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I wonder why there are so many more weapons then anything else. I think a lot of it has to do with weapons being more immediately evocative. The really flashy, lethal, destructive effects translate best to weapons, and on top of that, named and magical weapons are very common in fiction so there's a large base to draw from.
I've been noticing that there's a small but enduring trend of items that utilize oft-forgotten or ignored mechanics. Hats off!
"This Thing is a Thing, except that it doesn't do the stuff a Thing does, like you'd expect. It does this instead, which isn't very much like a Thing at all, but for sake of argument, let's keep calling it a Thing." I had one which was essentially (changing deets around here), "This +2 Greataxe deals 2d6 damage on a successful hit, weighs 8 pounds, and has a crit value of 19-20/x2" We have that, it's called a +2 Greatsword! On the plus side, someone here made a comment that could only have been about my item and it wasn't unfavorable.
I expect I'll get well into Star again this year, but that's it. Realistic goals, ho!
I wasn't initially considering jumping in on this, but I recently read some really interesting articles on Howard Carter-era Egyptology, and I'm kind of in the mood to play with some tomb-robbin' Aspis Consortium Indiana Jones villains.
Got a Brastlewark-themed Side Trek (350 words) and a Brastlewark Gazetteer (1500 words) that are all finished up. Running them past some friends and then they'll be heading your way.
Golarion Gazetteer: Brastlewark should be in by tonight.
I have been running a little late, but I should have a Golarion Gazetteer and maybe a Side Trek or Weal or Woe in by Monday.
I swear to God I've seen the OP's concept come up in one of their ERP threads.
Mine was the Plague Cake; So you were plague cake guy! My quibble with the plague cake is that it fell pretty clearly into a villainous niche. I get that the judges have been rewarding certain items that have obviously villainous applications, but the issue with the Cake is that it was something that the PCs would use maybe once, in an extremely specific circumstance, but it applied much better when used as, say, an obstacle put in place by a villain trying to cover his/her tracks, or as a macguffin intended to stymie the PCs. I think you also lost points based on gross-out factor. That's never really been an issue for me, but I think it's been a longstanding cliche to the judges.
Reviews and critiques of people's items to come when I have more time, but here's my Breach Master's Epaulets, edited for the one error I realized too late; the original version didn't have transmutation in the Aura. Breach Master’s Epaulets
For every panel deployed in such a fashion, the epaulets’ Damage Reduction value drops by 1. For example, with one panel deployed, the wearer possesses DR 4/adamantine. As a standard action, the wearer can reabsorb adjacent, undamaged panels, restoring the ribbon and its associated functions, DR and redeployment, immediately. The epaulets produce one new ribbon every 24 hours, and can never have more than 5 ribbons. If the epaulets have 5 ribbons, they may reabsorb previously deployed panels as detailed above, but to no benefit. Construction
I'm afraid, my darling Breach Master's Epaulets, that you're still due for a few revisions.
Welp, time to pour all the effort I would have poured into the monster round into making Wayfinder articles! I would encourage that everyone who has the predilection do the same!
Congratulations to everyone!
I am glad nobody has posted "I GOT THE EMAIL" yet, so there is still a modicum of hope.Well, I did get an email from Paizo today. But it was not "the email." You tease!
My eye has been twitching spasmodically and refuses to stop, and it's all your fault, Sean!
Watch out, next April's special - "Goblinz Invade North Pole!" Considering that we have to adhere to canon and given what we saw of Golarion's North Pole in "Jade Regent," suffice to say I'm not rooting for the goblins.
In my home campaign, I've done a lot of expansion on Coretyn and its mayor, the Archheathen Kettermaul Charthagnion, so I think I may submit a Side Trek or piece of fiction dealing with him and his conspicuously ever-present Ice Devil "advisor." Also expect a Golarion Gazetteer on Brastlewark, for a little bit of uncharacteristic whimsy.
Good point. I'll refrain from making such jokes in the future.
After reading this thread, I'm beginning to regret my test stat block, Mythic Vampire Goblin What Only Lives in Absalom. Also off the drawing board: a giant crab that wears buildings like hats, thus technically fulfilling the "monster lives in the city" criteria in the same fashion that a hermit crab's environment could technically be "soda can."
Cool, the first time I saw my own item was after the cull. In other news, I saw a sub-90-word hat that was so fun in concept that I texted my girlfriend about it immediately after reading it. It's going into my home game!
I don't know if it's a common item type or I was just unlucky, but I just ran into four items that store channeled energy (each set against each other) in a row. The items weren't bad, per se, but I found myself going "more of these!? Come on!"
Perhaps it's my L5R background, but one of the Japanese-themed items is a quirky one I like and keeps coming up for me. It's nice since it makes for a pretty easy upvote. A bit late to the party, here, but I know exactly which one you're talking about and it's one of my favorites.
I'm noticing a great preponderance of seed and seed-themed items.
Damn it, there was a super-cool hat that had a core mechanic that was totally superstar, but then had a bunch of little superfluous unnecessary extra bits. I still voted for it, but it pained me how much I loved ALMOST everything about it, like if I was eating a delicious key lime pie but instead of a dollop of whipped cream in the center, it had a big lump of nacho cheez.
Found the apology item!
Guy, where did you come up with these effects? Did you just spin the "random bonus" wheel and decide your item gave the wearer whatever it landed on?
This is a game! That's why humor shouldn't be an auto-reject. The most memorable moments in my years of gaming are either funny or swashbuckling (which is often funny). But catchy titles, good writing and interesting effects are what I think I vote on, not in that order. That said, I think deliberately aiming for "the humorous item" is a slippery slope. What's funny and what's not is a subjective, to be compared to the objectivity of game balance and formatting. Gauging one way or the other on humor just distracts from whether it's actually a good item.
But yeah, there's nothing that's foolproof. There's a saying that an artist's favorite work is always the thing he's currently working on, and his most hated is the one he just finished. Don't I know it. Thanks for the advice! However, it was (from my perspective) an extremely minor error, so aside from the requisite forehead-slapping I'm not going to let it discourage me too much.
It frustrates me that I always notice the minor error in my item right after submission, despite a day full of second-guessing and rewording. C'est la vie!
The hiss of "it begins" that I just made at my computer desk was entirely involuntary.
To slightly rephrase some thoughts that have already been made: I think a lot of this also ties in with whether progressivism and regressivism, from a societal perspective, can be attached to the alignment system. This is really something to be left up to the GM, because there are mixed messages in the game itself as to this sort of thing. Erastil is portrayed as, to some extent, sexist in his pursuit of traditionalism, and while he's certainly good DESPITE that (I've gathered that whether his sexism makes him inherently evil is something a base breaker, but let's not get into that and assume that Erastil is still deserving of the LG alignment for the sake of this post)--and it doesn't factor into his goodness--it could be argued that his regressive beliefs tie into his lawfulness. The same goes for other cultural artifacts like slavery. Is Asmodeus' support of slavery a component of his evil? A component of his lawfulness? It's implied to be both, but it's up to your GM to determine the actual ratio.j The way I've always handled it is that progressivism and regressivism fall more into the Lawful-Chaotic axis than the Good-Evil axis, and it's responses to those cultural practices that color the latter more. In a society where slaveholding is absolutely the norm, not owning slaves could be considered a good action with context, but it's almost certainly a chaotic action. However, that doesn't make a chaotic action necessarily good, either. Cayden Cailean's brand of rebellion may be copacetic with our uniquely American view of "liberation," but Lamashtu or Rovagug would just as soon see a slaveholding society destroyed for the fact that it's a society at all, not that it's slaveholding.
Hot-weather and cold-weather outfits can save a character's life at early levels, so I always make sure to pick them up. As far as quirkier items, I've always been a fan of owning board games and other knick-knacks that require the use of the hands. It gives the character something to do during the more aimless roleplay scenes and adds character.
So does anyone have any predictions about what the cliche items and elements will be this year? Last year we had cell phones, filigree, and attunement periods, among others. Do you think we'll see the same ones? Will we see anything new? In addition to all the "Ice" stuff that everyone's been echoing, I expect that this isn't the last we'll see of cell phones and other tech-as-magic-item shenanigans. With the announcement of Iron Gods and the success of last year's Numeria-themed submissions (albeit in the encounter section rather than the items section), I'm thinking that space tech is going to be a common theme. EDIT: Well, just go and beat me to it, then, Jacob. Here I was thinking I'd wow everyone with my unique and individual opinion on the internet!
Wow, it's RPG Superstar time again? How the days go by. I haven't put much thought into preparation, but I believe the phrase goes "once more into the breach."
How deeply I wish, all of a sudden, that I was a Seattle local.
I'm tempted to make "Tourism In..." attached to a less-expanded-upon location a regular thing for Wayfinder after the success of the Darklands one (that reminds me, whatever happened to the ideas for a Darklands kingmaker conversion?). Time to go hunting through the Katapesh and Qadira books for an interesting locale! I'm also tempted to write a short adventure JUST so I can have a rooftop chase scene.
The dueregar city is lovely stuff. Thank you kindly! I always felt that Hagegraf was done a disservice by its one paragraph in Into the Darklands... EDIT: Some of my own disjointed thoughts --The Weal or Woe articles are way cooler than usual, I think it's because the authors had more free reign to horrible underground beasties for the Woe halves. In particular, the Will-O-the-Wisp villain was just downright devious.
Goodness, how I wish I was at paizocon right now.
Golarion is close to Earth-like, but it's about half the size, if not even smaller. Or, at the very least, it has half the gravity: the falling rules have people fall about half as fast as they would fall in real life.
Also, the gods fail and they all need to be killed and forgotten. Especially the so-called good ones. Could you elaborate? I like that the gods are fallible and in some cases (Erastil) even backwards. They hew closer in the direction of the Greek or Norse gods than Judeo-Christianity, which I think is appropriate for such a gonzo setting.
Cayden Cailean, with his anarchic views and opposition to tyranny, seems like the natural fit.
I will admit that I have less material prepared for the First World than Kaer Maga as of right now, but that's by virtue of having had an arc of my home game in Kaer Maga, whereas the First World arc I have planned is a month off. That said, you have no IDEA of the First World side trek prospects I'm already drooling over. Checkerboard boss battle where the PCs have to move like chess pieces? A verdant, roiling hillside that acts like an ocean for some mechanics and ground for another and upon which the PCs have a naval battle? Killer gnomes playing the world's most sadistic version of Hide and Go Seek? The (First) World is my oyster.
I'm siding with First World and Thassilon, although if we want a more contemporary setting, my vote is Ustalav (horror issue) or Andoran (our beloved 'Murka expy is well fleshed-out, but underutilized for modules aside from Falcon's Hollow).
Sounds a little similar to the Absalom issue. I'm still hoping for the Great Beyond, myself.
Pacific Islander Tattoos were given, not merely purchased. Each tattoo MEANS something. EG, a friend participated in a cross-ocean voyage in a traditional canoe (1970s?). When they crew off loaded in Fiji (?), they had a big party and he woke with a Tattoo with stylized waves on his back. We were in a bar in Pearl City (near Honolulu) and the bouncer recognized the Tattoo and showed his. We got in and drank free that night and he and his wife got invited for lunch the next day. So a Paladin having Tattoos associated with advancement, etc. makes great flavor. In my first-ever Pathfinder game I played a half-orc paladin of Sarenrae from the woods north of Andoran. In retrospect I played him with all the hallmarks of the Redeemer, doing nonlethal damage when he could and trying to convince monsters to use their superior strength and other monstrous attributes to better society, but not even the APG had come out at that point. He was a reformed POW from the goblinblood wars, and I played him as having a lot of remaining aspects of orc culture that he applied to his life as a holy warrior; he wore a ghoulish war mask as the faceplate of his helmet, he had a tendency to eat monsters that wouldn't redeem to supplement trail rations, and most importantly, for every major victory (read: boss battle) he would pull his shaving razor, carve another tally-like scar into his face, and rub colored chalks in before letting it heal naturally (his lay on hands obviating the traditional orc means of obtaining status-bearing facial scars). TL;DR I played a Paladin who did body scarification as a sign of cultural significance!
so by the time all of this is sorted out which will be the token straight character? No one, thus far. I believe that the official word on the iconics was that they were all to be considered bisexual unless proven otherwise.
I think the ninja is transgendered, merisiel and seltyiel bi, alain and kyra gay Expressly, Alain at the very least has a ton of heterosexual sex, although it's unknown whether he actually pursues it from a romantic standpoint or as a form of self-validation.
I had a particularly egregious ordeal with an inquisitor of Sarenrae who inquisit-ed his own teammates. By which I mean he acted incredibly suspicious of, rarely healed, and tried to steal the stuff of anyone who didn't have "Sarenrae" written in the religion tab.
As one could probably assume from the delay, I will not be able to submit art for consideration in time, due to unforseen circumstances. However, I will have a character art portfolio ready for next Wayfinder in a few months! I'm really looking forward to seeing how it's all going!
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