petrea_mitchell | Entries tagged with pfs

I have just heard of the meme where you post the first sentence of the your post of each month to look back on the year, and I would like to participate:

January: Regional headline of the day: "Several cars trapped overnight inside monster tumbleweed pile in eastern Washington"

February: "What’s in that bag marked ‘Bag Full of Drugs,’ sir?"

March: After all that drama about quarantining people on cruise ships and travel bans and so forth, it turns out the new virus has been circulating for weeks in the Pacific Northwest.

April: Like everything else these days, the Endeavour Award is attempting to become as virtual as possible, which means switching to electronic reading copies.

May: Oregon has an election coming up on the 19th, which is expected to have no particular extra drama despite the times because Oregon has been 100% vote-by-mail since 1998.

June: Technically an Irish casserole, since the recipe I used called for simply piling the ingredients into a covered dish and baking them.

July: The Open Gaming Convention is a yearly summer get-together in New Hampshire.

August: I had nothing much to do Friday morning, so I caught up on anime and blogging.

September: "FBI investigates after alarmed pilot tells LAX tower: ‘We just passed a guy in a jet pack’"

October: 3 of 4 summer shows wrapped up here.

November: There were quite a few trick-or-treaters out walking the neighborhood last night, by the sound of it.

December: Back in 2013, one of the losing bids for the 2015 Worldcon had wanted to hold it at a hotel in Walt Disney World.

You can sort of tell that there were a pandemic and an election going on, but I think the main conclusion is I love odd headlines.

This was the week that the vice-presidential debate was won by a fly and then everyone wrote columns about how nice and normal the debate was. 2021, send help.

Then again, this was the week that my voter's pamphlet showed up. (Well, pamphlets. For the larger elections, we get one from the state with the national and state-level races and measures, and one from our county with all the local city, county, and special-district stuff.) That usually happens a week or so before the actual ballot gets to me. It's coming! Soon!

We are now solidly into fall. The rain started in earnest yesterday. After a few days of heat in the morning and air conditioning in the evening, yesterday was also the first day that we just left the heat on.

I am full of useless energy about things I can't do yet. I'm taking a couple days off to fully attend SPIEL.digital, which has released the enormous list of games being demoed there, but I can't start planning until the actual schedule gets posted. No Pathfinder games this weekend because I'm running out of scenarios I haven't played yet. I'm all ready to suggest programming ideas to the virtual replacement for Smofcon that was announced almost three weeks ago, but since the announcement nothing more has happened.

And there's the voting thing. Luckily we are well-supplied with 24-hour dropboxes, so I won't have to wait long once I fill out my ballot.

Just over a month! Probably a couple weeks until I get my ballot!

Immediate problems continue to be of the mundane sort, like the sudden urgent work situation that led to a late night on Friday, a whole extra day of work plus on Saturday, and having to drop out of a Pathfinder Society game on short notice. As a result, this will be the first weekend since maybe Memorial Day that I've played no PFS at all.

To be fair, they do pay me enough to put up with this sort of thing. As long as it isn't too often.

We have one more week of hot weather coming, and then probably the rain moves in for good and I stop feeling quite so unhappy about not going anywhere.

In which a scenario has A Reputation, and there is a detour into art criticism...

PFS2 #1-18: Lodge of the Living God (Zuzzak): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-25: Grim Symphony (Losseyel): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-03: Escaping the Grave (Yara): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-13: Devil at the Crossroads (Losseyel): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #2-02: Mountain of Sea and Sky (Losseyel): ( Read more... )

And with that, Losseyel is up to 7th level. I've already played the three scenarios that allow for 7th-level characters, so she has to wait until another 5th-8th level scenario turns up.

I never managed to get a character up to a level where they ran out of adventures in 1st edition, so this is a weird feeling.

With the release of the Advanced Player's Guide for Pathfinder 2e, I wanted to try out either one of the new ancestries or one of the new "versatile heritages" which can modify any ancestry.

I'd already decided I wanted to try running a witch, and use of of the special backgrounds available to people who've played first edition PFS, and I had a half-formed character concept I was calling Urban Fantasy Heroine Minus the Tropes I Hate, but then I decided to randomize some aspects of the character and the concept didn't fit anymore.

So instead, I have Zuzzak the musetouched aasimar goblin. Zuzzak hails from the Hao Jin Tapestry, a demiplane originally created by a legendary sorceress as a place to stash interesting buildings, landforms, and entire communities. For most of 1e PFS play it was under the control of the Pathfinder Society, but the grand finale of 1e was it unraveling and the Pathfinders having to rescue as many people as possible from it.

Zuzzak's mother is remembered as a beautiful and mysterious goblin woman who stayed with the tribe a little over a year, spontaneously combusting shortly after Zuzzak's birth. (Goblins think fire is kind of neat, so this event is recalled more with admiration than horror.) In reality, she was an azata aware that the tapestry would soon unravel, trying to give the goblins a little help surviving the event by taking on a mortal form to produce a child with extraordinary abilities.

Zuzzak only knows that she found the prettiest lizard in the world when she was a few years old, and it helped her learn all sorts of interesting things, including how to guide her tribe through the planar upheaval to rescue. Zuzzak took a liking to the Pathfinders, decided they were the best tribe (goblins will readily switch allegiance to a stronger leader or a tribe which offers more opportunities), and became a field-commissioned agent.

Witches don't have to ever find out who their patron is, which allows me to not quite make up my mind yet. Maybe it's just Zuzzak's mother controlling her familiar, or maybe it's a loosely connected group of azatas.

Another thing I didn't quite make up my mind about was the character's gender. So she's identified as female for now, but Zuzzak has been questioning a lot of things lately...

Since I'm not playing any Pathfinder this weekend, I should get caught up on my scenario notes and reviews.

PFS2 #1-10: Tarnbreaker's Trail (playing as Yara): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-21: Mistress of the Maze (Losseyel): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-22: The Doom of Cassomir (Yara): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-15: The Blooming Catastrophe (Yara): ( Read more... )

PFS #2-00: The King in Thorns, tier 3-6 (Losseyel): ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-24: Lightning Strikes, Stars Fall (Losseyel): ( Read more... )

This was the big gaming day. First up was a game of DungeonQuest, a boardgame from 1985. When I was paging through the event listings for Gen Con, the fact that it was from 1985 caught my eye. I pointed it out the SO, who immediately looked it up on BoardGameGeek, found a bunch of reviews talking about how this game usually ends in death for all characters, and started doing dramatic readings of the especially entertaining ones. Which convinced me that I absolutely needed to experience this game for myself.

DungeonQuest is a ton of fun if your sense of fun is sufficiently warped, because yes, your character is almost certainly going to die, and the suspense is more about how interesting their death will be. There are a lot of options for surprise permadeath in this game, including: monsters that only some characters are equipped to handle, traps, dead ends, monsters that no characters are really equipped to handle, and the Doomshadow, which is what got me. It follows you around, forcing you to roll a d12 every turn, and if you ever roll a 1, that's it.

The GM remarked that he has run this game several times for cons now, and I was the first player to make it as far as the big treasure chamber at the center of the board. Alas, I did not make it back out again. The person who did win got stuck near the outer wall with a jammed door, then decided to stay near the wall, frantically searching for any treasure at all, finally finding some on the next-to-last turn and then teleporting out just in time.

The GM ran the entire thing with a camera pointed at a physical copy of the board and players telling him what moves we wanted to make, and rolling dice on Discord. This worked out much better than I thought it would.

Then it was time for the Pathfinder Society multi-table special kicking off season 2. I'll leave my thoughts about the scenario itself for the next adventure log, but I will note here that it ended an hour early, which I saw a couple Gen Con veterans attributing to the fact that everyone could actually hear each other. One big advantage for online play there over packing everyone into a ballroom or two.

Pie of the day: a second roast lamb one. Soda of the day: Root beer, the last different flavor to try. A rather disappointing one, too much sweetness and not enough rooty taste.

The early end of the PFS game freed me up to see "The History of the Book", which is my new favorite talk from Worldcon. If anyone reading this still has access to the option to rewatch panels, definitely catch this one. Lots of information that was new to me, the most shocking part being that when you see a parchment-era book being destroyed in a TV show, it's too expensive to make replica ones, so that is an actual historical artifact being destroyed.

I later tuned in to "In Space No One Can See You Hide the Evidence: Crimes in Space", but also needed to make dinner during that hour, so I was only able to listen with half an ear and didn't pick up much from it.

The last panel of Worldcon for me was, appropriately, "Virtual Conventions and Conferences", which revealed a disaster that nearly halted Worldcon before it started. No, not the virus, an error on Zoom's part. Worldcon got a package deal that was supposed to be in effect for a two-week period that included the convention dates. It was set up on July 12, and someone at Zoom entered the 12th as the first day, causing all the webinar rooms to vanish the day before the start of the con. It took nine hours to get it straightened out because Zoom's tech support only operates on Pacific time.

A lot of information was shared and compared about the specific platforms that various cons have used over the last few months. I would have liked to see some discussion about how easy it is now for people to run coattail events, but it wound up focusing on mostly technology.

That was not quite it for Worldcon, though...

Gen Con kicked off with the launch of the Pathfinder 2nd edition Advanced Player's Guide, bringing a whole new bunch of ancestries and heritages to 2e. I really wanted to try out the witch class and something from the new ancestries and heritages, so I rolled a few dice in public view on the main PFS Discord server, and now I have a half-angel goblin ready to bring in when Yara graduates from the 1-4 tier.

First game of the day was Cosmic Colonies on Tabletopia. The game itself uses cards and polyominos as you attempt to make asteroids suitable for habitation. One neat feature for evening things out is that you get a random hand to start the game with, but any cards you play are then passed to the player on your left at the end of the round. Pretty good, would play again.

Being the first session of the con, a lot of time was spent at the beginning ironing out technical difficulties. Tabletopia turns out not to play well with Chrome, for instance. I was using Firefox, but ran into a problem where I couldn't dismiss a popup which was too big for my screen insisting that I sign up for a free trial.

One thing that struck me about both boardgaming platforms from yesterday was that where Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are constructed with an eye to being an aid to players by implementing some of the rules in code, Tabletopia and such are conceived more as a simulation. You get a 3D representation of your gaming table and the ability to move your point of view around. You also get some work to mimic real-world physics, which can work both for and against you. For instance, when you're trying to return a resource counter to its stack, it would be neat if it just snapped back into the stack, whereas it was possible to not put it back precisely on top and have it fall to the table.

"Dice Questions Answered" presented the results of some experiments on dice rolling and fairness. The main question it answered was "Are your dice cursed?". The answer was, your d20s probably are cursed. The majority of d20s tested were biased, and more were biased toward low numbers than high numbers.

What biases them seems to be imprecise tolerances, a problem that gets worse as you move to dice with smaller and smaller faces. While the float test is useless, a good pair of calipers turns out to be the quickest and easiest way to tell if your die is going to be fair or not. Also, sharp corners work better than round ones.

The second game of the day was Planet Unknown on Sovranti, another space-themed game which turned out to also involve polyominos, but with wholly different mechanisms for allocation and scoring. I liked this one a lot, probably because I'm attracted to crunchier gaming systems and this one was significantly crunchier than Cosmic Colonies. It was the sort of game where none of us really fully grasped everything that was going on until a few turns in, yet managed to have fun anyway.

Sovranti, which turns out be pronounced like "sovereignty", is a downloadable app rather than a browser-based platform, and currently in beta. It adds avatars to stand around the virtual table (not customizable, though with a long list of varying ethnicities to choose from), but it falls closer to the "aid" end of the spectrum than Tabletopia. Rules were implemented in code, with a robust undo mechanism. One feature missing in comparison was the ability to select a board and zoom in on it, but our GM, who was one of the developers, assured us that that was on their shortlist of features still to be implemented.

Pacific Pie of the day: classic chicken. Very classic. I'd forgotten how good their chicken pie was. Wild Bill's soda of the day: vanilla cream. Possibly the best vanilla cream soda I've ever had, in that it tastes like actual vanilla and cream rather than just sugar.

Worldcon's Masquerade happened, all by pre-recorded video. A fairly small number of entries, which would be normal for a Worldcon outside North America, but all good. My favorite would probably be "The Pirates of New Zealand", all adorned with native NZ birds rather than pirates.

This was also the day that the site selection result was announced. To the surprise of practically no one, Chicago romped home with over 90% of the vote. The Jeddah committee will be trying again for 2026. In the traditional SMOFfish manner, they are now being recruited to help out with the next couple Worldcons.

Props to the nine people whose first-choice vote was a write-in for "Free Hong Kong", both for the sentiment and for setting up the additional write-in of "Moderately Expensive Hong Kong".

A lot of people stopped by the bid channel afterward to offer their condolences to the Jeddah chair and wish him Eid Mubarak. While it is well understood that the bid was a nonstarter (and that the odds for 2026 are not great right now either), few people want to crush the spirits of such an enthusiastic and committed bunch of young fans.

"Great Worlds in SF" was mostly about the mechanics of worldbuilding and how it is communicated to the reader-- the map in the front of the book and so forth. Fewer recommendations for specific great worlds than I was hoping for.

"My Favourite Anime" was the last thing I made it to for the day. Always good to see a bunch of people getting to enthuse about anime at an sf con, and many recommendations were made. It suffered from one problem that tends to occur on any open-ended anime-related panel, though, which is that very little of what was talked about was less than about 15 years old.

This panel also set a record for the number of feline interruptions. One panelist was plagued early with recurring appearances of a tail in frame with her, while another had a cat hanging out in his background grooming itself for a while, which eventually decided to come up and demand lap time and scritches.

With Losseyel moving up to level 5, and most existing 2e Pathfinder Society adventures being for levels 1-4, I needed to roll up a new character for those. Back during PaizoCon, I poked my 2e random character generator and came up with a concept I'd been saving for this moment.

Yara Highroad is a halfling from a small community in Qadira (think the west end of Persia during one of its more imperial phases), where she used to run a wayside shop selling supplies and curiosities. Shortly after her 35th birthday, she began to have increasingly urgent and disturbing dreams featuring lost butterflies, the north star, and trackless lands of endless night. Recognizing the dreams as a calling from the goddess Desna, she sold her stock, embarked on a life of travel in Desna's service. As a Pathfinder, she supports the Horizon Hunters faction, which seeks to raise the Society's profile by performing ever greater feats of trailblazing and derring-do. Between missions, she seeks to inspire others by telling tales of her adventures via interpretive dance.

Mechanically speaking, Yara is a warpriest, which is to say a martially-oriented zealot, of the hippie goddess. Since Desna really isn't one for smiting people much, Yara has used her training to toughen her body for the rigors of long voyages, strange foods, and other hazards of travel.

Every Pathfinder Society season, which runs from Gen Con to Gen Con, there are a few scenarios designated as part of the "metaplot", an overarching story thread that runs through the season. I've now managed to play all the ones for season 1 of the second edition. In fact, I think this may be the first time I've played any metaplot scenarios during the season where they were released.

Continuing the adventure log, again with no spoilers but a certain amount of extraneous commentary...

PFS2 #1-11: Flames of Rebellion: ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-00: Origin of the Open Road: ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-07: Flooded King's Court: ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-20: The Lost Legend: ( Read more... )

One big advantage Gen Con has over nearly every convention which has abruptly moved online is that it already had its own software for managing an online schedule and signups. Warhorn is okay for your gaming conventions of a few hundred people, but it isn't built to handle the traffic rush from mega-cons. (When PaizoCon signups smacked it with 10 times its previous traffic record, the resulting slowdown led someone to comment, "How much XP do we get for killing Warhorn?". And PaizoCon is well over an order of magnitude smaller than Gen Con.)

Gen Con's software allows you to gather everything you especially want to attend onto a wishlist. Then, when signups open, you can press one button to try to sign up for everything on your list, instead of having a tab open for every event.

Chatter on Discord revealed another very useful feature: You can put conflicting events on your list, and the software will resolve it by signing you up for your highest priority that it can actually grab. So if you sign up for A, B, and C in the same timeslot, your process will first try to get a seat at A, and if not, go for B, and so forth. If it does manage to get you a seat in A, then it skips B and C and moves on to something at another time.

So if you really, really want to play the PFS multi-table special in English in the level 3-6 tier, and there are 25 tables that meet that description, by golly you can add all 25 of them to your wishlist and not worry about getting duplicate signups.

It occurred to me after doing that that if I absolutely wanted to make sure I had a chance to play the special, the thing to do would be to add all the English-language level 1-4 tables too, and be prepared to show up with a new character if I wound up in something that far down the list. In the process of doing that, I discovered that the wishlist tops out at 50 items. I do want to play some other things, so I took the level 1-4 tables back out of my list and will just hope that I'm one of the first 150 people in the queue who wants to bring a level 3-6 character.

The Open Gaming Convention is a yearly summer get-together in New Hampshire. This year, of course, it can't happen. However, the local Pathfinder Society chapter has, you guessed it, decided to go ahead and run its games anyway, just as an online event.

Being under the auspices of one gaming group has standardized the experience more than usual. They've managed to stick to just one VTT platform (Roll20) and have a standard online form for every session to fill out.

Anyway, that's one more weekend with something to do.

1. Paizo's latest blog post gives a little more detail on the Gen Con signup fees. A portion of each fee will be donated to charity.

2. Also from that post, the Paizo crew is ready to tackle online multi-table specials. Again, this is something the online gaming community has been doing for years, just not any of the Paizo people.

Multi-table PFS scenarios have players divided up into tables of level 1-2, 3-4, etc. Multiple tables can be run in each tier. Each table has its own GM, and the scenario as a whole has an coordinator who keeps track of time, announces when certain conditions that affect everyone begin or end, and so forth. They are a huge amount of fun, more than worth all the extra effort.

3. Gen Con's latest newsletter mentions yet another conferencing platform I hadn't heard of before: Jitsi.

4. I left out one of my favorite characters that I encountered last weekend. Someone built a character around doing shield attacks. She was Shieldmaiden America, fighting for truth, justice, and the Andoran way (Andoran being the notable democracy in the Pathfinder setting).

ConCurrent happened last weekend. It felt like everything went more smoothly than it did with PaizoCon, probably because the large group of first-time online players from PaizoCon has now gotten comfortable with the format.

There's nothing spoilery behind the cuts, it all just got kind of long.

PFS2 Quest #4: Port Peril Pub Crawl: ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-14: Lions of Katapesh: ( Read more... )

PFS2 Quest #1: The Sandstone Secret: ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-16: The Perennial Crown, part 1: The Opal of Bhopan: ( Read more... )

PFS2 #1-17: The Perennial Crown, part 2: The Thorned Monarch: ( Read more... )

The last year or so that I was at my previous job, my team had a whiteboard with an area set aside for a calendar of the current and following month. This was used to track releases, people's time off, and other important work stuff, but pretty soon it also started collecting doodles commemorating holidays.

Adding a Juneteenth flag to it sticks in my mind for two reasons. One is that it forced me to confront the limits of my artistic abilities for drawing even simple geometric shapes. The other is that I then had to explain what Juneteenth was to everyone working in that corner of the building, except the one guy who'd lived in Texas for a couple years.

This year, Twitter and Square have made Juneteenth a permanent company holiday for their US offices, so hopefully everyone in the US software industry knows what it is now.

My company hasn't followed suit on this one, but it happens that I will be taking the day off, albeit for the less noble purpose of attending an online gaming convention. Originally this was going to be Origins Online, but it was abruptly cancelled this week. The immediate cause was a bunch of its non-white program participants pulling out over the lack of a statement in favor of racial justice, but one suspects there were pre-existing problems and this was just the last straw. (Also the whole event had a feel of being slapped together at the last moment, and perhaps this provided an excuse to avoid a logistical meltdown.)

But there is ConCurrent. It was conceived when Paizo submitted 450 game sessions to Origins Online and only 100 of them were accepted. Having already started to marshal the resources to run the other 350, Paizo decided it would run all of them anyway as a companion event. When Origins vanished, it was a simple matter of getting those 100 sessions that had been under its umbrella moved over to ConCurrent.

In case you're wondering, Paizo already made a statement on racial injustice last week.

I was going to include mini-reviews of the PFS 2e adventures I've played in my last post, but it got long enough that I figured I should split them into a second one. These are the adventures to date of Losseyel, the rapier-wielding, law-worshipping elf wizard.

PFS2 #1-01: The Absalom Initiation: Recommended to all new players as their first game, this is a set of four mini-adventures designed to introduce you to 2e mechanics and the major Pathfinder Society factions. I definitely second that recommendation.

PFS2 #1-02: The Mosquito Witch: The Pathfinders investigate a local urban legend that seems to have come to life. Way too many investigation hooks; this was the play-by-post adventure that ran long, partly because we got lost in the weeds of trying to chase down all the clues.

PFS2 #1-04: Bandits of Immenwood: A straightforward scenario, enlivened by a very interesting final encounter and the fun of running a weirdly unbalanced party. We had three monks, one barbarian, one sorcerer, my wizard, and nobody with any kind of healing abilities, mundane or magical. The 2e networking mechanics came in very handy to let us grab a bunch of healing potions to make up for the lack of other healing.

PFS Quest #6: Archaeology in Aspenthar: Pseudo-Egypt has cut off access to its tombs and treasures, but its neighbor is offering cut-rate opportunities to go delving into random bits of its ruins. What could possibly go wrong? Well, not that much because this is a quest rather than a full adventure.

PFS Quest #2: Unforgiving Fire: Someone has made off with a statue of great religious significance, and the Pathfinder Lodge which had it last would like it recovered before things get too awkward with the people it was borrowed from. A much richer background story than #6, at least, but the exact same underlying structure.

PFS2 #1-08: Revolution on the Riverside: The Pathfinders are sent to investigate the ruins of a long-abandoned lodge and get caught up in an attempted rebellion. Bringing a 2nd-level character to an adventure in a mostly 3rd and 4th level party (meaning we played a harder version of the adventure) nearly turned out to be a fatal mistake, but OTOH she was the only character with strong social skills in a scenario that turned out to particularly need them.

Anyway, more good than bad. I'll probably try to pick up another couple quests to even out her experience points (2e is 12 xp per level, with quests providing 1 xp and full adventures providing 4 xp), and then avoid any further ones.

I've been doing mostly play-by-post for my online Pathfinder Society fix the past year or so, but when we all got sent home for a while and I had nowhere to go on weekends I figured I had enough time to go back to real-time virtual tabletop gaming. All I needed to do was finish up the play-by-post game my main PFS 2e character was in, which looked like it only had about a week to go. This was, of course, the moment when the play-by-post game slowed down massively. Eventually the GM disappeared altogether and we had to find a replacement. (This happens from time to time in online play, there are procedures for it, and I hope our original GM is okay out there somewhere.)

So I wasn't free of that game until early May, but that was still in time for PaizoCon! Which is usually Memorial Day weekend in Seattle, but moved online and took the entire week and weekend following Memorial Day instead. The way the schedule worked out, I was only able to make it to weekend games.

One of the great things about PaizoCon was it introduced a whole lot of people to VTT games who'd never played them before (including quite a few of the Paizo staff). This was also the downside. Of the three games I played, two started an hour late. One of these was the high-level game on Fantasy Grounds. The GM had been encouraging people to get their characters set up as soon as signups opened, and even helped me finish importing mine two weeks before the game. And yet, when game time arrived, two of the people who'd signed up showed up to say, "I've only downloaded the app, what do I do next?"

This game was also a milestone for me in that it was the first time I've ever had a character killed. This isn't that big a deal in a sufficiently high-level game; characters at this point can use the reputation points they've accumulated to pay for being raised. The in-game explanation is that their Society factions will go and retrieve and resurrect prominent members if they get killed.

The two games on Roll20 were both PFS Quests, a quick adventure format where you get one-quarter the experience of a normal scenario but spend one-half the time doing it. The quests are already being phased out at the end of this PFS season, to be replaced by a different quick adventure format. The two I played were nice in that we got to visit lesser-used areas of the Pathfinder world, but both had almost exactly the same structure and this could get old very quickly.

Since then I've been trying to get in a game per weekend, when I don't have an online con to go to. I'm currently signed up for games into early July.

Gen Con is moving online for this year too. It's where the new Pathfinder Society season gets kicked off every year, so these days I have actual reasons for wanting to attend.

The fact that even the online version is up against Worldcon is a problem, though... OR IS IT?

Gen Con will be running on Central Daylight Time. Worldcon will be on New Zealand time. I'm in the Pacific Time Zone. The bulk of Worldcon programming with start at 3pm my time and run late into the night. I know that sounds absolutely perfect to some of you, but I'm a morning person. In the middle of Northern Hemisphere summer, I'll be waking up before 6am without the aid of an alarm clock.

Gaming all morning and then panels and virtual con suite in the afternoon/evening sounds doable. It wouldn't be the first or even the second time I've been to two conventions simultaneously.

The other night I discovered my randomized PF2e character generator had stopped working. I got it restarted, ran a few test rolls, and one of them caught my eye and I decided I had to do something with it.

Meet Chikamin, the gnome barbarian. She's not angry so much as very straightforward. She was a merchant for a while, doing the Five Kings Mountains run and making a regular stop with a copper dragon living near the dwarven lands, but gnomes have to keep looking for new experiences or else they wither and die.

So her new thing is NATURE! She's picked up some survival skills, learned to talk to burrowing animals, and started worshipping Gozreh, the main nature god. She joined the Pathfinders and the Horizon Hunters faction because they said she could travel to all sorts of new wild places. She carries a polearm to make up for being short and slow, and she has a camouflage ability which she's willing to use only for long enough to get the drop on her opponents.

Despite being more diplomatic than the average barbarian, she is required to become exceedingly cross if you say anything bad about copper dragons. I forsee this making things awkward at least once in her adventuring career.

The rain has started. I've finally remembered to order new rain gear. Apparently it will take three weeks to reach me.

Cat

A cat demonstrates its catio on the 2019 Portland Catio Tour yesterday.

Fandom

One of the volunteers helping with the catio tour thought I looked familiar and then we worked out that we see each other every year at Orycon.

Gaming

The delayed Play-by-Post Gameday VIII has just kicked off. The Pathfinder Second Edition game I signed up for decided not to wait and started last Monday.

I killed another captain in Sunless Skies yesterday, by making it to the last realm and not being nearly prepared enough for everything there wanting to kill me. The next captain will take it slow and steady and try to get more engine upgrades before going back there.

Books and media

Finished reading Grease Junkie, which turns out in the endnotes to have actually been assembled without a ghostwriter. Many more mechanical adventures were chronicled, from the practical (rethinking how ice cream machines work) to the less so (there are inherent difficulties in trying to drive a desk across France). Lots of fun.

Next in the stack is a book on the Basque language. One of my regular stops on Powell's trips is the languages section, where I try to find something I don't have a book on yet. Then I go through the first few chapters, learn a few of the interesting features of the language, put it on a shelf, and never get back to it.
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Natterings From Nepantla

Entries tagged with pfs

First lines of 2020

23 days to go

37 days to go

Adventure log: Overleveled Edition

Zuzzak the witch

The further adventures

Worldcon day 5, Gen Con day 3

Worldcon day 3, Gen Con day 1

Yara Highroad, Smiter of Squares

Achievement unlocked: PFS 2e season 1 metaplot

Secrets of the Gen Con wishlist

Another rump convention

More gaming convention tidbits

ConCurrent adventure log

Juneteenth then and now

The further adventures of Losseyel

PaizoCon and other adventures

Considering a double

Another new character

Weekly diary, September 8, 2019

Cat