Ganzi.... Tail?

Okay,
I made a Ganzi for PFS (with the purchased boon) and looking at the feats for the heritage (and the artwork), I am a bit confused.

Where in the blue blazes did the Tail thing come from? It is an addition to what the Ganzi were in PF1, and seems... out of place here. Did the writer get them confused with the Tiefling, or the Kobold?

I miss Quibble, as I mentioned in another thread, but taking up ancestry feats with Tail stuff, I just don't know what to say at this point.

Simply put, proteans are the chaos thingies and they often have tails.

(In fact, literally every single protean in PF2E does.)

Il’setsya, the only Ganzi I can name, had a big tail. What’s the problem?

And if you're not a fan of the tail you do still have an entire other ancestry's worth of feats to select from.

Ganzis are, like most of the planetouched ancestries, VERY variable in appearance. One of their primary roles in the game is to empower a player to be able to build an entirely unique cosmetic appearance of their own and have a published option to go with.

Any planetouched ancestry could, in theory, have a tail. But ganzis, as the chaos-themed ones, are more likely to have tails, because the primary chaos-themed supernatural extraplanar creature type in Pathifnder are the proteans, and they all have tails.

Ganzis without tails absolutely exist, though. And as we publish more and more ancestry feats for ganzis that don't work with tails, there'll be more non-tail options. But having a tail-themed option from day one was important to us to help define their basic theme.

Not to mention that it can be flavored as anything broadly similar : tentacles, additional arms, writhing hair, swarm of colored motes of light, whatever.

Much of the official art of ganzi I have seen have tails, it's been a thing since they where introduced. The ganzi creature in 1es Planar Adventures has a prehensile tail as one of of their ganzi oddity abilities.

They are creatures of chaos, any weird anatomy shouldn't bother you, in fact the weird variable anatomy is kind of the point.

I was also pretty disappointed in ganzi; I am a decendant of raw chaos, fear my ability to do funky things with resistances and have a quirky tail!

I was also pretty disappointed in ganzi; I am a decendant of raw chaos, fear my ability to do funky things with resistances and have a quirky tail!

Yep, Protean.

Ganzi evolved a bit since the original presentation in 'Distant Shores', to one with multiple subtypes based on the various beings of Chaos from the Maelstrom. Since the proteans are the primary heralds of CN, protean-touched ganzi got a prehensile tail.

Probably didn't hurt that the one illustrated example ganzi in 'Planar Adventures' was protean-touched with a tail that a keketar would have been proud to call their own.

The key thing is that they're wildly varied in appearance, probably more so than any other planar scion. So go crazy with customizing them in your home game!

*waves in cHa0s!*

Well, heck.

Didn't realize they evolved after Distance Shores in PF1.

I was just taken aback with it, since an awful lot is taken up by the tail option.

Thank you, James, for chiming in.

I saw there is a single feat about valkyries, having a feat line with themes related to aesirs would also be awesome in the future.

Well I don't like it. The consistency of having tails hardly screams "chaos" to me. Quite the opposite.

I don't get it.

It's an ancestry feat a character may take or not ( consider it as an extra feature. The more the possibilities, the better! ).

If you don't like it, of if you think it doesn't suit your character, then don't take it.

After all, it's unlikely you are going to find Ganzi with tail anywhere during your adventures.

I don't get it.

It's an ancestry feat a character may take or not ( consider it as an extra feature. The more the possibilities, the better! ).

If you don't like it, of if you think it doesn't suit your character, then don't take it.

After all, it's unlikely you are going to find Ganzi with tail anywhere during your adventures.

For me it's less about the optional ancestry options and more about the artwork. Creatures of chaos should not all look the same. They should not all be codified, organized, and predictable in appearance. That's a trait of order and law, not of chaos and primordial essence.

Demons got it right. They're all over the place. Their forms and abilities seem to never end. There are always new demons it seems. That is not true of the Proteans.

"They should not all be codified, organized, and predictable in appearance."

Being art showing off a specific creature they kinda have to be for the most part, at least starting out, if there's no codification in the art it's kinda defeats the purpose of getting it in the first place.

Especially when there's 8 other Planar Scions that they have to be distinctly separate from.

Seems kinda weird to me to pivot to complaining about proteans themselves. The flavor mentions they're often shifting, and we don't exactly have the technology to show that in GIFs for the books. They also look like jumbled messes which vary pretty wildly in color scheme and features, which I think gets the point across just fine — the proteans are chaotic but they also live in one place, so they're going to have stuff that works in that place, just as devils generally have humanoid bodies with legs. And of the two pieces of artwork on the PRD for Ganzi, one has a tail, and the other doesn't. Like. Big whoop.

HumbleGamer wrote:

I don't get it.

It's an ancestry feat a character may take or not ( consider it as an extra feature. The more the possibilities, the better! ).

If you don't like it, of if you think it doesn't suit your character, then don't take it.

After all, it's unlikely you are going to find Ganzi with tail anywhere during your adventures.

For me it's less about the optional ancestry options and more about the artwork. Creatures of chaos should not all look the same. They should not all be codified, organized, and predictable in appearance. That's a trait of order and law, not of chaos and primordial essence.

Demons got it right. They're all over the place. Their forms and abilities seem to never end. There are always new demons it seems. That is not true of the Proteans.

This is actually mentioned in the lore of proteans, so it's at least an intentional choice.

Most proteans have a serpentine body with the head of a primeval beast. Scholars have long been intrigued by this fact—that scions of dissolution and disorder would share so many features—pointing out that even in the purest chaos there is some semblance of order. Others note that the serpentine form is one of the most primeval shapes, perhaps suggesting that in a reality at the dawn of time, such shapes were all that could exist. The proteans themselves have little to say on the matter, which, perhaps ironically, only adds to the confusion and lack of consensus surrounding their kind. After all, if even chaos cannot be trusted to be chaotic, would that not be the purest form of entropy?

There's even art in the Ancestry Guide - hell, one of them is on AON - of Ganzi without tails. This is a complete non-starter of a complaint.

Some Axiomite in Axis:

Oh my God Becky, look at her tail
It is so big, she looks like
One of those keketar's girlfriends
But you know, who understands them?
I mean, her tail, it's just so big
Uh, I can't believe it's just so long, it's like out there
I mean, uh, gross, look
She's just so, Chaotic Neutral

The thing about ganzi and proteans is, they aren't really creatures of "pure" chaos - they are just more chaotic than other creatures. If they where "pure" chaos they would just be a soup of random energy and matter scattering in random directions in the maelstrom. Intelligence and form just aren't possible without some order.

Proteans get to be representatives of chaos because they are the most chaos-adjacent intelligent creatures that exist in numbers and aren't tainted by good or evil. They are creatures of "more or less the most chaos that a creature can contain while still being stable and intelligible".

Ganzi are then humanoids who have a small fragment of "mostly chaos adjacent" in them.

Proteans are all kind of serpentine, so as to better navigate the currents of the Maelstrom, right? I figured that's where the tail comes from.

Proteans are all kind of serpentine, so as to better navigate the currents of the Maelstrom, right? I figured that's where the tail comes from.

When Sarah, Wayne, Wes, and I were working to come up with the look for the proteans, we decided that since they were primeval, and since they were one of the oldest (not THE oldest, but maybe second oldest) forms of non-deity life in reality that they should look primeval, or even prehistoric. And since I'd already set up the chaotic neutral plane as a sort of metaphysical ocean of sorts, that all worked together for us to say to Wayne "Make them serpentine like ancient prehistoric reptiles, like mosasaurus or elasmosaurus or the like." Amber Stewart was the one we hired to write a lot about them in those early days so she also had a lot of influence on how they looked; things like their strange supernatural "crowns" or a lot of their non-visual stuff comes from that first article she wrote back in the Legacy of Fire era.

The tail is all about primeval imagery though.

Some Axiomite in Axis:

Oh my God Becky, look at her tail
It is so big, she looks like
One of those keketar's girlfriends
But you know, who understands them?
I mean, her tail, it's just so big
Uh, I can't believe it's just so long, it's like out there
I mean, uh, gross, look
She's just so, Chaotic Neutral

Have to say it, this got a chuckle out of me.. Ah, Sir MixAlot, you are a wit.

Yeah, my main concern was that there was a significant portion of the Ganzi feats taken up by the Tail stuff. I still had other choices to go to, and am going by the ever changing colors of their skin and hair that was inferred in PF1 for my character.

But my first character was a Bubble Gum pink haired grrl that was a telekinetist. I just never thought of her having a tail.

So, thanks all for clearing up my confusion. I will forgo the tail stuff for now with Thesa.

Cheers!!