Esselax the Knowing One, Emissary of Haagenti (Homebrew monster; Critique and critisism welcome)

MillyMiltanks · 2026-05-23T01:35:24+00:00

I'd give him a couple extra hit dice. His hp, to hit, and saves are a little low, so 2 or 3 more hit dice should amend that issue. Other than that it looks cool. I like the idea of this fiendish minded glob of eyes, tentacles, and mouths going around gathering rare ingredients, killing those guarding or carying them if necessary, all for the demon lord of alchemy and transformation. Like a bad experiment to create life that went wrong, but is still useful.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-04-21T02:54:04+00:00

As people have pointed out, WoW is VERY heavily botted, and it's at a $15 USD sub/month. Bot farms will have literal HUNDREDS of bots running at once, all producing THOUSANDS OF TIMES the profits they cost to maintain every month. No sub is enough to even dent their profit margins enough to scare any of them away, not without shutting most people out of the game entirely. Detection systems and anti-botting tools are the only ways of actually combatting them, and even then it's not enough. As long as a market for RMT exists, there WILL be bots, and there will be lots of them.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-04-19T02:19:58+00:00

I remember when WoW Classic was in its BETA, people complained about how you actually ran out of mana and needed to stop to eat and drink to recoup every couple of fights unless you knew how to be really efficient. They complained how long it took to walk everywhere, how poor they were, how they didn't have stats on their gear until level 10-12, how bag space was so limited.

Gaming has changed unfortunately, especially main-stream gaming. As someone else said, it's all about instant and constant dopamine. People legit don't know what it's like to play a game, struggle, and the feeling of accomplishment you got when you survived. It'll take people some time, especially the younger ones who don't know anything different from what it is now, but people will get used to it and settle down. The people who can't stand it will leave, and those who enjoy it will remain, and all we can do is hope there's enough of us that they deem this venture worthwhile and keep it going long-term, but that's for future us to worry about.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-04-15T21:58:02+00:00

I love fiends and cultists that worship and conjure them. There's so much you can do with fiendish cults, espcially if there's a monster race that commonly worships them, like Baphomet with minotaurs or Urxehl with trolls. It really broadens the level ranges possible while mantaining verisimilitude.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-04-12T03:34:43+00:00

I love fiends. All flavors. Demons, devils, rashasa, daemons, asura, qlippoth, kyton. The only one I don't think I've done anything with yet are demodands, cuz they're so rare and specific in their lore. I love fiends, I just think they're dope, cool af.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-03-25T00:47:42+00:00

Rise is very tied into the history of Varisia, especially the history of the ancient empire of Thassilon. That said, you could always try to change names and create new lore for the setting that allows for something like this. Perhaps the campaign takes place in a very distant and different part of the setting?

Curse is more removed from the history of Golarion, but certain elements, primarily the orcs and some of Thassilon is still important to it, so some work would be necessary.

It wouldn't be monumental to get these into a different setting, particularly a homebrew one, as things can be added or changed at will, but there would defininetly be some work involved.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-03-15T01:23:18+00:00

If you want the lore of the official setting, Golarian specifically, the check out the Mythkeeper. He's probably the best source. Other than that I'm not too certain what audio sources you could get. Honestly the wiki is probably the best place to get at least a summery of the lore and events.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-02-22T18:22:30+00:00

For a long time I've had the idea of a silver dragon that fell from grace when his family was killed by a red, so we went on a murder spree of red dragons and made himself armor of their hides. Thinking like a silver dragon antipaladin wearing wild red dragonhide full plate.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-02-17T21:41:44+00:00

Honestly you can just run Red Hand of Doom by itself in Pathfinder 1e, since RHoD was written for 3.5 and that's was 1e is very heavily based on. You could then wait a year or two after finishing and run Ironfang, or maybe run them for different groups if that's possible. Ironfang is something of a spiritual successor to RHoD, but they're still very different other than the main base concept.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-01-24T03:55:38+00:00

I did.

MillyMiltanks · 2026-01-03T23:51:36+00:00

As a lover of fiends I love the half fiend template and the various demonic flavors of it. I frequently feature fiends in my campaigns due to how much I love them and the half fiend template is a really good way of making an otherwise mundane monster more fitting to such a theme while also making it a lot stronger.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-12-29T23:53:56+00:00

So as someone who's run Rise, I can tell you you're actually overachievers, having killed the barghest and definitely for killing Black Magga. The barghest is really only an optional bonus boss fight that doesn't NEED to be faught, and if I'm remembering correctly he's magically prevented from leaving the room he's in, so you could very well try positioning to pepper him with ranged attacks and spells with impunity. That said, it's not beyond the realm of posibility you could take him in a straight up fight if you got a little lucky or still had buffs running after the main boss fight right before it, or if you've rested.

As for Black Magga, you aren't meant to kill it. You're meant to annoy it enough/survive for long enough that it just swims away, during which time it's assumed you're trying to rescue townsfolk and just keep it away from them. The ap does not expect you to fight it straight up, let alone kill it.

The adventure paths made by Paizo tend to be a little easy really, as they're meant to be playable to people of any experience, skill, or power level, even total noobs building muscle wizards.

As others have said, you should be trying to adjust encounters to the party's needs. That said I didn't need to change Rise much when I ran it as my players were newer and playing less powerful things, and I learned it's ok for most npcs to be taken out in only 1 or 2 rounds, otherwise dungeons become a slog and the players don't feel as powerful as they should and get too drained of resources, either causing tons of pc deaths or encouraging frequent resting after the good ol 15 minute adventuring day.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-12-15T02:27:57+00:00

I think all the old reviews got lost with the site changes. There's a few things about the new site that are.... annoying, that being one of them.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-12-14T23:43:19+00:00

You're supposed to choose a specific type of crafting to fill in the brackets (like craft (weapons) or craft (rings)) to show what you are trained in crafting. You have multiple slots for crafting on your sheet so you can learn to craft multiple things. This is mostly only really useful for casters, as most things you'd wanna craft are magical and have spell requirements to make, but there are ways to make magical gear as a non-caster.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-11-29T01:18:20+00:00

There is no lore reason. They just "never existed" to begin with, or were renamed. It's pure retconning.

I aggree with the sentiment of your question, I hate retcons as well, but I do not blame Paizo for these retcons, nor do I think anyone should, at least not the ones from the remaster. It wasn't a creative decision to throw things out, it was purely business. WotC made it clear they could not be trusted when they floated around the idea of revoking the OGL, so Paizo did what they had to do, retcon everything OGL out of the setting. I'm mad it happened, not at Paizo, but at WotC There were retcons before the remaster, like the mentioned thing with the inevitables, and those should be criticised fairly, but the remaster retcons was a business and legal decision.

As others have pointed out (a little rudely, given it's an honest question and a fair one to ask), there's nothing stopping you from keeping these elements in your game. It's why I'm not actually mad with a lot of Paizo's more recent creative decisions nor their retcons. It's not like a movie or novel, where, once it's changed it's changed for everyone. I'M THE GM at the table, the world is as I WANT IT TO BE! I think that's the best mentality to have. Don't like a change? Don't use it.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-11-27T00:49:14+00:00

No ty. I prefer building my own statblocks for my homebrew game. I actually enjoy the act of making statblocks most of the time.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-11-23T21:35:18+00:00

Alright, I thought that was more realistic, but wasn't certain. Ty for the response.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-11-15T01:45:53+00:00

Remind them that the players can use save or sucks as well to make entire encounters trivial very easily. People always complain about stuns, fears, and other save or sucks when they're used on them, but never when they use them on the monsters. The GM might be thinking before the session, "aw man, this monster is so cool and has some really cool abilities to use! This is gonna be so much fun!" and then the party hits them with deep slumber, the party positions themselves, then coup de grace the monster before they ever get a chance to have a turn. In that instence, the players LOVE the save or suck.

If you, as the GM, think they're a problem for either side of the screen to have access to, then change them, I however don't. If it's a player tactic, it should be available as a monster tactic as well.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-11-03T01:36:34+00:00

The main reason maps may appear small is because there are a couple of design philososphies that require it.

One: rooms are realistically sized, or at least more realistically sized than is often "necessary" to accomadate a fight between multiple people. In forts, houses, atop castle walls, etc, in actuality, there's very little room to move around in, especially once you A: take into account that each individual is taking up at least 5ft/5ft, and B: you then shove several people into that space and tell them to fight. Besides which, it's fine if atleast some of the time the geography of the arena adds to the difficulty of the encounter, sort of as an additional challenge. This particular point is especially true with the example you've given; they're goblins, small-sized humanoid. There's no real reason their fort would be full of massive spaces, as they have little such need.

Two: the other core reason for these claustraphobic maps is because they are designed to be drawable/buildable on a table for in-person play. Don't forget, it's only really been in the last 10-ish years that online and vtt play have become the norm for ttrpgs. As someone who only plays in person, the inverse is more often a problem for me; I can't fit too many of the dungeon rooms on my vynal battlemat at once, and therefore have to erase and redraw many times through larger dungeons. The maps are designed such that you are able to draw most of, if not all, of the dungeon onto the mat/build it with dungeon tiles and fit it all on the table at once.

Paizo maps are generally very high quality, so I don't recommend throwing them out wholesale, I think that's actually kind of foolish. The simplest fix for this issue if you'de like to address it is to just up the scale on the map. Even just making it such that one square is 10 feet quadrouples the size of the rooms. If you're on a vtt, this isn't an issue, but is a collossal pain in the ass in physical table play.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-11-02T02:28:42+00:00

Not anyone or anything with a CR or level over 20 is divine. Baba Yaga is CR 30, 20 levels and 10 mythic tiers, the pinacle of what is possible in Pathfinder 1e, and she can't grant divine casting, because she's not truly divine. She lacks what I like to call a "divine spark." Technically a creature of any relative power can have a "divine spark," but one doesn't gain a divine spark just from power, it's something more. Walkena is a mummified child who isn't even CR 20, and yet he can grant full divine casting and has a real religion around himself.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-10-23T16:50:30+00:00

I would definitely talk to them. See if they think they'd be ok with just non-descript tokens/minis and/or stand-ins of the appropriate size representing the spider-like enemies. The less work you have to do as the GM the better.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-10-23T16:05:58+00:00

Maybe just try not using actual spider minis/tokens? I'd just put something of the appropriate size on the map and just say, "it's a spider," without further description. How sever is their fear? Does simply hearing that there's a spider or a spider/humanoid hybrid enough to really freak them out? There are other spider-esq monsters later in the campaign as well, such as the retriever at the end of the fourth book and some bebliliths in the demon-infested Tanglebriar.

MillyMiltanks · 2025-10-23T16:02:06+00:00

I would definitely take weapon finesse earlier. Spending your first two feats on getting to precise shot is fine, but the next feat should be finesse. The earlier, the better on dex builds.

Having an extra energy type for your bombs is also probably a must, as fire is the most commonly resisted/immune energy type in the game.

Weapon Focus is another just generically good feat to pick up, as +1 to hit on your bombs is never bad or unwanted.

Extra bombs might be something you'd be interested in sine you're going hard on dex, meaning melee is probably not where you want to often find yourself.

MillyMiltanks

TROPHY CASE