SteeleType's page

I got the beginner box and four sessions in I am still super excited to start it. I planned one session of introduction and roleplay and it has ballooned into all the players chasing down plot points and forcing me to improvise for 3 sessions of intrigue and roleplay with a panicked combat thrown in when I can.

TODAY I'm going to get them back on track and start the box. Yup. Definitely.

Welcome to the GM side of fun.

SteeleType wrote:

Another player informed me they want to be a skeleton, I was initially hesitant but hey, it's Ustalav! I feel like someone would need stitch flesh to use medicine on them, right?

Not exactly. The rules tend to be explicit about precise actions.

Here, Stitch Flesh is required to use the Treat Wounds action on an undead. It does not change the other actions of the Medicine skill.

Thankfully, AFAICT, only Treat Wounds mentions being used on a living being. All other Medicine actions can already be used on an undead even without the feat. Even Battle Medicine.

Oh so it's a good bit easier than I thought! This is super helpful, thank you! I like how easy they've made it to play unusual ancestries without too much punishment.

Another 'special' potion is a common Elixir of Life. It's alchemy, not magic (alchemy is generally not magic at all in PF2), so works on void healing living creatures. Other purely alchemical things also should mostly work.

That makes tons of sense, thanks for the extra tip! Looks like there's plenty of opportunity for me to make healing as easy for them as everyone else.

Welcome! I hope you and your group have many more exciting adventures.

I would recommend you cut and paste your review of Tyrant’s Grasp onto the forums here (in the appropriate location) or the actual product review page for the books. I’m always interested in reading reviews and I tend to limit my social media, so rarely make it over to Reddit. You might find a different and more active audience here on the Paizo interwebs.

Oh great thought! I'll do that here in the forum soon. I'm a little hesitant to post it to the product pages because we made some relatively large changes that I think may have impacted some of my critique (overall I LOVED the AP though). For example I complained about issues I had with the final encounter, but it turns out our group was way off the intended balance. We had 5 players, which until then was pretty easy to balance for, but it's much harder with "boss" fights due to the action economy advantage. We also decided that instead of level 18 + mythic we really wanted to take out characters to level 20 to get capstones, because we had never done it before. Turns out that kind of impacts the balance lol. But I'll work on a modified version sticking to products themselves and see about posting them!

SteeleType wrote:

It seems like the medicine skill will work and I'm planning on letting them buy special potions or something. For heal spells.. Great point I will take a look around!

Medicine skill does work out of the box like it does for other living creatures. For Undead PCs (which is also a thing - you could have a character that is an actual Vampire) the person doing the treatment would need Stitch Flesh. But that isn't required for Dhampir.

For special potions, those would be the Oil of Unlife.

And for Heal/Harm, you just need to pick how you want it to work. Either have them healed by Heal like other living creatures, or healed with Harm like other undead creatures. Don't try to 'run it RAW' because the RAW is that neither has any effect - which is just crazy. Most of the time I hear it being run that a Dhampir (or other living creature with Void Healing ability) will be healed by Harm and damaged by Heal like an Undead creature would be. That is also what I would recommend.

Fantastic! Thank you so much. The RAW does seem super strange. I like the idea of running it in reverse to build a little bit of tension and because there are other methods of healing which seem pretty generous. A little extra resource and slot management seems thematic for the horror-ish setting. Another player informed me they want to be a skeleton, I was initially hesitant but hey, it's Ustalav! I feel like someone would need stitch flesh to use medicine on them, right?

Well hi!

I have not played either and they look cool. Dhampirs are in Player Core 2 so that should fit in nicely with the remaster AP...but technically they're living, not undead. They just react to vitality and void damage as if they are undead. There are discussions on the forum as to what this means/how far this goes, so take a look at some of the discussions and decide how you're going to handle things like Heal spells before it becomes an issue.

Cheers and best of luck!

Thank you so much for this advice! I've been struggling a bit to wrap my brain around it. It seems like the medicine skill will work and I'm planning on letting them buy special potions or something. For heal spells.. Great point I will take a look around!

Hello friends!

I've been playing Pathfinder with the same group since 2016. We've done a homebrew campaign, a full play of Tyrant's Grasp, and we recently got our feet wet with second edition with Outlaws of Alkenstar.

I am stepping into the GM role with a new group of folks who have never played any Pathfinder before, so my Unlit Star beginner box just arrived :D

My plan is to run the beginner box, transition into the Troubles in Grayce book, and then poll the party to see if they would rather move on to Bastion of Blasphemies or branch out into a homebrew campaign where they can see more of Golarion. One of my players is excited to play a Dhampir so I'm eagerly reading up about vampires to see what kind of plot hooks I can add.

This post is just to say hi, really. I haven't engaged much with the Paizo community (apart from writing up a review of Tyrant's Grasp on Reddit). But I'm excited to carry the GM torch into a new group.