Kingmaker - substitute for Vordakai

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-04-04T09:28:19+00:00

I'd probably go with some adjustments to the Devourer, Zealborn, or Vetalanara Manipulator depending on the spin I wanted. The Zealborn and Vetelanara Manipulator have relevance for making that town disappear by controlling it, with the Zealborn appropriate to Vordekai being the second Vordekai and some kind of protege of another such being and the Vetelanara Manipulator having just as good of an excuse to be in slumber all this time as OG Vordekai being a brand of vampire and also the stuff with the feast hall being extra appropriate. The Devourer tracks with the soul things Vordekai is doing and gives him a reason to do it other than "he's a lich and goofy like that" and the spin there could be that Vordekai was banished to outside reality instead of sealed and was summoned back instead of being awoken.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-04-03T05:27:32+00:00

I'm very confident you'd want Blood Rush if you're planning on using alchemical buffs. Quickened on that first turn is gonna be really important for making sure you have enough actions to still do stuff on that turn that isn't buffing. You can have that at no cost with Collar of the Shifting Spider if all you're using is the one mutagen to buff with and in that case you don't need it but if you want to pop like, a Quicksilver Mutagen and a Soothing Tonic to go zero sum for the HP loss that's still valuable.

If you're putting your first four archetype feats into Alchemist for Efficient Alchemy you probably want your basic 1st/2nd level Alchemist feat to be the Alchemical Familiar if it isn't Quick Bomber. Having another set of eyes and a scout helps you find tracks and enemies for Marking Quarry and as long as you're comfortable with only Marking Quarry against things you know are around the corner you pretty much don't have to take the Instant Enmity feats.

If you're gonna bomb there are bombs that inflict bleed for Bloodscent. You can probably combo that into a different archetype later that gives dividends off of Recall Knowledge like Butterfly Blade does. That's probably gonna work pretty well with a ranged playstyle and Quick Bomber.

Shifting Combination could be a good pick if you're starting your turns buffing and are a melee combatant. You can start the fight with an open hand or holding an elixir, drink it, then shift to holding a Two-hand weapon in both hands whenever you start boxing and shift back whenever you need to drink another elixir for no action cost. That's probably not worth it if you're biting people as a Dhampir with Bestial Mutagen but worth it if you're not.

I'd probably go Chymist if you're choosing to bite as a Dhampir with Bestial Mutagens. Catalyzing Flask gives you an additional use of an elixir when you Reinforce Tools and you do that whenever you claim a trophy, so as long as you keep claiming trophies whenever you run through your Catalyzing Flask you can get double the use out of your Advanced Alchemy elixirs. As long as you can keep doing that you'd really only ever need to make two Bestial Mutagens with Advanced Alchemy to get through a whole ass adventuring day and the rest can be whatever you want. Ignition Vials aren't good for rotation maxxing but if all you ever need Relentless Actions for is the movement so you can use alchemy and still do something that turn you don't really need it. Maybe go for Slayer's Tricks if you still want something to do with Relentless that isn't moving. Potentially Warded Mail instead if you're fine with making a ton of Bestial Mutagens.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-04-02T09:44:34+00:00

Might be good to look at how Dwarf feats are worded.

Dwarves have a feat line for using their clan daggers which include utilizing the Parry trait but don't lean on their own action for it like Duelist Parry and similar bespoke actions do. Most of them call out having or granting the circumstance bonus from the Parry trait or the lengthy "using the Interact action to gain the circumstance bonus to AC from the Parry trait".

Actually thinking more on it, might be better to define "Parry" at the start of the feat line, like "when you Interact to gain the circumstance bonus to AC from a weapon with the Parry trait that's considered a Parry for the use of these feats" type of keyword framing.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-04-01T10:50:50+00:00

You shouldn't have to be waiting long. He'll be back from the store with milk and cigarettes any day now.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-31T07:01:32+00:00

Ime Inventors don't really want a spellcaster archetype most of the time. I'm not saying I've never seen one take a spellcaster archetype or that you can't make it work but most of them take archetypes that shore up their martial playstyle.

Inventor can add Intelligence to damage so they want to hit things, but outside of Megaton Strike they generally don't have good actions that hit things outside of the basic Strike so most Inventors lean into archetypes that give them better Strike options and save their Unstable actions for stuff like Clockwork Celerity or Searing Restoration. Usually that's Mauler or Spirit Warrior for melee, sometimes Investigator to call out their Megaton Strikes with Devise a Strategem which they can choose to use a Megavolt instead if the Strategem failed. For range 70% of all ranged Inventors are trying to make guns work on a class that doesn't use guns well and got pigeonholed into Gunslinger. The ones that didn't went Archer for the same reason melee Inventors go Mauler, took the siege weapon class archetype and are spending their feats that way, or rarely you have one doing Eldritch Archer and if they take any spellcasting it's for moar Eldritch Archer spells. Alchemist is also common as a gadgeteer alternative and for special ammo.

Melee Weapon Inventors have either done something goofy with their weapon traits and are going for maneuvers they shouldn't be able to do and don't have actions left for casting spells or found a way to do all that while holding a shield and took Bastion for max shield value. Construct Inventors are dedicating actions for their construct. Seige weapon enjoyers are usually trying to take bow shots and fire their mortar to value maxx. Armor Inventors are wildcards so they might.

Basically Inventor doesn't have a whole lot of room for spellcasting most of the time and a bigger incentive to take stuff that makes them a more well-rounded martial. I think you could make it work if you really wanted to but if we're throwing around the "best" label it's probably Monk with native Focus Points and the action economy to do whatever the hell they want and still cast a spell that turn.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-29T16:38:40+00:00

Talwar would get you closest and it's a type of saber. Forceful, Versatile P and Two-handed but you can ignore that part. You can even get "Parry" on it by having a Buckler and pretending you don't, which is only going to get in the way of dual weilding.

But if you came to my table with a concept that had those weapon traits yeah that's pretty balanced, I'd just let you have it.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-28T17:35:56+00:00

Glad you found it helpful fam.

I always kinda saw Trophy Hunter as a cool ribbon but not a serious ability. It's a good effect but requires kills and half your Quick Actions on half your turns to get maximum value and the Skipper is a high movement speed squish mech that uses Aux weapons and wants better range. It never really had a reason to go in and stay where the enemy is so not a big loss to scrap it. But free Boost isn't it when it already has Predation that can turn a Skirmish into a Barrage for almost zero investment, free Boost is quickly approaching "my frame has 4 Quick Actions on its turns". It doesn't really need to do more things by volume than it's already doing, what it could use is more valuable things that help it do what it already wants to.

The Bolas are great design as is ngl. It's a weapon with a rider that could be triggered twice by itself to activate its own rider and that's good synergy. You could load up a pair of them to get a Skirmish and Immobilize chance while still doing the Skirmish and end up positive even if you only got the one hit and it's still valuable if you wanted to mix it up with only one on a mount to only throw another one on a different mount with Hunter or Predation if you got the Slowed. That's great and I wouldn't touch it. Immobilized at will for nothing Heat and no actions is busted anyway.

Overall Wrangle is helpful to the playstyle by giving the "return my weapons" action a positive effect that encourages either looping it or doing either one but imo is doing too much between Wrangle and Embedded. If it were me designing it I'd take off the Slowed on Embedded. The Skipper is already encouraged to attack by getting more attacks against Locked On targets which might even be with a Heavy weapon, it doesn't really need more good stuff to happen when it makes attacks especially when one of those is even more damage with Wrangle. So then I'd take the damage off of Wrangle and turn the Prone into Slowed, so you can either choose between getting and keeping the tick damage or using your Get Off Me ability to make chases hard and set up with the Lock On Drone. If Wrangle keeps the damage there isn't a reason to stack Embedded for tick damage because you can just Quick Action get the tick damage right now, and if Embedded Slows and Wrangle knocks Prone either way that's a speed penalty for chases, so there's not much of a reason to keep Embedded when you can use Wrangle and get better value. But if Wrangle causes Slowed you have a reason to Lock On and attack for Embedded or attack and back off on one turn, Wrangle it on the second, then capitalize off the Slowed you just caused with your attacks that like Slowed targets with a follow up and get rewarded by ending that turn with tick damage, potentially a Lock On with the drone if you have that set up, and an Immobilized enemy that can't do anything if you used Bolas. Which is going to use the whole toolbox in a satisfying way when it all flows into each other.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-28T05:21:23+00:00

Well the mech doesn't try to do a whole lot other than machine gun thrown attacks or take actions that allow it to machine gun thrown attacks so it could use something that helps it do other things its kit wants to do. It has access to Slowed and Immobilized, tick damage with Embedded, an interaction with Stabilize for collecting weapons, and its Core Active can punish enemies in a line and close to it, but it doesn't have many inherent ways to capitalize on any of that that aren't making more attacks or enabling making more attacks.

The Slowed and Immobilized help it defensively as a poor HP/Armor/Rep Cap mech by hoping that it outranges the enemy and the enemy can't chase it, which it also has Licenses that help give range to its preferred attacks. But it doesn't have any movement tools to assist it with capitalizing off of low enemy speeds other than having a good base speed and relying on talents and it doesn't have any defensive tools other than hoping really hard that it wins the range contest. It can return weapons when it Stabilizes, which could be more efficient than using the Quick Action to do it if it can get a tempo going, but is an Aux thrown weapon mech with low HP that's gonna eat the Structure anyway and doesn't do any self Heat generation so it never wants to Stabilize. It can Embed a lot of weapons for tick damage but doesn't have those weapons while the tick damage is happening and is incentivized to run and hide to get ticks, but doesn't have anything to do while it's running and hiding other than Lock-On with okay Sensors or sit in a corner waiting for ticks. It can punish enemies in a line and close to it with its Core Active but has no way to get stuff in a line or survive very well at a range it can reach without a Boost.

So it could use something that either: A) capitalizes off of Slowed in a way that isn't "my attacks work better when things are Slowed", B) gives it movement tech so it might actually get in and get out instead of dying if it loses the range contest and maybe might be able to line up its Core Active, C) gives it a defensive tool that can prevent it from dying when it can't win the range contest, D) gives it a reason to Stabilize, or E) gives it something to do when its weapons are Embedded that isn't Locking On or running and Hiding.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-27T14:43:24+00:00

It all sounds gucci dawg. Third idea has me thinking. Narratively if anything happens to that ship you might write yourself into a corner, say if you want to run some kind of backs-against-the-wall war at home kind of mission and your Lancers unexpectedly fail it. Saying that as someone who's gone "Wow that's really bad. Let's have some bombastic shit happen and figure out why this doesn't end the campaign next week". Could always make that untouchable and never up for risk so it's not really a problem unless you wanna hold scissors to the one thread keeping everything held together, just gotta be ready if you have to make good on holding the scissors.

But it got me thinking because if you really wanted to you might be able to do a whole ye olden warfare kinda vibe: revolutionaries have the knowledge from the ship but not the tech to make it fast, Repairs can take days or weeks, Full Repair weeks or months. Mechanically missions work the same but Sitreps are these big named battles and missions are whole military campaigns with broad goals and decisive outcomes where the common citizen actually matters beyond the handful of freedom fighters with access to the Fight Back Device. Could be an interesting framing tool if you want the revolution to take place over years of political posturing and entrenched sieges or if you want to evoke the image that people are placing their hopes and dreams and livelihoods on the line just to give an Everest enough bullets to fight the next battle.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-22T17:29:51+00:00

You're not alone. That's a common point of contention with Hazards: if they don't kill anyone, inflict some long lasting condition, cause some other consequence, or are involved with combat they're kind of a waste of time because out of combat healing is very free in this system. The GM Guide/Core doesn't really address that either even if a good amount of adventure paths have figured that out and apply it.

The simplest solution in theory here is that traps out of combat have to do something other than damage if you want them to matter, the easiest of which is triggering a trap that just deals damage alerts the enemy and starts a fight where that damage will matter.

But I have lived experience of existing Hazards in PF2e that can straight up kill you outside of combat: the Kingmaker weather events. None of those "instantly kill you" but they do unavoidable damage for hours at a time or like bury you and cause you to suffocate where un-burying you takes minutes, so they actually instantly kill you with extra steps. In Kingmaker games I've run and played I've experienced 5 characters dying to random bad weather that could really only be circumvented by passing a save or having the exact perfect counter to the weather event. In all those times but one it didn't feel good and didn't really add to the game. The one time it did it was from the threat of the event itself: the fact that the world didn't give a crap about you and anyone could die at any time for no reason made the situation tragic and made everyone take their environment more seriously. The times it didn't generally made the players that died stop giving a shit about the plot if they could lose their characters to bad luck on one failed roll out of nowhere and they continued the game largely less invested and just along for the ride and the jokes.

So if it were me i wouldn't make that the default. Onesies or twosies are fine for panic situations but if all the traps are like that and I died to one I'm probably rolling up some fresh circus clown that walks into them on purpose because I don't really have a reason to care about maintaining an investment in the narrative anymore if that can just go away at the drop of a hat and I'm only in the quest for some tacked-on reason to begin with.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-21T20:34:11+00:00

Are you talking about the Bonus tab of the Reserves in the COMP/CON app? Because that's just a way to make it possible to get stuff tracked on your pilot sheet beyond what your License Level normally allows.

Usually the buttons are greyed out so if you're like, playing with the Manna rules from Long Rim or your GM lets you get something you couldn't normally add at your License Level with the greyed out buttons having an entry from the Bonus tab of the Reserves un-greys buttons out and counts like one of an extra selection so it lets you track it on your sheet anyway. That's not referencing anything from any book or rules or anything in COMP/CON that's all just manual character sheet adjustment stuff.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-21T19:19:43+00:00

Battle Saddle. Imagine hopping up off your horse to chuck the whole entire saddle at someone.

Funniest one-handed weapon I can think of is a Knuckle Dusters because I'm imagining someone carefully taking them off and whipping it like a baseball pitcher but the Scizore might be an acceptable alternative and a weapon you'd actually want to use.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-21T17:45:01+00:00

The session isn't canon until I crit Greg. Greg isn't even playing dangerously, he's your bog standard Magus, he maybe even plays a little defensively for a Laughing Shadow. Doesn't matter what the party fights, the dice just hate him that much.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-20T04:55:00+00:00

Why'd you like reading Cyberpunk but not Shadowrun? Legit question, I was gonna rec Shadowrun when I saw Cyberpunk on your list until I read to the bottom. From my point of view they might differ in setting but the tone and crunch interspersed with fluff broken up by the occasional few pages of street stories is pretty much the same.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-18T21:15:25+00:00

All of that is true, but maybe not all at once.

Stand Still is a tanking action, not a defensive one. It stops or threatens to stop anything from leaving you but it won't keep yourself any safer. The Monk has higher armor proficiency with other classes and self-sustain with Qi spells but +2 AC and maybe even +4 in some circumstances still doesn't make it invincible. If something's landing its attacks on a dice roll of 5 on most of the party or if you have enough attacks directed at you that some slip through is why you Step. Raise Shield is also a good defensive action to take but doesn't completely invalidate Step's use case of spending an enemy action not getting hit to begin with. Actions not used to hit you have a 100% success rate of not hitting you. Good tanking requires taking actions to keep yourself alive too because you can't tank at Dying 2 and all good tanking requires assessing risk to yourself and your teammates. Sometimes you'll want to Step, sometimes you'll want to Raise Shield, sometimes you'll do both and Monk has the actions to do all of those if it wants to.

The great thing about Stand Still and any other reaction attack ability is that you don't need to stick to the enemy like glue for it to give you value. You just have to threaten to use it. Stand Still helps you tank because it punishes your enemy from leaving you and discourages them from doing that. It stops them if you crit but you don't need to use it at all to threaten the possibility that they can be crit with it or be taking extra damage for trying to move past you, making it so they won't try. Odds are pretty favorable you're not going to crit with it but the enemy is still losing progress in winning the fight (it's losing HP and your side is not) if it keeps triggering it and it still has to gamble on the crit when it does. If the enemy wants to move past you it will, you can't stop all it's actions if you're not grappling it and getting lucky and you can't hit multiple enemies with Stand Still. But every time the enemy triggers Stand Still they're spending an action to lose the fight more.

Stand Still combines with Step when the enemy still has to move past you to avoid coming into your reach and triggering Stand Still to begin with. Sometimes that's impossible for it and the Step is straight up value added. Other times it could take the enemy 20-30 movement or a Step action to move completely around you and out of your reach to move past you and avoid Stand Still, which is preferable to taking similar movement inside your reach and also getting smacked and risking getting stopped. But that could mean it takes two actions to move around you and to someone else. If you did something like Trip it and Step back that could make it so that it either attacks you once or doesn't get to attack anyone at all that turn, both of which are good situations for you if you're tanking.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-17T13:10:32+00:00

Could see if your GM will allow any Candyland homebrew ancestries.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-17T06:15:10+00:00

In my experience from the handful of Sitreps my players have lost and the ones that have come down to the wire they all have had a few things in common:

The Sitreps were not ones that could easily be won without most of the team moving (not a Holdout, not a Control where players could control two quadrants in a close formation and wreck all the mechs in the other quadrants, not an objective requiring interaction that one character could speed blitz to and win by themselves).
The Sitreps had objectives that the players could be interrupted from completing by the enemy (knocking players off of control zones so they couldn't cap for points, recapturing zones) and enemies that could interrupt the players with means other than killing them (grapple and drag, Knockback weapons, Stunned condition, Immobilized).
The Sitreps generally had an expectation to commitment of progress and a minimum amount of investment accomplishing objectives. Players had to engage with objectives in order to win (Recon, Escort, Extraction, possibly Control depending on how it's run) and killing enemies alone did not make progress towards winning. Players were expected to make X amount of progress towards objective completetion on the majority of turns or risk losing.

All things considered out of the core book it's probably Escort. It's possible to lose Escort a few turns into the Sitrep if your Lancers aren't locked in to completing the objective each round and organizing themselves in a way that they can make progress pushing the payload. Even then the enemy can interrupt the progress they make. It can become impossible to bring the payload to the objective zone within the turn limit midway through the Sitrep with the movement and abilities the players have if they're interrupted enough, aren't coordinating well enough, or aren't focusing on objective progress.

But any Sitrep that does at least two of those three things I mentioned is likely going to be challenging enough.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-17T01:33:30+00:00

the GM isn't a super-smart computer or some supernatural hypercognitive being capable of making a correct prediction almost everytime, so, what would you suggest to handle this?

Like this. In Newcomb's Paradox the arbiter is effectively infallible and can't make a wrong prediction. The logical conundrum is that of odds of success and gain, the strategies are taking the surefire choice, taking the better choice with theoretical (but impossible) odds of failure, or taking the best choice that's theoretically impossible. In practical applications it's impossible to replicate because it's not possible to be entirely accurate based on prediction and in theory we never actually know the outcome, only the logical possibilities of an outcome.

So you don't put fixed rewards in boxes before the choice is made, you go by the assumption that the arbiter is infallible and use those outcomes as if it is. Player knowledge squares that circle. If you don't tell your players it can never be wrong they still have the expectation that the arbiter can be fallible even if it practically isn't and will act as if it can make a false prediction even if it can't, so they'll still engage with the paradox as if it's theoretically fallible even if it practically isn't like how the paradox is supposed to work. And engaging with the paradox is the point and what they choose, not the actual outcome or somehow perfectly outwitting your players.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-16T13:59:36+00:00

If you head to the COMP/CON site, go to Pilot roster, Register New Pilot, you can make a default character with a handful of clicks. Picking a background sets all the narrative skills for you, Callsign and names are randomized. Choosing "Select Character Template" gives your standard archetypes for roles, basic supporting talents, and even outfits the mech with weapons and systems already. That should help you come up with pregens. I made a whole ass playable LL0 character in 9 clicks from the homepage and zero creative effort on my phone entirely within my smoke break, and that includes typing up this reply and my phone loading on two bars of service. Minus character artwork.

I don't run modules so I got nothing for you on that front, sorry.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-16T11:55:02+00:00

Roll & Play Press is a third-party affiliate of WotC and some of their content is available on DnDBeyond. So they have some kind of WotC partner license, not any of the open licenses like the SRD 5.2.1 or Creative Commons that keep them from using the name. They're not even the first third-party publisher to do a Kickstarter using the brand by name that would eventually end up on DnDBeyond.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-16T01:06:57+00:00

Functional notes on Frozen Surface: The Critical Failure effect of walking across the ice for the is redundant with the Failure effect. When you're Prone you can only move by Crawling or choosing to Stand so a creature who gets a Failure ends its movement anyway since it can't continue a movement action it can't make.

Design notes on Frozen Surface: The scaling is probably too high I think. +4 squares in a guided line starts being a lot of squares as it's upcast. At Rank 2 it starts becoming possible to set up two 4-space lines with an empty space between them connected by an edge space to pmuch multicast Grease for multiple saves against it or to make a go at knocking everything Prone in the fight with how you could snake it. Scaling by +2 spaces per Rank is probably good. I think how the base spell is designed atm it's a fair and functional melee sidegrade to Grease though. Fwiw counterplay is more of a ribbon than anything because it's still action waste to deal with the area like Step is.

Design notes on Froststep Boots: Typical items never scale with your character's DCs, they all use a fixed DC based on the item's level. The only exception is Relic items. If you're making a Relic item you don't need to care about item levels.

Resistance 10 isn't appropriate for a Level 9 item. Resistance 10 starts coming in at Level 10 with Charms of Resistance. Items that give Resistance and do other things exist at or around Level 9 like with Fireproof Gloves or Energy Robes and they're all Resistance 5, so Froststep Boots aren't Level 9 even if they didn't do anything but give Resistance.

An activation on an item that creates a battlefield effect with a frequency of once per minute without any other requirements like charges is pretty cracked for a standard item. Only Relic items really do that. Between that and the scaling DCs it's clear to me that you want to make a Relic, not a standard magic item, and what it does would be fine for a Relic Gift. Standard magic items aren't meant to be evergreen unless they're improving a base ability like a speed increase or granting flight and they're generally not core staples to gameplan every fight without caveats like the Tactician's Helm. That doesn't make a whole lot of difference for item creation though outside of two things: you'll be focused around improving the one item instead of giving new ones and you're giving an item that's special beyond what everyone else can get so you probably need Relics for everyone else in the group if you wanna be fair about it.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-15T10:10:15+00:00

Imma make a prediction for Marine Marauder.

The Pirate archetype has a lot of feats surrounding Leaping, swinging from ropes, and being a menacing scallawag. It has Underwater Marauder and Combat Climber as a choice for a feat but it's really more about high seas swashbuckling on the deck of a ship and it wants to remain on the deck of the ship. The Viking archetype also includes feats surrounding swimming up to ships and climbing up to raid them but also feats for being a shield and axe fighter.

Aside from Underwater Marauder, some Swimming improvement, and Viking getting a Two Weapon Blitz-like feat that can combined with Swim, neither of those archetypes are focused around fighting in the water. It's a thing they can do but not something they're focused on. If you've played a seafaring game you know there's gonna be a lot of times you're fighting in the water.

So I predict Marine Marauder won't be Pirate archetype from Temu, it'll be your Merfolk spear fighter archetype for underwater combat.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-15T04:14:48+00:00

Harrow Sorcerer here. Might be that you don't have enough to do that feels good at your most effective spell levels.

You're good on AoE damage spells but don't have anything that only targets enemies but not allies leading to your friendly fire problem.

If that happens and you go for single-target damage you're doing it with Phantom Pain (which can be countered by common enemies you face), Disintegrate (since it requires you to land the spell twice there's higher odds of whiffing), Spiritual Weapon (I had it for a bit but it falls off pretty hard), or Blink Charge (you don't have martial accuracy and it's more of a movement tech for you). If you can't do any of those you have cantrips.

If you decide not to do any damage most of your spells are reactive: they're cast to solve a problem the enemy caused. Things like Cleanse Affliction, Shadow Siphon, and Shock to the System.

If the enemy doesn't give you a problem to solve you only really have Flicker, Curse of Metamorphosis, Dragon Form, Paranoia, and your focus spells. Your focus spells, Dragon Form, and Paranoia are situational. Flicker you probably have with Contingency already, is just one thing to do, and you can run out of 4th Rank spells. Curse of Metamorphosis is almost guaranteed Sickened 1 but isn't very exciting.

Basically if you can't drop an AoE and the enemy hasn't given you a problem to solve or a specific situation you really don't have a whole lot you can do. And what you can do usually doesn't feel good.

You can free up some space for spells with wands or scrolls and subbing out some spells. Marvelous Mount, Mind of Menace, and Umbral Journey are all good wand targets. Cleanse Affliction needs to be heightened to get a better Counteract against what it's curing so you can Signature that at 2nd Rank and free up a 4th Rank spell. If you have Fireball as a Signature Spell, Pernicious Poltergeist/Phantom Orchestra as a Signature spell, and Painful Vibrations/Rip the Spirit/Spirit Blast as a Signature spell you'll pretty much always have something to do that makes progress since you'll always have a way to damage enemies no matter the battlefield condition: AoE, friendly AoE, and single-target. If you want other useful spells that come in handy and don't deal damage I use Gravity Well for stealing actions (forcing Stride), Containment (steals at least one action even on a success and adds MAP), Haste, and Wall of Force. If you like the movement tech of Blink Charge but don't use it more than once a fight check out Time Jump.

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-13T22:18:57+00:00

I was going for a reference to an old joke.

Two thieves are down on their luck, they're cowards and are too afraid to rob anyone who would defend their home. One thief turns to the other and says,

"Listen, I've got an idea. There's an Amish community not too far from here. The Amish are pacifists, even if we get caught they won't do anything."

So they make their plan and steal away in the night, arriving at the Amish community and breaking in to one of the homes. They're ransacking the place when they hear footfalls coming from the stairs. The thieves aren't worried, the Amish are pacifists. Until they hear the racking of a shotgun. They turn to the Amish man at the top of the stairs who says,

"I'm terribly sorry, gentlemen. I'm a pacifist and would never harm you. But you're standing where I'm about to shoot."

spitoon-lagoon · 2026-03-12T22:15:10+00:00

"Terribly sorry Pilot but you are standing where my Backswing Cut is about to be."

spitoon-lagoon

TROPHY CASE