sozin's page

Back in the 2010-2014 period, I was GMing a lot of Pathfinder online (using MapTools!--nowadays I'm all Foundry all the time after doing a stint of Roll20). On my commute to and from work I spent ... so many hours ... creating tokens from my Paizo pdfs. I carefully organized them into portrait and tokens folders, used photoshop to cleanup the art and TokenTool to make the tokens.

It was excruciating dull work that took forever.

But now Paizo's released 1000+ tokens, I can brazenly say that ITS A G*%%+#N STEAL DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO MAKE THESE MYSELF AND THEY AREN'T NEARLY AS GOOD

*cough* I'm sorry. Some token-induced PTSD there. This is an insane deal. Buy it now. Great tokens for best VTT that will also work on other VTTs.

You don't need to use a PDF extractor with the Paizo PDFs. You can right-click an image right in the PDF, and select "Save As..." and you can save the image as a BMP or JPG.

This is also true. (Personally I find this too manual, but YMVW.)

For rescaling, the following trick works quite well.

Does anyone know if the Rise of the Runelords map folio is complete with all the encounter/ battlemaps?

It is mostly complete. Some of the battlemaps have changed. For example, the final boss fight at the very end of the AP has a different map. I think there are a few others that are different, but I could be wrong.

download link

sorry 'bout that

Gencon session last night was a blast - party really loved this scenario. There were four dwarves at the table, and at one point in the scenario the game turned into a spontaneous pub crawl. When they encountered the Maguffin

the game temporarily turned into a giant drinking party. Good fun.

I am GM'ing this at Gencon on Saturday, so I whipped up a visual cheatsheet for myself on all the acts, characters, clues, and information.

It can be found here (Flickr link). I probably missed/messed something (this is a meaty scenario). Cheers!

Thanks for doing this! Omission - Missed a few of mine, all from Skinsaw:

• Deed to Foxglove Manor image|download
  
• Ledger of Aldern Foxglove image|download
  
• Foxglove Manor haunt handouts one|two|three|four|five
  

I created one. This sheet contains a listing of day, time, event, system, GM, number of participants, and your preference (0-4). There is a summary table above the event that shows you, for each day, how many 0's, 1's, 2's, 3's, and 4's you've selected. there are optional columns for more than one Paizocon participant.

I'm coming to Paizocon with a group of 3 or 4 other Chicago-ons, so I'll be creating a copy of these sheet and sharing it out to them so we can all see what events we are interested in, and whether or not we should be using buddy requests.

I think this has been asked before, but I couldn't find it, so: pmg, is there any good rule of thumb for the number of 4s, 3s, 2s, and 1s a person should submit to the auction? My feeling is only 1 four, 1-3 3s, 3-10 2s, 10-20 1s, and as many 0s as you like.

Hope this is useful to ya!

Had a kid! Good trade-off.

Ok, here's a tent with ThornDJL's Alastriel elf lady mini as an example minifig tent.

Go listen to this podcast

what the expected time frame is

It took me about 9 hours, all in.

any parts that may prove difficult.

• Definitely follow the podcast's advice and give the party the dream sequence encounter with Rhoswyn. The podcast talks extensively about this, so I won't get into more detail.
  
• For the waterfall encounter, make sure you give whatever PC is water diving a chance to spot Avormeigh.
  
• I added the Avormeigh
  random encounter and my party loved it
  
• See the optional random encounter in the mist list
  
• Once the party gets to Rhoswyn's domain, remove all of the spriggans and replace them with some other fey creature (I personally used pimped out redcaps). The party has been fighting the spriggan's for all the module now and same-monster-fatigue will have set in.
  

I recently modded up the great Pathfinder tents using Ashton Sperry's excellent (free!) art on deviantArt.

Here's an example.

If you want one - post below or send me a message. You can find all of Ashton's great drawings here. All I need is:

- Character name
- Player name
- Image url
- Faction (if you want the faction image on the tent)

Heh. This one is also worth reading: Why I Left Google

Whoops! Sorry.

plans download link

list of council agents download link

It's the night before the Walcourt session for me, and I is makin' the handouts!

Are you noticing that the squares are 10', not 5'?

Ah, doh! That makes it more reasonable. Thank you.

I made Lamatar an 8th level ranger in addition to being a barrow wight, and gave a +1 frost longsword and spiked gauntlet so he could go full two-weapon and still level drain. I also made 2 of the 3 hags greenhags, so they were smaller, and gave all of them 5 levels in witch.

Sweet ideas.

I did give Barl some different feats and spells, and I added a zombie stone giant (the AP states he killed one of his bodyguards that gave him sass, so why not animate him to provide an example of expected behavior to the other?).

Also very cool. Thanks again.

I'm prepping for my party to hit Hook Mountain next week and I have some concerns, and wanted to see how other folks ran this combat.

1) The little room where the hags and Lamatar are in... it is pretty small for 3 large creatures and 1 medium one, not to mention the little tiny choke point that leads into the room. I'm concerned that combat in this area is going to grind to a halt due to the little chokepoint and limited combat area in D7. Since the hags aren't going to leave the room (from the text: "The denizens of areas D7–D9 do not join battle here, preferring to face intruders in their lairs where they have stronger advantages."), the entire combat seems like it could lead to a boring tactical standoff.

Suggestion: Move the encounter to area D8, the Lamashtu shrine.

2) The 6 guards in area 5 and 6, and the 8 exhausted/enslaved ogres in area: that's 13 ogres all packed into a set of caves with feeder tunnels of 10" width. My party is kind of sick of fighting ogres after Fort Rannick, and now they have to fight 13 more in a choke-point rich environment. I smell a boring combat.

Suggestion: Change the 3 ogres in area 5 into one stone giant; change the two guard ogres in area 6 into two juju zombie ogres, brought back to life by the necromancer Barl; have the enslaved ogres turn on their zombie guards when the fight goes down in area 5, and give the party a chance to intimidate/diplomacy onto their side.

3) Not really a problem, but I'm curious if anyone has modified Barl's spellbook to include spells from Ultimate Magic/APG/Combat/other sources that are thematic for either this encounter, the AP, or stone giants in general.

Cheers

In the last couple of weeks some of the chat denizens and I were kicking around ideas of ways of continuing the Council of Thieves Adventure Path past the final module.

This discussion got me thinking about a nice community driven project. Elevator pitch: the community assembles the collective wisdom found in the GM Reference AP threads into a "missing manual"/ "AP #7" pdf.

Taking the Council of Thieves AP as an example, this AP #7 might contain:

• Ideas on how to continue the adventure past #6; for example: mechanics for managing the party-PC-wants-to-run-for-mayor-of-Westcrown; plot line for "the Queen sails down from Egorian with her army and the PCs enlist the help of the disenfranchised nobles, Order of the Scourge, and Andoran revolutionaries to wage an actual revolution against the Thrunists!
  
• Collected (usually James Jacob provided) errata
  
• Community created handouts - for example, my Liebdaga's Infernal Contract, or my build your own Chelish Crux
  
• Tools drawing together the AP metaplot together. When running an AP I frequently have to go through the entire thing and draw together how everything fits together; for example, Treppa's heirarchy of noble houses, or, more extreme, a visual timeline of the AP a la XKCD's movie narrative charts
  
• Hooks for folding one-shot modules into the AP; for example, I ran my party through Masks of the Living God, swapping out the Razmirian cultists for Mammonites
  
• Analysis of how to improve specific combat scenarios; for example, removing the staggered condition from Liebdaga to make the Big Boss Fight more fun for the players.
  

#1: Any interest in this? I'd probably start with CoT.
#2: What would Paizo's position on a AP Missing Manual community published content be? "That's awesome?", or "That's copyrighted material, piss off!"

Cheers!

Summoners. Hate how they slow down combat.

My party got to the Black Magga piece last night. It went very well.

R1: Magga rises out of the water, kills the lone hero she's depicted holding in the module art.
R2: Magga tears into the church in a frenzy.
R3: Magga uses her Breath of Madness ability on the crowd.
R4: Magga bellows out in draconic, "You puny mortals can't begin to dream of what I've lost because of your stupid dam!" And continues to smash/destroy the church. I decided, on the fly, that Magga had left a clutch of eggs in her lair in the Storval Deeps, and the combination of being (potentially permanently) separated from her lair, her home in the Storval Depths, her clutch, and being forced to splash around the low rivers of southern Varisia has seriously pissed her off.
R5: Magga uses her 3/day spell like ability and demands that party member 1 go to her lair in the Storval Deeps, find that which is most valuable to her, and return it to her.
R5: Magga uses her 3/day spell like ability and demands that party member 2 go to her lair in the Storval Deeps, find that which is most valuable to her, and return it to her.
R6: Magga uses her 3/day spell like ability and demands that party member 3 go to her lair in the Storval Deeps, find that which is most valuable to her, and return it to her.
R7: She casts desecrate on the ruined Church, curses Erastil, blesses Lamashtu, and swims downriver.

The desecrate bit was the last straw for the residents of Turtleback; taking a look at the destroyed town, their newly unhallowed church, and their dead mayor (yeah, Magga killed him first), they decided that the safest place for them was Fort Rannick and everyone went north.

One the party starts journeying north into Storval I figure I'll create a little side adventure for them whereby they are compelled to adventure into Magga's lair.

I created a wedding invitation party handout to set the mood for the intro of the module.

You can find it here.

Hey Neil, if you'd ever like to see what Fellnight looks like in full VTT glory (battlemaps, anti-aliased fog, fully stat'ed out tokens, etc), let me know and I'll throw up a Maptools server for ya. ( sozinsky at gmail dot com if interested. )

I created one.

You can read more about it here, including project home page, download details, maptools version requirements, etc.

Hope this is useful to all you VTT players.

If you're anything like me, you dislike having to manually remove all the duplicate image files that get created when you do an image export from a paizo pdf.

I got tired enough of doing it that I wrote a little Python program do it for me.

Things you'll need to use it:

1) Install Python (any version)
2) Right mouse click on this link and do a save as. This downloads the python script. Save it to a folder that you'll remember! (Here's the file in github for you nerds out there.)
3) Open up a cmd prompt (Start->Run->"cmd").
4) Change directories to where you downloaded the script. For example, if I downloaded it to my Windows7 downloads folder, I'd type in "cd C:\Users\lhayhurst\Downloads".
5) Run the script by typing the following into your cmd prompt:

python imageDupeDetect.py --dir $FULL_PATH_TO_FOLDER

where $FULL_PATH_TO_FOLDER is the fully qualified path of the folder you'd like to clean up. For example,

python imageDupeDetect.py --dir "C:\Users\lhayhurst\Documents\Paizo\Modules\3.5\J1_EntombedWithThePharaohs" --verbose

6) The script will then find all of the duplicate files in that directory and print them out. If you'd like to have the script delete them for you, then enter the following:

python imageDupeDetect.py --dir "C:\Users\lhayhurst\Documents\Paizo\Modules\3.5\J1_EntombedWithThePharaohs" --delete --verbose

A few notes:

- If you pass it a top level folder, it will process all the folders underneath and including that folder; for example:

python imageDupeDetect.py --dir "C:\Users\lhayhurst\Documents\Paizo\Modules\3.5" --verbose

would process all of the 3.5 modules.

- You can ask the program for help by typing in:

python imageDupeDetect.py --help

Which prints out

usage: imageDupeDetect.py [-h] --dir directory path [--delete] [--verbose]

optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--dir directory path directory to recursively process
--delete if set, will delete duplicate images.
--verbose turn verbose mode on

- For you nerds out there, the script is a simple brute force solution, running a md5 check on all the files with the same bytes size.

Enjoy!

I've worked in the financial community for the last 11 years, and have a lot of sympathy of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. What the big banks have done to the United States and its people over the last ten years has truly been atrocious. They are, as Matthew Taibbi says, giant vampire squids.

However:

1) The American people had a share in this mess as well. Millions of us bought houses we couldn't afford.

2) The US Government and regulatory agencies made it sickeningly easy for the vampire squids to do what they did. The are equally culpable.

3) There are a lot of trading firms that provide real value and liquidity to the marketplace. I work at one of them.

I urge anyone who gives a fig about this topic to go listen to NPR's pitch perfect analysis of the 2008 crisis, The Giant Pool of Money.

This year at Paizocon I ran I3: Pharaoh, the classic second edition module from Tracy and Laura Hickman.

Leading up to Paizocon I spent several months porting the entire module over to the Pathfinder ruleset from second edition. Today I got around to uploading the results; the master pdf can be found here.

Everything else, including a MS Word version, battlemaps, pogs, stat blocks, a maptools .cmpgn file, and a complete herolabs .por file, can be found packaged up in a zip file (warning ... 200 plus megabytes).

Like most labors of love, this project took a lot of time and energy, and so any feedback, bugs, issues, commentary, etc on the port would be appreciated! If you end up GMing it, I'd love to hear how it went for you, and would be happy to answer questions about how to make the experience better for yourself and your players.

Awesome!

And for any AP hungry folks that haven't checked out Slumbering Tsar yet - you should. It's incredible - first edition feel with the pathfinder ruleset, authored by the exquisitely wicked Greg Vaughan.

the real world would back this up - all of the falcatas I see on images.google.com are one-handed.

-scribbles note to house rule this one for his party alchemist-

My party has hit Infernal Syndrome and I am makin' the handouts.

First up: Liebdaga's Infernal Contract. (I riffed off of the infernal contract found in Princes of Darkness. )

The above links are broken!
-Snowyak-

Thank you! The below should work:

- the deed to Foxglove Manor, from the year 4627
- Aldern's financial ledger, including 4 hints about Iesha's "visit" to Absolom

I created some player hand outs which can be used to construct a physical Chelish crux. Just cut along the pentagon lines. I riffed off the above ideas, changes mostly due to me hunting for images that looked cool / embossed well.

Hellhound

Tiefling
Fates
Bone Devil
Unicorn
Skull
Angel wings
Spider
Layers of Hell
Devil star
Marilith
Asmodeus

Key:

DM handout: what Pathfinder Ailyn Ghontasavos discovered in the libraries of Skyreach at the Great Lodge in Absalom that lead her to Westcrown.

Would you also still buy Adventure Paths and modules, though?

I would. You'd just have to throw something else into the hardcover AP to make it just different enough -- ie, errata gleaned since the softcover was released, or an additional article ("the making of this AP: interviews with the authors and artists and editors"), etc.

I would absolutely buy hardcovers with the first four Adventure Paths fully converted to the PFRPG system

Ditto!

Hey all, about to do CoT, and wanted to make sure that I understand the governmental structure correctly in Westcrown / Cheliax, and how these groups can play into CoT AP.

As I see it, there are five main sources of power in Westcrown.

The Mayor's office: responsible for fostering order via the dottari, maintenance of city infrastructure, and taxation. The Mayor is appointed by the Chelish Queen.

The Order of the Rack: The House Thrune's private, out of band enforcer group, separate from both mundane police force/local law enforcement and imperial law enforcement. Reports directly into House Thrune. Are given complete leeway by the Queen to to whatever the @#$^$ they want within the borders of Cheliax, provided that they obey the Measure, the Chain, and the Disciplines.

The Church of Asmodeus : the legal system of the country, responsible for the laws of Cheliax (the Asmodean Disciplines). Broken out into two main branches: the Inquisitors, the secret police of Cheliax, who create and development informants throughout the country, and the Prelates, or judges, usually clerics of Asmodeus, responsible for making judgements on criminal and civil cases.

The Nobility: Although they have no formal place in the government system, their members do "populate the bureaucracy and fill out vacancies in the Church" (Cheliax, 7).

The Council of Thieves: Shadowy, mythical bunch of rogues, pulling the purse strings and coffers behind the scenes.

And now, some questions.

1) Are any of my statements above incorrect?

2) Is Cheliax a theocracy, defined as (Wikipedia) "[a] form of government in which a god or deity is recognized as the state's supreme civil ruler, or in a higher sense, a form of government in which a state is governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided." While Asmodeus isn't the supreme ruler of Cheliax -- Queen Abrogial the Second is -- she certainly can be seen to be "divinely guided." Or is it instead an absolute monarchy, "[W]here the monarch exercises ultimate governing authority as head of state and head of government, thus wielding political power over the sovereign state and its subject peoples"?

3) Are the dottari part of local municipal government, or are they part of the Church of Asmodeus? In the CoT AP 1 it clearly states that the Mayor "controls the Dottari" (pg 50), but in Cheliax : Empire of Devils it lumps the dottari between the Inquisitors and the Prelates (pg 5).

4) Speaking of the prelates, what is the formal name of this branch of the Church? They are not formally named in the Cheliax : Empire of Devils book, so I've taken to calling them the Prelates, after Alaster Wolfstongue, Senior Prelate of Kintargo, and scourge of the Devil's Perch (pg 5).

5) Does the Church have an official place of power (courthouse) in Westcrown? In AP 1, I cannot find one listed. If not, where do criminal and civil trials take place in Westcrown, and who administers them (i.e., does the Mayor's Office appointment judges in Westcrown)? It would appear natural for Thrune to make sure that the Church had plenty of influence -- both Inquisitors in secret, and Prelates in public -- in the city. "The Church controls access to the Queen ... its clergy staff various portions of government bureaucracy, control the courts, and help to create the laws that come before the queen for her approval" (Cheliax, 7).

6) Speaking of Inquisitors, it appears that the Inquisitors have zero AP presence in the CoT AP. Did I miss a reference somewhere? I'm guessing there are some really interesting places where an agent could be inserted (as a sleeper agent in the Council rooting out the true nature of crime in the city, or someone investigating the Children of Westcrown, or someone keeping tabs on the Mayor, etc).

7) Does anyone else see a heavily Italian influence in this AP? Westcrown itself is a city of canals, and feels quite Venecian or Roman; a lawful evil/theocratic/noble government running things -- almost as if the Catholic Church (a potentially LE organization in real life -- flamebait, sorry); a shadowy, mafia-like criminal group in the background pulling strings; the names of things themselves sounds Italian -- the "Condottari", the "Regidottari", names like "Parego", "Vira", etc. Designers, was this intentional?

Thanks in advance!

The Only Sheet ( http://www.theonlysheet.com/ ) is fantastic. It's Excel based, mature, and has native Pathfinder support.