Xenophile's page

For context: I ran S&S over Skype, and for various reasons the game petered out halfway into Book 2, but I had plans for how to handle things up to and including Book 3. Looking over the AP again made me want to share some of them.

When I was looking over the NPCs, I couldn't help but notice that Tessa Fairwind and Sandara Quinn were almost identical, both in personality (Pretty Girl Who Thinks You're Cool) and appearance (Skinny Pale Redhead in a "Sexy Pirate" Costume). In-game, I used the Besmaran Priest from Isles of the Shackles for Sandara's character portrait. Personality-wise I focused on the fact that she's a devotee of the pirate goddess who's new to actual piracy; enthusiastic but out of her element, acting on holy teachings instead of practical experience. She ended up in a casual romance with the party's captain, a female (but very androgynous) half-elf barbarian who she saw as embodying the true pirate spirit.

As for Tessa, I decided to play up the traits described in her NPC Gallery entry and present her as comically decadent. Not Caligula decadent, just Oscar Wilde decadent. She almost always has someone on hand with a platter of fruit and drinks. She reflexively lounges whenever she sits down, even at important meetings. She flirts with everyone to the point where other Free Captains just block it out. She gambles with those lucky dice of hers, often for small and petty stakes. She says "yes" like "mmmmyeees" for some reason. To her, piracy isn't about fame, fortune, or power, though those certainly help achieve the real goal: doing whatever she wants whenever she wants, and never doing anything that isn't fun if she can help it.

"Alright, make yourself at home, just don't sit on any documents. Or move any documents, I have a very precise organizational system. Well it won't kill you to stand for a couple minutes! Look, you asked me what I've been working on all this time, and against my better judgement I'm showing you, so I'd appreciate some gratefulness.

"It all started in 4707. I was in Magnimar when the murders started: bodies with ancient symbols carved into them popping up left and right. It was pretty hairy for a while. But then four adventurers mosey into town and take down the whole cult behind it and just move on. Not long after I start hearing rumors about giant activity in the region, a whole army of them gathering from all corners, but before anyone can separate rumors from facts it gets busted up by the same four people! So I start asking questions, looking for patterns, and there are signs that the cultists and the giants were both being influenced by some kind of ancient wizard-king. What do you think happened to him? Killed by our mysterious champions.

"Now, that's all pretty wild, but Varisia is a pretty wild place. I didn't think too much of it until the very next year, when Korvosa had its plague-rebellion double whammy. Can you guess who got mad Queen Ileosa off the throne? No! A different band of adventurers! And barely a month later, Riddleport had that falling star incident. According to some very reliable sources, the whole thing was a part of some secret dark elf scheme, and the only reason they didn't do worse is because of yet another fighting foursome. All different people, but all packing more skill and resources than most small armies could muster.

"After that the region cooled off for a while, but I knew something big was going on, so I started to look outwards, and everywhere I looked the same pattern started cropping up. In Cheliax, the former capital gets overrun with fiends; four heroes save the day. In Ustalav, a cult tries to resurrect the Whispering Tyrant; four heroes save the day. In the River Kingdoms, a new nation springs up practically overnight and fends off an incursion from the First World; its leaders are four heroes. I'd bet you anything that the same things have been going on in Garund, maybe even Tian Xia.

"And then it all comes back to Magnimar. The tsunami of 4713 hits and a whole city rises off the coast ready to launch an invasion; the only reason we all survived is because of those celebrity Pathfinders who had been dashing around the region. After that, I wasn't surprised to hear that the Worldwound had been closed. It's just an extension of what's been happening for almost a decade, on a larger scale. Crisis after crisis is averted by relative outsiders with the power to take on armies alone. It can't be a coincidence.

"This isn't 'one of my crackpot theories,' everything I've been telling you is fact! Here's a theory: this whole world is coming apart at the seams, and someone or something has been coordinating small, elite teams to counteract it! Right now signs point towards the Pathfinder Society; they have considerable reach and grasp, and the groups seem to follow similar tactics in the field, but the Pathfinders almost never get involved with political power like these people do. I briefly thought that someone could be masterminding these incidents as excuses to put their agents in control of local governments, but I don't know anything that could mastermind the kinds of extraplanar forces involved. Maybe Aroden's disappearance has something to do with it all... if prophecies have no power, that means the end of the world isn't some fated event, it could happen at any time or be postponed indefinitely. It's all heavy stuff.

"I don't expect you to believe all of this at once, but if you look at my findings-- What? No! This is all real! Just because you don't care about anything that happens more than two miles away from-- Get out of my house!"

I don't want to step into the mathematical crossfire going on, but since the "no mechanical justification for leadership" thing has cropped up again...

Should I make my NPCs roll off-screen to justify their achievements? Does the town blacksmith need to make Craft checks if I want there to be weapons and armor available for purchase? By the same logic, does a BBEG's master plan require a series of Intelligence rolls to formulate, followed by numerous Diplomacy checks against the DCs needed to make their minions Helpful? If I want the PCs to encounter a town ransacked by said minions, is it necessary to play out the attack beforehand, complete with Profession (Soldier) rolls to properly coordinate?

Mechanics are only relevant in terms of how the PCs interact with everything else. Granted, this doesn't mean mental Attributes are meaningless; a spellcaster might raise his eyebrows if one Touch of Idiocy reduces a mastermind to a vegetable with minimal damage. But narrative questions like "how did he rise to power?" don't need to be answered with numbers.

Follow-up: more and more I'm seeing this as a good argument for the old-fashioned ways before Skills became a big deal. A character's ability to locate hidden treasure or negotiate with uncooperative NPCs was based on the player's ability to describe what they did rather than a bonus and a roll. These two methods have equal merit in my eyes, but things like this definitely cast the alternative in a better light.

I don't think anyone is saying "you can't do cool fantasy with humans anymore," it's just that 99% of cool fantasy is about humans and human lookalikes already. I don't think it makes you a special snowflake for wanting something that hasn't been the default for forty years.

Though the obvious rebuttal to that is, "Then why are you playing Dungeons & Dragons?"

(just for the record, I totally know what you mean about 3.5/PF's mechanical hangups, I'm mostly in it for the APs rather than the system itself)

Okay, I see this topic crop up on a pretty regular basis, but it never reflects what I perceive as the norm. Are traditional "some humans, an elf, and a dwarf" parties really in the minority after decades of being the only option? Sure, you see the occasional band of exotic adventurers, but they're more visible by virtue of being exceptional.

If you ask me, adventurers are ALWAYS weird; the only reason it isn't "immersion breaking" to see an armored soldier, a healer-priest, an arcane sage, and some sneaky guy with knives all wandering around together with no ties to a larger organization is because that's the kind of absurdity that we've come to accept without questioning.

FOLLOW-UP: It should probably be noted that Golarion acknowledges this old game logic concession as an actual element of the world; most people are familiar with the idea of adventuring parties and their unique line of business, and the Pathfinder Society has all but standardized it. And I like that, because it's a game setting that really KNOWS it's a game setting and doesn't force you to awkwardly explain all the old cliches that necessitate a campaign. But I'm getting off-topic.

Rust monsters really sum up the D&D monster aesthetic to me. Their natural habitat is sprawling abandoned underground complexes, and their primary food source is the equipment of overconfident adventurers. They look like crosses between beetles and glyptodonts; I think they might have been created when Gary Gygax used a box of cheap plastic "dinosaur" toys as miniatures. Plus, they're kinda cute in a buggy way.

Owlbears probably take second place for many of the same reasons. When you run into either of those guys, you know what kind of game you're playing.

Xenophile wrote:

I think that it's very easy to see the rules as your master instead of your tool...

Wow. This sums up what I've been feeling for a good time. During my early D&D 3rd edition days (also my earliest DMing experience), justifying plot stuff as rules components made me feel more confident and rules-savvy. As the time passed, it became more and more of an obligation to my rules-lawyering players.

4th edition broke that mold incidentally saying "OK, this goblin shaman has this special power that only he has". Say what you will about that system, but you could really design a monster/NPC with whatever power you felt it needed. Paizo has done that many times over the years (most important NPCs have special, cool and unique abilities) but we're still somewhat shackled to this "must follow every rule" attitude.

Yeah, that's where I got that mindset too. 4E was my first taste of D&D (having only played GURPS before), and between the system itself and the painful edition wars I learned a lot about game design philosophies. Unfortunately, I also have a strong sense of insecurity when it comes to houseruling, so it can be hard to put those lessons to use.

I think that's still a pretty reductive viewpoint, but then again, this is a pretty reductive game (see: alignments). The nature of intelligence is far, far out of my areas of expertise, and even if it was, arguing about it would just cause derailment.

Now, if you want to make a mechanically smart fighter with a limited point build, here's something that can help you: there are literally magic hats in this world that can make you smarter, wiser, and more charming. I can actually see some random amoral adventurer putting on a headband he found in a dragon's lair and suddenly thinking, "Whoa, I've been going about this all the wrong way! Political power beats loot every time. Let's see, if I invest what I have wisely and start building support, then in a few years I might be able to organize a local coup and..."

I have to say, this thread has been a great source of ideas.

In a fantasy setting, Boudicea is probably a reasonably leveled aristocrat with high Charisma and just above average Intelligence, maybe a 12. She has Diplomacy and was able to unite several tribes. (While she doesn't need to make those checks, being an NPC, I would feel bad as a DM if I didn't give her the ability to do so.) She had loads of poorly-equipped troops. Her opponents were far fewer, better trained, disciplined and equipped (higher level) and had a commander with lots of ranks in Profession (soldier) and a higher Intelligence score.

Honestly, I would not advise tacking Attribute scores onto actual people, historical or otherwise. In real life, things like how smart and skilled you are go far beyond a single numerical value, and you can't claim that anyone won or lost because of some fundamental difference in brain power.

A lot of the things I wanted to say in this thread have already been said, so a big thanks for that. I think that it's very easy to see the rules as your master instead of your tool, but in the end the mechanics are just there to keep combat scenarios balanced (at least primarily). You can have a BBEG with Int 7 who's still a tactical mastermind, so long as it's expressed through roleplaying elements rather than feats.

Just for fun, I decided to come up with a narrative explanation for the fighteriest fighter that ever fightered becoming an evil leader.
You start off with Gladius McSword, yet another disposable soldier in the army of Malevoland. He's as smart as a horse and half as charming, but he's physically fit and he knows how to use a weapon. He survives battle after battle, honing his martial talents along the way and climbing the ranks. It quickly becomes obvious that he's useless in a position of leadership, so his superiors decide to put his skills to use elsewhere: as the king's bodyguard. This works out, until the king is swayed by foreign diplomats to halt Malevoland's military conquest. War is all that Gladius has ever known, and he can't comprehend any reason to not kill people and take their stuff, so that's exactly what he does to the king. Naturally, Malevoland's royal vaults contain a number of powerful artifacts, and he has just enough cunning to use them as leverage and stay in power. Meanwhile, the royal adviser, who's actually quite brilliant and prefers to influence things indirectly, offers his services in guiding the kingdom towards Gladius's vision of glory.
And so you get King Fighter, an unsurpassed master of stabbing with the mind of a rabid dog, armed with the resources of an entire nation and hell-bent on taking over the world because he can. I think that would be an enjoyable BBEG.

I'm... on the fence. A lot of these do sound interesting, and the magus did pull off the old and notorious fighter/wizard hybrid very well, so there's some precedent.

But one of my favorite things about PF as a system is that the archetypes allow the handful of "vanilla" classes to cover a wide range of concepts, even by combining elements from other classes sometimes. Unlike in 3.5, you don't need a special scout class (for example) when you can just tweak a ranger or rogue to fit the niche. In fact, I'd argue that the ninja and samurai should have just been meaty rogue and cavalier archetypes, but that's behind us now.

Furthermore, a lot of these concepts were already very close together. Rangers were already pretty similar to druids and rogues, and "battle clerics" have never been very hard to make. The magus works so well because wizards and fighters have virtually no overlap, so combining them creates something very new. From what we've seen, the battlerager is probably closest to this formula, and I'm actually pretty interested in seeing it. The barbarian and the sorcerer are already like dumber, flashier cousins to the fighter and wizard.

ALL THAT SAID, I'm interested in all the other material this book offers, even if I'm not guaranteed to buy it (or let my players use some of these hybrids if I'm feeling really curmudgeony). If there's one thing I'm always grateful for, it's the online reference document.

Honestly, Wrath of the Righteous reminds me of Pacific Rim more than this.

Well, you get there using Baba Yaga's Hut, the goal of the mission is to rescue here, and the whole AP has been about that, but I suppose if you could come up with other reasons for that to happen you could probably plug it in. The last book is supposed to transition from this very directly, though.

I'd at least give the rest of the parts a quick look to come up with a plot contraction, but that wouldn't be hard.

"Baba Yaga has gone missing! There's money in it for you if you get her back! Here's her hut!" Would probably suffice on short notice.

Hmmm... would there be any problems resulting from jumping into this adventure with characters created at level 13, rather than starting at the first one in the path? The only possible one that comes to mind is magical items from previous adventures playing a vital role.

I'm not (currently) too interested in playing the whole thing, but I definitely see the gonzo appeal of making Rasputin Must Die! its own mini-campaign.

This is definitely something I'd like to see used for less "exotic" Pathfinder enemies; in fact, after GMing my party's first independent boarding attack in Skull & Shackles this Thursday, I wouldn't mind a troop statblock to represent the enemy crew!

Maybe make a booklet for it? Armies of Golarion or something along those lines? I think there's already a thread with that name...

First thought: Disappointment that this isn't a high fantasy space opera campaign, which is what my mind jumped to when I first heard the title.

Second thought: As much as I like Varisia, I'm a little tired of adventure paths that focus on it.

Third thought: Oh, but making the Pathfinder Society a central element is cool! It's always been one of the setting's more memorable features.

General impression so far: It looks like a fun return to basics, but unless I'm missing something there doesn't seem to be a big "do all this and you'll be able to achieve X!" hook. Skull & Shackles let you become pirate lords, Jade Regent sent you on a journey across continents, but all I'm getting from this is relatively generic threats of ancient evil. Seems like wasted potential, especially when the Pathfinder Society's role could give you an excuse to travel across the entire Inner Sea region.

Well they already have beards, so that's a step in the right direction.

Most of my opinions have already been stated, but here's what I always say first when I'm trying to explain why Golarion is cool: one of the main gods ASCENDED TO DIVINITY ON A DRUNKEN DARE! He was like, "Yeah, yeah I can reach the staaar-hic-stone! Jus' you wash!" And then three days later there was a powerful new force of Chaotic Good in the world.

I also appreciate just how much of a Fantasy Kitchen Sink the place is. There's room for any type of character if you do your research.

And you know, even though I complained about it in the first thread, I'm slowly starting to warm up to the idea of all the gods just being regional deities (though it would make more sense of they were created through belief, like Discworld gods).

I haven't had a chance to read through most of this thread, so I might come back and add anything that comes to me later, but the first thing that comes to mind: Arcadia, going by the little we know about it, seems like a wasted opportunity for weirdness.
My reaction to its entry in ISWG went something like, "Oh cool, the New World! If there's virtually no contact with this mysterious continent, that means there's endless possibilities! There could be a massive, technologically advanced kobold civilization, or warmongering barbarian elves, or flying cities, or... Native American tribes and colonist vikings. Exactly like in historical America. Hm."
I know that Golarion is heavily based off of Earth, and that can be pretty cool sometimes, but Avistan has a load of stuff that's nothing like European history and/or folklore. Arcadia seems a little restrained by reality. Tian Xia is kind of similar, especially with the statement of "ninja and samurai are only from Fantasy Japan."

EDIT: Oh yeah, and there's a slight problem with the hinted-at deities of Tian Xia and Fantasy India (can't remember the name). It implies that most if not all of the default gods are regional deities, and yet they're usually treated as if they're the only gods. I mean, where were Iori and his three thousand siblings when Rovagug was trying to eat the planet? Did Aroden's death matter to the people on the other side of the world who never knew he was alive?

I've been wondering which of the Golarion gods would want Holy Guns in their employ... definitely Abadar, since his holy weapon is the next closest thing to a gun, and it fits Sarenrae's philosophy of, "If you have to kill someone, do it quick." Dwarves are real traditionalists, but guns also represent masterful crafting, so I'm unsure where Torag would stand. Erastil would unquestionably blow a gasket over KIDS THESE DAYS AND THEIR BLACKPOWDER WHY IN MY DAY ALL HUNTERS NEEDED WAS A BRANCH AND SOME DEER TENDONS AND THEY COULD FEED THEIR FAMILIES FOR A YEAR!

Also, as an aside: anime isn't an art style, it's a medium. Try comparing Fist of the North Star with Lucky Star and then see if you still think they're the same style.

Gnomes are hiding a terrible, evil, wicked, world-shattering secret.

Never trust anyone who smiles that much.

I remember something from one of the books saying that some people suspect all gnomes of being the individual sensory nodes of an extradimensional being in the First World. Now that's a conspiracy for you!

"I want my new character to be a wizard!"
"Oh come on, how did he manage to learn magical spells?"
"He was tutored by an old mage."
"You're just saying that because you want to play as a wizard!"

Sometimes you decide on a character's mechanical elements first and flesh them out after, and sometimes you start with a purely conceptual character and then assign statistics to them. You end up with the same thing either way, and how well they're actually roleplayed depends on the player.

Anyway, regarding the actual topic: I enjoy dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in my fantasy settings, with a few exceptions. Sometimes you have to keep them hidden away on an exotic little island or plateau, but they aren't really out of place alongside magical hybrids, giants, and dire mammals. I like how 4E's default setting mentions drakes (basically small raptors) as common domestic animals used in much the same way as dogs. I also agree that they're better off without the Latin names, though it's not a very big problem.