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Can you tell us the tale of Ostog the Unslain?
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I wanted this on the first page, so you can answer it once and for all - hopefully some people will see it before they ask again. ^_^
How did Aroden die?
Well
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Can you tell us the tale of Ostog the Unslain?
Preferably as a ballad, please.
What part of Golarion makes your mind speculate about ideas more than any other?
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Ooh! I have one! When are you going to restart your Age of Worms game? Last I remember I was being carried out of the arena by a charmed ogre minion...
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And while we're at it... what about your Absalom game? I've got secret societies to build there!
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What is your real name?
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Instead of asking you questions here, can I ask them on your Facebook page?
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How was this not already a thread?
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I thought it was... might have gotten buried and forgotten in the archives >_> Guess this is round 2.
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I've personally always wondered what is the etymology of "Iquander"?
Publisher, Chief Creative Officer
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Wow.
Ok, you got me.
Honestly one reason I have never encouraged a thread like this is that I am very, very, very busy helping to run Paizo, and I don't want to give people the impression that I am ignoring their questions (even when, frankly, I am forced to ignore their questions!).
I see some good, fun questions here, and will try to answer them as soon as I can carve out some free time.
Thanks for the interest, folks.
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Publisher, Chief Creative Officer
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I would like to lay down a few rules for this thread:
1) I will not answer rules questions of any kind here. We have more appropriate forums for that here, and I am not your guy for those types of questions.
2) I will not answer questions about other companies in the games industry unless those questions have to do with my own work with and for those companies. For example, I'm happy to answer questions about Green Ronin's "Armies of the Abyss," which I wrote, but I will not answer questions about their staff or their current product offerings, because I have nothing to do with them.
3) I'd rather avoid politics and religion. Not sure this is a 100% ban, but it's not really in my or my company's best interest to get involved in these sorts of issues on paizo.com, so I will choose not to 99.999999999999% of the time.
So I guess it's not really an ask me _anything_ thread, after all. :)
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I loved meeting you at comic con, and that I had panties on my head while doing so.
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Wow.
Ok, you got me.
Honestly one reason I have never encouraged a thread like this is that I am very, very, very busy helping to run Paizo, and I don't want to give people the impression that I am ignoring their questions (even when, frankly, I am forced to ignore their questions!).
I see some good, fun questions here, and will try to answer them as soon as I can carve out some free time.
Thanks for the interest, folks.
Np :3
(at least I remembered what you do this time)
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What are the odds of ever seeing you as an Adventure Path author again?
Howl of the Carrion King and The Whispering Cairn especially are among my favorite adventures and I'd love to see what else you have in store.
Also, what is the likelihood that we'll see a mega Absalom adventure or product?
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1) If you were going to run an adventure somewhere in the Inner Sea Region, where would the first place that you, personally, would consider and why?
2) If you were going to run an adventure somewhere on Golarion that ISN'T in the Inner Sea Region, where would the first place that you, personally, would consider and why?
3) How old where you when you played in your first d20 game?
4) What's your favorite thing about working at Paizo that doesn't involve paper?
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What are the odds of ever seeing you as an Adventure Path author again?
Howl of the Carrion King and The Whispering Cairn especially are among my favorite adventures and I'd love to see what else you have in store.
Also, what is the likelihood that we'll see a mega Absalom adventure or product?
We need a "Demand things from Erik Mona" thread.
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And while we're at it... what about your Absalom game? I've got secret societies to build there!Aren't you lost in Kintargo or something?
I'm not lost at all. I'm just eager to figure out what I did to get to 12th level is all.
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I understand you're responsible for the ghoran, so...
1) Based on what's said about the ghorus seed, it seems impossible that this form of reproduction could actually allow ghorans to multiply. Would I be correct in assuming that they can engage in both asexual reproduction (via the ghorus seed) and some other form of likely sexual reproduction that creates new ghorans, rather than just rebirthing an existing one, or is there some other explanation, like using cuttings or somesuch?
Since Erik thread-photo-bombed James's thread, I'll do the same. ;-)
Check out Inner Sea Races for answers to your ghoran questions!
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I'm not lost at all. I'm just eager to figure out what I did to get to 12th level is all.
Do we really want to know? ;)
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Publisher, Chief Creative Officer
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I wanted this on the first page, so you can answer it once and for all - hopefully some people will see it before they ask again. ^_^
How did Aroden die?
He was too busy and got extremely stressed out on the eve of a big deadline, and, well, the rest is history.
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Publisher, Chief Creative Officer
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Can you tell us the tale of Ostog the Unslain?
Wow. That's a long story, indeed.
For the full story, you'd have to check out "The Saga of Ostog the Unslain," an epic poem composed by the legendary bard Styrian Kindler (pen name "F. Wesley Schneider"), who recorded Ostog's exploits as a fellow companion over many years.
An early version of the story can be found in the old "NPC Guide" product, which contains write-ups of all the characters in James Jacobs's "The Shadow Under Sandpoint" campaign.
Ostog was an oarsman to the Linnorm King lord Hrolf Harfargr, rowing south along the Varisian coast for a raid on the southlands. During a storm, a treacherous lout named Girt Bearwearer led a mutiny against Harfargr, and Ostog stepped up to defend his liege lord. In return, he received several grievous sword wounds to the chest and stomach, and was thrown overboard amid choppy seas. He managed to swim to shore when he should have died (this is the birth of his "Unslain" title), and he staggered ashore in the little town of Sandpoint just before the first session of James Jacobs's office campaign.
There he met up with a group that included most of the other player characters in the NPC Guide (played by the likes of Jason Bulmahn, Sean K. Reynolds, James L. Sutter, Christopher Carey, and Wayfinder editor, PaizoCon founder, and honorary Paizonian Tim Nightengale), forming the nucleus of the party that would survive the entire "The Shadow Under Sandpoint" campaign, culminating in a battle to the death with the Sandpoint Devil.
Ostog will tell you that he struck the killing blow, which is definitely, 100% true.
Others helped, sure, but he slew it himself and deserves pride of place in the annals of history (and in Styrian's epic poem).
At that point, James's campaign shifted to the sands of Osirion, where we played a modified version of Gary Gygax's "Necropolis" superdungeon campaign for about two years. That campaign ended just a couple of months ago, and Ostog the Unslain managed to retain his title the entire time, going the whole campaign without dying and, importantly, without wearing a scrap of armor.*
A couple of facts about Ostog:
• He wields the greatsword of his slain lord, Hrolf Harfargr. The blade is known as Gnarlfang, and he retained it for the entire campaign, choosing to improve its magical qualities over time rather than replace it with a less meaningful piece of treasure.
• The idea of Ostog wearing no armor was to see if the bare-chested barbarian so common on 70s and 80s fantasy paperbacks could actually work as a concept in Pathfinder. This led to me pressuring Jason Bulmahn to add the Savage Barbarian archetype to the Advanced Player's Guide.
• When I wrote the "Meet the Iconics" backstory for the iconic hero Hakon I decided to incorporate Ostog, making Hakon his long lost brother.
• Ostog has a metal miniature from Reaper and a toy figurine from Diamond Select Toys. I've thus far demurred from putting him in a Pathfinder Battles set because I know that while power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and my tyranny can only go so far.
• My buddy Stephen Radney-MacFarland snuck Ostog into an art description for the Advanced Class Guide, and he ended up on the back cover of that product. I'm pleased that Ostog's fame is so great that I no longer need to push him into products myself. Others are now doing the dirty work for me. Delightful.
• Ostog will next appear in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Barbarian Class Deck as a playable ACG character. I'm thrilled beyond words by this (which I didn't plan), mostly because Ostog gets an awesome new illustration!
• Ostog had a Facebook fan page, but it has shamefully switched allegiances to something else. You can find evidence of it if you scroll down.
• Ostog remains Unslain.
* Pedants will mention that he did get an armor bonus from his pelt of primal power (taken from the ghost of his arch-enemy Girt Bearwearer, but that aspect is not reflected in the approved version of Styrian's epic poem.
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Did you know, after hearing about Ostog's triumph of surviving his campaign unslain and unarmored, I built an NPC inspired by Ostog? I ended up going with the Invulnerable Rager archetype with Dragon Totem and Stalwart feats. As a side effect, he enjoys walking bare chested through mountain passes as he is all but immune to the blistering cold of winter.
He also gets all of the ladies.
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Publisher, Chief Creative Officer
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I understand you're responsible for the ghoran, so...
This is indeed the case. That being said, I have not written everything we've published about them. Jessica Price notes that there is a section on ghorans in Inner Sea Races. I didn't write that one, so it's possible that some of the answers I'll give to your Ghoran questions will not necessarily jibe with that resource, which I didn't write. I always had more I wanted to say on this race than the space in the Inner Sea Bestiary allowed, so it's sometimes difficult for me to remember what made it into print and what was just ideas that I had that never quite made it to paper. What I'm trying to say is: Take my responses for what they're worth.
Before I get to answers, a bit more history. The ghorans come from three influences, basically.
The first is that I've always thought it was kind of lame that there were no playable "plant people" in Pathfinder or any of its precedents. Sure there have always been plant monsters like vegepygmies, but they've never really been presented as something you could actually _play_. I really enjoyed the cacatae plant men from China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, and wanted to include something similar in Pathfinder. When the Inner Sea Bestiary came along, I jumped in for a couple of pages specifically to redress this long-held grievance.
The second inspiration is a coincidence that ended up giving me the ghoran's most interesting element: The Ghorus Seed. At the time I got the Inner Sea Bestiary assignment, I was assigned to jury duty in downtown Seattle for a couple of days. While I never managed to find myself empaneled, I did manage to carve out about 16 hours of uninterrupted reading time. I decided to make the most of the time, and plowed through a massive esoteric tome called "The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception" that outlined the cosmology of an early 20th century mystic Christianity sect called the Rosicrucian Fellowship. This book introduced a number of core occult concepts to me, but the one that most strongly caught my interest was the idea of the "permanent atom,", a single atom that persists throughout various reincarnations, and which "preserve within themselves, as vibratory powers, the results of all the experiences through which they have passed."
From the permanent atom was the Ghorus Seed born.
The third influence upon the ghorans is the name "Ghorus" itself. "Ghorus" comes from my character Ghorus Thoth, whom I played in more than 100 sessions of the old Living City organized play campaign for Dungeons & Dragons. When I was writing the Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer and a lot of the broad strokes that formed the basis of Golarion, I pulled the name Ghorus as a renegade druid, and it was only a short step from there to incorporating a bit more about him into my Nexian plant monster for the Inner Sea Bestiary. The two Ghoruses don't really have anything to do with one another. Ghorus Thoth was a Thayan cleric of Jergal the death god--about as far as you can get from the druidic life. But their names--and the name of the ghoran itself--are all tied together.
On to the questions.
1) Based on what's said about the ghorus seed, it seems impossible that this form of reproduction could actually allow ghorans to multiply. Would I be correct in assuming that they can engage in both asexual reproduction (via the ghorus seed) and some other form of likely sexual reproduction that creates new ghorans, rather than just rebirthing an existing one, or is there some other explanation, like using cuttings or somesuch?
This is the part I most expect to be changed in Inner Sea Races (I know I read that chapter, but I can't remember it's take on this aspect), but in my original conception there is no such thing as Ghoran reproduction. The druid Ghorus created a finite number of seeds, and there will never be more of them. Thus the race of ghorans is always in decline, which gives them a tragic air that I appreciate. I also like the idea of the high magics of Nex's time being severely degraded and in many cases lost, so the idea of a finite resource fits the general theme of the region pretty well.
Of course, you can eject the seed, replant it, and eat the husk that remains. It's still delicious, after all, and no seeds are wasted. Sure, the personality of the meal is gone and will be replaced by a shadow of itself that only barely remembers its former life, but that's a small price to pay for keeping a nation fed, eh?
2) When reproducing/rebirthing using the ghorus seed, is the soul of the original ghoran the same as the soul that the new ghoran has, or is it a different soul with the memories of its progenitor?
It's the same soul, I reckon.
3) If it is the same soul, can a ghoran live indefinitely in this manner as long as it doesn't get killed in some other manner, or is there a limit to how many times they can rebirth themselves with this method?
Yes. They can survive indefinitely, so long as they keep replanting themselves. Of course, people keep wanting to eat them, which isn't helpful. Some old Nexian recipes waste a shameful number of seeds, calling for them to be crushed and mulched to add extra flavor. The more destructive the dish, the more decadent and expensive.
4) What is the natural life span of a ghoran if it doesn't expel and plant its ghorus seed? Short? Long?
I'd say relatively long, sort of like a tree (meaning possibly hundreds of years), but over time they would start to look sickly and gross, like a dying plant. They are probably most vibrant (and tastiest) in their first century of life, probably peaking at about 30-50 years.
5) About how long do most ghorans go before planting their ghorus seed without a pressing need (like, say, wanting to ensure their survival if they have reason to believe their seed will be safer than their body)? Is it something they do fairly regularly, or is it something they don't do lightly?
It's definitely something they don't do lightly, because it is essentially a death of the self. The creature that comes back shares some memories of their past incarnations, but they are fundamentally a different person in most of the ways that count. Given that most of the things ghorans do and say that humans can relate to in any way they do as part of an elaborate evolutionary form of survival mimicry, ghorans are weird enough without swapping around their personalities willy nilly. They eject their seeds only in grave moments of absolute necessity.
6) Do ghorans mind if their bodies are eaten? They were bred to be food, so I'm not sure if they're fine with that so long as they get a chance to plant their ghorus seed first, or do they actually resent being created as a food?
They totally and utterly resent being created as food, and push the Nexian Council of Three and Nine to formally ban the practice and make their slaughter illegal. Of course, they're just so darn tasty that it's difficult for the Council to act on their behalf. It took centuries for them to even be noticed by the law as sentient creatures, so the attitude of many of Nex's aristocracy is "don't be so pushy. You're lucky with what you have."
It's worth noting that, in most circumstances, if a ghoran's body is being eaten the seed has already been expelled (and thus the individual ghoran is more or less already dead) or he is in the process of being eaten alive. In the latter case, the ghoran would do whatever it could to prevent being eaten (just like any other creature). In the former, he would be beyond caring. If murdered, however, a flash of insight in some later incarnation might cause that version of the ghoran to fixate upon the murderer of its "ancestor," and swear itself into some kind of deranged revenge scheme.
7) Do ghorans have some sort of society? They are intelligent beings, even if on average less intelligent than humans, but at the same time, they're plants, so I'm not sure if they would have a desire to exist in some sort social group or not...and if they did, how alien that social group might be.
Yes, they band together in and outside Nexian cities, especially the capital at Quantium. They tend to live in cylindrical towers with lots of windows and open roofs, the better to let in the sun. These places smell of flowers and fiber, and almost always remain cool and damp regardless of the weather outside. Ghorans are, as a culture, quiet and patient, eager to spend long hours with the breeze gently cooling their bodies and participating in a form of communal meditation. Observers believe that they are able to tap into some kind of common hive mind, but the ghorans themselves do not speak of this to outsiders.
8) Since ghorans are delicious enough for it to be a racial trait, I've got to ask...just how delicious are they, and what do they taste like? And what are the tasty bits? Is it all or mostly...
Their skin tastes like watermelon husk marinated through in bliss. Their pulp tastes of ecstasy and succulence, the perfect palliative for human hunger. They are bio-engineered to nourish and delight.
They're great. You should have one.
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Publisher, Chief Creative Officer
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Instead of asking you questions here, can I ask them on your Facebook page?
You can ask them on my Facebook Fan Page, sure!
Other places to interact with me online:
My Twitter.
My Tumblr.
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If the Akashic Record has a perfect psychic record of every moment in history, couldn't you just go there and find out how Aroden died?
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Erik, what are the chances for a Janira Gavix mini? She is racking up some serious PFS time!That's pretty unlikely, as the character isn't really on my radar, I confess.
What makes you want a miniature of her?
What about a Laori Vaus mini?
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About Janira Gavix -
Almost every PFS group plays "The confirmation", and some GMs love to have the actual minis for each encounter and NPC.
Sooo. . . as a VL, what are the possibilities of a PFS themed set of pathfinder miniatures with characters like the VCs, major creatures from games like wounded wisp, confirmation, etc. that are heavily played?
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Erik, what are the chances for a Janira Gavix mini? She is racking up some serious PFS time!That's pretty unlikely, as the character isn't really on my radar, I confess.
What makes you want a miniature of her?
Sorry I didn't answer earlier, I was busy bothering Stephen Radney-MacFarland at Pacificon...
Almost every PFS group plays "The Confirmation", and some GMs love to have the actual minis for each encounter and NPC.
That is pretty much the answer. She is one of the favorite reoccurring characters, especially since she is the first one many players take notice of (that aren't Faction leaders of course).