Community standards question

[Outl]

I'm a little surprised that almost everything in Dark Archives is sanctioned. Dark Archives containes a lot of necromancy and occultism, and is flavored to match.

I was under the impression that the pathfinder baseline on CRB 486 was interpreted rather broadly in PFS. I imagine something like the Shadow Spy spell, as written, would violate the first point. I can just imagine the reaction of a passerby hearing a player talking about wringing a bird's neck and drinking its blood.

The PFS Guide to Organized Play seems pretty clear about table variation though: "No banning of legal character options", "No changes to spells", and so on.

I suppose I could just cross my fingers and hope it never becomes an issue. But I'm going to ask for advice instead: what is the right or best way for a GM to handle this if it does become an issue?

[Sebastian Hirsch]

Well, it depends on the options, sometimes all that is needed is to be creative when you describe the action or the spell, avoiding gruesome or graphic descriptions.

It is similar to how we treat spiders when a player with arachnophobia is at the table, replacing the token, not using the word spider etc.

We have a similar setup with the skeletons, people are supposed to respect people's boundaries at the table.

[Tomppa]

It's also good to remember that even though most of Dark Archives is marked as "PFS Standard" or not specifically limited, a many of the options are uncommon with no access conditions written into them, and thus can't be accessed in PFS.

That being said, Shadow Spy Spell, while it sounds gruesome, isn't an actual bird the character kills. It's a semi-real construct made of blood, soil, and shadow. It also only has a range of 120ft so it's probably pretty useless in context of most society scenarios and unlikely to pop up too often. Of course, these points are only relevant to the shadow spy, there are probably other weird and questionable options in the book too.

We stab and maul people to death all the time - it's best not to go into too much detail of what happens when the bird returns.