Some Gnoll Opponents for PF 2e

The island of Ursino (not-Corsica) on Verra has a bunch of gnolls. The gnolls are cursed mercenaries who were brought in as exiles from the Temmeno Empire (the not-Ethiopian Empire) over a generation ago by the Banco di Asmodeo to exert the banks control over the island and beat back swarms of the undead. A few missed payments, broken promises, and angry contractual negotiations later, and they're now organised into roving bands threatening the inhabitants of Ursino and are looking for a way off the island to go back home. 

These gnolls are sort of based off of the buda spirit from Ethiopia, tho' only very loosely, and with any anti-semitic elements totally scrubbed. Buda accusations IRL can be used for anti-semitic purposes, but are used more widely to handle breakdowns in social relations. For more see Hagar Solomon's book The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia, Tom Boylston's "From sickness to history: evil spirits, memory and responsibility in an Ethiopian market village", and this book chapter about a recent contemporary buda crisis. The part that particularly interests me about budas is their use to express the anxieties of subsistence farmers about integration into the market economy, which is very on-theme with Verra's focus on the 17th century emergence of global capitalism in a fantasy context.

So these gnolls are bad people who have practiced cannibalism and been cursed by the Hidden God to take hyena features for it, one of a larger class of beast peoples originating in this way. They reproduce by spreading the curse - making other people eat dead bodies so that they in turn become gnolls. Ultimately, their goal is not to wipe out the inhabitants of the island or whatever, but to get a few ships and either the crews to operate them or knowledge of how to sail them themselves, and then to go home (where, truthfully, they will be no more welcome; the Temmeno don't want cursed cannibal mercenaries they've already exiled coming back)

There are three gnolls in Pathfinder 2e as it exists: one level 2, one level 3, and one level 4. I wanted PCs to be able to fight gnolls right from the start of the game, so I created a bunch of -1, 0, and 1 level gnolls, which will be especially helpful once the PCs hit levels 2-4 and I can send big hordes of the low level ones after them. I created these gnolls using the PF Tools Monster Builder, and I think there are a few typos where I forgot to change gear or names on powers, but the numbers should all be right.

So with that long introduction, here are some low level gnoll opponents for you to use.

Anyhow, enjoy!

Campaign Setting WIP: Verra

I'm starting up a Pathfinder 2nd Edition campaign, and have nine people potentially interested in playing (probably ending up with a core group of 4-5 regular players and another 4-5 occasional players). So I needed a P2 campaign setting. I decided to go with something early modern, and "Verra" (an allusion to the Latin words "veritas", "vir", and "terra") is the result. I'm going to show a few pictures from my work-in-progress.

Verra is a combination of ideas from several settings I've created over the years, some of which I ran campaigns in, and some which never get off the ground. Elements of Moragne, Emern, the Wolf Sea, and Feuerberg / the Old Lands all recur, with Feuerberg, as the most recent, having the greatest influence.

Verra is an early modern setting paralleling our own early-to-mid-17th century, one of my favourite time periods for games. You have full plate, guns, the birth of modern science, the emergence of the second wave of colonial empires, megacorporations, the emergence of the novel and mercantile capitalism, etc. It's when we first start calling people "adventurers" historically, IIRC.

The isle of Ursino. 10km hexes.

The campaign is going to be set on the isle of Ursino, which is loosely inspired by early modern Corsica. The entire island was created a million years ago when a dragon of titanic proportions died in the ocean and its bones and back sticking up above the sea became a mountainous island. The island was settled in successive waves of peoples, including the ancient Pturian serpent men, the Xarxean elves, and the Krovian Empire. They mined the dragon's bones and body for magically potent substances and raided the ruins of preceding empires.

About 150 years before the campaign begins, the last king of Ursino attempted to gain immortality through lichdom. The ritual worked, but led to the death / undeath of everyone in his capital (the grey dead forest in the southwest), the excommunication of the king himself, the depopulation of most of the island, and the cessation of diplomatic relations with the major powers of Urovia.

The Kingdom of Ursino's end left an opening for the devil-run Banca di Asmodeo, the most powerful institution of the nearby Magnificent Republic of Gorga. They spent astonishing sums of money buying land rights, bribing monarchs for recognition, and outfitting a fleet that relieved the struggling remnants of the kingdom that had held on in the north-east of the island. The Yomishtan Pope refuses to recognise their claim to sovereignty over the island since the Banca di Asmodeo is ultimately run by heretics but everyone else does. The BdA now controls the lucrative trade in draconic remnants.

The local nobility are still not completely happy about the bank's rulership. There are lots of nationalists who want one of their own to ascend to the throne. Some are desperate enough to conspire against the bank, especially with the Serene Republic of Nerral or the Verenigde Vroost, other major maritime powers who are interested in mining the dragon's remains. This has been intensifed in recent years as gnollish pirates have begun occupying the the western swamps and raiding across the mountains to attack the mining communities. It's felt that the bank only cares if their financial or political interests are at stake.

Tombalberi is the town in the northeast. 10km hexes.

Tombalberi ("Tombtrees") is the main port and settlement on Ursino. It's a large walled town of approximately 15,000 people. It's the centre of the Banca di Asmodeo's power on the island.

I created this map using: https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

I'm planning a session zero to bring as many of the potential PCs together to create characters, so we'll see what people come up with. I'm expecting a fair number of pirate-types.

Great Battle Map Drawing Tutorial

This video starts off as a review & discussion of some Pathfinder 2e module called "Fall of Plaguestone" but around 20:40 "Classic DM" (T. Elliot Cannon) begins showing you how to draw good-looking battle maps. I thought this was a very good tutorial and easily adaptable to non-Pathfinder purposes. I'm not great at drawing battlemaps, but I've always wanted to improve.

It looks like Classic DM might be making this a series - on Oct 1 he uploaded a second tutorial video focused on "the Indigo Oasis" module.

[Review] Pathfinder 2e

I picked up a hard copy of the Pathfinder 2e core book last Wednesday, and have read it over enough to feel like I can offer a review of it. I'm still digging through the details of the spell section, but I've read the rest of it cover to cover (and separately, read the SRD).

The book is 638 pages not counting endpapers, and like the Pathfinder 1e corebook is composed of material that in stock 3.5 was scattered across the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. The Monster Manual equivalent - the Bestiary - is out but I haven't read it yet, except for glancing through some of its content in the SRD.

As many people know, the offline game I've been playing in for the past eighteen months or so has been a D&D 3.5 game. I'm not a great fan of D&D 3.5 (the group is good enough to bear with the system) and much prefer the various rationalisations and clean-ups of it, like Arcana Unearthed / Evolved, Iron Heroes, and Trailblazer. Pathfinder 1e, which is a slight rebalance of 3.5, didn't go far enough in the core book for me, and I never became invested enough in the system to follow the various developments and tweaks it made to the d20 core over the course of its run, as extensive as I understand they eventually became.

Pathfinder 2e however, has impressed me with how extensively it's cleaned up the d20 system. The strength of the d20 system is its systematic character, and I find Pathfinder 2e has doubled-down on that strength. It's not a system that leaves much implicit, from defining the three rhythmic structures of play (Encounters, Exploration, and Downtime) to explaining exactly how far one falls in a single round spent falling (500 ft. the first round, 1,500 ft. each additional round). You can hate this systematicity if it's not something you care for, but insofar as one does enjoy it (and I do), Pathfinder 2e is a surprisingly well-done implementation of it.

I designed a first-level human wizard character in Pathfinder 2e to test out how cumbersome a process it would be, and I found it took about half as long as creating a D&D 3.5 character. The main time savings were in attribute selection, skill selection, and feat selection. In D&D 3.5 these are all processes that demand a lot of consideration and often provoke "analysis paralysis" in new players, with inobvious long-term consequences and large lists of options, Pathfinder 2e breaks these processes up into a lot of smaller decisions that accumulate over the whole process of character creation and involve picking from smaller lists. That speeds things up considerably.

I also think it will be relatively easy to design your own backgrounds, ancestries, and other bits for character creation because you can get a clear sense of the scope of work for each piece. After looking over the backgrounds once, I understood what each offered (an ability boost tied to one of two stats; a free ability boost; two skills, one of which is a Lore specialty; and a skill feat tied to one of the skills) well enough that I feel comfortable designing my own.

5e breaks down parts of its character creation process in similar ways, and that brings me to the final piece of this short review, which is comparing 5e and Pathfinder 2e. I've been middlingly positive towards 5e as an edition: I own the core set and Xanathar's, and prefer it to 3.5 at the end of its run and to 4e. But I've never been in love with it as an edition either. I don't like the importance of attributes in its system, and I'm not wild about its skill list, and there are various other small choices or gaps in its design such that I'm not an enthusiast.

By contrast, after reading the Pathfinder 2e core book, I was excited and interested in running a d20 game again for the first time in maybe a decade or more. Certainly if I was going to run a campaign using a d20 system, Pathfinder 2e would be my preferred system for doing so. This is surprising for me, but I think it does a better job extending and intensifying the core strengths of the d20 system, whereas 5e tends to be structured in such a way as to mitigate d20's weaknesses.

I think Pathfinder does a better job structuring the cycle of exploration, relies less on attributes (and more on skills) to determine character capacity, and has more granular combat. I wouldn't say any of these was a key criterion for my decision, but each contributed to it, along with my more general admiration of its systematic character, whereas I think D&D 5e tends to leave much more open (and this is probably why many people love it - I'm not trying to start a fight about whether it's good).

Anyhow, I'm at the beginning of a larger conversation with my group about switching from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder 2e, and I'm quite hopeful that we'll decide to do so eventually.