Grizzly McSnarl, this huge, lumbering guy with a bad case of RBF. He never takes a hand off the big-ass knife on his hip. If the players dig a little deeper, they’ll learn he’s an anxious kind of guy who worries too much about every little thing, and coasts on his intimidating looks to deter trouble.

I always maintain that the best oneshot is the one you cobbled together last night. Get a little weird, slap some stuff together, and let the players fly off the rails.

I use Gimp and just hand-draw everything. I’ve learned that players don’t really care too much about maps, so going above and beyond with high quality, ultra detailed stuff is wasted effort unless you derive joy from the creation process.

Resist the urge to run Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons. Those systems empower the PCs to fight evil, and win. That power undermines the horror so completely, it may as well just be a coat of paint. You might think “hey, what if I just make the monster too strong to actually fight?” That’s going to lead to a TPK 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, the spellcaster will pull a wild move you didn’t anticipate and come out on top anyway.

huh. i’ve always solved that problem by polluting the dungeon with glyphs of warding to raise a middle finger to future generations of adventurers hoping to find treasures

smuggled in under the bell ofc

what a fucked up animal who defies categorization. i love him

Edit: I have been informed that this is a fabricated facimile of a platypus. I am no longer in love

the fucking long sabaton

-a nuclear winter!

(i am shook that nobody else swept in to finish the line)

Savage Worlds. They call their fortunate hero inspiration point analogue ‘bennies,’ hehehe.

I imagine Benny from F:NV spinning around and saying “what in the goddamn” every time it comes up

Our group made a little detour back to 3.5 for a short adventure and wow this isn’t even an exaggeration. Wizards start with like, 4 hp

I do kinda get that. I’m beyond disinterested in the Blood Hunter & Illrigger on the D&D side of the coin. I just think Paizo’s got all their bases covered as far as setting agnostic classes go.

Every class I want is represented in game. A lot of my favorites are bit more scuffed than I would’ve liked, but they’re there. new classes like Runesmith and Exemplar are what gets me excited for 2e now. I dunno, maybe a Rivethun class, a Prophet of Kalistrade class, and an Esoteric Knight? Mining the lore and old prestige classes for new ways of play appeals.

I like the runelords in PF, they’ve always been kinda goofy being wizards with big polearms though. Having an actual class to back up their aesthetic makes me happy. Also, one of my group’s members pointed out the similarity to Deathknights in Warcraft, and I kinda wanna make that happen.

Right? I thought Paizo said they were gonna be slowing down, now they’re dropping all these new playtests back to back to back

yea, i may have made it a project of mine in the past to look at each of the spells on each list and rewrite them to set them all around the same power levels in their respective spell ranks. eg. Making Daze as useful in its niche as Electric Arc. As a result I’ve gotten pretty familiar with the spell lists in practice, and I really don’t think Occult matches with where the imagination goes when it hears that word.

Occult doesn’t even have Harm, the most fundamental Void (death energies) spell. It’s like making a Electromancer class an Elementalist, despite the fact that that spell list doesn’t have Lightning Bolt (or shocking grasp, or sudden bolt etc. etc.). It sounds right, but the game design falls short of the job.

Now that we’re in a post-remaster world, I would not be upset to learn that Paizo’s putting more void spells in occult though, I think it’s more appropriate now that the old spell subschools are gone.

urgathoa: am i a joke to you

Yeah, I guess so, hehe.

Necromancy to me is first and foremost the manipulation of the forces of life and death; Manipulating living and dead things, not creating them from thin air. An ideal necromancer to me should be able to find the bones of a giant in the field and make use of it to lift a fallen rock blocking the way, but not call in a skeletal giant in the middle of a populated city. The latter encroaches too much on the summoner’s thing.

Re: Blue Mage, I actually meant more the final fantasy blue mages, who piece together their spell list by defeating monsters and learning their moves rather than by a singular theme.

re: spell schools

eh, hard disagree. The evocative name aside, Occult is pretty much all spirit and mind effects, it’s more the ‘Bard’ school to me. I could definitely see the ghost hoarder subclass have a strong occult lean, but the whole class? nah.

Divine (and previously, the cleric list in 1e) has always been the poster child for Death magic. Void in 2e is most well represented by that tradition, even if Vitality is something it represents too.

Conjuring up the dead has nothing to do with what I want from a necromancer. if you’re not pulling in literal ghosts from the boneyard, it just looks like a summoner with a thanatopic hyperfixation; indistinguishable from the undead eidolon summoner. It lacks the spirit and function of an opportunistic recycler.

I want a necromancer to be closer to a blue mage than a conjurer, pulling up a frankenstein of a minion from the component pieces of what they find on their adventure.

Pulling up super flimsy figments with limited ability to interact with things around them, then popping them to create strange and quasi-real effects though… that’s an incredibly appealing idea for an Illusionist. Pull a rabbit of caerbannog out of a hat, then toss it for your next trick. Trick an enemy with illusory soldiers tossing a spear their way.

I think the class has juice, but doesn’t necessarily fit the bill.

Also, I kinda hate that the thralls explicitly can never take actions. Limiting the to in-combat utility is pretty uninspired, but I wouldn’t mind as much if they weren’t strictly real.