Tim Emrick's page

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.)

I've finished Plague of Shadows, and also read Robin D. Laws's The Worldwound Gambit since my last post.

I've been a longtime listener to the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast, but hadn't actually read much of Laws's writings other than a couple of RPG books (Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering--which I reread every couple of years--and parts of Over the Edge). So this was one of the PF Tales novels that I was most curious about, and it did not disappoint. The premise is pretty unusual: The protagonists are not heroes, they're con men and cutthroats. But demon attacks in Mendev have become much worse of late, which interferes with these criminals' meticulously planned schemes. Relocation is not really an option, because building a new network of contacts takes time, and meanwhile the demons will keep expanding if not stopped. So mastermind Gad has the crazy idea of taking a crew into the Worldwound to steal whatever is allowing the demons to bypass the warding stones. If you ever wondered what a Leverage-style grift/heist would look like in a fantasy RPG setting, this is it.

Next up: Master of Devils, by Dave Gross. This is the earliest sequel within the Tales line, though not the first I've read. (Death's Heretic and The Redemption Engine are two of the five(?) Tales I had read before acquiring the full series.)

I've finished Prince of Wolves, and have started in on Howard Andrew Jones's Plague of Shadows. 2 down, 36 to go....

Paizo has published PFS 1E Chronicles for all but the last 6 or 8 of the 38 Pathfinder Tales novels. I've read very few of those boons so far, to avoid any spoilers for the novels. Ironically, I acquired the full series very shortly after my last bout of PFS 1E play ended. But if I do play more someday, I'll have a stack of quirky little niche boons (mostly one-use, I believe?) to drop on those characters.

See the Character Options page, under "Using options from Pathfinder sourcebooks."

My wife's Pathfinder skittermander (from the "if you earn a SF2 credit in the first month" deal) is a monk with Hug Master, but they're still only 1st level so far. She plans to take Wrestler Dedication at 2nd level, and possibly Flurry of Maneuvers at 4th.

From the "sparks" campaign I've talked about in the "tell me about your PF1 campaign" thread:

Wizard's player: "If we collect enough sparks, we can create a new god of breakfast."
Cleric's player: "This is why none of you are clerics!"

"Shambling mound tea. Now that's different."
"That'll ail what cures ya."

I've finished Winter Witch, and have started re-reading Prince of Wolves, by Dave Gross (the very first Pathfinders Tales novel I ever read, probably over a decade ago now).

If your GM won't allow it, then there are always alternate racial traits you can swap out fire affinity for, and some of those might be just as useful to a warpriest (like fire in the blood and fire starter).

First up in the cubic foot of media tie-ins: Winter Witch, by Elaine Cunningham. It has a very high-octane prologue, in which the home village of one of the two POV characters is assaulted by an army of monsters from Irrisen--just as her baby sister is being born.

Wouldn't PF2 classes being options unlocked via whatever their play credit system is called an ideal solution?

I believe that the OP staff have indicated that more PF2 content will come online eventually through boons, but we'll have to wait and see what kind of timeframe that involves.

IMO, one of the biggest arguments for not opening the floodgates between the two OP campaigns immediately is that SF2 is new for ALL GMs right now, even the ones who have run PF2 for years. In a home game, the GM has more control over how much material from the other system to allow, and playing with the same people long-term makes it easier to know what those PCs are capable of and how they work. But in OP, every session is potentially an all-new mix of players and PCs. Give everyone some time to learn SF2 as its own thing before you start to ease in the non-native stuff.

Conversely, not all PF2 GMs will (or will want to) make the same effort to become familiar with SF2 content so they'll need time to adapt, too.

I hope these tokens will be larger than the ones in Murder in Metal City. I would expect tokens for Medium creatures to be a full 1" diameter, but the ones in MiMC were much smaller than that, regardless of creature size. That makes them much harder to identify from across the table (especially when most of my players are middle-aged, with corrected vision). For the PCs, I ended up pulling the best approximations I could from my SF 1E pawn sets, just so my players and I could tell which pawn was whose.

It's been several months since I last posted about my friend Dave's "sparks" campaign, so it's time to catch y'all up a bit.

* Deep in the druid forest, we discovered a gate to another world, where we encountered a Titan who was chained to a mountainside. He offered information if we would drive off the giant eagle that attacks him every dawn, even just for one day. [Prometheus is unknown in the PCs' world, and he only ever called himself "Firebringer."] We helped him, and learned how to destroy the gate (which was interfering with the existing magical site it had been attached to), and received a few other oracular answers. We also fought some large beasts that had drunk from blood flowing from the Titan's wounds, and discovered that the blood had magical powers. Among other things, consuming or otherwise being exposed to the blood makes it easier to resist the effects of acquiring more "sparks."

* When the gate's power was broken, it produced some sparks of unusual size and power. The PCs tried to be smart about containing this power, by timing their approach so that they all touch the "sparks at the same time, and split the power between them rather then one person risking taking it all in. Miraculously, this worked, and all 5 PCs survived the ordeal.

* We eliminated the new head druid, a werewolf who had taken over the Preserve by bloody conquest, and his chief lieutenants. The rebel druid who had begged our help now needs to learn the ritual to become the new head druid. Our cleric petitioned one of Sarenrae's servitors for knowledge of that ritual, so that our new friend could start preparing for it.

* One of the former kingdoms who had been subjugated by the Empire is working on reestablishing itself as a free state in the wake of the Day of Chaos. We decided to visit it next. Just as we reached its borders, we came across two cloud giants being set upon by a flock of shadows, and went to their rescue. We saved one of them, but the other was too far gone. The attack appeared to be orchestrated by the Empire's secret police, whose ninja-like agents employ undead shadows. The giants had received a summons related to an old, pre-Imperial alliance, and were here to determine if those who had sent the call had the right to. We escorted the giant to the capital to meet with the king, and the alliance was confirmed after much debate.

* We also met with the king and his advisors at length, and learned of the debt they had incurred in securing an artifact to help free and defend their kingdom. The artifact was a re-usable rod of cancellation, but it incurred a debt of souls to recharge, and that debt was now dangerously high, and would eventually come due.

* The king tried to recruit us to help with that problem, and a few others--including a haunted battlefield teeming with undead spirits, which we've known about for some time now and do not feel remotely ready to tackle yet. [The 5 PCs are currently 7th, ana travel with a couple NPCs around 4th-5th level.] We did have the thought that those spirits could be used to pay some of the price owed by the king (this solving two problems at once), but we will return to that idea once we complete our current journey back to Crafttown, where we had had sent some of our spoils in order to commission new magical gear for ourselves. Once we accomplish that, we will make a decision which bit of hero and/or explorer work we wish to tackle next.

Sounds great, BenS! I haven't been on the boards the past couple days, but just saw your PM about tracking.

I've finished re-reading the Arthur and Mabinogion parts of Bulfinch's Age of Chivalry, and have started the (semi)-historical knights at the very end (which includes Richard I and Robin Hood, which I'm partway through now, then some other names I don't recall anything about from when I last read this ~30 years ago).

When I'm done with that, I'm going to read at least one of the giant box of Pathfinder Tales novels I just acquired before starting in on rereading The Legends of Charlemagne (technically a separate work by Bulfinch, but bundled with Age of Chivalry in my paperback edition).

I, too, am interested, though I seem to be a little late in seeing this. The only sets I already own are Giantslayer and Pathfinder Society.

I'm mainly interested in the Bestiary sets (as I only own #1), but would also be interested in Reign of Winter and Shattered Star. I played the latter some years ago, and am unlikely to replay or run either AP, but based on the inventory lists on their product pages, I would still get a lot of use out of them in other games.

Is it just my copy, or is the picture of Arvin on page 4 a weirdly low-resolution image blown up to normal spot-art size? Oh no, is he glitching?! ;-)

I think the justification for the ability score modifiers for adding class levels is that such creatures are exceptional members of their races to be able to acquire class levels instead of simply advancing in racial HD. (Similar to how PCs are exceptional members of 0-HD races that are usually limited to NPC classes.)

The only method that I know of for a 0-HD race to gain HD that aren't from a class is through the application of a template. And all of the templates that I can think of offhand that do this (mostly undead) have their own particular ability score adjustments.

If you want a creature with 0 racial HD to gain a size increase based on being bigger/tougher/older/etc., it is significantly less complicated to just apply the giant simple template. Heck, add it multiple times if you have to, to get the result you want.

Heal seems to be an error on Lunar-17's spell list. Soothe or Motivating Ringtone seem to be the most logical choices for replacements, but both are much less versatile spells.

Looking Jaedana, the next pregen as I prepare and there is something else that seems wierd. She has the Express Driver specialist skill feat but she is Inflitrator which gives her Computers as a skill...Express Driver is a pilot skill feat.

Jaedana gets Express Driver from the spacefarer background. She is missing her Computers skill feat for infiltrator.

I also notice both have the tag "Unique" I wonder if that means they work differntly for the adventure?

Unique simply means that they are a unique individual, not one of many creatures who can be represented by the same stat block. I don't think that this tag has much mechanical effect except to maybe make Recall Knowledge DCs harder.

This kind of connection reminds me of early Season 1 of SFS 1E, where just about every scenario had a teaser reference to something coming out a couple months later. Those throwaway bits never seemed to connect to much until I starting going back to run a lot of S1 for new recruits these past couple years. Suddenly, it seemed like they were everywhere, and I actually saw the majority of the connections! Naiaj "randomly" complaining about dealing with drow traders is the one that always comes to mind first, because both ends of that were among the first dozen or so scenarios I ever ran for SFS 1E.

Message sent!

Yes, Battle Medicine exists, and works just as in PF2.

For now, healing items from PF2 are NOT available in Starfinder, unless you are allowing them in a home game. (The GM Core book has a chapter of rules for mixing the streams, but I haven't read that far yet. And Society only allows SF content, very VERY few exceptions.) There are, however, spell ampoules, spell chips, and spell gems, which can contain spells for later use.

Medpatches are no longer just for first aid; they have taken the place of healing serums as the primary "leveled" tech for restoring HP.

Hypopens help clear conditions and affliction, either by reducing a condition's value, or making a counteract check against an affliction. The higher levels can provide some beneficial boosts instead.

Serums are pharmaceuticals with a variety of effects.

Sprayflesh allows you to Treat Wounds again before the usual immunity period ends.

Regarding stat blocks: Has Paizo said that they're removing stat blocks entirely, or just that there won't be appendices for them anymore? The changes I've heard about sound like they will be switching to something very close to (perhaps even identical to?) the new model that Season 1 of Starfinder Society 2E is using. Those scenarios DO include all necessary stat blocks, but they're presented in the main text because the change to two-level tiers means that the authors no longer need to design two full sets of stat blocks for a single adventure. (The awkwardness of having those multiple subtiers of stats in-line is why they moved them to appendices in the first place.)

Granted, the Starfinder Alien Core book hasn't yet come out, so it might be possible that once it has, adventures using those monsters might simply get a citation rather than a stat block (as they did in early seasons of 1E PFS and still do in APs). If that's the case, then I will be very disappointed, as it will require more prep by the GM (having the necessary book(s) handy, keeping links to AoN open during play, or printing/copying the relevant bestiary pages to keep with the adventure).

I just acquired this adventure last night, so have done only the most cursory flip through it so far. However, I do have a few comments to make at this point. Much of this will be echoing things said here already, but bears repeating.

* The flimsy paper for the handouts concerns me, as it doesn't feel like it will hold up to extensive handling. Using the same card stock as the NPC and item cards would have been vastly preferable. I may try printing these from the PDF to see how that compares (or at least to have my own GM copy for reference and annotate as I read the adventure).

* I hope that the pregens are reissued in PDF form with text for their feats and special abilities, and the second page expanded to two pages for readability. Or that some saintly fan works up a text file for player reference so that I won't have to. My players are reasonably experienced (most of us played all of the playtest adventures), but lazy. If they didn't build the character themselves, and the sheet makes them look stuff up in a book, they often just ignore those option even if they're really useful. (Most of us also have corrected vision, so tiny print is tiresome.)

* I did find a temporary fix for the undersized second page of each pregen. If you own the PDF, print those pages on 11" x 17" paper at 150% scale. That will fill the page pretty much perfectly, and folding them in half works just fine.

* I hope that this adventure will be sanctioned at some point, even if it's just the sort of quick and dirty generic form that HMM has proposed. I bought the adventure in spite of the lack of sanctioning so that I'd have more material to get (IRL) experience as a GM with the new edition. However, my home group (me included) does prefer to get Society credit for the time they put into playing adventures.

* Apart from the purely abstract incentives of credit, this adventure also seems like a perfect back-story for introducing a khizar PC into Society play--especially if an ambitious player built their own khizar for this adventure instead of using the pregen. Getting credit to reflect that would be nice.

* I would have preferred pawns to the tokens, but I do anticipate using some of these for my other SF2 games. They're a good size for Tiny and Small creatures when used beside pawns or conventional minis. (And if they fit into pawn bases as some have said, even better--I can use colored bases to distinguish them rather than their tiny printed numbers.)

* I was a bit disappointed that the flip-mat wasn't laminated, like Paizo's other flip-mats are. It would probably see more re-use in other games if it was.

* For the maps that didn't get a flip-mat, is there any chance of getting full-sized images so that those of us with access to large-format printers can print our own full-sized maps? (I know that's often done for OP scenarios that use flip-tiles, but I don't know how feasible it would be for something like this.)

That's all for now. I'm sure I will have many more comments once I actually dig in to read the adventure.

In Inner Sea Gods, the sidebars about the paladin codes (and antipaladin codes) of various gods provide some good examples of how this "alignment drift" can define a sect within the overall faith. (I can't recall if the main text discusses alignment-based differences between clerics or not.)

The only *god* of the big twenty who doesn't really 'speak' to me, in any of his alignment options, would be Rovagug.

I think with Rovagug's followers, regardless of alignment, their core beliefs boil down to something like this: "Rovagug is the strongest god. It took a large coalition of other gods to stop him, and even then they could only contain him, not destroy him. None of those lesser gods is worthy of worship. Sure, he'll eat the world when he gets free (and he will), but until then, we should be like Rovagug and take whatever we want without any rules to stop us." None of that encourages playing well with others, even other Rovagug cultists, so it's probably the least likely god for a PC to worship. It's kind of a miracle that the cult still persists! (In that way, it's rather like the cults of the less subtle demon lords--they somehow survive in spite of themselves, because the god/demon always welcomes new tools.)

We had a couple of good ones in last night's SFS2 game.

One player was debuting an ysoki envoy that they decided to play as very timid. When the party found signs of a feline predator in the area, the player squeaked faintly, "A feline predator?!" That fell right into a lull in the table chatter, and cracked us all up.

Two other players, a couple, were playing Chk Chk and Dae, and leaning into the pair's lore as best friends and personality foils. The ysoki frequently found the mystic's macabre outlook unnerving, so at the end of the adventure, Dae confided to them, "Between you and me, they did get shaken a little in the jar."

There were a fair number of SFS1 boons that had the Pathfinder header by mistake, too, IIRC.

The outdated license text seems to be the bigger problem, IMO.

From what I've read elsewhere, Machiavelli himself was not as ruthless as he advises the reader of The Prince to be. First, he was writing it with a powerful potential patron as his main (sole?) audience, so slanted it towards what would appeal to a De Medici.

Second, most of it is couched in terms of "this is what has worked historically, and this is what failed, and here's why." Judgments of good or morality are very utilitarian: Will this keep the people loyal to you? Will this keep you in power? And where he does outright condemn bad behavior, it's very often paired with other failings in leadership ability.

The book, while very short, provides much useful insight into Renaissance Italy and its politics. (For example, Machiavelli roundly condemns the use of mercenaries as highly unreliable tools, but almost every Italian city-state was using them at the time. In just a handful of concise paragraphs, he explains how Italy got that way.) I would consider it highly recommended reading for anyone studying that period, whether academically or just to be able to better follow literature, media, or a game using that period as a setting.

I'm taking a brief break from Bulfinch to reread Machiavelli's The Prince.

I haven't written a long bio for any of my RPG characters in many a year, but I do enjoy delving into setting lore for details to keep my PCs from being just like every other member of their class or ancestry.

My favorite SF2 playtest character was directly inspired by some of the new lore for 2E. He was largely a beat-stick (close quarters) vesk soldier, but he was also a borai and a worshiper of Zon-Shelyn, which gave him a rather unique outlook on (un)life. (And a memorable look, too: a brawny corpse lustily singing in battle, accompanied by the buzzsaw of his whirling painglaive.) His somewhat fraught relationship with still-living vesk made things that much interesting when I chose to play him in Empires Devoured.

Both the PF2 and SF2 Player Core books have guidelines for custom mixed ancestries. This option is strictly "Limited" in PFS2, because it requires too much GM overhead. It's not called out in the SFS2 Character Options page, but probably should also be Limited for the same reasons.

In my limited experience with SF2 so far (playing through all the playtest adventures and running #1-00 a couple of times), the solarian performs pretty well in combat. Yes, its role boils down to "get into melee, and hit things a lot," but that's true of most PF2 martials as well.

In Empires Devoured, our party included a ranged soldier, a close-combat soldier with a reach weapon, and a solarian. The two soldiers could reliably damage multiple targets, but the solarian could do more damage against a single target thanks to higher Str and being photon-attuned.

In #1-00, where the players must play pregens, the solarian regularly shined in combat. Dae's solar weapon has reach, which meant that Nimbus Surge was triggered regularly when enemies closed to melee. They also have Shattering Weapon at 3rd level, which is a significant boost to damage output (and better than the playtest version).

SF2e boons for playable legacy ancestries dropped both half-ancestries; looks like PF2e doesn't even have options for Half-Elf, Half-orc as separate ancestries. SF2e Half-Elf, Half-orc were replaced with goblins and Leshy

Half-elf and half-orc are now the aiuvaran and dromaar versatile heritages, respectively, in Remastered PF2. So far, SF2 only has two versatile heritages (borai and prismeni) in order to showcase options unique to the SF setting, but I'm sure others will be (re)introduced in due time. Characters who would now be nephilim, geniekin, etc., in PF2 terms have long been part of the SF1 canon.

I would interpret that as the Harmony ability acts like a free Sustain (much as anchoring actions do for Sustaining a witchwarper's quantum field) but the duration can't be extended beyond the listed maximum.

Warped Savant wrote:

Strange Aeons = I wish I could've run this one, and the first book is one of the best I've read.

I've prep'ed all six books and it has its highs and lows. I'm working on tightening some of the connections and coming up with extra motivations.

Really what it comes down to is my wife (one of our players) finished "The Complete Works of Lovecraft" and wanted to play this AP next. So I was on the hook no matter what! :)
But I'm convinced any campaign can be a fun one with good players! I look forward to running it.

I'm a long-time Lovecraft fan, and fascinated by Robert Chambers' King in Yellow stories, so this is one AP that I would have liked to try running at some point. I own the first book, and am very intrigued about what I've read about the later parts. But two members of my home group were in an abortive Strange Aeons campaign that didn't finish book 1, and the adventure proved very frustrating for them, so I doubt I could ever get a run of my own off the ground (especially now that we play very little PF1 anymore).

Some kind of mobile internet interface/ computer board.

A comm unit covers this pretty well. It's basically a "futured-up" smartphone, allowing you to communicate with other units, or access the local infosphere.

The anacytes themselves make a distinction between VIs, which are not sentient, and true AIs, which are. In cases where a VI transcends its programming and becomes self-aware, the anacytes will treat it as a person, with certain rights and autonomy, instead of a mere machine.

There is a SFS 1E scenario which has a plot involving exactly such a situation.

Here's a couple of characters I've played and enjoyed who fit the bill:

* Half-orc heavens shaman. Both his skin and clothing were heavily decorated with astrological symbols (including a Sacred Tattoo), so he was spooky-looking but not the clear and preset danger that, say, an orc barbarian would be. He eventually acquired a wyrmling nightmare dragon as a unique spirit guide (through a PFS boon), who was even weirder-looking than he was. His spellcasting was almost entirely party support (buff allies, de-buff enemies), and he avoided melee (but could take a few hits), so rarely had flashy spotlight moments, but he was still fun to play.

* Sylph sky druid. The archetype looked fun, and I decided that a domain would be an interesting change of pace from the animal companion that nearly everyone else's druids took. (It was also less to manage at the table, in person or online.) He was a sailor by profession, the child of a pirate, so was most at home on a ship.

* Halfling lore oracle, with the community guardian archetype and Lore Keeper. I played her in the Legacy of Fire AP (we made it through 4 books before an indefinite hiatus), where she soon became a leader within the Sarenite faith. Because it was an AP rather than PFS, she was able to take the Leadership feat, and most of her followers consisted of people she helped rescue or convert during her adventures. She had a fairly gentle hand when it came to proselytizing, preferring to focus on the material benefits of visiting her temple (food, shelter, employment) more than religious motivations (though the wasn't afraid to bring out the "Sarenrae is a forgiving god" stuff if she thought people needed to hear it).

I'm going to be spending most of August trying to cram the Starfinder 2E Player Core into my brain, so I'm limiting my other reading to fluff I've read before. At the moment, that's Bulfinch's Mythology: Age of Chivalry (which is mostly devoted to the Arthurian legends), but I've barely started it.

I haven't read through the archetypes yet, but now I'm wondering about the viability of a multiclassed solarian/soldier build. Specifically, how effective Whirling Swipe with a solar weapon would be. (When we played Empires Devoured during the playtest, my close-quarters soldier dished out a lot of damage to multiple foes, but my son's solarian could often do more against a single target while photon-attuned.)

In addition to that human ancestry feat, most multiclass dedications have a 4th-level feat that gives you a 1st- or 2nd-level feat from its class. And you can always take a lower-level class feat when you gain a new one. So there are many reasons for every class to have some 1st-level feats, whether they get one then or not.

I'm guessing that it was a decision made to reduce page count, but I dislike the fact that the Player's Guide and the first three adventures have much narrower page margins than was the standard in PFS1, SFS1, and PFS2. I'm a GM who regularly prints out scenarios and keeps them in 3-ring binders. A standard 3-hole punch clips bits of text when the margins are this narrow.

While I know a few players who plan to rebuild 1E Society characters to play in 2E, I prefer to explore new characters. (Though I did make a 15th-level version of my oldest 1E SFS character for Playtest Scenario #4, to see how similar and how different operatives are between editions.)

I've registered 4 SFS 2E characters so far, but I'm unsure which will be my primary character at first (especially since it looks like I'll be GMing the final 2E rules before I play them).

- Division By Zero, contemplative witchwarper, who continually analyzes his surroundings to pierce the veil between realities.
- Showtime Joro, human envoy, who embarked on a career as an adventuring musician to differentiate themself from other Joros.
- Shuulathanna, aquatic astrazoan operative, whose primary identity is a fashionable kalo.
- Rising Galeforce, barathu soldier, who uses their Large size to protect their teammates and help them achieve their mission.

We had a couple of new players at Pathfinder Society this week. Among the many things that we explained were Hero Points and fortune effects. Later on, my wife had to explain how her campaign coin worked both the same and differently from those.

Then one of the newbies asked, "How do you get a campaign coin?"

While my wife was considering how best to answer that, I interjected, "Give your firstborn to the Society," and gestured with both hands at my 21-year-old son, who was GMing.

(And yes, they did get the serious explanation, once the other veteran players at the table could stop laughing.)