The basic deity descriptions in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game are very basic indeed. Name, alignment, domains (and later, subdomains) assigned, and favored weapon. Some deities have expanded descriptions, needed to support some feats and prestige classes that grant power (including spell-like abilities) in exchange for performing obediences, ritualistic activities done …
A little epiphany last night — Dungeons & Dragons 4e magic items and artifacts look like a very good model for these things — caused me to want to reexamine some of my assumptions or memories of other editions. In this post I do a little more rigorous examination of …
What makes up a deity? Leaving aside the philosophical elements, we can start pretty simply. In fact, we could get by with as little as a name (so we can identify which is which), an alignment (so we have some idea of what team they’re on and what their personality …
Once again I’m taking a run at the A-Z Blog Challenge. This time, I’m using it as impetus to write a book I’ve wanted to have for years. Deities in Dungeons & Dragons are largely defined, mechanically, by the domains they grant their clerics. When designing game entities such as …
When I started this series, I’d intended to go through the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and trim it down to the bare mechanics, then build it back up with the elements as I wanted them. That got derailed almost immediately. I figured I’d work through the source rule book as a …
In my first take on the cavalier expert path, I tried to distill the path down to the primary elements that made it a ‘cavalier’ rather than some other kind of warrior. I ended up with Mount and charge Order and challenge Banner Three elements, with different abilities gained in …
The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game has an immense amount of content. I know. I publish PDFs that were originally created as research documents for various topics and character classes. Believe me, there’s a huge amount of content. Many people use only the core subset, others kitchen-sink it and allow basically anything (possibly …
Many campaigns have world-spanning deities whose power reaches everywhere (more or less). They can provide the ‘full range of services’ (i.e. spells all the way up to ninth level, or seventh in some editions of D&D). Very useful from a game play perspective. However, the idea of being able to …
In my previous post I wrote about the evolution of the Echelon Reference Series. So far there have been four stages: Raw copy and paste aggregation. Ultimately not useful to me because it threw away so much information without gaining me much. Aggregating by source document, marking up in Word …
The Elemental Tetratheon is a deliberately polarized pantheon focusing primarily on the hermetic elements. While I like how most of the deities in this pantheon turned out, and the individual subpantheons show merit, I decided to take a closer look to see how they fit together as a whole. Final List …
