When building the setting, how do you decide on whether to make something wholly original, draw from D&D tradition, or draw from real world mythology?
(By the way, I love the setting so, so much. It fulfills all the things I potentially loved about D&D)
Creative Director
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When building the setting, how do you decide on whether to make something wholly original, draw from D&D tradition, or draw from real world mythology?
(By the way, I love the setting so, so much. It fulfills all the things I potentially loved about D&D)
I honestly don't really know... I just know which one of those three choices at the time seem like the most interesting and go with it.
Note that often drawing from D&D tradition isn't an option since not all D&D traditions are open content.
Mr. James Jacobs,
How would Desna and Lamashtu react when finding out about a mythic invidual whose mythic power comes from the last spark of Cuchanus's power that made to Golarion? Thanks for the previous answers and for overall entertaining the questions of we silly forum goers.
Calling it here, it's the Dominion of the Black.
Zon-Kuthon's whole story is so Hellraiser/Event Horizon. It only makes sense given what we know of the Dominion.
Just to head that off at the proverbial pass...
I've been doing a LOT of thinking about the Dominion of the Black lately, and I've got pretty solid in my head what they are and what they're about.
And that doesn't fit in well at all with Zon-Kuthon.
It's not the Lovecraft mythos. It's not the Dominion of the Black. It's something else.
Interesting. I always envisioned the Dominion as some weird cross-breed between The Thing (from the eponymous movie with Kurt Russell) and the Reapers from Mass Effect. Therefore, Zon-Kuthon was some sort of "indoctrinated" herald.
... a world that's intended to be mostly humanocentric.
Out of curiosity, what would you advise for someone interested in creating a world that's not humanocentric? Less about specific races, more about world flavor and such? How would you keep humanity from stealing the center spotlight, preferably without making them near-extinct or turning them into a slave race? (Not looking for anything in-depth here, just a few suggestive pointers from an experienced worldbuilder, really.)
Can werebeasts be made from creatures NOT of the animal type?
Hey James. I hope life is treating you well. I appreciate what you do here. That said, I have a question. :)
What sort of wealth management systems are there in Golarion? There's the Bank of Abadar in Kaer Maga but my PCs are in Magnimar. They recently came under a large windfall. The sort of windfall to make a poor-ish party come into their full WBL and then some. I'm just trying to think what sort of institutions are in place that denizens can use to manage wealth, what their practices are etc. If this is already in a book just point me in the right direction and unfortunately Ultimate Campaign isn't until April.
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Earlier questions about summoners earlier this week came from another conversation on these boards which became acrimonious, rude, etc where some, including me suggested a lot of roles for eidolons and other people had a heart attack/screamed and in one case basically suggested I was immoral.
What is your take on suggestions including:
Husband/wife summoner/eidolon, perhaps with children (half-celestial/fey/infernal whatever or maybe just assimar/tieflings?)?
Eidolon with rank or sharing the summoners rank in the Eagle knights?
Going into a resturaunt and ordering a beer for your eidolon, taking them to a dinner party?
Having eidolon being a character's 'daughter'. Note said player knows out of character that this is a delusion?
Eidolon is the characters childhood friend for a socially isolated half elf (all her friends tended to outgrow her)?
All of these questions came down to the difference between treating them as intelligent beings and possible friends rather then pets and tools?
Promise not to ask you about summoners for awhile.
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Creative Director
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Mr. James Jacobs,
How would Desna and Lamashtu react when finding out about a mythic invidual whose mythic power comes from the last spark of Cuchanus's power that made to Golarion? Thanks for the previous answers and for overall entertaining the questions of we silly forum goers.
With great surprise, but she'd also probably see to it that her faith knew about it and went to protect him before he got himself eaten by Lamashtu.
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Creative Director
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... a world that's intended to be mostly humanocentric.Out of curiosity, what would you advise for someone interested in creating a world that's not humanocentric? Less about specific races, more about world flavor and such? How would you keep humanity from stealing the center spotlight, preferably without making them near-extinct or turning them into a slave race? (Not looking for anything in-depth here, just a few suggestive pointers from an experienced worldbuilder, really.)
The problem with making a world that's not humanocentric is that it has much fewer points for us, the humans playing games in that world, to relate to. The game is less about playing someone discovering unfamiliar new in the world, and more about BEING the unfamiliar new thing.
It takes the fantasy genre away from the roots I prefer—Conan, Leiber, Moorcock, and Martin—and puts it into something that feels like something else entirely.
It also makes world design increasingly more complicated. How do cities look, for example, if the dominant race on the planet are blind jellyfishes who float in the air and have a single long manipulator limb protruding from their top?
That's the type of changes that can actually work okay if you have a single very imaginative person building an entire world, protagonists included.
But having multiple authors build a world for protagonists that are unknowns (PCs) means that you have to answer a LOT more questions when you do something like this, and you end up spending all your time detailing things like how shopping for bread works (or if things like shopping and bread even exist at all) rather than actually spending time developing adventures and plots. And even if you DO manage to get all those shopping and bread questions answered, you've essentially just created an entire world with baseline assumptions that don't have direct relations to the real world, and thus whenever you want to do something new, you can't rely on the knowledge and history of humanity to help. You have to sift through your mountain of notes to find out if you've mentioned how the jellyfish people dig graves, or indeed if there's any such thing as digging or graves in the first place.
That's obviously an extreme example, but the point is if you want to create a non-humanocentric world, you will need an increasingly large amount of time to build that world, and that means you'll have less time to tell stories set in that world or play games set in that world.
In "The Spires of Xin-Shalast", when the PCs are searching for the city:
I really love what you've done with locating the lost city, but I'm confused about a few things, and I want to implement your vision. At this point, the PCs have Silas Vekker's journal pages.
1. Are the Will saves mentioned on page 317 of the anniversary edition pertaining to simply entering the "Xin-Shalast Environs" region?
2. If every PC passes the Will save, but haven't met any requirements for seeing the river Avah (either mundane or magical), can they still see Xin-Shalast if they traverse the mountains? In other words, is seeing the phantom river just a guide, or a necessary "tunnel" across realities?
3. If some PCs pass the save, but others do not, do the ones that passed end up in X.S., and the ones that failed end up separated? What prevents the PCs that passed from noticing the others are no longer with them? Is it just one of those things like, "hey, we're here! Wait, where's Phil and Suzanne?"
4. If the PCs teleport to where Xin-Shalast is on my map (let's say they guess randomly, like "over that mountain pass" or something) and the caster passes the caster level check, do they simply end up in Xin-Shalast? I reckon this is the same as #2, but it might be slightly different.
Edit: 2b./4b. Is the CL check to prevent teleporting directly to X.S., or is it to demonstrate that something funny is happening here? Same with mundane travel in #2. If this is the case, the only way to X.S. is the phantom river method?
Thanks kindly!
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Creative Director
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Can werebeasts be made from creatures NOT of the animal type?Absolutely. There's one adventure that has were-hellhounds.
A Pathfinder adventure? The closest I can remember we ever came to that was a race of hellhound shapechangers from D&D's fiend folio that ended up having a small role in Shackled City. I actually wrote up those monsters for the Fiend Folio, but they got unfortunately (in my opinion) changed from being a unique race during development at WotC into something far less interesting—hell hound lycanthropes, mechanically speaking. But even then, they didn't use the lycanthrope template to build them...
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Is Aucturn, or any other of the Distant Worlds, in any way based on the mythos of the sci-fi novel, 'Rama' or its [lame] sequels? In what general scope can we look to these as reference for setting-specific elements on that/those world(s)?
James Sutter designed that world, along with the rest of the book, and he's a pretty ravenous fan of sci-fi. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Rama inspired Aucturn or other elements. I know for a fact that Dan Simmons' Hyperion stories inspired parts of Distant Worlds (as well as several elements of Golarion, large to small).
As for using sci-fi novels as "reference," you can't. You can absolutely use them for inspiration if you're intending to run a game in a setting or plot or area that utilizes similar themes, but the exact details you're looking for as "reference" won't work for the official version of anything. If only because those books are copyrighted and we can't (and don't want to) steal wholesale from their ideas and plots.
What are 10 very big differences between devils and demons?
Because I really don't know, if it were for me I just cut the demon and devil stuff and throw them all together and call them fiends because I don't know the real big difference.
A Pathfinder adventure? The closest I can remember we ever came to that was a race of hellhound shapechangers from D&D's fiend folio that ended up having a small role in Shackled City[...]
Kevin_Video might be thinking of the Jezeldan werewolf tribe from Pathfinder #45, Broken Moon. They were werewolf fighter/rangers with the Fiendish simple template added, but a GM might give them a unique physical description to play up their demon-worship aspects.
While I'm not the hugest fan of summoners, something did occur to me. In Golarion, clerics are restricted to having a deity and can't worship a philosophy. This does change the class quite a bit, so maybe applying the same principle (Golarion-specific changes to the class) could work. For example, maybe slap an alignment restriction on and have the eidolons related to proteans and how they're ever-shifting. Or has that ship sailed?
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Creative Director
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What sort of wealth management systems are there in Golarion? There's the Bank of Abadar in Kaer Maga but my PCs are in Magnimar. They recently came under a large windfall. The sort of windfall to make a poor-ish party come into their full WBL and then some. I'm just trying to think what sort of institutions are in place that denizens can use to manage wealth, what their practices are etc. If this is already in a book just point me in the right direction and unfortunately Ultimate Campaign isn't until April.
The church of Abadar's probably the closest thing to a multi-nation banking solution. There's plenty of other local solutions, some of which are very powerful and respected, depending on the location. Absalom's got some big banks, as does Katapesh and Sothis.
Ultimate Campaign actually DOES have a lot of info about investments and banking and using wealth to build organizations and buildings and the like... none of it is world-specific, but all of it works great for Golarion.
The church of Abadar's probably the closest thing to a multi-nation banking solution. There's plenty of other local solutions, some of which are very powerful and respected, depending on the location. Absalom's got some big banks, as does Katapesh and Sothis.
Ultimate Campaign actually DOES have a lot of info about investments and banking and using wealth to build organizations and buildings and the like... none of it is world-specific, but all of it works great for Golarion.
Would each 'branch' be pretty local or would they organize across locations with magic to shift currency around, scrutinize ledgers, etc?
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Creative Director
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Earlier questions about summoners earlier this week came from another conversation on these boards which became acrimonious, rude, etc where some, including me suggested a lot of roles for eidolons and other people had a heart attack/screamed and in one case basically suggested I was immoral.
What is your take on suggestions including:
1) Husband/wife summoner/eidolon, perhaps with children (half-celestial/fey/infernal whatever or maybe just assimar/tieflings?)?
2) Eidolon with rank or sharing the summoners rank in the Eagle knights?
3) Going into a resturaunt and ordering a beer for your eidolon, taking them to a dinner party?
4) Having eidolon being a character's 'daughter'. Note said player knows out of character that this is a delusion?
5) Eidolon is the characters childhood friend for a socially isolated half elf (all her friends tended to outgrow her)?All of these questions came down to the difference between treating them as intelligent beings and possible friends rather then pets and tools?
Promise not to ask you about summoners for awhile.
1: Interesting.
2: Meh. Do not like.
3: Only if your eidolon looks close to a core race, otherwise do not like.
4: Interesting.
5: Interesting.
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Creative Director
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A Pathfinder adventure? The closest I can remember we ever came to that was a race of hellhound shapechangers from D&D's fiend folio that ended up having a small role in Shackled City[...]Kevin_Video might be thinking of the Jezeldan werewolf tribe from Pathfinder #45, Broken Moon. They were werewolf fighter/rangers with the Fiendish simple template added, but a GM might give them a unique physical description to play up their demon-worship aspects.
Ah. Those things are templated templates. A werewolf with the fiendish template. In-world, that's got traction due to Jezelda, and in that case, I'm fine with it. I'm even fine with half-fiend werewolves... either half-fiends who have contracted lycanthropy, or werewolves who have been turned into half-fiends via dark magic.
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Creative Director
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While I'm not the hugest fan of summoners, something did occur to me. In Golarion, clerics are restricted to having a deity and can't worship a philosophy. This does change the class quite a bit, so maybe applying the same principle (Golarion-specific changes to the class) could work. For example, maybe slap an alignment restriction on and have the eidolons related to proteans and how they're ever-shifting. Or has that ship sailed?
That ship has sailed.
And making clerics have to worship deities doesn't change the class quite a bit at all—the concept of a cleric worshiping an idea or philosophy is not much more than a side note in the Core Rulebook. The bulk of the cleric class DOES assume you worship a deity.
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A Pathfinder adventure? The closest I can remember we ever came to that was a race of hellhound shapechangers from D&D's fiend folio that ended up having a small role in Shackled City. I actually wrote up those monsters for the Fiend Folio, but they got unfortunately (in my opinion) changed from being a unique race during development at WotC into something far less interesting—hell hound lycanthropes, mechanically speaking. But even then, they didn't use the lycanthrope template to build them...Can werebeasts be made from creatures NOT of the animal type?Absolutely. There's one adventure that has were-hellhounds.
A Pathfinder adventure? The closest I can remember we ever came to that was a race of hellhound shapechangers from D&D's fiend folio that ended up having a small role in Shackled City[...]Kevin_Video might be thinking of the Jezeldan werewolf tribe from Pathfinder #45, Broken Moon. They were werewolf fighter/rangers with the Fiendish simple template added, but a GM might give them a unique physical description to play up their demon-worship aspects.
It's not an official Paizo adventure, but a Pathfinder adventure nonetheless. From Coliseum Morpheuon, the first 16-20 level adventure for Pathfinder, you come across the Hounds of Ill-Prophecy. They're tiefling natural were-hellhounds (Nessian).
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What are 10 very big differences between devils and demons?
Because I really don't know, if it were for me I just cut the demon and devil stuff and throw them all together and call them fiends because I don't know the real big difference.
1: Demons are chaotic, devils are lawful.
2: Demons are formed from sinful souls but devils are formed from the damned.3: Demons ultimately seek to destroy/tempt to sin, whereas devils ultimately seek to recruit/corrupt to evil.
4: Demons prefer hands-on interactions with mortals, devils prefer using minions and intermediaries.
5: Demons will not honor agreements, but devils will.
6: Demons have different traits than devils (rules differences).
7: Demons are FAR more numerous overall than devils.
8: Demons don't respect authority as much as devils, and are more likely to rebel or do their own thing; they're more unpredictable than devils.
9: Devils are a much older planar race than demons—devils formed before humanity but demons formed after humanity.
10: Demons tend to have various feminine traits regardless of gender, and devils tend to have more masculine traits, regardless of gender.
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Wouldn't that be more true of a Natural lycanthrope as opposed to the Afflicted one? After all part of the trope is the person waking up in thier birthday suit in the middle of the forest with no idea how they got there.Is it possible to be a lycanthrope and remain lucid while transformed?
(related, I hate vampires unless their name is Alucard or Dio)
Yes. Unless the GM says no. It's absolutely possible for a NPC one to remain lucid; we do this all the time in our adventures. Since the template doesn't really have a downside to it if you allow PCs to remain lucid and in control of their actions while transformed (there's no alignment change associated with the disease), that removes the only reason why not all PCs run out to become lycanthropes just for the free stat boosts. That's fine if you want to run a game where all the PCs are lycanthorpes, but not all games want that.
(And I don't see how that's related, but that's okay.)
Yes; natural lycanthorpes are more lucid in their change than afflicted ones... but the OP wasn't asking about the differences there.
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Creative Director
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Would each 'branch' be pretty local or would they organize across locations with magic to shift currency around, scrutinize ledgers, etc?The church of Abadar's probably the closest thing to a multi-nation banking solution. There's plenty of other local solutions, some of which are very powerful and respected, depending on the location. Absalom's got some big banks, as does Katapesh and Sothis.
Ultimate Campaign actually DOES have a lot of info about investments and banking and using wealth to build organizations and buildings and the like... none of it is world-specific, but all of it works great for Golarion.
They'd be more local than not. The larger churches of Abadar have more resources to shift currency around between locations, but that's not a 2-way street.
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Creative Director
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Mr Jacobs,
Does Piercing Spell "Benefit" of +5 get doubled under Spell Perfection? This seems to be a wording issue that is hotly debated.
Any time a rule wording is hotly debated, questions regarding that rule NEED and MUST be posted to the rules forums for FAQing and designer notice. This is precisely the kind of question that me answering makes it look like Paizo's house isn't in order.
Hi James,
I'm running Carrion Crown with some friends and have an encounter with agents of the Whispering Way planned soon. I was just wondering if the Whispering Way would consider binding or summoning daemons as a potential tactic. What kind of extraplanar creatures would appeal to their tastes?
Heya James,
I was curious as to how you would handle players wanting to perform the following actions:
1. Wanting to hide an object in a location.
2. Wanting to smuggle cargo or people through a blockade or checkpoint.
What kinds of skills would be involved? Who would be making the skill checks?
Thanks!
Any time a rule wording is hotly debated, questions regarding that rule NEED and MUST be posted to the rules forums for FAQing and designer notice. This is precisely the kind of question that me answering makes it look like Paizo's house isn't in order.Mr Jacobs,
Does Piercing Spell "Benefit" of +5 get doubled under Spell Perfection? This seems to be a wording issue that is hotly debated.
Mr Jacobs the post has been posted below and marked for FAQ. if you can get it to the FAQ teams attention that would be awesome.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2pfuf?Does-spell-perfection-double-piercing-spe ll#1
They're automatically notified. It's more of a question of how many people you get to click the FAQ button. It seems that around the 60 mark is the "answer soon" area though that holds no intrinsic value that I know of.
A Shattered Star question, sir.
What would the CR change be, if any, if I changed the Babau demons', in L25, abilities to remove dispel magic and add greater invisibility? This "super stealthy assassin" feels better with this to me. I don't discount dispel magic. I love the spell actually but with the description in the PRD I kept looking for their invisibility ability and couldn't find it. :P
Unless dispel magic is inherent in how they operate I don't see why they have it. I would also probably take away their spears.
James, I know you’re not a huge fan of running Paladins, but surely you have some in the games you either play in or run. In those games, when one of those paladins does his spell-like ability of Detect Evil, can/does the target know they are being detected? Perception? Sense Motive? Spellcraft? I mean I figure the first two would at least get you “That guy in full armor is staring intently at you for a few seconds, then his eyes narrow like he doesn’t like what he’s seeing”, but would the target know that it was Detect Evil or just a mundane scrutiny?
2: Demons are formed from sinful souls but devils are formed from the damned.
What's the difference from being sinful and having been damned?
3: Demons ultimately seek to destroy/tempt to sin, whereas devils ultimately seek to recruit/corrupt to evil.
Not seeing much of a difference between temptation and corruption, honestly. Care to enlighten me?
9: Devils are a much older planar race than demons—devils formed before humanity but demons formed after humanity.
So does that imply that only humans can be corrupted into devils, since both the dwarves and the elves are older races than humans?
Can the two races create more of themselves aside from the corruption of a mortal soul?
Not to dissuade questions about devils but the book of the damned parts 1 and 2 contains a TON of info the subject of demons and devils, respectively.
James,
What god would the Xill worship? Who would be in charge of the Xill?
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Most APs have a female questgiver/helpful ally at the start. Will Wrath of the Righteous have a male one? Or none at all?
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Creative Director
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Hi James,
I'm running Carrion Crown with some friends and have an encounter with agents of the Whispering Way planned soon. I was just wondering if the Whispering Way would consider binding or summoning daemons as a potential tactic. What kind of extraplanar creatures would appeal to their tastes?
They'd prefer undead for all things. Including undead fiends. When it comes to outsiders... neutral evil is probably the closest aligned to their tastes, but in the end they don't really care much one way or the other.
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Creative Director
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Heya James,
I was curious as to how you would handle players wanting to perform the following actions:
1. Wanting to hide an object in a location.
2. Wanting to smuggle cargo or people through a blockade or checkpoint.
What kinds of skills would be involved? Who would be making the skill checks?
Thanks!
A combination of Bluff, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth, opposed by Perception and Sense Motive as appropriate.
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Creative Director
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Any time a rule wording is hotly debated, questions regarding that rule NEED and MUST be posted to the rules forums for FAQing and designer notice. This is precisely the kind of question that me answering makes it look like Paizo's house isn't in order.Mr Jacobs,
Does Piercing Spell "Benefit" of +5 get doubled under Spell Perfection? This seems to be a wording issue that is hotly debated.
Mr Jacobs the post has been posted below and marked for FAQ. if you can get it to the FAQ teams attention that would be awesome.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2pfuf?Does-spell-perfection-double-piercing-spe ll#1
"Getting things to the FAQ team's attention isn't something I have the time to do. That's the whole point of the FAQ button. Click the button and they see it. Whether or not they publicly acknowledge the fact that they've seen it is up to them.
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Creative Director
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Mr Jacobs,
Can we expect an epic level handbook-ish expansion by paizo crew? Also on your devil and demons discussion what about angels and other celestials, any background there? I'm about to take a planetar with the True Name feat, but theres not much info on them. What was he before? Do they get "promoted" to a solar later? Do you get promoted from a solar to something else?
That book is in the works—Mythic Adventures is the "epic level handbook-ish expansion."
We've also got "Chronicle of the Righteous" coming out soon; LOTS of info about the Empyreal Lords and the good guy outsiders in there.
I'm not sure what you're referring to as far as the "True Name" feat though.