artisan's page

The gunslinger and ninja and samurai are cool "second" or even "third tier" concepts in the list of things you might want to put in your Pathfinder campaign.

That's why they're in a book called "Ultimate Combat" and not one called "Core Rulebook".

+1

Is it so hard to leave the usage of this class up to GM discretion. Like the ninja and samurai, I wouldn't let people play these classes if it didn't fit into the setting.

I don't think they were going for that style. Maybe they could make a prestige class that would let you exchange grit for ki and vice-vera.

My house rule has always been, on the roll of a natural 1, you make a reflex save, dc 15 vs a mishap. Failure means you brake your weapon, as in the broken condition. If you roll a natural 1 on a weapon with the broken condition, the save is increased to 20, and failure results in the weapon being destroyed. This too complicated?

The reflex save represents the character's ability to subvert damage to the weapon before it occurs. With a sword, they fumble on the swing and either hit, or miss a stone wall. With a gun, the natural 1 would be represented with the gun beginning to flare up, and the reflex save would be to try and smother the flame before the shot explodes. I use this because low level characters have a fair chance of failing this and ruining their weapons. Where as high level pcs might rarely still misfire through sheer bad luck.

My house rule has always been, on the roll of a natural 1, you make a reflex save, dc 15 vs a mishap. Failure means you brake your weapon, as in the broken condition. If you roll a natural 1 on a weapon with the broken condition, the save is increased to 20, and failure results in the weapon being destroyed. This too complicated?

A new holiday?!? Yay!

I'm celebrating by knocking back a few at my computer.

While I'm at work.

Also vomit, everyone needs to put vomit in their item's effects.

[QUOTE="Lazurin Arborlon

I know this was a joke about bad players, but if taken seriously
this one actually would make a fantastic cursed item...lol

Imagine a character who blithely moves along thinking his every action a success ( not the player mind you, just his character)

Refuses healing because he simply doesnt believe he was stabbbed in the chest, Falls in the water and wont swim because...well clearly he vaulted over that pit...loses his diplomacy role, but goes on the quest for free, because he clearly negotiated a 1000 gp per party member fee for their services.

I'm going to put that cursed item in my adventure. Much fun will be had.

I can't believe I have to wait over a month to find out if I made it to the next round. I'm going to be stressed out the whole time, I so excited. My item is awesome and fun.

I've been googling for a while now and I can't seem to find out if Orcus is open game content. I know the name itself is from Greek mythology, but how much of the orginal d&d Orcus character is OGC?

Thanks for all the info guys. I love this message board.

I've been googling for a while now and I can't seem to find out if Orcus is open game content. I know the name itself is from Greek mythology, but how much of the orginal d&d Orcus character is OGC?

Check out "Into the Darklands." It presents an entire city of intellect devourers and how they work to steal bodies; they essentially treat stolen bodies in the same way decadent nobles might treat their clothing and the latest fashions and styles. Pretty creepy stuff.

Don't have the book, but it's a solid idea. I could get several adventures out of that concept. I love mixing Lovecraft's themes into my fantasy games. Somewhere between Conan the Barbarian, and Hellboy, both of which had similar mythos behind the brute main character.

Mairkurion {tm} wrote:

When little Jimmy J opened the Monster Manual and saw DAT's freaky b&w illustration of the Intellect Devourer, if he had only known how important that monster would have been to his sanity many years later...

He probably had a good idea. It's always been one of my favorite monsters.

How about a intellect devourer cousin? A more intelligent sinister evolutionary off shoot of them that takes hosts permanently, and tends to forging evil aberrant civilizations. At this point though this is seems more world specific to me,.. Hrmm? I'll have to think about this problem, if nothing more then for my own campaign. If anyone else is interested I could share the template I designed, that is if I can track it down.

The intellect devourer (in the bestiary already) pretty much does everything you're asking for, I think. They make GREAT monsters for the "alien monsters that eat brains and enslave folks" monster niche.

I was thinking of something a little more permanent. But you are right, they are similar ideas. A intellect devourer is just a poor replacement for a illithid in my opinion.

There's just something sexy about a skinny humanoid creature that has a head like cthulhu's.

As they say where I'm from(Texas); there's room in that stable for more then just one horse. (They don't really say that, I just made that up. Folksie wisdom works for politicians.)

artisan wrote:

One more suggestion- something new.

The greatest evil/alien race, the Illithid are not open game content. "Boo!" I know.
I'd like to seem something that could replace them.

Only if they are lower CR, there is a place for alien beings who invade humanoid hosts definitely... but illithids are far from easy-to-use when it comes to designing interesting encounters at higher or lower level. Any kind of alien-invasion creature must be able to have some ability for expansion, and class levels are still the easiest way IMO.

As a template, you could make them as weak-sauce as you want, just apply to something without racial hit die. This it becomes a 1hd aberrant with probably a 2-4 CR increase do to the special abilities the template would give you.

Or counter wise, if you wanted them to keep the host's memory and skills, you could let them keep 'em, just change the personality and alignment. In any case, the option for a low level version is there as low level humanoids are easier to capture then high level ones.

One more suggestion- something new.
The greatest evil/alien race, the Illithid are not open game content. "Boo!" I know.
I'd like to seem something that could replace them. My idea; a parasitic aberrant that enters the brain somehow and slowly eats away the host's brain while it hard wires it's own mind into the poor sod who was unlucky enough to get captured by them. Over the course of a week to a month, the host body starts to change; it's skin begins to gray, all hair falls off, sexual organs shrivel and waste away, and all body fat drips off like the person has a vile plague. During this time the host is usually imprisoned by these horrible creatures. However, sometimes they manage to escape, though unless they can find a high level cleric, they are still doomed to the slow take over.

What the end product looks like really depends on how close something can look like to a mindflayer with out breaking copyright. If you could even get away with using the work mindflayer that'd be cool. These creatures could easily replace the illithid as a great evil race in a campaign.

I would go about making them as a template. Being that any creature could serve as a host, from dog to dragon, you could have a large variation possible. However, most would use humanoids as hosts since they have large intelligent minds and are easy prey in large numbers.

I have designed these creatures for my world and the PCs seem to think of them as good villains.

artisan wrote:

Blink dogs anyone? They're in the 3.5SRD. Any reason they weren't included in the bestiary?

For the blink dog, it came down to, basically, us having to chose between blink dogs, black puddings, and boars. We had to put in boars because they're a load-bearing monster (they show up as animal companions and on summon nature's ally spells and as wildshape options). We wanted to put black puddings in because there's really not a lot of oozes in the book.

Which left blink dogs on the cutting room floor. They'll be in Bestairy 2, though. I think.

YES! I count this as a personal victory. I know it's not but self deception can go a long way to boost one's self esteem. Thanks for watching the boards. I feel like you really care about the community, not just the money.

Blink dogs anyone? They're in the 3.5SRD. Any reason they weren't included in the bestiary? Other then that anything vaguely steampunk would do things to me that normally only large amounts of heroine or very cute girls can do. Steampunk; swoon...
I'm not talking robots, but clockwork golems. Every campaign I've ever runs has at least one gnomish tinker as an npc. The last campaign has Smithin and Wesson. Two tinkerers who were raising a daughter as hetrolife-mates.
I even have a good clockwork template if anyone's interested.
After that, lets see, anything that is planescape like. Really off the wall creatures from the outerplanes. I don't know how much is copyrighted, I'm guessing as much as WOTC wants. But what's wrong with blatant rip offs?

I agree with this person I've never met, and certainly wasn't just talking to about this very topic over gmail.