Pathfinder / Tropes G to P

Tropes A-F | Tropes G-P | Tropes Q-Z

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G-L

• Galactic Conquerer: The Dominion of the Black, a mysterious alliance of Eldritch Abominations and the alien races that conspire with them. Their core motive is unknown and potentially unknowable, but given how they are known for using slaves as raw materials for their ships, it's probably safe to say it's pretty nasty for all life not interested in being the villains in a Cosmic Horror Story.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The book Sargava, The Lost Colony for First Edition is notorious for several badly written character options. Chief among them is the feat "Monkey Lunge", which is literally impossible to use as written in the normal action economy: it requires a standard action to prepare, and only lasts one round. The attack roll you would use to execute it is also a standard action. You can only make one standard action per turn.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • In-story, goblins have been built up as braindead idiots with no survival instinct. Rules-wise, however, they have the same Intelligence and Wisdom as the average human.
  • Likewise, half-orcs are more often than not described as dim and brutish, with those who aren't being exceptions to the rule. By the rules, a half-orc takes no negatives to stats and takes a +2 bonus to any stat of the player's choosing. So it's entirely possible to have a half-orc with 20 intelligence or charisma right off the bat.
  • Zigzagged by the firearms rules. In real life, gunners displaced archers because firearms were equally lethal with a much smaller learning curve, making conscripts effective fighters in a fraction of the time. Pathfinder embraces the simplicity and classifies them as simple weapons (meaning almost every character is proficient with them by default) but then gives them damage appropriate for simple weapons in the name of balance. This results in some strange stat lines, such a weapon called a, "Hand Cannon" that deals 1d6 damage (the second-smallest damage die type and equivalent of a light crossbow.) The section justifying the firearms rules at the beginning of the book that introduced them explains that like their real world counterparts firearms are Powerful, but Inaccurate, which means that a hit in this case typically just grazed the target. A critical hit is a good clean shot, which because firearms often have the fatal trait will frequently do more damage than a hit to the vitals with a crossbow.
  • In Blood of the Night, the vetala-born dhamphir, or ajibachana, is described as yearning for knowledge and often engaging in scholarly pursuits. They are the only dhamphir heritage that takes a penalty to their intelligence.
  • Blood of the Moon continues the tradition with the wereshark-kin, or "seascarred" skinwalker breed, who are said to gravitate to the magus class^note which favors strength and intelligence. They take a penalty to their intelligence and receive bonuses to their wisdom and constitution, neither of which are particularly useful for a magus. They do, however, get a few unique magus arcana.
  • A rather odd example is the Termagant Kyton, whose horrifically pregnant-looking appearance and description as a "coddling, cooing mother of nails and aberrant life", which "seeks to make all living creatures adopted members of her malformed brood" implies a role as some kind of Mook Maker and/or Monster Lord. Instead, her abilities and attacks focus on poisoning victims, being a poisonous Action Bomb, and having victims of her poison be poisonous Action Bombs in turn.
  • Pretty much anything involving the Iconics. Stats are available to play them in level 1 games, despite many of them having backstories that should have leveled them up considerably. Furthermore, both the audio dramas and the comics portray them fighting through the first volume of Rise of the Runelords as established, if not yet famous, warriors.
• Garrulous Growth: The Alchemist Character Class in First Edition has the optional ability to grow a tumor on its body, which functions as a Familiar and can be temporarily detached to act autonomously.
• Gem Tissue: Aeon stones usually orbit their user's head, but characters can permanently incorporate them into their bodies through a combination of psychic attunement and surgery. Afterwards, the stone counts as a part of the user and can't be targeted separately by attacks or effects.
• Gender Bender:
  • One of the potential drawbacks on a magical item is that the user's gender changes while the item remains in their possession (or possibly, just while it's in use). The item in question is usually labeled cursed for a reason, as the effect is forced onto the player character, though the item itself still works inspite of it.
  • Anevia Tirablade, the wife of half-orc paladin Irabeth Tirablade, was born male, but felt more comfortable as a woman. A magic elixir fixed that for her.
  • The Serum of Sex Shift, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, was introduced in 2E. Besides the above in-universe use, it's probably intended as a way for players to explain a sudden sex shift for their characters without breaking immersion. As for why they made sure to explicitly note that it can produce any combination of sexual characteristics, as many times as you want, well, draw your own conclusions there.
  • As part of the Bestiary-wide, sweeping attempt to eliminate One-Gender Race in 2E, they note that Changelings can be either male or female, males simply not being usually detected as such. However, they can still turn into hags, which are all female. This became explicit when the Lost Omens Ancestry Guide went into more depth on the subject.
• Genie in a Bottle: Represented by the magical items efreeti bottle and the ring of djinn summoning.
• Genius Bruiser: Despite being more brutish-looking than their female counterparts, male Lashunta are notably the first canon race that has a bonus to both Strength and Intelligence. The other are the "scaleheart", or werecrocodile-kin skinwalker breed, which are noted for their violent tendencies.
• Genius Loci: The Kami, introduced in Bestiary 3, are native outsiders that are literally the spirits of specific locations, like mountains and islands.
• Genre Shift: Most AP's tend to shift in tone or genre as the books go on. This can be due to the events of the story, or because of the location the heroes venture to. Book two of the Kingmaker Adventure Path for instance goes from a typical adventure to becoming the rulers of a new kingdom. Adventuring still takes up most of the gameplay, but you will spend a lot of time running your kingdom.
• Geometric Magic:
  • The various symbol spells invoke this trope.
  • The Sacred Geometry feat, on the other hand, doesn't — it improves your spellcasting if you can solve a number puzzle.
• Giant Animal Worship: Krakens are sometimes worshiped by coastal communities, either as avatars of nature or as divine figures themselves. In a variant, krakens are highly intelligent and malevolent and tend to think that Humans Are Insects, so they might accept the reverence — or demand it.
• Giant's Knife; Human's Greatsword: One of Galt's infamous soul-trapping guillotines was captured by a frost giant, who attached its blade to a haft and wielded it as a greataxe. Somehow, the crude jury-rigging made the blade's magic even stronger.
• Glad You Thought of It: The special action "Plant Notion", introduced in Giant Hunter's Handbook, combines a Diplomacy check (to convince the target of a course of action) and a hard Bluff check (to make them believe it was their idea all along). In addition to the misdirection, it bypasses the usual penalty for attempting Diplomacy on an unfriendly character.
• Glass Cannon: The Monk class in 1e fits this in comparison to Fighters. Monks get the fast movement ability, which increases their speed, and can deliver a Flurry of Blows, which allows them to make several additional attacks whenever they make a full attack action. However, as a cost, they are forbidden from wearing any armor or using shields, making it more difficult for them to raise their armor class. With fewer Dump Stats, they'll typically have lower physical attributes than straight fighters. Further, they get a smaller hit die than fighters, so they have fewer hit points.
• Glass-Shattering Sound: The shatter spell.
• Gloomy Gray: Gnomes who don't get enough excitement and novelty in their lives suffer "the Bleaching", which turns their skin, hair, and eyes grey and ultimately causes Death by Despair.
• Go Back to the Source: On a meta level: Pathfinder #1 (Burnt Offerings) was set in the town of Sandpoint. Pathfinder #200 will be Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, set in Sandpoint and based on the original Pathfinder office campaign.
• God Couple:
  • Most famously, the goddesses Shelyn (love and beauty), Sarenrae (the sun and healing), and Desna (travel and freedom) are canonically a thruple. Second Edition has a cult called the Prismatic Ray that worships them as a trinity.
  • Pharasma, goddess of birth and death, is in a relationship with the minor deity Mrtyu, the psychopomp usher responsible for fallen soldiers and victims of murder and suicide. Mrtyu is said to have been the first mortal ever to die with love on his lips, which intrigued Pharasma enough to try wooing his soul when it reached the Boneyard; their relationship has helped her to understand the emotions of mortals better.
  • Erastil, the god of hunting, agriculture, and community, is very family-oriented and is Happily Married to the minor agriculture goddess Jaidi, with whom he has two children. He frequently tries to set other Good-aligned deities up with partners, and considers Love Goddess Shelyn a friend for her support for marriage and family.
  • The Tien deities Shizuru, goddess of the sun, and Tsukiyo, god of the moon, are Star-Crossed Lovers who are only able to be together during a solar eclipse after he was murdered by his brother Fumeiyoshi and then brought back to life.
• Godhood Seeker:
  • In general, the Starstone — a magical meteorite held within the city of Absalom — has the power to allow mortals to ascend to godhood, if they can pass the traps and tests surrounding it. Absalom is thus home to a constantly-replenishing series of hopefuls seeking to take the Test of the Starstone and become divinities, although the vast majority fail and perish — only three people successfully passed the Test in the five millennia or so it's been around.
  • Tar-Baphon, the Whispering Tyrant, is a lich obsessed with both power and personal survival. He views his current status as an ageless undead and the most powerful necromancer to ever live as a stopgap measure mean to give himself time to work towards his real goal — conquering Absalom, draining every drop of divine power from the Starstone and becoming a god. The finale of "Tyrant's Grasp" is specifically focused around stopping him from doing so.
  • Erum-Hel, the Lord of Mohrgs, is an undead servant of Tar-Baphon's who has spent the last several centuries obsessing over his defeat by the crusader hero Iomedae. As Iomedae eventually became a goddess, she is now far beyond any retribution, and Erum-Hel has thus been forced to strike at her church in her stead. He still obsesses over the taste of blood he had during their clash, though, and desperately hungers for more. He has thus been giving serious thought to taking the Test of the Starstone himself, becoming a god and confronting his old enemy on an even field once more.
  • Nocticula, while already a demon lord and thus a lesser divinity herself, has long been rumored to be seeking to become the second demon lord to ascend to full godhood — something that makes the first such demon god, Lamashtu, more than a bit wary, as Nocticula's rise to her already considerable power has been paved with the a number of slain rivals impressive even among demons. At the end of first edition Nocticula indeed ascends to godhood, although to considerable In-Universe surprise she does so as a Chaotic Neutral, rather than Chaotic Evil, deity — her desire for godhood was in large part driven by a desire to grow past the bonds of demonhood and the limited nature of most outsiders' wills.
• God of Darkness:
  • Black Butterfly is an Empyreal Lord associated with darkness, distance, and space. She appears as a dark humanoid silhouette gleaming with images of stars and nebulae, and her personal realm is a quiet void whose physical surfaces are pockets of solid shadows.
  • Desna is a goddess associated with stars and the night sky, making her a cross between this and a variation of God of Light.
  • The land of Tian Xia has the god Tsukiyo, the most prominent Good deity to provide the Darkness domain to his clerics.
  • Zon-Kuthon is the god of darkness and de facto ruler of the Shadow Plane. He's also an evil deity whose faith is centered around Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • After her Heel–Face Turn, Nocticula became the goddess of artists, exiles, and midnight. Her followers are forbidden from completing works of art during daylight hours.
• God Save Us from the Queen!:
  • Queen Ileosa of Korvosa (the primary villain of Curse of the Crimson Throne) is a tyrant who keeps an Amazon Brigade of spies and bodyguards called the Grey Maidens brainwashed to follow her without question. She's psychotically petty and vain, too: she specifically picks beautiful women and then has their faces scarred as part of their induction.
  • The current queen of Cheliax, Abrogail II Thrune, is a ruthless tyrant (formerly described as a teenage Royal Brat) whose advisers include a pit fiend devil. You do the math. The worst part? He's there to rein in her darker impulses.
• Good Weapon, Evil Weapon:
  • Weapons can be magically given an alignment towards good or evil (as well as law or chaos) for the purposes of defeating an opponent's damage resistance.
  • Every god (whether good, neutral or evil) has a favored weapon, no matter how disposed to violence said god might be. Whether a specific character wields a particular kind of weapon can be a clue as to the god they worship (although nothing stops a non-believer from using that weapon) and thus what the alignment of that character is likely to be.
• Gorgeous Garment Generation: The rod of splendor garbs its wielder in magical noble's clothing — the finest fabrics, plus adornments of furs and jewels, worth 7,000-10,000 gold pieces. This particular item is a holdover from 3.5.
• Grammar Nazi: A 2E bestiary justifies dropping the term "lycanthrope" in favor of just "werecreature" with a rather snarky note about how the root "lykos" only applies to wolves and that if you call another type of transforming creature that they'll get offended and attack you. Apparently they didn't notice that "were-" only applies to human males, certainly not the only ones who can change, though.
• Green-Eyed Monster: The archdevil Baalzebul believes himself the only deserving son of Asmodeus and loathes the other archdevils for, in his mind, usurping his proper place in Hell.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: Lashunta women. The Lashunta are a species of psychic humanoids from a neighboring planet in Golarion's solar system, and female Lashunta resemble tall, beautiful human or elven women with antennae.
• The Greys:
  • The derro fulfill this role on Golarion, abducting people, performing terrible experiments on them, and later returning them without any memory of their experiences beyond some vague nightmares.
  • Bestiary 5 provides stats for actual greys. They are telepathic, evil, and like to paralyze and mind-probe people.
• Griping About Gremlins: An entire subset of tiny, malicious fey.
• Gruesome Goat:
  • Goats are sacred to several evil deities, including Asmodeus, the archdevil Belial, the infernal duke Zepar, the daemonic harbinger Slandrais and the demon lord Orcus. Of these, Orcus also has the head and legs of a monstrous goat.
  • A number of demons, including schirs (demons born from the souls of mortals who engaged in violent, spiteful crimes) and brimoraks (born from mortals who engaged in violent arson), have the heads and hooves of goats. This is subverted through the ez-azaels, celestial beings created when a schir is used a very literal scapegoat to atone a mortal population's sins; the schir usually dies, but sometimes is itself cleansed of its demonic nature and changed into a creature of good.
  • The illustration of the Shepherd (the page image for the trope), a throne of bones that turns any animal seated on it into an evil, intelligent servant of the archdevil Barbatos, shows a four-horned goat reclining on it, with a flame burning between its horns and A Glass of Chianti in its hoof.
• Grumpy Old Man: Erastil, God of Farming, Hunting, Trade and Family: cranky, conservative and reactionary... and Lawful Good.
• Guns Firing Underwater: Firearms can't be used underwater unless protected with specific magic, and even then, shooting through water imposes a stiff penalty on the weapon's accuracy. Early ammunition is ruined outright by exposure to water.
• The Gunslinger: Available by name in First Edition as a new class in Ultimate Combat which allows you to be a Wild West hero with Gun Fu. They use "grit" points to fuel their Improbable Aiming Skills, and regain grit by being cool. The class returned for Second Edition in Guns and Gears.
• Hammer Hilt: The First Edition feats Weapon Trick (polearms) and Spear Dancing Style both allow a character wielding a two-handed polearm to club opponents with the shaft of the weapon rather than striking with the head. In the former case, the "Haft Bash" trick removes the brace and reach qualities and treats the weapon as a club; in the latter, the spear is treated as a Double Weapon, with the shaft functioning as a light mace.
• Hanging Up on the Grim Reaper: Both The Grim Reaper and the Horseman of Death are fully statted out, making it possible for players to fight or even defeat them. However, they are both still personifications of death itself, so such a fight is basically hopeless for all but the strongest adventurers.
• Hates Reading: Alongside their many Stupid Evil tendencies, Goblins have a superstitious terror of the written word, believing that it can steal the thoughts out of their heads. This might be inspired by their ancient Magically-Binding Contract with Asmodeus. 2e even has a goblin spellbook...that's a magical pop-up book with no words in it.
• Heal It with Blood: The "Infernal Healing" spells grant the target a limited, short-lived Healing Factor and require a material component of devil blood or unholy water. Unlike normal Healing Hands, the spells are explicitly Evil.
• Heaven: Good-aligned souls are usually sent to one of the three Upper Planes based on where they fall on the Law-Chaos spectrum:
  • Heaven is a realm of perfect goodness and exquisite order, and its residents see the two as inextricably linked—righteousness requires structure, but structure is pointless without a just and noble goal.
  • Nirvana is a realm of pure good—an idyllic wilderness of enlightenment and redemption that promises sanctuary to the weary and enlightenment and transcendence to those who seek it out.
  • Elysium is a place of bold deeds and fiery passions, where heroes clash and revel, and freedom is prized above all. Its inhabitants represent a wide variety of freely given benevolence, often willing to directly aid visitors but more often serving as inspirations and muses to foster positive change.
• Hell: The tree Lower Planes are designated for evil mortal souls depending on their alignment:
  • Hell is the multiversal seat of tyranny and malignant law, where the souls of evil mortals and victims of the devils' machinations endure unending torments. Here every act is authorised, calculated, recorded and set like perfectly ordered clockwork within a vast machine driven on methodical suffering and greased with pain and purification.
  • Abaddon embodies the concept of oblivion of the mortal soul, where the Four Horsemen rule over a population of daemons epitomizing every iteration of mortal death.
  • The Abyss is a place of horror and destruction fed by mortal sin. Each of its innumerable realms is a unique iteration of chaos and evil, each with its own terrible and twisted environment, with one driving maxim: the strong survive, while the weak suffer and are destroyed.
• Hellfire: Made by devils, its damage is half fire and half (unholy) divine energy, meaning that being fireproof is not protection enough.
• Hell Seeker: There are a lot. Pretty much anyone who makes a Deal with the Devil for instance. Oddly enough subverted to a degree with the country of Cheliax, who see Hell's Infernal Hierarchy more as a model for government than as a place they want to be.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Champions of Purity has a short chapter and rules for redeeming evil people and creatures. To drive the point home, the page displays the Tiefling shown fighting Seelah on the cover of Blood of Fiends now proudly wearing a symbol of Iomedae.
  • A half-orc paladin subset, "Redeemer", focuses on doing this with monstrous creatures through various tweaks to regular Paladin abilities^note  They can even FORCE a (temporary) Face-turn through "Pact of Peace", a level 8 Ability that acts as a lesser geas — except for TheUndead and evil-aligned dragons and outsiders.
    • Second edition allows any race this option with the Neutral-Good Champion class.
  • Wrath of the Righteous has this as something of a running theme, ranging from allowing you to talk a turncoat back from the side of the demons to aiding a major succubus character in leaving evil and the Abyss behind and talking a Runelord into giving morality a try in exchange for breaking him out of Baphomet's personal prison.
• Heroic Sacrifice: What caused the aboleths' plans to use the Starstone as a Colony Drop to backfire spectacularly — two, in fact. Acavna, Azlanti goddess of the moon and war, saw the incoming Starstone and attempted to stop it, dying in the process... and then her lover Amaznen, god of magic, decided he would be Together in Death and used his life force to empower a spell that broke the aboleth control over the Starstone, making it much less lethal and inclined to fall where they wanted. Their sacrifice is also implied to have changed the Starstone's properties by infusing godly energy into it, which is what allows people to ascend to godhood.
• Hillbilly Horrors:
  • The Hook Mountain Massacre, with the bonus that some of the inbred rapist homicidal degenerates are ten feet tall. Ogres and ogrekin in general borrow a lot from this trope.
  • Marsh giants as well, with added elements of Lovecraftian cults, courtesy to their worship of Dagon.
  • The bloody jake archetype for the slayer class. One of their abilities is even called "The Woods Have Eyes".
• Hillbilly Incest: Ogres are based on a particularly monstrous and savage take on the theme of depraved cannibal hillbillies, complete with crude slang from the US South and a taste for banjos. They are also infamous for their incestuous practices, which often result in ogre clans being riddled with deformities, birth defects, and congenital disabilities.
• Historical Domain Character: Reign of Winter includes Rasputin the Mad Monk and Anastasia (Rasputin is the son of Baba Yaga, Anastasia was killed with the other Romanovs, but Rasputin resurrected her using a lock of her hair).
  • For some reason Thais is Cayden Cailean's herald
• Holy Water: Holy water is defined as water blessed by a cleric or oracle sworn to a Good-aligned deity; besides burning fiends and the undead like acid, it's also used to consecrate areas against evil magic and in liturgical ceremonies. The worshippers of Cayden Cailean, the god of adventurers and alcohol, are known to also bless alcoholic beverages in this manner.
• Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Four Horsemen are the near-godlike rulers of the Neutral Evil fiends known as the daemons (aka yugoloths in D&D).
• Hot God: Shelyn, the goddess of beauty, romantic love, and the fine arts, is the main standout, typically depicted as a slim brunette dressed in revealing silks. Predictably, Even the Girls Want Her: she's canonically in an on-again-off-again relationship with Desna, goddess of freedom, and Sarenrae, goddess of the sun.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action:
  • Several species in Pathfinder are quite capable of breeding with just about anything. Aside from the typical half-orcs, half-elves, aasimar and tieflings, there's also the matter of sorcerers whose bloodlines can include devils, dragons, angels, undead, plants, and shadows.
  • Of course this is often a case of Lamarck Was Right, with the example for the undead bloodline suggesting that your ancestor became a lich or the infernal bloodline suggesting that the power is actually a lingering effect of an ancestor's Deal with the Devil,
  • Indeed, their entries in the Bestiaries mention that creatures such as half dragons and half fiends are mostly the result of magical rituals, and only very rarely the result of actual sexual relations between different species.
• Human Sacrifice: A tradition among the evil religions, though the particulars can vary. The Demonic Obedience for Lamashtu for instance involves sacrificing a life that is younger than 4 weeks old.
• Humans Are Special: Subverted. The rise to power of the first human civilization, Azlant, was covertly backed by aboleths, and one can argue that humanity wouldn't have the status it now does without that start and its consequences.
• Humongous-Headed Hammer: The art in the Core Rulebook for First Edition depicts the warhammer as a big, blocky thing with a head almost as wide as its haft is long, that is nevertheless supposed to be a one-handed weapon. Ultimate Equipment adds the "earth breaker", a two-handed hammer with an even bigger head.
• Hunting "Accident": Attempted in War for the Crown Part 2: Songbird, Scion, Saboteur. After clashing with the PCs, Lord Titus Lotheed-Casava rigs the draw of hunting grounds for a "peasant hunt" so that the PCs are assigned to hunt in lands where he knows a powerful manticore has taken up residence, hoping it will kill them.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Taldor has a tradition called a "peasant hunt" where a convict is released into a hunting preserve dressed in an animal costume for partying aristocrats to pursue. If the peasant stays uncaptured for a full day, they get a pardon. Less malevolent than most examples because, at least in theory, the hunters are only allowed to use nonlethal means to bring down their quarry. The PCs have an opportunity to take part in one in part 2 of the War for the Crown campaign, but one of their rivals rigs the draw of hunting grounds to assign them to a territory he knows is inhabited by a powerful manticore, hoping it will kill them.
• An Ice Person: Several monsters are associated with ice or use ice-based weapons, including white dragons, frost giants, and some fey. For Player Characters, there are several spells that conjure ice or deal cold damage, and the ice powers are the main focus of the Winter Witch and Boreal/Rime-Blooded sorcerer bloodlines.
• Implacable Man: Pretty much the point of a high level samurai. They gain the ability Last Stand, which makes them basically unkillable to anyone but their mark. They take minimum damage from outside sources (except magic and Critical Hits), don't enter the dying state when they're below 0 health, and take no damage from outside physical attacks once they hit 0 health. These benefits remain until they either attack someone else, kill their foe, or die.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Findable in Numeria, in the wreckage of a spaceship that crashed millennia ago. This is the focus of the Iron Gods campaign path.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: How do some of those outfits even stay in place at all without double-sided tape, much less stand up to the strain of adventuring? And then there's Laori's skintight chainmail. Admittedly, she's a sadomasochist, so comfort isn't an issue, but still...
• In a Single Bound: When Rushing, the Tarrasque's jump is practically Not Quite Flight.
• The Infested: Korir-kokembes are a type of tropical dragons that live symbiotically with swarms of arthropods such as wasps, army ants, or spiders, which they host in nests within their gullets and can vomit forth at will.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: Many, many examples, including the amulet of the planes, the well of many worlds, and the cubic gate.
• Interspecies Romance: With all the Half-Human Hybrids and other crossbreeds running around and considering the Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action above, this happens pretty often. Though not as often as in D&D. It even shows up specifically in certain adventure paths, where the players can run into either characters currently in a relationship, or can become one if they wish. For specifics:
  • In Legacy of Fire, a harpy named Undrella unabashedly hits on the male player character with the highest Charisma score, and though it's hidden behind euphemisms, it's quite clear that reciprocating could be very helpful to helping her make a Heel–Face Turn, especially when she shows back up in the final adventure of the path.
  • In Skull & Shackles, an important non-player character in the last adventure is the half-orc son of a human sailor who befriended the female orc slave-to-be being transported on the ship he had been pressganged to serving on, helped her escape, and eventually fell in love with her and settled down happily.
  • The half-orc paladin Irabeth Tirablade, of Wrath of the Righteous, has a similar backstory, having been born to a male orc who genuinely fell in love with a human woman and abandoned his brutal culture to be with her. Besides which she's in one herself, since her wife is a pure-blooded human.
  • Wrath of the Righteous also has the Ascended Demon Arueshalae, who can potentially (and is encouraged) to form a romantic bond with one of the heroes. As she is a succubus seeking to redeem herself, she'll be this trope for any PC regardless of their ancestry.
  • In the second adventure for Reign of Winter, a potential non-player character ally is Greta, who is a female winter wolf ^note a race of intelligent, evil, talking white-furred wolves with frost-breath attacks and cold immunity currently transformed into a human form by the magic of her city of residence. Unlike Undrella, it's quite explicit that she's looking for romance, but a player character could eventually use this to help her to make a Heel–Face Turn. It's easier to get her interested if the PC is using a certain magic item that makes her assume they're also a transformed winter wolf, but it's possible to do so without it, and even if she is misled in the first place, she doesn't care when she finds out that her lover isn't a winter wolf. That said, it does make her especially interested in finding some way of maintaining a human form if she leaves the city, something the AP accounts for in the end if the players chose to do so.
• Introduced Species Calamity: Pest drakes are dragonets about the size of a pigeon that became major fad pets a few centuries in the setting's past. Many were released into the wild when they grew too big to care for, and more were freed when the fad passed, and they ended up becoming extremely common and destructive urban pests.
  • Spellsong Lyrebirds, from the upcoming Howl of the Wild, are the result of wizards attempting to create familiars that could cast spells. They escaped, and now they are birds that can cast fireball.
• In the Blood: Sorcerer bloodlines are defined by this. Sorcerers gain magic from some kind of change to their bloodline at some point, causing magic to manifest based on the source. Usually the explanation is that someone in your family was affected, and that meeting had a ripple effect down the line.
• I See Dead People:
  • The speak with dead spell partially resurrects corpses for conversation.
  • The Ancestor Mystery Oracle can converse with and summon the ghosts of their ancestors.
• Irrational Hatred: Yamabushi Tengu really, really hate ducks for some reason.
• Jackass Genie:
  • Efreet are as bad at this here as they were in D&D, but the Efreeti prince Jhavhul takes the cake. Not only will he usually fulfill wishes in a maliciously twisted way, he'll force you to use two out of three wishes to help him resurrect Xotani the Firebleeder, a terribly destructive Spawn of Rovagug, for... very twisted reasons.
  • Glabrezu demons delight in fulfilling mortal wishes in ways designed to maximize pain and grief. Wish for a loved one to come back to life, for instance, and they'll resurrect them as a vampire or some other horrific undead; if a blacksmith wishes for patronage, they'll get it in the form a tyrant who'll use their works to spread war and misery.
• Jekyll & Hyde:
  • Damiel Morgethai under the influence of the chemical mutagen he is addicted to.
  • The Master Chymist prestige class is ten levels' worth of this trope.
• Jerkass: Alain, the iconic Cavalier who appears in the Advanced Player's Guide is the kind of guy everyone can't help but hate.
• The Journey Through Death: The River of Souls carries the the newly dead across the Astral Plane and into the domain of Pharasma, Goddess of Death, where they're judged and sent to their final fate. Some fiends try to poach souls from the River, so it's heavily guarded by celestials, devils, and demons alike.
• Kaiju:
  • Achaekek the Mantis God (one of the few gods with stats) qualifies, as do the Spawn of Rovagug — unique gigantic monstrosities that are the spawn of the Rough Beast Rovagug, god of destroying the world. The Tarrasque is just the most famous of the Spawn. Rovagug himself is typically depicted as a monstrous beast as well, rather than anything remotely humanoid.
  • Other gigantic, high-power monsters can be considered this, like Mu spores, behemoths, krakens...
  • A kaiju template, inspired by high-powered Japanese movie monsters like Godzilla and Gamera, was scheduled for appearance in Bestiary 3, but it was cut because it would have been eight pages long. Paizo held off on releasing it until they got mythic rules (ie, rules for playing near-demigods) ironed out, so it didn't appear until Bestiary 4. However, they made a change. Rather than a template, it was Actual Kaiju. First, there's Agyra the Forever Storm, a massive two-headed pterodactyl that can spit lightning bolts from each head, create a hurricane, and produces sonic booms when she flies and top speed. Bezravnis, known as the Inferno Below, resembles a monstrous, distorted three-tailed scorpion whose powers include throwing webbing that constricts on its prey until it's crushed to death and firing heat rays from each stinger. Finally, Mogaru the Final King is a twin-tailed, energy-absorbing, Breath Weapon-wielding saurian creature.
  • In Second Edition, Secrets of Magic adds the 10th-level primal spell Summon Kaiju, which briefly summons one from a list of specific kaiju. It arrives the turn it's summoned, then departs the next—with each part having calamitous effects. The 10th-level primal spell Nature Incarnate allows you to turn into a kaiju for one minute.
• Kamaitachi: Kamaitachi are malicious fey creatures resembling flying weasels with curved blades instead of legs, who delight in causing pain and suffering. They have the ability to delay the actual damage caused by their slashing claws — effectively, someone they cut won't actually start bleeding and hurting until the kamaitachi decides they should — and use this to force people to shame and demean themselves in exchange for their lives.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Ultimate Combat introduces the katana and wakizashi. They're mostly identical to longswords (bastard swords before errata) and shortswords respectively, but with a very minor additional cost ^note 35 gold more when a 2nd level Player Character is expected to have 2000, a greater critical threat range, and an additional special property "deadly" that makes them better at executing helpless foes, and wakizashi can deal piercing or slashing damage while shortswords are only effective at piercing. Note that this is more about Power Creep than katana fanboyism, since they're also exotic weapons which require special and specific training to use properly — western exotic weapons have a similar level of power.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Falayna, an Empyreal Lord, is practically the patron saint of kicking ass and looking good doing it. She herself is described as a beautiful woman who wears gleaming silver armor, silk robes, and an incredible number of colorful jeweled rings on her fingers. Her followers are likewise encouraged to embrace feminine beauty and train for battle at the same time.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Sarenrae, the Neutral Good Goddess of Healing and the Sun, reserves this for those who have no interest in redemption.
  • Generally, the easier option for dealing with trolls. Unless you're a wizard or alchemist (or just Crazy-Prepared) you probably won't have acid lying around.
  • On the other hand, while it isn't as bad as in 3e, fire is the most common immunity.
  • Oracles with the Blackened curse gain access to an assortment of fire spells in exchange for burn-scarred arms that cost them on weapon attack rolls.
• Kill the Poor: Ileosa Arabasti in "Curse of the Crimson Throne" unleashes a plague with this goal in mind.
• Knight Templar: The Hellknight orders of Cheliax, which can be effectively summarized as Judge Dredd in fullplate.
• Kubrick Stare: The King of Roses◊ from the adventure The Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale.
• Lady of War:
  • The goddess Iomedae is, well, the goddess of this.
  • Also, Seelah, the iconic paladin.
  • While not her main aspect, the goddess Sarenrae fits the bill when she needs to, as seen here◊.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The adventure The Witchwar Legacy has a big one. One of Baba Yaga's witch-queen daughters, Tashanna, was exiled to another reality both as punishment for staging a coup against her mother and as a means to encourage her to grow into a great witch and demon-binder in her own right. The infamous Greyhawk villain Iggwilv, who received a lot of attention in Paizo's Dragon and Dungeon runs, was a member of the Circle of Eight under the alias "Tasha".
  • "The Dead Eyes worship a one-eyed orc deity whose name is long since forgotten[...]"
• Left-Justified Fantasy Map: Partially averted, the areas that have been detailed so far are Avistan — a rough Europe analogue, Garund — an equally wild and varied Africa analogue, and the western region of Casmaron — roughly equivalent to the Middle East and Central Asia. More Recently, Tian Xia, an analogue of eastern Asia, has been detailed as well. Arcadia (an American analogue) has been mentioned, but not detailed yet. Ditto for Vudra, the southeastern part of Casmaron, which is basically the Indian subcontinent.
• Level Drain: Downplayed. Undead can still inflict negative levels, but you no longer have to earn those levels back the hard way. Averted in 2e, where the negative levels mechanic is removed entirely.
• The Lightfooted: The Ninja's "Light Steps" ability lets them walk across any surface without difficulty or disturbance: rough terrain, ice, the thinnest tree branches, Booby Trap triggers, Caltrops, water, lava...
  • The '2e'' Rogue's Cloud Step feat lets them Stride over water, air, and solid surfaces that can't otherwise hold their weight. Downplayed in that they still have to end their turn on solid ground.
• Light Is Not Good:
  • Shining Children (creepy borderline-Eldritch Abomination evil outsiders with light and fire themed powers) and Lurkers in Light (creepy extraplanar evil fey with abilities that make them most dangerous in well-illuminated areas) from the second Bestiary. There is also the demon lord Nurgal, representing the merciless, destructive power of the sun, and has a portfolio of pointless conflict.
  • The positive energy plane is home to a race of creatures called the jyoti, highly xenophobic guardians of the sources of life and other positive energy aspects. While those who know of their existence frequently assume them to be good, they are jealous and violent defenders of their home plane, frequently coming to blows with adventurers with the slightest provocation.
• Lightning Lash: A kineticist who specializes in the air element can charge a whip (or any other weapon) with electricity, or manifest a whip made of pure electricity, with the right talent selection.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Played straight by 1e, mostly or completely averted by 2e.
  • In 1e, Spellcasting classes tend to dominate the late game after spending the early game nursing single digit hit points. It should be noted that it's still significantly better about this than 3.5. Most significantly, fighters have been given unique feats that give them extremely powerful combat maneuvers and the duration of game-breaking battle spells is generally measured in rounds and had their numerical advantages severely decreased. Casters also have the option of taking the additional hit-points from their favored class.
  • In 2e, much more care was taken to keeping martial and caster classes balanced relative to each other, both in and out of combat, at all levels. Martials are overall better at single-target damage and defense, casters are still overall better at utility and area damage, but it’s a common culture shock for players from other systems used to playing very powerful casters to feel “nerfed” by the system.
• Living Dinosaurs: Dinosaurs exist as powerful apex predators in the primeval Realm of the Mammoth Lords and the trackless Mwangi Expanse. They serve as the most powerful animals to exist without magical backing.
• Living Drawing: Trompe L'oeil paintings are magically-enhanced copies of an original creature that can step off the canvas, assume solid three-dimensional forms, and even inhabit other paintings. These entities can only be permanently killed by destroying the painting that generates them.
• Living Shadow: The spell shadow projection allows you to make your own shadow into this.
  • The sceaduinar, the native inhabitants of the plane of negative energy, which lies at the core of the Plane of Shadow, are a variation of this, being crystallized manifestations of the destroying energies of the plane. They are quite hostile to all living, and unliving, creatures.
• Llama Loogie: Llamas can spit as a special ranged attack that does no damage but sickens the target.
• Load-Bearing Boss:
  • Once during Council of Thieves, where the chain reaction that leads to the destruction of the mayor's villa and the release of the pit fiend starts with one single, murdered Kyton (although sad Kyton is killed by an NPC before the heroes arrive).
  • In the retired Pathfinder Society scenario Skeleton Moon, the final boss is a huge assassin vine that's been infused with a soul by accident. It tears away from the tower it's attached to leading to mere rounds before the whole thing comes crumbling down on the PCs.
• Locked into Strangeness: In Second Edition, it's mentioned in the description of the Raise Dead and Resurrect spells that the target comes back changed from the experience, with a streak of white hair being one possibility.
• Loony Laws: Mayor Barzillai Thrune's decrees at the start of Hell's Rebels include edicts to control rats and stray dogs, mandatory display of the queen's portrait, restrictions on the wear of embroidered clothing, a ban on drinking tea after sunset, and a ban on mint.
• Lord of the Ocean: There are two main sea gods, both known for their tempestuous and fickle natures:
  • Gozreh takes this role in his female incarnation as the goddes of the sea (as opposed to her male incarnation as the god of the sky); as the ruler of the seas, she's depicted as a woman with sea-green hair whose lower body is a pillar of roiling water. Being the god of the seas in one incarnation and of winds and storms in the other, Gozreh is worshipped by most people who make their living in or on the water, especially fishermen, merchants and sailors, and favors the trident as a weapon.
  • While the cult of Gozreh is well-established and predominant in the continents of Avistan and Casmaron, the people of Tian Xia worship Hei Feng, the god of sea and storms.
• Lost World: The Vaults of Orv in the lowest levels of the Darklands are these.
• Love Dodecahedron: The villains of Burnt Offerings, the first Rise of the Runelords adventure. It's a squicky dodecahedron at that. Orik the sellsword likes Lyrie the wizard, who's too hung up over Tsuto the monk/rogue to care. Tsuto loves Nualia the evil cleric, who is having sex with Tsuto, but doesn't actually love him because she's still vengeful about her former lover Delek. The goblin chief is also infatuated with Nualia (though the text claims it's more of an intellectual curiousity, from a goblin, no less) and is neglecting his wives, so they're all sleeping with Bruthazmus the bugbear (who's probably the only one happy with the arrangement).
• Lovecraft Country:
  • The description of the Lost Coast from Burnt Offerings, the first chapter of Rise of the Runelords (the first published adventure path), reads like a description of the Dunwich area.
  • A much more explicit version of the trope is the County of Versex in Ustalav (which is otherwise the setting's main Überwald), with all notable settlements being almost direct expies of their New England equivalents. Carrion Hill and Hyannis are Dunwich, Illmarsh is Innsmouth, Rozenport is Arkham, and Thrushmoor is Kingsport.
• Lovecraft Lite: Turns up everywhere, when you scratch under the surface. Nasty elder gods, ancient non-humanoid civilizations, weird and inimical aliens, and direct references to the Mythos—notably, the most definitive take on Golarion's creation we have suggests that Yog-Sothoth is one of two pillars needed to keep the cycle of reality functioning. The guys at Paizo love H. P. Lovecraft. The game as a whole also does not actually care about these except as thematic elements or when they are direct antagonists, and most Mythos creatures are just more monsters, no Sanity Meter to speak of.

M-P

• Mad Doctor: Many of the alchemist archetypes from Ultimate Magic are based around knowledge of anatomy (and how to severely damage it).
• Made of Indestructium: Major artifacts need to be destroyed by fantastic means. A different, and always difficult, method is needed for each one. No conventional attempts can harm them. Pathfinder owes this trope to one of its inspirations through a long line of descent.
• Mad Scientist: The alchemist class is based on a fantasy application of mad chemistry, with incendiary bombs, Psycho Serums, and spells in potion form. The Ultimate Magic sourcebook adds various alternate alchemist archetypes like the vivisectionist, reanimator, and clone master that allow for a wider range of Mad Scientist types.
• Magical Counterfeiting: The bottom-level illusion spell "Fool's Gold" disguises copper or silver as gold for a few hours, increasing its perceived value up to a hundredfold. Careful appraisal can expose the fraud early.
• Magical Girl: The magical child archetype in Ultimate Intrigue is a spellcasting version of the dual-identity vigilante class. Signature abilities include an magical animal companion and a Transformation Sequence called by that name. The transformation allows the magical child to switch identities rapidly but with less subtlety:
  "The transformation is quite a spectacle, involving loud sounds or music, brilliant colorful energies, and swift motions."
• Magical Star Symbols: A major symbol in The Magocracy of ancient Thassilon is the Sihedron Rune, a seven-pointed star representing the power of magic, the seven disciplines of Thassilonian magic, and their associated Runelords. The original Sihedron is also a powerful Dismantled MacGuffin.
• Magic Dance: Because Pathfinder was originally based on D&D 3.5 rules, for a long time it had the same problem with D&D where bards had a difficult time making this trope their specialty. The Remastered version of Second Edition axed spell components, and with it the requirement that composition spells that use the Performance skill use an auditory performance if they have a verbal component (as most did), meaning that bards can finally specialize in dance. (By a strict reading of the rules, however, they're still required to make some sort of vocalization.)
• Magic from Technology / Magitek: The planet Verces is the most technologically advanced in Golarion's solar system, using equal parts Star Trek level technology and arcane magic to keep their spacefaring society running. Neither is seen as conflicting with the other.
• Magic Knight: The magus base class blends arcane magic and swordplay from level 1, channeling spells through weapon attacks, and gaining the formidable ability to cast a spell and make a full attack routine in the same round. The class has — largely — replaced the Eldritch Knight, a decent prestige class that unfortunately required struggling with a somewhat weak character before it could be achieved.
  • Second Edition also has the Magus, with the ability to channel a 1-action or 2-action spell that requires an attack roll into a Spellstrike that combines it with a melee Strike, applying the effects of both on a hit.
• Magic or Psychic?: In First Edition, "psychic magic" is an entirely separate category of magic, contrasting with arcane and divine. Six classes introduced in Occult Adventures tap into this type of magic, and the spells they can use have little overlap with what other classes can cast. In Second Edition, only Psychics have access to psychic magic, and it's more to do with the exact methods of how they cast spells, as they share a spell list with bards and other casters with access to the occult tradition.
• Magic Potion: Potions work as essentially bottled spells, remaining dormant until used. Most potions are drunk, but some are made as oils to be applied to the skin. In terms of effect, they range from simple healing and stat-boosting things to drinks that cause you to sprout eyes all over your body or that turn you into a hive-minded swarm of wasps. Potions are often the province of alchemists, but are also made by arcane spellcasters such as wizards and witches. The making of potions is a very complex processes of selecting ingredients and distilling, brewing and proofing mixtures, and professional potion-makers are often very protective of their trade secrets. Potion variants include ones with delayed effects, ones that heal you in addition to their other effects, and ones deployed as gaseous clouds instead of being drunk.
• The Magocracy: The two most prominent examples are the nations of Nex and Geb. The former nation focuses on standard magic (like evocation and transmutation), while the latter is a necrocracy focusing almost exclusively on necromantic magic.
• Massive Race Selection: While the Corebook has only seven race options, there are more than 50^note As of this posting there are 56 distinct playable races if one considers all the books (many of which have variants and sub-races). These have been detailed in such books as Advanced Race Guide and each of the various Bestiaries, as well as a few of the Adventure Path modules and the "Blood of" and "People of" Player Companion books.
• Mass Resurrection: One monk variant has the ability to do this for all of their fallen allies in exchange for completely wiping themselves out of existence (subverting Death Is a Slap on the Wrist), making them not just Deader than Dead, but an Un-person to the point where even their name disappears from where it was written down.
• Master Poisoner: A number of classes such as rogues, assassins and ninjas are proficient poisoners, but it's the Alchemist who can really exploit poison. Alchemists who specialize enjoy complete immunity, reduced creation time and costs, and design poisons that contaminate the weapon longer and are more difficult to resist.
• Mayfly–December Friendship: Elves who grow up among shorter-lived races rather than their own kind are called Forlorn. Since elves are considered adult at 110, each one of them has by this time buried roughly two generations of "childhood friends" who grew up, lived their lives and died of old age. Many more companions will die in the course of the rest of their lifespan (naturally somewhere between 350 and 750 years), resulting in many Forlorn becoming cynical, bitter and insular.
• Medicinal Cuisine: A Witch can learn to cook magical meals that can cure poisons or disease, grant power-ups, or suspend the effects of old age. The catch is that they need to be made from intelligent humanoids.
• Medieval European Fantasy: Played straight with the continent of Avistan, but averted overall: Garund is a stand-in for Africa, Casmaron is Central Asia, Tian Xia is East Asia, and Arcadia is the pre-Columbian Americas (upgraded to a similar tech level to Avistan and Garund). Pathfinder draws heavily from many pulp sources, so while Avistan has a lot of medieval Europe in it, other continents and time periods are equally well represented.
• Messianic Archetype: Ihys, brother of Asmodeus and the first god along with him. Besides his name being apparently taken from the Christogram, he actually combines Jesus and Prometheus into one savior archetype. He created mortals and then granted them free will out of sympathy, before being murdered for it by Asmodeus with a spear that remains a holy relic (i.e., the Spear of Destiny).
• Metaplot: The game's default setting, Golarion, advances in real-time, with Adventure Paths typically taking place roughly concurrently with their real-life release dates. Thankfully, it manages to avoid most of the pitfalls that metaplots can lead to. While it's generally assumed that Adventure Paths "go well", writers rarely explicitly reference them or their outcomes in non-AP material (barring the Cutting Off the Branches in the transition to 2nd Edition), so players don't need to buy decades worth of books just to catch up.
• Mind Rape: The supplement Ultimate Magic introduces a whole raft of spells that can inflict this upon others. They range from murderous command (you order someone to kill the person closest to them) to malicious spite (make someone hate another person for days and work to harm them constantly) to the granddaddy of them all, prediction of failure (force someone to experience the pain and grief of every single failure and mistake they will ever make in their life, all at once, FOREVER).
• The Minion Master: The Thrallherd prestige class from 3.5 returns in Psionics Unleashed.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Every Adventure Path turns out to be this, in some way.
  • Rise of the Runelords: Goblin attack on a small town -> Plot to resurrect evil tyrant that has been dead for millenia.
  • Legacy of Fire: An astrologer dies to a mysterious fire -> Mad genie and its minions try to steal an Eldritch Abomination's power.
  • Kingmaker: Nation offers a group of adventurers a chance to forge their own kingdom -> Mad faerie plans to steal a large chunk of Golarion to attract her former lover's attention.
  • Carrion Crown: Accidental death of a doctor -> Attempt to bring back a powerful lich.
  • Skulls & Shackles: People get shangaied to work on a pirate ship -> Cheliaxian plot to take over a pirate nation.
  • Iron Gods: Flame that fuels Torch's industry gets stolen -> Mad AI tries to become a god.
  • Wrath of the Righteous: Attack on crusader city during a holy day -> Plot to turn magical defenses against crusaders and enslave them -> Attempt to cause the Worldwound to increase in size, drawing much of Golarion within its influence.
• Mirroring Factions: The Pathfinder Society and the Aspis Consortium are engaged in pretty much the same thing— looting artifacts from ancient dungeons—but the PFS likes to get on a high horse and to claim recovery and preservation of knowledge as its objective, whereas Aspis are much more ready to admit that it's just business for them. Over time the former organization has undergone a lot of reforms, but since the Pathfinder Society needs all the manpower it can get it still has a not undeserved reputation for this.
• Mister Seahorse: The Mythic Realms sourcebook mentions the Crater of Carnal Joining in the Pit of Gormuz, where a priest of Rovagug named Multh gathered 1111 virgins of both sexes and all races to try and entice Rovagug to "bless" the world with another of its spawn. What arose from the pit was instead one of Rovagug's servitors; Galulab'daa, a mountainous gibbering mouther. Though most of the offerings died, four lived and were left pregnant with Rovagug's grandchildren; of these four "Woeful Mothers", one was a human man, and the other was a male troglodyte.
• Mithril: A holdover from D&D (and to an extent The Lord of the Rings), mithril is still shiny, still light, and still expensive. Humorously, it is also nonstick, making it a surprisingly good material for making cookware such as waffle irons.
• Mixed Ancestry Is Attractive: The Blood of Angels book for 1st Edition states that aasimars, humanoids with partial descent from a Good-aligned outsider, generally appear to be particularly physically attractive versions of the base creature thanks to inheriting some of the beauty of their celestial ancestor. The same is not generally true of tieflings, who tend to look stereotypically demonic and are widely feared due to their fiendish ancestry.
• A Molten Date with Death:
  • Xin-Grafar, the lost City of Golden Death, has canals of molten gold that flood the streets at regular intervals as a defense mechanism. The mechanism's Ragnarök Proofing didn't save the control system, so it can no longer be turned off; player characters need to time their visits very carefully.
  • The top-level Wall of Lava spell creates exactly that: the wall deals fire damage to everyone nearby; causes far more damage, plus Damage Over Time, to anyone who touches it; and can be directed to erupt every turn.
• Money Mauling: The "Coin Shot" spell enchants three coins so that they can be thrown with all the force of a bullet. The more valuable the coin, the more damage it does.
• Mon: Summoners bond with eidolons, planar creatures that they can call on to fight on their behalf. There are also familiars, which are weaker but can augment a caster's power, and the animal companions of druids, rangers and hunters.
• Moral Guardians: In a rare actually good example of this, the exscinder archons have the ability to magically censor any text. Given that in the Pathfinder universe reading the wrong thing literally kill you, and that things like the Necronomicon and sapient, evil grimoires of fiendish origins do very much exist, such measures are not at all unreasonable.
• Mordor: Virlych, an area near Ustalav, has been corrupted with intense negative energy due to The Whispering Tyrant ruling for centuries. Even after he was eventually imprisoned in his own lair of Gallowspire, the land is still filled with undead and other horrors, as well as being permanently dark and cloudy.
• Mortality Grey Area: There are a few races that, for a variety of reasons, are functionally very close to the undead (typically, they're animated by negative energy and hurt by positive energy, whereas all living creatures by definition work the other way around) but are still flesh-and-blood beings with active metabolisms and the needs of living creatures. Dhampyrs, the children of vampires and living humanoids, are once such race. Similarly, there are mortics, former mortals who were exposed to immense amounts of negative energy and survived... technically.
• Move in the Frozen Time: The 3rd-party supplement Path of War (a Spiritual Successor to D&D 3.5's Tome of Battle) has "God of the Hourglass", the ultimate stance of the Riven Hourglass discipline. Among its effects, it allows the user to retain their awareness inside a time stop effect and unfreeze themselves long enough to take a single action.
• Mr. Fanservice: Seltyiel, Sajan, and Valeros come to mind.
  • All three of these guys crank the fanservice up a bit more in their Mythic Adventures redesigns — Sajan and Seltyiel have both done away with every stitch of clothing on their upper bodies while Valeros has ditched his armour for a gladiator-esque shoulder-guard, leaving his scarred, muscled chest visible to all. Apparently becoming a Mythic Hero does away with the need for conventional armour.
• Muggles Do It Better: Or at least just as well. In the main setting, the warriors with swords or the odd experimental firearm can at least have a chance when confronting spellcasters of equal level. And they're much more common. Late in Reign of Winter the PCs confront a group of soldiers with modern weapons. They are backed up by vampires and some odds and ends, but it's the soldiers who have the potential to cause some of the biggest problems. And then Iron Gods establishes that, given enough time, technology that equals or surpasses some of the greatest feats of magic can be developed while being accessible to everyone.
• Mundane Utility: Particularly in adventure paths, several items and materials that are usually focused on for high-end adventurers are shown to have uses above and beyond adventuring careers. One example is Mithril — one adventure path has a character who has a mithril frying pan. Not only is it a masterwork item (thus giving a cook a +2 to their check when they cook with it), but it's naturally non-stick.
  • Exaggerated in 2e by the High-Grade Mithral Waffle Iron, which uses extremely high-quality mithral to make waffles that are slightly better than waffles from regular Mithral Waffle Irons.
• Murder Into Malevolence: Zig-zagged. Most forms of The Undead force a Character Alignment invoked change to evil, but ghosts might retain their original personality and alignment in death; the rules only note that a death traumatic enough to cause someone to linger as a ghost might also drive the victim to evil.
• Mystical Jade: The munavris, a species of pale humans who live in the deepest reaches of the Darklands, live on a scattered archipelago of jade islands floating on the waters of the Sightless Sea. The origin of these islands isn't known — the munavris simply found them when looking for somewhere to live — and they seem to possess magical powers. The aboleths, fishlike monsters and some of the munavris' most bitter enemies, are unwilling or unable to come close to them, and it's believed that the islands' influence played a part in the development of the munavris' Psychic Powers. The jade is tough enough for the munavris to make armor out of it, and each island is made up of a unique color of jade, which their inhabitants use as badge of their island of origin.
• Mystical Plague: The spell cursed earth can infect a one mile radius area with any disease of the caster's choice.
• Mythology Gag: The book, Bastards of Golarion, features a section talking about a particular kind of half-breed they refer to as the Celebrity; someone whose inter-species heritage makes them popular, even beloved. The accompanying artwork is a young, white-haired woman in peasant clothing with a pendant of Desna around her neck and looking rather depressed. The picture is, of course, of Nualia, the big-bad of Burnt Offerings but of her before her descent into insanity and worship of Lamashtu.
• Naginatas Are Feminine: A close variant: the western cousin to this weapon, the glaive, is the sacred weapon of Shelyn, Goddess of Love and Beauty, who is worshipped both in the western continents of Avistan and Garund and in the eastern continent of Tian Xia. Strangely the actual naginata is favored by a male deity, Fumeiyoshi, the Tien god of undeath and dishonor.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Like all fantasy settings Golarion has its fair share of these, but the names of the Spawn of Rovagug REALLY take the cake with names like "Festering Ulunat, the Unholy First", "Great Doom Chemnosit, the Monarch Worm", "The Tarrasque, Armageddon Engine", "Unyielding Kothogaz, the Dance of Disharmony", "Wrath-Blazing Xoanti, the Firebleeder", and "Volnagur the End-Singer".
  • Also related to Rovagug, there's the name of Golarion itself to the wider universe. The other planets get poetic names like The Green or The Cradle or The Dreamer. But Golarion is The Cage.
• Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: Leshies tend towards names like this, as the immortal nature spirits give themselves several descriptive names throughout their lives. Sample names from the Player Core include Verdant Taleweaver, Masterful Sun Drinker, and Snowy Pine Branch.
• National Weapon: Many races, such as Elves and Gnomes and Dwarves have Weapon Proficiency or Familiarity with a small group of weapons. Also, each god has their own favored weapon like Sarenrae's love of scimitars.
• Nay-Theist: A whole nation of them; after a devastating religious Civil War, the people of Rahadoum decided to outlaw religion, destroy the temples and throw out the priests as being more trouble than they're worth. The overall stance seems to be rather balanced, as while they have to deal with many hardships that could be handled more easily with divine aid and/or magic on their side, a lot of the problems in other lands actually are caused by gods and religions.
• The Necrocracy: The nation of Geb is run by intelligent undead. Interestingly, it actually manages to have fairly good relations with its neighbors, as it's non-expansionist and uses its fertile land to grow abundant crops, which it sells for cheap. Sure, mortals living in Geb have it pretty rough, but mortals outside of Geb are generally willing to put up with it for those prices.
• Nerf: And buffs too. A nearly-comprehensive list of each can be found on GiantITP, or you can ask around Brilliant Gameologists. Just be prepared for some backlash.
  • Druids and clerics were the only base classes to actually be weakened by the conversion from 3.5, to partially address the CoDzilla^note "Cleric or Druid + Godzilla", i.e. the classes being Game Breakers as implemented issue: both classes were capped at 4 base spell slots per level per day at max level (down from 5 for 1st through 5th level spells, bringing them into line with the other full casting classes), clerics lost access to heavy armor (but gained access to their patron deity's favored weapon, previously reserved for the War Domain), and Wild Shape was changed to use the rules for the wizard spell beast shape.
  • Prestige classes, which 3.5 had seen go from 'rare alternate class options' to 'virtually mandatory powerhouse classes', were generally reduced in power across the board. Further, some of them were later almost entirely superseded by new Paizo base classes (such as magus and ninja) which fit those niches from Level 1.
  • Dragons generally saw a reduction in Challenge Rating. Not counting undead or templates, the strongest dragons in the Pathfinder bestiaries are the ancient gold dragons, with a CR of 20, compared to D&D 3.5 Monster Manual, in which an ancient gold dragon clocked in at CR 24, and still had two age categories to go above that, maxing out at CR 27 as a great wyrm^note  A CR 26 red dragon and a CR 27 gold dragon were added with the Dragons Revisited supplement, however.. On the other hand, the Tarrasque receives a significant buff, going from CR 20 in the Monster Manual to CR 25 in the Bestiary, the highest CR of any monster until Bestiary 4 started statting H. P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. The Challenge Rating of just about everything was reduced compared to 3.5, principally because Pathfinder PCs got more feats and class abilities to work with.
  • Second Edition, being an entirely new system that deliberately distances Pathfinder from its 3.5e roots while trying to fix issues like Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, does plenty of both nerfs and buffs compared to its predecessor. Spellcaster player characters in particular lost a significant number of their "I win the encounter" buttons and generally had the power level of their spells massively reduced, while martials got a net power increase by comparison. Several especially useful spells are now rituals that any party can theoretically access.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The rivals of a famous athlete named Kurgess set a trap to kill him in the arena. It worked, but his death protecting the other competitors was so awesome it ultimately resulted in him ascending to godhood.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Subverted. In this game system, everything is vulnerable to getting hurt. Creatures from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition often had their Damage Reduction completely removed or at best heavily limited (no more DR50 enemies). Even being incorporeal only grants full immunity to almost all non-magical attacks — it's possible to punch a ghost to "death" with bare hands, if the hands are enchanted.
  • Played straight by the gods, who do not get stat blocks (unlike material published for D&D 3.5e).
• Ninja: Introduced in Ultimate Combat as an alternative version of the rogue class (which had the potential to be pretty ninjariffic already). The "proper" ninja is focused more on stealth and less on general trickery, and uses ki energy to fuel supernatural powers.
• Noble Tongue: The aristocracy of Cheliax commonly speak Infernal (the language of Lawful Evil outsiders, particularly devils) due to the tight alliance between the ruling House of Thrune and the Church of Asmodeus. Operas (Cheliax's most favored art form) for the aristocracy are performed exclusively in Infernal. Chelish commoners still mainly speak Taldan (the Common Tongue of the continents of Avistan and Garund).
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The philosopher Pao-Lung is a stand-in for Confucius.
  • While it's not canon this fan picture of Abrogail Thrune II bears a strong resemblance to Lindsay Lohan.
• Noble Savage: The Kellid and Shoanti human ethnic groups. The Shoanti are more noble, the Kellids more savage.
• Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack:
  • Trips, disarms, dirty tricks, feints, grapples etc. are placed under an umbrella called the "combat maneuver" and given a unified pair of statistics to work from, Combat Maneuver Bonus and Combat Maneuver Defense, which work much like Armor Class and Spell Resistance in that a character rolls a d20 plus their CMB to overcome the target's CMD. As in 3E, combat maneuvers provoke attacks of opportunity when used unless the user spends a feat on the "Improved" version (except feints: they don't provoke A of O and "Improved Feint" instead downgrades them to a move action from a standard action). The game also inherits 3E's slate of non-damaging "save-or-suck" spells and adds several of its own.
  • The Witch class specializes in save-or-suck spells, getting few that inflict direct HP damage but many designed for inflicting status effects or ability damage. They also have the "hex" as a core feature, which can be used on an unlimited number of creatures once per day per creature. The Slumber hex, available at 1st level, is a single-target Forced Sleep effect that is considered almost mandatory for Witch PCs.
  • 2e maintains large numbers of status-inflicting skill actions and spells meant to inflict status effects only. They no longer use a separate Combat Maneuver bonus/defense, though.
• Non-Health Damage:
  • First edition had more monsters capable of doing this than you could shake a stick at, and the players were capable of doing this as well. Spells such as Ray of Enfeeblement, Calcific Touch, and Touch of Idiocy could drain out the big six stats; if Constitution went to zero, you were dead. If any of the rest went to zero, you were helpless. Plenty of poisons and drugs also did ability score damage.
    • Pathfinder 1e's shadows laugh at D&D Fifth Edition's shadows, because they roll against touch AC to hit, deal 1-6 Strength damage, and come in a greater variety that can do 1-8 points of Strength damage (with the saving grace that zero Strength paralyses instead of killing). Given most Pathfinder games embraced point buy, dumping Strength was even more common.
    • The Feeblemind spell, inherited from D&D, reduced the character's Intelligence and Charisma to 1. Most spellcasting classes lost all spells at that point. Wisdom-based casters were made too stupid to speak, so they likely also were not going to be doing anything important either.
  • Second Edition has all kinds of ways to inflict this and makes it part of the meta. To wit, in Second Edition you get three actions per round and with every attack, you face an increasing penalty to hit. Thus, against all but the weakest enemies, taking three attacks is heavily discouraged. So what should a PC do? Use skills to Intimidate to inflict Frightened, damaging the enemy's ability to do anything, or Deception to Feint and reduce their AC, Bon Mot to fluster them and reduce their Will, and so on. Unlike most editions, these are pretty much resolved just like attacks.
• Noodle Incident: How Aroden died is deliberately kept really vague, though people in-universe have a lot of theories about it.
  • How exactly Dou-Bral turned evil and became Zon-Kuthon is also rather vague. According to the books he was exploring the Dark Tapestry (outer space) and ran into... something (Implied to be some kind of Eldritch Abomination, though nothing else is known about this being) that turned him insane and evil.
    • It has since been hinted that Dou-Bral was exploring past reality itself, somehow stumbling onto a hibernating counterpart of himself from a previous cycle of reality that hijacked him.
  • An in-universe example, in Return Of The Runelords the characters meet an NPC with an exact copy of himself, who he lives with. While the book explains why this is the case (a freak portal accident basically split him into two people) if the PCs ask why there are two of him, he just tells them it's none of their business.
• Non-Human Head: Rakshasas, as per D&D, have animal heads, and sometimes fur and tails, but with a greater diversity in which species they appear than just tigers. For instance, Vimanda Arkona has that of a fox. With the Rakshasa bloodline, a player sorcerer can become one, too, though you don't have to be as evil as they are.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Energy Drain is now no longer permanent (generally). Thus, energy draining undead are no longer massively broken relative to their challenge rating. While the drowning rules lost their infamous ability to heal subjects at negative HP, there are still no rules to stop drowning.
  • The Quick Draw feat allows you to draw any item from your pack as a free action... except flasks of alchemist's fire or acid. You also cannot sneak attack with such items, unlike all other weapons. These changes were put in place due to volleys of flasks being popular among 3.5e rogues as a means to fight enemies resistant to physical damage or vulnerable to fire, as well as being a potential unblockable multi-kill to enemies with the magical equivalent of a Molotov cocktail.
  • The original 3.X rules for non-lethal damage resulted in jokes about how you can punch people all day without killing them. The rule was changed so that after a character has accumulated enough non-lethal damage to equal their maximum HP, any further damage is automatically lethal.
  • It was ruled that, if an attack would do zero damage, instead of always doing one point of Scratch Damage, it does one point of nonlethal damage. Most creatures that were affected by this rule were creatures like house cats or rats, which were fairly notorious in 3.x for their ability to injure or defeat 1st-level humans (scratch damage is a big deal when you have four hit points) — humorously demonstrated here.
  • One of the gunslinger class's starting rules lets him or her start the game with a gun, but a low-quality one that only he or she can use and can thus only be sold for scrap. This closes two loopholes in one go, because otherwise firearms are generally more expensive than an entire party's worth of gold can afford at first level. It ensures that the player can start the game with their class's weapons, but can't hock it for a big payday at 1st level.
  • The Magus has the option to get a Swashbuckler deed and use their arcane pool points as panache points to use the ability. However, they count as a 0th-level Swashbuckler for the purposes of the ability. This is a highly unusual way to implement it (many abilities copied from another class would do nothing at all at 0th level), and had to be confirmed via errata — which added that although they can spend their arcane points as panache points, they don't have panache points for these abilities, not even if they get actual panache points by another source. The goal appears to be to stop the Magus from gaining Precise Strike or Evasive, respectively powerful offensive and defensive boosts that care about whether you have at least one panache point and your Swashbuckler level, that were considered acceptable on a non-caster melee class but too powerful on the Magus. This has the side effect of making the majority of Swashbuckler deeds, even quite innocuous ones, partially or entirely nonfunctional if taken by the Magus.
  • A popular defensive measure for Alchemists was to get a Tumor Familiar with the Protector archetype. This allows the Alchemist to shunt half the damage they take to a familiar which regains 5 HP each turn. Ultimate Wilderness created an obvious patch on this by preventing Tumor Familiars from taking the Protector Archetype, because, apparently, they are unable to be so loyal as to give their lives for their master. The fact that they literally have a feat called Die For Your Master is surely irrelevant.
  • The Summoner class includes a note that the player's eidolon cannot wear armor because it "interferes with the Summoner's link to it". This is just a patch to prevent all Summoners from making their eidolons humanoid-shaped so they can put them in armor and double their armor class.
• Offering Another in Your Stead: Shabti are artificial copies of a living person created to take the person's place in the afterlife, almost always so the original can escape damnation at the shabti's expense. Psychopomps work to correct the Karmic Misfire and have shabti Rescued from the Underworld.
• Official Game Variant:
  • Ultimate Combat, which introduces firearms to First Edition, lists off five possible different campaign-wide Technology Levels for guns, modifying which types of firearms and gunslinging classes are available. These range from "No Guns", to the midlevel "Emerging Guns" (the Gunslinger class introduced in the book is intended for this tech level), up to "Guns Everywhere" (guns are reclassified as simple weapons and cost 10% of their listed value).
  • The Pathfinder Unchained family of supplements for First Edition includes a number of variant rules, ranging from Obvious Rule Patches to several classes (notably Rogue and Summoner), to Revised Action Economy, which essentially back-ports the action economy of Second Edition into First Edition.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: By necessity, any canon ending to the events of the adventure paths is this, but the writers seem to have chosen the coolest possible outcomes. For instance, judging by the wording, the adventurers in Reign of Winter seem to have accomplished the near-impossible task of defeating Elvanna non-lethally.
• The Old Gods: The Ancient Osirion pantheon was worshipped there long before it was ever a unified kingdom. Once the worship of other gods of the Inner Sea Region became the norm there, however, they decided to withdraw and focus more on a quite-similar culture on a distant planet. They still receive some amount of worship from their ancient priesthood and mystery cults, granting spells to clerics even in the modern era, but they no longer play an active role in Osirion or Golarion as a whole.
• Ominous Floating Castle: In the Giantslayer adventure path, the villain is a tyrannical storm giant who has taken over the flying castle of a clan of cloud giants by slaughtering its old rulers with the aid of a few traitors, and afterwards filled it with his minions and servants and converted it into a flying base of operations for his plans to conquer as much of the world as he is able.
• Omnicidal Maniac:
  • Rovagug, who wants the end of the entire universe. Then there's the daemons who certainly look this way to anyone on the outside.
  • The fire giants: any action they take, constructive or destructive, according to their religion, brings the day closer when their God uses the Sword of Twilight to smash reality, causing the world to never have existed.
• Onesie Armor: In first edition, which is basically a modified 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons, armor mostly follows the same rules. There is a set of optional rules for "piecemeal armor", and it's just as complicated as you would think, particularly if you are wearing different kinds of armor (which is the main point of such rules.)
• One-Word Title: Also a Portmantitle.
• Only Killable at Home: inverted for the fey, who will die permanently if slain anywhere except their plane of origin, the First World. The First World, as a prototype of creation that was abandoned by the gods, exists outside of the normal cycles of existence, including those of life and death. While in the First World, fey — and non-native beings who become acclimated to it — will gradually reform if killed, although not without some loss of power. This is one of the primary reasons behind the fey's bizarre behavior — they genuinely aren't used to thinking of death, whether their own or others', as anything more than a temporary inconvenience, and its permanency in other worlds tends to catch them somewhat flat-footed.
• Orwellian Retcon: The January 2023 controversy over Wizards of the Coast's attempts to change the Open Game Licenseprompted Paizo to begin divesting Second Edition of remaining references to classic D&D lore. In the remaster of Second Edition, drow have been excised from the setting in favor of expanding the role of the serpentfolk, rendering huge chunks of the Second Darkness AP Canon Discontinuity.
• Otherworldly Technicolour Hair: Gnomes are originally from the First World (Pathfinder's version of the Feywild), and can have unusual hair colours (bright green being a common one). They can also suffer from an inversion; gnomes who don't have enough whimsy and excitement in their life suffer from a terminal condition called The Bleaching, where they lose all their colour.
• Our Alebrijes Are Different: Alebrijes are magical beasts created when a particularly vivid dream inspired by a real or imagined living creature generates a new being within the Dimension of Dreams, or more rarely when a preexisting animal becomes altered by the Ethereal Plane's influences. They resemble multicolored animals, usually patterned with complex stripes, spots or spirals and sometimes with additional traits — wings of some sort are fairly common. They can move between the Material Plane, the Ethereal Plane and individual mind-scapes at will, and may form strong bonds with individual mortals, especially if they were created from a dream of an animal with whom the mortal had a close link. In these cases, the alebrije may seek out the mortal after death to protect their soul and escort it to the afterlife.
• Our Angels Are Different: They're the only kind of outsider that spans multiple alignments. Besides them, there are the archons, agathions, and azatas invoked that dwell in Heaven, Nirvana and Elysium respectively.
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Cryptids, including more modern ones (20th century and later) not often found in other fantasy tabletop RPGs, are featured quite prominently. They even got their own book! Though, its primarily the famous ones like sea serpents, sasquatches and yetis, water orms, mothmen, chupacabras, and the "Sandpoint Devil". They've also got the Australian bunyips and the purported living dinosaur mokele-mbembe.
• Our Demons Are Different: Evil spirit creatures, collectively called fiends, are grouped into several different categories depending on alignment and/or plane of origin. Each aligned plane has a race of "true" fiends as well as at least one secondary race of lesser fiends.
  • invoked Hell, the Lawful Evil plane, is ruled by the devils. It is also inhabited by the asuras. A third Lawful Evil race of fiends, the velstrac (called kytons in 1E), lives on the Plane of Shadow but has embassies in Hell. Devils are formed from the souls of evildoers, who are slowly and carefully tortured over eons until nothing remains except pain, obedience, and hate, at which point they become of the least of devils. Asuras are the twisted result of gods making mistakes, and very angry about it. Velstracs are mad, twisted beings obsessed with pain, who create more of themselves by torturing people until they can't tell the difference between pain and pleasure.
  • invoked Abaddon, the Neutral Evil plane, is ruled by the daemons. It is also the home of the divs (corrupted genies). Daemons want to kill everything, everywhere — they came into existence from different types of deaths mortals can experience, and want to destroy every soul in existence. Divs ALSO want to destroy everyone — but more, they want to destroy everything, returning everything to oblivion in service of their lord Ahriman.
  • invoked The Abyss, the Chaotic Evil plane, is ruled by the demons. The qlippoth and demodands also dwell there. Demons are born from the sins of evil souls — and a single soul can spawn hundreds or thousands of them. Qlippoth existed before everything, were evil before evil existed, and have a loathing hatred for the souls of mortals, which created the demons that now outnumber them. Demodands are the flawed creations of the thanatotic titans, who were sealed in the Abyss after a failed attempt to defeat the gods; the titans tried to create their own life to surpass the gods, but only wound up with misshapen, but powerful, monsters.
  • Finally, Golarion itself is home to two minor races of fiends: the rakshasas and the oni. Rakshasas are eternally reincarnating fiends with bestial aspects and bodies with one aspect reversed, which establish twisted caste systems. Oni are evil spirits whose burning hatred of humanoids causes them to incarnate as monstrously powerful examples of various races. There's also sakhils, which are corrupted psychopomps that rebelled against Pharasma and the inevitability of the end of the universe.
• Our Dragons Are Different: In addition to the classic D&D evil chromatics and good metallics, there are the elemental primordial dragons, the savage linnorms, the twisted azi, rideable Dragonkin, and a whole bunch of draconic critters. There are also the Imperial Dragons, based on Asian mythology. Now there are also Outer Dragons, who are rather alien and shimmery looking. There are also the much weaker, lesser drakes, which can largely be summed up as want-to-be-dragons.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: They originated underground, tunneled their way to the surface during the Age of Darkness, and pulled humanity out of the dark ages. Otherwise pretty standard.
• Our Elves Are Different: They have Monochromatic Eyes, and their primary goddess is one of lust, trickery, and revenge. Otherwise also pretty standard. They bailed on the planet during the Age of Darkness, only returning en masse within the past few millennia when a demon took over part of their ancestral homeland. Their "ruling class" apparently lives off-world through special "Elfgates" of which few truly still function, and the species as a whole originates from this otherworldly homeland. Also, they're Aliens, hailing from an isolated continent on the lush jungle covered planet of Castrovel.
  • Those elves who are raised outside "proper" elven society are called Forlorn, "maladjusted" souls who live their lives as hard as humans and tend to be more somber than most of their kin on account of always outliving their friends.
  • Elves who fall too far into wickedness become drow.
• Our Gargoyles Rock: They barely need to eat or sleep, and honestly only kill things (slowly and tortuously) because it's fun. They're also almost literally made out of rock, will last as long as a statue will (although they usually end up killing one another before that), and occasionally come in gemstones. Oh, and some of them are Weeping Angels.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: If they can curb their appetite they look like chalk-white, hairless, red-eyed elves, perfectly "fresh" and even beautiful at times. But if they indulge their hunger for flesh, they putrefy and start rotting away as new meat replaces the old...
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Gnomes are fey creatures exiled from the First World in the wake of a disaster of uncertain nature; they can't quite adjust to Golarion, and spend a lot of time obsessing over minutiae and seeking out new experiences in order to avoid going mad(der) or going through a usually-lethal process called Bleaching, a process of literally being bored to death which slowly reduces them to a pile of dust and bones. It's darkly hinted by the developers that the story of the disaster may be a fabrication, and gnomes are really humanoid interface devices through which vastly more powerful beings can study the material world.
• Our Goblins Are Different: The goblins of Golarion are dangerously stupid pyromaniacs who loathe dogs and horses (the feeling is mutual), are terrified of writing (it can steal the words out of your head!), and sing horrible merry songs about eating babies. Hobgoblins are as militaristic as the Dungeons & Dragons norm but are so universally ambitious that they can't hold an army together for long, being an entire race of Starscreams. Bugbears are psychopathic serial killers who live for the smell of fear and are unnervingly good at hiding in places nothing that huge should be able to fit — like behind your door, or under your bed.
  • Monkey Goblins are an offshoot of regular goblins evolved for life in the jungle; they're mostly the same, but have prehensile tails.
  • The Jade Regent adventure path introduces the Tian-regional variant known as the kijimunas, who are much more human-looking, red-headed, and much nicer than goblins. They basically live only to play pranks and to fish, and are very generous with sharing their catches, being well-known for spontaneously donating huge loads of fish to coastal villages suffering from famines. Also, they absolutely hate octopi, murdering them with the same zeal as regular goblins murder dogs and horses.
  • The grindylows are aquatic goblins who are half-octopus from the waist down. They love octopi, but hate squids.
  • It's worth noting that goblins (the baseline "comically evil" pyromaniac version) actually are statted to have the same range of intellect and skill as humans and are templated for use with player classes. So not only is it possible for them to be just as powerful as the PCs, mechanically they're set up to be a race where powerful, competent members would have no problem using other goblins suicidally (say, as flanking minions or to grapple PCs and hold them still for a fireball)... and the goblins being used wouldn't have a problem with it either even if you explained it. So they're not quite as harmless as the blurb implies, they're actually some of the more dangerous encounters around if a DM is inclined toward tactical play.
• Our Gods Are Different: Unlike some other D&D settings, most gods of Golarion have no stat blocks and are explicitly immune to mortal adventurers. To drive the point home, there have been a few examples in the fiction where a mortal being has defeated a god or god-like being, but was unable to truly end them, just remove them as a threat for the present. Ydersius, the god of the Serpent Folk literally had his head cut off and thrown in lava, and it didn't actually kill him, instead rendering his body mindless and wandering the Darklands and leaving his head....well, entombed in a pit of lava.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: In addition to the standard variety, there are ningyo — nasty little mer-monkey creatures which, if killed, automatically rise as undead that are active only at night and indistinguishable from corpses during the day — and the selkies — shape-shifting seal-people who like to lure people close by acting friendly, then eat them.
• Our Monsters Are Different: The classic "savage humanoid" races are all revisited, keeping fairly close to their original D&D themes while making it clear that they are all monsters, who do not work and play well with other races.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Many of the classic weird D&D monsters reappear. Notably, the flavor text often comes up with fairly sensible explanations for them. For instance, the infamous flumph is a Lawful Good aberration acting as a defense against more evil aligned ones, the carbuncle's signature attack of dying for no reason other than depriving players of loot became a deceptive teleportation effect that leaves behind a fake corpse, and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing, who provides the page quote, had its lure changed from a part of its body to a puppeteered cadaver.
• Our Orcs Are Different: They're insane nihilists who laugh in the face of death. They also originated underground, and got pushed up ahead by the Dwarves as they made their way to the surface.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: They're sickeningly horrifying embodiments of brain-damaged inbred hillbillies. Distantly related are the bugganes, a race of 9-foot tall molerat people who share their ogre-cousin's brutality, but combine it with a frightful capacity for stealth and persistent hunting.
• Our Souls Are Different: The planes are constantly being worn away by the Maelstrom, and so need a constant supply of divine energy from the Positive Energy Plane to maintain themselves and grow. The gods couldn't trust each other to divide this divine energy fairly, so they divided it into discrete packets, gave those packets free will, and allowed them to choose — via dedication to a deity or Character Alignment — which plane would be their ultimate home. Those packets of free-willed divine energy are souls.
• Our Titans Are Different: The Titans tried to wage war upon the gods. Some, the Chaotic Good Elysian Titans, turned upon their kin and assisted in their defeat. The Chaotic Evil Thanatotic Titans were imprisoned in the deep layers of the Abyss, where they created the flawed demodands as servants. Both are hideously powerful, and described as very near divine. Then there are the Hekatonkheires, who were the first to take up arms against the gods, and rather than be banished to the Abyss with the Thanatotic Titans, they were cast out of reality because they were too powerful for the Abyss to contain, and their lesser descendants are more powerful than regular titans of the other varieties. Bestiary 4 then introduced the Formorian titans. Rather than the malformed giants of Dungeons & Dragons, they're titans so powerful they had to imprisoned within their own armour!
• All Trolls Are Different: The savage aspect of the common D&D troll is played up; they're feral wilderness creatures who see everything as food, have no fear of death, and have odd intergender relations, though they do treat their young with care and some are capable of civilized conversation. The trope name also holds true within the setting, as art depicting trolls can be wildly inconsistent without even taking into account troll subraces (ice trolls, water trolls, etc.). The Jotund Trolls are notable for being strange even by troll standards, having nine arguing heads.
• Our Vampires Are Different: There are several vampire offshoots. Each, notably, has a unique way of resisting Permadeath.
  • The ancient, sterile Nosferatu.
  • The bestial, plague-bearing Vrykolakas.
  • The memory-eating Vetala.
  • And the hopping, Life Energy-drinking Jiang-Shi.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: Along with the usual werewolves, wererats, wereboars, weretigers, and werebears of D&D, there's also werecrocodiles, werebats, and weresharks. Skinwalkers, natural born lycanthropes, have a Beastial form.
• Our Witches Are Different: The witch is an arcane spellcasting class that gains their powers by communing with a "patron". They have a spell list focused on party support and debuffs, and a class feature called "hexes" that grants various supernatural powers—everything from cursing a target to fall asleep to being able to turn their hair into an offensive weapon.
• Out with a Bang: Distressingly common:
  • Harpies, being a One-Gender Race comprised solely of women, need to mate with humanoid males to propagate their race (as well as just for fun). However, they usually eat their lovers once they're done with them — indeed, it's noted that it's actually considered bad luck in standard harpy culture to not eat the father of their daughter, unless he is powerful enough that it is worthwhile not to consume him once the harpy has been fertilized.
  • Lamias (or at least the regular, matriarch and harridan versions) are much the same, except the way it's worded implies that partners dying from exhaustion, murderous flares of temper, drug overdose or sadism taken too far is actually more common than the lamia eating her lover.
  • Hags, again, need humanoid males to reproduce. They don't always kill their partner, though. It depends on how they feel. Especially if they think it'd be more "fun" to leave the resultant neonate hag-daughter in her daddy's care, they may well spare their unwitting mate.
  • Jorogumos are spider-women who, again, need humanoid mates to father their offspring. They then act like wasps, in that they implant the fertilized egg(s) into the father and paralyse him with their venom; when the egg hatches, the daughter fatally eats her father for nourishment.
  • Thriae, again, are a Cute Monster Girl race prone to eating their mates. But they're actually treated oddly sympathetically. First, only the Queens treat their consorts this way. The others form more emotional attachments. They also only do so when a lover has grown too old and feeble to reliably fertilize the Queen anymore, and they always use an anaesthetizing venom to render their former lover unconscious and devoid of pain before they begin. Finally, the consorts of Thriae queens are almost always volunteers.
  • Ogres are a male example of this; it's been stated that they tend to rape humanoids (especially women) to death. Ogres, we'll remind you, are 10ft tall, 500 or so pound, horrifically strong, dim-witted sadists. You can put the pieces together as to what the general cause of death is.
  • The players can actually cause this in a monster; a member of the siren race is noted in the Bestiary 2 for her tendency to commit suicide, or literally die of heartbreak, if a male she has her heart set on escapes from her whilst she's courting him.
• Oxymoronic Being: As funny as it may seem, one of the best build for an oracle of Winter is to be a lizardfolk with the Cold-Blooded curse — as in, extra weak to the cold. This is because oracles have a spell to throw the effects of their curse at an opponent, and giving a foe -4 to saving throws against your primary spells as well as a chance to stagger them is nothing to scoff at. Not to mention that several of your revelations have effects that can help counteract the curse.
• Paranormal Gambling Advantage: Nudge the Odds is a spell that enhances the user's skill at gambling. The catch is that it turns a physical feature of the user like their iris or a lock of their hair gold, which can't be concealed using magic. As every village on Golarion will have at least one professional magic user on average, don't bother. Magic is common enough that the odds that you'll be caught are quite high, and it's only a minor boost.
• Parasites Are Evil:
  • Ghlaunder, the Gossamer King, is a Chaotic Evil god of parasitism and disease strongly associated with biting insects — he himself takes the form of a hideous, mosquito-like monster. Thematically, his cult and mythos emphasize motifs of feeding off of others while spreading weakness and disease to one's victims.
  • First edition's second Bestiary specifically notes that parasitic animals, such as lampreys or ticks, do not have counterparts among agathions, Neutral Good outsiders who resemble humanoid animals of various sorts. While the text notes that parasites are not intrinsically evil, it also states that their habits and natures are too far from the noble goals of the upper planes for blessed souls to wish to model themselves off of them.
• Perky Goth: Laori, an NPC in Curse of the Crimson Throne, who is really quite incongruously cheerful for a cleric of the god of darkness and suffering.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: Undead, constructs, and most outsiders don't need food or sustenance of any kind. Even ghouls, though inflicted by a ravenous hunger, don't actually need to eat, and develop into a more powerful form if starved long enough. Clockwork constructs are an exception, but they can still wind themselves up if they have their own Wind-Up Key.
• Perpetual Storm: The Eye of Abendego in the default setting of Golarion is a colossal hurricane that has picked up in the southern seas shortly after the death of one of the setting's main gods, Aroden, and stayed in place for over a century since.
• Phantom-Zone Picture: The mirror of life trapping, which can imprison multiple victims who look into it.
• Physical God: Walkena, the leader of Mzali, was born a mortal, but ascended to godhood after his mummification in order to repel a colonizing army. Gods having a physical presence is extremely rare on Golarion, but the nature of his ascendency has somehow allowed him to remain. Unfortunately for the people of Mzali, Walkena rules it with an iron fist like a petty, childish tyrant. Fortunately for everyone else, his xenophobic nature means he only cares about the Mwangi Expanse, and tends to focus far more on Mzali than anywhere else.
• Pike Peril: Giant pike are described as aggressive predators that will attack any living thing they encounter. Like those from its parent game, they vary between nine and twenty feet in length.
• Pirate: There's a whole nation of pirates, and supplemental rules for ship-to-ship combat, plunder and all the other qualities of the 'romantic' pirate.
• Planetary Romance: The other worlds in Golarion's star system are designed to facilitate this.
• Plot Hole: A particularly noteworthy one exists in the Carrion Crown adventure path. The villain's plans rely on retrieving a few specific items and one book is dedicated to the party getting one of these items before them. Despite the item being described as essential to their plans several times, the party getting it first has no impact on those plans. There's no explanation for why the plan still works and the item's surprise lack of importance means the whole book revolving around it can be skipped without affecting the plot at all.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • Asmodeus, among other things, is noted several times to be a rampant misogynist. Makes sense, given that he represents the bad things that can come from order (tyranny, imperialistic militarism, ruthless enforcement of class divisions, institutionalised use of torture, etc.).
  • Even worse is the demon lord Kostchtchie. Asmodeus only really cares about gender as it applies to other divine beings, not sparing the gender of his mortal worshipers a thought, and even then he never lets this prejudice get in the way of his plans. Kostchtchie, on the other hand, hates all female creatures with a passion; among his three commandments is that his faithful should never submit to a woman, that women exist only to pleasure men and produce warriors, and that a weak and feeble man is worth more than a strong and capable woman.
• Portmantitle: Also a One-Word Title.
• Post-Script Season: 2nd Edition moves the timeline forward 10 years, and explicitly has all First Edition Adventure Paths concluding satisfactorily. Of course, that just means the time has come for new threats to crop up!
• Power Creep, Power Seep: Correcting the power creep of 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons was one of the game's founding goals. Inevitably, as it has aged, it has developed a few examples itself...which Second Edition was in part intended to correct.
• Power Glows:
  • Paladins in Pathfinder can imbue their weapon with a divine spirit, granting it magical properties depending on level and causing it to light up like a torch.
  • Also, many spells are highly visible when cast; even when cast silently and without gesture, a dazzling display of arcane energy still betrays a caster's presence.
• Prehensile Hair: One of the Witch's possible starting powers. Bald women with this power animate their eyebrows. Men with this power use either their beard or their mustache.
• Precision-Guided Boomerang: Specifically, Weapons with the returning properties (mundane boomerangs do not return). Even Melee weapons (if they also have the throwing property).
• Prestige Class: 1st Edition does offer a wide selection. Unlike the game from which it sprang, however, there are also generous rewards for players who abstain from a Prestige Class and set out to attain high levels in a base class, and the archetype class modifications make it easier to specialize without having to take a prestige class. In fact it's arguable that the efforts by Paizo to address Empty Levels and increase the flexibility of base classes through the archetype system actually makes taking a prestige class counterproductive if the level 20 cap is kept. Second Edition offers some mid- to high-level archetypes that might functionally act as these, although you take them in place of your class's feats instead of taking separate levels of them.
• Proactive Boss: In the Rasputin Must Die adventure, the titular mad monk uses Astral Projection magic to harass the heroes as they attempt to gain access to his extraplanar sanctum.
• Primal Polymorphs: The Primal spell list (mostly used by Druids, but also by some Sorcerers and Witches) has more polymorph spells than the other lists, including Animal Form, Dinosaur Form, and Dragon Form. Druids of the Wild Order also get the Wild Shape focus spell, which doesn't use spell slots.
• Psychopathic Man Child: Goblins and some ogrekin. Goblins' childish traits are usually depicted humorously, whereas everything about ogrekin is played for horror or Squick.
• Public Domain Canon Welding: This game incorporates features of the Cthulhu Mythos into its game line, including game stats for various Mythos entities and an adventure path where the world of Golarion is infiltrated by the Mythos realm of Carcosa.
• Public Domain Character: A number of monsters pulled from Victorian and pulp literature are featured in the setting.
  • Several gods are taken from real-world mythology, including Asmodeus, Lamashtu, Sun Wukong, Camazotz, Ahriman, Apsu, and Dahak.
  • Numerous creatures and gods from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, including Great Cthulhu himself.
  • The Legions of Hell include the Malebranche and just about the entire Ars Goetia!
• Puppeteer Parasite: Intellect devourers fulfill this role in Golarion, among others. Included are psionic beings literally called puppeteers (actually minions of Phrenic Scourges) and ammonites that animate corpses as vehicles to conquer the land. There is also a third party race of Snail People called the Zif, whose actual intelligence is a permanently bonded parasite.

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