The problem with that is that is assumes a second fluff magic system behind the mechanical one.
Eh, you misunderstand my meaning. You don't need to call it anything. You don't call it anything when you lift a weight, but you still use work to exchange kinetic and potential energies, and your body strengthens for it (slowly of course). Magic let's your will affect the world directly, using some aspect of the spheres or whatever metaphysic you want to fluff. When you warp the world, this happens under your will. Since this energy is exerted and controlled by your will, it manifestly doesn't harm you nor have any chaotic effects, but like a torn muscle strengthens, the touch of the spheres leaves flesh stronger for its presence.

I'm no writer so I'm sure you could say it better, but that's my head cannon for why HP climbs with level. The same kind of effect that allows a fighter to become a true blue super human with seemingly no magic. Something is effecting their flesh that only exists in a reality connected to magic and the spheres no?
 
I will be working on the turn plan proposal this weekend for strategic actions... so hopefully we can just append research and minor actions like last time and have it all done in a day. Most if it will probably just be me cleaning up the Realm sheet and modifying the template.

I have quite a few background actions of my own this time around. Though given what DP said last turn plan (he wanted to split them up by category per vote), and the scope of what I want to propose, I'm guessing this will take place over multiple days regardless, meaning there's no huge rush if people want to do last minute modifications. That happened several times last time since people fly out of the Lurker Zone for just a bit around that time.
 
On second thought you're not misunderstanding me at all really. I guess I just don't see why A clever writer like you can't fluff the slow strengthening of flesh as it relates to the existence of the spheres and magic in general without invoking an underlying metaphysical energy that's named. Because doing so branching too far from D&D for little reason. This whole conversation sounds like something Lya would love to talk about for example.
 
...how much forces we have on Toad Isle, again?
We havent been keeping it a secret, and with it being a font of MKs power, illithids are all but guaranteed to strike there.

Also, @Goldfish, shall we inform Gith that we have a way to cleanse Abberant corruption, via said Holy Waters?
They might just find it useful, I have little doubt that Illithids employ mind/body-warping weapons on Nirvana.

We've done nothing with Toad Island, though I imagine Saan has some minor presence there.

I'll add it to my plans this weekend. Though it'll probably just be a minor outpost, unless you want to dedicate specific forces there. A Herald, maybe? With a swarm of wyrmlings?
 
Eh, you misunderstand my meaning. You don't need to call it anything. You don't call it anything when you lift a weight, but you still use work to exchange kinetic and potential energies, and your body strengthens for it (slowly of course). Magic let's your will affect the world directly, using some aspect of the spheres or whatever metaphysic you want to fluff. When you warp the world, this happens under your will. Since this energy is exerted and controlled by your will, it manifestly doesn't harm you nor have any chaotic effects, but like a torn muscle strengthens, the touch of the spheres leaves flesh stronger for its presence.

I get what you are saying, but what you are describing is a supernatural effect in a world that is (like all fantasy worlds) assumed to be like ours unless specifically called out as such.

To give an example, Dany for instance can tank an artillery bombardment because of her HP, but she still looks like a kid. If I fluff that as resilience, she just stands there and takes it, then we have a supernatural effect and the questions about anti-magic effects come into play. If on the other hand I fluff it as getting out of the way of most of the attack because she is just that lucky/skilled there is nothing obviously supernatural going on to call into question the magic system.
 
On second thought you're not misunderstanding me at all really. I guess I just don't see why A clever writer like you can't fluff the slow strengthening of flesh as it relates to the existence of the spheres and magic in general without invoking an underlying metaphysical energy that's named. Because doing so branching too far from D&D for little reason. This whole conversation sounds like something Lya would love to talk about for example.

ASoIaF is a gritty setting were shanking your enemies to death (while sometimes stupid) can also be a way for an elaborate plot-thread to end where the consummate schemer places himself in a poor situation with someone he couldn't or didn't predict who is perfectly fine stabbing them in the throat. And just "gritty low fantasy" aspects get wedged onto the conceit that the setting is now high fantasy, but the people in it were living in a low fantasy world.

That is part of the conceit, though. The characters are low fantasy people, in a newly high fantasy world, but they don't become high fantasy themselves--they grapple with it, it's where the conflict is coming from.

Edit: I know, I know, "but what about Viserys who probably could one-man an army like some kind of wuxia character?" I point you toward scorpions managing to kill Meraxes, who despite being a feral-dumb-dumb dragon, is still a dragon, with many of their innate physical advantages. Viserys is only cocky about armies shooting siege weapons at him because he knows he has five different ways to prevent a ballistae from ever managing to scratch him (his cloak, Starmantle, Wings of Cover, time magic... etc.)
 
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We've done nothing with Toad Island, though I imagine Saan has some minor presence there.

I'll add it to my plans this weekend. Though it'll probably just be a minor outpost, unless you want to dedicate specific forces there. A Herald, maybe? With a swarm of wyrmlings?
Mhm, no, I dont think we have any need to make anything else from it, than what it already is.

Just settling enough forces there for it to not be easily taken should be good enough for us.

It is not a strategic location of immense importance however you turn it, just something that will distract us if attacked and hurt our relationship with MK if left undefended against Illithids.
---------------------------
And damn it, i would have loved to work on RAs/Adventure actions now too, but we havent gotten updates on most things we set up this month yet, so no idea what is done and what isn't.
:'C
 
If I fluff that as resilience, she just stands there and takes it, then we have a supernatural effect and the questions about anti-magic effects come into play.
Why is the choice binary? Can't be both? She's clearly gaining some resilience, because a level 3 warrior with an axe couldn't one shot Dany if she was rooted, prone, and asleep. Because HP.
 
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Why is the choice binary. She's clearly gaining someresilience, because a level 3 warrior with an axe couldn't one shot Dany if she was rooted, prone, and asleep. Because HP.

Actually he could, since that would count as a coup de grace, she would probably have to crit fail the fort save though.

That said in a wider context the choice is not binary, I can have Dany's buffs fluffed as giving her resilience, or her dream-forms or her armor. I just don't want to open the can of worms that is HP-magic resilience with no actual magic to excuse it.
 
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because a level 3 warrior with an axe couldn't one shot Dany if she was rooted, prone, and asleep. Because HP.
To be fair, Coup de Grace is a thing in dnd.
Coup de Grace
As a full-round action, you can use a melee weapon to deliver a coup de grace to a helpless opponent. You can also use a bow or crossbow, provided you are adjacent to the target.
You automatically hit and score a critical hit. If the defender survives the damage, he must make a Fortitude save (DC 10 + damage dealt) or die. A rogue also gets her extra sneak attack damage against a helpless opponent when delivering a coup de grace.
The situation you described is, in fact, an almost-certain death sentence to most non-OP characters, even if Warrior 3 is the one making it.

Edit: DP'd.
 
Haha I love that. Coop De Grace guts my argument in the best way. Technically. I'm frankly a D&D scrub, so it's cool to learn of this. I've been learning as I go from reading this quest.

That being said DP, my question and thought came from a discussion during the Tyrosh Invasion planning (where I'm at in the quest). In that segment, you said that all HP results are fluffed as luck, which seemed wierd. Given that was over a year ago, and the buffs and casts mixed with luck makes more sense.
 
Gathering corpses from the sorts of enemies they fight is rather dangerous, setting up new procedures for that does not make sense for the first purchase, which will be small and experimental, though that might change later with larger orders.
@Goldfish could we design a plant creature, specifically for gathering corpses in hazardous locations, I'm thinking something with corruption resistance, a shrink item Spell like ability, and a Hoard gullet spell like ability, they should be fast not too big and with a snakes ability to unhinge their jaws, so they can swallow the corpses after they have shrunken them, then they zip across the battlefield, gathering up the bodies for delivery to the Fungus Forge.

Because as DP pointed out, gathering corpses can be quite dangerous, and if you're doing guerilla combat, then it has to be done quickly before enemy forces arrive, so a corpse gathering creature, could increase our allies corpse gathering rate quite a bit.

I'm thinking we hand these out with no down payment, but 20% of the corpses gathered by them go to us, until they have given us 2 times the cost of making the corpse gatherer, at which point 100% of the corpses gathered, belong to whoever owns the corpse gatherer.
 
If they aren't paying us in corpses, I think we should point out it's an option for the low CR beasts we can sell them.

There is no benefit to spreading the specific details of how our recycling works.

Corpses are already established as valuable reagents even outside of necromancy, they can pay us in the GP value of corpses if they like and we can even discount/subsidise it so they effectively are making a 1:1 (actually 1/3:1) transaction but telling them about it is just needlessly oversharing.

Reminder that they won't give us lore on Deep Ones that they feel is too dangerous, if they won't share knowledge on enemies I'm certainly not willing to even entertain sharing knowledge of our internal state mechanisms.
 
There is no benefit to spreading the specific details of how our recycling works.

Corpses are already established as valuable reagents even outside of necromancy, they can pay us in the GP value of corpses if they like and we can even discount/subsidise it so they effectively are making a 1:1 (actually 1/3:1) transaction but telling them about it is just needlessly oversharing.

Reminder that they won't give us lore on Deep Ones that they feel is too dangerous, if they won't share knowledge on enemies I'm certainly not willing to even entertain sharing knowledge of our internal state mechanisms.
Some parts of corpses are valuable reagents, other parts not so much, and I think they will feel quite a bit better about giving us Illithid corpses, if they know we are recycling them completely in the Fungus Forge, as opposed to using them as crafting reagents, crafting with Far Realm parts, carry risk of Fare Realm corruption.

Aside from that, we already told the people in Vialesk they could pay in corpses, we haven't been hiding the fact that we value corpses well beyond their reagent worth.

And there's no full overlap between what corpses are valuable in the Fungus Forge, and what corpses work as reagent, a commoner 5 human is worth a good bit in the Fungus Forge, but you couldn't extract 10 IM worth of reagents from it, it's the same with Sahuagin, they aren't worth much at all as reagents, but they are worth a lot in the Fungus Forge, if we make it seem we just want reagents, the Githzerai aren't going to be bringing us all the corpses, only the corpses that have worth as reagents, and most of the Illithids Flesh Forged slaves, don't have much value as reagents.
 
@Crake, @DragonParadox, as a note, I don't think that this "Vote separately for assigning people to RAs, Adventure and other actions"-thing is a good idea.

There are 2 ways I can see it going:

1) We vote wholly separately. But if we, say, start by piling up all the RAs we want, the need for other actions will be lost in the hindsight.
Let's be honest, we have a lot of Actions, and there is a need to keep them all in mind at once, or awkward situations of the "Whoops, we need this person on Adventure instead of RA we voted him on. Let's reschedule!"-sort will arise a lot and be generally confusing for everyone.

2) Someone makes up a plan long before the Turn Vote, and then has it presented piece-by-piece for voting.
Nothing really changes except even less feedback than the last 2 months' when I did the "Hey guys, here's what I have in mind, please give suggestions"-way of doing that.


I dont mind foregoing pre-planned turnvotes (even if I'd rather not to, it's one of few times I feel useful and productive, and I genuinely do my best to include the thread as much as i can, it's not like everyone has as much spare time to waste as I do anyway), but I feel like the discussion needs to include all the actions at once, lest something gets overlooked along the way.
 
@Crake, @DragonParadox, as a note, I don't think that this "Vote separately for assigning people to RAs, Adventure and other actions"-thing is a good idea.

Yeah, fair point, the system as it is kind of creaks, but that might just be from all the complexity and level of detail the world is rendered in. I'm less worried about player engegement these days than I was say a month ago, so with stuff seeming to get back on an even kilter it might be worth just keeping the system.
 
@Crake, @DragonParadox, as a note, I don't think that this "Vote separately for assigning people to RAs, Adventure and other actions"-thing is a good idea.

There are 2 ways I can see it going:

1) We vote wholly separately. But if we, say, start by piling up all the RAs we want, the need for other actions will be lost in the hindsight.
Let's be honest, we have a lot of Actions, and there is a need to keep them all in mind at once, or awkward situations of the "Whoops, we need this person on Adventure instead of RA we voted him on. Let's reschedule!"-sort will arise a lot and be generally confusing for everyone.

2) Someone makes up a plan long before the Turn Vote, and then has it presented piece-by-piece for voting.
Nothing really changes except even less feedback than the last 2 months' when I did the "Hey guys, here's what I have in mind, please give suggestions"-way of doing that.


I dont mind foregoing pre-planned turnvotes (even if I'd rather not to, it's one of few times I feel useful and productive, and I genuinely do my best to include the thread as much as i can, it's not like everyone has as much spare time to waste as I do anyway), but I feel like the discussion needs to include all the actions at once, lest something gets overlooked along the way.
As someone that just caught I can attest to the fact that new people will miss a lot of stuff if the votes arent consolidated, 14000 pg is a lot of backlog to read through in order to find votes that arent tied directly to posts, I even went back after each post to find a vote tally posted by the qm or other people and I was still surprised sometimes when ten or so posts later something seemingly came up out of the blue and reading the recent thread made it obvious that everyone expected it and I was left wondering if it was worth reading 50-100 pages of chat backlog to find where it was introduced and discussed before being voted on and if it was even worth it.

As an example when i asked about the wyvern I didn't even know about the armory page where their information was listed or when they were even built! its just one day there was a vote to bring the wyvern along to ambush the efreeti and I was left wondering when the heck we even built the things!
Granted considering how long the quest is newcomers probably arent the greatest concern this was just my two bits but I generally dont like the idea of separate votes.
 
As someone that just caught I can attest to the fact that new people will miss a lot of stuff if the votes arent consolidated, 14000 pg is a lot of backlog to read through in order to find votes that arent tied directly to posts, I even went back after each post to find a vote tally posted by the qm or other people and I was still surprised sometimes when ten or so posts later something seemingly came up out of the blue and reading the recent thread made it obvious that everyone expected it and I was left wondering if it was worth reading 50-100 pages of chat backlog to find where it was introduced and discussed before being voted on and if it was even worth it.

As an example when i asked about the wyvern I didn't even know about the armory page where their information was listed or when they were even built! its just one day there was a vote to bring the wyvern along to ambush the efreeti and I was left wondering when the heck we even built the things!
Granted considering how long the quest is newcomers probably arent the greatest concern this was just my two bits but I generally dont like the idea of separate votes.
We do want newcomers, it's just about impossible to make it easy for newcomers, that's what happen, when there's over 3 million words in story only mode.
 
Yeah and it's only getting harder to catch up, by this time next year, the quest might be nearing 5 million words in story only mode, we can't really do much to make it easier to catch up, so what we do is make sure to try to be patient with people who has just caught up, and so don't know much about the plans, we have talked about a few thousand pages ago.
 
Agreed, consolidated Turn Plans are my preference, but I apologize if I give the impression it's for the same reasoning @egoo presented.

It's just what I'm used to. If you want to find any one turn plan, you can use keywords and have a reasonable shot at digging it up in under a minute. If we changed it to the other way, good bye to that.
 
Ah, we're going about this the wrong way.

There is already the perfect template out there for us to use.

The Bladeleaf Creature. We already sold a bunch of them to the Admiral in Vialisk. The template on the PFSRD site was missing the actual stats for the Animated Leaf Swarm, but the one I linked includes the base swarm, which is modified by the creature the template is applied to.

We just need to put it on the proper chassis, preferably one that flies, and we're golden.

What the actual fuck is that template?

I feel like +10 Natural Armor alone should justify more than +1CR. How the the hell is this supposed to be balanced? If I stick this template on a Treant and throw the resulting creature at my average level 8 party they're going to get absolutely slaughtered. Unless you have massive cc or debuff spells you just flat out can't do anything against this monstrosity.
 
What the actual fuck is that template?

I feel like +10 Natural Armor alone should justify more than +1CR. How the the hell is this supposed to be balanced? If I stick this template on a Treant and throw the resulting creature at my average level 8 party they're going to get absolutely slaughtered. Unless you have massive cc or debuff spells you just flat out can't do anything against this monstrosity.
Ah, but here is your problem. You assume someone without magic matters in D&D.

There are quite a few templates, builds, etc. around that make something entirely invulnerable to level appropriate martial classes while adding next to no defense against casters.
 
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