In reply to Halancar (msg # 26):

Oh I didn't mean to exclude classical and folk and anything else you could think of. In fact I think I made a mistake in how I worded that sentence about the pantheon link. That should be more of a guideline, I don't think any musician should be left out. I spent a bit of time talking about electric instruments to be sure modern artists can be represented but older styles should be welcome as well. In fact a deaf oracle follower of Beethoven sounds pretty neat to me. Can you imagine being deaf in that setting?

@praguepride
I don't know that album sales should be the criteria for greater/lesser god. I would base it off of their sphere of influence, which would of course be arbitrarily decided upon by the group. Maybe leaving the whole hierarchy out of it and just calling them all even would be the best way to go.

I think giving the races a musical tendency is a good idea, but personally I'd rather it not be a hard rule that race x listens to music y. Maybe that's just because I want to play my Dio character as either an elf or a gnome(I haven't decided yet). Elf because he was in a band called Elf. Gnome because he was short.

What I mean is to establish genre pantheons instead of racial pantheons. You can make the setting more diverse then Pathfinder RAW and allow anyone to worship anything, just the default cultures would gravitate towards one genre or another, again if you're following Brutal Legend.


And I agree on the sphere of influence...once you establish "cultures", say around musical genres, you can then cull the top stars of those genres to form your greater gods.

So Beethoven and Mozart are the major gods of the "Classical" pantheon, while Black Sabbath/Metallica are the major gods of metal.

Then again it's all really up to the GM. If the GM decides that the Pixies are the overgods then who can really argue with him/her?

Ah, I thought you meant 10greater deities total. 10 per genre is a good idea.


True, it is up to the gm. Of course no one has stepped up. If anyone is interested in being a pc alongside me I'd be willing to put something in Wanted.

There is a game starting up here
link to another game

It is NOT Pathfinder, the system is GURPS and the genre is science fiction, but it has the same flavor of music at the center of everything, so I thought I'd mention it.

I'd love to put together a Skald for a music domains game.  Or a flavoured cleric :)

The other character idea I had for that was a doom herald malefactor for a death metal band....

Man this sounds like Brutal Legend :)

I'm in the mood to play in or run a game in Ravenloft.  I always envision Ravenloft to be a game where people don't worry about the longevity of their characters, just get the most out of every moment.  Players could even play commoners or what not.  If a player's character dies, they would simply pick up another character in the story that makes sense.  I could offer an array of available characters that might fit into the story as it progresses.  Any thoughts?

A commoner game in Ravenloft would be AMAZING. I'd play if someone else ran it :)

This game idea popped up in my brain over a weekend and it's itching the space behind my eyes.  I had wanted torun it not in Pathfinder, but in a simpler system - though it seems that nobody likes that idea. Sad as I am about that (the system I had in mind would have allowed for combats to end in a matter of a week or two) the game does seem fun to me.  Would it work in Pathfinder?  I think it could - but I'd want to maintain a 1/day post rate.

Anyway, Looking for feedback on this idea.  if there is any interest, I might create the game over Christmas to begin in January.

A hundred years ago, the land was filled with the bounty of life and culture only a golden age can bring.  Peace reigned among the Kingdom of Alusia and beyond, in the woodlands where the Elven-kind dwelt and in the mountain clan-holdings of the Dwarves. Learning and beauty were the watchwords of the civilised lands, art and poetry were created in quantity and of quality...

And then there was the Drachenacht.

It all ended.  The sky went dark as vast wings blotted out the sun.  Fire rained down from the sky,levelling the towns and cities and villages.  Vast, winged reptilian intelligences devoured ash and cinders, hoarded the riches and the treasures of an age they had broken. Dragons returned to Alusia and destroyed it.  Smoke obscured daylight for months as the dragons burned and tore their way through anything that caught their attention.

Oh, Mankind were the first to try and resist these dread beasts - but swords and bows hardly harmed them, and magic seemed to have little effect over these monsters. The Elves fled as their woodlands were reduced to charcoal. The dwarves retreated under their mountains to avoid their most hated foe.

Once the races of man and elf and dwarf had fled or dug too deep to unearth, the Dragons began to nest amid the carnage they had wrought, birthing strange creatures of their own flesh but warped in order to further their own goals.  The Dragonkin were able to oust hidden groups of humanity from their pits to feed their parents.

Now, there is only one free city, one place hidden from the Dragon Menace - the 'city' of Shield. Shield lies under the ruins of a town on the outskirts of the lost kingdom of Alusia, and is ruled by the hereditary heir to that throne, King Kemnon. Mankind and a handful of other races live here, eking an existence from the fungi-farms and scavenging parties they can manage.

Kemnon has called for heroes though, man and women who he would send to strike back against the Dragons and reclaim his throne.  The portents all point to Mankind either living on the surface of the world once more, soon, or else burned to a crisp in an infero of dragon's breath.

I do like the idea. As for the system and the duration of fights, remember that as the GM you can perfectly well step in once it's obvious the PC are winning, and cut it short :) (on the other hand, it probably wouldn't go well if you cut it short when the PC are losing)

Dragons actually being forces of elemental destruction of sufficient quantity and cohesion to challenge the humanoid races is a good concept.

The tone of the game will depend greatly upon what the king wants the heroes to do. Two options off the top of my head would be: a) group of heroes go seeking some artifact power that would give the kingdom a chance at winning the war; or b) king is forming a group of elite forces who will take the dragons on directly, killing them one by one or in small groups now that the dragons aren't rampaging in massive armies no one could resist.

As you can imagine, those two games would be very different from one another and would appeal to completely different players.

Sounds like Reign of Fire but with the resistance coming from under the earth.  Sounds fun, can follow the plot on the movie and go after the Big Bad fella or strategic missions to collect resources to create the uber dragon killer artifacts or pieces and material to craft specialized armor/weapons to help the heroes battle them.

Can we imagine Dragonkin something like Draconians in Dragonlance?

The über-artifact is rather cliché (and why wouldn't they have used it before civilization was utterly decimated?), but I do love dragons and dragon-centric games. I don't know exactly what is aimed for either, but perhaps instead of there being true hope, this is more a final stand, a last ditch before everything ends. A bit more bleak and end-times themed.

If you run this game I am in.

:)

There is no magic bullet, no port vent that will explode the Deathstar, no orb of Deus Ex Machina or anything of that sort in my imagining of the tale that we'd be telling.  I'd be going for a grim-dark mood with over-the-top combat and magic effects, but ideally a lower magic setting - so some limits on magic and magic users. The game was inspired in part by the film 'Reign of Fire', and in part by 'The Gamers 2: The Dorkness Rising' but I do not want to create a game that is simply about humor - those games bore the pants off me.

I had originally imagined the game using a very cut down system to improve the flow and leave mechanics as something that works for the story, not against it.  However, it could work using a Pathfinder system - I'm thinking of going E6 - not entirely sure as yet.  I want dragons to be deadly deadly foes - and I want character death to be a very real possibility when facing them.

Any thoughts about this?

P.s.
Sorry for the late reply - I was travelling and then had some internet troubles when I arrived.

The problem with making combat shorter, I've found, is that it can be even more brutal to players then ordinary.

For example, if you say take 3 turns at a time (i.e. everyone can make 3 moves and 3 standard actions as part of their turn) then winning initiative REALLY wins battles as you can slice & dice the enemy before they get a chance to react. The flipside is also true though...

I would say that taking triple actions would definitely speed things up (for as long as my combats are, in terms of rounds they're usually less then 10 total rounds in game) and if you tell players up front then they know to expect to get 1-shotted (or deliver a 1-shot) every combat...
This message was last updated by the player at 21:42, Mon 11 Jan 2016.

I was wondering if anyone has had much experience with urban campaigns, specifically those around a "mega-city", a metropolis where the players wouldn't have much reason to leave.

I've never played in one, but I've always been interested in playing one, as well as building one, but not running one myself - I've accepted I can creator a game but not run one.

I've heard good things about Ptolus and Sigil from Planescape, and I also own Cadwallon which is a very interesting read. Are there any others which folks would recommend, that are either for, or would work well within Pathfinder?

Is it the kind of game someone would be interested in running?
Is it the kind of game others would want to play?
If using a homebrew, would they mind me assisting in creating the city, or even working together so that you run the game and I help build the set pieces?

Ages ago I ran a game based out of Waterdeep, the "mega city" of Forgotten Realms.

I spent hours combing through different books so I could throw up EVERY SINGLE store, NPC, and point of interest into an information thread, along with a lot of hidden information for myself.

The idea was to give the players the information they needed to have more agency in the game. I was hoping that instead of just saying "We go shopping" or "We find a tavern" they would actually look at the information I provided and say which shop or which tavern...

That...didn't work. At all. I have no idea if anyone even read through all that work :(

I wouldn't really rely on the setting to run the game. Call my cynical but unless you're running a freeform game I have seen very little initiative from players in the past 10 years. There are of course a few exceptions but the majority of players are content to just sit there and wait for you to drag them from plot point to plot point. If the GM is not pushing the story forward, >50% of players will just stop checking the game and let it die.


That being said, they can be fun to offer a different experience then a typical dungeon crawler however I have found that most games that deviate from the "kick down door, fight monster, grab treasure" format tend to suffer and die because the player's aren't ready for a non-standard game.

NOW there are exceptions and if you can find those players beforehand, or are willing to play "player roulette" where you go through several rounds of replacement then there is no reason a game like that can't work out, it's just the long running games I've seen for D&D/Pathfinder have all been Adventure Path/Linear kick down monster, fight treasure, loot door style games...

Urban settings have my preference actually because there's always people to interact with and the game usually covers more social aspects instead of just hack&slash dungeon crawls. I really love Sharn from Eberron myself.

Edit: I recognize what you say Praguepride. Especially for D&D/Pathfinder. The system is almost fully about combat and has a pretty sickening amount of minmaxing in its community and that seems to draw a certain type of player to it. Take systems like World of Darkness and you will more often see the opposite kind of player pop up; people who want to tell their personal story rather then being dragged along on the plot train. I myself like some personal freedom and not feel punished when I go off the course the DM laid out for me, and do some roleplay character development, something Pathfinder sadly is not strong at. I found a few exceptional DM's over my years who can manage it though, but then indeed the attrition problem rears its ugly head. As soon as people have to think for themselves or are not handed loot at regular intervals they start losing interest. So it's really hard to find those types of games that manage to keep breathing.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:08, Mon 11 Jan 2016.

Last time I tried to show initiative by trying to bluff my way through a plot instead of fighting my way through, the GM threw us into a TPK, so I tend to just follow the GM's lead more often then not now...

Which I know I shouldn't do, but it's easy :(
This message was last edited by the player at 23:16, Mon 11 Jan 2016.

Bad GM is bad.

An urban environment can be fun, as a GM, even if my intent is to let the players "play in the big city sandbox," I find its always best to have a few one-off adventures in my proverbial pocket for when the posting shuts down, or maybe worse, when four of my players go silent, but one person is happily running about talking to npcs, etc.

Agreed but it's always hard when playing with people you don't know. I like it when player's take initiative but not at the expense of other players. I had a player basically say "none of your stories matter, just follow my super awesome guy" and everyone pretty much quit because they didn't want to deal with him.

Every single plot line was like "That's dumb, let's do this instead..."


Meanwhile I have been playing in games and nothing was happening so I was like "I'm gonna go to the tavern and chat up the mysterious guy in the corner" hoping to jump start some kind of plot...ANYTHING. We had been standing around chatting to each other for months RL without anything happening.

Well the GM got really pissy about it. First there wasn't a guy in the corner and then there wasn't even a tavern. Then the GM just quit.

/shrug

I figure I'm just going to do my thing and have fun with it :P