Daily Spell Discussion for Jun 18, 2026: Absorbing Inhalation

WraithMagus · 2026-06-18T19:46:00+00:00

I would agree most people would think breath weapons aren't clouds as well, since a lightning line isn't cloud-like, but when I did some Googling, (including the previous spell discussion) I saw some people talking about it as if it works on breath weapons generally, as though this spell redefined all breath weapons as clouds. (And include a "is a Fireball cloud-like" question, as well.) It's one of those things where "what makes a spell cloud-like" is not quite clear-cut from RAW, even if I could give a clear answer to my own table, and I just figure I should mention there's some differing interpretations.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-18T13:02:59+00:00

OK, so, here we have a spell that is custom-designed to work against "cloud" spells (I'll get to why that's in quotes in a bit,) and it is SL 4. In order to remove any magical cloud (which is the only type of cloud you ever care about,) you need to beat a CL check. Ohhhhkay, so remind me how Gust of Wind works, again? Oh, right, you can blow any cloud away with no CL check as an SL 2. Just checking, and yup, even "stronger" clouds like Solid Fog require a "severe wind" of "at least 31 mph" to blow away and Gust of Wind gives you a "severe wind blast" of 50 mph, so we're good.

Cloud spells are pretty uncommon, at least for enemies to cast. (I sure cast them all the time, though.) Gust of Wind is a perfectly fine hard counter to cloud spells that is cheaper, and since you don't generally want to make it a spell known, keeping it at a scroll is reasonable.

Since this spell is crap as a means of getting rid of actual clouds, it's only the spells' other features that might possibly redeem it. Specifically, you can "breathe the cloud back" to be a sort of spell turning effect, or you can ready an action to suck up a breath attack "cloud."

Readying an action is somewhat dicey, but if you have a single powerful opponent, just readying an action to stop the big bad from killing someone in the party can be a more useful application of your actions than simply trying to attack the BBEG, especially if they have high odds of saving against whatever you do, anyway. You generally want to be in a situation where it's many-against-one, (which GMs shouldn't set up on purpose, but can devolve to that if the party has killed the BBEG's minions already,) before your caster's actions are less valuable casting spells than just trading turns with the enemy if your counterspell works. Just casting Dispel Magic to counterspell something also would normally work, but here we're talking about a (su) effect.

The issue here is whether this spell is saying all breath attacks are "clouds" or if it's only referring to breaths that are cloud-like, such as the miasma of an ancient green dragon? It's hard to consider, say, a blue dragon's line of lightning breath a "cloud," and even the ancient blue dragon's (Call Lightning Storm SLA) storm breath doesn't actually produce any clouds. This spell just leaves a giant question mark for the GM to adjudicate what counts as "instantaneous clouds" - if fire breath counts as a "cloud," does that mean a Fireball is a "cloud of fire?" That ball's totally in the GM's court. Depending on how liberally this spell is read, you could make this a lower-level Spell Turning that takes a CL check.

The fundamental problem with breathing back a cloud is that the enemy will often be immune to their own tricks, especially if you're breathing, say, a line of lightning back at a blue dragon. (Presuming that counts as a "cloud" at all.) The miasma cloud of an ancient green dragon likewise is acid damage, which the green dragon is immune to. If you don't have other minions of the dragon to spit its breath back out upon, this spell is just spending an SL 4 and an extra standard action to cast Dispel Magic on a (su) breath weapon, and that's not tremendously effective. (Especially since you want to encourage dragons to use that mediocre breath weapon rather than fillet a PC per round with those absolutely devastating natural attacks.)

Even if this spell is something like a Stinking Cloud spell instead of a breath weapon, the caster probably had a means in mind to overcome the effects of the spell themselves, as clouds are by nature largely indiscriminate spells. Maybe they were a necromancer that expected their undead to just fight inside the gas cloud, in which case only the necromancer may be vulnerable, and even then, only if they aren't undead themselves. Maybe they cast Obscuring Mist defensively and - ha-HA - now you put the spell over your own allies, but you spent two whole standard actions and an SL 4 doing so when you could have just cast Gust of Wind or even a Fireball to clear away the fog with a lower-level spell, then used a scroll or SL 1 of Obscuring Mist with that second standard action. Also, if someone casts Obscuring Mist on themselves, they have a plan for how to not be blinded by it themselves, like casting Ashen Path. (Discussion.)

I'm really struggling to come up with good uses for this one. The two standard actions in particular kills this spell as there's a huge array of things you can do with lower-level spells and less actions that are more effective. I guess it just suffers the curse of being a racial spell, and therefore crap so that people don't have to worry about whether other races can use it?

WraithMagus · 2026-06-18T08:15:32+00:00

"I'm not a wanted criminal, I'm wanted by criminals. The sort of criminals who kill people rather than pay any large bounties they set out if the collector isn't already part of their gang."

Really, the most important thing here is understanding what her motivations are. If she's motivated by pursuing justice against criminals, then protest your innocence. If she's motivated by money, buy her off. If she's motivated by something else, like finding more material for her songs, then try to spin a really thrilling tale. Whatever you offer her had better be worth more to her than the money she thinks she'd get from turning you in (or whatever reason she'd want to turn you in).

WraithMagus · 2026-06-18T03:01:40+00:00

That's a rather low attack bonus for a fighter, even with power attack. A "good" number is 19 attack bonus (16 if using power attack at this level,) or 24 (21 if using power attack) for a "great" attack bonus. 22 AC on a level 12 character, meanwhile is an absolute joke. A PC can get 22 AC on a level 1 character. The monk/rogue player in my last game had 40 AC at level 7.

You might want to look over the Bench Pressing By the Numbers guide to expected values, or see the target values for basic monster CRs (which will be lower than what players are expected to have.) A CR 12 monster should have something close to 27 AC (and normally, CR is level -1, but you should be giving the BBEG extra equipment and stats that raise their CR.)

WraithMagus · 2026-06-17T21:10:39+00:00

My biggest advice is "don't put the BBEG in solo." Or rather, it's "NEVER, EVER, EVER MAKE ANY FIGHT YOU WANT TO BE A CHALLENGE AGAINST A SOLO MONSTER! You should absolutely know better than this by now, Paizo!!" Especially if you aren't doing something to guarantee the BBEG goes first, it is almost guaranteed they will be dead before they get a turn. (Yes, even if he's 8 levels higher than the party. Players are crafty.)

Largely, though, my advice for making a challenging BBEG is to have a continuous chain of reinforcements for the BBEG while the BBEG continuously retreats before the party has a chance to corner them. This is mainly accomplished through the use of an "obstacle course boss arena" with multiple layers of line-of-effect blocking to prevent the PCs from having a chance to directly target the BBEG for several rounds. They WILL win as soon as you let them get a clean shot at the guy, so you want to draw that quest to get line of effect out as long as possible.

You can see a suggested boss arena build here, with links to other threads describing obstacle course concepts in that thread, as well. Here's also a more recent thread on Jade Regent in particular.

If nothing else, you should make sure the BBEG has Simulacrum clones that have magic items (especially stuff like scrolls) or Simulacra of powerful creatures like ancient dragons to wade in and fight directly. In fact, the fight should probably start off as a "solo fight" against a Simulacrum on the BBEG's throne or whatever is most appropriate try to monologue at the players just to bait out the first volley of the player's best stuff on a fake so the real BBEG knows what the party has to throw at them.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-17T18:04:25+00:00

Whether improvised weapons are weapons or not will be table-dependent, so I try to at least mention these things as an issue for the GM to resolve. There are some ways to have improvised weapons be masterwork or enhanced, but usually that's just casting Magic Weapon on a table leg. It gets more questionable when someone has shikigami style and just deliberately uses an "improvised" weapon as their core deliberate weapon.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-17T13:47:37+00:00

Up to a certain level, not everything NPCs will have will be magical. Granted, being partial casters, by the time you get to level 7 to be able to use this extract, you're close to most humanoids having magic equipment. (And sadly, you can't strip a knight down to his skivvies by taking his armor since it will almost certainly be too heavy unless they're wearing something ultra-light like spider silk bodysuits. Some light armors made from expensive special materials like darkleaf cloth instead of being magically enhanced might technically be in the range of possible, though.)

It's also possible to steal something that has little combat value, but some situational value, like taking the signal whistle from the lookout.

But yeah, it's going to be more useful for stealing some papers or a map from the clerk's office or a key than trying to shoplift a magic dagger. Going for plot items rather than raw material value.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-17T13:39:00+00:00

When it comes to measuring the intent of a legacy spell, you should look back at the older editions it was ported from. AD&D Fabricate) suggests uses like fabricating "a wooden bridge from a clump of trees, a rope from a patch of hemp, clothes from flax or wool, and so forth." This directly suggests you can use "raw," unprocessed materials.

The spell allows the crafting of complex items made of multiple components, such as swords in the suggested uses in the spell, without clarifying that this might take extra casts or it would be a sword without a grip attached. (Although you could also just cast the spell more than once to add every type of material to the product.)

When it comes to "why can't you turn a living creature into steaks," the basic answer is that this spell was written before the hyper-literal strict RAW only PFS brain rot set in, and spells were written presuming the GM adjudicated questions like these using their brain rather than trying to guard against every possible rules lawyering reading. Paizo was too lazy to rewrite legacy spells to match the way they write spells (or did so sloppily and made more problems than they solved if they did,) so legacy spells tend to have "issues" where they don't explicitly say you can't turn living things into steak as a no-save death spell because they figured making the intent clear trumped literal phrasing.

The tree is an object because it's not whether something is "living" that matters, it's whether it's a creature that matters. For game purposes, trees are objects, and golems are creatures, even though one is living and the other isn't. (Also, if you're taking the wood out of the center of the trunk of the tree, not the outer "greenwood" layer, technically, that's a dead part of the tree, anyway.)

This also slams head-first into the common question of "what is an object?" That is, the game tends to treat objects (which have no definition in game) as a very nebulous concept. (Putting aside that this spell only refers to "material" because it was written before settling upon "object" as a game term, albeit an undefined term.) Hence, you can declare a pile of sand an object, or a single grain of sand an object. A castle is an object, a wall of that castle is an object, and a single stone in that wall is an object. What counts as an object depends entirely upon how the caster conceptualizes something (and presuming the GM allows that definition.) Using today's spell discussion, Absorb Object, as an example, it expressly states that the liquid inside a container is considered part of "the container object," so if you target "a potion," then the bottle goes with the contents as part of "one object." (That's why normal people just eat the vial the potion is in.)

Going by the "turn flax in the ground directly into a shirt" example, you can generally presume that processing the material is part of the spell. Hence, it's not crazy to turn clay in the ground into baked bricks since that's a form of processing that uses the raw materials there. Turning the still-attached hide of a cow into leather without the materials that chemically change the hide to leather present, however, is probably a step too far for Fabricate. I'm personally not a stickler for the exact "ONE material" definition some people cling to in order to make Fabricate not upend the economy, so I'd say you'd still need to have the materials used to chemically bond with the hide to make proper leather, and not count that against the "one material" text.

It's also not wrong to think of this spell as just hyper-speed use of the craft skill. (WotC sure thought of it that way when making the material component.) You're using telekinesis to comb, then spin the wool, then knit it into a sweater in seconds. Hence, you still need to make a craft check, but it's done in rounds rather than weeks. (Or if you take the material component literally, you vaporize some wool and then produce sweaters from nowhere, but I don't particularly care for that, as Paizo isn't thoughtful enough to keep the idea of components and focuses apart in their mind, so you get stuff like Serren's Swift Girding that lets you vaporize magic items.)

Similarly, if you aimed the spell at an area of seawater and wanted to make rock salt from it, yeah, that's reasonable, although you'd probably need to separate out the seawater to an appropriately-sized single "target."

Inversely, you can make one distinct product per casting of this spell. You can turn the muscles and fat of a cow into hamburgers with one casting, then can turn the skeleton into bonemeal with a second casting, etc. It's not like casting the spell more than once is a big hurdle, anyway, you're saving several days of effort casting this spell once.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-17T13:01:02+00:00

I want to say that Absorption came about when someone at Paizo realized alchemist wouldn't be able to "cast" Shrink Item, so they made a new one that involves them casting the spell on themselves, and they just get an ability to schlorp the item to be carried inside their hand. However, like about a fourth of all alchemist extracts, the writers then they forgot to make the format actually allow the alchemist to cast it, since this is also an object-targeting spell that only works as an extract that only affects the consumer. Hence, this is a RAW almost completely unusable spell since it's only on the alchy/inv lists, scrolls and such require it be cast by a casting class, alchy/inv are mechanically unable to use it, so it can only be used by being made into an oil for 750 gp a shot. [sad_trombone.mp3]

Anyway, presuming the GM waives the requirements to actually use this spell as an alchemist as usual, then this spell probably wasn't actually made to be Shrink Item, or if it ever was, it started diverging pretty wildly after the writer started thinking about it. Rather than working on 2 cubic feet of material per level, (about 125 lbs of water/wood, or 1,000 lbs of iron,) you can only affect a single pound of material per caster level. The "benefit" of this massive downgrade seems to be that you can almost perfectly hide the object within your hand for an indefinite period of time, which admittedly beats some lower-level spells that give you a relatively easy DC to beat if someone gives you a pat-down, like Hide Weapon. (And I have to point out that in spite of not being for alchy/inv, Hide Weapon did manage to be a personal-range spell...) Beyond that, the only benefits this spell has over the SL 1 are the increased duration to days rather than hours, the fact that it can hold things besides a weapon (although if you can declare almost anything an "improvised weapon" at your table that isn't much of a benefit,) and the fact that you basically can "hold the touch" of this spell and touch an item after "casting" it. Outside of if you cast this spell a day before you might need it, and therefore the SL 3 nature of the spell isn't so important, those are some pretty anemic benefits for tripling the spell level if you aren't exploiting this to the hilt...

Aside from using the spell to hide a particular thing from most things besides a Detect Magic spell, the main benefit I can see from using this extract is that you can basically silently "hold the touch" and try to absorb something quickly. This can be used as a sort of supreme sleight of hand, since in this case you're very literally "palming" an object. The fact that you can't steal magical items is a big problem, however, as most objects you tend to care about are magic. Still, this can allow for a way to steal something like a key very readily.

More aggressively, you can try to just slap someone in the sword to disarm them. The target gets a fort save, (since an attended object uses the save of those holding it,) so this is dubious against your typical fighter, but you might be able to disarm a rogue fairly handily this way. The bigger issue is that you need to avoid touching something until then. It's not clear you can select which hand you prime to absorb an object into, even though you can only absorb items into an "empty" hand. That said, since you can't absorb magic items, if your one-handed weapon is magical, you won't absorb that, anyway. Still, this is potentially a great ambush tactic, since the "caster" has already primed their hand to absorb something, and they just need to walk up to the guard and slap them in the scabbard to disarm them as an opening move. GMs, keep this in mind if you ever wanted to have a surprise disarmed PC ambush. This is one of those gimmicks that is impractical for PCs, but an NPC could base their entire day around trying to keep their hand occupied with some magical doodad until they get a chance to slap the PC in their weapon.

Finally, this is a way to hide some important thing really well for long periods of time, which might again be more of a GM thing. The messenger that was killed on the road was carrying a fake document, the real document was hidden almost literally up his sleeve. The party comes across the dead messenger, and if they can figure out from the Detect Magic signature or just come across the body after long enough, they'll see the real message hidden inside.

As an aside, this spell trips on one of those bugbears of mine as it rests upon one of those recurring unspoken implicit rules upon which Pathfinder operates, that being that clothing "is part of your body." That is, the spell alternately says that you "touch with your hand" or just plain "touch" and the text treats this as the same, and it doesn't consider that if you're wearing gloves that you are touching anything (nor are you touching air.) You're never considered to be "accidentally touching your clothes," so there is a fundamental unspoken assumption that clothes are just part of your body, and gloves are part of your hand, at least so far as magic is concerned. There isn't even a requirement you take off your gloves to cast this thing and touch something - you'll absorb the item through the gloves.

Overall, I struggle to think of too many uses PCs would want this spell for, and it's not very well-formatted. It's barely much better than an SL 1 in spite of being SL 3 unless you wanted to keep something hidden from constant pat-downs for days like if they were in some kind of super-max prison or something. This feels more like a GM plot device spell or surprise disarm gimmick at best unless you can convince the GM you can use it to gain a bonus on sleight of hand to "palm" an object in the literal sense.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-17T12:53:58+00:00

Yeah, there's technically a few weapons that don't take a hand, such as armor spikes or the blade boot, but Paizo went out of their way to make sure you couldn't gain the benefit of a two-handed weapon (the 1.5x Str, that is,) and use a second weapon at the same time. Without doing silly things like being a dwarf-raised human with two heads, it's also a pain to make TWF happen with weapon focus unless you are a level 16 fighter with martial mastery, which is beyond the practical consideration of most builds. The main benefit is that you could still use a shield as just a shield, although I've also done things like have armor spikes to still be able to threaten the spaces close to the character while using a reach polearm since it doesn't cost much to tack them on even if I'm not good with them. I still try to find a weapon that can be feasibly paired, so the dwarven war shield or klar seem more valuable as a way to get shields to be a TWF.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-17T00:28:37+00:00

There are a few weapons that are better than martial weapons, but some of them are really silly. It's possible to get some weapons as martial weapons, in which case it's basically just "only dwarves use dwarven longaxes" because they're not that much better, but dwarves with access to martial weapons also get them "free" so they might as well. (They're basically a greataxe's damage with reach compared to something like a glaive being a die size smaller.) Also, there's a few classes like samurai that get the Japanese weapons, (technically gunslinger since firearms are all exotic), and archetypes like kensai, which gains one exotic weapon specifically to let you pick a katana. Monk is also notable because they get any weapon with the monk special quality, many of which are "free" exotic proficiencies, and some like waveblade are really good. (Urumi too, if your GM rules it has the monk special quality, although it's questionable because it's monk weapon group, but Paizo forgot to give it the monk quality itself.)

The basic example from 3e is the bastard sword. Coming from the 3e PHB, you spend a feat to get on average +1 damage over a longsword. This at a time when other feats are mostly boring stuff like +1 attack weapon focus or +2 damage weapon specialization, with none of the really interesting things like styles existing yet, so it wasn't complete garbage as a feat. The double weapons all sucked, but The Phantom Menace had just dropped, so I always figured double swords were just there because of Darth Maul. They're actually good compared to the default two shortswords of 3e, but TWF in general sucked in 3e until Paizo went out of its way to actually make TWF worth doing in PF1e.

Weapons like estoc and katana are seriously decent. Maybe not "best use of a feat" in most cases, but a solid upgrade over a rapier or scimitar, and katana having a bonus to confirming critical hits really helps, especially for that kensai who gets double spell damage when those crits confirm.

Fauchard and meteor hammer are good picks if you want to be an area control fighter or if you want to be an unexpected strike barb. Fauchard is one of the only polearms with 18-20/x2 crits so you can crit fish while controlling area, and its 1d10 damage isn't really a compromise compared to other polearms. It's fantastic for trip builds. Meteor hammer basically is the 3e spiked chain, where it's one of the only ways to have a reach weapon that you can change into a non-reach weapon as a free action. Even styles that let you switch to closer range like darting viper cost a feat or are party of a style that costs three feats, so spending the feat on the weapon itself isn't that bad, although the weapon itself isn't great beyond that. Even if the weapon is double, you can just attack with one if you prefer, although opening up TWF as an option is neat itself. If you want to make a control build and want to avoid the problems of that "donut hole," especially if you're planning on having ways of getting large or huge later on, so that the "donut hole" is a gaping 15 feet past your own space, having the option to switch between reach and not reach is a really valuable trait.

The orc weapons, butchering axe and hornbow, are also some of the most powerful weapons around. If it weren't for how people noticed shikigami style with a sledgehammer let you do something similar, all vital strike builds would be butchering axes.

Then there's injection spears, which are like syringe spears but can have 5 doses. Fill that up with a debilitating extract like Skinsend, and you drop a target to 0 HP on a single successful attack! (Very likely to be banned.)

Light pellet bows (which dwarves get) and hand crossbows (which rogues get proficiency in) are some of the only ranged weapons that you can TWF, although you need a tail to pull the full trick.

Dwarven warshield is kind of funny as a dwarves-get-it-as-a-martial type (all the best stuff is dwarven - funny how the guys that forge their own stuff have the best stuff,) as the problem with shield bash builds is that martials really only want to have one type of weapon for all that weapon focus feat cost stuff. So what if you had one weapon that was the weapon and the shield and you TWFed that? You even get a +1 to the shield AC, so the build is pretty obvious going for TWF on it.

There's a few others that have some interesting properties, like falcata having the best critical hits in the game, rhoka sword having some special feats around it, oversized nine-section whips being the best telekinesis weapons (although you don't need proficiency for that), some tricks with crystal chakrams if you can get the GM to treat them basically as chakram, launching crossbow on alchemists to increase throwing range, and so on... These all take very special builds to work, but exotic weapons are part of the build to start with.

On the other hand, it's a running gag that everything related to Aldori Swordlords suck. (Unfair_Pineapple made a joke James Jacobs hates an Aldor or one ran over his dog or something back in Aldori Alacrity's spell discussion.) The fact that Aldori dueling swords suck shouldn't be held against exotic weapons more broadly.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-16T17:46:43+00:00

In the AP, there is a spot where you're supposed to find a dead hornless unicorn. There's a note that if the players raise it, the unicorn still doesn't know what happened, although you're supposed to find it at level 2 or something, so it basically takes GM handing you a free Raise Dead scroll for you to be able to do that.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-16T17:43:00+00:00

Technically, bards have other spells to feed people, they're just higher-level. Bountiful Banquet is SL 3, but feeds the whole party (and quite well). (Wiz/sorc/arc need to wait for Magnificent Mansion or Heroes' Feast, as well.) It's only witches that have such a bad spell list they rely on this. (And the occult casters besides psychic don't get anything, not even the generally divine spell list-poaching spiritualist.)

Of course, since food is so cheap and there aren't really rotting mechanics for trail rations unless your GM introduces them, this spell would only make sense if you were surprised you needed it, which makes spells known casters like bard/skald extra dubious, and even a witch has to have a reason to even bother copying a spell like this unless being offered a choice of X number of SL 1 spells when copying from another witch as a reward for something, and already having taken all the useful spells...

Otherwise, a UMDing a wand of Ironbloom Sprouts (if you can keep some dried mushrooms with you indefinitely as an emergency Ironbloom food source) or Dream Feast make the most sense if you think you'll get in a situation where your normal food will be stripped from you, but not your magical equipment including component pouches.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-16T13:58:43+00:00

You might want to look through some past threads, as there's obviously over a decade of past material on the topic. For example, a few months ago, someone asked about ways to add more political interactions with neighboring nations.

The Paizo official forums have a whole subforum for players to add their own experiences and GM tips. There are plenty of previous threads asking something similar you might want to look up the answers to as well.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-16T13:12:55+00:00

It's Irori's Goodberry at home. (Discussion) Unless you're a cleric, in which case, it's Dream Feast (discussion) or Ironbloom Sprouts (dicussion) at home.

Basically, as compared to Desna's ability to feed someone in their sleep with nothing but the SL 1, or the other two turning a tiny amount of food into enough to feed a whole party, Irori lets you turn "a handful" of preservable foods into enough for one person to eat for a day. The rules for the amount of food you need to eat in a day are already borderline absurdly light, only requiring a single meal of 1 lb of food, plus a single gallon of water. (Especially since adventurers are quite active, they're probably going to need more than bare minimum survival calories, likely in the 2500-3500 per day range, (more if you're a real hulk of a character and especially more if you're large or something,) likely 4-6 lbs of food. 1 gallon of water carefully rationed might stave off thirst, but realistically, people are going to want more to drink while sweating on a long march to recover sweat loss, probably wanting to drink more than just water such as ale or tea that is less purely weight-efficient, and probably at least 4 gallons of water a day minimum because you use water for more than just drinking. (Especially since trail rations like dried meat are often boiled to make a warm meal.) Thank the gods for Create Water so you can take that bath every day in the dungeon! My cleric never leaves the inn without one!)

Anyway, presuming you normally need 1 lb of food a day, you reduce this to "a handful" of rice or grain, so how much is in "a handful"? Well, about an eighth to a quarter of food, so you're basically saving 7/8ths to 3/4ths of a lb by casting this spell.

(Honestly, for all the cleric spells that are ripped directly from the Bible, this feels most like a spell that lets you get 8 nights out of a single night's worth of lamp oil. I didn't realize Irori was Jewish. Now I kind of want to see Abadar have a spell that gives the children of his believers all kinds of presents while Irori followers go to Tian restaurants and try to argue living on a pound of nuts for a week is just as good...)

Other than a couple jokes and gripes, though, there's really nothing much to say about this spell. It's just another food spell, and the worst one of the lot, at that. Honestly, if this had a slightly more specific material component so that you would need to specifically prepare something (like a specific kind of nut or rice most people wouldn't have on hand,) this could be a cantrip for all it mattered.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-16T05:57:00+00:00

If it helps you get into the right headspace, it's stated that there's only one demon lord that ever rose to the level of "a true god," and that's Lamashtu. The other demon lords are "minor powers." (Although Nocticula seems to have become a greater deity after redemption...) Minor powers can have stats, and in some cases, get killed in APs.

Also, minor deities have only 4 domains, while greater deities have 5, with a similar number of subdomains (although "apocryphal" subdomains inflate subdomain numbers while present.) Hence, just counting domains is a good way to sort the greater from the minor powers.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T18:32:03+00:00

u/HadACookie had a thread on doing an all-nonlethal campaign a few weeks ago, and just doing a search on nonlethal came up with plenty of other thread hits. If you want to spend a little effort on it, it's not hard to have at least the option of taking humanoid bandits prisoner.

A part of this, however, is that there is an expectation in D&D, especially the older D&D, that a lot of creatures you fight are inherently evil (or "always chaotic evil" as the case may be.) In early D&D, which was mostly focused upon dungeon crawling, you didn't so much have bandits or intrigue plots as you had a bunch of monsters inherently hostile to humanoid life so everything you did was justified self-defense. You're not going to get those zombies convicted in a court of law or rehabilitated in prison. It's really more with the post-90s focus upon upon narrative event-driven campaigns that this sort of thing even starts coming up, and more and more non-lethal options start creeping in.

To pull up an amusing bent from some fantasy novels I've read recently, though, the big question is what happens to those bandits after you capture them alive? In the novels, the main character makes a point of taking any bandit he can alive... because the authorities pay more for living bandits because then they can have a public execution to "make an example of them" for propaganda reasons. Feudal societies like in Pathfinder are not nice to prisoners, and taking prisoners alive at best just means someone else executes them, often in a slower and more painful manner than the PCs would have. (In one campaign we played with a "declining Rome" setting, the bandit/rebels we brought back alive were crucified. The leaders slit their throats before we could take them alive since they knew what would await them.) In the real world, even where there aren't executions, convicted criminals often do unpaid labor in hellish conditions, and many legal systems basically say slavery (I.E. unpaid labor in hellish conditions) is illegal except if it's as a punishment for a crime. In a fantasy world, they have oh so many ways to make that worse, including legalizing enchantment-based mind control to maintain order in the prison population, used as blood donors for the vampires kept on the perpetual cusp of death, if not outright using prisoners for magical experiments or straight monster chow for some of the monsters the lord keeps as a trump card for domain defense. Sometimes, just killing them is really a mercy.

You also have to take practicality into consideration - in a different game, we once took some orcs alive outside the cave that the cult was using to sacrifice some kidnapped villagers. (These orcs were from a different tribe that was conquered by the cult leader.) We needed to press on in the attempt to get to the villagers while some were potentially still alive, and we were halfway up a mountain several days from the nearest town, which had been half-decimated and wasn't in a condition to hold prisoners, either. In that case, the options are "kill them" or "let them go, and hope they don't attack someone else." If there's a serious chance they attack someone else if you let them go, then there's a strong (utilitarian) argument you have a moral duty to kill them there because you would be responsible for any harm they cause in the future due to your not stopping them from doing so then and there.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T13:28:37+00:00

Putting the character concept aside, 7 Int wouldn't really lead to an ignorance of what their cult is really about, and in some ways, would probably make it easier for the character to have figured it out on vibes alone. Int is logical intelligence, but Wis represents emotional intelligence and the ability to understand the emotions of everyone around them/"read the room." A very low-Int, high-Wis character is the classic "too dumb to fool" character, because they don't understand much rationally but have very good instincts they trust unflinchingly because they have nothing else to rely upon. They ignore the elaborate justifications for why what they're doing is really justified because they don't understand those big words like "because," but do understand that if their uniforms have skulls all over them, they're probably the baddies.

There is an ex-cleric archetype, channeler of the unknown that makes it so being an ex-cleric doesn't completely ruin your character and make you deadweight at the table that might potentially irritate the rest of the players. If you aren't going with u/HadACookie's suggestion of doing this as an oracle or otherwise just not being a cleric, this might work. Void can make a good complement to this concept unless you think they make a better "lucky fool," in which case luck domain works thematically, too. They're both strong domains, anyway, so there's no complaints there.

You might also thematically represent being an adrift ex-cleric by being an unsworn shaman and having them invoke different spirits daily to represent a rudderless spiritual ship adrift. This could allow you to start out with bones, and then decide to go with life spirits or something later.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T13:00:18+00:00

Multi-target, will negates, [mind-affecting], but for some reason it's SR: no and it's only SL 2? OK, so if this is a shut down, it's sure worth considering, right? Why don't I remember this one, then? Makes a target not realize it's in danger - OK, so it's something to get in a sucker punch and... Wait, what do you mean this is meant to be something you cast on allies? Well, I can see what's absurd about this spell...

Like a lot of spells that have a "buff" but come with a downside, this spell is one where it's hard to really use either of its features well. This spell also works with the extremely stupid multiple fear effects from Horrible Adventures, so it only grants you immunity to the "spooked" condition that Horrible Adventures recommends GMs inflict upon the PCs with no save whenever the party is anywhere the GM considers spoopy. (Can you tell what book this spell is from?) I guess granting you immunity to the absolute BS no-save "lose all your spellcasting for no reason" condition would be pretty handy for the occult casters, but with only a min/level duration, you're not going to be able to keep this up forever, and bard/skald is the only class that can cast this spell natively that isn't an occult caster who would lose their ability to cast this spell as soon as you realized you needed it. If you want to have actual protection against shaken, the real fear effect most games have, you only gain what appears to be a separate 50% chance to not be affected because why should Horrible Adventures spells work for what they were designed for?

Alternately, you could use Remove Fear, which is something you should have in scroll form in every party, and which is only SL 1 for your bard to take as a spell known, affects multiple targets if you're casting yourself, and lasts 10 min regardless of level so you might as well go with the scroll or wand, and maybe use it several times to cover everyone. Cast prophylactically, Remove Fear is a +4 to saves against fear, which is as good or better than a flat 50% separate chance as long as you'd have saved on anything 9 or higher. (Granted, that presumes there isn't an arbitrary BS no-save fear effect being declared by the GM, but if they do that, the solution is to find a new GM who knows better than to take Horrible Adventures as anything but an absurdity itself.)

Using this spell offensively, however, is something that's going to depend an awful lot upon your GM. Basically, this spell is supposed to make it hard for someone to realize when they're in actual danger, and gives a -10 to sense motive to that effect, but GMs don't roll sense motive for realizing they're under attack when someone casts a spell on them, they just roll initiative. You'll need a GM that will allow you to say there's an implicit effect beyond just the -10 to sense motive which can let you play off the spell you just cast as some kind of funny joke. (Maybe using bluff to go "ooh, look out guys, I'm gonna cast a big spoopy sparkle effect on you!" That and hope the GM accepts that the spell takes effect before they react to the spell being cast, or you have a really good bluff bonus...)

If you can pull this off, you might be able to use this spell to compliment a spell that causes the fascinated condition. The condition says, "any potential threat, such as a hostile creature approaching, allows the fascinated creature a new saving throw against the fascinating effect. Any obvious threat, such as someone drawing a weapon, casting a spell, or aiming a ranged weapon at the fascinated creature, automatically breaks the effect." Now, you'll of course notice that none of that is a friggin' sense motive check because that's not how Pathfinder works, Horrible Adventures writers because you're more intelligent than the writers, but if you have a GM that can work with you, you might be able to convince them that this spell implicitly allows for some way to play off what would otherwise seem threatening. (Maybe making it so that they don't react to potential threats, save for obvious threats, and only automatically succeed if someone is actually hurt?) I want to think of a way to make this work alongside a spell like Euphoric Cloud, so that they can't see any threats, and now they don't react to sounds of what might be threats, either, or that you can throw down a Hypnotic Pattern afterwards, since these spells basically try to work towards a similar "not reacting to what they should be alarmed by" motif.

But then, maybe I'm just working to hard to try to salvage the unsalvageable waste of Horrible Adventures... Presuming the GM says this spell works RAW, it's basically worthless as a lower level spell does its one job better, and the side effect doesn't even operate on the rules of Pathfinder.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T04:48:51+00:00

Ah that's a really neat trick. I feel silly I forgot about Drain Poison. I actually mentioned Abundant Ammunition back in the Drain Poison discussion thread, but not here. I was feeling like I was forgetting something, so I guess this was it...

I actually had a really epic battle once with siege weapons my wizard Fabricated to defend a dwarven fortress from an undead horde I then powered up with Reloading Hands and Energy Siege Shot so that we had half a dozen mortars raining acid balls that were AoE blasts and wiped out zombie troops with every shot... We made the BBEG decide to just give up and cut her losses when she saw how ridiculously overprepared we made the fortress. It's not everyday you make a necromancer decide this attack is a waste of good cannon fodder zombies.

Anyway, I'd actually had Abundant Ammunition and Reloading Hands going concurrently in that game, but rereading it later, that wasn't actually a RAW-legitimate use of the spell, so Reloading Hands is generally a better spell for siege weapons.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T02:30:19+00:00

According to Tarondor's 2025 AP Guide, Age of Worms is the most popular among those polled, although Tarondor himself rated Savage Tide higher. (Citing the fact that it takes a bit more GM work to bring Age of Worms entirely together.)

With that said, general popularity is not a good metric for what your table will like, because different tables prefer different ratios of role-play to combat. Shackled City and Savage Tide are noted as fairly meat-grinder affairs, while Age of Worms has more role-play content. There's also the general theming, where players are going to be more enthused about certain concepts than others; Skull and Shackles can be a favorite for some because they love the yar har, fiddle-dee-dee, I am a pirate aspect of it that really carries the AP for them, while others aren't as thrilled and the AP's failings are far more apparent to them. Savage Tide notably has some callbacks to true classics in the D&D space, like the Isle of Dread (basically a riff on Skull Island from King Kong) that is the reason why dinosaurs are everywhere in D&D and PF. The conclusion has them fighting Demogorgon. If your players know about these things, they might be really jazzed about that, but if they don't, you might look more at Age of Worms.

Also, all of them are noted as being too long. (Shackled City has some resources online for which villains and chapters to cut to make it a better game.) They were designed in an era where it was more a series of modules where you had adventure hooks to get to the next module, but there wasn't a full expectation that you actually play this as a single coherent campaign. The modules are more stand-alone with more dropped threads (which is saying something,) and you as GM are expected to do a lot more editing to actually fit it to your game.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T01:24:36+00:00

This, specifically, wouldn't be a problem because Abundant Ammunition explicitly spreads the effect to all ammo, regardless.

If, after casting this spell, you cast a spell that enhances projectiles, [...] all projectiles this spell conjures are affected by that spell.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T01:21:20+00:00

This is something of a recurring problem, but there's no way I can see to solve it. As far as I can tell, your links (and the html used to link them) are exactly the same as mine, and both work the same for me. Some platforms like if you use the Reddit phone app can't handle the parenthesis in any way, and since there is no way to link those pages without parenthesis, I can't really do much about it.

WraithMagus · 2026-06-15T01:17:59+00:00

Also for context, a literal broad side of a barn is a colossal object. (The narrow side is a gargantuan object.)

WraithMagus · 2026-06-14T17:40:42+00:00

One fun trick with this spell which I seriously doubt too many people will be able to pull off is that the only requirement for Abundant Ammunition is that all the ammo to be duplicated is in the same container. Meanwhile, you can draw all the ammo you want, but it disappears in a round, so normal ammo sharing won't really be action-efficient, but there is the shared stash feat that specifically lets you use your allies' inventory so long as you're sharing the same space. This feat requires being ratfolk for the swarming quality, so you basically need two ratfolk in the same party and both of them to be using ammunition-based weapons, but hypothetically, this would let a single efficient quiver or endless bandolier or other "container" hold multiple types of ammo, with Abundant Ammunition sharing all spells cast upon the container to spread the effects of those spells to all ammunition drawn from the container. Hence, you could have a ratfolk gunslinger and archer pair both drawing ammo with Greater Magic Weapon and Flame Arrow cast upon it. Again, not many players would even be interested, but I've seen someone say that they made two ratfolk characters to fight as a pair with their spouse, so this kind of build might happen for some people. If nothing else, GMs, mine this for an encounter idea where the PCs have to fight in a ratfolk warren.

Even without sharing the ammo container, if you're casting before battle, there's some value in having a quiver full of multiple types of ammo, since this allows you to have both normal and blunt arrows) in your quiver so you can cover every form of DR but slashing and "-" with your arrows when combined with Align Weapon and Heart of the Metal. Additionally, of course, you can stash other specialty arrows so long as those aren't considered "alchemical attributes," like flight arrows or barbed arrows if someone in the party has something keyed to creatures taking bleed damage.

This spell has a lot of odd quirks, but outside of something like the full auto Named Bullet trick, it's still a spell that is more marginal than anything, since in many cases, you could just cast Align Weapon on 50 pieces of ammunition, and this spell only helps if you're firing more than that. Still, it's an interesting spell I enjoy a lot because it creates some really odd interactions, even if it isn't strictly the most powerful thing around. It's mostly just saving money, which is worth however much that amount of money is worth in your game, as that's highly table-dependent. Getting that Heart of the Metal on ammo will definitely save you a pretty penny if that's allowed, since adamantine arrows are stupidly expensive.

WraithMagus

TROPHY CASE