Souls At War's page

polymynia wrote:

no actual concrete plan, discussion of what is actually being discussed, or why this was actually decided in the first place

Ok, I gotta ask... Why do you think you're entitled to this information? As far as I can tell, you're not a Paizo employee, so why do you or any customer for that matter, need to know what discussions they're having, their timelines, their negotiations with their vendors, etc? This is not the kind of information that companies release to the public so I'm struggling to understand what you think you're owed here.

Paizo relies on customers money, which also mean they need customers, and customers don't like being screwed over for "no reason" (and/or poorly explained ones).

Paizo needs to learn the differences between wanting to say something and needing to say something, and the differences between wanting to say X, but needing to say Y.

Also should consider better timing for announcements and avoid pilling things up.

Also, why a flat 10$ to all? Adventures (128 pages) will now be more than half the price of Adventures (256 pages).

The announcement is rather "last minute".

and +1 for wanting justifications if this affect older products.

Cheliax has always been poorly written IMO. The Big A is not stupid he would never put up with stupid people running his foothold in the Material Plane but time and time again Cheliax is written as if totally stupid inept people are running it. It would only take a bit of good writing to make Cheliax a good bad guy if the goody to shoes always beats the evil bad guy without any true resistance what's the point of having a bad guy to begin with? There are worse bad guys to fight TB is much worse and more dangerous to the world order than Cheliax ever could be.

Cheliax should crush Andoran in a war they have about even sized populations and Cheliax can call whole armies of devils to supplement their army. If Andoran left their boarders in large numbers TB would swoop in and have human snacks of the old and infirm. The whole of the Inner Sea should unite and eliminate TB then settle other wars.

Someone did already point out that Asmodeus doesn't want escalations of literally divine proportions.

But yeah, AP wise Cheliax has the poorest track record for consistency. Could be one of the out of verse reasons for the Hellfire Crisis.

Honestly, I've always thought that war as we think of it/historical know it wouldn't exist in a world with D&D and Pathfinder style magic.

I would honestly expect a lot of magic fueled assassination attempts and sabotage taking place via a small number high level agents. The logistic of moving hundreds of men is challenging...why bother when you can send 5 through a magic portal to cripple a city's infrastructure and stop them from producing things to continue the war.

While Golarion has high magic, that high magic is very "concentrated" in a small number of people. I don't think there is any kind of widespread magical transportation system getting large quantities of people between places similar to a railway system.

the Magic thing is concentrated, thus "rare", but it is usually well known and countermeasures do exist, and Magic doesn't come with infinite uses.

But maybe we should avoid derailing the thread further.

Come to think of it, does PF2/PF2R have rules for buying/renting properties, cost of living, building/maintaining infrastructures, etc?

Yes, but publishing them over 3 or 6 months does not force them to spread the writing over 3 or 6 months. They could theoretically write it in exactly the same way they will be going forward, and then just hold onto the later parts for longer.

Books 5 and 6 were often still being written when book 1 was sent to the printers, so...

One other possibility is that multiple authors could better divide their areas of expertise.

-snip-

And page count would be easier, too. Currently, all three modules in an adventure path have the same length. But with all three in a single book, the length could vary. If the middle 2nd-module section needs to run long to tell its story well, cuts could come out of the 1st module or 3rd module rather than the 2nd module to fit the page count.

Two pretty good points, and they can be combined too.

Flying ancestries in PF2 are tricky mechanically, as permanent flight is a rather high level ability. The 1/5/9 Featline is a elegant solution from the mechanical point of view.

However, a recent discussion about the flight feats made me realize it does cause a disconnect between NPC and PC of the same ancestries:
- A Level 2 Strix NPC can fly.
- A Level 2 Strix PC can barely "jump good".
PC's can't fly, when seemingly everyone else can.

There is the whole thing about "game balance", then the "NPCs use different rules than the PCs" thing, Howl of the Wild also has that kind of thing, and not just for flight.

I agree that having lore reasons could be nice.

It should also translate to better internal communications to make sure everyone is on the same page, and better continuity.

Should also help (more) when crap happen, like someone having to leave the project, an author having severe Blank Page Syndrome, etc.

Apart from some early growing pains as the AP writers adjusted to PF2, the biggest issues I've run into with APs seem to have stemmed from the limitations of the monthly format- bases and locations getting discarded because they weren't ready for the next author, abrupt shifts in tone or theme, important details not getting to the GM until it's too late, that sort of thing. APs are still going to frequently be multi-author, so I don't expect all the wrinkles to be ironed out, but I'll be happy to see the shift in action eventually.

Some of us already pointed out it should help with internal consistency, and hopefully avoid what happened in Council of Thieves, Serpent's Skull and a few others.

We calling them Adventure Modules now?

Many already referred the regular Adventures as "Modules".

Might also help with future changes to the site, store and subscriptions.

So at this month's paizo live on twitch, paizo announced that they are changing from monthly releases to quarterly releases. and instead of 3, 4, or 6 books for an AP they will be 1 single volume together.

I honestly quite like this change.

Which technically could mean that books might switch from 3, 4, 5 or 6 parts "more easily".

Ah, that the coherence of APs will now be easier to manage, it should also be easier to release pawns once more for each AP :)

Internal coherence/consistency (writers) and

I think this is purely a positive change! It’s not like anyone realistically should have been starting an AP before the whole thing was released anyway. The only downside I can think of is that there’s now more of a wait in between APs, but the logistical problems this solves as well as the cohesion it allows across an entire AP more than makes up for that.

external coherence/consistency (Game Masters, Players)

Kinda glad if optimization become more optional than mandatory.

for Easy vs Hard, a few things/variations to think about:

- Level of optimization and synergy or lack thereof.
- Number of PCs (already mentioned).
- Relation to the Random Numbers God.

How are area D and area E connected? text doesn't say much, and the map for area D doesn't show any.

From the Hellfire Crisis page : "prevent the diabolic forces of Hell from overtaking the world."

Maybe Hell is getting tired of Cheliax keeping on losing. So the devils arrange behind the scenes for an excuse to take a far more active hand in the setting.

Kinda goes with what I asked in the revious page:

So there is a possibility Hell has less and less need for House Thrune.

Torrent and Nail are based out of Cheliax, so it kinda make senses they would say no.

Still curious about Scourge, who should oppose this, but maybe not publicly, and Gate who is usually the other "screw politic" order.

and maybe Crux, dilemma between hating other Hellknights and liking the idea of being a death-squad again?

And the mess with the Glorious Reclamation is still recent, so even some of Thrune's detractors might tell Andoran the shove it, especially if they know about the Lumber Consortium BS.

Alzira is lacking an Unholy Symbol of Camazotz.

UpliftedBearBramble wrote:

We did our usual discussion for Book 1, and we were looking for that megadungeon. I assume it's in book 2 and 3, so compared to Otari and Abmonation vaults the only other 2E megadungeon we're getting less.

The majority of the book seems like troubles in Otari, and under Otari for the little missions to help introduce people to the game and general combat. Those were separate from the megadungeon before, that means the MD we're getting here is significantly smaller for the same price.

This argument is in incredibly bad faith. You’re not getting less of an adventure for the same price — it’s not like the book is blank. You’re just getting a different type of adventure than in book 1 of Abomination Vaults. If you’re trying to argue that this shouldn’t have been marketed as a megadungeon, then I would disagree with that too, as it’s not like it’s inherently bad spending book 1 getting the PCs to care about the town next to the megadungeon they’re going to spend the next 2 books exploring.

To be honest, the player's guide could have done expectations management and explanations a bit better.

Like I said, I find PbP and live sessions (fortnightly anyway) can be roughly equivalent. It's helpful to know that you run long sessions, though, that also partly explains the quick pace.

For example, 8 or 9 weekly 6-hour sessions for an AP book is around 48-54 hours of play. Similarly, my AV and Empires Devoured sessions (as a player and GM, respectively) tend to run around 3-4 hours. So if we finish Empires Devoured in 12-13 shorter sessions, that's around the same amount of gameplay (call it 40-52 hours). And AV took us roughly 8 months per book, but that was only about 13-14 sessions probably. Still roughly in the 42-54 hour range. No idea how long it took us to finish book 2 but it was probably around that.

So I'm guessing a 6-book AP is around 250-300 hours of gameplay.

Getting back to the topic, I suppose I'd like to see more stories in the ~100 hour range, that's about 25-30 sessions which you can do in a year and change with fortnightly sessions and accounting for real life.

As a total aside, a rough conversion for play-by-post is one hour equals one week (I tend to run a bit faster, 3 weeks to 4 hours-ish), so you'd probably be looking at one book every 7-10 months. Roughly equivalent to fortnightly 3-4 hour sessions.

Can be useful to remember that not everyone play at the same pace, so how much development/advancement happen in the same span of time will vary.

The Raven Black wrote:

I have sometimes read that 3-parters felt a bit rushed and could have been developed more.

Some of them do. That said, some of the 6-parters feel padded.

Partly why I think they could consider mixing 4 and 5 parters in once in a while, especially if/when hitting "too much for 3, but not enough for 6".

Edit: as a side note, I wonder how people feel about slow burn types like Council Of Thieves.

nephandys wrote:

Is anyone else getting a bad feeling about the upcoming changes to the loyalty program? The way it’s been described so far - lots of vague “coming soon” language and talk of a “better experience” - just screams corpo-speak for we’re cutting benefits, but trying to make it sound like a good thing.

Let’s be honest: when companies say they’re “enhancing” or “evolving” a program to “better serve us,” it usually translates to more restrictions, fewer rewards, or a new tier system that’s harder to climb. They frame it as a win for the customer, but it almost always serves their bottom line, not ours.

Until they drop actual details, there’s no way to know for sure, but the language so far feels like a red flag. If the changes were genuinely beneficial, they probably wouldn’t be so cagey or need to spin it this hard. They'd be shouting them from the rooftops instead of deferring them for a future blog.

Would love to be wrong on this, but right now it feels like we’re being softened up for a downgrade.

I know that feeling, but usually Paizo is a good company, somehow an exception among the big names in the hobby industry.

They might also be cagey due to things out of their control.

Since the primary point of switching to 4 Adventure Paths a year was to give folks additional chances to like one enough to want to buy it, swtiching back to 3 would erode that goal while not appealing to folks who want full 1–20 level six-part Adventure Paths. Seems like a solution that would disappoint everyone but also give us on the Narrative team another dose of disruptions to the workflow, so I don't see this happening.

Still something that can be talked about, especially when wanting to try experimental ideas/APs.

On 12 volumes a year:
* 1 x 12 (would be slow, and the thing about variety)
* 2 x 6, what was used before.
* 3 x 4
* 4 x 3, currently used.
* 6 x 2, kinda short
* 12 x 1, OK, that's pretty much standalone modules.
some combo like 2 + 3 + 3 + 4 or 3 + 4 + 5.

And with a dose of "themes in APs", branching/splitting AP, granted those would probably be an headache to make.

Expectation management: Will Liralarue get mentioned or show up?

bit more snarky... decided on the fourth R Of The RuneLords yet?

Useful to remember that there are people in Isger who want to throw Cheliax out, so a lot of opportunities for many factions and sides.

It IS unusual for volume 1 of an Adventure Path to be available before a Player's Guide is. That's not the norm, and we try not to do that, but... sometimes reality has other complications in mind, I guess.

Was it Hell's Vengeance? One of them was cursed; big site update 2 days before street/release date, which wasn't a good idea, especially since pretty much all product lines had a release, and an Humble Bundle sale that caused a catastrophic increase in trafic to the site, which did result in quite the crash... and a player's guide that was released closer to book 2 as a result.

Edit: might have been "War for the Crown"

Would you mind linking the Player's Guide or whatever it is we'd need?

@I'm Hiding in Your Closet: On your Paizo page, if you place your cursor over "My Account" a list pops up and you'll click on "Digital Content".

You'll see a full list of Player's Guides. Just scroll down until you find CC. Once you do, click on it and download and you'll have it. :) *thumbs up*

Carrion Crown Player's Guide since I'm not sure those are automatically added to download.

Few questions:
- How will you handle age categories?
- Young Characters?
- Templates?

My headcanon is ~snip~

I think you posted that in the wrong thread.

Claxon wrote:

The "take what you want" but "be loyal to your crew" part I think is what keeps Besmaran adherents from going full murder hobo.

Also, if you look at history, pirates usually didn't want to kill their targets. Because if you became notorious for killing your prey, they would fight harder and to the death (if they thought their only way out alive was to kill you). Ideally pirates just want their prey to surrender and give over their stuff.

And stealing is bad, but like, not as bad as murder.

You hit the nail on the head

I completly aggree with you

My question is not, can there be non-evil pirates, that I aggree with
I am talking specifically Holy (good aligned) Clerics of a Goddess of PIracy. Someone who has good intentions but will only raid and plunder as their lifes work. How would THAT work

Jack is a fun guy, but I wouldn't call him a really morally upstanding person.

While Good vs Evil is one thing, it can be useful to remember the whole Law vs Chaos part, and maybe avoid conflating Good with Law and Evil with Chaos.

Also, Robin Hood as a "good thief"

id prefer age of ashes or agents of edgewatch, SoG is really good as is

AoE is an interesting case, it wasn't well received, which would normally DQ it from a compilation/remaster, yet it is one AP that could gain a lot from a remaster.

For some things, the degree of success of failure is known, but perhaps not what the effect is. Is Unrest or Ruin going to increase by some amount? Is a hostile army going to get a bonus? etc.

This is pretty much what JJ, Tridus and I are talking about, it would be after the "you succeed/fail", but before describing what it means/does and any extra roll(s).

Thank you, so basically it's an optional reroll with a +2 circumstance bonus, but the GM is not allowed to tell you the outcome (most likely only applies to events then)

the GM is allowed to tell the outcome of the second roll.

Admittedly, the roll to result thing might not work well with things like play by post.

Souls At War wrote:

Kavlor wrote:

I think we will have this sides:

Cheliax, Ravounel, Nidal, Isger, Katapesh goverment, Mzali, Shackles, Korvosa, Molthune, Oprak

vs

Andoran, Nimrathas, Katapesh Firebrands, Senghor, Vidrian, Nimrathans, Kraggodan, Five King Mountains

I don't see the Shackles teaming up with Cheliax.

Also, many nations and groups would probably stay neutral until their opposite take sides, with some "play/trade with all sides" types in between.

This is also asuming A vs B, not some A vs B vs C thing.

For the Shackles, maybe Cheliax doesn't do a full alliance but instead offers the pirate lords letters of marque that lets their ships through the Arch of Aroden so they can prey on Andoran shipping? Privateering like that was pretty common back in the 1700s, so it would make sense that nations might do it in Golarion as well. Would make for some fun mini adventures as well, where the PCs can engage in ship combat!

Would still be weird for the Shackles to side with Cheliax... and Cheliax probably wouldn't be the only one using privateers and mercenaries.

I reminded myself today that the Tower of Slant Shadows had a strange syncretic religion pop up around it a few Golarion-decades ago - cultists of Desna and of Rovagug who originally named together simply to protect the Star Tower from a group of demodands (shaggy and tarry, iirc). One interesting dimension which probably has a slight (but prolly no more than) influence on their religious understanding is that both are opposed to Zonny K but are now defending his works or one of them, at least... So there is a TINY chance that he might end up being worshiped by the cult as well? Mostly, I imagine it would just be Desna and Rovagug.

Complicating the question is that James Jacobs has said that they wouldn't be doing anything with demodands in 2e XD

Wondering if anyone has any ideas about what that syncretism might look like and how it has evolved in the time gap between 1e and 2e (both from a world building POV and mechanically as a 2e pantheon)?

I don't see Rovagug being interested in protecting the Star Towers, especially since he gain from them being destroyed.

Thread kind of reminds me of the issues people had with Bastards of Golarion, and to a lesser extent, Blood of the Beast.

Thanks and goodwill only go so far, especially when being a one way thing, gratitude won't put food on the table most of the time.

There is also the risk vs reward part, if doing something cost more resources for the PCs than they get in return, they might be bothered by this. Part of this might be bad luck with dice rolls.

It can also be useful to tell the players ahead of time that they are expected to spend a lot of resources, and as a GM to remember they will need said resources.

There is also a possibility that this AP simply isn't for them.

For Andoran I would love to see more of the political factions and organizaitons. Major guilds have a seat in the People's Council. Also how council districts are drawn and chosen. The Lumber consortium is a big one but there should be others.

Kinda reminds me, I would like a good explanation on how the Lumber Consortium has that much power.

The point is that Paizo does not know where the boundaries and/or comfort level for specific types of actions lie with your (and every other) group.

Even Hell's Vengeance is fairly well "sanitized" from what it could be.

Aside from the Chelish curse, HV suffered from inverting the roles of heroes and villains, one of the reasons it didn't feel like an Evil AP.

Shay: If I get trampled in the crowds I just want everyone to know: Josh isn’t allowed to have my legos

Josh: Not even the cool spaceship ones?!

Why do I imagine the following would be: "Shay: Especially the cool spaceship ones." ?

Yes. The one thing I DON'T want is for the war to kick off and end in the same adventure. Things must change, but a war should take 3+ years to resolve. And Paizo can get feedback from the community before deciding where to go to resolve the war. I feel strongly that Geb is the more interesting faction to ally with, because I want to fight the horrors and mages of Nex more than more undead again.

Let the good vs. evil fight against undead campaign be against Tar-Baphon. And in Geb we can be the group of adventurers that joins undead.

Useful to remember that some undeads are against Tar-Baphon's plans, especially those who feed on the living, and this is quite divisive in Geb, just not brutally... yet.

One thing to keep in mind with Civil War AP/Adventure is the question: "which side?", something that might not be easy to answer.

Personally, I actually knew very little about Golarion lore before the event. Like, I knew some about very specific areas and topics, and about a couple major events (like a certain two powerful beings escaping their respective prisons and changing the literal map), but I learned a lot assembling my conspiracy boards. So much effort to be completely wrong. XD

At least you can admit it and not go: "I'm not wrong, it's the Paizo writers who are wrong".

Is it just me or is this module too top heavy with magic loot?

Last session the party beat up three sealbreaker knights, all of whom had +1 full plate, a +1 heavy steel shield and a +1 longsword. That's over 6,000gp of loot per knight. Then the otyughs gave them glove of storing, which contained a scabbard of keen edges, a further 16,000gp worth.

Earlier they were gifted a +2 halberd by Ranton Gandry, Brunna gave them a +2 shield. They beat Kilibrandt and got her +1 shadow studded leather, +1 composite bow, belt of dex +4, and cloak of resistance +2, along with the gear from her hirelings.

And that's not even mentioning the multitude of potions, wands, talismans, etc they keep picking up.

I would suggest reading the whole module, and the beginning of the next one, there is usually a reason for increased loot.

Charles Evans 25 wrote:

I gather from your post that Rovagug's immunity has been discussed in a thread before though. Do you have a link, please, to the thread in question?

Still have to find the blog post commenting on this series being the “safe from death” notices, but the entries can be found here.

and the Which Core Deity will we lose? thread.

and Achaekek isn't the only deity with contradicting lore, hell, PF1 never really made its mind about Ydersius being quasi-deity, demigod or full deity.

those images, especially the spoilered one...

Does it mean Deities can

The issue is that Mesoamerican have long been smeared as Devil worshipers who did blood orgy rituals which was far from the truth.

The idea of a pure evil demon lord people worship to cause eternal darkness is also fake b%~~&+@#. Mesoamericans didn’t even have concepts of platonic good or evil.

Even the early frays had a hard time trying to teach the concept of "evil" in mesoamerican society because in nahuatl there isn't a word for "bad", there is only good "cualli" and not-good "ahmo cualli". Someone explained to me this with fruits: the fruit that is still immature is not good "ahmo cualli"; the ripe fruit is good "cualli", while the rotten fruit is not good "ahmo cualli" but neither of those states or phases are inherently "bad", the same applies to anything else, everything has its own time.

After stating this... the divinity that would carry the "evil" concept can be traslated to Tezcatlipoca and even so this god is also a protector of the poor and slaves. Although in modern times the word "chamuco" referring to the devil may have its roots in the god Oxomoco from the primal couple, the ancestors of the humankind.

Word of advise, might be very useful to know when people are talking in-game/in-verse vs real life things, and when things get mixed...

I'm someone who likes a lot of different styles of adventures in my campaigns rather than sticking to a single theme the entire time. Stringing together a few shorter APs sounds like a good way to get that variety.

However, I've also grown to like a good thru line. What are people's thoughts on an AP that skips levels. Like, Vol. 1 is levels 1-3, then you do some other adventures before Vol. 2 kicks off at level 8 or something. The whole thing goes to 20, but sporadically.

Something like Eden Odyssey's Wonders Out of Time (for 3.5) if anybody remembers that. It's a favorite of mine.

Kinda highlight one of the issues with 6 parts APs, filling 6 volumes with contents can be difficult.

I enjoy Saranrae as a goddess more than basically any other fictional god I've read about in any fantasy setting, since I find her focus on redemption (with swift retribution against the unredeemable) to be fascinating. I associate the Pathfinder setting very strongly with her. Hence, her loss would make me very unhappy. Also since I personally find Arazni to be a pretty naff replacement (it should have been Nocticula!), if it turns out to be Saranrae who has to go.

Saying "well, isn't her legacy enough for you?" sounds a bit clinically detached and uninvolved, no offense intended.

It has been mentioned a few times that Arazni won't take the mantle of whoever bites it.