>>Ask *James Jacobs* ALL your Questions Here!<<

I'm much more interested in talking about my favorite campaign settings, and the Forgotten Realms is in my top five of those favorites.

What are the other four?

On that note, how can physics in PF possibly work so as to allow the advancements that canonically happened in Starfinder, or on Earth?

Because Pathfinder, and the setting of Golarion, are made-up fantasy settings that use imagination and suspension of disbelief to come alive, not reality.

As for the category of "agreeing to disagree"... I've said variants of this many times before but it sounds like the type of game we're publishing isn't something for you. It's is popular enough to keep a staff of several dozen full time employees employed and to have lasted through multiple edition changes and well over a decade of work, but that absolutely doesn't mean it has to be for everyone. There's many choices out there.

If, on the other hand, deconstructing campaign settings and spending time shooting holes into the construction is what you enjoy, please go ahead and take that discussion to a different thread here. It's getting tiresome.

James Jacobs wrote:

I'm much more interested in talking about my favorite campaign settings, and the Forgotten Realms is in my top five of those favorites.

What are the other four?

To further clarify, I'm talking about D&D settings here. My favorite D&D campaign settings are, in order of favorite to fifth-favorite:

1: Greyhawk
2: Dark Sun
3: Forgotten Realms
4: Ravenloft
5: Planescape

If this expands out to include ALL settings for ALL games, it'd be:

1: Baria (my homebrew)
2: Unspeakable Futures (my post-apocalyptic homebrew)
3: Golarion
4: Earth (as it exists in Call of Cthulhu)
5: Greyhawk

What is it about those settings that puts them in your top five? Well, other than your homebrews, I can understand why those are there. :-)

Hi James, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your continued presence on this thread. It means a lot to the community having you be so ready and willing to take time out of your day to chat with us.

As for an actual question, is plane shifting pesky undead to the Boneyard a good way to get rid of them, or is doing that likely to get grumpy Psychopomps on my case?

What is it about those settings that puts them in your top five? Well, other than your homebrews, I can understand why those are there. :-)

Greyhawk: Because it was the first D&D setting I played with, and because so much of it is synonymous with what makes me love RPGs in the first place.

Earth (Call of Cthulhu): Because cosmic horror is my favorite genre.

Dark Sun: Because it's so grim and gritty and post-apocalyptic, and was the first D&D setting that really went somewhere new.

Forgotten Realms: Same reasons as Greyhawk, but less so since it came later.

Ravenloft: Because horror is a glorious way to explore the fantasy genre.

Planescape: Because it brought demons back to D&D, had an amazing look to it, and felt dangerous and kind of subversive.

Hi James, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your continued presence on this thread. It means a lot to the community having you be so ready and willing to take time out of your day to chat with us.

As for an actual question, is plane shifting pesky undead to the Boneyard a good way to get rid of them, or is doing that likely to get grumpy Psychopomps on my case?

Thanks!

And it certainly gets rid of the undead in the plane where you're at, but it won't win you any thanks from the psychopomps, since it just makes their jog all the harder. It's like scooping up the rats infesting the house you just bought and then dumping them off at the hospital where the rat-bitten populace has been taken to be treated. It might make your house safer, but it's not doing favors to the hospital.

D3stro 2119 wrote:

On that note, how can physics in PF possibly work so as to allow the advancements that canonically happened in Starfinder, or on Earth?

Because Pathfinder, and the setting of Golarion, are made-up fantasy settings that use imagination and suspension of disbelief to come alive, not reality.

As for the category of "agreeing to disagree"... I've said variants of this many times before but it sounds like the type of game we're publishing isn't something for you. It's is popular enough to keep a staff of several dozen full time employees employed and to have lasted through multiple edition changes and well over a decade of work, but that absolutely doesn't mean it has to be for everyone. There's many choices out there.

If, on the other hand, deconstructing campaign settings and spending time shooting holes into the construction is what you enjoy, please go ahead and take that discussion to a different thread here. It's getting tiresome.

Sticking with the physics example, your answer doesn't really explain my question. Could I get a more in depth answer?

Sticking with the physics example, your answer doesn't really explain my question. Could I get a more in depth answer?

No, because I don't believe that any answer I could possibly give would do anything but further disappoint you, and because "sticking with physics" when trying to justify a made-up piece of fiction for an imaginary setting that's here to have fun telling shared stories in is, in my opinion, unpleasant.

D3stro 2119 wrote:

Sticking with the physics example, your answer doesn't really explain my question. Could I get a more in depth answer?

No, because I don't believe that any answer I could possibly give would do anything but further disappoint you, and because "sticking with physics" when trying to justify a made-up piece of fiction for an imaginary setting that's here to have fun telling shared stories in is, in my opinion, unpleasant.

Let's do a more specific example: how do the people of Starfinder reconcile the fact of actual classical elements being a thing with the scientific fact that fire/heat is a chemical reaction (a fact that would have been required to build, say, internal combustion engines)?

Going back to FR, my biggest problem with the setting is the intense implication of "magic is inferior to tech to the point that if tech were developed, magic would be completely obsoleted."

What is your stance on this idea?

Let's do a more specific example...

Let's not.

Going back to FR, my biggest problem with the setting is the intense implication of "magic is inferior to tech to the point that if tech were developed, magic would be completely obsoleted."

What is your stance on this idea?

Sounds like you're still trying to get me to answer the same question but with a different coat of paint, so instead I'll answer it by noting that as long as they brought Eilistraee back, it's all good.

Hi James (aka Mr. Patience himself). Have you by chance seen the work someone did converting Curse of Strahd to Call of Cthulhu (on Reddit I believe)? Ravenloft and Cthulhu are two of my favorite things and I'm very intrigued at the idea. What would you think of such an endeavor?

I stumbled upon this purely by looking up stuff about samsaran race.

This is a 1E question and I hope that's ok.

I know quite a few of the Paizo vets wrote for the Age of Worms module back under the 3.5 days. Has that ever been converted to the best of your knowledge by Paizo? Or even anyone for Pathfinder 1E?

Hi James (aka Mr. Patience himself). Have you by chance seen the work someone did converting Curse of Strahd to Call of Cthulhu (on Reddit I believe)? Ravenloft and Cthulhu are two of my favorite things and I'm very intrigued at the idea. What would you think of such an endeavor?

I didn't see it, nope. I'm not super into the idea though, since the two games are very different and play to different strengths.

I stumbled upon this purely by looking up stuff about samsaran race.

This is a 1E question and I hope that's ok.

I know quite a few of the Paizo vets wrote for the Age of Worms module back under the 3.5 days. Has that ever been converted to the best of your knowledge by Paizo? Or even anyone for Pathfinder 1E?

I helped create Age of Worms back in the day for Dungeon Magazine (I even own 3 original pieces of art from that adventure, including the cover painting to the last issue). While we did compile Shackled City into a hardcover, unfortunately, Wizards of the Coast ended our license to work on the magazines before we got a chance to compile Age of Worms.

In fact, the end of that license is the main reason we shifted over to Pathfinder Adventure Paths, and then 2 years later to the Pathfinder RPG once Wizards of the Coast shifted to 4th edition D&D.

Wizards of the Coast is the only one now who could do any Age of Worms compilation products, and they're not gonna do one for Pathfinder. Or for D&D, for that matter, I would guess. Who knows what the future will bring, but I doubt Age of Worms will ever get reprinted or compiled for any system.

*snip*

If this expands out to include ALL settings for ALL games, it'd be:

1: Baria (my homebrew)
2: Unspeakable Futures (my post-apocalyptic homebrew)
3: Golarion
4: Earth (as it exists in Call of Cthulhu)
5: Greyhawk

Have you considered putting out anything on your Baria or Unspeakable Futures settings (or have you already)? What kind of setting is Baria?

This asked with the understanding, of course, that you probably only want to focus on publishing things for a single setting at a time.

When you GM, are you more the type to level content to the PCs so that everything is mechanically pretty balanced or are you more likely to present a sandbox and the players need to pick their battles, as the could run into a Lich at Level 1 if they stick their nose into the wrong dungeon?

I get the feeling (don't know if justified) that you have a soft spot for elves, thinking about the characters you've been involved with (Merisiel), your own characters (like Shensen) and characters you like (Eilistraee).
Is there a special reason why you think elves are great?

James Jacobs wrote:

*snip*

If this expands out to include ALL settings for ALL games, it'd be:

1: Baria (my homebrew)
2: Unspeakable Futures (my post-apocalyptic homebrew)
3: Golarion
4: Earth (as it exists in Call of Cthulhu)
5: Greyhawk

Have you considered putting out anything on your Baria or Unspeakable Futures settings (or have you already)? What kind of setting is Baria?

This asked with the understanding, of course, that you probably only want to focus on publishing things for a single setting at a time.

Baria is very much a standard fantasy style setting, heavilly inspired by Greyhawk and my personal tastes in fiction, but also built to be "native" to the concepts in D&D. Large swaths of Baria have been directly transported and updated into Golarion, such as a large amount of Varisia, many of the deities, Kyonin and "alien elves," Mediogalti and the Red Mantis, Treerazer, the architecture of the Great Beyond, and much much more. So... Baria is pretty much already out there for folks to have fun with, more or less. If I were to publish it as-is, it'd look derivative and plagiaristic to Golarion. So that's unlikely to ever happen. (Bonus Points; The planet Baria is on is Androffa).

Some of Unspeakable Futures has crept into Pathifnder as well: the gunslinger class, the android ancestry, and the Technology Guide (and thus large parts of Starfinder's technological items), but the world itself is something I've kept close to my chest so far. I do hope to some day figure out how to present it as its own game/setting, but that's not something I can responsibly do while I already am super busy as a creative director/backup developer at Paizo. The big thing for me, though, is to present Unspeakable Futures in a way that I retain ownership over the setting and creative control, so that I'll have something I can keep as my own and continue to explore once I'm retired or whatever and no longer working for Paizo as an employee.

When you GM, are you more the type to level content to the PCs so that everything is mechanically pretty balanced or are you more likely to present a sandbox and the players need to pick their battles, as the could run into a Lich at Level 1 if they stick their nose into the wrong dungeon?

I much prefer the sandbox method, but in a way that's fair to the players. I don't enjoy arbitrarily dropping things on them just to trick them. That's lame. Instead, I have numerous different story ideas for where things could go, let the players make the choices, and then race ahead of them detailing things as suggested by what they're into.

So a combination. A sandbox, but one where the things the PCs encounter are fair encounters. But with hints of things that are too much for them to handle and if they get bull-headed and go there anyway, they get in over their heads. BUT when that happens I make sure to let them back out and run away once they realize what's going on.

I get the feeling (don't know if justified) that you have a soft spot for elves, thinking about the characters you've been involved with (Merisiel), your own characters (like Shensen) and characters you like (Eilistraee).

Is there a special reason why you think elves are great?

Nostalgia, pretty much. In 1st edition AD&D, elves were so much more versatile when it came to choices for classes, and as such, they were the most fertile of choices when it came to imagining new types of characters, so that appealed to me. At the same time I started to really get into D&D, I also got really into Elfquest. And elves seemed friendlier to me, and the fact that they lived in nature appealed to me. Since I lived in the woods myself until age 18, that element really appealed to me. And because elves are magical, and magic is amazing.

Gibblewret_Tosscobble wrote:

I stumbled upon this purely by looking up stuff about samsaran race.

This is a 1E question and I hope that's ok.

I know quite a few of the Paizo vets wrote for the Age of Worms module back under the 3.5 days. Has that ever been converted to the best of your knowledge by Paizo? Or even anyone for Pathfinder 1E?

I helped create Age of Worms back in the day for Dungeon Magazine (I even own 3 original pieces of art from that adventure, including the cover painting to the last issue). While we did compile Shackled City into a hardcover, unfortunately, Wizards of the Coast ended our license to work on the magazines before we got a chance to compile Age of Worms.

In fact, the end of that license is the main reason we shifted over to Pathfinder Adventure Paths, and then 2 years later to the Pathfinder RPG once Wizards of the Coast shifted to 4th edition D&D.

Wizards of the Coast is the only one now who could do any Age of Worms compilation products, and they're not gonna do one for Pathfinder. Or for D&D, for that matter, I would guess. Who knows what the future will bring, but I doubt Age of Worms will ever get reprinted or compiled for any system.

That is truly a shame. But thank you for answering. I think my group got to the 2nd module but never continued.

My green/black painted version of Mumm Ra action figure would have made quite a nice mini for Kyuss. Maybe when I have more time I'll convert it myself.

Another question, I'm starting Way of the Wicked for the 3rd time (I'm the gm) and I have a question about scrying on this magic item:

When scrying is used, what happens if one of my players rolls (well I would be rolling in secret with their bonuses) hits a natural 20? Does that mean they just aren't able to be seen?

Do they realize scrying is happening? I don't use this spell enough to really understand it.

When scrying is used, what happens if one of my players rolls (well I would be rolling in secret with their bonuses) hits a natural 20? Does that mean they just aren't able to be seen?

Do they realize scrying is happening? I don't use this spell enough to really understand it.

There's rules for how scrying attempts can be detected in the spell description for scry, I believe, but yes things can detect scrying, especially if they use magic to do so or to see invisible things. If a PC notices it, there's not too much they can normally do except get paranoid; often a PC noticing scrying on something is a great way to foreshadow there's a spellcaster out there interested in them without giving everything away, and when a PC notices this they feel good for being observant. So if they notice the scrying, congratulate them and let them make of it what they willl

I much prefer the sandbox method, but in a way that's fair to the players. I don't enjoy arbitrarily dropping things on them just to trick them. That's lame. Instead, I have numerous different story ideas for where things could go, let the players make the choices, and then race ahead of them detailing things as suggested by what they're into.

So a combination. A sandbox, but one where the things the PCs encounter are fair encounters. But with hints of things that are too much for them to handle and if they get bull-headed and go there anyway, they get in over their heads. BUT when that happens I make sure to let them back out and run away once they realize what's going on.

That's exactly what I'm going for, cool to hear! If you don't mind the follow-Update:

As always, thank you so much for engaging in this thread! It's much appreciated!

James Jacobs wrote:

I much prefer the sandbox method, but in a way that's fair to the players. I don't enjoy arbitrarily dropping things on them just to trick them. That's lame. Instead, I have numerous different story ideas for where things could go, let the players make the choices, and then race ahead of them detailing things as suggested by what they're into.

So a combination. A sandbox, but one where the things the PCs encounter are fair encounters. But with hints of things that are too much for them to handle and if they get bull-headed and go there anyway, they get in over their heads. BUT when that happens I make sure to let them back out and run away once they realize what's going on.

That's exactly what I'm going for, cool to hear! If you don't mind the follow-Update:

How do you like to drop hints and foreshadow when the PCs would be in over their head?
I feel like describing monsters as deadly and vicious doesn't quite cut it, as practically the whole bestiary is deadly to the average person, so I'm looking for ideas.

As always, thank you so much for engaging in this thread! It's much appreciated!

It varies according to the story, but often I'll use rumors that make the PCs think that a more powerful monster is involved in a plot, so that they'll have an inkling of how tough they should be before they seek that foe or region out. This works best if you have players who aren't brand new to the game, of course, and requires you to run a game where monsters tend to be "gatelocked" at levels, which is the basic assumption of Pathfinder. That's why we don't have liches below 11th level, for example, or why fiends tend to be higher level overall, or why we don't have true dragons going too low in level, or why we skew golem levels toward the high end of things. That way, if a player hears a rumor that a dragon or a lich or a golem is in an area, they understand that there's a minimum power level they should be before attempting that. Likewise, you can lean on monsters that are classiclly low level like kobolds or gnolls\ or giant spiders or whatever, that the players know tend to be low level, and then once they get up to around 4th level or so shift away from using the classic low level monsters in their roles.

Other times, you can use allied NPCs to help guide the PCs toward things, or away from things, but this requires you to foster NPCs whose advice the PCs trust. This way lets you use an NPC's voice to direclty talk to the PCs. And if you take care that the quests the PCs are offered are all accurate for their level, and give out more of these quest leads than the PCs can ever do, that also helps to give the illusion that the PCs are in a sandbox where they're making their own choices but aren't ever really in danger of getting in over their heads.

Or you can put physical barriers up to "fence" in the PCs until they're powerful enough to bypass the barrier. This is the basic theme of extra planar stuff—traditionally, you can't travel to other planes unless you find a plot-placed portal, or get access to plane shift, which is why extraplanar stuff traditionally has skewed higher level. You can do this for campaigns set solely in the Material Plane by putting the tougher sandbox content behind doors that the PCs can't possibly unlock until they find a key or gain the skill to pick the lock, or in a deep mountain range that they can't easilly navigate without flight or high athletic proficiency, or put the higher level stuff on an island that's too far away to swim to so that the PCs must "unlock" that by going on quests to earn passage on a boat or buy their own ship or whatever.\

It all really depends on the nature of the campaign.

The key thing is to remember that you're the GM, and you know the danger levels of the things the PCs are about to face, but the PCs absolutely do not. That element of the unknown is in and of itself often enough to make players wary, so that when you drop tiny hints that something bad is in a region, most groups will assume the worst and act appropriately. It's easier, in my experience, to have the OPPOSITE problem, where you set up a plot that the players assume is too tough for them, and then they ignore it until they're way over-leveled and go back and crush the plot (or just forget the plot entirely)... and that's fine too. That too is part of the sandbox experience.

If the players end up not finishing an adventure you set up or completely ignore hints to go do something, that just means you get to use those resources in the NEXT sandbox game you run. In this way, each time you run a sandbox campaign, you're not just preparing for the current game but for all the games to follow.

AND FINALLY: You can put the PCs into situations where they're over their head on purpose, but if you do so you need to plan for their failure and let them "fail forward" in the plot. Maybe your campaign plot is built on the idea that the PCs die and get resurrected by an ally. Maybe your campaign requires the PCs get captured so that they can meet an important NPC in prison and then play the escape from jail scene. Perhaps you've planned for them to shipwreck or otherwise get stranded in a remote area and then fight for survival. Rather than say to the PCs "You died and got resurrected" or "you got captured and imprisoned" or "the ship you were on just crashed", hold those plots in your proverbial back pocket for when events on the ground enable them.

(Side note: if you set up these sorts of hooks as part of the campaign's background, that's about the only time that this heavy-handed plot development works... assuming you tell the PCs in advance "I'm gonna run a game where you start out shipwrecked on a tropical island" so the players know what sort of story they're getting into and build their new characters appropriately. This is something we let players know in our Adventuer Path Player's Guides. And in fact, creating your own Player's Guide in advance of a sandbox game is a great tool to use; you can actually say in there "everyone knows the Bloodgasp Swamp is a dangerous place that only the mightiest of heroes travel to" in order to set expectations up.)

Do you have an off-the-cuff estimate for how many people are in Cheliax's standing army (or equivalent thereof)? That is, how many people Queen Abrogail could put in the field (assuming the various independent Hellknight orders weren't interested in getting involved for whatever reason)?

Disclaimers: I'm not looking for anything elaborate; if this question is a problem, I won't be offended if you decline to answer it; I promise not to argue with you about any answer you give.

Do you have an off-the-cuff estimate for how many people are in Cheliax's standing army (or equivalent thereof)? That is, how many people Queen Abrogail could put in the field (assuming the various independent Hellknight orders weren't interested in getting involved for whatever reason)?

Disclaimers: I'm not looking for anything elaborate; if this question is a problem, I won't be offended if you decline to answer it; I promise not to argue with you about any answer you give.

I don't. We don't have rules for how mass combat works, and never really bothered to figure out what a total population is for the various nations, because the stories Pathfinder focuses on doesn't need that information.

Some day, when or if we do a mass combat type book, then we'll have to sit down and crunch numbers and make decisions and all of that—for all 40+ regions. It's a pretty intimidating task, even before you consider the heavy lift of designing a fun and functional mass combat system in the first place.

In the meantime, feel free to come up with numbers on your own that make sense for you and your players. And if you do want to do mass combat stuff in more detail than the brief, naratave-focused version we tinkered with in Kingmaker, then later in Ultimate Campaign, there's plenty of games out there you can use and simply re-skin the troops and proper nouns to match your game's needs.

A Warhammer:Total War type game set in Golarion would be AMAZING, on the topic of mass armies!

An actual question though: I saw a post on Reddit where a user claimed that the being or force which had corrupted Dou-Bral into ZK had already been revealed. I won't quote it on the off chance somebody accidentally let something slip and I don't wanna cause drama there, but as far as I know, that's still a mystery.

Am I wrong? Was it maybe revealed in some Starfinder material? Or is this person just making stuff up? They seemed pretty sure or else I wouldn't have even thought twice.

An actual question though: I saw a post on Reddit where a user claimed that the being or force which had corrupted Dou-Bral into ZK had already been revealed. I won't quote it on the off chance somebody accidentally let something slip and I don't wanna cause drama there, but as far as I know, that's still a mystery.

Am I wrong? Was it maybe revealed in some Starfinder material? Or is this person just making stuff up? They seemed pretty sure or else I wouldn't have even thought twice.

Check out the hardcover Book of the Damned, page 161, in the section at the very bottom of that page called "Beyond the Beyond" for the first significant hint of text we published that revealed this information.

In that paragraph, I leave the name of the god mentioned unsaid, because this was intended to be a bit of foreshadowing. I'd been planning on doing a bigger, deeper reveal as to what happened, presented in the context of a high level standalone adventure. I had an author lined up for it but in the end that adventure got cancelled before work started as a result of a combination of miscommunications and a perception that high-level adventures aren't as popular as lower level ones, alas. We might get a chance to explore this unrealized adventure again some day, but the revelations that were planned there eventually got into print (in a much smaller footprint) in the Nidal book.

I don't know if we've yet revealed the exact nature of the "alien being" that transformed Dou-Bral into Zon-Kuthon, but I can and have confirmed it's NOT a Lovecraftian thing. I'm hesitant to reveal who/what that thing was here, since I know I've told plenty of folks at Paizo who it was, but I can't recall off the top of my head if we've revealed that in print yet. I don't THINK it's been revealed in Starfinder, but if it has, chances are good that the revelation was one that they chose for that game's themes and direction, and may not be canonical for Pathfinder.

I hope not, since it's a reveal that I would love to put into that potential adventure as a big reveal that can happen "on screen" in a game!

Go ahead and shoot me a PM to run the reddit thing by me if you want though!

A Warhammer:Total War type game set in Golarion would be AMAZING, on the topic of mass armies!

An actual question though: I saw a post on Reddit where a user claimed that the being or force which had corrupted Dou-Bral into ZK had already been revealed. I won't quote it on the off chance somebody accidentally let something slip and I don't wanna cause drama there, but as far as I know, that's still a mystery.

Am I wrong? Was it maybe revealed in some Starfinder material? Or is this person just making stuff up? They seemed pretty sure or else I wouldn't have even thought twice.

Its not been canonically revealed, what it was that in one paizocon "ask writers lore questions" segments one of writers told their own headcanon for it.

...I think? I'd like to be corrected if that was actually the canon answer, but as far as I know, anything not in books isn't canon until it is. That is how it works right?

Virellius wrote:

A Warhammer:Total War type game set in Golarion would be AMAZING, on the topic of mass armies!

An actual question though: I saw a post on Reddit where a user claimed that the being or force which had corrupted Dou-Bral into ZK had already been revealed. I won't quote it on the off chance somebody accidentally let something slip and I don't wanna cause drama there, but as far as I know, that's still a mystery.

Am I wrong? Was it maybe revealed in some Starfinder material? Or is this person just making stuff up? They seemed pretty sure or else I wouldn't have even thought twice.

Its not been canonically revealed, what it was that in one paizocon "ask writers lore questions" segments one of writers told their own headcanon for it.

...I think? I'd like to be corrected if that was actually the canon answer, but as far as I know, anything not in books isn't canon until it is. That is how it works right?

Yeah... it's not canon until it's printed. And if it's a mistake, it should stop being canon, but that's tough. Which is why printing lore errors is so awful and frustrating, because we don't have a method or a gaming-culture where we can correct errors. Which is also why I tend to get pretty hesitant even revealing things like this that I'm not sure are ready for print yet. :)

Having just binged the thread after leaving it unread since November, James, you have surpassed a saint's patience.

Haven't read the Abomination Vaults properly yet, but really dug the article on Nhimbaloth you wrote. How did you get the idea of her being a predator that feeds on other predators? Coming at it from my background, it hits the depravity of the Empty Death and her cults really well since multiple tiers of predators feeding on each other is so ecologically unstable.

Having just binged the thread after leaving it unread since November, James, you have surpassed a saint's patience.

Haven't read the Abomination Vaults properly yet, but really dug the article on Nhimbaloth you wrote. How did you get the idea of her being a predator that feeds on other predators? Coming at it from my background, it hits the depravity of the Empty Death and her cults really well since multiple tiers of predators feeding on each other is so ecologically unstable.

Oooh, so I guess part three is out! Yay!

The original inspiration for Nhimbaloth is Algernon Blackwood's short story, "The Willows," but the element of her being a predator predator is all me. It's one of those ideas that just ended up coming out of my brain as a result of spending decades consuming various forms of horror stories.

I feel as if guns do too little damage compared to bows. I'm not asking for a full retread according to historical accuracy, but it is undeniable that guns would deal more damage than bows. What do you think about this?

I feel as if guns do too little damage compared to bows. I'm not asking for a full retread according to historical accuracy, but it is undeniable that guns would deal more damage than bows. What do you think about this?

We're not trying to do a real-life simulator, but a game. A game whose primary focus is fantasy, with guns as fringe elements and not the focus. Making guns "better" than bows would result in everyone always choosing guns over bows and would shift the optics of the game setting we publish into a different area than the optics of what most people prefer to play with.

By making guns equal but not better (or even a little less optimized, depending on who you ask), we hope to set things up so that the choice between gun and bow is more of a thematic one that a player makes to fit their character's theme, nature, and background, rather than implying that there's only one "right" choice.

If we wanted to build a game where there was only one right choice, there'd not be any choices at all, and you'd level up without deciding anything. The ability to customize and adjust your character to make it your own, something that isn't a carbon-copy of every other character, and to be able to do so without everyone citing the rules mercilessly to show you that you made the wrong choice AND simultaneously being shown that you made the wrong choice in every combat encounter is not something we strive to do.

I've been mulling this over for a while now, but can you give an example of where a LG and a LN follower of Irori differ?

Is a LG Iroran more interested in seeking perfection to help others while a LN follower is more interested in perfection for the sake of perfection?

I read somewhere that Razmir survived entering the Starstone Cathedral, but was unable to touch the Starstone whilst doing the trails. I'm unable to find a source for it so what's your take on Razmir's history?

I've been mulling this over for a while now, but can you give an example of where a LG and a LN follower of Irori differ?

Is a LG Iroran more interested in seeking perfection to help others while a LN follower is more interested in perfection for the sake of perfection?

A LG one would help others seek perfection before seeking perfection themselves, whereas a LN one would seek perfection for themsevles first before looking to help others.

I read somewhere that Razmir survived entering the Starstone Cathedral, but was unable to touch the Starstone whilst doing the trails. I'm unable to find a source for it so what's your take on Razmir's history?

I suspect what you read was internet speculation.

My take is that he's a frightened and frustrated monster of a man whose failures combined with his skill at misleading an entire nation of people make him a dangerous threat and, potentially, an interesting main villain to confront and defeat some day in an Adventure Path.

That said, he's also the creation of Jason Bulmahn, and if we do anything with him, I'd want Jason to either be involved from the start, or to have significant input and guidance for those working on it, or to step away from it and give it his blessings for others to do with what they will. Preferably the first, with him being directly involved, but that's not always the case.

As far as I know, he's never entered the Starstone Cathedral, but that doesn't stop him from saying he did and having a lot of people believe him.

NovelEnigma wrote:

I've been mulling this over for a while now, but can you give an example of where a LG and a LN follower of Irori differ?

Is a LG Iroran more interested in seeking perfection to help others while a LN follower is more interested in perfection for the sake of perfection?

A LG one would help others seek perfection before seeking perfection themselves, whereas a LN one would seek perfection for themsevles first before looking to help others.

Thanks!

Does the Church of Abadar have a monopoly on banking on Golarion? In the Inner Sea Region?

Is every church of Abadar a bank?

Does the church of Abadar stick to cities, or do they try to establish a presence in smaller towns (like say Otari) as well?

Does the Church of Abadar have a monopoly on banking on Golarion? In the Inner Sea Region?

Nope.

Is every church of Abadar a bank?

Nope.

Does the church of Abadar stick to cities, or do they try to establish a presence in smaller towns (like say Otari) as well?

They don't stick to cities. Remember: Abadar is not JUST the god of cities. He's also the god of law, merchants, and wealth... all things that can exist outside of cities. A small-town church of Abadar is more likely to double as something like a sheriff's office or a merchant's guild or a watchpost or a moneylender's establishment rather than a bank, but there are small town churches of Abadar, just as there are big city chruches of Erastil.

What are your religious beliefs?
Do you hope for an afterlife?

Is there a bank in Otari? If so, how trustworthy is it?