Wonky Chewbacca's page

I have only heard bad stories about using the proficiency without level rules. I might suggest instead a campaign that will never go beyond level 3 or 5, as Keith Baker(creator of Eberron) describes his "ratcatchers" campaign. Usually in Eberron, we expect NPC's with third level spells to be common. So limiting your players to level 5 or lower will ensure they don't overtake the generals. Instead, players would get extra feats as they advance. A level 7 elite unit is always going to be at the edge of what a level 5 conscript can fight.

Thanks for the tip! I'd never looked at an reporots of prof. without level, I just knew that the concept sounded intriguing.

I've always had a horrified fascination for World War 1, where stagnant tactics and new weapons technologies combined to create some of the more horrifying scenes in our history, and as such fantasy equivalents like Turtledove's Into the Darkness and Eberron's Last War particularly interest me. I loved Shadows of the Last War, from back in 3.5. Does anyone have suggestions for a low-level Eberron game set during the Last War that demonstrates the horrors of this new age of war without
a) having the entire party die with their unit when a living cloudkill comes rolling across the battlefield (or other such unceremonious deaths)
b) sparing them via coincidence and luck so frequently that it becomes conspicuous ("ever notice how the base camp only gets shelled by mage-fire when we're out on patrol?")
I'm already considering using the no level to progression rules, both to allow parties to potentially harm much more dangerous foes and to demonstrate even legendary heroes getting pulled down by greater numbers, and have access to the excellent Pathfinder's Guide to Eberron.

I'm currently attaching character sheets to the last characters from the Companion Guide, and read Groetus's edicts/anathema. Edicts include : "put the suffering out of their misery" and anathema include "artificially extend someone's lifespan or existence".
Can Harrim provide healing to an unconscious ally without violating his god's teachings and risking his powers?
As an aside, back in 1st edition, when deity alignments were just "one step away", I had an idle idea for a CG cleric of Groetus who believed that, in the face of inevitable annihilation, he should convince everybody to grab at every chance for happiness, and to party as hard as possible before the end. I never got around to asking about said concept, but with Gods & Magic at hand it seems way off base. What's a good deity or demideity for "we're all doomed, let's party"?

If we get to the point where PF2 has what it does now, plus an Inquisitor, a Medium, a handful of niche Ancestries I really want (Lashunta, Minotaur, Sekmin, Wyrwood - the list's getting awful short, lately!), and Lost Omens books for the Broken Lands, Golden Road, and bits of Arcadia... I think at that point, I ascend into some kind of higher being, or am finally banished. Something.

I'm honestly still stunned we got Psychics back so fast, and ditto for Androids and Nagaji. Between those and the big Lost Omens setting books so far, Paizo's really taken some good bites out of what I have to beg for.

Wait, did Nagaji come back as a playable ancestry? All I find on AoN is reference to their Bestiary 3 stats. I've been hankering for them to return ever since Alika showed up in Life's Long Shadows.

Stone, bone, obsidian and bronze weaponry and armor, for sure.
Also, phrenology, since Dark Archive brought back some of the occult unlocks. I'm tired of having to rely on Deception in order to handle people's skulls.

Even with the Baphomet connection, let's look at what he has to offer:

Edicts: Confuse paths and roads, outwit your foes instead of overpowering them, pace labyrinths

Anathema: Kill something that cannot significantly harm you, bargain with Asmodeus

That's... honestly not terrible? I mean, the bit where they habitually muck with the transportation infrastructure isn't ideal, but the rest of it seems like it's something you could work with.
...

A little late to the party, and a bit off topic, but my wife has been introducing our son to the Hanna-Barbera shows of her youth, and now the thought of a small cult of Baphomet worshippers based off the Really Rottens from the Laff-A-Lympics is going to haunt me all week. Switching signposts, and all that.

The condition is genetic . Re growing the liver results in the same bad liver coming back. Changing the genetic material for the liver results in a violent exothermic reaction between the growing liver cells and the patients immune system. (hence the name)

Seems plausible. To hare off on a tangent, it makes me wonder if supernaturally tough creatures like dragons would be prone to difficulty with things like organ transplants and anything else requiring immunosuppression? How do you suppress the immune system of a creature with a dozen dragon hit dice (not a thing in Starfinder, but you get the idea) enough to get it to accept a foreign organ without catastrophic side-effects? Even if you could, imagine how murderously virulent draconic pathogens would be, so an immunocompromised dragon would probably be risking death even from exposure to a half-draconic rhinovirus.

Then again, mixing real-world systems and RPG logic is a recipe for strange rabbit-holes.

As students advance through the academia system, they get access to their branch's feats, such as Rain-Scribe Sustenance and Tempest-Sun Redirection. Some of these are handy, some are fairly niche, and then we have Uzunjati Storytelling. Uzunjati Storytelling lets you make a Lore check to impress someone, and then says this will rarely do anything, but might, if the GM feels like, lower a Diplomacy DC.
The level 12 feat you get, as opposed to, say, Cascade Bearers Spellcasting, which lets you pick your halcyon magic off any of the four traditions, or Emerald Boughs Hideaway, which gives you a personal bag of holding, is Uzunjati Recollection, which lets you spend *another* action to get a +1 to the Uzunjati Storytelling feat. A level 12 feat that gives you a +1 to a check that in the text says it won't do anything unless the GM feels like it.
This feels like the Uzunjati are getting such a short end of a stick that I'd have to bring back first edition size categories to measure it. Any suggestions for improvements or replacements?

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

{. . .}

I don't think it would work like that myself. Given how the real world works, some powerful magic user would use magic to advance the world in a fantasy magic world. {. . .}

More likely that they would use it to take joyrides into orbit/the Inner & Outer Planes.

Magic can finesse some very powerful effects at the local level, and occasionally cause regional devastation, but it isn't very good at mass production.

Speaking of other planes, it seems connecting to the Plane of Earth (or City of Brass for that matter) would guarantee Golarions would learn metallurgy, steel, and so forth, at least as a concept to pursue.

Once somebody can regularly contact civilizations from beyond the planet, it seems technology would come swiftly. Privation might make implementing technology hard, make its appearance sporadic (i.e. Thundarr!), yet I'd imagine magic would be similar since it'd be tied to individuals (if all the institutions have to rebuild that is).

I've read that the recent theory is that people knew how to work small quantities of iron well before the Bronze Age ended. They preferred bronze, partly because of how easy it was to decorate with, partly because it didn't rust as badly as early iron, and a few other reasons. It wasn't until near the end, when tin from Middle East was disrupted, and infantry tactics began to overshadow chariots, that iron started to grow more popular. The industrial base had built up a bit, and smaller groups were growing in power; they found iron easier because it didn't need a massive trade network to make possible.

"Sure, mortal, we'll teach you iron in exchange for certain... considerations... The key is the material you use to tile your blast furnace..."
"Our what?"
"Blast furnace. You don't have those? Okay, this'll optimize the temperature you burn your coal at, so listen carefully..."
"Our coal? Our what now?"
"Oh, by Vyr Azul! Okay, listen..."
"Hey, pal, thanks, but it's only 1 point of hardness, right? And bronze only bends on a 1? I think I'm good."

They don't have to be high level to cure disease or poison or heal or create water for endless water.

Given the sheer number of gods, I think there would be tons of priests. I think it would be one of the most common professions in Golarion even more common than it is in the real Ancient world given the magic in Golarion and D&D worlds is real.

I think almost everyone in the world would likely learn some minor cantrips just like most of the modern world has some idea of how to use cell phones and computers. Magic would be like the cell phones and computers of a magic as technology world.

In the current iteration of PF, it would be even more common given the lack of ability minimum requirements to learn. You can have an 8 wisdom and still learn some cantrip.

I think the worlds would develop very differently. Way too many gods providing way too much access to easy magical power as well as ubiquitous users of arcane magic as well as long-lived races and planar interference. It would be a very different strange world that wouldn't mirror our timeline very well.

I think it should be taken into account when designing and thinking about a fantasy type of world.

The Bronze Age just isn't that interesting in a world where gods are providing magic like a pez dispenser, wizards can fabricate things out of thin air, local druids can alter the weather as needed, and you have creatures so powerful and magically inclined they would appear as gods to the locals.

That sounds like a *very* high-magic setting. I don't think such a world would have developed into anything like modern Golarion. I think we may just have irreconcilable takes on the setting, but one final rundown of your points.

1: The average person is suggested to be level 1, since you can't hire craftsmen with higher than a +4 bonus. Create Water isn't a cantrip anymore, so a basic initiate can provide water for a few people, but it'd really be easier to use a well or irrigation ditch, especially since it all evaporates in a day.
2: That sounds like a fascinating setting, but there's nothing in any of the Lost Omens source material to suggest that the guy sewing up the hole in your pants and the barmaid know cantrips. Also, a quick search indicates that even today only half the world has easy access to computers.
3: Don't you need a 14 to take a multiclass dedication, in addition to being level 2? I think we can assume the guy driving the hay to market didn't start as a wizard. Also, PC construction rules aren't necessarily indicative of NPC capabilities. (An argument that could be used for or against me, I realize, but I don't often see NPC blurbs stating CG Female Human swineherd/enchanter.)
4: The entire premise of the witch suggests that being a cleric isn't 'easy', or people wouldn't be cutting deals with their parakeet to get around it. The presence of a god doesn't automatically suggest the presence of clerics to them. The forgotten gods of Danger Island, Lissala, Hylax, Damoritosh and the old gods of Androffa are all gods that exist, yet none of them have much in the way of clergy on the ground on Golarian at this time. Keep in mind that, from the perspective of the character, being a worker of divine miracles isn't as simple as clicking 'cleric' on the class bar in the hour before they wink into existence, it represents years or decades of dedicated training and above average faith. Ditto for wizards, demonstrably so here, as arcane magic was outright lost until the Old-Mage reinvented it.
5: I think it is wise to consider the role that magic would play when envisioning a world, but the idea that all fantasy worlds derived from the same set of game mechanics must develop in the same way isn't very convincing. We've got multiple continents even in the modern Golarion, all of which developed with their own unique natures, none of which were dictated solely by what the casters were up to at the time.
6: The Bronze Age is absolutely the place for gods developing often fickle blessings to their heroes, and strange beasts being worshipped or propitiated as terrible gods (how many demigods had to rescue sacrifices from god-sent beasts?). As for the other two, fabricating a house from thin air is great, but it's going to vanish tomorrow and I'll still need a house then, and I don't think they've ever portrayed Golarion as so crazy high-level that level 13 druids are all over the place, altering the weather as needed.

---

In more direct response to OP, I've found entertainment trying to map regions of human history to relative dates of Golarion history for comparison, sometimes with interesting results. For example, the mythic time of Atlantis from Plato's Republic roughly lines up with the last...

Yes, I'm really thinking that the Tarrasque showing up is a good starting point. Ninshabur falls at the hands of level-inappropriate encounter, Taldor probably hardly gets off lightly (a couple civilizations did survive the Bronze Age Collapse, at cost), and the fall of the Shory would be a properly epic high point of the game. Ideally, Osirion would be at the height of its power, but historical Egypt had a habit of telling itself that it was still at the height of its empire centuries after the fact, so I can probably make that the perception without even tinkering with the timeline. Maybe throw in a couple more Spawn for the lulz.

Interestingly, if one were going for a time that matched scientifically (which is, obviously, a madman's pursuit), the Age of Darkness does have a certain resemblance. Some historians now think that the Collapse started with a super-volcano eruption that dimmed the sun for a few years and caused massive crop failures all over Europe.
Oh, well, at least it wasn't 1816.

As a tangential aside, Eberron is an excellent example of how you can fine-tune things beyond 'high magic' and 'low magic'. 'Common but minor magic' gets you something approaching our modern era, whereas 'rare but powerful magic' gets you something more Middle Earth-ish.

Wonky Chewbacca wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

A game where the magic doesn't exceed modern technology that would allow the powers in the world to have far more powerful technology than a real Bronze Age World.

D&D worlds are places where priests cure diseases with magic, heal instantly, and raise the dead. Magic users can create things out of thing air. Even alchemists can manipulated chemicals to do incredible things beyond modern day tech.

I get you sort of want to use some historical inspiration for culture creation. But you'll always have to acknowledge D&D worlds would make our modern technology seem just ok.

I think the big difference there is ubiquity. Sure, Remove Disease is handier than a regimen of antibiotics, but you're not necessarily goimg to have temples that stock level 5 clerics every dfew blocks, and paying for a spell is way more pricey (probably, tryimg to convert GP to USD is a rabbit hole to fall down). Raising the dead in particular rarely gets a mention, outside of PCs and (rather more infrequently) enemies of PCs. In some settings or eras, magic may be rarely available to the man in the street, with clerics mostly occupied in ritual, temple politics, and waiting on nobles, while arcane casters are either sequestered away with their own otherworldly concerns, or simpy feared and misunderstood.

On the other end of the spectrum is Eberron, which while made of purest awesome is about as far from what I'm aiming for here as one can get without digging my father's Spelljammer books out of the closet.
TL:DR, I think one can absolutely run a game that invokes the Bronze Age or Neolithic, you just need to keep in mind that magic can be on a slider just like technology.

I don't think it would work like that myself. Given how the real world works, some powerful magic user would use magic to advance the world in a fantasy magic world. There would be a huge number of priests given the number of gods allowing the use of magic to improve and care for the world....

Well, three points:

First, the assumption that there are high-level people idly kicking around all over the place is just that, an assumption. It applies to modern Golarion because of all the APs people need to kill their way through, and it *definitely* applies in Forgotten Realms, but Eberron, for instance, calibrates things so that very few people have actual PC levels, and even then someone above level 5 is exceptional. The Bronze Age is a time of mythic heroes, true, but one way you could present that is that, with much of pre-Earthfall history lost, everybody who can so much as forge a good suit of armor or cast a fireball starts attracting rumors about being the child of Nethys or Gorum.
Second, the thing about technology is its reproducibility. A lvl 9 wizard can do things that nobody can with modern technology, but if they're adventuring on the other side of the continent they're not really changing the life of the average Joe (except for preventing them from being eaten by chimeras.) There's probably some guy crafting everburning lanterns to decorate noble's homes, but even that, one of the most basic magical conveniences, represents the entirety of how many week's income for a normal worker? A skilled hireling can, with an 11 on the roll, get 2 sp a day. (Since there's no option in the corebook to hire anybody better, one can assume that people with higher checks are definitely not the norm.) That's over ten weeks pay, right there. Unless those in power are making an effort to spread their largesse and create a wondrous, magical city where everybody benefits, the commoners are never going to see any of that.
Finally, (and this is all archaeological speculation), part of the reason that technology remained relatively stagnant (compared to when it took off in Classical Greece, if we're sticking to the Mediterranean) was mentality. Lots of discoveries were made, but the idea that one should disseminate and share knowledge, instead of hoarding it for your own people's benefit, hadn't really caught on. Seafarers suspected the world was round (even if they weren't crazy enough to try sailing around it in the ships of the time), but that was a trade secret, kept within the brotherhood of navigators. You didn't go telling farmers.
One could assume people would be equally clannish with the supernatural arts. "Sell wands and scrolls? I labored for three years to work out the base principles of Magnificent Mansion, sir. Why would I give Ibrahim over in Nefvarin the chance to reverse engineer it and steal my secrets?! Sure, the coin would be nice, but my home has as many luxuries as I can fill it with, politics bore me, and unless somebody figures out how to build a cinnabar mine I bargain with shaitans to get most of my research materials, and they want more interesting things than silver dinars."

A game where the magic doesn't exceed modern technology that would allow the powers in the world to have far more powerful technology than a real Bronze Age World.

D&D worlds are places where priests cure diseases with magic, heal instantly, and raise the dead. Magic users can create things out of thing air. Even alchemists can manipulated chemicals to do incredible things beyond modern day tech.

I get you sort of want to use some historical inspiration for culture creation. But you'll always have to acknowledge D&D worlds would make our modern technology seem just ok.

I think the big difference there is ubiquity. Sure, Remove Disease is handier than a regimen of antibiotics, but you're not necessarily goimg to have temples that stock level 5 clerics every dfew blocks, and paying for a spell is way more pricey (probably, tryimg to convert GP to USD is a rabbit hole to fall down). Raising the dead in particular rarely gets a mention, outside of PCs and (rather more infrequently) enemies of PCs. In some settings or eras, magic may be rarely available to the man in the street, with clerics mostly occupied in ritual, temple politics, and waiting on nobles, while arcane casters are either sequestered away with their own otherworldly concerns, or simpy feared and misunderstood.

On the other end of the spectrum is Eberron, which while made of purest awesome is about as far from what I'm aiming for here as one can get without digging my father's Spelljammer books out of the closet.
TL:DR, I think one can absolutely run a game that invokes the Bronze Age or Neolithic, you just need to keep in mind that magic can be on a slider just like technology.

(Worth noting that the OP themselves has suggested it might be better for the thread to be derailed into silliness, especially since the mods aren't about.)

I mean, unless someone wants to donate, oh, 150 gp in onyx for my horse? It'll be more resistant to bludgeoning afterwards.

I would say the Earthfall and subsequent Age of Darkness are pretty easy to compare wirh the bronze age collapse

That'd been my first thought, but I haven't found much information about Casmaron before Earthfall. Are there any sources out there?

And, of course, setting it in a time with Ninshabur and Ancient Osirion around contributes to the aesthetics of the period rather handily.

Are you focusing on the Bronze Age or the widespread collapse?

With all of Golarion's major empires and ancient species, I don't think any time period qualifies for the former. Technology's always been skewed from Earth norms, with metallurgy in particular quite advanced. And the empires have outstripped anything from our Bronze Age so you might have to find a time after one fractured, yet I wouldn't say there's anything bronze about that.
As for the latter, there are many instances depending on what flavor of destruction you'd prefer or how much chaos.

Perhaps if you listed/ranked which aspects you'd like to include then it might be easier to answer. PCs don't usually operate at the scales/scope/timeframe we're talking about (unless trying to prevent it as a campaign arc!) so which bits were you thinking would be part of their narrative? And before, during, after?

I imagine one could tune Kingmaker to fit that motif, rising after the fall, or perhaps protecting one's kingdom from said collapse. Conan's setting might work as well (if there are any RPG materials still available that is). And depending.

Yes, less of a "prevent this" and more of a "survive this and lay the foundations for society's rebirth". Kingdom rules could be handy, though my attempts to graft them onto 2e always feel clunky.

I suppose the collapse of a bunch of ancient, sophisticated city-states in the face of environmental crisis and rampaging refugees is what fascinated me. Egypt knocked out of its golden age, Mycenae, Ugarit, Hattusha all wiped out over a span of mere years... I suppose one could substitute "Spawn of Rovagug" for "super volcano ". Didn't the Tarrasque take out the Ninshabur civilization? I should look at the timeline of when the various Spawn were devastating Garund. If Ulinat & Xotani vs Osirion and Tarrasque v Ninshabur roughly line up, I may have a thing. And for low-level mooks, I'm sure Rovagug's cult spikes in activity whenever its Spawn are active.

I'm studying up on ancient history (and reading Island in the Sea of Time) and it seems like a fascinating period. Any suggestions, either to a similar period in the canon history or where one could be inserted?
I haven't seen vast amounts on Ninshabur in the core books, but it seems like my best bet. Are there any books that go into more detail? And did it ever get near Osirion during the time when its borders were at their height? What other cultures and kingdoms were in the region at the time?

If you aren't explicitly a girl in your avatar and username, people assume you're not a girl. Changing the username isn't even always enough, as it's turned out.

Also, I like catgirls. Who doesn't?

Makes sense. I need a better avatar, people still don't get that I'm half-Wookiee on my mother's side. As for catgirls, some of the more hipster foxpeople I know seem to have some obscure aggro, the peasants.

EDIT: Not seeking to denigrate you or the legendary carpet of chest-hair Lictor Sabinus hides under that hellknight plate. I've never tried to derail a thread (much less my own) before, and am unsure as to the reccomended level of irreverent whimsy to use.

If a shepherd cleric of Obad-Hai was into breeding Pokemon with normal animals and spinning comfortable loose-fitting garments with the wool, she'd be a Mareep-sheep-shawl Shalm-shaman

That's the spirit.

By the way, I appreciate the herculean efforts you've made these past months to act as a voice of reason and civility on these boards. If you don't mind me asking, why the name change?

Some of the people I've talked to genuinely seem to be itching for a Very Specific Idea Of What Queer/Left-Leaning People Are Like. They want the "SJW I can own with my clever talking points", and so many of their takes just feel like they're arguing with phantoms.

It's where the "Twitter warriors" came from. It's where the "torches and pitchforks" came from. They can't find any of us being "triggered" the way they want us to be, so they just sort of make people up to be mad about.

If you like you can start talking to me about shalms, if it helps.

Oh god, there's another thread about this??? How many do we need? Give the mods the holiday break off, people.

I'd hoped to avoid it by phrasing myself as diplomatically as I could, and keeping an agreeable tone to my responses, but it does seem to have reverted to ground state, yes. I got some decent feedback before it fell apart, but I apologize, nevertheless.

I will note that while Pathfinder is, ultimately, a game with the underlying intent of entertainment, its therapeutic value is quite real. What is therapy but mental healing, and what is fun but healing from the stresses and damages that living inflicts? Gaming has been critical in helping me explore the nuances of my gender, besides helping me defeat (by proxy) things I lack the power to throw fireballs at in real life.
Still, don't heal at the cost of others. If writing the old stories is causing the writers harm, the early parts of this thread provide many useful suggestions for alternatives we can seek. I for one had missed Luis Loza's original post, and was unsure what level of the company the decision had come from, or I would probably have started this on reddit or some such.

1. Challenging the inclusion of fighting racists with me and not with the person who inserted it into your statement prior is curious.

2. If you need to face current real world injustices for your group to feel catharsis, would it not be better to play one of the many alternate history games where fighting against real like monstrous injustice is the point of the game?

1. Yours is the first response that felt like a personal attack, so yours is the first I've felt the need to defend myself against.

2. I've looked at a fair number of game systems, and I've never seen anybody who does it better that Paizo. White Wolf doesn't give a damn about things like encounter balance, Chaosium has this guanopsychotic d100 system that looks like it never evolved past the 80s, Exalted is either 300 pages of errata or... whatever they were trying with 3rd edition.

I don't think there is need to assume everyone preferring darker material is acting in bad faith (despite my bad experiences with warhammer fans ;P Some people can just like dark stuff without ulterior motive), but I definitely would prefer to see break from this subject for few months at least before it returns x'D

That's fair, it's been a fraught few months. I've only kept my fool mouth shut this long through teeth-and-fingernails willpower.

I've said my piece, let the devs make of it what they will, and gained some options and suggestions in the process. Call it a win.

Pathfinder has plenty of recent "dark" content, and no indications they want to veer away from the vast majority of it. Take a look at the big-bad/main encounter zone in the first adventure of Agents of Edgewatch. Bad guys who are implied to do virtually any sort of terrible things off-screen = fine. I have no idea what we'll see in the upcoming Blood Lords AP, but I expect it'll have some significant darkness.

Given the outcry that accompanied Agents of Edgewatch, I'm not sure how much of anything from that AP that we'll be seeing again. The Blood Lords AP is encouraging, I'll admit.

Sanityfaerie wrote:

He's asking for the opportunity to stab rapists and slavers in the face, because he and his playgroup find the experience of stabbing rapists and slavers in the face to be cathartic.

Well no, he’s asking for the company that just took it on the chin for the current state of slavery in their game to double down and make adventures exclusively built around slavery and to up the ante in the process and include rapists because somehow fighting slavers and rapists is more cathartic than fighting Owlbears and Bugbears.

Let’s not let all the context of the ask drip out.

Pretty sure rapists never came up in any of my posts. No 'somehow' about it, there just aren't enough owlbear-related injustices currently plaguing the Earth to drive home my general inability to address them in real life.

PATHFINDER DARK: FOR WHEN THERE'S ALREADY A WHOLE SETTING, BUT YOU ONLY NEED THE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEE

(I hope people remember monster truck commercials)

Well, if I can advertise it like that, I might drop the whole 'job' thing to pursue writing modules full time.

keftiu wrote:

I don’t want this, the devs don’t want to write this, and it wouldn’t be usable in Society play. I really don’t think this is gonna happen. As others have said, this sort of thing is why Infinite exists.

Yes, it definitely wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, but I thought there'd be no harm in asking.

Amusingly (to me), the absence of much support for the idea suggests to me... how to put this...?
We've had a lot of people complaining about judging older historical periods by modern moral standards, and decrying the sanitization of the setting for a variety of claimed reasons. Since the only reason I can think of to portray evil is to overcome that evil, maybe I've stripped some of the ambiguity from my view of their claims.
(No surprise to most, I'm sure. Apologies, my persistent tinnitus keeps me from hearing higher pitches.)

Or, alternately, there's been yet another thread on roughly the same subject developing in parallel to mine, that's been keeping people busy. That's what I get for being such a slow typist.

I don’t want this, the devs don’t want to write this, and it wouldn’t be usable in Society play. I really don’t think this is gonna happen. As others have said, this sort of thing is why Infinite exists.

Yes, it definitely wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, but I thought there'd be no harm in asking.

Amusingly (to me), the absence of much support for the idea suggests to me... how to put this...?
We've had a lot of people complaining about judging older historical periods by modern moral standards, and decrying the sanitization of the setting for a variety of claimed reasons. Since the only reason I can think of to portray evil is to overcome that evil, maybe I've stripped some of the ambiguity from my view of their claims.
(No surprise to most, I'm sure. Apologies, my persistent tinnitus keeps me from hearing higher pitches.)

Darker, grittier and "classic" PF can easily turn into shock value IMO. Even just so that you can show how your villains really are horrible beings worthy of your worst. Hence my warning.

It's a fair warning to keep in mind, to be sure. Hook Mountain Massacre was... excessive, no argument, there.

Good points, all, particularly SanityFaerie.
I do have great hopes for Pathfinder Infinite, as that swings into gear.
I've considered converting older PF1 titles, though I've been waiting for the selection of items and monsters to grow more robust and save me time in that respect (I suppose with the Grand Bazaar and 3 Bestiaries out it may be time to get cracking on Legacy of Fire).
While doing terminal things to terrible people is pleasing, I also love the opportunity for being faced with terrible situations with no obvious 'best' choice. I loved War for the Crown for its murkier situations and need to compromise in the face of situational realities. Kill the murderous spider baron, even if he's mostly a jerk under a nasty curse, and you'll probably have to kill his retainers in the process, who are just trying to cope in a messed-up situation that their loyalties won't let them out of? (Mind you, it was all the sweeter when the party decided to dump a bunch of money into a trio of Break Enchantment scrolls and risk life and limb playing interference while the invisible bard tried to get off a sufficient UMD check, but figuring out how to direly risk life or limb taking an unexpected third option is part of the 'lesser of two evils' scenario.)
I'll have to look into 3pp. I've always hesitated because Paizo's writing is, by and large, stellar, and they've spoiled me, but if their market demographics have shifted that is where their first priority needs to be. I still love much of what they're coming out with (any AP that goes to Mars or gives me tundra nomads on megafauna would be okay in my book regardless, really). The last time I glanced in the direction of 3pp was back in 3.0, and so much of that was rubbish. Still, that's been... never mind how many years. I'll do some research into that angle.

Paizo's writers, staff, and editors have expressed their disinterest in writing about these topics.

What you're asking for is for Paizo to go out of their way to specifically hire, train, and retain people at all levels of their organization with the only requirement being that they enjoy writing about edgy stuff.

There isn't a big enough market for that, and honestly, would likely result in catastrophic organizational problems.

You can also use all those elements in your home games to your heart's content, so I don't know why you'd need Paizo to go out of their way.

Did they express that? Alas. Maybe an independent creator browsing the forums will notice.

As I mentioned before, I have very little time to write my own campaigns, these days. Work and parenting barely leave time to show up for sessions, much less build them.

In recent years it's been Paizo's policy to de-emphasize many of the more odious social elements that were established in Golarion's younger days. I understand and for the most part support the reasoning; many of Paizo's customers seek escapist fantasy and don't wish to be reminded traumas that they or their ancestors or kin may have experienced. Nevertheless...
I and most of my players seek a more cathartic style of play. We process our traumas and assorted modern angsts by facing truly visceral evils and an imperfect, flawed world, and stabbing them with a +3 sword. Would that I had the time to plan more of my own games, but the popularity of the Adventure Path line shows I'm not alone there. Therefore, I'm asking to see what sort of support there might be for Pathfinder Dark, or Pathfinder Classic if you will, an run of games with more mature themes, independent from the main line.
As others have mentioned, some of us want to free slaves, and to face drug dealers, bigots, imperialists. Why not a step further, with an adventure where the PCs are slaves and have to save themselves and their fellow downtrodden, rather than be rescued by others? Or morally murky adventures where one has to infiltrate vile criminal organizations in order to dismantle them from within? A long-running Galt adventure, where one had to balance the desire for true reform while staying in the favor of a mob that only seeks to perpetuate a cycle of violence and blame?
Pathfinder made its mark initially not only through a superior level of writing, but its darker, grittier world that held true, non-cartoonish evils, and felt like a realistic world, warts and all. I know some people here miss that feel, often at length. The original Dragon Age held the same sort of appeal for me, and I don't think I'm alone in my willingness to shell out my income for 'low fantasy' stories. Although one could hardly call it low fantasy, I always loved Exalted for its depiction of a fallen, Bronze Age world that needed fixing. It's a pity the ruleset is such a train-wreck (or three separate train-wrecks, by edition).
It should be clarified that I'm not asking about a line of evil adventures. Hell's Vengeance never held much appeal for me. Crushing realistic evils, not glamorizing them, that's the sweet spot for me. I understand that can be a fine line to avoid, given the sort of fanbase that might be attracted otherwise, but think that it would be worth it to try.
What do we think?

It will be interesting to see how paleolithic weapons and armor are handled (if at all) in this AP: how they function in 2E, what magic items and treasure looks like in such an environment, if there will be some barter rules, and how such equipment would compare to equipment of comparable level heroes from more technologically advanced regions in Golarion.

By all that's holy, I hope so. I've tinkered with Stone Age game concepts ever since Far Cry Primal (and a variety of movies, and Monster Hunter, which doesn't quite match up), but I've never worked out a replacement for a coin economy that I was quite satisfied with. If I can find it here, my "Iruxi tribes in Antarctica back when it was a forest during the Cretaceous" will have everything it needs!

Even if not, face-explodingly stoked about this one!

Midnightoker wrote:

Fetchlings pretty please! Gnoll is a huge favorite since I have an old Gnoll character.

An aberrative touched Ancestry for those that want to be more tethered to the occult essences.

Aberrations are tricky things to pull off as PC races, or as non-evil for that matter. One of the toughest challenges I had back in Lords of Madness for D&D was to come up with a non-evil aberration race. There's nothing in the creature type that says "MUST BE EVIL" but the fact that they're supposed to be, well, aberrant, means that they can't fit into normal society or life in some way. Which makes them tough calls for things that should be able to fit in to a society, which is what has to be an underlying assumption for a player ancestry since the game's about characters working together in a society in most cases.

It's further a challenge in that the further we get away from the expectation of human sized and human shaped, things we take for granted in world design and adventure design start falling apart. If we make nagas a PC option, what sort of wearable magic items can they wear? How do they handle things like doorknobs? What if the adventure expects every player to have feet for some reason?

Starfinder's probably a better game to look to if you want to play truly unusually shaped characters... but even then it gets tricky and potentially has unintentionally comical or unbelievable situations showing up that can break a table's verisimilitude.

You made the silthilar (those were then aberration searms, yes? Been too long simce I cracked open my LoM.)? I loved those guys and their grafts!

Er, addressing the original post...

At the behest of my players, I have homebrewed a gnoll ancestry, and will be posting it in Homebrew tomorrow when I have access to a real keyboard. I will be welcoming all all advice and comments (on how workable they are, not the whole genocide issue that ate this thread alive). I will particularly be welcoming anyone with ideas for recreating the Net weapon, as I have a barbed net as a racial (ancestral, I suppose, after 25 years of gaming that's going to take some getting used to) advanced weapon to round out the ol' flindbars.

I am a lying liar who lies. After perusing the entries in both Homebrew and Conversions, I concluded that the aforementioned entry would best fit in the Conversion section.

Er, addressing the original post...
At the behest of my players, I have homebrewed a gnoll ancestry, and will be posting it in Homebrew tomorrow when I have access to a real keyboard. I will be welcoming all all advice and comments (on how workable they are, not the whole genocide issue that ate this thread alive). I will particularly be welcoming anyone with ideas for recreating the Net weapon, as I have a barbed net as a racial (ancestral, I suppose, after 25 years of gaming that's going to take some getting used to) advanced weapon to round out the ol' flindbars.

After an initial wailing and gnashing of teeth after reading about the minion trait, I have since started a hunt for solutions, and thought I would address the gallery. In combat, I understand the necessity; the action economy is a critical feature that they're strictly regulating. But what about outside of combat? What if I want my beastie, to paraphrase another, to chase down fleeing bandits, hunt for food, or guard the camp while we're away or while I sleep? Do they lapse into a stupor the moment I stop Commanding or lose sight of them?
It then occurred to me that the Minion trait is mostly dealing with Encounter Mode, where the action economy is at play, yes? So, my questions are:
1:What independent actions do you use your animals for?
2: What exploration/downtime activities can we coopt, modify, or invent to represent them?
Some are obviously trickier than others, such as bandit chasing. If they're fleeing, defeated foes, maybe something as simple as a skill check or attack roll against a level-based DC? No need to slow down play mopping up, after all.

In the Triaxus section it mentions Ryphoran half-elves, yes.

But, it also goes on to say (and I'm paraphrasing) that they're identical to other half-elves (so no fur or weird ears or seasonal variation). That implies that they're compatible with the other half-elves (and with humans). It also, in character, seems to be causing some consternation as it implies that Ryphorans are more like humans than was previously thought.

Well, sure. Ryphorians are the only other species that I can call to mind rocking the general bonus feat. Clearly the same chromosome that gives you a bonus feat also makes you elf-compatible.

Well, after a day or so I managed to locate my brain, and found the rules for her hacking into robots, at least (listed under the Treasures section about her Compact AI Core). Thanks for the clarification and suggestions for my other questions, all. I'll put on my miner's helmet and start digging through the Ask James Jacobs thread. If I don't come back, tell my wife I love her.