obfuscatingDeity's page

I don't really have any *intentional* diversions as a rule beyond the ones that come up organically from my players interpreting the setting and building their characters in conversation with it; like, for example, a player who wanted to play a minotaur cleric of Erastil, so now we've got a hidden Druidic/Erastilian community with a minotaur population in Cheliax's Whisperwood.

Either the changes are from collaborating to make players' character concepts work, or they're from the choices my players make over the course of an AP; like my Age of Ashes party has elected to build an international trade guild that has slowly increased Breachill's prosperity to the point that they're suing Cheliax for sovereignty, and so in any future games I run in Golarion there'll be a big international trade guild headquartered in the city-state of Breachill.

...(some unfortunate whitewashing of a canon character)...

Dunno if you've heard from any other locations, but I can confirm the OoA depiction of Trietta Riccia seems to be a fluke. We've got new art of her in IL that hews much closer to previous depictions.

keftiu wrote:

More than half of Book 4 is roleplay.

Wait what? That sounds insane haha. How does that even work

Perhaps the clearer way of putting it is "more than half of book 4 is made up of diplomatic problem solving." The thing to remember, gang, is that PF2e *does* have mechanics for making impressions and influencing people; it even has a whole subsystem for it.

I imagine many folks tend to play with those systems from a roleplay-first perspective, but there's nothing keeping a group from summarizing their arguments and then rolling to see how convincing their character was.

From that perspective, then, the campaign could potentially *not* be too "roleplay heavy," as long as your players are well-versed in the influence mechanics and feel comfortable summarizing arguments and debate points rather than acting out long conversations.

Book 4 in particular is all about learning the idiosyncrasies of a group of important political figures and working to influence them towards a certain goal, and most of the books have opportunities for diplomacy and pacifism to win the day, but you could just as easily handle it purely mechanically if that's what your players are more into. Mine probably wouldn't enjoy it in that style, but you know yours better than anyone else here does.

I've been running War for the Crown for a bit now(plus a PFS prologue to set the stage and stakes as suggested by another thread on these very forums) and I definitely think it's pretty aces as far as an RP-focused campaign goes. In WftC proper we had I believe four full sessions with only a single combat encounter, simply because the Exaltation Gala is that chock-full of cool people to talk to and things to do. I'm very excited for the future volumes, and I think Taldor has turned out to be a dark horse great setting for our group.

Yeah, I mean, the dynamism of the art isn't great, but the draftsmanship is perfectly fine, it's not like it's Actually amateur work, it's just a bit stiff. I really like the design of that halfling blood lord, very fun sunny-macabre, and I Really like the design of the AP title.

I'm honestly grateful that I still have a volume and a half of Age of Ashes to get through before my party will have an opportunity to start up Strength of Thousands. My heart goes out to those with itchier trigger fingers than I, this is definitely a bummer to deal with.

I'm most of the way through running Age of Ashes volume 4 and about 65% of the way through running Extinction Curse volume 5, plus a decent clip into Abomination Vaults as a player.

I read Agents of Edgewatch and thought there were some really cool ideas in there that I might mine for future urban adventures, and Strength of Thousands is the next AP I intend to run. I find it extremely compelling and am very excited to dig into the school setting and explore the ways that it and the PC's develop over their tenure. I've also been reading Quest for the Frozen Flame as it releases and imo it's a super compelling and interesting take on an area that hasn't had a lot of love in Pathfinder's history. The Mammoth Realms are very cool and I'd be stoked to run Frozen Flame at some point.

Addendum to my previous post, because I only looked at the encounter header and not the text:

How do folks like the three bosses this AP revolves around? Are they fought in a set order?

I’m curious about the dragon and the boar.

So, based purely on the encounter as written in the adventure, you actually:

is it ever laid out what happens if the burning mammoths catch up with the broken tusks? or just assumed it'll never happen?

I got the impression that if the burning mammoths catch up with the broken tusks, they'll simply fall upon the following and completely wipe it out, since they're so much stronger and numerous than the BT's.

It's funny, I likewise just got my copy of Broken Tusk Moon and thought the tasks at the beginning sounded super cool and fun. Admittedly they aren't quite as exciting as a combat encounter or a dungeon, but I appreciate stuff like that(and the various tasks in Kindled Magic) as an on-ramp into understanding the PC's, their allies, and the setting around them as a live-in world where more mundane things have to happen to keep things moving. Also a great way to establish character personalities and party dynamics in less fraught circumstances that will later bear out in the exciting adventure portion.

There is of course the Great Wyrm that is in Age of Ashes, whose statblock lists them at level 23. That's probably our best guess at the general level range of any future Great Wyrms.

I will say I'm a little bummed that there's no regional or city-scope maps for the Akiton locations. That's definitely one of my favorite things about Gazetteers, because it makes it easier for me to throw down extra points of interest or use the information elsewhere in the gazetteer to present a more living space.

However, skimming the adventure part it seems really cool, and Seldo will be a dope place to explore regardless, especially because one of my players is planning on playing a Ysoki if we end up picking up this AP, and it'll be nice to play out people being completely unperturbed with her presence but confused by the more common ancestries in the party.

This AP, more than any other I can recall, is more centered around its theme than its story. Books 1 & 2, student life in the Magga.. Magyam.. African Hogwarts,

It's not that hard to spell Magaambya. Think about the message you're sending by performatively being unable or unwilling to.

The Deadshot Lands finally got me to check out Valiant, Luis Loza's actual play... and it's wild to see things from that in the text! Here's hoping we can see Altameda in full someday soon.

I meant to comment on this awhile back, but I just want to say that I'm very excited that Pathfinder is still continuing the tradition of "using stuff that a writer came up with for a home game," because I feel like you almost always get stuff that's very compelling and playable because it's already been in a game.

Well, I'm vibrating now. Thanks for the replies!

** spoiler omitted **

This depends on how good the Magaambya delegation is at politicking:

Any Archetypes in this one?

Kind of! There's an expansion to a previously-released archetype from a Lost Omens book that only had a couple of feats in it, gaining a handful more.

Also, vis a vis the diplomacy/Mzali section of the volume, it's pretty neat; basically running around trying to make nice with the Evil rulers of the city so as to help build the foundation for future change. I don't know if I exactly agree with the ideal of incremental, stable change presented as the ultimate goal for the Magaambyan delegation here, but I accept that there's already an active revolutionary group fighting for change in Mzali and it's not us, at least at the moment.

Any new player options in this?

Yeah, a ton of new uncommon spells(mostly divine and primal) that the PC's can get access to during the adventure, and a new set of feats for an existing archetype, namely:

And, of course, cool items and stuff.

Sure, but if Seisho is in Germany, then they obviously won't be able to make it *live*(which might have been the word they meant to use), because 4 PM EDT is 10 PM Central European Time. A German person might stay up that late just to watch the Guns & Gears panel, but it's certainly reasonable that one would be asleep at that hour.

Thankfully, even if you miss the livestream, I can only imagine that all the streams will be archived on Twitch and Paizo's YouTube channels in the following days or weeks.

April? are we taking a three month break from AP releases?

No, Jan-Feb-March is going to have the Quest for the Frozen Flame 3-part adventure path releasing.

I am punching the air with glee right now. This has everything: clockwork guards, gunslinging anti-heroes, organized crime. This was made for me.

Another angle for specifically the "we have three keys, so we can't imagine that the Scarlet Triad can actually enact their plans for Alseta's Ring" point is this:

The Scarlet Triad has already gotten access to two keys in the past before the PC's got them. They gave the Cinderclaws the means to steal the Hunter's Arrowhead from the Ekujae and Laslunn had managed to get the Eye of the Wise through her own machinations.

Considering that they've also come through on their own at least once from the other side, it's really not much of a leap to imagine that it could happen again. Not to mention they've already come into town and kidnapped an NPC once(Fadelby Vusker in the adventure as-written, Alak Stagram in my own campaign because he was a PC's boyfriend), and Laslunn has been pushing for a more active stance on taking the Citadel for the Triad.

They know that the Citadel exists, they've used keys to invade before, they've snuck into town and endangered people before, and by this point the PC's are definitely on their radar considering their very visible actions against the Triad in Kintargo.

The PC's have made a very bad enemy who could conceivably come after them at any time, and their only lead at stopping them is to go into Jewelgate where they know another high-ranking member is making nefarious movements. They could stay at home and just ignore the machinations elsewhere in the world, but they've really only got half of the total keys(counting Lotusgate's, which obviously isn't relevant), and the last one they found was in Triad hands.

I feel like it's easy enough to assume the Triad is holding onto the rest for their own purposes and that's a scary sword of Damocles hanging over Breachill.

Can someone pitch me on this? I’m not feeing the hype.

So, for me, who isn't particularly already interested in the Realms of the Mammoth Lord, I just think it sounds like a really novel angle to approach an adventure from. There's been a handful of wilderness exploration segments of past AP's, with varying degrees of success, but an AP focused entirely on wilderness exploration and survival--not exploring a mysterious island or frontier, just straight up trying to survive in a hostile environment--feels pretty new.

Plus, in part because I've never been super interested in the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, I'm intrigued by what kind of story could take place there. It's untouched ground in a subgenre that hasn't been approached at all in Pathfinder so far: straight up stonepunk.

There's a reference to a magical mace having the "Scarlet Triad symbol," but WHAT is the symbol?!?

The same symbol that's on the pauldron of the Scarlet Triad Thug art on page 17 of Tomorrow Must Burn, and also on page 74 of Hellknight Hill, in the campaign background section.

Wouldn't that impact the follow-on volumes as well?

Honestly, not as much as you might think; since PF2e grants XP based on the difference between the challenge's level and the party's, the initial encounters will give a fraction of the XP they would to a level 1 party.

it would probably end up a cakewalk as the PC's stomped through the early chapters for tiny XP rewards as the difficulty ramped up to be level appropriate, probably around the time they finished the volume.

obfuscatingDeity wrote:

he's a ghost now, so not exactly a full-on wizard.

I'm not sure that's a valid construction. Why can't a ghost be a "full-on" wizard? What does "full-on" mean in this context?

Yeah, I'll admit that that's my shakiest point, because I couldn't really think of anything else to say about Geb. I suppose being a ghost doesn't invalidate him from being a full-on wizard.

I suppose if I had to point to one thing that put Jatembe over Geb, it was that Jatembe did it first. If I read the dates correctly, Jatembe figured out wizardry more or less by himself in the Age of Anguish(-3502 AR) through various communiques with powerful outsiders, including(potentially) the skull of a near-dead god, which already marks him as having done some dope stuff before he even became the father of modern wizardry.

Geb, on the other hand, doesn't come into the historical picture until -929 AR, over 2,500 years after Old-Mage Jatembe pioneered wizardry from the ruins of Azlant. Geb came from 2,000+ years of Osirioni magecraft tradition, at least some of which was probably filtered east from the Magaambyan's influence. Jatembe didn't have any of that, and managed to create the oldest living magic school on Golarion.

IMO, Jatembe takes the crown easy.

So, I'm relatively new to Pathfinder, having only picked it up in the last couple of years and voraciously absorbed as much lore as I can in the meantime, but I feel like there's a pretty solid difference between Jatembe and all the other wizards mentioned a bit further up:

All those other wizards have gotten their butts kicked. Sorshen and Xanderghul both lost to adventuring parties as part of AP's, the various ways that Arazni has come out the worse of certain fights is well-recorded, Tar-Baphon got blasted into lichdom by Aroden, and Aroden himself got murdered fairly recently. Nex fled Quantium when Geb flooded it with deadly fog, and while it seems like Geb is still going strong after Arazni stopped running his kingdom for him, he's a ghost now, so not exactly a full-on wizard.

Jatembe showed up, pulled the art of wizardry itself out of the wreckage of the Azlanti culture, set up a school to generate heroes and wardens of the world that has lasted all the way up unto the present day, did a bunch of cool folk hero stuff, and peaced out. I have no qualms whatsoever with agreeing that Jatembe is the greatest wizard to ever live.