Natterings From Nepantla

When the Starfinder second edition playtest was announced, I committed to running each of the four standalone scenarios for the local PFS players. I also managed to play each of the scenarios online.

For #1, the level 1 scenario, I tried out the witchwarper class because it had some very cool theming, but it actual practice it worked as a generic arcane spellcaster. I was disappointed. Other people have tried it at higher levels and liked it, so either it needs some building up to come into its own or the particular options I tried using just don't work well.

Scenario #2 is 5th level. For this I built a pahtra (cat-like alien) envoy. I didn't have a very clear character concept in mind to begin with, but as I picked options the character's personality evolved into "Han Solo but a cat". Envoy was a very fun class to play; whatever the situation, you've got something you can do.

For scenario #3, 10th level, I tried out a skittermander operative. Skittermanders are six-armed lizard-like aliens who tend toward being excessively helpful; I picked Outlaw for her background with the explanation that she helped out the wrong people one time. Operatives are about shooting people in lots of creative ways, and I picked a specialty that supported multiple small guns to go in those copious hands rather than concentrating on one weapon. It was fine; I don't tend to gravitate toward classes that are just about combat, but it was interesting to try.

Scenario #4, the 15th level one, I finally turned to the thing that had actually captured my imagination first when looking through the rulebook. One of the ancestry options is the barathu, a floating jellyfish-like alien. Barathu heritages include the merged barathu, where multiple barathu have combined to form a hive mind. So basically a sentient siphonophore. Siphonophores are cool! So I played a merged barathu solarian and it was fairly cool. My only big complaint is that with the limited number of options in the playtest rulebook, I was running out of things to pick for my starting gear. Barathu feats have a lot of overlap with the augmentation options, and there were only barely enough solarian crystal options to fill out a 15th level solar weapon.

As for the scenarios themselves, #3 is the clear winner. The author clearly had a lot of fun writing it.

International Chess Day: Do you play, or have you ever played, chess?

I played it some as a kid. Then one day at school, I saw an older kid who had some real expertise play a few short games against other kids-- very short, only a few moves long-- and I think I had a glimpse of what chess looks like to an advanced player. And suddenly it looked like a simple, boring game, and I lost interest.

The local game store finally opened its new play space at the end of September. I am now running games in person there (yes, wearing a mask) for the local Pathfinder Society chapter. Which means: it's time to start painting my collection of miniatures!

I originally ordered a bunch of minis in the spring of 2021, figuring to use the warm weather over the summer to sit out back and paint them. But then they didn't arrive until fall, and none of the game stores were reopening their play spaces anyway at that point, and the minis languished, except for a couple I painted at a workshop at Orycon that year. The SO did give me a beginning miniatures painting set for Christmas, though.

So I finally opened that and started on the animals, and now I'm working on the monsters. Some of them have turned out okay.



Not shown: quite a few that didn't turn out so well.

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?"

The funding campaign to get KeyForge restarted is live at Gamefound and already well past its minimum funding goal. Ghost Galaxy has promised that this is a one-off campaign; future sets will be published in a normal manner.

Just a week and a half ago, a podcast episode went live with an interview with an ex-Fantasy Flight Games marketer who confirmed the rumor about ransomware. According to him, FFG never even made an internal announcement about it. He just started noticing there were things he could no longer reach on a backup server and then asked people in the IT department until someone finally told him that it was a ransomware attack. FFG lost a lot of work, including the deck-building algorithm and then next two or three planned sets of KeyForge beyond the one being funded now.

At Worldcon, I taught KeyForge to a couple people and played it against one person who hadn't played in a while and another who's still active. I had a few unopened decks with me and planned to open one if I ran into another person who was current with the game, so I did that and discovered I'd had this sitting on my shelf for two and a half years:



That's an Anomaly card, the rarest of the rares. This is only the second one I've ever seen in person.

If any of you happen to like watching other people play RPGs, I will be participating in one on Twitch on Saturday.

Extra Life is a charity which raises funds through the gaming community to support children's hospitals. There is an Extra Life team for the people who maintain the Pathfinder 2nd edition ruleset for the Foundry virtual tabletop. This team decided to do a fundraising drive by getting permission to run a pre-release Pathfinder adventure, with one of the players participating to be Alex Spiedel, the head of Paizo's organized play program.

This began with an auction for the other spots at the table, which is where I come in, as (to my mild surprise) one of the winning bidders. So, if you have nothing better to do at 0900 PDT (1600 UTC) on Saturday, you can tune in here to see me with my gnome barbarian and the rest of a cast of interesting characters tackling the season intro. And, presumably, to be subjected to lots of messaging about donating to Extra Life. (If you want to save time, their donation page is right here.

Yesterday I stopped by my friendly local gaming store for something and inquired whether there was any news about a timeline for restoring the play area. During the pandemic, the tables were put away and product shelves expanded into where they had been, and the store was looking at tough decisions about what to put away to make space again.

A new solution has been found, though: it's expanding into the vacant space next door, and the new improved play area will go there. So within a couple months, hopefully, I will finally be GMing some PFS games there.

On my way to the store, I passed signs announcing the grand opening of a new food cart pod. I'd noticed a fenced-in group of carts which has been in the back corner of a local parking lot for the last few weeks, and that turns out to have been a pod forming. There are three carts offering Mexican regional cuisines, one with Indian street food, one for hamburgers and cheesesteaks, one specializing in Hawaiian-style smoked meats, and one which is all drinks.

I happened to be planning to get myself a food cart lunch anyway, so on my way back I got myself a Hawaiian smoked meat platter. It was very good, even though the alleged guava pork had barely a trace of guava flavor.

So now I only have to travel a mile from home rather than two miles to reach the nearest pod. There isn't much overlap between this one and the next nearest, though, so I expect I'll continue visiting both of them.

After the Friday afternoon item couldn't be held because I wasn't there, every other scheduled item in gaming had enough people to run. Nothing hit its maximum, but with 158 people on site (more were attending online), getting 3 players for a PFS game on a Monday morning means 2% of the available convention decided to spend their time with me. Scale that up to a more typical con size, even for a Westercon, and that's pretty encouraging.

( Additional notes, mostly for my future use )

It is inevitable that as you get close to a convention, someone will wind up having to back out at the last moment. The Westercon gaming track has lost an RPG session because the GM won't be able to make it. That's okay, there's a backlog several ideas that didn't make it onto the schedule, so its replacement is a session where I see if anyone wants to learn to play KeyForge. Or maybe where I encounter someone who has, unlike me, kept in practice during the pandemic, and get soundly defeated.

The bigger loss is that the SO, who was going to split gaming room supervision duty with me, isn't going to make it. An item has been added to the "help wanted" page on the Westercon site looking for additional room hosts, but so far no luck. I'm currently figuring that I will just be spending most of the con there and closing the game library when I need a meal break. At least we know this ahead of time so I can be prepared.