William-Scott Hathaway's page

That's why the article is so good. Zombies are unnatural because they are of dual nature, living and dead. But they have been with us so long, that they have their own class. Zombies are zombies, which are different class than, say, vampires or ghosts. You don't see a zombie and think "oh, he is 50% human, 50% corpse". You see him and think "he is 100% zombie"

So to make zombies creepy again, you have to mix them with other things that belong to different classes, with unnexpected and unnatural descriptors for a zombie.

A zombie isn't creepy anymore. But what about a zombie rocking a cradle? What about a zombie reading a book? What about a zombie cooking? Or painting a scene of when he was alive? What about a zombie playing with a doll?

I believe the reason for this is because of what you said above. By locking certain creatures into certain behaviors, actions and roles, you make them predictable and quantifiable. Every so often, mixing things up and subverting a player's expectations of how a creature should act can do wonders for setting a mood, especially when it comes to creatures that are "supposed" to be scary. The example I provided above is one, but the vampire that hunts in broad daylight, the werewolf that is more sane during the full moon, or the flesh golem that acts and talks like a living child are also excellent examples, at least one of which has actually been used by Paizo.

I'm still fairly early on the campaign but I have wrapped up the Fishery at this point. My battle with Gaedren was deliberately anticlimactic. Gaedren is an old man, well past his prime, I wouldn't expect him to put up a good fight, and he didn't. One of the party members was almost feeling sorry for him when he all but threw himself on the bloodrager's blade at the end. As the life was slipping out of him I had him chuckle one more time and mutter something about "seeing if Hell was any better than Scarwall". In my version, he was part of a group that traveled through Belkzen once upon a time and stopped by Scarwall to get out of a massive storm. That night all of his companions died and he barely got out alive. He was picked up by a patrol from Lastwall and eventually made his way to Korvosa. That experience started tipping him from 'selfish ass' to 'cynic with no regard for any life but his own.' This has allowed me to foreshadow Part 5 while adding some depth to his character. The party will encounter his old companions amongst the undead of Scarwall and can learn what happened to him there.

Don't know if this will help anyone, just my thoughts on the topic.

My party should be reaching Renchurch in another 4-6 weeks or so. Really looking forward to fooling around with all of the awesome material there, especially this. My party is one that very much likes to take breaks and handle things at their own pace, but they are very under equipped to deal with large numbers of haunts. Hopefully, this will encourage them to take a few more risks and push through rather than take their time.

Hello Paizo forums. I'm looking for a bit of help. I have a group that is, after two and half years, finally about to hit module 6 of Kingmaker. As we'll soon be wrapping up, I want this last module to be particularly memorable.

I've been trying to assign each of the many bosses in this module with one or more musical themes to play alongside them, most of which have been pulled from various video games. I have most of them picked out, but I'm struggling to find appropriate music for The Knurly Witch, Ilthuliak, The Wriggling Man, and Nyrissa herself.

Any ideas would be appreciated, as well as a link to the music.

Pretty sure I found the item with the longest name that other's have been referring to.

I do not know how you guys do it really.

After going through the compulsory 2 wondrous items, I had an interesting object paired against a wall of text. After that, the next two pairings were average to bad against the same. And I just could not keep on voting. After only 3 votes.

That was 4 hours ago and I feel like trying again but I fear the same will happen quickly :-(

Inspirational music, rewards at set milestones, and sheer stubbornness.

Alright, so I had been planning on running a group of four level nine characters through the Tomb of Horrors for the purposes of a playtest. One one of my players however, was so interested in his character build that he asked if we could do a solo adventure just to test him out before hand. I ended up running him through the Entombed with the Pharaohs as a result.

He was playing a level 9 Skald themed after Ronnie James Dio. Over the course of the module, the Skald proved to be an incredibly resourceful class. Having access to the Bard Spell List gave a huge amount of magical versatility. He was able to deal with undead, swarms, outsiders, and constructs simply by making going over his spell list. Throw in Spell Kenning and he always had a spell for any situation, even if he didn't need it.

Ragesong worked quite well. It was able to give him a much needed boost to his combat ability when he didn't have the spell for the job.

Mechanically, within the realms of this small playtest, the Skald looks to be a fairly versatile class capable of dealing with numerous situations whilst alone or with a group. I'll have data on the group playtest within a couple weeks but it does seem like he will synergize fairly well with melee combatants of both the Tank and DPS variety. We'll see.