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Only because there didn’t seem to be a discussion linked in the blog….
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I really love Pallemi, I like how he gets so fixated on the wonder of creation and helping others (even if it makes him naive to the risks of the implications, ala the automaton design being sought for warfare). Also just love the design of a non-typical automaton with a more clockwork aesthetic, W.A.R. continues to crush it with his illustrations of the Iconics!
I also like the parallel between him and Usharak, both have lost all they loved (one through violence, another through plague and time) but Pallemi looks forward while Usharak looks back. Usharak wants to find a means to bring what he loved back, potentially regardless of the cost and consequence, while Pallemi is ready to move on and continue helping whoever and however he can.
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They've knocked it out of the park with this intro! A non-Jistkan automaton is a very interesting thing to see and makes him a very unique iconic.
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Does this make Pallemi the oldest iconic?
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I also like the parallel between him and Usharak, both have lost all they loved (one through violence, another through plague and time) but Pallemi looks forward while Usharak looks back. Usharak wants to find a means to bring what he loved back, potentially regardless of the cost and consequence, while Pallemi is ready to move on and continue helping whoever and however he can.
I will point out that the year AR 576 is the year that Geb cast his poison fog over Quantium and when Nex fled to his Refuge. That means that the plague fog that killed his family and village was caused by Geb himself.
And as that was the final clash of the Archmages' War.... technically that means Pallemi lost his family to an act of war.
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I will point out that the year AR 576 is the year that Geb cast his poison fog over Quantium and when Nex fled to his Refuge. That means that the plague fog that killed his family and village was caused by Geb himself.
And as that was the final clash of the Archmages' War.... technically that means Pallemi lost his family to an act of war.
True! That makes the two new Iconics even more parallel with one another, and their divergence more interesting.
Both make sense, too: Usharak came back right after the result of the razing, where the dead still lay on the earth, and went through the grim process of taking on their bones in Iruxi tradition. That certainly would cause someone to be much more raw about their loss and cause them to fixate on it and a potential "solution".
Pallemi, meanwhile, finds himself in an era so distant that generations have come and gone, and so there's really nothing he CAN do except carry on. What happened to his family is now a historical footnote, and even if the story implies that he experienced very little of that intervening time and thus it could still be considered "fresh" to him, there's a level of finality that could make it easier (even if no less painful) to move on from.
ADDENDUM: FURTHER, Usharak really railed against his profession before "surrendering" to it too late, while Pallemi genuinely loved his work. So those differing outlooks take shape in multiple ways!
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These new Iconics are truly fascinating.
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Love him! I was very dubious about the possibility of new automatons, but I like how they threaded the needle by making him both "old" in the sense of he wasn't born yesterday, but "new" because he's still younger than the Jistkan automatons. Helps keep the mystique but doesn't keep the lore in a box.
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Not a fan of the artwork this time 'round. The story is good, but a little halting, presumably to better reflect Pallemi's unique personality.
I really thought he was going to be badly burned rushing into the fire to help people, and then would have his body rebuilt into an automaton. I kind of think that was a missed opportunity.
Oh well, it rocks plenty as is!
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Does this make Pallemi the oldest iconic?
Chronologically, yes it does... at least so far.
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Also - if I'm not mistaken this is our first rare iconic! Truly exciting possibilities moving forwards if this keeps going.By Ancestry, yes! Though technically Nahoa was the first Rare Iconic because of Exemplars being a Rare class ;P
Actually, Jotunborn are also rare, so alas that distinction goes to Grimmyr.
Love Pallemi! Robots so often get used for allegory for neurodivergence, it's fun to see a character who's clearly implied to actually as much going back to when he was still human!
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I rather enjoy that the Runesmith has done the big Necromancer thing, and transferred his soul into an undying body.
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I think Pallemi as concept good, but for immortal person I wished he had more history and adventures behind them, not being in research lab for thousands of years.He's just an iconic, not a major character in any actual media. His adventures are ahead of him as people will play the game as him. Or not, as a lot would still probably make their own characters in the end. Iconics are meant to be a little (or a lot) vague.
And even if he was a major character, still his main adventures should happen in a new game, book, or a film. Not in his past.
A level 3 pregen PFS character with thousands of years of adventuring experience would be a bit odd.
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I appreciate that the art convincingly sells that Pallemi is an Automaton who isn't a Jistkan Automaton.
...I'm 1% disappointed that my theory he looked different because he's a Wyrwood did not come to pass, though.
Yeah, I'm a little dissapointed too because I thought this might be a sign there was a new construct ancestry in this book, similar to how Grimmyr/Jotunborn shook out. Doesn't sound like we're getting any new ancestries in this one, but some official openning up of Automaton lore is welcome. The "Jistkan Soul Cage" flavor is fun but might feel a little restrictive to some players, official recognition that the same technology has arrisen with different origins and designs gives people more licence to be creative with it.
...some official openning [sic] up of Automaton lore is welcome. The "Jistkan Soul Cage" flavor is fun but might feel a little restrictive to some players, official recognition that the same technology has arrisen [sic] with different origins and designs gives people more licence [sic] to be creative with it.
I agree! That's one thing that I really LOVE about this new blog post.
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…Okay you didn't need to specifically go in and add [sic] to all my spelling errors, the post is two up, people can see it for themselves.
…Okay you didn't need to specifically go in and add [sic] to all my spelling errors, the post is two up, people can see it for themselves.
Sorry. Editor/journalist habit.
Pallemi seems an interesting character, a person displaced in time and unusual in species. However, I am perplexed that iconic runesmith's backstory mentions runes only secondarily. The only mention of runes was:
Once he began learning the names of the aspects of magic, he found himself able to wield it himself. It started with simple words allowing him to create sparks of electricity to wake new constructs, or bits of ice to cool a forge. The words eventually took the form of runes, commanding greater power. Pallemi’s mentors took note and provided greater teachings. He learned more about runes. He studied the magic of local faiths and soothsayers. He even learned to fight with a weapon for the times he needed to stop an uncontrollable guardian. After several years, he received his greatest task yet: the automaton.
That feels more like construct smithing than runesmithing.
That leaves the question of whether Pallemi learned fast casting of runes in the Runesmith class in ancient times as an ancient form of magic before spellcasting become dominant, or whether he learned it in modern Golarion because he already had mastered runes for construct construction.
I think Pallemi as concept good, but for immortal person I wished he had more history and adventures behind them, not being in research lab for thousands of years.
Pallemi entered a burning house to save a neighbor before he learned any magic. That is an adventure. I can imagine an Iconic Encounter story where present-day Pallemi is rescuing someone from a house fire using his magic and his construct abilities while having a flashback to that day in his youth. Interesting stories do not have to be about great and historic events.
He's got that full metal alchemist deal going, and I can respect that.
He's got that full metal alchemist deal going, and I can respect that.
Ooh! I hadn't even considered that!
I wonder if the character was in any way inspired by Alphonse Elric.
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Thassilonian would depend on intended age. The only way for a thassilonian automaton to exist is for it to come from New Thassilon, as Automatons didn't exist pre Earthfall. Which means any time-displaced Thassilonians would only have 8 years to reverse engineer an automaton and implant themselves into the chassis. In short, it's impossible for a Thassilonian automaton to have been in the chassis for more than 8 years, more realistically, only a couple of years, pretty much a brand new chassis. And at that point, an Automaton really could have just come from any particularly talented contemporary constructworks.
This supposes that the art of creating Automaton-like creatures was not known to Azlanti or other pre-Earthfall people.
Considering how devastating Earthfall was, it could have been lost until the Jistkan Empire (re)created it.
Like Arcane magic and Old-Mage Jatembe.
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The lore established at the time indicated that what the Jistkan empire got from the Azlanti was golem craft, not automaton craft, and that automaton craft was a Jistkan innovation. Which, sure, you can retcon it by saying that they also borrowed it from the azlanti, but it feels a bit weird to establish a society as having a notable innovation, and then retconning the innovation even being theirs.
Plus to be frank, the Thassilonians and the Azlanti were bigger operations than the Jistka Imperium. If they had the capacity to make Automatons, they would have made automatons in numbers that equaled or exceeded that of the Jistka Imperium, and would have been a common iteration on the race from day 1.
Not necessarily, there is still plenty of lost Azlanti and Thassilonian technology being rediscovered to this day on Golarion (and other worlds).
And as far as retcons, it would certainly be FAR less severe and unnatural to suggest that a culture that regularly engaged in advanced construct building may have had some access to Automaton-adjacent creations that are only now being unearthed than, say, "OOPS!! Turns out all the appearances and accounts of Drow were just propaganda from one Pathfinder agent and it was Serpentfolk the entire tiiiiime!"
Scale is irrelevant too, it could just as easily be that even though they were so powerful and expansive, the Azlanti/Thassilonians still only "perfected" the technique very late into their reign before Earthfall. Or just that the means was still so costly and complex that they couldn't expand it into an industrial scale the same way they could with non-sentient constructs. Plus their whole "human supremacy" vibe may have caused a lot of them to shun the idea of imparting their own souls into their creations (with the very notable exception of First King Xin).
All that to say, I don't feel like it would be a stretch at all for Paizo to expand Automatons out beyond just the Jistkan empire and if anyone were to precede them in analogous technology, it would definitely be the Azlanti/Thassilonians.
ADDENDUM TANGENT: Perhaps when pairing the civilizations for shorthand we can utilize a portmanteau like the Azlantilonians? Or Thassilanti? ;P
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Jistkan soul-cores are a very different sort of tech than Azlanti clockworks, even if both are constructs. The soul core is the unique part of the Jistkan process that means you get a person rather than a set of instructions, and I'd honestly suspect a cuckoo hag (or other maker of Soulbound constructs, I guess) would have a closer starting point for reverse-engineering the Jistkan techniques than a Thassiloni clockwork maker.
(I'm kinda wondering if the Jiskan's intermediary stages, where they were animating mindless constructs with fiendish extraplanar energy, were an important development stage towards actually figuring out how to put a soul in a construct to both power it and provide a personality/memory)
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Actually it was not just extraplanar energy, it was fiends themselves. The foundations of golemcraft was the binding of elementals with abjurations and illusions to pacify and imprison them. The Jistkans experimented with binding fiends and celestials themselves into the cores rather than the traditional practice of elementals.
Great bits of lore. Thank you.
Now I feel the impetus for this experimentation might have come from people corrupted by fiends and that all Automatons might have core instructions within them to turn them into puppets of the ones who engineered this whole conspiracy.
And that this possibility was what convinced Azlanti to not delve too deep in souls-animated constructs.
This will be my head-canon on this from now on.
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Actually it was not just extraplanar energy, it was fiends themselves. The foundations of golemcraft was the binding of elementals with abjurations and illusions to pacify and imprison them. The Jistkans experimented with binding fiends and celestials themselves into the cores rather than the traditional practice of elementals.
Can you provide the source(s)for that? I'm curious to know more.
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