Natterings From Nepantla

With the Pathfinder Society scenario release cadence slowing for a bit, I needed to make another character to play repeatables with.

Stinging Ammak is a kholo, a gnoll from Golarion's equivalent of the Sahel. Kholo society is organized into clans, with leaders generally being women who are good at hunting.

Ammak is very, very good at hunting, and quite a few other things. She's set her sights on commanding a much bigger pack-- she wants to rise up through the Pathfinder Society ranks to join the Decemvirate, the secretive council which runs it. And she's going to do it by mastering the rules of the Society, following them to the letter, and building a web of influence by appearing helpful to everyone.

Mechanically, Ammak is a mastermind rogue. I managed to get her started with 15 of the 16 standard skills trained, and then said what the heck and spent a feat to get the last one.

Ammak is, unusually for a rogue, lawful neutral. Because the character concept I started with was, "What would the PFS equivalent of a SMOF be?"

A new Pathfinder Society season is fast approaching, and I have too many character ideas at this point. But I settled on this one for my main character.

Kit is a sturdy human peasant in her 30s, hailing from Tian Xia (PFS's equivalent of East Asia, dominated by a group of polities resembling Warring States-era China). She is completely unremarkable in appearance aside from a tan streak or two in her hair. She speaks Common well enough to get by but not brilliantly. She has some fighting skills because, she says, her homeland is a militaristic kingdom and everyone has to do their stint in the army. All in all, definitely an ordinary person who is absolutely not someone you would expect to turn out to be a magic fox who likes to prank people.

Of course she is a magic fox who likes to prank people. She speaks five languages fluently and has oracular powers giving her connection to the wisdom of spirits long deceased, which she attributes to speaking about her fascination with the stories of the past under the full moon and receiving one of the moon god's unpredictable blessings. She also has some bonus innate magic, a frightening number of trained skills, and the ability to use magic items she normally shouldn't be able to. She is so-so at direct physical combat, but a side effect of her oracular ability means she won't be doing a lot of straight combat anyway.

In the Pathfinder Society, she has joined the Grand Archive faction for access to their substantial collection of old texts and artifacts, making her very well placed for the upcoming season of adventures, which is going to be themed around lots of cool new magic items.

As my Pathfinder Society characters continue to advance, I need to keep creating new first-level ones so I can play the new lower-level adventures. It's time to finally start playing one concept I've had rattling around in my head for a while.

Ahiru-dono (which should technically be Ahiru-hakushaku, but I recognize there are limits on what I can ask my fellow players to try to pronounce) is a tengu (bird-person) dhampir (person with some vampiric heritage) from darkest Nidal (the closest equivalent I can find in the Pathfinder world to fantasy Transylvania). He's unusually short, with feathers of a greenish hue. He comes from a long line of dhampir, but has offended the memory of his ancestors first by becoming a strict vegetarian and then by running off to have adventures. He is very, very excited to have joined the famous Pathfinders, tinged with the uneasiness of knowing that his two faithful servants are out there somewhere looking to forcibly return him to the fold.

And here's the image I'm using for his virtual tabletop token, because if people don't recognize a certain obscure 1980s cartoon from that description, then the image won't give it away either:



There is a long tradition of adapting fictional characters of all sorts for RPG play. Or even nonfictional ones-- I recently adventured with someone who used a picture of Phil Donohue for his character.

Discussing this with the SO led to a question about what the Muppets would be like as Pathfinder characters. Mostly they'd have to be various flavors of bard, but it occurred to me that one could do something interesting with Miss Piggy, and the character I've been using for bounties (short adventures restricted to level 1 characters only) was going to be levelling up soon, and, well...

Pigathia Lee is a half-orc from the farmlands of Old Taldor, who has come to the bustling metropolis of Absalom to leverage her uncommonly good looks into a showbiz career. She joined the Pathfinder Society for its connections, and fights as a monk. For her first-level feat, I picked Ki Strike, which allows a monk to hit harder briefly, and has a verbal incantation, which... well, you can guess the punchline.

Odds are pretty good that people can figure that one out even during a 1-hour adventure, so I've got a token for her which doesn't give it away.

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.

Pathfinder's second edition does a lot of things I applaud, but one big issue for me is character backgrounds. You have to pick one from a list of standardized backgrounds that provide both stat modifiers and the character's backstory, and many character concepts may find that none fits well. Even the official blog post meant to get us all excited about the new character creation system ran into this problem.

Also, while I think the overall approach that 2e uses is best for people who know exactly what they want, and that will be most gamers, I miss randomness.

So I made a thing for randomly generating character outlines. You get a random heritage, background, and class specialty (if applicable), and then build a character around that.

With the SO witnessing, I rolled up an arctic elf wizard, specializing in abjuration, with a Barrister background. (Yes, there are a few weirdly specialized backgrounds in the list.) An ironic result, since part of this exercise is to break out of the box, and I tend to play spellcasters when left to my own devices. And the first character I randomly generated by first edition PFS rules was also a wizard. But, I belong to that cranky old school of gamers which believe that you have to play the first thing you roll, which is why the button disappears after you roll. At least there's an unusual combination with lawyering background, since Pathfinder elves tend to be chaotic-aligned and not so much about following procedures.

So, Losseyel hails from the icy Lands of the Linnorm Kings, where she gained a reputation as a negotiator between her small elven community and the various local kingdoms. When she was not being useful, though, her pedantic insistence on following rules made her tiresome to the other elves, and they eventually convinced her that more of the world could benefit from her talents. She meant to settle in Absalom, but discovered along the way that she rather enjoyed travel, and soon joined the Pathfinders. During her training, she became entirely at ease with human society, even taking up worship of one of their gods: Abadar, deity of law, commerce, civilization, and following the damn instructions.

Losseyel has an arctic fox familiar, and she goes into battle with mage armor and a rapier. Yes, line things up right in this edition and your wizard can use a sword.

I like her! Now I just need to find a game.