WoW: Shadowlands Culinary Adventures

 "I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

This is a weird thing to make a blog post about. Honestly, I once promised myself I'd never write a post about World of Warcraft too, but here we are. I've been having a blast with the world of Shadowlands and the expansion's gameplay, but I've noticed something about the world that's stuck with me enough that I want to talk about it. 

The food in the Shadowlands is fucking bizarre. Food in WoW has gotten steadily weirder over the years because it's hard to continually be unique. However, if every other expansion is a calm walk down a hill, Shadowlands is a leap off a cliff. I can't shake thoughts on how this stuff would taste. I'll go over the cuisine of all four zones then afterward the "meat" of the article, the player-crafted food. 

Thank god my home town Revendreth is relatively normal. I found things like "Fearstalker's Delight" which...let's face it, if the real world had Fearstalkers there'd probably be a dessert named after them here too. It had Cabbage Wrapped Minced Mite, Evernight Porridge(which I'd love to try), and various roasted local wild animals like Barbecued Dreadwing and Skullboar Chop. This is also the only place in all of Azeroth that they make Cottage Cheese. Imagine having to die then travel to a giant Transylvanian wasteland to have something to go with your sliced peaches. In the Sanctuary of the Mad you can try Batloaf, Mirecrawler Goulash, or whatever "Odorous" rice is. I have my own ideas on what they mean by odorous. None of them are good. If you're wistful for Wendy's after you die and your soul travels to a realm intended to torment you into reform, you can have a Muckfrosty, which apparently comes in five flavors: "Cold", "Chunky", "Slough", "Brown" and "Not sure which this is". This is one of the more obvious jokes in the expansion's cuisine, which makes me worry that the rest of what I've found is supposed to be serious. 

Ardenweald is like a place you'd put Republicans if you wanted to torture them. In addition to the usual fried or roasted local beasts this "twee nightmare" forest world has Wild Hunter's Stew which I'm sure is just a thing I've had in the real world, Poached Strider Eggs in a realm that has no Striders, and a wide selection of vegetarian hippy druid food like Grilled Slumbershrooms, Torchberry Bundles and Ripe Wintermelon, which again I think is just a real thing I've eaten. There's also Midnight Starpeppers. I don't care how star-shaped or beautiful your peppers are, eating a raw pepper for lunch is fucking weird. You can drink "Ardendew" which I'm a hundred percent convinced is the afterlife equivalent of Fiji water: regular water in a weird shaped bottle sold for five bucks. Desserts include "Candied Brightbark" and in this place I'm sure it's actual bark with candy coating on it. 

Bastion has the kind of food you'd expect out of the Elysian Fields since, y'know, it's just the Elysian Fields with blue people in it. Ciabatta, candied walnuts, pomegranates, fruit salad, et cetera. In fact, that's all you can eat in Bastion. Ciabatta, walnuts, pomegranates, fruit salad and spring water. I already didn't like these guys because the fridge logic of how their realm works is a little horrifying and this certainly isn't helping. At least I'd be able to have my favorite type of bread. 



Ah, Maldraxxus. I saved you for last on purpose. It has exactly what food you'd expect out of a blasted necrotic hellscape filled with undead. I found Finger Foods which are a clever play on words, and Yummy Toes which are fucking not. There's lukewarm milk from the weird skinned bisons which roam the area. Blood Oranges(GET IT?) and apparently they actually eat the weird hairlike fungus that grows out of the fleshy ground. We also have "Tea Bones" which are, disturbingly, a food. You can wash it down with a Corpini Slurry, which I'm going to assume is the rotten green stuff that comes out of a decomposing body, poured into a glass with a little crazy straw. You're welcome for that mental image. Maldraxxus also has an enormous amount of alcohol, more than any other realm. Because of course it does. 

On to the main event. The food on inkeepers and vendors is usually just world fluff and flavor. Nobody really needs it, it's just there if you need some out of combat healing in a pinch. Virtually nobody ever does, though. It also just looks nice and cute on the vendor when you're selling him all the junk you stole off dead bodies. Player-created food, on the other hand, even the average player interacts with constantly. It's cheap and provides big benefits, making it probably the most efficient consumable buffs in the game.

And this time, they're all really fucking weird. I'm going to go over them one at a time and give them a score from zero to five. Zero means I wouldn't ever even try it. For no amount of money. One is least likely to eat(but willing), and five is most likely.

Pickled Meat Smoothie. Dear diary: Today God looked the other way. This stuff is made with Aethereal meat, which I'm assuming is some kind of cheap, bad cut of meat. You also need vinegar, vegetables, a blender, and a complete lack of self respect. 
Tastiness Score: Zero.


Biscuits and Caviar. This is just something you could have in the real world if you were rich and stupid. It's one of those pregnant woman craving jokes played straight.
Tastiness Score: One.

Sweet Silvergill Sausages. Is fish sausage a thing? Is sweet fish sausage a thing? It seems like it is. Silvergill are caught in Bastion so, out of any of the fish in the Shadowlands, these ones are the most likely to taste good. It's one of the few basic, normal dishes in this entire afterlife.
Tastiness Score: Four.


Butterscotch Marinated Ribs. This is one of the things that keeps me up at night. Logically, I think "this would be disgusting" but then, when I'm in my bed, when everything's quiet...I wonder. 

Tastiness Score: Five.


Meaty Apple Dumplings. Okay so this sounded weird at first, but I did find plenty of recipes with apples and meat, usually pork. It's made with "Shadowy Shank" which sure, I can believe tastes like pork. What I can't forgive is making dumplings with shank, which is historically a tough cut of meat only suitable for stews. 
Tastiness Score: Three.


Cinnamon Bonefish Stew. Listen, I can't imagine something fished up in a necrotic wasteland called a Bonefish tastes good or has much meat on it, let alone goes with cinnamon. 
Tastiness Score: One.


Candied Amberjack Cakes. Mmmm, candied fish, doesn't that sound great? Sure is a lot of sugar in these recipes. These are made with Amberjacks which are fished up in Ardenweald and I'm sure they taste deliciously gay. It's also made with Bonefish, which means this recipe strikes me as a way to use up all your spare Bonefish without having to eat something that tastes like Bonefish. 
Tastiness Score: Two.


Banana Beef Putting. Once again this complete mistake is made with Aethereal meat. I'm sure the implication is supposed to be that it goes well with sweet things, but personally I'm taking this to mean that Aethereal meat is already kind of gross and cheap and makes chefs desperately cast about for ways to make it taste good. A valiant effort. But the answer's still no. 
Tastiness Score: Zero.

Tenebrous Crown Roast Aspic. Y'know, I'm sure Tenebrous Ribs taste at least as good as beef ribs. Taking the best meat in Shadowlands(probably) and making an aspic out of it is a crime on the level of putting ketchup on wagyu steak. I'm not normally that person when it comes to food but aspic is where I draw the line. For those of you who don't know, aspics are the second worst thing to come out of 1950s America, right after the Cold War. It's a savory gelatin suspension with bits of meat or vegetable floating inside. Yeah. If that doesn't already disgust you, I urge you to watch a few videos on classic American 1950s dining. The worst part? This stuff buffs haste. My character has to eat it. 
Tastiness Score: Zero.

Steak A La Mode. The picture implies this is some sort of steak pie, but still. WHY?! It's made with shank again but also with seraphic wings. I'm sure that's for the basket of fried wings that comes on the "side" and serves as the actual meal. 
Tastiness Score: Zero.(Fried Seraphic Wings: Four)

Iridescent Ravioli with Apple Sauce. Made with Lost Sole and Amberjacks, both fish that sound fine. Y'know what? We've been through hell. I'm giving a pass to the fish ravioli with sweet apple sauce. It's vaguely normal. Fuck it, it even sounds nice. 
Tastiness Score: Four.

Spinefin Souffle and Fries. Spinefin probably taste like crap. I'm putting that out there right now, there's no way a piranha from Soul Tormenting Vampire Translyvania is a good tasting fish. Still, it might be okay, and if nothing else? I can fill up on fries like I always do. 
Tastiness Score: Two. 

There's also Smothered Shank which is an actually decent way to cook shank, Seraph Tenders which I'm sure is what I'd be ordering ninety percent of the time, and Fried Bonefish which is probably the worst possible way to cook bonefish.

If the World of Warcraft cookbook is any indication, loads of Azeroth's meals are pretty good when you get down to it. They sound weird and exotic because Azeroth's wildlife is strange, exotic and overly large. Does that mean I'm going to make some butterscotch sauce for my next rack of ribs, though? 

Erh...you first. 

Anatomy of a Bad Ability

 "You know what my days used to be like? I just tested. Nobody murdered me. Or put me in a potato. Or fed me to birds. I had a pretty good life. 

And then you showed up. You dangerous, mute lunatic. So you know what?

You win. 

Just go. 

It's been fun. Don't come back."



Today I'll be discussing examples of powers and abilities I consider "bad" so I can hopefully impart some theorycrafting wisdom and methodology to you. I'll use several systems as examples so we can keep this to theory and avoid turning it into a single-game discussion. You won't need any system knowledge until we get to the Vampire bit. THAT game has a few too many terms to explain them all, but hopefully you can still get the gist of what I mean in that section. I will also be staying away from discussing equipment, since there's rarely an intended perfect balance in that area: Worse things do exist, whether they're cheap, old, or obsolete. 

But before we start, what do I mean by bad? I mean things you shouldn't take. That might be because something else is better at its job, but mostly I mean they're not worth what they cost. They're things you wouldn't want, even if they align with your character's theme. What I don't mean by that is abilities which are substandard but okay to take if you're going for a theme or you're okay with spending a bit more for something you think is cool. No, every system has dozens of things like those and it's a perfectly fine thing to take them. I'm discussing things everyone would want to avoid, and how to tell the difference. If you're impatient, core lessons will be at the bottom. 

Let's begin with Pathfinder since I have a previously discussed example. Ultimate Wilderness has a feat tree called Beast Hunter. Over the course of three feats(You get one feat every odd level) you get a laundry list of abilities. 

• +1 Attack

• +1 Dodge Bonus to AC

• +2 to Survival

• +4 to CMD and CMB

• +2 to Reflex Saves

• Ability to act in the surprise round

• +4 to confirming critical hits

Sounds nice. However, you can only apply these bonuses to animals, which are one size category larger than you, which are native to a specific terrain. In addition to that distinction being insanely specific, we have two more problems. The first is that this feat's biggest benefit, the bonus to CMB, is conditional. Your character may not use combat maneuvers at all. The second is that there are extremely few animals past CR 10, meaning this ability has a shelf life. Even a GM who wants you to be able to use this feat tree would struggle to challenge you with animals past level twelve or so.

Our next example is a quick one from Shadowrun. The Cool Resolve adept power gives you an extra die per level to resist the use of charisma linked social skills against you. It does not work on critter abilities, but it does work on other adept powers. Hopefully this one is obvious to you: PCs don't get social skills rolled on them. It's just inherent to the very idea of gaming that you can't do it. So, all this power does for a PC is protect him from a few adept powers. How likely you are to run into those is up to your GM...but I'm guessing the answer is "not often". 

On to Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. Here, feats are an optional choice. You get fewer of them than earlier systems, every four levels for most classes. Everyone also has a blanket option to put two points into stats instead of a feat, to a maximum of 20. This means feats really have to "pop" for you to want to take them. Only some of them achieve this, honestly. One that definitely doesn't pop, Weapon Master, is our next example of a bad ability. When you take this feat, you get +1 to STR or DEX(a concession for this being a feat with a lesser benefit) and proficiency with four weapons of your choice. Here are the problems with this. 

First, the ability score increase you're getting might potentially be useless to you. An odd stat does nothing, and the game "caps" at twenty. You can balance this out four levels later by putting a +1 in STR and also another odd stat, which you may or may not have. If you don't, then there's a +1 somewhere that's just going to go to waste. Taking another feat with a +1 is a possibility, but there aren't many of those and chances are it's not going to line up in your build.

The second problem becomes clearer when you look at 5e's weapon list. There are a smaller number of weapons than previous editions of D&D, with fewer variances in abilities and damage dice. In addition, unlike its predecessors, 5e does not multiply the STR bonus to damage of a two handed weapon: you simply get the larger die. This means two things. One is that there probably aren't four weapons on this list you really want. Remember, there's no "tripping" or "grappling" weapons, or exotic weapons with funky rules. The other is that you probably already have a proficiency in a decent enough weapon just from your class, unless you're playing a spellcaster. 

About that. Every class that gets the Extra Attack feature also gets decent weapons: Either all martial weapons for fighter/barbarian/paladin, Rapier for rogue, and punching faces for Monk. The classes which don't get decent weapons also don't get more than one weapon attack. If you're serious about wanting to take more attack actions, you'd multiclass. If you multiclass, you're going to receive some of that class's proficiencies. So the only characters who would take Weapon Master are non-martial classes who do not wish to multiclass. Basically, they're making a pretty poor decision: They're taking a minor improvement to something they'll never actually be good at. Even wizard has Quarterstaff, which can deal 1d8 damage. A greatsword isn't so much more damage that you'd waste a precious feat on it.

Can you take this for flavor? Sure. It's all it's good for, honestly. But even then, in 5e you're sacrificing a lot for flavor sometimes. Its feat and racial choices are relatively more important than in other systems.

Our final example is from Vampire: The Masquerade, and it's a controversial one. If my old LARP friends are reading this they're howling at me. That's because the Sabbat-only Thaumaturgical path "Path of Father's Vengeance" sounds really cool. It certainly sounds powerful at first glance. 

One dot lets you read psychic impressions of blood bonds in other vampires. This is, arguably, the most useful power in the path. There are plenty of situations where you would want this information, even though Sabbat are "protected" from blood bonds via the vinculum. It would be easy to use this to find traitors in your pack or city, even though it doesn't share the names of the people the target is bonded to. 

Two dots reduces a target's appearance to zero for a night and specifies that all social rolls during this time generally fail, unless it's intimidation. Basically, it turns you into a Double Nosferatu for a night. If you're mainly combating the Camarilla in your game, this is an excellent way to force a brutal break of the Masquerade without making yourself a target. Still pretty useful. 

Three dots is another curse, the Feast of Ashes. The victim of this power can't drink blood for an entire week, only eating ashes, and only being able to use "ash points" to rise. This sounds amazing and might have some edge cases for use, especially if you can briefly attack someone in a way to reduce their blood pool immediately, like Vicissitude's chest-collapse attack. If you don't, however, it's extremely likely that the victim of this is simply going to hide and/or save his blood for the inevitable fight with you. There are better ways to accomplish this that cost less experience.

Four dots is Uriel's Disfavor, which makes the target take a health level per turn of damage for every round they're exposed to light, even artificial ones. First off, the description even says most vampires hide for the entire week they're under this curse. Second, do you know what else is bright and causes health levels of damage? Fire. Thaumaturgy even has a path where all you do is shoot fire at people.

Five dots reduces the target to his original, non-diablerized generation for a week. This sounds awesome until you realize that diablerie is kinda rare when you're not playing a LARP and you're not likely to run across many foes that have done it to the point that this power is going to be worth using. Oh, and it takes three rounds to do it. 

So, most of these powers would be pretty awesome if you could do them in secret. But you very specifically can't do that. No, you have to quote Vampire Scripture and clearly state the curse to the target for it to work. It's neat flavor, but it means sneaking is out. In addition to how hard these powers are to apply effectively, this is an extremely rare discipline to learn, even among Thaumaturgy paths. The GM is encouraged by the book to make Thaumaturgy a special or monumental thing for a Sabbat player to learn. To do all that work and blow your shot on taking Path of Father's Vengeance...it's a bit sad.

@}-,-'--

So I hope you learned something, but just in case my examples confused you, here's some lessons I wanted you to take away from this discussion. 

Think about when you'll be able to apply the ability. As we saw with all of our examples today, even something that sounds awesome isn't very good if you're not able to use it often. This obviously varies from GM to GM, but some powers just plain aren't ever going to come up no matter how hard your GM tries. This is particularly true of things like Cool Resolve. You also need to keep in mind any restrictions the power has, and how often those will get in your way. 

Make sure the ability's usefulness won't fade. Some things are more useful early or late and that's fine, on some level. However, some rare few are simply useless at higher levels, and you should watch out for that if your game is likely to get to that level.


Think about what you're paying to get it. Sometimes a power plain isn't worth its cost, like Weapon Master. Other times something is defined as rare and thus will likely take some sort of laborious adventure or cost in-game to get it. Rare doesn't always mean good. Remember that, particularly if you're playing a White Wolf game. 

Analyze if everything you're getting is useful to you. The Big Game Hunter feat tree feels like a big value until you realize you're not likely to use everything it gives you. It makes you feel like you're getting more value than you really are. Character builds in even the simplest games can vary a huge amount, but some things just aren't likely to come up in tandem with each other. 

I hope that helped. This feels basic and remedial to me, but I often see people miss these judgement points and treat people who are good at analysis as wizards. We're not. Well, some of us are, in the sense that we're playing wizards. The rest are just putting these abilities through a mental wringer before deciding to take them. 

Meme Builds: Tonberry(Updated)

 "Sneaky beings that slowly creep through the darkness carrying knives and lanterns. Their incessant, innocent stare stabs through opponents, pushing them over the brink of despair."

Here's a blast from the past. Whenever I find something about my meme builds can be updated, this is how I'm going to handle it: Fixing the build and reposting it. If I simply edit the page, chances are you're not even going to know I did it. So this is better. 

The only change here is that I found out about the feat Advanced Weapon Training that leds you get Focused Weapon earlier, at five instead of nine. This eliminates what I thought the biggest disadvantage of the build was, so it's very important. I also updated some build advice.



I'm gonna do some build showcases. They're gonna be meme-y and funny, but I assure you all of them will be playable. I don't like putting together unplayable or bad characters, even as a joke. I don't want people mistaking joke builds, or builds that simply test theoretical limits, for playable ones.

The builds I'm presenting are gonna be just the core of what they need to be the thing I'm saying they are: some are gonna have a lot of free levels where you can take whatever you want. Some will have none.

Tonberry
Class: Fighter

Feats
1 Weapon Focus(Dagger)
1F
2F
3
4F Weapon Specialization(Dagger)
5 Advanced Weapon Training
6F Vital Strike
7
8F Improved Weapon Focus(Dagger)
9 Devastating Strike
10F Improved Critical(Dagger)
11 Improved Vital Strike
12F Improved Weapon Specialization(Dagger)
13 Improved Devastating Strike
14F
15
16F Greater Vital Strike
17
18F
19
20F

Weapon Training
5 Light Blades
5b Focused Weapon(Dagger)
9

13
17

This is nothing special, honestly, but I'm enamored of the idea. At its base, this is stacking a simple Vital Strike build with Focused Weapon to (eventually) get mucho damage on your attack actions. Once the build comes together, you'll be able to shuffle slowly toward your victim and hit them with Everybody's Grudge(also known as The Attack Action) for 8d8+15 before adding your Strength or weapon enhancement bonuses.

Pros. Like every vital strike build, you're super mobile. You'll hit for ruinous damage even on rounds you have to move, and you'll do even more if they're dumb enough to sit still for you to take a full attack. You're great against high-AC targets, since you can put most of your damage behind one really high attack bonus. You're using dagger, which is an easily concealed and very common weapon. You'll have a lot more luck getting a dagger into somewhere than a two handed weapon, even if you're not concealing it.


Cons. You're not really using your other hand(but see Full Memery below). If you decide to be size small to commit to the joke, you're losing a significant amount of damage because the weapon die progression from Focused Weapon will be lower. You also lose out on a weapon flag that's very important to Vital Strike characters: the weapon dice enhancing flag Impact can't be put on a light weapon. 

Finishing the Character. There are a few "X times a day, save vs. an effect" feats that go with Vital Strike. Those aren't too bad. Staggering someone in particular with Staggering Blow can sometimes save your(or someone else's) butt from a full attack action. If you're taking that one, you should probably do so at level ten and put off taking Improved Critical a while.  Power Attack can basically be used on every attack since you're really likely to hit, and there are a few ways to stack Vital Strike with cleave that I saw. Vital Strike also goes amazingly well with Sunder, melting through a weapon(or armor) in one strike. You could also take movement related feats, but be careful: Spring Attack does not work with Vital Strike. AC or defensive feats could also be on the table since you're probably using a shield to make use of that other hand.

In addition, anything that increases your weapon die type disproportionately buffs your damage compared to other people. Enlarge Person isn't very in-line with the theme, but it's a good spell. A wonderful spell for you to slap onto an item is called Lead Blades. It's a level one, but it's a ranger only spell, so you might expect the GM to put you on a quest to find an enchanter who can do it. I'd suggest doing that quest, because it's your best buff.

Finally, a note on basic building. This is a character that could multiclass if they wanted to. Easily. You could even make them into a Weapon Finesse character since you don't get as big a benefit from STR than a traditional fighter: You're only ever making one attack, and with a one-handed weapon to boot.


For Full Memery. Hide your armor under your robe, or buy glamered armor. Ask if you can reflavor a shield to a lantern. If they say no, you can still enchant your shield with a +1 weapon bonus(so it's a magic weapon) then put the Glamered weapon flag on it. Since it only goes away when you attack with the weapon, it'll look like a lantern(and function as a shield) the entire fight. Caution, though. If your GM is a stickler, he's not gonna like how you got around his decision. He might declare something un-fun like blocking an attack with the shield reveals the glamour.


If You Hate Fun. The cool thing about this build is that it can be taken to be a "weapon master". You can pick any of those cool but useless weapons out of the equipment guide and declare your character is the master of it, unparalleled at its use. You'd basically be right. Focused Weapon can also turn mediocre weapons into great ones, and you can use that to leverage the strengths those weapons have, like kusari-gama's reach and trip bonus.

NON-TTRPG: Terraria, a post-game dissection.

"This is going to be a terrible night..."


Hello and welcome to our first post that's not about tabletop gaming. I said I might do this a long time ago, but none of my ideas were ever so compelling that I wanted to urgently get them down on (digital) paper. I decided to finally put the game Terraria to bed after they released its final content patch. Not to bury the lede, but I used to call this my favorite game however I'd never beaten its final boss on my own. I was excited for Journey Mode anyway, so I went on one last ridiculously complete run through the game. Now that I feel I'm completely done, I have a lot, a lot of thoughts on the game. After almost nine hundred hours, it's probably more than I'd care to put in a basic review.

In fact, I want to put a Steam-style review here before we start. Terraria is a lot of fun, especially given its price tag. I certainly didn't put all those hours into a game I hate. It's even more fun with friends. Despite what I might say about their design philosophies and intentions in the following paragraphs, Re-Logic went above and beyond and deserves respect for creating such a dense and interesting game.

That's probably enough Ado.


The Good

So this is a creative voxel-style exploration game with platforming. The key gameplay elements are collecting weapons, armor and accessories which all alter your gameplay style. That's a solid start. The game has a lot of "grind" to it, such as farming consumable materials or things with low drop rates. That's okay on some level. It's the game. I have more to say about consumables later, but the idea of them is fun.

Here's the part where I gush about Journey Mode. Basically, thanks to allowing you to "learn" and duplicate items, it does two things. The first is that it allows you to be as creative as you want without having to farm up a ton of resources. I've made plenty of bases over the years which are boring, stock standard wood towers full of rooms because I'm under pressure to get something, anything up. Thanks to creative mode's duplication, time-locking and other stuff, I was able to spend several glorious hours designing a huge mansion that I'll put at the bottom of this post for you to see.

The other is that it softens the game's need for farming and grinding. Again, I'm not a hundred percent against having to farm. Coming back for my 10th or greater playthrough, though, it was nice to be able to avoid it. I can lock or speed up time, raise the enemy spawn rate, or duplicate gold and consumables all to avoid long grinds. In addition, being an exploration-based voxel game with hundreds of weapons and accessories, it has an even greater need for item sorting than Minecraft or similar games. Journey Mode is particularly great for people who hate doing that. All with still being able to play on higher difficulties and earn everything from those a normal player would. If you feel bad that Journey is "Making the game easy", go ahead and jack the difficulty slider up to Master.

The two new bosses in the latest update are fine. Very well designed, and The Empress of Light is a downright gorgeous fight. I was impressed. They're both optional, though. I won't say that's absolutely a strike against them, but unless you're playing on expert difficulty, they don't really give you anything important. 

More broadly, the game marries explorative creative gameplay with platformers. I dunno guys, I was just destined to enjoy this on some level. The gear is all fun, there's a ton of self expression, and the bosses all have cool, crazy designs. Procedurally generated worlds being corrupted by a spreading "sickness" like the Corruption, or even later the Hallow is a great idea. Distinct areas and the ability to break the sequence of natural progression if you're good is great design.


The Bad


Here's the thing, though. A lot of Terraria's design feels unfocused, like it was based on what they thought was "cool" instead of a coherent philosophy, or worse...in response to players approaching the game "wrong". More on that later. Let me explain what I mean.

Consumables are at a point in this game where a full "load" of helpful consumes is almost half of my inventory. Are they necessary? Well, that depends on what you're doing. You take a shitload of damage on expert or master difficulty. Defensive consumes are a must, and offensive consumes can even make up for taking more defensive accessories or armor, turning them into ad-hoc defenses in themselves. Consumes are a very important part of this game, to the point that some popular mods add a "potion belt" where you can put up to ten stacks of them. Ten is sometimes not enough.

I need to make a point here, so let's go over what you carried all of the time at various stages in this game. I gotta stress that, this is only potions you always wanted to use. When I'm talking about "too many potions", rare conditional utility potions like gravitation or obsidian skin don't count.

During the vanilla release, you had this stuff.

Restorative: Health and Mana potions.
Helpful: Featherfall, Swiftness, Night Owl, Shine, Danger Sense, Spelunker, and Hunter.
Combat: Ironskin, Regeneration, Archery, Magic Power, food buff, and Mana Regeneration.

Obviously, depending on the weapons you use you can skip some of that. I want to point out that while nobody will want danger sense, spelunker or hunter during a boss fight, these potions are outright vital if you're still searching for things in the world.

The Fishing patch added more of them, mostly combat potions.

It added Ammo Conservation, Endurance, Life force, Rage, Wrath, Summoning, and flasks.

Keep in mind I trimmed this list down and left out a few potions some people would find useful like Thorns, Heart Reach, or Titan. My point is, for serious excursions, players will feel the need to carry sixteen stacks of potions, more if they're a magic user. For reference, you have forty inventory slots and ten hotbar slots. Many of these potions require fishing to make, which is much more time spent than the relatively passive herb growing of the vanilla release potions. This means, of course, that those potions in question(particularly endurance, life force, rage and wrath) are intended as "seldom use" potions for bosses or hard areas.

Shame that turning the difficulty above "normal" ends in you dying like a fucking stink bug, then, huh?

Let's get back to fishing later in our next section and instead talk about farming some more. After The Crimson was added, it was impossible to get the "opposite" sickness's items in your world. You get what you get, either Corruption enemies or Crimson. The problem is that the stuff is notably different, and in some cases, extremely unbalanced when compared to one another. For example, many items related to The Crimson(including the super important Flask of Ichor) reduce defense stat. This is very good. The equivalent items for The Corruption cause a DoT called Cursed Flames. It's not bad, exactly. But it's way worse, comparatively. In addition to that, there are many items you may want from exploration and none of them are guaranteed. You're very likely to get one of each, but it's not a promise. This is particularly true of water chests.

This means that sometimes, it's ideal for you to create another world, bring your character into it, and generally fuck it up(with dynamite) and farm what you want out of it. This is perfectly acceptable to me, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel like it was...an exploit. With the final patch, they made it possible for you to build an artificial biome of the opposite sickness. Slowly and with great effort. This still doesn't help with certain items you may find vital like Flesh Knuckles. It feels like a "single world playthrough" is a challenge.

Finally for this section I want to talk about boss AI specifically. Usually, it's okay. I think little things like having to "trick" Plantera and juke her to dodge is neat. The knowledge that she always follows you a certain way helps you fight her. But. There are a few too many bosses who are soundly defeated by flying circles around them. Literally, the best way to dodge in this game is in wide circles, even the Moon Lord. Especially the Moon Lord. I don't know what Re-Logic could have done to combat this, but given the game's difficulty curve I'm almost glad it exists.

On the subject of bosses, I said a while ago that some things in Terraria felt like they were designed in response to players instead of trying to make a complete game. In the beginning, people would build arenas to fight bosses in. I mean, this is a creativity-driven voxel game, why wouldn't you? It made them notably easier. So, the first time a new boss was added, it was The Wall of Flesh, a boss who steadily traveled toward you, not stopping, and would kill you if you got behind him. Players built a long road in Hell to kill him. The Mechanicals were next and seemed to be more of the same, but all needed quite wide areas to fight, and the new 'meta' was using wings to fly and dodge. A brief respite from this seemingly grudge-driven design philosophy. Next added was Plantera, a boss who's extremely hard, if not impossible to get to an arena: She follows you constantly and thus needs to be kited in very wide circles. That, and you can't control where you're summoning her: You have to find randomly spawned "Plantera Bulbs" and destroy them. Then came The Golem, a boss who you fight in his own specific arena which you can't change until after you kill him. Then the Lunar Pillars which spawn in semi-random places and the Moon Lord, who constantly moves to stay in a certain position in relation to you.

Do you see what I'm saying? It feels as if the game's design has been half, or more, trying to force players to approach it in a single intended way. Maybe I'm wrong and this design philosophy was just an attempt to shake things up. I hope it was and any of the malice I attributed to it was misplaced. Still, I consistently feel boxed-in by this.

There are eighteen pre-hardmode NPCs, six hardmode NPCs, one seasonal NPC, and three optional pets. Re-Logic must have realized this was a problem, because they introduced a system where you benefit from placing them in small bases all over the map. While this is admittedly a good system, it doesn't really fix the problem of like five of six of these motherfuckers needing to go. I don't have a problem with "fun" NPCs like the Zoologist, Golfer or Party Girl. Honest. They're neat. What I have a problem with are NPCs like the Tax Collector, the Truffle or the fucking Pirate Captain who barely do anything for you...or in the case of the Pirate, almost literally nothing. NPCs who only bring one little thing like the Cyborg and Steampunker don't feel great, either.

It would be one thing if they were just in the game somewhere, but thanks to the creative nature of the game and the high damage they take, you're basically forced to care for them. I remember having to deal with bases constructed carelessly by other players and several NPCs dying per night. On my most recent play-through, I even skipped earning several NPCs. If you know me at all, you can probably tell that's a very serious decision.

The Ugly

This is going to be a short, brutal section filled with what I consider the game's worst stuff. Before now, my talking points were pretty broad. These are not. These are very specific. 

Fishing, and The Angler. First off, it's cruel to put a slow fishing subgame in a broader game where you're spammed with enemies near 24/7 in most areas. That would be true even if it weren't strictly necessary for the game's most important potions. It's also slower than the already-slow cast-and-wait gameplay seems, because you need to find a good fishing pole, farm good bait, farm sonar and fishing potions, and deal with the Angler.

Speaking of him. I already don't like fishing minigames. This guy makes it a lot worse. For good fishing gear and to complete the game's best informational item, you need to do his quests. Once a day, he'll ask for a quest fish from a certain biome. Something you can't just stock up on. you bring it back and he gives you a randomized reward. Of these, there are six extremely important ones: Three fishing accessories, and three informational accessories. Here's the problem.

One: It's once a day. If this were just the fact that he always had one quest it would be bad enough, but he makes you wait a pointlessly arbitrary amount of time, exacerbating the issue of already having to grind a ton of these stupid missions for what you want. Oh, and by the way? You couldn't use beds to speed up time passing until the most recent patch.

Two: The six accessories you want are very rare rewards, and until the most recent patch, you could get duplicates. You want the Weather Radio, Sextant and the Pocket Guide so you can finally finish the extremely long-winded cell phone item? Too bad, here's twelve sextants.

Three: Everything else you'll get is basically garbage. The rest of the rewards are either decorative(which you might not want) or fishing consumables, which you're already spending to even do this. It feels wonderful to pop a sonar potion to make this easier and your reward is...a sonar potion. 

On top of that, this kid consistently cops an awful fucking attitude with you. That might not seem like a problem to some people, but it's irritating and demoralizing to be forced into dealing with someone who has contempt for you. Ya'll are into Tabletop RPGs, I presume, and you hopefully know the damage a forced interaction with an extremely negative NPC can do.

Healing. So at some point, along with the Golem I believe, they added another tier of armor to attain. Good stuff. Beetle armor for melee, Shroomite armor for ranged, and for magic users? It was spectre armor. Each of these sets came with multiple pieces so you could change around your "sub spec" and the spectre armor had a version with an extremely interesting set bonus: You could heal via your magic damage. In addition to "tanking" and "threat" items recently being added, it felt a lot like the game was adding a trinity of sorts, one that wasn't strictly required, but could enrich multiplayer a lot.

Maybe Spectre Armor was too powerful when it came in. Maybe. However, Re-Logic basically did everything they could to bury the entire concept of healing. Spectre Armor was nerfed no less than twice, the entire concept of magic-based damage was redesigned(needlessly, in my opinion) and the final strike was that the Moon Lord causes a severe debuff to healing received.

Regenerative armor like the Valhalla chest and leg pieces were not only untouched, but remain the easiest way to kill the Moon Lord. 

Speaking of Valhalla, the Old One's Army event(a crossover with Dungeon Defender) is miserable and dumb and I hate it. GETTING those pieces includes a pretty severe grind of having to play a tower defense minigame which I find wholly unwelcome. You must approach this game on its terms and its terms only, especially if you're alone. You have to grind seals to get better stuff to grind seals with, and the worst part of it is that you probably really want those Valhalla pieces I just mentioned, and some of the third tier boss's gear is quite nice. I mean, not to be rude but if I wanted to play Dungeon Defender...I'd play Dungeon Defender. trying to recreate it on a 2d plane just flat out doesn't work.

Base Defense. So at some point they decided mobs should be able to bash doors in, with some fucking mobs even removing the door's placement entirely. This pointless stupidity was implemented to add a certain amount of danger to random events(see below) but all it serves to do is restrict your creativity. Now, we have to place doors in weird areas and make dumb looking floating bases. I love my mansion and I consider it the best thing I've built in Terraria, but the fact that it's not safe because I wanted to make a normal looking house drives me up a fucking wall.

It would help if traps and devices were useful, but after you get to hard mode, not even the special traps from the Golem's temple do enough damage.

Speaking of events where your door gets bashed in, Most bosses have some form of chance to spawn randomly if you haven't defeated them yet. Notably, the Eye of Cthulhu and the Mechanicals. I like this. It keeps you on your toes. There's also the Blood Moon and later the Solar Eclipse, which are...fine. I said my piece about door-bashing, and in general these events can mean you're outside dealing with them for the entire time they're active. There's also the Goblin Army, which is important to do once, and the Pirate Invasion, which is worthless, dumb and deserves to be removed from the game. These two events can keep happening after you finish them, and aside from being an enormous waste of your time, can string together along with blood moon and solar eclipse to keep you fighting dumb bullshit that won't go away for 20+ minutes.

The Goblin Army brings the goblin tinkerer into the world. It means you're excited to beat it the first time. After the first, it shouldn't spawn again unless you use an item. In the very least, it shouldn't happen during Hard Mode at all, because the only thing different is a single hard enemy, and the rest die like cannon fodder around him. Just make the Goblin Summoner a rare mob somewhere.

The Pirate Invasion brings the Pirate Captain who, like I said, barely does anything at all. It doesn't drop anything you're very excited to get, aside from the extremely rare discount card. It serves as an annoyance at best, something to distract you from other things you'd rather be doing. It should be removed and its unique items added elsewhere.

I've danced around explaining the difficulty of the game, so we might as well explain it fully in my final section. The good aspect to this is that bosses have better, different AI in Expert/Master and drop unique loot. Normal enemies also drop more loot more frequently. They can cause additional debuffs as well. This is fun. The problem is everything else. 

Mostly, extra difficulty is just everything has more health and does more damage. Defense stat is more effective to compensate, but frankly this is almost like a wish on a monkey's paw. It means that, if you want to play a difficult game of Terraria while solo, you're no longer playing a game that has fun, varied specs. It means you're either a god of dodging or you're putting on the gear you need to survive. It means magic characters, who are already squishy, have an amplified disadvantage.

This is hardly the only game which does difficulty like this, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on it. It's just depressing to have the thought of finally playing a magic-based character in Terraria and ending up in Melee a tenth time because I'm taking so much damage and dying so often.


So that's it. I hope you noticed how often I said "Until the latest update" , because I wanted to stress that Re-Logic did, in fact, try to address some of my issues. Not every fix they added is a great one, but I'm glad they did and I'm thankful that they're trying, even if I didn't always feel their design was always coherent.

So in summation? If you like platformers or voxel games, give it a try. It's not like it's very expensive. Maybe being warned about the bad stuff will help. My advice? Definitely get some friends together...and maybe don't worry about completing the Cell Phone.

Was I Wrong About Ultimate Wilderness?

"Which way does a tree fall?"

"Uh, down?"

"A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean."



I wasn't impressed by Ultimate Wilderness when it came out. I consider it "late cycle" for Pathfinder 1st edition, since I've long considered its best days to be Occult Adventures and Ultimate Intrigue. I saw lackluster feats, middling special rules, and terrible archetypes. Did I judge it too harshly, though? I'd like to give it another chance.

Just to be clear on my criteria, here they are. The first one is mechanics. By this I don't mean to judge how powerful the options listed in the books are. Absolutely not. I want to see how interesting they are, if they're useful enough that you don't feel bad taking them for flavor, and if they bring anything unique to the table. The thing about mechanics is that I often search for a "good enough" level of playability because that makes it a viable choice compared to other things. Ideally, it should be good enough that you can take it because of your character's theme and not worry about being a feat(or class) behind for wanting it.

The other criteria is how inventive, insightful, or interesting the book is. I know, this is a pretty "feely" category, but what I can do for you is keep in mind books in the past that we all agree are excellent, even non-Pathfinder books like Lords of Madness or Libris Mortis. We can use that as a rough gauge in addition to just how clever I think the book is. Lords of Madness, for example, brought us the extremely interesting Abberant Blood feats in addition to a wealth of information on physiology, habits, and history of popular abberations. Despite the book not being a powergamer's paradise, it still knocks it out of the park.

I'll be talking about the racial archetypes when I talk about all the archetypes. Some of them do bear mentioning.


Races. We're not off to a good start. We have three races: your "I wanna play a fae" stand-in Gathlains, and plant people Ghorans and Vine Leshy.

Gathlain are okay. Perfectly playable. It's a great race if you're trying to maximize your AC: Small, Dex Bonus, and Natural Armor Bonus. I don't think maximizing your AC is a very fruitful endeavor, but there are worse things to be good at. They get a fly speed, a crappy one thanks to Pathfinder severely overvaluing fly speeds. But it'll be perfectly usable for all out-of-combat flying needs. They can take a few feats to gain some middling spellcasting, but also the amazing Wandering Mind at 9th level: it lets you roll a second save vs. mind-affecting effects on the second round of the effect. That's damn nice.

Ghorans are the first place in this book that I get upset. They get a plant type that's so cut down that it's a massive disadvantage: they get none of the plant immunities but are still subject to plant-type spells. It's not great, but in addition it's completely nonsensical. They're plantlike on the level that they literally need sunlight to live, but they're subject to poison, polymorph, sleep and stun effects. Sure, why not. They also get an ability called Seed which lets them plant a seed which grows into a healthy duplicate of them 2d6 days later. It's meant to let you rearrange your skill ranks, which is a neat idea.

But if you can't figure out why I dislike an ability which lets the PC go on a crazy suicide mission once every 2d6 days, I can't help you.

Next we have Vine Leshies, and yeah, they've got the cut-down immunities too. I'm not gonna go over their benefits too strongly. They get a nice thing or two for natural areas, but overall this is a terrible race. They're cute, but they're bad on the level of kobold or halfling, and that makes me sad. Special shout-out to giving a small size race a grappling feat. I'm sure everyone's rushing to make grapplers who are 3 feet tall.


Next up is Shifter. I talked about it already, so I'll be brief. Shifter's okay. Maybe even some good stuff. You need to use its errata, though, if you want to be effective. Without boring you with the details, primarily using natural attacks isn't a very good idea for 1:1 attack bonus types so it's really vital that shifter gets Shifter's Fury at level six. Otherwise, you're restricted to using deinonychus or tiger the entire time. It also wants to take a nice Wisdom for only one ability, Defensive Instinct. It feels bad, but it's not a dealbreaker. Mechanics aside, I like Shifter. They fill a great little niche and open up a lot of concepts that you would otherwise have to twist and squeeze to play.


Archetypes and Class Options. Lemme just get this off my chest right now, Leshykineticist, a Leshy-only archetype, sacrifices choice and utility for extra abilities. The first of these extra abilities is the talent Green Tongue, a "speak with plants" effect that they already fucking have via being a Leshy. This is inexcusably lazy design. I stared at this for an hour just trying to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

That's probably the biggest mistake in the book(so far), but the majority of these archetypes range from bland and boring to outright terrible "trap" choices. Another shining example is Tribal Fighter. They sacrifice metal armor and shields, their first bonus feat, and weapon training. In return, they get improved unarmed strike, an extremely minor benefit toward taking Style feats, and benefits with everything in the "tribal" weapon group. That does, at least, include unarmed strike. I mean, do you see the problem? How does this inform my play style, exactly? Why give them a bonus to all tribal weapons but also style feats? Why's this a fighter archetype and not a monk archetype? This archetype is extremely specific at best and leagues behind the Master of Many Styles monk archetype at worst, in terms of both concept and ability. Moving past that, there's several archetypes for the original, not-unchained monk. What a fucking waste of time.

Let's just go over the good ones, and you can draw your own conclusions based on how few there are. Herbalist is excellent for turning Alchemist into a completely different kind of class thematically, and I love it for that. The "Gathlain" archetypes of Fey Courtier and Season Sage are interesting ideas, with Season Sage in particular being an interesting trade-off for if you don't want to take Wild Shape. Feral Striker is another decent choice for Brawler if you'd rather not deal with Martial Flexibility. Saurian Champion is potentially the only good thing about Cavalier, and that's because you ride a dinosaur. As for Viking, I don't know how effective it is seeing as how it has a raging shield user aesthetic, but it's at least fun and unique.

Shifter gets its share of crazy archetypes that open up a ton of options, but they bear special mention. Elementalist shifter is fine, but Water has the issue of taking a -4 to attack and damage whenever the target is touching the ground. That's pointlessly debilitating. Rageshaper has you hulking out for a few rounds a day, tying your entire character to something that won't last more than one fight...and on top of that? It has another one of those "go crazy and start attacking your friends" abilities. No. No, not ever. This is stupid. I mean, was any thought put into playing these at low level? They get this at fourth level, spend a FULL ROUND ACTION to hulk out then...punch up the place for a measly four rounds? Things with a duration end on the initiative count right before they started so you do, in fact, waste a round activating it. It's not even markedly better than normal shifting which is measured in hours. Fiendish Shifter could use more than minutes per day for its abilities, but there's worse things. Weretouched is fine. Actually, it's a great way to play a lycanthrope so long as you don't care that your class kind of ends after level eight. Verdant Shifter is here too.

Oozemorph...

God Dammit.

Okay, so I know the guy who wrote this. He's an intensely creative person and has a keen eye for balance. Just so we're clear. Fluidic Body being something you have to manage really closely(or else lose your magic item slots) is...fine. It's not something I'd ever want to do, but I can see this being...okay. It really fucks you at low levels and I definitely feel like oozemorph would really suffer below level five or six, more from logistics than mechanics.

But...

Bob? Bob, do you think maybe this is a hard sell to fit into a party? Mechanics aside. As in, someone asks what I'm playing, and I say I'm a sentient pile of protoplasmic mercury? I know, I know, Odo. But...I get looked at weird for playing normal races. Like Skinwalkers or Nagaraji. I'm not saying it's bad or doesn't fit. Anything fits in Pathfinder, Golarion especially. It just doesn't strike me as very...easy to play.

The archetypes I didn't mention really don't deserve to be talked about. This is a huge section full of bland crap, to be blunt. Some of them are probably playable. I can't keep interest long enough to really analyze a lot of them. Kineticist even gets a whole element, Wood, and all I can say is...it's fine. I don't know if throwing your lot into healing with Kineticist is worth it, but if it is, Wood is your element. The book seriously leans on archetypes centered around terrain types, like swamp barbarians and mountain druids. It's fucking boring.

Feats. So I do have some praise here, but let's get this out of the way quick. I'm going to do a whole post on what makes an ability bad, but to go over it quickly: overly specific conditional bonuses are often the path to an ability nobody will ever want to take. There's a lot of those here and this section is almost as full of bland crap as the other ones we discussed. We'll save discussing specifics for another post, but suffice to say this book has a lot of examples. Many are fine if you've got room in your build for flavor feats...but not everyone does.

Onto the good stuff. The Wilding tree of feats is amazing and something I'd want to see expanded upon or emulated for other flavors. It's a way to add some nature spice to any class by taking animal empathy and some other neat things as feats. In exchange, not all of it stacks with class abilities. It's to limit bonus stacking in these areas, and frankly, it's something I'm okay with. There's also some useful and fun abilities like Woodland Wraith giving you concealment in natural areas(and thus letting you hide easier) and the awesome False Trail for when you're trying to shake someone tracking you. This is an amazingly useful feat if your character or party are criminals. Overall, this section is somewhat strong since it's filled with "diamond in the rough" powers like these. I could spend all day pointing out which ones are bad and which are great...but I'd rather teach you how to see it for yourself. So let's move on.

I'm gonna take the alternate rules separately instead of talking about the section as a whole.

Discovery and Exploration. These are, frankly, some really neat rules that can spice up having the characters searching for old ruins and such. Everyone can contribute and it turns the whole concept into a minigame instead of just "And Thusly"ing your way through it after a skill check or two. It adds value to survival(which, okay, didn't EXACTLY need it) but also to linguistics and some other skills. However, I'd move its suggestion of Profession(Cartographer) to another skill unless this is a game really focused on exploration...or if you're using the Background Skills alternate rule.

You really should use Background Skills, by the way. It's great. Anyway.

The First World. I get why this is here but, at the same time, I don't. This is a fairly standard explanation of the concept of a fae dimension or world, and it's fine. I don't think it really provides anything even an intermediate GM would need, but maybe it gave someone some ideas, and that's okay by me.

Foraging and Salvaging. Okay so, while pathfinder has a focus on magic items, I consider these vital and interesting rules which I've been screaming for since the days of D&D 2e. It lets people actually, legitimately gather resources, and while it may not be worthwhile to actually do...that can be tweaked. I can imagine games who are already using the Automatic Bonus Progression and cutting back on magic items to use these a lot. I like it.

The Green Faith. This is a bunch of nonsense that goes on and on about nature religions. It's bland and nobody needs it.

Harvesting Poisons. Another rule set I've been crying out for. Harvesting your own poisons is virtually the only way to make using them viable, and until now there's been no official rule for it. This is sorely needed.  This section also covers an expanded section on poisons which I find pretty good.

Hazards and Disasters. Adding CR and rules to natural disasters so they're more usable is a fine use of your book's space, I guess. I don't really see this as very necessary, but there are worse things to include.

Herbalism. This is a bunch of stuff you can either buy in a market or find with Profession(Herbalist). You know my opinions on Profession, but this is a damn nice thing to include. Even if they're not all very useful, it's nice that the druid can say they can find an herb to help in a situation and then actually do that without the GM having to bullshit him.

Spells of the Wild. This section is basically a whole thing on how all those nature spells(you know, the ones that aren't Fireball) are totally useful you guys, and this is how you use them. I mean, I guess it's fine. Most of their advice is bland and pointless, and really I'd have liked more alternate rules in this space...or even just more herbs. Those things were cool.

Trophies. Not much to say but I fucking love this feature. It adds some decent value to Craft, Knowledge and Survival and the extra gold you get isn't exactly going to break the bank. I've used these rules in a real game and it was fun to see everyone get into it and help make a trophy.

Weather. Listen. When people say Pathfinder is (ugh) "Fiddly" or has too many rules, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. I know it just amounts to a bunch of random tables, but did you really need this whole section to tell you there's like a 20% chance it rains?

Wilderness Traps. More traps. Traps are good. They're all CR 5 or below. That's bad.

Next is a whole chapter on familiars and animal companions that adds options, clarification and variety that's sorely needed. They're not all amazing options, but nothing ever is. It's fine, and plenty of the "bad" options I saw are fine enough if that's what you want. Prankster familiars getting the ability to fool their master is cute and harmless enough, but I've had GMs who don't need that kind of ammo. YMMV I guess.

Spells. You can't have a nature book without a big list of new nature spells, I guess. For once I don't mind, because D20 is a little lacking in decent nature-themed spells and this section adds some. It also adds Fey Form and Ooze Form spell lines, which is nice. Overall the spell section is okay, nothing to write home about. Sea of Dust stands out to me as the kind of spell that can start an entire plot moving...even if it's not the sort of thing we need stats on.

Equipment. This is a bunch of junk, frankly.

Magical Plants. I separated this out because this section drives me nuts. Honestly, it's neat to think of magic plants and what they might do. And I know it's better to have magic item costs than to not have them listed. But it's weird that these things are so restrictive in their use when nobody in their right fucking mind is ever going to buy them. It also brings to mind parties carting around a pile of sod and a tree in a wagon because it gives magic fruit. I don't like the whole culture of constantly saying PCs are idiots who do dumb shit...but I can really see this one happening.


@}-,-'--


The Conclusion. So is this a bad book? It's not great, but it definitely comes off as worse than it really is. The races, archetypes and feats sections are exhausting, so by the time you get to the meat of what this book is great at, you're probably too tired or mad to see it. In addition to that, the races, archetypes, and feats are most of what we were really hoping were great. It's a simple fact that for every GM, there's 4 to 6 players. Ultimate Wilderness brings a lot of cool flavor and options to the table, but overall it's a very "GM heavy" book. That's okay sometimes, but it's not what we wanted. As for me? I like it just fine. It brings forth great rule systems for things I've always wanted and hated "bullshitting" through in the past. It puts Ultimate Wilderness squarely in my "problematic favorite" category along with Gunslinger, Improved Familiar, and cheese fries.

World Building 101: Racial Culture (Yes, it's about Orcs)

So the Orc Argument kicked up again. I'll explain what that is in a moment, but suffice to say it's a fight I've been having for ten years or more now. I thought I'd collect my thoughts about it and tie in a little bit of advice on not being super fucking yikes when you include non-human races in your game. Before we go any further, though, I want to say two things.

I'm not an expert, and I'm not well spoken at the best of times.

And.

We are going to talk about real racism and real fascism and I want you to take it seriously. I'm sorry  if you feel like I'm telling you what to do, but some methods of thought or ideals we're discussing aren't okay. They cause real harm to real people, and believing these things or normalizing them is the first step down a very dark and destructive path.


I'm glad we got that out of the way. The "Orc Argument" I'm referring to is a lot of different individual topics ending in the general idea that depictions of Orcs (and sometimes other nonhuman races) is mired in racism, and the idea of an "antagonist race" is woefully terrible at best. The argument is generally one side saying "Hey maybe these are shitty racial descriptions and we shouldn't promote ideas like ingrained evil, eugenics, or stereotyped rip-offs of existing human culture" and the other side generally claiming that nothing has ever been racist or bad in the history of anything that's ever existed.

You know how racists are.

Anyway. This begins with Tolkien and how some alarming things leaked into his writing. While nothing leads to a directly stated narrative of Orcs being analogous to a real world race or culture, I hope this assorted collection of facts will get you closer to seeing what I mean.


Purity of blood and bloodlines are incredibly important in the Lord of the Rings books, from Aragorn's bloodline to Gondor's weakening totally having nothing to do with their mixing with Middle Men.

Race mixing, as Saruman mixing the blood of orcs and men, is depicted as a "great sin".

There is certainly an element of genetic imperative in his writings, from Orcs being "born evil" to the idea that Eowyn will never be happy so long as she's trying to "fight like a man" and refusing a more nurturing role in life.

Villains in Lord of the Rings are from the east and consistently(though not universally) described as dark, black, swarthy, sallow-skinned or slant-eyed.

Many of the heroes are tall and fair. All of them are white. And no, I'm not saying the hobbits or dwarves are tall. If you thought of using that as a "gotcha!" you're a jackass.

In a letter, Tolkien described Orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."


I won't go into depictions of dwarves in his work and the yikes of their place in the world, but look up their common traits and ask yourself who it reminds you of. So, was Tolkien racist? I don't think he was consciously so. He hated the racist depictions of Axis powers in wartime propaganda and he hated Hitler. We know that for a fact. No, I think the man was incredibly Eurocentric and that's where a lot of our problems come from to begin with.

The fact is, Middle Earth was fashioned with Orcs to provide an endless supply of enemies to kill that nobody felt bad about killing. This is a handy parallel, because that's what virtually every RPG setting uses Orcs and other Goblinoids for. In most settings, descriptions of Orcs sound like someone is playing Bad Guy Trope Bingo.

Here's a collection of what Orcs are like as of 3rd edition Faerun: Warlike to the point of the concept consuming their entire lives, savage, patriarchal to the point of treating women as trophies and slaves, brutish and encouraging of in-fighting between siblings, uncaring of the weak, sickly or undersized, and fond of slavery.

The passage in Races of Faerun then goes on to explain how much it sucks being an orc woman, then describe several other types of orc who are just as bad. Some of my favorite facts include Mountain Orcs are really dirty, Gray Orcs are irrational, and Half-Orcs all had terrible childhoods and are too savage for human society. We at least got through the entire Half-Orc section without talking about rape, so that's a mild half-thumb up for Forgotten Realms.

In Warhammer and Warhammer 40k, Orks are fucking ridiculous ultra-violent soccer hooligan types who are also psychic plant-based creatures who reproduce by spores and don't even have women. If you think I'm making any of that up...save yourself. Don't look it up. I don't normally overstate how awful something is without explaining it...but don't open that stupid, stupid pandora's box. Libera tu tutemet ex infernis.

Volo's guide is a new book, only four years old and written for 5th edition, and yet...it's about as bad as Races of Faerun. In 5th edition, Orcs fight constantly, their entire lives consumed with conflict, in the hopes that they can die in battle so Gruumsh adds them to his eternal army so they can keep fighting forever after they die. It calls Orcs savage and brutish, but also states that only orcs who were "touched by Gruumsh" can control or lead other Orcs. That might have been fine if it were some sort of literary flourish or a subtle implication, but the book goes on to state that Gruumsh literally sends "particularly charismatic" orcs an actual vision which imbues them with supernatural powers that allows them to rise to a position of leadership, which would be completely impossible otherwise. Yikes.

Volo's Guide goes on to say things like the Orcs are superstitious and constantly live in fear of their gods(who are all evil, of course). They don't pair-bond at any point and see mating as a "mundane necessity of life" with no special significance. Orc children receive no maternal or paternal love and grow up in constant conflict and are left to cultists of the orc's spellcaster and assassin gods to "accept or reject" if they can't handle it. So 5e's core setting Orcs aren't even pro-social, basically.

Several settings(not just Faerun or Volo's guide) also include the idea that Orcs "respect strength" as a simple(stupid) explanation why they're ruled over by a different, smarter(more European) and more powerful villain. The idea that strength and fighting is often their only major cultural trait yet they're perfectly willing to follow orders and stay in their lane when the GM needs some weenies for a fight is a big part of our problem.

There's a lot to unpack here. I'm sure everyone who's read our examples(and many other depictions of Orcs) can tell that these are pretty bad, but maybe not why. I'm going to try and slowly unravel this massive pile of yikes for you.

First I want you to imagine I came at you with a character concept. Forget any sort of racial background. Say they're a human. I tell you they're from a tribe of barbarian nomads who survive by fighting and raiding. They didn't have a mother or father and they've been fighting their entire lives. When there's no fight to fight, they're training to fight. They're hoping to die a "good" death in battle so they can fight for forever in the afterlife. They only respect strength.

I want you to look me in the fucking face and tell me that character would be acceptable to play. Drive up to where I live, knock on my door, pull a Ted Kennedy and look me in the eye. It's an absurd character most people, if not all, would call a thin excuse to play a munchkin character who checks out of all aspects of the game except combat. You would rightly call their barbarian tribe ridiculous to the point of parody.

Except you probably noticed that all I did in that passage was describe an Orc as presented in either of our fantasy examples. Even past all other implications, these cultures are poorly written. They're slapped together with "evil" in mind and filled to the brim with ridiculous stock "evil race" stereotypes. Faerun throws in sexism for seemingly no reason other than to make Orcs a little more detestable, something I can't stand to see. Many settings imply or outright state that an orc's nature is something "inside" them, or in their blood.


In the real world, the belief that behavior is determined by an individual's genes or some aspect of their physiology is called Biological Determinism. You probably know this from three places: One is that it's a core component of Eugenics. Another is the famously awful cranium capacity measurement experiments in the late 1800s which were used to justify slavery and oppose women's suffrage and immigration. The final reason you may remember this concept is that it's often used to scientifically justify racism despite being an enormous pile of bullshit that's been discredited for over a hundred years.

So it's not that Orcs resemble a real-life culture in any way, and that's what makes it racist. Orc "culture" being expressed as a ridiculous caricature and Orcs being "genetically bad" are essentially the same thing as tactics real life Fascists and racists use against marginalized groups to justify unconscionable acts against them.

This isn't okay to do just because this is a fantasy world with races who do have striking physiological differences. Supporting fascist ideals is wrong, even implying that Biological Determinism might be correct is wrong, and nothing about this being a fake fantasy world full of green dudes makes that any better.

The idea of an "antagonist race" is a fairly toxic one in several ways. The wholesale "othering" of an entire race is a pathway to racism that I've personally seen: People who strongly identify as Alliance players have expressed radical feelings against orcs in World of Warcraft despite the story going out of its way to declare that no entire race of people is all bad. However, this declaration often comes at the end of a long, long period where the faction opposite of you is depicted as far more villainous than those actual players would know unless they played your part of the story.

It's also shitty simplistic writing steeped in old Eurocentric ideas. All the good people live in this tired pastiche of ancient medieval Europe, mostly all happen to be white, and all the bad guys are total savages with darker skin who come from a different land, live by raiding and pillaging, think of nothing but fighting, and want nothing more than kill and destroy because it's "In their blood"...

Yikes.

I mean, it sure does sound worse when I spell it out, right? But I just described the classic Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Most of the people reading this will probably have played in a game like that. I truly, sincerely hope I don't need to explain what's not okay about that.


It's okay for races to have differences. It's not okay for races to have a biological component that drives or determines their behavior. It's okay for a culture to have negative aspects. It's not okay for any culture to be wholly and ridiculously evil. It's not okay just because they're racial cultures. It's not okay to use an entire race as antagonists in any sense. It's bad writing, it's a bad habit, and it's supporting bad methods of thought.

The idea that a villain has mobilized an entire race of people to do his bidding is another concept born from racism. It doesn't make any sense and is born from the sweeping generalizations racists love to make. Organizations, tribes, cities, individuals will work for villains for a variety of reasons. An entire race is absurd. If you want mooks and weenies in your fights, and stock villains you can easily use in fights, I promise you that you're not gonna have to stretch to make your party not care about killing them. You don't have to fuck up your whole world to achieve it.

If you want to use Orcs as villains, fine. If you want to tell a story about racism, wonderful. If you want people in your world insisting that Orcs(or tieflings, or aasimar, or any other race, even the planetouched) are just "born a certain way" and "have savagery in their blood", fine. It's not okay for that claim to be literally true.

Coming up with cool organizations and compelling villains is part of the fun of world building, anyway. Nobody's asking you to have a dense, morally grey plot. Just think about the decisions you're making and ask yourself why you're doing it. "That's just what D&D is" or "It's Tolkienesque" have been the crutch our hobby has been limping forward on for too long. Cast it aside and be better. Write better worlds.

Meme Builds: The Shape

"I-I-I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall; not seeing the wall, looking past the wall, looking at this night...inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. Now, you can either ignore it, or you can help me stop it."



I was building an NPC, so I was looking at rogue archetypes. Here's a dirty secret: For as much as I like rogue, I tend not to bother with most of its archetypes. Back in the original, non-unchained rogue days they had very little you could trade out for other class abilities, and 90% of the archetypes that popped up would trade Trapfinding and Trap Sense for something minor, and that's it. I got to skipping them, I found them boring.

Then I found Rake. It's in a well respected hardcover book, it's mechanically effective, and it's a ton of fun. It was like Christmas. Within a few minutes of finding it I had a build in mind, and I thought...I might as well share. Rake is described as boastful, roguish and charming. Michael Meyers is none of those things...but let's use Rake to build him anyway.


The Shape
Class: Unchained Rogue
Archetype: Rake

Feats
1
2b Weapon Focus(Dagger)
3 Dazzling Display
5
7
9 Shatter Defenses
11 Quiet Death
13
15
17
19

Rogue Talents
2 Weapon Training
4
6
8
10 Opportunist
12
14
16
18
20

First off, having the skill unlock for Intimidate is necessary to this build. If you're playing an Unchained Rogue, you'll be taking that as your first Rogue's Edge unlock. You can also take the Signature Skill feat, but either way: Make sure you have it by level five.

The idea behind this build is easy. You pop up out of nowhere, stab them, and horrify someone into a coma with Intimidate's skill unlock. Bravado's Blade lets you trade up to your entire sneak attack bonus into an Intimidate roll, which can easily net you the "over ten" panicked condition bonus of the intimidate skill unlock. This sends them screaming away from you. Sure, it'll alert everyone around you, but that can be to your advantage. You can move people around who would otherwise be stationary, or pick off more people as they split up to look for you. They might even leave something unguarded. In addition: some people may come back after their panicked condition is over...but they might not, too. This could potentially buy you a lot of time to work.

The beauty of this is that while it's an ambush build...you can do all this shit in combat too. You can reliably crowd control people by trading your damage out, and because it's a free action? You can do it on any applicable Attacks of Opportunity as well. That's why I listed Opportunist as a required portion of this build. People running in a blind panic also makes them provoke AoOs. Handy.


Pros. Crowd control is huge. This is also not really a very heavy build: You have a ton of room for other things. You can easily turn this into a combat rogue, or even multiclass. It's easy to fit into millions of different play styles or character types. This build borders on just being an amazing trick you can work into other, pre-existing builds.


Cons. Infiltrating by scaring people can be really hairy and unpredictable. It's a powerful tool, but you need to be able to think on your feet and react to situations accordingly. Alerting everyone that an enemy is among them can sometimes be to your benefit...but sometimes it's not. People will be looking for you, so a high stealth check is a must. If you can find a way to get Hide in Plain Sight, it will be extremely useful. People running around like chickens with their heads cut off will reduce your number of viable hiding places. In addition to those concerns, some things are just plain immune to fear.

Oh, and you gave up Trapfinding and Danger Sense. If your party was looking for a typical "Pick the Locks, Disarm the Traps" Rogue...you'll do okay, but you'll eventually have some bad news for them... around the time you find your first magical trap.


Finishing the Character. There are so many places to take this build that our Christmas Morning theme continues. You can stack this build with anything that gives swift intimidates, since Bravado's Blade is a free fucking action. That means you could use the boar style tree(though you may have to multiclass for all those feats) or the borderline overpowered Enforcer to get additional(albeit smaller bonus) chances in a round. Demoralize doesn't stack, but it's handy if you're up against someone who's hard to demoralize, or you'd rather keep your damage up by not trading everything out. Gory Finish can let you pop up, kill a weak enemy, and set up a whole room of people as demoralized... very thematic, but also handy to start a combat with. Building a grappler and taking the feat Strangler would let you hold someone in place while they're flipping out screaming at you. I don't know how effective that would be, but it's certainly a hilarious mental image. You could also fill out the utility of Intimidate with Nerve-Wracking Negotiator or even just taking skill focus. Any skill bonus you can get over the "reliable" level of Intimidate can just add damage back into your strikes.

Rogue can take intimidating prowess as a talent to free up feat choices, but it also has a ton of complementary talents. Fast Getaway or Major Magic in Invisibility can help you completely disappear after an ambush. If you're confident enough that you're not trading out every single die of sneak attack, Bleeding Attack will help you tick away at their HP while they're running from you.

I want to give a special section to discussing a particular feat, Dastardly Finish. It lets you coup de grace cowering opponents, which is a condition you can cause once you have 15 ranks of Intimidate. Here's the thing, though: anything with a limited duration ends at the beginning of the initiative count they were caused. So, someone who you caused to cower on your action wouldn't be cowering for your next action. You could use this feat on someone you demoralized via an AoO, but in general, this feat is a great one for your friends to take, not you.


For Full Memery. Dress up like an actual fucking horror movie slasher. A mask is a must. Build a reputation. Straight up gruesomely murder people who deserve it. Leave calling cards. Use a Hat of Disguise to rapidly switch to your killer persona. Better yet: Dress like your killer persona, and use a Hat of Disguise to pass for normal.


If You Hate Fun. For once, there's not much to put here. It's not a meme-heavy build in the way that someone's going to notice or think it's silly if you don't want them to. You can play the boastful rogue in the way Rake recommends, or a cowboy-esque brawler who relies on overawe and reputation to get things done. In addition: You don't have to use daggers. You can use any finesse melee weapon for your Weapon Focus.

Stupid Magic Items III

I told you I'd never run out of these. While I'm removing the "In defense of the magic shop" descriptor as this goes forward, never forget that I do this to illustrate that giving players freedom to come up with their own magic items, or even just buying things off the shelf, is preferable to constantly getting random loot.


Lesser Poisoner's Jacket. Sometimes things look good because they fit a role well. Sometimes they look great because you don't see the need to do the math on it. You trust the designer to make sure the item is 'worth it' to buy. Fortunately for all of you, I like math. So, first off, you're going to be getting this item between levels 7 and 8, if you want it. It'd be a significant magic item in that range. Second, it costs 12,000 gold and lets you 'create' a 300gp(or less) poison three times a day. It sounds great, like I said. Well, the first problem is that you need to use this jacket 40 times before it was worthwhile to buy it over just buying the poisons outright. If you use all three of them in one combat(Likely, and even probable), that's fourteen encounters. That's not great, but none of it is a dealbreaker, exactly.

Your best options for poison are going to be Blood Leaf Residue(DC 16 contact poison for HP and CON damage), Giant Wasp Poison(DC 18 for DEX damage), and Large Scorpion Venom(DC 17 for STR damage). You can't actually make a decent poison that's going to directly help you kill someone, but that's okay. Debuffs can sometimes win you a fight.

Hopefully you see where I'm going with this. At level 8, someone with a "bad" fort save will have a +4 or so. Someone with a "good" fort save will have anywhere from a +8 to a +10. Monsters virtually never have a "bad" fortitude save, and their numbers at level 8 will ballpark around +12. So your significant expenditure item is netting you "free" poisons you have to use a ton of to get value from that will be obsolete even before you can reasonably get the item.

Oh, and the greater version is bad too. Repeat everything I said, and also there simply aren't very many decent poisons in the 2k-4k gold range that you'd be excited to use.


Volatile Vaporizer. I was gonna let this whole "stupid magic items" thing slide. I was. There's a lot of shit to talk about and I felt I made my point. Then I saw this abomination while gearing up a character and I got real mad. This thousand gold consumable item turns a potion into a 10ft radius cloud which affects everyone in it. It's an item which is consumable that costs a thousand gold or more that you use on a 50gp potion so it can affect multiple people.

Let's assume you need more convincing. For this item to be worthwhile, you'd need to fit twenty people in this 10ft radius. You can fit 12, if they're not ratfolk. Even then, they'd have to all be busy(unable to just drink a potion on their own) and all benefit from the potion for this to be worthwhile.

So this is the perfect item for your party of 24 ratfolk who all pack as tight as possible in a 10ft radius, who all have ranged attacks and all benefit universally from a cure light wounds potion that cost a thousand fucking gold. Great, we found a use.


Book of Extended Summoning. So this is where someone tries to make the argument that you're not "supposed to" buy everything in the book, and their value comes from finding them in a treasure hoard. My counter-argument is that finding something like this begs to be sold, and if it can't? It feels like being cheated out of loot.

This is a book which functions as a Metamagic Rod of Extend, but only for summoning spells, only of a particular alignment, and it crumbles when used. A Lesser Rod of Extend is 3,000 gold. The lesser book is a whopping 750 gold. Yes, that means Rod makes its money back in a mere four uses. In a busy dungeon, that might be two fucking days. Easily. The Standard and Greater versions fare similarly, losing value after four-ish uses. If it would be completely ludicrous to buy an item, it shouldn't be on the random loot table either. Whoever decided this item's cost has their head up their ass.


Cautionary Creance. This is a 100ft leash which only functions when you attach it to a flying animal companion or familiar. The leash then attaches to the master's arm, giving him a -1 penalty on skill checks and attack rolls with that arm. So you give up the significant range advantage of a flying companion by leashing them and take a minor attack penalty in exchange for...feather fall at will. They're...they're explicitly a flying creature, how often do you think you're going to need to cast feather fall on them? Other than that, once per day it lets you use Share Touch Spells at a range. So if you desperately need to buff your hawk once a day and don't mind carrying a ludicrous one hundred feet of leather strap around all the time, I guess this is your item.


Dust of Acid Consumption. This dust will absorb up to ten gallons of acid and turn it into a minor consumable acid attack item. It costs 1,600 gold. The lengths that you'd have to go to, just to render this item legitimately useful, are staggering. There's other ways to get rid of acid. Depending on the acid, buckets work. Those are five silver. A guy casting Protection from Elements probably works too. He's probably in your party. Just give him the two grand.


Efreeti Bottle. It's a 145 thousand gold item which you have a 10 percent chance of losing forever because he attacks you, or a 10 percent chance of losing forever because he granted you three wishes, which cost a little over half the price of this item. Great use of your gold. Again, I'm weighing this against selling the item. You could sell this and have most of the gold toward just buying three wishes.

Dumb and Wrong: D20, III

You might be wondering if this means I'm not done with Mecha and Manga. No, apparently, I'm not: it has a thing or two on this list. The density of 'wrong' in that supplement is fucking staggering.



Benefit: Normal Appearance. "Benefit" is a catch-all category of feats that provide a small benefit such as being an actual police officer, having ties to the mafia, or even having a friend you can call who has a teleporter... or a taco truck. It's for things that will be useful but can't really be quantified by numbers.

One of the suggested benefits in Mecha and Manga is the ability to "buy off" a drawback associated with your character's physical appearance or race. A "Drawback" is a numeric penalty or drawback like the Hulk's involuntary transformation or a weakness to a particular substance, like Kryptonite. You take them voluntarily so...if...you don't want a drawback, you just... don't take one. If it's late in the game, you pay off the point(s) and you erase it. That's how Mutants and Masterminds is. Changes have to be justified in the game, but after that? You're done, re-arrange your points.

This makes me so mad. What kind of rinky-dink bullshit is this where we have to catalogue this whole process by writing down our drawback then writing "Benefit: Bought off" next to it? Why include mandatory archetypes if you're going to let people skirt the drawbacks in them? This is exactly the dumb shit I was worried about when I mentioned the racial archetypes earlier in the book. It's unhelpful and wrong. Speaking of wrong...


Benefit: Standard Features. Artificial heroes can have five points of equipment per rank installed in themselves "As part of their species racial template". I mean, you guys don't need me for this one, right? Can you think of a reason this doesn't gel with the rules? The whole point of equipment is that they're locked down, minor point value powers that are balanced by the fact that you can lose them. You can't exactly lose something that's installed, can you?

The Features powers exists for this purpose. Once again, Mecha and Manga pointlessly re-invents the wheel.


"Golden Age" Benefits. I probably don't have a lot to say about the M&M Golden Age supplement, so let's place this here. It's a book on how to run a Golden Age comics era game, the sort of comics you saw in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Apparently, an enormous part of this book focuses on WWII, like there's nothing else to that era. Regardless, the Golden Age had a higher percentage of heroes who were "normal" people than today. It was a much more "down to Earth" time. Before we go any further, I just want to say M&M isn't very good at expressing the "Normal" side of heroing. If you wanted to run a Watchmen style game, you could absolutely do that: But you're not flexing the system very well. There's a lot that the system intentionally glosses over for that hero feel, and "low power hero" games might even be better in say, D20 Modern, Spycraft, or Gurps. Basically, what I'm saying is this book is already kind of on my shit list for being a bad idea.

That said.

Golden Age didn't seem to get the memo and includes a lot, a LOT of information and rules that I can't imagine coming up. There's a benefit(with several ranks!) to be exempt from the draft. I mean, you get why this isn't okay, right? How is this not just flatly a part of your game's plot? What the fuck are you going to do, leave the guy out of the military adventures? Take away someone's PC and tell them "They got drafted, make a new PC"? If they're doing all of the adventures together anyway whether they've been drafted or not, what exactly do I get out of spending points on this? There's even a huge amount of pontificating on what "level" of exempt you are and what social stigmas you face for it. It honestly feels like it's written with no research and just reflects basic pop culture ideas of the forties and fifties. This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in a supplement. This definitely replaces that 3.0 D&D feat that gave you minor benefits vs. hippos as the stupidest feat ever created.

There's also a benefit to be exempt from rationing, giving you a +4 to any rolls on the "Rationing Table". I couldn't even find it! I have no idea what the fuck this does! Just take it and buy out the eggs and steak in your local supermarket, I guess. Fill up your big fucking death trap 40s car with gasoline and do donuts on main street.

A depressing amount of M&M's supplements have huge sections telling you how to play and build your character. In a system that's so free and agile...that sucks.


Pathfinder's Butterfly Knife. How the hell did I miss this one in my post about bad weapons? It provides literally no benefit over a basic dagger, can't be thrown, requires some nonsense to open it, and requires an exotic weapon proficiency to use. It's a Worse Dagger.

Where do I fucking begin?

Let's start of real simple. You can totally throw a balisong at someone. Like, it's not even harder than a traditional knife to throw. I even remember hearing something about throwing an unlocked butterfly knife at someone so it flails end-over-end in the air and stuns or confuses them.

This is what I mean by cool tax. This is a stock example I can point to, forever and until the end of time, of cool tax. It provides no benefit over a regular dagger and I'm floored that they couldn't think of anything to spice it up with. Even if you don't want to do that, what's wrong with this just being an expensive dagger, a modification? What's wrong with this being martial but with a small benefit? This is creatively bankrupt.


Chalk. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. I don't always check the physical copy when I'm writing stuff. It's extremely rare that the PFSRD website is wrong or misleading. Still, when someone I know showed the entry for chalk to me, I had to go look. Here, I super try to avoid doing this, but you need a direct quote. 

"This fat piece of white chalk easily marks wood, metal, or stone. You can write with it for about 24 hours before it is expended. Chalk also comes in other colors, but these are rarer and can be more expensive."

What a weird fucking way to express how much chalk you get. You can write with it for about twenty four hours? How in the world do they expect anyone to track that? You know, the entry for ink and inkpen don't even bother explaining how much writing you get out of it. Because it doesn't matter! Sometimes it's okay to abstract mundane gear. My brawler Icke had applejack whiskey and ink on him for the entire game. Was it the same bottles of either he started with? Probably not! It's probably his hundreth bottle of applejack and millionth inkwell. It's FINE. It's an extremely small amount of resource, even for a level one character. We can calm down.

And this entry also hits on a huge pet peeve of mine. An enormous one. Vague statements like "This is rarer and more expensive" can fuck off. It's ONE COPPER, just say it comes in a variety of colors! This is never going to come up! You're just baiting people into arguments. Arguments over chalk. Again, it's one copper, so if it's "more expensive" what is it, two fucking copper? This is the purest definition of minutiae I've ever seen.

And yeah, I'm completely aware that the person who wrote that probably didn't think about it and just needed to fill a few sentences. What do you say about chalk, anyway? It's chalk. Buy some chalk. Make little drawings on the dungeon walls, it's what we're all gonna use it for anyway.