Creative Director
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In fact, the Dominion is more or less at war with them. They don't work well together.Well now I'm very confused. I must have been misreading a lot.
Edit: Oop, yep, I just gave another read of the wiki page and immediately noticed it said they're in conflict. Idk how I missed that. That is very fascinating.
Please keep posts to questions on this thread. In a case like this, where you feel the need to continue the conversation (which is not the purpose of this thread) you should include a question... for example: "Why did you decide they were at war?" in which case I would have replied "Because the Dark Tapestry is immense and it needs to be more than a one-note region where everything works together for a common goal."
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Creative Director
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Favourite Pathfinder alien?
I barely know anything about Pathfinder, and don't know many of the names at all since I'm just a player in a game that hasn't been played since February, and the only writing I've done for it is a few monsters...
...so, I guess, mi-go is my answer.
If you were looking for "favorite alien invented by Paizo and not picked up from literature or mythology, then I guess lashunta.
If you were looking for "favorite alien invented for Starfinder and that didn't exist before Starfinder," I don't have one off the top of my head, since I'm not familiar enough with the monsters. Which probably means that defaults to skittermander.
(My preference for Starfinder games, by the way, is human or human-adjacent PCs and with the aliens being strange NPCs or monsters or the like; I prefer the Star Trek approach to aliens, not the Star Wars approach... and even better, the Alien approach to aliens.)
What are the differences bewteen Mestama and Gyrrona's religions? I've read about both, but in the end they look and feel very similar.
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Creative Director
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What are the differences bewteen Mestama and Gyrrona's religions? I've read about both, but in the end they look and feel very similar.
The alignment, mostly. But also check their areas of concern. Gyronna has Extortion, Hatred, and Spite, so her faith is about being mean and cruel and awful to their victims while turning a profit. Mestama has Cruelty, Deception, and Hags, so she's more focused than Gyronna. Gyronna is more against society, while Mestama's faith focuses on making single vicims have awful horrible lives using cruel trickery rather than mean but obvious threats.
AKA: Gryonna acts more like a fighter, while Mestama acts more like a rogue, I guess.
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Creative Director
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(heh, silly autocorrect)
But yeah, I was just asking for favourite alien that's been made by Paizo, not necessarily favourite playable one.
What about the alien T-Rex with the scythe arms?
I have no idea what that thing's name is. The art is nice, but I have no idea what else it can do, so it's not really something that's on my radar.
With Pharasama being the goddess of births, why there is no psychopomp-blooded race?
Who is your favorite comedian (living or dead)?
I prefer the Star Trek approach to aliens, not the Star Wars approach... and even better, the Alien approach to aliens.
How would you define those three different approaches for yourself?
(I'm not well versed in Star Trek at all, therefore the question).
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Creative Director
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I thought they were both Chaotic Evil?What are the differences bewteen Mestama and Gyrrona's religions? I've read about both, but in the end they look and feel very similar.The alignment, mostly...
Oops, they are. My mistake. That said, the other observations stand in how they're different.
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Creative Director
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I prefer the Star Trek approach to aliens, not the Star Wars approach... and even better, the Alien approach to aliens.How would you define those three different approaches for yourself?
(I'm not well versed in Star Trek at all, therefore the question).
Listed in my order of preference:
Alien: Sci fi focused on humans being the protagonists, and the rest of the universe being scary, unknown, dangerous, and hostile.
Star Trek: Sci fi focused on humans or very close to humans being the protagonists, with them all having a humanoid shape (one head, two arms, two legs), with the weirder aliens being things that are difficult to understand or decidedly inhuman in not just shape but mind and goals.
Star Wars: Sci fi focused on humans mostly because they're less expensive to portray, but with a wide range of increasingly non human things being mixed in with humans to such an extreme that the strange becomes overwhelming and everyday and, ultimately, boring since there's no surprise that something weird is just around the next corner.
Have you watched the Haunting of Hill House/Bly Manor?
Hello James, how's your Monday so far?
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Creative Director
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Hello James, how's your Monday so far?
We've got the day off from work for Indigenous Peoples Day. So far, I've had a coffee and a light breakfast, watched a bit of you tube, and I'm now about to start playing some more Divinity Original Sin 2. Today's goal is to swap back and forth between that and binging "The Haunting of Bly Manor." I'm on episode 5 and so far, I'm absolutely loving the show.
Do you have a favorite playstyle for Divinity Original Sin 2? I've been having a blast with an archer with elemental arrows and an Aerothurgist.
Favourite Pathfinder alien?I barely know anything about Pathfinder, and don't know many of the names at all since I'm just a player in a game that hasn't been played since February, and the only writing I've done for it is a few monsters...
I feel like there's a joke here I'm just not getting.
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Creative Director
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I feel like there's a joke here I'm just not getting.Favourite Pathfinder alien?I barely know anything about Pathfinder, and don't know many of the names at all since I'm just a player in a game that hasn't been played since February, and the only writing I've done for it is a few monsters...
No joke. And please make sure to use this thread to ask questions.
Hello James, how's your Monday so far?We've got the day off from work for Indigenous Peoples Day. So far, I've had a coffee and a light breakfast, watched a bit of you tube, and I'm now about to start playing some more Divinity Original Sin 2. Today's goal is to swap back and forth between that and binging "The Haunting of Bly Manor." I'm on episode 5 and so far, I'm absolutely loving the show.
That is excellent news!
Regarding your love of the horror genre, what is it based upon? What do you get out of your favorite authors (any media)?
No joke. And please make sure to use this thread to ask questions.I feel like there's a joke here I'm just not getting.Favourite Pathfinder alien?I barely know anything about Pathfinder, and don't know many of the names at all since I'm just a player in a game that hasn't been played since February, and the only writing I've done for it is a few monsters...
Apologies, but just to echo the confusion in the form of a question: what do you mean you barely know anything about Pathfinder and have only written a few monsters for it (given you being Creative Director for it and writing a ton for it as far as I know)? Were you maybe referring to Starfinder?
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Creative Director
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Apologies, but just to echo the confusion in the form of a question: what do you mean you barely know anything about Pathfinder and have only written a few monsters for it (given you being Creative Director for it and writing a ton for it as far as I know)? Were you maybe referring to Starfinder?No joke. And please make sure to use this thread to ask questions.I feel like there's a joke here I'm just not getting.Favourite Pathfinder alien?I barely know anything about Pathfinder, and don't know many of the names at all since I'm just a player in a game that hasn't been played since February, and the only writing I've done for it is a few monsters...
Ah; yeah, that was a typo. Meant to say that I barely know anything about Starfinder, likely a result of being confused about being asked about an alien in the first place when I was at the time working on some Starfinder freelance, ironically.
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Creative Director
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Regarding your love of the horror genre, what is it based upon? What do you get out of your favorite authors (any media)?
A combination, I suppose, of my dad letting me stay up to midnight to watch monster movies with him on Creature Features on Saturday night, and my grandparents (on my father's side) introducing me to horror comics and authors like Stephen King, Clive Barker, F. Paul Wilson, and so on.
What I get out of my favorite horror creators is the thrill of being scared, but also the delight in facing the evils and horrors, real or imagined, of the world, to help bolster myself against having to face them in the real world in all their myriad forms.
Maybe being a fan of horror is practice for enduring the awfulness the world has in store for us.
Hi James!
I'm looking for some GM advice. My players are approaching high level now in my first 2e homebrew campaign, and are about to start an adventure inspired by Dark Souls - a big undead city controlled by seven leaders, who will act as bosses.
I know you're a Dark Souls fan too, and while I appreciate that it's a very different beast to Pathfinder, I wonder if you have any advice on creating boss monsters with the Dark Souls feel, that are a bit more than "lots of hit points, hit with big melee attacks"? I want combats that feel epic and a bit longer than regular fights, but without becoming a drag. How do I avoid a fight that just degenerates into a stationary melee, with players doing the same old "strike-strike-raise shield" routine?
Bonus round question: do you know of any good boss encounters in print that could serve as inspiration, for any edition of the game?
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Creative Director
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Hi James!
I'm looking for some GM advice. My players are approaching high level now in my first 2e homebrew campaign, and are about to start an adventure inspired by Dark Souls - a big undead city controlled by seven leaders, who will act as bosses.
I know you're a Dark Souls fan too, and while I appreciate that it's a very different beast to Pathfinder, I wonder if you have any advice on creating boss monsters with the Dark Souls feel, that are a bit more than "lots of hit points, hit with big melee attacks"? I want combats that feel epic and a bit longer than regular fights, but without becoming a drag. How do I avoid a fight that just degenerates into a stationary melee, with players doing the same old "strike-strike-raise shield" routine?
Bonus round question: do you know of any good boss encounters in print that could serve as inspiration, for any edition of the game?
Make them immense. Use artwork from or inspired by Souls games as handouts to help set the mood. Let the PCs learn about the seven bosses' backstories by discovering hints in the world. And go for the flavor of the setting rather than making it super hard... but still consider putting in elements that allow the PCs to recover from TPKs in a way that doesn't feel like cheating.
The best place to go for inspiration for those sorts of things is the Souls games, but don't look at the combat. Look at the ambience.
Have you played Ghost of Tsushima yet?
If not I highly, highly recommend it.
Did you play Divinity: Original Sin? The first one, I mean. If so, how much better is DOS 2? :-)
What I get out of my favorite horror creators is the thrill of being scared, but also the delight in facing the evils and horrors, real or imagined, of the world, to help bolster myself against having to face them in the real world in all their myriad forms.Maybe being a fan of horror is practice for enduring the awfulness the world has in store for us.
I hope it does the trick for you.
You may just be the person I need to solve a 20ish year old gap in my memory. An old flame of mine let me borrow a book that was about a guy and his son (could be a daughter) going on an island to look after an old house. Long story short, there was a painting in the house that changed depending on the proximity of a
big bad "creature" to said house. IIRC, the trap that led to the attic could also be used to access another reality where said creature lived. In the end the protagonist was betrayed by a woman he met when he first arrived at the old house. She was there to be impregnated by a human and it was part of a grand scheme to restore the Earth to what it was eons ago, in order to make it habitable for the old beings that were displaced by the changing nature of the planet.
Dear God I hope that makes some kind of sense to you, because the only other feature I remember is that there was a ziggurat somewhere in there.
Do you know to what book this story belongs to?
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Creative Director
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You may just be the person I need to solve a 20ish year old gap in my memory. An old flame of mine let me borrow a book that was about a guy and his son (could be a daughter) going on an island to look after an old house. Long story short, there was a painting in the house that changed depending on the proximity of a
big bad "creature" to said house. IIRC, the trap that led to the attic could also be used to access another reality where said creature lived. In the end the protagonist was betrayed by a woman he met when he first arrived at the old house. She was there to be impregnated by a human and it was part of a grand scheme to restore the Earth to what it was eons ago, in order to make it habitable for the old beings that were displaced by the changing nature of the planet.Dear God I hope that makes some kind of sense to you, because the only other feature I remember is that there was a ziggurat somewhere in there.
Do you know to what book this story belongs to?
Alas, I don't recognize the story. Sorry!
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Creative Director
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How do you communicate that your character has a sophisticated vocabulary without using words such a character's world lacks the cultural context we have? (i.e. words named after people who existed on Earth but don't on Golarion like "philistine," "herculean," or "Socratic")
By having a giant vocabulary myself, and by spending years/decades practicing that vocabulary by writing/reading/editing so that I can draw upon lots of synonyms for words like that, combined with relaxing that whole side of things with the fact that, while my characters exist in an imaginary world, I do not, and thus when I speak with other players I can use real-world words that don't have in-game legacies.
AKA: I don't speak Taldane when I game, so I don't get too worried about it in play.
EDIT: I get a bit less cavalier about it when the words used are being printed in a Paizo product, but even then... there's a LOT of words that have as their genesis things that wouldn't exist in Golarion... particularly when they come from biblical sources. Armageddon, christened, goliath, spartan, etc. In cases where a synonym works, that's fine, but sometimes it's better to use a word that is the perfect one in English even if that word doesn't exist in Golarion. Which, again, when you get down to it... is ALL English words.
Hi James,
I'm GMing second darkness and have been converting it to pathfinder 1E as I go. Right now I'm looking at the aboleth mage Ndtkia. From my understanding aboleth mage was an entry in the monster manual that was basically an aboleth with 10 levels in wizard. I'm debating between whether it would be better thematically to rebuild an aboleth with 10 levels in wizard or psychic and just using a different published Alghollthu around the same CR. Any suggestions?
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Creative Director
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Hi James,
I'm GMing second darkness and have been converting it to pathfinder 1E as I go. Right now I'm looking at the aboleth mage Ndtkia. From my understanding aboleth mage was an entry in the monster manual that was basically an aboleth with 10 levels in wizard. I'm debating between whether it would be better thematically to rebuild an aboleth with 10 levels in wizard or psychic and just using a different published Alghollthu around the same CR. Any suggestions?
In 2nd edition, a monster's level generally determines its spellcasting capacity.
If I were building a conversion for Second Darkness, I'd rebuild Ndtkia from the ground up, starting with the aboleth stats from the Bestiary and upscaling the numbers to whatever level I decided to set him at. That level would then determine his spells, and I would give him occult prepared spells, using a wizard of equal level to determine how many spells he would be able to prepare. I'd probably give him one or two wizard feat type abilities, but wouldn't bother giving him EVERYTHING a wizard would have, since that just overcomplicates things.
Hello sir,
I have a very important question that the lore of the setting hinges on.
What was Aroden’s Mother’s name?
Somewhat related follow up, what is the Golarion Equivalent of the name Maria?
Thank you for your time.