#oh pathfinder has some cool lore though. it has some cool gods

[steakbones]

looking at the pathfinder 2e accessibility items category these are so badass they have an immovable arm (immovable rod but its a prosthetic arm) wtf

[balioc]

Talkin’ About Outsiders

Riffing on my recent post:

If you wanted to keep something like the traditional D&D Great Wheel cosmology, and you wanted all the planes on the Wheel and all the various alignment-oriented races of outsiders to be cool and thematic and not-shoehorned-in, what would it look like?  Let’s give it a shot.  Maybe this will be useful someday, if I ever run a planar-savvy D&D campaign.  Or if you do.

Guiding Principles:

* All groups of outsiders should feel narratively resonant.  Players should have an intuitive sense of what they’re about, what role they would play in heroic fantasy stories, etc.  We want to avoid “oh yeah, those guys over in that corner, because of course there have to be some guys over in that corner.”

* Outsiders should feel otherworldly and mystical, like the spirits they are, not like Another Race of Monsters that’s been jammed into a planar role by fiat. 

* Outsiders should strongly reflect their associated alignment, but, like, in a cool way. 

I’m also going to be working with my own personal gut-level sense of how the alignment grid “should” work on a cosmic scale, which suggests that the “corner planes” -- LG, CG, LE, and CE -- are going to be the strongest, most magical, most populated, etc.  In a metaphysical sense, a strong good/evil commitment and a strong law/chaos commitment reinforce each other rather than diluting each other.  In a demographic sense, while in fact the plurality of mortals are TN due to vacillation or apathy, most noteworthy mortals with plane-defining levels of soul power have corner alignments.  In a pragmatic storycrafting sense, three of those four corners are way cooler and better-developed than anything else on the Wheel, so we should probably run with that.  The upshot is that the NG, NE, LN, and CN outsiders can and should be constructed such that they just have less impact on the universe overall.  The in-betweeny planes...well, they’re afterthoughts, we’ll get to them (briefly) but can ignore them for now.

OK.  Diving in:

Chaotic evil demons from the Abyss and lawful evil devils from Hell are being kept, more or less intact.  They’ve gotten more attention than any other planar races, by like an order of magnitude; they’ve got lots of existing lore and monster-design that people know and love; it would be a crime to throw that stuff away.  Fluff should probably try to present them with a somewhat more-philosophical, less-Flanderizing spin than they usually get.  The conceptual heart of demon-ness isn’t “graaaargh kill smash consume defile” (even if that is a popular instantiation), it’s something like “literally nothing matters except my desire and my vision.”  Similarly, devils would benefit from a little less “we’re all legalistic treacherous assholes” (even if many of them are) and a little more “the order of the universe is legitimate, the infernal hierarchy is legitimate, we follow the rules but we play to win.”  But fundamentally these are the creatures you know and love, don’t fix what ain’t broke. 

Neutral evil yugoloths can stay, too, more or less.  They’ve gotten a fair amount of good monster design too, and they’re popular, although I confess that I have no idea why.  A race of fiendish mercenaries who manipulate and prolong the Blood War?  Sure, why not?  I do want to give them a bit more character, though, and not the inexplicable apocalypse-obsessed death-spirit thing from Pathfinder.  Rather: as I understand it, neutral evil as an alignment is mostly about pure selfishness.  It’s not hard to capture the idea of “selfishness” in spiritual cosmic form -- that’s the gaki, the hungry ghost.  Yugoloths should be driven by intense insatiable cravings, presumably with each kind having a different general category of craving.  This will do a lot to define their politics internal and external, the means of treating with them, etc.  (Also, to be clear, “daemon” as an importantly-separate thing from “demon” is very silly and I have no truck with it.)

The collective term for demons, devils, and yugoloths is of course “fiends.”

The lawful neutral outsider race has already been covered in my previous post: that’s the fae.  Inhumanly perfect spirits obsessed with rules, oaths, codes-of-honor, etc.  Dangerous, and certainly not benevolent, but also not inimical to the flourishing of mortals in the way that fiends are.  Hard to understand, as all outsiders must on some level be, but probably easier to deal with than any other spirits if you know the right codes and protocols.  Probably we play down the “capricious nature spirit” thing and play up the bit where they have courts, monarchs, diplomatic ties to Heaven and Hell, etc.

The chaotic neutral race should be...well, something better than the slaadi, that’s for sure.  “They’re infinitely variable and unpredictable, except that they’re all magic frogs who speak in word salad.”  Gee.  Useful for storytelling, that.  I don’t have any super-brilliant ideas here (and am open to suggestions), but I have what I believe to be a good-enough idea: genies.  Proud, wild, tempestuous spirits who treasure their own freedom and dignity above all else.  Binding them can be a road to great power, since they’ll do pretty much anything to escape, but it’s also unbelievably risky.  You can make up some cute lore about their anarchic ad-hoc anything-goes society. 

I’d like to use “angels” as the collective term for good-aligned outsiders, the equivalent of “fiends.”  We could go with “celestials,” I guess, but it’s awkward that the LG plane specifically is (sometimes) called Celestia, and really “angels” has a connotative punch like nothing else. 

Lawful good gets archons.  Yay archons.  Tiered choirs, divine armies, holy holy holy, the whole shebang.  The fluff for these guys could stand to be fleshed out some -- as far as I know it hasn’t been touched since the 3.5e Book of Exalted Deeds, and that version was kinda lame -- but there’s like infinite amounts of Christian angelology lore on which to draw, so I’m not worried.

Neutral good needs something better than guardinals, since “benevolent animal dudes” really had no spiritual resonance at all.  Fortunately we can do some conceptual repurposing here. I think we can just grab the beings that D&D currently calls “angels,” start calling them all “devas” -- even the planetars and solars, which I guess become “planetary devas” and “solar devas” -- and stick them all in NG.  No one really uses them as all-purpose divine servants anyway, as far as I can tell.  They are beings of pure benevolence, protectors and guardians and healers, etc. etc.  Possibly we call the NG plane “Celestia,” to fit with the celestial-objects theme of the devas, and just go with “Heaven” for the LG plane.

And then we come to chaotic good, which is definitely the hardest row to hoe.  CG has a very important spot on the Great Wheel, the CG outsiders need to have something akin to the narrative power of the demons and devils and archons, and...I just don’t think there’s any pre-existing thing that fits the bill.  “Chaotic good” is not the kind of idea that has been traditionally associated with mighty spiritual mysteries, which is probably why all the existing CG outsider races suck so much.  (Seriously, as far as I can tell, it’s always either “we’re elf knights who fight for freedom! but, like, planar!” or “uh, we’re spirits of art and beauty, I guess, sorta?”) We’re going to have to develop these guys from scratch. 

Rather than trying to come up with an “archetypically CG outlook” or something, I think it would make sense to start with an image of their world and society.  This is a good, lovely, beneficent version of the Abyss.  This is a place of tremendous diversity, where outsider lords carve out their own domains according to their own idiosyncratic specifications.  Which means you have, like, a million conflicting little paradises each defined by its own vision.  (But not, like, at war, the way demon lords always are, we’re all very Good here.  Just...different from each other.)  It probably adds up to a sort of hipster’s-vision-of-the-big-city vibe.  You imagine a race of cosmic Manic Pixie Dream Girls, essentially, always flowing into and out of each other’s circles, descending to the Prime Material Plane in order to experience delights / inspire greatness / find adoring mortal fans who will validate their coolness. 

I think it would be a mistake to give these guys a single strong visual theme, the way that the guardinals are “animal people” and the eladrin are “pretty elves.”  They’re a menagerie of weird-but-beautiful monsters, the way that demons are a menagerie of weird-but-ugly monsters.  The race needs a name, but right now I don’t have a good one.

For true neutral outsiders, I think we can just go with elementals and call it a day.  They’re mindless!  They do as they’re commanded, unless they don’t, in which case they have incredibly simplistic urges like “burn” or “flow!” 

The in-between planes -- y’know, Gehenna, the Beastlands, Acheron, etc. -- are cool, in some vague theoretical sense, and I don’t think we should scrap them entirely.  But I also think it’s a mistake to try and give them their own full-fledged native outsider races, to pretend that they’re going to have the same depth of inherent character as the main eight outer planes, etc.  Instead, I suspect it’s best to use them as divine domains.  Because they don’t have powerful native outsider races, they’ve all been taken over by gods.  Exactly which gods live on which ones is a matter of your particular setting’s theology, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense to say “these are the places where you’d expect to find gods by default, a god who lives on one of the main eight planes is doing something kinda weird and probably has a close relationship with the local outsiders.”

[micahbhunter]

:D yay, a fellow DnD'er!! What do you play as, and do you have any artwork of them?

Yay! Hey there!

Sadly I don’t have any art of my characters, but I’m tempted to put a chart of all of them. I have so many that I play, since our group runs so many campaign’s and gives everyone a chance to DM (we actually just halted my campaign for now and just started a new one)

I guess I’ll list them from class, race and level

Teal'o Hopefield. D&D 5th Edition. Homebrew, Monster Hunter inspired. Tiefling, Bard. Level 13 College of Lore.

He’s my fat lovable Tiefling Bard who tries to solve everything with kindness and food. He’s probably my highest level character from my longest running campaign and I love him. I even have a Heroforged miniature of him.

I’m actually working on a more elaborate back story from him right now, which I’ll post later and I’m tempted to take a level in Cleric with Sune (Forgotten Realms goddess of love and beauty) as his deity, since our old group needed a cleric. Plus I love the idea of him being a traveling minstrel writing powerful love ballads and helping with match making after retiring from monster hunting lol

Madcap the Magekiller, also know as “Squishy”D&D 5th Edition. Homebrew. Myconid, Soulknife level 7? Seeker.

Another fave of mine from a heavy homebrew monster campaign a friend ran. I really can’t remember what level he got to? Maybe level 7? Because I know I got all my cool stuff for my class than. He started off as a regular old myconid (which are completely neutral and only speak telepathically) than got captured by a warlock and experimented on (slightly less natural and now can only live by absorbing magic) and was than sold to into slavery to goblins. To make a very long hilarious campaign story short ( I’ll tell more later if asked ;) ) he than met a troglodyte barbarian and a thri-kreen (think antro-mantis that likes to eat elves) ranger along the way and they traveled through the Underdark into an active volcano, fought some drow (whom the trog hit on the only princess while the Thri-Kreen ate her family), punted gnomes into lava, roasted some mind flayers and ate their brains, got stuck together while fighting a gibbering mouth, had the most amazing use for a swan boat ever and disturbed a gnome grave site after the trog peed on an grave marker and had to fight several very angry gnome spirits, than finally got to the end where they fought and sealed a volcano goddess into a silver snuff box. Also the trog is now a god/chosen one…flying mad with power somewhere in the world with Madcap, who the trog literally drove him insane through out the campaign doing stupid shit that got us all in trouble and turned him evil because of it. So now he wants to experiment on everything, like his former master did to him!….he also has a fire peytron that he hatched from an egg on top of the volcano that he rides. Lol that campaign was so insane! I wanna go back to it some day just to see what happens to those three.

Anacharis Delevanti, the Jasmine Bard Pathfinder 3.5 Homebrew, Legend of Zelda inspired.Merfolk. Another Bard (duh), level 7. Dervish Dancer.

Online campaign with some friends from my hometown and their buds on Skype. I play a posh, pompous pretty boy who was born to nobility with a jerk of a father who’s an Ambassador to the world’s capital, that didn’t like him out of his 14 brother and sister’s because he wasn’t “pure blooded”. He basically told his dad to fuck off and traveled to the capital to make a name for himself, which he did! He had a giant tea/poison empire that got destroyed after mysterious forces burned it all down (they killed his butler!) and started the campaign with basically nothing but what he could salvage from the wreckage. He’s a lot of fun to play because he’s so spoiled and flamboyant and the only male and neutral character in the group of good hearted females and is constantly bickering with the dirty wild and Russian dwarf raised ranger (my sister’s character).

Plus he’s one of my only characters that is asexual and aromantic, though very charismatic to all. Oh right and he’s also a belly dancer that sleeps with a night mask and a plush octopus names Mr. Scallops :D

The DM always starts the campaign with a fish joke at his expense lol.

Dross, aka Mithras Oakeneye, from the Salt Wolf Clan.D&D 5th Edition HomebrewGhostwise Halfling. Necro-Druid. Level 2. Circle of the Deathbloom.

One of my most serious and somber characters that I’m currently playing. Ghostwise Halflings are more tribal in nature and Dross lived in a very strict one that hated he practicings the “Old” and “Forbidden” ways. Basically a form of druidism and necromancy that made new plant life from the corpses of dead bodies. The only friend he had was the son of the head elder, who was also the most skilled Hunter that stood up for Dross. But when the clan faced an orc skirmish, his best friend died protecting him and Dross used all his power openly to save the clan. Without the elders son to protect him, the rest of the elders exiled him, stripping him of his former name (hence why he took the name Dross) and smashed his sacred clan item, which usually if a Ghostwise Halfling lost said item, they would have to go on a quest of atonement. He still has his but he used the pieces to turn them into a boulder opal stone pipe. He than made a flower from his former best friends remains and is sailing, with others, to a new land so he can plant it at an ancient tree, per his friends dying wish to see it.

He’s the most creepy character I’ve played. He doesn’t talk, only to one person at a time telepathically (Ghostwise powers, yo!) and is covered in his own eco system of mushrooms and moss and plants that are living on his arms and back. His eyes are a dull white but he can still see and his former reddish brown hair is now black from all the stuff living off him. He erie and smells of earth and loom. Plus probably hasn’t showered in like, 10 years lol

And that’s it! I have more characters from one-shots and small campaigns but those are my main four so far!

I’ll put up more later if people ask me lol and feel free to ask more about any of the one’s I listed and the campaigns their in!

Or tell me about yours. I love talking about D&D and character lore, so,much!!

[fic-dreamin]

Come for the Archdevils, stay for the... As the description hypes this up, it is packing the biggest bads in Pathfinder, with dozens of creatures well over 20 CR. Aside from the Archdevils and the Four Horsemen, there are also empyreal lords, and Charnel Gods which are angry remnants of dead gods. These entries offer as much lore as they do new stats, so you can add to your world even if these aren't planned for your roster. Of course, there are plenty of "normal" monsters too. Go to Amazon

Cr 30 boss monsters and insect were's oh my I was very excited for this book. Reading through it though it feels less like a bestiary and more of a splat book. It is awesome to have extremely powerful foes just to chuckle at the absurdity but in actual practice, I think few GM's will find them useful. Each of the archdevils have 2 page stat blocks with a lot of fluff thrown in. I enjoyed reading about the horsemen but ultimately they were just rehashed from the Horsemen of the Apocalypse book. Regardless, the book offers a ton of new non Demi God monsters and my new personal favorite of (entropic) wereinsects. You can have weremantis, werespider and werewasps. Go to Amazon

... "late game" challenges I'm sure you already know about like the Demon Princes and the Four Horsemen In addition to the "late game" challenges I'm sure you already know about like the Demon Princes and the Four Horsemen, this book also has a lot of cool monsters for CR 10 to 15 inspired by mythology and folklore. I was happy to see stories like Rawhead, Bloody Bones and La Llorona turned into monsters for Pathfinder. There's a few character options in the book, but not very many. Overall a great resource and one of the better Bestiary books in the line. Go to Amazon

Nice, but slightly rushed I rather like this book. Mainly for the new races, cool constructs, troops, and entothropes (insect lycanthropes). The downside is some of these monsters seem like they were either rushed or plain forgotten. One such example is a construct that gets a racial bonus while in "sentinel mode" meanwhile the only thing listed was it's standby mode with no luck of finding the ability in the universal monster rules in the back of the book. Aside from that a great book for high level play with a little for lower level play as well. Go to Amazon

Another amazing bestiary for Pathfinder! I had high hopes and expectations for the latest Pathfinder bestiary, and it did not disappoint! There is lots of great material there that will definitely see use in my own Pathfinder campaigns! Go to Amazon

Five Stars Excellent book. They keep getting better & better will they ever run out of Monster? Go to Amazon

Definitely worth the purchase Lots of fun and terrible beasties to pit against your players, all with beautiful or disgusting artwork, as appropriate. This book is everything I expect from Paizo, including the cheap binding. But, oh well. I have duct tape. :) Go to Amazon

Another awesome book from Paizo Some interesting additions to the game. Another awesome book from Paizo! Go to Amazon

One Star Five Stars Five Stars Four Stars Roll well or write up a new character