Torke Steelpike's page

This is one of the classes I'm most excieted for (along with bloodrager and warpriest). Cannot wait for the ACG so I can take a peek at the classes in their offical form.

This makes me curious. Since Iron Gods pt. 1 has a street date of August 14 due to Gen-con, does that mean subscribers will get our print and pdfs even earlier or should I expect it around the same time as usual since I can't afford to attend gen-con.

I don't remember where but I remember James Jacobs saying that Paizo has most if not all the pieces needed to run a Test of the Starstone AP. TO me this fills all the expected requirements. It'll be experimental and it's freaking insane enough to really shine as AP #100. I would love for it to be true and end with us becoming Gods... or die trying.

Not to count my chickens before they hatch, but will we be contacted if we win? There's no note in the submission page about that. Do we just have to buy each comic in hopes of our character being in a little bio page towards the end of the issue?

Since the first site the PCs explore says it would take around an hour of digging just to get the door open, I plan on having the Scorched Hand walk by having already finished their first site in less time than it takes for the PCs to even enter their site.

They will make some bragging comments and/or deriding comments about how lame the PCs are.

Damn. Where were you two weeks ago when I ran the first dungeon for my group! I would have loved to do this. I still introduced them to the Scorched Hand in the bar as "the party that finished first." And also since it took them four days game time to complete the first dungeon (they're all spellcasters do to some awesome miscommunication), no one can leave for their second site until all the teams return. So the sorched hand not only has a "holier than thou" look on the party, but they also are pissed about them taking so long.

I'm going to start putting him together, but put me down for a half-orc fighter. I don't know if I'm going to give him an archetype yet or not, possibly, but don't know for sure. I'll post again with more info once I finish designing him.

Torke Steelpike wrote:

I'm actually planning for each dungeon to be a separate day and at the end of each day they go to the Tooth and Hookah to unwind and brag about their encounters.

Is that... not how it's supposed to work? I could swear that's how it's supposed to work.

If not, good idea! So good I assumed it was in the adventure all along :)

Cheers!
Landon

It seemed like that to me too which is why I'm doing it. The Scorched Hand will bribe the guards and sneak in early on the third day to ensure they get to loot their sacred temple.

Here's hoping its something reminiscent of the Stargate movie.

I think the group I'm running for is going to name their team The Misfits since their a hodgepodge of different races: Half-drow, Aasimar, half-elf synthesis, kitsune, and two others who still haven't picked out a race as far as I know.

I'm actually planning for each dungeon to be a separate day and at the end of each day they go to the Tooth and Hookah to unwind and brag about their encounters. This is mainly because its how I originally thought it was being done. It also allows the spellcasters to renew their spells and of coarse get a second meeting with some of the other groups. Scorched Hand is going to sneak in on the third day to go to the Temple and I might have the Crytpfinders try to sneak into the main party's room since I"m portraying Falto to be a bit of the dickish side.

Holy hells this is amazing. When is this book coming out because it just made the top of my list.

Though we really haven't had a chance to play it, one of the characters in one of the groups I'm playing in is planning on playing a spymaster rouge who loves to masquerade as the inquisitor... my character. They were childhood friends and its been going on their whole lives and despite worshiping Iori, my inquisitor is none the wiser on the rouge's shenanigans.

Ha, that's pretty cool. Well The Wolfhound is a cavalier so that's kinda paladin like. Maybe I'll borrow that Averta thing for them.

So as we all know, there are multiple teams exploring the Necropolis. Aside from The Scorched Hand, the other teams are pretty much left up to us to flesh out if we want. Since I love this kinda stuff, I was wondering what my other DMs were planning to have these character's personalities like?

For me, Falto of the Cryptfinders is the party's tour guide of the hookah lounge. He's pretending to be fairly drunk to try to get more info from the party while introducing them to everyone else. He's also all for making himself look better in telling the story about his guild, even at the cost of his other party members. He's by far my favorite so far. They don't care since he's good on his word about loot. The Summoner has social issues, speaking better with his eidolan than other peple. The Cleric has a bit of an addictive personality and will be either smoking or passed out.

I have some of the other characters fleshed out a little. The Daughters of the Desert are a bunch of flirts, while the barbarian is the only one that'll put out the quickest. Some of the others the players will have to work for if they really wanna hit it (this is a fairly common request for my group). Mad Dog and one other I called The Wolfhound are the only members of the Dog Soldiers that are at the bar. Mad Dog is drinking away his sorrow and The Wolfhound is there to make sure he's not going to get into any trouble. The other members are taking care of the remaining fighting dogs. Black Kiss is a bigger flirt than the Daughters and uses it to her advantage with trying to get info from other groups. The others are fairly recluse, the Rouges don't even talk while the Magus is curious when it comes to the arcane.

So yeah, that's how I'm planning to flesh out the other groups. So yeah, how are you guys going to flesh them out? I'm always curious about this stuff.

thanks, figured it was something I was over thinking.

Posting this here so hopefully other players don't spoil themselves with my question. Anyway, started modding the adventure for my party of six and noticed one of the members of the Scorched Hand is an evoker. What class is that? The best I could get off the srd was that its a wizard but the wizard page has 0 info on the evoker.

I ask because one of my players wants to me to intergrate Arcane Schools (specifically guilds) into our game so he can benefit from them. Thing is he's the only arcane guy in the group. most of the others are martial and divine and I rather integrate a rule into the game that benefits everyone instead of just one player. So my question is if there's guild-like rules that benefit all types of players or am I better off trying to homebrew something?

Quick question, the lich get's a special attack called paralyzing touch, but the wording makes it looks like it's on top of its normal touch attack. So yeah, that's my question: is the Paralyzing Touch it's own attack that must be declared or is it added onto the Lich's normal touch attack that deals the negative energy damage?

Alright, so. Got a guy in my group that wants to integrate the Magic School system, more specifically the guilds, from Inner Sea Magic into a game we're playing but I personally feel that it'll just be him benefiting since he's the only arcane spellcaster in the group. My main question is if there's equivalent rules for martial and divine casters as well or am I better off trying to homebrew an equivalent.

The other card games we play are Cards Against Humanity and Munchkin. Both are fairly quick in comparison to set up.

I love this game, so do a lot of my friends. However, the one thing we all agree on that we don't like about it is that it takes a long time to prep. Prep for one game can take upwards of 5-10 minutes between card shuffling, rebuilding our character decks, building location decks, etc. Does anyone have any tips or anything to quicken prep time? I know saving character decks is one, but sometimes I'll be able to play with a couple different groups of people, so i can't really save their decks all the time.

My group plays multiple games. Just about everyone runs at least one game, some of us run two. So when I say that the worst PC and DM are the same person, you can see how.

When it comes to a worst PC, i can't really narrow it down. The guy just didn't seem to make good characters. I take that back, he had one that was good but the rest were horrible. His first character was back when we plaid D&D 4e. He was playing a cleric named Cirelc (cleric backwards). In the opening battle the party is fighting a two warring bands of kobolds and goblins. In the fight, one of the fighters gets ganged up on and nearly killed. the cleric took two points of damage from a bad roll. The cleric decided to heal himself. Thankfully the fighter was able to get out of the mess thanks to the other players.

His most recent character was a druid he made for a one shot game I was running in pathfinder. It was one shot for him at least cause moved across state and was here to visit. He made a fifth level druid who spent all his gp, all 10,500 of it, on a quarterstaff that did fire and electric melee damage. His AC was 11 for christ sakes. He said its because the party he plays with at his place focuses more on roleplaying than combat, while our group focuses more on combat than roleplaying (we've fixed that now and do our best to balance the two). Either way, I would think even in doing a roleplay centric game you'd still build a character that was properly prepared.

As for him being the worst DM, I'm thankful that I personally didn't deal with it. I personally haven't dealt with a bad DM (a bad event organizer yes, but not a DM). Everything was essentially an illusion, one that was impossible to save against and even wolf could not tell the difference between when he smelled it.

Oooooo. I may need to save my money to get that.

I just got my hands on the NPC Codex and I love it. I love skimming through the pages and reading up on different NPCs and such and just feeling inspired for my own NPCs in my games or feel the need to build off of one already in the book. My main question is if there's any plans for an NPC Codex 2 where they include the classes that have emerged since the core book as well as the new iconics. I would probably buy it in a heartbeat for the inspiration alone.

This was pretty late in a campaign. The party is in an airship moving in to lead an attack against an evil tyrant of a usurper. As their flying they see shapes in the distance, a bunch of soldiers on the backs of griffons and hippogrifs flying towards them with a particularly large bloke on a wyvern. As the party barks orders to the crew, the warforge barbarian (we kinda made a pathfinder port for it) turns to me, who was GMing this, and asked "does being fired out of a cannon count as a charge?" I was caught of guard by this question but said yes. So the party loads the warforge into one of the cannons and fires him while aiming at the leader on the wyvern. Well by the grace of some god, he hit the guy dead on and knocked him clean off his mount, causing him to fall do his death. I had the barbarian roll a reflex save to try to grab onto the saddle. he failed. I give him a second chance to grab the tail since he doesn't have to worry about the poisonous barb. He succeeds by one and then uses his move and standard to pull himself back onto the saddle of the wyvern. Seeing this, the other soldiers are horrified and their moral is gone. They bolt in every direction, some heading back towards the kingdom while others appear to go AWOL. He kept the wyvern as a mount and continued to go on wonderful adventures together.

Dervish dance, dex to damage with scimitar.

Intensify spell.
Shocking grasp.
Everything else is whatever seems fun to you. Hexcrafter and bladebound are both excellent archetypes.

this! A thousand times this. Especially if you go elf. You're gonna have a rough first two levels until you can get dervish dance at level 3 but it picks up. I also like going Kensai Magus, yes you get a diminished spell pool but you get a lot of nice bonuses based off your int score plus access to fighter combat feats. Also the Dimensional Tree looks like a lot of fun if your willing to pull the sheer amount of feats into it (Dimensional Agility, dervish, etc.)

yeah, I can see that. and since it's an item, any class can take advantage of it.

Hopefully this weekend I can give Torke some proper playtime before I start drumming up ideas for another new class (spellsword first, then maybe gunslinger). Maybe I'll think up some dragon shaman related items. Dragon bone helm for instance? no idea what it'll do but it just sounds awesome.

Ta da!

The infiltration rules from the GMG (pp. 160-163) are a really neat starting point for a raid or heist, but there are only 3 sample obstacles shown (and not very interesting ones at that).

Are there any other places with more sample obstacles? I know we're supposed to design custom obstacles, but there isn't really much to go on from the GMG.

The adventure begins...

Hello everyone! Thank you for responding to my message, and be sure to introduce yourselves! I've invited 5 people instead of 4, per Painlord's recommendations. For those of you who submitted multiple characters, now is your chance to work out with the other players which one you're going to play. Once that's done, you can see if anything in your fellow player's backgrounds suggests you might have met before, and do some minor tweaks if necessary.

Our goal is to start the gameplay thread no later than the 13th, but we can start earlier if everyone's good.

Welcome to Zoralon, a world of magic and mystery! With the collapse of the imperial house of Akarna, the world’s greatest empire has fallen under the sway of an enigmatic prophet, while off the coast the Free Isles remain a bastion of independent merchant princes unfettered by creed or crown.
You have been chosen by one such prince to explore Thalis, a perilous and frozen land far to the north, where tales tell of rivers that glitter with diamonds and hills that teem with mithril and gold… …and of monsters, evil, and a deathly frost that swallows all.
You will meet new allies, make new enemies, and discover a dark force that threatens to destroy not only Thalis, but all of Zoralon.

Links are in profile

Hello, everyone! I'll be busy until March 5th, so you'll have until then to submit character concepts. (Multiple character submissions are permitted). I'll then spend a few days going over submissions, ask for clarifications and resubmissions if someone's concept is almost but not quite there, then make the final decisions and start playing, preferably no later than the 15th. I've never PbP GM'd before, so we may have to work out some kinks, but helping you guys tell your stories will be worth it, I promise.

While I'll be too busy to GM until March, I'll be dropping by the thread pretty often, so feel free to ask me anything.

It'll be a fairly standard PbP game, shooting for 4 players, and almost everything in Paizo 2e books is permitted. We'll try counting XP (and doing fast progression for the first three levels before slowing down to normal speed), but I reserve the right to use arbitrary story awards to keep you on track.

The only other house rules I know we'll be using are Deep Backgrounds (though you don't have to use that one if you don't wish to) and Free Archetype. However, since I've never GM'd 2e before, let alone the remaster, and will be using a mix of premaster and remaster content until at least the 1st of August, there may be a need for more. I will endeavor to be as transparent about any of these decisions as I can.

Basic setting information, as well as character creation information and expectations for player behavior can be found in the following links in my profile. The setting info won't be on the test; in fact, its best if you immediately forget everything unrelated to your character so you aren't tempted to metagame.

Your post should consist of two spoilers: one containing your numbered answers to the Player Questionnaire (it's okay to skip any questions you can't or don't want to answer), and another describing your character. (Name & pronouns, ancestry, background, class, build, and a few paragraphs of backstory plus any other information you think I would need).

If you are selected, you'll need to make a token. It's okay if you swipe it off DeviantArt or use AI, I won't judge.

If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask.

This is supposed to be fun, so don't stress out like these are the LSATs or anything. You don't need to answer all the questions in the questionnaire, they just help me build a better game for you guys.

Welcome to Zoralon, a world of magic and mystery! With the fall of the imperial house, the world’s greatest empire has fallen under the sway of an enigmatic prophet, while off the coast the Free Isles remain a bastion of independent merchant princes unfettered by creed or crown.
You have been chosen by one such prince to explore Thalis, a perilous and frozen land far to the north, where tales tell of rivers that glitter with diamonds and hills that teem with mithril and gold… …and of monsters, evil, and a deathly frost that swallows all.
You will meet new allies, make new enemies, and discover a dark force that threatens to destroy not only Thalis, but all of Zoralon.

So I've been thinking of starting an online campaign for PF2e (combat on Foundry VTT, noncombat on the boards) and tried my hand at a custom setting. The goal was for it to be close enough in tone and style to Golarion that every class and (almost) every archetype could find a natural home, but not simply be a predictable Find-Replace job. It also had to be something one person could maintain.

I've got some ideas for where the campaign could go, but I don't want to fall into the trap of writing the players out of the story or putting tons of development into things they will never see, so they're still tentative at this point.

The general outline is a scouting mission to a hyperborean continent taken on behalf of a merchant house with ties to the government, with the other continent having a strong viking and fey theme while the merchant houses possess an early Renaissance Italy feel to them (I'd tell more, but I don't want to spoil anything).

I'd like to know if anyone is interested in the setting, as well as which parts of the setting seem like they'd be fun to adventure in and therefore worth developing more.

And if there's anything confusing about the setting, please let me know so I can fix the documents before we go live!

Continental Map (not to scale; represents about a quarter of the globe)
Local Map (of campaign start area)
Player introduction (Character creation information and basic setting assumptions)

Geography (brief primers on the regions depicted on the map, a la PC1 pgs 31-34)
Deities (note that demigods and demon lords aren't listed here to help avoid spoilers).
Languages
The Planes (very brief primer)
Ancestries
Classes

So I set about creating a custom setting for PF2e, drew a rudimentary map, and wrote some documents, and I'd like some feedback on whether they actually give players what they would need to make characters and are written in a way where they can understand the setting, if there are any changes you'd recommend, and what parts of the setting struck you as interesting.

I'm open to critiques of the setting itself as well as of document readability, obviously. I haven't started the recruitment thread, so nothing is set in stone yet.

The world was designed to map well enough onto standard PF2e setting assumptions that every class and (almost) every archetype, pre- and post- remaster, could find a niche, and that players used to Golarion wouldn't feel lost as long as I kept the custom names for familiar things (Nuralon for Netherworld, Zokai for hobgoblin) to a minimum and introduced them slowly.

Continental Map (not to scale; represents about a quarter of the globe)
Local Map (of campaign start area)
Player introduction (Character creation information and basic setting assumptions)

Geography (brief primers on the regions depicted on the map, a la PC1 pgs 31-34)
Deities
Languages
The Planes (very brief primer)
Ancestries
Classes
Game info (posting schedule, expectations, etc.)

I understand that the point of level-based RPGs is that going up in level allows you to face more interesting and dangerous enemies, so wasting interesting monster concepts on level -1 and 0 stat blocks can be a feelsbadman.jpg moment for devs (especially when you can take a level 1 mob and knock it down a peg with the weak template if you're so inclined).

But if you want to create 2- or 4-monster encounters for level 1 characters, and want to do it by grabbing monsters right out of the book without making your own (perhaps the players did something completely unexpected and you have to wing it), you're pretty limited.

Bestiary 1, 2, and 3 have 33 level -1 and 27 level 0 creatures between them (including monsters like the blue-ringed octopus that are pretty... niche), while bestiary 1 alone has 50 level 1 creatures, almost as many as both of the other levels' monsters combined for all three books.

If the monster core is still in development, maybe we could get some more micro-monsters for characters just starting out to fight?

And if it's already off to the printers, maybe Monster Core 2 could have some?

So I'm making a custom setting and campaign for PF 2e intended for PbP. I've GM'd PF 1e in-person games, and am familiar with the 2e rules, but have never GM'd a PbP game or ran a game with a custom setting before. I've got 4-5 pages of notes and a rough draft of a world map. Before writing more, and possibly falling into the trap of writing about things the players will never see or care about, I decided to come here.

What would you as a player need to know before making characters for a custom setting PbP 2e game?

Why is the Pathfinder 2e magic system so much stingier with this capability than 3e and 5e?

Illusory disguise (disguise self in 3e/5e), humanoid form (alter self in 3e/5e), veil (unless heightened all the way to 7th level), the potion of disguise from the APG, and even shapechange (because by RAW all it does is duplicate lower-level spells that all have this limitation) all seem to be limited to impersonating types of creatures rather than specific individuals.

As far as a spell or magic item that permits the impersonation of a specific individual and that fools touch and blindsight, I can't find one.

Was this an oversight by the devs? Why did they add these restrictions to the PF versions of these spells?

Now, this news hasn't been confirmed yet, but it looks like WotC is seriously considering canceling the 3.0/3.5 OGL and replacing it with one that would take as much as a 25% cut of everything major 3rd-party publishers make on RPG products.

This includes Pathfinder 2e, because it includes the 1.0a OGL on page 638.

They seem to be trying to cancel and replace the 3.5e OGL with something very similar to the truly awful 4e license that nobody used (now updated with provisions that screw Foundry, Roll20, FantasyGrounds, and anybody trying to make virtual tabletops or other online tools).

Pushback might make them reconsider, but I'm worried that the final decision would rest with lawyers at Hasbro who couldn't give two damns about RPGs and basically consider Paizo, Kobold Press, and Green Ronin as pirates and parasites.

Could Paizo still produce content for 2e if they had to fork over 25% of everything they made off 2e? I haven't heard anything from the Paizo devs but this sounds terrible.

So ChatGPT has been all over the news lately and I'm wondering if anybody has any experience using it as a Gamemastering aid.

Obviously, it's nowhere near the point of replacing a GM altogether, but when I typed in "What are some original story ideas for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign?" (I wasn't sure if Pathfinder was prominent enough in the training data for it to know what that was). The machine then gave me these:

They're all pretty standard, though number 2 seems more like an adventure than a campaign (though it could become a campaign with some improvisation and further development). I rolled a d8, got a 7, and typed in "In number 7, why did the group of powerful dragons declare war on the mortal races?" and got this response:

I decided that while some of these reasons were not mutually contradictory and could be woven together to make the story more engaging, I was most interested in trying to pin the AI down on #4 and see how good its world building skills were. So I asked "In number 4, how did the evil deity convince the dragons to wage war?"

So number 5 is kind of a cop-out, but at least the machine is smart enough to realize that these methods are not mutually exclusive. Now, a story needs a cast of characters besides the villains and the PCs, so my next question was: "Other than the players, who resists the dragons most fiercely?"

The AI had a bit of a hiccup here, accidentally listing as item number 2 out of 5 a group that would ally with the dragons and why, so I downvoted that response and asked for another.

My next question was, "How do the dragons initiate hostilities?"

It was at this point that I realized it would take a considerable amount of chatting with the machine and teaching it the rudiments of a particular campaign world before it could go beyond generalities that would be obvious to any experienced GM, and I didn't have that kind of time. But maybe people on the boards do. Has anybody tried using it as a GM tool, perhaps to help with writer's block?

It won't write adventures for you, but it seems like it could handle intellectual grunt work, like spitballing ideas that the GM can then refine. I also tried to see if I could get it to write descriptive text for NPCs:

"If I were to describe the leader of the dragon armies in the style of a novel, how would I do it?"

Now, that description was a little middle-schoolish, and the AI didn't realize that black dragons breathe acid, not fire, so I went over it again making a few changes by hand to make it less clunky:

Neither of them is winning any Nebula Awards, but when you're trying to juggle DM'ing with job/school/family, you're not trying to. You just want to prep your descriptive italicized text paragraphs with minimal fuss.

Anybody else tried using AI for something like this?

Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e are similar games, but key differences (action economy, saving throws, the skill system, and bounded accuracy in general) separate them enough that mental effort is required to translate between them.

How many people on these boards also play 5e? And how do you split your time and attention between them if you do both?

Other than books and movies specifically written as tie-ins for Pathfinder, D&D, & games spun off from them, what are some good series to draw inspiration from that more or less match the tone, themes, and assumptions inherent to the 2e/5e rule sets?

Because in most fantasy fiction, magic is so rare that the story’s protagonists and antagonists pretty much encounter most of the world’s magic items and users in the course of the story. Meanwhile, Pathfinder and D&D treat mid-to-high-level items and spells like Gulfstream V private jets: rare, impressive, and only privately owned by extremely exceptional people, but not so rare that each one is a household name inscribed in folklore.

I’ve always wondered where this spell draws the line between what’s translatable and what’s not. If a document is written in a dead language but is otherwise unremarkable, the effect is straightforward. If it contains a secret code written in the same language but hidden, it would translate the code if you noticed it, but if you fail the check to notice it, the spell doesn’t help.

At first, I thought the spell was simply there to eliminate unintentional obstacles to understanding caused by language barriers, but then I thought some more and things got complicated.

I’d like to ask how other tables handle things like context, metaphors, and figures of speech. Does this spell translate “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” or are you spending the whole session learning to communicate, Picard-style?

Your Standard Fantasy Setting (warning: TV Tropes link!) can get a little stale after a few years. What are some of your favorite examples of Paizo subverting expectations regarding a generic fantasy setting element or story progression?

A good (if obvious) example would be the death of Aroden. It would have been like having to call off the Second Coming because Jesus choked on a bagel.

(If it’s in an adventure module or path, be sure to put it in a spoiler tag unless it’s on the back of the book or happens before the first session begins).

So I was reading “Why Nations Fail” (Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson), and as a thought experiment sought to apply what I could of its conclusions to the fantasy RPG context with the goal of creating more detailed worlds and more fulfilling games.

(TL;DR: Andoran will probably be ruling Golarion within the next 50-100 years because democracy is such a superior form of government.)

If I say something stupid, please point it out! If something doesn’t make sense, tell me! It’s how we all learn. If a prediction or statement doesn’t ring true, point it out!

Assuming I’ve read the book correctly (an iffy prospect, since I dropped Poli Sci halfway through my first semester of college 10 years ago and never went back to the subject), nations fail in two main ways:

1. When no actor is able to establish a monopoly on violence within a given territory, leaving it devoid of law and order and prey to banditry.

2. When the state centralizes all power in the hands of a tiny elite that ignores the rule of law whenever doing so is convenient and governs overwhelmingly in its own narrow interests.

An example of Failure Mode 1 would be the Mwangi Expanse on Golarion (or Somalia in the real world). Failure Mode 2 is the default position of any feudal kingdom or imperial despotate, and includes nearly all nations in recorded history as well as most fictional nations, including Cheliax et. al. on Golarion.

The detriments of Failure Mode 1 (anarchy) are obvious: it is impossible to establish a prosperous society when barbarian tribes, bandits, monsters, and similar dangers wander the countryside attacking any would-be settlers.

But the detriments of Failure Mode 2 (authoritarianism) are less obvious, to the point that many GMs don’t fully consider their consequences when worldbuilding. The Mode 2 society, wherein the power of the state is in the hands of a relatively small, closed oligarchy (often but not always hereditary), is very brittle. The elite, with no legal checks on their power, eliminate any nonviolent methods of displacing them (assuming they ever existed in the first place), politicize the justice system until the law effectively means whatever they want it to mean and applies only to those they don’t like, and engage in massive corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and all manner of selfish practices that undermine the very government they purport to lead. In extreme cases, their misrule can precipitate the collapse of the state via peasant revolt, military coup, or similar events.

In a Failure Mode 2 society, power centers independent of the ruling clique are a threat to its power and thus to social stability, especially independently wealthy entrepreneurs, merchants, adventurers, or businessmen. The ruling clique will seek to co-opt any such power centers, buying them off if such can be done at a reasonable price (keeping in mind that “reasonable” for a dictator can be quite a sum, since none of it is actually his money). Independent power centers that refuse to be co-opted or corrupted are harassed out of existence by crooked tax collectors, or simply destroyed by violence in the less subtle dictatorships.

In Mode 2 societies, trade (especially long-distance trade) is almost always a government monopoly, either carried out directly by the Crown or else by a monopoly trust that acquired exclusive rights to a particular trade via corrupt connections to the ruling clique.

Education (other than apprenticeships in simple trades) is discouraged in Mode 2 societies save for the children of the ruling clique, and perhaps the clergy if the nation is a theocracy based on the contents of a sacred text (or at least what the ruling clique says are its contents). Literacy in particular is a threat, promoting the concepts of the rule of law and accurate knowledge of history and current events that could be damaging to the ruling elite’s hold on power.

Taxes in Mode 2 societies are very high, as without any nonviolent legal means of opposing the rulers they are free to set the tax burden at whatever level they can competently administer without sparking famine and state collapse, rather than the level most conducive to widespread prosperity. This tax revenue is then mostly wasted on luxury goods, payoffs required to co-opt rival elites, various white elephant projects, and pointless wars.

The highly unequal wealth distribution in Failure Mode 2 societies makes control of state revenue a prize of immense value, to the point that a series of civil wars sparked by greed can ultimately destroy a civilization and cause a society in Failure Mode 2 (authoritarianism & dictatorship) to revert to Failure Mode 1 (anarchy & barbarism).

Access to supernatural powers is extremely limited in Failure Mode 2 societies. Wizardry and alchemy are only taught and practiced by members of state-sanctioned guilds with arbitrary and capricious membership rules written to keep the magical arts under the thumb of the state. Attempts to practice either art outside guild strictures are harshly punished by the authorities. Sorcerers, psychics and other mystical practitioners not affiliated with the ruling clique are usually deemed enemies of the state, as are members of schismatic religious orders, foreign cults, Druidic circles, witches’ covens, and any other alternative mystical or spiritual practice not beholden to the ruling elite.

But the most pernicious trait of Failure Mode 2 societies is their tendency to squash innovation and growth purely out of the leaders’ paranoia. Any technological or magical breakthrough that might increase productivity and save labor is usually outright banned by the ruling elite, out of concern that anyone rendered unemployed or underemployed by the advance would begin contemplating rebellion.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the preceding paragraph. For nearly all of human history, economic growth and technological advancement were essentially nil because the negative consequences of authoritarian government were so serious. The absence of the rule of law, confiscatory tax rates, frequent civil wars, and an elite that actively undermined their own citizens in the name of stability ensured that for most of human history, stagnation was the rule. But when the Glorious Revolution of 1688 reined in the near-absolute power of the English Crown and put parliamentary democracy on a firm footing, England and its colonies rapidly industrialized and within two centuries effectively ran the world.

The tropes of fantasy literature and gaming can sometimes obscure this (especially the tropes of the Good or Wise King), but absolute monarchies (hereditary or not) are authoritarian systems by definition and are prone to all of their flaws, including the ones mentioned above. The absence of authoritarian rule is such a strong predictor of prosperity that, barring democratic backsliding, total military conquest, or supernatural calamity, democracies such as Andoran which practice Common Rule are almost guaranteed a level of prosperity that will grant them global economic hegemony within a century or less.

Long-lived races such as the elves are better capable of the self-restraint required for an authoritarian state to function reasonably well for an extended period, but when an elf or dwarf of bad character gains the throne, centuries of misrule can create truly hellish dystopias that more than squander the fruits of their predecessors’ reigns.

As far as the game impact of all this goes, in a Failure Mode 2 society, the player characters are on a collision course with the state from level 4-5 on: either they will join forces with the state, or ultimately destroy it. The paranoia of authoritarian government is too strong for any other outcome to be likely over the long term, barring extenuating circumstances.

Distributing political power more widely (particularly among a merchant class whose wealth is based on business savvy rather than corruption or inheritance and who have both the motivation and the means to check the power of the Crown) produces less abusive government, and sometimes results in the creation of rule-of-law constraints on the Crown’s power that ultimately lead to parliamentary democracy, but the discovery of overseas colonies loaded with natural resources and natives easily exploited for slave or near-slave labor lock in a country’s authoritarian bent by freeing the Crown from reliance on its own population for state revenue.