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 I promised Not-India and Not-London, and here they are.  The Verdurous Lands are hot, humid and posses dense vegetation. There's only a dry and a rainy season. Saragoss Saragoss is a large ship graveyard, covered with a never-ending fog hiding the treacherous seaweed that grasps any passing ship and never lets go. The few inhabitants are all sailors stuck there, fighting each other to survive in a brutal environment where resources are few and limited. Sharks and monsters also haunt the sea: from ghost buccaneers to scaly fishman will appear to attack the hapless sailors. Few escape, as they cannot know that just beyond the fog to the south lies land. Sri Raji The cities of Sri Raji are walled bastion of civilizations surrounded by vast rice fields. Outside of these areas, dense jungle and ancient ruins can be found. The ruler is the dread Maharaja Arijani, who lives in the Accursed City of Bahru, inside his palace Mahakala. He is actually the high priest of Kali, but no one opposes his self-promotion to Maharaja. Despite his cleric spies being everywhere, all Arijani asks from his people is a single sacrifice to Kali each day. The poor chosen is sent to Bahru on an albino elephant, never to return. The cities have some amazingly beautiful architecture, contrasted with abject poverty in the streets. The caste system that rules the Domain is absolute. The Sri Rajians take tradition and religion very seriously, with a large number of gods and a complex theology based on cosmic cycles. The University of Tvashti is world-renowned, as the wisest scholars study all facets of technology and the natural world within it's halls and libraries. Despite this, Sri Raji is merely CR4 (Classical).  The Wildlands South of Sri Raji are the Wildlands, a land of beasts where man is not welcome. It's a large land, teeming with all kinds of wildlife both natural and supernatural. Any attempts at settlement have been ruthlessly crushed. Some do still adventure into the land, in search of emeralds or gold or even the legendary elephant's graveyard said to exist within the Wildlands. Strangely, it seems as if no snakes exists within this Domain.  The most useful map Zherisia was the name for the Domain that once existed outside of Paridon, and though the land is now unknown the inhabitants of the city have kept calling it that way. Paridon Paridon is a bleak city, steeped in fog and bloodshed. Everyone tries to be home before nightfall, to escape from the brigands and scarier things that come out. With the disappearance of the Domain that once fed the city, they have transformed their once-beautiful parks into meager crops. They also import a lot fo foodstuff from other Domains, but hunger remains a problem for the lower classes. Religion isn't common, although the "theological philosophy" of the Divinity of Mankind is popular. This cult preaches perfection of the mind, body and spirit. The city is ruled by a council of aristocrats, who care little for the needs of the lower classes, but is surprisingly progressive in other ways. The press is not controlled by the aristocracy, and the law applies equally to all. Every 13 year, the city's most infamous inhabitant strikes: the still uncaught Bloody Jack. The killer is due to begin his rampage again this year. Timor Some scholars have recently noticed that the sewers of Paridon no longer fits with the existing maps. It's because they are now the Domain of Timor: an endless maze of brick tunnels, always leading further down, filled with filth, poison and monsters. Those who get lost down there rarely come up again. The inhabitants of this Domain, if any, are unknown but most likely not human. Next: After the smaller Clusters, we now reach the Islands of Terrors, all alone in the Mists.
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May 21, 2017 05:37
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Covok posted:I see your argument on the devolutionsit, but the ape thing may just be a reference to mankind evolving from a shared ancestor with apes. Like, Gorrilla Grod (except not thinking he's upgrading people). The problem isn't the authorial intent, its what the audience is invariably going to read into it. More than a decade now and there's only been the tiniest bit of movement away from writing for and marketing to the people that are now literal fascists. Paizo's QA could have caught this and not included it, or included it with a big sidebar calling out anyone that "goes there" with the class. But they didn't because they knew it would blow up in their faces if they did. It's gross, Pathfinder is bad, and Paizo needs to be excoriated for it. e: The Living Grimoire is a neat idea. For me, it hearkens back the glut of Japanese-style RPGS of the PS1 era, where every character had a unique set of weapons like books, soup laddles, and water polo balls. ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 06:32 on May 21, 2017 |
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May 21, 2017 05:37
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Cease to Hope posted:the devolutionist's animal companion is a devolved humanoid. you can just get rid of that, obviously, but then all you're left with is an ability that you could just as easy write up as a niche spell. (and it is a spell later in this book: Vile Dog Transformation turns any ordinary dog into an acid-mawed wolf monster) I love that spell too because of how dumb it is. See, at the end of the spell the hell-acid-dogs die/dissolve/whatever, so the spell requires a save. But you can bypass the save if you raised the animal yourself. It also doesn't give two shits what kind of dog you're casting the spell on, they all turn into the same template. So the ideal way to use the spell is to have an extra-dimensional chihuahua puppy mill. PurpleXVI posted:However. For me the highlight here is the Living Grimoire, because hell yeah smacking bad guys and monsters around with a huge book. I love the fact that it's an intellectual divine character, and that it uses the improbable weapon to smack things. Reminds me of an old Scion character I had that used one of the Epic Strength knacks to beat people up with a laptop messenger bag.
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May 21, 2017 06:21
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 Rifts World Book 11: Coalition War Campaign Part Eighteen: "If the CS authorities learn about the stalag, they will shut it down and mercifully execute the poor tortured D-bees."  "It's okay to kill D-Bees if they're orcs, right? I mean, genre conventions." Adventures & Settings Regarding the Coalition Oh my gently caress, how is this tire fire of a book not over yet? Well, we're almost there. We get some rando musings here from Siembieda regarding running adventures around the Coalition. He says not to overestimate the strength of the Coalition, and that there are other forces in North America that might rival him. Tolkeen might be powerful enough to oppose them (big emphasis on might given how the metaplot will go), the Xiticix might attack the Coalition, Archie-3 might take action in their conflicts, Lazlo is an unknown factor, as is the Federation of Magic. There also could be unknown new powers that pop in through a rift at any time. Rifts World Book 11: Coalition War Campaign posted:What madness and dark force that exists at the very heart of the Coalition States themselves? Not everybody is content playing second fiddle to the Great Prosek family. Well, you wouldn't know it from all the fuckin' sycophant Coalition NPCs in the books. Quentin Turnbull is the closest thing we've seen to a discontent, and he not only has no actual power in the Coalition, but he's a footnote at best. In any case, there's a lot of handwaving over anything could happen, you guys, which is nice of them to say until they publish seven Coalition Wars books and tell us in no uncertain terms how it turns out, PC agency be hosed. But we've got a long time before that particular debacle infests the game line and don't need to fret about it. Yet. That obviously wasn't planned out when this book was being written, but it's the future weren't heading towards.  "Super-high tech helmet and I still have to use old-fashioned glass lens technology to sight in with. Makes sense." Hook, Line and Sinker™ Quick, down and dirty adventure ideas HLS created by Jolly Blackburn Rifts® Adventures written by Kevin Siembieda Just like in Rifts Index & Adventures 1, we get adventure seeds in the Hook, Line, and Sinker format (which also gave us the derivative Challenge, Focus, Strike format in Legend of the Five Rings). I'm going to cover them as quickly as we can to wrap this drat book up.
Rifts World Book 11: Coalition War Campaign posted:To the Rescue  We get the nonsense XP tables, including one for "ISS Psi-Stalker" (doesn't exist). There's an XP table for "D-Bee Vagabond" but I don't know what they refers to, because it's different from the normal Vagabond table but doesn't have any corresponding class. And that... is... that.  Denoument As much as I hate to harp on CJ's absence really affecting the line, the difference in quality since his departure is readily apparent. Coalition War Campaign is loaded with half-baked ideas and realizes very few of them. The editing is embarrassing. It's also loaded with ham-fisted Coalition back-patting, including the excruciating metaplot used to excise material Siembieda doesn't seem to care for. Attempts to humanize the Coalition just come across as apologism for fascism, and it keeps wanting to have it both ways where they're heroes on the ground but villains at the top, and it profoundly doesn't work. Lastly, the whole Tolkeen campaign isn't really detailed enough to use, since we still barely know poo poo about Tolkeen to begin with. The line is in a sharp nose-dive and it's going to stay pretty bad for a long while before it gets better. So far as I've reviewed, it's a tossup between this book and Rifts World Book Four: Africa as competition for what I think is the worst book in the line. Africa is still probably the worst for me on account of its ugly art, lack of direction, and faceless stereotypes, but Coalition War Campaign comes close with its appalling editing, writing, and design, which really shows a new low in the game line. And, of course, the excuses for genocide veiled behind the "aren't we all just humans" attempt at shades of grey. I kind of wanted to get to the point where I can review this book because I figured it'd be prime fodder, but I didn't realize how absolutely gross it could be upon just a casual read. And that's it! We're done with this disaster.Well, the Coalition won't be away long, because the next World Book I'll be covering will focus on them again, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. But before that... Next: Time for me to get out the mic again? Already? Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 07:29 on May 21, 2017 |
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May 21, 2017 06:50
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Honestly I don't see the racism angle with the devolutionist at all? They devolve humanoids into apes because the less-evolved form of a human is indeed some kind of ape (nothing is actually more or less 'evolved' than anything else really but it's a common enough misconception). The fact that racists peddle 'black ape' bullshit doesn't really have anything to do with it beyond the fact that they both relate to the base concept that an ape is a lesser kind of human being. EDIT: That said, defending loving Pathfinder of all things is not a hill I'm willing to die on. ZeroCount fucked around with this message at 07:01 on May 21, 2017 |
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May 21, 2017 06:54
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The line is in a sharp nose-dive (...) ZeroCount posted:Honestly I don't see the racism angle with the devolutionist at all? 
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May 21, 2017 07:03
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ZeroCount posted:Honestly I don't see the racism angle with the devolutionist at all? They devolve humanoids into apes because the less-evolved form of a human is indeed some kind of ape (nothing is actually more or less 'evolved' than anything else really but it's a common enough misconception). The fact that racists peddle 'black ape' bullshit doesn't really have anything to do with it beyond the fact that they both relate to the base concept that an ape is a lesser kind of human being. I actually think the twist to do with that concept would be to invert it and go full Dr. Moreau. You get the same general effect of being dark but teamwork-compatible and now your big buddy is an ape or a bull or whatever that you made more human, not a human you degenerated.
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May 21, 2017 07:10
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Asimo posted:I... envy your naivete here. Go check some of the right wing media threads in D&D and come to a quick understanding about how easily stuff like this can be read in horrible ways.
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May 21, 2017 07:11
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Somebody post that Planetary page where HP Lovecraft is utterly convinced that black people are an egg laying alien species.
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May 21, 2017 07:14
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ZeroCount posted:Honestly I don't see the racism angle with the devolutionist at all? They devolve humanoids into apes because the less-evolved form of a human is indeed some kind of ape (nothing is actually more or less 'evolved' than anything else really but it's a common enough misconception). The fact that racists peddle 'black ape' bullshit doesn't really have anything to do with it beyond the fact that they both relate to the base concept that an ape is a lesser kind of human being. racists also peddle the idea that the correct place for inferior people is as servants at best, and the devo druid has a devolved humanoid pet. racists also also peddle lovely ideas about evolution as part of "race realist" ideas about how black people are less evolved and less intelligent than other races. racists also also also are the only ones who ever use "feral" to describe human beings outside of the extremely limited context of a child who grew up without human contact. this one's just hosed. i know they were going for the whole dr. moreau and jekyll/hyde idea of "human evolution" - we're going to see a lot more of that later, with varying degrees of success - but this one trips hard over the racism deeply embedded in those turn-of-the-century ideas.
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May 21, 2017 07:14
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Asimo posted:This is really an understatement, I think. I lasted another two or three books I think before unceremoniously dropping the line, and while I think some of that was growing out of my teens and realizing how crappy RIFTS actually was, I was still picking up other RPGs at the time and the drop in book tone and quality is really noticeable in retrospect, especially when laid out like this. Hey, I called it a "disaster", and a "tire fire", I don't know what else you want me to say! Mind, "least favorite" was too kind a weasel phrase and I fixed it. Coalition War Campaign is one of the worst. Not as bad as Africa, but possibly even worse than Spirit West in my estimation. Breaux's new robot and vehicle designs are the only real highlight I'd see as worth salvaging from its pages. I guess Nowak's rank references are at least a useful reference. But the adventure seed at the end where it talks about "mercifully" executing D-Bees clinches it for me. It really is that bad.
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May 21, 2017 07:41
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Asimo posted:I... envy your naivete here. Go check some of the right wing media threads in D&D and come to a quick understanding about how easily stuff like this can be read in horrible ways. I've done this. It'd definitely be much different in a racial element was raised at any point and in any way but it wasn't. Cease to Hope posted:racists also peddle the idea that the correct place for inferior people is as servants at best, and the devo druid has a devolved humanoid pet. racists also also peddle lovely ideas about evolution as part of "race realist" ideas about how black people are less evolved and less intelligent than other races. racists also also also are the only ones who ever use "feral" to describe human beings outside of the extremely limited context of a child who grew up without human contact. this one's just hosed. i know they were going for the whole dr. moreau and jekyll/hyde idea of "human evolution" - we're going to see a lot more of that later, with varying degrees of success - but this one trips hard over the racism deeply embedded in those turn-of-the-century ideas. [/quote] In regards to the first one, keeping an ape as a pet or as a slave is something a lot of people do. We as a society still do it and we do it frequently. I saw a bunch of chimps in a zoo like, five months ago. This is just an unfortunate thing that humans do to apes and is what the devolutionist does to their ape. The fact that their ape was once a proper person is really hosed up and I'm not sure why it isn't a purely evil class. Again, the source material is not raising the racial element here. It's a thing that turns humans into apes and then enslaves the apes. That racists frequently refer to black people as apes and want to enslave them is not a connection. If anything it's two different things that both relate to the same core idea, the idea that apes are a weird kind of lesser human. The devolutionist is just a fairly simple extrapolation of this idea while racists take this idea and use it to apply terms like ape to the various groups of people that they consider to have a similar status. I understand that you feel the core idea itself has been tainted by association but I don't think racists adopting a particular thing to use as justification makes that thing by itself unusable. A few months ago a bunch of nazis were making a big dumb ruckus over milk and lactose tolerance for some dumbass reason but I wouldn't expect anyone to abandon dairy because of it. Now using 'ape' as a pejorative has definitely been tainted and I wouldn't do it to anyone but I don't think the entire goddamn concept of apes or silly evolutionary levels as they exist in the public imagination is sullied.
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May 21, 2017 08:00
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ZeroCount posted:In regards to the first one, keeping an ape as a pet or as a slave is something a lot of people do. We as a society still do it and we do it frequently. I saw a bunch of chimps in a zoo like, five months ago. This is just an unfortunate thing that humans do to apes and is what the devolutionist does to their ape. The devolved companion is a human(oid) though, not an ape. You are picturing a gorilla here and it's just not what the book says. quote:They transform intelligent creatures and domesticated animals into throwbacks to their feral ancestors. Like, you could definitely play that as "vaguely elf-y or dwarf-y gorilla" and that's probably a good plan, but they failed to nail that here and their failure is pretty significant. I don't care about druids with monkey butlers, but it gets weird and ugly when you stick a (even former) person in that role.
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May 21, 2017 08:17
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That's why you Moreau it up! Now your big lunk is a surgically modified antelope!
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May 21, 2017 08:52
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Cease to Hope posted:Living Grimoires are a bizarre combination of inquisitors, Advanced Class Guide's warpriests, and wizards. Instead of having the free-floating Judgement combat bonus of normal inquisitors, they have a metal-bound holy book. The holy book is a magic weapon, with level-based weapon damage and scaling magical abilities taken directly from the warpriest. The book also doubles as a spellbook: instead of using WIS-based spontaneous casting, living grimoires are prepared spellcasters that use INT and scribe spells in their holy book like a wizard's spellbook. The end result is a significantly worse melee (or ranged) combatant than a standard inquisitor, but somewhat more effective spellcaster. It's not a good tradeoff - inquisitors will never be as good as a primary spellcaster - but it's certainly still playable. I'm sort of sad I missed this class when I set up the character I'm playing in a Pathfinder campaign currently. Instead I just refluffed a heavy shield on a Lore Oracle.
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May 21, 2017 09:16
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wiegieman posted:Somebody post that Planetary page where HP Lovecraft is utterly convinced that black people are an egg laying alien species.  ?
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May 21, 2017 09:43
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May 21, 2017 09:55
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Hey, I called it a "disaster", and a "tire fire", I don't know what else you want me to say! Mind, "least favorite" was too kind a weasel phrase and I fixed it. Coalition War Campaign is one of the worst. Not as bad as Africa, but possibly even worse than Spirit West in my estimation. Breaux's new robot and vehicle designs are the only real highlight I'd see as worth salvaging from its pages. I guess Nowak's rank references are at least a useful reference. But the adventure seed at the end where it talks about "mercifully" executing D-Bees clinches it for me. It really is that bad. I can't wait to see the horrors of the actual coalition "story arc" though since I've never read a Rifts book released since, I think, New West?
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May 21, 2017 10:46
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Nessus posted:People are really committed to racism and while I think there is a point where you are letting the racists live rent-free in your head, this one was not a cognitive leap of great breadth or complexity. There is actually a Pathfinder archetype (and spell) for that! The spell, anthropomorphic animal, is for druids and wizards; the archetype, vivisectionist, is for alchemists, who then get that spell and can make it permanent without the permanency spell. (They also get baleful polymorph and regenerate and a bunch of other tricks that have nothing to do with anthropomorphic animal.) Sadly, there's no archetype that gets one as an animal companion. I think. I kind of wish there was, default anthropomorphic animals are kind of mechanically bad (in that they're often not great for the cost required, not that they're done in a confusing way). I mean, they're cool, just not good. They don't get any more HP than the animal had, though they don't lose any either. They lose some of their natural abilities in exchange for becoming intelligent and getting hands, but they're dumb as a post (INT 3; you'd think you could also cast awaken on them to make them fully intelligent, but that would make them a magical beast and you can't anthropomorphize those with the spell). The best way to get a powerful one is to use a really big animal. edit: T-Rex Man would be pretty scary though. Prism fucked around with this message at 13:04 on May 21, 2017 |
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May 21, 2017 12:56
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Cease to Hope posted:The devolved companion is a human(oid) though, not an ape. You are picturing a gorilla here and it's just not what the book says. Oh, I'd always assumed they were apes but you're right, they don't actually specify that. That does come off as a lot more suss then yeah.
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May 21, 2017 13:02
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Nessus posted:That's why you Moreau it up! Now your big lunk is a surgically modified antelope! If I did that, I'd borrow from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen... then get sad when nobody at the table recognized Rupert the Bear.
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May 21, 2017 15:15
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Heck, even keep the "regressed human" angle and not just go with the ape's stats. Maybe the human ends up with traits from other animals, or even plants or elementals. Sort of like inflicting an unwanted version of wildshape that makes them dumb and compliant.
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May 21, 2017 15:58
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Asimo posted:Honestly, horrible as Africa was, what stood out to me at the time was Triax & the NGR. Which was... what, ten pages of vague and completely useless setting information followed by pointlessly redundant statblocks of guns, robots, and reprinted monsters? Even to my stat-addled teenage brain I remember being unable, to help but think how pointless the whole drat book was, but Carella's stuff started shortly after that so I guess it delayed my dropping of the line a few years. But Coalition War Campaign was basically that but worse, since even if it had more setting information it was both almost as useless and way, way creepier. Triax & the NGR at least has consistently good (if derivative) mecha designs and a central conflict to play with, and if you want to play NGR troops, at least you get to be just horrible nativists instead of horrible fascists. Which is perhaps splitting hairs, but you're at least not asked to genocide any gnome babies. To me, the interest-killer was actually England, because it's so scattershot and mind-numbingly boring. Then again, it's even Siembieda's admitted least-favorite book because it "doesn't evoke England well enough". Needed mecha-beefeaters and cyber-corgis, I suppose.
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May 21, 2017 17:41
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
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May 21, 2017 17:46
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Doesn't every campaign? I mean, if you're just going riff off of national stereotypes as Rifts often does you might as well go all the way.
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May 21, 2017 17:59
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The only good thing I perceive about Simbieda's mecha 💀 and magic game is that every single time you guys start talking about it, amazing ideas gush forth. That's it.
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May 21, 2017 18:07
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:The only good thing I perceive about Simbieda's mecha 💀 and magic game is that every single time you guys start talking about it, amazing ideas gush forth. I firmly believe that some things exist only to inspire others to do better. Much like my posting.
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May 21, 2017 18:53
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I mean, if you're just going riff off of national stereotypes as Rifts often does you might as well go all the way. Needed a double decker troop transport with a skull wearing a crown on the front that has minimissile launchers that blare out an endless loop of hail britannia.
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May 21, 2017 20:08
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Barudak posted:Needed a double decker troop transport with a skull wearing a crown on the front that has minimissile launchers that blare out an endless loop of hail britannia. It also needs to have like Juicer Chavs, except it's not Juice running through their rigs, it's just normal street drugs.
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May 21, 2017 20:51
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But for some unexplained reason you need a 13 ME to qualify to play one.
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May 22, 2017 03:11
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oh god it's coming, we can't stop the...  HORRIBLE ADVENTURES Part 6: CSI Golarion There's two more updates worth of archetypes to get through, and we've still got 135 pages or so worth of rules to dig through before we get any explicit advice on what characters in a horror campaign might actually do. So much of this chapter is useless to anyone who doesn't have a huge pile of Pathfinder books, unless you use one of the exhaustive Pathfinder SRD sites. This is late-stage D&D at its most sclerotic and self-referential, with extra options embroidering the extra options from previous books. Don't ask me, I missed my check by 14 points Investigators are the rogue/alchemist hybrid from Advanced Class Guide, and they specialize in making rogues feel bad. Cult hunters study a cult during downtime, and increases their combat bonuses against that particular cult while decreasing them against everyone else. They get a bunch of defensive abilities against the things cults do, like brainwashing or poisoning people, too. There's some fuzziness about what it means to be a "follower of a cult" for the purpose of bonuses: does it include mercenaries? Summoned creatures? Created undead or constructs? It's atypically vague for Pathfinder. Grave diggers hunt undead, similarly to the way cult hunters hunt cults. They're also a hybrid of investigator and Occult Adventures' occultist: they can use a bone as a necromancy implement and a lantern as a conjuration implement. Layering two different spellcasting systems over each other makes a terribly complicated character that doesn't say "grave digger" to me. Profilers are supposed to be Sherlock Holmes types that can tell what happened at a crime scene and where the killer went next and what they were wearing. To do this, they have an extremely limited version of Track that only works on crime scenes and requires DC 40 or higher Sense Motive checks, once per hour. This is an ability they get at level 3! It's not like profilers give up anything of value compared to regular investigators, but it's bafflingly useless. All three of these archetypes are pretty bad, but they all at least have a clear niche in a horror game. They suffer a bit from the problem that they are very focused on a specific situation or enemy, but at least they're situations and enemies that might reasonably appear in the sort of campaigns this book later suggests GMs run. No cabbage vendor yet Kineticists, from Occult Adventures, are Benders from Avatar the Last Airbender mixed with 3.5e/4e warlocks, plus a side of X-Men. They're spellcasters that mainly rely on element- or telekinesis-themed at-will powers. Dark elementalists suck a whole lot. Instead of relying on high CON like other kineticists, they're INT-based, and fairly strictly restricted in how much burn they can take to power their abilities. However, if a sentient creature died in their presence during the last minute, they can offload their burn to that creature's lingering soul, which incidentally makes it harder to revive that creature. It's an evil-only archetype for a not-terribly-interesting one-shot villain. Psychokineticists are WIS-based kineticists that take burn in the form of penalties to Will saves and WIS-based skill checks instead of as nonlethal damage. Most of the text is given over to covering the obvious resulting loopholes. They're worse than regular kineticists because of their smaller burn pool, but at least they don't suck quite as bad as the very similar overwhelming soul archetype from Occult Adventures. I'm also not clear what they have to do with horror - kineticists are the least spooky class from Occult Adventures. Kineticists also get two new powers! It's a temporary elemental familiar you can upgrade to a permanent one with a second power choice. Spooky. Bloody Rare Mediums are Occult Adventures' take on the Binder from D&D 3.5e's Tome of Magic. They make pacts with legendary spirits to draw on their power. Each spirit is a collection of permanent class abilities, but mediums can switch spirits with some prep time. These new spirits are modified versions of the base spirits, and to use them you have to give up access to the base spirit. For example, the Butcher is an archetype for the Champion, so the Butcher's abilities replace some of the Champion's. To summon one of these legendary spirits, the medium has to do some thematic task, then swear an oath, which varies depending on the spirit but always involves promising never to summon the regular vanilla spirit counterpart ever again. Breaking the oath means you can't ever summon that non-core spirit ever again. I get that they don't want to give the medium a bunch of free power expansions, but this is really complicated to explain and the requirements to summon these special spirits are all some really ridiculous bullshit. On top of all of this, it really wouldn't be a big deal to make the medium stronger! It's not very strong to begin with, and plenty of classes automatically get more powerful whenever they get new options from a non-core book. The Butcher replaces the fightmans Champion spirit, but I don't know how or why anyone would bother with it. First, to even summon it, you need to do a ton of bleed damage first - but mediums don't actually get any abilities that cause bleed damage. Even if you get over that hurdle, none of the Butcher's abilities are better than the Champion's extra attack per turn on a full attack anyway. One Butcher ability is notable in how clearly it illustrates this book's navel-gazing emphasis on cross-referencing the rest of the line, no matter how inane. A medium channeling the Butcher grants all of his slashing weapons the Deadly ability, from Pathfinder Ultimate Equipment. That sounds useful, I wonder what it does! Ultimate Equipment posted:Deadly: When you use this weapon to deliver a coup de grace, it gains a +4 bonus to damage when calculating the DC of the Fortitude saving throw to see whether the target of the coup de grace dies from the attack. The bonus is not added to the actual damage of the coup de grace attack. Oh. That's terrible. Not only is that terrible, couldn't they have just said, "A Butcher's coup de grace attacks add +4 to the DC of the target's Fortitude saving throw to avoid death"? On top of that, that has the same name as the unrelated (and also completely useless) Deadly magic item quality, also in Ultimate Equipment. The Deceiver replaces the sneaky Trickster's bonus to DEX checks with a bonus to CHA checks and Will saves to resist being spied on or told what to do. Summoning requires the medium to swear to "never make a truthful statement, except to answer a question whose answer is clearly already known to the asker" sothat poo poo's not playable for PCs. Even if the GM ignores that very stupid vow, its only new trick is a 11th level ability to redirect an attack of opportunity to another target in reach, once per attacker per day. The Heretic is a more or less evil-only version of the clerical Hierophant spirit. To summon it, "you must first pervert the worship of a congregation of worshipers of a good deity to evil," so you can get the Heretic's ability to pretend to be a member of another religion and fool its followers. You don't have to be evil to do that, I suppose, but it's a pretty evil thing to do! This spirit could easily be rewritten to allow for infiltrating an evil cult, I guess, but that wasn't something the author felt like supporting for whatever reason. It's probably because they can spontaneously cast any cleric spell of a spell level they can normally cast at the cost of 1 influence, as long as a true believer of the infiltrated religion asks them to cast that spell. The Lich is a variation on the Archmage spirit, and surprisingly playable! To channel the lich, you have to make a plan for making a phylactery, because it lets you make one-shot phylacteries for yourself for 10K gp a pop. The significant downside is that you can't choose which spells you want to learn from channeling the Archmage; you have to pick the pre-chosen list of necromancy spells. This means giving up half of one of the most powerful medium abilities: being able to grant yourself knowledge of any cleric or sorc/wiz spell whenever you have enough time to switch spirits. The Terminator is a variation of the garbage Guardian spirit, and they didn't even bother filing the numbers off. Everyone here has seen that movie, right? It has that stupid useless Diehard ability where you don't fall unconscious at 0 HP, it shrugs off bleed effects, it's immune to morale bonuses because gently caress bards, it's just generally useless. It's so lazy and bad that I almost missed that it's yet another option in this book that grants immunity to fear. The Warmonger is a variation on the vanilla Marshal spirit that grants extra bonuses to attacks of opportunity. It's here for the sake of completeness I guess. Improved Emotional Abuse (Ex) The mesmerist is Occult Adventures' psychic bard variant that gives people the evil eye and implanting hypnotic triggers in their allies, rather than singing songs. The Dreamstalker is a hybrid of the mesmerist and Advanced Players' Guide's witch class, which only makes sense if you remember that the witch hex everyone everywhere takes first is Slumber Hex, at-will save-or-sleep with no HD cap. The dreamstalker gets slumber hex but with limited uses, get some random sleep/dream/nightmare-flavored chaff, and can give up their mesmerist tricks to learn extra witch spells in addition to their regular spells. The next two mesmerist archetypes are only available to evil characters. In fact, one of them isn't suited to any game and is a terrible loving idea that should have been spiked at the pitch stage. The gaslighter isn't quite what the name implies, but it's still an exceptionally bad idea. Their abilities are all focused on making their victims afraid of or repulsed by their own reflection. I think the idea is that the gaslighter is fooling enemies into thinking they've been transformed into something horrible, but that isn't well-communicated. Rather, it just comes off as magically inflicting body dysphoria on people, as well as eroding their sanity. (The latter ability is even named "Corrosion of Sanity".) Take away "magic" and you're just describing real emotional abuse, in an archetype named after real emotional abuse. It can't even be defended with good intentions: "gaslighting" is a name for a specific kind of abuse, and there's no possible alternate meaning! The name doesn't even make any sense, since Pathfinder doesn't have gas lights. While Horror Adventures does give decent advice on being up front about possible emotional triggers for players, the gaslighter is so specific and targeted that I can't imagine it would ever be a good idea to roll the dice on it. The Hatemonger is the other evil-only mesmerist archetype, and it's a little more reasonable. They gain a bunch of spells to encourage hate or manipulate people into hating each other, and can surreptitiously lace their "touch treatment" healing ability with these spells. Adding a single ranger-style favored enemy is a nice touch. I don't know many Pathfinder GMs who use these complicated player-style character options for NPCs, but even if you don't, the Insidious Hatred healing-mixed-with-enchantments ability is easy to steal for a variety of different sorts of villain. Magic Murder Bag Occultists, a class from Occult Adventures that really needs a better name, are psychic spellcasters who channel their spells through themed focuses. They're similar to Eberron's artificers or Magic of Incarnum's soulmeld classes. You would think a class that literally uses bell, book, and candle would be fertile material for horror-themed games, but the two occultist archetypes are incredibly complicated messes. Either of them could have been adapted for almost any spellcasting class in the game, and they both have the same gimmick. Haunt collectors take a full page, nearly a thousand words, to say that a haunt collector occultist can set magical traps. The trap is a ghost that casts a spell on whoever the occultist specifies, under conditions specified by the occultist. Also, they get the most inconsequential ability from the medium class, just to make things confusing. Talisman collectors scribe master talismans to use as focuses, which work exactly like normal focuses. All of their other abilities use spellbound talismans, which are spells scribed on a small object. They can throw spellbound talismans to apply touch spells at range or give spellbound talismans to allies to activate on their turn. Talisman collectors can also cast a spell as a triggerable magical trap, this time as a glyph contained in a magical circle instead of a ghost. Besides the awkwardness of having two different abilities both named "talismans," this isn't an archetype so much as two metamagic feats taped together. They aren't even thematically linked: scribing talismans does not naturally lead to throwing those talismans like a dart. Jesus Was Way Cool Now that we've gotten to paladins, you'd expect a straightforward swap to remove the immunity to fear and replace it with a comparable ability that doesn't cause as many problems in a horror game. So of course there's nothing like that. Martyr paladins have bleeding stigmata, which for some reason inspires their allies exactly like bardic song. They can also use lay on hands at range and can use any paladin mercy they want on an ally, but whatever condition they remove from an ally they have to transfer to themselves. Martyr paladins also lose the immunity to fear as a tradeoff for making their auras wider, but it's tied up in an archetype with an extremely specific theme. They also lose divine grace for an extremely dumb "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" save bonus aura against bardic performances, language-dependent or sonic spells, and gaze attacks, so nobody's going to bother with this. Soul sentinels get a mercy that removes confusion and a mercy that temporarily suppresses the corruptions from chapter 1 and I don't understand why this is presented as an archetype instead of just a pair of additions to the list of mercies that paladins can choose. They also get an aura that protects allies from curses and hexes. They're still immune to fear. Tortured crusaders are selfish paladins. They don't benefit from CHA (and cast spells with WIS) and their to-hit and AC benefit from Smite Evil is fixed at +4. They can set a contingency where their lay on hands activates on themselves automatically, and trade in uses of lay on hands to get extra uses of smite evil. However, they can't heal allies with lay on hands, they don't have mercies, and their auras don't affect their allies. Of course, their auras do still affect themselves, so they're still immune to fear! Setting aside the silliness with the immunity to fear, these archetypes do feel like they belong in this book, when so many others don't. Martyrs and tortured crusaders feel like reasonable modifications of the core paladin for a world of terrible, terrifying things, and soul sentinels interact with this book's new systems and presumed villains. Soul sentinels are the strongest, Next time on HORRIBLE ADVENTURES: 
Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 05:39
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Why do games insist on presenting all their 'this is just for the villain, we mean it, seriously' poo poo as viable player options?
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May 22, 2017 06:27
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Leraika posted:Why do games insist on presenting all their 'this is just for the villain, we mean it, seriously' poo poo as viable player options? it's a 3e thing. monsters and NPCs use the same rules as PCs and every option available to a NPC is (theoretically) also available to a player character.
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May 22, 2017 06:34
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Leraika posted:Why do games insist on presenting all their 'this is just for the villain, we mean it, seriously' poo poo as viable player options? It helps pad out the page count.
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May 22, 2017 07:32
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I love the Tortured Crusader, it's just so transparently the 'Edgy rear end in a top hat Paladin' that you can't help but laugh. He's an archetype that's also genuinely transformative of how you'd play a class and that puts him well above all the lovely archetypes that could just be optional class ability choices. Too bad it doesn't solve the core issues of being a paladin though.
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May 22, 2017 07:34
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Formatting question for folks: I have a copy of GURPS Fantasy Folk and I was flipping through it and I think there's some interesting stuff to discuss here, but I'd have to go out of order for the book or it's gonna be a bunch of dumb bullshit. Does anyone care about things like that?
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May 22, 2017 08:51
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Post it whichever way works for you.
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May 22, 2017 08:54
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Cease to Hope posted:This is late-stage D&D at its most sclerotic and self-referential, with extra options embroidering the extra options from previous books.
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May 22, 2017 10:48
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Nessus posted:Formatting question for folks: I have a copy of GURPS Fantasy Folk and I was flipping through it and I think there's some interesting stuff to discuss here, but I'd have to go out of order for the book or it's gonna be a bunch of dumb bullshit. Does anyone care about things like that? I doubt anyone's going to be reading along at home and going "AHEM. You wrote about the goofy thing on page 10 before you wrote about the goofy thing on page 2!" If posting it out of order is the order in which it makes the most sense(or the way in which it can be written the funniest, either way), then post it that way.
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May 22, 2017 18:38
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Nessus posted:e: Also the main determinator of life expectancy is usually infant mortality, which can skew the numbers hugely. If you make it to adulthood in just about any period of human history you can expect good odds on at least making it to your 50s or 60s, the trick is getting through childhood. That said, the Coalition clearly doesn't want high quality demographic info either. Nessus posted:Formatting question for folks: I have a copy of GURPS Fantasy Folk and I was flipping through it and I think there's some interesting stuff to discuss here, but I'd have to go out of order for the book or it's gonna be a bunch of dumb bullshit. Does anyone care about things like that? When a book wanders from topic to topic, comes back to the same topic several times without explaining it consistently, etc. and you review it page by page, it tends to result in stultifying walls of text. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:24 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 20:21
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