trashclown's page

Clown nonsense is my entire brand as a GM, I desperately require Reveller in Lost Glee to make it to print! Perhaps a clown of Comedy and a clown of Tragedy would be a good pairing to get the best of all kinds of clownery?

50ft or longer sounds right; a ranged weapon with an increment the same as the melee weapon's reach sounds incredibly counter-intuitive.

Hi, looking in Bestiary 2 page 220, the Radiant Warden has two attacks; a melee attack with reach 15 feet, and a ranged attack with reach 15 feet.

Is this a mistake? What should the range increment of its radiant beam be?

Um, I finally checked back on this thread. I didn't mean to insult anybody, I promise. It was meant to be a mostly humorous PSA-like thing in which I talked about always-evil undead... I'm really sorry to anybody I offended. ...yeah. I didn't know I was going so neck-deep in deep philosophy when I made this thread.

Good day to all y'all!

I've been making a new fighter and I noticed something about the rules that confused me.

With the bonus feats, "Upon reaching 4th level, and every four levels thereafter (8th, 12th, and so on), a fighter can choose to learn a new bonus feat in place of a bonus feat he has already learned.". Why would you want to do that?

Is there some good reason for losing a feat to gain a new one, rather than keep the old one AND gain a new one? I must be misreading something, because right now it looks like a rather redundant clause. Or is it that you get a new feat AND get retrain the old one?

Thanks for the clarification!

Silly question, isn't it? We all know zombies as being under the command of a diabolical lich or who knows what kind of despicable necromancer, but I still wish to push my point and ask; why are undead always evil?

My hypothesis is simple; not all zombies, skeletons, vampires what-have-you are necessarily evil. Surely just because one deals with negative energy doesn't mean that you're suddenly very much into the idea of causing pain or eating flesh. What about necromancers that simply want a zombie butler named Jeffrey? What of them? The simple cleric who wants to know more about the lines between life, death, and unlife/undeath (depending on whether you're a optimist or not).

Let us begin with the causes for the opinion that undead are truly, irredeemably evil. Imagine this situation; an uncontrolled zombie is strolling around a Varisian road for reasons unimportant. He encounters a delicious-looking mortal. What will that zombie do? Hunt down and kill the food, of course! But then again, isn't that what all animals do? It's simply striving to survive in a world where food is vital. Now, before I dig myself any deeper into your unenlightened idea of villainous undead, let me alter that hypothetical situation we just had. A necromancer and his undead pet/cohort/friend are walking down the same road, when they encounter a similarly delicious mortal, very similar to the same one we just subjected to natural selection. The necromancer has full, complete, unquestionable control over this undead "abomination". Now, whether or not the NECROMANCER says "Jeffrey, eat that human." is what's important. In our situation, let's assume we merely had an awkward spot of eye-contact or what-have-you. No harm done! Both Necromancer, Jeffrey, and our innocent bypasser remain unharmed. "Result", as they say.

Now, onto the perhaps more pressing matter. Now we've shown that zombies are merely True Neutral, as opposed to Neutral Evil, let's move onto the alignment aspects of the Necromancer himself. Dealing with dead bodies is always a touchy subject. Defilement of corpses! Deshmilement of smorpses, I say! Ask yourself this; when you die, do you want to stop being useful? I thought not. Now your soul's moved on to the afterlife of your choosing (determined by your alignment which is determined by a very judgemental extradimensional force, by the way), your body doesn't really mean much, unless you're chosen to be resurrected by a necromancer (I shall move how necromancy and resurrection are the same later)! What an honour it is to be chosen by a practitioner of "dark arts" to be used once more to help others. I remember reading in one of my books that "Dealing with negative energy is guaranteed to turn you evil". Well, what a load of ignorant puss! It's merely the fact that some people have used undead for unspeakable evil in the past that has caused this entirely incorrect notion.

Vampires are incorrectly known to be universally evil, but has anyone ever asked why? Why? You. You and your ignorant claims cause them to be "evil". People don't CHOOSE to become vampires; the vampires choose them, if you would believe those notions. Vampires are mostly immortal undead that recoil at sunlight, garlic, mirrors and holy symbols; but you probably knew that. Now, they have a disadvantage in that they must drink the blood of mortals to survive. Now, no-one really wants to go into that kind of embrace with pointy fangs, do they? Thus, vampires have to hunt for their sustenance, which often leads with bad results for vampire and mortal alike. One, the mortal often dies, as the vampire has to take every last drop in order to survive until the next feeding, and the vampire earns negative karma for killing a probably-innocent man. If mortals would just simply bleed a little for those struck by the curse of vampirism and call upon a cleric to heal the wounds, we wouldn't have these problems. Tsk tsk, living beings.

Now, let us move onto liches. Ah, liches; how they embrace undeath and its many wonders. But still, people consider them evil just because they're undead. How rude. What if I told you that liches have the capacity for kindness, and they just wanted to continue to do good for all eternity, using undeath as a means to escape true death? How presumptuous to simply presume one's intentions are always to cause death, despair and ruin to innocent folk such as you and I? If I could create a sighing sound-effect using the simply medium of text, I would. But I can't, so we shall move on.

Lastly, we need to discuss the hypocrisy around necromancy. I've seen countless tales of clerics resurrecting heroes and the fallen, and they're worshipped like saints! Peh! Necromancy is *exactly* the same as resurrection. In fact, I'm surprised I'm the first to bring this up. Firstly, let's look at the similarities. One brings the dead back to life, the other brings dead back to unlife. The latter is better, as it lets the dead spirit rest in its (hopefully) wonderful afterlife. The other rudely brings back the laid dead from its luxurious paradise back to a world prejudiced against something as simple as a controlled and monitored zombie. "Oh, joy of joys! Jeffrey's back from the dead! It's a miracle!". Wonderful, right? Well, let's change one variable; HOW he was resurrected. "Iomedae above, help us! Jeffrey's back from the dead! It's a disaster!". Just because some people aren't perfect at returning the dead from the slumber instantly makes them evil. Maybe you're the bad guys after all. I just want to help people... I just wanted to help the innocent man back onto his feet...

you're probably wondering why i'm making this pointless argument, considering the negative stigma our kind faces. i'm a lich. i wanted to help people who were down, so i did what i had to do. i couldn't resurrect him. i'm so sorry. i nEedeD tIME to stuDy... UndEath waS tHe onlY opTiOn... I wAs cast Out, just fOr neeDing time...

ANYWAY. Like... like I was saying... trust the living dead. You already do it enough with your "resurrecting". Hypocrites.

I think in most cases, the Lich would seem more malevolent, thus more scary. However, if you introduced the devourer by it using its Slay Living ability on a random NPC, that'd show it to have the power to instantly kill the players, meaning that the devourer would be far more scary.

The Lich would be certainly more logical if this was a big plan, of course.