Creative Director
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Any chance of seeing a Companion of the devil worshiping land of Cheliax?
Actually, you'll note that the Council of Thieves Player's Guide is on the schedule for August... this will be the Cheliax Player's Companion (just as the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide is the one for Katapesh).
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Any chance of seeing a Companion of the devil worshiping land of Cheliax?Actually, you'll note that the Council of Thieves Player's Guide is on the schedule for August... this will be the Cheliax Player's Companion (just as the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide is the one for Katapesh).
Very interesting and exciting! Thanks!
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You know, prior to reading the Companion, I always felt like the people who compared Cheliax to an Orwellian Police State were pushing it just a little. Sure, they were diabolists, but clearly they were desperate people who turned to the strongest force they could find for protection.
Yes, they were evil, but it was a forced evolution, not a pre-existing trait.
Page 3, Understanding Cheliax sidebar: "Even before the Thrune
Ascendancy took shape from the chaos that surrounded the
failure of the Starfall Doctrine, the people of Cheliax believed
in the goal of power for its own sake: military, economic,
political, or magical." Well, that's Orwell totalitarianism in a nutshell; power for its own sake.
There's plenty more in the book that digs into this, especially the lengths that the government employ to "revise" history, but I just wanted to point out the fundamental conceit of Cheliax. Not only are they bad, they were always bad.
Congratulations to the people who could read between the lines far better than I.
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There's plenty more in the book that digs into this, especially the lengths that the government employ to "revise" history, but I just wanted to point out the fundamental conceit of Cheliax. Not only are they bad, they were always bad.
Which lends itself to the question, what sort of god was Aroden, anyway? His worshippers sure don't seem to have been very nice people, even before they turned to Asmodeus...
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You know, prior to reading the Companion, I always felt like the people who compared Cheliax to an Orwellian Police State were pushing it just a little. Sure, they were diabolists, but clearly they were desperate people who turned to the strongest force they could find for protection.
Yes, they were evil, but it was a forced evolution, not a pre-existing trait.Page 3, Understanding Cheliax sidebar: "Even before the Thrune
Ascendancy took shape from the chaos that surrounded the
failure of the Starfall Doctrine, the people of Cheliax believed
in the goal of power for its own sake: military, economic,
political, or magical." Well, that's Orwell totalitarianism in a nutshell; power for its own sake.There's plenty more in the book that digs into this, especially the lengths that the government employ to "revise" history, but I just wanted to point out the fundamental conceit of Cheliax. Not only are they bad, they were always bad.
Congratulations to the people who could read between the lines far better than I.
Orwell was such a master that even Cheliax is not as scary as 1984 (this is by no means a slight on the wonderful creation wrought by the Paizo team).
I remembered a website with these Top 10 scariest 1984 posts...
"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
"From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
"We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instance of death we cannot permit any deviation . . . we make the brain perfect before we blow it out."
"The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face."
"A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."
"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
But remember the final line of the book (1984, that is):
The hope lies with the proles.
Can anyone tell me the spell: Signifer's Rally is an [evil] spell? I mean apart from the name?????
Can anyone tell me the spell: Signifer's Rally is an [evil] spell? I mean apart from the name?????
The brimstone is a clue....
What so any spell that smells of brimstone is evil? It still makes no sense that this is an evil spell. Nasty name and nasty smell does not equal evil. Is the teleportation via hell- how does that work?
Balzeebub's Boiling Cure
Conjuration (Healing)[evil]
Level: Brd 1, Clr 1, Drd 1, Healing 1, Pal 1, Rgr 2
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Touch
Target: Creature touched
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Will half (harmless)
Spell Resistance: Yes (harmless)
When laying your hand upon a living creature, you channel smelly energy that cures 1d8 points of damage +1 point per caster level (maximum +5). However it also leaves 1d6 boils on the skin where the touch was made, they stink real bad of nasty creatures with big sharp pointy teeth
;-)
What so any spell that smells of brimstone is evil?
Nope.
It still makes no sense that this is an evil spell. Nasty name and nasty smell does not equal evil. Is the teleportation via hell- how does that work?
Heh heh heh. That's something the signifers aren't explaining. :)
(Maybe the last sentence of the spell should indicate to you that something weird is going on....)
Well, to me, the last sentence of the spell is a sort of circular argument about the evilness of this spell:
The spell is [evil] therefore the teleprt is hedged by MCaE, becuase MCaE hedges it is therefore an [evil] spell etc.
I still don't get it, there is no explanation why this is any [evil] spell, if it is just 'fluff' [evil] 'cos it was written that way, fine. I could make a spell that did an identical effect (apart from name and smell) that didn't have the evil descriptor, and therefore would be unaffected by MCaE, if it is only fluff... your hints are too vague for me, maybe I am too slow, but I still don't see why it has an [evil] descriptor. MCaE works because it has the [evil] descriptor, that is an effect not a why....
It's evil because you teleport through Hell.
Which also explains the brimstone.
And why it doesn't work in areas warded against evil.
horse > cart
:)
Thanks, in that case it makes sense (as I guessed above, after your first hit with the hint bat!)
I'll note that on the PDF,for sure, 'cos I reckon the teleporting through hell bit will need to be adjudicated at some point when it gets used... it is an awesome spell :-)
Heh heh heh. That's something the signifers aren't explaining. :)
Should have got the wife to read this, she would get the subtle answer. Me, I need to be hit in the face
There are maps of Westcrown and Egorian... but no map of Cheliax itself.
Note to Paizo: If you're describing a nation in a Companion and including a section on geography, please include a map.
There are maps of Westcrown and Egorian... but no map of Cheliax itself.
Note to Paizo: If you're describing a nation in a Companion and including a section on geography, please include a map.
There's a very detailed half-page map of Cheliax in the PFCS. Reprinting it in the Cheliax book would mean 1/2 page (or more, if you wanted the map larger and with more details) of new content in the Cheliax book that we'd have to cut to make room for the map.
There's a very detailed half-page map of Cheliax in the PFCS. Reprinting it in the Cheliax book would mean 1/2 page (or more, if you wanted the map larger and with more details) of new content in the Cheliax book that we'd have to cut to make room for the map.There are maps of Westcrown and Egorian... but no map of Cheliax itself.
Note to Paizo: If you're describing a nation in a Companion and including a section on geography, please include a map.
Unfortunately, that means I would have to have both sources (which I do, but I'm not all customers). I'd rather cut half a page of text in the Companion in order to have the map to keep the geographic info in close context.
Just noticed that one of the named characters has ranks in Hellknight so Im wondering which book the class would be showing up in?
There's a big Hellknight article coming as part of Council of Thieves, so that was my guess ...
Is the Tiefling detailed in this book?
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Is the Tiefling detailed in this book?Nope that article is in the Council of Thieves AP book the first one of the series that is.well.. actually tiefling is expanded upon.
the base tiefling is in the Beasty book.
True but since it was free I assumed they was asking about more details, in other books.
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Those feats in the book (Cornugon Smash, Osyluth Guile et al.) are *very* cool -- in fact, they're so cool and useful that I wish they had been available to everyone in the PF RPG core rules.
Well, this just underlines the fact that not only is Cheliax the supreme empire on Golarion -- we also have the best damn feats and fighting-styles in the whole world, too! :)
now that PF RPG is out do the feats in this companion (eg. Cornugon Smash) have their requirements for skill ranks reduced by 3?
Thanks! [turns book to back cover, laughs, and gives self facepalm]
Questions regarding the feat Hellcat Stealth. Is this meant to work like the Hide in Plain Sight class feature? Do you need cover/concealment?
Considering it is meant to resemble the Hellcat special ability I almost want to treat it like invisibility only with stealth checks.
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They work similarly. HS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but you have a penalty on the check. HIPS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but it requires a nearby shadow, and has no penalty.
Got this two days ago, and just had to let the nice Paizo-people know that I really liked what was done with the Persona feature. It feels much more useful to get several short character-descriptions than one big as in the previous companions.
(Still, here's hoping we get a nice in-depth description of Queen Abrogail if there's ever a Chronicles book done for Cheliax - I want to eat my cake and have it.)
They work similarly. HS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but you have a penalty on the check. HIPS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but it requires a nearby shadow, and has no penalty.
Thank you for clarifying. Much appreciated. :)
They work similarly. HS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but you have a penalty on the check. HIPS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but it requires a nearby shadow, and has no penalty.
for further clarity: does it only trump the need for concealment to enter stealth? or does it also trump the need to end your turn in concealment to not break stealth?
Breaking Stealth When you start your turn using Stealth, you can leave cover or concealment and remain unobserved as long as you succeed at a Stealth check and end your turn in cover or concealment. Your Stealth immediately ends after you make an attack roll, whether or not the attack is successful (except when sniping as noted below).
They work similarly. HS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but you have a penalty on the check. HIPS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but it requires a nearby shadow, and has no penalty.
for further clarity: does it only trump the need for concealment to enter stealth? or does it also trump the need to end your turn in concealment to not break stealth?
Breaking Stealth When you start your turn using Stealth, you can leave cover or concealment and remain unobserved as long as you succeed at a Stealth check and end your turn in cover or concealment. Your Stealth immediately ends after you make an attack roll, whether or not the attack is successful (except when sniping as noted below).
The reason this question has come up is that one of our players seems to have found a loophole that will allow essentially a permanent Improved invisibility at 15ht level. 6 attacks at +7d6 sneak attack, 5' shift to stay in stealth.
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The reason this question has come up is that one of our players seems to have found a loophole that will allow essentially a permanent Improved invisibility at 15ht level. 6 attacks at +7d6 sneak attack, 5' shift to stay in stealth.They work similarly. HS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but you have a penalty on the check. HIPS trumps the need for cover/concealment, but it requires a nearby shadow, and has no penalty.
for further clarity: does it only trump the need for concealment to enter stealth? or does it also trump the need to end your turn in concealment to not break stealth?
Breaking Stealth When you start your turn using Stealth, you can leave cover or concealment and remain unobserved as long as you succeed at a Stealth check and end your turn in cover or concealment. Your Stealth immediately ends after you make an attack roll, whether or not the attack is successful (except when sniping as noted below).
If you mean he does it with "sniping", he can only make 1 attack, because it is a standard action.