Recent content by Paul Farquhar

My take on the warforged is that they can customise their appearance in the same way that they can change their armour plating, and are thus very varied to reflect their individuality.

The assumption of the rules is that the setting is independent of the rules. And that is achieved by assuming player characters are exceptional and what they can do (and what they look like) does not reflect the rest of the population.

A virus host needs to be able long enough to propagate the virus. After that it’s no longer needed.

You need to be careful round Aberdeen, that’s where the Farquhars come from and they are a dodgy bunch.

If you are based in Edinburgh you can get around by bus easily enough, or walk, it’s only a small city. Arthur’s Seat, behind Holyrood, is a pleasant evening walk. You can get the train to Glasgow, it doesn’t take long, to see the Burrel Collection for example. IMO Glasgow has the better museums...

Which is what several of us have been saying all along: square one works, there is no point in a new setting.

I assume you have the obvious things like Edinburgh Castle and Ben Nevis? Something different that might appeal to RPG people: the Glasgow Necropolis. Inverewe Gardens has an interesting microclimate, and should be midge-free at this time of year if you are interested in nature. Expect to lose...

The Christmas “music” in the supermarket this morning was so terrible it made we long for Wham!

Golarion tends to have more extreme variation of theme than FR. This country is this genre, and next to that is another country with a completely different genre. A lot of Ed Greenwood’s original FR work is its own thing, rather than obviously being based on a specific genre. A lot of the more...

Yup, as soon as you start allowing PC abilities on mass ranks of troops you very quickly get a magical arms race that turns every setting into Eberron. That’s why player character exceptionalism is such an important concept for any traditional pseudo-medieval setting like FR and Greyhawk. You...

Read it? Yes of course Tolkien mistrusts the powerful. The thing that makes Gandalf and Galadriel good people is that they distrust themselves. And of course that is the whole reason Gandalf cannot take the ring to Mordor himself. The whole book is about how important the contribution of...

Even if the breath weapon is only D6 once per day a 15' cone is going to devastating on a pseudo-medieval battlefield*, since each person on the enemy front row will be hit by three in the first round for 3d6 - enough to wipe out the entire rank. So you would also have to reduce the cone range...

Wut!? Not even PC species are well balanced. They certainly ain’t balanced for NPCs. I’m pretty sure AoE breath weapons that do more than enough damage to kill several enemy troops at once even if they save beat a unit of dwarves with an extra hp apiece and the ability to sense tremors. I...

No, keeping their numbers very low so they don’t rule the world with their breath weapon infantry is.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has quite a lot of that, but on the other hand they are much more entertaining than the last two movies.