DM Púca's Ironfang Invasion (Inactive)

Game Master rdknight

More to come...

Hi there team.

I’m going to be playing Caeleron, elven slayer.

I’ll get him built and an alias created ASAP, probably the first half of this week.

Looking forward to kicking some hobgoblin butt.

Hi everyone, really excited to be playing this character in this campaign. I've been looking to play a skald for a while now, and this one has an Icelandic first name and everything, since all historical skalds were Icelandic. :)

I'm in CET timezone (GMT+1), so my posting times may be a little odd compared to other people's.

Looking forward to playing alongside you Skalla. I’m currently playing a skald in Skull & Shackles, they’re a lot of fun.

I’m posting from GMT, so I suspect our posting times won’t be too far out.

The discussion thread is open now.

Checking in.

Checking in.
Will make Faurna's profile soon.

Half-Elf Nature Shaman

Glad to see you guys doing this.

Golfdeltafoxtrot checking in with Caeleron.

I wanted to run a few things past you, GM, to check you're happy.

Caeleron carries the elven short-blade, which is a reskinned gladius - I like the idea of a shortsword that slashes and pierces. I envisage it looking like this. Happy to change things if you're uncomfortable with the reskin, but I thought the extra cost and weight were a fair trade for the extra damage type.

I've also used background skills - I don't know if you're planning on using them or not, and I'm happy to remove them if not, but I like the opportunity to use skill points to make characters more rounded.

Elven short-blade is fine Caeleron. I remember coming across it before, but can't remember where. Could you point me to it?

I love background skills so they're in use.

I'll try to get something like an orientation post up today, but it may turn out to be a long day for me so no promises there. It could be tomorrow.

It's not a specific weapon, unlike the new leafblade and thornblade which may be what you're thinking of.

I just took the already existing gladius and gave it a new, less Roman, name. It's a straight reskin of my own devising, but I wanted to let you just in case you weren't keen.

Oh yeah, those were the ones I was thinking of. Happen to know what they were published in?

Yeah it's fine. I've never been a huge fan of the very restrictive damage type specs for most weapons. It doesn't make sense for so many of them. You can simply look at a longsword and see it can obviously be used for both slashing and piercing for example. For others like the estoc it does make sense. But mostly it seems like a niggley classification that creates weird, outsized effects, like requiring separate Slashing Grace and Fencing Grace feats.

They're in Adventurer's Guide.

It is a bit clunky, but I suppose 3rd Ed has always been like that. It does create some weird corner cases, but I've got no plans to create any of those!

And in a twist of PbP fate, I've just realised that Callista is being played by the GM of the other two PbPs I'm in.

I'll try to resist the ordering your character around habit. :)

I'll try to resist the ordering your character around habit. :)

I don't mind being ordered around, as long as I get some treasure for it.

Another question for the GM (sorry if you get sick of these) -

Will you be using the Militia subsystem suggested in the back of the players' guide? I've not read anything about it, but I know opinions are divided about additional subsystems tacked onto APs.

I'll give this as my (non)answer for the moment. I'm in Motteditor's campaign as Clover. I hadn't considered running a table 2 until exchanging a few PMs with him after the recruitment ended.

At this point I have the first volume, which I'm reading now. I don't have much of an idea what the militia system will be used for in the AP, or how it will work. In short, I know just about exactly as much as you do about it.

So, it depends. My default view is that AP subsystems tend not to mesh well with PbP because of the slowness of decision making relative to tabletop. Even if a subsystem is pretty good, like the one in Hell's Rebels, it tends to slow things down in ways that are detrimental in PbP.

That said, if it turns out that the militia system is very important we may use it. Likely with some streamlining and simplification if possible. If it isn't that important I will probably hand wave most of the things it's supposed to do.

That seems eminently sensible.

I'm of the opinion that subsystems tend to slow things down and divert focus away from the actual adventure, so unless they're vital to an AP - which I doubt this one is - they're probably not worth the extra work.

The end of the players' guide bit detailing how the militia system would be used says that it's not vital, but suggests rewarding PCs with a small number of bonus feats to make up for the slight loss in power.

I'm not trying to sway things one way or the other, just wondering whether to look at the system or not.

I'll add that I'm grateful (to you and Motteditor, it seems) for the chance to play - I know it's a lot of work, especially as you're playing and running at the same time.

Speaking of feats, have you looked into the feat tax rules and would you consider them for this campaign (militia or no militia)?

I'd never seen the rules before, but I'll consider them. I'm sympathetic to the idea. Some feats certainly are just taxes on the way to getting somewhere a character needs to be.

On the other hand, with little experience as a DM and no experience playing above level 10, I do wonder about unforeseen outcomes. Granted or merged feats mean more feats for other things. This will make characters relatively more powerful as time goes on. I don't want to find myself having to rebalance encounters later in the AP to compensate. I have enough on my plate as is.

I'll probably ask around some and get advice. Maybe I'll get lucky and find someone who's used them before.

I have been running a Kingmaker campaign since 2014, and an Iron Gods campaign since 2015. I just TPKed a Strange Aeons group which is now becoming a Ruins of Azlant group. I play with the feat tax rules exclusively.

Kingmaker group is 13, Iron Gods is 10, Strange Aeons was 3.

I haven't found that they've made noteworthy changes in difficulty or challenge. They add a lot of flexibility, which is the point. If I need to scale up difficulty, I assume the NPCs are playing with the same rules by substituting NPC feats for Power Attack, Deadly Aim, and Point-Blank Shot. If anything, this makes the system more lethal at higher levels because monsters can be further down their feat trees, yet it is (of course) a boon for players since they have so many more options in every single encounter.

Here are my house rules if you want to steal anything, DM.

I wish every roleplayer ever could read your game expectations, Azure.

It'd solve a lot of in-game b*@~*+~&.

Well thanks, Caeleron. It only took me 27 or so years to get that sheet where it needed to be! I think the idea of, "What is the least selfish way to do this?" is the best approach to RPGs, largely because everyone at the table should be thinking, "They gave up their free time to do this, too."

I completely agree. There's a (thankfully) small minority of RPGers who really struggle with the social contract of an RPG, and I'd much rather be able to educate them, or as a last resort weed them out entirely, before they cause too much trouble. I've only been roleplaying for 17 years though, so I suspect you've seen much more of it than me.

"Only" 17 years. I was 20 17 years ago. I think you're pretty snugly in the "old-timer" category, knife ear. I deem anyone who's been playing tabletop RPGs for more than 5 years is experienced, and anyone who's been playing more than 10 is my frigging brother/sister-in-arms!

I have a free hour or two before we head off to Danang, so I'll try to write out more of Azure's backstory.

Coming up to 30 years role playing, and still loving it.

Started with D&D 3rd in 2000 at the tender age of 13, and it’s not always been especially regular, but I suppose that makes me moderately experienced, though not compared to a lot of people in this hobby.

Wow... I can count my RPG experience because I've played so few campaigns...

But I've always liked creative writing and that kind of thing.

The first time I played it was a homebrew and just turned into my trying to have my brother's character not be killed because he was playing an a@+#$+# and I'm overprotective of my brother.

Second was the Kingmaker campaign and I died 3 or 4 times then left he area so that stopped.

Tried on here and got into Ways of the Wicked, then the campaign died.

Flash forward about 5 years and I'm here again.

Got into Rise of the Runelords, that died because of the DM's medical reasons, got into one that was called Plunder and Peril and was in the Shackles. That died too for unknown reasons.

So basically I've gotten super good at making characters but have little experience playing them lol.

That's sadly the way of PbPs.

I've been quite lucky PbP-wise - I'm currently in two other APs that are going excellently, but I've played in three other campaigns that died after varying lengths of time, and got selected for a Rise of the Runelords game that didn't even get off the ground before the DM canned it.

Okay. I'm home again. Let's go to Golarion. What's the story, GM?

Thanks for your patience everyone. It's taken a while for the boards to get back to normal and for me to be able to post at the same time. On the bright side I've gotten almost everything I need to do to prepare finished up.

First, I'll get some unanswered questions out of the way.

Militia System: I've had a chance to read the first two chapters of the AP now and I've decided to go ahead and use the militia system. I was skeptical before about it taking extra time and slowing things down, but I can see it actually doing the opposite. Since checks are made weekly for militia actions they won't come up often during play time. Some of the capabilities it can give the party like recon, access to markets, and smuggling will make things much easier for the party since this is mostly a wilderness campaign for a long while.

Some things that would take up multiple game turns in traveling, buying and selling, and group decisions can be handed over to militia units to run in the background and speed things along at the cost of some minor and occasional record keeping. I can set up a google sheet for this and it should be easy to track.

There are also options for having the militia stuff fade into the background later on if it proves to be a burden.

Feat Tax Rules: I will add the following changes from the Feat Tax Rules. They can be found here: Feat Tax Rules

Power Attack, Weapon Finesse, Point Blank Shot, Martial Mastery, and Combat Expertise will work as written there.

Mobility and Dodge will be merged into a single feat as written there.

That's as far as I'm going to go with those. As I've mentioned a couple of times, my lack of experience with higher level play makes me leery of what might happen with combat maneuvers and the rest if they are merged. Consider that I've been playing for about 4 years to the combined 70 years or whatever it is exactly that you guys have.

I don't want to have to start rescaling encounters and so forth later on because I eased feat requirements now. This compromise should allow more freedom in choosing feats and for characters to come online faster without changing their power too much.

Added NPCs: Without going back and digging I don't remember the specific whos and whats of the requests (one was for a Chernasardo Ranger NPC as a friend), but I won't be adding any "custom" NPCs. You should consider yourselves to be alone in the AP, with any relatives, friends, etc. to be out of the picture. There's a big bagful of NPCs in Ironfang from the very beginning, quite a few more than the six or so mentioned so far for possible relationships. I don't want to complicate things any more than they need to be. On that note I suppose, the Leadership feat is banned.

Gameplay: Almost every PbP starts out assuming daily posts, often making it a requirement. If they even manage it at the very beginning, it never lasts for more than a month before the posting rate drops to maybe 3 turns a week. I'm not going to pretend we will do better. We have quite a few time zones to consider and I figure that the best we can do would be an update plus all player posts within 48 hours.

The rate I'll be going for is 3 to 4 updates per week. If something comes up and you won't be able to post for a while, let everyone else know. It's not a big problem campaigns last for years and things will come up for everyone. Just communicate about it.

If you haven't posted within 48 hours of an update I reserve the right to bot your character to keep things moving along. I'll be more likely to bot during a combat than outside combat. I'll make conservative and resource-minded decisions if I bot a character.

I'll be using block initiative for combat. Simply put, I'll roll initiative and those characters who beat the enemies' initiative will all go first as a group, then the enemy, then those characters who didn't beat the enemy as a group.

I'll also roll saving throws for characters when the roll is needed to progress combat. Same with Perception in some cases where the situation would require a player to make multiple posts in order to get to the next update. I won't do this a lot, but I don't want to let the game start dragging as we wait for a roll or two.

Okay, that's most of the big stuff I can think of right now. I'll put it all on the game page and open up the gameplay thread with a starting post in the next day or two. Then we'll be on our way!

All sounds good to me, thanks GM.

I'll obtain a copy of Lands of Conflict and start reading up on the militia rules.

Excited to get going now.

Good to go here.

I think I'm going to rebuild Caeleron slightly before we get started.

We've already got two front-liners in the form of Azure and Skalla, and though I'm the only full BAB in the group I think three melee and two magic in a party of five is a little wonky.

I'm going to move some stuff around to make Caeleron more archery focused. It's a slight adjustment to his stats and a change of feat.

GM - how do you feel about characters having pre-crafted items? For instance, Caeleron has a +5 bonus to Craft (bows) and enough gold to have bought the raw materials for a non-masterwork composite longbow with a +2 Str rating. Admittedly it would have taken 150 days to craft at some point before the adventure starts, but then he's an elf so it's not like he's short of time. I understand if not, as it might be perceived as a little unbalanced.

@Caeleron: Most of the time I'd say no to pre-game start crafting. But, considering the difficulties you all will be having in acquiring goods and equipment in this case, I'll say yes.

I think you will all find having an archer along to be very valuable anyway.

Awesome, thanks GM.

I get the sense that we might be hard up for resources at times, which is why I took the ranks in Craft, not least to keep us in arrows.