We've got a busy week here at Paizo. Come to twitch.tv/officialpaizo on Thursday, Aug 31st at 4 p.m. Pacific for a special livestream to kickstart our Pathfinder Playtest. Join Michael Sayre and James Case as they talk about the design concepts behind our two new classes!

I have no idea what they would even be at this point, I've kind of got every class I want. They did show off the gorgeous new cards in a very recent blogpost though, maybe a harrower of some kind? I'd be super suprised to see the original version of the Medium that uses harrow legends instead of mythic legends.

I've purposefully been holding off on making anything until 2.5e drops, but i'm pretty excited to put together an Anadi Wood Sorcerer+Elementalist that specializes in fabricating permanent objects during the adventuring day. Rope bridges, grappling hooks, nets, whatever you need, so long as it's got some rigid or rope-like components, they can put it together over the course of a short re-focus.

I'm brewing up a sandbox/campaign for my group and it's coming together swimmingly. The overarching theme of the adventure will be homecoming. The players are marooned and need to find their way home, the knights of lastwall might find an artifact or two to help take back the gravelands, the firebrands want to make a land of exiles into a refuge, etc. etc. I'm struggling with the motivations of one of the six forces the party'll face in the field however.

An off-shoot of the Technic League has discovered that they can hijack a ritual occuring off the coast of Garund to resurrect the league's founder and zap her home, earning themselves a ticket to Androffan in the process. To pull this off, they need the necromantic expertise of the Whispering Way. It's a one-way trip into the storm, even for powerful spellcasters, and the Whispering Way is aware of this.

To those more familiar with the Whispering Way than I am, do you have any ideas as to what the Whispering Way would be up to on the side while out there? Why would they agree, and what do they get out of sacrificing capable necromancers to this effort?

I'm thinking that since the Whispering Tyrant hates Aroden, there might be some connection there, but it's pretty nascent at the moment, and i'm not entirely sure I can link that up with the game's theme.

In games like Deus Ex and Dishonored, the player can leave combat ability on the table and go through the entirety of the game without fighting anyone. Stacking boxes to get to where they need, sneaking through complexes, and talking down the big-bad are all options that get you to credits. If you could coordinate with your team, i'm certain you could get a similar playstyle going in quite a satisfying way in PF2e. Realistically though, people come to this game to roll dice with their bardiches out, so you're more likely than not going to have a standard grab bag of murderhobos as your teammates.

With friends like these, how viable are your Adam Jensens, your Faith Mirrorsedges, or your Frisk Undertales? Can you really set up a character that doesn't use any combat ability and find success in a standard adventure path, relying on your team to take on your share of the combat encounter budgets for you? In what ways would you pull your weight to justify the character's "slot" in the party?

In games like Magic the Gathering, you're building your decks less around cool singular abilities, creatures and spells, and more about orchestrating a moment of critical mass where you can overwhelm and guarantee victory. Pathfinder 2e has some similarity to this kind of building, where the idea is less to make a situation where every time you X, Y happens, which triggers Z procs, and more to stack bonuses and penalties to artificially create critical successes for your team, then figuring out which ability or spell to best make use of that setup. For example, the ideal combat set-up against a boss fight on a balcony might be Heroism 9 on the fighter from the cleric, Synesthesia on the enemy from the bard, a Gust of Wind from the wizard to inflict prone, all culminating in a Brutish Shove off the ledge from the fighter.

However, the big appeal for TTRPGs for me is that not everything you can do needs to touch combat like in a traditional RPG video game. I'm particularly interested in strategies that help you traverse environments, interacting with people you wouldn't ordinarily be able to get a word in edgewise with, and bypass dangerous encounters entirely.

In this vein, I think Protector Tree and Shape Wood are a great couple of spells for any primalist to learn and prepare on the regular. Protector Tree creates a really nice damage mitigation tool in combat, but it also sprouts a permanent (unworked) medium sized tree! That's only kind of neat, but becomes a valuable resource when paired with the Shape Wood spell, which just so happens to require a bunch of unworked wood to be useful! Now, so long as you have both of these spells in equal measure, you can fabricate wooden items that you ordinarily wouldn't be able to bring with you on adventures for dirt cheap. Ladders, steps, platforms, wheels, axles - you've basically got a low-tech Garry's mod at your disposal! If you need a cart to move massive loot, a few casts and some basic assembly and a Form-Retention'd Wildshape will get that Mithril Door from the dungeon back to town.

Are there any spells, items, or abilities you've found useful when used together like this? I'd be eager to hear them!