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So I'm playing a thaumaturge in PFS and we are fighting a group of foxes. The foxes have no weaknesses, so when I succeed on exploit vulnerablity, I pick a weakness that applies to one fox and just that fox, right?
I'm on the spot, so I say this fox is weak to rabbits. I pull a rabbit out of my bag (hat) and I beat the fox to death with the rabbit and my hatchet.
The whole table is in stitches, laughing about this. I decide the next one will be more serious. Next turn, I have another fox, so I roll exploit vulnerablity. This time it's weak to a piece of a henhouse, which no fox ever entered. The table laughs again.
Is this the proper way to play a serious member of the dark archive? What serious weakness would a fox have? Im not complaining, I'm curious what other thaumaturges would have done. Playing comedy characters is pretty common for me, and I'm glad to have the opportunity, but I don't believe this is how Paizo intended the class to be played.
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Well, the flavor is of your own making.
Yes, Thaumaturge Personal Antithesis does take quite a bit of creativity if you want to come up with a weakness that is serious and believable.
But there are certainly other options than comedic. Or even serious. Plenty of in-between or abstract that could be done.
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I mean, "The universe has a weird sense of humor" is a 100% reasonable perspective for a thaumaturge.
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Currently playing Age of Ashes - so spoiler.
Fighting Gerhard Pendergrast, our Thaumaturge pulled out a scrap of an academic article and declared that his weakness was properly researched and peer reviewed research papers.
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Yes, the bag of everything gets a bit far-fetched. The class's biggest appeal to me is that I can customize the props to suit a range of roles, but ultimately one's role has to include "hoarder extraordinaire" too which kinda kills most of the edgier concepts I'd enjoy. That leaves the comic ones, like a toon pulling out whatever they need (or I suppose Batman in some campier iterations!).
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Like most classes, it can be as silly or serious as you want.
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Serious weakness for a fox? A fox hunter's arrowhead, a collar from a foxhound, fried tofu if you're in fantasy Japan. Foxglove is poisonous but I don't know if the name is relevant... Then again names are magic to a thaumaturge.
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A shard of a henhouse is a brilliant fox anathema; I’m not seeing what’s so silly about that one.
If the class is feeling too comedic… have you considered playing it differently? You could just as easily have wrapped the an amulet of hunting hound’s teeth, a holy symbol of Erastil, or a splash of fox’s blood.
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My gnoll thaumaturge has done the following to create weaknesses to his bite attack:
- Bitten a silver coin when facing a devil.
- Whispered the name of Lamashtu into his teeth when facing a follower of a dead god, and again when facing undead.
- Invoked the words of Abadar on his tongue when dealing with a traitor.
- Bitten through his bonds when escaping slavers.
- Used the blood of the fallen when fighting multiple enemies after finishing one.
For a fox, he would have used the name of Lamashtu in her aspect as the goddess of wild beasts. He's pretty easy to work with because he has two very different deities he reveres, and they can cover a lot of situations.
My elf thaumaturge instead sings her foe's part in the Song of the Created and introduces errors to create vulnerabilities or lie to the world about about her blade is made of.
For a fox, she would tie her blade to the concept of the hunt. She uses a pretty substantial reflavoring of the mechanic, but it's been working well.
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So far my favourite custom vulnerability was from a Tengu who would mimic the voices and cries of all the people a bad guy has ever hurt.
It was all very dramatic.
Big Fiddlesticks energy. I love it.
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Is the silliness a bad thing? Like others said, you can play any class as silly or serious as you like; though I suppose the thaum has an easier in for silliness than most classes. The mood of your game is something I hope was discussed at the start, and if it is a problem, it's not like you can't switch it up to someone more occulty, or go with a generic "I pull out an anathamic charm and attach it"
I feel the henhouse scrap though is really clever though; since no fox managed to defeat it while it was still assembled and all
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...or for an evil thaumaturge, a bunch of different tokens charges with the essence and influence of various demon lords and archdevils. Whatever it is, you can bet money that there's some demon lord or archdevil out there who hates it, feeds on it, or both.
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What serious weakness would a fox have?
I'd take a page from Zatanna Zatara's playbook and say it's name backwards to invoke it's weakness.
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Also while it can enhance your experience depensing on the table there is no need to describe exactly how your character performs every move. For many people it is enough to just say they cast fireball without describing the runes they trace and how they look like.
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Yeah, I think you're running into the fact that your brain works on humorous associations, I've had players do things like want to use the language and symbolism of flowers for all the opportunities to invent a weakness.
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Yeah, I think you're running into the fact that your brain works on humorous associations, I've had players do things like want to use the language and symbolism of flowers for all the opportunities to invent a weakness.
I've been thinking about making one up that is a cook and the weaknesses are to spices that would complement a dish you could make from them. So they'd recall a spicy owlbear stew so they'd pull out some crimson peppers for that kick of heat and a few points of extra damage. Don't ask where she learned those recipes for PC races, undead and the like though...
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Don't ask where she learned those recipes for PC races, undead and the like though...
I mean, I am not personally a cannibal but I nonetheless understand that humans, like pigs, store their fat subcutaneously rather than marbling it through the muscle (like beef, for example). So culinarily human meat is best treated like pork, indeed various cannibals throughout history have described human as "long pork."
For the undead, I imagine that there's been considerable thought put towards "how to cover up the taste of meat that has gone off" since Golarion lacks refrigeration.
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Don't ask where she learned those recipes for PC races, undead and the like though...I mean, I am not personally a cannibal but I nonetheless understand that humans, like pigs, store their fat subcutaneously rather than marbling it through the muscle (like beef, for example). So culinarily human meat is best treated like pork, indeed various cannibals throughout history have described human as "long pork."
For the undead, I imagine that there's been considerable thought put towards "how to cover up the taste of meat that has gone off" since Golarion lacks refrigeration.
Well, it all depends on who you're cooking for: for instance, Leshy can gain nourishment from decaying matter and gnolls will eat just about any dead body. So it could be zombie and skeleton fertilizer, an Irongut Goblin corpse tartare or a gnoll elf roast. The only rub would be incorporeal creatures, though I guess I could still use what I would if they where still alive.
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The only rub would be incorporeal creatures, though I guess I could still use what I would if they where still alive.
Think about modernist cuisines use of vapors and foams and the whole "rotary evaporator to make a transparent pumpkin pie" they do at Alinea.
You might not be able to eat the ghost, but perhaps you might include a soupçon of negative energy in your foam ("una espuma espoooky" perhaps?) or stabilizing some protoplasm with soy lecithin in a siphon.
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An incorporeal food weakness could be salt. Heck, salt has a long tradition of discombobulating various supernatural (and/or slug-themed) creatures even outside the kitchen. And then one can flavor one's salt as being from certain sites or composed differently.
It's a pretty saucy approach to thaumaturgy at the least. I could see combining it with some sort of totem-collecting Archetype.
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The ancient Greeks also associated fava beans with the dead (perhaps because they had a similar texture to flesh and the black spots at the flowers were associated with soul fragments.)
The Thaumaturge is the best class for a player who knows a bunch of random things about a bunch of topics, as there's no diagetic reason your character wouldn't also believe this.
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Well, PF1 DID have Weapon blanch (ghost salt) that was "crafted from the ectoplasmic remains of destroyed incorporeal undead" so I guess there is some material there.
An incorporeal food weakness could be salt. Heck, salt has a long tradition of discombobulating various supernatural (and/or slug-themed) creatures even outside the kitchen. And then one can flavor one's salt as being from certain sites or composed differently.
It's a pretty saucy approach to thaumaturgy at the least. I could see combining it with some sort of totem-collecting Archetype.
I did think about mineral salts [sea salt] for earth elementals, salt from the ash produced by burning the timber of the salt tree for fire elementals, bamboo salt for water elementals and fleur de sel for air ones.
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Clearly foxes are weak to soured grapes.
I think fighting foxes in tactical combat is a silly scenario. I can't imagine wearing armor and swiping at them with a hatchet - regardless of fence applications - not being somewhat absurd if you thought about it.
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I disagree. I essentially made Geralt as a Thaumaturge with some Ranger multiclassing; just treat the weaknesses as blade oils, or alchemy.
You have the freedom to make this. You don't have to be Benny in the Mummy, whipping out every religious symbol ever; you CAN be, or you can be one of the Winchesters. You can be a Witcher. You can play it in so many ways, the silliness is only from your own perception and presentation.