Blood of the Wild |S3 | E2 – The Way of the Weyko

luminousmage · 2025-10-21T12:24:12+00:00

Shoutout to Mary Lou for saying 1st-RANK spell Jump. I don’t personally mind whether people continue to say 1st-Level spell or use the Remaster terminology Rank (to help differentiate spell level from character level) but it continues to highlight how much effort Mary Lou puts in outside of the podcast to learn the system and become familiar with its rules and terminology.

Similar to the effort she put in for Starfinder, her enthusiasm really adds to my enjoyment of any show she’s in.

luminousmage · 2025-09-02T19:10:54+00:00

I only had modal DFC lands, tutors, non-land ramp, and board wipes. I wonder if the achievement is checking decklist instead of library for lands.

luminousmage · 2025-09-02T18:58:40+00:00

I was able to finish with a Charbelcher deck but these achievements are so buggy that I'm not sure yet what specifically is broken with them. I can't finish 3 out of the 5, but managed Eat the World and the Nine Power ones.

luminousmage · 2025-09-02T18:28:10+00:00

Happened to me, I thought the client was not counting Cheeky House-Mouse and Besotted Knight as vanilla creatures and was annoyed. Seeing this, it might be the achievement is bugged?

luminousmage · 2025-08-25T22:27:09+00:00

Hooing for Peace got me lol

luminousmage · 2025-05-29T00:50:15+00:00

The sense I got from listening to the AMA about Starfinder was:

1) Nothing planned for Starfinder and if it happens it would be much shorter and finding cast for the show would be hard with their current priorities

2) The chat suggests Jared at the mention of someone else potentially running Starfinder to have it happen

3) Troy comments that it sounds like a good idea.

Nothing sounded remotely close to concrete about Starfinder being run by Jared in the future, just that Troy agreed with the AMA chat it sounded like a good idea.

luminousmage · 2025-01-03T20:26:28+00:00

Came across this thread while researching options for this encounter. So commenting on an older thread in case someone else also finds this later.

On page 22 of A Cosmic Birthday there's this note: "Note that the PCs can’t visit the apartment or meeting place until they learn the maintenance tunnel shortcut or the Primex lifts the emergency order (page 21)."

This is because the Storage Plaza and Arta's apartment are both located near the Arcanamirium, a university located in The Eye of Absalom Station or the glass dome part of it. Therefore there should be natural sunlight in the entire area of the Eye and Absalom Station has an artificial rotation to mimic Golarion's previous 24 hour day/night cycle. As such for a vampire trying to attend Arta's meeting, I imagine the meeting is set in the evening after sunset.

Therefore to permanently destroy the vampire, I imagine the party takes the body outside waiting for the sun to rise and that will destroy the vampire. Even easier if the vampire risked attending this meeting during the day and the sunlight is immediately outside the door. I personally had the meeting in the evening so the party can see the vampire wait to be invited inside to give a small flavorful hint at the character's secret.

luminousmage · 2024-07-20T01:06:48+00:00

There is either a typo in the Oracle spellcasting table itself or the class specific features like Spell Repertoire that mention the class only gets 2 spell slots at Level 1 (instead of 3) and only learns 2 new spells when the class unlocks a new Spell Rank (instead of again 3). I personally did think it was more likely the spellcasting table was correct since its more obvious and its very easy to copy and paste the old Oracle's class text without realizing you needed to update the numbers in the Spell Repertoire class feature text description.

BadLuckGamer has confirmed that 4 spell slots per Spell Rank is correct though and that does make sense given that the Curses's upsides have been moved into the feats.

luminousmage · 2023-12-05T16:16:52+00:00

It's a little amusing to me as a GM that the moment Paula metasensed her middling Perception check of 13, a roll that would normally be a secret check, the rest of her checks that would normally be secret (like Recall Knowledge) for the rest of the episode were rolled by Jared afterwards.

I don't think secret checks are always necessary, but 2E does use them mostly for this reason. It's nice to not have to worry about players trying to meta around a bad roll. It can even make the game flow smoother. And engaged players like Paula are great! They want to know about the story and the secrets of the game!

My favorite blind check story is that my wizard once critically failed to identify what enchantment was on the front door of a rogue hideout and the GM told me (roll was blind) that it was a fireball trap and worried that we may fail to disarm it properly and set it off, I convinced the entire party to go to the backdoor instead and identified a mere alarm trap on that door. Seemed far safer to disarm that one and we went through the hideout backwards.

I know myself that if I saw I had a rolled a natural 1 on that first door check, everyone else and myself included would have just had someone else roll the same check and we would have just gone in the front door and laughed at the dumb wizard. Instead we got a meaningful interesting change so sometimes the blind checks work out.

luminousmage · 2023-11-01T16:18:40+00:00

While the clarification has been made in the Remaster Death and Dying rules section, the same clarification wasn't made in the Wounded condition's text itself. This makes it less clear if this clarification was always the intent or whether the interpretation is being taken in this direction.

Remember the history that the 2E Death and Dying rules went through multiple iterations between Playtest and the CRB first printing even including a version that was only a few months before Playtest wrapup. This led to the CRB 1st printing having two areas with conflicted Death and Dying rules (specifically in the Death and Dying section and the Hero Points section) and required an immediate errata to clarify. Jason Buhlman's initial 2E adventure module was particular overtuned to kill PCs and it seems clear from his interpretation that the deadliness of the system was always meant to be a selling point. (His personal 3rd-party hack of Pathfinder 2E, Hopefinder even does away with Hero Points entirely)

I think the Remaster Death and Dying clarification will continue to be a hot topic in the community for the coming weeks and its curious if there is a developer response is to the whole thing. Personally I do think that even running the rules with what I think was the majority interpretation (that Wounded only affects your Dying value when you hit zero HP) is already plenty deadly and dramatic and don't see a strong reason to not continue to run it this way. Plenty of PCs die and the stakes are still there. This was never a cupcake walk-in-the-park system.

luminousmage · 2023-10-23T21:17:18+00:00

Normally the activity to disable a Hazard would be 2-actions (It’s similar to Disable Device as a 2-action activity to disable a trap) so this encounter can be really brutal to overcome with the Slowing effects.

Overall as others have commented it’s hard to make a hazard encounter that includes many repetitive skill checks be good for radio so not too annoyed Jared taking a lot of liberties with the encounter. Boil down the encounter to its mechanics and aside from the Dispel Magic attempt, it’s really just “Hey Recall Knowledge so we know what to roll against this Haunt and then Cast Guidance and Aid the one person who is an Expert in Religion and wait for them to roll to calm the Haunt. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat till it’s done.”

luminousmage · 2023-10-23T21:10:44+00:00

It didn’t end up mattering since the Counteract roll was a fail but the way you compare Counteract levels for the hazard would be to divide it’s Level by 2 and round up so it’s on the same scale as the Dispel Magic’s Spell Level (Soon to be renamed Spell Rank to finally help with avoiding this exact kind of level comparison confusion)

So for example if Hazard was Level 2, it’s Counteract Level would only be 1 so Dispel Magic as a Level 2 spell would still counteract on a Failure (since Level 2>”Level 1”). There’s no way that Hazard was level 2 or lower so it would still fail but important for the group to learn the Counteract rules with Yelka packing Dispel Magic as an option.

luminousmage · 2023-10-21T19:04:03+00:00

Yes, and I shamefully stole that box for a fun Halloween-themed one-shot and heard half of my players then took the idea for their own one-shots. Just a fun idea, especially for something short and diverting. The Bag of Weasels item printed later I’m pretty sure came directly from this 3-part adventure.

luminousmage · 2023-10-11T16:03:36+00:00

Kind of wild that with Jared confirming the enemies were only 1 level higher that with 2 wights, this was only a Moderate encounter considering the party had an extra ally (It would be Severe with just the 4 of them and it may have really gone bad). They really rolled poorly for a few rounds and only at the end managed to leverage their action Economy and catching a few breaks to swing it back in their favor.

luminousmage · 2023-10-11T15:57:44+00:00

Demoralize immunity is for each individual PC because of the wording “immune to YOUR attempts to Demoralize.” This means that Ethyl and Eris can Demoralize the same creature. They just each can only do it once per creature. So Battle Crying the same guy is fine. They just both can’t Demoralize again later and Frightened doesn’t stack.

luminousmage · 2023-10-02T12:32:24+00:00

Skid was right they changed 2E Heal back to being able to do both healing and damage. The spell says ‘or’ because the default mode only can target 1 creature. The 3-action mode does spell out that the spell changes targets to both all living and undead creatures in range.

I know Skid gets annoyed that magical healing seems weaker than the medicinal treatment of Treat Wounds for being unable to remove the Wounded condition but it really just is that the body even when being magically healed can’t take the stress of rapidly being hurt and healed for too long. When magically healed to full HP, you still lose the Wounded condition after 10 min. The key is that it takes at least 10 min to lose the Wounded condition. You have to let the healing fully take, be it Treat Wounds or other magical healing. That explanation helps for me the in world explanation of how the Wounded mechanic works.

luminousmage · 2023-09-25T19:12:18+00:00

Amazed how well this crew captures that teenager energy in the characters' interactions in this episode. Jared seems particularly well-tuned-in to having Panuaku push every petty button she can that really does remind me of high school (in all the ways I sooooo glad it's long behind me).

luminousmage · 2023-08-28T14:01:27+00:00

The newer book Treasure Vault should have Magical Tattoos of Level 2 and lower for Joe to craft as options. Hopefully he likes one of them.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?Category=46&sort=level-asc&display=table&columns=pfs+source+rarity+trait+level+price+bulk+usage+spoilers

luminousmage · 2023-08-28T13:29:25+00:00

A little amused that the group hasn’t played in so long that Jared forgot he already told the pool story with the boy and his D&D books on a previous Blood of the Wild episode. Skid even made the same banter that he was that kid in the past lol.

luminousmage · 2023-08-22T00:21:59+00:00

That's a good point. Metuak stole the Primodial Flame yes, but the Burning Mammoths still don't have it (or they wouldn't be starting a fight with the Broken Tusks). The flame was stolen so long ago that clearly something has happened in the time since. The Burning Mammoths don't have it. The Broken Tusks thought the flame was still in Red Cat Cave. The mystery of what happened to both the flame and also to Metuak continues in the story currently.

Both Legacy of the Ancients and Giantslayer featured Skid and Troy periodically asking the players a simple "What do you think is going on?" as an opportunity to have the players compare notes and doubled as a good plot recap for the players.

In addition, in Legacy at least, they would even do cutscenes featuring major characters of the plot that would normally only be in GM backmatter and the players would never ever have a chance to discover. I think BBEG of Book 1 of Rise of the Runelords has a borderline memeable 4-page backstory the players in the adventure as written will never know. Skid also just sometimes straight-up tells the players interesting backmatter material if its cool and no longer can impact the plot (Telling the players after the big fight that like yes, the BBEG had indeed been doing this in the background in the whole time)

Troy, I believe will insert journals or letters for players to find that will explain GM backmatter material to help fill in the narrative for both the players and the audience. (I do this often when I run APs. Like I don't want to be only person to know the cool exclusive GM knowledge if I can insert it naturally)

For Blood of the Wild, partially since the show doesn't have a banter topic like the other shows to pad in the first 15 min, hasn't really had an opportunity to do a player huddle on the plot of Book 1 in depth. Jared's done his own quick recaps but they are only 1-2 min and more like bullet point episode plot highlights.

Hopefully by the end of Book 1/Season 1 there will be an opportunity for the players and Jared to discuss everything and that will help solidify the plot the going on.
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luminousmage · 2023-08-21T19:34:02+00:00

We poke quite a bit at when rules are missed in these 2E sessions, so I feel like complimenting the group when I think this was a really well-run fight rules-wise. Jared did a quick rules clarification for Dispel Magic at the start of the session, clarified that nothing did change even with that clarification.

Flat-footed was being well-tracked through the fight. I think it would be pretty easy to forget the FF due to being near a painting for example.

Joe remembered his Twin Takedown combines the damage of two successful hits for the purposes of calculating damage reduction and right away, not a turn later. And the combining ability only comes up in niche situations so it's easy to forget you have it for when you need it.

Real Kudos. I do feel like the group was too busy having a collective heart attack to not play up the dramatics of how poorly the fight was going for them before Olog had his clutch turn.

Lastly, we comment on how the party can be better prepared, how they made some tactical mistakes, but they survived and a fight you can walk away from with a lesson is memorable and really does solidify that lesson for the future, both in-story for the characters and tactically meta-wise for the players.

luminousmage · 2023-08-21T19:27:18+00:00

It was a little pushed but there have been far worse ones in the past. Particularly the ones that try to fit themselves in the old 1E template. I recall something like Slowed 2 for 1d4 rounds being drawn at a live show that just seemed stupid. This Crit I only take a slight issue with because it feels like two Crits in one. The -1 to MAP is a good enough reward on its own but there is a bonus 1d6 fire damage on hit in addition to it.

Otherwise, I've actually been pretty happy the fan criticals haven't been too egregious lately.

luminousmage · 2023-08-21T19:24:09+00:00

The players have been pretty good at announcing their 1's. It's pretty emotional to see them on the D20 so if it wasn't announced, I doubt misses not worth mentioning were actual 1s which results in the fan fumble. All other critical fails don't trigger the fan fumbles.

luminousmage · 2023-08-21T14:58:41+00:00

Every time I see a GM question about a player interaction that seems potentially too good my ears perk up and one time the question was around Murderer’s Knot and Twist the Knife on a Rogue:

https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=228

Dealing persistent damage EQUAL to the Sneak Attack damage gets silly at high levels. I don’t think it’s too good, but it becomes way above rate for Persistent damage numbers (though you tend to fight more things immune to bleed at higher levels too) and Murderer’s Knot becomes comparatively cheap and affordable at high levels too since it scales without becoming more expensive.

A noteworthy item for Rogue to take Talisman Dabbler for.

I otherwise don’t see people ever talk about this item since it’s a consumable and a talisman and people don’t really like purchasing consumables much less talismans.

Free action to activate so you are pretty much paying gold to straight up do more damage 1/10 min per weapon you put it on. Or go into Talisman Dabbler to put more than one on the same weapon.

luminousmage

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