I wrote up a human inquisitor of Kabriri for a Wayfinder article that I didn't end up submitting a while ago - it was for the Osirion issue, and the concept of the article was a pair of desert guides, one helpful, one dangerous.
The dangerous one was an inquisitor of Kabriri who basically acted as a way for ghouls out in the desert to feed - he would pose as a guide, lead teams of treasure-hunters to the ghoul's haunts, and then turn on them when the ghouls struck. He used a hat of disguise and the abilities of the infiltrator archetype to blend in and act as a different guide each time.
As I can't think of anywhere else I would use it, here's his stat block.
Rhajmat
XP 1,200
Human Inquisitor (Infiltrator, Sanctified Slayer) 5 of Kabriri (CR 4)
CE Medium humanoid (human) (misdirection shows as CG)
Init +5; Senses detect alignment; Perception +11
DEFENSE
AC 16, touch 12, flat-footed 14 (+4 armor, +2 Dex)
hp 31 (5d8+5)
Fort +4, Ref +3, Will +7
OFFENSE
Speed 35 ft.
Melee falchion +6 (2d4+3, 18-20/x2) and savage maw +0 (1d4+1, 1 bleed on critical)
Ranged shortbow +5 (1d6+2, 20/x3)
Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
Special Attacks bane (8 rounds/day), bleeding touch (1d6 bleed touch, 2 rounds, 6/day), precise strike +1d6, sneak attack +1d6, studied target +2
Inquisitor Spells Known (CL 5th, Concentration +7)
2nd (4/day, DC 15) – death knell, hold person, savage maw (ARG)
1st (5/day, DC 14) – cause fear, divine favor, ear-piercing scream (UM), shield of faith
0th (At will, DC 13) – bleed, create water, guidance, light, resistance, sift (APG)
STATISTICS
Str 15, Dex 14, Con 11, Int 9, Wis 16, Cha 10
Base Atk +3, CMB +5, CMD 17
Feats Endurance, Extra Bane, Fleet, Precise Strike, Weapon Focus (falchion)
Skills Bluff +11, Diplomacy +8, Knowledge (Dungeoneering) +6, Knowledge (Nature) +6, Linguistics +1, Perception +9, Sense Motive +8, Stealth +8, Survival +11
Languages Taldane, Osiriani, Ancient Osiriani
SQ cunning initiative, domain (Death), forbidden lore, guileful lore (+3 to Bluff and Diplomacy), misdirection (DC 15, detects as CG), necessary lies (+5 to saves against lie detection or truth compulsion), orisons, solo tactics
Combat Gear masterwork falchion, composite mighty (+2) shortbow, 20 arrows, +1 studded leather armor, 2 potions of cure moderate wounds (2d8+3), flail, light steel shield; Other Gear hat of disguise, human jerky, ranger’s kit
My drunken brute barbarian/grenadier alchemist is all about booze. He's a follower of Cayden, has maxed-out Craft (Brewmaster), and I describe all of his alchemical infusions, extracts, and mutagens as different types of magical booze. He even has holy beer instead of holy water.
The only booze-related magic item he as is the Tankard of the Drunken Hero, which is from Inner Sea Gods and is quite neat. Lets you do remove fear and heroism on yourself 1/day and automatically unties you if you get tied up.
He's got a trait called Fortified Drinker that gets him a +2 bonus to mind-affecting saves (so pretty much all Will saves) and another called Iron Liver that gives a +2 bonus to resist poison and drugs, and +4 to resist alcohol.
It helps that rage and mutagen Strength bonuses stack; he can really hit hard if he needs to when they're both going.
The unchained summoner removed most of the big issues with the class; I'm not sure you're reacting to an issue that still exists. Anything that class can do, the druid can do better in terms of spamming summons and then wrecking shop with their spellcasting, plus a druid can then turn into a huge beast themselves and tear things apart, which the summoner is rubbish at.
The first version of the summoner had too many overpowered evolutions available too cheaply. The biggest offender here was Pounce, which was a one-point evolution, available at very low level. It was insanely, stupidly cheap, and I genuinely don't understand how it got past the first round of playtesting. It made the route to an OP eidolon way too easy, and it was trivial to have a class feature that was a better melee combatant than the fighter.
They also didn't pick the level of the spells very well. Summoners had delayed spellcasting and then their spell list changed the levels of all the best spells so that they got them at the same class level or slightly before the main casters like wizards and clerics. The craziest of these was Haste as a 2nd level spell on the summoner list, which they got access to at character level 4, earlier than anyone else.
The other thing that was ridiculous was the synthesist archetype, which was a very cool idea that was pretty rough in execution. You could basically forget all your physical stats, since you used your mental stats and the eidolon's physical stats while it was summoned - and it was going to be summoned all the time. It was trivially easy to be far more powerful than just about anyone else in the party as a synthesist.
The unchained summoner, on the other hand, removes all these issues. The eidolon is useful, but you have a lot fewer evolution points to play with, and the outsider typing means it's all pretty flavorful. The only spells you get access to at all early are all summoning-related, with nothing that makes them more useful outside of their intended niche than primary spellcasters.
I ran this last night for a high-tier group, and we had a good time, but I thought this got off to a bit of a rocky start.
I had...
Arcanist 2
Inquisitor of Cayden Cailean 5
Paladin of Iomedae 4
Magus 2
Bard 5
Cleric 4 (a Kyra pregen from a new player who showed up)
The start of the scenario was a bit rocky - there are too many steps. You get a letter from the VC telling you to meet at a tavern, but you're just meeting the other PCs there, and from there you go find the Shoanti village, where Tide Watcher escorts you to the actual cave system. Too many steps. Just have the letter direct them to meet Tide Watcher at the Shoanti village, with a map to where they're going. Way easier, and you can put in a Shoanti trader or something if they decide they need to buy something.
The cave system wasn't the clearest thing in the world either. If the path that Tide Watcher and Julian both took to get to the Thassilonian ruins goes past the goblin battle site, why didn't they see it and put two and two together on what went inside? If it didn't, how are the PCs supposed to stumble across it? Are we just supposed to assume that Tide Watcher (who presumably is decent at Survival as a Shoanti chieftain) missed the goblin battle site? I had the PCs find goblin tracks, and gave them the option to follow where they came from (which would have led to the battle site) or where they were going (which led them to the cavern with Julian and the door). I had no issue believing that Julian didn't notice the goblin tracks; presumably as a low-level cleric he doesn't have any Survival skills.
Once the PCs were inside everything went well. They murdered the hungry fleshes, then headed to the kitchens. Most of their interaction with the goblins were with the two goblin cooks, one of which basically sold out the rest of the goblins due to a really high Intimidation roll from the inquisitor. He told them the short version of the story of how the tribe found the place, and then encouraged them to go murder the rest of the tribe so he could be in charge.
Next they fought Grib, which was a brutal fight. Several of the PCs got nailed hard by the stink bombs and they were out for a good chunk of the fight, and the inquisitor was nearly killed by the bombs. Quick thinking from the cleric got one of the goblin sneaks into the vat, which I ruled was not great to be immersed in completely. Didn't have to decide what was going to crawl out (another hungry flesh?) because they kept throwing alchemist's fire into the cauldron. A timely hold person from Kyra and a CdG from another party member took out Grib. Nobody picked up any entertaining mutations as they stayed well away from the fleshwarping pots, and made all their saves against the thrown goop.
The big fight with the skald in the central cavern was fine, though I forgot about the noise hazard (dumb on my part). The skald goblin went down fairly quickly as the party jumped on her. The flying goblins didn't get to do much with the fact that they can fly; seemed a bit weird that they didn't focus on ranged combat, reach weapons, or keeping mobile; as written they basically just jump down and start attacking with their claws, doing nothing with the fact that they can fly. Maybe scorpion tails with reach or javelins instead of a few of the mutations they have?
There was one goblin left when the skald went down, and PCs were standing in two of the doorways of the room - all of them except the one that went to the Queen herself. I had the last goblin run to the Queen, which prompted her and the sinspawn to move into the big room, which didn't give the PCs any time to heal up after the skald fight. That made the last fight really dangerous. They took out the sinspawn but the Queen was beating on them when we ran out of time - our play space had a hard stop time and I hadn't been keeping an eye on it as well as I should have. The bard was down when we had to stop, and there was a good chance he was about to get caught in a line of five PCs as her breath weapon was about to recharge.
All in all I liked the scenario quite a bit, just thought that the start could be cleaner and involve less steps and that the cave system could be clarified.
I actually had an all-human party the last time I played, which surprised the heck out of me. I've had several no-human groups, but an all-human table (with five or six players, as I recall) was pretty surprising.
I've never seen a lot of classes - our region is fairly basic. Only one or two of the Occult classes, and no Vigilantes at all. I've never seen a druid, oracle, inquisitor, witch, ninja, samurai, bloodrager, brawler, hunter, or shaman either. Generally not too much out of the ACG, really, except for stuff I've played.
I will alter tactics to avoid a TPK if I think that's something that might happen, though I'll try and make it reasonable within the stated tactics.
I would love to run a game for all advanced players that was intentionally more adversarial and up the challenge, but I don't think that's something I'd be comfortable doing with a mixed group. You'd have to make that kind of thing clear ahead of time as well, in my opinion.
So, an interesting thing happened at my most recent PFS game, and I wanted to see what other people think about it.
I was running a 3-7 scenario with several people from my local lodge, including two of my more mechanically-minded players. I also had a player (let's call him Bob) who's relatively new to the game, and perhaps not the most socially skilled of fellows. He's running a psychic sorcerer of some kind; a few minutes of research tells me that he's a psychic bloodline sorcerer from Occult Adventures, and is 4th level or so. I haven't audited his character or anything, but my understanding is that his spell selection is mostly mind-affecting stuff. Certainly most of the things he does at the table are mental attacks from the psychic sorcerer spell list - he uses mind thrust and psychic strike as his main attacks, and honestly isn't too creative in what he does - 90% of the time it's one of those two things. If his target is immune to mind-affecting attacks, like an undead or something, he'll either use that ability anyway or do nothing.
At the beginning of the scenario, one of my players told Bob that he'd gotten some complaints about his character, and basically said something to the effect of "You should change your spell selection so it doesn't suck so much. Stick around at the end of the game and we'll talk about it."
Understandably, Bob reacted to this rather defensively. I stuck up for him, generally of the opinion that it's nobody's business how their character is set up, and tending far more toward the roleplaying side of the hobby than the mechanical. I attempted to defuse the situation, basically saying that it's Bob's character and he can play it as he likes.
That said, I can understand where they're annoyed. Bob's character DOES kind of suck at his job, but I feel like if he's not asking for help, criticizing his PC isn't helping anything. It's one thing to have a semi-useless character at low levels; most low-tier scenarios aren't really very threatening, even if PCs do dumb stuff or make almost entirely sub-optimal choices. Hell, I've seen low-level scenarios where one PC who's built well as a generalist can basically solo the whole scenario if they want. Difficulty ramps up considerably around 5th level or so, to the point where having to carry a character through who isn't contributing to the party much can put everyone's PCs in real danger of death.
So, what do people think is the right answer here? How "optimized" are characters in PFS supposed to be, and how much does that change as they level up? I realize a lot of this will be determined by scenario choice and the specifics of the region's players, but honestly the idea that someone's character isn't "up to snuff" rubs me the wrong way. I'm not sure there's a good way to advise a player on this without coming off as insulting, and I don't want to be a lodge where there's a feeling that "You have to be this competent to play with us." That way lies a level of elitism and rudeness that I'm not too comfortable with.
I would argue that most of the races that are presented as "human + other creature stock" wouldn't work as the base race for something like that. For example, I would say that the son of a dhampir and a tiefling isn't some sort of weird dhampir+tiefling mix; he would just be one or the other. That leaves out quite a few - aasimar, tieflings, all the elemental-touched, dhampir, changelings, and a few other more obscure races.
I would agree with you that androids couldn't be planetouched; they don't seem to have children, after all. From the description of the race, they just seem to reboot every so often with a fresh spirit inside them.
Wouldn't think samsarans could be planetouched, either - they've already got their own weird thing going on, and it doesn't seem to involve sexual reproduction. Admittedly, I did something similar with an aasimar character - the idea I had for him was that he was perfecting himself over multiple incarnations, and had finally managed to "purify" himself enough that he was starting to take on celestial features. I figured it fit well enough for a warpriest of Irori.
If you're attached to the idea of some mechanic for physical attractiveness, how about something simple that uses an existing game mechanic?
Attractive (Social Trait)
You are conventionally attractive, and as a result have an easier time in lots of social situations. You gain a +1 trait bonus to Bluff and Diplomacy rolls made against those who might be attracted to you. This bonus increases to +2 if you're attempting to seduce them.
Yeah the pregens often have rules that are a bit different from norm. For example Yoon is size small as a human.
I always assumed Yoon was supposed to have the Young template, though I have never bothered to check if her stats match up. Should be -4 Str, -4 Con, +4 Dex, and Small size. The adjustments to natural armor don't mean anything to a human.
Has anybody noticed this? I was printing pregens yesterday for a convention, and noticed that the 1st level magus pregen exists now. I checked him over and found that, at 1st level, he has spellstrike.
Spellstrike is a 2nd level magus ability, and there aren't any archetypes or anything on Setyiel that would give it to him early.
Anybody know what's going on? I'd assume that it's just there because it's a defining ability of the magus class, but I would think that if that was the intent they'd change the class, not just adjust it for a pregen.
Is it just a mistake on the part of whoever wrote up the pregen, or an intentional change for the pregen? If so, are there any other rules "adjustments" going on for any of the other pregens? I know I almost always adjust some things when I'm writing up a pregenerated characters for a convention game or something, but I'm not doing so as part of the same company that's writing the game!
So it looks like Seltyiel, at 1st level, has spellstrike - which a magus doesn't get until 2nd level.
I didn't see any description of why he gets this ability early. PRD confirms that it's a 2nd level power. Admittedly, it's an iconic (defining, really) power of the class, but it's still only supposed to show up at 2nd level.
Murder on the Throaty Mermaid is set entirely on a ship. It's a murder mystery that plays out differently depending on the PCs in the group, which is a fun little mechanic.
I ran this yesterday for several players, and had a good time. Couple of questions/notes.
1. I just assumed that Maggie could speak Goblin. Otherwise the scene doesn't make any sense, as she's explicitly supposed to talk to her. The goblins couldn't reasonably be multilingual - they all just came out of the whelping cage, after all. I had her speak strangely, as she learned the language academically, rather than by interacting with goblins.
2. My PCs, to my surprise, were pretty kindhearted for goblins.
They beat up Kettlehead and his friends, but sent them back to the village instead of killing them. He ended up following Chuffey around later, as Chuffey dragged him out of the bog when he fell in after getting hurt.
When they met Maggie, they actually spent time trying to free her wagon rather than attacking her, and in the end she actually ended up heading on rather than getting killed or chasing them away - they invaded her wagon, so she did eventually start chasing them away, but while that was happening the other managed to motivate the mule sufficiently that I thought it was best to have it pull the wagon free. They ended up running off into the swamp with some of her stuff (including the invitation).
3. The goblin raid doesn't seem to include any other goblins, at least not that I could find. I presumed the tribe sent some other warriors that dealt with the other wedding guests - I basically had the non-named halflings run away when everything started, and the rest of the goblin warriors mostly chased the guests or pigs around.
The PCs started everything by sneaking into the barn and setting it on fire - Mogmurch set the place on fire with explosive mud and alchemist's fire, and Chuffey drank the Elixir of Fire Breath and went to town a few times. Rita decided to ride one of the horses around and eventually leapt off of it into the wedding cake (for a soft landing) and into a fight with the bride.
The fight with the bride and groom seemed to take an awfully long time, with the PCs and opponents both having a pretty low attack roll, so it was a lot of swing-miss swing-1 point of damage.
While that was happening, Mogmurch invaded the home riding Squealy Nord (after Lottie stopped him cold by holding the door closed, he leapt through the kitchen window). Chuffey decided he wanted the groom's fancy vest, so he took several turns making CMB rolls to disrobe him.
All in all we had a good time, just a few things that took some changes from the GM.
I see that now, didn't notice it glancing at the table.
I still don't agree that it is appropriate though. A level 6, 20 dex rogue with masterwork tools has a 75% chance to fail, and 50% chance to set off this trap.
The average damage is also quite capable knocking a 5-6 char unconscious.
That's a pretty hard screw.
Especially after the mimic that killed a character a round from full.(and you know it did)
Looking above, I do think our GM was right not to apply the constrict damage to the automatic grapple from the mimic (not for the reasoning he gave, but since they don't get a roll for the grapple it doesn't look like it should get the constrict damage)
the trap was described to us as based on blade barrier. Was it strictly based on blade barrier, or reduced in some way? If it was literally blade barrier, that CR is 10-11, which is a bit much for tier 5-6.
base 1
+6 spell level
+3-4 for +1 per 10 average damage(I'd personally round 38.5 to 40)
Actually, I found an interesting note on that page that's very relevant.
Quote:
For a magic trap, only one modifier applies to the CR—either the level of the highest-level spell used in the trap, or the average damage figure, whichever is larger.
So that makes it a CR7 trap, right in like with a 5-6 scenario.
The DCs were high because of how magic traps work and how the DC calculations function. Also, the intention of the traps (other than the blade barrier) was to give a way to tell the stories while still exposing the PCs to risk. I'm sad that this didn't seem to work for your party. Did the hints on how to get around the traps help at all? Each one had a way to completely avoid without ever rolling Disable Device (except for the last mechanical trap, which had very low DCs).
To an extent, yes. Our investigator had already spotted and disarmed the pain trap in the corridor before the statue before we got a chance to read the inscription on the wall, so that was pretty meaningless for us. I took some damage (and marked off another wand charge) due to the acid spray from the fleshy wall-growths scraping it off, so it was kind of annoying to do that and then get a hint for a trap we had already disarmed.
We figured from the inscription on the statue that left was some sort of compulsion trap, and right was some sort of blade trap (I figured it would be a compulsion effect to attack yourself based on "fall on your sword"). The demon in Valais kept telling us to go left, so we actively ignored it and went right.
The mimic fight wrecked the two melee characters hard. The cleric got smote and put down in the first round; I was at -5hp with ferocity at the end when the kineticist's fire blasts killed the thing. Ouch. Only question I had was that the GM ruled that since the thing was a half-fiend, it didn't have the demon subtype, and thus warned us that the demonbane arrows wouldn't help. That didn't quite seem right to me, but that's what he said.
We avoided the fight with the humans up top, and the fight with Laktharis wasn't that hard for us - we had prepped pretty well with Protection from Evil, so he tried to dominate a few people (including Valais) to no effect. Eating up his standard action gave the rest of the PCs some time to kill him, though he did beat up on us melee people pretty hard, and a greater command kept my eidolon out of the fight entirely due to its poor Will save.
The traps were... OK. The DCs seemed really arbitrarily high; even rolling well with a +16 the investigator couldn't disarm several of them, which felt discouraging. We got hit by the blade barrier pretty hard, and never went left (because why would you trust a demon) so never dealt with the other side. Nobody outright attacked the duplicates, so I think we just bypassed that encounter (from what's described above).
All in all I thought it was pretty solid; from the description above it seems like we missed the most interesting trap. The blade barrier trap was a generic "mark off wand charges" trap for us, and a frustrating one at that because of what seemed like an overly difficult DC. The mimic fight was quite memorable.
I looked around for the same thing when building my current PFS magus - I wanted to build him as an ice mage from Irrisen, so using cold spells was important to me for the concept. I ended up taking a level in arcanist for a few useful exploits, including School Knowledge (Evocation/Admixture). It was the best way I could find to do it at low levels.
My players avoided the compulsion effect through the key-items, but if they hadn't, my plan was for the compulsion effect to have them walk into the room, chanting in Infernal, and start praying toward the statue (essentially the fascinated condition). This would have forced new Will saves as normal for fascinated when the fight with the construct started, though.
I figured it made sense enough for a temple structure, and be appropriately creepy and not too punishing.
An unrelated question - where are all those vines coming from in the last room? They've got to be over a hundred feet underground at that point, and yet the final room of the dungeon is half-covered in vines. It looks like they're growing out of the pool, so I just went with that and described them as infernal plants, possibly leftover from when the place was used to open dimensional rifts.
The bard and the occultist both had pretty decent Knowledge checks, so they were pretty well covered there.
Two of them (the occultist and the alchemist) had already done FaFI, and it flowed pretty well from the first scenario, though it wasn't all that clear why Zefiro wasn't in trouble already if his co-worker was (my PCs assumed that he would be fleeing with her from the Hellknights).
The encounter with the magistrate was IMO kind of terrible. Lots of pointless skill checks that don't do much, and derail the scenario if the PCs don't pass enough of them. I don't care for that design. It also didn't make much sense that if Cheliax and the Society have both given the PCs permission to go and do this, why does a local dignitary need to be convinced to allow it? The whole plot is that Cheliax wants the PCs to go there and be convinced that it's a Taldan colony, after all.
Things worked out fine once they got into the dungeon proper. A few took a few points of nonlethal damage from the sandstorm, and the skeletons inside were pretty easily dispatched. The wayang rogue had no trouble securing the tarp, as he couldn't really hurt the skeletons anyway, as he was a knife-rogue fighting DR 5/bludgeoning skeletons.
The bard spent pretty much the whole dungeon session re-casting detect magic, so they found the various ward keys easily. The statue of Aroden was a bit of a puzzle as they rolled badly on their Will saves.
They did well on their Kn (History) checks throughout, and found all the forgeries. So good on that front.
The descent through the layers of Hell was fun, though I was a bit worried when someone proposed setting the nasty oily water that you're supposed to jump across on fire (What would THAT have done? The stuff is clearly flammable, since it catches fire if you take fire damage.)
The fight with the construct was pretty brutal; I rolled at or near max damage twice with the 2d6 damage eye bolt, and dropped both the barbarian and the alchemist. The party ran into the secret corridor (which both the rogue and the barbarian spotted straight off) and the fight was mostly there. The ivory rod and the occultist managed to give them enough time to get the alchemist and barbarian back on their feet. Once they got the barbarian back up and swinging the thing didn't last too long, though. DR 2/- doesn't last that long against a raging, power-attacking barbarian.
The fight back at the museum was pretty nasty as well. Personally, I like having fewer, more meaningful combats, so this works well for me. I had Iluvia stay up on the balcony, opening with a swarm of spiders that rolled toward the PCs and down the library corridor for the rest of the fight. The alchemist and occultist took care of that with some fire, which obviously set the library on fire, which they had to deal with. A raven-delivered Inflict Moderate Wounds dropped another PC, making this one of the more dangerous sessions I've had; he was only one or two points away from death. Fortunately a combination of spells and a nasty crit from the barbarian took out the bad guys, and it all worked out well in the end.
I enjoyed this module quite a bit; the only real issue I had with it was the unnecessarily game-y and artificial section with the magistrate.
(Accidentally posted this in the wrong forum earlier, re-posting here.)
Amateur Swashbuckler has a requirement that you can't have the panache class feature. A sleuth has a similar feature, luck, but it's not specifically called out as a panache pool. Would I be able to play a Sleuth with Amateur Swashbuckler in a PFS game? I've been out of the loop for a while; has there been an official word on the equivalence of panache, grit, and luck?
Amateur Swashbuckler has a requirement that you can't have the panache class feature. A sleuth has a similar feature, luck, but it's not specifically called out as a panache pool. Would I be able to play a Sleuth with Amateur Swashbuckler in a PFS game? I've been out of the loop for a while; has there been an official word on the equivalence of panache, grit, and luck?
Level 6 seems a little low for some characters but I agree it seems high for the others. So I don't know about that. I can't imagine Vetinari any lower than level 15.
I'm curious as to why. I agree that he's very stealthy, but if he's just dealing with other people of low to middling level, you don't actually have to work that hard to make a rogue or ninja with a +lots Stealth score. Give him, say, maxed out ranks at 8th level, a +5 or so Dex, and Skill Focus, and he's looking at +19 Stealth without investing a whole lot outside of the normal assumptions I'd make for him. This is the guy who started juggling without ever actually doing it before, so a really high Dex is kind of a given.
Quote:
Vimes is not lawful good. He will bend, break, and ignore any rule that gets in his way of serving the greater good. Carrot is lawful good and Vimes is always frustrated with him because he doesn't know when to break the rules.
Well, I'm reluctant to tread into dangerous territory, but I'd argue that he's a Lawful person who has really, really bad anger problems that he's not always great at dealing with. Suffice it to say that I'd argue that he's Lawful, but I can see NG as well. If I were to write him up in Savage Worlds he'd have Code of Honor as a major flaw.
Quote:
Sort of. Discworld trolls are more like earth elementals than giants. I'm going to have to design a new race for them.
Oh, sorry, yes. I assumed that was the case. His race should be Discworld Troll, which would be something like... Large size, +lots to Str and Con, a significant Int penalty, and maybe some kind of environmental effects like a penalty to initiative if the temperature is too high. I'm not honestly sure how you'd balance it to a human; most of the Discworld races are significantly higher in power than baseline humans.
Feegles should be some kind of Diminutive fey race with a bonus to Strength and a natural headbutt attack.
Yeah, Lawful Neutral (or even Lawful Evil in his earlier appearances) makes the most sense to me. Personally I'd cap out Discworld's levels significantly lower than Pathfinder - I think it would make sense as an E5 or E8 world.
Eskarina might make sense as a Dimensional Occultist witch; I've seen someone post that as a possible class for her before, and I think it makes good sense for the little we see of her post Equal Rites. Simon from the same book would be an Int 20+ wizard.
Just off the top of my head on the Watch characters...
Vimes: LG Rogue/Urban Barbarian or Urban Ranger/Urban Barbarian. He does stuff I'd consider high Stealth and Sneak Attack on occasion, and fights with dirty tricks and other combat maneuvers. So I think rogue or urban ranger levels make sense.
Carrot: Human Cavalier with Eldritch Heritage (Imperial bloodline), or Blood of Azlant. Maybe also the human racial thing that lets him get stat bonuses rather than the bonus feats. Really high Strength and Charisma, good everything else. This is what you play when you roll really well for your character.
Angua: Human (natural werewolf) urban ranger.
Detritus: Troll fighter or warrior.
Wee Mad Arthur / Buggy Swires (who have kind of become the same character, weirdly): Feegle fighter or urban ranger; both occasionally have birds that they treat as animal companions.
Of note - there is actually a core poison that does hit point damage, but it's untyped. I was aware that poison wasn't a damage type in PF. We talked about putting in a sidebar about it, that will probably be in an updated version of the book.
Hydra's Fang Incident has quite a bit of swashbuckler action, as it's set entirely around a port. Murder on the Throaty Mermaid is all ship, and it's quite a fun roleplaying-focused scenario as well. I seem to remember that The Glass River Rescue from S5 had a fair amount of stuff on a ship as well, and then turned into a mystery.
Here's my item; I'd appreciate any feedback people are willing to give.
Aegis of the Martyr Aura moderate abjuration; CL 10th
Slot shield; Price 18,000 gp; Weight 6 lbs.
Description
This +2 rallying heavy steel shield is reinforced with Elysian bronze, and usually decorated with the crest of a knightly or religious order dedicated to principles of protection, devotion, and self-sacrifice. Once per day, the bearer of the shield may activate it to place a protective ward over nearby allies, placing his own life on the line to guard his charges. Allies within 30 feet of the shieldbearer gain a +1 sacred bonus to AC and saving throws, and reduce all damage they take by 10 points per attack. When the ward has prevented a number of hit points of damage equal to the wearer’s maximum hit points or 100 (whichever comes first), or when one minute has passed, the effect ends. The bearer of the aegis immediately takes damage equal to the total damage prevented by the shield.
Construction Requirements Craft Magic Arms and Armor, hero’s defiance, shield other; Cost 9,000 gp
I know I messed up two things already:
1. Forgot to include the price of the masterwork shield in the price; it shouldn't be twice the cost of the item.
2. Forgot to include the requirements for the rallying property.
I think of it as a barbarian weapon, for the most part, or evil undead. Undead can gain temporary hit points via energy drain and use that to power the Vicious effect, so it works well for them. Barbarians tend to have a whole pile of hit points, so they can spare it, but to be honest they'll usually kill stuff in one hit anyway.
Obviously it's better if you have some way of regaining hit points. I played a psychic warrior in 3.5 with a Vicious weapon and a power that let him regain 1d6 HP with each attack, so the GM just called it a wash while I had that power active.
A grenadier alchemist that focuses on bombs can do this just fine. Grenadier gives up all the poison stuff, which doesn't fit his concept very well, and instead gets some additional fighting abilities, which would work well for him.
I'm currently playing a barbarian/alchemist with the same concept; I throw fiery booze at my opponents and then drink a shot of the Really Good Stuff and wade into combat, possibly coating my sword in flaming booze as well.
Simple weapons are always going to be mechanically worse than martial weapons. Other than that, not clear, really. Because they're low-tech weapons, I suppose? It's possibly an unusual nod to realism; there's a reason you don't see a lot of people hunting with slings after bows became a thing.
The simplest solution would be to eliminate the Deadly Aim feat, which is the core of a lot of the damage output for an archer character. I'd consider not allowing Rapid Shot to stack with Flurry of Blows from a zen archer as well (I'm not certain if they should stack by RAW or not).
Clustered Shot is a good feat, but it shouldn't come online for a while, and honestly it's fairly easy for an archer who can pull out whatever arrows he needs to bypass most DR anyway.
The big issue with a curve blade is that, by my reading, nothing here prohibits the use of Power Attack as well as Elegant Strike. That makes it really, really powerful. A two-handed weapon with PA is already the highest damage output available; this increases it based on level. That seems quite good, especially with the swashbuckler's defensive abilities.
I'm also not a fan of Elven Grace coming online at 4th level but replacing an ability gained at 8th level.
Probably Norgorber, among the major gods. He's Neutral Evil and is the god of greed, secrets, poison, and murder.
Zon-Kuthon, the Hellraiser expy, is another good candidate. He's the god of envy, pain, darkness, and loss, and is very torture and pain focused. He's LE rather than NE, but otherwise a strong contender for the equivalent deity.
Which aspect of Shar do you want to focus on, the darkness/night stuff (which is more Norgorber) or the emotional stuff (which is more Zon-Kuthon). As I remember Shar is kind of a nihilistic god, which is closer to ZK.
After the illiterate halfling barbarian with a dinosaur tried to play in Library of the Lion, I always let people know what's generally expected. Roleplaying, investigative, combat-focused, dungeon crawling, etc.
I was surprised it didn't show up in the ACG, to be honest. I think it's a fine concept for an archetype. An angry guy who fights with his bare hands is pretty archetypical.
I'd probably trade out martial flexibility as well, as well as most of the "smart combatant" stuff that the brawler gets, in exchange for a slowed-down rage progression and access to some of the rage powers.
I've used such a familiar as an encounter before, as it was looking for someone to avenge its master's death (or, better yet, raise him from the dead). I had it slowly losing Intelligence and abilities over a couple of days, and completely freaking out about the experience as it got dumber and dumber. In this case, it was the raven familiar of a decently-powerful wizard (low teens, I think).
Yes, you can drink an extract while raging. You can't MAKE one, but you can drink it, since that doesn't require concentration or mental effort. You're just drinking something you've already made.
You can't make a bomb while raging, because you have to actually do chemistry right then to make it.
You don't get to drink an extract as a move action. They're close, but potions and extracts are different. Effects that modify the use time of a potion don't apply to the use of an extract.
