Tikael's page

You can still play with all the legacy options. Some things will get tweaked slightly but we are moving copies of the renamed and reprinted items to a module, and while alignment will be vanishing from the sheets in a dedicated section it will stay accessible in actor data and the same module will make it show up in the actor traits (which, they probably should have been in there all along actually).

The remaster is not the giant change people seem to think it is, and we are trying to make it as seamless as possible for people while also not ballooning our compendium size to unmanageable levels or offering conflicting sets of legacy/remaster data and rules to people. We're treating the remaster as errata, and most groups will hardly notice the changeover.

If roll 20 works better for your group, great. Use the VTT that works best for your group. We'll keep working to make the PF2e system better, and trying our best to manage a fairly difficult situation data wise in a way that makes the most sense going forward.

In fact, that makes the price even more absurd.

In what way? You really don't know the amount of work that went into this. Try to do all the work yourself: remake the maps, make your own journals, code up hexploration and macros, source music and sound effects, and make tokens for every single creature used. I think you'd find that it would take you an absurd amount of time and even if you only valued your time at pennies an hour this would still be an absolute steal at the full price of the module.

If this was sold at a low price point then Foundry would be losing money making it. Video games rely on selling millions of copies to make back their money, this one isn't going to sell millions of copies. The market just is not that big.

So, yes. If you don't like the price don't buy it, it is in fact that simple. Don't try using the fact that the core Foundry software is a great deal as an argument against charging fairly for the work they did.

Edit: foundry team is fantastic so should be able to have fun putting them through their paces this 3 day weekend. Also so glad the name wasn’t actually demigod.

The classes are both done already and the playtest module will go live tomorrow when the playtest document drops. Animist is basically designed in a space that is nigh-unautomatable for us, with swapping of spell lists and lore skills being one of the largest gaps in what the system can do right now. Exemplar is in a good place though, there's only one thing I left unfinished that could still be done and maybe I'll circle back but I wanted to take a day off last weekend too :D

Excellent write up and I am excited to see where things go.

Question: Did you modify a PF2e game system on Foundry VTT for the test? Or was it a complete rewrite?

(all hail the Foundry PF2e community)

I don't know what they did specifically but I can give some insight on how you would run a comprehensive playtest in Foundry. I am one of the system devs for PF2e on Foundry, and did the module for the Starfinder Field Test.

The PF2e system on Foundry built out a lot of homebrew tools, allowing GMs to quickly add traits, languages, damage types, etc to the system and then the way we automate most things, rule elements, let anyone tie proper automation to their new homebrew traits. For a playtest this kind of stuff should change often, likely even mid session, so setting up automation beforehand may be overkill. But for things that are stable in the game you can solidify them either inside a test world or as a module which could be shared among testers by just sending a zip file around.

We have a guide on how to make modules and have those modules contain some basic automation like pre-registering custom traits, adding trait descriptions for easy reference on hover, custom base weapons, etc. Once rules become more locked in place it's easy to add them in to things like that for automation purposes. Stuff like class features, etc require more knowledge of rule elements which is a specific skill but it's easier to pick up that skill than it is to learn to code and we have a wiki detailing how to use them if you want to implement your own automation for something. Simple things like a bonus to X in Y circumstance is easy to do because we have a form for that kind of rule element. More complex things like selecting class features, granting abilities, modifying how rolls are made, implementing auras, etc are all doable but require a deeper dive into the system.

If we get more official field test documents I will happily update the module to reflect the new rules, and yes we will put out a module for the upcoming class playtest when we can just like we did for Kineticist, Magus, etc when they were in playtest.

We answered this on the discord but I'll post something here to at least put our (The PF2e on Foundry VTT team) position on the remaster where people can see it.

We will be treating the remaster as a large errata. Nothing we've seen thus far looks to be too big a change that the game won't be entirely recognizable. We are not going to fork the system or maintain legacy options unless Pathfinder Society also supports those legacy options. Things like the removal of alignment will likely come with guidance as to what to do with creatures that deal alignment damage on their strikes or abilities and we'll know more about how we'll handle that when we finally see the remastered rules. But things like negative damage becoming void damage is an easy switch for us to do. Removing ability scores, likewise, is something that should be easy to handle.

For changes like creatures not being reprinted, we have no plans to remove creatures from our compendiums. We would need a real reason to actually delete an NPC. Some spells will be rendered useless, like Divine Lance, that will get removed and some new spell will be put in its place in theory but we'll know more when we get the remaster. Things that are getting renamed will just be renamed, and if needed we will migrate the name change. This is most likely in the case of Flat-Footed -> Off Guard, because our automation relies on the item "slug" (A version of the item name that is stable even for people using translated versions of the system) and that slug would change if we change the name in the main system repo. But that's an easy migration to do and for 99% of users they won't notice anything except the normal migration message on loading the system for the first time post remaster.

For premium modules let's lay out what the premium modules even do so people know what the system controls and what the module adds. When you enable a premium module like Gatewalkers it asks you to import the adventure. That adventure is a set of pre-made scenes, journals, macros, etc. The module does not store the full actors it uses, instead it stores a reference to the system's version of those actors. So if the module needs a Mitflit it doesn't use its own version it grabs a new copy from the system and applies any stored changes they have for that actor (such as elite / weak or changing the name of the actor to be a specific NPC). This way the module doesn't have to update or maintain its own actors, they piggyback on ours. If we find a mistake in an actor that actor will be fixed in the next system update, and we have fast turnaround on system releases so we can get fixes out faster than the modules can. So, for the premium modules when you do an import it will grab the remastered versions of monsters when you import, and if you've already imported we will handle migrating any breaking changes on your world's existing actors.

I personally am really looking forward to seeing more of the remaster. Additionally, if anyone wants to help out with our system data entry now is a great time to jump in and learn how to before the remaster comes out so when people get those PDFs we can make sure we keep up our streak of getting content into the system for major books on the release date. We have a Discord server where all us system devs hang out. Feel free to ping me if you want to try a starter data entry (or code) project, as I have a few things good for people new to the process and we can help you get set up.

It's real weird to see myself on the Paizo blog. Thank you to all of the other volunteers who help make the system, it really wouldn't be possible to keep up with Paizo's firehose of content without help!

You can load all the books at once. Generally it's best to wait until you are closer to finishing a book before importing the next one though. The reason for this is that Foundry works by having everything in world loaded in RAM and sent to each client. 3 books worth of stuff isn't going to grind your game to a halt but you may still notice some slowdown on the initial load into the world from it. It's also good to wait because the module works by pulling actors from the system's compendium, and we update those creatures all the time, fixing errors or adding in new automation. So by waiting until you are closer to using them you likely get more accurate and better automated NPCs in your game world.

The treasure actors being a generic icon is due to a bug in the Forge that will hopefully be fixed soon (is already fixed?). The module does in fact use a custom icon for them.

Name: Jangle, the Goblin Sorcerer
Level: 8
Location: The farm
Catalyst: Sometimes the dice be like that

The Gory Details: The party pulled the caligni and some of the children of Belcorra into a fight at the same time. They were able to funnel them down but the cleric had to step back to heal. When they set off the first caligni a chain reaction tore through the group, of caligni setting off the next. This knocked the sorcerer down, but he was brought back up by the druid with battle medicine then casts dancing lights to blind the caligni.

So, now at wounded 1, the sorcerer decides to stay in the fight given that the things they are fighting are pretty weak, blind, and funneled down into a line. He drops another caligni with an electric arc, the caligni's explosion takes out one of the children of Belcorra and hits the party. The last two caligni are all that's left and they are in rough shape and blind. One swings blindly into the square Jangle is in, rolling a 17 and 20 on the flat checks, then rolls double slice: 20, 20.

The first critical hit dropped Jangle to dying 3 and the second finished him off. The party finished the fight and scurried home, they debated how to bring him back and settled on the only true answer for the chaotic goblin: reincarnation.

So anyways Jangle's a shoony now.

Does this include versions of the tokens where the art doesn't extend past the borders of the "ring"?

The module includes the tokens and the full portrait art, plus blank rings. You can easily use that ring and the portrait to stamp out a regular pog token of any creature you want. The pop out style isn't for everyone but from my experience the majority of people enjoy it. Only a few creatures extend far beyond the frame and those are ones that maybe deserve to be a bit more imposing or visually exciting I think.

Yes. The OGL and CUP cover the game rules and much of the other text (but not adventure text, so no room descriptions, etc). See the [PF2e system on Foundry](https://github.com/foundryvtt/pf2e) for an example that follows CUP/OGL while automating the game rules. You can even use our data entry for your own project as long as your project follows those two licenses and our own Apache 2.0 license.

So this is kind of a big one then that should probably be asked. The PDF to Foundry module worked off of purchased PDF's. Can we anticipate some support to those of us who have used this route to help create our games? And being as the Beginner's Box is very common in the Humble Bundles, will there be future support for that?

PDF to Foundry is no longer being updated with new APs. Frozen Flame was the last one. The decision to end support for it was Fryguy's, he was spending ~30 hours a month doing the work on it and spoiled every AP, adventure, and society scenario in the process. He was going to retire PDF to Foundry earlier but when we got word that Outlaws of Alkenstar would be the first premium module he pushed on to close the content gap. There is nothing preventing someone else from stepping up and making a similar program, but they would have to start from scratch as his code is closed source and he won't be releasing it to help reduce piracy. He could decide to add future content into the module again, but given that these modules are beyond anything the importer could ever do it's unlikely to be revived. Nothing in the module as it currently is will be going away. All the APs up through Frozen Flame will be importable as normal.

Fantastic to finally get to talk about it! Everyone is going to be blown away by these modules!

Started in June 2020 and ended in January 2022, played entirely on Foundry.

No deaths but a lot of close calls, the balor scored 3 crit fails on it's death explosion but I rolled abysmally on damage and 3 characters ended in the ~15 HP range (I was more than 30 damage below the average for that roll).

Faccio - Human Mastermind Rogue, dealt out absurd damage on every crit.

Father Meatbiter - Lizardfolk Cleric, multiclass champion. Tanked for the group and kept the bandages flowing.

Toland - Gnome Wizard, loaded with other spellcasting traditions through archetypes

Brokton - Catfolk Aberrant Sorcerer, learned blood feast and used it + tentacular limbs to kill an absurd number of things.

Killing blow was by Toland, who critically hit with a hail mary Deity's Strike, dealing nearly 150 damage. Just barely enough to put the manifestation down.

Thank you for taking these steps.

One of the Foundry PF2e volunteer devs here. We appreciate the support from the community but we do understand Paizo's dilemma, and don't want to cause problems or headaches. Foundry does not have the same business model as the other VTTs, and for many of us that is why we like it so much. But Paizo has relationships with other companies that need to be maintained, and Foundry's business model makes that a finer tightrope to balance on.

In the end we all love PF2e and Paizo and that's why we do the work that we do. The PF2e Foundry team is affiliated with neither Paizo nor Foundry. We do not want special treatment, and while we would like to see things like high quality art we understand both the position of Paizo and Foundry. We don't want to enable piracy, we just want to keep working toward building the VTT system that we all want to play on.

Remember, regardless of whether you play your games in person, or on Foundry, Roll20, FGU, Astral, D20Pro, Talespire, Owlbear Rodeo, or any of the other VTTs out there: First and foremost we are all fans of PF2e, and while we certainly share your enthusiasm for Foundry we ask that you be respectful and remember that we are all playing the same game.

If you want to show your support for the PF2e Foundry team then be positive about Foundry instead of negative about other VTTs, buy a Paizo PDF and tweet about running it with Foundry, buy the Battlezoo Bestiary Foundry module when it releases (Kickstarter has ended now). Definitely don't make life harder for Aaron, who we all like.

With a lot of people on VTTs these days I'd love to see the licensed dice designs wind up on them. The Rollsmith makes custom dice for Foundry and I'd like to be able to buy the dice on there too. I already collect the sets for the APs I run.

Has Paizo considered licensing the current dice designs or new dice designs for digital dice?

Fantastic! I would love to see an official token pack for Foundry but it's great to have official support!

Name of PC: Toland
Class/Level: Wizard 11
Adventure: Tomorrow Must Burn
Catalyst: He should have known better than to roll low four times in a row.
Story: The party had already rescued the hostages and fought the Scarlet Triad mooks, but Jagakki remained so they went after him. Fighting through the bears and giants Jaggaki hit them with cloudkill, and the wizard responded by lobbing several fireballs into the room Jaggaki was in while the champiopn and rogue cuut a path through the giants. Toland darted through the cloud to get away from the poison damage and Jaggaki threw a flesh to stone at him. Toland had his own prepared and attempted to counterspell: rolled a 2, hero point changed that to a 1. Then for his save he rolled a 4, exactly critically failing the save. When his turn came around he rolled his next save and got another 4. The rogue then got a critical hit with analyze weakness up off on Jaggaki and earned a spot as the prime target when he comes back.

Even though the party cleric fixed it the next day with stone to flesh I'll still count it as a death.

I went with the buttons, beer, some matroshka dolls, and I found each of them a Russian silver coin from around 1918 on E-bay.

I made a festival for my players to participate in between Cult of Cinders and Tomorrow Must Burn.

https://scribe.pf2.tools/v/t1pVhRSd-breachill-festival

I figured I wanted some way to introduce Vusker and get the PCs to care about him before his story beat, but also give a little more flavor to the town. I'm not sure about the DCs for a few things but they are all roughly right for a 9th level party.

The Adventure Paths I have played all the way through or most of the way through:

Council of Thieves - Very good, especially book 2. May need some tweaking later in the AP to keep it more connected, villain kind of comes out of nowhere for the party.

Kingmaker - Fantastic AP, but kingdom building might be best done between sessions after the first time introducing how it works. The villain definitely needs to be foreshadowed. They are releasing a remake for 2e and 1e next year that adds more story and ties the villain in better.

Serpent's Skull - Played books 1-4, players lost interest due to heavy exploration with little structure. If you do this I suggest almost entirely throwing out book 2. The rival faction stuff just gets in the way. Adopt the Kingmaker hexploration rules to the whole thing, it's a lot of large maps to explore. Also make sure you have rules for overland travel ready. Overall this is an AP I really want to run but I would essentially be rewriting so much of it, great ideas but I think it might have been better if it hadn't come right after Kingmaker when they had a chance to get feedback on exploration and travel rules.

Reign of Winter - Running now, in book 5. Book 5 might be the best 1e AP book, and it's almost worth running the AP just for it. My party lost it when they figured out where they were. We will likely be finished by the end of the year. Books 3 and 4 seem a little out of place in the overall story but they had some really neat set pieces so even if the party doesn't know why they're fighting a dragon siege on an alien planet they still enjoyed it.

Carrion Crown - I've run book 1 twice and it's amazing. You should really play up the mystery a bit, the first time I ran it the party heard "old prison outside of town" and they were like "oh so that's the dungeon let's just go there and find the ghost". Book 2 was hit or miss and both attempts at running it ended there. The trial was interesting but maybe consider implementing more of a victory point system. Also the dungeon at the end makes very little sense and is incredibly linear.

Strange Aeons - Ran part of book 1. This is one of my favorite ideas for an AP and I may try running it for my current group some time in the future. Unfortunately I started running this at a time when my friends were doing things like having kids or going back to school.

Mummy's Mask - Ran book 1. This one got derailed by my senior year in college and subsequent moving across the country for grad school. I love the theme and I enjoyed book 1, my party might have been a bit happier if the rogue hadn't always rolled 2's when looking for traps.

Jade Regent - Ran books 1 and 2. I was looking forward to getting further in this because I like the theme and the idea but it just didn't come together. I think the party also didn't like the idea of traveling across the world just to make an NPC the ruler.

Age of Ashes - Running book 2 now. This is a 2e AP and I really liked book 1, book 2 is a bit of a slog and might highlight that the tighter math of 2e doesn't play as well with open ended exploration where the party can blunder into higher level fights. My advice for anyone running book 2 is to put the easier pillars closer to town, and drop some heavy handed hints that dispel magic might be an effective counter to the pillars.

Still a week away from release but I've been combing through my PDF and I've found a couple things that may need to be addressed so I figure I should make a thread to help compile stuff as it gets spotted.

Watch and Learn Pathfinder Agent feat - This feat does nothing. You already gain this as a benefit of the dedication feat without having to spend a reaction or see an ally using the skill.

Reflexive Grip Swordmaster feat - Similarly the first part of this feat duplicates the benefit of the dedication.

Loving the book though!

I'm liking what I see so far.

I really like the new scrollmaster stuff, especially the recall knowledge feats! Lots of interesting player options here and some really neat items.

My party is getting closer to the end of the campaign, likely done in 2-3 months or so. I'm going to get them each a gift related to the campaign, since this is the thing we've been doing together for over a year now. I've found a button with Baba Yaga's hut on it, bottles of Old Rasputin beer, and a cross stitch pattern my wife is going to stitch together for them of a weasel (a running theme of my group is they claim to be weasel hunters). I was thinking about getting them a winter themed dice bag or something, but does anyone else have any ideas that fit thematically?

A mechanical fire breathing dragon? We've achieved Truckzilla!

PDF to Foundry. You may also want Compendium Mapper, which helps you put images on any compendium you want (ie they cannot distribute the images from the bestiary but if you get them yourself you can quickly map them onto the bestiary creatures).

Also: Foundry is hands down the best VTT, $50 is all you need to spend. Fantasy grounds is crazy expensive to actually automate things and all that stuff is free in Foundry.

Thank you for this. When I first read about this AP the first image in my head was Sam Vimes from Discworld, but that isn't the image that many immediately saw when they read the announcement and it shows my privilege that my first thought was an idealized version of law enforcement from a fantasy book. It's hard to see your own blind spots, but we can address them when we're made aware and strive to do better in the future.

Both my parties have a wizard in them (level 10 in one and 2 in another). Both have been very useful. Wizards could probably use a slight boost (honestly just make thesis better or improve them st some level), but they aren't terribly far behind in combat and are ahead of sorcerer outside of a fight.

Darkvision isn't implemented yet, I kind of remember seeing the developer of Foundry say some things about it being on his to do list. I don't know of any modules that do this, and don't see any in the Foundry list (but this list is not exhaustive). Might be a good idea to ask in the Foundry Discord channel.

I'm all in on Foundry as well. I could write a huge list as others have done but there's a few points that I really want to underscore:

One time purchase. I bought Foundry and none of my players need to have a license to join my server. I don't have to pay a huge license fee to do this like I would with Fantasy Grounds either. $50 and it's yours. You also don't have to pay to bring in the PF2e rules, the community built them into the PF2e game system which is freely available.

Self hosted. I've used Roll20 off and on for a few years when my group couldn't meet physically, and at the beginning of the lockdown this year before I got Foundry set up. The number of times we would all have to refresh Roll20 was ridiculous. That rarely happens with Foundry. When I did pay for the dynamic lighting years ago on Roll20 it lagged things and was generally a pain to set up. Foundry runs on my computer which has the horsepower to avoid being bogged down by more than 40 walls at once.

Active community. The community is super helpful on Discord and the devs of the PF2e game system are rapidly making improvements. In Discord the other day they said Bestiary 2 might be done as soon as next week. If there is some aspect about the system you don't like odds are there's a module that changes it. I didn't like the lack of a ping like roll20 has, well there's a module that adds one. I didn't like how dark the revealed fog of war was once it left direct line of sight, and there's a module for that too.

Ease of use, with a high skill ceiling. It's easy to just drop things in and go like you would with Roll20 (I think easier actually, since the tools to make walls are very well done). But it's also got a ton of depth to it as well. Want a macro that toggles rage on a character? How about one that rolls medicine against the chosen DC and gives the result? Or one that pulls a will save for the whole party? All doable once you learn the macro system. One other thing that I don't see many people say often is that the GM can just drag select a bunch of tokens, then roll initiative for all of them. Anyone who's played on Roll20 knows the annoyance of not having your token selected when the GM asks for initiative.

Like I said I really could go on, but others have said it already and those are my big 4 categories for why it's the preferred choice.

I've converted RoW to 2E fully and it's been great, consider just doing that. Most of the monsters are fairly easy to convert by just swapping out equal level ones. Treasure will need to be scrapped and converted from the ground up unfortunately, but it isn't too hard to do.

I'm not seeing where it says you can't cancel the flaw with a boost, in fact I see precisely the opposite:

Dwarves, for example, receive an ability boost to their Constitution score and their Wisdom score, as well as one free ability boost, which can be applied to any score other than Constitution or Wisdom.

I don't have my books with me but that's the wording from AoN https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=66

Xenocrat wrote:

Donovan Du Bois wrote:

Ravingdork wrote:

It's impossible for a 20th-level character trained in Thievery and possessing a +30 modifier to disable a trap of Master difficulty. However, the 1st-level rogue with Trap Finder and a +5 modifier can. The first character is indisputably more skilled, but apparently doesn't know what to look for, unlike the rogue.

This actually seems like a problem with the game mechanics. I can't imagine a way this makes sense, and it sucks for anyone looking to take skills outside their normal class for flavor.

This is actually Extremely Good. We need more proficiency hurdles like this requiring PCs to be tall enough to ride this ride.

This is the capturing the experienced dilletante who can do easy tasks without a thought vs the novice who is focused on learning his craft, who isn't super reliable yet but knows more and can at least try more complicated stuff the dilletante doesn't understand.

Thing of it as your 50 year old dad who can change the oil on his beater in record time because he's been doing it so long vs. the 20 year old kid who doesn't have that smoothness yet but knows how to trouble shoot the computer error readouts on a modern engine.

How is this a good thing though?

"Sorry you wanted to step outside the stereotype for your class, but you'll never be better than a level 1 character without putting in tons of investment."

Seems like you might as well just not let players take skills outside their class if you are going to invalidate them with level 1 characters.

Think about it like this: you memorize your times tables out to large numbers, you can rattle off 32*27 faster than anyone else. But a mathematician can solve a complex differential equation, and if you didn't put the effort into learning how to do those you can't. Going to expert isn't just getting better at the skill it's learning new ways to apply previous skills.

You can juggle 3 balls all day every day but you can't just jump to juggling 5 balls from there without putting in more effort.

Not really a typo just something that is more specific than it needs to be and comes out seemingly contradictory on first reading.

On page 143 it says "Because a press action requires a multiple attack penalty, you can’t use one when it’s not your turn, even if you use the Ready activity." but under the Ready activity on page 470 it says "If you have a multiple attack penalty and your readied action is an attack action, your readied attack takes the multiple attack penalty you had at the time you used Ready"

I take it that only things with the attack tag suffer from the penalty out of turn and so since no press attacks have that tag they can't be used as a readied action. But that doesn't seem super clear from how it is worded and if the intent is to keep press actions from being used out of turn it would be much clearer to just excise the "Because a press action requires a multiple attack penalty" part entirely.

But that does mean that you could do a one action flourish then ready another one action flourish to get off two in one round which gets around the MAP and the flourish limitation.

If unarmed and simple are tied together then the text in mutagenist is redundant. I wonder if they'll replace it with something.

core rulebook page 331 disrupt undead is missing the cantrip tag.

Treasure is proving to be quite difficult to convert. :(

Yeah, I just converted the second book of Reign of Winter and I know when my players hit the end of a big encounter and find their hard earned pile of 75 copper they are going to be very confused. The wealth by level changes are really tough to manage, but at least my group is OK with us fumbling at it for a while until we get it figured out.

On page 353 of the Bestiary it lists Pixie as being on page 310. Pixie is actually on 309.

On page 356 of the Core Rulebook the spell Pest Form says "You transform into a the battle form of a Tiny animal". The "a" appears to be a typo.

Here is a version that doesn't need numpy, since someone on reddit gave me the stern look of programmer disapproval.

I realized in some down time this weekend that I hadn't downloaded my PDFs in a while, so I decided to take the chance to go download them. But it turns out I hadn't downloaded anything since Strange Aeons (grad school really does eat up your time). So I had well over 100 files to do. Since I didn't want to manually rename over 100 files I made a Python script to do it for me and figured I'd share it for others who might also be in a similar situation and don't want to spend forever unzipping and renaming things.

https://pastebin.com/Q9HDgRbj

It's written with comments so even someone new to Python should be able to follow it. If you don't know how to run Python but want to use it https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter0/ will walk you through the process of installing a basic Python environment (or just install anaconda). The only thing you would need to add on top of that is the numpy package which either comes with anaconda or just run

python -m pip install --user numpy

from your command line/terminal once Python is installed.

Hopefully someone else finds it helpful.

They need to make a concentration check if they cast inside a threatened area or while distracted (like all spellcasters). The only real difference is that they can cast and attack in one turn however there are two important things to remember: If using a weapon to deliver a touch attack you can cast then move then deliver the attack (touch attack spells grant a free attack with the spell), also when making a full attack action and casting you can cast then 5 foot step then make your attacks so unless they have reach you avoid the need for a concentration check entirely.

So, seeing that some people think that the party needs more reason to interact with the townsfolk and more ways to earn trust, I came up with some extra stuff to throw into the town to help with that when I run it.

Helping some townsfolk: I figure some easy haunts around town would help to get the PCs interacting with the people in town and give an opportunity to gain some trust. These are basically benign spirits that are becoming restless and serve not as a threat but as an irritation to the townsfolk. These still need some fleshing out but I figure they are at least a start. Each of these could give the PCs 1 trust point and should have some way for the PCs to find out the history of them.

The missing ring: Anyone who tries to pull the bucket up from the well in town finds it much heavier that it should be. Once the bucket is lifted out of the well there is nothing apparently weighing it down and its weight returns to normal. A search of the well reveals a ring.
History - Some time ago a man planned to propose to his sweetheart, he got his grandmother's ring and proposed... and was promptly rejected. He threw the ring into the well and now the spirit of his grandmother wants the ring brought out of the well and returned to the family.

Good luck: Every night small bundles of twigs, or flowers and found spread around town. These are a good luck charm that appear seemingly out of nowhere. People find them in their stew, in shoes,anywhere really.
History - There was a particularly superstitious man who was buried a few decades ago. His spirit senses the unease in town and is simply trying to give them luck, annoying though it is. His spirit will be at rest if the PCs find his grave, and replace the now crumbling horseshoe embedded in the headstone.

A rap on the knuckles: When people cuss, tell a dirty joke, or spit on the ground they find that they experience a stinging slap on the back of their hand.
History - Father Grimburrow's predecessor was a stern man and spent his time patrolling the town with the goal of cracking down on indecency. He carried around a switch and anytime he heard swearing, or lewd talk he would deliver a swift swat to the knuckles. This father had a favorite sermon and would deliver it at full volume in the town square from time to time. Father Grimburrow can provide this sermon if the PCs wish to read it in the town square they will calm this spirit by convincing him that moral people are here in town.

Melody on the breeze: When the wind blows a faint song can be heard, usually played at funerals as an instrumental the townsfolk are worried about the music as a bad omen. No one quite remembers the lyrics.
History - The song was written by a bard from town and now the spirit sings the sad tune into the wind, should the PCs find the lyrics (or know the lyrics with an appropriate knowledge check) they can sing along with the wind to calm the bard and stop the haunting music.

Setting a mood: A horror campaign needs a good mood set, as such there should be some strange events going on. Things like one of the PCs hearing their name whispered in their ear with no apparent source. If you have the 3.5 Ravenloft book they have a list on page 15 of strange happenings that fit well in most horror games. If you don't they aren't too hard to come up with but here are some of mine:

1: Ashes in fireplaces form crude faces, enough to be disturbing but not enough to say it is not simply pareidolia.
2: The path to Harrowstone has fresh footprints in the mud, when no one has been around to make them. The PCs may even see boot prints being made by nothing at all as they make the trek to the prison.
3: Bells sounded in town seem to have a slight delay from when they ring to when the sound begins.
4: Animals are becoming hard to find, except carrion species, who are becoming disturbingly present.
5: Tea leaves at the bottom of cups, dropped harrow cards, dropped sticks, or other common Things used to divine the future come up as woe. (This should not affect divination magic, but for example: a harrow deck could be dropped and the first card picked up could be a bad omen or some such)
6: Metal objects tarnish quickly even after a polishing.
7: Blood stains are becoming incredibly difficult to remove from clothing.

These should not really have any sort of in game effect but should be used to set a mood and further the "something really wrong is going on here." vibe that should be cultivated with a horror game.

Anyways, figured I would share these with everyone else.

Usually activating a weapon ability is a standard action, so I would go with that unless specifically noted.

I do believe that puts it in the lead of "most dangerous thing in the AP". Seriously that thing packs a punch.

I got 24 possible popularity points on my count, if the party goes in with 32 fame points and only spends the minimum (5 points is all that is absolutely required to avoid a huge ding to your fame points), then you have 27 unspent fame points. This would be a +87 (32 + 27 + 4 [bonus to cha checks from saving the nobles]) to the final fame check. The party would then also get +2 for every party member not making the check (This would be +10 for my group, 5 players one of whom has a feat that gives an additional +2 on aid another) they also add in the charisma modifier to the roll (this should be done by the party's smooth talker so I will assume a +3), and another +4 if anyone has leadership.

So best case scenario: +100 (96 for most 4 person groups without leadership.)
What my group will likely end up with: +84 (my group basically refuses to return stolen goods, which dings then for an automatic 6 fame points. This is what I get for running a campaign with only neutral characters)

Joriavah's initiative is listed as +134. I can only assume she isn't pun-pun in a succubus costume so i'm sure that's not right.