It was easier to think of that than the goddess who awaited her in the dry land of death, the one she had disappointed in her grief.
Kivran Sulla, champion of Iomedae and soul warden of Pharasma, has lost three companions in the same number of months, and she’s just stopped saving Absalom long enough to grieve. The only person she can ask for advice is her mother, former adventurer and highly-placed paladin in the Seventh Church. Unfortunately, she’s just about given up hope that her mother will approve. Of anything.
Takes place in the fifth book of Agents of Edgewatch, but there are no significant spoilers.
Front Notes
All lyrics are from Dar Williams’ “The Tide Falls Away,” a song which gave me some serious Kivran feels.
This takes place in book five of Agents of Edgewatch (just after chapter two, I think?), but I’ve cagily avoided any direct spoilers, so it should be safe to read even if you haven’t played or finished the adventure.
End Notes
Behold: the closest I will ever get to writing a songfic 😉 And now I inflict this self-indulgence on you!
Some notes:
Aside from the song, which was the proximal cause, another impetus for this fic is how many character deaths we’ve had in this campaign — three, and one player is now on his third character. (Death effects suck). I wondered how Kivran would grieve that. Especially when she had some down time to reflect on it. Especially when in close proximity to her mother, who doesn’t take this whole “joining the Edgewatch” and “becoming a soul warden of Pharasma” thing very seriously.
Way back when Kivran’s mom first appeared “on screen,” the GM asked me what I imagined her being like. My response? “Imagine a female version of Henry Spencer from Psych.”
If Ameredine is Henry Spencer, then Carlo is the father from Pride and Prejudice!
The “gang leader in the Docks” was a real NPC who Kivran became obsessed with. Kivran’s Battle Cry, appearing out of the shadows in their final conflict, was “your hair smells terrific.” It was a crit success; Frightened 2 🙂
Re: sensing Cedela’s alignment: that was the moment when Kivran probably said, “oh yeah, I did once have Sense Alignment before I retrained.” And also that she’s seen Cedela damaged by good/positive damage.
I figure Ameredine probably was involved in one of the Mendevian Crusades.
Other party members, for name reference:
Shep, leshy summoner. Sorry for calling her a “sentient berry bush.” I guess Kivran is a little fauna-ist.
Lucio Merenas, Taldan human swashbuckler (played by my husband).
Zokaratz Vir, fetchling witch from Shadow Absalom. This player previously played Jabi (a kobold alchemist who retrained into inventor. And yes, he did really have an animated rope with button eyes as a construct companion).
Cedela, Galtan human rogue. Who totally doesn’t have the Grey Gardener archetype 👀This player previously played Frøya (an Ulfen human thaumaturge) and Nathraak (a Varisian human magus).
Also! Since the last Kivran fic I wrote, I haven’t shared the art that I commissioned from Kii Weatherton. Please enjoy!
This is a letter my Pathfinder character Kivran wrote to her mother, a high-ranking paladin of Iomedae in the Seventh Church in Absalom –basically informing the clergy of her crisis of faith (and also hey, Mom, I joined the Edgewatch).
This resulted in her being summoned to the Church for a “come to Jesus Iomedae” chat with one of the ranking deacons, so: mission accomplished.
I was rather proud of it, so I thought I’d post it here. I was going for an overly formal and somewhat melodramatic tone, and I think I nailed it.
Very minor spoilers for Agents of Edgewatch.
Enjoy!
To Knight-Faithful Ameredine Sulla, greetings.
In accordance with the rules of the Seventh Church, I, Kivran Sulla, knight-acolyte of the Tempering Hall, write to inform you of my whereabouts and intentions.
When I left the Tempering Hall some six months ago, my course was yet unclear. Unlike many in the service of our Lady of Valor, I felt no need prove myself in battle, and I was unsure where my talents might be best put to use. Indeed, my time in close contact with the faithful left me with more doubts than I had when I began my initiation. These doubts I shared with the spiritual counsel of the Tempering Hall, but their words did not put me entirely at ease. I believed I would need to seek wisdom from Iomedae’s own hand at work in the world.
For some months I have been serving in one of the units of the Absalom guard — one whose name I will not speak, but suffice it to say, it is very close at hand to the Seventh Church, and yet in spirit vast eons apart. It has been eye-opening, and has given me an levelness of view towards the faithful of all gods and goddesses, not merely the Inheritor’s own. It will perhaps surprise you to learn that other faiths have as much to teach about how one lives with truth and honor as the Seventh Church itself does.
I soon felt I had grown beyond the walls of the Ascendant Court, however, and when the opportunity to join the Edgewatch presented itself, I jumped at it. Where better to learn about the gods of Golarion and their faithful than at the Radiant Festival?
Four days I have served the Edgewatch with the same fidelity and honor that I showed in my studies at the Tempering Hall. To be quite honest, it has tried me — perhaps further tempered me.
I am sure you will find the sordid details of the affair in Mr. Vancaskerkin’s tabloids, so I will omit them here. But the mere words of a reporter cannot reflect the change written on my heart.
While Iomedae’s justice may be sublime in the living world, what I have come to understand is that her blade does not penetrate the veil of death. For some time I have asked myself: what is honorable, when all crumbles before us? What is loyalty, when our own bodies betray us in the end? What does it mean to rule, when even kings die? What does it matter that serf does not bow before his lord, when his life is mere days compared to the eternity he will spend beneath the earth?
I found no answers, because those were not questions Iomedae could answer. That question is for Pharasma alone, who rules the vast dry land beyond the grave.
And the answer I have received is this: a good and honorable death may be more important than a good and honorable life.
Did you know? The streets of the Precipice Quarter are built upon the bones of our ancestors. One day my fellow agents and I came across some workers who were battling skeletons — walking corpses, animated by fury. What made them so furious, so desperate, in death? Did they perhaps die without faith in one of the gods of our land? I entered the hole they emerged from, and learned the sad and simple truth. They had been interred alive, due to some terrible accident — a cave-in, a locked door, some shoddy construction, I don’t know.
I could see how they would have lived their last days, close enough to the surface to see light streaming down on them through a grate, but too far to call for help. How must that have felt? How that must have rent their souls, the divine cruelty of it all!
Of course they were furious. Of course they were desperate. They had been abandoned by their gods. I felt sorrow and revulsion in equal parts — sorrow for the mortals they had been and the dreams that had died with them, and revulsion at the twisted abominations they had become. I burned with rage to think how they had been denied Pharasma’s judgment at the last — how even in death they were not at peace.
I felt a duty to end their suffering, to put them to rest. To give them the mercy they had been denied.
Indeed, I have taken an oath to this effect — one many of our temple take, to put the undead to rest. But I suspect my reasons are different.
The Pharasmin priests of the Precipice Quarter have been very accommodating, and have been teaching me their rituals of rest. Despite the hardship of the past four days, and the terrible things I have seen, I have felt peace in my heart from this small power the Lady of Graves has granted me to make the world right.
Perhaps I have found where my talents are best put to use.
This letter has gotten very long, so in summary:
I am well — stronger than ever, and my heart is light. You may write me care of Edgewatch Station in the Precipice Quarter. I will serve both Iomedae’s judgment and Pharasma’s mercy, as best as I know how and as long as I live.
Your sister in faith and your obedient daughter, Knight-Acolyte Kivran Sulla
(This started as a repost of a few bullet points about PF2e mechanics that I wrote on Facebook. Then it turned into a novel. Why am I like this?)
After I wrote my what I’m looking for in my next campaign post, I decided to apply to a Pathfinder 2e game that was advertising on /r/lfg. I was interested in giving PF2e a try, because I was getting mighty sick of Wizards of the Coast’s continual missteps on issues of inclusion and representation in D&D. I had heard that Paizo Games — the makers of Pathfinder, another fantasy RPG — were better in this regard.
… I made some errors in judgment while lurking on /r/lfg, but joining this game was not one of them!
Wtf is Pathfinder, anyway?
For context, we need to go back to D&D 3.5e, and its Open Gaming License, which allowed other creators to piggyback on its rules system to build their own games. Many creators did this, and I had some experience with them — I played a lot of Crafty Games’ Spycraft and FantasyCraft, in particular.
“I’m going to go build my own games company! With kobold blackjack! And goblin hookers!”
The world of Golarion also came out of this — presumably because they could no longer use any of the brand-identifying D&D settings.
I never played PF1e, so I can’t say much about it. But from what I understand, it was incredibly similar to D&D 3.5 — so much so that people called it “D&D 3.75.”
Then came Pathfinder 2e in 2019 — arguably in response to the incredible popularity of D&D 5e. More importantly, PF2e refined many of the systems from PF1e, doing away with some of the more annoying aspects of D&D 3.5.
Given that, I initially expected a game that was more like D&D 5e. But PF2e is definitely its own unique system, and still feels more like 3.5 than it does 5.
The Campaign
I joined a game with a bunch of pretty woke players, playing Agents of Edgewatch, a pre-written Adventure Path designed to take your character from level 1 to 20.
This was not a neutral choice, it turned out, but it would turn into a good example of Paizo’s relatively strong voice for DEI in the games industry.
In AoE, you play fantasy guards at a fantasy world’s fair. I suspect Paizo was going for a buddy cop movie/Brooklyn 99/Discworld Guards sorta feel, but the book had the misfortune of being released in July 2020.
… you know, the month George Floyd was murdered and protests against police violence erupted across the U.S.
That definitely gave me pause, but this was the first test, for me, of how Paizo would handle such an issue. In this regard, I was generally pleased. Apparently the publisher, Erik Mona, issued a public apology for the insensitivity that implied, and options were added to play as adventurers looking for work, or to make all damage non-lethal without the usual mechanical penalty.
(Btw, I came to all this after the fact — Paizo/Pathfinder wasn’t really on my radar in 2020. But this was on my mind as the group deliberated what to play, and this is what I learned as I investigated).
My group chose this adventure rather than the other AP that was offered, Extinction Curse. I can’t speak to how my fellow players made their decision, but mine was informed by my Pathfinder-playing friends, who judged it as the better written of the two APs. Forging forward with that decision, we opted for the “assume non-lethal damage” option, but we still decided to go with the fantasy cop angle.
So far I don’t feel like anyone’s abused it, although I am still bothered by the fact that — since you’re not exactly dungeon-delving in this game — all your cool stuff comes, basically, from civil asset forfeiture. That’s definitely kinda YIKES in my book. But when you’re taking stuff from a half-elf you find up to his elbows in flayed humanoid skin, it feels a lot less awful.
(We still feel bad about accidentally killing Rusty the Rust Monster, though).
Currently we are level 4, and have just defeated the villain of book 1.
My character
I’d wanting to play a paladin in D&D for a long time. In Out of the Abyss, I watched my fellow player Justin have a helluva good time with his dragonborn Oath of Devotion paladin Gaulir. I found myself saying, “Yeah I want to smite things, too!”
Also, you may recall I’m a big fan of this fic, where the original female main character is a paladin of Kelemvor (a newer god of death who arose out of the Time of Troubles) who once served Torm (god of duty, loyalty, righteousness, and law).
The PF2e equivalent of a paladin is champion. (“Paladin” is specifically the lawful good subclass of champion). Additionally, in PF2e, what god you are a champion of is actually important — in 5e it feels more like flavor text. So I knew what god I picked to be a champion of was really going to matter.
The (very) rough equivalents of Kelemvor and Torm in the world of Golarion are Pharasma and Iomedae, both goddesses. I decided my character — who I named Kivran — was going to be a redeemer (NG) champion of Iomedae, who was beginning to have doubts about the righteousness of her path. She had looked at how the divine right of kings was used as a bludgeon against the less fortunate, and begun to ask herself, “What is honorable in the face of suffering and death?”
Mechanically speaking, I ended up taking the Godless Graycloak background which… might not have been the best choice? It’s literally the atheist/non-religious faction of the Absalom guard. But I saw it as reactionary to corruption Kivran saw in the temple of Iomedae.
To summarize: she had lost faith in the clergy of Iomedae, but not the goddess herself.
I also gave her a family history where she was an only child, and her mother was an adventurer and a paladin of Iomedae. Thus she had been raised with the expectation that she would become a champion of Iomedae, too, and felt some pressure to join the temple before she was 100% ready.
I saw her trajectory as a character as moving from being a champion of Iomedae to a champion of Pharasma, but it turns out mechanically speaking, that’s kinda hard to do in PF2e!
One of my fellow players pointed out that I could use the Splinter Faith class feat to do this, but a) it doesn’t seem that mechanically useful; it just gives you access to a different set of focus spells, which are super limited, anyway. Point B) there’s actually not that much of a splinter between Pharasma and Iomedae. As my GM put it:
Iomedae: be valorious! do good! smite evil! pharasma: oh, and to undead, too! iomedae: yeah, what she said!
That said, the GM has been very accommodating, playing up or modifying aspects of the adventure to show Kivran’s growing interest in Pharasma and sorrow for the fate of those who become undead; he even wrote up a ritual of rest that Kivran has taken to using after destroying any undead. I also took the Shining Oath feat at level 3 to further expand this angle of her character.
L0ng story story, I’m still figuring out how to express this inner tension mechanically. My current leaning is to pick up the cleric archetype for Pharasma, but we’ll see.
Anyway, this is the random piece of fantasy art I picked to represent Kivran. Turns out the options when you search “female paladin fantasy art” are kind of awful.
One of the few that didn’t involve chainmail bikinis, mesh shirts, or high heels.
Kivran is a human of Taldan heritage, so I needed to pick an appropriate last name for her, too. It seems like a lot of the Taldan names are Latinate in nature, so of course the first thing that came to mind for me was the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, possibly because I’ve listened to a lot of Hardcore History.
Hence: Kivran Sulla, native of Absalom, only child of two adventurers, troubled champion of Iomedae, former Graycloak, newly a devotee of Pharasma.
… also, thanks to a combination of factors, the party’s mom. (Glimpse of Redemption reaction, an undercover operation where I had to pretend to be the druid’s mom, said druid yelling “Moooooooom!” whenever she took crit damage and wanted me to use said reaction, and dubbing of said ability as Mom Glare).
The rest of the party
We started out as a group of four, but one player stepped away after a couple of months, and two more players joined — including my husband Matt.
The other two original characters were:
Nathraak, human wizard from the bad part of town (the Puddles). He has a history where he got arrested for practicing unlicensed medicine, which got him interested in law, which eventually led to him becoming part of the guard corps for the Puddles. (And, eventually, the Edgewatch). One thing I think is super interesting about Nath, mechanically, is that he really doesn’t cast a lot of spells. He seems to be built to do two things: counter spells, and heal with the Medicine skill rather than magic. Occasionally he also yeets his staff.
Shep, the leshy druid, and her bear companion Berry. She likes to remind us that the Starstone Isle is not entirely the city of Absalom and does in fact have wilderness. She also pretends to be offended by jokes about leshy, casts Electric Arc a lot, and once disguised herself as a human child and pretended to be Kivran and Nath’s kid.
About a month ago we were joined by:
Jabi, kobold alchemist, who we met when undercover in a sketchy club. Very nervous and generally high on some kind of mutagen. He also comes with his pal Rope Snake, who I’m still not sure is a real snake or some kind of construct.
Lucio Merenas, another Taldan human and swashbuckler from a family down on its luck. This is Matt’s character.
(I feel kind of bad for Matt, because he joined the campaign right before we fought two big bad humanoid enemies. Thus the story of his game thus far has been failing to Tumble Through the squares of enemies with ridiculously high save DCs. I think he’s still having fun? But that’s at least part the awesomeness of the group itself).
I like the style of play in this group. It scratches my itch for both roleplay and tactical combat, for sure. It’s also a good level of seriousness for me — people clearly care about the adventure and their role in it, and they’re minimally distracted during game (I’m probably the worst about distraction, especially since it’s Thursday night right around when my ADHD meds start to wear off…) But no one is playing an edgelord character, either, and we often fill Discord with memes and gifs OOC.
On the whole, I feel like I got what I was looking for in my original post!
The party, lined up for photos at the end of last session. Things got rough.
And finally, what I came here to say…
Mechanically, I have some Thoughts about how this plays as an RPG system, having played for a few months now:
Most important: I’m having a lot of fun.
It is WAY crunchier a system than I was expecting. There’s a reason they call it Mathfinder.
At the same time, that crunchiness brings a lot of options, allowing you to build the sorts of characters that would be impossible in 5e.
Yes, yes, rules-light systems exist, but sometimes what you want is to roll high numbers and feel like a fantasy badass.
That said, you don’t roll a lot of high numbers at lower levels, it seems. It’s hard to feel effective when you’re level 4 and you absolutely cannot hit a target to save your life.
You do feel pretty badass, though, when Shield Block saves you from eating an owlbear’s crit at level 1.
That’s another thing — you really feel like a whole character starting at level 1. One of my least favorite things about 5e is that you don’t really gain class identity until you pick your subclass, which for quite a few isn’t until level 3. In PF, you get it right at level 1. It wasn’t like Kivran had to do a rotation to decide what sort of champion she wanted to be.
PF2e has moved on a lot from its origins in D&D3.5, but one thing that remains: you have to min-max to some extent or you will have a bad time.
… why yes, I AM still traumatized by memories of the miserable 3.5 campaign I was in, where I spent most of my time stuck in melee range as a half-orc archery ranger constantly failing Will saves.
Luckily, I do enjoy min-maxing to some degree, and more importantly I know a fair number of people — both in my game and out — who are happy to provide guidance. Also this PF2e champion class guide helps.
I feel like the classes are pretty well balanced, at least across a representative sample of enemies. There are definitely fights where I feel more effective than others — and I’m sure, given their relative strengths and weaknesses, Nath and Matt feel the same way — but I also don’t look at the druid or wizard and be like, “okay, I will never be that effective.” CoDzilla, it is not.
Everything is a feat. And you get a LOT of them — even without variant rules, you get something like 11 class feats alone by the time you get to level 20. (Not counting skill feats, general feats, archetype feats, etc). I had to create my own cheatsheet just to keep track at a high level of everything my feats allow me to do. And this is level 4 — I imagine it will only get worse as we get higher level.
Each feat alone is generally a pretty small or niche benefit. It feels weird to take a feet that, say makes you better at climbing, but when you get so many of them…
Feats build on each other and combine in interesting ways.
There seem to be fewer feats that are outright traps in PF2e compared to 3.5. (Although one could argue that the Group feats are, at least in this campaign, where our GM never bothers with the rule that Diplomacy/Intimidate/etc can only be used against one target at a time. Why yes I’m still annoyed I spent points on Group Impression).
This is a system where it REALLY helps to plan out your character to level 20 in advance, since there is a lot of “how many class feats will I have by X level, and how does that affect what feats I take now, or what prerequisite feats I take?”
Relatedly, my kingdom for the free archetype variant rule to be included in the web version of Pathbuilder!
I like the three-action system a lot; it gives a lot of flexibility that you just didn’t have with 3.5’s “move and two actions and also you get a five-foot-step” system. I can move twice and raise my shield! I can attack three times!(admittedly with an increasing penalty after the first attack)
While ranged attacks in melee range still provoke attacks of opportunity (*shudder* *flashes back*) I enjoy that attacks of opportunity aren’t something anybody can do. Generally only fighter or champion PCs can get them, and in monsters, you can usually guess by what sort of creature it is.
For all that it is a crunchy system, combat doesn’t bog down or interfere with RP the way I remember it doing in 3.5. Maybe it’s the campaign level; maybe it’s that my fellow players seem to actually, yanno, plan out what they’re going to do when it’s not their turn. Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how it works out at higher levels, when we all have more feats.
In conclusion
This has been a really long way of saying:
I’m liking Pathfinder. It’s different, but in good ways. I really like my character and I feel invested in her success. I like my fellow players and I like the style of play. I like options that aren’t continuing to give Wizards of the Coast money as they continue to do shitty things.
I still wish Pathbuilder worked for me, though.
That’s all, folks! Tell me about your own Pathfinder experiences, and revel in telling me where I’m wrong.
