the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh's page

Significantly tougher, for sure. In that case just making a new level 11 character and treating it like a new campaign is also an option.

Indeed, but my underlying issue here is not having a player group who are good with starting at levels other than 1 (which is also my preference, but might not be exclusively with the right players). I am trying to figure a good combination of previous Paizo adventures to go before FotRP, given this and the other constraints I mentioned a few posts ago, but have not quite got there yet; still, we have plenty of other options in the mean time.

I find this interesting, mostly because I've run Ruby Phoenix twice and I've found the setup pretty easy: either you're going because you want to test yourself for fame, or because the prize for winning is so powerful that it's going to be a big help in whatever other thing you're trying to do.

I think my post addressed your first setup option for the groups I have/potentially have/have had to hand; the second makes sense in theory but I'm not sure I could make "you have completed this 1-10 story, now go to the Ruby Phoenix Tournament to get some extra power to nail down the ending" work particularly well without undercutting the 1-10, though that may well just be me.

It's been an easy one to get started on in my experience. (It's also great in its own right, which is why I ended up running it twice! Both groups completed it.)

Very glad to hear it. It certainly reads well enough that I would like to run it at some point.

I've not posted here for ages (for a variety of RL reasons, no negative reflection on these forums) nor run many games either, and I am someone who really misses 1-20 APs, so this may make me well make me a statistical outlier as a datapoint. No player group I potentially have to hand are interested in playing anything that does not start from level 1, though I am hoping Prey for Death might be an exception it will take a lot of persuasion. So while direct sequels are more use to me than most other options, I do see the perspective that they could very easily feel like just 1-20 in slightly different clothing.

I have really liked some of the lore continuity in recent-ish APs, like seeing what became of the Harbingers of Fate in Stolen Fate. I have just started to read Seven Dooms for Sandpoint and am enjoying it immensely, and I am thinking in terms of running a somewhat modified Last Call as a sequel to Sky King's Tomb because the thought of a bunch of highly politically committed dwarves wanting to get the word out about Taargick through the medium of an opera, putting Wagnerian aesthetics in the service of that in-universe political perspective, amuses me immensely and I think would work well for the people who are likely to be concerned. And for what it's worth I am aspiring to fit Shadows at Sundown into Return of the Runelords, probably as something Sorshen points the PCs at during the Korvosa section of Runeplague, at some point when I have the right people and the time and energy.

The key to me, for fitting together APs, is not so much geography as credible character continuity, which may well be an aspect specific to the players I have to hand. Stolen Fate was easy to fit with characters from multiple 1-10 APs because it had "the cards selected YOU" as an opening and characters feeling they should investigate that even with a deal of reluctance worked for the players; on the other hand, for all the many and definite virtues of all the 1-10 APs, I've still to see a group finish one who would plausibly have any interest in Fists of the Ruby Phoenix, ten levels of characters invested in a life-or-death struggle for survival like Quest for Frozen Flame just does not pivot well into "and now you're going to leave everything you have spent the last ten levels investing in to go compete in the Magical Olympics on the other side of the world" for us. A 1-10 that focused on people adventuring purely for fame, fortune and fun, without any deeper stakes to care about, is I think what I would need to fit there, and I have no idea how plausible or commercial that might be.

Incidentally, James, I have a vague recollection of you mentioning a goodly while ago that you were thinking about a high-level AP that would fit very well after Seven Dooms for Sandpoint - was this one of the ones that has come out since, or is it one still to be revealed?

I'm a little surprised that folks are so opposed to going from the existing 1-10s to Ruby Phoenix, as it always felt to me like each one would produce a team as tightly-themed as the NPCs are. Surely the audiences would love a team of steampunk outlaws or Mammoth Lords?

My feeling is that the audience probably would, but the Mammoth Lords really aren't set up to be the kind of people who would be interested in going half way around the world to compete against random people they do not know for the benefit of an audience; everything about their motivations set up in their AP is focused on their own tribe's survival and safety, and confronting locally-scaled opposition. I love Quest for Frozen Flame and do hope I get to run it at some point, but it's not a story that feels like it naturally leads into anything else concerned with the outside world, at least for the kinds of characters I can connect to fitting well with it in the first place.

Indeed and one of the reasons I like 11-20 APs is I like the stories of "people who have each individually done impressive things coming together later in their life to do something"

Like if you want to play the tough, cynical veteran with the heart of goldit's hard to be that guy at level 1. It feels weird to be a level 1 character whose story involves "I've been fighting wars for kings and the like for the last decade".

That all makes sense to me, and I can certainly appreciate those stories as stories; I've just happened to largely been dealing with players who feel a significant positive difference to getting inside a character's skin if they play them from the beginning of their career, and that's also my preference as a player, so we're not likely to be drawn to that shape of story as something to play ourselves/

If you're asking for a 1-10 AP that ends with the PCs near where Ruby Phoenix begins, not likely. The goal of Ruby Phoenix was that it requires "heroes who have proven themselves" in order to get invited to try out for the tournament, which means that ANY 1—10 Adventure Path was intended to be one positioned for proceeding into that Adventure Path.

I wasn't asking for a 1-10 to end with heroes geographically near where Ruby Phoenix begins, cool though that would be; was thinking more of a 1-10 that encouraged a party coming through it to think of themselves as "we are a team of people good at what we do who enjoy basically respectful competition with professional equals" more so than, say, "we heroically defend our local homeland or tribe from ten levels' worth of adversaries most of whom we think in terms of killing." (Maybe, for example, by putting in one or two rival adventuring parties who are not jerks or going to turn on the PCs at some point by default.)

If anything, I think it would work better for my potential player groups, in terms of psychological plausibility, to get a team for Ruby Phoenix out of playing the first half of Strength of Thousands, with its emphasis on being part of a community and on non-murdery solutions to many problems, than out of the existing 1-10 APs that I have read (not got to Outlaws of Alkenstar yet). Though realistically that will never happen because we'd all be overwhelmingly more likely to want to finish Strength of Thousands.

But, in my eye, you don't get to say Valeros committed an evil action because he saved Abrogail Thrune's life and she went on to murder a thousand people. He saved someone's life. That's as far as the moral calculation goes.

And that seems to me an essentially Chaotic Good assessment. Whereas Lawful Good arguing "more good was done by the saving of a thousand lives than the saving of one" works for me. Chaos acts on impulse, be that self-serving impulse(Evil) or the impulse of what feels to be the right thing in the moment(Good). Law thinks things through and applies principles.

What the character does not get to do, is claim that stopping the evil they were chasing somehow absolves the action.

For a Lawful Good character in a situation where the only possible options are a lesser evil or a greater one to consciously choose the lesser, and do what they can to atone and make reparations later, seems entirely LG to me. (Presuming that all possible effort has gone into finding options that avoid both evils, and has failed.)

the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote:

[A]lignment will be assessed by actions and their consequences, not the motivations with which they are carried out.

How far removed from the inciting action does the consequence need to happen for it to still be connected to the PC and thus their alignment? If an LG character saves somebody irredeemably evil is it an evil act even if they don't know about it? What if they save a child that grows up to be a mass murderer? If a good character is shoving their way through a crowd chasing after a threat to the city's safety and shoves somebody who ends up trampled by the crowd does that count against them?

To my mind, the question of "how far downstream of their actions is a person responsible for the consequences" is the essence of the difference between Lawful Good and Chaotic Good, for what that may be worth. Again, entirely a thing needing being clear on in session 0.

However, we as beings with limited knowledge and foresight can't possibly judge by anything but the intention behind the act and if a reasonable person would link the action taken with the supposed intention.

If anything, I think limited knowledge and foresight apply more strongly to whether we can know the intentions behind an act than to whether we can see the consequences.

My starting position, for what it is worth - and subject to discussion with players before any particular game - is that Lawful expects thinking through and responsibility for the consequences of one's actions to a greater extent than Chaotic, be that Good, Neutral or Evil. I would certainly default to regarding a Lawful Good character unthinkingly getting a bystander trampled by a crowd as failing in being adequately LG. On the other hand, in a setting where morally significant free will is an established thing, that does place the responsibility for a child who grows up to be a mass murderer on the shoulders of said person once they have grown up to be making the decisions to murder or not, and entirely beyond the control (and therefore responsibility) of the person who saved them as a child.

I guess you just see it differently than most. It's not the power of Chaotic Evil, it's just the power of Magic for me. Yes, it's has some ties with demons in this case. It could be almost insignificant though. It definitely is not a direct conduit into the Abyss. Well, unless the player wished it so. The player, NOT the GM.

This would be one of those places where my deeper underlying principle is "things of that sort need to be agreed to by players and GMs before the game, and neither gets to automatically override the other".

A session 0 laying out the expectations of a particular campaign and confirming everyone is on the same ground seems essential to me. If I am offering to run Wrath of the Righteous, for example, a set of characters who would be effective and well-suited to Skull and Shackles are likely to fit very badly, or indeed the other way around. Better to confirm everyone is on the same page at the beginning; and because alignment is historically an issue so many arguments tend to arise over, and because so many of those are the same arguments over and over, being clear where everyone is coming from in handling alignment is near the top of the list for discussing there. A player doesn't unilaterally get to make decisions about that any more than they unilaterally get to make any other decisions, or than I do; that's the nature of a collaborative game.

Where the heck did people get the whole "Sorcerer Bloodlines need to be alignment restricted" in the first place?

I'm expressing it as a preference. And while Pathfinder has historically not had alignment restrictions of that sort, earlier versions of the D&D family of games have had more stringent ones, so I am not making this up out of thin air.

And before anyone says "but oh some classes had alignment restriction". Yeah the classes where you literally got power based on your behavior. A lawful good paladin was literally drawing power from them following a code of conduct (having a deity only changed the code and maybe granted a few spells/feats), Barbarians were literally drawing power from their anger management issues, etc.

Sorcerers? Their bloodline has no effect on their behavior.
Witches? Their familiar has no effect on behavior.
Oracles? Their mystery has no effect on behavior outside of the curse.

Your first paragraph is entirely true, and the examples you list in it are things I think Pathfinder is weakened by having set aside.

Whether witches or oracles should be bound to consistency with the source of their power depends on how much they are expected to know about what the source of their power is in the first place, to my mind, but I can totally see "only Lawful Good spellcasters get access to Lawful Good familiars" as a good thing. To my mind successful, fun, flavourful characters emerge from well-defined, coherent, consistently played concepts; and defining what is a good match with a particular character concept is exactly the same thing as defining the set of options that don;t fit with it, looked at from the other side.

The idea of writing a kind, law-abiding character's alignment as Chaotic Evil because of the class they're playing shocks and upsets me

The idea of a kind, law-abiding character having access to the power of Chaotic Evil rather than inherently obtaining access to the power of Lawful Good does not work for me.

In the setting, Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are all observable, measurable forces that exist and influence the material realm. The idea of relative morality is absurd in that context. It's fine to have values that don't align perfectly with one of them, but it's hard to say a thing is "good" when it isn't "Good," in the context of morality being empirical and fundamental, rather than a vague sense of a set of social expectations that shift at varying speeds.

The place where I see unacceptable restrictions on player agency, in this way of looking at things, is "the multiverse says this thing is Evil so you have no choice about having to regard it as evil". That they are observable, empirically measurable forces is precisely what removes them from the arena of moral decision-making.

I want to be able to tell stories where a truly good person can, if the situation calls for it, have to consider the possibility of sacrificing not just their life but their afterlife in the name of doing something good that the multiverse happens to have labelled Evil. (The infernal healing example again.) I want to be able to tell stories where accepting the objective polarities of the metaphysical forces of the multiverse or raging against them are equally valid options for PCs.

Taking away player agency based on the semantics of cosmic force alignment and not on actual moral implications would be very frustrating for a system that's supposed to be able choices and morality.

This may be an irreconcilable difference in taste, then, because where you see frustration, I am seeing the kind of interesting roleplaying challenges that make alignment worth having.

I would also note that the apocalypse locust in the PF1 Bestiary 4, with its ability to brand people such that they become, metaphysically and for the purposes of related effects, Chaotic Evil regardless of their behaviour or intent, indicates that choices and morality are not universally in control of alignment status in Golarion's cosmology.

Choices and intentions are what defines a person's alignment.

Assessing alignment based on intention seems to add even more murkiness to just the places where arguments are most likely to happen. When GMing I make it clear from the get-go that alignment will be assessed by actions and their consequences, not the motivations with which they are carried out.

So being a demon-bloodline sorcerer shouldn't make you evil any more than being a Tiefling makes you evil.

The difference, as I see it there, is that "tiefling" isn't a character class. A tiefling is not inherently required to do anything with their life that relates to or engages with their fiendish origin. A demon-blooded sorcerer, by definition, is using powers directly deriving from Chaotic Evil as a cosmic polarity. A purely human sorcerer who leans into using the powers of Chaotic Evil is in any games of mine also going to become Chaotic Evil in short order if they are not already there.

This would, I think, work better if Good and Evil were referred to as Celestial and Fiendish as polarities go, because I think the game becomes a lot more interesting if alignments are cosmic forces that shape their users and all have a bunch of adherents embodying and more or less aggressively proselytising, but the game itself does not cede them any specific moral authority; that nothing requires either a character, or (even better for avoiding arguments) a player, to regard Evil as having to match their personal conception of evil, or Good good. Infernal healing, to pick a fictitious and therefore hopefully non-controversial example, is much more interesting to me as a concept if it can at the same time do something a player could plausibly deem good (heal someone) while still being objectively, in the setting, Evil, with the consequences that entails.

(Also, short of some really fancy footwork an Abysaal Exalt working not to be a relentless vanguard of oblivion and nihilism is inherently trying not to be an Abyssal Exalt as their makers intended, to my mind; I like Exalted as a cosmology because so very much of it is explicitly about exploring what in a D&D-derived model come out as alignment-based quandaries.)

This is probably a ridiculously unlikely proposition, but a revival of the "<X> Monsters Revisited" line would warm my heart like few other imaginable possibilities.

That would be unfortunate if that were the case. The whole identity of sorcerers is their inherent magic that they don't get a choice in. It's in their blood. That can definitely have a stake in how someone turns out but it's still the sum of your choices that make up a person. Having alignment restrictions for sorcerer's essentially takes away their free will because they never had a choice in the matter.

If a character's inherent sorcerous abilities derive from a strong connection to incarnations of Chaotic Evil, it works for me that they should be required to be Chaotic Evil, at least to begin with. Thinking in terms of redemption arcs from that might be workable with a role-play heavy group, though finding a modality for that that does not equate to "stop being a demoonic sorcerer" is kind of challenging in the context of the particular plausible player groups I am thinking of. (I may have been spending too much time thinking about how that kind of thing works in Exalted recently.)

Addendum, in the interests of fending off rehashes of unproductive discussions I have had before; I work in research neuroscience, and the general consensus in the groups I play with is strongly that free will, as it is implemented in Golarion, and the moral significance thereof, is an interesting fictional construct that works in a game context. Any argument based on the assumption that that value of free will happens in RL will get no traction with me.

I am generally in favour of much tighter alignment restrictions for any number of character concepts, as it is a shape of constraint I have found much more likely to generate creativity and interesting characters than to stifle them.

Not sure what "Mini AP" means, but if that means a 11–20 3 part Adventure Path, then the Stolen Fate Adventure Path, which starts in Absalom, makes an easy transition from Abomination Vaults to a new campaign.

But note that Stolen Fate has no through line with Abomination Vaults' plot and themes.

How likely are we to at some point get a 1-10 AP that left PCs well positioned for proceeding into Fists of the Ruby Phoenix? Not expecting or asking for plot throughline here, but something with thematic/subgenre expectations that would connect on well there would be very cool.

I've mentioned before that the shorter APs are essentially a no-go for my current plausible player groups, though Quest for Frozen Flame might turn out an exception if I skew it somewhat more isolated and stonepunk than written, and am very much looking forward to seeing whether/how Stolen Fate might work following on from one of the 1-10 APs.

People would be mad if Demon Sorcerers were required to be Chaotic Evil. I just wish the game was consistent.

I would be delighted if Demon Sorcerers were required to be Chaotic Evil.

If you aren't aware, it does seem like 1e's PFS #7-00 may have tied a bow off on them as a faction.

now that you mention it, I believe I had seen that said before, but was not remembering it when I made the post above, thank you for reminding me. Does that scenario actually detail any of what the Harbingers expected to happen in the Age of Glory, beyond the mere fact of Aroden returning?

The Harbingers of Fate and their Book of 1,000 Whispers.

Golarion's timeline has now progressed beyond the canonical scope of their prophecies for what should have been happening in the Age of Glory had Aroden not died, IIRC, but I'd still love to have details of what they expected, and which bits they were trying to make happen to "fix" things; I have toyed with the notion of homebrewing something in which a second volume of that shows up so that the basic idea can still be relevant for some decades to come.

The Dominion of the Black don't IMO count as obscure, but the sort of questions I'd like to see answered about the scope of their operations feel more on a scale to fit in Starfinder than Pathfinder.

Would the 12 part AP be half-speed advancement, or go to level 40? Or somewhere in between? EDIT: I realised the OP was not actually advocating 12-part APs, but presumably someone was at some point and I was curious about what was actually meant.

As one of the people who has been expressing a preference for longer APs, what I was hoping for is some mode for Legendary/Epic/call it what you will adventuring that goes beyond 20th level, say to 30th. Something that is specifically "levels past the current cap" rather than Mythic's "different track of advancement in parallel with regular levels". I did start suggesting this well back in PF1 times, and my mental model here was based on a combination of the pacing of PF1 APs mostly not going to 20th, and that the last few levels tend to advance more slowly (in terms of volume of AP content per level) and I would expect that tendency to increase in a putative new Epic system.

Also, by "longer" here, my primary suggestion in recent years has been for a 9-part AP adjacent to a 3-parter, which would not leave people who didn't like whatever the topic of the AP turned out to be without any AP content for an entire year, and which also seems to be less work (though I'm well aware making any such thing work is still an awful lot of work) than a 12-parter.

I'm still on for a pure exploration AP, with no overarching big bad. Or one where the central conflict is between different equally sympathetic groups and "crushing the Evil ones" is not a workable solution, such as followers of Abadar vs. followers of Erastil over the path of growth and development of a small town - complex diplomacy FTW. Or an all-planar odyssey. Or something that gives us answers about the large-scale scope and make-up of the Dominion of the Black, though I have no preference for whether that happens in Pathfiner or Starfinder and I can see ways it migh be easier in Starfinder.

Though while I am coming up with a list of requests, I feel I should also note that I am still very pleased indeed that between Quest for Frozen Flame and some of the side elements of Extinction Curse the things I had wanted from a dinosaurs-and-megafauna Realm of the Mammoth Lords/Deep Tolguth AP, that I had been jonesing for for years and think I have mentioned in threads like this before, were provided in a very satisfying way.

If we need people to live in neat caves somewhere, I would prefer "some sort of person that we've never heard of before" (like the Shisk or the Goloma) to a type of person we've seen and already know what they're about.

If we want people living in neat surface-level caves in Arcadia, the cliff giants from 1e Bestiary 4 seem tailor-made for the role, and I can't recall any mention of them anywhere else in lore.

I know you're not a fan of the system, but the 4e setting books on planar content - Manual of the Planes, The Plane Above, The Plane Below, and Underdark (which details the underdark of the Feywild and Shadowfell!) - are still probably the finest planar fantasy supplements I've ever read, barring 2e Planescape's more Sigil-centric stuff.

Thank you for the recommendation, I shall put those on the list to look up at some point.

Scale, and complexity.

I want places that are alien. Not meaning to come across contrarian for the sake of it, but nearby planes that are like the Material Plane or connect closely to it are the least interesting bits of the wider multiverse to me because they add relatively little to the things that can already be done on the Material Plane, and the bits that would add to that have by and large not had a huge amount of focus; there were implications in some of the 1e lore about potential really large-scale conflict going on between xill and phase spiders in the Ether, for example, but apart from one encounter in Kingmaker I can't recall anything in an AP or module touching on that.

I want places that feel big and alien enough that players and PCs alike will feel awed, where veteran adventurers will not just be either big fish in small ponds or hurtling towards the career-climax triumph of facing the BBEG of that particular campaign. I don't think that has to preclude either places that are complex and grounded enough to feel lived-in, or the in-locale equivalent of a Sandpoint or an Otari where low-level locals can have their first adventures, though the thing that would be most to my taste would be environs where beyond-20th level play was supported without the level of rendering the setting unrecognisable that could easily come from 30th-level characters wandering around Golarion. (I love Golarion unreservedly on the scale at which it works, I'd just like options to go bigger when adventurers get to the end of what the current system supports, and within the scope of Pathfinder rather than, say. scratching that itch by playing Exalted.)

I expect that my preferences here are a fairly small niche, but I was really impressed with The Reaper's Right Hand as a step in the directions of both high-level, and compellingly detail-dense, extraplanar content, so it can happen. And while D&D 4e is not a game that appeals to me in the slightest, I did read the entire Scales of War AP for that system because of its high-level planar content, and uneven though it is that feels like another worthwhile example that the kind of thing I am wishing for can be and has been done.

Its pretty much true to the 1e AP (ie not foreshadowed).

I have just been reading my copy this last few days, and I am really glad to see how much this is the case; there are lots of APs where you know where the ultimate big bad will be from very near the beginning, a lot of what makes Kingmaker work for me is not having that information to distort expectations away from the exploring-and-kingdom-building plot.

the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote:

keftiu wrote:

Aroden’s death may well have caused all the issues that coincide with it, but the end of prophecy is something that impacts the whole world, rather than just the folks familiar with one god’s cult - hence the setting being Lost Omens, and not Dead Arodenworld.

I thought WotR made it pretty clear that Aroden's death had no direct causal impact on the opening of the Worldwound, but I may be misremembering.

Who was talking about the Worldwound?

I was counting it in the category of "all the issues that coincide with Aroden's death".

I now wonder what big prophecies they had in other parts of Golarion that did not come true.

The further we get into the timeline, the less hope I hold for seeing the Harbingers of Fate and the Book of 1000 Whispers get a major plotline that would tell us more about what the Age of Glory after Aroden's return was supposed to look like. (We know the founder of the Harbingers tried to bring that Book's prophecies about in order to set things back on course, but I do not recall ever seeing any specifics.)

If I were doing that, having the second volume of the Book of 1000 Whispers detailing events from 4714 on show up, or at least be rumoured to exist, would be where I would start.

Feh, I take a break for a bit and miss some fascinating discussion in one of the most interesting alignment threads in a long time.

An awful lot of problems go away, and an awful lot of roleplaying opportunities open up, if one lets go of the assumption that what any given character considers good or evil has to map on to Good or Evil the cosmic polarities, and more recently I have been tending to refer to said polarities as Celestial and Fiendish in-game to encourage that distinction; treating those as physical forces, that happen to have dominion over what becomes of the soul after death, that a lot of associated outsiders identify with, but without any other moral weight.

I think I find that easier to engage with and certainly easier to GM with because my personal experience of humanity suggests that almost all people do what they do, whether the outcome be good or evil or Good or Evil, because they regard it as worth doing; intentially malevolent "evil be thou my good" is thankfully rare, though not non-existent.

(Incidental note in the hope of heading off some quagmires this line of thought has led to before; I work in neuroscience research, and arising from that am absolutely sure that morally significant free will in the Golarion sense does not exist in reality; so I am treating it as a game construct from the get-go.)

keftiu, Cori Marie, KC; thank you for continuing to fight the good fight even when it's this uphill a battle.

Mind you, helping the masses value vague posts on social networks over the word of recognized authorities / experts is something any Lawful society will dislike, including Lawful Evil ones.

Yeah, Lawful Good has a really intense, nuanced, moderation style. It works, but it takes a lot of energy.

I find it all too plausible that Cheliax is racist against tieflings, because considering "mostly like the approved outcome but Not Quite, in ways that can be considered a moral failing or a betrayal" worse than "entirely the Other" is something I have seen in cases of RL bigotry.

I would certainly be interested to see more Crown of the World content.

TriOmegaZero wrote:

I confess that I do love these forums. I love the community in-jokes, the history we’ve built that can be reread on occasions, the stories written through play by post recorded and revisitable for reminiscing.

I feel the same way.

And likewise, despite being a relatively recent and infrequent poster. It's a valued point of light for me in these dark times.

To clarify: it /doesn’t/ work for me, and I wish it wasn’t part of the setting.

My apologies for the misreading.

I confess to discouraging people who min-max from joining games I run.

The Marvel Superheroes system of the 80's and 90's was fun too!

Goodness, that takes me back. The group I was in in secondary school played some of that in the late 80s, it never took off with everyone but I found it a lot of fun.

Most of the settings I've had most fun in have been homebrew. I quite like some aspects of Exalted's Creation, but given how much of Exalted's mechanics seems to be built around actively wanting the PCs to wreak fundamentally world-changing havoc, I'm not at all sure how much of that would survive any significant length into a campaign.

Most interesting-looking setting I have read recently is Mechanical Dream, though it seems a bit short on long-term plot hooks, and I am also very taken with The Strange and have an opening campaign in that setting sketched out. And I am aiming to pick up SPLINTER one of these days, because the basic concept sounds cool to me if the execution delivers.

(There is part of my brain that wants to graft Nobilis characters and concepts onto the Mechanical Dream world, but I have many other projects and life is short.)

Fash?

Not sure what that means?

It's probably worth noting that in Scots English "fash" is a verb meaning "to fret about something".

Still both ideologies are now associated with genocide….. so not particularly nice for a RPG.

Indeed, but I can quite sympathise with people finding those satisfying villains to thwart and defeat.

Like I heard Legendary Planet 3rd party ap has basically LN space nazis, but I haven't read it or played it so can't really confirm that

I have read it, it was one of the options for a game I was hoping to run a few months ago that fell through. The villains in questions are totalitarians in a roughly steampunk/dieselpunk setting, with a supposed ideology of racial purity which is I think intended to read as dark irony given that the species they belong to are basically steampunk cyborgs. There are bits of back matter and details of their aesthetic that suggest Nazis, but others that suggest Stalin, so I think anyone running the campaign could go either way.

Like the city of Promise, Rahadoum feels like a place that was written to subvert some kind of expectation and Paizo won't commit on saying 'Yeah, this is bad. These are bad guys.'

If the city of Promise had actually subverted the tired and perniciously cynical trope of "experiments in making society better are always corrupt and evil really" I'd have been very much happier with it.

I would like more Qadira. More interesting fantasy informed by understanding of the historical complexities and subtleties of the Islamic world seems nothing but a good thing to me.

And also, definitely more blue dragons.

Kobold Catgirl wrote:

I literally always thought Katapesh's thing was "pure free markets, pure capitalism", and never even heard that it had a notable enslavement problem until these debates started.

There does seem to me to be a verisimilitude issue with a "pure capitalism uber alles" society not having a slave trade, in a setting where there are potential customers for slaves among the unquestionably evil (and Evil).

I should probably add, I personally would cheer loudly if Golarion lore were to go in a direction of reclassifying "pure free market capitalism" as Evil, but that does not seem a plausible development to me from here.

the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote:

There seems to me to be a difference in scale between "we expect DMs to make tactical-scale changes to an AP according to the needs and preferences of their table" and "we have been detailing a major negative social force in our entire campaign world and that is about to vanish."

If that's the argument, I'd say anyone asserting that needs to believe in themselves more as an effective DM. we all have the potential to improve, but making a change to a setting (even a significant one) when you have some prep time is not impossible.

I am reasonably confident in myself as an effective DM, thank you. One part of how I care about being that is having high (possibly excessively so) standards for consistency and coherency in the fantastic worlds I present, and it is pleasing to be able to deliver that for players who feel likewise.

My personal fix? Make Katapesh /weirder/.

It’s run by aliens. You can buy anything there. Don’t play it as just “endless bazaars full of drug dens and slavers, all run by nefarious foreign-types,” but lean into it being a place where those from other worlds and other planes rub shoulders with the wealthy and desperate alike. Want to hire a Shobhad mercenary? Want to try ‘food’ from Aucturn that gives nightmarish visions? Share tea with a psychopomp?

Which gives me visions of the Pactmasters' place as "interplanetary master traders" bringing them into conflict with the denizens of Leng we canonically know from Legacy of Fire trade in Katapesh betimes. (Or possibly mercane, but I'm not aware of any setting lore giving mercane any characterisation beyond "plot device for players to buy and sell stuff when they are in desolate wilderness" so there is less to connect to.)

I've found any 'fun' had in general terms with very FEW outliers as previously noted 'dealing' with slavery of any sort, including 'Company Store' concepts has been weighed heavily against by the 'not-fun' of how such a horrible thing exists, and loosely parallels my workplace environment.

Sure, you can go find a new job! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I entirely sympathise with you finding that not-fun. At the same time, I myself am more than a little drawn to empowerment fantasy about bringing the equivalent of the employer for whom I worked 90+ hour weeks for very unreliable remuneration to some sort of account, and it would not work so well for me were the unpleasantness not convincing in the first place. (There is a scene in the last chapter of Hell's Rebels that would work well for that shape of catharsis for me, frex.)

I'm not saying that they should have gaps all over, nor that the goals of the APs should not be clear and at least somewhat well guided, but that the DM should be able to bridge those gaps to a reasonable degree. This includes adding slavery if an especially edgy DM just must have slavery in their setting.

There seems to me to be a difference in scale between "we expect DMs to make tactical-scale changes to an AP according to the needs and preferences of their table" and "we have been detailing a major negative social force in our entire campaign world and that is about to vanish."

I literally always thought Katapesh's thing was "pure free markets, pure capitalism", and never even heard that it had a notable enslavement problem until these debates started.

There does seem to me to be a verisimilitude issue with a "pure capitalism uber alles" society not having a slave trade, in a setting where there are potential customers for slaves among the unquestionably evil (and Evil).