Yamara Potato Nose's page

That probably depends a LOT upon which Czar you have to deal with. Actually, it also depends a lot upon which Soviet leader you have to deal with.

Fair point, but the Czars of Russian folk tales (rather than Russia itself) do seem to be fairly lawful evil, and perhaps we should look to them more than real Czars in this context.

But even under real Czars there are enough Lawful people in the system to allow someone LG some scope for action.

Hertzen was exiled and at one point found himself assisting an auditor from the capital to investigate local malfeasances. And I can easily see a LE auditor preferring a LG assistant.

We that is getting away from paladins serving in Hellnights.

I forgot to mention in my last post that both Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union strike me as being more similar to . . . Irrisen . . . Which is canonically Neutral Evil, and ruled largely by Neutral Evil rulers. They care not for order or freedom, except as tools to use for their own selfish ends. Either way, not Hellknight material.

Irrisen is based on Russian folk tales.

A Czar who finds an underling too LG for his taste might send him to this kind of place with the order to slay Baba Yaga, and offering the reward in the form of his daughter in marriage in case of success.

The Czar would expect the underling to be eaten by Baba Yaga, but should the underling return with Baba Yaga's head, the Czar will grit his teeth and throw the kingdom's largest wedding party ever, at which literally an ocean's worth of vodka will be consumed. Which is pretty Lawful, I think.

Really? Both the Russian Czars and the Soviet Union have long struck me as more Neutral Evil,

The backwater provincial officials that Hertzen describes do seem to be more of the Neutral Evil variety - I am sure Norgorber would approve of a lot of them. But the higher authority seems to have more of a lawful bend.

The Stalinist system seems to have inherited the worst that the Russian empire had to offer, and leaned a lot more into the evil direction.

I can see Hellnights fighting for the Czarist Russia, but I think only the most evil of them would support the USSR, especially under Stalin.

I have been reading Alexander Hertzen's autobiography "The Past and Thoughts", and it gives one a lot of ideas on how a good person might serve a Lawful Evil/Lawful Neutral authority. (Alexander Hertzen was a 19th century Russian writer and influenced the worldview of the subsequent revolutionaries.)

Pre-revolution Russian Empire was pretty much Lawful Evil / Lawful Neutral, although they were rank amateurs when it came to evil. I suppose it is campaign-dependent whether Cheliax's level of evil is that of Stalin, or of the Russian Czars.

But there was a lot of scope for action for a Good official or military person, as long as their attempt to do good did not extent to attacking the state. Even refusing, to the Czar's face, to participate in bogus judicial proceedings is something one might be able to get away with - although one should not be surprised if one is reassigned to a particularly unpleasant part of Siberia - but this is not an issue for player characters who frequently operate in unpleasant places anyway.

What is the difference between regular Pathfinder and Core?

I am interested. Haven't done PbP before though.

I would guess that there are two general ways in which a paladin could look at law.

One, a paladin could be of the view that law just happens to be the best tool to achieve good. But it is still a means to an end, not an end in itself. At a purely theoretical ethics level, such a paladin may well agree with someone who is neutral good on the importance/unimportance of law. From this perspective, at least in some cases achieving a greater good by allowing (or even committing) a lesser evil might make sense.

Another, a paladin could see law as a good in itself. From this perspective, achieving a greater good by committing a lesser evil (or even lesser chaos) is a contradiction.

The former paladin could conceivably work with Hellnights or Quebec Provincial Police.

It also depends on who the Hellnight deal with members who refuse to do some of the more unsavoury things that Hellnights do. Maybe rather than taking any kind of disciplinary measures they send them against whatever unambiguously evil monsters happen to be around - and there no shortage of such monsters in Golarion.

and you don't even need 'human waves', which often means just underequipped and disposable soldiers sent up against machine guns.

The Russians just outnumbered the enemy in every theater and pressed that advantage. They didn't need 'waves', per se. They just had more men.

Seriously, they lost a million people, and were just getting started. That tells you something about their willingness to eat losses.

And yeah, the Germans were overextended. They still killed everything the Russians threw at them, until that winter came, bought Russia time, and then the numbers really started coming at them.

==Aelryinth

The Soviets (not just the Russians, Russia and USSR were not exactly the same thing) had underequipped and disposal soldiers, and a huge numerical advantage.

The battle of Kursk, for instance, saw something like half a million deaths on each side. For the Germans, that was a disaster from which they never recovered. For the Russians, it was printing a few more draft notices.

So I am not sure what you are disagreeing with here, if anything.

An average German soldier was, in every way, superior to an average Soviet soldier. This did the German soldiers no good at all.

Molthune is basically Prussia (a part of modern Germany, the one who unified it as a nation).

That is probably a much better way to think of it, if one must think of terms of RL analogies.

And btw, "human wave tactics" is what north korea and China used against South Corea and the US during the Korean war, it has nothing to do with Russian military tactics.

The Soviets used them extensively (and often with great effect) during WWII, and during their war with Finland - this also explain in large part why Soviet losses were so enormous. The Fins got to watch in disbelief as the Soviets cleared minefields just by sending lots and lots of disposable troops through them.

Molthune is so Soviet Russia.

Only in that it is expansionist. Nothing in the description suggests any kind of overriding ideology, reliance on large number of unskilled soldiers for human wave tactics, gulags, etc.

Maybe an idealized version of Imperial Russia would be a better model. (Soviet Union was basically Imperial Russia but with bad features magnified. Imagine Imperial Russia but make it a bit better, and with a lot more class mobility for those willing to serve in the military.)

Why not? The law/chaos axis is just as polarizing and strong as the good/evil axis, canonically. It's merely a human way of viewing it that we can't see this.

If you are a human LE person, you might prefer CG people to CE - because you prefer people who are not going to cut your children's throats while they sleep to people who share your penchant for evil if not law.

But would this necessarily be different for non-humans - who, after all, have a sense of self-preservation and are capable of emotional attachment to others?

(Asmodeus probably dislikes Rovagug more than he dislikes Desna.)

But having just one axis of your alignment matching, and one opposing, doesn't mean that you should get along just fine and dandy.

Heck, being of the same alignment does not mean that you will get along. A Lawful Good diplomat who worships a god of peace and love and order will have a very different take on things than a Lawful Good general who worships a war god. (Both might, from time to time, even retain services of someone less lawful and good than themselves to bugger up the other's plans.)

Just by both being good really shouldn't mean they're all peachy friends.

People can be peachy friends and still be incapable of working together.

If this was the case, then the celestial realms should've long ago destroyed the lower planes simply because it'd effectively 3 vs 1 vs 1 vs 1. And that's obviously not the case.

I would guess that the lower planes have to exist for metaphysical reasons - as long as evil as a concept exists, they will continue to exist, since they are the physical manifestation of that concept.

Also, azata and archons, when cooperating, are not likely to stab each other in the back for purely selfish personal gain - however much they might detest each other. (They might stab each other in the back for operational reasons - see the two LG guys above - but not for purely personal gain.)

Demons and devils, however, especially the latter, would, in addition to having different attitudes towards organization and rules, would also backstab each other from time to time for purely personal gain.

A female halfling walks in. Her nose looks like it was broken a few too many times, the top of her left ear is missing, and she has a nasty scar below her right eye. (None of these look like recent injuries, however.) She sports a very practical #3 brush cut.

She wears a breastplate, and there is a wooden medallion with an image of a sword in a mountain hanging around her neck. Behind her back is a two-handed sword (halfling sized). She has two daggers on her belt.

Nimbly, she jumps up on a bar-stool and orders a large beer. Softly, she utters a prayer. "Thank you Gorum, our Lord in Iron, for guiding us in defeating our enemies for Your Glory, so that we may continue fighting for Your Glory, and also go for a beer."

I am putting together a realm set in the River Kingdoms for my campaign, and they actually have a priest of Hanspur as their executioner. Death by drowning is the purest death, you see, the water washes away all sin. As far as the executioner is concerned, he is doing the evildoers a favour.

I think not having real world religions in Pathfinder is more 'Keep us from being sued into bankruptcy' than anything else.

That would be true if one made the sort of mistakes that TSR made back in the day with Cthulhu mythos and Melnibonean mythos. There are no similar copyright issues with older mythologies.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the population of the Inner Sea region?

The source material gives population numbers for various settlements, towns, and cities - does this include the farmers living around those settlements - or just the urban population?

What would prevent a Christian fundamentalist from accidentally going through a dimensional portal and ending up in Golarion?

Presumably, were this to happen, they would carry on trying to convince people to accept Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior, and probably confuse people in the process.

And if it is ultimately belief that powers clerics' spells, rather than a deity, perhaps the fundie might even find themselves capable of casting clerical spells.