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Personaly, regarding teleportation, I'm a fan of the "Tesseract" method, in which one merely folds reality so that two distant points are briefly adjacent, with everyone in-between being none the wiser. Most teleportation spells are fairly decent level. Dim Door is a 4th level spell, the same level that causes tentacles to burst from the ground and so forth.
Creative Director
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It's true. Greg and I pretty much see eye to eye on All Things D&D... with two exceptions.
1) Drow weapons melting in sunlight.
2) Steam Power.
That's not to say that what he wrote about both in Into the Darklands wasn't cool... it WAS. It just clashed with my fickle sense of what fits into Golarion and what doesn't. Because I'm picky, I guess. :-)
1) Drow weapons melting in sunlight.2) Steam Power.
Now, how can we combine those two things?
I know! Drow have those Steamwarpers! They create fearsome weapons, powered by the steam of a special alchemic substance. They double your strength bonus to wield them, and the damage dice are from weapons two categories larger (1d8 steamwarped dagger), but this weird Darklands substance (which has to be contained in containers of alchemic adamantine-glass) has a violent reaction to sunlight - whenever a steamwarped weapon is explosed to sunlight, it heats up and sears the wielder - and it also lights up with the light of a dozen suns, blinding a Drow permanently.
There. It's so scientific it HAS to work.
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big enormous swords using steam and needing to be "charged" (like an old chainsaw), becoming heatand improving in the characters impulse dealing more damage (+2 and double in charges) and doing extra damage vs cold based creature...
for an example play Devil May Cry 4and watch Nero's Sword
still i don't think it would fall within the feeling of Golarion... but is much better (i think) than FF8 Gunswords :P (which concept i loved, maybe as 1 shot flintlocks)
It's true. Greg and I pretty much see eye to eye on All Things D&D... with two exceptions.
1) Drow weapons melting in sunlight...
Hee hee hee!! Ahh good times :D
*remembering look on players faces very first time all their stolen weapons melted away*
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Bump to get thread revitalized
I can't think of anything to add to this at the moment, although something I would wonder about is what do they think fossils are in Golarion? In RL they called dinosaur fossils dragons or great buffalo, etc. before Sir Richard Owen came along and used the term dinosaurs.
I like to keep tech down to a minimun. I don't like guns in my sword & sorcery campaigns. Star Wars Saga. OK. Pathfinder not so much.
Not so much technology, but the advanced idealogy of Republics is a great addition to Pathfinder IMHO
big enormous swords using steam and needing to be "charged" (like an old chainsaw), becoming heatand improving in the characters impulse dealing more damage (+2 and double in charges) and doing extra damage vs cold based creature...
for an example play Devil May Cry 4and watch Nero's Sword
still i don't think it would fall within the feeling of Golarion... but is much better (i think) than FF8 Gunswords :P (which concept i loved, maybe as 1 shot flintlocks)
Thinking about it, I think rather than rely on steam, maybe Golarions are more advanced at extracting useful work from crystals, perhaps partly based on piezoelectrical effects, which were first studied in the mid-18th Century on Earth. Perhaps, augmented with simple spells, were able to generate laser effects very early in their technological development, although perhaps not able to adequately "weaponize" them except for traps.
I can also see them developing a sort of blast powder like used in the Iron Kingdoms. Since I'm using a PC's from Space idea, this could potentially be a McGuffin if the PCs can find a way to substitute blast powder for rocket fuel.
But these are just ideas for advancing Golarion tech.
based on paizoelectrical effects
Fixed that for you. ;-)
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My last wizard was a proponent of Phlogiston Theory, which was great fun. I could see something like that being a commonly-held belief in Golarion.
I like to keep tech down to a minimun. I don't like guns in my sword & sorcery campaigns. Star Wars Saga. OK. Pathfinder not so much.
Not so much technology, but the advanced idealogy of Republics is a great addition to Pathfinder IMHO
I agree. I've spent quite a bit of time developing alternatives to real science to avoid players "accidentally" inventing gunpowder. Too much tech / industry pretty much does in the heroic fantasy, for me at least. Social sciences aren't as disruptive. Philosophy works well in most settings. Although convincing that 20th level wizard that he's no better than some peasant might take a bit of doing...
I've run my own campaign world since 1975 and while I wanted it to *look* like the real world on the surface, it's very different "under the hood". It's all about the elements in my world (with "spirit" as a 5th element -- don't mention the movie *please*). With a little work you can come up with explanations for about anything you want (like a livable underworld) and avoid those pesky things you don't want (like gunpowder or mechs). Gives the philosophers and scholars tons to argue about without involving advanced degrees in real world sciences too.
Ultimately, I'd say check out your DMs opinion on science. It's always their call in the end...
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My last wizard was a proponent of Phlogiston Theory, which was great fun. I could see something like that being a commonly-held belief in Golarion.
I fiddled with an idea for a world for a while where there were large phlogiston deposits underground in certain parts of the world. Occasionally, these deposits would cause large chunks of land to sheer off and float into the sky creating "skylands" and at least one floating continent. Most eventually drifted into a very low orbit around the equator. As long as the phlogiston remained trapped, it was all good, but if the deposit ever ruptured or vented, down came the whole landmass.
Other ideas included skyburgs - chunks of floating ice - and phlogiston mines for dirigibles and other floaty items. Oh, and that ALL land, even continents, float on the ball of water that is the world, so a side view would show large landmasses floating on a layer of water, small skylands floating in the air, and tiny bits of land way up high, floating in the aether.
Some of the issues that I never resolved were how fast the skylands would travel and what would be the effect on the lands underneath (especially if they had a more-or-less consistent route) of a slow-moving, continent-sized shadows? But the equatorial regions would be pretty inhospitable anyway due to falling rock.