The trickiest part of finding an audio book is that it has to be both a good book AND have a good narrator. What I’ve discovered is that it’s much easier to find a narrator you like and browse the corpus of books they’ve done looking for other titles that look appealing than it is to look for appealing titles and then just hoping that the narrator will be good.

Enter Ray Porter, who consistently elevates everything he’s involved with. (I’ve previously listened to his presentations of Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse and Peter Clines’ Threshold series among others.) I’m browsing through the literally hundreds of audio books he’s recorded when I suddenly discover that I already own one of the books he’s done: A Pathfinder Tales tie-in novel called Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter.

Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure how I acquired it. It must have been part of a bundle or a free book-of-the-day deal or something. But, in any case, it had been sitting in my Audible library untouched for several years at this point.

And that’s a pity. Because this book is really good.

HIGH FANTASY NOIR

In form, Death’s Heretic is a noir detective story in a fantasy setting.

Over the years, I’ve read any number of such stories. Often they have a steampunk veneer. Many of them take place in crapsack worlds. But a lot of them are just literally Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler with a veneer of magic and a smattering of fairy wings lightly dusted over the affair.

Death’s Heretic, on the other hand, stands out from the pack by truly owning its identity as a D&D… err, sorry… Pathfinder novel. Rather than trying to limit its scope to some “noir” subset of Pathfinder, it instead embraces the totality of Pathfinder’s cosmology and interprets it through the lens of a noir story.

Let me see if I can explain the difference: Whereas a typical “D&D noir” novel would open with a dame walking into a detective’s office and saying that her dad was killed by a fireball spell, Death’s Heretic opens with an angelic representative of the Goddess of Death requesting assistance because someone was killed and, when they attempted to resurrect them, they discovered that their soul had been kidnapped from the afterlife.

There’s also a dame, but you can see the difference. It’s not just that there are more fantasy elements being thrown into the mix; it’s that the fantasy elements are being allowed to fundamentally alter the nature of the story. It’s one thing to set a noir story in a weird, selective version of Waterdeep that somehow ends up looking like 1930s San Francisco with the serial numbers filed off, and it’s another to take the totality of Waterdeep, frame a story there, and truly see where it takes you.

Sutter pushes the envelope in other ways, too: He actually divorces himself quite strongly from noir tropes in general by setting the story not in some fog-drenched metropolis, but rather in the sun-drenched empire of Thuvia. Strong elements of pulp fantasy are also naturally pulled in as part of the setting. And that’s just the beginning, as Sutter relentlessly cranks up the dial as the narrative progresses.

BUT ALSO…

Death’s Heretic has more going for it than just novelty and creativity, though. Sutter just writes a legitimately good novel: The characters are interesting and multidimensional. He takes the time to weave together a number of interesting themes revolving around mortality, immortality, and the nature of faith.

Ultimately, this is one of those reviews I write specifically to call attention to something really nifty that I think is (a) not well-known enough and (b) that people would really enjoy if they knew it existed.

So now you know.

I hope you have a great time with it.

GRADE: B-

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

Based on this poll I’m currently working on my first professional design work featuring the Pathfinder system. (The 3-to-1 advantage over 3.5 was impossible to ignore. Hopefully the other people, like me, using 3.5 in their home games will be OK with the minimal on-the-fly conversion work necessary to make a Pathfinder module work in 3.5.)

I’ve run into a conceptual difficulty, however, surrounding the conflation of Listen, Spot, and Search into a single Perception skill. It’s a fairly minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but I wanted to get some outside opinions on it.

LOCATION KEYS

The way I structure location keys is fairly straight-forward:

• There’s boxed text which conveys the common information that anyone walking into the room would immediately perceive. (“You see a box in the corner with a weird symbol painted on it.”)
• After the boxed text, I immediately list any reactive skill checks which should be immediately made by anyone entering the room. These are typically perception-type checks, but they might also be knowledge-checks. (For example, make a See Hidden check to notice that there are small spiders crawling all over the box. Or a History check to recognize the symbol as the royal seal of Emperor Norton.)
• Then each significant element in the room is independently described with additional details that will become important if characters investigate or interact with it. (“Inside the chest is ruby which has been cracked in half. You can see that the inside of the ruby is filled with empty spider’s eggs.”)

The significant elements often include specifically delineated skill checks that become relevant during the investigation/interaction. In my work with 3.5,  this delineated skill check was usually a Search check and, as a result, the format was self-evident in its utility: A Spot check for the room was almost always at the top of the key entry; specific Search checks for various elements within the room were located with those elements.

What’s happening in Pathfinder, however, is that I’ve just got Perception checks scattered throughout the room description. My concern is that it’s not necessarily self-evident which Perception checks are passive versus which Perception checks require active searching, which could lead to the key being more confusing to use at the table.

EXAMPLES

Here’s a really simple example of what a room element looked like in a 3.5 module:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Search (DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

Here’s what a straight conversion to Pathfinder looks like:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Perception (DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

In isolation, that doesn’t look particularly problematic. But if you’re a Pathfinder player, what I’m specifically interested in is what you think about this:

Iron Door (Area 11): This locked door has been severely dented and scarred.
—Perception (Active – DC 12): It looks like the door was battered upon using handheld siege weaponry.

Is it clear what I mean? Is there a better solution for what I’m trying to distinguish here?

Reactive Perception checks are part of Pathfinder, but the term “active Perception check” isn’t actually part of the core rules. It does seem to be fairly widespread among fans, either as a natural evolution of the “reactive” terminology or because it migrated over from 4E (where “active Perception check” is a term of art).

Thoughts?

Quick question: I’m probably going to be releasing an adventure module in the near future. I’m trying to figure out if I should stat it for 3.5 or if I should make the jump to Pathfinder.

You can select both answers on this poll. Basically, if you would buy the module if it was for a particular system you should select that option.

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Had a quick thought for handling bribes last night as I was slipping off into sleep:

1. Set a “bribe value” for the NPC.

You could put together a set of charts based on income, wealth, sense of duty, and/or potential consequences. But mostly you can just make a judgment call on “that sounds like about the level where this gal might be influenced by the offer of money”.

2. If a bribe equal to the NPC’s bribe value is given, grant a +1 circumstance bonus on associated checks.

Keep this in mind when setting the “bribe value”. It’s not the value at which the NPC immediately buckles like a well-worn belt. It’s the value at which they think, “OK. That’s slightly tempting.”

3. For each doubling of the bribe value, grant an additional +1 circumstance bonus.

So if the bribe value of the NPC is 1 gp, then a bribe of 2 gp gives you a +2 bonus; 4 gp gives you +3; 8 gp gives you +4; and so forth.

There’s no functional limit to the size of the bribe the PCs can offer, but obviously this exponential system does provide a practical limit. Start with a bribe value of 10 gp and you’d need a bribe of 10 billion gold pieces to get a +10 bonus. (Again: This is another reason to keep the initial bribe value at the “slightly tempting” level and not the “likely to accept this bribe” level.)

Note: The system assumes that you don’t tell the players what the bribe value of the NPC is. (Although maybe they can find that out through Gather Information or Sense Motive checks.) With that in mind, use some common sense and rounding while adjudicating the system. For example, pure math might say that you need to bribe 256 gp to get a +9 bonus and 512 gp to get a +10 bonus. If a PC bribes 250 gp, though, they should get the +9 bonus and if they bribe 500 gp they should get the +10 bonus. This is all meant to be an easy-to-use mental guideline for your benefit, not a binding contract written in blood.

Keep in mind that offering a bribe is risky: If the resulting Diplomacy check is blown even with the bribe in play, the target may become insulted or angry in response.

For a beginning GM, the location-based method of adventure prep is the best way to go: Draw a map. Number the rooms. Key the rooms (i.e., describe what’s in each room).

(1) Start small with a Five Room Dungeon.

(2) After a couple of those, go a little larger. And, when you do, start thinking about Xandering Your Dungeon.

(3) Okay, that’s getting awesome. But this map-and-key thing is a little too static: Monsters are just sitting in their rooms and waiting for the PCs to wander by and hit them over the head. So mix it up by prepping an Adversary Roster that’s independent of the map key and then run the monsters in the complex actively (so that goblins from area 6 might run across the compound and reinforce the goblins at area 1). At this point, it may also be useful to broaden your encounter design to give yourself more flexibility in how you use encounter groups.

At this point you’ve probably run about a dozen adventures and you’re starting to get comfortable as a DM. Awesome. Now you can start exploring non-location-based methods of adventure prep. For some basic priming check out: Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, and Don’t Prep Plots. Or, for another classic alternative, check out Hexcrawls.

And if you’re really ready to jump into the deep end: Game Structures.

HOW TO PREP

Throughout all of this, however, don’t over-prep. I think it’s really important to NOT use published adventures as an example of how to prep: Professional adventure writers are trying to communicate their vision to you. If you’re prepping notes for yourself, however, you can trust your creative instincts in the moment.

For example, it’s not necessary to elaborately work out and write down all of the different tactics that a group of orc fighters might use. You can just jot down “8 orcs” or “8 orcs, they’ll try to kick over the pot of boiling stew to burn the PCs” and then trust yourself to be creative in the moment.

Rule of thumb: Details are overrated (with the proviso that essential details and awesome details should always be jotted down).

Similarly, you don’t need to spend a lot of time customizing every stat block. You can take generic stat blocks out of the Bestiary and make them interesting through context and use and creative description. (The one-eyed orc chietain wearing the steel-plated skull of a wyrmling is pretty awesome. But there’s no reason you can’t just use the stat block for an orc warrior from pg. 222 of the Bestiary.)

Another rule of thumb: If you’re spending more time prepping it than your players spend playing it, you’re probably doing something wrong.

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