gods all be aware he was tricked?

It's like someone invented nukes in this universe. There HAS to be a reaction. You don't just let an evil god start killing gods, you dish out punishment.

Well, certainly there has to be a reaction. A whole bunch of reactions, in fact. How else did we think this event was going to start a war? I'm just saying I would think less of any supposedly wise and goodly deity whose immediate reaction was to jump to punishment--thats more of a lawful or lawful evil domain, if we still had alignment.

It doesnt even really matter that he's (formerly known as) evil--more significantly is that he's supposed to be an assassin who doesnt kill true deities. I would expect finding out how/why it might have happened to be the top priority of any wise deity, right after making sure he's not actually going on a rampage, and perhaps detaining him, none of which requires inflicting preemptive punitive justice.

OTOH, as i already said, I fully expect this to start a whole drama bomb anyway, because I don't expect the wiser and more level headed deities to get the final say on what happens to Achaekek. Maybe Granny Spider objects on principle to detaining Achae, maybe that starts a full on brawl among some deities, maybe Calistria sees what a mess this turned out to be and decides not to take credit/explain. There are more than enough hotheaded and foolish deities to be jumping to conclusions, and there's gently of level-headed deities who might call for Achaekek's execution as it serves their needs, I just hope that none of the deities I respect have the gut reaction to demand revenge without investigation or trial. They'll be dragged into the war by fools and ambition, obviously, but I can't respect anyone that champs at the bit to punish somebody without bothering to uncover what would be revealed as an elaborate assisted suicide.

It's worth noting that...

Casting spells with the unholy trait is almost always anathema to deities who don't allow unholy sanctification, and casting holy spells is likewise anathema to those who don't allow holy sanctification.

Casting holy spells (which one must imagine is a major point of becoming holy sanctified) is explicitly anathema to Pharasma in as much as 'almost always' applies as a general statement. One might argue that 'almost' is intended to mean "you can do if it you can appeal to the deity's sensibilities" but I expect that this is more corner-case language, not "one of the top deities of the setting is actually holy-lite, but only if you go around her back and get holy through another channel." If Pharasma was cool with her followers not remaining neutral to the war in heaven, she'd allow sanctification.

Mind you, there's only a handful of ways of becoming holy in the first place, right now. It's pretty much exclusively 'cleric/champion with deity', follow the path of cultivation (somewhat against the gods' wishes), or be hit with a chunk of exploding godstuff and join the fight as a micro-deity. If you want to play a cultivator champion of Pharasma who vows to end the plague of undead in the world, I am not the one who is going to stand in your way from doing something cool.

I actually thought she had been confirmed as an empyrean/celestial nephilim long ago but I wouldn't know where to begin looking for evidence to back up any such spurious claims.

Hmm... You know, I feel like I would be quite disappointed in any capital-G Good Gods who decided for some reason to opt for punitive justice against the tool in a cosmic assisted suicide. I could see somebody wanting to take it out on Achaekek, but I hope it's none of the deities I consider generally wise or benevolent because that would make no sense to me.

Thing is, I don't think we actually know what causes the War yet beyond the ignition point. Right now it seems the god most directly responsible is actually already dead--and unless Gorum knew that his death would absolutely rock the heavens and shake the foundations of the cosmos, I feel like the responsibility is a lot more shared, and probably very little of it should actually fall on the god of assassins being tricked into killing somebody he's not supposed to. Certainly if any living god can claim the most responsibility it will have to be Calistria for tricking Achaekek, but I suspect more realistically the whole war is a series of events that capitulate out of control.

If I were to guess one or two steps in, I suspect some deity or deities do seek to hold Achaekek responsible, but Grandmother Spider stands up for him, whether because she realises he was only a tool, because he's her brother, or just because she opposes the gods on principle. Competing interests soon enter into it and the plot becomes impossible to track, but I'm sure we'll see a lot more when the time comes.

Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:

Waldham wrote:

Quote:

Enormous mammals inhabit the continent, some of which have gone extinct elsewhere in Golarion and some of which are utterly unknown.

What is enormous mammals ?

I don't know if you've since found your answer, but in short:

- Enormous means 'really big'
- Mammals are a type of animal that don't lay eggs (mostly) including humans, elk, and cats for random examples.

In any case, as the others have covered, there are several places not claimed by a nation, although it is important to note that places that do not belong to a nation (i.e. state) are not necessarily unsettled or lacking in governance, and that even places that have not been settled are not necessarily uninhabited by a people who lay claim to the territory.

Hope this helped!

Daedon for example ? Hyaenodon ? Smilodon ?

In Pathfinder, these examples ate presented as "giant prehistoric versions" of modern animals (boars, hyenas) so in my opinion would absolutely be appropriate. For other examples, you might consider any megafauna that might show up in the realm of the Mammoth Lords (with potentially less emphasis on cold-weather adapted species).

Sarusan is not exclusively giant mammals (for example the thylacine, native to real-world Australia, is listed) but it does seem like the description is painting a very Lost World picture, albeit without the emphasis on dinosaurs specifically.

In case others are unfamiliar, this is the name of a new ritual in the Tian Xia Character Guide that allows the casters to go on a drunken bender and allow fate to give them an insight into a case, allowing them to choose from a small list of options and temporarily "losing" any option not chosen (information, dignity, items, etc)

I remember the first time it clicked for me that every time a character gets stabbed with a blade, they probably have a bloody hole in their clothes that isn't just going to heal itself up. Somebody needs to be washing and sewing these garments up after every fight if they're going to keep the adventurer look without buying copies of the same wardrobe in bulk.

In any case, don't forget that a portion of that coin is in silver, too. Also I think the ability of states to conjure or planeshift to/from the plane of earth to mine infinite gold is a bit overstated. Oprak certainly has the ability to organize such a thing if it wanted, but I don't think most wand of planar travel can be scaled up so greatly, and I'm not sure of there even are spells that allow you to create permanent valuable items currently...

I didn't post a link?

The post in question has since been deleted. It included a link to pathfinderwiki, but in the same line of text also included a different link you might have accidentally clicked on if you weren't paying enough attention. Also RB probably means AI, but I wouldn't be surprised if IA is the French acronym.

Just finished reading through parts of No Breath to Cry:

As for the corrupted version of Willowshore, that's also a projection of Kugaptee's dreams much like everything else that remains behind.

I would put this in the Pathfinder 2e Rules Discussion forum. There might even be an errata thread started for whatever book this comes from (I assume PC2) although I think this is the first I've heard of this feat, so it is worth a mention still!

That reminds me that I've been meaning to ask. Is there are particular reason that the (post-festival) population numbers were set to just over 200? Whether for narrative or thematic purposes of achieving a certain 'feel' to the size of the remaining body, or even to facilitate the feeding logistics that come up in Book 2?

I've been thinking of increasing the initial population to account for the size of the town, but it occurs to me that perhaps "about 200 survivors" was chosen because it makes the PCs feel more isolated and vulnerable vs. say 300-400 survivors.

(I suppose one could also just increase the initial population and leave the surviving population alone, but one imagines the trauma of seeing literally half your neighbours die horribly might leave a darker mark on the town for a bit longer than if it were more like 1 in 5. Might start getting a bit hard to roleplay, whether you elide the trauma or not)