captain jonah's page

How about looking at this from the other side.

What about when it is one or more characters who are prisoners.

If the characters have gone out of thier way to execute the hill bandits who are raiding the caravans because the harvest failed and the local lord kicked them off his land then to them the characters are just another bunch of evil mercenaries working for the evil lord.

If the players found out why the bandits were raiding and tried to help then when one or more of them is found unconcious after a battle and taken prisoner the bandits will have an entirely seperate view of and attitude towards the character.

There is a lot of talk about paladins and Evil. As a note aside from priests of Evil gods and demons/devils/Undead etc etc not a lot of things show up as evil on a detect evil. Your baby killer will be evil and will radiate an aura of Evil. Your unpleasant bandits may be robbing merchants but unless they are going out of thier way to torture and kill helpless people fighting and killing guards for food to feed the family is not Evil.

Characters who make the effort to deal fairly with anyone not Evil can be treated in the same way. Characters who murder every helpless prisoner first time should expect the same treatemtn if any of them fall. Characters who make an effort to take prisoners, treat them well and deal harshly with those that return to thier evil ways afterwards should get a better deal than "hey its that evil adventurer who killed bob, fred and charlie after they surrendered. He is down and his cleric is out of spells. Cut his head off before his friends get back"

And why not. A long stem pipe takes time to smoke, time to think and consider.

Your warriors will be chewing on half a thick cigar. Cleric types sniffing incense, druids and rangers with roll ups that may even have some pipe weed in them.

But a pipe, now that is a sign of class. Wizards of the world, sit in the corner of the inn and draw on a fine pipe of best pipe weed.

Hat of disguise. Pah.

Back in the old days it was suck it and see. Half elven ranger of mine became a centuar. Good for archery and such but the rest.
Move silently, clump clump. Hide in shadows, what there is a horse sized shadow here? Sneak into the ruined castle by climbing over the back wal..... Erm what :-)

Not sure how this would work with Pathfinder as I'm just starting here but it seems to work well with straight D&D games (not 4E).
Instead of lots of magic items I start the players with 25 points for stats and they gain +1 to a stat at 4/8/12/16/20 and +1 to all stats at 6/12/18 (ala Conan). This makes the players themselves a lot more powerfull without needing magic items.

Low level enchounters need to be tweaked to fit the epic stats but after that it works for me.

Magic items with a single power add nicely and with masterworked grades the actual magic weapons become less missed till they hit the magic weapon needed mob.

By restricting magic items a bit as well and some carefull ref bias towards peeps who are picking items that are not core for the class you can keep players more focused on who and what they are and less on the item list.

For example by improving his stats steadily as he levels the fighter gets better at fighter stuff and if he puts on a ring of invis and elf feet and finds he keeps being heard due to his armour penalty and monsters noting his foot prints and armour oil smells which the rogue knows how to hide with his skills.
Fred the fighter finds he does much better as fred the fighter and a lot less well as fred the invisible, slightly silent bloke.

Hello all.

I could be wrong here but having, erm, borrowed the books from the DM for a good read of the Hellknight bits I thought the final qualification was done by the order. Under the description of the Armigers it mentions devils are summoned to teach fear, pain and knowledge of tactics etc and those armigers who survive this bit face a devil in battle. Those who win become hellknights and those who fail die.

Sounds very much as if this is done as the "graduation" of the armigers to full blown Hellknights.

Sort of apply for the class, meet the the other requirements, spend weeks/months of game time doing all those behind the scenes tests and such like then do one fight to the death with a devil run by the ref.
Not such a huge problem and should be quick but it will serve to keep the casual applicants away, "what, you mean i can get killed applying for this prestige class!".

Many thanks for the help everyone.

Ah. Clearly I kicked over the anthill here.

Thanks for the help or advice. Our characters were asked to pick a reason why we knew a criminal and looking at the reasons available the death of a loved one just jumped out. A paladin darkened by the lost of his beloved wife, the chance to cry out "you killed my wife, prepare to die".

I also found a thread here about paladins of Asmodeaus which was a little, erm, interesting.

To be honest though I have always seen paladins as champions of organised faiths hence the law part and then servants of gods hence the good/neutral/evil bit. Codes of conduct etc based on god served. Paladins of good (honour) are not law based, they are detect/smite evil and channel positive. Paladins of Evil (tyrany) are detect/smite good and channel negative, Paladins of nuetrality (Law) detect/smite chaos and channel one or the other based n choice or god.

I have always found it odd that a LN or NG god would strip a paladin follower of paladin status for following the tenants of the god not those of LGness.

Anyway is there a way to get the Hellknight stuff without getting the module as we may be running the module later?

Greetings all.

Being very new to the whole pathfinder goodness I thought I would post a question here before I start buying stuff as there is way too much pathfinder stuff avaialable and I want to focus.

I had a look at the players book and unlike 4.0 paladins are the old "goodly" types. I have also seen (well the ref waved it in front of me then took it away before I got to the next page, the Hellknights writeup.

My plan is, as with many of my characters, to be a darker more world weary paladin. More focused on Law and less bothered by Good. The pathfinder one is the normal sense evil/smite evil, be of good behavior type which is not what I am after. Since the hellknights have paladins and are clearly lawfull not good are there LN paladins in the game, or LE ones for that matter.

I can always try to talk the ref into LN being detect/smite chaos and behave lawfully but otherwise as paladin but it would be nice if I could pick up a pdf which had what I was looking for. So is there a pdf that covers this. I am looking for a core class to start with not a prestige type class.

Many thanks for your time