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She's the end result from a gestalt mythic Way of the Wicked.
She is a 20/10 MR Bronze Dragon Knight/Thaumaturge (from Thunderscape) that became a Dread Devourer through a messed up attempt to become a vampire.
She literally is a monster.
That pic is her in her true from. She is gargantuan in her dragon form.
I modeled her behavior after Helena from Orphan Black...
Fun as hell to play.
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Who is, in your opinion, the scariest enemy in the pathfinder bestiary? What about the scariest enemy relative to their CR rating?
This things popped up in this sorta question before. Look at it. Think about it. Now imagine it having Vital Strike.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/witchfire
But for me personally, Green Dragons.
A dragon that can see through dense foliage, has hide in plain sight in forests and woodland stride and thus has the potential to be a 40ft ninja walking through the woods where it's possible it's opponents can't see more than 10ft out and every squares difficult terrain.
And it's aquatic, meaning if you were to encounter it in, oh say, a bayou, or anywhere it can shift between thick trees and aquatic terrain... Well I doubt I need to explain how much a nightmare underwater combat is.
It's got the most versatile array of horrible terrains to face it within. I consider it the scariest of the dragons for that reason. Red's may be big and Volcanos can be miserable, but rarely does a Red get to dance between total cover and total ninja on a whim.
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Who is, in your opinion, the scariest enemy in the pathfinder bestiary? What about the scariest enemy relative to their CR rating?This things popped up in this sorta question before. Look at it. Think about it. Now imagine it having Vital Strike.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/witchfire
But for me personally, Green Dragons.
A dragon that can see through dense foliage, has hide in plain sight in forests and woodland stride and thus has the potential to be a 40ft ninja walking through the woods where it's possible it's opponents can't see more than 10ft out and every squares difficult terrain.
And it's aquatic, meaning if you were to encounter it in, oh say, a bayou, or anywhere it can shift between thick trees and aquatic terrain... Well I doubt I need to explain how much a nightmare underwater combat is.
It's got the most versatile array of horrible terrains to face it within. I consider it the scariest of the dragons for that reason. Red's may be big and Volcanos can be miserable, but rarely does a Red get to dance between total cover and total ninja on a whim.
*takes notes*
Players won't know what hit them.
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Also, before anyone asks about why a number of my sketches have ladies with giant t~&@. I will explain it as I explained it to a friend of mine.
This made me realize that anime/manga has ruined my expectations for the 'giant tits' descriptor.
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What is your favourite magical item, excluding the Big Six? What about favourite for each slot on the body?
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Also, before anyone asks about why a number of my sketches have ladies with giant t~&@. I will explain it as I explained it to a friend of mine.This made me realize that anime/manga has ruined my expectations for the 'giant t@@#' descriptor.
Well they're not that giant where I live, but I joke with Aratrok and Ms. Raital Latral that there must be something in the water (or the meat, more likely) because they have difficulty believing me when I say that big breasts are pretty common here (I think it started when Raital was lamenting the size of the breasts on a character portrait she found but wanted to use for a character that was around 15; and I just kind of quirked a brow and was like "Um, that's actually a bit below average where I live, they get a lot bigger". Que shock and awe. :P).
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Awesome!
(Spamming this around!)
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What is your favourite magical item, excluding the Big Six? What about favourite for each slot on the body?
Hard to say really. It's none of the big six, even though I do like them.
For consumables, I've always loved feather tokens and elixirs, and the often overlooked elemental gem is surprisingly awesome. I remember years ago I mentioned that for low-ish level parties, using an elemental gem was essentially your "oh shit, must win" button. TOZ mentioned he had never even heard of it (it's been around since 3.0) as many haven't. I noted that while it was a 2,250 gp consumable, that's not so bad when your whole party chips in and not bad at all if you're crafting it yourself (about 282gp / party member in a 4 person party). Then of course, there are things like Incense of Meditation (a major mid-late item for my blaster druids) and Prayer Beads (mostly Karma, 'cause Karma is amazing, and it's not even a true consumable since it recharges).
If we're talking permanent magic items I use most often, pearls of power will take the cake. I use them on pretty much any prepared caster character, which includes Clerics, Druids, Paladins, Rangers, and Wizards. Not only do they allow you to play them as pseudo-spontaneous casters but it effectively gives you extra spells per day to boot. Picking up Craft Wondrous for these alone is totally worth it IMHO.
I've also enjoyed the Bag of Tricks, which can be used to pull out random animal minions for 10 minutes at a time. The animals follow any orders that could be issued with Handle Animal (but no check is required). They're kinda expensive, but like elemental gems, if you're crafting them yourself and splitting the cost between the party members you can afford them when they're still pretty useful.
The hand of the mage is a favorite not because of the effects but because of the hilariously unfortunate implications. The magic item involves a mummified elven hand, which means for every one of these things, some elf dude or corpse is lacking a hand. What makes this really funny is that they're cheap enough that they're a commonly traded magic item (they're not even considered medium magic items), which means there's tons of them out there. Imagine the horror than is living as an elf in a world where every community of at least small-town size has an average of 3 of these things available for sale every restock period.
Overall I think I love custom magic items the most, particularly those that have x/day uses of spells or powers, because they tend to be pretty cheap to produce or litter treasure hordes with, are often very easy to flavor, and do cool fun things. For example, I dropped a magical shield with a dragon etched on the front that could be made to breath fire onto nearby creatures (CL 5 burning hands spell) which became a favorite item for a low-level group I was running for. Meanwhile in my last big campaign, my brother's Paladin created (at great expense) a cloak that allowed him to pop divine power and fly using the same mechanics as boots of speed, which he flavored as the cloak transforming into mighty angel wings and granting you the wrath of heaven.
In a couple of campaigns, I've dropped weapons with the inevitable strike psionic power on them as an x/day ability (inevitable strike allows you to use a swift action to get +5 to your next attack and ignore concealment on that attack), which is a pretty cool ability for 400 gp. Other cool abilities to drop as 1/day powers include things like summon monsters, feather fall, etc.
Some really fun items are 1/- consumable spell effects which are great for littering low-level treasure hordes with. Since you halve the cost of the magic item and then divide by 50 charges, you can find amusing things like 1-use cantrips for 10gp (purify food & drink, stabilize, and create water are fun), or a lucky copper coin that casts bless or bane when flipped and then becomes a normal coin, or a small carved dove that transforms into a flock of glimmering birds to feather fall you before vanishing.
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What is your favourite place in Golarion (if any)?
What is your least favourite place in Golarion (if any)?
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What is your favourite place in Golarion (if any)?
What is your least favourite place in Golarion (if any)?
Hard to say, exactly. I'm pretty fond of Cheliax as it was presented in some of the early Pathfinder material, because the campaign setting book I have for 3.5 actually presents evil-aligned PF deities that people have real reasons to worship (most, including the PF deities in later years, just come off as stupid and "we eat babies at gatherings" evil), and I thought that Cheliax had a lot of interesting potential.
Ustalav is another favorite, mostly because it's got this cool Transylvanian vibe and has a surprisingly rich history.
Least favorite would probably be...modern Cheliax. Mostly because Paizo killed pretty much any and all interest in their society for me in later publications as they have fervently marched all their deities and such clearly into the realm of insane baby munching evil.
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How, exactly, did you houserule invisibility and why? I saw you mentioning it a couple times, but I'm not sure I understood what were you talking about.
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How, exactly, did you houserule invisibility and why? I saw you mentioning it a couple times, but I'm not sure I understood what were you talking about.
I house ruled invisibility to get total concealment regardless of light sources for the duration. This lets you Stealth as long as you're invisible and you can casually walk down a hallway full of nothing to hide behind and not be noticed.
Essentially, the massive bonus to Stealth was removed. Why? Because it makes no sense that being harder to see makes you harder to hear, and you end up with stupid situations like being invisible making it easier to sneak past a blind person, or harder to hear in a lightless room where no one can see.
Invisibility also provides certain combat buffs that it's closest rival in the Stealth department (blur) doesn't. Greater invisibility is still one of the strongest spells you can have in your arsenal because of that (and invisibility is still really nice to have).
However, actually having a decent Stealth score is still needed if you plant to lurk around someone closely while invisible (keep in mind that if you're invisible and keep your distance you probably won't get noticed since there's a -1 penalty to Perception checks / 10 ft.).
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Further, it was deemed that any creature you cannot see is effectively "invisible". Which means if you've got two guys sitting in a lightless room and one of them is being completely still, they get the bonus to Stealth for being completely still (in this case, a +20 circumstance bonus) while being invisible. This means having darkvision in some places is a pretty sweet deal.
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How do you handle the fact that an invisible person shouldn't be defended against in melee with the same ease as a visible person? (I'd give the blind penalties vs the invisible attacker but that might just be me)
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That's what I meant by "Invisibility also provides certain combat buffs that it's closest rival in the Stealth department (blur) doesn't".
Essentially, I treat any character who cannot be seen by the person they're attacking as being invisible. So if an orc attacks a human in the dark, the human is in a very terrible situation.
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OMG! Did you say you were gonna make stealth usable?
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Why are Pseudodragons so darn cute?!
Big head and eyes in relation to their body, for the same reason human babies seem cute.
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But Pseudodragons don't scream the way human babies do!
I don't know about that, have you ever heard one scream?
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Why are Pseudodragons so darn cute?!Big head and eyes in relation to their body, for the same reason human babies seem cute.
I'm gonna add that tiny things often seem cute (insert "miniature *any animal*" for reference), and when you consider that most pseudodragons are theoretically mild tempered, and acts like large dragons (who often lounge about like cats), you end up with a reptilian-looking creature who's friendly like a dog, chill like a cat, and looks like a baby dragon. These guys are legit.
They're also Intelligent so they can be your best bud. And if you need a non-habit forming sleep aid, well, they got your back there too.
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How often per week/month do you play Pathfinder? What about other RPG systems?
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OMG! Did you say you were gonna make stealth usable?
Well, "usable" could mean a lot of things but I can say that Stealth as we use it in my games tends to run pretty smoothly and can be very strong.
Having cover/concealment allows you to Stealth, so by at least mid levels, most people who are interested in Stealthing will usually acquire some means of gaining concealment on the regular. Common methods for doing this are spells like blur (think predator stealth, where you're not actually invisible but you're hard to see and so you can often Stealth around people unless they notice something isn't quite right), invisibility, or the psionic power concealing amorpha (same deal with blur, you blend with your surroundings).
Scent can often alert creatures to your presence but it's not particularly great at dealing with Stealthed creatures because you have to keep burning actions to pinpoint their locations, and even then they still can't be seen (so they're still getting combat bonuses when they attack you and have total concealment, even if you're aware of what space they are in via scent, blindsense, etc). Blindsight / Touchsight can foil Stealth / Concealment though (Touchsight is one of my go-to powers on psions explicitly to keep invisible foes from wrecking my base).
By mid/high levels, spells like faerie fire and glitterdust are key for taking out really irritating strike-vanishers ("strike-vanisher" is a term I use for characters to keep Stealthing every round because they can, usually making an attack then moving and Stealthing as part of the action, allowing mid level Stealth characters to harass and terrify things while making it hard to retaliate because the striker keeps becoming unseen and changing position each round). A number of summoned monsters and minions are also worth keeping around for helping to ruin a strike-vanisher (earth elementals have tremorsense, erinyes have true seeing, etc), moreso than their combat prowess (a mind-linked earth elemental who just continually uses earth-glide to stay out of combat acts as a very good "spotter" to let you know where to aim your abilities to ruin their Stealth checks or pin them down).
We haven't set out with certainty how Stealth will be revised in D20 Legends. I'm personally fairly happy with the way Stealth plays out at our tables, though I think I'd like to create more ways for non-casters to contribute against a strike-vanisher.
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How often per week/month do you play Pathfinder? What about other RPG systems?
It varies but not nearly enough thanks to my crazy work schedule right now (we've been short handed for a while, with new applicants being turned down because their background checks fail, or because the district manager vetoed them during their final interview). A while back, about once a week, sometimes more. When I was unemployed years ago, virtually every day. Sometimes more than once in a single day.
These days, scheduling and responsibilities outside of gaming get in the way a lot. However, I've been trying to have my manager cut my hours back so I can have time to work on things AND hang out with friends more (I feel like my friends are getting neglected T_T), and hanging out with them more at least implies my GMing more (and maybe in a blue moon getting to be a player).
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OMG! Did you say you were gonna make stealth usable?Well, "usable" could mean a lot of things but I can say that Stealth as we use it in my games tends to run pretty smoothly and can be very strong.
Having cover/concealment allows you to Stealth, so by at least mid levels, most people who are interested in Stealthing will usually acquire some means of gaining concealment on the regular. Common methods for doing this are spells like blur (think predator stealth, where you're not actually invisible but you're hard to see and so you can often Stealth around people unless they notice something isn't quite right), invisibility, or the psionic power concealing amorpha (same deal with blur, you blend with your surroundings).
Scent can often alert creatures to your presence but it's not particularly great at dealing with Stealthed creatures because you have to keep burning actions to pinpoint their locations, and even then they still can't be seen (so they're still getting combat bonuses when they attack you and have total concealment, even if you're aware of what space they are in via scent, blindsense, etc). Blindsight / Touchsight can foil Stealth / Concealment though (Touchsight is one of my go-to powers on psions explicitly to keep invisible foes from wrecking my base).
By mid/high levels, spells like faerie fire and glitterdust are key for taking out really irritating strike-vanishers ("strike-vanisher" is a term I use for characters to keep Stealthing every round because they can, usually making an attack then moving and Stealthing as part of the action, allowing mid level Stealth characters to harass and terrify things while making it hard to retaliate because the striker keeps becoming unseen and changing position each round). A number of summoned monsters and minions are also worth keeping around for helping to ruin a strike-vanisher (earth elementals have tremorsense, erinyes have true seeing, etc), moreso than their combat prowess (a...
I would also like to point out that for a small price of 30 gp, you can negate your scent entirely
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Oh, and as to other RPGs, much the same. I'm not actually much of a fan of most non-d20 RPGs (I usually end up wishing we were playing D20 when I play them, with a few exceptions). I enjoy computer RPGs / JRPGs a lot but it's hard to find time to play them frequently when you'd rather be playing D&D with your buds (and don't have time :P).
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I am not sure if this has been asked before, but what do you do for a living?
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I am not sure if this has been asked before, but what do you do for a living?
I'm currently a customer service b&@%$ at a local convenience store. It's not a particularly glamorous job but it pays the bills and I enjoy the people there (I love my manager, which is a great thing when working for others). I've mostly stuck to lower paying local jobs around my community because they tend to usually be flexible, and I live in a rural area where most people would commute to other areas for higher paying jobs.
However, ever the optimizer, when I was looking at possible job opportunities in the area, I tried to factor in the average gas prices, miles traveled, commute time, etc. I eventually decided that it was more efficient to just take a job at the convenience store 8 minutes from my house. What I lost in hourly wages I was saving in gas, time, and mileage on my vehicle (to put it into perspective, aside from running errands like grocery shopping at the new Walmart that opened near here recently, I'm pretty much either at home or at work, so I fill my minivan up roughly once a month for less than $40, and it takes me about 16 minutes to get to and from work (about 8 minutes there and 8 minutes back), and only puts about 10 miles on the vehicle for the round trip.
My customer service skills are pretty hax, so I get a surprising number of job offers from people passing through our little store. However, most of them would require me to up my commute to a half-hour at least (1 hour round trip), and frankly I'm not really interested in doing that since it means I'd be losing out on 5 hours in my week on sheer commute, put way more miles on my vehicle, and spend tons more in gas money, for a few bucks more an hour. I'm not feeding anyone except my Dad, brother, and I (yay for being single I guess?), so I'm not particularly desperate for something that pays more unless it's a lot more (and then, I'd need to see if it would toss me into a higher tax bracket and kill the benefits).
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However, long term goals include saving up money to open my own business (my grandfather had a strong mind for business and taught me a lot), and trying to make something out of my writing if possible. Pretty much just intent on banking money when not spending it on my friends and family (I used to be incredibly frugal, and need to return to my miserly ways so I can bank cash faster). :P
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Who was your favourite Pathfinder character that you have played before? What about a favourite DMPC? Favourite villain?
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Who was your favourite Pathfinder character that you have played before? What about a favourite DMPC? Favourite villain?
My Psion "Witch" Agatha springs to mind as a big contender for favorite Pathfinder character that I've played. I played her in Aratrok's Reign of Winter game and had a blast (she was also the only character from the original party to make it to the end game, because defense is not a tactical error, despite what a lot of people will tell you).
That said, I've got a few that also contend. I've got a vampire right now named Alina who's a lot of fun. She was originally cooked up for a campaign Aratrok was doing set in Ustalav but I'm revising her for my friends' Wyrmspire persistent world (which also includes revising the vampire mechanics heavily to be more of a PC option by default). Alina was a young noblewoman in a vampire house that was "slain" by crusaders during a time of civil unrest (in Ustalav it was during the crusades against Tar Baphon, in Wyrspire it was after the death of the royal family). In both instances she was impaled on a spear in a location hidden from the sunlight and left for dead. Eventually the spear rotted away and she woke up and is now exploring the world and trying to rebuild her family.
Way back when, I had a ghoul of all things that inspired me to begin to write a novel about her (with the prodding of a friend of mine to write something for novel November). I'd like to remake her at some point (she was a ghoul psychic warrior who lives as a human by day and hunts her murderers by night, wearing a disguise and a white porcelain mask). She was a Stealth monkey and prone to causing mad havoc by "appearing out of nowhere" (she'd sneak up on you using concealing amorpha like the predator) and then start ripping people apart. She prefers to fight with her claws and bite while in her disguise, and a sword when she's passing as a human. She misses her family who left their home after her apparent death. Making her situation worse, being an undead creature is a death offense in the lands she was born in and her beloved sister is a templar huntress who's been tasked with hunting down her alter ego (not realizing it is her own dead sister).
Another character I remember fondly and would like to rebuild (as a Ranger) was an elf from my campaign setting. There's a race of nomadic desert dwelling astrologer elves who travel around the deserts of the prime continent based on the patterns of the stars. They even foretold the coming of the Starkin (an alien race of refugees that came to live in the same desert, after they fled their planet after losing a war with the aberrant forces of the neothelids). Anyway, their cultural weapons are these short-swords attached to ropes or chains called 'dust-blades' and they have a fighting style that frequently makes use of swinging them around in circles like dust-devils. She dual-wielded her cultural weapons (which was cool because she could attack from lots of different angles and TWF with them at close or long distances). Anyway, she became an adventurer because she had a romantic relationship with this human for a while and they had a half-elven child. According to their culture, she was supposed to wait until adulthood before leaving their tribes, but the human - wanting his daughter to see the world with him before he was old and withered away - whisked away with her one night out of the blue. Angered and fearful, she set out to track them down and return her daughter to her rightful place, though I intended her to eventually have a change of heart by the time she tracked him down (as she saw more of the world herself and her anger waning enough to sympathize with the difficulties of their situation).
I had another character who was a Paladin that was born with a genetic disorder that left her with a crappy immune system and a frail constitution. Her father left their family to go search for some sort of cure and would be away for months at a time on his journeys. Blaming their daughter for his absence, her stressed mother became ever more embittered with their daughter and more abusive over time. Eventually when her father failed to arrive home on time (due to a rather mundane transit problem, but it's a D&D world, you assume he got eaten by a kraken or something) her mother threw her out of the house in grief. She eventually was taken in by a church of Wee Jass and became a Paladin, with her faith in the goddess undoing much of the ails of her illness. Her long term goal was to become a lich-knight. She was very much not your typical Paladin, as she was a bit of a potty-mouth, loved whoring it up, and dressed a lot like a witch, and she never called herself a Paladin (in fact she normally used the term "fool" as her preferred title). She acted as a mercenary who went around doing adventuring jobs for people but was prone to secretly doing jobs for poor people for little to nothing (like, she might haggle with the mayor of a community trying to stop a goblin problem because she knew they could afford it, but might turn around and hunt down a missing child of a beggar for nothing). Her heart-led heroics often conflicted with her "better judgment" and she always noted it would get her killed one of these days. She was the sort that would be fighting for her life and suddenly break from combat (eating the AoO) to push some kid out of the way of an oncoming bad-thing, all the while shouting "Why the f*** are there always kids with giant monsters and falling rubble!? Tell me that, gods! Oh shiiiii--!" *crash* She eventually ended up having an on and off romance with a Lawful Evil Hellknight that she frequently traveled with (I think she brought out the best in him).
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As for favorite NPC, DMPC, or Villain, that's a reeeaaally tough one. Mostly because the lines frequently blur on those subjects (as an example, in the last campaign I ran for Aratrok & Raital, they picked up NPCs in their party like bleeding hearts pick up orphaned kittens, and several of those were also their antagonists).
And since I've been GMing waaaay more than playing over the course of my history with this game, it's a really long list to sift through. Looking back, when I was a teenager I was running a campaign where one of the PCs ended up getting betrothed to a half-black dragon at the demand of her mother (and you really didn't want to argue with "mom") but the two actually became really close and she traveled with him on his adventures but was eventually slain by a dragon slayer (vorpal weapon, ouch), and he went on a quest to return her to life. Both she and her mom (a bigass black dragon) were fun to play.
Another "mom" dragon was the hedonistic red wyrm mother of this half-dragon in an Eberron campaign. The party was attacked by a couple of assassins, then approached by a group of dragons passing as humans, where they were explaining that the group is somehow tied up with the draconic prophecy and some ne'er do-wells were intending to kill them because of it. The dragons that approached them included a rather tsundere black dragon dude, and a bronze dragon lady, and they were implicit in that they weren't to do anything to aid them aside from warning them about their would be attackers. Later they met one of the other dragons in their cult, the half-dragon's mysterious mother. She was...not what he expected. A hedonistic red dragon who reveled in drug use and debauchery. She preferred to stay in human form because she got way higher doing drugs in human form. Turned out his birth was, theoretically not even a grand thing but just the result of her slutting it up for the fun of it. She was acknowledged as an embarrassment by the other dragons, but they couldn't really do much about it since she was quite literally superior to them in all respects (aside from her mannerisms).
The black dragon was pretty cool, but he broke is oath to stay out of it after warning them that he wouldn't intervene if they ended up in danger earlier in the story. However he became rather appreciative of the party, and around a major milestone of the campaign (the party was beset by assassins along the spire-bridges of Sharn in the middle of a heavy-pour thunderstorm) he broke his oath and joined the battle when the party was grossly outmatched and in severe danger, which resulted in him taking his true form and fighting alongside them on the bridge as lightening arced around them. He was later scolded for his intervention by his peers.
Raital's favorite villain was the vampire lord Vandread (I mentioned him on the entire page that was deleted by the moderators). Just because Zangief is badguy doesn't mean Zangief is a bad guy. Vandread was a bad guy. Horrible in fact. Egotistical, arrogant, sexist, narcissistic, and sociopathic. He backstabbed the party a few times, and was trying to use Raitral's character as leverage against a demon queen who was intending to use a rare cosmological event, known as the Black Star, and he wanted to ascend to true godhood using the star's eldritch powers.
His underling, Victoria, was perhaps one of my favorite villains ever. She ended up being one of those lost kittens the party scooped up (along with a couple of other vampires they rescued from Vandread's coven at the behest of Raitral's character). I think I've mentioned Victoria on the boards a few times (mostly in the LGBT thread, but I tend to stay out of that thread these days because it makes me hate life). Anyway, Raital's character Aliizsa eventually freed her and got her a way to change her sex and she watched over Aliiza's mansion (since after Vandread's defeat, Aliizsa assumed lordship of his estate as his thrall who overthrew him).
The goblin sorcerer Grex Stitzelkin, renamed "Jum Jum" by the party's rogue who gang-pressed him into service when his mercenary company failed to kill the party. Jum Jum was something of a comic relief character but he could be pretty deep at times as well. Among his achievements, he once blasted the party's Paladin to hell and back with magic missile spamming (but Paladins shrug that shiz) and inventing a spell that summoned a rainbow colored unicorn to impress his highschool girlfriend, before having said unicorn kick the poop out of said girl and the goblin jock she was cheating in him with. He later forgot the spell and tried to re-invent it to make Aliizsa happy, but all he managed was a rainbow colored jackass (to which the party rogue who gangpressed him referred to as his gay ass of pride). The prismatic ass also had a tendency to say things occasionally, but then pretended to not be able to speak when questioned about its side-comments.
The marilith that I unfortunately never got to use because the campaign fell apart due to scheduling difficulties. Oh lawdy, I was looking forward to using her so much. She was trapped in one of the great sky cities by Raital's character (a former demon goddess and rival) during the demon wars. The entire city was warded against teleportation because of security reasons in the old days, and now half-buried in the earth's crust, it served as a mighty fine prison for the marilith. The marilith, however, immediately did a 180o turn and ordered her troops to save the survivors after the crash and became the god-queen of the city for over a hundred years before the party went to find the city (Aliizsa since having been reborn as a mortal). It became understood to the party that the marilith had been breeding an army of fiendspawn elves and had strangely deigned to lay many eggs herself in the heart of the fallen city (an act unheard of since mariliths don't normally want rivals and so they typically only form spontaneously from the plane itself, but she was physically choosing to lay eggs to create more mariliths). Shenanigans were happening man. Shenanigans.
God...I could do this all day. (T_T)
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>Making her situation worse, being an undead creature is a death offense in the lands she was born in and her beloved sister is a templar huntress who's been tasked with hunting down her alter ego (not realizing it is her own dead sister).
That is going to be awkward at family gatherings.
>God...I could do this all day. (T_T)
I don't think anyone would mind)
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>Making her situation worse, being an undead creature is a death offense in the lands she was born in and her beloved sister is a templar huntress who's been tasked with hunting down her alter ego (not realizing it is her own dead sister).
That is going to be awkward at family gatherings.
Yeah, it was a major plot point for the character. Eventually they're intended to be reunited when her templar sister and her encounter one-another and her sister begins to figure it out (because of a subtle mannerism and sign that she notices during their battle).
I really should get back to writing that. o_o
>God...I could do this all day. (T_T)
I don't think anyone would mind)
Daw. (^///^)
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Have you ever tried playing with mythic rules?
Have you ever tried playing with mythic rules?
No, because I hate them. :P
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Why do you hate them?
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Have you read Friendship is Dragons? What do you think of how they defeated the first bbeg?
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Why do you hate them?
Well, I'll start by saying "to each their own" since I know they're loved by some people but...
1. The mechanics themselves are terribly balanced, even moreso than normal Pathfinder. There was clearly no measure or controls in place when being designed, they were apparently rushed, and the end result was awful.
2. I don't feel that it really adds anything to the game. Mythic isn't actually anything special, it's just a switch that makes a character super amazing vs non-mythic creatures and have extra powers to track. All it does is mostly invalidate the toolkits that GMs have by making only mythic creatures really meaningful, and if everything is mythic, nothing is.
3. I don't really see the need. D&D already goes from goblins to gods. Becoming epic badasses that roflstomp mortal armies with both arms tied behind your back while you beat people to death with your d*** is called rising in level.
4. Since it requires a lot of extra work to deal with a mythic campaign (significantly more than including new subsystems like psionics, since unlike things like psionics and path of war you really do need to use mythic content) for little gain, I don't see it as worth the effort.
5. I feel it would be better to just gut some of the cool stuff that mythic allows you to do (like being able to grant spells to followers, wear bikini-mail like this guy, etc) would be better as just options that characters can achieve in the normal game.
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What houserules do you use?
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What houserules do you use?
For Pathfinder...
1. 15 Point Buy.
2. (Typically) Medium XP track.
3. PCs have 1.5 their HD HP at first level (d6=9, d8=12, d10=15, d12=18).
4. Creatures without alignment subtypes are treated as Neutral. Alignment-based attacks and abilities are 1/2 as effective vs Neutral. The exception are the protection from and magic circle spells which grant the +2 AC/saves vs Neutral foes and +4 vs their opposed alignment. Paladins can smite almost anything not on their specific team (based on their alignment subtype, see below) but at +1/2 Paladin level to damage (minimum +1).
5. Classes with alignment requirements lose them. Paladins and Clerics with particular alignment auras gain the alignment subtypes associated with them (so a Cleric of a Chaotic Good deity has the Chaotic and Good descriptors as if they were from a chaotic good plane), complete with any benefits that provides (such as overcoming DR with their attacks or being immune to spells that are aligned with them).
6. Healing spells moved to the Necromancy school, gaining the Positive descriptors. Negative energy spells gain the Negative descriptor.
7. Sorcerers and oracles buffed (using these spells known and spells per day charts, and gaining bloodline or domain spells immediately). Oracles get good Fort as Clerics.
8. Sorcerers can opt to choose a pair of domains instead of a bloodline, adding any of their domain spells to their list of sorcerer spells known. They gain any benefits of domain abilities using Charisma instead of Wisdom and replace Cleric level with Sorcerer level. Domain sorcerers are noticeably distinct from wizards in this regard as this grants them some access to a number of cleric and druid spells as part of their natural magic, and can allow them to do things like get an animal companion.
9. Wilders buffed (they get new power levels at the same rate as psions). Good Fort & Will. Wilders can opt to either cycle their powers like a vitalist or learn 1 power / level (one or the other). Surge blast deals 2d6+Cha modifier * wild surge bonus (to a maximum of 1d6/level, which basically means your wilder begins play at 1d6+Cha mod, so they don't blow people out of their boots at 1st level).
10. Everything gains at least 4 skill points / level. If your class has 2 + Int mod skills, it is now 4 + Int mod skills.
11. Combat maneuvers do not require feats to avoid provoking attacks. Feats make them better or allow you to do things you couldn't be default.
12. A number of core feats improved/scale. Two-Weapon Fighting and Vital Strike are 1 feat that scale with your BAB. Improved *combat maneuver* feats likewise graduate into their greater versions when you hit BAB+6. Quick draw allows sheathing as well. Point Blank Shot removed for archery feats. Shot on the Run requires +4 BAB and can be used with Vital Strike or Path of War strikes. Combat Expertise reduces the penalty for fighting defensively by 2 (so -2 to hit) and increases the dodge bonus you get for fighting defensively or using a total defense by +1, plus an additional +1 at BAB +6, +11, and +16, and grants the same bonus to dirty trick, disarm, reposition, steal, and trip maneuvers. Cleave becomes Great Cleave at BAB+6, and can be combined with Vital Strike.
13. Constructs and Undead have Constitution scores representing how physically durable they are. This makes them scale better. They're still immune to most forms of attack against their Constitution scores (because they're immune to damage to their physical ability scores).
14. Construct and Undead immunity to mind-affecting things removed. The Mindless subtype was added to the game and is possessed by any creature lacking an Int score. This basically means that sentient constructs and undead can do things like become afraid, or come under the influence of things like suggestion or charm person (in the case of undead with the augmented subtype who were humanoids).
I think that's about it.
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*awesome PCs/NPCs/Villains*
Totally not bleeding tears of envy at how awesome your games sound. Meanwhile, my most noteable character took 7 years before she had any real chance to RP and the GM ignored most of it and my favorite character I only ever got to play one time so never really got to develop much of a personality outside his backstory.
*houserules*
You know, I'm seriously considering adopting some of these. Gonna have to talk it over with the group I'm running a game for, which is already using enough house rules I needed a document to track of.
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*awesome PCs/NPCs/Villains*Totally not bleeding tears of envy at how awesome your games sound. Meanwhile, my most noteable character took 7 years before she had any real chance to RP and the GM ignored most of it and my favorite character I only ever got to play one time so never really got to develop much of a personality outside his backstory.
*houserules*You know, I'm seriously considering adopting some of these. Gonna have to talk it over with the group I'm running a game for, which is already using enough house rules I needed a document to track of.
>Totally not bleeding tears of envy at how awesome your games sound.
You are not the only one, my friend.
Which reminds me. Ashiel, I have seen some people ask if they can join some of your games as spectators, to see how it all plays out in reality. Did anything work out of that? If it did, is it possible to do that again?
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Tels, I totally support rp as well, though my gming style is not particularly suited to pbp nor heavily directed games (aka, I am better at games where the players drive things forward at their own pace and in their own direction.) You are certainly welcome to join any, though I've only got a houserule test game and an upcoming pony game currently.
I'd love to show you a game with some rp depth to it.
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Who was your favourite Pathfinder character that you have played before? What about a favourite DMPC? Favourite villain?
For me it's Valerie Castell Surtova for pc. Kingmaker campaign. She was a half orc bastard of the line, child to a Surtovan father who dallied with an orcish assassin who operated out of Nidal. Valerie lived a fairly complicated life. Her lineage was meant to be leveraged to take some advantage of the Surtova line and to cause some suffering for them at some later date, particularly since asides her very very sharp teeth, Valerie seemed quite human. Valerie personally took a liking to cannibalism and grew a fascination with undeath, even as she excelled at her assassination studies, asides from a habit of getting over excited and biting her tongue and then only cursing, and understanding demonic languages. She chafed under all the orders and restrictions and punishments though. So she bailed and decided to instead try her other bloodlines hospitality. It went over about as well as one could expect. Along the way her cannibalistic ways made her run afoul of ghouls several times, and in helping them acquire more meals and sharing, she learned of Kabriri who may well have been the origins of her powers and her strange cursing habit.
In any case she arrived at Brevoy soon enough and presented herself to her family and had the signet and story to back it up. She was too dangerous to be disposed of quietly, so instead she was given a job to... Prove herself to her lineage, by being sent down to this new kingdom thing Brevoy was trying and keep an eye on things and ensure their loyalty was properly placed. She picked a group that had a fellow cultist of Kabriri to join up with, and to cement their partnership he made her a hood with a minor enchantment that made the inside pitchblack but can on activation make ones eyes and teeth glow bright white (Gave a +2 circumstance to intimidate). She then spent the initial meeting with the group pretending to be his zombie for awhile.
Valerie spent most her time doing one of three things. Sneaking about and spying on everyone through the many secret doors and underground tunnels she was building under the castle, running the kabriri assassin cult she made, and taking off all her gear, putting on a dress and pretending to be someone else. She managed to force the construction of an enormous graveyard with gigantic black gates, becoming the name of the capitol, Blackgate.
Valerie herself was excitable, friendly, always ready to lend a hand and protect her group. They were HER family, HER home, HER cult, and what she took ownership of, she defended fiercely and with incredibly vicious aggresion. This got her killed a few times though, so she did a stint as a troglodyte for a little while, which she found awkward but liked the claws, and later as a full human, in which she promptly tore the jaws out of a demon and had them grafted in place of her own. She was evil as hell, just to everyone who wasn't in her good books.
Her end goal was the worst though. The tunnels were a long term game plan for her. Ever digging downwards. She purposefully took it the slow way for a simple reason. She wanted to be a demon, but this was what she and her family made. But they were mortal, she would become undead the moment she perished again. So she had time. Let them enjoy what they made, and when they all passed, she would at that point have successfully undermined the whole city right into the Darklands, collapsing it and making it the worlds largest open grave as a sacrifice to Kabriri.
Also she was a mechanical mess. Bone oracle 1/Ninja 4/Shadowdancer 3/Demoniac 9. The main reason she functioned in her role was Paizo does not anticipate Shadows, especially buffed ones, and I happily made good use of UMD. Hell I had an artifact weapon at one point, and guess what still works inside an antimagic field? Poor poor all spellcasting and supernatural ability reliant last boss. Just chased her around an overly small room with an AM and a super sword, and all her armor was from magic. WHOOPS.
As for DMPC, Gonna go with... Jestak. I can't take full credit for her, she's in Wrath of the Righteous. A named villain npc mook who has almost no background or backstory but can surrender and will follow along loyally with the pcs if they beat ehr and show mercy.
So I just make stuff up. She's a barbarian from a nearby tribe that is relevant in book 3 and joined up with the demons because they were strong. She delights in violence and bloodshed, and is more than happy to follow the pcs into a fight against the demons because they're strong too and fighting strong enemies. She surprisingly holds her own really well too despite all the mythic junk around.
She often is in town and finds those amidst refugees and workers and such who don't want to be weak or have nothing left and recruits them into a fighting force, deciding to take an example from those who saved her, and makes a fighting pit in the city. Of course she doesn't quiiiite get exactly this whole mercy sorta deal. The pcs manage to convince her to avoid killing her trainees and opponents in the arena but that really only means she get's a few clerics on standby cus she brutally beats the opposition to the brink of death then gets them healed back up to full again.
She never quites grasp the whole respect for life sort of deal, but she doesn't do torture or oppression. While she believes the strong should rule she sorta figures the weak need to exist, either to get stronger or at least so a contrast exists in the first place. She's too impatient for torture and oppression would require her to dedicate her efforts to caring what the weak are doing too much. She'd rather be fighting something strong.
Amusingly, despite initial fatalities and the rather extreme and brutal nature of her training, it may well have helped save the city at several times when demons assaulted the area, to suddenly be surprised when a large contingent of heavily scarred militia berserkers descended on them while the pcs were handling the generals.
She also hid the fact she had no upper back in her armor. Demonic mutation, looked like her upper back crumbled away like obsidian into a pool of lava that's defying gravity. Wasn't actually a tiefling though and it didn't actually burn. Was not pleasant to touch though. Worldwounds pretty screwed up. There's a reason the Mongrelfolk come from there.
As for Villain... Hm. MANKIND. Sorta. Something I sorta enjoy is when the villain is not a person, it's a condition. Or more specifically when Fear itself is the villain.
The second book of Carrion Crown is my favorite paizo adventure of all time. Once played, you'll probably get what I mean.
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*awesome PCs/NPCs/Villains*Totally not bleeding tears of envy at how awesome your games sound. Meanwhile, my most noteable character took 7 years before she had any real chance to RP and the GM ignored most of it and my favorite character I only ever got to play one time so never really got to develop much of a personality outside his backstory.
Bummer. :(
As a general rule, I enjoy incorporating as much about the actual characters into the games as I can. What I typically ask players for during their character creation is a brief summary of their history, noteworthy bonds they have (such as any friends, family, rivals, organizational ties, etc), and if possible, some ideas for good hooks for the character's initial adventuring. The lion's share of material can be added and filled in on the go and the real RPing happens in-game (what good is a 10 page backstory if you never get to make use of it? Though I actively tell players to avoid handing me a 10 page backstory because I probably won't read it, especially since a bullet-point background can get the necessary info I need about the character).
I think a lot of my style for developing characters is influenced by my artsy side. When drawing, you'll typically do a rough sketch which lays out your foundation and then you keep adding and tweaking stuff as the concept comes more to life. A similar approach to character design (starting with an idea, fleshing it out a bit more, adding fundamental details, then filling in to taste) makes it a lot easier to get to know the characters and the initial brevity allows for easy integration into the game.
This has a couple of advantages not listed. I've noticed that players often have to "meet" their own characters for a couple of sessions before the character's personality is actually solidified for the player. Likewise, it makes creating (and incorporating) the character much easier by starting with an idea or concept and then adding details and discussing the character.
From there, my games are typically designed around the characters and what they tend to do. I introduce NPCs frequently, liberally, and all over the place, and hooks live and die with the PCs' interests. For example, most of the NPCs that I mentioned in the other posts were "throwaway" NPCs who evolved into major NPCs recurring NPCs. "Jum Jum" for example was literally just a CR 2 goblin sorcerer in a band of faceless mercenaries. Victoria was a psychic monk that was supposed to assassinate the party (she actually got roflestomped because Paladins, Barbarians, and the psychic-archery multiclass thing Aratrok was playing) and ended up as a beloved character as she was the "coven sister" of Aliizsa (Jeo, Aratrok's character actually found her first when they returned to Vandread's lair, and Jeo didn't even attack her while she was recovering from their fight. She just gave her the stink eye and the vampire was shamed). Vandread himself began as little more than a hook for getting Rai's character involved and became a major antagonist (and the first BBEG that suffered the party's full wrath).
Here's a breakdown of how my last major campaign (with Aratrok, Raital, my brother, and a few other players who came and went as scheduling limits dictated).
- The campaign began with Jeo. We determined that she was a former exotic slave from a nearby country, she escaped, has some monstrous features (and was mistaken for a planetouched). She turned to adventuring as a means to an end. She hoped to eventually rescue her best friend, another exotic tiefling slave, from her former owner.
- Jeo goes on a short mini adventure which is a soft dungeon crawl at the behest of this ruling lady of a small fishing town. She finds an old dwarf vault full of copper pieces and stuff. Her ultimate goal is to retrieve a part of a disk-key that the lady of town she was in was searching for, and part of the key (which is fractured into three pieces) is in an abandoned dwarf vault from before the war.
- Jeo goes and finds help to get the treasure out and continue working for the lady for a bit. Some new PCs join the campaign (including a dwarf my brother has). This continues briefly, then as a few of the players have new obligations due to their college courses, my brother brings in a Paladin but has no idea as to a backstory but he just wants a sword and bible inherited by his parents and be a member of the templar order. I've been looking for a good way of getting Jeo back to Gosha to deal with her former master.
- Carrius, the Paladin, arrives in the same village as Jeo as part of a small team led by his superior and rival, Cadius (which quickly became his rival). Cadius was kind of a douche and it turned out that Carrius was on probation for royally screwing up and had been assigned to this backwater task under Cadius for a while. Carrius didn't even know what happened OOC but that was part of secret technique for getting him to bloom in roleplay.
- Cadius leaves Carrius in the town with orders to continue to investigation they were there to conduct since the locals weren't particularly interested in talking to them. He was mostly just saddling Carrius with a boring job in a small village nobody cared about.
- Carrius and Jeo meet and he gets a chance to speak to her employer who was hiring Jeo (who Carrius was supposed to be investigating). Jeo's employer noted the next piece of the disk-key was owned by a rival nobleman in the city Carrius was from (a mayor IIRC), so she suggested that Jeo travel with the Paladin to ensure a safe trip there (and then her employer grabbed the Paladin and proceeded to give him all the info he was supposed to get but she didn't give his superior Cadius, because now it suited her, and some of it was BS anyway). This got them both back to the town with the Templar (Jeo traveled with him under the guise of safety in numbers and an interest in performing freelance work for the Templar, which was a common thing for adventurers).
- They arrive back in town much earlier than Cadius had expected, but Carrius was pulled aside by a new NPC. A childhood friend of his named Klari (she was a warrior/kineticist) who mentioned further details about the grand screw up that he was supposedly involved in (and he learned it involved a suspected criminal, a runaway cart, a cabbage stand, and the statue of their not-Jesus in town). But that she was asked to grab him because the chapel master wished to speak to him (oh no, he thought, as by this time he was expecting to get chewed out by this NPC for this running gag involving the "incident"). However, when he arrived in the chapel, the chapel master explained that they reacted too harshly to the collateral damage from the incident and upon further consideration felt he had made the best of a bad situation, and he technically succeeded in capturing the suspect, and the trauma of a cart of cabbages barreling down a hill and nearly being crushed by a statue of their god-savior scared him so badly he volunteered all the information they wanted and even confessed to a few crimes they weren't even aware of!
- Carrius was then placed on a new assignment that involved going after a nobleman that was suspected of having ties to slavers. As it turned out, Jeo still needed to get that key piece (unbeknownst to the Templar) and it happened that the rival of the lady who hired Jeo was the guy the templar were going to arrest, so Jeo insinuated herself into their group under the guise of being a new friend and wanting to learn more about Carrius and the order she wanted to work for (she actually intended to steal it while they were busy). Carrius was assigned to the job with Klari and a new NPC, Myriel a quiet templar inquisitor (they're psychics who will get the truth out of you) who had only recently arrived at their chapel after she graduated from her training church with honors.
- They went off, Carrius does some badass Paladin stuff, Jeo steals the last piece of the key (her employer had the 1st, she retrieved the 2nd, and now stole the 3rd). They arrested the nobleman and returned to the chapel. Jeo took a day or two during their downtime to go return the key piece and was told that her employer would need some time to find the exact location that the key needed to be used and would get back to her.
- The information the corrupt nobleman gave to the templar revealed a more insidious and pervasive connection to the southern slave trade than expected. Carrius was promoted and tasked with Klari and Myriel to travel south (outside of their range of legal authority) and investigate the slave rings in the country that was the root of it. Jeo catches wind of this and sees an opportunity to go back to Gosha and rescue her friend with the help of some Templar dudes, so she asks to accompany them as a freelancer.
- They arrive in Gosha and begin an investigation. Shenanigans ensue, but they meet up with a nobleman named Simon Corzlo who appears to be the son of Jeo's former captor Aidan Corzlo (she didn't even know he had a son) and his friend (a rather strange mannered tiefling). He explains his family is no longer in the business of slaves and he has moved their interests into arms dealing. He invites them to his estate to help the further, but Jeo is suspicious.
- They go to his estate and Jeo finds a surprise. Rather than needing to launch a rescue, she finds that her friend is the lady of the house, dressed in noble refinery, and the lover of Simon. Furthering her surprise, the tiefling with Corzlo was her friends daughter (whose tiefling mutation involved her growing at an alarming rate, as it had only been about 12 years since Jeo left). She finds her former owner, Aidan, has taken extremely ill and has been bedridden for some time and the estate moved into the control of his son.
- Jeo later discovers that her friend gave birth to a daughter after manifesting some magical powers. She mind-f***ed Aidan into releasing her, and she later found out that she and Simon had been poisoning him. However, she found out after she went to confront Aidan and during a heating yelling match between her and the bitter old bastard he had a heart attack.
- Simon points them in the direction of some of his fathers old friends and connections to help them on their search. This is where they encounter Vandread and his vampire coven and pick up Aliizsa (since Raital had just joined the game).
- They walk into a trap Vandread places but manage to overcome the trap and capture a high profile Goshan nobleman who's involved in the slave trading. They're technically a bit outside the law here but they manage to get him to drop some names and their investigation points back to their home country to the north and corruption within their own nobles for profit.
- Jeo curses Vandread out for setting them up, he plays it off as hedging is bets since he wanted to seem the friend of the slavemaster should they have failed. She gives him a further piece of his mind, causing him to be taken aback. Insulted but highly intrigued by this woman's fiery outburst he decides he must add her to his harem and he concocts a scheme to have his vampires retrieve her and lets them take Aliizsa with them so they can easily track them (because he can magically find a book Aliizsa is bound to, which means he can find them). Scheming begins. He also tasks Miranda, another vampire the party met a bit earlier to go with them.
- The party returns to their Kingdom, and Jeo's friend and her new husband Simon travel with them as they're supposed to attend a ball for business anyway (Jeo doesn't trust Simon a whole lot, but she's not wrong to distrust him, seriously there are many snakes in the grass in this situation).
- Carrius is discovered to be traveling with vampires to his order's chagrin (undeath is punishable by a second death or worse). He returned much stronger than when he left, and when challenged on his company, he basically told them to eat it, they were under his protection. His former superior Cadius ends up having a duel with him in the middle of his chapel. Carrius, now wearing his bigboy pants, engages in a furious duel and spanks Cadius as he displays Paladin powers rarely seen in the order (most of the order are warrior/paladins, but Carrius is Paladin-Paladin). Carrius heals Cadius after their duel, and the chapel master Merles commends Carrius' merciful reasons for protecting these vampires. Carrius is promoted for the successful mission in Gosha. He and the others are then sent to the capital city to root out the slavers once and for all.
- While in the capital city, the party busts up some slave things, rescues a few people, Aliizsa buys an underaged sex slave because she couldn't leave her at the brothel. Vandread makes moves against the party. They're ambushed by Victoria again (with only Jeo and Aliizsa this time). They beat her up again. They become friends with her. They encounter the vigilante ghoul from my novel, they blow her up a bit. They become friends with her too. They meet a half-orc pistol-barbarian named Buckshot, they become friends with him too (noticing any trends?). Aliizsa is kidnapped by Vandread.
- Aliizsa is revealed to be an ancient evil demon goddess incarnated into a tiefling body as part of a scheme to further the machinations of hell after the hellgates were sealed at the end of the great demon wars. Heavy. The party with the help of the Templar order with the aid of some of their captured or turncoat vampires (like Miranda and Victoria) locate Vandread's mansion in the city and launch a full-scale swat-style invasion on the mansion (think ending of Scarface, except with D&D adventurers and knights). They end up cornering the vampire lord and while Carrius is actively tanking him (smite evil, much aggro, very pissed), Jeo had fashioned an anti-vampire grenade using Craft Wondrous Item (essentially a super sunburst greenade) and they debuff-bombed him and toasted him.
- Jeo is attacked by ninja assassins working for the oni who was hunting her after her Kumiho mother abandoned her at birth to keep her out of his organization. The oni shogun was a powerful Yakuza force that had a presence in the prime continent, and the kumiho were his personal assassins and servants, an elite band of supernatural ninja. Jeo's mother ends up finding her again, chastises her for finding her, then beats the stuffing out of the ninja and leaves with her daughter (though she notes that the oni shogun will find them as he always does).
- The templar order wants to destroy the remaining vampires. The party is not cool with that (Aliizsa considers them her family). Carrius gives them the finger and decides he, Klari, and Myriel will leave the order if they pass judgment on them. Aliizsa's demonic nature becomes apparent when demons attack the grand cathedral after her awakening in Vandread's torture chamber. The templar are super pissed. Aliizsa is planar bound by he order and meets with the patron demigoddess of the order (a planetar) who persuades the order to let the party go because their goals will coincide with the order's long term. She explains that the demon wars aren't truly over as Aliizsa's very existence shows and the machinations of the fiendkind continue to tick the clock closer to doomsday.
- Around the same time the demons attacked the cathedral and Jeo's mother is around them, another Kumiho ninja shoes up and rips Aliza's torso out (Stealthy bastards these magical ninja folks). However Aliizsa is a vampire so she got better. They were about to kill the new assassin, but Jeo's mother Jugeum stops them, begging them not to because the other assassin is...Jeo's other mother. Turns out this assassin, Feiya, was Jeo's father in the biological sense, shapeshifters being shapeshifters. At Feiya's protest, she accompanies Jeo and Jugeum. She notes that the Oni Shogun will eventually send more to retrieve them and none have ever escaped him for too long before he retrieves his property.
- Based on the information the angel provides them, the party breaks off from the order and goes into 100% free-mode (Carrius and his friends unofficially abandon their order and travel with the party, they have no connections of obligations, so they're deciding what to do from there. They had a few outstanding options, such as visiting with the exiled drow prince to discuss the civil war that was mentioned by a drow rescued from Vandread's torture room, or visiting Constellation, the last remaining sky city where Aliizsa's birth family was deemed to reside.
- Having recently discovered that Jeo's former employer (from waaay back at the start) had the key to the fallen starcity with the marilith that the templar's demigoddess feared within, they decided that they needed to deal with or perhaps get her to be an ally against the demon queen who was scheming on the material plane. So they opted to go pick the key up from her old employer and explore the fallen star city.
- Inside the star city, they discovered that the city was still thriving, albeit with a very tainted influence of demonic life. The advanced city was a mixture of alive and vibrant and dingy and dirty with large sections of the city without power and filled with dangers. At the core, they found that the marilith was breeding an army with no clear motivation, and laying marilith eggs like a xenomorph queen, which was a horrifying prospect because these are my mariliths and the greatest champions of the world are like CR 12...
- Aliizsa fearfully struggles with guilt for what she did in her past and how it led to this, while also hoping that the marilith won't vaporize her when they meet her. She recruits a few of her former succubus minions who were still here from the invasion, and they end up acting as their spies in the city (greater teleport and ethereal jaunt being what they are). The party causes a bit of a stir when they stop some of the demonkind from bullying the civilians in the slums.
- The party works with a resistance group in the city that tries to keep the old ways alive. The resistance group is a bit of a joke though and the party questions why the marilith hasn't wiped them out, given that she probably could if she really wanted to. It's theorized that she might be controlling the city via order through chaos, keeping her demon minions placated by the constant struggle with the resistance while she schemes.
- The party tries to hedge their bets on whether the marilith intends to overthrow the demon queen out of vengeance for being left in the fallen city to rot, or if she is breeding an army for the demon queen to reignite the fires of war from within the plane itself. Aliizsa argues that if they can overpower the marilith she would swear fealty to her and their cause in exchange for her life (because that's apparently how lords and generals make friends in hell).
- The campaign ends because we can't put sessions together frequently enough to be anything more than an annoying tease.
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*houserules*You know, I'm seriously considering adopting some of these. Gonna have to talk it over with the group I'm running a game for, which is already using enough house rules I needed a document to track of.
If it's helpful, here are the revised construct, revised undead, and mindless subtype.
Here's the changes to animated objects and golems. Notice the beautiful scaling as opposed to that awful flat-HP bonus based on size.
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>Totally not bleeding tears of envy at how awesome your games sound.
You are not the only one, my friend.
Which reminds me. Ashiel, I have seen some people ask if they can join some of your games as spectators, to see how it all plays out in reality. Did anything work out of that? If it did, is it possible to do that again?
That's basically how Aratrok ended up joining my games. He shot me a PM asking for advice for his GM because he wanted to run an undead PC and the GM was nervous about it (but I had said I GMed for undead PCs semi-frequently). Later Aratrok participated in one or two OpenRPG games, and invited me to a MapTools game, and the rest is history.
I worry that I wouldn't live up to the hype though. I'm just one person. Aratrok and Raital could summarize my GMing / provide some insight. I'm sure they've got some beef with it somewhere.
As to sitting in on sessions or even taking part in them, that's actually really easy. I do my GMing on MapTools these days. The hard part is actually finding time to run a campaign (hopefully I can finish a short mini-adventure I was doing for my friends' persistent world, Wyrmspire and then have no outstanding obligations for GMing).
I don't know how entertaining the game would be without playing it it though. Though we do often use voice-chat over Discord and such, when I'm using a medium like MapTools, pretty much all the dialog and roleplaying is through text (we banter about stuff OOC though) because I feel like the player's own mind's eye is better for filling in the blanks for voices and scenes better, and it gives a sort of interactive storybook vibe that I think is pretty cool. I see it as a certain strength of the medium that traditional tabletop gaming lacks (it can be a little more immersive). I still love tabletop though for different reasons.
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an upcoming pony game
My childhood was a good one.