> We've got a busy week here at Paizo. Come to twitch.tv/officialpaizo on Thursday, Aug 31st at 4 p.m. Pacific for a special livestream to kickstart our Pathfinder Playtest. Join Michael Sayre and James Case as they talk about the design concepts behind our two new classes!

I have no idea what they would even be at this point, I've kind of got every class I want. They did show off the gorgeous new cards in a very recent blogpost though, maybe a harrower of some kind? I'd be super suprised to see the original version of the Medium that uses harrow legends instead of mythic legends.

Nudul really nailed her style with this I think. It's no replacement of course but I thought it was a really well-made homage.

I've purposefully been holding off on making anything until 2.5e drops, but i'm pretty excited to put together an Anadi Wood Sorcerer+Elementalist that specializes in fabricating permanent objects during the adventuring day. Rope bridges, grappling hooks, nets, whatever you need, so long as it's got some rigid or rope-like components, they can put it together over the course of a short re-focus.

I'm brewing up a sandbox/campaign for my group and it's coming together swimmingly. The overarching theme of the adventure will be homecoming. The players are marooned and need to find their way home, the knights of lastwall might find an artifact or two to help take back the gravelands, the firebrands want to make a land of exiles into a refuge, etc. etc. I'm struggling with the motivations of one of the six forces the party'll face in the field however.

An off-shoot of the Technic League has discovered that they can hijack a ritual occuring off the coast of Garund to resurrect the league's founder and zap her home, earning themselves a ticket to Androffan in the process. To pull this off, they need the necromantic expertise of the Whispering Way. It's a one-way trip into the storm, even for powerful spellcasters, and the Whispering Way is aware of this.

To those more familiar with the Whispering Way than I am, do you have any ideas as to what the Whispering Way would be up to on the side while out there? Why would they agree, and what do they get out of sacrificing capable necromancers to this effort?

I'm thinking that since the Whispering Tyrant hates Aroden, there might be some connection there, but it's pretty nascent at the moment, and i'm not entirely sure I can link that up with the game's theme.

It's supposed to be fully compatible with PF2e, so we've got a good idea of what it'll look and play like. There's also a Playtest available to check out, which I'm excited to take a look through later today.

In games like Deus Ex and Dishonored, the player can leave combat ability on the table and go through the entirety of the game without fighting anyone. Stacking boxes to get to where they need, sneaking through complexes, and talking down the big-bad are all options that get you to credits. If you could coordinate with your team, i'm certain you could get a similar playstyle going in quite a satisfying way in PF2e. Realistically though, people come to this game to roll dice with their bardiches out, so you're more likely than not going to have a standard grab bag of murderhobos as your teammates.

With friends like these, how viable are your Adam Jensens, your Faith Mirrorsedges, or your Frisk Undertales? Can you really set up a character that doesn't use any combat ability and find success in a standard adventure path, relying on your team to take on your share of the combat encounter budgets for you? In what ways would you pull your weight to justify the character's "slot" in the party?

In games like Magic the Gathering, you're building your decks less around cool singular abilities, creatures and spells, and more about orchestrating a moment of critical mass where you can overwhelm and guarantee victory. Pathfinder 2e has some similarity to this kind of building, where the idea is less to make a situation where every time you X, Y happens, which triggers Z procs, and more to stack bonuses and penalties to artificially create critical successes for your team, then figuring out which ability or spell to best make use of that setup. For example, the ideal combat set-up against a boss fight on a balcony might be Heroism 9 on the fighter from the cleric, Synesthesia on the enemy from the bard, a Gust of Wind from the wizard to inflict prone, all culminating in a Brutish Shove off the ledge from the fighter.

However, the big appeal for TTRPGs for me is that not everything you can do needs to touch combat like in a traditional RPG video game. I'm particularly interested in strategies that help you traverse environments, interacting with people you wouldn't ordinarily be able to get a word in edgewise with, and bypass dangerous encounters entirely.

In this vein, I think Protector Tree and Shape Wood are a great couple of spells for any primalist to learn and prepare on the regular. Protector Tree creates a really nice damage mitigation tool in combat, but it also sprouts a permanent (unworked) medium sized tree! That's only kind of neat, but becomes a valuable resource when paired with the Shape Wood spell, which just so happens to require a bunch of unworked wood to be useful! Now, so long as you have both of these spells in equal measure, you can fabricate wooden items that you ordinarily wouldn't be able to bring with you on adventures for dirt cheap. Ladders, steps, platforms, wheels, axles - you've basically got a low-tech Garry's mod at your disposal! If you need a cart to move massive loot, a few casts and some basic assembly and a Form-Retention'd Wildshape will get that Mithril Door from the dungeon back to town.

Are there any spells, items, or abilities you've found useful when used together like this? I'd be eager to hear them!

Howdy everyone, you might be surprised to hear there's a 3rd edition of an unofficial TTRPG based on the elder scrolls, or you might not! It's a classless party-based d100 system where you can do all sorts of wacky stuff like make custom spells and enchant a fork to cast Absorb Health on hit.

I have a question about how you would judge a funky interaction though. The Atronach stone grants the Spell Absorption (5) trait, which does as follows:

"Whenever magic of any kind affects them, roll a d10. If the value is less than or equal to 5 the magic has no effect on them and instead they regain missing MP up to the cost of the magic."

Nice. It helps offset the Stunted Magicka trait, which prevents natural regeneration of your MP. However, it's a bit of a double edged sword. Suddenly whenever you need healing, it's a coin toss as to whether you recover HP or MP, which could be disastrous in certain circumstances. When the party Recalls out of the collapsing mine, you might be left behind!

On the other hand, the Mysticism school offers the Absorb Health and Absorb Magicka effects, which deal X damage to an enemies HP or MP, then restores half as much HP or the entirety of MP damage to the caster. Ordinarily, this is an inefficient conversion of MP to Damage/enemy MP, but with the Spell Absorption, it can completely recoup your spent MP 50% of the time... and it's trivially easy to make multi-hit weapon enhancement spell to grant you that coin toss on every swing of your axe, or a big pulse or cloak effect to proc a bunch of absorptions at once.

My question to you is, is that too much? Is that a proper "reward" for dealing with a 50% failure chance on critically important effects? At first blush, it seems cracked and definitely not intended, but I'm not convinced the upsides eclipse the downsides.

I've been looking for an Int-based chassis for an artful dodge TWF build, and one of the options that come up is the Alchemist. Trouble is, alchemist needs a free hand for bombs! Looking for archetypes that could replace that, I stumbled upon the Blood Alchemist.

It replaces Mutagens and Bombs for the ability to make magic circles out of your extracts that let you cast certain specific spell-like abilities at-will so long as you stand in them and don't re-prepare your extract slots. It's a huge trade for a unique benefit.

I'd imagine you could get up to some really funky construction shenanigans, having access to expeditious construction, shape stone, and fabricate. And then the potential of having a nearly always-on Magic Vestment & Greater Magic weapon for your entire party opens up a lot of options for situational weapons & armor sets.

What do you think of the archetype? Does it have potential? Does it give up too much?

Minor spoilers for Stolen Fate.

I like that. More permanent items should be usable forever and hard to obsolete after you gain them. What's the point of questing for Excalibur if you have to retire it after a single adventure?

The Medium class, introduced in the Occult Adventures book, has a pretty wide selection of skills and abilities, but hasn't been well supported since release. Only 4 feats interacting with the class at all - Legendary Influence (& it's improved version), Spirit Focus, and Channel Spirit. I certainly like it, but there are a few aspects of it that are pretty much universally disregarded as unusably bad, that probably could've used some buffs and extra features to support it.

Like the Guardian spirit.

The guardian spirit is two of twelve spirits a medium can potentially channel on a given day (One base Guardian, and one Legendary Guardian, of which 3 have been published... none of which are particularly noteworthy). These spirits focus your Spirit Bonus into your AC, Con checks, your Fort & Reflex saves, and thaaaaat's it. Nothing active, only passive defenses. The Seance boon bosts your CMD... Which again, not something that helps you interact with the world. Your lesser spirit power grants Armor and Shield proficiency. Who has enough money to buy a second fully enchanted suit of armor they don't wear most of the time? And you don't need shield proficiency if you find a shield with no ACP.

To summarize, it's not a great foundation. Barely better than not channeling a spirit at all.

So what if you're hanging out in a castle and it's your only option for the day? Just give up and go to sleep? No, that's silly. You've got a world to save or something similar, so let's make the most of this spirit with as little investment as possible, because I KNOW you'd much rather put the rest of your build towards support the other spirits.

To start, I would ask that you dedicate precisely ONE feat exclusively to the guardian spirit. This is a tough ask, but I think it's worth it. That feat is Nature Soul. That's right, the +2 Survival and Knowledge (Nature) feat solves the Guardian's issues and it is now a completely viable spirit! Thanks for coming to my post.

I kid, it's just a pre-requisite for your Legendary Influence feats. When you hit Lv 4, you qualify for Animal Ally, so retrain your Legendary Influence to Legendary Influence, replacing whatever you picked initially for the ability to pick up a new Animal Companion that only exists when you're Guardian'd up.

Since you don't have the feat and don't gain it until you Seance up, you can "prepare" a new companion as if you were gaining the feat for the first time every time you channel. Horses, Birds, and Wolves are my main 3 recommendations. Horse with the Bodyguard archetype is a good "Default" pick, but on days you know you'll be delving indoors, prepare a Wolf. On days you know you'll need an aerial scout, prepare a bird. Easy!

At lv 9, you gain access to Improved Legendary Influence. Prepare "Blades Above & Below" as your Guardian feat, acquire a Horsemaster's Saddle, a pair of Training Spiked Gauntlets attuned to Outflank & Paired Opportunists. You might not have a spirit bonus to anything worthwhile, but now when you ride your temporary ally, you have an always-on +5 to hit medium or large enemies, and whenever you crit, you provoke an attack for yourself and gain a +4 bonus to that swing!

Your ally can come with the feat "Intercept Blow," letting it sponge 50% of incoming damage as an AoO-equivalent. It's unclear if you can proc Paired Opportunists off of this, but what you can do for sure is make much greater use of that DR and ER that comes from Guardian's Intermediate Power.

If an enemy wises up to your companions tricks and targets them, great! That's actually ideal. You have effectively "pulled aggro" off your team an onto what amounts to a summon. Remember that you do not have Animal Ally on days you don't prepare the guardian, so it doesn't matter as much to you as it would a ranger or druid if your buddy makes it the whole day or dies. You gain a new companion every time, as if you were gaining the feature for the first time. You can use Paladin's Sacrifice to protect them if you want to preserve them for another encounter, too.

You don't end up ever really needing to spirit surge on a Guardian, so you can Propitiate from Influence 3 to 2 at the start of the day and just never touch the Influence Penalty, enjoying the benefits of having this bonus buddy instead.

This is a lot of words to say "Get yourself a guardian for your Guardian". I hope this might be helpful to anyone who just doesn't know what to do with their weakest spirit.