UnArcaneElection's page

{. . .}

Hell, non-Vancian spellcasting would be on my PF3 things to consider list. That would fix this, lol.

Hey, could be worse. Just be glad we don't have JD Vancian spellcasting . . . .

I started this thread over 5 years ago....man time flies...

I love the elemental planes, if I was going to get rid of anything it would be cut back on outer planes. You only need one heaven and one hell. So instead of nine outer planes, it would be 5 planes.

Why would you want such a one-dimensional cosmology as just one Heaven and just one Hell?

Observing from a distance, it seems to me that 2nd Edition lost a lot of the flavor that 1st Edition had. I'd like to see 3rd edition bring as much of that back as possible without running afoul of OGL encumbrance.

Although if 3rd Edition turned out to be an unholy hybrid of Pathfinder with Mutants & Masterminds, that would get my attention as well . . . .

Aww, I was rooting (no pun intended) for a Leshy Necromancer iconic! I still think it could have been cute- using the themes of natural decay and plant life to make a less "dark" Necromancer is a popular trope these days.

I could see this as being a way for Necromancers to turn over a new leaf . . . .

^Related to this, although with a Starfinder angle, in the last couple of days I just stumbled on this really brutal musical tradition in the Star Trek setting, of all places.

Wow.

Even Cheliax just puts its performers at high risk of death, not demanding that they actually kill themselves.

Everybody okay out there?

^Possibly related to that, see this thread.

Considering just who has control over AI right now, AND all the lawsuits against AI companies over intellectual property theft, I think it is better to err on the side of overcaution right now, even if it feels Luddite.

Possibly related to this, some blog posts don't have a way to go to a discussion thread at all. An example is A Draconic Takeover. And it used to be that if a blog post didn't have a discussion thread at all, it had a built-in way to start one.

keftiu wrote:

Likewise, I think there's a lot of room for a more-sympathetic fantasy take on something like the Andean 'mummies,' who could be something like guardian spirits or respected ancestors - nuance, as always, is key.

Yeah. We're already seeing some undead trend in this direction, in fact. Book of the Dead gave us both the Iruxi Ossature, which is very clearly coded as a beneficial tutelary spirit. There's also the Iroran Mummy, which is treated as the result of enlightenment rather than a product of evil necromancy. I guess they're also tutelary spirits, now I think on it, just of temples rather than home communities.

Worth noting that these are both pre-Remaster, and thus have non-Evil alignments explicitly listed.

The first row of pictures has an introduction. But who's in the second row of pictures?

{. . .}

And of course, it's fair to say that this is a fantasy setting, so people who consciously devote themselves to evil causes and unholy powers exist,{. . .}

You don't even need a fantasy setting for that.

I could see how a Mocking Dragon might serve as a Q-like semi-antagonist in a campaign.

When I try to go to one of my posts in my listing of user posts to pick up where I last looked at a thread, it usually works. But ever since the store upgrade, one exception has cropped up: If I click on one my posts that is in the comments of a blog post, such as for Revenge of the Runelords Player's Guide, the link instead takes me to the blog post with no way to see the comments, except for the following strange workaround. The workaround is to click on Reply to my own post, and then I get a proper reply window and can see the previous several posts. But I have to stay in an abortive reply -- if I click Cancel, the comments thread disappears and I am taken bag to the blog post with no way that I can find to get to the comments thread (I don't even see the "Join the Discussion" link that appears in some blog posts).

^By the ideas I was putting together above, perhaps, but it might depend upon what it's played on. They would likely see part of appreciation of the music of other cultures to be building instruments on which said music sounds most in tune.

^Technically this would work, but I don't think they would like to blank out their hearing during a whole battle, since that might be important for knowing what's going on that they can't see. Now on the other hand, if they had some way to switch Silence on and off, now you're talking . . . .

^. . . I can imagine they wouldn't be too fond of the noise made by such things as well as the risk of shooting yourself. Although for the former, permanent hearing damage from loud noise seems to be a mammalian thing, so maybe they would be able to put up with it.

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Added: Also, nobody calls the language they speak "Common". It's Taldane, or Mwangi, or Tien, or whatever.

Closest I can think of is in the Star Trek universe, in which English is occasionally referred to as "Federation standard".

^Those are even suitable for boggy areas on Earth, and on Golarion, would have the added benefit that things like Will-O-Wisps wouldn't be able to destroy them very easily and would have a hard time misleading travelers on a corduroy road from straying. (And Rust Monsters can't easily destroy them either, and would have no urge to do so.)

{. . .} Janet Paegin {. . .}

The “tyranny” she practices is bureaucratic rather than brutal: a relentless insistence that all knowledge be cataloged, protected, and preserved from ignorance. {. . .}

I can see that sooner or later, she's going to run afoul of the Order of the Rack.

UnArcaneElection wrote:

So Belimarius made a mistake. Karzoug made worse mistakes, and as a result he's dead while Belimarius is still alive.

No, Belimarius did not make a mistake.

She exercised poor judgment and did something she meant to do, stupid as it was.

A mistake is when you're doing math and forget to carry the one, or missing your exit on the interstate. You didn't mean to do those things.

Belimarius was too stupid to do the correct thing. Instead, she decided to do the wrong thing.

Same thing applies about doing something stupid. Belimarius did something stupid that got her in trouble for a while, but she's still alive and in power in a significant region of Golarion. Karzoug did something even more stupid and now he's dead.

If Paizo hasn’t made it specific, it’s kind of up to the GM to decide if dragons are interested in the shipping business or not, I suppose.

@Mathmuse: The canal era is kind of cool I always thought. There’s a canal in Scotland that took too long to build and ended up being undersized for the ships of the time. England has an extensive network of canals as well.
Of course, unloading the cargo and portaging it past the falls is also a possibility.

. . . And that is a lead-in for railroads, since some of the very early railroads were portage railroads, with a subset of those using cable haulage since suitable locomotives were not available at the time and/or the track had a slope too steep for wheel adhesion on rails and cogwheel railways were not yet up to the task(*). Cable haulage on Earth usually used a steam engine or in later instances electric power, but water power could be used, and has occasionally been used for powering cable haulage on Earth.

(*)Technically, one of the very first locomotives was a cogwheel engine (made by John Blinkensop, it was made that way just to get more adhesion on level ground before heavy-duty rail was available for the running of locomotives heavy enough for good friction adhesion.

One potential problem with rails or anything else made of metal on a large scale: Rust Monsters. Or are those about to undergo Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure?

UnArcaneElection wrote:

AceofMoxen wrote:

The guide claims this is the 'Final' Runelords story. Let's check back in five years.

Remember that (unless something happens to her in this AP), Belimarius is still alive and kicking and unreformed . . . and while she was one of the weaker Runelords, seeing the success of a reformed Sorshen would give a great amount of ENVY -- just what she needs to power her up. And Belimarius didn't survive this long by being stupid, even if a significant amount of luck was involved -- expect her to engage in not an outright attack, but clandestine asymmetric warfare.

Everyone in Xin-Edasseril spent 10,000 years reliving the same week over and over precisely because Belimarius is an idiot who trusted Karzoug's instructions on how to build a runewell and failed to spot his sabotage.

So Belimarius made a mistake. Karzoug made worse mistakes, and as a result he's dead while Belimarius is still alive.

The guide claims this is the 'Final' Runelords story. Let's check back in five years.

Remember that (unless something happens to her in this AP), Belimarius is still alive and kicking and unreformed . . . and while she was one of the weaker Runelords, seeing the success of a reformed Sorshen would give a great amount of ENVY -- just what she needs to power her up. And Belimarius didn't survive this long by being stupid, even if a significant amount of luck was involved -- expect her to engage in not an outright attack, but clandestine asymmetric warfare.

^Hey, I like finding truth stranger than fiction.

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Christopher#2411504 wrote:

{. . .}

The dwarves in Highhelm have some Elemental Plane taps for Water and I think for forge heat? Those options can reduce the need for conventional infrastructure, but do mean elementals might walk in.
{. . .}

If they have the power and wealth to get elemental taps like that, it would make sense for them to get taps for air as well.

Actually they are using lichen walls grown by druids for that and noise barriers:

Quote:

Breatherwalls

Air within Highhelm is produced and purified by a variety of cultivated lichen that are grown upon porous latticed walls placed throughout residential areas. Known as "breatherwalls", druids of the city created the lichen to improve air quality and dampen otherwise deafening noises that could echo through the halls of the underground city. These oxygen-creating emplacements are so efficient that it is possible for the entire city to subsist entirely on its produced air, even if every air shaft and entrance is sealed away to defend Highhelm against a potential siege. The practice of growing the breatherwall lichen is a trade secret, inviting many outsiders to try and steal the technique to no avail. This has not stopped spores of the lichen from appearing on the black market, although their legitimacy is questionable.

You won't be invading them through a nice Air plane tap. Plane of Water or Plane of Fire - those are the only two backdoors. And they aren't exactly "army sized" backdoors.

They also use Grindlegrubs for organic waste disposal. So no attacking via sewer exit either.

Highelm is the epitome of "we won't run out of necessicities, even if we have to close every tunnel access airtight".

Now I'd like to know how they supply energy to the breatherwall lichen, since producing oxygen takes energy . . . Oh, right -- trade secret. And maybe that's what's keeping others from successfully stealing the technique. Now obvoiusly, with the right kind of magic (which they used to call Evocation magic . . .), you could supply energy to the lichen that way, but it's interesting to speculate what other kinds of energy could be used (like, for instance, if you just can't get enough raw power out of magic).

Interestingly, more than one actual type of metabolism exists on Earth that can produce oxygen and is NOT photosynthesis: Dark Oxygen. The linked article lists water radiolysis (implies serious radon problem, but Dwarves might actually not care), oxidation of surface-bound radicals (which amounts to an abiotic version of what they list for methanobactins later), chlorite dismutation, nitrite dismutation, and what they call methanobactins, which actually use oxidized metal ions to oxidize water (they don't explain this, and the enzyme name is misleading, but if you follow up the reference they give, it actually makes sense). I do see from the article on Highhelm that the Dwarves did go to some trouble to let in sunlight as well, which could be used to power the lichens by standard photosynthesis, although if they don't have a transparent barrier to erect over the sunlight portals, this would be unavailable during a siege.

Wow, I wasn't expecting this to generate so much interest, given how my posts about music on Golarion largely fell flat.

Also, ironically it wasn't the use of lead pipes that was a big problem for the Roman people. The waters directed through the lead pipes were pretty rich in minerals which provided a protective layer which inhibited the leaching of lead into the drinking water.

The bigger issues were the use of lead acetate sweetened wine and leaded cooking ware, which were the real problems.

With proper management, you could still use lead pipes today. Remember, the leaded drinking water problem of Flint Michigan began because the city changed their water source, ignored advice about the problem before the change was made. Had the new water source been appropriately treated, the lead pipes could have been fine because of the layer of passivated protective coating the inside.

Direct lead poisoninng by lead acetate and close source poisoning by cookware would indeed be extra trouble. But I wouldn't count out slow leaching of lead through the protective minteral layers on the pipe also causing lead poisoning over long periods, as well as the possibility for the same thing that happened in Flint, MI (and Newark, DE) happening to Roman pipes and simply not being recognized among people corrupt enough to use lead acetate to sweeten wine (a practice which continued well after being banned in the 1700s).

{. . .}

The dwarves in Highhelm have some Elemental Plane taps for Water and I think for forge heat? Those options can reduce the need for conventional infrastructure, but do mean elementals might walk in.
{. . .}

If they have the power and wealth to get elemental taps like that, it would make sense for them to get taps for air as well.

Now that i think about it, we really need a hardcover "Infrastructure of Golarion."

Follow that up a few months later with "Taxcodes of Golarion."

Now that you mention it, Civil society of Golarion (which would include both of these) could be a genuinely good book.

What kind of infrastructure can we expect to find in cities and towns on Golarion? Obviously, we have roads, ports, wells, and buildings/fortifications, but what about other infrastructure? For instance, on Earth, Ancient Rome had paved roads and a network of aqueducts (although they also had the VERY BAD IDEA of using lead in the pipe sections of the aqueduct network).

{. . .}

Hellbreakers: A 1st- to 10th-level campaign involving the outbreak of the war between Andoran and Cheliax. Can your PCs make the difference in this violent clash that threatens two of Golarion’s most bitter rival nations?

Hell’s Destiny: An 11th- to 20th-level campaign that continues the war-torn story from Hellbreakers and can also work on its own as a high-powered campaign. Can your PCs stop a truly diabolical threat from engulfing the Inner Sea region and casting the continent of Avistan into ruin?
{. . .}

These sound REALLY INTERESTING. I wish I could Favorite the original blog post . . . .

Just checking in . . . .

Another angle on this: What about national musical traditions? Cheliax is canonically known to have a tradition of (often rather brutal) opera. And Nidal, the nation of pain, seems like it would favor painful and nightmarish music (which both suggests a heavy metal vibe and a tuning system having maximum harmonic entropy, such as this example using 26 equal divisions of the octave). Cheliax might be more inclined to go with 24 equal divisions of the octave to revel in the discipline needed to make use of pairs of instruments tuned to 12 equal divisions of the octave and offset by a quarter tone, as in this awesome fire and brimstone example. But then dissidents in both nations (often under the influence of Desna) might seek to modify such musical traditions to transition from nightmare to less frightful dreams . . . .

This sounds like an awfully familiar situation -- going to need Dae here . . . .

Here's a great video about the Physics of Dissonance. In principle, skilled crafters should be able to make instruments for a variety of tuning systems. I would be disappointed if Dwarves DIDN'T do this.

{. . .}

Environments commonly used on Golarion but not commonly used on Earth would be expected to have an influence on music-making. For instance, those living underground and having easy access to stone and metal but not to wood or most other organics could find themselves pushed in the direction of making instruments of the idiophone families, consisting of struck bars or rods, which would have highly inharmonic partials, thereby causing effective harmonic relations between notes to be different from those produced by stringed, woodwind, and brass instruments {. . .}

Here's a great video relevant to this.

I would personally like to see the return of junk magic

Now you've got me thinking of this vision of perverted Technomancers that cast spells through the sending of spam . . . .

For everyone asking about the Starfinder Second Edition Player Core PDF, we're sorry for any confusion! This change is a one-time change due to the nature of Starfinder Second Edition launching for the first time. {. . .}

This must be a relief to some people who were wondering if it was due to an unintended confluence of alternate realities . . . .

Now starting to feel like we're getting to know Iseph in a way not conferred by the original Meet the Iconics for Iseph.

You just know Sarenrae is looking down on her going, "She's rude, but I like her."

This needs to be the next twinge of dread for Ulka to experience . . . .

Too bad a renkroda had to lose an eye for Obozaya to learn honor . . . .

{. . .} I'd certainly enjoy less feat-intensive drone customization too, but minibots (... Please stop autocorrecting to "mini boys"...) sound like a great addition. {. . .}

Off-topic, but related in a back-handed way -- this reminds me of an ongoing problem: I am Entertainment Chair for the Boston Street Railway Association, and I take notes for the Entertainment, which as you might imagine often features the buildings where streetcars are stored, which are often called "carhouses" . . . and AutoCorrect in Apple Pages (competitor to Microsoft Word) keeps changing this to "cathouses". Very embarrassing when I send one of these in for review and missed an instance of where this happened.

^Maybe that comes later?

Same.

Got a sorcerer, fighter, cleric, and rogue.

That sounds almost . . . traditional.

{. . .}

Human: These adaptable survivors from Lost Golarion are a legacy ancestry with new options. What more do I need to explain? You’re a human, right? (Aren’t you?)
{. . .}

Hey, in these days of AI, you can never be sure. Better to check beorehand . . . .

The awesomeness continues. And bonus points for the Babylon 5 reference at the (so far) end.

Berselius wrote:

But does she fight, slaughter, and leave orphans in her wake for a cause or simply for the glitter of gold? If it's the later, she might find herself facing the vengeance of some of her victims one day and death might not be as kind as it has been before...

Yeah I feel like some of the themes are conflicted. She refuses the lessons of harnessing her anger and aggression but ends up becoming monsterous anyways. She fights for the helpless but is also cruel and kills for money. Maybe that's supposed to be part of the tragedy but I'm not feeling it. She's kinda just a hypocrite

Oh, how the world loves to force us to become that which we hate . . . .

I like the idea that a dwarven 'keyboard' instead of a single long row like we have on a piano, might be a pair of smaller round keyboards, with the users hands sitting in the center, able to reach the keys arrayed around their palm without much movement of the hand from a central position. A form of xylophone designed along this, with bars of different sizes, or even different alloys, would be operated by a dwarf who wears metal caps over their fingertips, so that, instead of rapping them with a bar, they'd be tapping each bar with a metal-tipped finger to produce the tone.

That could certainly work on a small scale, although to get more compass, you would want to hold hammers with some reach. Although related to this concept would be the idea of arranging the instrument to go most of the way around you so that you don't need to move from one end to the other to access all of the notes (this would come in REAL HANDY for a marimba -- those things get LONG). This would be like how timpanists usually arrange the timpani in semicircles around them (you can occasionally get a glimpse of this in the video of Diggy Diggy Hole linked in Here4daFreeSwag's post above).

The notion of different metals giving off different tones might carry through to both smithing and jewelrycraft, as metalworkers might 'sound' various metals and listen to the sound they produce to appraise the purity / content of a metal sample (or coin, etc.), which could look unusual to a non-dwarf, to see a moneychanger tap a silver coin with a tiny steel hammer and listen to the tone to determine if it's counterfeit or pure.

Apparently this is something that is actually done on Earth.

And remember that idiophones don't just include metallophones and xylophones. They also include lithophones.

And here is an awesome video on natural and crafted lithophones. And with its cave environments, it seems quite appropriate for Dwarves, even though these things are to be found right here on Earth.

Anybody still on the air?

I love this kind of thread! But it seems to be hard to get them started and keep them going.

Copying in and expanding upon some of what I wrote in a thread that I made related to this, but which hasn't gotten much traction:

Earth precedents:

• In parts of Africa, closing the circle early resulted in 5 divisions of the octave (not sure if equal), with the octave stretched to work with the inharmonic instruments that could be made and maintained with limited materials availability in a hot climate that is not friendly to most European instruments.
• Some music (Slendro) in Indonesia does the same thing, while some other music (Pelog) in Indonesia uses 9 divisions of the octave (not sure if equal) with 7 of the 9 notes normally being used.

On Golarion:

• Environments commonly used on Golarion but not commonly used on Earth would be expected to have an influence on music-making.
• For instance, those living underground and having easy access to stone and metal but not to wood or most other organics could find themselves pushed in the direction of making instruments of the idiophone families, consisting of struck bars or rods, which would have highly inharmonic partials, thereby causing effective harmonic relations between notes to be different from those produced by stringed, woodwind, and brass instruments; yet they would also be able to make brass instruments and even metal "woodwind" instruents and pipe organs, both of which would tend to have more conventional harmonics. That sounds an awful lot like a large part of the Dwarven population to me, as well as some other Ancestries.
• I can foresee that despite being thought of as stodgy and uninventive by those giving a cursory look from outside, Dwarves might actually have a lot of musical innovation, as crafters of musical instruments take great pride in using the inharmonic partials of idiophones (described above) to generate new forms of harmony and indeed inventing tuning systems together with their instruments, and thereby competing instrument makers might well come up with competing tuning systems.
• They might want an arcanaphone (see below) to glue it all together.
• Since Golarion has working magic, this should enable the development of arcanaphones, which would be Golarion's equivalent of synthesizers, but using magic instead of electricity to generate sound. Given the existence of fairly low-level magic for making convincing sounds of things that aren't really there, the cost of such instruments should be only moderately outrageous -- out of reach of most of the common people, but easily in reach for the nobility and upper merchant classes.
• And if they had short fingers (which also sounds like Dwarves to me, as well as Small Ancestries), it would tend to drive them to develop keyboards of layout radically different from the Halberstadt (piano/harpsichord/organ-style) keyboard familiar to us; such radically different keyboards started to appear at least as early as the 1800s on Earth, so their development on Golarion would not be completely unexpected). Of course, having idiophones lends itself to the use of hammers to strike them, and the idiophone components may or may not be laid out in a pattern like a keyboard (much as seen on Earth). Having short arms and fingers becomes less of a problem if you can use long hammers to get reach.
• And if they had enough wealth, as the Dwarves are reputed to have (along with great longevity), their nobility might even be inclined to splurge for something like a pipe organ having as many as 50 notes per octave as well as numerous ranks, that would cause Earth-based accountants (even those working for nobility) to take fright. Even for the Dwarves, such instruments would almost certainly be very rare, but greatly prized as national treasures.