Serguei

no, not if it takes a party slot. Otherwise, why not.

Agreed.

Those are orcs, right ? (I mean the barbarian and the wizard, not Rob )

Guys, I think we all missed the point. Forton is indeed the new comic relief character. He's to Bruce Lee what Cohen the Barbarian (Discworld) is to Conan. Forton will complain about old age, the lack of commodity in the wilderness, back problem and then suddenly punch in the face the conceited young adventurers around. right ? right ?

More on that : So there are two kinds of gods :" those of the Pact" and "those who hunt." The Progenitor and the gods where utterly opposed at first. Until they realized that souls could be strengthened by the events in Life. so the Progenitor and the racial gods agreed on the cosmic wheel of reincarnation in order to augment themselves. The "gods of the pact" do not consume a soul when they gain one, they depleat it from its power and throw it back in the reincarnation cycle. On the opposite, "those who hunts" simply devours them, hoping to reach such a size that they could at last devour the Progenitor itself. of the God of death : Most sentient living being believe that death is univocal, the end of life, plain and simple. and so they believe that there is only one god of death, even though it seems to have a split personnality. They are in fact two separate entities : the Arbiter and the Rejuvener. The first is an agent of the gods of the Pact , whose task is to ensure that the lawfull gods have their due share of souls, while the second is an agent of the Progenitor and makes sure that all souls may have an attempt at reincarnation. So they are really opposed in their goals.

Cosmology : first draft All souls find their origin in a Greater Being. In a cosmological event, that Being got "fractured" and lost parts , tiny dust-size , sparkles of itself, that becames souls. All those fragments try to rejoin with the original part. But they cannot. Because the gods wish to gather as much souls as they can in order to harness the power inherent to souls. Most racial gods (affiliated to a particular race) made a pact : they would gather the souls from a race. But some other gods, more chaotic and greedy, chose to size with no one, and hunt souls whereever they can. so we have no good gods, only power-hungry. Some of them behave in a lawfull way and seemingly with benevolence toward a specific race. There's room to invent a creation mythos, several gods, and lesser gods working for them in hope to gain a part of the power greater gods could have. The Afterlife is a maze designed to lose the souls and hide the way back to the Progenitor. But the Greater Being, though Reality is veiled from Him by the gods, is not powerless. He created the reincarnation cycle as a safety exit from the Maze, in order to give souls another chance to rejoin with him, should they fail upon the attempt they're given at death.

I totally agree here. Obsidian, you have yet time to trash that NPC and create something better.

possible failure makes success enjoyable.

If souls are central to the design of PE, make every races different in regards to how their souls "work" or what becomes of it in the afterlife.

I'd like to have some timed quests (but certainly not every quests) It adds a sense of reality : some matters require urgency and are more important than other mundane tasks

Mages and clerics are all about spells. Their gameplay depends on how spells work. I trust Obsidian to offer a good variety of those. Fighters in IE games where quite boring : select target, swing weapon until it dies. I hope they get much more possibilties in form of combat maneuvers, tactics, and so on. ( Trip, Stun, Bull Rush, Sunder, Disarm, Fencing techniques, "Special moves", ... )

Mount & Blade : Warband. Despite all its flaws, a very enjoyable game.

I loathe eastern monks in western settings (which PE is , obviously, with all those pseuso-celtic names) D&D added monks to catter to the masses, but I think it's a horrible design. I'd like to see monks as portrayed by Sean Connery in "The Name of the Rose" And if you really need to have a bare-handed fighting class, call it the "brawler" .