justmebd's page

I think I enjoyed Phantom Menace more than this. I REALLY wanted to like it but it was just . . . TERRIBLE. I'd say 90% of the movie didn't actually make a damn bit of sense. The "plot" is paper thin and some of the character "developments" are even worse. The Poe Dameron storyline is . . . Good God, did these people ever take a script writing class?

I'd go into more, but then I'd have to start getting spoilerey.

I went with seven people, ages 15-50 (I'm not the 50 year old). The two youngest kids were the only two who liked it. The rest of us just stared at each other trying to see if the person we were looking at was the only one who didn't like it. We agreed it wasn't very good.

I hope everyone else likes it.

I'm truly upset about this because this isn't a case of "nerding" out. I really want to know how Rian Johnson got through the first cut of that movie without asking himself, "What did I just do?"

Plus side: SOME of the Luke stuff is entertaining. The Rey/Finn Lightsaber fight is well choreographed.

Page 33, first column, first paragraph after the "Vespam Artisans" header.

I quote:
" . . Should point the PCs to Vespam Artisans in Old Korvosa."

This is the BEST typo ever. As a reader, I've been transposing Old Korvosa for Old Kintargo in my head constantly. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's been doing that.

As a former editor, I can empathize with the issue, but don't be disheartened. I love it, and the unintentional reference to one of my favorite APs just brought a huge smile to my face.

Well, I've (finally) backed this, on the basis that I have no money.

I'm assuming the paper is digestible?

Yes, and the tears of your players also are quite delicious.

I have to say, the years-long rivalry between Richard and Greg is one of the finest things ever to come out of this here Interweb Messageboard Post-a-ma-thingamajig.

BIG thanks to the Paizo team for getting this on the front page. I'm privately working on one of my friends to get him to jump in. He REALLY wants to but has a "policy" about not getting involved in Kickstarters.

I keep threatening to kill his character next time we play.

Anyone reading this who is on the fence should consider a few things:

1. The Frogs ALWAYS deliver, you do not have to worry about fulfillment.
2. Go to the page and read all the updates. If you aren't convinced by the amount of stuff the Deranged .. . . sorry, the admirable Mr. Pett has offered as teasers, we'll just have to unleash the hidden terror on that playground full of puppies.

We wouldn't want that to happen now, would we?

I dove deep into that Sister Lyme encounter . . . I may need a new set of clothes.

I was thinking of wearing a Giant Hat and ringing a bell.

Too much?

Woke up to see we've hit 360 backers.

She grows . . . . and consumes . . .

I have it on extremely good authority that Greg doesn't drink, and I know he'd really want me to have his share:) Plus whisky would only make him cry anyway, not that he's ever drunk it.

If you're considering making a bigger purchase, I should just say that the Blight, which is festering in my cellar and growing, now has rudimentary gristle-heads and is beginning to make noises. She's been like that ever since I mentioned that she might be getting out to play. I really need to buy a bigger cage to house her fleshy, flaccid, hairy limbs so please do consider it long and hard, it would be greatly appreciated.

Yarp.

PS And I'll be round next Tuesday.

You're more than welcome. Also, I would be remiss if I did not invite Mr. Webb along, as well. He is most welcome to share a dram with us.

(Pauses while drinking 20-year old Scotch and peers thoughtfully at the numbers)

"This is an interesting development that will require more drinking," the man says.

Of course, Mr. Pett and Mr. Vaughan are more than welcome to come over and partake of my Scotch collection at any time.

(I may regret putting that in print)

It is the middle of the night here in NE Ohio, and Insomnia once again has gripped my body and mind.

I turn to my old friends at FGG to soothe my troubled mind. As I peruse the Blight, my mind begins to crack and fracture.

What is this I see before me?

Is it real? Is it soft? Will it bite?

(The rest of this journal is illegible due to the blood spatters)

I'm backer #106.

Curse my need to pay bills and be at work when this launched!!!

For the Record: I LOVED Mythic. It totally worked for me.

In the spirit of the thread:
Has Paizo ever considered putting out a "Dungeon" style Magazine/product? I know there are 3rd party sources out there for this kind of stuff, but I was curious if Paizo ever has entertained the notion.

Auxmaulous wrote:

Nice preview - I will have to pick this up...somehow.

To me when I think of the Blight (using the beautiful Styes as a point of mood reference) I think of Lustmord, Godflesh (Pure II - the last track), and Samhain's "The Hungry End" in particular. Just to name a few.

I would implore that Mr. Pett go too far vs. not far enough. This is going to one for the rpg history books.

Hoorah!

We've had quite a few discussions (young master Vaughan and I) about content Auxmaulous, it's a very fine line as you know but I've tried to push as far as I can go. The AP and campaign are very much adult. Implied violence is always a stronger weapon as far as I'm concerned, but tricky to pull off. I hope it does take that disturbing step into Between; there are certainly a few situations in Levee that made my players uncomfortable, but not in a gratuitous way - more sort of WHAT!!!! Things from the past like the ghouls in the cornfield in Skinsaw, the play in Sixfold, the helplessness of Sorrow and the creepy isolated atmosphere in Mockingbird are the sort of things that come to the fore, as well as some other more darker things.

Great choice of music, I've now a new set of tracks to check out.

Here's a Levee ** spoiler omitted **...

Speaking of real life flavor for this type of campaign, this guy/urban legend is about 5-10 miles from my house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Robinson_%28Green_Man%29

Then, there is Zombieland, which is right in the same area. My wife's grandparents are buried in the graveyard they refer to.

http://old.post-gazette.com/regionstate/20001031zombie1.asp

Lastly, I only live about an hour from where the original "Night of the Living Dead" was filmed.

justmebd wrote:

I'm working on a piece involving Shades, Greg. I was going to ask if you thought I should Channel Mr. Pett while writing it, but the mere thought caused a shadow to fall over my house, the neighbor's cat fled his usual perch on my porch and I believe I went insane for a few minutes.

The priest next door even made the sign of the cross at me, but I thought that wasn't out of character for him.

And the porch

It needed fixed anyway.

I'm working on a piece involving Shades, Greg. I was going to ask if you thought I should Channel Mr. Pett while writing it, but the mere thought caused a shadow to fall over my house, the neighbor's cat fled his usual perch on my porch and I believe I went insane for a few minutes.

The priest next door even made the sign of the cross at me, but I thought that wasn't out of character for him.

If I had more than two human followers on my twitter, I might have more of an impact.

Until then, I'll just help Herald Frog keep this thread at the top.

I cut back on my vacation spending for this.

Our long, national nightmare is over.

The package arrived today. The shipping label looked fine. Not sure what the problem was.

Then Cthulhu erupted from the book and chewed my leg off.

Crystal Frasier wrote:

I guess you could say Barzilai is... confection-wary

:D

Huh. I'd have thought him a big fan of devil's food cake.

I'll just show myself out.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Ugg.

Just got back from the post office. It is clear why that organization is bleeding money.

According to their printout, there is a "Label Encoding Error," which is code for the label got ripped somewhere. So I said, "Can you call the facility where it's at right now and get it fixed?"

"No, we can't do that," she replied.

"Because that would make sense," I said.

She smiled and agreed with me 100%, then told me to contact their customer service line. A line that will not let you talk to a human and just says the package is "Delayed."

I sent an email through their contact page. It didn't make me feel any better.

So, if Bill gets this package back, he should demand a refund of his shipping charges, but somehow I doubt that will happen.

Good news: Manuscript down to a final polish and the last few crunch bits. John should have it Wednesday at the latest.

Woohoo!!

Shipping update!! It gets better!!

The package left Cincinnati and went to Memphis, Tenn. So after criss-crossing my location, it just went south.

Now it's back in Pennsylvania.

Definitely having a talk with the post office tomorrow.

Gambit wrote:

Rathendar wrote:

Hopefully one of these can beat Saint Kargath in cool factor, or come close to Lord Soth. Ungarato has some cool to him based on history bits posted so far. Looking forward to this article.

The original Death Knight, causer (or at least non-preventer) of the Cataclysm that befell his world, owner of his own castle of horror on Krynn, and a Dark Lord with his own Domain of Dread in Ravenloft...thats gonna be tough to beat. ;)

Even Arthas is number 2 on the all time Death Knight list behind Soth, and I loved Warcraft 3 something fierce.

I still have an intense desire to paint "Lord Soth's Charge" by Parkinson on a wall somewhere.

To this day, I wish I could get the original and hang it on a wall in my house. I'm a Keith Parkinson geek, but Lord Soth's Charge remains my favorite of his work. An absolutely STUNNING painting. The world lost a great artist when he passed.

Hypothetical purely for entertainment purposes:

The powers that be call you in and inform you they've obtained the rights to do a Mad Max RPG. You are the creative lead and Jason is the rules guy. Generous resources will be at your fingertips and it now is your top priority.

About how long do you think it would take you guys to put out a finished product?

If selling ad space on the inside covers and a few splash pages at the end instead of in-house ads brings the end-user cost down, I'm in favor of it.

I've always been mystified by the resistance to ads. They never bothered me, personally.

Eating breakfast and pledging to the FGG Kickstarter. Good start to a Friday.

I was a charter, then I lost my job and the subscription had to go for a few years. It's a shame really because I had started with Dragon back in 1985. I hate breaking streaks.

Good news from Richard Pett today. He thinks he'll probably be able to get me all the completed manuscripts for The Blight by Easter. If that is the case, then an end-of-year release for The Blight is much less speculative. Still no guarantees as the manuscript is still sight unseen, and we'll have to do all the development work from our end as well, but it fills in a lot of blanks on where we're at in the process exactly. So, woohoo!

Some players died a little inside upon hearing this news. In a related story, Richard Pett grows strong on the tears of ravaged players.

Just out of curiosity -- and so I can prep my wallet via a tax return -- when is the next KS planned to go live now?

I know you were delaying it until you got caught up on everything else, and wanted to know if you have a timetable now with SOA on the slow boat from the Orient.

What I really loved about Gamma World was the one box set that had a regional map of the US, the Northeast Ohio/Western PA area, and my hometown was on the map.

As a 12-year old, I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

TOH 4 Kicked some serious posterior. I wonder if it was just put out "too close" to the TOH Complete?

Wait . . . does that mean my TOH Complete now is incomplete? What's the world coming to? There's no reason to live!!! Where's my canoe?!?!?!?!?

*Runs screaming from room, gets in a canoe and falls off of a cliff*

Oh no, thank YOU!!

Deep Magic was, hands down, one of the best RPG products I got this year.

Animate Skeleton made me giggle like a 10-year old gamer for about 15 minutes.

Before I even finished the "A's," I was on the phone to my gamer friends reading out some of the spells to them.

I'll be getting HotDQ and RoT when I get my tax return next February. Can't wait.

Lord Gadigan wrote:

Thumbs up to whoever wrote the item entry for the Mind Burner. The little details like the pool of white smoke forming in the weapon's dish before it fires and them beam scattering stray particles that cause those near it to remember scents associated with important memories help turn it into a rather unique, interesting item as opposed to a generic mind-damaging high-tech gun.

I'm pretty sure I put that detail in... but it might have been Nick. Hard to tell where one starts and the other ends.

And I'm officially frightened now.

Yes.

You can do a new edition without throwing everything that was done previously out the window, and I believe that is EXACTLY how Paizo would approach a new edition.

It is time to do some dusting and maintenance. This is not a bad thing.

JoelF847 wrote:

1) Will there be a section of the adventure that involved a dwarven outpost/cit, such as Janderhoff?

2) If so, will there be a gazetteer entry for that city?

Sadly, no for both, but primarily because I don't want to steal any thunder from the Dwarves vs. Orcs AP that I eventually hope to do.

Dwarves vs. Orcs AP?

You have my attention, sir.

Just so everyone at Paizo HQ knows, I am so IN for a Dwarves vs. Orcs AP. Put this on the 2016 AP schedule and just take my money.

I have a group of 5, and we're about to start this adventure path in a couple weeks. Two of the players are new to RPGs completely, so I was looking forward to running people who aren't corrupted by years of min-maxing and Google searching for optimal builds.

While we were chatting 3 more people (good friends) came over and of course they want to play too. Nobody else wants to run the game, and I don't see any possible way to do this with 8 people. With that many players, it seems like skill checks would be moot (since somebody is bound to have the right roll) and combat would turn into a hours-long cluster.

Do you think it's possible to tweak (every) encounter to run this with a large group? I'm leaning towards a loud NO, but I told them I'd take a day or two to consider it. Any thoughts/suggestions?

I used to run a group of 8 in middle school/high school in the 1st Edition days, so I have some experience with that. While not optimal, if breaking the group up isn't being received well, this is a workable situation.

Here's what I did:
1. Fighters and Thieves were the only class I allowed to be Doubled up for PCs. Spellcasters were limited to one wizard and one cleric. I made healing more readily available after tough combats.

2. Keep combats simple. This was easier in 1st Edition, so you may have to munchkin the rules for Pathfinder a little bit. As an example, instead of multiple checks for this or that, if a player wants to do something like bouncing off of tables and walls while swinging on a rope, you make it one roll and it's a success or a fail. Adjust bad guys accordingly and always err on the side of more hit points and more opponents until you get a feel for what the group can take. It's not an exact science once you get that far above the established design levels as the math starts to break down.

3. Make sure EVERYBODY gets along.

4. Make sure EVERYONE is on the same page.

5. Don't sweat the small stuff, just move the game along.

Hope that helps and good luck.

Neil, out of curiosity, how many times did you give an evil laugh and rub your hands together in a menacing way while you were writing this?

I can feel the dark side flowing through you -- But in a good way.

This video speaks for itself. SPOILERS if you haven't read Book 3 or watched the last episode.

http://uproxx.com/tv/2014/06/watch-a-crowded-bar-react-to-the-mountain-vs-r ed-viper-battle-from-game-of-thrones/

The only non FGG Kickstarter I backed that is WAAAAYYY behind schedule is Call of Cthulhu 7th, but they've been good about updates and it looks like it will be here sooner rather than later at this point. I think the enormity of what that project's stretch goals created got away from them.

I backed Monte Cook's Numenera and that was right on time, and it looks like The Strange also is right on schedule.

FGG is the best, though!! (End shameless brown-nosing)

I have Convention envy. Before the kids, I went to GenCon every year and Origins almost every year.

*Sigh* Good times.

I'm excited. Thanks FGG for doing this. I'll be pledging as soon as it goes live (Assuming I'm not at work at the time, asleep, indisposed, captured by aliens, killing zombies, piloting the Starship Enterprise, assaulting Tsar, plotting my takeover of the universe or possessed by a demon).

Greg, I wrote the 2002 D&D Open at GenCon, and the original version of the final encounter with the Gargantuan Red Dragon was so deadly, the guy running the tournament leveled the whole encounter down and took out the surprise attack from the Dragon.

I think you and the other FGG guys would've been proud of the design.

If Greg is one of the writers, I'll just create a new bank account for you guys to take my money from.

Dear Bill and Skeeter,

You guys are awesome and I just threw $110 at you for SoA.

(Fingers crossed you get to the Poster Map goal)

- Justmebd

My wife goes for a job interview tomorrow. If she gets the job, I'm in. If I win the lottery tonight, I'm in.

If somebody wants to give me $110 right now, I'm in.

I'm a sucker for CotCT, and I think Part 5 (Skeletons of Scarwall) is one of the best adventures I've ever read in my 30 years of gaming.

Playing SoS felt like the original Ravenloft in many ways, and that's just one part of the Adventure Path.

I recommend CotCT to everyone who ever asks me as a good entry point.

Hopefully, Paizo will have the time/resources to collecting and updating it at some point.

I see you are collaborating with Greg Vaughan on an Adventure Path installment. This requires I ask some hard-hitting questions about your writing process.

1. Who got to write the nouns? The Verbs?
2. How were adjectives divided up? Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock?
3. I bet dividing up the adverbs was a nightmare. Was bribery involved?
4. The person who wrote the final encounter was probably determined via Thunderdome. Tell me it was Thunderdome.

Hope this gave you a good chuckle.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Greg Vaughn for creating some of the best adventures/AP installments I have ever read.

I see he is getting part 1 of Shattered Star, so I also want to take this opportunity to get everyone on board to demand he be chained to his computer to also write Part 6 of this AP.

I love his high-level stuff, and I still think Skeletons of Scarwall is one of the best modules ever written for ANY game system.

Who's with me?