Search Posts
I agree with Kishmo: You only get the specific benefits listed in the heritage's text. Pathfinder and Starfinder have yet to publish a playable PC ancestry or heritage that has anywhere near the the full immunities of a construct creature, despite having androids, poppets, automatons, and so on. All of those ancestries are living creatures, not "pure" unliving constructs.
I have finished King of Chaos. It holds up well against Gross's previous Varian and Radovan books, and like them, adds some interesting twists to the duo's personal journeys (Varian's magic and Radovan's fiendish heritage). This novel also introduces a third POV character, as they reunite with a character from Queen of Thorns. Next, I have decided to switch gears and finish Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, so I started The Hero of Ages tonight.
It looks like the missing art for the kaylixes might be on the cover for Scenario #1-23: Psychic Echoes. I noticed that, too. Mystery of the Frozen Moon seems to be the most popular non-metaplot scenario of Season 1 among most players I know (many of whom would drop the "non-metaplot" qualifier). I'm eager to run the sequel in a couple months. Many of those same players (myself included) are hoping that lu-venons will become a playable ancestry someday. If we're lucky, maybe they'll appear in the player's guide for a future season? (OTOH, I've been hoping that about yetis since Season 1 of 1E, but we can't always get what we want.)
I'm 55 and have always been a voracious reader, so I've had to limit my list to series that I've loved enough to still reread part or all of occasionally. In no particular order: - The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
And here's a couple more that I'm still reading but anticipate adding them to the list above, in time: - Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson (I'll be starting the last book of the trilogy soon)
In practice, most treasure that the PCs come across should be at their level or lower, with an occasional item of slightly higher level. If they are buying something (whether at character creation or during downtime) then the level cap can be used as a way to determine what is available to them. (Society play does this, with some Chronicles giving early access to a specific item featured in the adventure.)
I'll put this into context later, the next time I post an update about my friend Dave's "Sparks" campaign. But I wanted to share a moment from today's session while it's still fresh in my mind. Today we fought a bunch a giant leeches. Near the end of the fight, my half-orc fighter got grappled by one, so couldn't attack with his two-handed heavy flail. So, like the badass he is, Melech just punched it hard, twice, and knocked it out.
I have read Wizard's Mask, and found it a bit lacking compared to some of the previous Pathfinder Tales, though I'm not sure if I can articulate why. I started Dave Gross's King of Chaos on my lunch break today. Another Varian Jaggare and Radovan adventure, this time set in the Worldwound at the time of the Wrath of the Righteous AP. I have not played or read that AP, so only know the barest bones of what happens during it. I'm hoping this novel will give me more context about those events.
Alien Hunter is tied to "It Came From the Vast," which was written for 5th level. That's one of the levels that you're allowed to start a new character at, so you're in luck. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you convert your character to the official rules: * You'll need to check what changes, if any, were made to the ancestry, class, feats, spells, etc., that your playtest character used. Then for each element, you can decide whether you want to use the official version, or swap out that option for something else. * You'll need to re-buy all your gear using the starting wealth appropriate to your level. (See the SFS 2E Guide on Lorespire, or GM Core, for details.) There may also be some items that your character acquired in the playtest that aren't available in Player Core, so you won't be able to keep them. * At the moment, there are no SFS2 scenarios for levels 5-6. The first one of those comes out next month, and there will only be one more this season. So you will have very limited options to play your converted character for the immediate future, unless you build a lower-level version of them. I have one playtest character of my own who I've converted to the official 2E rules. My kasatha mystic ended A Cosmic Birthday at 4th level, so I decided to build a 3rd-level version then apply a few GM credits to bring him up to 4th, so that I could resume playing him at the level he had reached before. Part of the impetus for this was to make sure I had a level 3-4 character available when those started coming out. (I may have spread my level 1-2 XP between too many characters to advance more than one of them in time for that new tier...)
I am very excited to see this form out in the wild now, as it were, but I (and other local GMs) have questions. May sessions be reported retroactively, or only for games played after a certain date? (And if the latter, what's the cutoff date?) Specifically, can adventures that we played during the 2E playtest period be reported now using this new form? I recall that those could be reported during that playtest period for [SFS 1E] AcP, but they gave no other credit.
Clerics and Oracles are good healers and buffers. They can be reasonably effective combatants if they are built for it, but that will impact their support role. I consider clerics to be the easiest to learn and play of the four full divine casters, because channeling and domains are fairly straightforward compared to the other three classes' special features. Oracles are more complicated due to their revelations and curses, but I enjoyed the one I played, who reached 12th level or just beyond. (Dedicated healer, practically a pacifist, but I chose the Lore mystery to make her useful for more than just healing and being the party face.) Choosing a curse that will not consistently detract from your fun may pose a bit of a challenge. (My oracle had the tongues curse, so the PCs who cared most about any useful info she might spout during combat quickly learned the language(s) she was allowed to speak under stress. It worked out well enough, and enhanced her growing reputation as a holy woman.) Druids can be good combatants with wild shape, if you have the physical ability scores to back it up. (If you're used to D&D 3E or 5E, where you pretty much just use the creature's stat block as-is, you'll be in for a rude shock if you dumped Str. As did one of my players in a campaign that we converted from 3.5 to PF1 halfway through.) They also have a number of useful battlefield-control and damaging spells. They can contribute some healing if the party is lacking a dedicated healer, but are more fun if they don't have to swap out more interesting spells to fill that role. I've played one shaman, up to 12th level, and I'm still not sure how effectively I was able to play him. The spirit rules make the class complicated, especially once you get access to wandering spirit and wandering hex. (I made a cheat sheet of all of his options for those, and still defaulted to the same load-out over 90% of the time.) I liked the character concept fine (spooky half-orc fortune-teller, heavens mystery), but it's my least favorite class of the four full divine casters.
I've finished Pirate's Honor, and enjoyed it. The lunar naga Celeste is, of course, the most compelling character in the book. The captain whose honor the title references? Eh, much less so, but he's necessary for the plot, and he's far from unlikeable. I'm still trying to decide whether to read the next Pathfinder Tales novel (Ed Greenwood's Wizard's Mask), start Sanderson's third Mistborn book, or find something else to read (or reread) instead.
If he does die, I've been using the Borai Versatile Heritage to explain why an NPC that died returned in a later scenario. Excellent idea! When I played Empires Devoured, one of the PCs died horribly in one of the end-of-chapter gauntlets, and came back as a borai. It seemed the least disruptive way to keep the story on track.
This season you’ll also see a few new additions to the campaign, including new boons in our boon store and a generic adventure sanctioning document, which will allow players to gain XP for their Starfinder Society characters while playing longer Starfinder adventures. Big cheers for HMM for proposing this, to the community for supporting the idea, and to leadership for making it happen! My Murder in Metal City players thank you all, too.
I only use it to tweak the existing races when the players want to play something interesting. I do not let them use it to custom make their own races. That's pretty much all I ever used it for, too. And even then, it was mostly just a tool for judging what made a fair trade when swapping out racial traits for new traits, to create new subraces for my homebrew settings. Or how much I needed to add to beef up an underpowered race to be more on par with the core races. Like when I wanted a kingdom ruled by a dragon, whose primary minions were kobolds. But those little yappers are so freaking PUNY in 1E, they needed to hit the gym or something, sheesh. :D
I've finished Well of Aacension, which can largely be summed up by, "Okay, so you've overthrown the god-king. Good luck holding onto what you've won." That's a gross oversimplification, of course, but is definitely the main theme, as Sanderson takes a hard look at the consequences of the first book's victory on his characters. Before I move on to the last book in the trilogy, I've started another Pathfinder Tales novel, Pirate's Honor, by Chris A. Jackson.
My most detailed homebrew setting for PF1 was for a campaign that I called "Time of the Tarrasque." The premise was that the Tarrasque's infrequent periods of ravenous activity often reshaped kingdoms, and the very landscape, and only the greatest heroes of each generation dared face it--and its return was approaching. I intended to run the cmapaign from level 1 through level 20, with mythic rules introduced at some point along the way. But it required a massive amount of work to generate so much original content, and I burned out on the game after about 2-1/2 years (early 2017 to mid-2019), with the PCs only at 5th level. I had been tinkering with the setting for many years before this campaign, and had been through a few iterations before it ever saw play. IIRC, I started working on it sometime during D&D 3E, so switching to PF1 wasn't too burdensome--and opened up a lot of new options as well. One of my (rather too ambitious) goals with this setting was to have as much of it as possible being my own creation, rather than borrowing heavily from other settings or adventures, or real world cultures and mythology. I'm still very proud of what I did accomplish before I got overwhelmed. One of my successes was building a pantheon of gods from scratch, initially with the goal of covering all of the core domains and alignments with as few gods as possible (and none being standard PF gods). Groups of related gods (elements; celestial bodies; seasons; etc.) eventually became separate pantheons within the whole, and a few new gods were added along the way. I initially resisted having any of the pantheons being exclusive to any one race, so that I wouldn't need to make gods for every race. But as I fleshed things out, different races clearly would favor some pantheons over others, so became closely associated with those gods, but other races could (and often did) adopt them as patron deities, too. The only pantheon that remained primarily tied to only one race was that of the humans, which was a very late addition in the process. In this world's history, humans had come from another continent, where they built a large empire that was ruined by a series of wars against titans. The remnants built ships to settle new lands, often coming into conflict with other peoples who were already there--elves, dwarves, giants, etc. The majority of humans retained their old gods and old, expansionist ways, while some groups broke off and made more peaceful contact with the natives, even adopting their new neighbors' religions in some cases. I also sketched out a rough history of the world, with the migrations of various races, the rise and fall of kingdoms, and the Tarrasque's wanderings threaded through it all. Much of this grew fairly organically. Decisions about which religion a race or nation favored inspired cultural details (nonbinary, gender-changing, and poly gods made similar mortals more welcome among their worshipers). Religion often added another layer to rising conflicts, too (the "imperial" humans had bitter clashes with "heretical" humans who adopted other faiths, particularly the elemental religion that first arose among the giants, which were too much like titans to be trusted). I had a fairly detailed Google Site that I maintained for the campaign while it was still active. That wiki was archived when Google Sites had a major overhaul some years back. I have just now re-activated it in order to share a link to it, but I have done absolutely no in-depth checking to see if anything broke in the transition. I also have session summaries posted on my blog. This page gives link to each installment.
Green Ronin's Freeport setting has been a favorite ever since I discovered Death in Freeport in the early days of D&D v.3.0. I used to generate and post fan errata for this product line, which eventually led to me getting a gig updating the Freeport Trilogy to v.3.5, followed by a few more freelance projects to proofread, edit, and write for the line. Over the years, GR provided companion books for using the setting with a variety of other RPG systems, from Pathfinder 1E and Savage Worlds, to their own in-house systems, True20 and Fantasy AGE. (The last of those is their current default for the setting.) I ran a total of three Freeport campaigns. I started with the original Trilogy (plus a few filler adventures) in 3.0, then did a sequel in 3.5. The third and final campaign started in 3.5, then we switched to PF1 after a long hiatus for a cross-country move. (We were only able to continue that game because my wife's best friend and coworker [and her spouse] made the same move for work, so I still had 3/4 of my players available. And those three are still the core of my home group, over a decade later.) My home group hasn't played PF1 regularly in quite some time (we mostly do PF2 and SF2 now, and mostly Society play), so if I ever do run another game in the Freeport setting, PF1 seems unlikely. I think it would only happen if I could somehow sell them on one of the longer, campaign-length adventures, like Return to Freeport (which was written for PF1).
My big takeaways? 1. All scenarios will become repeatable? WHOA, that's HUGE. It will be much easier to fill tables if we don't have to weigh the (not insignificant) cost of replays vs. other things we want to spend our AcP on. (In my case, another rare ancestry or two.) 2. Returning to full stat blocks in the scenarios? THANK YOU! I don't think I know a single GM who liked the change away from that.
For the duel, I think the intent is that Bo-Shek has a change of heart when the PCs prove that they're actually worthy enough foes to make useful allies. I wondered about that reference to seizing control of the Beasts, too. The best explanation that I can come up with is that there is an outside chance that Bo-Shek could die in the duel, despite his stated morale condition. A critical hit or a critically failed save could drop him from above 20 HP to 0*, which would kill him unless the GM rules that the PCs can heal or stabilize him if they act immediately (assuming they are so inclined). Killing Bo-Shek creates a power vacuum that the PCs can easily fill, having just proven themselves the toughest folks around. And they're here to seek the Beasts' help, after all. * While unlikely at low levels, especially if Bo has a turn to use Rallied by the Beasts, such a crit is certainly possible. Just this week in a PFS2 game, my lowly 2nd-level summoner's eidolon did a whopping 58 damage when it crit with a Furious Strike with a fatal weapon.
Nice! The PF2 AoN pages also have this feature, and I'll need it for games in both systems in the very near future.
The group I'm running through Murder in Metal City just needs one more session to finish up the adventure. We've had to break it up over 5-6(?) sessions total since we can only play for a few hours each week, and it's been a few weeks between each session because it's been our back-up game when one of our regular players (the one with the busiest schedule) isn't available. Having it be sanctioned might have given us a little more urgency in finishing it, but everyone seems to be enjoying it--despite the need for lengthy recaps at the start of each session to remember everyone where they are in the mystery.
Once again, it’s been a few months since I last posted about my friend Dave’s “sparks” campaign. Time for another capsule version of what we’ve been up to since then. But first–-I can’t recall if I’ve ever described our party’s make-up, so here’s the quick run-down: PCs (level 7 when we resume our story, reached 8 near end of this installment):
NPCs (level 5-6 each?):
Now, on to adventure! Spoilered because it’s quite long: * En route from the town of Wall to Rockport, we encountered a family of unusually intelligent ogres: a mother and father, their three teen-aged children, and “Gramps” (a normal, stupid ogre, but old and tough). They had a small squad of hobgoblins (army deserters) working for them. We used stealth and strategy to take out the ogres and their minions in small groups rather than all at once–-which proved a sound strategy when we faced the parents last, because they turned out to be ogre mages. * We reached Rockport, and learned that the survivors here was split into three factions: remnants of the army that was stationed here at the time of the Day of Chaos; a cult following the “Blood Lady” (who may or may not be led by vampires?); and nobles (or looters/squatters posing as such?) in the wealthy quarter. We witnessed a meeting between delegates of the first two groups, who were preparing a joint expedition going somewhere to the north (unfortunately the same general direction as Crafttown, where we were headed). We decided to press on, to give warning. * We reached Crafttown, warning the town authorities (the heads of the largest temples), and shared news of our travels in exchange for news from the city and other locales that we had helped them contact. We also collected some items that we had commissioned, and did some real shopping for the first time in months. * We were introduced to a visitor who sought help for her master. Melinda was a former slave of Lord Bone, a nobleman necromancer who died on the Day of Chaos, but his numerous undead creations remained in and around his manor. She and her companions (other young women) were rescued by a mysterious “Mister Slit,” who gave them a more comfortable life in return for helping him. He was using giant leeches to clean up something he called a “sploosh,” but someone had stolen some of his beasts and he needed outside help to retrieve them. From her somewhat scattered report, we wondered if Mister Slit might have discovered a site related to the divine death (or deaths) that sent the “sparks” into the world. Between this possibility, the magical gifts Melinda bore as payment, and our fear that the Rockport expedition might be headed there, we agreed to go with her. * After Lord Bone’s death, his undead servants had split into a handful of factions, each ruled by an intelligent skeletal champion. There was also a bone devil who had been bound by Bone to guard the estate from thieves, and who had not been released by his death. We got involved in one clash between champions on the way to the manor, helping one slay a rival and thus avoiding fighting both. Once there, we encountered the bone devil, but it used invisibility and dimension door to escape once it was badly wounded. * We explored the manor house, and holed up there when the army from Rockport arrived. We waited for the invading army and the estate's undead to engage and weaken each other significantly before we joined the battle. When we did, we took out the surviving leaders of both sides. Interrogating the survivors confirmed that the Blood Lady's followers sought to gain more of the blood (or whatever it was) that Mister Slit was harvesting with his leeches to help expand their cult. * The bone devil returned, and killed many of our prisoners, then fled again before we could kill it. So it remains the one remaining threat in the estate. * Melinda led us through underground passages beneath the manor to reach her master’s home deep underground. Along the way, we fought giant spiders, umber hulks, and displacer beasts, and kept our distance from a fungus forest guarded by some sort of mushroom people. [We reached 8th level at this point.] * Tracking some ghouls, we discovered a damaged portal to another plane, held open by some gigantic creature’s branched appendage that was stuck in the rift. The gate was pulsing with negative energy, so Tari used death ward to protect Melech while he broke off enough barbs to allow the unknown creature to withdraw its limb so the gate could close. He succeeding in dodging the thing’s thrashing, and it pulled its limb back through. However something else–-a greater shadow–-came through the shrinking portal. Fortunately we dispatched it before anything else came through, and the portal closed. [Out of character, we’re pretty sure the trapped creature was a nightwing, so we are VERY glad we didn’t have to fight it directly!] * We eventually reached Mister Slit’s lair, and were introduced to him. He wore voluminous clothing, with gloves and a hood, and never emerged from the pool in which he soaked. He explained (in a rather strange, rambling and cryptic way) that he was once Lord Bone’s apprentice, before he escaped and travelled far underground, where he encountered aboleths, who changed him into something not fully human anymore. He plots revenge upon them, but first he needs to increase his power. To that end, he had discovered this place, where some of the divine blood spilled in the battle that killed the God of Domination had splashed through into this world. He had bred giant leeches to collect the blood and refine it for his use. * Mister Slit’s immediate concerns include the well-being of the ladies in his care (who will not be able to accompany him when he returns to the deep) and the presence of ghouls near his home (an underground empire of ghouls finding any remains of a dead god’s corpse would be calamitous!). We promised to eliminate the ghoul patrol we knew to be close by, and then to take the women to the surface. After that agreement, we spent quite some time exchanging additional news and lore with him, and were given several useful scrolls that he had looted from his dead master’s collection and had no use for. Next time, we will hunt some ghouls, then determine whether we can traverse an alternate route to the surface that Mister Slit knows of, that would allow us to avoid the bone devil at the manor. He has also promised to show us the “sploosh” so that we can study the site for ourselves.
Ooh, I think I know the combat you're talking about. When I ran it, the PCs pursued other options, so that condition never came up.
I finished Called to Darkness and read Tim Pratt's Liar's Blade. I've just started the second book of the Mistborn Trilogy, Well of Ascension.
I expect that partly depends on when Paizo finally issues Condition Cards for SF2. The groups I play with make heavy use of the PF2 deck* to track conditions, but SF2 introduced three new conditions, and IME, Suppressed is the only one that the folks I play with can fairly consistently remember without looking up. (And only because it's rare to not have a soldier at the table.) [* Which, BTW, also needs to be reissued for Remaster, even if it is (AFAIK) just replacing every instance of "flat-footed" with "off-guard."]
I read Era of the Eclipse, and enjoyed it--as I expected to, having read one of Pratt's Pathfinder Tales. His characterization of Dae and Chk Chk in the frame story felt spot-on, as did Zo!'s cameo in both the frame story and the main story. The latter is an account of life on Absalom Station immediately after the Gap ended, and serves as an excellent introduction to that mysterious bit of history. And, as the title hints, we get to see evidence of why Hellknights seem to be even worse people in Starfinder than they were in Pathfinder. (Or at least in PF 1E, where it was possible to play a Hellknight who wasn't a total fascist bastard. PF 2E and SF, not so much, IMO.) I have started Called to Darkness, by Richard Lee Byers. It's set in (and below) the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, a region of Golarion that I'm less familiar with than most.
I heartily agree with Squark about the lu-venon! Every single person I've played or run #1-02 with wants to play one now. The Season 2 player's guide seems like the ideal place to present them, too. I want to see copaxi, stellifera, and kiirinta, because I enjoyed playing my 1E PCs of these species. I'd also like to see more legacy ancestries and versatile heritages made available. My last registered SFS1 PC was a samsaran who received a few levels' worth of GM credit but I only ever played her twice. If I ever rebuild any of my 1E PCs to re-use in 2E, she'd be at the head of the list. (I have at least one friend who wants to play a jinsul, but I'm perfectly content to continue restricting their role to "Nazis who are there to get punched.")
And this morning, I recalled that my wife bought me a (very) early birthday present, Tim Pratt's Starfinder 2E novel, Era of the Eclipse. I was going to save it for my birthday, but decided that it sounds like pretty much exactly the kind of thing that I want to read now, before diving back into more Sanderson.
I have finished Mistborn, and have yet to decide if I want to immediately go on to the second book of the trilogy, or take a break to read whatever is next in my TBR stack of Pathfinder Tales. I did enjoy Mistborn a great deal. It had some intriguing world-building (particularly in how magic works), and the POV characters were well-written, but it was also long and (like most fantasy novels have to be) rather heavy on exposition in places.
We discovered last night that, while boost is powerful, it can be risky in melee. It's an Interact action, so has the manipulate trait, and thus triggers reactions such as Nimbus Surge and Punitive Strike. (Though those two reactions won't disrupt the manipulate action on a crit like Reactive Strike does, so the boost remains hard to prevent short of taking out the user.)
I have finished The Twice-Wanted Witch, and enjoyed it immensely. I started Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn today, but am only a couple chapters in. I was gifted the Mistborn Trilogy by my wife, who has not read them but had them recommended to her by a trusted friend. OTOH, one of my co-workers adores Sanderson, and is excited that I'm trying him out.
Instead, I started working my way through Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. For some unfathomable reason, I have never read it. I read a ton of Bradbury in middle school (my school actually had a decent SF section for its size in the '80s) but never that one. Though I did finally get around to watching the movie this past Halloween season.
I finished rereading The Twice-Sold Soul over the weekend, and started in on The Twice-Wanted Witch last night. I'm enjoying it a great deal so far, and am feeling very proud that I get to game regularly with a creative of her caliber.
It's all in the Spells chapter now on pgs. 296-297 Excellent, thank you!
I've finished Queen of Thorns. It's full of interesting Kyonin lore, and finally gives some solid answers to questions about Radovan's origin. I'll be taking a break from [Pathfinder Tales novels] in late January, when a friend's second published novel comes out: The Twice-Wanted Witch, by Katie Hallahan. It's a modern-day "witches and demons" queer fantasy romance story, and a sequel to her first book, The Twice-Sold Soul. (Her author page on Amazon is here.) The sequel is out (I got my copy Tuesday, on launch day) but I need to finish rereading the first book before I can dive into that (I'm about halfway there).
Those classes seem to be missing the following text that was added to Remastered PF2 casting classes in order to make the rules for gaining Focus Points simpler and more consistent: "The maximum Focus Points your focus pool can hold is equal to the number of focus spells you have, but it can never be more than 3 points."
Grenades (Player Core 280) are Area Fire weapons (255), so they use class DC.
I have finished Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets. It's a thriller very much in the vein of his previous Langdon novels, this time set in Prague and mixing noetic science (the study of consciousness), high tech espionage, and the Golem myth. I enjoyed it, despite Brown's overuse of ending chapters with "and then he saw something that changed everything" teasers. Though he does change up his usual formula a bit by having dedicated bachelor Langdon begin the book already romantically involved. Next up, I'm planning to read the next Pathfinder Tales novel, Queen of Thorns by Dave Gross.
I have just finished Robin D. Laws's Blood of the City. It's a mix of caper story and political intrigue, heavy on betrayal and revenge. And of course, it is both tightly plotted and character-driven, as I've come to expect from Laws. I received some new books for Christmas, despite not really needing any for a good long while. I will probably read one of them next: Dan Brown's new Robert Langdon novel, The Secret of Secrets. I also received Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy, which I know nothing about yet. I plan to save that at least until after reading my friend's new novel (see a couple posts back), which releases in a few weeks. That will take priority as soon as my copy arrives.
I haven't run this yet, but will be in a few weeks. When I run PFS and SFS, I typically use a combination of PF/SF pawns and LEGO (both minifigures and brick-built monsters), depending on how good of a match I can get with either method, space required to transport, and how much time and inspiration I have to build minis. At the moment, my minis for this scenario include tiny brick-built plasma penguins (replacing the motley bunch of LEGO birds I originally pulled from my collection) for the first fight, and SF1 vlaka pawns for the second. I made float tokens by printing smaller copies of the art and attaching them to card stock to make fold-up minis. Those pawns fold flat, so easily fit into a pocket in the binder with the scenario. If I have enough time and inspiration before game, I may try building LEGO models for the floats, but those would take up a lot more space in my gaming bag.
I'm also a little iffy on trying to do the Odyssey as a single movie (as near as I know, he's only doing the one). To me, in order to do the story justice it'd have to be either a 2 or 3 part movie, or a TV series. The movie will almost certainly put wildly differing amounts of emphasis on different parts of the story than the original did. To start with, the voyage up until Calypso's island is all told in flashback, and only fills 4 out of 24 books in the original epic. Similarly, the Trojan Horse only gets a very brief mention. But clearly, those are scenes that moviemakers will want squeeze as much spectacle out of as they possibly can. The other 20 books all take place in the last year of the ten that it takes Odysseus to get home. There is a lot here that can easily be condensed, starting with the first four books, which follow the now-grown Telemachus as he sets out on his own quest to find word of what happened to his father, and the last 8 or 9 books, which are devoted solely to events once Odysseus finally returns home (an essential endcap to the story, but only a few episodes out of many in the full arc). For Homer, the human-scale homecoming was far more important than the highly fantastical wanderings, which is why it gets so much more space in the epic. (And the Iliad is even more extreme in its focus on "The Wrath of Achilles" episode from the 9th or 10th year of the war.) To fill out the story of either of those decades in the lavishly detailed way that modern audiences raised on streaming series clamor to see, you would have to draw from numerous lesser epics of the time, fill in the blanks yourself, or a mix of both. But that kind of long-term project is also a gigantic gamble, which is rarely (if ever) guaranteed to be supported through to the end. So instead, we get things like this and Troy, which try to craft a "good parts version" that will fit into only 2-3 hours. But if Nolan's Odyssey is even half as good as Troy, I'll be well pleased.
The most entertaining use of a portable hole that I've seen was in an old D&D 3E game, where a dwarven sapping team used one to help simplify travel arrangements. There were the obvious uses of picking up the hole then teleporting with it, or smuggling it into or out of places where a small squad of clanking dwarves would draw too much notice. They could also place it on an inner wall of a ship to make an extra cabin. That came in especially useful when a sketchy-looking gnomish flying machine (operated by even sketchier-looking gnomes) was the only way to get where the PCs and their allies needed to go. Because it was an extradimensional space, they also avoided having to make saves vs. motion sickness while inside it!
I have just finished Liane Merciel's Nightglass. It's a fascinating book, with a deep dive into what life in Nidal is like. The second half explores the conflict between humans and strix in western Cheliax. (I found the parts about the strix particularly interesting, because I recently started playing one in PF2.) I do feel compelled to give a content warning. The first half, in Nidal, tells the story of a young shadowcaller's apprenticeship, so there are depictions of torture and abuse, often directed towards children, and some grotesque body horror. And the second half is not without a certain amount of graphic violence during battle scenes. I had previously read this author's Hellknight, so was expecting a well-told story that didn't shrink away from the more uncomfortable parts of Golarion. And that's what I got (and then some).
Most of my experience with this has been with Society play, and mostly it's done in the interest of time. For example, if the party has taken out all the significant opposition during a fight, but some minions who pose no real threat remain, the GM might handwave the mopping up in order to avoid boredom and to have more time for more interesting content later on. I can think of one PFS scenario where I handwaved an investigation where the party had to make multiple Diplomacy checks to gather information. (It was an early season adventure, so such challenges tended to be klunky, with everything locked behind Diplomacy checks to gather information.) I knew that one PC was highly invested in Diplomacy, and would have made every single check on a roll of 1. So I simply provided the information and gave the party some time to discuss it and their next steps before we moved on to a more interesting scene.
I should probably ask friends not to get me ANY books for Christmas, since I still have ~30 Pathfinders Tales novels to read, LOL. I'll be taking a break from those in late January, when a friend's second published novel comes out: The Twice-Wanted Witch, by Katie Hallahan. It's a modern-day "witches and demons" queer fantasy romance story, and a sequel to her first book, The Twice-Sold Soul. (Her author page on Amazon is here.)
My odyssey through the Pathfinder Tales line has reached City of the Fallen Sky, by Tim Pratt. Many players (myself included) dread any scenario involving Numeria or the Technic League. This book's main antagonist a great example of why.
I have read Master of Devils and re-read Death's Heretic. Next up is Song of the Serpent. No duds in the Pathfinder Tales so far, which I find encouraging. (Knock on wood.)
|
