Pathfinder RPG Advanced Race Guide

Paizo's latest add-on to its collection to its Pathfinder RPG line is the Advanced Race Guide (ARG). This is not a book for DIY would-be dictators to guide the master race to take over the world, but rather an in-depth exploration of the various character races available in the Pathfinder RPG and setting lines. I find it an interesting supplement, although not necessarily a must-have for everyone. GMs who want to tinker with their races for their homebrew worlds will definitely want a copy, as will players who want some more unusual race options (provided their GM allows the book of course). For those who largely stick to core material or don't do a lot of homebrewing or want to use unusual races, it may not be worth the expense (if in doubt, get the $10 .pdf). There is some degree of repetition of older material, as the ARG is to an extent a compilation of races featured in previous Paizo publications, although the purpose of the book is also of course to expand in depth upon them all. And of course there is an extensive section on how to build brand new races as well.

The ARG builds upon concepts originally introduced in Advanced Player's Guide (APG), and I would say that Paizo largely expects you to own and use the options in the APG if you want to use the ARG. The ARG uses alternate racial abilities, alternate racial favored class abilities, and archetypes, all introduced in the APG first, and the archetypes available include archetypes for the APG base classes as well as the base classes introduced in Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat. I take this as a blessing and a curse, a sign of "supplement bloat" to a degree. If you own and use all the options in the APG, then you'll have no problem further supplementing your games with the ARG. If you don't, the book may be largely useless to you. My own personal dilemma comes from the fact that I do not use any supplementary base classes in my home games, so all the archetypes that reference the APG, UM, or UC classes are useless to me and I feel like I have less content available to me. I realize there is a rock and a hard place situation here--if no prior supplementary material is referenced, then those who do use those materials also feel short changed. I will give Paizo credit that they explain what all the new concepts are so that if you don't own the APG you will still understand how the various alternate abilities and archetypes work, but this book, more than any other supplement to date, has rung to me as "you must have collected all four to be able to use this book properly." This situation is very much YMMV, and I point it out simply so that others may be aware.

The book is divided into four sections, the first three of which are basically variations on the same theme. Every race depicted in these three sections gets new alternate racial abilities, favored class abilities, archetypes, as well as race specific feats and equipment. There's also extensive flavor text for all races, and lovely art to accompany it.

The first section looks in depth at the core races, dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc, and human. It expands upon their description text from the core rulebook, and it adds more alternate racial abilities and favored class options than what are listed in the APG, although what is listed in the APG is also repeated. Every core race now has a unique favored class option for every core and base class available in the game. Core races also get three new archetypes per race. I appreciated the extra detail in this section, although I did feel to a point like I was re-reading stuff I had already in the core rulebook or APG, but the new material is also valuable. I especially enjoyed most of the new feats and equipment.

The second section basically does the same thing for non-core but popular races for both PCs and NPCs, such as familiar "savage" humanoids like goblins, kobolds, and orcs, as well as the various races oldschoolers would collectively refer to as "planetouched," like tieflings and aasimar. This section goes into a little less detail--although what is there is still comprehensive, and each race has only two archetypes and less new material. Likewise the third section repeats the formula for very uncommon races, including a number of "animal-folk" like catfolk and tengu, as well as some unusual planar influenced races like the suli (jann-descended) and the wayang (shadow-descended). My understanding is a lot of these races originally appeared in Pathfinder setting material (I don't usually buy from the Companion or Chronicles lines so I can't speak to how much new is introduced). These uncommon races get only one archetype and again less information in general, but are still presented with well written descriptions. I did feel short changed on the amount of abilities--in particular, I think at least the races in the second section could have used more racial abilities and favored class options, to match the first chapter. I would have been willing to sacrifice some archetypes from the first or second chapters for the extra space. In fairness, for racial options, I generally prefer the alternate abilities to race-specific archetypes, but that's in part because I grew tired of racial class restrictions as far back as the 80s, and it's a concept I have no desire to see return to the descendants of AD&D.

The final section is the race builder, a system to allow GMs to build brand new races from scratch. It uses a point based system to build races, with "standard," "advanced," and "monstrous" races as categories for how many points you should use to build a certain race and how many abilities they may be able to have. The system includes a strong caveat that the race building rules are guidelines, and that the entire section is to be used at the GM's will and with the GM's discretion, which I do think must be borne strongly in mind by any and all users. I participated in the ARG playtest and review and I think the designers did take some of the most important feedback to heart -- for example, that not all core races needed to be shoehorned into a 10 point build, when obviously some core race abilities were truly more or less valuable than what the developers originally tried to assign them to be to make them fit a mold that they'd never been put into in the first place. This makes some of the point costs and assignments more sensible than they were than in the playtest, and at least I am fine with the fact that some core races come out to more or less than 10 points. From what I recall from the playtest, I think few will protest.

Still, I wish more player feedback from the playtest had been taken into consideration for the final product. My particular, though minor, peeve is that there are too many too-specific abilities -- a racial ability that grants you the ability to work with stone, but no such thing for working, say, with metal or clay or leather. Of course you can substitute in such things yourself, but I would have preferred many of the choices to have been made more generic to begin with, rather than force us to wing it in a system that already presumes a fair amount of "winging" to start with.

Nonetheless, it is a solid system that will give race tinkerers a lot of content to work with--again as long as all is taken as firm guidelines than laser-etched rules. I also like that the section provides some advice for how to deal with races of different power levels. Since Pathfinder did away with the problematic "level adjustment" concept from 3.5, the race builder rules offer different alternatives for having very racially "mixed" adventuring parties. The basic rule of thumb is generally to take a powerful race and remove abilities so that they match core more closely, or alternately to use the race builder to add abilities to weaker races so they are better balanced with stronger ones. Some may not like the idea as much as I do, but I appreciate firmly getting away from the character level issue entirely.

Production-wise, the book matches the high standard of quality that other PFRPG hardcover books meet. It is a good length, printed cleanly and clearly on glossy pages with beautiful artwork that enhances but does not distract from the text. The spine is solid enough, and I ordered mine from Paizo directly, whose dutiful golems placed corner protectors all over the book so there was no chance of it getting battered in shipping. My one layout nitpick is that for each race listed, the standard racial abilities are listed in a separate box at the bottom of the page. The way the pages are designed, it is very easy to read the race's description and then go straight into alternate racial abilities before you've managed to read the standard racial ones first, and makes it hard to cross reference between the two.

The ARG is a very nice supplement, with a well-organized and vast amount of information on Pathfinder character races. While I wouldn't consider it required reading, if character racial options are what's up your alley, then it's THE go-to sourcebook for Pathfinder.

Brian Fargo plans to make Wasteland 2 backed by Kickstarter

If you've never heard of Wasteland, it was a video game produced in the 1980s and was THE seminal post-apocalyptic RPG which sired the Fallout series of games.

Veteran game developer Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment has launched a Kickstarter project to fund a sequel. Rather than deal with the utterly abysmal way publishers treat developers, let alone the fact that few mainstream games get proper QA testing before release these days, he's gone straight to the fans to provide the backing needed to get the project rolling. The response has already garnered over $1.6 million, with 18 days left to get even more. The original goal was $1 million with any additional funds going to expanding the game further; it also is part of the Kicking It Forward program, which means some of the profits will go toward other indie projects.

(Fargo, for the record, wrote and produced the original Wasteland and was co-lead on the original Fallout, and has a generally impressive list of games in his design portfolio.)

People have some reservations about patronage projects like this, and I understand those reservations. Anyone should think carefully about whether they want to contribute. But the mainstream video game world is getting riddled with issues of publishers nickel-and-diming players for bits and pieces of the game as they go along, and laying on the hassle of stunts like requiring famously single player games to be online-only. This is exactly the kind of situation where I think it's incredibly valuable to be able to put your money where your mouth is and be part of helping realize what should be a great project. As opposed to, say, pre-ordering a product you can be guaranteed will be full of bugs and incomplete on release.

And yes, I've put money down to back this. For $50, I get not only a digital copy, but a boxed copy with disc and real live actual game manual and other "feelies" that have been long forgotten in contemporary video game distribution. And all of it DRM free. All that for $10 less than the average MSRP for a mainstream RPG these days, which are usually guaranteed to be buggy and incomplete on release. (You can donate as little as $1, and for $15 you get a digital copy of the game.) I know I'll have to wait to see the final result, but I am happy to wait to see a final, complete, well-designed product. I realize I can't be guaranteed of such a thing until the game comes out, but I'm willing to take the chance this once, as I feel under the circumstances it's a good chance to take.

(crossposted to my dreamwidth and livejournal blogs)

Harvesting Fun

After Dragon Age, with its wrist-slittingly bleak outlook on storytelling, I decided to go look for something with sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. And nothing is more like the video game manifestation of a cheery Lesley Gore song than the Harvest Moon series.

Well, actually, I'd never played Harvest Moon itself before. I'm a huge fan of its fantasy cousin Rune Factory, which is in fact a really brilliant fantasy series for the DS (I believe there is a version or two for the Wii as well). But Harvest Moon actually came first, and is a series of farming games. Yep, farming. You play a newcomer to a town, you sow crops and raise livestock--and you also try to befriend and even woo townsfolk and participate in town shenanigans like various festivals. It's a simple simulation but quite addictive. Rune Factory adds dungeon crawling, monster fighting, and item crafting to the table, and as a fantasy gamer I thus prefer this, but Harvest Moon in its simplicity has its appeal, even if its cows and chickens don't look slightly and awesomely demonic.

The particular Harvest Moon game I got is "Tale of Two Towns." I'm led to understand this is a pretty entry level version of the game. Its gameplay is largely as in Rune Factory but without the monster hunting bits. You plant crops, raise animals, fish, scavenge in the wilderness, cook dishes, and chat with people and do quests for them. The gist of the story is that you move into a mountainside area occupied by two towns, who have been bickering for generations. They bicker over which empty farm of theirs you get to occupy, and you have your choice of either (and you can move back and forth between the two); one is better for raising crops and the other is better for raising animals. You have to raise the towns' friendship over time by participating in cooking festivals, which is how the towns "duel" each other. And that's pretty much it.

It's a very slow paced game, and I have a feeling I may not have picked the best example of the series out there, but it's a nice break from dark and dreary RPGs (though I will probably go back and do a replay of Fallout: New Vegas soon, or crack and buy Skyrim even though I said I'd wait until all the DLC came out first). There is a simple pleasure to be had in figuring out growth cycles and how to befriend your animals and learning recipes and so on, plus engage in the difficult matter of how to earn the most profit with what you produce or find (the mechanical goal of the series is to maximize profits, interaction and romance and town plotline aside). The music is decent, the graphics bright and pleasant, with lots of lovely little details painstakingly worked into the background.

It's a Japanese game, and for some reason every Japanese game I've ever played come with a degree of the "Guide Dang It" philosophy (to borrow a phrase from TV Tropes)--you really have to at some point look at a walkthrough to figure out certain things. But such things as they are. Some things in the game could have had a little more thought put into it -- you can have a pet owl that flies you from the top of the mountain to one of the two towns, but no way to quickly get TO the top of the mountain, so the owl is kind of useless (I wish I hadn't bought him). The inventory is waaaay too small... I get inventory management is part of the game's challenge but it's frustratingly so; inventory management is NOT fun and it's the one big thing that detracts from the series (Rune Factory has this problem as well, though Rune Factory 3 was better about it). I think if they put all your tools in a separate inventory that did not take up backpack space, that would be a godsend. The quest system is a little too random--often you receive requests for stuff that you can't possibly achieve (not till much later in the game). But ultimately, there's a lot of fun to be had.

If you like simulations and have a DS, and you're in the mood for a nice quiet game, check it out--or other Harvest Moon games. And if you like Japanese fantasy games, definitely get the Rune Factory series (3 in particular was brilliant--phenomenal story AND you are a WERE-SHEEP. Yes, a were-sheep. How can that not be awesome?). Its next installment is coming out frustratingly only for the 3DS. I may have to give in and trade in my lite for it (but generally, hate the whole 3D mess, so it may not be worth it).

Dragon Age leaves me wanting to move on from Bioware

I think I'm giving up on Bioware games for awhile. Mind, I've been trying to get away from buying anything published by EA--the company's practices do not endear me to them--but Bioware was always a big kicker. I'm a big fan of Bioware's earlier stuff--I've played the Baldur's Gate series, Neverwinter Nights and all its add-ons, and Knights of the Old Republic. I missed Jade Empire, and I missed Mass Effect and Dragon Age on release because my computer couldn't handle them at the time. But I picked up Dragon Age: Ultimate Edition for cheap on Steam relatively recently, and my delight with catching up with what Bioware was up to (even if still a year or two behind) quickly faded.

What it comes down to is the following:
- Good story moments and interesting choices offset by other moments of feeling utterly railroaded
- God, the awful cutscenes which would pull nonsense like pull your entire party into the center of a room before you got ambushed. What made that especially lazy is that there were wonderfully challenging fights that didn't have to resort to such cheesy cheating tactics. As I've noted elsewhere, if Dragon Age were a TTRPG (well, it is also one, but bear with me), and the GM suddenly picked up my miniature and moved it to a spot to his advantage, I'd grab my mini back from him and shove it up his nose.
- Others have waxed on this more than I, but it DOES feel like I've played this game several times before... with the only significant differences being that it's more gory (whatever) and I like fewer of the characters
- God the bugs. And I got this game late and fully patched, remember.  The one where the game pulls the hideously boring and cliched "you find yourself in a dungeon with none of your stuff" was just so enhanced by the fact that the game actually deleted my belongings permanently. Lovely.
- So much of it is bleak and depressing, without reprieve. I've just come off finishing Awakening, where there is not one but two sidequests which end in you finding someone's lover having committed suicide. What? Why? Why is this necessary? It's not like they were even very interesting sidequests with otherwise rewarding results (okay, one might have been if it wasn't hideously bugged, but still). Not to mention that the whole storyline is that you're pressed into service into an organization where you must either let yourself be murdered or taint yourself with demon blood, the result of with will, guaranteed, doom you to a life of nightmares and eventual insanity and death within a few decades. Lovely. I feel so heroic.
- Not interested in endless "cinematic" dialogues; voice acting isn't that important to me, but they seem to be emphasizing that and other shallow stuff rather than, say, good combat design (see above about the cutscenes). 
- And that's the biggest thing. I play RPGs often, to feel heroic. Grey areas and difficult moral decisions are good, but I want to feel like my player character chose to do good things and good things came of it. I felt often through much of the game like maybe just letting the world end might have been the kindest thing to do. Even trying to play heroic, I didn't feel it. And I often felt the most important choices were taken from me--or not adequate options were offered me.
- There was a point where I kept playing just to see how it ended, not because I was having fun.

TL;DR: I stopped having fun.

Mind, when I say the stuff about depressing and not feeling heroic--the last game I played before this was Fallout: New Vegas. Shiny happy, black and white morality, rainbows and bunnies Fallout: New Vegas. Well, that's how I seem to remember it now, even though I know there was hideous death and brutality and slavery and difficult decisions, but somehow, they made it fun. Dragon Age seems to be about showing how awful and bleak and dark and gory it can be for the sake of being awful and bleak and dark and gory. The Fallout series (I've played all of them but Tactics) is darker and bleaker and gorier, but it isn't the point; it's about how people deal with that and still come out on top. Plus the humor's better, in my opinion. But I digress.

And ultimately, I think I want to step away from Bioware is because when I stop and think about it... when I think about what was the best Bioware game EVER... for me, it was Baldur's Gate 2. Which, by all means, is one of the best computer RPGs of all time, and that's not my opinion, that's fact. :)

But I think they hit their peak early, and I haven't seen much but downhill since. I'm sure Mass Effect has its own good stuff going on, but at this point, I don't think it's worth my money to find out.

Ah well, lots of other good games out there to play. And I look forward to that, certainly.

Fallout: New Vegas: Lonesome Road - An Informal Review

So Dead Money was Fallout's take on survival horror, Honest Hearts was straightforward wilderness adventure, and Old World Blues was an especially awesome and often hilarious dose of retro sci-fi horror, Lonesome Road follows as Fallout's take on... a dungeon crawl.

And don't get me wrong, as a dungeon crawl, Lonesome Road is exceptionally well designed. You have dark dank tunnels to run through, traps to disarm, phat l00t to find, undead and constructs and aberrations to fight, and a big bad who taunts you through magic messages. That the "dungeon" is a devastated military facility and nearby town, and one exceptionally built at that, is just fabulous. If I were to set out to build a dungeon crawl game and I made it similar to Lonesome Road, I'd have done a great job.

But Lonesome Road is also supposed to be the essential finale to the Fallout New Vegas story. Sure, we all know the actual end to the story is the end to the main game (all of the DLC stories take place before the story's end). But if we played the game plus DLC in order of release, Lonesome Road is last. It's the big shabang everything was leading up to. The Big Bad gets name dropped early on in the main game, and most of the DLC all mention Ulysses and/or the Divide and the Courier's inevitable showdown involving that man and that place. For months, the hype has been built: what's going to happen at the Divide is going to be mind-blowing, reveal-all, amazing.

And instead of a mind blowing finale, we get a dungeon crawl.

The story is a loose blob of cryptic messages that strings together your purpose for traveling through the maze of twisty passages, all alike. There's only one human person in the story, and his sole purpose is to taunt you so that you remain annoyed enough to traverse the Divide so you can shoot him in the face before he sets off a nuclear missile strike (which he could have done without inviting you for the show). And that's it. You don't learn very much--Honest Hearts gave better insight both to the history of the Legion and important characters in New Vegas's backstory as well as shed light on life at the edge of the apocalypse. And it's easy to miss a lot of the clues there are. I found them, but it still doesn't fill in many blanks, and in some cases just leaves open more questions and seeming discrepancies (for example, Ulysses seems to imply the Courier accidentally wrecked the Divide, but evidence you find suggests it's always been an unlivable hellhole ever since an earthquake went off before the Great War started).

Ultimately, because the story is both piecemeal and contradictory, the point of playing through Lonesome Road feels much less like bringing history to a close and revealing more about the Courier, and more like an excuse to go hunting deathclaws in a post-apocalyptic ruin. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with hunting deathclaws in a post-apocalyptic ruin, but it shouldn't have been marketed as anything more than that, and it shouldn't have been the finale.

Purely gameplay wise, Lonesome Road is solid. The environments are exceptionally well built--there are a lot of toppled buildings and you have a lot of freedom of exploration (with minimal risk of falling through the infrastructure like Fallout world design tends to incur). If you're the kind of person who plays Fallout mostly for the shooter aspects of the game, you'll love Lonesome Road--fantastic areas to go hunting monsters in. I'd say Lonesome Road is even most enjoyable when you ignore Ulysses' ramblings and just explore and kill things.

I did experience some memory/slow down issues (on a brand new computer), although some of those were resolved after a graphics driver update. So make sure you're up to date on everything before you play. I didn't encounter many gameplay bugs.

The mechanical add ons are a mixed bag. There's a handful new weapons and armor, and you'll be very happy in particular if you like heavy weapons (my pistol toting light armored sneaky gal had less to make use of). There are several crafting recipes I wished I had about 30 levels ago, and there are several perks I'd wished I'd been able to build my character up to (there are notable exceptions in the form of a set of perks only available at level 50, which are very cool perks at that). This further makes Lonesome Road frustrating as a capstone piece--most of what it has is great for low-mid-level characters, but it's a high level adventure that came out when most who've bought it first have played through the game and are going to use their highest level characters to play through it. I seldom do multiple playthroughs, although Fallout New Vegas in general has high replay value, so I imagine the most I will get out of Lonesome Road is not the adventure itself, but the perks (literal and figurative) it will offer to new characters.

Oh yes, of course, there's also ED-E. You encounter a similar eyebot and can upgrade him (of course, by the time you finish upgrading him, you lose him). Any upgrading you do to Lonesome Road's ED-E transfers over to your companion back in the Mojave, if of course you weren't one of the people, like me, who had him randomly disappear in the middle of the Wasteland and never come back. I guess it's cool to get ED-E's backstory, but to me he'll always be a floating bucket of bugs more than anything else, and being a floating bucket of bugs with extra perks isn't much better. I'm also a very character-driven RPG player and I prefer the humanoid companions anyway. And on that note, frustratingly, ED-E also gets a perk which makes Veronica's workbench perk redundant (I guess maybe it's fair because Veronica also gets an "upgrade" perk from Dead Money... or it would be if her bonus perk applied to her actual preferred mode of combat).

In summary: the designers deserve a lot of credit for environment design and providing a lot of opportunity for both action and exploration (something which is hard to balance). Gameplay add-ons are a decent touch. But story and character-wise, Lonesome Road is far and away the weakest of the Fallout New Vegas installments. If you play the game for the story, you can skip it without losing much. Honest Hearts was a less bland foray into adventuring and had more main-game plot relevant. Dead Money was much more tense and terrifying, and Old World Blues was far more entertaining with an infinitely better set of antagonists. If you can only afford one DLC, make Lonesome Road your lowest priority. If you have all the DLC or are planning to get the Ultimate Edition in February, play Lonesome Road as soon as you can (which is still not until level 25) and save the better DLCs for later.

Fallout New Vegas: Crowning Moment of Awesome... for Veronica

Hello, neglected blog. I needed a place to nerd out about video games, and then I remembered: here you are.

While I have grand plans to do a comprehensive review of Fallout: New Vegas (a year later, why not?), I decided to wait till I finish Lonesome Road first.

In the meantime, I want to share my crowning moment of awesome for my favorite F:NV companion. The following contains spoilers:


So, there we were, having infiltrated the Legion Camp, and I (Jinx, the Urban Space Cowgirl, AKA "Courier") was about to face Darth Vader Legate Lanius himself. I had read about how tough he was on the Internetz, how the very best at tactical fighting and FPS type players were killed over and over by him, how he was a BEAST. While I was very high level (44?) I am not the very best at combat, and was going for drama in terms of equipment (Joshua's armor and pistol). I thought, I've got Speech out the wazoo, hopefully I can talk him down.

Marching behind me were my backup: a bunch of creaky-kneed retired Nazis in power armor, and Veronica Santangelo, also clad in Enclave armor, courtesy of Arcade Gannon.

I talked to the Legate. I passed speech checks! But I got saucy with him anyway, and he decided to attack.

Except he ran past me, toward my backup crew.

Veronica stepped forward, sending an uppercut to his masked jaw that would have made a Deathclaw weep. He was thrown into the air, landed, turned around, and ran back toward me as if to scream, "Mommy."

I caught him in VATS: he was below half hit points. I finished him off with a shot to the arm courtesy of a Light Shining in Darkness.

The giant cazadors in Zion gave me four times as much trouble. And probably? Because I couldn't take Veronica with me.

The moral of the story: bow down and worship the lesbian techno-monk, fools. All hail Veronica.

Suikod20: Overview and Runes

First of all, I realize I should probably provide an outline of the general stuff that is being or will be worked on in this project so you can see how it all goes together. It is here (copy-paste the link):

[Sorry, the link is broken. If you know me, you know how to contact me for the documents should you want to look at them. If you don't know me, for privacy purposes I am sorry I cannot help you at this time.]

Second of all, I have finished a new draft of the Runes and Rune Spells Document. This document contains only spell runes at the moment. It is almost 50 pages. Holy heck.

[Sorry, the link is broken. If you know me, you know how to contact me for the documents should you want to look at them. If you don't know me, for privacy purposes I am sorry I cannot help you at this time.]

This system is largely the crux of what will—or won’t—make “Suikod20” work. I already wrote this up once and then thoroughly revised (my long suffering comrade-in-game-system-scheming Allen had a look at an earlier draft—much is changed since then). Believe it or not, the system I had earlier for how you determine caster progression and caster level was more stupidly complex than it is now.

Caster progression still needs to be fixed. I think overall, everyone needs more spells per day (because I realized that while there’s some nice flexibility of the runes, even the best spellcasters will only be able to have “12 known spells” at a time, effectively (if 3 spell runes are equipped, right hand, left hand, and forehead). The advancement also needs to be adjusted so that 2nd tier spells can’t be cast earlier than 4th/5th level, 3rd tier spells till 6th/7th level, etc. You’ll see further notes on this in the section. Ideas for an algorithm to determine this—or hell, take a crack at it yourself (PLEASE, I can’t add 2 and 2)—are very welcome.

As for the runes and their spells, I figured out very quickly that if there was a discernible pattern to how Konami determined what made something a high or low tier spell or how a rune balanced with other runes, I certainly couldn’t find it. As you will note, I took a basic guideline for what a given rune spell’s comparative spell level to PFRPG spells was and ran with it. I am far more concerned with comparable balance—maybe too much? I don’t know. Read through and see.

Most spells for runes were done this way:
1. Look up what the spell did in Suikoden
2. Determine rough comparable spell level
3. Look through core and APG spells. If found very appropriate analogue, used that, with edits where necessary.
4. If no existing spell, try to make a spell that mimics the video game spell’s abilities as reasonably as possible while also working well with PF game mechanics and seem of the appropriate spell level.

Note that I tried to remember to note on spells if they were of a descriptive subtype, like “fire” or “death”—and frequently, I forgot. If you note something should have a noted subtype (to help determine whether someone is resistant to it), please write it in.

I have copious notes in the whole section about where I derived a spell from (the APG came out between the first draft and this draft, and kindly provided lovely spell sources I didn’t have before) and loads of uncertainty about how a spell should play out. Ample feedback desired.

This is a lengthy document so I do not expect fast turnaround; anything you can offer is much appreciated.