Natterings From Nepantla

Pathfinder has a cousin named Starfinder, a spacefaring "science fantasy" game set further ahead in the timeline of Pathfinder's setting. Starfinder 2nd edition, which will use the same basic system as PF2e, is coming out next year. Right now there is a massive playtest in progress.

Yesterday I ran playtest scenario #1 for four of our local PF players. There are pregens available for this scenario, and I saw most of my fellow players using them when I played it and scenario #2, but all the locals built their own characters.

Two players brought pahtras, which are basically anthropomorphic cat aliens. This included our local curmudgeon, whose rationale was "Why would anyone not want to run a cute kitty cat if they had the option?". Player #3 had prepared for all continencies by building one of each class at the appropriate level, which means probably he had a pahtra in there somewhere too.

Player #4 had a human soldier named Flint Ironstag. I thought, "That sounds like those he-man names Mike and the bots kept coming up with during that one MST3K episode," but I didn't want to say anything that could be taken as disparaging.

After the game, player #4 volunteered that Flint Ironstag is a name taken from that very episode.

I'm not 100% sure that player #4 was even alive when that episode first aired.

The latest sourcebook about the main Pathfinder setting is Impossible Lands, covering a chunk of the world roughly equivalent to east Africa and parts of the Indian Ocean. It contains detailed writeups of several nations which are all distinctly different from each other with no generic RPG lands. It's full of fascinating details on people, places, creatures, and even a few recipes.

But good grief, the actual prose. Try this sample:

A facade of order isn't quite accurate to describe Ecanus's culture, but the city's tight choreography is tenuous, and its recent misfortune hasn't calcified any sustainable harmony. On the contrary, recent troubles have exposed the city's derelict conceptual wounds.

The book is has tons of sentences like this. Either the authors were struggling to make their wordcount at the last minute and didn't have time for another editing pass, or the editors had a tight deadline and didn't have time for it.

Does anyone know a term for this particular sort of style collapse? I've come across it in other contexts and it would be handy to have a shorthand for it.

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.

I came up with this character concept a few months ago, thought it was neat but useless, then realized there was one scenario coming up that it would be perfect for, and now the new multi-table special which is debuting at Gen Con turns out to be a followup to that scenario, so I guess this character may continue to have sporadic adventures with the Pathfinder Society.

First, some lore: Like pretty much any Earth-analogue setting from the D&D tradition, Golarion (the main Pathfinder setting) has a vast network of subterranean caverns, housing entire civilizations that have never felt a need to visit the surface. In this setting it is known as the Darklands.

Also drawing on the D&D tradition, there are four elemental planes. In the ancient past, they were ruled by four good-aligned rulers, but those rulers were overthrown and imprisoned in unknown locations by their evil counterparts. Pathfinder Society season 8 had a storyline that led to the Society freeing Ranginori, the original elemental lord of air.

Yangrit Ratna comes from a dwarven clan that worships Sairazul, the lost queen of the Plane of Earth. She felt more drawn to protecting the unique flora and fauna of the Darklands, and followed her calling to become a druid. However, when word of Ranginori being freed reached her clan, she developed an interest in making connections with the Pathfinder Society in case they get a lead on any of the other elemental lords, in the interest of keeping nature in balance.

Yangrit is a stone order druid, which along with her heritage gives her some useful abilities that only function when she's standing on earth or stone. So there's a rather limited area where she can help, but as long as we keep getting occasional scenarios set in the Darklands I'll keep bringing her to them.

There is a recently released Pathfinder Society scenario that quickly developed a reputation for total party kills. So extreme was whatever the issue was that Paizo released revised statblocks for one of the encounters.

Word is that it's still a party-killer.

This has occasioned a brief morbid discussion on Discord where people who are planning to play this scenario this coming weekend at PaizoCon all made sure that we are up to date on the current rules for getting a character brought back to life.

I'll be playing Ahiru in it, so I'd better note on my character sheet that he's left instructions for whoever raises him from the dead to use the ketchup again...

It is frequently said these days that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Case in point: the consequences of my post about Westercon and gaming are that people encouraged me to at least try volunteering to run the gaming track, so I did, and I am in fact going to be running gaming at Westercon.

I made it to Kumoricon last weekend, and enjoyed seeing a few people I haven't seen in a couple years, giving a talk about history of conventions, going to a talk about 150 years of trains in Japan, doing a bit of smoffing, learning mahjong, and so forth. The attempt to run a game did not go so well, though.

( A tale of drama and intrigue out of all proportion to what is being attempted )

The one thing I can do directly is take care to ensure that nothing like this happens in my gaming room.

With my newfound time and energy that isn't being spent commuting, I've wanted to start running in-person Pathfinder Society games at my local gaming store at such time as it's ready to start hosting in-person games. Which is not yet, but the return of in-person conventions is providing another avenue.

So, for instance, I could volunteer to run a game at Kumoricon, the local anime con, coming up in a couple weeks. ( But there are complications... )

Looking a few months ahead, there will certainly still be an extensive PFS preference at the local gaming con, so I'm already to volunteer for that when the call goes out.

After that, hopefully my next con will be Enfilade!, which is all miniatures gaming. But after that, I'm fairly confident of attending Westercon 74. ( Which gets even more complicated... )

Thursday: Had enough time to get to the Greek cart in Hillsboro, only to discover that it was not opening at the given time. One of the other food cart operators volunteered that the Greek place had recently had someone quit and its hours had become unpredictable.

Central Hillsboro has a one-way street grid, so I had to walk my bike along the block to get to a street going my way. Halfway there, I found one of those tiny places which is just a window for placing orders with a kitchen right behind it built into the side of the building. It's called Abu Rasham Express, and it serves Mediterranean food including recognizably Greek dishes, so I got a pita plate from there.

Friday: Had the second half of the pita plate for lunch. For dinner, we picked up German food from Gustav's. I tried the sausage plate, and the wild boar sausage was a definite winner.

Saturday: Timed it just right to get to the central Beaverton pod after stopping by Tous les Jours, which I have since learned is actually a global South Korean French bakery chain. And it is not even the biggest global South Korean French bakery chain out there. Over the next few days I would find the yuzu hand pie to be good, the blueberry cream cheese filled bread roll to be like having a bagel adulterated with a lot of air, and the fancy macarons to be tasty but nearly all the same despite allegedly being different flavors.

At the pod, I picked up some traditional cod fish and chips from The Frying Scotsman, which I would have half of for lunch.

Sunday: Had the other half of the fish and chips for lunch. Couldn't talk the SO into getting Italian food so we had homemade spaghetti for dinner instead.

The gaming went well too. Nobody recognized Pigathia, or at least nobody admitted to it. Somebody did recognize the token for Ahiru in my last game of the con. The game to brag about turned out to be the Thursday afternoon one, where I was part of a party that made it through a level 7-10 adventure with no healer. (We did have a wizard who did amazing work with counterspells, a couple of smart prepared spell choices on the part of my wizard, and a veritable ton of healing potions.)

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.

Today I found the right timing to leave the house on my bike and catch the bus that gets me to the farmers' market just when it opens. It feels weirdly late to be heading out, because the market pushed its opening time back an hour when things started shutting down for the pandemic, and also because I used to walk to the bus all the time.

I had a hankering for a pretzel-style croissant, but the German bakery booth which is there every week was not there this week. On the other hand, I did score some strawberries to snack on the next few days.

I headed over to the Fred Meyer nearby so I could use their ATM, since the one we shop at every week has had theirs replaced by one for a credit union which charges for withdrawals from other banks. Unfortunately, this one has had the bank branch inside it displaced by the same credit union. I guess that means it's happened to all their stores, meaning the only ATM anywhere near us I can use without a fee is the freestanding one in the parking lot of the Fred Meyer where we shop every week, which has not been replaced by a credit union one.

I went over the transit center to take the bus home, only to discover that in the year-plus since I was last there, all the stops have been rearranged, so I just missed the bus and had to wait for the next one.

On the other hand, the delay meant I would be going past Rainy Day Games, our friendly local gaming store, right when it opened, and I had been planning to visit there this weekend. I've decided that I want to start volunteering to run Pathfinder Society games there when in-person gaming with random strangers is doable again, so I need to start collecting supplies.

Top of my list was a Pathfinder Combat Pad, which I have seen in use in-person and look fantastically useful. Next was a deck of condition cards, which remind you about the effects of being stupefied, clumsy, dazzled, etc. along with some cards that help track the duration or intensity of conditions. Rainy Day had both of those, but not the other thing I was looking for, miniatures for the Pathfinder iconics (a set of characters which can be used by new players or ones who don't have a character of the appropriate level for the adventure). They do have a wide selection of non-game-specific fantasy miniatures, though, so it's just a matter of going back again after I make myself a list of what I need.

Rainy Day is within bike range of my house, and the weather was beautiful, so I rode back, but of course this took my past my favorite donut shop, so I felt compelled to stop there and get one. They seem to have been doing a normal amount of business the couple of times I've stopped by in the past year, but today they were extra busy, thanks to a get-together of Volkswagen fanciers in the parking lot next door. So there was a bit of a wait before I was able to get a German chocolate donut, ride home, and consume it, feeling relatively accomplished.