Tag Archives: Pathfinder

More Gushing About Pathfinder and Paizo

Posted on August 18, 2012 | 3 comments

OK, let me just combine all this up into one post so all my posts aren’t just pro-Paizo puff pieces.

First of all, Paizo just swept the ENnie awards yet again.  Gold medals for product of the year, favorite publisher, best production values, best cartography, best minis, best cover art, etc.  It’s just embarrassing.

Next, they have some whole new product lines they’re offering via subscription.  Comics, which doesn’t excite me, but the pawns are cool.  Basically cardboard standups to replace minis (even though they have a minis line too).  You get them at about 15 cents per pawn, and they are honestly arguably better than minis – less storage, full color, you don’t have to paint them… And themed to what you need.  Very nice.

And they have reissued perhaps the best adventure ever, Rise of the Runelords, updated for Pathfinder, and with a tie-in to this year’s Shattered Star Adventure Path.

Paizo is putting out more, better product than anyone ever – even TSR at its height.  It’s a true Renaissance of tabletop gaming and they are leading it.

OK, now back to your regularly scheduled cynicism.

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Want A Mess Of Cheap Miniatures?

Posted on August 18, 2012 | 7 comments

Well, Reaper Minis is having a Kickstarter for their “Bones” (unpainted resin minis) line, and it has raised – get this – $750,000!!!  Their gain is your… gain, because now for a $100 pledge you’ll get 145 minis (and maybe more, as more pledge money pours in!).  The latest nine are officially licensed Pathfinder goblin minis.  You have a week left to sign up!

Now, I don’t know if I want 145 unpainted minis, because I have no patience for painting.  On the other hand… 145 minis for $100?  Sheeeeeeit. How can I turn it down?  A dilemma.  All of you should sign up so they’ll give us more stuff and it’ll help me make my mind up!  🙂

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Pathfinder Is For Munchkins

Posted on August 17, 2012 | 3 comments

At least it is now – because Paizo and Steve Jackson Games have joined forces to create Munchkin Pathfinder!  Munchkin is, of course, the comedic card game of adventuring which has come to all major gaming genres – and now to Pathfinder’s Golarion.  That’s hilarious and awesome.  I love how Paizo is such a community player and helps build other companies up – they earn their leadership role in the industry by really leading.  I can’t wait for this one!

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Jade Regent – The Hungry Storm, Session 3

Posted on July 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Third Session (11 page pdf) – We head to a tower in the Arctic that is making naughty storms and sweep and clear it.  It might be a spaceship or something. We’re not sure. We kill them all and let the DM sort it out. Enjoy our continued journey through the Jade Regent Adventure Path!

Pretty much we spend the entire session in the Storm Tower. We were playing pretty smart.  We roped ourselves together going across the bridge in (saving lives), I as Yoshihiro used my see invisible to tag invisible opponents with dye arrows (saving lives), and Bjorn bull rushed many an undead off the top of the tower (saving lives).  Sadly I missed the final battle as I had to catch a plane that evening. Like many boss fights it had a lot of back and forth buffing and dispelling. Jacob piles on the frontal damage and then V’lk spikes her from behind.  Bing bang boom, we do it by the book.

 

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Paizo Violates WotC’s Corpse – Again

Posted on July 10, 2012 | 5 comments

There I was about to go to bed when I decided to check up on the latest gaming news.  Well, in a bizarre 1-2 punch,

  1. Wizards of the Coast announces they’re giving up on their virtual tabletop
  2. Paizo announces they’re launching a virtual tabletop that sounds 1000% better

Oh, snap! Wizards has been promising a VTT since the beginning of 4e and has had infinite trouble in delivering. But check out the news on Paizo’s!  Runs in a Web browser and is totally cross-platform; will have content from the Adventure Paths and all; and will be free (you’ll pay for some kind of extras). It doesn’t try to enforce rules (which is great), it just does tokens and map and initiative tracker duty.

I tell you what… Everything I hear about the PF MMO makes me think it’s going to suck, but since they are doing EVERY OTHER THING perfectly, it’s making me doubt myself – maybe it will rule too!

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Jade Regent – The Hungry Storm, Session 2

Posted on July 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

Second Session (15 page pdf) – We go mano-a-mano with a white dragon! And our caravan nearly gets murderized by ice trolls. Then we go to hungry storm undead haunted spires and hack undead like there’s no tomorrow!  And since we’re near the North Pole, tomorrow is a long time coming.

Well, our dragon hunting nearly backfired – the dragon hit us while we were trying to rappel down an ice crevasse and before we’d buffed. The fight was interestingly three-dimensional; here’s one of the cell phone camera shots of the whiteboard we took to send to Bruce (he Skypes in):

You can see V’lk and Spivey trying to flee by spider climbing up the wall of ice as the rest of us come down to help.  The “I like cake” guy is our local guide Tiktik who went into that special form of NPC stasis as soon as the action started. It was a tough and interesting fight and Jacob kept trying to commit suicide during it but once we finally cornered the thing, I spiked it through its brain-pan with my katana.

My favorite line comes from later in the session, though:

They tell him that the Snowcaster elves live up on the High Ice. They are pale-skinned and very mysterious. They might make toys and love snow-cones. They are gruff towards outsiders, but respect shows of force. “I think we can arrange that,” says Yoshihiro.

With that we wander the arctic ice some more, nearly get wiped out by ice trolls and paralyzing undead and other such random encounters.

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Jade Regent – The Hungry Storm, Session 1

Posted on July 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

We’ve moved into the third chapter of the Jade Regent adventure path and it’s chilly Arctic action all the way!

First Session (14 page pdf) – We fight snow chimeras and Wilford Brimley the Eskimo Shaman.  Real world arctic survival tip – you can’t eat the liver of a polar bear, it has so much vitamin A that it’s poisonous, but the rest is OK.

As we travelled across the Crown of the World, we get a lot of nice picaresque encounters. First was the hideous hag Arnalaak, who had stolen all of a village’s children and transformed them into water monsters. We solved that by marrying Jacob off to her; sadly, it didn’t take.

Then we fought a chimera with the heads of a dragon, walrus, and polar bear that we dubbed a cryomera. My character Yoshihiro is coming along well as an archer; one three-arrow full attack from me got it hurt bad and Harwynian finished it off with Magic Missiles.  Similarly, the next encounter with a giant pike (which tried to eat Harwynian) took a lot of magic missile and arrow damage.

Then we find the Arataki (aka Inuit aka Eskimo) village and return their kids, but a shaman who looks like Wilford Brimley has it in for us.

I don’t know what I would have done in this campaign without Suishen, the magical katana.  See invisible, wind walk, and protection from cold pretty much convert most of the impossible challenges in the AP to possible.  In this case, I saw the invisible Wilford Brimley skulk off and we trailed him directly to his lair. He attacked us with a host of frozen undead, and used a gust of wind to blow me around a lot, but I used my ever-popular dye arrow trick to highlight him (since I can see invis and I’m the archer, I bought dye arrows to mark sneaky BBEGs for party destruction).

Next time, we go dragon hunting!

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 5

Posted on May 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

Fifth Session (10 page pdf) – We kill Thorborg the oni and make a bunch of new friends in preparation for our journey north. Plus we have to fight BLINDHEIMS!

Well, both Tim and Matt showed up late, but luckily walked in by the time we opened the door to the boss’ lair and went inside. Things started out well – I used Suishen’s wind walk and see invisible to get up in the air and see the oni and I shot her with an outsider bane arrow.  And then she shot a spear-sized arrow right into me with a crit and down I went in one shot. I’m not really made of hit points, it’s why I want to become an archer eventually.

V’lk then saved the day with an obscuring mist – cancels ninja backstabs and also made the oni have to move out of the mist and then attack.  Gobo pumped a couple cure light wounds into me by then the rest of the party was still screwing around down with the ninjas in the mist so I had to charge her again. But in a spate of good luck, V’lk poisoned her and I hit her, she missed me, and I hit her again taking her down – I maxed out all my stuff to do it. She fell to the ground and got scorching rayed in the face as a coup de grace.

Afterwards when we’re opening cells, we get flash-blinded by froglike critters – I recognized them immediately from my old Fiend Folio days.

Yep, it was blindheims. A blast from the past. We killed ’em.  After handing Ravenscraeg over to Longthews (if only he would be a useful ally in the future, but thrall-raping seems to be the extent of his mens’ skills) and headed north in our caravan.

Soon we got attacked by a frost giant raider who put a whupping on me till everyone woke up and got their act together.  Jacob is part frost giant or something so now we’re keeping him as a guide to “teach him their ways.” Apparently that’s horse thieving, but I guess he’s dressing it up a little more mystical than that.

That’s all we did; between travel and treasure distribution and a bad case of “everyone not paying a lot of attention” we chewed through the session hours pretty rapidly.

Oh, and we leveled to sixth.  Woot!  Didn’t get much, but more hit points is always welcome.  New character sheets as I get them are uploaded to the main campaign page.

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How We Track Treasure Nowadays

Posted on May 27, 2012 | 2 comments

Tracking treasure and its distribution has always been a bit of a pain. How much loot has been lost because it got tossed in a bag “for distribution later” and then forgotten?

For our Jade Regent campaign, I got tired of it (and of how much time we spent on doing distributions) so I came up with this Excel spreadsheet format. Warning: It has all our treasure in it, so there’s spoilers for the first two chapters of the Jade Regent Adventure Path.

We keep the spreadsheet on a common Dropbox so all of us can get to it at the game and at home. Whenever we get stuff it immediately goes onto the Party Treasure tab. We note where it’s from so that when we ask our DM two sessions later about identifying or pricing “that toad statue” we can help him figure out where the heck it came from.

Once we pause and do a distribution, all distributed items go to the Distributed Treasure tab. Some of our players aren’t real sharp about writing things down, which is fine if it’s just them sucking due to not keeping their stuff straight but some items are plot related. Also sometimes we have to do distributions when someone’s not there, so this way they know what stuff we gave them last session.

Then there’s a separate Coinage tab for raw cash with a running total of “party funds” and once it gets high enough we dole out shares.

Since this is Jade Regent our caravan has a separate economy of its own, and we track that on the Caravan tab.

We’ve found it very helpful. I don’t like clotting up the session summaries with loot lists (though I’m having trouble breaking Bruce of doing so) and too often it’s one guy who writes it all down in pencil and then loses the list between sessions.  Welcome to TECHNOLOGY!  Feel free and download it and use it yourself, just tell them Geek Related sent you!

 

 

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Skull and Shackles – Why Community and Open Licensing Are So Important

Posted on May 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Paizo Publishing has started in on their next adventure path, the pirate-themed “Skull & Shackles.” They are supporting it well, with six books of adventure and rules material, the Isles of the Shackles campaign setting book, a Player’s Guide, and the Pirates of the Inner Sea player’s book.

But where it really begins to shine is the support that their rich ecosystem provides – third party publishers and fans, empowered by the OGL specifically and Paizo’s pro-community policies in general.

So from third party publishers, you can get paper minis for the AP from Pathfinder Paper Minis, which has done them for a number of APs. Or expanded ships and ship rules from LPJ which expand on the rules in the Player’s Guide. Hero Lab has the rules content from S&S going into their tool.

But that pales compared to the community support.  Just on the Paizo forums, we have people statting up all the NPCs in Hero Lab. And putting together tools to help track all the pirate jobs and NPC attitudes, and generally helpful things like calculating how far away you can see a ship or creating ambient noise files tuned to the AP.

And that’s why open licensing and promoting instead of shutting down fan sites is good business, and why Paizo is beating the pants off WotC right now.

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 4

Posted on May 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

Fourth Session (13 page pdf) – Trolls, ninjas, necromancers, statues – they all fall before our righteous wrath. We kill, and loot!  And kill and kill and loot!  Kill kill kill, loot loot loot…

Most of the Paizo APs, I’ll be honest, give you crap treasure.  This one is different!  Besides my new intelligent katana Suishen, we’ve found a lot of unique and cool magic items.

The most enjoyable fight was with the three monks then the lady ninja.  It was a big “you can’t see them” fest – I took care of the shadows and all with a daylight from Suishen and then I figured the See Invisible would take me the rest of the way – but that ninja chick, even when sniping and taking a -20 to her Stealth check, was totally staying hidden and owning us with sneak attacks.  Three shuriken are a joke unless they’re each coming with a many-d6 sneak attack attached.

The toughest fight was with those stupid statues.  Super high DR, immune to all magic, break  your weapons when you hit them – and they were like CR4 or something, what a hose job. We had to stop after to recover to hit Thorborg.

This weekend, we’ll fight the oni posing as Thorborg Silverscore!  I best log off now because there’s a hell of a thunderstorm brewing here in central Texas, but more soon!

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 3

Posted on May 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

Third Session (14 page pdf) – We assault Ravenscraeg, Thorborg’s hideout. It is full of ravens, and ninjas, and raven-ninjas.  And we totally find the intelligent ancestral sword of the Amatatsu family in a hole!

Our plan to sneak around like ninjas is largely busted by a raven swarm attack. Our disguises do let us get the drop on a room of ninjas, though, so we fight them then a squad of Vikings pretty well.

Our Viking prisoner gives up some intel. Being Combat as War fans, we set up an ambush for their werebear leader and took him down with extreme prejudice.

Some DVD extras – Bjorn snatched all the money from the Murder God’s offering bowl, I hope it’ll come back to haunt him.  And the inside joke of “Eye Ape, Ear Ape, Ear Ape” is because I figure the blind Gobo, mute V’lk, and just-doesn’t listen Harwynian are like the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil monkeys. And in some anime, Paul had seen that subtitled as “Eye Ape, Ear Ape, Ear Ape,” which amused all of us.

We also liked going into the kitchen. The Vikings were like “You pesky ninjas, get out of the food!” Then we killed them.  Except for the baker, we commanded him to continue baking the tasty bread.

It turns out the most vicious sub-boss in the place was a raven! We had quite a time fighting it. And of course Bjorn’s anti-animal abilities don’t work on it.  “It’s a magical animal!”

In the end, we found the intelligent katana, and learned Thorborg is really an oni!  We had been half considering leaving and letting Asvig Longthews and his Vikings clear the place, but that convinced us we need to sweep and clear – next time!

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