I’m still playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Jan. 24th, 2020 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariMy most useful party member just exploded into bloody chunks, and I feel like I need to talk about it.
Jaethal is an undead ex-judge who has weird paladin-like abilities despite being the farthest thing possible from a paladin. She’s also the most unambiguously evil bastard in your party, and it’s not even because of the undead thing. She was murdering her own family members out of boredom long before she died. On your team, she’s the one who will advocate torturing innocent people, or threaten to murder someone’s family to get them to cooperate. She has no redeeming virtues, no friends, and only the vaguest idea of what she’s doing with her (un)life.
On the other hand, the magical energy that keeps her “alive” is the same kind of energy used for level drain attacks, which means she’s completely immune to level drain. She can’t be poisoned, can’t be sickened, and never gets tired. She can heal herself with the same spells she uses to damage enemies, wear a cursed life-draining cloak with no fear of the side effects, and just for the hell of it, inflict acid damage any time she wants. (For instance, if she’s fighting the early-game enemies who regenerate from literally everything besides acid.) Despite her antisocial nature, she gets all kinds of buffs from standing next to an ally, and I found myself building my team composition around who would work the best alongside Jaethal.
When people kept trying to kill her for things she’d done in the past, I tried to talk them down. Sometimes they forced a fight. Other times, they did horrible things themselves in their pursuit of her. There was always an out for why a good character would side with her, up until she planned to murder her daughter for a magical ritual.
I told her not to do it. She told me it wasn’t a choice, because she’d be punished if she went against the will of her dark goddess. I pointed out that she’d drifted from place to place, trying to follow her goddess’s will as best she could, and none of it had made her happy or filled the void inside her heart. Her daughter was the only good thing she’d brought into this world, and the only thing she’d leave behind when her goddess got sick of her and cast her aside. She conceded that it was time for her to finally rest. She renounced her goddess. And then—explosion.
I didn’t load my saved game. I didn’t want to go through with an alternate path where she murdered her daughter. But it still stings a bit whenever I look at the feat list, and it reminds me that characters who learn such-and-such a feat get a bonus when standing next to Jaethal.
Jaethal is an undead ex-judge who has weird paladin-like abilities despite being the farthest thing possible from a paladin. She’s also the most unambiguously evil bastard in your party, and it’s not even because of the undead thing. She was murdering her own family members out of boredom long before she died. On your team, she’s the one who will advocate torturing innocent people, or threaten to murder someone’s family to get them to cooperate. She has no redeeming virtues, no friends, and only the vaguest idea of what she’s doing with her (un)life.
On the other hand, the magical energy that keeps her “alive” is the same kind of energy used for level drain attacks, which means she’s completely immune to level drain. She can’t be poisoned, can’t be sickened, and never gets tired. She can heal herself with the same spells she uses to damage enemies, wear a cursed life-draining cloak with no fear of the side effects, and just for the hell of it, inflict acid damage any time she wants. (For instance, if she’s fighting the early-game enemies who regenerate from literally everything besides acid.) Despite her antisocial nature, she gets all kinds of buffs from standing next to an ally, and I found myself building my team composition around who would work the best alongside Jaethal.
When people kept trying to kill her for things she’d done in the past, I tried to talk them down. Sometimes they forced a fight. Other times, they did horrible things themselves in their pursuit of her. There was always an out for why a good character would side with her, up until she planned to murder her daughter for a magical ritual.
I told her not to do it. She told me it wasn’t a choice, because she’d be punished if she went against the will of her dark goddess. I pointed out that she’d drifted from place to place, trying to follow her goddess’s will as best she could, and none of it had made her happy or filled the void inside her heart. Her daughter was the only good thing she’d brought into this world, and the only thing she’d leave behind when her goddess got sick of her and cast her aside. She conceded that it was time for her to finally rest. She renounced her goddess. And then—explosion.
I didn’t load my saved game. I didn’t want to go through with an alternate path where she murdered her daughter. But it still stings a bit whenever I look at the feat list, and it reminds me that characters who learn such-and-such a feat get a bonus when standing next to Jaethal.
