Welp, time to put our money where our mouth was, everyone.
Perhaps, but there is still a lot of us who never put much weight to Paizo acknowledging the union, a step that was virtually inevitable given the near unanimous support of the staff. Now, the real work begins. I will continue as I have from the start of all this in that I will return to my purchasing ways if/when Paizo demonstrates a change in their practices. All of this is still just talk. I am happy for the union and their progress to date, but I am not yet satisfied.
Perfectly fair. To be clear, I was addressing everyone who did make promises contingent on voluntarily recognition.
Welp, time to put our money where our mouth was, everyone.
This household is still on 1st ed, but I'm looking through me and my spouse's accounts now to figure out which digital APs we haven't bought yet, so we can buy even more. They'll get played in a few years, once we're done with our, uh... THREE current groups, I'm sure.
The union should be a good thing for the staff, but it feels like there's been a general shift from "acknowledge and fix any transphobia or no more purchases" to "acknowledge the union or no more purchases", which feels like transpeople being ditched as soon as some other cause comes along (as usual)
Hi Trans person here, I'm one of them that is focused on the union getting recognized, because a union will help prevent similar things in the future. Please don't pretend you speak for every trans person here.
At least one of the trans players I ran through Hell's Rebels got very upset about this whole thing, and has now told me they support the union as a solution, so I'm mostly taking cues from the exact people whose feelings I'm most worried about.
Apart from that, however, a union shifts the conversation so that we no longer have to trust management at all. Granted, I will still be SPITTING ANGRY if they never acknowledge the transphobia, and everyone above the union line will be forevermore effectively dead to me, but a union will give the content creators the power to fight transphobia when it comes up from now on, and I trust THEM. Apparently, content creators were the ones responsible for everything I loved and trusted in the first place, so I have no problem shifting all of my love and support to them instead of management.
I'd love to be proven wrong about management, but I'll settle for supporting a company where I know the trans-friendly workers have enough power to make demands and to be paid more fairly for their contributions.
I felt so awful when Pathfinder Infinite dropped and all of the excitement I WANTED to feel was instantly snuffed by knowing I'd never engage with a Paizo product ever again.
I will actually feel that excitement again if this union gets recognised.
I live in a place where unions and strikes are so everyday that the idea of being anti-union admittedly boggles my mind. Wages here are higher across the board, and our workforce is so much better protected, given the horror stories I hear from US friends.
Maybe the US is just... doing unions wrong? I don't know. Either way, I can't help but feel that unions are a Good Thing all around, and always at least a step in the right direction.
I've been an evangelist for Paizo since the days when I literally begged my family for Dungeon and Dragon Magazine subscriptions for Christmas. I have converted whole groups to Pathfinder on the basis of Rexus Victocora's existence. My stomach TURNED at everything I learned from these threads, and--far worse--all of my industry contacts from cons verified that these things were true via whisper network.
I thought there was nothing that could ever convince me to buy a Paizo product again, let alone encourage others to buy them and play in our Pathfinder games, so I didn't bother engaging on the forums. But this. This will do it. IF management takes it seriously and engages voluntarily.
P.S. I mastered in infosec. The doxxing was wildly inappropriate, and in direct contravention of Paizo's stated Privacy Policy (which actually serves a purpose, yes, it's not there just to tick a box).
"Paizo will not share your personal information with third parties without your permission, other than for the limited exceptions stated above."
Sort that out, and make sure that it never happens again, Paizo.
Through judicious use of water lung, invisibility, and touch of the sea, my witch made her way onto the Dominator through the rudder area. Eventually, she made her way to the captain's currently-empty cabin and snuck inside. The rest of this plays out after she's broken into his liquor cabinet and poured herself a glass of wine.
Captain Pegsworthy is cracking the Rock with us, since it's currently surrounded by Consortium ships. A truly epic mass ship combat ensues, wherein we and our NPCs are solidly getting our butts handed to us. One of our ships goes down.
Slowly, however, I get the pleasure of hearing things from outside like: "What's this bloody fog?" and "Someone dispel this nonsense!" The Dominator gets distracted.
Shortly thereafter, the Death Knell appears, howling after the Dominator. The two ships get locked into combat briefly, and the zombies try to board. I am given leave to roll a few dice for Pilk... who soon crits on the captain of the Dominator with his harpoon, and yanks him off the Dominator.
The first mate yells something akin to "Captain! NOOOO!" The Dominator pulls around to broadside the Death Knell, and manages to blow it out of the water. Pilk once again goes down laughing maniacally.
My witch takes advantage of the chaos to make her way back off the ship into the water.
Our group has now decided that Captain Pilk is obsessed with hunting down my character... and the Chelish first mate-turned-captain is now obsessed with hunting down Pilk.
Game set match.
People laughed a lot during this session, considering it was supposed to be a crazy serious mass combat. This was an excellent game.
Our mutiny apparently happened waaay before everyone else's. Then again, our group has a tendency to pre-empt our GM and go off the rails regularly.
We've got some Chaotic Goods in the party who weren't super keen on the idea of attacking some random merchant ship. Our GM also really played up how horrible the officers were, to the point where our characters were finally convinced they were going to be murdered in their sleep anyway if they didn't take some initiative. So, since we knew we were going to be sent on board the next target first as cannon-fodder, we planned ahead with all our friendly-aligned NPCs.
When we were sent aboard the Man's Promise, my witch put down an Obscuring Mist-- presumably as part of our plans-- and a bunch of our friendly NPCs used the cover to hop ships even though they weren't supposed to. Meanwhile, we had made friends with Fishguts the cook, who had levels in rogue; we had him do a Disable Device on the bilge pumps and take some key parts with him an hour before we closed in on the Man's Promise. One of our PCs had noticed the oil barrels when wandering around, so we had Fishguts set fire to them as his last action before joining us. Apparently, he decided on his own initiative to let all the animals go free too, since it wasn't right to leave them in cages as the boat sank.
Connabar's job was to surreptitiously cut *nearly* through a few sail ropes before leaving, since he was on rigging at the time.
All told, we got our friendlies on board the Man's Promise, quickly told the other captain that we'd fight on his side if he left *pronto*, and we cut the grappling hooks and overturned the boarding planks behind us.
Barnabus Harrigan and his buddies tried to board after us, but Harrigan *tanked* his save against my misfortune hex, and ended up botching his attempt to swing across the two ships. I have never seen a more satisfying 1 on a d20 in my life. Scourge made it across, but between everyone we had, we pounded him into the ground. Our gunslinger took his fancy coat.
There's talk that Harrigan *might* have survived in spite of his smoking, sinking, animal-overrun ship. Nevertheless, we screwed him over pretty completely.
I hear the rest of the module was jury-rigged to accommodate the fact that we were hanging out with the merchant instead of killing him. We hit a storm and needed water and fought some stuff on an island, but we eventually dragged ourselves to Rickety's Squibs, and the grateful captain sold off his wares and bought us a newly-squibbed ship from the recently-arrived Captain Pegsworthy in return for our help.
Given our reluctance to attack random passing boats, the GM has messed with the game a bit to put us up against his version of the Aspus Consortium. Who feels bad for slavers, right? Chelish slavers. Even better.
So, I'm a player in Skull & Shackles, and I just had to share this particular story here. Beware spoilers, fellow players.
We're in Raiders of the Fever Sea. My captain is a witch with sea-flavoured powers.
Spoiler:
We ran into Captain Pilk(sp?) and his crew of zombies recently. It was a tough fight, and some great sceneage-- Pilk ended up going down with his ship laughing maniacally about how he'd return with the moon for my character's head!
Naturally, at first our group was like 'uh, crap, we have to fight him again?'. But a few scenes later, we're at Rickety Squibs trying to decide how we're going to crack the Rock. The GM has told me this isn't standard for the module, but he's put the Dominator as guarding the Rock for his own reasons. Long story short, there's a big, nasty Chelish warship in our way and we're not sure how to take it down.
So someone in the party gets the bright idea... to make my witch invisible and have her sneak onto the Dominator before sundown, exactly a month from now.
We haven't played this out yet. But our GM's face was *priceless*.
We're supposed to crack the Rock tonight. We'll see how far we actually get. Will update this space with hilarious zombie hijinks soon.
I tend to run my games pretty sandboxy with some IC hints when something might be too tough to do immediately. Tiernan tried to check on the Fantasmagorium, but saw redactors there, and knew he couldn't handle them alone. He had to go looking for his family elsewhere in the hope that some of them had escaped (which was true, as he found Rexus at the protest). This coincided with OOC GM info to the extent of 'you don't want this character to die in prologue, I assume, so you don't try to fight them all, right?' The player was good-natured about that. (That said, had he tried, I probably could have had him captured, let him play Rexus for a bit, and had him rescue his brother later.)
When Tiernan told the full group about it later, they decided to take some time to plan accordingly/gather some allies. This with some pretty blatant OOC talk that went like 'If you want to try it anyway, feel free, but it's going to be very rough.' My PCs are pretty good about controlling their characters and not the other way around, though, which I understand is not everyone's group dynamic.
As an aside, Tiernan knew the monastery was sitting on some seriously bad news items, but his face when he read his mother's soul time and found out about the Book of the Damned... priceless.
Aw! I'm so glad our group wasn't the only one to do this. Actually, technically, our monk was Rexus's older brother, and I highly recommend the idea.
Spoiler:
The PC, Tiernan Victocora, was a full-on member of the Many Steps Monastery. We did an intro session detailing where everyone was during the Night of Ashes-- Tiernan and Rexus were separated at the time, and neither actually knew whether the other was still alive until the protest in Aria Park. It was honestly pretty intense. Two of the other PCs were commoner rabble-rouser type friends of Rexus who helped him hide from some suspicious Hellknight types that night, and later find his brother.
We just finished Turn of the Torrent, and we're still enjoying the vengeance quest + sibling dynamic. With Rexus's utterly crappy Con score, his brother keeps trying to push him into a support role, but Rexus both wants to participate more fully in order to avenge his parents, and is having trouble with his older brother's brand new anger issues, which have turned Tiernan into someone he's not sure he likes as much.
So, uhm. To be shorter and less breathless, this has been a fantastic idea, and I'm really glad we did it. I hope you get a similar experience.
The following feature heavily throughout my early playlists and thought the list might be helpful to other GMs. Let me know what music you'll be using so I can steal your ideas too! :p
WOW. I kid you not, we have an almost-identical playlist. I'll be checking out the few OSTs on yours that we didn't already have! XD
In that spirit, here's a few things we have on our list that you didn't have, but that probably belong in the same box:
The Fountain OST
Max Richter (an artist, not a movie; he has a lot of very excellent piano stuff)
Dead Space OST (for combat scenes with undead/devils and really horrifying tableaus)
Two Steps from Hell, various stuff from their Ashes and Power of Darkness albums
Thanks very much for posting your list! I'm always excited to find really good, thematic music for my games!
@James Jacobs: That's exactly the help I was looking for, thanks! I can even keep that cross-over NPC, but make him a real jerk who only talks to them long enough to tell them how uninterested the GR is in them and their tiny city's problems. Once Hell's Vengeance comes around, it'll be "Ohh... *that* guy."
If they REALLY want to play Glorious Reclamation characters to take out Thrune and redeem Cheliax... they don't want to play Hell's Rebels, unfortunately.
I don't get the impression that they want to join the GR, necessarily, just that they're coming up short on reasons not to look for the occasional help from them.
James Jacobs wrote:
The Glorious Reclamation is headstrong and doesn't necessarily think things through... they're acting before thinking, and striking at Cheliax before the time is right, and a lot of Iomedans (including all those few in the Kintargo area) feel, in effect, that the GR has kicked the hornet nest when the anti-hornet gear is still on the way, and now that they've kicked the nest early, those canny hornets will figure out how to entrench and will be even TOUGHER to get rid of.
I can definitely understand the frustration of someone kicking off a rebellion before anyone is ready to deal with it. However, halfway intelligent PCs (and mine are) will be willing to look past that distaste once they realize that they're going to be starting their own rebellion as a result, and will therefore need rebel-type support. That's basically the crux of our issue.
Thankfully, we're a group that's big on talking about these issues and settling on solutions together. After having a chat with some players, this is what we've basically come down to so far:
-As-written, it's still a bit difficult for even non-Iomedan PCs to avoid the temptation of asking the Glorious Reclamation for eventual help. The PCs might even disapprove of their actions, but they're still a big game in town, as far as rebellions go, so "why not bug them for help with the mess they started". I honestly don't have a good answer for that, other than the distance factor, and by Turn of the Torrent, the GR will be even closer.
-This normally wouldn't be an issue-- I'm pretty good on my feet as a GM, and just having the GR send a few trinket items and an NPC their way would be a tame task-- but it's going to cause unavoidable conflicts with the eventual Hell's Vengeance stuff.
-Because of this, we're most likely scrapping plans for Hell's Vengeance, running an open-world Hell's Rebels as-is, and crossing our fingers that any spur-of-the-moment decisions I have to make for them won't wreck our ability to run Hell's Vengeance later. Honestly, no one had any better ideas than that. If we can actually make the next AP work anyway, it'd be kind of fun to set up an occasional visit from a benevolent GR NPC in this game, only to have the PCs try to kill that dratted do-gooder NPC in the next game. (That is, if you share our particular sense of humour, it's fun.) :D
How about you use your GM powers and tell the players "you know what, that whole Glorious Reclabumble thingy doesn't exist in my canpaign"?
As above, my group *wants* to eventually do both games, and we're explicitly interested in having easter eggs between those games.
Let's just leave it at "I *could* decide not to include the Glorious Reclamation, but that's not what I *want* to do, and it's not what my players want to do, either." It's basically completely contrary to why we wanted to play two linked APs in the first place, and why we decided on running these two in particular.
I think my biggest issue is that while this related-AP thing sounds great in theory, the writers seem to be going back and forth between the selling point of having two linked APs and the reality of 'we're not actually prepared for you to link these two APs in any way, so just don't do it'. It's creating a disproportionate amount of confusion for us, especially since we were so excited about the premise at first.
CBDunkerson wrote:
I'd just put the glorious reclamation action so far away that if the PCs were to try to get involved with it they'd be abandoning Kintargo to it's fate. Keep them busy in Kintargo and it won't matter what they think of the glorious reclamation.
Fine, they think they support that thing on the other side of the country that they've only heard vague weeks old rumors about... by the way, the hideout is under attack... and on fire... again.
This was one of my original ideas, but in practice, Hell's Rebels encourages a more relaxed pace with its here-and-there adventures and rebellion tracking sheet type rules. If I just keep hammering at the PCs to keep them exhausted, that's going to lead to unhappiness (we went through this exact scenario in Council of Thieves, actually, in some respects). Basically, most of the appeal of a rebellion game is in the free-form nature of it.
But if I *don't* keep it difficult to take a breath and/or leave the city, the natural inclination is going to be to hook up with the large, intimidating force that started this whole rebellion thing and actually made Thrune sit up and take notice.
Honestly, I think that's a fair thing to worry about even in a campaign that doesn't heavily feature Iomedans. Because if you're a rag-tag group of good-aligned PCs that needs allies, why *wouldn't* you go after some help from the big, well-funded, well-supported rebel force that happens to totally share your leanings? There's got to be a better reason to supply than the incredibly generic, airy one supplied in the AP, which went something like 'They're presumably doing the rebel thing wrong, but we can't give you any specific instances of what they've done that even people from their own religion disapprove of.'
I've got an interesting problem I'm trying to plan for before starting this path, and I'd like to get thoughts from other GMs who might have already handled it.
My group is big on the Iomedan angle in Kintargo, suggested-culture-be-damned. The Player's Guide suggests that the Glorious Reclamation should elicit head-shakes from Iomedans in Kintargo, but it would really, really help to have a solid reason why, other than 'the Glorious Reclamation is stirring the pot'. After all, the PCs in Kintargo are about to do the exact same thing themselves.
I've got a few ideas on how to keep Iomedan PCs separated from the Glorious Reclamation in thought and in deed, but they're likely to fall apart as soon as Hell's Vengeance comes out. That's my real frustration in trying to plan this out in any kind of elegant manner. That said, here are some of the attempts I've made in my planning notes:
The Glorious Reclamation's leader is not native to Cheliax. He/she is basically a bull in the china shop, with no real understanding of the local customs, social mores, and consequences that might occur because of certain actions. As such, that leader keeps making obvious mistakes, getting good people killed, and drawing attention when subtlety might have been more advisable. Basically, any rebellious Iomedan organizations actually native to Cheliax, which might have been slowly building up resources for a rebellion proper, have just had their plans rudely upended by some well-intentioned but arrogant outsider who thinks they know best. This outsider angle also helps starkly separate local Iomedans in a literal way-- even if this outside leader has amassed native followers, it would certainly chafe longstanding Iomedans to watch a bunch of recent fresh-faced converts join the Reclamation, and go immediately running off to their deaths.
(Possibly in addition to 1) The Glorious Reclamation has a zero-tolerance attitude toward evil. A large number of Chelaxians are LE, or at least tolerant of such attitudes. If you kill everyone in Cheliax who's evil, you may not have much of a country left to save. So far in my games, I've portrayed good-aligned religions in Cheliax as being more predisposed toward redemption than smiting, rather by necessity. If we go with point 1 as being true, outside Iomedans would be much more smite-y than redemptive, and therefore their methods might strike native Iomedans as shortsighted and/or actively harmful to the people of Cheliax.
That said, since we're hoping to eventually use stuff from Hell's Vengeance and not conflict with it outright, I'm worried that this take on the Glorious Reclamation will immediately conflict with the way those modules are set up. It's probably bugging me all out of proportion to the possibility, but I'm still interested in seeing if other people have dealt with the problem differently.
While I could always just tell PCs "Don't play an Iomedan" (who am I kidding, I *hate* doing that), I'd rather just provide them with roleplaying fodder ("Damn those Glorious Reclamation fools! Did you hear that they did X? They're going to get us all killed! Now we have to clean up the mess they've made out of our city!").
Clearly unformatted item that's almost certainly OP for the price, a few grammar and spelling mistakes... and yet. I really loved the concept, and the writer clearly put some work into giving it an interesting drawback. I can't upvote it compared to the one next to it, but I'd love to see a reworked version of it down the line.
