The Transiapheian Bulletin

(GLOG) I Can Fix Him - Conversions of Bad Pathfinder Classes

Completely Skippable Introduction

One of my most shameful vices is this: sometimes, of an evening, I'll pour myself a tall glass of hard cider and pass an hour or three browsing the Library of Metzofitz, a wiki that compiles third-party content for the first edition of Pathfinder.

The world of Pathfinder 3PP was, and is, an incestuous cottage industry with razor-thin margins, and the sheer volume of content it's secreted over the years is intimidating. Most of it is perhaps best understood through Joseph Manola's lens of RPG books as fiction. I've no doubt that there are people who use this content in actual games, but I strongly doubt that they're a majority or even a plurality. The nature and texture of the wiki tells you a lot about the mindset of the Pathfinder theorycrafter / game-imaginer: almost all of the content is player-facing, blood-themed abilities and Guy Who Teleports A Lot are both strangely overrepresented, and there's a lot of focus on distinct subsystems that sprawl, overlap, and interlock to the point of absurdity.

(One day I need to talk about City of 7 Seraphs, a Sigil knockoff setting guide / undifferentiated rules slab that runs to over 600 pages and probably has more author credits than people who've ever actually used it at the table. But that's a blog post all of its own.)

The experienced Library-diver will quickly acquaint themselves with the big-name publishers in the space, but one of them clings to my brain more firmly than the others: Little Red Goblin Games. You can identify LRGG's stuff pretty easily because it's not very good. It's poorly written and edited, and obviously imbalanced even to someone like me with limited system mastery.

But the classes they put out... I'd never build around an LRGG class even if I still played Pathfinder, but on one level I have to respect their willingness to make theoretically playable options out of narrow, underbaked, or unorthodox concepts. What if a guy could coup de grace, like, better than everyone? What about a sea-paladin whose divine patron hates and persecutes her? Or someone who gained powers by eating part of Godzilla? What if you could play an adventuring chimney sweep?

A while back, I tried converting a Pathfinder class to GLOG. It was pretty fun! And if I enjoyed doing that for a class that was (relatively speaking) stable and well-designed...

The following two classes have not been edited or playtested, obviously. Use at your own risk.

Class: Executioner

Original class here.

You kill people for money. You used to do it on behalf of The Law, because The Law, righteous and absolute though it is, isn't much good with an axe. These days, it's more of a freelance gig.

Starting equipment: Huge axe, thick leather apron and gloves (as light armour), hand mirror, pocket-sized holy book (which you probably can't read), bottle of rotgut, box of sleeping pills.
Starting skill: Sanitation, Animal Handling, or Criminal Law.

Per template: +1 to Save vs. effects that would kill you outright.
A: Unehrliche, Execute (4 criteria)
B: Execute (3 criteria), Jaded
C: Adaptable, Hands in the Guts
D: Execute (2 criteria), Lights Out

A: Unehrliche
Ordinary people regard you as dishonourable or unclean. They see you as a rogue, and not the dashing, sexy kind. They will talk to you and take your money, but they won't be happy about it. On the upside, they don't like paying attention to you, and are likely to overlook minor misdemeanours (drunkenness, vandalism, looking and acting shifty) if they're not directly affected.
Fellow executioners, criminals (oddly enough), and members of other "dirty" professions like ratcatchers and gongfarmers hold no such antipathy towards you. Most adventurers don't really care.
This is a spiritual effect, not a social one. It applies even to people who don't know you're an executioner.

A: Execute
Your melee attacks with edged weapons deal double damage as long as they meet the following four criteria:

At template B, you only need to meet three criteria. At template D, only two.

B: Jaded
You are immune to fear, disgust, shame, guilt, and sorrow, including magical forms.

C: Adaptable
Creatures count as familiar to you for Execute purposes if you're familiar with something similar. If you know horses, you can execute a hippogriff. If you know humans, ogres are probably close enough.

C: Hands in the Guts
You have an instinctive understanding of the underbellies and margins of society. Once per settlement, you can tap the local beggars, sewer workers, and rag-and-bone men, and ask them a question. As long as someone in town, anyone, knows the answer, you get it within a week.

D: Lights Out
If you meet all four criteria for Execute and land your attack, you kill the target. No save.

Commentary
I was drawn to the original executioner class because of its unusual power scaling: instead of getting stronger over time, the executioner's core ability starts strong but awkward and gets easier to use. While I've tried to make this executioner more flexible and give them some out-of-combat utility, they still lean more heavily than many classes on their allies. The definition of "impaired" is left intentionally loose so you can profit from whatever disabling abilities your party has.

Class: Godfisher

Original class here.

You've used strange oceanic rituals to fish up and steal a tiny portion of the sea's boundless power. The sea hates you for this, but it hates a lot of things and there's only so much hate to go around.

Starting equipment: Fishing spear, light armour and big floppy hat, net, sieve, henna kit, string of devotional beads.
Starting skill: Fishing, plus Astronomy, Meteorology, or Draftsmanship.

Per template: +1 to attack rolls, and you need to drink an extra half-person's worth of water per day.
A: Sea's Ire, Thalassokinesis
B: +1 attack per round, Water Sculpting
C: Greater Thalassokinesis, Sea Devours the Mountain
D: Water Artist, Sunk Cost

A: Sea's Ire
You sink in water. Aquatic animals instinctively despise you, and will attack on sight if they think they can hurt you, even if it looks suicidal. Seabirds think you're cool and are drawn to you, which might actually be worse. You sleep poorly, wracked by murky, abstract nightmares, and heal -1hp from a night's rest.

A: Thalassokinesis
One of your hands, traditionally the left, is imbued with the power of the water - not water, the physical substance, but the water, the metaphysical force and concept. As long as that hand is free, you can wield this power as an attack. Choose your target (they must be visible, water-based, and within shouting distance), and pick one of the following.

Whatever number you roll on the d4 (just the natural number, not the modifier), you can't use thalassokinesis again for that many rounds.

B: Water Sculpting
Your empowered hand can work and shape water, and water-based liquids like tea and unattended blood, as if it were wet clay. You can tease it into shapes, pick it up and move it around without a container, and so on. It will struggle to support a weight, and it snaps back to an ordinary liquid the moment you stop touching it.

C: Greater Thalassokinesis
You gain the following thalassokinesis options.

C: Sea Devours the Mountain
You deal a cumulative +1 damage per consecutive attack against the same target (second attack deals +1 damage, third deals +2, and so on). Thalassokinesis does not break your streak.

D: Water Artist
Water you shape using water sculpting now persists until physically disrupted, even when you take your hand away. It has the approximate strength and tensile qualities of wicker. Any amount of damage collapses it.

D: Sunk Cost
When you hit a creature under the effects of your thalassokinesis with a physical attack, your thalassokinesis comes off cooldown.

Commentary
The original mariner is a cool idea weighed down by a horrible central mechanic. Trying to mechanise the GM fucking with you is rarely a good idea, and in this case some of your best abilities are effectively pure GM fiat. I tried to do something with ire points, but ended up ditching them in favour of static, flavourful drawbacks, and condensed the magic into a simple subsystem.
If I were feeling particularly wankerish, I'd say that the physical awkwardness of rolling a d4 is meant to reflect the unease of using stolen powers.