Rast

Todd Stewart's page

Contributor. 2,668 posts. Alias of Amber_Stewart (Contributor).


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It's probably worth noting that the funnel of eroded quintessence from the Maelstrom back to the positive energy plane isn't natural per se, but due to the intervention of the aeons at a location/object known as the Antipode. The proteans of course are not happy about this because without it, their desire to return the static portions of the cosmos back to their own ever-changing, fluidic reality that it all first arose from would proceed much, much faster.

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Congratulations! :D

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Kevin Mack wrote:


Yes thank you this is an Ap that I'm assuming has been in development for over a year (if not a fair bit longer)

APs have a long lead time. For instance, I turned in the manuscript for book six last July.

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Mudfoot wrote:

Each of the planes is infinite in extent in 3D terms, but join in certain places on the 4th and 5th dimensions.

Worth noting that of Golarion's planes, only the Maelstrom and the Abyss have been specifically called out in print as being infinite in scale. The others are mind-bogglingly large, but finite.

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As good conceptually as the various maps are, it's worth noting that location for the various outer sphere planes (except the Maelstrom and Abyss) is relative and unfixed. They move and drift about within the surrounding Maelstrom, with the Borderlands in the Maelstrom adapting to partially reflect the nature of the bordering plane.

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No, that only applies to Planescape or Forgotten Realms.

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And yes, to clarify, this is indeed me, and it's finally my first AP entry. :)

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Woohoo! :D

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N'wah wrote:
Hooray! Congrats, Amber!

Thank you!

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SOLDIER-1st wrote:
Todd Stewart wrote:
FWIW, I'm working on submitting a (non-canonical) story involving Vorasha for Wayfinder.
I am eagerly anticipating this. She is a menace to one of my characters in particular.

Ultimately it ended up not being in Wayfinder, but it got suitably scrubbed of product identity names like Vorasha and published as 'Taste. Savor. Appreciate.' in 'Mythic Monsters: Daemons' by Legendary Games.

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CNichols wrote:


And in this thread, Todd states that Aesdurath's commander is Charon.

Yeah, that's me. :)

I will note however that Aesdurath's allegiance to Charon did not end up appearing in print, so my answer there in that thread remains non-canon. But please feel free to use that in your home game.

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CNichols wrote:

Hey. Just a quick question.

Has it ever been established which daemon harbingers serve each Horseman? If not, does anyone have solid guesses as to who works for who?

There is not a chart in print that states which harbinger is ostensibly loyal to which Horseman. Some of them have had allegiances provided in the flavor text in either BotD3, the hardcover BotD, or Planar Adventures.

For example, off the top of my head, Jacarkas the Collector is mentioned in PA as being a servitor of Trelmarixian, while elsewhere it has been mentioned that Zelishkar of the Bitter Flame is in thrall to Szuriel, Vorasha the Ophidian is the consort of Trelmarixian, Pavnuri the Lord of Nothing is for the moment in thrall to Apollyon, Tamede serves Apollyon, and Geon serves Szuriel.

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keftiu wrote:
Amber_Stewart wrote:
keftiu wrote:


I'd sooner see a cool NPC with a neat story who happens to be trans than a thousandth instance of queer anguish written by someone who hasn't lived it.
I think Il'setsya Wyrmtouched in 'Planar Adventures' satisfies that. :)
Oh, is she trans? I've seen her art around, but not read that book.

Yes, it's implied in her backstory as the rationale behind her bargain with a protean artifact that erases you from history and all specific memories of your past, but grants your greatest wish (though she remains aware of what her wish was).

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keftiu wrote:


I'd sooner see a cool NPC with a neat story who happens to be trans than a thousandth instance of queer anguish written by someone who hasn't lived it.

I think Il'setsya Wyrmtouched in 'Planar Adventures' satisfies that. :)

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I hope folks like the ZVGVZB article!

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Monitor is a blanket term for CN, LN, and N outsiders collectively. It isn't for N outsiders specifically, of whom the primary group is psychopomps.


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You get a warpwave!

And YOU get a warpwave!

Everybody gets a warpwave!!!!! :D

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Belltrap wrote:

Hello, Mr. Stewart. I'm having a bit of trouble deciding on what to use for the ringmaster of an extraplanar traveling circus. Do you have any suggestions?

(Suggestions for circus members/acts outside the ringmaster also welcome, of course.)

I suppose it depends on the theme of the circus? Are the participants willing? Is it evil or otherwise? Perhaps a brutal efreet or dashingly handsome diabolic ringmaster? An erinyes in a traditional ringmaster's outfit would be snazzy. If good aligned, a troupe of lillends from the Wandering City of Emerald Song strikes me as absolutely on-brand. And I can see a single imentesh protean ring-master herding about a faux-chorus of azuretzi 'mockery-wyrms' who take on the forms of another circus's members and doing their own thing.

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Axxeor wrote:
i adore erum-hel and your article on him in undead unleashed. while i have my own ideas as to how i may or may not integrate him, i wanted to ask you, todd, what do you think erum-hel was up to during the events of tyrant's grasp?

Given his power, utility, and previous faithful servitude to Tar-Baphon, it seems absolutely bizarre that the Whispering Tyrant didn't have him there when he sought to lay siege to Absalom. Clearly something is up.

My absolutely non-canon answer here is that Erum-Hel, in the Whispering Tyrant's absence has become absolutely consumed by his desire for revenge on Iomedae: an obsession absolutely out of his reach. This was in Undead Unleashed, and I would posit that it has grown such that it actually superseded the Whispering Tyrant's call to renewed service.

At the same thing, with the suggestion that Erum-Hel has been collecting objects and relics related to failed Starstone aspirants, you can absolutely bet that Erum-Hel was watching and following Tar-Barphon's progress and ultimately his failure, trying to learn for his own eventual potential attempt.

Still, it's only a matter of time before Tar-Barphon learns that Erum-Hel is still extant and tries to take control over his former servitor.

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Really happy to be seeing all the Meet the Author blogs, especially for learning more about folks relatively new in writing for Pathfinder.

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Iwaopeln wrote:

Really love these. They flesh out the early mythology really well and are well writed too.

The story of the Bound Prince is really something I hope will be develloped in the future

There's a good bit out there, some of it involving reading between the lines. The Bound Prince has multiple titles. :)


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Not featured in the artwork: the Speakers of the Depths watching and eating popcorn.

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How about a big book of Central/Southern Garund, picking up on a bunch of yet-to-be-explored ancient history elements from 'Heart of the Jungle'? :D

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Luis Loza wrote:
I could totally see us doing another book in this vein that covers characters from greater Golarion and beyond if this does well enough!

This 1000x yes.

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CorvusMask wrote:
Oinodaemon getting redesign(in this case I guess only a name change because we literally know nothing else about him) to be more Paizo original than D&D version where the name came from,

The Bound Prince / The Father of the Forsaken / The First Daemon aka The Oinodaemon has had a uniquely Pathfinder origin story and nature since their first description in the 3.5 The Great Beyond. Everything since then has progressively built upon that uniqueness. The only thing that's legacy really is the Oinodaemon title.

The handling here in the Windsong Testaments was lovely. :D


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James Jacobs wrote:


And the Bound Prince is not tied to the Eldest...but more to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse...

The Bound Prince... yeah... Who totally doesn't exist!!!

Everything is fine! Everything is under control! There's nothing wrong in Abaddon at all! Myself and the other Horsemen have everything under control! THAT'S JUST AN ECLIPSE IN THE SKY. NOTHING MORE!

*slowly boiling abject panic and a glance back at Balishek's crater with the worry that what happened then might happen again...*


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James Jacobs wrote:
This and the upcoming stories were a blast to write. I think folks will get a kick out of some upcoming ones in particular. It's about time to get some actual creation myths for the whole pantheon out there, in other words, rather than just a myopic view from, say, Asmodeus...

Yeeeeees. Multiple conflicting origin mythoi and history via biased sources is amazing for plot hooks and adventure seeds.

Just need a bespectacled illureshi protean giggling and presenting a bunch of them, and when asked which of the conflicting stories is correct, getting a singsong answer of 'All of them!' as if causality and continuity wasn't the slightest concern. :D

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Holomog, Droon, Geb, Nex, be still my beating heart etc etc. Would love to see more of them.

Grand Lodge

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Anti-ganzi? Why wou... *explodes in a shower of Gamma rays*

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All of the daemons began as mortal souls, and exist in their current state either directly descended from one mortal soul or more rarely an amalgamation.

I would specifically call out the Oinodaemon, Trelmarixian, and Szuriel as having been noted in print as starting as a single mortal soul or having a prior mortal life called out.

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I would -love- getting to write more about Ird or perhaps even more so Arzikal 'the city of hungry spires'.

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Everything big has been covered by James already, but I'd add that if you're super invested in paraelemental planes, there are published references to inclusions of one elemental plane or another drifted beyond the standard mix you get from the order that the planes are arranged within. You could certainly use those to have any of the particular paraelemental mixes you could want. Even if those inclusions are small scale by comparison to the massive size of the elemental planes themselves, for adventure purposes the difference might be academic.

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All of you are awesome and awesomely talented :)

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Michael Sayre wrote:
The Painted Oryx wrote:
Is that Sarkorian flag intentionally Haida-esque? It looks great! Really interested to learn more about Sarkorians! So far this book looks amazing. Can it be August already?
Maybe just a teensy bit. I'm Tlingit and I liked the idea of seeing more of the PNW arts and cultures represented in Paizo's books, so I may have nudged the World Book devs with some suggestions I had for what the new Sarkoris Scar flag might look like as the Sarkorians and their gods gather together again.

It's a unique look, though I'd always gotten a Slavic/Siberian shamanistic theme for Old Sarkoris.

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FallenDabus wrote:


Oh, on that note though, did the Demented Cycle ever make it to a new safe refuge when the WotC boards went down? All the links to them I've found recently are dead.

These links to google docs should hopefully work

The Architect: link

The Dire Shepherd: link

The Wanderer: link

The Blind Clockmaker: link

The Flesh Sculptor: link

The Inquisitor: link

The Chronicler: link

The Lie Weaver: link

The Proselytizer: link

The Book Binder: link

The remaining in-progress stories include The Dream Reaver, The Ineffable, and The Shackler

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FallenDabus wrote:

How many words do you think you've written for the Storyhour so far?

(I'm working on compiling it all into one doc, so we may actually know in the near future)

Looking through the various documents in that folder, and only including the storyhour proper and not all of the slew of side stories taking place in the background within the same timeline and universe of the storyhour, my quick wordcount:

805,320

Wow.

Add in all the other stories and maybe even SH2 within the same universe and we're well over 1 million words. Imagine if I'd ever been paid for that. LOL.

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Alexander Augunas wrote:
It never sat well with me that only humans were special enough to have children of the planes.

This was never the case in Golarion's cosmos.

Any planar-scion / planetouched could be of any mortal heritage, be it human, demihuman, other humanoid, etc. PFS had some restrictions on this entirely related to concerns over size category due to non-medium-sized races, but this was purely an organized play restriction, not something otherwise in-universe for Golarion.

Grand Lodge

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Kalindlara wrote:
PossibleCabbage wrote:
I like the idea of Aasimar as an ancestry where the heritages are things like Angelkin, Musetouched, etc. than I do with Aasimar as a heritage or archetype available for any ancestry.
This is my preference by far.

Likewise.

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The Gold Sovereign wrote:


In my headcanon, the Speakers, the Godmind and the Monad are as powerful as true gods, they just don't want to focus on trivial matters like granting spells and answering followers.

The Speakers of the Depths are full deities. It/They are given a divine stat block in Planar Adventures with a full set of domains. They just don't directly interact with mortals much, so there hasn't been much discussion of them outside of the Protean Ecology in LoF and the discussion of them in Planar Adventures.

That said I'd love to write a -lot- more about them given the opportunity in the future to do so.

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CorvusMask wrote:

Do we know for sure there ARE more than five of Protean Lords? (four described ones plus the one that disappeared into dimension of time along with primal inevitable who dragged them there)

Also, thing about Godmind is that doesn't it exist on only when axiomites are having a council?

The Maelstrom is infinite and in so one reading of the published content says that in theory there are innumerable more protean lords, it's just that only a portion of them will have any presence within the local cosmological shallows of the Great Beyond.

Only 5 are detailed in CoR, but I think you can safely assume that there are many, many more. Give it time and -ask Paizo for more protean lord details!- and you'll surely see more eventually. :)

You might also conceivably consider the Watching 7 of Galisemni either as seven nascent protean lords or collectively acting as one, though there isn't an answer here in print. They're a unique situation.

As for the Godmind, it is mentioned in print as godlike, and the wording could be read as possibly a full god formed collectively as an emergent consciousness from the axiomites as a whole, but at most times basically software running in the background on the entirety of the axiomite race, but with major sections of it present in the axiomite hierarchs (mentioned briefly in CoR).

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Meraki wrote:
David knott 242 wrote:


Ydajisk the Mother of Tongues (Chaos, Knowledge, Rune, Trickery) lord of language evolution, lost words, and slang
New favorite deity/demigod.

I'm so glad that you like them! I had lot of fun finally giving them more detail. Any feedback on their boons? :)

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Rysky wrote:
Andrew Mullen wrote:

I finally figured out something that's been poking my brain for a week: the illurishi protean is totally copping this fella's style! At first I'd just recognized the little green staff poking out of the scabbard, but once I made the link I noticed the whole outfit.

(Going with "this fella" for Wrath of the Righteous spoilers should anyone still be concerned about such a thing)

** spoiler omitted **

My next campaign is totally having a gaggle of voidworms or azuretzi (aka mockery wyrms) under a cloak, pretending to be an

spoilers:
ancient, terrible worm that walks. :D
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Roswynn wrote:
For instance in Egyptian mythology one of the cosmogenesis myth involves a number of frog and snake deities in the primeval chaotic void... the frogs belong to That Other Game, so PF gots the snakeses.

The Ogdoad of Hermopolis. That was a major inspiration for PF's proteans.

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Cthulhudrew wrote:
Cyrad wrote:
Finally, more proteans. Always found it weird they're supposed to be the most varied outsider and yet there's only a handful of them out of the 10 years of publication.
I see this and I raise you an "I've always found it odd that these representations of pure chaos all seem to be very singular in form."

Things to keep in mind here are that proteans as serpentine in form are both a callback to prior frog-like exemplars of chaos in another, previous game that aren't open IP, a nod to a wide number of real-world mythological motifs of serpents and primordial chaos, and that it's really hard to have artwork depict creatures with subtle and constantly evolving morphological changes on the outside, or insides that are basically perpetually-shifting goo, and still retain some coherence of appearance in type such that they're immediately recognized as proteans. :)


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That's one snazzy illureshi there!

No need to focus on dour, boring psychopomps, off-brand transformer inevitables, and those clouds of angry math axiomites. !snaetorp eroM

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Roswynn wrote:
Todd Stewart wrote:
DeciusNero wrote:


Also that protean is a pretty cool design; sort of reminds me of the phantasmadaemon, a bit!

That'd be the illureshi protean! I'm really happy that you like them.

And yeah it might remind you a bit if the phasmadaemon as I made them both. Blame the crazy on me ;)

Awesome art, Todd!

Oh no, I didn't do the artwork! I wrote up the critters in question. :)

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DeciusNero wrote:


Also that protean is a pretty cool design; sort of reminds me of the phantasmadaemon, a bit!

That'd be the illureshi protean! I'm really happy that you like them.

And yeah it might remind you a bit if the phasmadaemon as I made them both. Blame the crazy on me ;)

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One of my favorite things about this book, and equally so about the prior books set around Tabris's in-world writings, is the use of excerpts written by Tabris. It opens up the lingering question of just how much do or even can you trust him, or perhaps trust his sources that fed him information.

The use of an unreliable or biased narrator when juxtaposed with the particular elements when Tabris's in-world writing contradicts certain elements of planar prehistory (such as the nature of the Abyss, a pre-existant Maelstrom, the manasaputras, the positive and negative energy planes largely not mentioned, etc)rather than being a problem, just opens up a certain delightful element of mystery that I adore.

The steps that you can take to resolve the apparent mutually exclusive bits of history written both in and out of game open up a lot of questions and plot hooks. I think folks have had a lot to work with for BotD, CotR, and now CoR to play around with in that regards! This book is a world-builder's dream, especially if you're a fan of Golarion's cosmology and a nerd about the lore therein. :D

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Tequila Sunrise wrote:


Interesting, I had thought all trans people were uncomfortable with their given genitals.

While the underlying biology isn't subject to social influence, that multi-factorial biological underpinning of a given person's internal gender identity is a spectrum, rather than a binary male or female. Thus someone may identify as trans but not have enough underlying dysphoria, or not have dysphoria directed to their genitalia as opposed to other aspects of their body, such that they choose to go down the route of altering them by any means.

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So hey, the book is out finally and it was a blast to work on and a pleasure to do so alongside my other fantastic co-authors. I did the protean and axiomite elements of the book, so any questions about that content I'll happily field within the bounds of what I can as a freelancer.

Also yes, the illureshi protean in CoR was probably one of my favorite monsters to have ever created. :D

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