Jeremy Walker's page

Session 4 is now up.

Session 4

Hey all, episodes 2 and 3 have been posted.

Session 2
Session 3

Hey everyone,

I realize that this isn't exactly a campaign journal, but it's pretty close, as I think if you like reading about other people's RPG campaigns there's a chance you would be interested in this.

Inspired by the opportunity presented by the podcast format, as well as by some truly great work from other podcasters out there, my friends and I have decided to record our play sessions and put them online in the form of a podcast for other people to follow along.

The home of the podcast is located here and the RSS feed can be found here.

Finally, if you want a direct link to the actual files, you can them at session 0 and session 1.

The podcast is also available through the iTunes music store, search for Journey to Madness.

I'll try and post here whenever I upload a new episode, and of course I'm interested in any feedback you guys might have.

Enjoy the show!

After watching my last campaign nearly fall apart from the overuse of buff spells (and the resulting mess of multiple dispel magic spells) by the time the characters reached 11th level or so, I was forced to implement a system very similar to the one Jason posted on the first page (and I allowed 4 buffs instead of 3, and no bonuses from spells were allowed to stack with each other at all).

This solution worked well enough that we were able to continue the campaign for awhile, at least until 16th level or so, but the first time someone cast a 9th-level spell (as it happened, it was an NPC that cast gate) that was the end of the campaign, as both myself and the players lost interest in a system that had become, essentially, who can get their uber spell off first.

In general, I agree that a system of limited buffs can be very helpful in reducing both the tedium and time intensive nature of high-level D&D, but I was bothered by 2 things. First, that the solution was a very obvious band-aid to cover up a glaring flaw in the underlying magic system, and as a result the solution felt both artificial and incongruous. And second, I had to spend a lot of time adjudicating on the fly which effects counted as a "buff" and which did not. It also had some unintended side effects.

The problem bothered me sufficiently that after my last campaign ended, I spent a great deal of time reinventing the entire magic system with the "buff problem" in mind before a started another campaign. So far, things have gone pretty smoothly, but the characters are still only level 4 or so, so it obviously hasn't really been tested yet.

Event modules are extremely difficult to do well, and Carnival was something of an experiment to see if we could pull it off and how much interest there was.

Based on the response so far, it seems to have been a success.

2) This one's more for the editorial staff. Are there stats for running the Derhii as PCs? I assume there's a few levels worth of Level Adjustment, but beyond that, what are the Ability bumps, etc to consider?

It seems that Kobold king will return on free rpg day.

Any idea yet what level this is going to be? I might just put my Falcon's Hollow campaing on hold until this is out...

That would be important to know - is that how the stat block for locations is defined?

I do have one minor gripe about the module though, and that was that I wouldn't personally categorize it as a Journey adventure. Really there is no journey involved since the start of the adventure assumes the PCs are already in the valley containing the lost city. To me it read much more like a Wilderness (or even an Urban) adventure than a Journey adventure. This of course, in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the module.

Anyway, none of the journey modules are about actual journeys. The closest thing we have to that is W2: River into Darkness and W3: Flight of the Red Raven.

Not to sidetrack this thread or anything. Your ideas about turing J3 into a campaign are pretty cool.

If, for some reason, we were to re-release the text of D0 as part of another product, we would endeavor to incorporate any errata to the adventure as part of that product. (Something like what happened with the SCAP book)

But, barring that, it's unlikely we'll ever go back and fix it.

As for the translations, I have no idea, I'm not involved with that process at all. But somehow I doubt it.

Will any future modules involve high-level play? I can see there being multiple play groups out there that retire their high-level characters when they conclude an adventure path (to try the next path), so I can foresee the desire to run some high-level adventures for your group's previous set of characters... you know, getting the band back together once in a while for the one-shot reunion concert. Unlike other types of stand-alone high level adventures, you have a ready market of 'graduates' who will have completed Rise of the Runelords, Crimson Throne, etc.

The short answer is that it's unlikely we will do modules above about 14th level, for 2 reasons. First, it's difficult for us to do a complete high-level adventure in 32-pages. The length of the encounters coupled with the difficulty of finding an appropriate plot that can be told briefly means its challenging to pull off well.

The second reason is that historically high-level modules sell worse that low- and mid- level modules. The only high-level modules that have been consistently popular have been the ones connected to adventure paths.

The upcoming module The Demon Within, is about as high level as we are likely to get. If that module does really well, we might consider upping the number of high-level modules we do. But even then, its pretty unlikely we'll do anything higher than 14th-15th level

Another request would be to eventually put together something like Goodman's 'Adventure Finder' to make it easy to find adventures in your campaign's current area of Golarion, cross-indexed by region.

Gary Teter wrote:

Another test!

Hmmm. Not a very successful test I guess.

MUNCH!

Gary Teter wrote:

Testing!

Hmmm. OK, so it's not a reliable problem.

Many thanks for the response, Jeremy. :)
Would it be possible for you to please clarify what the 'slam' damage for a Shoggoth (mentioned in the 'Engulf' special ability) totals? I can find tentacles, but no 'slam' damage, in the attacks section.

And a question:
Has the fungus in room 9 a CR?

As I'm sure Mary will attest, there's a big difference between an optimized 4th-level party and a non-optimized one.

If your players are the type to get the most out of the rules, you should raise the challenge level some. If you want some ideas to make the undead tougher, check out the dread zombie and dread wight templates in the Advanced Bestiary. Having Patrissa keep her sorcerer levels is another good idea.

James Jacobs/Wolfgang:
To kick things off here, I have a couple of questions about Shoggoths.
(1) I see mention made in the 'typical physical characteristics', that the Golarion version of a Shoggoth presented here '...is capable of secreting a thick, viscous, semi-opaque, sticky slime that further enchances its ability to ctach and devour its prey...' but I see no mention of any bonus feat or racial bonus to grapple checks in the stat block. Is this an accidental omission? Should it have better grappling abilities than those listed?

(2) According to the information on page 27, either attempting to gain control of the Shoggoth or successfully controlling it (via use of the Shoggoth Stone) are both Chaotic Evil acts, even though the Shoggoth's given alignment is CN. Is this because the Shoggoth Stone is a Chaotic Evil item (which I do not find mentioned), or for some other reason? Is attempting to control a Shoggoth by other means a Chaotic Evil act?

Attempting to control the shoggoth by means other than the artifact would not necessarily be an evil act, it would depend on what you were using it for.

As a comment, I was slightly surprised to see what appeared to be teeth/fangs in the artwork, given the Shoggoth's listed creature type, although I realise that these might not actually have any solidity to them, being more decorative(?) than functional.

This group can't cast freedom of movement until 10th level (when the bard can cast it 1/day). They can't cast death ward until 14th level (and that's if the paladin gets up to 18 wisdom...seems unlikely).

Regardless of how much healing you have, the lack of those 2 spells could be a major problem.

I agree, shoggoths rule.

<-------ftw

A minority view here:

snip

If you want to make the haunts harder though, I'd aim for increasing the DCs for skill checks by 5, and for saving throws by 3 (that's about how much better people will be at 4th level). I'd double (or so) the amount of damage they do, either just straight up increasing the damage or by giving them some sort of lingering effect (posion, etc.)

Strength 14
Intelligence 11
Wisdom 13
Dexterity 12
Constitution 8
Charisma 14

RIP EGG

Ah doomsday

My feeling is that yes, climate change is bad, and it might redraw the map and end the world order (such as it is), but it probably won't kill off humanity.

Personally my two favorite scenarios are the Supernova Apocalypse and the Gray Goo Scenario

Blight, hands down.

My druid has just attained 7th level. He can transform into thousands of different creatures, his animal companion is either a ferocious killing machine or an unhittable juggernaught. He can call down columns of fire from the sky to blast the perverters of nature. He can walk through a nest of assassin vines without fear of getting grappled. He can bring his companions back from the dead!

Or...he can automatically kill any a single plant (of any size!). Hmm. But wait, I can use it to damage plant creatures! Oh but flame strike does just as much damage to multiple plant creatures.

Yeah....

Personally I've never allowed karmic strike.

Robilar's Gambit is ok though, by 12th-level, I'm fine with the fighter doing stuff like that. After all, look at what the wizard is doing!

Impartial Tribunal, Chase on Charred Ground

In this situation, I think the total concealment issue is important because it means that the attacker has to pick a square and hope the target is in it. If he is, no miss chance. If he isn't, oops.

In the monster format we actually use for our products, the name of the monster comes first, followed by a physical description of the monster, followed by its stat block, followed by its ecology and other information.

Mind the Machine, In the Bleak Midwinter, Born of Lightning

He'll certainly be appearing in Pathfinder 7. Not sure if he'll also be appearing in the GM Module before or after that.

Sadly, he had a sequel to it called The Lightning Curse that never saw the light of day before the mag's run ended.

But I'll say no more right now.

There is also one in "Fortress of the Stone Giants" (Pathfinder 4)...I discovered it in my mail a few days ago :-)

There's not a lot of focus in E1 on tragic loss. Oh, there's puh-lenty of loss, but it's not the party's fault. Tragedy has to do with decisions and ramifications. (Think Oedipus. Think Macbeth. Think Annikin Skywalker.) The massacre in E1 is bathos, not tragedy.

For the townsfolk, their greed and carelessness has led to aggravating the native creatures that dwell within the paradise they have despoiled. Do they deserve the punishment that the fey are delivering? Perhaps not, but it was their arrogance that caused the situation in the first place, and the whole point about fey is that their values and morals are not the same as humans. To there minds, mortal lives are of little significants next to the eternal beauty of the forest. To them, wiping out Falcon's Hollow is less than the humans deserve for the damage they have caused, which will take centuries for the fey to heal, even without further interference.

Can you truly say that Oedipus deserved what happened to him? Although he may have acted in ignorance, like the people of Falcon's Hollow, it was his actions that nonetheless created the situation that led to his description, just like Falcon's Hollow (except for the timely intervention of the PCs).

Of course, the saddest part is that the common townsfolk had little say in organizing the destruction that they are being punished for, but that is often the way that war works. The (relatively) innocent are usually the first to suffer.

As for claiming that Syntaria does not suffer from what happens in the module, I have to disagree there as well. First, she watches her beautiful and happy children transform into evil twisted creatures of frozen darkness before her eyes, and she is powerless to halt the transformation. Then she has to make a terrible choice, allow the (admittedly unjust) punishment to go forward, or betray her own people to her hated enemies, and watch as the careless and destructive humans slaughter many of her own kin (whose lives, I might add, she values more than the lives of the entire population of the town).

At the end, if the PCs fail, she pays almost as heavy a price as the town, as her fey desert her and join the heartless armies of the witch queen, and her territory is transformed from a paradise into a frozen wasteland.

If the PCs succeed, she is rewarded for her act of treachery by being forced to watch the harvest of her forest continue, knowing that, unless some miracle happens, it is only a matter of time (and for an immortal fey, not a very long time) before the forest is completely destroyed, and she and her fey kin face exile and death.

As for those who say the module is too dark, well, it is pretty dark. But, the good news on that front is we aren't planning on doing something quite so grim again for awhile.

A couple templates from the SRD that include sample monsters are skeleton and zombie.

If you are looking for how we handle templates at Paizo (and I would encourage you to look as there are some significant differences) you can find templates in U1: Gallery of Evil and J1: Entombed with the Pharaohs.

I'm mostly worried about the one-note nature of the products, and that's something that's beyond Nicolas Logue's control - for that the responsibility rests with paizo and the editors of the line. They specify the general outlines and themes of the modules themselves and they have the ability to change it. Luckily, it looks like they are going to be broadening the themes.

Horror, and dark fey are two of the themes we were excited to explore early in the conceptual process of the module line's development. In retrospect, it's kind of unfortunate that the release of those modules coincided so perfectly with the Pathfinder horror adventure, as it perhaps gave readers the impression that we were going horror, which was not the intention.

You can expect us continue to present a wide array of adventures and themes, while at the same time we make the occasional return to those areas (like Falcon's Hollow) that prove to be the most popular with our readers and subscribers.

Seskadrin, Kotalya, Onuyaka, Henrietta

I appreciate the suggestion, and it is a good idea, but considering where we are with the Dungeon online supplements, I'm not willing to commit to doing this yet.

I will keep it in mind though.

We don't have any high-level adventures coming up in the immediately future. In general, it's extremely difficult to produce a quality high-level adventure in the 32-page module format, mainly to do the length of high level encounters.

Also, there is a smaller demand for high-level adventures as compared to low- or mid-level ones.

I'm not going to say we'll never do high level adventures (especially with a new edition potentially on the horizon) but we don't have one on the radar yet.

My concern is that the adventure seems to be either "the players win" (defeat everything before 60 minutes elapse) or lose (because they have to rest). I'm not sure how the intermediate solutions would ever really occur in play.

But, things don't always go as planned, and the reason why that table is in there is that there are a lot of groups that will either ignore the warning they are given, or will never get any warning at all, and for them, timely discovery of the dire situation they are in is unlikely.

Just how quickly they realize things are going wrong will be the difference in how much of the town is left when the dust settles.

Also there's an outside chance that the PCs will spend a lot of time working on some sort of alternate road to victory (like hunting the woods for the cold rider, for example), and the table will help DMs adjudicate the results of taking too long.

Kestria, Bereket, Iskandria, Vramaire, and Draeth

Honorable Mention: Karistynia