>>Ask *James Sutter* ALL your Questions Here!<<

[James Sutter]

Steve Geddes wrote:

Are the six arms of Absalom Station named anywhere? The gazetteer in the back of AP1 explicitly names one and then provides a list of neighbourhoods - they read to me as parts of other arms, but perhaps they are each an entire arm?

Not yet! Stay tuned for the Pact Worlds book!

[Steve Geddes]

Awesome. Thanks again!

I was convinced my group weren't going to be interested in Starfinder and that I'd have to enjoy it purely as reading material. As it is, I distributed a few Core books "just to see what you guys think" and we can barely talk about anything else now as we finish off our current campaign. Next one will be Starfinder for sure!

The incorporation of setting into the rules was the determining factor for us, as it turns out. Even the long-time homebrew fan is murmuring about how we should all use the core setting to run our games.

[Tacticslion]

HOW HAVE I NOT SQUEED AT YOU ABOUT HOW AWESOME SF IS, YET?!

AAAAGGGGGHHHHH~!

SO DAGGUM COOL!

Thank you~!!!

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Is it okay to ask you Starfinder setting questions? I was under the impression that that "Ask Staff Member threads" might be rude since James Jacobs closed his to take a well-deserved break, and I didn't want to be rude.

[Haladir]

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

Is it okay to ask you Starfinder setting questions?

Bad timing, APZ...

James: Best of luck in your future adventures!

And drop back in here now-and-again to let us all know what you're up to!

[Purple Dragon Knight]

Dammmmm... :(

It is with mixed emotions that I say farewell, James. I've been a fan of everything you created at Paizo. I'm really hoping you keep writing Pathfinder novels, contribute to AP gazetteers and campaign setting installments.

Salim Ghadafar is the Drizzt of the Pathfinder Novel line, so please keep him alive... Pharasma says so! (and the whippoorwills want Salim to have his own comic, too!)

To me, you'll always be Fluff Man. Lore Man is a bit too serious and disciplined to describe you, and not as fun as Fluff Man.

PS: please consider touching base with this thread off and on to discuss your new projects.

PS2: what did Neil Gaiman say? :)

[Rysky]

... how about Flavor Man then?

(Fluff literally means "something of no importance" so probably not the best compliment :3)

[Purple Dragon Knight]

Rysky wrote:

... how about Flavor Man then?

(Fluff literally means "something of no importance" so probably not the best compliment :3)

To us grognards, Fluff is the highest form of art. So there. I stand by my compliment, and you... you should be ashamed to uncover my old age... :P

[Rysky]

... no?

Lets go back to complimenting the Froggy, shall we?

[Purple Dragon Knight]

Let's

[Cedric De Lance]

Super huge fan of you work here. Death's Heretic got me into the whole Pathfinder Tales line. I was wondering if you were going to make a third Salim book?

[Tacticslion]

You are awesome, my dude! Rock on!

[James Sutter]

Thank you, all of you! It's been an honor to spend so many years working on Pathfinder and Starfinder, and I definitely plan to keep writing for both if I can! And as for a third Salim book... well, that'll all depend on Paizo and whoever they settle on as a new publishing partner for fiction, but you know if they send up the Salim signal, I'll come running. :)

[HWalsh]

James - Since a lot of us (I know I am one of them) really aren't big fans of Pharasma or the "death of prophesy" in Pathfinder, with all the funky weirdness in Starfinder regarding the Gap and what not... Is Prophesy fixed?

I really miss being able to tell stories about prophesies without "breaking the lore" of Golarion.

[Pharasma, Lady of Graves]

I like me...

[HWalsh]

Pharasma, Lady of Graves wrote:

I like me...

And I am sure you are a nice person who feeds souls to Goetia because you have no choice. That having been said you also manipulated fate to cause the death of Aroden, enslaved his soul to use it as a herald, prevented the second golden age of man, and destroyed prophesy.

That whole, "There is no prophesy" thing has been a serious and severe headache for me for a good number of years now.

[James Jacobs]

Jumping in on this thread to provide a bit of context:

Prophecy is one of the more overused and cliched tropes in fantasy; it shows up ALL THE TIME in fantasy fiction and genre fiction, and by setting up Golarion with it being "broken" we were basically trying to avoid using the prophecy crutch for any content in the setting.

It goes beyond a distaste for this overused genre cliche though.

Golarion is not primarily a fiction setting; it's primarily a tabletop RPG setting. The main characters are your PCs. Their stories are not set in stone. What happens in your game is up to your players' decisions. We set up situations and present plots in the form of Adventure Paths (or YOUR set them up if you run adventures of your own design, and so on), but hard-coding prophecies into the setting that MUST come true is, in my opionion, the worst kind of railroading you can inflict on player characters.

In a way, the concept that "prophecy is broken" in Golarion is merely another way of saying "now, for the first time in Golarion's history, the future is being decided by player characters."

It's not meant to hamstring GMs or cramp storytelling tools. It's meant to FREE GMs and to allow player agency and choice to matter.

[HWalsh]

James Jacobs wrote:

Jumping in on this thread to provide a bit of context:

Prophecy is one of the more overused and cliched tropes in fantasy; it shows up ALL THE TIME in fantasy fiction and genre fiction, and by setting up Golarion with it being "broken" we were basically trying to avoid using the prophecy crutch for any content in the setting.

It goes beyond a distaste for this overused genre cliche though.

Golarion is not primarily a fiction setting; it's primarily a tabletop RPG setting. The main characters are your PCs. Their stories are not set in stone. What happens in your game is up to your players' decisions. We set up situations and present plots in the form of Adventure Paths (or YOUR set them up if you run adventures of your own design, and so on), but hard-coding prophecies into the setting that MUST come true is, in my opionion, the worst kind of railroading you can inflict on player characters.

In a way, the concept that "prophecy is broken" in Golarion is merely another way of saying "now, for the first time in Golarion's history, the future is being decided by player characters."

It's not meant to hamstring GMs or cramp storytelling tools. It's meant to FREE GMs and to allow player agency and choice to matter.

With due respect on this matter,

Player agency is a term tossed around way too often. There are a number of schools of thought on the matter, but I don't do sandbox games. I do narrative games. Player choice matters in so far as the illusion of choice is far more important than actual choice.

In my opinion, frankly, removing prophesy doesn't free the GM. It simply cuts off a common (what you consider too common) trope and removes it from the GM's toolbox. When running Golarion games it does hamper what I can and cannot do unless I break the setting. To me, removing a tool makes no sense, because if a GM doesn't want to use prophesy then they don't have to. The removal of it as a thing (when you even admit it is a staple of the genre) simply means if someone wants to stay within lore and metaplot they can't include it.

It became so annoying, to me, I had to build a massive 1-18 Mythic Adventure for my players just so I could have them kill Pharasma to fix things.

What seems like railroading to some isn't railroading to everyone. The games I have run post-Pharasma's death have used prophesy before, and it was no less railroady than Rise of the Runelords or Shattered Star.

I love Pathfinder, don't get me wrong, but that one aspect of Golarion has been a thorn in my side for years.

[captain yesterday]

Then please start a new thread about it.

This isn't the place.

[Gark the Goblin]

Since you wrote a LOT of the early Varisia content, particularly the first gazetteer . . . How tall do you think the Fogscar Mountains are? Could you see them >60 miles away like you can see the Olympic mountains from Seattle?

[CrystalSeas]

Sutter Goes Viral