Tim Emrick's page

I finished Godsrain last night, and very much enjoyed it. Merciel sprinkles in a lot of interesting lore throughout, which helps bring the world to life. I'm well-versed enough in Golarion lore to catch a lot of the references, including many that go unexplained, but there are quite a few added touches original to the author, too. And each of the 4 "PCs" gets a satisfying through-arc distinct from the others, even while they world together to save the world.

I won't say more about the plot for fear of spoilers, but I highly recommend reading the short fiction pieces in War of Immortals either shortly before or shortly after Godsrain because Samo and Nahoa, the two new iconics from that book, play a supporting role in the novel.

I'm not sure how much I'll be posting here the next few months, because I anticipate most of my reading for a longish while will be RPG rulebooks--even more so than usual--and those get discussed elsewhere here on these boards. I bought a Fantasy Age 2E adventure path at Origins, my wife and I have preordered the SF 2E core books, and I was just given Monty Python's Cocurricular Medieval Reenactment Programme as a belated birthday gift this past weekend. (Based on that last title's intro, it promises to be a very entertaining read, even if I never attempt to play it. I do enjoy rulebooks that are fun to read, rather than just an infodump about game mechanics.)

Ouch, the timing of this could not be much worse, given the SF 2E release schedule. I'm very glad that my wife and I recently preordered several of those books.

Safe sailing through these troubled seas, mates!

Wait, what's "Hard mode" then?

(I ask, while realizing you probably mean without reducing things due to 4 players...)

I haven't read the scenario myself, so don't know the details. But it's one of a handful of scenarios where, if everyone in the group agrees, the GM can increase the difficulty of encounters. There's no benefit to doing it other than bragging rights if you survive.

I have finished The Bourne Identity, and am eager to finally see the 2002 movie, because I'm curious about how it adapted a novel that is very grounded in its own time (1980). (Looking up those dates online, I discovered that there was a TV miniseries of the book in 1988 starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith. That sounds fascinating.)

This morning I started Godsrain, by Liane Merciel, which I received as a birthday gift earlier this week. I enjoyed another novel by this author, Hellknight, and am very curious how she handles the titular cataclysm, so hope it lives up to expectations. I am enjoying the characterizations of the main characters (Kyra, Merisiel, Ezren, and Amiri) in the first few chapters I've read so far.

I assume you'll be playing the level 14-15 tier? (17-18 tier feels like it would be too much of a jump)

Best of luck! I hope your group has fun.

12-13 subtier. We could have added in some additional Seeker-level stuff, but very little of it seemed to fit this campaign's theme, so we went for the quickest route to the finale. (I forget what subtier we played PTT at in our Giantslayer/Shattered Star/miscellaneous game with this same group some years back. I'm guessing 14-15.)

When I posted before, I'd forgotten that we had to push the conclusion off the couple more weeks due to scheduling.

*Particularly* your third edict. :D

I meant anathema. But the third edict is pretty good, too.

And I've been corrected by my GM that only two of Zefira's companions accepted the power of the Tear. But I think the decision was easiest for her, for the reasons given above.

And I must congratulate you, Alex, on your exquisitely designed test god. *Particularly* your third edict. :D

Our round-robin Torch/Shadow Lodge game has reached its capstone adventure, Passing the Torch. We're playing Parts 1 & 2 over two sessions each due to the time required for high-level combat, and will be concluding Part 2 his Tuesday night. We're playing Passing the Torch on "hard mode" because our characters are pretty effective for their level (12th), and we might never play these characters again after this, so why not? (It's all PFS play, so we could theoretically play them again if they survive, but probably not with this group, since this concludes the campaign arc we planned out.)

***

My wife has started running Menace Under Otari, the adventure from the PF2 Beginner Box. Our group are all experienced players instead of the novices the adventure is written for, but she's the only one of us who's actually played this adventure before. Because we don't need to learn the game, Part 1 only took about 3 hours of the 4-hour slot we'd reserved, and I'm guessing Part 2 will fit into that time, too. We may end up playing Trouble in Otari afterwards, which is a full-sized module.

Another result of not being first-timers is our bizarre party composition: instead of the four iconics provided, we have a strix bard (my PC), a strix rogue, a tengu druid, a kholo fighter, and a nephilim orc summoner. At least some of us plan to apply the credit to a version of our character to play in PFS (I certainly do). Wutuchillik is the first bard PC I've played since AD&D 2E, and I'm enjoying her.

***

I'll have to catch up on the "Sparks' game I'm playing in some other time, when I have more time to check my notes.

How open is your GM to feedback from players? It might be worth talking with them about why they used mobility-countering tactics so frequently, and about your frustration with being shut down so regularly.

Without knowing more about that dynamic, and the reasons for it, all I can say is that taking a Dex penalty seems like an extremely risky solution to the problem. Low Dex severely hurts pretty much every character build, unless you have heavy armor. With your current build, you'll be taking penalties to AC, Ref, Init, and throwing your bombs. And increasing HP only helps so much; better AC is a far more efficient way to avoid death (both in the number of hits you'll take, and in how many resources you'll need to expend to heal damage).

I needed a book to read while traveling for a family visit followed by Origins, so when I saw The Bourne Legacy in a thrift shop, I grabbed it. I haven't seen any of the Bourne movies, but have heard them referenced often enough in a gaming context that I was curious. I'm enjoying it so far.

Any adventure featuring J Dacilane. Though unless you met him back in first edition, you might not even realize he's transmasc.

J is easily among my favorite recurring NPCs from 1E. Way back when the first Dacilane Academy adventure was announced, our local group was still playing 1E often enough that I ran the scenarios that J first appeared in to provide more context for anyone meeting (or running) him in 2E. (Because J's gender presentation shifts over the course of that arc, I asked for a reality check from a trans/NB friend to make sure my pronoun use would be appropriate for each stage of his story.)

Also of note, the Academy's students include one each of genderfluid and nonbinary named characters. It makes for an interesting bit of color, but is never the primary thing defining the character's role in the story.

Et voila! You should now see the update under the Lost Omens: Ancestry Guide sanctioning.

Sweet! I've had a strix character concept in mind for a while now, but the steep AcP price tag had put that solidly on the back burner--until now.

(OTOH, I have three other PCs still at 1st level, so I've not sure I'm in a super rush to introduce yet another brand-new PC until at least one or two of those advance a level...)

I will add that any ranged attacker, regardless of whether they're using bows or ray spells or kinetic blasts, needs Point Blank Shot and Precise Shot to be effective in most fights. Most offensive cantrips require a ranged attack roll, and there are a subset of spells at every level that require them, too. Most of these spells target touch AC, but that advantage is greatly reduced if you're constantly taking a -4 to attack because your target is in melee.

I've seen caster and kineticist characters who were entirely useless in combat because the player chose mostly spells or blasts that required ranged attacks, but forgot these two basic feats. And when you're a half-BAB arcane caster, you're already behind the curve on attack bonus.

Finally, note that neither feat has a BAB prerequisite, so they can be taken as early as 1st and 3rd level (or both at 1st for a human).

I read Distant Wolds a few years after reading Pact Worlds, and it was fascinating to see what had changed dramatically in the time between the PF and SF eras, and what was still largely the same.

I spent a year in grad school in Normal, IL (GDW's hometown) a couple years before the company went under. I tried Dangerous Journeys very briefly, in demos at the public library. It had some interesting ideas, but I found it overly arcane in its mechanics (a all-too-common tendency for Gygax's work). It felt like it was trying to be both D&D *and* GURPS, and fell flat on both counts.

Strictly Rules As Written, an environmental field collar only works for a creature companion.

I'm assuming you're asking with the intention of using it to save the life of an NPC who has been suddenly exposed to vacuum, or will be imminently without time to prepare? Otherwise, a spacesuit would do the trick, or the environmental protections built into any suit of armor.

I've
finished the Roman Drama anthology I posted about last time. Seneca's three tragedies (Medea, Oedipus, Thyestes) were by far my favorites, because of my interest in Greek myths. I was familiar with the first two because they're closely modeled after Aeschylus's plays, but Thyestes was new to me because (as the intro explains) there are no surviving Greek texts of that segment of the Mycenaean myths. Perhaps the most notable thing that three have in common is that nearly half the text is the central character raving about their own crimes, and the many wrongs done to them.

Since then, I've reread Sun Tzu's Art of War this past week. (I own the translation edited by James Clavell.) Musashi's Book of Five Rings lives next to it on my shelf, and I usually read these two books back-to-back whenever I revisit them, so I likely will this time, too.

I need to give some thought very soon to what book(s) to take with me on my family's vacation travels next month. Space is at a premium because we're going to a family wedding, then to Origins.

I'm rather fond of Songbird Station, in the Diaspora. It's the absent goddess Shelyn's largest temple in the Pact Worlds, and her faithful do her proud whether she's listening or not. One entire SFS scenario is set there (which I'll be running again in a few days!), and it's featured in the backstory for at least one bounty and one one-shot module.

I'm very curious how the creation of Zon-Shelyn will affect the place in 2E!

I'm very much enjoying the Galaxy Guide so far, but have one major quibble: It badly needs an index! It's going to be hard to look up info on a specific world unless you can memorize what's in each genre category.

The majority of my PF1 experience has been with Society play, which is ill-suited to any romance plots directly involving PCs. I only gave a handful of my PCs anything resembling a lovelife, and that was strictly offstage during downtime.

I have been in a handful of non-PFS games where one or more PCs acquired a romantic interest, but as others have said, that's very much up to what the players want and are comfortable with. I'm currently in one homebrew campaign where my PC is the one with a romantic subplot. Our party rescued several acolytes of the cleric PC's god, and one, a half-orc, now travels with us to escape her racist hometown and learn from our cleric. She also hero-worships my half-orc fighter, who has been very protective of her from the start due to their shared outsider status. My PC has been careful to not take advantage of her, but they've grown closer over the past few months, and now with winter approaching, it was kind of inevitable that they started sharing a tent. And we mostly leave it at that.

I have been in campaigns where romance was much more prevalent, but most were in other systems. The kind of soap opera nonsense that could easily derail a typical d20 game is the meat and potatoes of (for example) the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG.

I'm currently reading a collection of Roman dramas, three plays each by Plautus, Terence, and Seneca.

Plautus's plots will feel familiar to anyone who's seen or read Shakespeare's comedies, because he was one of the Bard's favorite authors to plunder for plots and stock characters. (For example, "The Menaechmi" is the mold for the twins separated at birth and mistaken identity gimmicks Willy loved so much.)

I've only read the first of the Terence plays so far, but it was largely more of the same. So far, the book is Interesting because I've never read any Roman plays before, but these soap opera farces aren't my usual cup of tea.

I'm looking forward much more to Seneca's plays, which just from the titles (Medea, Oedipus, Thyestes) promise something more in the Greek tragedy vein. (I'm also partial to Medea as a character because I used her to very good effect in the Greek myth solo game I ran for my wife. Her hero quickly learned to hate and fear witches--but the truly legendary ones most of all.)

In my group's Torch/Shadow Lodge campaign, we're 12th level, have finished "Betrayal in the Bones," and are starting the campaign's capstone adventure, "Passing the Torch," tonight.

There's been some talk of our group doing a "hard mode" campaign after this--all the most challenging, lethal adventures ever released for PFS 1E--but I'm finding myself underenthused by the idea. I think I'd rather just have my Tuesday nights back to rest and relax.

The shield cantrip can be very useful to a swashbuckler. It keeps your off hand free, and saves you the cost and bulk of a physical shield (and repairing it) while still preventing some damage mow and then.

Recently I was in a Starship combat that went 9 or 10 rounds. We only had one gunner using broadside, which left everyone else with fairly obvious and repetitive actions. This actually made the turns go faster. What ended up happening was that everyone had fun gotting involved in taunting the Corpse Fleet ship to the point that the Corpse Fleet likely has wanted posters for us...

I was that gunner! :D

I will say that the PbP format did make that combat more fun than most of my in-person experiences. When there is a stricter time limit, it just feeds into the players' frustration that the combat is dragging, because it's taking time away from doing more fun stuff.

I am rereading David Alexander Smith's In the Cube, which is part of the Future Boston shared-world setting created by a workshop of Boston-area SF writers. The main premise of the setting is that first contact with aliens happens just outside Boston, so the city becomes the designated contact zone between Earth and all extraterrestrial species. Boston both profits and suffers from the massive influx of alien tech and trade.

In this novel, set decades after that first contact, we follow a private eye whose latest case takes her all over the transformed city of Boston, from recognizable historic landmarks to completely alien spaces. Her partner is an alien with special senses that help their investigations, but as with any human-alien contact, their relationship is more complex and fraught than it seems at first.

This is the longest FuBos story I've read (most are short-story length) and by far the most satisfying one, in part due to word count. Smith makes excellent use of the workshop's extensive world-building, injecting a lot of background color into the story without bogging down the plot, and many of those details become integral to the story's resolution.

(One personal danger with this book is that it tends to make me homesick for Boston, where I lived for 20 years (during my 20s and 30s). I first read this novel shortly after moving there, and portions of the book take place where some historical landmark still stands, half-buried under all the future infrastructure of the city.)

I want to see starship combat rules that are actually FUN for everyone at the table. The clunkiness of starship combat has been my biggest complaint with 1E as both a player and a GM. With the exception of a handful of scenarios where the odds were clearly stacked in the PCs' favor, starship combat tends to drag on for far too long, and in most combats, it feels like only the pilot gets to make any meaningful choices.

My home group dislikes starship combat enough that I'm using the narrative starship combat rules while running the Scoured Stars AP. So far (5 out of 12 chapters completed), that's been a far superior experience--combat is much shorter, and everyone at the table feels like they made a meaningful contribution. I hope the 2E rules end up closer to that than to the standard 1E rules.

Of course, the narrative rules aren't available for use in Society play, which is the vast majority of my Starfinder experience. So, with the exception of the occasional con game that I get assigned to run, or a cool-sounding scenario I can't bear to miss out on playing (like the upcoming Final Assessment), I generally avoid Starship-tagged scenarios as much as possible.

Another element to think about is the fact that, as an inquisitor, you're a divine caster. In the default setting of Golarion, that means you serve a patron god, who will have certain expectations about your behavior. Depending on the campaign, that may just mean the basic rule of staying within one alignment step of your god. But there are also sourcebooks like Inner Sea Gods that go into more detail about the tenets of the faith and the role of its priests.

[I realize that this is the 1E forum, but the entries for gods in 2E do an excellent job of summing up the god's expectations in a few Edicts and Anathema. A look at those might help you find some ideas for that list of principles that you're looking for.]

Given your character's origins, would his patron be an archdevil, or the god of his mother's church? In either case, I could see literal "law" being a core concern for him. Laws bring order, but require study to understand properly. And those who understand the laws best also know how where the loopholes are, which they can legally exploit--which could promote more order overall, or make a mockery of it, depending on the circumstances.

Tieflings can take the Expanded Fiendish Resistance feat, which gives resistance to one additional energy type.

(I thought aasimars had a similar feat, but couldn't find it on Nethys, and don't have my book handy.)

I am rereading L. Sprague de Camp's Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature. I first read this book over a decade ago, and am noticing much more this time though how dated (and often pejorative) much of the language is when referring to pre-industrial peoples. (It was written in the 1950s.) On the other hand, de Camp still comes across as far less racist than the Theosophists and other groups he discusses (and frequently ridicules), who had extremely questionable ideas about the origins of various races and ethnic groups. Though I do have to remind myself that de Camp was also one of the most prolific writers of pastiches of the works of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, both of whom were rabidly racist.

This past week, I ran my last session as GM in our group's round-robin Torch/Shadow Lodge campaign (the one that inspired Warped Savant's take on those scenarios). That was 4-12 Refuge of Time, which they played at 11th level. It went fast, because this group is far more optimized than the NPCs they had to fight. Now everyone else has one scenario left to run, with our most experienced GM running both parts of Passing the Torch as our capstone.

***

In my friend's homebrewed "sparks" campaign, we've finished our investigation of the archmage's plantation. We managed to safely end the time-stop effect and free the people stuck in stasis. This involved the release of a vast amount of "spark" energy from the machine responsible, so most of the PCs have now absorbed a potentially dangerous amount of this energy.

The GM has now revealed some of the game mechanics he's using for this phenomenon: First, we have to make a Fort save to safely absorb the energy (DC based partly on how much we're trying to absorb, and what we've already absorbed), or take damage proportionate to the amount we failed by--and then roll new saves until we succeed. Second, we then have to make a Will save to choose how the new ability we gain manifests, otherwise it's random. Many of these powers are spell-like abilities, but not all of them (for example, my half-orc fighter now adds 1 bleed damage to a successful critical hit).

We've also met an NPC who trades in the "essences" of things. Our working theory is that he's some kind of (semi?)-divine outsider, because what he has offered is pretty powerful. When we were trying to end the time-stop effect, he showed intense interest in bargaining for the vast amount of gathered time-energy (which he now considered us the owners of, because we had defeated the place's guardians). After much debate, we agreed to the trade, and have acquired some additional abilities separate from our "spark" powers. (Examples: the rogue gained luck [reroll one d20 a day], the ranger gained a short-range dimension door, my fighter gained ferocity as a full-blooded orc, and the wizard gained a list of names of exraplanar beings that she can contact once she learns the appropriate spells.)

We have moved on to investigating a druid's preserve that has been thrown into conflict by the Day of Chaos that splintered the empire. We've learned that the druids have had a schism of their own, with a violent fanatic taking over and attempting to breed super-sized monsters to use against his enemies. We've agreed to help some survivors of the more peaceful faction by dealing with this threat.

My PC has also acquired a romance side-plot over the last few months. After we helped out a small temple of the cleric PC's faith, a half-orc acolyte from there joined our party. One reason for this is that Leeta's hometown is extremely racist (the empire was human-dominated, with a slave class of "savage" humanoids). She has also been rather infatuated with Melech (my half-orc fighter) ever since meeting him. He's felt very protective towards her this whole time, but very early on made an effort not to take advantage of her affection. They have, however, become quite close since then, spending more and more time alone together when they can. *Something* is going on between them that we haven't explicitly defined yet. But one telling detail is that sleeping arrangements have shifted. Melech is the only man in the party, and at the start of the campaign, always shared a room or tent with his sister (the party rogue). Now he shares his tent with Leeta instead.

I'm pretty sure a PF2 AP has you briefly meet some Contemplatives on Akiton - who's to say a few didn't decide to make the trip back to Golarion with those heroes?

Contemplatives have been part of PF since 1E. Distant Worlds, the gazetteer for the other planets in Golarion's solar system, includes the Contemplatives of Ashok in the chapter on Akiton and in its bestiary appendix.

On a side note, reading Distant Worlds for the first time a few years after reading Pact Worlds was quite fascinating! The Starfinder developers clearly used all that lore as starting points, but some worlds have changed MUCH more radically than others. (One example: The chapter on Apostae makes zero mention of the drow, so their dominance of the planet clearly dates to a much later period.)

Sweet, thanks! I tried to do a search for an answer, but your search fu is clearly superior.

I just filled in the last two boxes of my Game Store Owner boon last night, so it's good to know I can claim that +10% whenever this PC gets GM credit, too. She just hit 4th level, so has made a whipping 219 extra credits since she unlocked the +5%, but it will add up to something useful someday!

Please forgive the thread necro, but I'm running this in a few days.

I will be assuming that the solarion crystal is supposed to be the minor version, as that's level 5, which matches the Chronicle sheet.

And speaking of the Chronicle sheet, only three of the nine items listed there appear anywhere in the scenario. I suspect that the others were copied in error from another scenario's Chronicle?

The fermawr's tentacle lash attack and frantic grasp becomes more problematic the longer I look at it. This creature has neither grab nor multiattack, but both seem necessary to make its concept work. If it's supposed to have the grab universal monster rule, then it grapples if it hits KAC+4, or pins if hits KAC+13. If it is supposed to have multiattack, then that would be at a -6 for all attacks. But full attack is a full action, so it wouldn't get a swift action that round. And since grapples must be maintained with new checks each round, it can't make its swift action bite against a grappled target unless it only makes a single standard-action attack. I suppose Cleave gives the potential for two grapples from a single standard action, but I can't see a way to get three grapples and a bite in one round unless the bite is simply rolled into a multiattack.

Is there ever a time that a GM can use the effect of a boon already possessed by a character when applying GM credit for a scenario to them? The reason I'm asking is because some Social Boons (such as Known Quality and Game Store Owner) can increase the amount of credits earned from the adventure or from downtime. Can these extra credits only be earned when getting player credit for a scenario, but not GM credit?

I don't think you could justify a 1" envelope of air providing any lift for flight. It's not a true atmosphere, it's just a thin layer clinging to you. A careful reading of the spell seems to support this:

Life bubble doesn’t provide protection from energy damage, negative or positive energy (such as found on the Negative and Positive Energy Planes), or radiation; it also doesn’t provide the ability to see in conditions of poor visibility (such as in smoke or fog) or the ability to move or act normally in conditions that impede movement (such as underwater).

(Emphasis mine.) Vacuum clearly impedes movement, so I would rule that life bubble doesn't change that.

ACG = Adventure Card Game? I've never heard of anything like that for Starfinder. And with 2E on its way, I seriously doubt that we'll ever see one.

13 STR for a DEX based character is actually a good idea. A character with 10 STR has a light load of 33 lbs. It does not take much gear to put you over that limit. A starting martial character will have trouble staying under that limit. A chain shirt weighs 25 lbs, a rapier is 2 lbs, a dagger is 1 lbs., an empty backpack is 2lbs, a bedroll is another 5 lbs. That puts the character at a medium load. That is without a ranged weapon or any other gear including waterskin or rations. Dropping the armor to studded leather will reduce the total weight to 30 lbs, but again that is without any other gear.

This is precisely why anyone who wears armor and/or carries any appreciable amount of gear shouldn't dump Str. When I was starting PFS, I wondered why Merisiel (the iconic rogue) had 14 Str when she was a finesse build, but then I added up the weight of all her gear, and pretty much every bit of that 14 Str was essential.

The longest running solo player game I've run used BESM 3E. As with most RPGs designed for a group of PCs, there are a lot of factors to take into account with a single player (action economy, more gaps in skills, getting stuck if that one PC fails at a critical moment, etc.). But we've made it work, mostly by making her character fairly powerful on her own, giving her an NPC companion, and having many situations resolved through role-playing rather than fighting.

Trail of Cthulhu and Gumshoe have "Confidential" campaign books designed for one player and one GM, but I haven't played either version of either game. But from what I've heard on the creators' podcast, the saving grace of those solo games is that the base game system takes the approach that the PCs are highly competent at their professions, and always get the clue they need to continue to the next part of the story. Failure just means that progress comes at a higher price (expending more resources, getting injured, etc.).

I haven't GMed PFS 2e (yet), but I've played enough to currently have a character of almost every level from 10 down. I don't recall any deaths at tables I've played at (with the possible exception of a pregen or two?), but I have definitely had a few scenarios where it as a very close thing, and most of my characters have been knocked unconscious at some point (occasionally in multiple fights per adventure).

Compared to 1E, I'd say that it's easier to inflict (and take) damage because the math is designed to prevent the creation of characters who always hit or can never be hit. But it's harder to kill someone outright. Healing is much easier between fights, thanks to Treat Wounds, consumables, certain focus spells, etc., which makes in-combat healing less critical to survival. However, a group without a dedicated healer (magical, mundane, or both) will have a harder time finishing fights and recovering from them. My wife (who does GM a lot) is of the opinion that in-combat healing is most essential at very low levels (where a lucky critical hit can take you from full HP to dying 2 in one hit) and at very high levels (10+, where the amount of damage possible can swing a fight quickly). And I know she has seen some character deaths at tables she's played at (the PC went to 0 while taking persistent damage, that sort of thing), but I'm not sure how many, or whether she's seen it as a GM, too.

I finished The Once and Future King, and have started The Book of Merlyn, which White had intended to be the fifth and final book of the story. It's mostly set during the night before Arthur's final battle, and circles back to Merlyn and his lessons involving animals.

When TOAFK was printed without TBOM, the ants and geese episodes were incorporated into The Sword in the Stone. So I had read them very recently, but they both make more sense in the context of TBOM, when Arthur is old.

Tim Emrick wrote:

In my group's round-robin Torch/Shadow Lodge game, we've reached 10th level, and will be playing Shadows Fall on Absalom tonight. After that, we have 7 more scenarios before the finale of Passing the Torch Parts 1 & 2 at 12th level.

So close to the end!!

Do most / any of the others know how it ends?

More or less.

This is mostly the same group that played through two APs (Giantslayer and Shattered Star, alternating books and GMs) in PFS-mode a few years ago. We filled in some gaps in level advancement with parts of Emerald Spire, PFS scenarios, and a high-level module or two, and ended up reaching 19th level at the end. (A subset of us reached 20th later after one last PFS special that had no upper limit.)

Part of the PFS content we used was Passing the Torch, because it was Seeker tier, and still relatively new at the time. However, those PCs had never met Torch before, so most of the relevant backstory was lost on them. (I believe that all of the players had had experiences with Torch, with other PCs, so out of character, we all had our own thoughts about him.)

We're all very curious how PTT will turn out this time around. At least a couple of the players despise Torch out of character, while another (my wife) generally dislikes him but has been much more sympathetic since playing the scenario where you finally learn about his early history. (That one is coming up next level, shortly before PTT.)

What skill is used for Recall Knowledge checks about kucharn? The two examples in this book (and in one of the playtest scenarios) only have the kucharn tag, not any of the creature type tags used in Pathfinder 2E.

In Starfinder 1E, the Swarm were monstrous humanoids, which isn't used in 2E, so that's no help, either.

I am now re-reading T.H. White's The Once and Future King, and am roughly halfway through it.

I've finished the third of the four books that make up this novel, but then took a short break to read another book. The diversity office on campus was giving away some copies of Trevor Noah's book Born a Crime. I haven't seen a lot of Noah's stuff, just occasional clips from The Daily Show and one comedy special, but I like his sense of humor and storytelling skills, so took a copy to check it out. The book is a series of stories about his life growing up in South Africa, in the last years of aparthied and then in its aftermath.

As a middle-aged white guy in the USA, I knew some basic things about aparthied, but had never really studied it. Noah's perspective was very eye-opening, deeply personal, and written in a very engaging and accessible way. And it's not all grim--he did have many positive experiences amid the chaos of those years, many of them thanks to his mother's unwavering dedication to preparing him for a better life than had been possible for her.

LEGO Minifigure Series 27: A quick review of the new series.

In my group's round-robin Torch/Shadow Lodge game, we've reached 10th level, and will be playing Shadows Fall on Absalom tonight. After that, we have 7 more scenarios before the finale of Passing the Torch Parts 1 & 2 at 12th level.

***

In the "sparks" home game, we are 6th level. We are currently investigating the manor of a wizard known as "the Creator," a powerful crafter who invented the first magical slave collars that were used throughout the empire. We now know that he was the target of one of many simultaneous attacks by the Resistance on what became known as the Day of Chaos, but something went wrong and his home is now the epicenter of a zone of frozen time. Even the air is in stasis, until someone moves through an area, leaving a pocket or tunnel that normal air can enter from outside.

Several people are trapped in this field, some with collars frozen in the act of disintegrating, and clearly affected by the confusion effect that followed the collars' destruction in the rest of the world a couple of months ago. The Creator was not present, but we found signs that he had been caught by the phenomenon but later retrieved by the imperial secret police. We've discovered a hidden magical device that seems to be responsible for the effect, but removing lead panels to study it has apparently degraded the field so that time is passing again, just extremely slowly; the effect will likely fail entirely in a few weeks or months.

We now have two new goals that we're trying to figure out how to accomplish:

1. Restore the people frozen in time--and keep them from killing each other (and us!) until the "paused" confusion effect wears off.

2. Find a safe way to siphon off energy from the Creator's device. The thing contains a vast amount of the divine power that we're calling "sparks," with two opposed types of energy held in a careful balance. Opposed sparks normally explode on contact, neutralizing each other and producing half as much neutral energy. We want to prevent such an explosion, and also want to prevent any of this "spark" energy from falling into the hands of anyone less altruistic than we are--but we don't know what this much "spark" energy would do to us, either.

FYI, you're responding to a 12-year-old thread (which incidentally, predates the introduction of shield bosses by 3 years).

I've finished Luzzi's Dante book, and read Dan Brown's Origin, and enjoyed both. In the latter, the most interesting character is

I am now re-reading T.H. White's The Once and Future King, and am roughly halfway through it. This was another choice inspired by recent events in an RPG campaign, in which another player's modern-day mage character was in large part inspired by White's Merlyn--an incredibly powerful, but often bumbling and socially awkward, wizard with a quirky perspective on reality. (He's even fallen hard for an enchantress! Though hopefully one more clearly benign than Nimue.)

The junk shop owner Julzakama is depicted in a muscle shirt, which shows off more skin than any other vesk portrait that I can think of offhand. That piece of art doesn't render individual scales. However, apart from his head spikes, his skin texture seems to be pretty uniform overall, with a subtle shift in color on his neck and chest.

The core races didn't get Bestiary entries, probably because all the rules to make NPCs of those races are in the CRB.

The NPC Codex has a 1st-level dwarf warrior (which is the class that the 3.0/3.5 MM used for a generic dwarf, not fighter).

The NPC Codex's 1st-level fighter is human, but it shouldn't be too hard to change the fighter stat block to be a dwarf: remove one feat and one skill (the human's bonuses), add dwarf traits, and add Dwarven to languages. You probably don't need to change ability scores, though swapping the 8 from Int to Cha would preserve the skill line as-is. Weapons are probably fine, but you could change the sword to a warhammer or battleaxe for a more dwarven flavor. (Optionally, move the rank in Heal to a Craft skill, and the healer's tools to matching artisan's tools. Switching to a warhammer or battleaxe frees up just enough gold to afford masterwork tools.)

Starfinder Second Edition Playtest: Introducing "Encore": Stats and backstory for my first 2E playtest PC.