First Edition Conversion Guide

For the setting-level play philosophy this conversion is intended to preserve, see How Mar de Oro Plays.

Using the conversion

Pathfinder First Edition mechanics remain authoritative. Mar de Oro changes setting assumptions, fictional interpretation, and only the procedures explicitly presented in this guide.

Use the native rule first

If Pathfinder First Edition already provides a suitable rule, use it. Apply a Mar de Oro procedure only where this guide specifically introduces one.

Specific beats general

When a Mar de Oro rule conflicts with the ordinary Pathfinder First Edition rule for the named procedure, use the Mar de Oro rule for that procedure. Otherwise, use Pathfinder First Edition normally.

What this guide converts

Firearms, massed fire, battlefield scale, ships and airships, Fortera, Embedding, Resonance Tuning, resurrection consequences, and Mar de Oro creatures and phenomena.

Characters and setting assumptions

Character options stay Pathfinder First Edition. Their meaning belongs to Mar de Oro.

Classes

Pathfinder First Edition classes are playable when their abilities can be expressed coherently in Mar de Oro. Class mechanics do not establish the objective cosmology of Aeon. A cleric may understand power as divine grace, a wizard as formal pattern, a psychic as cognition and resonance, and an alchemist as repeatable material technique. Their explanations can disagree while the Pathfinder First Edition mechanics remain intact.

Characters and institutions may disagree about what Fortera means. That disagreement is part of the setting. The mechanics remain Pathfinder First Edition.

Wish and open-ended reality alteration

Miracle and other open-ended effects may reproduce their ordinary printed spell functions when those functions can be expressed coherently through Fortera. They cannot be used as Wish by another name, prove a cosmology that Mar de Oro does not possess, create unrestricted reality alteration, or override a specific setting prohibition.

Playable peoples

Use normal Pathfinder First Edition race and character-option mechanics unless a specific conversion says otherwise. Playable peoples are integrated throughout Aeon. Species or ancestry does not determine nationality, culture, religion, language, profession, allegiance, morality, or class.

Availability, rarity, and technology

Default-setting availability assumptions are not Mar de Oro availability. The setting decides whether an item, firearm, reagent, spell service, or technology is common in a place. Access does not grant proficiency. A character who can buy a musket still uses the normal Pathfinder First Edition proficiency rules.

Magic items

Use the native Pathfinder First Edition magic-item and item-creation rules. In the fiction, runes, enchantments, wondrous devices, ammunition, and similar mechanics may be expressed through Fortera, embedding, material engineering, resonance, or another setting-appropriate process. Embedding in Chapter IX is temporary and does not replace permanent item creation.

Firearms and Volley Fire

Pathfinder First Edition provides the firearm rules; Mar de Oro maps its technology onto them.

Campaign firearm baseline

Use native Pathfinder First Edition firearm rules for touch AC, range increments, reload actions, capacity, misfire, broken firearms, ammunition, critical hits, feats, class abilities, and Gunslinger interactions. Do not import the Fifth Edition Advantage, armor, reload, or misfire rules.

Mar de Oro weapon mapping

Custom early-firearm profiles

Carbine. A shortened shoulder firearm. Reload it using the normal rules for a two-handed early firearm.

Early Rifle. Rifled barrel. When a single bullet is fired at a target benefiting from cover, reduce that cover bonus to AC by 2, minimum +0. This never permits an attack through total cover. All other firearm rules remain native Pathfinder First Edition.

Kalthoff Repeater. The internal mechanism holds 30 shots. A wielder can make normal iterative attacks and full attacks up to remaining capacity. Replenishing the full internal magazine and powder service takes 1 minute; Rapid Reload reduces this to a full-round action. A poorly maintained repeater can have its misfire range increased by 1 at the GM’s discretion until serviced. Kalthoff repeaters are proprietary Knights Solaris technology. They are not ordinarily purchasable, craftable, reverse-engineerable, or taught outside the order unless campaign events explicitly change that access.

Firearm interactions. Rapid Reload, alchemical cartridges, Gunslinger deeds, firearm enchantments, broken-weapon rules, and misfires function normally unless a custom profile above explicitly changes that interaction. A Kalthoff reservoir service is the listed custom reload procedure; ordinary single-shot cartridges do not bypass its internal mechanism.

Noise, smoke, and wet powder

Use Pathfinder First Edition firearm mechanics for the shot itself. The fiction still matters: black-powder fire is loud, smoke accumulates during sustained firing, and rain or wet powder can create situational penalties or misfire risk when the GM has established those conditions. Do not create a universal weather penalty when the fiction does not require one.

Volley Fire

Volley Fire is a Personal Scale shortcut for coordinated black-powder fire. Use it when several shooters are acting as one prepared firing group and rolling every individual firearm attack would obscure the actual tactical question. Once the body of troops is operating as an army, use Chapter V instead.

Volley procedure

• Minimum 3 loaded firearms. Shooters must be able to coordinate and fire into the same target area.
• Unless already drilled, braced, and waiting, the group spends the previous round preparing the Volley.
• Each participating shooter spends the action normally required to fire and expends one shot. Resolve one Volley instead of separate attacks.
• Choose one creature or one occupied 10-foot square within the shared range of the firing group. All participating weapons must have the same range increment; weapons with different range increments cannot be combined in one Volley. Beyond the first range increment, reduce the Volley save DC by 2 per additional range increment.
• Damage is 1d10 per complete 2 shooters, maximum 10d10 at Personal Scale. Larger bodies of troops should be treated as armies.
• Reflex half. Volley DC = 10 + half the coordinator’s base attack bonus + the coordinator’s Dexterity modifier + 1 per five shooters, maximum +4 from shooter count. If no coordinator is obvious, use the best suitable shooter.
• Apply native cover and line-of-effect rules. Total cover prevents the Volley from affecting the protected target.
• A shooter participating in a Volley does not also make a separate firearm attack in the same round. After the Volley, every participating weapon must be reloaded and the group must satisfy the preparation requirement again before it can Volley again.

Suppression

A creature that takes Volley damage makes a Will save against the same DC. On a failure, it is shaken and its speed is halved until the end of its next turn. This is pressure from massed fire, not fear magic; immunity to fear does not automatically negate the movement effect if the creature is physically keeping its head down.

Morale

For NPCs whose willingness to remain exposed matters, a Volley that removes more than half the target’s current hit points can justify an immediate morale check, withdrawal, surrender, or break in formation. Pathfinder First Edition has no single universal personal morale rule, so use Will, the army Morale rules, or the fiction appropriate to the scene.

Ambushes and credible danger

Use Pathfinder First Edition’s native surprise rules to make prepared ambushes dangerous, legible, and consequential.

Surprise

Use the native Pathfinder First Edition surprise-round and flat-footed rules exactly as written. Do not import Fifth Edition Core HP. Combatants who are aware act in the surprise round; unaware combatants do not, and flat-footed defenses apply normally until a creature has acted as Pathfinder First Edition specifies.

Firearms can make a prepared ambush especially dangerous because early firearms can attack touch AC at close range. That is a reason to telegraph lethal situations correctly, not a reason to invent a second hit-point pool.

Using deadly creatures correctly

Before using a deliberately lethal ambush or overwhelming creature, know what happens if the characters are caught. Simulate the dangerous case. Give real clues the players can act on, such as unusual scent, pressure change, missing animals, damaged terrain, strange silence, Fortera signs, displaced water, a witness warning, or a route that suddenly looks wrong.

Design the fall

A deadly encounter should have a playable failure state when the fiction permits one. Defeat can mean unconsciousness, capture, separation, injury, loss of equipment, a creature achieving its objective and leaving, political exposure, or an ally intervening at cost. This does not protect characters from death where survival makes no physical sense. It prevents the GM from accidentally ending the campaign simply because no consequence beyond death was considered.

Physical protection

1. Can the attack physically reach the target?
2. Can it physically affect the target?
3. What physical layer is actually being struck?

An intact frigate hull prevents a pistol from damaging machinery deep inside it. The sailor on the deck remains vulnerable. A creature may have anatomy too thick for meaningful small-arms damage while retaining softer eyes, wounds, mouthparts, joints, or underside. Use hardness, damage reduction, cover, object rules, or simple impossibility as appropriate.

Battlefields, armies, and scale

Use Pathfinder First Edition’s native mass-combat framework; Mar de Oro supplies the doctrine, scale, and battlefield fiction.

Three scales

Army-scale rule

A Mar de Oro army can be infantry, cavalry, rifle troops, artillery-supported troops, marines, or another force. Build it through the native army rules. Ranged capability, Morale, commander quality, resources, tactics, and strategy do the mechanical work. Mar de Oro formation doctrine tells you what those choices mean in the fiction.

Formation doctrine

Formation describes deployment and battlefield intent. Line, march column, attack column, square, and skirmish order tell you how the force is organized; Pathfinder First Edition’s native army rules resolve the mechanics.

PCs inside a battle

If the important question is what a PC does personally, switch to a normal encounter. If the important question is what a body of troops does under that PC’s command, keep the PC inside the army procedure and let command, Morale, Profession (soldier), Charisma, and established advantages matter through the native system. Do not give the same character a full personal turn and a second army turn for the same six seconds of fiction.

Artillery and siege weapons

Use Pathfinder First Edition’s native siege-engine rules for crews, aiming, loading, misfires, and damage to objects.

Native siege framework

Use Pathfinder First Edition siege-engine rules for crew, aim, load, attack rolls, range, misfire, hardness, hit points, and proficiency. The native cannon is the baseline field piece for Mar de Oro. Fortifications use normal object, hardness, cover, and structure rules.

Mar de Oro artillery roles

Swivel gun

The swivel gun is a Large direct-fire black-powder siege engine. It is too large to use as a personal firearm and too light to stand in for a full field cannon. Aim 0 means it requires no separate aim action under the native siege rules. Load 2 is resolved through the normal siege-engine action pool, and Rapid Reload does not reduce siege-firearm loading time.

Ranging and beaten ground

A battery threatens the space its actual weapon, line of sight, ammunition, terrain, and observation allow. Unless genuine surprise applies, ranging shots make the danger legible. Once the enemy has the range, exposed troops must move, find hard cover or dead ground, break observation, create concealment, counter-battery the gun, sabotage it, or force it to relocate. Use native attacks and saves where required; use the battlefield fiction to decide what is exposed.

Ships and airships

Use native vehicle rules and mounted siege weapons, with Mar de Oro rules only for vessel-specific systems.

Three naval modes

The switch follows the fiction. When the question is what the vessels are doing, use vehicle action. When it becomes what the people aboard are doing, use a normal encounter.

Tactical speed from knots

This is a conversion aid, not free movement. Acceleration, turning, wind, current, damage, altitude change, driving checks, and the native vehicle action economy still determine how much of that speed the vessel can actually use in a round. Sea-going warships normally sit in the lower band; Mar de Oro air warships occupy the 20–45 knot band established by their class.

Vehicle chassis

Use the native Pathfinder First Edition vehicle framework. The official Pathfinder First Edition airship’s balloon-and-magic fiction is not Mar de Oro canon; only the chassis concepts are useful. Mar de Oro airships remain sailing warships whose Éterlumin lift system reduces downward load while separate propulsion, sails, balance, and control determine movement. All listed Mar de Oro military airships use the Colossal vehicle chassis for vessel-scale combat unless a specific deck plan says otherwise: base AC 2, Base Save +0, CMB +8, CMD 18, and ramming damage 8d8. Their actual AC and saving throws use the native vehicle rules and therefore depend on the captain’s Profession (sailor) modifier. Driving Check is Profession (sailor). The official Pathfinder First Edition airship and warship are numerical anchors, not Mar de Oro fiction.

Broadside aggregation

These are class-specific Mar de Oro battery abstractions expressed through Pathfinder First Edition siege rules. Use the attack modifier of the relevant gunner or crew under the native siege framework. An aggregate Broadside has a x2 critical multiplier regardless of an individual cannon’s critical multiplier because the battery is resolved as one vessel-scale event rather than dozens of separate cannon criticals.

Fleet role mapping

These are complete vessel-scale combat baselines. HP and Broadside preserve the established Mar de Oro fleet relationships; Hardness, vehicle AC, saving throws, driving checks, movement, object damage, and siege attacks remain Pathfinder First Edition procedures. The native Pathfinder First Edition warship at 1,200 HP / Hardness 10 and native airship at 720 HP / Hardness 5 confirm that these hull values sit inside Pathfinder First Edition’s vehicle scale. Use a vessel’s canonical deck plan and crew complement when exact space or staffing matters.

Battery cadence. A Broadside represents the entire working battery firing as one vessel-scale event. A Stable, fully crewed battery can make one aggregate Broadside attack on the vessel’s turn. This abstracts many gun crews loading and aiming in parallel. If Weapons or Crew is Impaired, the GM can require a reload / reorganization round or remove one firing arc. If either is Disabled, the main battery cannot fire. Individual cannons encountered at Personal Scale continue to use their native Aim and Load actions.

Fleet doctrine. Albion hulls trade structural margin for speed, acceleration, and aggressive positioning. Valdegracian hulls favor Hardness, staying power, and broadside weight. Heller vessels sit between those approaches. These differences are intentional and should remain visible in pursuit, turning, and firing-solution play.

Altitude and firing solution. Similar altitude uses normal range. A meaningful altitude advantage with a clear firing solution can extend effective engagement range to about x1.5. A major altitude advantage with clear observation and unobstructed favorable downward fire can extend it up to x2. Altitude does not increase Broadside damage. Terrain, cloud, smoke, bearing, firing arc, and observation can still deny the shot.

Subsystem states

Do not give every subsystem a second hit-point pool. Track four operational states only when targeted damage or the fiction makes the subsystem matter: Rigging/Lift, Weapons, Crew, and Bridge/Command. Each begins Stable and can step to Impaired, then Disabled.

A credible targeted hit that deals damage after Hardness equal to roughly 10% of the vessel’s maximum HP in one event normally steps the relevant subsystem down once. A catastrophic hit, internal explosion, or direct physical destruction can step it down twice when the fiction clearly supports that result. This is an operational threshold, not a second HP track.

Éterlumin Reserve

Track Éterlumin Reserve separately from structural HP. Reserve represents usable service, calibration condition, containment integrity, and operational availability. Consumption, leaks, forced operation, failed tuning, or containment events can reduce Reserve. Repairing hull HP does not automatically restore it.

Lift failure

Lift is not a balloon and loss of Lift is not automatically instantaneous free fall. An Impaired Lift system reduces safe altitude change and handling. A Disabled Lift system cannot maintain normal level flight: the vessel begins a controlled or uncontrolled descent appropriate to remaining propulsion, rigging, balance, damage, and crew response. If the failure is physical, repair it. If the system is serviceable but miscalibrated, tune it. If usable Éterlumin is gone, resupply it.

Three engineering problems

Physical access

An intact warship hull protects internal machinery from ordinary personal firearms. Exposed crew remain vulnerable. A character can damage internal components with personal-scale attacks only after gaining a breach, hatch, exposed mechanism, boarding position, or another physically credible route.

Fortera Overdraw

The player chooses to push. The save determines what pushing costs.

Overdraw

Ordinary class spellcasting represents established, stabilized interaction with Fortera and uses native Pathfinder First Edition mechanics. Safe ordinary casting has no special Overdraw penalty. Overdraw is voluntary: the caster deliberately forces a working beyond current safe capability.

Pathfinder First Edition safe capacity

Pathfinder First Edition spells have fixed spell levels rather than a universal heightening system. Overdraw therefore does not grant access to a higher-level spell. The caster must already know, prepare, or otherwise be able to cast the spell normally.

Respect the spell’s printed maximum unless a specific Mar de Oro rule explicitly permits exceeding it. If the spell has no meaningful level-dependent parameter remaining to increase, Overdraw does not invent a new effect. Metamagic remains native Pathfinder First Edition and is separate from Overdraw.

Containment save

Declare the Overdraw tier and the parameter being pushed before the roll. The working is already attempted. The containment save determines the cost.

Strain

Use native fatigued and exhausted conditions. If a character is already fatigued and takes a result that would fatigue them again, use the normal Pathfinder First Edition interaction that worsens fatigue to exhaustion where applicable. Overdraw never represents Éterlumin poisoning.

Ripple

Ripple is the area of field disturbance created by the working, multiplied by the listed modifier. It does not increase the spell’s damage, range, duration, save DC, or other numerical effects unless another rule explicitly says so. If a 20-foot-radius spell produces Ripple x2, the disturbance extends across a 40-foot-radius area even though the spell’s ordinary effect remains 20 feet.

Containment responses

Embedding

Embedding is temporary Fortera craft. Permanent magic items still use Pathfinder First Edition’s native creation rules.

Embedding binds an eligible spell or Fortera working into a physical object for a limited useful life. Choose an Embedding Depth from 1 up to the creator’s character level.

No additional Craft check is required merely to perform the standard temporary technique. The costs are time, access to the working, the physical object, appropriate materials established by the fiction, and the spell or slot expended when the embedding completes.

Completion

When the Embedding completes, expend one appropriate prepared spell or spell slot for the effect. The slot then recovers normally. It is not committed for the object’s useful life. The creator must satisfy the normal Pathfinder First Edition requirements for knowing, preparing, or otherwise being able to cast the working.

Depth and power

Depth controls longevity, not spell level, caster level, save DC, or potency. A 2nd-level spell embedded at Depth 10 takes 10 days to make and naturally lasts 10 days. It remains a 2nd-level spell effect. If creating the effect itself requires Overdraw, resolve Overdraw separately when the Embedding is completed.

Decay and enchantment

Embedding creates the effect. Enchantment slows the decay. No Fortera object is intrinsically permanent. Long-lived artifacts are embeddings whose decay has been slowed, stabilized, maintained, renewed, or repeatedly tuned over long periods.

Embedded ammunition

Resolve the physical projectile through normal Pathfinder First Edition weapon and ammunition rules and the embedded Fortera effect separately. The bullet remains ammunition. The embedded working remains a Fortera effect. Each separately embedded item is its own object. A case, bandolier, chest, magazine, or ammunition box does not turn multiple embedded rounds into one Resonance Tuning target.

Resonance Tuning

The standard working for preserving embeddings and maintaining calibrated systems.

Class access. Resonance Tuning is a 2nd-level spell for any Pathfinder First Edition class that casts spells and can coherently perform a Fortera working. It is added to that class’s spell list for Mar de Oro campaigns. Alchemical or other nonstandard casting methods can gain access only when their normal class procedure can express the working without rewriting the class.

You establish a stable resonant reference in an existing Fortera embedding or a calibrated Fortera or Éterlumin system. Choose Preserve Embedding or Calibrate System.

Preserve Embedding

Touch one object containing an active Embedding. For the duration, its remaining useful life does not decrease. When Resonance Tuning ends, decay resumes from exactly where it stopped. An embedding with 3 days remaining that is tuned by a 10th-level caster still has 3 days remaining when the 10-day tuning ends.

Tuning cannot restore an expired embedding, restore a consumed effect, replenish charges, or extend the ordinary duration of another spell, class feature, summon, condition, or unrelated Pathfinder First Edition effect. Multiple tunings on the same target do not stack; a new casting replaces the previous duration.

Maintenance logistics. Preserving munitions and specialist equipment over long voyages is an intended use of Resonance Tuning. Practitioners can cycle 2nd-level spell slots across a stockpile over days or weeks. The cost is continuing access to trained practitioners, casting time, and spell slots. Tuning preserves remaining useful life; it never recreates an expended shot, consumed activation, depleted charge, or expired embedding.

Calibrate System

Touch one physically serviceable Fortera or Éterlumin component or coherent system. Tuning corrects ordinary resonant drift and holds the system to a stable reference for the duration. Appropriate targets include resonators, regulators, Fortera instruments, lift references, Éterlumin controls, embedded ship equipment, synchronized engineering systems, and laboratory apparatus.

If miscalibration is the only problem, the system returns to normal calibration. If it is physically damaged, incomplete, depleted, or operating outside safe limits, the spell establishes a stable reference but does not solve that other problem.

Overdrawing Resonance Tuning

Resonance Tuning is the standard Fortera spell for which forcing a failed Overdraw automatically risks Catastrophic Tuning Failure. On a failed containment save, the caster may Ground the Working: the spell is expended, tuning fails, and catastrophe is avoided. If the caster instead forces the tuning to completion, apply the normal Overdraw result and one or more concrete failures supported by the target system.

• An embedding loses all remaining useful life.
• A resonator ruptures.
• A regulator falls violently out of agreement.
• An instrument becomes unusable until repaired and tuned again.
• A lift reference collapses.
• Usable Éterlumin Reserve is lost.
• A pressure or containment event occurs.
• Failure propagates into a physically connected system when the relationship supports it.

Resurrection and Soul Shattering

Use native return-to-life mechanics. Mar de Oro changes what return can mean.

Return to life

Use Pathfinder First Edition spells, costs, caster-level requirements, time limits, conditions, and restrictions for returning a dead character to life unless a specific Mar de Oro rule says otherwise. Raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection, and comparable effects remain Pathfinder First Edition procedures.

Soul Shattering

When Soul Shattering occurs, resolve it narratively rather than through a random table. The returned person may be altered in body, apparent age, memory, personality, temperament, identity, or only one narrow aspect of the self. Determine the change from the death, the return, the Fortera conditions involved, the character, and the campaign.

The truth of what happened can remain unknowable. The player retains authorship over how their character understands and responds to the change. The GM establishes what the world can observe and what consequences follow.

No automatic cosmological proof

A successful return-to-life effect proves that the Pathfinder First Edition procedure worked at the table. It does not, by itself, establish planes, divine beings, souls as a mapped substance, or another cosmology that contradicts Mar de Oro canon. Describe the event through Fortera, retained pattern, religious interpretation, medical observation, or uncertainty appropriate to the campaign.

Creatures and phenomena

Use native CR and encounter math while preserving each creature’s behavior, feedback, and discoverable solutions.

All creatures resolve through normal Pathfinder First Edition creature rules regardless of physical size. Use native size, space, reach, movement, senses, saves, combat maneuvers, conditions, damage reduction, resistances, and encounter XP. Unlike the Fifth Edition conversion, Pathfinder First Edition keeps Challenge Rating because encounter building depends on it.

The statistics below are complete Pathfinder First Edition encounter baselines. They use Pathfinder First Edition CR, XP, AC, hit points, attack bonuses, saves, damage expectations, and haunt timing while preserving the behaviors already established in the Fifth Edition and Pathfinder Second Edition conversions. The Fortera descriptor is a Mar de Oro tag only; it does not imply extraplanar origin, alignment, or a separate Pathfinder First Edition creature type.

Moon-Affected

Moon-Affected are people whose bodies have become unusually resonant with Fortera. Lunar resonance is one trigger among many. The person remains present; the altered state creates an intense urge whose expression depends on the individual.

Read the creature lore →

Source Beast

A Source Beast is an intelligent, persistent Fortera correction entity. The first manifestation forms where an unresolved contradiction acquires a body. That place does not tether it.

Read the creature lore →

Blackwake Ray

Blackwake Rays are immense flying animals attracted to heat, pressure release, venting, and large airborne vibration. A Ray on a vessel is as much an engineering problem as a combatant.

Read the creature lore →

Drowned Choir

The Drowned Choir is a submerged colony that stores vibration and reproduces patterns it actually experienced. Its records can be evidence, bait, warning, or accident.

Read the creature lore →

Hushmoth Swarm

Hushmoths are tiny animals whose wing activity disrupts hearing, spoken coordination, signals, and sensitive Fortera instruments. They are interference, not an anti-magic field.

Read the creature lore →

Bellmouth

Bellmouths are small pattern-copying animals. They can reproduce complicated audible or pressure patterns with structural accuracy but do not understand what those patterns mean.

Read the creature lore →

The Last Crew

The Last Crew is a retained coordinated pattern of a vessel’s final emergency. Use the Pathfinder First Edition haunt timing chassis, but it is a Fortera phenomenon rather than undead.

Read the phenomenon lore →

Reef Shepherd

Reef Shepherds are immense, normally peaceful marine animals whose armored backs can support entire ecosystems. Their serious response to harm is movement, diving, rolling, and displacement of water.

Read the creature lore →

Roadback

Roadbacks are heavily plated animals with poor eyesight and exceptional sensitivity to deep vibration. Herd movement can reveal underground pressure or Source changes before people understand the cause.

Read the creature lore →

Rain Saint

A Rain Saint is a retained Fortera memory that becomes perceptible only through active rain. Use haunt timing, but do not treat it as undead or as proof of a supernatural soul.

Read the phenomenon lore →

Keel Leech

Keel Leeches attach to active hull machinery, pressure lines, vents, or lift structures. The creature is dangerous because removing it badly can release the pressure it has been absorbing.

Read the creature lore →

Borrowed Tide

The Borrowed Tide is a colonial swarm that grows around rope, cloth, branches, bones, wreckage, and other structure. Human-shaped debris can make it resemble a survivor at distance.

Read the creature lore →

GM quick reference

The shortest route from Mar de Oro fiction to Pathfinder First Edition mechanics.

Routing

• Individual characters and creatures: normal Pathfinder First Edition encounter rules.
• Prepared groups of roughly 3–20 shooters: optional Personal Scale Volley Fire.
• Commanded bodies of troops: native Ultimate Campaign mass-combat rules.
• Wider battle or war: fiction, clocks, terrain, reports, factions, supply, and consequences.
• Artillery: native siege engines plus battlefield context.
• Ship-versus-ship: native vehicle rules with mounted siege engines and aggregate Broadsides.
• Pursuit: vehicle driving checks or a clock when exact movement adds no decision.
• Boarding: normal encounter rules.

Firearms

• Use Commonplace Guns for early firearms.
• Do not import Fifth Edition armor modifiers, reload rules, Core HP, or misfire procedure.
• Pistol, musket, and blunderbuss map to native early firearm profiles.
• Carbine, Early Rifle, and Kalthoff are custom early firearms; advanced cartridge weapons do not become common.
• Kalthoff capacity 30 permits normal iterative/full attacks until the magazine is empty.
• Kalthoff repeaters are Knights Solaris proprietary technology. Their exceptional capacity is intentional and access is controlled by the fiction.

Fortera

• Class magic stays Pathfinder First Edition and is interpreted through Mar de Oro.
• Wish is unavailable.
• Pathfinder First Edition Overdraw pushes caster-level-dependent parameters, not access to higher-level spells.
• Containment: Fortitude DC 10 + half character level + 2 per tier.
• Embedding takes Depth days and naturally lasts Depth days.
• Resonance Tuning is a 2nd-level spell, 10-minute cast, touch, duration 1 day/level.
• Preserve Embedding targets one separately embedded object per casting. Ongoing slot / time expenditure can intentionally maintain special ammunition stockpiles.
• Forcing failed Overdraw on Resonance Tuning risks Catastrophic Tuning Failure.

Ships

• 1 knot ≈ 10 feet per 6-second round for tactical conversion.
• Broadside = one aggregate direct-fire siege attack, one damage roll, and target Hardness applied once.
• Use the class-specific HP / Hardness / Broadside table in Chapter VII; actual AC and saves remain native vehicle calculations.
• Track Rigging/Lift, Weapons, Crew, and Bridge/Command only as Stable / Impaired / Disabled when they matter.
• Track Éterlumin Reserve separately from structure.
• Damage → repair. Depletion → resupply. Miscalibration → tune.
• Disabled Lift means loss of normal controlled flight, not automatically instantaneous free fall.

Creatures

• Use the complete Pathfinder First Edition stat blocks in Chapter XII with native CR and encounter XP.
• Moon-Affected: Control and Human Trace matter.
• Source Beast: force raises Correction Level; understanding lowers it.
• Reef Shepherd and Roadback are environmental forces as much as opponents.
• The Last Crew and Rain Saint are phenomena best expressed through haunt/hazard procedures.

Rules references and licensing