Thebazilly's page

Love to see Alchemists being icky again!

The adventure stops presenting Otari content at about this point, yes. It seems to be assumed that the PC's will spend their resting time in Yldaris once they start exploring floors 7-10.

I have always been a firm believer that if Paizo is going to name Archives of Nethys the official rules repository, they should at the very least be kicking a little funding their way. I support AoN on Patreon because it's been such a valuable tool for so many years. It just sucks that fan volunteer work can be co-opted so easily.

It's frankly getting a little embarrassing that the remaster update is taking so long. With no estimate in sight and sparse status updates. AoN has had the books for 3 months now. Foundry and Pathbuilder had updates out mere weeks after the official releases.

I am sympathetic to the developers doing this in their free time and it's truly not an important issue overall. I'm just baffled.

Archives of Nethys also started listing the titles and locations of all the back matter articles. This might be a little easier to search if you're looking for something specific.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Articles.aspx

A 5-15 Adventure? Yes, please!

This rule would have killed at least two characters in my campaign, and very possibly more. Which isn't really a value judgement, but I prefer less lethal games.

I see this heavily encouraging not healing downed characters - or at least if you go down, you're doing nothing for the rest of combat to avoid drawing aggro. That just sucks as a player, especially in a system where I've had some intense combats last two full hours. I... don't understand the utility of mechanics that tell you you can't play the game.

I'll be sticking with the way I currently run the dying rules.

I love the Cleric and Witch buffs I'm seeing in this thread. The Divine list needed some help.

Since we're having an "edition change," I'm going to go with Mystra, even though she doesn't exist in this setting.

Here is the document if anyone else wants to steal from it! As I mentioned, though, it's mainly reflavored magical tattoos.

After Treasure Vault came out, I ended up homebrewing a bunch of items based on the magical tattoos (and some various other permanent magic items that seemed cool)! I lifted the Magical Tattoo skill feat to allow the PC to craft the fleshwarp items.

My player is very happy but hasn't gotten a chance to try it out yet because the party still hasn't 100% cleared out the 6th floor where the labs are.

I can share at some point but I'll have to copy the information over from my personal document once I get home.

Well, I pronounce it mah-jus, so therefore I am the most incorrect and I win.

Fun! I can't wait to see the other new Ancestries!

Agreed wholeheartedly.

For some reason the website won't let me log into the forums from my phone, so I have to scroll past all the playtest categories every time.

ARPG with couch co-op? Excellent! Very excited about this. Congrats on the announcement.

Is couch co-op confirmed? That would be awesome.

I'm willing to see where this goes, hopefully it turns out well! Owlcat's Wrath of the Righteous is one of my favorite CRPGs.

FLGS exclusive special editions? I love it!

Can't wait to hear more about the new dragons.

Excellent post, Mark. This is an absolutely heroic effort on the part of the team to get the books turned around so quickly.

For some reason, the PDF for this is enormous - it's 192 MB. By contrast, the core rulebook is about 80 MB. The entire Kingmaker AP + the Companion Guide together weigh in at about 160 MB.

Most individual AP volumes weigh in between about 20-50 MB.

Can someone please fix the PDF? It's large enough that it's actually inconvenient - it looks like Gatewalkers 3 has a similar (but not as bad) issue, as does the new Starfinder Drift Hackers volume (109 MB). Starfinder Adventure Path PDFs have had similar issues in the past, too.

I would also like to note this issue. At the very least it hasn't crashed my PDF reader yet.

keftiu wrote:

Curious what this version of Champion looks like with Alignment gone. I do hope what we would’ve called Neutral Champions can still sneak in somehow; a very classic LN-style “Judge” is definitely missing.

Oh damn, I kind of liked how the different champions had different powers, although LG was much better than the rest.

I expect there will still be a "Paladin," "Redeemer," and "Liberator" cause with the same exact tenets. The PC just won't have "Lawful Good" written on their sheet to go with it.

I for one am happy to see alignment go. I expect it will be a change to make "alignment damage" into holy/dark/axiomatic/anarchic as another energy type (you know, Final Fantasy style) and that's about it. The rest is already covered with Champion causes and deity anathema.

Nephilim…

Legally distinct Aasimar, if I had to guess.

Well now, this is interesting. I'm assuming this is primarily a re-issue to get the system under the ORC license? That's going to be a hard sell to people who already own the CRB/GMG/APG.

How extensive are the class rebalances? Is the Witch going to be buffed?

Well, I was excited to buy these when they came with a digital version, but I probably won't now since I primarily play online.

Too bad. I love the new art that's in the Stolen Fate player's guide.

I think treating attack spells like basic saves would also be relatively easy to justify in fiction. It would basically be replacing touch AC. It might be hard to penetrate the scales of a dragon with an arrow but a disintegrate spell mostly just needs to make contact.

I did this in my home game for my Cleric player. This particular player does not have high system mastery. The party is Level 6 right now and her Warpriest needs to roll a 15 or so on the die to hit an enemy's AC with a spell attack. Next level the other spellcasters will be getting spellcasting proficiency increases, but the Warpriest is not (which is a separate issue), so I gave her an item that lets her do half damage on a missed spell attack roll to make her character feel a little less bad.

I don't want to go around lecturing my players on "building their character incorrectly" or telling them what spells to pick. It's not fun to be told you're playing the game wrong. The point of PF2e was to make poor build decisions like this much less debilitating. It doesn't particularly matter to me if the skill ceiling for spells with attack rolls achieves parity, the skill floor clearly does not.

I'm running without Free Archetype, since my players are all fairly new to the system. I didn't want to overload them with more feats as they're already having difficulty with the number of choices. Maybe in the future, but I'm souring more and more on Free Archetype the longer I think about it.

If I used it in the future, I would probably restrict it to a handful of options that fit the theme of the campaign. Maybe replace unlocking the ability to take an archetype in an adventure path with just automatically gaining it as a free archetype. (Abomination Vaults has a couple unique archetypes, for example, one of which is very skill-focused and not all that useful, and one of which is unlocked at level 8 of a 10-level adventure.)

There are a lot of flavorful archetypes that will just never get used, even in a Free Archetype game. The fighting style, Marshal, or Medic archetypes are just much more mechanically useful than "you are a Pirate."

What is the purpose of Mezmin's advice? How does keeping eyes closed help the heroes?

I suspect there was some other puzzle here that was a victim of editing. Jaul's advice doesn't make a difference in the puzzle as written.

I think Level 1 is a good starting place here. I'll take a stab at some of this to show you how I'd translate it.

When they first enter the dungeon there's a poison arrow trap mostly meant to fire at them and alert them: THIS DUNGEON HAS TRAPS!

Reflavor a Poisoned Lock trap as a dart. I'd only use one or two, since the way Simple Hazards are balanced mean they are pretty much guaranteed to hit and damage a PC.

Goblins Tunnels with some sword and shield goblins engaging the party, and goblin archers hitting and running through the tunnels ambushing the party.

The standard Goblin Warrior has both a melee and ranged attack. Let's also throw in a Goblin Commando as a leader!

The second is a trap I was inspired by from Goblin Slayer in which there's a hard to see hidden passage past a break in the wall on the way to the very obvious straight ahead spider warren for goblin reinforcements to ambush the party from behind...or get ambushed if the party has great perception! Along the way there are spider webs all over the walls and a giant acid pit between the party and the spider warren.

Sounds like you want a secret door, let's say that's a DC15 Perception to spot, with a trapped hallway and a safer hallway.

There will be a spiked pit trap down this corridor leading up to the first mixed orc and hobgoblin trap.

I'd recommend just using a regular old Pit Trap. My first time playing my character got stuck in one for ages and couldn't climb out!

Let's go for a Moderate encounter with the orcs and the pit trap here. An Orc Brute is a level 0 creature (party level-1), so worth 30XP. The trap is worth 6XP for being a party-1 simple hazard. The encounter budget for a 5 PC moderate encounter is 100XP. So we can get pretty close with 3 Orc Brutes and 1 Hidden Pit Trap.

The level 2 Orc Warchief would probably be a great boss encounter for the end! Make sure you follow the Encounter Building rules. They are accurate, unlike 5e's encounter guidelines!

B2. Large Monster Holding. There's a Rusty Grate Pit (Hazard 6) with a Stealth DC 0.

Is that "Stealh DC 0" a typo?

I'm looking over the Building Hazards rules, and all of its stats seem to align with a Hazard 6 Low challenge, about the middle point of the range, so it would seem that a DC 20 would have been what would be expected.

I'm not saying I want a player to fall into the pit...but I really want a player to fall into the pit. :)

In my hardcover compilation version, it says this grate pit is "Stealth DC20 (expert), or 0 if the grate is open."

I've always wondered about the half-elf thing on Golarion. You'd think with Elves being from an entirely different planet, they'd be more difficult to interbreed with.

Congrats! That's a huge achievement!

I recall a Reddit thread where someone was "showcasing" how helpful ChatGPT could be for generating NPC statblocks. They prompted it to create a backstory for a Tiefling Wizard who is a coward. ChatGPT wrote 3 paragraphs about this idea, but it didn't come up with anything new, just restating the prompt in more words.

Or this example, where there is a human player prompting ChatGPT with some ideas, but it still fills in the blanks with the most generic answers imaginable.

The thing that's fun about tabletop RPGs is that there are limitless options and creativity. A computer on the other side of the screen necessarily curtails it.

Also, I'm on team forever GM and I'm either getting Stockholm Syndrome or finally growing into the role because I enjoy it more than playing now.

In the Impossible Lands books, it refers to the large stew pots that the dwarves of Dongun Hold cook. It mentions some have been stewing and cooking since before the time of Nex and Geb according to their cooks. Just a few paragraphs later, it mentions that during the winter months, all fires are extinguished, and even cookfires go dark as dwarves eat only preserved or otherwise dry goods.

As written, it seems to imply these forever-cooking stews are allowed to just... sit for a season, which is understandably vile. Can we assume that these stews DO continue cooking and simply are not eaten, or is the assumption that the stews are somehow preserved or frozen in the mountain heights to be re-thawed when the fires roar back to life?

This confused me, too.

The cooking fire tradition seems to be based on the Jewish practice of not lighting or extinguishing a fire on the sabbath. Maybe they are allowed to keep the fire burning as long as it was started before the winter?

we have run through what was an 8-month supply of our Pathfinder Core Rulebook in the last 2 weeks

The ORC Horde has arrived and pillaged the warehouse! This is awesome news!

I also really like Arazni after learning a bit more about her. Love that she reclaimed her agency, love that she's a goddess that doesn't want to be worshiped, but is still inspiring enough that people will do so anyway. Love that there's space for her to be angry and vengeful about what happened to her. Also, Arazni's Anathema including "insult Arazni" is hilarious.

Oh, is this an edition war thread now?

I'm of the opinion that there should be a Final Fantasy Tactics style feat that lets you administer potions/elixirs by hucking them at your friends' heads. Item action economy is just kinda janky.

There's definitely one in Abomination Vaults. I can only assume there's one in every Adventure path. My players refuse to sell it.

How much do Pathfinder and Starfinder books rely on SRD? If that gets yanked, does that mean no more owlbears in Pathfinder and magic missile gets renamed?

It's still an arguable point the extent which SRD content is even copyrightable. The original OGL is just Wizards saying "we won't attempt to sue you for using this stuff, and we will attempt to sue you for using that stuff." You can't copyright the words "magic" or "missile," or a game mechanic that does d4 force damage, or the concept of a wizard shooting out magical energy that unerringly hits an enemy. But if you combine all of them, is that copyrightable? Nobody knows.

So, depends on how ballsy Paizo is feeling. I'd guess they're going to err on the side of caution, given the card game renames the spell.

Copywright doesn't just protect words and the way in which words are written but the ideas in those words.

This is incorrect in many cases. Knitting patterns, recipes, and game mechanics (and I'm sure many other procedure-based forms of communication) are all un-copyrightable. The only thing in them protected by copyright is the specific choice and order of words.

What exactly do they use the OGL *for* though? I was under the impression that rules were not copy writable or protectable. Is it just the name "d20" or "d20 system" that they own?

I'm also confused about this. The article mentions that Mutants and Masterminds is built on the OGL. Is Wizards trying to exercise ownership over every d20 system?

This reminds me of when Blizzard released the Warcraft remake with the changes to the community creations, trying to pre-empt another DotA getting away without giving them any money.

This is why I added random encounter tables. I think I'm going to start rolling random encounters every time my party re-enters the dungeon, one check for every floor they "travel" through. That way we can still handwave traveling into the dungeon, but it gives an incentive to find the fast travel options and still preserves the flavor of delving deeper.

Is it intentional that you get XP for killing Chafkhem but not for using diplomacy on the encounter? A lot of encounters explicitly give the same XP for the non-violent solution. Feels a little bad. The 30 XP sidequest doesn't make up the difference.

There's a couple places like this in the adventure. I've been giving full XP for bypassing/befriending any enemies even when it's not specifically noted. I want to reward this sort of behavior!

Wow, cool! Dwarf AP with Crystal Fraiser on the byline? Very exciting!

willfromamerica wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

keftiu wrote:

I’m super curious how well Gatewalkers and Stolen Fate feel together as one campaign. The promise of swapping 1-10s and 11-20s has always been great, but none of the options have felt like great lead-ins to FotRP, so I have high hopes here.

Having written the last volume of Gatewalkers and developed all of Stolen Fate...

...apart from the levels matching up well, they won't really match up at all as one campaign.

That's fine, of course. But just to manage expectations, these two Adventure Paths are VERY different.

Stolen Fate does offer some advice on how to start up with a group of 11th level PCs from ANY 1st to 10th level Adventure Path though, since Stolen Fate starting with "You're all famous adventurers and that's why (INITIAL EVENT OF STOLEN FATE) happens to you and not someone else."

There's maybe a bit more organic links between some stuff that I'm working on now along these lines, but those announcements are several months away I suspect.

Just for fun, which of the 1-10 APs do you think segues most naturally into Stolen Fate?

Abomination Vaults.

As someone currently running Abomination Vaults and prematurely daydreaming about what to do for levels 11-20, this excites me greatly.

Call me basic, but I really like a lot of the core deities.

Sarenrae is a classic archetype (how many good sun gods must there be out there?) but she comes across as kindly when she needs to be and firm when she needs to be, which is a difficult line to walk for a Good deity. It's also hard to not like a god that gives you Fireball.

Shelyn is just wonderful and I love the interplay of her church with Zon-Kuthon.

Cayden Cailean is just a fun concept and lends himself very well to adventurer worshipers.

I admire the writing of many of the Evil deities as well. There are reasons that a character could turn to Urgathoa, Lamashtu, Zon-Kuthon, or Asmodeus without being capital E Evil. (At least at first. That's how they get you.)

I love this idea! It's really the sweet spot of d20 power levels.

Also more 11-20 Adventure Paths, please!

I've written some random encounter tables for the entire dungeon, so I figured I would share!

If you're playing at the table, I recommend using the Angry GM's Tension Pool mechanic for random encounters. Since I'm playing on VTT, I just roll a 60% of encounter check roughly once per hour in the dungeon (max 2 rolls per long rest inside the dungeon), or when my players do something particularly noisy or stupid.

I've kept the encounters fairly tame, as I find the threat of a random encounter is usually enough to get my players to behave. The encounters could certainly be beefed up some more if your players stop being afraid of them.

Floor 1 - Gauntlight Keep
1-10 Snapping Turtle
11-30 1d4 Mitflits
31-50 1d2 Giant Maggots
61-70 Ball Python
71-80 Giant Frog
81-90 Freznelkesh (no encounter if she is killed)
90-100 Roll on Floor 2 table

Floor 2 - Servant's Quarters
1-10 Roll on Floor 1 Table
21-30 Corpselight
31-40 1d4 Rat Swarms
41-50 Choker
51-60 1d4 Morlocks
61-70 1d2 Morlock Engineers
71-80 Morlock Engineer & 1d4 Morlock Scavengers
81-90 1d2 Hunting Spiders
91-100 Roll on Floor 3 Table

Floor 3 - Library
1-10 Roll on Floor 2 Table
11-20 Gibbering Mouther (from Area C40, remove if killed)
21-30 1d4+1 Ghouls
31-40 1d2 Canker Cultists
41-50 Canker Cultist & 1d4 Ghouls
51-60 1d2 Cave Fishers
61-70 1d2 Corpselights
71-80 Ghast
81-90 Ghoul Crocodile
91-100 Roll on Floor 4 Table

Floor 4 - Belcorra's Retreat
1-10 Roll on Floor 3 Table
11-20 1d4 Corpselights
21-40 1d4 Flickerwisps
41-50 Namorrodor
51-60 1d2 Squirming Swill
61-70 Volluk Azrinae (no encounter if killed)
71-80 Vampiric Mist
81-90 1d4 Blindheims
91-100 Roll on Floor 5 Table

Floor 5 - Arena
1-10 Roll on Floor 4 Table
11-20 Gibbering Mouther
21-30 2 Basilisks (from area E10, remove if killed)
31-40 1d4 Skeletal Champions
41-50 Skeletal Mage
51-60 1d2 Grothluts
61-70 Will-o-Wisp
71-80 Otyugh
81-90 1d4 Flickerwisps
91-100 Roll on Floor 6 Table

Floor 6 - Fleshwarping Labs
1-10 Roll on Floor 5 table
11-20 Jafaki & Drider (remove if killed)
21-40 Seugathi Servant
41-50 1d2 Dreshkans
51-60 Drider
61-70 Will-o-Wisp
71-80 Mulventok
81-90 1d4 Shangriol Heaps
91-100 Roll on Floor 7 Table

Floor 7 - Prison
1-10 Roll on Floor 6 Table
11-20 Sacuishu (remove if killed)
21-30 1d3 Barbazus
31-40 Erinyes
41-50 Levaloch
51-60 1d3 Dreshkans
61-70 1d4+1 Grothluts
71-80 Will-o-Wisp
81-90 Gibbering Mouther
91-100 Roll on Floor 8 Table

Floor 8 - Farm
1-10 Roll on Floor 7 Table
11-20 Belcorra (no encounter if she is regenerating)
21-30 1d2 Chuul
31-40 1d4 Caligni Stalkers
41-50 1d4 Children of Belcorra
51-60 Elder Child of Belcorra
61-70 1d4 Drow Hunters
71-80 Drow Shootist
81-90 Dread Wisp
91-100 Roll on Floor 9 Table

Floor 9 - Hunting Grounds
1-7 Roll on Floor 8 Table
8-14 Belcorra (no encounter if she is regenerating)
15-22 Riding Lizard (reduce Yldaris population if killed)
23-37 Salaisa Malthulas & 1d4 Drow Wardens (from I12 & I14)
38-45 2 Drow Shootists (reduce Yldaris population if killed)
46-53 2 Caligni Defenders (reduce Caligni population if killed)
54-61 2 Urdefhan Death Scouts & 2 Urdefhan lashers (reduce Urdefhan population if killed)
62-76 4 Urdefhan Warriors & 2 Ceustodaemons (reduce Urdefhan population if killed)
77-83 Urdefhan Blood Mage & 3 Tormentors (from area I35)
84-91 Cauthooj (from area I41)
92-100 Ravirex (from area I51)

2 sessions in and the players are most of the way to Level 2. They've missed a lot of secret doors and investigation spots. They glommed onto Boss Skrawng's map pretty hard and haven't even noticed the outbuildings and extra doors that he didn't draw. I'm afraid none of them are even going to roll high enough to find the secret door down to Level 2.

The Corpselights are a pretty nasty fight for first level characters! My party decided to half-ass running away when they realized that the things did a huge amount of damage, and it ended with a Corpselight using its cone attack while they were clumped up for a TPK. (I was also a little mean to them and started them at night, so it may have been a little more difficult than intended.) The party had broken through the stained glass window and were outside, so I had Wrin drag them back to town instead of making everyone roll new characters.

Having a blast so far!

I rage-quit Kingmaker permanently sometime in Act 4 of that game, but I'm really enjoying Wrath of the Righteous.

I agree that the difficulty settings are kind of misleading (enemies have to be set to "weaker" to even come close to their Pathfinder stats). There are enough settings that I have tweaked the game to where it's fun for me, at least.

The companion writing is decidedly improved, which probably makes the biggest impact of anything in the game. That and turn based mode. I cannot stand RTwP.

Only complaints so far is that Crusade mode sucks and can't be turned off without losing access to stuff (but at least there's difficulty settings and auto-resolve to take care of that...), and the game has too many trash fights.

Also, the crystal enemies have been patched so that you're immune to their aura after a successful save now.