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Jim had a couple rough years IRL and that put the book back quite a bit.

That is an excellent question, and my hunch is no, such a community wouldn't survive very long, whether due to extermination by outside forces or from self-destructing in service to their mad and uncaring gods.

It's not unusual for such persons to have infiltrated a community, possible even to its highest level, but it's rare indeed for the entire community to serve.

Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth are probably the best candidates for Outer Gods a community could worship and still remain viable.

At least for mortals, anyways. The Mi-go I've seen in print usually worship Shub-Niggurath (and will force other races to convert or die), but the fungi critters are probably better adapted to such worship than us primates are.

I'd suggest advancing it to 5 or 6 HD and giving it more hexes, essentially making it a special result from Lesser Planar Ally.

Maybe the witch's face can cast the hexes as a bonus action 3/day or so, allowing the cat to pounce on someone who just got their AC zapped.

(IIRC, the three described servants for each god generally fit a Lesser Planar Ally at 6 HD or lower, a regular Planar Ally at 12 HD or lower, and a Greater Planar Ally at 18 HD or lower.)

"Violent dragon god?"

Mengkare's in an alliance with Dahak?

Well, that's not good.

Arazni v. Tar-Baphon stuff

I remember thinking back when I first say their stat blocks in Mythic Realms that a fight between the two would've been really close, and probably would've come down to the die rolls.

I'd kind of assumed afterwards that Arazni's defeat as a mortal might've resulted from genuine bad luck.

It doesn't help that TB's statblock gave him NPC gear instead of PC gear+, like one would expect from an ancient lich king who actually had infinite money.

But yeah, he was L20/R10 to Arazni's L20/R8. She had proper gear (exceptional resources) and he didn't, so they might've actually been the same CR of 26 or so.

Yep, they're both CR 26.

So he'd be CR 27 if he properly geared up.

According to Cayden's deity entry, Cayden's church runs many orphanages, and it's not unusual for the orphans to take Cayden's last name as their own.

That being said, I don't recall any NPCs in print following that naming convention.

It's not impossible, it just shouldn't be effective. (Try writing with a pen in your mouth, for example.) Non-proficiency penalty, secondary attack penalty, and only getting half-strength mod (or no Str mod at all) on damage would all be reasonable penalties for using such an inefficient tactic.

Actually making such a thing viable would be a good(?) use of custom feats.

An intelligent horse picking up a sword in its mouth and being good at fighting with it should be an immense and unwelcome shock to the person at the other end.

Traditionally, Dracula resurrecting coincides with a generation skip. I think the interval is supposed to be every 100 years naturally, though an outside force can speed up the process (like in Symphony of the Night or Portrait of Ruin).

Dracula having to be confronted by the same Belmont or his close allies twice only seems to be happen under special circumstances (like in Simon's Quest and in Symphony of the Night).

Though the Soma Cruz games, Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow, got into Dracula being infected by an outside force (named Chaos in Aria of Sorrow), which is at least partly responsible for why he "resets" and goes back into "kill all humans" mode every time he comes back, even if he had an epiphany after a defeat (like in Symphony of the Night).

Probably also of note that is that Asmodeus generally advances his cause in the mortal realm as doing a whole "stability through honorable tyranny" thing - his religion is pretty well tailored towards making him look like a reasonable option for the common (if somewhat desperate) person.

But then, in the Outer Planes, beyond the perception of most mortals lies Hell - an entire nigh-infinite dimension that has been molded to Asmodeus's whims and stands as a monument as his absolute hatred of mortals and free will.

(Asmodeus is also the only god who can realistically claim an entire Outer Plane as his divine realm, and so shape that entire Outer Plane to suit his whims. Every other god living in Hell does so with his permission. (Though evicting a fellow true god like Dahak would probably be difficult, even for Asmodeus.) Even Pharasma only controls most of the Boneyard, not all of it.)

Hell is the closest thing to Asmodeus's real face, and represents what he really wants for the universe.

Asmodeus is completely bugf@+$ evil, dedicated to an eternal crusade to conquer the cosmos and crush everyone else in it, masquerading as affable evil.

Gunn getting fired over decade year old horrible jokes was simply odd, since Disney had to have known about them when it hired him (Gunn's entire shtick before Disney hired him was being a tasteless provocateur), and Gunn put out a statement apologizing for his garbage back when Disney first hired him.

Disney literally fired him in a knee-jerk reaction to being reminded of information they already knew and had already addressed, making Disney look like idiots. (It also means Disney potentially wrecked GotG 3 based on a report from one of the morons responsible for PizzaGate.)

Though if I understand correctly, the firing came from the corporate leadership - a decision handed out from above the movie division. Perhaps Gunn never would have been hired in the first place if info about his past Twitter stupidity had made it high enough up the Disney corporate ladder?

I think it's fair to say that when it is someone's job to watch movies, they are not going to be impressed by a movie that is merely "not that bad."

If anything, I suspect what critics hate most is sitting through a mediocre movie. A truly bad movie at least gives them something interesting to write about.

Geb would be a fundamentally different person if he'd sought lichdom. (Though yes, he'd still be a greater threat - ghost Geb can't actually leave the kingdom, lich Geb easily could. Ghost Geb had to send graveknights to steal Arazni's corpse; lich Geb could've just shown up in person and annihilated the entire Knights of Ozem, turning all of them into graveknights and not just the four idiots who tried to challenge him.)

Geb killed himself because he felt his life had no further meaning without his rival - and then returned as a ghost because he wasn't sure Nex was truly dead. The entire reason he's a ghost now is because he thought he was done, and then realized he never saw the body. (That might've been an awkward moment in the Boneyard. Pity whatever psychopomp tried to stop the mythic necromancer from leaving.)

If instead he'd retained his ambitions and became a lich, I imagine he would've finished the job of conquering the kingdom of Nex, and then quite possibly would've kept pushing northwards to take his revenge on Osirion, the kingdom that had exiled him in the first place.

Katapesh would've probably spared itself through simple immediate surrender - and kept its markets going by having a dedicated industry of abducting people and bringing back to Geb for conversion/feeding. Taking their slaving industry a step further.

Osirion was pretty powerful, so it might've held the line against Geb for quite some time.

If Osirion fell, he may then swing west and push all the way to the western coast of Garuand, claiming Thuvia and Rahadoum.

Depending on Geb's own ties to the Whispering Way, this could make him a natural ally to Tar Baphon when the younger super necromancer finally rose to claim Ustalav.

Possibly resulting in the Shining Crusade never happening, because if the Taldan Empire committed forces to fighting Tar Baphon, it would be vulnerable to a naval invasion from the Empire of Geb.

Which in turn would leave Tar-Baphon free to conquer northern Avistan at his leisure, letting him take Numeria, Sarkoris, the River Kingdoms, as much of Varisia as he wanted, etc. With Irrisen (and the looming specter of the universe's scariest grandma) and possibly Kyonin (I might be giving the elves too much credit - I'm not sure how strong they are, other than they're keeping Treerazer contained) being the only things able to hold him check.

Resulting in northern Avistan largely belonging to Tar-Baphon, southern Avistan belonging to Taldor, and northern and Eastern Garund belonging to Geb. Assuming Taldor doesn't fall apart under the strain of the situation and then getting conquered piecemeal by both undead empires.

Probably because monsters out of the Bestiaries are supposed to represent average specimens that can easily be picked up and run right out of the book.

A dragon having a full set of crafting feats and converting its entire hoard into a small number of powerful magic items (or an enormous number of minor items) is pretty much the exact opposite of that goal. (And also explosively increases the treasure value of the creature!)

Also, I'd say most dragons are neurotic enough about their treasure that the notion of sacrificing part of it fills them with existential dread.

A dragon wants an enormous pile of shinies. A dragon that converted its hoard into a +6 to all stats item would probably go a little nuts, even if the +6 to all stats item is objectively better than 30 million copper pieces.

That being said, making a dragon an item crafter could actually serve as a plot hook or setting dressing. For example, Yrax, Lord of the Howling Storm, is a white dragon who's gone through a lot of effort to create his own golems - and the PCs have to deal with the fruits of his labors while assaulting his fortress.

Seconded MMCJawa - the issue with Godzilla 2014 wasn't the focus on the humans; the issue was the focus on the wrong human. Mopey bomb technician dude wasn't remotely as interesting as his dad, and it made every scene involving him a complete drag. (And he even failed his damn mission at the end, and even worse, it didn't matter because the bomb was somehow airlifted away in time.)

And kudos to Cole for that list.

You could conceivably get this result through a mythic character/creature with both Divine Source and Beyond Morality.

Your faith is going to be a complete mess, though. Think of how bad the schisms are with, for example, Sarenrae, and her neutral heretic followers (the Cult of the Dawnflower) v. her mainstream neutral good followers. That's just the mess that can result from a one-step difference.

Now think of how much worse it'll be if you can have followers of opposing alignments.

They'd never stop killing each other.

Spoiler tagged because relating to real world religion:

why so little written about the Great Old Ones and other beings of the Elder Mythos? I would have thought there'd be more hints as to their existance. Where are they from if not beyond the known multiverse?

They're from the Prime Material Plane.

If anything, they were the original masters of the Prime Material Plane, long before such silly creatures as primates ever existed.

The Elder Things, Aboleths, and other ancient, ancient races managed to push them back and cast them down, though often at terrible cost. (See, e.g., "At the Mountains of Madness.")

Unfortunately, the means to contain them have been swallowed by the great abyss of time and their bonds are weakening.

I believe the stars are due to be right in the Pathfinder setting in 7 years or so?

The Call is deliberately vague. There's nothign to indicate it's an evil act.

Rather, it is a self-destructive act, since going through the change will effectively annihilate the changeling to create a new hag.

There's also the matter of whether the changeling in question actually understands what the Call means. I imagine most who answer it get reclaimed by mommy before they ever realize they were being summoned to their doom.

Who wrote the bastion archon? That's a really neat concept for the CR 20 archon, and feels incredibly fitting for Heaven.

Also, Planar Adventures is really good. You and your contributors should be proud.

All of this sounds awesome, and congrats on getting your character into the setting.

@ Ajaxis - another blog has had art for archetypes or prestige classes that'll be in the book, and James Jacobs has advised that there'll be a number of monsters statted out in it.

I'd expect it to be set up like the Inner Sea World Guide - mostly setting content, but a decent chunk of rules content as well.

Random aside: I liked that Thor is now merely inconvenienced by vacuum.

Thought something about that cover rang a bell.

That's the Menagerie from Book of the Damned (Vol. 3 p. 6) - a one-way portal from Nirvana to Abaddon.

Unfortunately for Kyra and Merisiel, they're on the wrong end of that portal.

Heh. Looking like Horror Adventures 2 is pretty much what an Abaddon cover should look like.

To answer the original OP, no.

Some of the Outer Gods and Great Old Ones are indifferent to us (Azathoth) or even kind of fine with us (Yog-Sothoth/Umr At-Tawil or Bokrug); many treat non-Mythos sapient beings as vermin or prey (such as Cthulhu); others will happily toy with us (like Nyarlathotep).

I generally don't agree with the whole "they're beyond good and evil" thing because, well, the Great Old Ones aren't stupid. They understand perfectly damn well what we are, and they understand what they're doing to us, and a number of them seem to honestly enjoy that.

The Great Old One attitude towards humanity boils down to "we're stronger than you, so we can do whatever we want with you."

Which, when you get down to it, is Chaotic Evil in a nutshell.

Gnoll (out of the ARG) will give a short term mechanical advantage for a front liner, but eventually wash out.

Now, if the new person actually wants to play a Bestiary gnoll, the answer should be no.

Though if you do allow the new guy a gnoll, you should probably open up the oddball race options to the rest of the group. Restricting them all to core races and then letting the new guy ignore that rule is just kind of rude.

Glamoured armor can look like whatever the hell the wearer wants while retaining full functionality.

Amusingly, we've had a full plate wearing cavalier glamour her armor into a chainmail bikini, in part just to show off and in part to deliberately draw fire.

If there's no official answer, then I'd suggest humanity's best friend - the dog.

Check the Obituaries thread for how many PCs have died to that trap.

Vrood got his money's worth, is what I'm saying.

Interesting time capsule of a thread. The casual gay bashing back in 2006 absolutely wouldn't fly today.

Conan's an extremely skilled dude with a sword, but ultimately still just a dude. A better question might be who're are equivalent characters (like Fafhrd or Parn from Lodoss War), not who can beat him. Because plenty of characters would beat him simply by virtue of punching in a completely different weight class.

Though now I'm wondering how he'd work as a Heroic Spirit in the Fate series. He'd probably have a whole grab bag of powers because he's done so much.

My understanding that is WAR is given a fairly brief description (maybe like 4 to 5 lines) and takes it from there.

WAR plays Pathfinder and is familiar with Golarion (IIRC, the iconic bloodrager is actually WAR's Curse of the Crimson Throne character), so I believe the orders nowadays will actually describe stuff in setting terms.

But I believe WAR has enormous leeway in designing iconics (the backstories aren't written until Paizo gets the art back from him) and in his other artwork.

So I believe the answer to Snorter's question is that WAR decides what the iconics are wearing, based on the short description he gets of class, ethnicity and region.

You can read WAR's thread for more details.

The cleric being a Calistrian an important detail - as a trickster goddess, Calistria's probably perfectly fine with the use of the amulet.

Using the amulet to run a scam on the town is probably CN, not CG, but being a CN Calistrian actually puts him more in line with the goddess.

Calistria's pretty mercenary about damn near everything, so getting people addicted to your magic and then charging them for it is fine in her book. Demanding they convert to Calistria, though... Well, keep in mind Calistria's also a goddess of vengeance. Once those addicts are hers, you might have someone suddenly figuring out that it's the amulet that makes the healing euphoric, not the priest....

(The more LE use of the amulet would be getting people addicted and then demanding that they convert to receive any further healing.)

Seltyiel in assless chaps would probably make some folks very happy, but that wouldn't fly on something that's supposed to sell in brick & mortar stores in the U.S.

Paizo could possibly get away with some pretty funky art stuff if they were a European company, but being primarily for an U.S. audience means having to deal with U.S. hang-ups.

23. Goblins.

Some of my favorite books/games/shows involve a fantasy setting that's actually a post-apocalypse setting, and rediscovering the lost tech is part of the storyline.

Bonus points if the fantasy party actually gains a robot as a party member.

Honestly, no, the big 3 evil outsider races do not have equivalent numbers.

Most petitioners that go to Hell wind up getting used as building materials or otherwise being tortured forever, without ever even making it to lemure status. A soul that makes it lemure status might get promoted to a higher form. Hell does boost its numbers by having soul farms, though - both entire worlds worth of mortals trapped in its various layers (mostly in the Sixth and the Second, IIRC), and various prime material worlds that Asmodeus has conquered.

Honestly, I don't think Asmodeus is even really interested in invading other planes - his goal is conquest of the prime material, and thus being able to just claim all souls as his. (Heck, part of Eiseth's long term goals reflects that she's really mad that Asmodeus is ignoring the Upper Planes, and she actually wants to hijack Moloch's forces and re-direct them from focusing on the Prime to focusing on the Upper Planes.)

Most petitioners that go to Abaddon are actively destroyed by the native daemons, which is probably a limiting factor on their numbers. Those that manage to survive become daemons reflecting their own deaths, and join in the carnage.

Daemons are easily the least populous of the big 3 evil outsider races because they eat their future. (Aside: Abaddon is the beneficiary of there being a number of high birth rate, high mortality neutral evil races like goblins, which might help mitigate the daemons' ouroboros impersonation.)

Demons, by comparison, (a) have no great drive to destroy their petitioners, other than sometimes for pleasure or as ritual fuel and (b), as mentioned above, can see multiple demons produced by a single petitioner. And so while the Abyss no longer has the benefit of its backlog of souls, it's still pretty boss at churning out more demons. And some of the sins linked to strong demons are actually really common, like wrath, lust, and greed.

If anything, it's a cruel cosmic irony that the CE plane is the one that may be the most efficient at producing exemplars.

The Abyss also the benefit of being home to a powerful chaotic evil goddess of life, who's determined to choke the entire universe with her spawn and who blesses her worshipers with healthy (if horrifying) young. Lamashtu is the demonic equivalent to Shub-Niggurath, and she is strong. As a "mere" demon lord, she invaded Abaddon and captured one of the Four Horsemen. She then killed a god and consumed his power. As a goddess, she's actually already invaded Hell and tore out a piece - that's where Basalfeyst comes from. Fortunately for the rest of the Outer Planes, she, like Asmodeus, is now far more interested in dominating the material plane.

What do qlippoth lords do with the souls of their worshipers?

Since said sinful souls are something they probably don't actually want...

I could also see her refusing Stark's armor, since accepting it would give Stark the opportunity to monitor her/interfere with her. I'm pretty sure he can just track all that stuff, and has demonstrated before that he can remotely command it.

Melek Taus is the object of worship a living religion, so I'll be very surprised if Paizo does anything further with him.

Leviathan would be pretty awesome, though.

@ Tinalles - IIRC, there are lawful neutral heretics of Zon-Kuthon who worship him as Dou-Bral, god of perfect, merciless, beauty.

So he'll actually answer to that name if prayed to, but the follower still needs to be compatible with him. Now, just what sort of afterlife awaits such a follower is open to question.

My memory might be way the hell off on this, though.

Heh. Yeah, Star Wars suffers a bit from the gods who rule the universe changing their minds on how everything works pretty frequently.

In light of Holdo being written to be completely dislikeable in order to try to make Poe look better, it's pretty reasonable to dislike her.

I imagine the actress did the best she could with a bad role, but she got a bad role.

“Well I’m in charge and important and this is a suicide mission so I need someone who I think is less important to sacrifice themselves in my place” said no one with a soul ever.

It's called "asking for a volunteer."

I immediately recognized that Holdo was doing the whole "captain* goes down with the ship" thing, but that's not the correct thing to do when you're the goddamn admiral charged with coordinating the entire Resistance, and presumably not actually replaceable.

But Holdo was also written to be terrible, so a heroic sacrifice was essentially what Rian Johnson (who I think is sole writer for this, actually) came up with to redeem her.

* Did that ship even have an actual captain charged with running the ship itself? What the hell sort of ship has nothing but admirals on the bridge? That's not what admirals are supposed to be doing.

Oh well.

Again, my evaluation of this movie is I enjoyed it, AND nearly every complaint about it is completely right.

Like the various enemies who had vital strike + spring attack (which never worked with how spring attack was written) as part of their tactics, that's a long running editing issue, not the rules team suddenly changing how something actually worked.

Also, keep in mind that the rules team is separate from the editing team and the adventures team.

Heh. If anything, the UI call-outs/revisions may be a result of the rules team trying to get everyone else synced up again after revisiting those rules; "getting their house in order" as it were.

Edit: The rules are also kind of badly organized, so it's very easy for writers to be unaware of stuff that's actually kind of important. Like how scrying spells create sensors that only DC 20 + spell level to perceive if you don't beat invisibility, and are just blatantly there if you do. Like, you cannot scry a dragon without immediately tipping it off, because your sensor is not getting past blindsense.

Now, a critical thing with Charm, is that if it works, it slams your victim's attitude towards you to Friendly.

Which means your victim can be perfectly aware that you just cast charm monster or person on him or her, and simply not care because he or she is Charmed.

Any statement claiming that subtle magic didn't exist prior to the errata and release of UI is blatantly untrue. There is just too much evidence indicating otherwise.

Except, of course, that the default rules for spellcraft gives everyone with line of sight to a caster an immediate check to identify any spell that was just cast, with the only modifiers to the check being those that would apply to perception checks.

Casting a spell 300 feet away gives everyone a -30 on the check to ID the spell, but everyone 300 feet away can still tell a spell was cast and gets to try to ID it.

Spellcasting has always been hilariously conspicuous; UI just made that clear (rather than being an easy conclusion to draw from the spellcraft skill).

If anything, what I'd call BS on is UI requiring you to get all new metamagic feats to conceal your casting, instead of just allowing silent & still spell to do the trick.

Alain would be the martial, Aric would be the skilled, Quinn would be the arcane.

Kyra, Keleshite cleric of Sarenrae, as the divine would be an amusing(?) choice.

Heh. I found the movie to be entertaining, but most of the complaints about the movie are completely right.

Now that I think about it, I'm actually kind of surprised I like this movie.

I suppose that's because of Luke, Rey, and Kylo. (And Finn still being perfectly likeable even if his arc was terrible.)

Kylo is no Darth Vader, but he's a much, much better Anakin than Anakin ever was.

I'm pretty sure paladins falling from unwilling evil acts goes all the way back to first edition.

I don't have a 1E Player's Handbook, but I do have a 2E one. A quick look...

Heh. Under 2E, a paladin who unwillingly commits an evil act loses all powers until he can atone.

Under 2E, a paladin who willingly commits an evil act can never get his powers back and immediately changes his class to fighter.

@ Matthew Downie -

1) No. While they could probably have fun playing up the Always Angry aspect, orcs aren't any more inherently evil than the Hulk.

2) No, getting turned into a wraith means your character got destroyed and replaced with a monster. The party needs to kill the wraith so that the PC can be brought back.

Pretty much, yes.

Folks have been playing Gygaxian paladins (i.e., lawful good, must obey a strict code of conduct to keep powers) for about 40 years now.

The vast majority of them don't have any issues.

Now, perhaps you've stumbled upon some deep dark secret and all of those groups who are running paladins without issue are doing something wrong.

Or perhaps they aren't doing anything wrong at all, and you need to reconsider why your group has problems when most other groups don't.

A rule making leeway for GM discretion does not entitle GM antagonism. That's just trying to lay the blame for bad GMing on the rules.

I'm pretty sure expecting your GM to not be a dickhead is simply the social contract.

I could see her looking demonic but softer somehow. Like, she might still have hooves, horns, and wings but shed the lava & obsidian look. Probably a cool colors scheme, as suggested already.

I can't see a redeemed Nocticula being remotely shy about being an ex-demon, and I'd agree with her attire veering towards the sexy side of classy evening wear.

I'd suggest looking at World of Warcraft's Draenei for inspiration.

She'd probably still have the tails; might even get extra ones, like a nine-tailed kitsune.