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What is Discarded Worlds?

It’s my website. I have some kind of half-baked grand plan to do things with it. But in reality it sits there, occupying the edgelordy domain name my inner teenager is proud of.

I made a wiki on one of the pages for all our WIld Tangents stuff. I kinda want to learn how to wiki, and this way it also makes things easy for others to edit stuff if needed without me having to to fumble thru all the html and stuff. html is fun, but also like.. aint nobody got time for that.

What are The Wild Tangents?

We are a group of nerds who want to play some D&D, or some other kind of TTRPG. It’s the name of our Discord server. Its currently a mis-mash of friends-of-friends :)

What is Foundry VTT and Forge?

• Foundry VTT is the virtual tabletop where we play. Think of it as the dining room table we are all hunched over as acne-having teens, drinking mountain dew, and snickering over why the katana is the superior blade.
• The Forge is where the VTT is hosted. Think of it as the dining room itself that we have taken over with all our painted minis, rulebooks, and cans of empty mountain dew.
  • In order to make all the peices work out, each person will need to create an account on The Forge that I can connect to. You’ll log into the Forge (be greeted at the front door), then get a link to the Foundry table (be ushered down the hallway to where the other cool people are).

What is the Pathfinder Society?

Paizo Organized Play

Paizo has a structured form of small adventures that people can join tables to play at their Friendly Local Game Store. These are meant to be smaller semi-standalone episodes that tie into common themes, but don’t really fit into larger campaign plotlines.

For example, the PFS Season 1 is the “Year of the Open Road” where the scenario episodes all tied into themes of travel and exploration; Season 4 is the “Year of Boundless Wonder” so the scenario epsiodes all have to deal with some kind of powerful artifact or treasure that must be sorted out. For overarching story plots, the Adventure Paths are where to go, but those usually require a long time commitment.

Think of it like an MMORPG

For those unfamiliar: MMO worlds are mostly static with a bunch of players running around independently completing a bunch of quests strewn about in the world. These quest lines have parallel-but-independent storylines that everyone is completing at different rates even though everyone is running around doing all this stuff at the same time. As the MMO gets expansions, the world gets some updates and new quest lines are added into the questing landscape, but the existing quest lines are still there for new characters to complete. Some players complete the quests/questlines several times over on different characters for various reasons - familiarity & easy exp, the loot, showing new friends the cool story sequences, etc.

The Pathfinder Society is basically an IRL MMO scenarios are similar - they are repeatable but only on different characters. There are valid reasons why you might want to repeat them - TTRPGs, unlike video games and MMOs, can be very different on different play throughs based on who is at the table and what their character is trying to accomplish. A player might be interested in replaying a scenario to get a new angle on lore they missed the first time, to get some easy/familiar exp for their character, build a shared experience with a friend to reference funny stuff that comes up, and other reasons (probably all of the above, tbh).

Pathfinder Society - in the real world:

the quests are essentially “episodes” under the umbrella of the Pathfinder Society’s evolving story/lore. This helps players going to their FLGS all know what to expect, since the Society has a general code of ethics. It’s a useful common starting point since often at the FLGS tables, you might be playing with strangers. It helps foster a more consistent experience regardless of where you play.

Pathfinder Society - in the game:

The Pathfinder Society is basically Archaeology Starfleet. Kinda like Star Trek Starfleet, they are bound by a code of ethics and moral imperatives to “Explore, Report, Cooperate”. They task themselves with digging up secrets of the past and acting as a kind of neutral diplomatic/humanitarian agency. In order to become a Pathfinder Agent, a person would need some years of study and training with the Society, which makes sense why lvl 1 PCs start with their initial weapon/skill training proficiencies, and a starting suite of abilities/spells. The Society has lodges established around the world which is helpful to serve as a base of operations for agents doing around doing stuff.

PFS Quest Rewards

The PFS scenarios have a sterile but useful way of assigning loot rewards at the end of the scenario - everything you, as a Pathfinder Agent, find over the course of the quest is handed over to the lodge when you report in. There is a kind of subquest completion checklist the GM will track behind the screen, and based on what you, as players, do and accomplish in the scenario will determine how much the Society pays your characters in return. If you rush through a scenario, you won’t get the full gold piece “paycheck” than if you took the time to help resolve the side issues presented along the way.

Characters then presumably have access to the Society’s resources in some way to craft/buy whatever magic items you can afford, rather than just putting up with whatever items you come across and waiting for the next best thing to come along.

Much like an MMO, you also gain additional points/reputation currency to spend on smaller bonus stuff. If you’ve got a lot of reputation built up with one of the internal branches of the Society, you can dip into the Society’s reserves a little bit to equip yourself with some extra potions and other consumables between each quest.

Record Keeping

So it is largely honor system for record keeping, but the FLGS does sign off on your completion of quests and stuff. Then you should upload the chronicle sheet to your account on Paizo’s website. This is mostly if there is an issue, past information can be pulled up to sort it out.

For our purposes, I wont have us do this unless people want to. I will be up front about this: I’ll probably be fairly lax about the record keeping. I will however maintain an excel sheet tracking who has what character, who signed up for which scenario, and stuff like that. The remaining details I figure will just live on the character sheets within Foundry. But if anyone wants this to plug into the official Organized Play stuff in some way, I’m open to it :)

So what does it mean for The Wild Tangents?

I’ll be hosting a virtual tabletop to run some PFS scenarios over time. I chose the model because I wanted something with a low barrier of entry :)

1. Time Commitment - A single PFS society scenario is intended to be a 4-5 hour event, which seems doable split into two play sessions, each being about the same time duration as inviting some friends over for a movie.
2. Flexibility - Being able to split one scenario into a two-shot and then just schedule those two sessions on an ad hoc basis may be an easy way to find time slots that work well for those involved.
3. Easy to Plan For - in some cases, the PFS Scenarios are pre-built with FoundryVTT in mind. Even the scenarios that aren’t prebuilt, they are short enough that I can do a hack-job import relatively easily on the back end.
4. Well-balanced - They are made by the Paizo people, so they match the expectations for the game mechanics. Also, there are rules in the scenario that tell the GM how to adjust things for uneven party coimposition, another benefit with folks joining here and there. Also also, there are prebuilt characters that can fill party gaps if absolutely needed.
5. Communal Anchor Point - similar to the point above, having PFS be a common allegiance among characters will help keep the goals and momentum headed in the same direction. The subtle and brooding nuanced campaigns with competing priorities are fun and have their place, but those are for another day lol

What am I hoping for?

1. A few people interested in a scenario would “sign up” for it.
2. We would put that scenario onto one of the tables (table alpha or table beta)
3. we would hop into the alpha or beta discord channel to decide on what our availability looks like and then schedule two sessions within a window of a few weeks, finding time slots where all who have signed up can attend.
4. We would do a quick meet and greet if needed, introduce our characters or any updates to them since the last quest.
5. Have the play sessions
6. use the table’s channel to handle any scenario-specific banter, ideas, updates, etc in-between sessions
7. Once scenario is complete, the table is emptied for another scenario to slot into it.