jester47's page

Wow, a magic item solution. Now that's thinking "outside the box." You don't even need a willing participant. Just geas a healthy gal with sturdy hips. (oops, sorry, that wouldn't be nice) Better to build a magic portable womb.

It depends on the DM. Your suggestion would be awesome for a comedy (or horror) campaign.

I don't really agree when you say "no sin is worse than any other." I'm guessing you mean that from a "theological" point of view, which is fine. But I think most people internally order trasgressions from bad to worse, and everyone is probably a little bit different in how they look at it.

I am coming from a theological/biblical perspective on that one.

For Evil Midnight Lurker:
To rephrase the statement I believe that any sin is as bad as any other. Still I must state that as a human I find it hard to see how stealing a lolipop is equivalent to murder, but that is when I do not heed my belief that any wrong is a wrong against an infinite being and thus infinately bad. The Psalms state that when one sins it is against only God, an infintite being. Thus the punishment is eternal unless forgivness is sought out of real feeling of sorrow for the action.

Back to Michael F:
Most people determine the magnitude of a sin based on the temporal consequences (because those are the most imediate to human beings)not the eternal consequences. This creates the concept of venial and mortal i.e. deadly sins, which is great for stuff like adventure paths and modules with content that makes people think about this stuff (and thus bringing it back on topic). So now I have to repent and stop stealing from my boss by posting at work.

I have not read the new pathfinder. However I think it is good to have complex characters in the game. Any DM Worth his/her salt would know what topics he/she can cover with the group. Furthermore any Christian should be able to look at these characters and see a great opportunity for roleplay and art reflecting the world in which we live. Finally any christian DM would be able to use these characters to teach about the situations.

No one likes abortion, especially those that perform them. Imagine a quest that leads to a "rod of womb moving." When there is an at risk pregnancy that could threaten the life of the mother, rather than terminating the life of the child the rod moves it to another willing surrogate. This is fantasy after all. Why should the choice even have to be made? It is a magic item that would not have much use in combat and so could be fairly easy to get.

As for a gay couple, a christian group under a good DM should have no problem with this. The PCs are probably not perfect flowers either and so it could provide a good lesson about looking at your own faults before calling attention to others. In the real world no sin is worse than any other, so this presents lots of space for RP.

In this I think that as a christian I would be more interested in Pathfinder adventures than I was previously.

Go Paizo!

Is it too soon to ask what monsters made the cut?

Actually the DM asked me if I wanted to make a new character or run him, and I have statted him, but I was wondering if there was somthing official. I don't think there is, but I thought I would check.

Simple... EVil will win because Good is dumb...

Oh wait... wrong thread.

I think the reason is that over the years the expectations have risen to the point to where if anyone publishes anything there is no way for all the fanboys to say that it does not suck. The editors are wise not to publish any articles because they want to spare the author the brunt of the "YOU RUINED YUGOLOTHS!!!!!" hate.

To sum up: People are way to interested in them to ever be able to write an article or book that does them justice. Best to leave your dreams intact than to feel the great hate.

baudot's 1a and 1b suggestions are golden. Heroes of Horror may join my list of rule books...

baudot, did all of this come from HoH? Or just the idea for the second part?

Compression is your friend!

jester47 wrote:

If your character dies IMC your new character starts at level 1. Even if the others are level 10. Though the difference is was never that huge.

But I have hit points heal at 1/level/hour of rest. Real damage is expressed as con loss. Its what you loose when you run out of hp. This makes the party tougher, and it makes it easy for people to catch up.

Obviously this will not work in an adventure path, but it does in an open campaign setting.

I was using this system but it collapsed, for me any way, when the average party level was around 6 as the difference just became to great.

I know what you mean. The way I dealt with was to reaverage the party and just drop the remainder. So if the party was 6th level and one person died assuming a 4 person party you would get 19/4 = 4. So I would try to shepard them into encounters that were good for a 4th level party. Dangerous for a 1st level character, but not too deadly as CRs go, and routine work for the 6th level guys. The xp gain of the rest of the party slows down while it speeds up for the 1st level guy. An 11 + 1 + 6 + 6 party might be a problem though. But if you are brutal enough, this should never happen. A good rule of thumb would be that you start at the level of the highest level character -8. That way the CRs don't get too out of control.

Oh and I forgot, also change the advancement rate. Keep the lower levels fast but slow the advancement way down as you level. Levels 10 - 15 are the levels where the abilities of the player characters start to break down the game, so make it harder to get there. This way you will have a nice mix of characters level 1-10. After all, Gandalf was a 5th level Magic User.

If your character dies IMC your new character starts at level 1. Even if the others are level 10. Though the difference is was never that huge.

But I have hit points heal at 1/level/hour of rest. Real damage is expressed as con loss. Its what you loose when you run out of hp. This makes the party tougher, and it makes it easy for people to catch up.

Obviously this will not work in an adventure path, but it does in an open campaign setting.

If my house ever caught fire, you'd see me dragging a Wal Mart crate (or two) full of Dungeons out the front door.

You might be speaking with a lot of hyperbole, but, I would suggest that you don't do this. In that situation time is of the essence. Some homes can become fully involved in less than a minute once there is a fire. You would not believe how fast one of these places can light up. If it is worth that much to you, get it insured.

oh and wayne's art rocks. Apologies for offtopicness.

Just to be clear Abinati, I was not saying that the laws are changeable. My email is beowulf47 at comcast dot net. Send me a mail and we can talk about Mark 7:1-23 and Romans 14 and how they apply to art and lust.

Abinadi wrote:

We need to treat our bodies as holy temples...

I couldn't agree more. I'm thinking of some of the temples of India, the ones where sculptures of men and women decorate the outside, acting out sacred geometry. This cover art also brings to mind The Song of Solomon, and Chapter 7 in particular.

Holy in that context means clean in the eyes of the God of the Hebrews. The temples you are describing would not be considered holy but rather unholy. :) The cover art only brings to mind SoS 7 if you let it. I see no naked women on the cover. In fact she is fighting which is not what the woman in SoS is doing. At all. Pornography is attempting to draw the infinite from the finite. SoS is not immune.

This art is fine.

POsting as a christian. People can turn anything they want into porn, from visual arts intended for athat purpose to the a picture in Time Magazine. It is not a matter of whats out there but whats in the heart. In Victorian england I hear the big thing was womens ankles. In the modern west it is breats. Both wizards in this discussion are covered enough given the angles for general publication. Yes there are hints of sexuality but not anything more than you get walking down the street.

We are running the styes and my character got blasted at the end of the last adventure. I have decided to run an NPC that the DM had, and I was wondering if he was part of the adventure as written or if it was my DMs placeholder.

Is there a character (Cleric of Cuthbert) named Bartholemew in the Styes and does he have stats?

I think it would be really neat for a customer to designate what issue in the future they might want to start a subscription when paying for it.

This makes sure a customer does not get duplicates. Say for instance a customer was going to subscribe in order to get savage tide. But he is not sure if he missed the first issue. He could say start at issue 2 of savage tide and I will pick up the first. Or when a customer is anticipating a series like istivan or the blood of Malar, they can say to start it there.

just a thought.

I think Rappan Athuk: Reloaded, Crypt of the Devil Lich, and Demons and Devils do.

I waas thinking along the lines of Shared Experience rather than originalty and coolness.

What about Revenge of Falcon, Flames of Falcon those modules featured a inn ran by a hill giant.

I too hopes it Toee the best module ever.
Are they really revamping the old classics to 3.5 G &D series wow I'm speechless. Although I am still wondering to this day where our the module classics of our time, Where is our tomb of horrors our Lost caverns of Tsojcanth. All these writers all these submissions gotta be some gold in there.

3.5: Crypt of the Devil Lich, The Mysterious Tower, Iron Crypt of the Heretics, Red Hand of Doom, Rappan Athuk, Shackled City, Age of Worms, Lost City of Barakus, Aerie of the Crow God, Mud Sorcerers Tomb.

3.0: Wizards Amulet, Crucible of Freya, Tomb of Abysthor, Belly of the Beast, Of Sound Mind, NeMornens Vault, Queen of Lies, Rappan Athuk, Vault of Larin Karr, Demons and Devils, Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, Freeport Trilogy, The Harrowing, Dungeon of the Fire opal.

Ok just watched the sneak peek video. Yeah, Castle Greyhawk for sure.

BUT: It did sound like they are very interested in revisiting some older material in the Expedition series... so I wouldn't put it past them.

ALSO: Expedition to Demonweb Pits does not seem to be the redo of DQ that I thought.

Those are good points.

Lets put it this way: I really want it to be Temple of Elemental Evil even though it might not be. I am finding enough "evidence" to back up what I hope it is.

I could be dead wrong.

I never had the pleasure of running or playing Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I can't afford to buy the adventure these days as it's prohibitively expensive.

Is the story-arc vastly different than the original T1-T4 series? If so then my suspicion is it's "Expedition to the Temple of Elemental Evil" or "Expedition to Hommlet"... perhaps to give those of us who never ran/played a chance to visit the good old moathouse.

"Return" was in the tradition of the "Return to" modules. Generally they covered the old module area 25 years after the original. That was sort of the theme. The players check out a bigger hommlet, a moathouse that has repopulated, and a few other surprises. The meat is a very big dungeon crawl far away from the "return to" area. I thought this detracted from the adventure. While that dungeon is fun, I don't think it really belonged in the mod and the connections to it felt sort of forced. So I just cut it out. I have the characters run around Nulb, Hommlet, the Moathouse and the ol Temple (I mean comon, its Return to the TEMPLE of ELEMENTAL EVIL not Return to the place we never been to before...)

I like to use the original Hommlet with the new Moathouse and the original temple. In any case a redo of the original would be awesome.

One thing I noticed was that Return to wraps up part 1 at page 32, the same length as Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury. It occurs to me that this was the original length, but got turned into a Mega Mod later. Only Monte knows the truth. Still, the "Big Dungeon" cuts out of the module quite nicely if you get rid of the mysterious priests and just move a certain cleric south without a certain weapon.

Sben, you are thinking Gary's Games. Game Wizards are on 65th, East of 8th. Not sure if Games and Gizmos are still around. Thought they went out of business.

Another item: Mona said that he had thought he was done writing for Wizards, that FC1 was going to be his last book for them, but then they offered this project and he said he couldn't pass up the opportunity to do it. From what I understand writing for the realms sort of annoys Erik. But he will do Classic/Greyhawk material with gusto and zeal. This leads me to think Undermountain is not it.

I will say this: If it is inot ToEE, then it is assuredly Castle Greyhawk. How you get an inn in it, I don't know.

I am still betting on ToEE. First off Mona said it was never mentioned but greatly hinted at. This I would say is the comment about classic adventures. Other things to consider:

First Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain got redone. This tested the waters and showed that "yes virginia there really was a market for old modules converted to the new edition."

Then Ravenloft gets redone.
Then The DQ series gets a redo.

Mona said there was an Inn that featured prominently in the material that he was working on.

So this leaves us with real options. A redo of ToEE and a redo of Undermountain.

The same reason for not doing ToEE can be made for not doing undermountain: The material of both has been touched on in recent years and there is no reason to go back:

For ToEE this is RttToEE and for Undermountain there is the description in the Waterdeep book and the web supplements that are being done by Matthew Sernett.

Going off the "its already been done" logic Undermountain has less of a chance than ToEE. Also, Undermountain is STILL being done. So there is no reason to do it.

I would agree that it was Castle Greyhawk if it was not for the Inn. The Inn is what makes me think that it is ToEE.

Mona admits he is a S U C K E R for classic (read Greyhawk/Gygaxian) material. His hint and the way it is phrased makes me think that in the previous version of what he was working on an Inn was a major part of the project. Castle Greyhawk in any of its incarnations does not fit this bill.

Most likely candidate: The Temple of Elemental Evil.

Further: The Temple is some of D&Ds most remarketable material. We have one Computer Games, two game books, and a novel, three of these products were written post 2000. While the original has never existed in this edition. I am pretty sure that the Temple of Elemental Evil is marketing gold because of its status next to GDQ and Ravenloft as one of THE modules of the shared D&D experience.

I rest my case.

Gary Teter wrote:

Heh. To get a line count, I actually did just count semicolons....

Shhh!! Don't let them know the truth!

Clean code! All shall bow before clean, well commented code whose arcane maunderings mean not to the Uninitiated! Thy semicolons, brackets and carets are a method in which to contact our Dread Overlords of the One and Zero! We plead with their messengers, StdIn, StdOut, and StdErr to hear our prayers and curses!

(Of course, I think they pay me at my work by how many pints of blood I can get out of a rock. >:( )

But alas, even Standard IO can be trecherous with the presence of the scoundrel printf and his buffer overflow of doom. And of course I call it StdIO so you can see that my heritige is c. :)

Undermountain would take much longer than the time he has put in the project assuming he is still doing his job at Paizo, which he is. Can't be undermountain because it is too big.

Flumphs in an automobile...

I'd rule out a faithful recreation of original TOEE... (a) it just seems too dungeon intensive for Eric, and a faithful recreation wouldn't really feature the Welcome Wench as much as the hint let's on and (b) if he was doing just Village of Hommlet, he also might find that a bit too mundane... I'd keep guessing.

The Welcome Wench is a huge part of the ToEE. Its supposed to be a place of intrigue and deception. Its the RP part of the whole module. Besides, I get the impression that Mr. Mona is all about the Dungeon. I don't think he finds anything dealing with a classic "mundane." To many Greyhawk is a mundane vanilla setting, yet he would sell his first born to work on it (well maybe not that far but it makes my point). He, like myself is a sucker for classics. I pegged RttToEE and I bet I get this one too.

Hommlet and ToEE are the only classic materials where an inn is prominently detailed and is intended to be the base of operations for the party and contains several clues.

Erik said:
"I'm told that Wizards of the Coast dropped a major hint about this product at Gen Con, but didn't name it outright.
Hmmmm.
--Erik"

With this info, and the info below, and knowing Eric, I would say ToEE. These are some of the questions and answers from the Q&A at Gen Con this year:

-Plans to update older modules like Ravenloft and Demonweb Pits?
-There are more coming and WotC is looking feedback from fans on what they would like.

-Is WotC doing more adventures in a box and short adventures?
-There is a lot more material headed to shelves in the future beyond whats been announced.

-Expedition to Castle Greyhawk coming?
-Already on the list as items being looked at for production.

1. It is somthing Erik could not refuse to do, and we already have FC1. This leads me to believe that it is based on classic material.

2. An Inn features prominently in it. Its probably not the Shady Dragon Inn. Green Dragon? Welcome Wench?

3. With the Ravenloft supplement on its way and Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, and WotC asking about what classic material the fans want redone,

I would wager that it has to be a classic revamp of Temple of Elemental Evil.

If so: Mr. Mona- could you please include the structural changes made to the Moathouse? Mainly a certain inverted obelisk?

You may want to check out Salt and Sea Dogs from Kenzer and Co.
Also, Necromancer Games has Dead Man's Chest.
Both are very good for Fantasy Pirate themed campaigns.

If I had to pick one I would go with DMC.

Oh, sorry, I thought I had ben passed-over. :0
:)

Hopefully this won't go down on my permanent record...

Hrm 2 years breaking LINE OF BUSINESS WEB APPLICATIONS (if this does not describe the Paizo web site, I don't know what does) for microsoft to improve their security and nary a call back. Must have someone specific in mind. :)

My collection will stop at 24 books and 36 magazines. PDFs don't count.

Man Gwydion, thats a total crock...
Everyone knows there are no virgins in Art School.

DMG if I recall correctly.

DMG I thought.

Cause the apparatus is just cool.

The Aparatus of Kwalish.

What are the Dungeon Adventures that use Mhorgs?

I've changed my Iron Golem to Bronze to avoid such an Achilles Heel. Doesn't roll off the tongue, of course.

I would still make it look like iron. Then when a rust monster attacks, the whole golems turns green. :)

There are so many that I cannot even think to name them, but five 3.0 adventures I would want in a compendium and updated at some point are:

Eye for an Eye: 82
The Harrowing: 84
Dungeon of the Fire Opal: 84
Rana Mor: 86
Headless: 89

Could we get a volume dedicated to non AP James Jacobs adventures?

I would buy an AoW hardback. Just because it allows me to cull down my collection.

Eric Mona,

Mr. Peterson through his descriptions has single handedly convinced me to purchase SCAP. I hope his endorsement is duely compensated for. :)

Professor Webb

I am a Rat Bastard when it comes to death. If I were playing an normal open ended campaign I require the players to start over at level 1 with their current party. This creates a good spread of levels that makes the game more interesting and offers incentive to get the other guy raised.

In a path situation, I am not as sure. I feel that everyone should have a character die in the course of a campaign (hey as DM almost ALL my characters die, spread the love). In a path situation though, it is hard to not bring back the dead character. I think I would stick with the rules of level loss. As the song says "let the bodies hit the floor." I think AoW is way cooler if the party cycles through 12 characters trying to stop the age of worms. Given that if I were playing an AP straight through, I would for the rest of the adventure have a raised or replacement character start one level behind the party, but then bring them up to equivalent number at the start of the next adventure in the series.

Adventure paths can be used in two ways, and those uses determine how you award experience.

First as an actual adventure path, like James said, XP is almost useless and archaic.

Second, mining the adventure path for locations and ideas and maybe an individual adventure can be quie fun. In this case XP is useful.

I think it works best on the sword coast.

Free City = WAterdeep or Balders Gate

Wormcrawl Fissue = Skull George

Wizards Tower = Candle Keep

Ha
stur.

Ha sutr

HASTUR!

hexTorians, veCnans

:)