Okay. Where is the Pathfinder 2E version of Cook People? This is probably the most iconic hex for witches. I'd really prefer it if Paizo reproduces this hex for PF2 please. I'm like.. begging here. I didn't even use it, just the fact it existed was fantastic.The witch can create fabulous spells by cooking an intelligent humanoid creature in her cauldron, either alive or dead.
Effect: Using this hex creates one meal or serving of food of the witch’s choice, typically a delicious stew or a dough suitable for cookies, pastries, or other desserts. Cooking the victim takes 1 hour. Eating the food provides one of the following benefits for 1 hour: age resistance, bear’s endurance, bull’s strength, cat’s grace, eagle’s splendor, fox’s cunning, neutralize poison (instantaneous), owl’s wisdom, remove disease (instantaneous). Alternatively, the witch can shape the dough into a Small, human-like creature, animating it as a homunculus for 1 hour. The witch must have the cauldron hex to select this hex. Using this hex or knowingly eating its food is an evil act.
Did the APG release yet? I don't think it's released yet for us to get that kind of answer.
That being said, I see this more of an NPC thing than a player choice. (They can certainly take it, but I don't see any practical player applications outside of RP purposes, and even then.)
Sure, Darksol. Or what if they want an evil campaign? An evil witch that eats people for bonuses teaming up with an anti paladin and a necromancer etc.
I don't really remember Paizo ever really publishing an Evil campaign, nor do I expect campaigns Paizo publishes in general to be accomodating to evil-aligned PCs.
And no, I don't mean the Chaotic Stupid/Stupid Evil players/PCs.
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Champions of Corruption was released in 2014. Hell's Vengeance was 2015.
I think things have changed at Pathfinder (for the better IMO) and they now want to push for more heroic fantasy, rather than evil campaigns.
If you want to eat people in your home campaigns, go ahead and *ahem* brew something up.
"I don't really remember Paizo ever really publishing an Evil campaign, nor do I expect campaigns Paizo publishes in general to be accomodating to evil-aligned PCs."
Then why print evil champions?
How about the Champions of Corruption splat book? Everything shouldn't just gear toward good campaigns.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Hell%27s_Vengeance
Also this was geared toward evil PC's. Same with the We Be Goblin series.
For world building and for something for good guys to face. They aren't even official anyway except for a certain NPC with specified stats. Sure, it's simple to convert to an identical scale, but who cares.
The main point of Pathfinder is you roleplay the good guys and you defeat/kill the bad guys. Or you roleplay neutral people who need a nudge of currency to defeat/kill the bad guys, those are fine too.
But Evil players? Big no-no in 95% of Paizo campaigns. Hell's Vengeance isn't very indicative to a typical Pathfinder experience anyway. We Be Goblins was more of a "Let's just screw around and see what happens" AP series than an Evil one.
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I'm 99% sure Cook People was intended to be an NPC option, except PF1 didn't let you label it as such due to the PC/NPC design symmetry.
All it did give us was squicky threads like this one. Granted, printing it as a player option wasn't as unwise as the Child Scent hex, but close.
Stuff like Coven, Cook People, etc., probably didn't get enough use for APG. I imagine if we get something like Horror Adventures again, we would see Cook People there.
Also, to make an argument from a very different direction than the others here… if you're gonna make an evil character who eats people, I think it's more fun/more interesting if you do it via Lore (Cooking) than a prepackaged ability that gives you a mechanical benefit.
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Stuff like Coven, Cook People, etc., probably didn't get enough use for APG. I imagine if we get something like Horror Adventures again, we would see Cook People there.I was actually disappointed with Horror Adventures. If they remake it, I am hoping it is more similar to the 3.5 book Heroes of Horror, which I simply adored. There's an adventure in that book where you come across a witch similar to Hansel and Gretel that has actually cooked people and placed it on the table for the witches guests to eat.
I'm a HUGE fan of dark horror and I like to run more of a dark themed game when I game. But I also like the PF2E rules, so I'd love for more dark themed options to add to my game.
Really? I haven't read much 3.5 stuff, but I enjoyed a lot of HA. It had a bunch of excellent dark archetypes, including Gingerbread Witch that's exactly on the topic you're looking for.
If you're looking for adventure hooks and the like, I imagine that's more Horror Realms, though. I really enjoyed them adding every corruption as an Oracle Curse.
Well, I guess I'm getting off-topic. It did sound like Witch had a number of on-theme things like vengeance curses and directly killing people. I'm cool with them using APG for the adventurer stuff, and save "cool it's there but I never used it" for a more targeted book.
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Given the popularity of things like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Dexter, The Walking Dead, etc..., I think people are more ok then ever with fantasizing about, and roleplaying as, "heroes" who are terrible people.
It's not my personal cup of tea, I like my heroes good and my villains evil, but clearly the populace at large loves it.
Leaving them out would be a huge blunder.
One of my main issues with Horror Adventures, I think, is that almost none of the cool options were usable in PFS and it didn't have enough of the themes I was looking for.
But here are all the archetypes that aren't usable in PFS.
The cool ones were Dark Elementalist, Elder Mythos Cultist, Experimenter, Gingerbread Witch, Mad Scientist, Necrologist, and undead master. And NONE of them were usable in PFS so I never got to play them since finding a group during PF1 days was tough hahaha."Archetypes: All archetypes in this book are legal for play except blood alchemist, bloody jake, dark elementalist, devolutionist, elder mythos cultist, experimenter, family hunter, gaslighter, gingerbread witch, hate-monger, life channeler, mad scientist, necrologist, serial killer, and undead master; the experimenter archetype grants Skill Focus (Craft [alchemy], Disguise, or Knowledge [engineering]) at 3rd level and 11th level as bonus feats instead of Brew Potion and Craft Construct."
Fair enough. Cook People falls into that same sort of category, though, so I'd kind of expect it in a book with a lot of other grizzly PFS-banned options.
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I don't really remember Paizo ever really publishing an Evil campaign
Neither do I.
Every now and then a have faint memories that the phrase "Hell's Vengeance" means something traumatic to me, but then the therapy kicks in and that gets repressed where it belongs. >.>
Similar feelings about Cook People.
I like it when Paizo does dark and morally gray - give me that all day long! - but when they try to do "edgy" it tends to just come out as cringe.
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".. where are the good traits in the "hero"?"
He realizes that the actions of the serial killer will destablize the region and many unintended consequences will occur, many many deaths will occur within the peasant folk. So he puts a stop to it. He has the foresight that he needs to act and do a little good in this world, despite his terrible actions in the past.
… okay.
In all honesty that doesn't sound moving or believable, and in both cases (the serial killer completely destabilizing the country and it leads to absolute horror and the "hero" randomly deciding to do something to stop the chaos) read as only happening due to writer's whim, not naturally occurring or flowing.
I'd prefer if they left things like Cook People out of the standard Witch options. They could always throw those abilities into an archetype for evil NPC's/PC's.
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Sure, Darksol. Or what if they want an evil campaign? An evil witch that eats people for bonuses teaming up with an anti paladin and a necromancer etc.
I don't really remember Paizo ever really publishing an Evil campaign, nor do I expect campaigns Paizo publishes in general to be accomodating to evil-aligned PCs.
And no, I don't mean the Chaotic Stupid/Stupid Evil players/PCs.
Clearly you forgot Hell's Vengeance, which was honestly one of the best damned campaigns I ever played. I had a devilishly good time, hell I wouldn't mind playing it again.
I try my best to forget it, glad y'all had fun with it ^w^
Serious question, was it really not popular?
I thought it worked very well as a campaign. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the fact that all but one PC were lawful evil worshipers of Asmodeus in our campaign.
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I absolutely hated it, as for the general consensus *shrug*
General Complaints I’ve seen though (and agree with):
Thrune 24/7 666 days a year, kinda tired of dealing with them at the point it came out.
There’s varying shades of evil and reasons to do so, but mostly the AP was a whole lot of douchebaggery. Most people who want to play Evil characters (legitimately, not troll) want to play Evil characters, not douchebags.
The reason your group gelled with it is another flaw (the AP, not you liking it), it’s a very, very specific Evil AP centered on Thrune and Asmodeus (see first point), you play anything else and it really doesn’t click.
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Another thing is in the previous AP, Hell’s Rebels (the AP fighting Thrune and Hell) has snippets talking about the Glorious Reclamation so seeing something so promising when you’re playing a revolutionary then turn around and immediately make them antagonists whose efforts you have to undo and demoralize left kinda sour taste and was rather disheartening.
Speaking of, with the finale involving taking over Westcrown you pretty much negate any good anyone who played Council of Thieves did. A lot of people weren’t happy with that.
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Words cannot describe how much I HATE that old Hex, and it baffles my mind that it would be described as an iconic Witch Hex.
To be fair, I don't mind dark stuff, heroes who are deeply flawed and have done terrible things, Game of Thrones like characters and scenarios, or anything else terrible and dark.
But there is a HUGE difference between that and "So my Witch eats people, LOL!". I would straight refuse to play in any game where a player elected to have such a feat. Even the most evil character I've ever played, a Yaun-ti Barbarian in 5e whose entire life's goal was to commit genocide on his own people, would have refused absolutely to work with such a being and would likely have killed them on principle.
I might be a little biased on this one in particular, because cannibalism particularly freaks me out. No idea why, but even typing in this thread is making me sick to my stomach.
Now to clarify, have the Hex. I'm not ever going tell people that the thing that they want to play as is wrong. I believe absolutely that people should have the options to create the gaming experience that they seek. But I really, really hope that this sort of fringe Hex isn't one of the ones that is a priority.
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I absolutely hated it, as for the general consensus *shrug*
General Complaints I’ve seen though (and agree with):
Thrune 24/7 666 days a year, kinda tired of dealing with them at the point it came out.
There’s varying shades of evil and reasons to do so, but mostly the AP was a whole lot of douchebaggery. Most people who want to play Evil characters (legitimately, not troll) want to play Evil characters, not douchebags.
The reason your group gelled with it is another flaw (the AP, not you liking it), it’s a very, very specific Evil AP centered on Thrune and Asmodeus (see first point), you play anything else and it really doesn’t click.
It sounds like you end up playing far more adventures paths and the smaller adventures (the category name I'm forgetting) because for my gaming group we didn't have a all Thrune all the time experience leading up to the AP. I think we had just finished playing through Rise of the Rune Lords, and before that I think it was Skull and Shackles.
And yeah, we mostly played caricatures of evil, but we all kinda figured that's what we were supposed to do. Perhaps there is something to be said about making a character that jives with the intent and direction of the AP, like it's not generic evil and perhaps that's where the problem lies.
Overall I still think it was a wonderful adventure, one of the most fun ones I've had. Playing a lawful evil antipaladin and catching every disease so I could bathe/s%&% in a town well to kill an entire town as part of the quest was just so perfectly evil that I loved it.
Words cannot describe how much I HATE that old Hex, and it baffles my mind that it would be described as an iconic Witch Hex.
To be fair, I don't mind dark stuff, heroes who are deeply flawed and have done terrible things, Game of Thrones like characters and scenarios, or anything else terrible and dark.
But there is a HUGE difference between that and "So my Witch eats people, LOL!". I would straight refuse to play in any game where a player elected to have such a feat. Even the most evil character I've ever played, a Yaun-ti Barbarian in 5e whose entire life's goal was to commit genocide on his own people, would have refused absolutely to work with such a being and would likely have killed them on principle.
I might be a little biased on this one in particular, because cannibalism particularly freaks me out. No idea why, but even typing in this thread is making me sick to my stomach.
Now to clarify, have the Hex. I'm not ever going tell people that the thing that they want to play as is wrong. I believe absolutely that people should have the options to create the gaming experience that they seek. But I really, really hope that this sort of fringe Hex isn't one of the ones that is a priority.
A Human Witch eating dead Kobolds isn't cannibalism. They aren't the same species. It's comparable to eating a dolphin, which is perfectly acceptable in many cultures (I'm not advocating eating dolphins IRL).
We have to remember that this is a game. "Ancestries" aren't ethnicities of the same species. They are entirely different species altogether. It's no more cannibalism than a cat eating a squirrel would be.
If they limited it to dead creatures of another species, I don't see how it could be a problem. But if you were playing an evil character, even live creatures could be ok. I mean humans do it to lobsters and crabs and lots of other things.
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As has been brought up before on these forums, cannibalism in a fantasy setting (such as Golarion) doesn’t just mean eating one’s own kind, it means eating any fully sapient species, so yeah a human eating a kobold would be a cannibalism, probably need a better name for it though.
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As has been brought up before on these forums, cannibalism in a fantasy setting (such as Golarion) doesn’t just mean eating one’s own kind, it means eating any fully sapient species, so yeah a human eating a kobold would be a cannibalism, probably need a better name for it though.
Not only is that not the definition of cannibalism, it's not even a workable definition of cannibalism.
Dogs aren't sapient, but a dog eating another dog is cannibalism. A dog eating a human is not cannibalism.
Wargs are sapient carnivores. Are you saying they are all inherently cannibals if they eat a goblin or kobold? That's ridiculous.
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Paizo has defined cannibalism in the context of their game world as any sapient being eating any other sapient being.
Could they have used a better word? Yes, but we have what we have.
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Yeah, I also agree it's a little silly, but it DOES get the point across pretty fast, so it's alright. (Sapiovore sounds like an aberration.)