Because a high level necromancer taking over an orc tribe isn't the same thing as LITERAL MUGGERS in dark alleyways robbing people at knife points in a city who are high enough level to cast Wish, and who could easily beat an adult dragon to death with their bare hands. In 1e the archmage elven queen of Kyonin was 14th, there's a nation ruled by a egotistical wizard convincingly faking godhood to millions of people running a nation named after himself as a despite who's level 19, and the ruler of the greater imperial power in the setting whose bloodline made a personal pact with Asmodeus himself as the patron of their entire country is a Sorcerer 16/Aristocrat 2. The legendary pirate king of the shackles who has been a continual thorn in the side of said imperial power for decades is an 18th level fighter with a pirate themed prestige class.
17th level street thugs mugging people for pocket change in an alley is the absolute dumbest thing Paizo have ever printed, and that's including the time they invented Chad Zak (yes, that was Paizo, they added it in Dragon #298 which was written by Robin Laws when he worked for them, not even Greenwood is that much of a fricking degenerate)
>Thief gets to 17th level completely self-taught after 5 months of plumbing tombs and caves with three random adventurers
Realistic and very based >Thief gets to 17th level with an entire network of fellow Thieves showing them the ropes, running scores for decades, dealing with rival groups, mugging people who could more than adequately defend themselves with divine gifts and arcane implements
NOOOOOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE ME FIGHT HUMANOIDS AT THIS LEVEL I WANNA SEDUCE THE DRAGONNNNNNN
To be fair to that anon, Pathfinder is also one of those games where just by virtue of having levels you become a god among men, as opposed to 90s RPGs where having levels meant you were slightly more skilled at tasks but still needed magic items (or GM giving you spells) to actually become Starkiller.
The same is true of AD&D. Class levels are explicitly stated to be extremely rare, with most npcs being 0-level.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Only in the DMG. Several campaign settings say bandits and pirates are like from 1 to 8
But that didn't matter too much because the difference between 5 HP and 20 HP isn't as big a deal.
1 month ago
Anonymous
bandits and pirates are in dangerous occupations where that's reasonable, and the random peasants out there outnumber them greatly
I didn't get the impression that the problem is how the mugger got so powerful, it's what the mugger is doing with their power. Like, if you can do the shit a 17th level character can do, you're not going to be mugging random buttholes for pocket change. You're going to be a gentleman highwayman who runs his own network of bandits out in some portion of the countyside, or the thieves guildmaster of an entire nation.
To be fair, the statblock that always gets memed on isnt some random mugger in an alleyway. Its one of the district bosses of one of the mightiest criminal organisations of Absalom, the most important and cosmopolitan cities in the entire world.
1 month ago
Anonymous
A 17th level thief would in any sane setting be the most powerful thief who has ever lived or ever will live, and he would have stopped working 10 levels ago because he already stole every material thing the world. Now he only steals abstract concepts from gods.
1 month ago
Anonymous
> sane setting > "The thief steals abstract concepts from gods"
That's a moronic, reddit-tier idea.
What the frick does the thief want "abstract concepts" for? > Hehe just to show how skilled he is as a thief
Fricking nonsensical
Symbol was a baby when he was taken in by orcs, even with his inherent powers from being an unholy scion the fact he survived at all is way more ridiculous than high-level thieves.
>Because a high level necromancer taking over an orc tribe isn't the same thing as LITERAL MUGGERS in dark alleyways robbing people at knife points in a city who are high enough level to cast Wish, and who could easily beat an adult dragon to death with their bare hands.
I went to look this up and Twisted Jack is not some random mugger, he's a high-ranking member of the most powerful thieves' guild in the "City at the Center of the World". Unless there's another L17 thug mook character you're talking about?
Because people refuse to admit that level and class based systems are fundamentally nonsense and require either eternal escalation or silly bullshit like level 17 street thugs
>Yes, you got level 17 demigod street thugs running around
Imagine hypergamy in this world. In our world you have 80% of women chasing 20% of men, and more like 95% chasing 5% on dating apps. In Pathfinder a level 0 fruit vendor should have zero chance of being a father, an average level 15 guardsman would have a 4/10 fat wife and the local lord would have a harem of 30 prostitutes.
You can't just say that without posting the picture
Not that anon but here. There's also a level 19 prison warden who looks like the average Greggs customer whose facility has Perception DC 40 secret doors.
>level 19 male human prison warden blocks your path >450 HP >+36 athletics, +31 intimidation >can literally kill normal people with one punch
AIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Guirden-sama, please have mercy
And why do only the best ones just outright have the Nazis and present the fact that their arguments are actually good for some people even if they're bad for others.
I got that, just it seemed weird to me that a group could be both theocratic and nazis given the nazis were aiming for a future where religious doctrine would be thrown out in favor of a state doctrine.
>Spoiler
Only if you are anti human civilization.
That's part of why I like the Nazis in Rifts.
Yes it's a kitchen sink setting, and its way of having nazis is arguably the most hilarious I've seen in a kitchen sink setting one of the founders of a city-state that would become a nation found an ancient library and inside discovered the cache of history channel documentaries about Hitler, and realized he must have been the greatest pre-apocalypse emperor if so many people were obsessed with documenting his life, so based everything from style to governing off of him but it also is clear that for humanity to survive comfortably, they need some harsh rules against the aliens, the mutants, and the mages.
Yes there are examples where people live without the nazi regime, but they're few and far between, and often lack the infrastructure the nazis were able to build up thanks to the fact they don't need to worry about Johnny Brickabs going crazy one day and punching down houses. Or they're places that miraculously covered so much pre-apocalypse tech that it breaks suspension of disbelief, as is becoming more often the case.
With the only exceptions being Germany who in Rifts apparently purged the non-German population at some point, and Japan, where the entire nation got Samurai Jack'd
But they're also not exactly easily accessible for most people in the americas
It sounds like a cute bit of lore, though I must admit the idea of a nazi esque society being able to build a actual functional state instead of the total failure basically only kept afloat by Czech industry seems a bit unlikely. Still, if nothing else, I think it captures their general pathetic nature. Literally only remembered for how much they fricked up.
I still think the perfect Nazi fantasy parody are the Skaven. If only because most of the Nazi top already looked like rat people in real life.
I assume he means stealing money from israelites and giving it to Germans is good for Germans.
Nazis weren't actually good for Germans, thus them starting unwinnable wars that ultimately killed like 7 million Germans, resulted in them being ethnically cleansed from the rest of Europe, winding up half under communist occupation, and just barely not getting blown up in WW3.
Natsoc's were luciferians. Luciferians must make themselves look good to deceive you. One way is to stage an attack on you in order to save you.
Most games are luciferian in nature: defeat the big bad evil guy who wants to stop you from having good things.
Oh, come now.
The satan-worshipping nazis are ruled by a *woman*. So they can't possibly be that bad, can they?
Checkmate, athiests. (Yes, we have a whole nation of them, too.)
>powerful fey are all buttholes or apathetic >the creators of the world are a wall >the most powerful human is a power hungry butthole necromancer with godlike powers who went around conquering other humans and fricking hundreds of women as his slave consorts >the last three mentioned are the "gods" of the setting >the most prominent god in the modern day setting is also the Devil LARPing and is also a butthole fey >the real God of the setting is the Demon Lord and he's trying to devour all of creation >oh yeah, and the Outer Gods might also exist and are unbeholden to the Demon Lord
Well it's grim derp for a reason
>the most powerful human is a power hungry butthole necromancer with godlike powers who went around conquering other humans and fricking hundreds of women as his slave consorts
Based.
In such a dreadful world, no reason no to go full hedonistic and not give a shit about everything else.
fey are all buttholes or apathetic
Kill fey. Behead fey. Roundhouse kick a fey into the concret. Slam dunk a fey baby into the trashcan. Crucify filthy fey. Defecate in a fey foodplate. Launch Fey into the sun . Stir fry fey in oil. Toss fey into active volcanoes. Urinate into fey wine. Throw fey into a dragon's maw. Twist fey heads off. Report fey to the Sentinels Unarmed strike fey in half. Cast desire end on a pregnant fey. Trap fey in quicksand. Crush fey under an elephant. Roast fey on a gridiron. Eat fey. Dissect feys . Exterminate feys in the colosseum. Stomp feys skulls with steel boots. Cremate feys in the kiln. Lobotomize feys . Mandatory hateful defecation for feys. Grind feys babies in a mortar. Drown feys in liquid gold. Incinerate feys with fire. Kick feys off a cliff. Feed feys to the lions. Slice feys with their own bone swords.
Okay, so it's a setting with a lot of evils to fight, a lot of adventures to have. Bloated, maybe, but you don't need to focus on all of it.
Golarion has many problems, such as being written by Paizo, but this isn't one of them.
Pathfinder doesn't work as a setting when you look at the big picture - too many things going on in too many locations, and a lot of conflicting themes. It works best when working with only one nation, maybe two if they are in conflict.
I mean, you still have countless people living pretty normal lives in their towns and cities and villages and farms. You just have a large variety of foes and dangers you can deal with as a party.
Its not really that different from many other established settings, really. The fricked up places are calles Felwood or Mourneland instead of Sarkoris, the evil nations are called Thay instead of Cheliax, the evil outsiders are called Daedra and Yugoloths instead of Divs. Random monsters are creeping around in pretty much very fantasy setting ever. Nastry realms of existance are also a generic staple of most fantasy, as are some evil gods or eldritch horrors. I wouldnt nessecarily say that Golarion is sooooo much worse than the DnD Multiverse, Azeroth, Nirn, the Continent of the Witcher or Sanctuary from Diablo. The things that want to steal your money and eat your face are just slighty different.
1. The setting isnt stuck in that time period, its just the current period. The setting does advance, as shown in the move to PF2e and its many books. And yes Rovagug is held in the Cage aka the prison demiplane at the center of the world.
2. This is true.
3. This is severely biased to present good as not good. The beastmen, agathions, live in an idealized state of Anarchy, but are still fundamentally good and make it able to work. The rustic faux utopia is not faux. It really is a utopia, and it doesn't crush your individuality. The type who would hate it aren't generally allowed into this afterlife. As for the celestial nanny-state, its the celestial mountain and its armies who fight cosmic evil and protect the various heavens. They also arent a nanny-state. Good is actually good in the setting, and making it to the afterlife after being a good person is rewarded handsomely.
4. He is describing the Boneyard where the soul is judged and sent to its proper afterlife, and it is not an afterlife unless you were a hardcore atheist. And yes the sahkils, thematically meant to represent horror villains and Aztec death gods, are psychopomps who rebeled after learning some cosmic secret. They live in Xibalba.
5. Yep, things to fight and save people from.
6. Cheliax was a dominant power, now its a falling power desperate to regain its former power with a mad queen who has damned every soul within its borders to Hell. And yes they are Satan worshipping nazi conquistadors.
7. Nidal is weird. Its not a complete horror show like the Hostel movies, but its still bad since its run by cenobite-worshipping goths. They are also not a vassal for Cheliax as Zon Kuthon, cenobite god, is the patron and protector of Nidal and perfectly willing to frick up Asmodeus and his Cheliax.
8. This depends on edition. In 2e it was resolved and closed in a 1e AP made canon, leaving the Sarkoris Scar a recovering hell blasted wasteland.
9. Yep, lots of evil to fight against. But Baba Yaga doesn't run her country, she installed her daughters to do that. Also, in PF2e, her granddaughter and child of her son Russian mystic Rasputin now runs the country after a previous daughter tried to capture and steal Baba Yagas power. Yes, Russia and by extension Earth, exists and you go there in an AP to fight Rasputin in 1918 to save Baba Yaga, who is also Russian but way more ancient.
10. This pertains to PF2e only, Tar Baphon escaped his prison and turned a nearby country into a zombie filled wasteland, tried recruiting his old minions the orcs (they rejected him), and is currently plotting the destruction of everything and trying to slowly expand his domain.
11. Yep, they exist. Thankfully most are in faraway jungles or sleeping.
12. This depends on edition and its not as big of a problem as presented. In PF2e the dark elves are disguised serpentfolk, looking for test subjects. And its the derro not dwarves who kidnap people.
13. This is true, and there really isnt any good reason for places other than the material plane to be friendly to mortal life.
14. Same as 13.
15. Space is dangerous and filled with danger.
16. The Lovecraft mythos is part of the setting, the Plane of Time is literally Yogsothoth (who came from a previous universe) and Azathoth is a cancer but also a linchpin on the functioning of the material plane. Cthulhu sleeps in Ryleh on Earth. Carcosa exists and Hastur lives there. And yes, there is a potential new outer god in a planet sized egg at the edge of the solar system, called Aucturn. Still exists in Starfinder, hasn't hatched. Apostae is the Pluto equivalent.
>drow are disguised serpentfolk in 2E
what the frick? what other shit had they changed? i thought drow were just what elf turn into when they become evil
Well, thanks to WotCs frickery involving the OGL, Paizo made the ORC and had to make some hard decisions around OGL creations and what to keep and change or simply get rid of, and drow fell on the "get rid of" side. The main dev responsible for the game, and who loves drow, made the final call to remove them. Was a big issue at the time. Now all dark elf shit was just disguised serpentfolk shenanigans. >what other shit had they changed?
All kinds of things. Golems got changed hard core, and are not called golems, don't even share a category anymore. Shambling mounds are now Heaps. Several archons got remade and hound archons no longer exist. Barghests are no longer weregoblin things but instead resemble their actual folklore as "demonic" dogs. Demons got renamed or changed. A lot has changed because of WotC frickery.
The dragons got some big changes too. Now all chromatics are just cosmetic variations of horned dragons and metallics are broken up among different new varieties, like conspirator dragons, empyreal dragons, and fortune dragons.
Athamaru are a new fishmen ancestry, remade from the kuotoa. Playable soon in Howl of the WIld, alongside mermaids, minotaurs, and others.
Gnolls are now kholo. Will be a core ancestry in PC2.
Druegar are now Hryngar.
Hags got a total rework and new names.
Nagas renamed and reworked.
Oozes rewoked and renamed.
Rakshasa lore reworked, no longer have backwards hands (a very silly OGL thing)
Sahaguin are Sedacthies now.
A bunch of stuff got the axe and no longer exists.
>Golems aren't a WOTC creation
Golems as a category of monster with specific magical immunities are. Flesh golems still exist theyre now just Charnel Creations. Iron golems are Iron Wardens. The golems still exist, but as separate constructs with their own stat blocks and no shared monster type effects.
>The main dev responsible for the game, and who loves drow, made the final call to remove them. Was a big issue at the time. Now all dark elf shit was just dis
Couldn't they have gone with dark fey (who are all dark skinned pointy eared) or dark elves? I doubt Wizards can copyright dark elves considering there's brown elves everywhere in other media and dark elves are a Norse myth thing.
They were redundant to the setting, and took up space that could be better utilized by the paizo IP serpentfolk. If you want to play a dark-skinned "underground" elf, just roll a cave elf. All thats been removed is a specific named elf culture with strong ties to WotC IP. Dark-skinned elves still exist and are playable, there just wont be sadist underground elves with a matriarchal culture doing evil shit. And you can still homebrew in drow if youre desperate for that particular culture in your games.
>The main dev responsible for the game, and who loves drow, made the final call to remove them. Was a big issue at the time. Now all dark elf shit was just dis
Couldn't they have gone with dark fey (who are all dark skinned pointy eared) or dark elves? I doubt Wizards can copyright dark elves considering there's brown elves everywhere in other media and dark elves are a Norse myth thing.
How fricking gay. You know, if you want a fresh perspective on dark elves that keeps them as dark-skinned evil elves, but legally distinct from drow, I got a book for you. I mean admittedly it's for the ACKS system and this is only a 2nd draft, but it's pretty damn good if I say so myself.
I'm curious as to just how big of a ball-drop this new, not-2.5 edition is going to be.
I assume we're well into the 'our fanbase will happily eat any shit we shovel out' phase of PF's life, but it'd be hilarious if too many changes to both system and setting backfire on them.
>”WOTCs frickery involving OGL”
Technically true insofar as that’s Paizo’s excuse, but they’re really just cleaning house so that they can start copywriting their own shit. OGL’s bullshit is virtually unenforceable in a court of law (most of its legal basis being ‘because we said so, mmkay?’) and Paizo is one of WOTC’s few “competitors” who actually has enough capital to put up a fight in court. Instead they’re giving half-orcs a new moronic, copyright-friendly name so that they can enforce order in their own, substantially smaller slice of the ttrpg market.
That's where you are wrong. The Serpants skull AP doesn't have a single gay in it.
And the one it might have is an evil lesbian succubus. Who abuses and makes slaves out of religious women by threat of taking away their connection to spirit animals
>Depicting gays as evil is the same as sucking a guy's dick.
You heard it hear folks.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I thought he just wanted a break from gayness
1 month ago
Anonymous
Then maybe you should stop being a disingenuous gay.
I should have know that his ability to be a disingenuous gay far out stripped his knowledge of the game and it's adventure paths.
As that character is not gay but could potentially be interpreted that way and since that guy can only think of gay. I know he would have if he had actually known anything about the game.
Who cares if a lot of the iconics and major NPCs are massive prancing fruits, the world is still fun and interesting. Let Paizo have their obligatory troon or lesbian and you get a decent Adventure Path, that was how this shit went for years.
Why is Ancient Greece depicted as though every single person is gay? Is everyone gay today? They were probably more accepting of it during that time, but it doesn't mean everyone was gay. We accept gays now, but most people aren't gay. Most of the people talked about were the upperclass. So if anything, rich and powerful people were extremely gay and regular people were heterosexual.
There was no such thing as a homosexual or 'gay' identity in Ancient Greece! It wasn't about who you were attracted to, it was about who you fricked. And, most importantly, _how_ you fricked them.
>They were probably more accepting of it during that time,
Except they weren't. They didn't even have a concept of "gay" in the way modernity does, as an immutable sexual orientation. Some men performed gay acts, for most of the same reason men back then fricked animals and children and siblings etc.; Men fricked everything unless someone convinced them not to.
Many Ancient Greek cultures did villify and even punish homosexual acts, and even the Spartans, now famous for their pederasty, punished adult men who slept with each other because the only kind of homosexuality they endorsed was pedophilic exploitation built around systematized grooming.
There's a fair number of our oldest philosophical texts that laboriously explain why homosexual acts shouldn't be conducted, because explaining to people why they shouldn't just frick everything that doesn't run away from you was a challenge, since the whole concept of "Don't put your penis in every hole you find" was ground-breaking.
Also, a lot of nobles were portrayed as having homosexual tendencies not for the sake of historical accuracy, but as attacks on their image. The easiest way to emasculate a man was to put him in the receiving role, and trying to figure out how much of any ancient "historical" texts were just propaganda is enough of a challenge that there's tens of thousands of historians who have made careers out of exactly that.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Many Ancient Greek cultures did villify and even punish homosexual acts, and even the Spartans, now famous for their pederasty, punished adult men who slept with each other because the only kind of homosexuality they endorsed was pedophilic exploitation built around systematized grooming.
That's a meme. No city-state punished 'homosexual acts' because no sex act was illegal in Greece. Bottoming was frowned upon in certain places but there was no specific legislation against it.
And the Spartans, at least on paper, disapproved of pederasty. Xenophon mentions that they had an outright peculiar insistence on pederastic relationships not being consummated because they thought it went against the city's ideals of restraint and moderation.
Relations between men of roughly the same age, on the other hand, were normalized to such an extent he casually mentions that Kleonymos, the son of Spartan king Sphodrias, was the handsomest and most highly regarded of all the youths of his years and had a lover Archidamos, the son of Agesilaos, who was utterly smitten by him.
I DON'T FRICKING CARE. YOU CAN PAINT THE SETTING AS "EPIC APOCALYPSE" AS YOU WANT, BUT IT STILL FEELS LIKE A STUPID, NO FRILLS WHATEVER SETTING FULL OF LESBIANS.
>Liking lesbians makes you a gay
I understand you have difficulty grasping the concept of 1+1=2, but I guess you just can't get off without there being a man ass in the porno.
And no one wants to listen to a closest homosexual get angry about men enjoying women fricking women. Yet here we are.
1 month ago
Anonymous
The closest homosexual here is you dumbass because I am not angry about lesbians here, you misunderstood what is going on likely from you failing at reading and thinking
IIRC, It's also implied the ancestor races of humanity (or humanity itself) are also biological runoff from the Outer Gods/GOO.
Also, I think Pathfinder's version of Hastur follows Delta Green's, and Carcosa being a collection of an insane, nostalgic fae timeloop creeps me out more than usual Lovecraft stuff.
That said, Pathfinder Society stuff is typical do-gooder stuff. You do have to kill people sometimes, but they're often people you can't negotiate with and if you're low on health, you can't risk knocking them out, since that's a harder action.
the REAL horror of it all is that the setting's recent retcons and metaplots have sanded off so many of its edges and reduced what made this clusterfrick kind of cool and fun even as a shitty kitchen sink setting.
Pathfinder sucks but at least it considered D&D monster descriptions in its worldbuilding. Kraken ruling class is lit.
I truly adore all the lore and world building that went into the monsters of 1e. To be a quick edgelord, it was cool to see ogres being described as awful rapist, cannibal, hillbillies where death is preferable to capture. The vast slave networks ran by hobgoblins, and shit like qlippoth preferring their sacrifices to be pregnant women.
5e is so fricking gay in how they'll gleefully describe how the villain decimated every village but very specifically spared all the children, refused to take slaves, and would execute any of his soldiers who groped a girl before they chopped her head off.
I miss edgy writing and worldbuilding. I always wanted to make a monster breeder devoted to Lamashtu but my group never played that much pathfinder (at least not the default setting) and they never had very many good options for it despite it being there.
>5e is so fricking gay in how they'll gleefully describe how the villain decimated every village but very specifically spared all the children, refused to take slaves, and would execute any of his soldiers who groped a girl before they chopped her head off.
I've noticed this phenomenon as well; I call it the YA fiction effect and I attribute it to publishers wanting to have their cake and eat it too - you can have gore and dismemberment and torture and shit and people won't bat an eye so long as it's not too gratuitous but having even PG-13 sexual content means that the ice gets a lot thinner and any sort of sexual violence or other taboo sexual activity immediately lands you on the naughty list. You can get away with it in the context of background lore and mythology and maaaybe villains but something like a tiny paragraph in a module about how things are so desperate in the Edgelordia region that many girls turn to prostitution as children to make ends meet is considered beyond the pale.
However, with all that said, I think the broader RPG community is at least partially to blame for it. If you have something in there about how evil god Y prefers his sacrifices to be pregnant (for a reason deliberately left unspecified) then you'll have terminally online autists speculating about the "logical conclusions" of rape camps to produce acceptable sacrifices and folk beliefs about the magical properties of unborn children or and shit like that and they'll make it even more grimderp than it already is on their own initiative - and if you try to forestall this by getting particular it comes off as bad writing and/or adds fuel to the fire. I would also add that there's a certain kind of person who, upon hearing that child prostitutes are de facto legal, will immediately try to buy one (likely with a suspicious resemblance to someone they know or knew IRL) because "why else would they be in the book? my character is TN so I see nothing wrong with it".
I wonder if anybody has ever baited some lore writer/module writer into answering rather or not sacrificing a pregnant woman gets an extra soul or some convoluted way of getting them to say a fetus counts as a person with a soul.
>5e is so fricking gay in how they'll gleefully describe how the villain decimated every village but very specifically spared all the children, refused to take slaves, and would execute any of his soldiers who groped a girl before they chopped her head off.
I've noticed this phenomenon as well; I call it the YA fiction effect and I attribute it to publishers wanting to have their cake and eat it too - you can have gore and dismemberment and torture and shit and people won't bat an eye so long as it's not too gratuitous but having even PG-13 sexual content means that the ice gets a lot thinner and any sort of sexual violence or other taboo sexual activity immediately lands you on the naughty list. You can get away with it in the context of background lore and mythology and maaaybe villains but something like a tiny paragraph in a module about how things are so desperate in the Edgelordia region that many girls turn to prostitution as children to make ends meet is considered beyond the pale.
However, with all that said, I think the broader RPG community is at least partially to blame for it. If you have something in there about how evil god Y prefers his sacrifices to be pregnant (for a reason deliberately left unspecified) then you'll have terminally online autists speculating about the "logical conclusions" of rape camps to produce acceptable sacrifices and folk beliefs about the magical properties of unborn children or and shit like that and they'll make it even more grimderp than it already is on their own initiative - and if you try to forestall this by getting particular it comes off as bad writing and/or adds fuel to the fire. I would also add that there's a certain kind of person who, upon hearing that child prostitutes are de facto legal, will immediately try to buy one (likely with a suspicious resemblance to someone they know or knew IRL) because "why else would they be in the book? my character is TN so I see nothing wrong with it".
Its not even edgelording to a certain extent if its just being frank about what a certain event would entail. If it follows that they would do something by the nature of what they are and the situation they are in, then there. If you dont want to over detail it that's fine, traditionally things not in tune with the tone would just be tactfully glazed over, given a less objectionable alternative, or not brought attention to at all. >"The villiage was destroyed and great misery and subjugation came to all, with great ransoms placed on the heads of the prisoners".
Instead of >"The village was destroyed and the women and children where taken as frick-slaves to the rape pits of the dark lord".
Which is a whole lot smoother than going out of your way to assure you that the obvious less palatable implications don't happen. >"The village was destroyed, and there was great bloodshed and blood-slaughter, though the children where NOT hurt by the dark lord's troops because that was too wrong, even for them".
>5e is so fricking gay in how they'll gleefully describe how the villain decimated every village but very specifically spared all the children, refused to take slaves, and would execute any of his soldiers who groped a girl before they chopped her head off.
I think it's hilarious that these same people think every military force in real life goes around raping. Like every single person involved is raping and murdering. To suggest that there were likely several people involved who didn't massacre kids and rape women is offensive to them. Whoever they don't like is an evil oppressing force raping and murdering everyone and everyone they do like is noble and misunderstood and the most progressive group no matter the timeframe in which they existed.
They can't accept that most of the time you're going to have some instances of rapes and killings of innocent people. They can't have that in their good group because they can't face reality.
Don't know nothing about Pathfinder, but I know canonically in 3.5 Forgotten Realms that any portal opened to the Far Realms stays open, and so everything will eventually be consumed by it because those portals also continuously grow. These can range in size from a grand gate, to the the width of a hair like the one a group of fey canonically guard. There's also canonically more devils and demons than the forces of good. There's at least tens of Pit Fiends for every example we have of Solars.
Not really. Most is barely relevant background dangers. The average joe still has a history of "grandpa Ruckus lived for 80 years in the northern taldan countryside. His largest problems have been taxes by the local noble, some wolves eating cattle, some minor goblin issues and a flood after a particulary nasty rain season. He never saw a dragon or a demon or space cthulu and especially no Kaiju. He has no idea that things live in space and knows shit about the planes, beyond some basic folklore the local erastil priest might have told him in a sermon. He died of natural causes."
[...]
Its not even edgelording to a certain extent if its just being frank about what a certain event would entail. If it follows that they would do something by the nature of what they are and the situation they are in, then there. If you dont want to over detail it that's fine, traditionally things not in tune with the tone would just be tactfully glazed over, given a less objectionable alternative, or not brought attention to at all. >"The villiage was destroyed and great misery and subjugation came to all, with great ransoms placed on the heads of the prisoners".
Instead of >"The village was destroyed and the women and children where taken as frick-slaves to the rape pits of the dark lord".
Which is a whole lot smoother than going out of your way to assure you that the obvious less palatable implications don't happen. >"The village was destroyed, and there was great bloodshed and blood-slaughter, though the children where NOT hurt by the dark lord's troops because that was too wrong, even for them".
>Its not even edgelording to a certain extent if its just being frank about what a certain event would entail.
Right, that was never in dispute. The point is that the threshold for sexual content is much lower than for other kinds and even if the author doesn't get edgy with it other people might and people with poor social graces (in MY hobby? No way.) might use whatever scraps are there to their maximum potential. My contention is that this is because PnP games are increasingly being marketed to kids in the 10-12yo bracket instead of the 15+ bracket that they traditionally were.
Honestly, it seems to be on the way to that. Nations that aren't run by literal nation ending threats or are fully made up of said predators, are way smaller than they should be.
Absalom is the absolute largest city on the inner sea, and potential in the world... It has
306,900 inhabitants, which is indeed a decent amount, but nothing near what "Largest in the world" should be. If somebody took the time to break it down, there's probably less than a billion, maybe even barely tens of millions of 'people' in the world. Which is catastrophic considering the big numbers lore writers like to throw out for how much bad shit there is.
Those numbers remind me of how some of my favorite post apoc settings talk about numbers.
Something like 47 million humans left in all of north america, and that's over a century since shit went bad.
My only reference point is 1e pathfinder but yeah, there's some grim shit in there. The Cenobite god is pretty cool in a ham sort of way. I don't know what's changed though.
Not much. They changed some names, tightened up the math, collated a lot of the feats into the core books (which is why we're gettign two for the players) and overall, stepped out from under WotC litiginous nonsense. Since their ORC is under neutral lawyers who don't give a frick, nothign you make using the ORC is going to be a problem - and it is fairly backwards compatible with 2e in general.
The way the Core GM book is written it's closer to OSR than anything D&D has put out since AD&D.
Most nu-nerds don't need rpgs, they need therapy and religion. The overwhelming majority of people in the fantasy now are depressed mentally ill weirdos who treat what was supposed to be a fun escapist hobby as their moody quasi-religious confessional. That's why there's so much tiresome muh grey and gray morality nonsense in fantasy now or other boring bullshit, and it's also why nothing new ever sticks regardless of how popular it was overnight, and why everyone keeps reaching further and further back to works created by people who weren't sad homosexuals like Tolkien and Howard, dragging their ideas and concepts into CURRENT YEAR in vain hopes to make something good but inevitably twisting it into more tiresome bullshit by throwing their mentally ill morality and concepts onto the characters.
The devil nazi conquistadors aren't allowed to have slavery anymore even though they worship the god of slavery because the wokes got mad. Neither are the duergar (nor would the drow, except they don't exist anymore for reasons only tangentially related to wokeness). Under the woke regime all fictional villains must be present day Republican politicians in genre-appropriate costumes. Any villain who isn't explicitly right-wing is probably an innocent victim, and anything to the right of the present day US Republican Party is absolutely beyond the pale and on par with graphic onscreen child rape.
Cheliax abolishing slavery (not really) makes perfectly sense in world, however. Its a nation that got its high sea fleet fricked by pirates, lost a major province to rebels and had another rebellion in their heartland that needed to be put down. The entire region has an abolishment zeitgeist, a new revolutionary faction (the firebrands) have risen and are funded by the two new states that sprung from rebellion. On their border is the fake USA who just wait for a casus belli to bring them freedom and democracy with gunpowder and steel and the bellflower network is still going strong. So all in all, Cheliax is in a pretty fricking rough spot. Getting some good international PR by saying "hey, we freed out slaves, we dont do that anymore!" is perfectly resonable. Especially if they do it in a devilish-lawyer way that just replaces it by debt-traps and fricked up contracts that keep the poors enslaved in all but name. They literally spell this out in the firebrands faction book. But you obviously dont care about any of that, you´re just having a culture war rant
That's fricking stupid. That's like if earth were a fictional planet and the author went "oh in 2024 Iran legalized gay marriage because they're in a rough spot and want better relations with the west but like sometimes local school districts take heather has two mommies or whatever out of the library so they're still homophobic." They literally worship the god of slavery, abolishing slavery would be inconcievable sacrilege, and if they did only abolish it in name only then the bellflowers/firebrands/andoran would have to be dumber than a bag of rocks to fall for it.
Not being a geopolitical dunce, tricking your enemies and binding people with decieving contracts is exactly the kind of behaviour that pleases a devil god.
yes but all of the abolitionist factions would have to be fricking imbeciles to believe that the country that worships the god of slavery and legal trickery actually meaningfully abolished slavery rather than it being a legal trick
The firebrands book actually goes into that. Everyone with a functioning braincell is perfectly aware of that. The firebrands, the bellflowers, Andoran, Kitargo and so on. But they arent the target of the matter. Its the general public. You know, the ones not deeply invested into international politics. The average guy on the street. For them, its presented by chelish propagandist as a huge win. No need to join the firebands and rebel now. And to a certain extend, it works. Just like in real life. Fighting actual slavery gets you a strong reaction. Fighting against sweat shops in asia building your electronics and cloths with sky high suicide rates? Eh, whatever. You might say "yeah, its bad i guess" and go on with your day unless you are an activist to begin with.
1 month ago
Anonymous
i really don't think "the nation that worships the god of slavery and loophole abuse says they abolished slavery" is going to convince anyone who had any chance of joining the bellflowers or firebrands anyway. If they were that stupid they'd most likely be more of a liability than an asset.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Many would laude Cheliax for their progressiveness when they change their flag to celebrate Halfling History Month once a year.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Halfling History Month
I would blast so many ropes that month, it'd be unreal.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Still, public perception is a thing. You may not stop people willing to become outright insurgent, but you may stop those who might become sympathizers. The average joe dont have our point of view. They dont know the new chelish freedom is a scam. For all they know, hey legally these people arent slaves anymore. The nation that loves his law says so in its laws. If you´re some guy up in Varisia, how much will you ever heard about abusive employment contracts? Its like with Saudi Arabia letting woman drive. See? They changed for the better. Just give them some more time to reform. We dont need a bloodbath, surely in the next few years other improvents will follow. Right???
1 month ago
Anonymous
Pretty sure the average guy up in Varisia would know Asmodeus is the god of slavery. Also unless they're actively joining the bellflowers or firebrands, what the average foreigner thinks doesn't matter since there are very few democracies.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Pretty sure the average guy up in Varisia would know Asmodeus is the god of slavery.
Its still a legal and accepted faith in various parts of the Inner Sea. And the asmodean clerics dont sell you the slavery part, they sell you the lawful society of order part.
>Also unless they're actively joining the bellflowers or firebrands, what the average foreigner thinks doesn't matter since there are very few democracies.
Information warfare is still important. For once, the prime enemy of Cheliax in fact IS a democracy (Andoran). Second, even monarchies and republics need to have an eye on public sentiment. Not to the same degree that elected officials need to, but still. Third, weaking the sympathizing bedrock from which insurgent groups recruit new people abroad is a valid interest of the state.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Well thats how real world dictatorships deal with social unrest and insurgency. You crack down hard on them or you extend an olive branch. Cheliax did both. They crushed the Glorious Reclamation rebellion and now they extend the olive branch of reforms (fake as they may be) to the people.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Still, public perception is a thing. You may not stop people willing to become outright insurgent, but you may stop those who might become sympathizers. The average joe dont have our point of view. They dont know the new chelish freedom is a scam. For all they know, hey legally these people arent slaves anymore. The nation that loves his law says so in its laws. If you´re some guy up in Varisia, how much will you ever heard about abusive employment contracts? Its like with Saudi Arabia letting woman drive. See? They changed for the better. Just give them some more time to reform. We dont need a bloodbath, surely in the next few years other improvents will follow. Right???
I hate to say it but isn't the US a prime example of this?
Slavery was technically gone after the civil war, but it still existed in a variety of forms in the south up until WWII, where the feds started clamping down on it out of fear the Nazis/Japs would use it to turn soldiers against the US.
But as far as most people in the north were concerned it was only convicts being forced to labor down there, and it wasn't until some rich white boy getting arrested for trumped up charges in Florida did people in most of the country start to say "how did driving over the speed limit get him indefinite years of hard labor?"
So officially banning slavery but still have slavery in other names, does in fact work, it's just a bit silly how it's done in Pathfinder due to how much random magic and bullshit there is in the setting to prove things one way or the other.
1 month ago
Anonymous
The noble northman myth lmao.
That stuff still happens today. We also have sex slavery going on in our country. It's easy to ignore because it's not out in the open and obviously most people aren't involved. Then you have the Epstein type stuff.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Oh of course, I grew up about 30 minutes outside of DC, worked under one of the bigger prosecutors in my state.
The amount of times he would kvetch about the sex trafficking operations and how the bigger ones he couldn't do anything about because it was technically based out of NY and the feds would take over (and then never do anything) was insane.
Though a few small time (2-4 dozen girls) operations would get busted here and there, it was rare to see it get covered outside of the local newspapers.
And then all of the local newspapers died in favor of the WaPo.
The point still stands though, if a nation (even a fantasy one) officially outlaws slavery, they can still have slavery. Sure it's not as open as it was during the early 1900s, but it's still so fricking common you can find out about your own state's issues with it through a google search.
And given fantasy settings don't have the internet/cameras, it's going to be more common to be in the early 1900s style where it's blatantly slavery but called something different.
1 month ago
Anonymous
“Slavery” aka mass importation of cheap non white labor still happens in the US. Or sweatshop labor.
Only difference is that average Joe taxes subsidize it even more than traditional slavery.
They still have slavery, they're just not mentioning it in adventures going forward (until Twitter goes bust and all the lunatics on it fade into the distance, so 1-2 years).
I don't know where the rapist ogres thing comes from. People say it happened in Rise of the Runelords but I looked through the module and at most you could maybe say that there was some stuff vaguely implied.
"Stories are told of ogres—horrendous stories of brutality and savagery, cannibalism and torture. Of rape and dismemberment, necrophilia, incest, mutilation, and all manners of hideous murder. Those who have not encountered ogres know the stories as warnings. Those who have survived such encounters know these tales to be tame compared to the truth.
An ogre revels in the misery of others. When smaller races aren’t available to crush between meaty fists or defile in blood-red lusts of violence, they turn to each other for entertainment. Nothing is taboo in ogre society. One would think that, left to themselves, an ogre tribe would quickly tear itself apart, with only the strongest surviving in the end—yet if there is one thing ogres respect, it is family."
So the first thing I always think of when a setting is like this:
How the frick did society manage to develop to the point it did (in this case, 16th/17th century)?
Like, with how much shit is thrown around vs. the strength of the general populace, it sounds like the worlds should have developed as various small city-states with massive god-forged walls and expanses of near-uninhabited lands between in order to keep out the array of monsters that would slaughter the average peasant. Not some broad-reaching nation with a ton of random villages dotting the landscape.
>Not some broad-reaching nation with a ton of random villages dotting the landscape.
yeah, they'd all have to be a lot smaller/tighter; a lot of people have come to that same conclusion
this is why so many people say D&D is fantasy wildwest, not fantasy feudalism
Because the OPs text is exaggerating things to quite a degree. Outside of the worldwound, you dont have extraplanar invasions every week. The aliens in space stay there most of the time. Outside of some small scale incidents with random villages, Cthulu isnt really an issue. The evil god locked up in the planets core is locked up and his cultists are your average loons in the deep forest.
Because the average person isn't gonna meet any of these things, it looks like there's fifty apocalypse stacks going at the time but in reality you have to look for a large amount of this shit to actually interract with it.
Yeah Pathfinder is a kitchen sink fantasy with some grimderp elements. there is even a evil god of fertility that wants worshippers to get knotted by dogs, werewolves minotaurs and demons and to breed monstergirls everyday which is based 2bh
>there is even a evil god of fertility that wants worshippers to get knotted by dogs, werewolves minotaurs and demons and to breed monstergirls everyday
It was a different time...
>the underthought&overwrought kitchensink setting written by hacks for a game whose highest ambition is to be a more math-autistic D&D, developed with no sense of scale and cohesion and with the mindset of a Dragonball-obsessed manchild, is in fact shit
who could had thought
>So while I suspect the word may come up a time or two in the future, we're just not going to be covering it going forward. A few in-production items might reference it still, but it's no longer going to be a notable part of the Golarion campaign setting.
1e Golarion is one of my favorite settings, it has edge AND camp at the same time it's great, so of course it's being sanitized because anything even resembling edgyness is problematic or some shit.
Yes
Wow, so the setting diegetically captures what your soul experiences when you're playing with the rules?
Yes, you got level 17 demigod street thugs running around
You can't just say that without posting the picture
what picture
Why does this trigger people so much? It's not that different from The Symbol in 3e who took over an orc tribe, and it's what, a Lv19 necromancer?
Because a high level necromancer taking over an orc tribe isn't the same thing as LITERAL MUGGERS in dark alleyways robbing people at knife points in a city who are high enough level to cast Wish, and who could easily beat an adult dragon to death with their bare hands. In 1e the archmage elven queen of Kyonin was 14th, there's a nation ruled by a egotistical wizard convincingly faking godhood to millions of people running a nation named after himself as a despite who's level 19, and the ruler of the greater imperial power in the setting whose bloodline made a personal pact with Asmodeus himself as the patron of their entire country is a Sorcerer 16/Aristocrat 2. The legendary pirate king of the shackles who has been a continual thorn in the side of said imperial power for decades is an 18th level fighter with a pirate themed prestige class.
17th level street thugs mugging people for pocket change in an alley is the absolute dumbest thing Paizo have ever printed, and that's including the time they invented Chad Zak (yes, that was Paizo, they added it in Dragon #298 which was written by Robin Laws when he worked for them, not even Greenwood is that much of a fricking degenerate)
>Thief gets to 17th level completely self-taught after 5 months of plumbing tombs and caves with three random adventurers
Realistic and very based
>Thief gets to 17th level with an entire network of fellow Thieves showing them the ropes, running scores for decades, dealing with rival groups, mugging people who could more than adequately defend themselves with divine gifts and arcane implements
NOOOOOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE ME FIGHT HUMANOIDS AT THIS LEVEL I WANNA SEDUCE THE DRAGONNNNNNN
To be fair to that anon, Pathfinder is also one of those games where just by virtue of having levels you become a god among men, as opposed to 90s RPGs where having levels meant you were slightly more skilled at tasks but still needed magic items (or GM giving you spells) to actually become Starkiller.
The same is true of AD&D. Class levels are explicitly stated to be extremely rare, with most npcs being 0-level.
Only in the DMG. Several campaign settings say bandits and pirates are like from 1 to 8
But that didn't matter too much because the difference between 5 HP and 20 HP isn't as big a deal.
bandits and pirates are in dangerous occupations where that's reasonable, and the random peasants out there outnumber them greatly
I didn't get the impression that the problem is how the mugger got so powerful, it's what the mugger is doing with their power. Like, if you can do the shit a 17th level character can do, you're not going to be mugging random buttholes for pocket change. You're going to be a gentleman highwayman who runs his own network of bandits out in some portion of the countyside, or the thieves guildmaster of an entire nation.
To be fair, the statblock that always gets memed on isnt some random mugger in an alleyway. Its one of the district bosses of one of the mightiest criminal organisations of Absalom, the most important and cosmopolitan cities in the entire world.
A 17th level thief would in any sane setting be the most powerful thief who has ever lived or ever will live, and he would have stopped working 10 levels ago because he already stole every material thing the world. Now he only steals abstract concepts from gods.
> sane setting
> "The thief steals abstract concepts from gods"
That's a moronic, reddit-tier idea.
What the frick does the thief want "abstract concepts" for?
> Hehe just to show how skilled he is as a thief
Fricking nonsensical
Symbol was a baby when he was taken in by orcs, even with his inherent powers from being an unholy scion the fact he survived at all is way more ridiculous than high-level thieves.
>Because a high level necromancer taking over an orc tribe isn't the same thing as LITERAL MUGGERS in dark alleyways robbing people at knife points in a city who are high enough level to cast Wish, and who could easily beat an adult dragon to death with their bare hands.
I went to look this up and Twisted Jack is not some random mugger, he's a high-ranking member of the most powerful thieves' guild in the "City at the Center of the World". Unless there's another L17 thug mook character you're talking about?
I mean, that just makes it more absurd that some random low lever gangster inexplicably has the same exact stats as him.
What random low-level gangster? When did this happen? This sounds like one of those stories that gets worse in the retelling.
Because people refuse to admit that level and class based systems are fundamentally nonsense and require either eternal escalation or silly bullshit like level 17 street thugs
>Yes, you got level 17 demigod street thugs running around
Imagine hypergamy in this world. In our world you have 80% of women chasing 20% of men, and more like 95% chasing 5% on dating apps. In Pathfinder a level 0 fruit vendor should have zero chance of being a father, an average level 15 guardsman would have a 4/10 fat wife and the local lord would have a harem of 30 prostitutes.
thats only because of sexual liberation and nanny states
absent that, women are forced to be mostly monogamous to survive
One would assume, given the time period, that they didn't commit the civilizational suicide of giving women rights.
Not that anon but here. There's also a level 19 prison warden who looks like the average Greggs customer whose facility has Perception DC 40 secret doors.
terrible
monkeys with typewriters
>level 19 male human prison warden blocks your path
>450 HP
>+36 athletics, +31 intimidation
>can literally kill normal people with one punch
AIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Guirden-sama, please have mercy
That's also missing her dozen level 12 goons
Eh, I'd say that accurately sums up just about any kitchen sink fantasy, so yes by technicality, no by comparison.
Have you tried asking the Pathfinder or DnD General threads?
Sound like every kitchen sink setting ever made.
>Theocratic Nazis
????
Why does every kitchen sink have a nazi analogue?
And why do only the best ones just outright have the Nazis and present the fact that their arguments are actually good for some people even if they're bad for others.
>Why does every kitchen sink have a nazi analogue?
They're in that goldilocks zone of Evil and Stylish, which is essential for a good villain faction.
>Evil
You totally don't understand.
Nazis
>???
I assume Cheliax
I got that, just it seemed weird to me that a group could be both theocratic and nazis given the nazis were aiming for a future where religious doctrine would be thrown out in favor of a state doctrine.
That's part of why I like the Nazis in Rifts.
Yes it's a kitchen sink setting, and its way of having nazis is arguably the most hilarious I've seen in a kitchen sink setting one of the founders of a city-state that would become a nation found an ancient library and inside discovered the cache of history channel documentaries about Hitler, and realized he must have been the greatest pre-apocalypse emperor if so many people were obsessed with documenting his life, so based everything from style to governing off of him but it also is clear that for humanity to survive comfortably, they need some harsh rules against the aliens, the mutants, and the mages.
Yes there are examples where people live without the nazi regime, but they're few and far between, and often lack the infrastructure the nazis were able to build up thanks to the fact they don't need to worry about Johnny Brickabs going crazy one day and punching down houses.
Or they're places that miraculously covered so much pre-apocalypse tech that it breaks suspension of disbelief, as is becoming more often the case.
With the only exceptions being Germany who in Rifts apparently purged the non-German population at some point, and Japan, where the entire nation got Samurai Jack'd
But they're also not exactly easily accessible for most people in the americas
It sounds like a cute bit of lore, though I must admit the idea of a nazi esque society being able to build a actual functional state instead of the total failure basically only kept afloat by Czech industry seems a bit unlikely. Still, if nothing else, I think it captures their general pathetic nature. Literally only remembered for how much they fricked up.
I still think the perfect Nazi fantasy parody are the Skaven. If only because most of the Nazi top already looked like rat people in real life.
Skaven are israeli, sigmarites are nazi.
>Spoiler
Only if you are anti human civilization.
>Why does every kitchen sink have a nazi analogue?
An excuse so you can kill humans with the same remorse when you kill orcs and goblins.
>spoiler
elaborate
I assume he means stealing money from israelites and giving it to Germans is good for Germans.
Nazis weren't actually good for Germans, thus them starting unwinnable wars that ultimately killed like 7 million Germans, resulted in them being ethnically cleansed from the rest of Europe, winding up half under communist occupation, and just barely not getting blown up in WW3.
Natsoc's were luciferians. Luciferians must make themselves look good to deceive you. One way is to stage an attack on you in order to save you.
Most games are luciferian in nature: defeat the big bad evil guy who wants to stop you from having good things.
Oh, come now.
The satan-worshipping nazis are ruled by a *woman*. So they can't possibly be that bad, can they?
Checkmate, athiests. (Yes, we have a whole nation of them, too.)
That sounds like boring lifeless kitchen-sink
SotDL is worse.
>powerful fey are all buttholes or apathetic
>the creators of the world are a wall
>the most powerful human is a power hungry butthole necromancer with godlike powers who went around conquering other humans and fricking hundreds of women as his slave consorts
>the last three mentioned are the "gods" of the setting
>the most prominent god in the modern day setting is also the Devil LARPing and is also a butthole fey
>the real God of the setting is the Demon Lord and he's trying to devour all of creation
>oh yeah, and the Outer Gods might also exist and are unbeholden to the Demon Lord
Well it's grim derp for a reason
>everyone is eating shit
Whoa.
mork borg is more grimderper. each day you roll a dice to see if some doom afflicts the world. at the seventh doom, the world ends
Honestly out of more borg parodies this takes the cake
you need to be slapped
>can't handle TRÜE grimderp
weak
>the most powerful human is a power hungry butthole necromancer with godlike powers who went around conquering other humans and fricking hundreds of women as his slave consorts
Based.
In such a dreadful world, no reason no to go full hedonistic and not give a shit about everything else.
fey are all buttholes or apathetic
Kill fey. Behead fey. Roundhouse kick a fey into the concret. Slam dunk a fey baby into the trashcan. Crucify filthy fey. Defecate in a fey foodplate. Launch Fey into the sun . Stir fry fey in oil. Toss fey into active volcanoes. Urinate into fey wine. Throw fey into a dragon's maw. Twist fey heads off. Report fey to the Sentinels Unarmed strike fey in half. Cast desire end on a pregnant fey. Trap fey in quicksand. Crush fey under an elephant. Roast fey on a gridiron. Eat fey. Dissect feys . Exterminate feys in the colosseum. Stomp feys skulls with steel boots. Cremate feys in the kiln. Lobotomize feys . Mandatory hateful defecation for feys. Grind feys babies in a mortar. Drown feys in liquid gold. Incinerate feys with fire. Kick feys off a cliff. Feed feys to the lions. Slice feys with their own bone swords.
More like Shadow of the Poop Spell.
is the guy on the right stabbing his own dick?
Okay, so it's a setting with a lot of evils to fight, a lot of adventures to have. Bloated, maybe, but you don't need to focus on all of it.
Golarion has many problems, such as being written by Paizo, but this isn't one of them.
It's a setting made so you always have something to do in it.
Pathfinder doesn't work as a setting when you look at the big picture - too many things going on in too many locations, and a lot of conflicting themes. It works best when working with only one nation, maybe two if they are in conflict.
That's like saying the real world doesn't work as a setting because too many things are going on, anon.
The real world is boring. Nothing ever happens.
Whoever wrote that crap is a moron who can't spell correctly.
I mean, you still have countless people living pretty normal lives in their towns and cities and villages and farms. You just have a large variety of foes and dangers you can deal with as a party.
Its not really that different from many other established settings, really. The fricked up places are calles Felwood or Mourneland instead of Sarkoris, the evil nations are called Thay instead of Cheliax, the evil outsiders are called Daedra and Yugoloths instead of Divs. Random monsters are creeping around in pretty much very fantasy setting ever. Nastry realms of existance are also a generic staple of most fantasy, as are some evil gods or eldritch horrors. I wouldnt nessecarily say that Golarion is sooooo much worse than the DnD Multiverse, Azeroth, Nirn, the Continent of the Witcher or Sanctuary from Diablo. The things that want to steal your money and eat your face are just slighty different.
>the evil outsiders are called Daedra
What did he mean by this?
Elder Scrolls.
1. The setting isnt stuck in that time period, its just the current period. The setting does advance, as shown in the move to PF2e and its many books. And yes Rovagug is held in the Cage aka the prison demiplane at the center of the world.
2. This is true.
3. This is severely biased to present good as not good. The beastmen, agathions, live in an idealized state of Anarchy, but are still fundamentally good and make it able to work. The rustic faux utopia is not faux. It really is a utopia, and it doesn't crush your individuality. The type who would hate it aren't generally allowed into this afterlife. As for the celestial nanny-state, its the celestial mountain and its armies who fight cosmic evil and protect the various heavens. They also arent a nanny-state. Good is actually good in the setting, and making it to the afterlife after being a good person is rewarded handsomely.
4. He is describing the Boneyard where the soul is judged and sent to its proper afterlife, and it is not an afterlife unless you were a hardcore atheist. And yes the sahkils, thematically meant to represent horror villains and Aztec death gods, are psychopomps who rebeled after learning some cosmic secret. They live in Xibalba.
5. Yep, things to fight and save people from.
6. Cheliax was a dominant power, now its a falling power desperate to regain its former power with a mad queen who has damned every soul within its borders to Hell. And yes they are Satan worshipping nazi conquistadors.
7. Nidal is weird. Its not a complete horror show like the Hostel movies, but its still bad since its run by cenobite-worshipping goths. They are also not a vassal for Cheliax as Zon Kuthon, cenobite god, is the patron and protector of Nidal and perfectly willing to frick up Asmodeus and his Cheliax.
8. This depends on edition. In 2e it was resolved and closed in a 1e AP made canon, leaving the Sarkoris Scar a recovering hell blasted wasteland.
9. Yep, lots of evil to fight against. But Baba Yaga doesn't run her country, she installed her daughters to do that. Also, in PF2e, her granddaughter and child of her son Russian mystic Rasputin now runs the country after a previous daughter tried to capture and steal Baba Yagas power. Yes, Russia and by extension Earth, exists and you go there in an AP to fight Rasputin in 1918 to save Baba Yaga, who is also Russian but way more ancient.
10. This pertains to PF2e only, Tar Baphon escaped his prison and turned a nearby country into a zombie filled wasteland, tried recruiting his old minions the orcs (they rejected him), and is currently plotting the destruction of everything and trying to slowly expand his domain.
11. Yep, they exist. Thankfully most are in faraway jungles or sleeping.
12. This depends on edition and its not as big of a problem as presented. In PF2e the dark elves are disguised serpentfolk, looking for test subjects. And its the derro not dwarves who kidnap people.
13. This is true, and there really isnt any good reason for places other than the material plane to be friendly to mortal life.
14. Same as 13.
15. Space is dangerous and filled with danger.
16. The Lovecraft mythos is part of the setting, the Plane of Time is literally Yogsothoth (who came from a previous universe) and Azathoth is a cancer but also a linchpin on the functioning of the material plane. Cthulhu sleeps in Ryleh on Earth. Carcosa exists and Hastur lives there. And yes, there is a potential new outer god in a planet sized egg at the edge of the solar system, called Aucturn. Still exists in Starfinder, hasn't hatched. Apostae is the Pluto equivalent.
>drow are disguised serpentfolk in 2E
what the frick? what other shit had they changed? i thought drow were just what elf turn into when they become evil
Well, thanks to WotCs frickery involving the OGL, Paizo made the ORC and had to make some hard decisions around OGL creations and what to keep and change or simply get rid of, and drow fell on the "get rid of" side. The main dev responsible for the game, and who loves drow, made the final call to remove them. Was a big issue at the time. Now all dark elf shit was just disguised serpentfolk shenanigans.
>what other shit had they changed?
All kinds of things. Golems got changed hard core, and are not called golems, don't even share a category anymore. Shambling mounds are now Heaps. Several archons got remade and hound archons no longer exist. Barghests are no longer weregoblin things but instead resemble their actual folklore as "demonic" dogs. Demons got renamed or changed. A lot has changed because of WotC frickery.
The dragons got some big changes too. Now all chromatics are just cosmetic variations of horned dragons and metallics are broken up among different new varieties, like conspirator dragons, empyreal dragons, and fortune dragons.
Athamaru are a new fishmen ancestry, remade from the kuotoa. Playable soon in Howl of the WIld, alongside mermaids, minotaurs, and others.
Gnolls are now kholo. Will be a core ancestry in PC2.
Druegar are now Hryngar.
Hags got a total rework and new names.
Nagas renamed and reworked.
Oozes rewoked and renamed.
Rakshasa lore reworked, no longer have backwards hands (a very silly OGL thing)
Sahaguin are Sedacthies now.
A bunch of stuff got the axe and no longer exists.
Golems aren't a WOTC creation.
>Golems aren't a WOTC creation
Golems as a category of monster with specific magical immunities are. Flesh golems still exist theyre now just Charnel Creations. Iron golems are Iron Wardens. The golems still exist, but as separate constructs with their own stat blocks and no shared monster type effects.
They were redundant to the setting, and took up space that could be better utilized by the paizo IP serpentfolk. If you want to play a dark-skinned "underground" elf, just roll a cave elf. All thats been removed is a specific named elf culture with strong ties to WotC IP. Dark-skinned elves still exist and are playable, there just wont be sadist underground elves with a matriarchal culture doing evil shit. And you can still homebrew in drow if youre desperate for that particular culture in your games.
>The main dev responsible for the game, and who loves drow, made the final call to remove them. Was a big issue at the time. Now all dark elf shit was just dis
Couldn't they have gone with dark fey (who are all dark skinned pointy eared) or dark elves? I doubt Wizards can copyright dark elves considering there's brown elves everywhere in other media and dark elves are a Norse myth thing.
How fricking gay. You know, if you want a fresh perspective on dark elves that keeps them as dark-skinned evil elves, but legally distinct from drow, I got a book for you. I mean admittedly it's for the ACKS system and this is only a 2nd draft, but it's pretty damn good if I say so myself.
Pretty shit tbh
It's okay to be jealous.
>nogames having opinions
lol
lmao
> -ACKS system
My brain is fully rotted
I'm curious as to just how big of a ball-drop this new, not-2.5 edition is going to be.
I assume we're well into the 'our fanbase will happily eat any shit we shovel out' phase of PF's life, but it'd be hilarious if too many changes to both system and setting backfire on them.
>”WOTCs frickery involving OGL”
Technically true insofar as that’s Paizo’s excuse, but they’re really just cleaning house so that they can start copywriting their own shit. OGL’s bullshit is virtually unenforceable in a court of law (most of its legal basis being ‘because we said so, mmkay?’) and Paizo is one of WOTC’s few “competitors” who actually has enough capital to put up a fight in court. Instead they’re giving half-orcs a new moronic, copyright-friendly name so that they can enforce order in their own, substantially smaller slice of the ttrpg market.
2.5e is moronic.
What's the magic version of Scientology? Are they referring to that one river kingdom where the king pretends to be a god?
I'm pretty sure they mean Razmiran
In which case, yeah, the comparison is pretty apt
Probably refering to Razmir the Livivng "God".
Druma is possible but I dont think they are referring to the prosperity gospel based country.
Someone do something like this for Forgotten Realms or Ebberon
Golarion is based.
That looks suspiciously like Faerun, which I guess would be on brand for a game that is basically just D&D but made by someone else.
It's even more of a clusterfrick than Faerun.
>tree huggers
lame and wrong
its "robin hood land"
and molthune is clearly communist russia
ffs this is basic
WTF is Sellenia. I've never heard of it and there's nothing online I can find for it. Isn't Cair Paravel something from Narnia?
It's the Stolen Lands from Kingmaker.
Based on what? A pride parade?
Prove me wrong, anon. Protip: you can't. Gaylarion is gayer than an rpg based off of ancient Greece. Every AP's full of homos.
you're so fricking boring dude
He's not wrong though. You can't throw a rock without hitting a lesbian in Pathfinder.
these days im sure
but I first looked at golarion in 2008 and it wasnt bad
I still prefer faerun, but im decently versed in golarion
cheliax is lawful evil to the max, and nazis are lawful evil personified to the bluepilled
its a natural conclusion
That's where you are wrong. The Serpants skull AP doesn't have a single gay in it.
And the one it might have is an evil lesbian succubus. Who abuses and makes slaves out of religious women by threat of taking away their connection to spirit animals
>not a single one
>except for that one
>Depicting gays as evil is the same as sucking a guy's dick.
You heard it hear folks.
I thought he just wanted a break from gayness
Then maybe you should stop being a disingenuous gay.
I should have know that his ability to be a disingenuous gay far out stripped his knowledge of the game and it's adventure paths.
As that character is not gay but could potentially be interpreted that way and since that guy can only think of gay. I know he would have if he had actually known anything about the game.
idk, still sounds pretty gay
Who cares if a lot of the iconics and major NPCs are massive prancing fruits, the world is still fun and interesting. Let Paizo have their obligatory troon or lesbian and you get a decent Adventure Path, that was how this shit went for years.
Why is Ancient Greece depicted as though every single person is gay? Is everyone gay today? They were probably more accepting of it during that time, but it doesn't mean everyone was gay. We accept gays now, but most people aren't gay. Most of the people talked about were the upperclass. So if anything, rich and powerful people were extremely gay and regular people were heterosexual.
There was no such thing as a homosexual or 'gay' identity in Ancient Greece! It wasn't about who you were attracted to, it was about who you fricked. And, most importantly, _how_ you fricked them.
>They were probably more accepting of it during that time,
Except they weren't. They didn't even have a concept of "gay" in the way modernity does, as an immutable sexual orientation. Some men performed gay acts, for most of the same reason men back then fricked animals and children and siblings etc.; Men fricked everything unless someone convinced them not to.
Many Ancient Greek cultures did villify and even punish homosexual acts, and even the Spartans, now famous for their pederasty, punished adult men who slept with each other because the only kind of homosexuality they endorsed was pedophilic exploitation built around systematized grooming.
There's a fair number of our oldest philosophical texts that laboriously explain why homosexual acts shouldn't be conducted, because explaining to people why they shouldn't just frick everything that doesn't run away from you was a challenge, since the whole concept of "Don't put your penis in every hole you find" was ground-breaking.
Also, a lot of nobles were portrayed as having homosexual tendencies not for the sake of historical accuracy, but as attacks on their image. The easiest way to emasculate a man was to put him in the receiving role, and trying to figure out how much of any ancient "historical" texts were just propaganda is enough of a challenge that there's tens of thousands of historians who have made careers out of exactly that.
>Many Ancient Greek cultures did villify and even punish homosexual acts, and even the Spartans, now famous for their pederasty, punished adult men who slept with each other because the only kind of homosexuality they endorsed was pedophilic exploitation built around systematized grooming.
That's a meme. No city-state punished 'homosexual acts' because no sex act was illegal in Greece. Bottoming was frowned upon in certain places but there was no specific legislation against it.
And the Spartans, at least on paper, disapproved of pederasty. Xenophon mentions that they had an outright peculiar insistence on pederastic relationships not being consummated because they thought it went against the city's ideals of restraint and moderation.
Relations between men of roughly the same age, on the other hand, were normalized to such an extent he casually mentions that Kleonymos, the son of Spartan king Sphodrias, was the handsomest and most highly regarded of all the youths of his years and had a lover Archidamos, the son of Agesilaos, who was utterly smitten by him.
I DON'T FRICKING CARE. YOU CAN PAINT THE SETTING AS "EPIC APOCALYPSE" AS YOU WANT, BUT IT STILL FEELS LIKE A STUPID, NO FRILLS WHATEVER SETTING FULL OF LESBIANS.
Lesbian monstergirls are you good for u
Good for stabbing with a railroad spike, Black person.
YURIgayS IN BODYBAGS
Shut up about how much you like putting dicks in your ass
>Liking lesbians makes you a gay
I understand you have difficulty grasping the concept of 1+1=2, but I guess you just can't get off without there being a man ass in the porno.
No one asked for projection from you gaylord
And no one wants to listen to a closest homosexual get angry about men enjoying women fricking women. Yet here we are.
The closest homosexual here is you dumbass because I am not angry about lesbians here, you misunderstood what is going on likely from you failing at reading and thinking
IIRC, It's also implied the ancestor races of humanity (or humanity itself) are also biological runoff from the Outer Gods/GOO.
Also, I think Pathfinder's version of Hastur follows Delta Green's, and Carcosa being a collection of an insane, nostalgic fae timeloop creeps me out more than usual Lovecraft stuff.
That said, Pathfinder Society stuff is typical do-gooder stuff. You do have to kill people sometimes, but they're often people you can't negotiate with and if you're low on health, you can't risk knocking them out, since that's a harder action.
>Is it really this bad?
Who can say? No sane person has ever given a frick or even read the official Pathfinder lore.
the REAL horror of it all is that the setting's recent retcons and metaplots have sanded off so many of its edges and reduced what made this clusterfrick kind of cool and fun even as a shitty kitchen sink setting.
Pathfinder sucks but at least it considered D&D monster descriptions in its worldbuilding. Kraken ruling class is lit.
I truly adore all the lore and world building that went into the monsters of 1e. To be a quick edgelord, it was cool to see ogres being described as awful rapist, cannibal, hillbillies where death is preferable to capture. The vast slave networks ran by hobgoblins, and shit like qlippoth preferring their sacrifices to be pregnant women.
5e is so fricking gay in how they'll gleefully describe how the villain decimated every village but very specifically spared all the children, refused to take slaves, and would execute any of his soldiers who groped a girl before they chopped her head off.
I miss edgy writing and worldbuilding. I always wanted to make a monster breeder devoted to Lamashtu but my group never played that much pathfinder (at least not the default setting) and they never had very many good options for it despite it being there.
>5e is so fricking gay in how they'll gleefully describe how the villain decimated every village but very specifically spared all the children, refused to take slaves, and would execute any of his soldiers who groped a girl before they chopped her head off.
I've noticed this phenomenon as well; I call it the YA fiction effect and I attribute it to publishers wanting to have their cake and eat it too - you can have gore and dismemberment and torture and shit and people won't bat an eye so long as it's not too gratuitous but having even PG-13 sexual content means that the ice gets a lot thinner and any sort of sexual violence or other taboo sexual activity immediately lands you on the naughty list. You can get away with it in the context of background lore and mythology and maaaybe villains but something like a tiny paragraph in a module about how things are so desperate in the Edgelordia region that many girls turn to prostitution as children to make ends meet is considered beyond the pale.
However, with all that said, I think the broader RPG community is at least partially to blame for it. If you have something in there about how evil god Y prefers his sacrifices to be pregnant (for a reason deliberately left unspecified) then you'll have terminally online autists speculating about the "logical conclusions" of rape camps to produce acceptable sacrifices and folk beliefs about the magical properties of unborn children or and shit like that and they'll make it even more grimderp than it already is on their own initiative - and if you try to forestall this by getting particular it comes off as bad writing and/or adds fuel to the fire. I would also add that there's a certain kind of person who, upon hearing that child prostitutes are de facto legal, will immediately try to buy one (likely with a suspicious resemblance to someone they know or knew IRL) because "why else would they be in the book? my character is TN so I see nothing wrong with it".
I wonder if anybody has ever baited some lore writer/module writer into answering rather or not sacrificing a pregnant woman gets an extra soul or some convoluted way of getting them to say a fetus counts as a person with a soul.
Its not even edgelording to a certain extent if its just being frank about what a certain event would entail. If it follows that they would do something by the nature of what they are and the situation they are in, then there. If you dont want to over detail it that's fine, traditionally things not in tune with the tone would just be tactfully glazed over, given a less objectionable alternative, or not brought attention to at all.
>"The villiage was destroyed and great misery and subjugation came to all, with great ransoms placed on the heads of the prisoners".
Instead of
>"The village was destroyed and the women and children where taken as frick-slaves to the rape pits of the dark lord".
Which is a whole lot smoother than going out of your way to assure you that the obvious less palatable implications don't happen.
>"The village was destroyed, and there was great bloodshed and blood-slaughter, though the children where NOT hurt by the dark lord's troops because that was too wrong, even for them".
>5e is so fricking gay in how they'll gleefully describe how the villain decimated every village but very specifically spared all the children, refused to take slaves, and would execute any of his soldiers who groped a girl before they chopped her head off.
I think it's hilarious that these same people think every military force in real life goes around raping. Like every single person involved is raping and murdering. To suggest that there were likely several people involved who didn't massacre kids and rape women is offensive to them. Whoever they don't like is an evil oppressing force raping and murdering everyone and everyone they do like is noble and misunderstood and the most progressive group no matter the timeframe in which they existed.
They can't accept that most of the time you're going to have some instances of rapes and killings of innocent people. They can't have that in their good group because they can't face reality.
Don't know nothing about Pathfinder, but I know canonically in 3.5 Forgotten Realms that any portal opened to the Far Realms stays open, and so everything will eventually be consumed by it because those portals also continuously grow. These can range in size from a grand gate, to the the width of a hair like the one a group of fey canonically guard. There's also canonically more devils and demons than the forces of good. There's at least tens of Pit Fiends for every example we have of Solars.
Yeah, but Desna is based so it all works out in the end.
It's not really even as bad as the modern world because they don't have slavery like we do.
>everything I don't like is a nazi
it's just so fricking tiresome
Bruh Cheliax would probably look at Nazi Germany and call it weak cowards.
Why is it that's it's always lorelets like you who make the most abhorrent pots with the most unfounded confidence?
Not really. Most is barely relevant background dangers. The average joe still has a history of "grandpa Ruckus lived for 80 years in the northern taldan countryside. His largest problems have been taxes by the local noble, some wolves eating cattle, some minor goblin issues and a flood after a particulary nasty rain season. He never saw a dragon or a demon or space cthulu and especially no Kaiju. He has no idea that things live in space and knows shit about the planes, beyond some basic folklore the local erastil priest might have told him in a sermon. He died of natural causes."
>frikkin'
Gonna be a yikes from me.
If the world is so monster-infested, then how come the global ecosystem hasn't collapsed from over-predation yet?
It's predators all the way down, I presume.
>Its not even edgelording to a certain extent if its just being frank about what a certain event would entail.
Right, that was never in dispute. The point is that the threshold for sexual content is much lower than for other kinds and even if the author doesn't get edgy with it other people might and people with poor social graces (in MY hobby? No way.) might use whatever scraps are there to their maximum potential. My contention is that this is because PnP games are increasingly being marketed to kids in the 10-12yo bracket instead of the 15+ bracket that they traditionally were.
>He thinks all monsters are predators
A dire ox will still turn your hamlet into a past tense, and all it wanted was to eat all your pumpkins.
Gentlemen, I don't have a brain, but I have a car, an extra strength fishing pole, a pumpkin, and a plan.
Anon please do not commit dire ox terrorism.
God speed, anon. I'll be rooting for you while watching from a safe distance.
Honestly, it seems to be on the way to that. Nations that aren't run by literal nation ending threats or are fully made up of said predators, are way smaller than they should be.
Absalom is the absolute largest city on the inner sea, and potential in the world... It has
306,900 inhabitants, which is indeed a decent amount, but nothing near what "Largest in the world" should be. If somebody took the time to break it down, there's probably less than a billion, maybe even barely tens of millions of 'people' in the world. Which is catastrophic considering the big numbers lore writers like to throw out for how much bad shit there is.
Those numbers remind me of how some of my favorite post apoc settings talk about numbers.
Something like 47 million humans left in all of north america, and that's over a century since shit went bad.
47 million same like a huge number for post Apocalypse north America
Yes there really is that much text in that box.
Idk Pathfinder doesn't do much for me but I know people who play it regulatly and they are havin' a blast
This is what happens when your worldbuilding involves throwing everything and the kitchen sink in the setting.
what's the problem? looks fun
Map got me at Clockwork Tsars. Would play in.
some of these I dont even get
like I understand they're all cliches, but what cliche is "elk tribes" or "city of shrines"?
My only reference point is 1e pathfinder but yeah, there's some grim shit in there. The Cenobite god is pretty cool in a ham sort of way. I don't know what's changed though.
Not much. They changed some names, tightened up the math, collated a lot of the feats into the core books (which is why we're gettign two for the players) and overall, stepped out from under WotC litiginous nonsense. Since their ORC is under neutral lawyers who don't give a frick, nothign you make using the ORC is going to be a problem - and it is fairly backwards compatible with 2e in general.
The way the Core GM book is written it's closer to OSR than anything D&D has put out since AD&D.
Most nu-nerds don't need rpgs, they need therapy and religion. The overwhelming majority of people in the fantasy now are depressed mentally ill weirdos who treat what was supposed to be a fun escapist hobby as their moody quasi-religious confessional. That's why there's so much tiresome muh grey and gray morality nonsense in fantasy now or other boring bullshit, and it's also why nothing new ever sticks regardless of how popular it was overnight, and why everyone keeps reaching further and further back to works created by people who weren't sad homosexuals like Tolkien and Howard, dragging their ideas and concepts into CURRENT YEAR in vain hopes to make something good but inevitably twisting it into more tiresome bullshit by throwing their mentally ill morality and concepts onto the characters.
The devil nazi conquistadors aren't allowed to have slavery anymore even though they worship the god of slavery because the wokes got mad. Neither are the duergar (nor would the drow, except they don't exist anymore for reasons only tangentially related to wokeness). Under the woke regime all fictional villains must be present day Republican politicians in genre-appropriate costumes. Any villain who isn't explicitly right-wing is probably an innocent victim, and anything to the right of the present day US Republican Party is absolutely beyond the pale and on par with graphic onscreen child rape.
totally lame if true
Cheliax abolishing slavery (not really) makes perfectly sense in world, however. Its a nation that got its high sea fleet fricked by pirates, lost a major province to rebels and had another rebellion in their heartland that needed to be put down. The entire region has an abolishment zeitgeist, a new revolutionary faction (the firebrands) have risen and are funded by the two new states that sprung from rebellion. On their border is the fake USA who just wait for a casus belli to bring them freedom and democracy with gunpowder and steel and the bellflower network is still going strong. So all in all, Cheliax is in a pretty fricking rough spot. Getting some good international PR by saying "hey, we freed out slaves, we dont do that anymore!" is perfectly resonable. Especially if they do it in a devilish-lawyer way that just replaces it by debt-traps and fricked up contracts that keep the poors enslaved in all but name. They literally spell this out in the firebrands faction book. But you obviously dont care about any of that, you´re just having a culture war rant
That's fricking stupid. That's like if earth were a fictional planet and the author went "oh in 2024 Iran legalized gay marriage because they're in a rough spot and want better relations with the west but like sometimes local school districts take heather has two mommies or whatever out of the library so they're still homophobic." They literally worship the god of slavery, abolishing slavery would be inconcievable sacrilege, and if they did only abolish it in name only then the bellflowers/firebrands/andoran would have to be dumber than a bag of rocks to fall for it.
Not being a geopolitical dunce, tricking your enemies and binding people with decieving contracts is exactly the kind of behaviour that pleases a devil god.
yes but all of the abolitionist factions would have to be fricking imbeciles to believe that the country that worships the god of slavery and legal trickery actually meaningfully abolished slavery rather than it being a legal trick
The firebrands book actually goes into that. Everyone with a functioning braincell is perfectly aware of that. The firebrands, the bellflowers, Andoran, Kitargo and so on. But they arent the target of the matter. Its the general public. You know, the ones not deeply invested into international politics. The average guy on the street. For them, its presented by chelish propagandist as a huge win. No need to join the firebands and rebel now. And to a certain extend, it works. Just like in real life. Fighting actual slavery gets you a strong reaction. Fighting against sweat shops in asia building your electronics and cloths with sky high suicide rates? Eh, whatever. You might say "yeah, its bad i guess" and go on with your day unless you are an activist to begin with.
i really don't think "the nation that worships the god of slavery and loophole abuse says they abolished slavery" is going to convince anyone who had any chance of joining the bellflowers or firebrands anyway. If they were that stupid they'd most likely be more of a liability than an asset.
Many would laude Cheliax for their progressiveness when they change their flag to celebrate Halfling History Month once a year.
>Halfling History Month
I would blast so many ropes that month, it'd be unreal.
Still, public perception is a thing. You may not stop people willing to become outright insurgent, but you may stop those who might become sympathizers. The average joe dont have our point of view. They dont know the new chelish freedom is a scam. For all they know, hey legally these people arent slaves anymore. The nation that loves his law says so in its laws. If you´re some guy up in Varisia, how much will you ever heard about abusive employment contracts? Its like with Saudi Arabia letting woman drive. See? They changed for the better. Just give them some more time to reform. We dont need a bloodbath, surely in the next few years other improvents will follow. Right???
Pretty sure the average guy up in Varisia would know Asmodeus is the god of slavery. Also unless they're actively joining the bellflowers or firebrands, what the average foreigner thinks doesn't matter since there are very few democracies.
>Pretty sure the average guy up in Varisia would know Asmodeus is the god of slavery.
Its still a legal and accepted faith in various parts of the Inner Sea. And the asmodean clerics dont sell you the slavery part, they sell you the lawful society of order part.
>Also unless they're actively joining the bellflowers or firebrands, what the average foreigner thinks doesn't matter since there are very few democracies.
Information warfare is still important. For once, the prime enemy of Cheliax in fact IS a democracy (Andoran). Second, even monarchies and republics need to have an eye on public sentiment. Not to the same degree that elected officials need to, but still. Third, weaking the sympathizing bedrock from which insurgent groups recruit new people abroad is a valid interest of the state.
Well thats how real world dictatorships deal with social unrest and insurgency. You crack down hard on them or you extend an olive branch. Cheliax did both. They crushed the Glorious Reclamation rebellion and now they extend the olive branch of reforms (fake as they may be) to the people.
I hate to say it but isn't the US a prime example of this?
Slavery was technically gone after the civil war, but it still existed in a variety of forms in the south up until WWII, where the feds started clamping down on it out of fear the Nazis/Japs would use it to turn soldiers against the US.
But as far as most people in the north were concerned it was only convicts being forced to labor down there, and it wasn't until some rich white boy getting arrested for trumped up charges in Florida did people in most of the country start to say "how did driving over the speed limit get him indefinite years of hard labor?"
So officially banning slavery but still have slavery in other names, does in fact work, it's just a bit silly how it's done in Pathfinder due to how much random magic and bullshit there is in the setting to prove things one way or the other.
The noble northman myth lmao.
That stuff still happens today. We also have sex slavery going on in our country. It's easy to ignore because it's not out in the open and obviously most people aren't involved. Then you have the Epstein type stuff.
Oh of course, I grew up about 30 minutes outside of DC, worked under one of the bigger prosecutors in my state.
The amount of times he would kvetch about the sex trafficking operations and how the bigger ones he couldn't do anything about because it was technically based out of NY and the feds would take over (and then never do anything) was insane.
Though a few small time (2-4 dozen girls) operations would get busted here and there, it was rare to see it get covered outside of the local newspapers.
And then all of the local newspapers died in favor of the WaPo.
The point still stands though, if a nation (even a fantasy one) officially outlaws slavery, they can still have slavery. Sure it's not as open as it was during the early 1900s, but it's still so fricking common you can find out about your own state's issues with it through a google search.
And given fantasy settings don't have the internet/cameras, it's going to be more common to be in the early 1900s style where it's blatantly slavery but called something different.
“Slavery” aka mass importation of cheap non white labor still happens in the US. Or sweatshop labor.
Only difference is that average Joe taxes subsidize it even more than traditional slavery.
They still have slavery, they're just not mentioning it in adventures going forward (until Twitter goes bust and all the lunatics on it fade into the distance, so 1-2 years).
I don't know where the rapist ogres thing comes from. People say it happened in Rise of the Runelords but I looked through the module and at most you could maybe say that there was some stuff vaguely implied.
lore blurb at the bottom. They are omega super rapists that will rape whatever they dont eat of you, days later.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/humanoids/giants/ogre/
"Stories are told of ogres—horrendous stories of brutality and savagery, cannibalism and torture. Of rape and dismemberment, necrophilia, incest, mutilation, and all manners of hideous murder. Those who have not encountered ogres know the stories as warnings. Those who have survived such encounters know these tales to be tame compared to the truth.
An ogre revels in the misery of others. When smaller races aren’t available to crush between meaty fists or defile in blood-red lusts of violence, they turn to each other for entertainment. Nothing is taboo in ogre society. One would think that, left to themselves, an ogre tribe would quickly tear itself apart, with only the strongest surviving in the end—yet if there is one thing ogres respect, it is family."
How do all these attempts at woah so grim so dark ttrpg settings still feel so pathetic compared to even your average edgy seinen manga?
So the first thing I always think of when a setting is like this:
How the frick did society manage to develop to the point it did (in this case, 16th/17th century)?
Like, with how much shit is thrown around vs. the strength of the general populace, it sounds like the worlds should have developed as various small city-states with massive god-forged walls and expanses of near-uninhabited lands between in order to keep out the array of monsters that would slaughter the average peasant. Not some broad-reaching nation with a ton of random villages dotting the landscape.
>Not some broad-reaching nation with a ton of random villages dotting the landscape.
yeah, they'd all have to be a lot smaller/tighter; a lot of people have come to that same conclusion
this is why so many people say D&D is fantasy wildwest, not fantasy feudalism
Because the OPs text is exaggerating things to quite a degree. Outside of the worldwound, you dont have extraplanar invasions every week. The aliens in space stay there most of the time. Outside of some small scale incidents with random villages, Cthulu isnt really an issue. The evil god locked up in the planets core is locked up and his cultists are your average loons in the deep forest.
>How the frick did society manage to develop to the point it did (in this case, 16th/17th century)?
Aroden
Because the average person isn't gonna meet any of these things, it looks like there's fifty apocalypse stacks going at the time but in reality you have to look for a large amount of this shit to actually interract with it.
Yeah Pathfinder is a kitchen sink fantasy with some grimderp elements. there is even a evil god of fertility that wants worshippers to get knotted by dogs, werewolves minotaurs and demons and to breed monstergirls everyday which is based 2bh
>there is even a evil god of fertility that wants worshippers to get knotted by dogs, werewolves minotaurs and demons and to breed monstergirls everyday
It was a different time...
it truly was. Paizo were based leftist back than, everyone of there AP used to have a waifubait, fixable evil villaneous or a monstergirl.
what happened to him?
Sounds alright to me, but I know I've no refined tastes. : )
it's like we refuse to move on from the fricking kitchen sink mess that was mystara.
Mystara was kino totale
>calls out pathfinder
>100% complaints about golarion specifically
skill issue
>the underthought&overwrought kitchensink setting written by hacks for a game whose highest ambition is to be a more math-autistic D&D, developed with no sense of scale and cohesion and with the mindset of a Dragonball-obsessed manchild, is in fact shit
who could had thought
>no sense of scale
how so
For me, it's Tian Xia.
Karate kingdom best kingdom.
I want to investigate that forest in the bottom left.
...for no reason.
godzilla enthusiast?
It sounds like a fun time.
Remember that slavery is officially non-canonical in pathfinder
No, it isn't. They just decided to stop mentioning it.
>"Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. "
t. Erik Mona
Don't ask. Don't tell.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6shvp&page=17?Paizo-Leadership-Team-Update#815
>So while I suspect the word may come up a time or two in the future, we're just not going to be covering it going forward. A few in-production items might reference it still, but it's no longer going to be a notable part of the Golarion campaign setting.
Do people actually use any of the in-universe setting? I use it for homebrew.
1e Golarion is one of my favorite settings, it has edge AND camp at the same time it's great, so of course it's being sanitized because anything even resembling edgyness is problematic or some shit.