Jon Yamato 705's page

So lets say the operative fails to trick attack put hits (most common result at my table) that still has a max average damage of 112 points of damage per round.

Wait, what?

It's just the opposite for us. The trick attack is an automatic success. But the operative doesn't have full BAB and misses a lot. How is your operative failing their trick attack roll?

The DC is 20+CR, so for the CR11 baddie would be 31.

By that level, the operative in our test party had 10 ranks in the skill, plus 3 for it being a class skill, 7 points of stat, 4 points (if I recall correctly) of operative bonus, 4 points from a class feature, and 2 points from race (ysoki). +30 to roll a 31.

Even if you dropped the race bonus and lowered the stat bonus to +6, it's still +27 to hit a 31. *Much* better than the operative's chance to hit, in our hands.

Or one could take the NPC operatives in Pact Worlds, specifically the Mercenary Commando (p. 157). A pair of these were an encounter in one of the modules we used for playtest. They have Stealth +25, or +29 when using trick attack, per their description. They succeed automatically against PCs of their level (DC30).

I will look at the numbers in the rest of the post when I have access to my player's character sheets. But this jumped out at me. We've been wondering if we're playing it wrong as the roll appears trivial, but we checked the rules carefully and can't see a mistake. Trick attack was hard at very low levels but had been automatic success for a while by 10th.

Playtest prior to _Threefold Conspiracy_, part 2.

We level-jumped the characters to 10th and ran the first bit of Dead Suns #5. Since the characters were supposed to be 9th, I added two human foes from later in the module to what was already there (an envoy and some incorporeal undead).

About 90 minutes later, the player said, "There is no risk that the PCs will lose and no chance that anything interesting will happen, but it's going to be another two hours. Let's stop."

I think he over-estimated slightly; probably only another hour. But it was excruciatingly boring. So we went on to a different fight. We did a monster on the ground (trying to avoid spoilers here). Not exciting but not terrible. (Why can you only single move when you trample, and you can't end up standing on anyone? It makes trample really hard to use against a party.) The next fight was against a single flying enemy with Mirror Images at will. We cut that one off after about 40 minutes. I don't know if the PCs would have won, but it was going to take a really long time either way, and it was not entertaining for either of us.

We went through the module and could easily see that more than half the fights would be similarly boring. The incorporeal undead were a big problem--they couldn't accomplish much but took forever to kill, and most PC abilities were irrelevant.

My player went off in a funk convinced this would never work, and came back a few hours later and said "Can I have extra budget as long as I don't spend it on armor or weapons?" I said yes, he rebuilt the characters, repicked spells, and I ran the first few fights from Swarm #6. He told me afterwards he'd gone about 25% over budget.

This went much better. The characters seemed to have a lot more options than just "sit and fire at something hard to hit". We did two linked fights on an open tarmac where the gunbunnies got to shine, and four linked fights in a mansion where the melee guy was the star, but (despite really bad rolls from the PCs on the latter fights) they were much more dynamic. (Also had the only memorable moment we've had so far: the snooty drow merc NPC reacted really poorly to being turned into a giant rabbit.)

The fights still took a really long time though. For me personally Pathfinder combats have a too-fast pace of decision at high levels--in the AP we just finished fights were generally 1-2 rounds unless I used huge numbers of foes. Starfinder goes very far the other way, probably too far. You can't take out anything quickly above level 3 or 4. You can't do a stealth-and-quick-strikes scenario, which is what the player tried on the mansion, because you just can't get rid of people fast enough when they have 100+ HP. The mansion fight took over two hours--some of that was, of course, both of us looking up rules constantly, but the huge HP totals really did make it drag. The low-level mercs, 5 levels below the PCs, did a tiny amount of damage to them but took 4-5 rounds to get rid of.

The player's conclusion is that he refuses to play levels 1-2 and is not sure about level 3. He would prefer high level, though he feels he needs more practice before tackling Devastation Ark. And he really wants to have enough funds to get fun, character-building bits of equipment, and not to have to spend it all on arms and armor.

I think a relatively simple fix for his frustration would be to give the characters an arms-and-armor budget and an accessories budget. This removes the temptation to spend everything on arms and armor (which is probably optimal but really boring) and allows for some fun and flavor.

My conclusion is that I am far from excited to run this system. Combats drag. The world background is not solid enough to make hacking and espionage exciting without a lot of GM prep work. Play balance among the classes is poor: in our hands all other non-caster classes look like feeble attempts to do operative or soldier.

But with careful character design and a 25% budget boost, I may be able to get a workable game starting with Threefold #1 and #2. (Haven't evaluated #3 yet, and #4 is going to be a lot of work--its middle part is more like an outline than a finished module.) I will leave out all the starship combats (luckily it has few) because I just can't stand running them, and put my GMing effort into trying to patch up the world background. I will trust the player to do his best with class balance, and thank my lucky stars it's only one player so I don't have to deal with player/player competitiveness. (Game balance still matters though; a character who is dominated by another in everything they try to do isn't fun even in single-player, and our PC engineer was dominated in that fashion by the operative.)

The single thing I would most want fixed, though I can't invest the time to house-rule it all, is the level-and-price table for equipment. It's really not working for me. Very basic stuff is out of reach of low-level PCs for no apparent reason--a sap is not rocket science, why can't you get one? Almost everything interesting seems to be gated to mid-levels or above. And the prices just seem really, really erratic.

The only way I think I could really make the price table work is to run the system as a corporate dystopia where the corps keep all the good tech for themselves and jack up prices on what little they let trickle down to the peons. Think "I owe my soul to the company store". Might work for Live Free or Die but it's kind of bleak otherwise.

The movement part of starship combat is pretty much a numerical optimization problem. I am tempted to write code to solve it. I think the turns where you are Winner Pilot are quite easy, and the ones where you are Loser Pilot (which is what really takes skill) will be more work but should be solvable, by brute force if I can't find a cute trick.

Otherwise I feel like a doofus every time, because it's a solvable problem but if I try to solve it each turn, combat takes *forever*.

Well, okay. It's just that every experience I've had with the forums in the last two years has ended with people saying, basically, "If you can't say nice stuff just go away." I understand the frustration in this particular case, but it's been a pattern. Makes the place seem very unwelcoming. It's too bad, because to be honest the critical posts are what I come here for--I want to know about problems and weaknesses so I can make plans to deal with them.

We find, for our games, that it really helps if GM and player(s) have a consistent understanding for what things PCs can do safely, what they can do with some risk/effort, and what things are beyond the pale. Otherwise you get unpleasant sessions where the GM is sitting there wondering why the PCs aren't making any progress, while the players are sitting there fretting that the thing they're apparently supposed to do will get them in trouble with the authorities. Or vice versa: the PCs do something and the GM has to say, "Um, guys, that brings down all of Absalom Security on your heads."

I know this isn't an issue for everyone. It is a big issue for us. And yes, I am willing to give a briefing on local law every time the PCs hit a new station or planet: that's part of what makes it feel like a *new* station or planet and not just the same old same old. To use an Earth example, visiting Somalia should feel really different from visiting Singapore. If it doesn't, the different locations are just cheap painted backdrops on "AdventureWorld" which is not what I personally enjoy.

I would like to politely ask that the response to "This doesn't work for me" not be chorus after chorus of "Go play something else, then." If you are going to have a thread on "What is your experience with Starfinder?" it is quite legitimate for people to mention negatives as well as positives. Maybe those who are upset should start a thread "What are your positive experiences with Starfinder"?

Putting aside starship combat, my overall feelings about the system are pretty meh. It works okay but I don't love it.

We had a better time once we understood that the NPCs hitting so much better than the PCs was a deliberate design decision, and what the reason for it is. It's still offputting to me though. I also really dislike that you can't look at an NPC and draw any conclusions from what they are wearing. The Azlanti soldiers in their full-body armor were incredibly easy to hit. My player started making Stormtrooper jokes.

Combat is much less dynamic than in Pathfinder, in our hands. I really miss the 5' step and characters with more substantial attacks of opportunity (no one seems to have more than one, and it's easy to lose that one because it is the same action type as something else you need to do). Combat manuvers, if we are playing them correctly, appear nearly useless because the target number is so much higher than a standard attack--better to hit and do damage than miss with a manuver.

My player has 4 PCs and in neither of the two parties we've tried have they seemed well balanced. It's apparently really easy to make a useless PC. In both parties it was the melee guy who overshadowed the others badly, though I guess that won't always be how it goes--it does depend some on the scale of the terrain.

I am hoping it will be more fun at higher levels. We'll be trying that (playtest style) tomorrow and Saturday.

Also, it's not the system's fault, but the AP plots don't make a whole lot of sense, and this makes it hard to get a grip on the setting. What is the law level of Absalom Station? It seems to vary from scene to scene in a bewildering way.

We are thinking of doing Threefold Conspiracy but weren't sure about the rules, so we just did a speedy combat-and-skill-checks-only version of Dead Suns 1 and Aeon Throne 1 with various levels of characters.

My player is excited by designing ships, but both of us were displeased by all four of the starship combats: I personally would happily never run another one. The pilot is the only character making any meaningful decisions--the gunner generally just has to roll to hit with the facing weapon. And the decisions the pilot is making are bizarre--they don't feel like starship combat to me so much as some kind of puzzle. If you want to do this well it's a lot of tedious calculation.

This may change at higher levels, I don't know. My player hopes it will. If it doesn't, I'm throwing out starship combat. (All the AP examples so far have been extremely forced, anyway.)

I will also note that the last fight in Aeon 1 would naturally have been an air combat rather than a space combat, but apparently you can't do that. Having some cloud banks, maybe a ground emplacement firing on the ships, some mountains, etc. could jazz things up, and this was a great opportunity missed.

Each of the 2nd Edition APs has had an early encounter which destroyed a lot of parties. I really wonder what is going on with the authors' control of difficulty.

My group bailed on 2nd Edition in large part because the playtest control of difficulty level was so demoralizingly bad. I had thought, though, that with experience with the system this problem would go away.

My spouse says, the system is for high-level play and doesn't actually work well at the low levels. (When we tried a first level Starfinder scenario we had the same feeling. It was too brutally hard to be any fun. We thought that around 3rd or 5th things might improve a lot.) Maybe a practical solution is to start PCs at 3rd, both in Second Edition and in Starfinder. We've been doing that in First Edition for some time and it generally seems okay. The PCs can show a little flair in the early going, rather than having to play super carefully, and this is good for setting up characterization. (If making an in-character but sub-optimal decision will get you killed, you probably won't; then the character never develops much personality.)

Where the NPCs ended up:

Ramona was Head of Security, and her protege was Mayor of the capital town (the government system didn't allow two roles for one person--did I mention we had a whole lot of election intrigue?)

Rayland was head of T's Edge, a covert operative force.

Eliza, amazingly, not only survived but got hold of a enisysian (a little symbiont that lets you break immunities to mind control) and was slowly and steadily working towards becoming an aboleth. We can only hope she'll be a friendly aboleth.... I was really surprised at who the PCs befriended and who they did not.

Koloshkora was Mayor of Mangrove, a city on pilings out in the bay (where the refugee locathahs went).

Thanaldu and its sibling Emmeroo became important recurring NPCs, part of a plotline where the PCs researched how to break aboleth control over their slave races. (I became very fond of Emmeroo, one of my favorite NPCs of the campaign.) There was a lot of angst over whether humans and faceless stalkers can possibly coexist peacefully.

Ochymua lived to fight another day, but is currently somewhere far, far away from these awful PCs!

Perril ended up sharing her body with the disembodied awareness of a monk from Eox (this is what happens if you fool around with the Orrery) and was the Mayor of the deeply technocratic town of Nal-Shakar. (Her people tend to call her the Queen of Nal-Shakar, offending the anti-aristocracy sensibilities of the rest of the island. We did a lot with subculture clash.)

Harcourt was a major public figure in Pearl Bay, the most Luddite of the kingdom's towns, and a major political adversary of the PCs: a lot of their electioneering was dedicated to not letting him get into office.

Eamon was Minister of Religion. Kurvis lost his election for Minister of Trade but was still a major political figure.

Deadtooth the monkey goblin necromancer kept getting caught supporting the other side, and amazingly, got to claim coercion/mind control/mistakes every time! They eventually exiled her....

Wow. Really a fun campaign with a lot of rich stuff going on. Kudos to the inventors of these NPCs: it was great material to work with.

Lessons from this campaign:

(1) The rate of technology development was too high for my personal tastes. I think if we kept playing they'd hit some kind of Singularity in another 5 years or so! I don't know if the best answer would be quarterly rather than monthly kingdom turns, or increasing all the tech development costs, or lengthening the tech trees, but something should have been slowed down. (My player really wanted to have about one kingdom turn per play session, so that was a constraint--it would have been tough to get this with quarterly kingdom turns, and I think impossible with yearly ones.)

(2) As usual, episode 6 was a weak link. The aboleth plans to harass the colony are a bit laughable at this level (a dozen 10th level dominated fighters, really?) and the Compass is confusingly hard to run, unfinished, not internally consistent, and generally unsatisfying. The plot to destroy Absalom is too disjointed from the storyline. (And my player, a Pathfinder Society veteran, would have been tempted to say "Okay, we'll go for that" the same way that players in Second Darkness sometimes ended up helping the drow destroy Kyonin!)

(3) Veiled masters don't fill their campaign role well. They need nondetection *desperately* or by the time they are level-appropriate, none of their illusion and shapeshifting abilities will work. Their spell repertoire is heavily biased towards the annoying Symbol spells (the times I tried to use these, they hurt the aboleth about as much as the PCs....) and their physical capabilities seem pretty irrelevant for a creature that should be shapeshifted into a humanoid all the time. I gave mine nondetection but I ended up wishing I had rewritten them from scratch.

Regular aboleth weren't all that great either. Shouldn't they be immune to mind control?

(4) I asked the player what he wanted to do next and his first comment was "Something less three-dimensional." Underwater combat is a pain! Flying combat is also! We stacked figures on bases to indicate height, or sometimes drew multiple slices through the map, but no matter what we did, it was hard. We had one fight in a 40' wide shaft deep underwater that was just madness to run.

(5) If you run this, be sure everyone agrees exactly what dominate does and how it can be detected. The module authors don't; some of them think that if you don't give orders you can hide the dominate (Episode 1).

(6) I think it's more fun if there are more aboleth and they don't vanish from sight between #3 and #6. We had an aboleth with a living submarine (a fleshwarped whale) that was a recurring threat for a long time.

(7) Ruins of Azlant totally shines as a kingdom-building game. I can't imagine doing it any other way. It hands the PCs two major artifact installations (the Orrery at Nal-Shakar and the Mutation Engine in the Flooded Cathedral) and in a standard campaign these mean nothing. (In ours, the PCs used the Mutation Engine to make two-armed into four-armed sahuagin, as a way of meddling in sahuagin politics; what they did with the Orrery was even more surreal.) It has the PCs explore the island and then nothing much happens with it, whereas we got really familiar with the whole area and fought back and forth over it throughout the campaign.

Overall, a fun campaign. Stressful to run (lots to keep track of, and 14th level with heavy equipment is quite formidable, though still easier than letting it go higher) but quite rewarding. Kingdom-building is good for developing NPCs and long-term plotlines.

My files suggested we started playing around August 2018, which is about standard for one of our AP campaigns--we always add a lot of material. In this case we played Azlant as a kingdom-building game, which seemed like a natural fit. We just finished today. There's obviously a lot more that could happen but it was an agreed-on natural end point. I did a series of little vignettes to show where the Republic might be 1, 2, 3...15 years in the future.

It was a 1 player campaign with 6 PCs, which is our standard house style. We used custom kingdom-building rules (took us about 3 months to write and test, back in 2018) loosely based on the ones in Kingmaker, with the addition of a Civilization-style technology tree.

Episode 1 ran pretty much as written, except that the PC party started out with more leadership authority than in the module, which was natural since they were to become the colony leaders. They caught on to the fate of the lost colony fairly quickly, as I expected (my player is sharp and his PCs were private detectives back in Andoran, so well equipped to solve mysteries).

Episode 2 was rocky, because the plotline with Helekhterie is a frustrating distraction from the fate of the old colony and attacks on the new one. The PCs did a lot of hexploration (though it took them forever to finish the island--I had made it bigger, about 11 miles by 7, with one-mile hexes). They built up their hometown but were slow to make any more towns, as the island seemed quite dangerous to them.

Episode 3 ran pretty much as written, and touched off a period of local war with the aboleth. I had to develop a number of aboleth bases. A gillfolk town on the nearby southern island, based on the town in Carrion Crown #4, got a lot of play. The colony by this point controlled much of the dry west coast of Ancorato but had not gotten far into the eastern forest/jungle areas.

Homebrew plotlines began to predominate around this point: Azlanti ghosts, aboleth bases, locathah politics, ceratiodi politics....

Episode 4 was pretty thoroughly rewritten. I put an aboleth in Talislantri who had subverted Rillkimatai's personal physician and was keeping him drugged so that he could neither govern effectively nor choose a successor. The PCs got involved in exposing and stopping this plan, though the aboleth got away. My main observation is that the difficulty level of #4 was WAY higher than any other part of the AP: the author built frightfully effective NPCs. I was using NPCs cribbed from #4 throughout #5 and #6 as they were much more effective than what was provided in those modules.

Episode 5 was touched off by undead attacks on the colony's locathah allies, and a homebrew island of allied undead, to build Auberon up more (I did not like the "couch potato lich" quality of the published storyline). Auberon's tower was still very easy for the PCs. We capped the PC level at 14 so I cut down Auberon a bit, but I'm not even sure it was necessary. Six well equipped PCs can really do a number on small numbers of foes, and Paizo seldom provides more than small numbers.

After this we went into a lengthy homebrew storyline in which veiled masters from the Mordant Spire (which in our timeline had been lost to them a century ago) tried to wreck colony society with subtle multi-pronged attacks. The PCs did a brilliant job sorting this out--over and over my notes contain months of escalating attacks and then a note "but this didn't happen" because the PCs nipped it in the bud. (The great release of the Azlanti ghosts would have been fun to run! But kudos to the PCs for stopping it, because it would have been quite nasty.)

The PCs developed technology that let them track algholthu mental links (via special tracking animals) and eventually triggered Episode 6 by hunting down Ochymua, who had been harassing them indirectly through minions for a long time. (There was a plot to sell ioun stones that made the user vulnerable to aboleth control, for example, that they eventually balked.) They easily overcome Ochymua's minions, but Ochymua escaped with its life. However, I was not able to find a convincing reason for it to try again after having been so badly thrashed.

By this point the PCs had 5 towns on and around Ancorato and had developed a LOT of technology, much more than I had really expected. They decided to go after the veiled master at the Mordant Spire, who was drawing mythic power from the dead shade of Acavna. Enormously to my surprise, the PCs decided to bring Acavna back. So the end of the campaign was a series of hard hit-and-run raids on the Mordant Spire to weaken their grip on Acavna, and then a bold journey (by train!) through the Boneyard with Acavna's ghost, ending up on the Moon. (They had previously lured Runequake to the moon, petrified it, and rededicated the temple on its back. These PCs think big.)

We ended on that climatic series of fights, and a scene of Acavna granting boons to PCs and NPCs who had aided in her rebirth.

Lessons from the game in a second post.

My GM toned the revenant down to something lesser, as there were only three PCs.

At the end of the encounter two of them were down and the gnome wizard had 1 hp and was in a Silence. The thing came after him. He threw his last vial of holy water and *missed*--and killed it with the 1 point splash.

I don't think I've ever been in a closer fight.

I'm not sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I guess it was both. A very memorable fight, but very hard on morale, and also part of what killed the game during the next chapter--it REALLY made the point that the PCs' former selves were bad folks, and unfortunately the PCs got it in their heads in #3 that the events were conspiring to make them back into bad folks. They balked, and we had to contrive an ending and terminate the game.

Our GM did the complete amnesia thing. By the time the PCs got to Dreams of the Yellow King they knew they had been Lowls' henchmen, and that their previous selves were pretty terrible people. (The guy who crawled back from the dead to throttle Painter in revenge for having been brutally murdered by him really made an impression.)

They got halfway through Dreams and basically said, "We're being asked to do a long string of awful things. The upshot of this is that *we will become our former selves.*" At which point the gnome wizard said, "Oh well" but the other two PCs said "Death is preferable" and things kind of fell apart.

The GM managed to craft a sort of redemption arc, but it was the end of the campaign--we terminated it at the end of Dreams.

I don't know if this would have been a problem for anyone else, but for these characters (and the particular spin the GM put on the dreamworld stuff) it really was. I think it was the ball where you weren't allowed to mention that anything was wrong that really sealed the deal. The theme of playing along with atrocities in order to get what you need just fit all too well into what (they'd deduced) their previous selves had done.

I would never assume a campaign would go to 20. Just look at how many reports we have on "how episode #1 went for my group" vs. "how episode #6 went for my group." So, rather than it seeming obviously best to push the high stat, to me it seems obviously best to go for having a useful bonus (and they are pretty much all useful) at a level I *know* I will be playing at.

Game design wise, I am really not a fan of "give up power at level N to get more power at level N+5 or N+10." It puts pressure on the GM to run from N to N+5 or N+10, and in my experience also creates pressure to get to N+ *sooner*, which can damage the campaign.

Certainly if you were building for a one-shot rather than a campaign you would never consider taking that odd stat point.

The premise of Age of Ashes--going to different, unrelated locales, and glossing over the question of why the McGuffins happen to be there--did not interest me at all. Episode #1 seemed very disjointed and flat, as well as having a poor handle on difficulty level. Episode #2 also had a poor handle on difficulty, and felt to me like it treated its NPCs as stage props, which is a big turn-off.

I can't judge #3 fairly because it's set in Kintargo, and depicts the things my Kintargo party worked so hard to establish as having gone by the wayside (what are slavers doing in the city? Why is the Bellflower operating in secret rather than alerting the authorities?) Paizo also did this to Westcrown (built up in Council of Thieves, trashed in Hell's Vengeance) and it prevented us from playing Hell's Vengeance. I really wish they wouldn't. Going back to a previous location is okay but I don't see why they like to depict them as worsened or wrecked. It's demoralizing.

I like the setting of #4 very much. I don't know that it would actually run well, and there's a dearth of run reports. I might try this one stand-alone sometime. I never read #5 or #6 as by this point I knew I wasn't really interested in the AP.

The circus part of Extinction Curse could work well for my group--we have actually done circus campaigns before. It seemed somewhat tacked on to the xulgath plotline, though, and my players had huge issues with the whole xulgath/Aroden thing. (And after I read #5, so did I.) #5 had some great color and flavor, but...ah well. I'll give this whole thing a miss. The circus parts are not very well developed, from what I saw in a partial readthrough of #1 and #2.

It also really underscores my inability to get any kind of handle on the game-world. Everything seems to float to the PCs' level, even worse than in 1st Edition--the sticking point for me was the small-town adventuring clan in Extinction #4, who are on a par with the teen-levels PCs for no apparent reason. The guy in Kintargo in Ashes #3 who casually summons a devil got the same reaction. Everything just seems to be what it needs to be for the immediate adventure, but the result for me is that there's no sense of a coherent world behind it all.

I really liked Agents of Edgewatch #1. It's far and away the best of the ones I've read, even though I think the privateer thing is a huge misstep and I would not run it that way. Reading the summary of upcoming modules, though, I doubt I could run this. My players do not take well to being railroaded and I doubt I could make those very specific plot twists come off as planned. Maybe just run #1, either in its native system or converted, then stop. (A bit scared to run it in its native system, because I think that once again it is not in control of its difficulty. I thought 2nd was supposed to make that easier?)

There is a kind of pattern of not really thinking about the morality of what you are asking/expecting the PCs to do. Using lethal force against the rival circus; accepting at face value that the xulgaths are more sinning than sinned against; financing your police operations by extortion; meddling in the love life of a perfect stranger in a culture you don't understand (Ashes #2). Any of these could work in a darker tone, but that doesn't seem to be the intent.

Compared to the better 1st Edition APs, these feel more like they're striving for color and splashy scenes at the expense of depth and world grounding. I can see how that could be really fun, but it is not at all my thing.

Favorite 1E APs: Rise of the Runelords, Council of Thieves (my GM did a bang-up job with this, about quadrupling its length in the process), Kingmaker, Hell's Rebels, Iron Gods. I like APs with a solid sense of place, ones that don't run all over. (Did not have good success with Jade Regent or Reign of Winter, as a result.)

If this sort of thing bothers you, you may also need to watch out for "Grateful NPC rewards the PCs ridiculously lavishly." Ruins of Azlant has a prime example of this: some NPCs ask the PCs to retrieve an item that they need to defend against threat X, then give it to the PCs *without having resolved the threat* and knowing that the PCs live several days journey away. I had to change this as it would have shattered suspension of disbelief. There are many lesser examples of this scattered through the APs, and if you want PCs to treat NPCs more realistically, you may have to add extra treasure to maintain WBL. (My Azlant party would certainly never have kept the item even if offered it.)

There's also a dragon in Ironfang who is completely distraught because the bad guys picked off some of her scales, and who rewards the PCs by letting them ... pick off some of her scales.

Of the APs I've run (about half) Giantslayer stands out as assuming you will just kill and loot everything--not in episode 1 or possibly 2, but definitely thereafter. Conversely, if your PCs are assiduous about looting they will end up with more than expected treasure, assuming they can find a buyer for Large equipment--the treasure actually listed is normal, but there are a *lot* of additional giants and they must have arms and armor. (There is also a literal infinite cash generator in module #3, in the form of an artifact that can change a small object made of precious materials into a large one--you'd want to fix that.)

Shattered Star, in our hands, had markedly too little treasure--I don't know if that was because the PCs refused to loot allies or just because the treasure wasn't there.

You can get in trouble in Hell's Rebels if the PCs are more attached to the Rebellion than to their own personal advancement: the Rebellion rules exist mainly to funnel stuff to the PCs, but good PCs may not play along. This one may also have issues with the PCs seizing stuff from the bad guys and then returning it to its owners.

Mummy's Mask has some library-looting that I think a lot of PCs would balk at: there are little treasures tucked into the library but why would you think you could take those?

I agree with what's been said about problematic aspects of this AP.

On the other hand, Dreaming Palace is the first 2nd edition episode that actually makes me want to run it--fixed up, yes, but the material is exciting to me, and that mostly has not been happening. The nightclub is *so cool.* The menagerie and the kobold project are pretty cool too. The murder hotel is a neat idea though I am iffier about the implementation.

I am worried about the bit in the murder hotel chapter where it says that if the PCs ask the BBG for a tour, "of course" he just uses it as a pretext to kill them. (a) This is not the most interesting continuation, and (b) I think he's likely to succeed if he's at all smart about it. The scenario is not balanced for taking the most dangerous of the rooms and adding him and his henchwoman to it.

In the first episode of an AP it is particularly important to cue how you want the players to proceed. There are a couple of points where this one cues in the wrong direction: the kobold TPK that others have noted, and I think this one as well. You should *want* the PCs to do cool non-combat things like asking for a tour and trying to weasel out information without giving any in return. A TPK or near-TPK says that's not what you wanted, and you likely won't get it in future episodes, which would be a pity.

But still, wow! those are some seriously exciting chapters. I hope to see more like this.

I was thinking about the large army camp outside the Citadel within the Vault, actually. By tomorrow every one of those soldiers has to be inside the Citadel or they'll die. It would be nice to see them starting to mobilize: that would make the point that the doomsday countdown is for real.

In setting up the map, please note that staircase yellow-R on the map on p. 40 connects to staircase red-K (not red-R, which does not exist) on the map on p. 50; a simple typo but it confused me for a long time. I do love the stair lettering though, and hope to see more of it.

The map is very difficult. Things that look adjacent may be a very long way apart: for example you cannot reach the two rooms marked H-27 from anywhere else on level 3. Luckily we can blame this on the Vault guys, who presumably designed it for some reason of their own that did not involve being defensible (balconies, auto-opening doors) or easy to live in (floorplan, staircases).

My husband ran _Council of Thieves_ with a tactically competent villain. I've never been prouder in a game than when we figured out what was going on--it took *months*. But he had to add a ton of material. I agree that preprinted material is difficult, but Iron Gods #6 was decent in our hands--it needed more foes, and more clumping together of foes, but mostly worked as written and was fun to run and play. It really stands out against this one, Second Darkness #6 (which we abandoned), Shattered Star #6 (a squib), etc. I think a major part of its success was that it was less afraid to use numbers of NPCs.

Captain Morgan, you're correct: I didn't catch the text that said the djinn was sent for non-PC-related reasons.

I still felt like it was a really lifeless scenario, though. Putting aside issues with difficulty--yes, groups differ, but invisibility really is a common PC ability that high-level NPCs should be able to deal with--it just didn't feel like things were actually happening.

In 24 hours from when you first arrive, the Legion is planning to destroy the entire Vault except for the inside of the Citadel. Except, they are asking the peches to pay tribute, because...why? And they have their whole army encamped outside the Citadel, where they will die, so those all have to be moved in--you'd think there would be some sign of that. And presumably they should also be moving in the troops from the satellite fortresses? Or are they just going to kill most of the Legion? I guess you could put this down to Asaersi being mind-controlled and her controller being a crazy megalomaniac, though one wonders how that friendship ever worked in the first place. But it would really help this doomsday countdown to feel real if the NPCs were behaving like it was real.

The NPCs react strongly to the opening of the Stone Roads, but they do nothing about the loss of the three ritual foci. Those are a minimum of 5-6 hours apart, so there should be time for them to do something. I had the yak-riders show up at the second site the PCs hit, instead of near the pech village, to try to fix this problem.

And I suppose it is possible that the Citadel is on alert, but it sure doesn't feel that way (except for no one being off duty). Asaersi is shut in a secret room where she can't command her troops. No one is specified as being in charge in her absence. The priesthood is shut up in a room behind a locked door, with no supporting troops. Even if you try to run the Citadel as responding to the PCs' attack, they are so badly placed that it's nearly impossible. For a tactical genius Asaersi did a really bad job of deploying her forces.

I did the best I felt I could without rewriting the whole thing, but it fell flat: the player didn't find the scenario credible, and about halfway through stopped trying to figure things out and was just "yeah, whatever" about the plotline. Maybe a better GM could have made something of it, but I couldn't. I have had better luck with RotRL 6 and Iron Gods 6 (my favorite of the #6 modules).

I have now run six #6 AP modules. More than most GMs, I dare say. I think a major problem with them is that Paizo does not like to use large numbers of opponents, but high-level play is, in our hands at least, *much* more fun and challenging if there are large numbers. The one decent fight we had in Onyx was the trainer and 6 monk trainees; a round later 8 ruby gargoyles and a gargoyle matriarch; a round later the naga and four monk bodyguards, and Asaersi and four monk bodyguards and an obsidian golem; and finally three alchemists and three shadows from the nearby balcony. It's a pain to handle mechanically, but at least it's fun. Small fights, at these levels don't work for us at all. They are over too quickly, often before some PCs can even act.

I suspect Paizo thinks GMs aren't up to it, and there are also big issues with EXP budget. I don't use EXP so I don't worry about that, but I know they do. But keeping numbers to 1-4 opponents per fight I think can work at low levels but really does not work at high levels.

Luke Styer wrote:

The title is a reference to “The Devil in the White City,” a book that is literally about a serial murderer hotelier who operated in a major city during the World’s Fair, and this guy is introduced as a hotelier during the Golarion equivalent of the World’s Fair.

Sure, but how many players know that going in? I certainly didn't until it got brought up, and I'm interested in serial killers and was already familiar with H.H. Holmes.

My household had read the book, and the title was a clear and annoying spoiler. If we ran this we'd be firmly in "pretend you don't know the whole plotline in advance" territory. Which we can do, certainly, but it's not as much fun for me in particular (my player doesn't care as much).

Here's my brief after-game report:

This didn't run well for me. There were two problems.

(1) Nothing felt real. In the fortress, everyone appears to just stand guard 24/7, without replacements, and with no response force to react to alerts. The NPCs are planning to destroy the vault in 24 hours when the PCs first arrive. Why aren't they doing anything to move the army into the citadel? Reaction forces from the Citadel arrive far before they logically could, and have no sensible plan when they do arrive. The High Commander is supposed to be a tactical genius but she throws away her forces for nothing.

My player was very unhappy with the lack of opportunities to do clever things, like tricking the response force (as there is no response force) or exploiting guard changes (which don't seem to exist either).

(2) The Ironfangs were completely unable to deal with very basic Pathfinder strategies. Except for the priests in the temple, no one had any countermeasures for invisibility. They tended to be very weak at range, so flight was also a huge problem. The alchemists relied on elemental damage and did not do enough to go through Resist Energy.

Furthermore, most opponents had to-hit values generally too low to hit the PCs, and numbers too small for strategies such as flanking and aid another to help--almost never more than 4 individuals in an encounter. For example, the PCs are supposed to be dissuaded from flying in by four ruby-wing gargoyles (CR12) but these cannot realistically hit a 16th level PC, even if invisibility is not in use.

The only thing the opponents had a good supply of is hit points, so the fights did take a little while.

We played with house rules that decrease PC power significantly--banning a lot of spells, including teleport (so no scry-and-fry). I also did not give the PCs their last level raise, because by that point it was apparent they didn't need it. I doubled enemy numbers at most points in the fortress, grouped nearby encounters together, and improved some enemy spell lists. I made almost every creature in the module Advanced if it wasn't already.

There were only two challenging encounters for the PCs in the entire module: the obsidian golems in part 2, and the obsidian golems in the finale. Those could hurt the PCs. Nothing else really succeeded in doing so, though I got a few lucky hits out of the monks (after tripling their numbers). There were some big creatures that looked scary on paper, such as the construct on the bridge, but the PCs had no need to fight that--they simply approached from the back side of the fortress. If they had needed to fight it, improved invisibility would have rendered it pretty ineffectual. The hill-beast had the same problem. Nasty if you melee it, but why melee it?

The PCs recognized the commander and the naga as major foes, concentrated fire on them, and took each one out almost immediately. It did not help that the naga's sole 9th level spell is very weak, and that the commander can't do anything significant at range, and can't fly.

I was disappointed. We ran this as a stand-alone because my group wanted to see high-level play, but I ended up feeling it was not actually built or balanced for high-level play. It's more like a level 5-7 adventure with higher nominal CR creatures subbed in, but no fundamental changes.

I guess Ironfang, like Giantslayer, has the problem that the enemy is basically mundane, and mundanes have trouble coping at high level, especially against a magically capable attacker who takes the initiative. It could have had some standing invisibility purge zones, some more flying enemies, better spell lists for enemy casters, but it was going to be hard to stay true to the premise and still be a challenge at these levels.

My advice to anyone considering running this: ask your players for a melee-centric party with little spellcasting (except healing) and little ranged damage. I have read several accounts that Giantslayer is fun and challenging for parties built along those lines, and Ironfang 6 might be too. And then add a lot more foes, and clump them up more! A good, dangerous response force would keep fortress invaders on their toes in both part 2 and part 4.

Nothing suggests the Ironfang forces arrive within minute. Quite the opposite, the AP expects the players to have time to talk to pechs and stuff.

It's 20 miles. About 7 hours at the speed of the golem party; let's say half that for the yzobu party. Yet the golem party, the slower of the two, is described as showing up during the conversation with the pech. Mighty long conversation.

I just found it intensely frustrating that here and elsewhere in the module, there was no attempt to ground anything that happened in real distances, times, enemy plans, etc.

I read multiple parts of this, and my player did as well; in the end we weren't willing to run it.

We've done "PCs as circus troupe" twice before, so the idea wasn't novel; but it's a good, flavorful idea. However, we felt that the AP sets it up and then mostly abandons it after episode 3. It's hard to avoid this in a 1-20 advancement scenario, but I felt that the AP would run a big risk of the player going "I know I have to deal with the xulgath plot but I don't want to; doing so will force me to abandon the circus plot which I'm more invested in." (Like the problem many people had with Second Darkness: running the inn is more fun than going on with the main plot.)

The quality that a previous poster described as "Are we the baddies?" really bugged both of us. Just at the moment, we are not up for "These folks are irredeemable, never mind what horrors our kind have committed, you shouldn't feel the least bit bad about wiping them out." It left a bad taste in my mouth. This was made worse, I think, by the very strong Aztec flavor of the pyramid in #5. If you want to be saying "These people are much more vile than humans" you probably should not model so closely on real-life humans.

Finally, it had the problem that so far all 2nd Edition material has had for me, which is that I can't form any conception of how skillful/ powerful people in the world are supposed to be. In #2 the PCs go up against a corrupt circus and it's a fight. In #4 they go up against some local yokels who have formed a sort of gang, and ... it's a fight? In #6 the PCs, who are now astoundingly high level, hear that their circus (with acts presumably reflecting that astounding level) wouldn't make the least impression in Absalom and they'd better go elsewhere. I just have no idea what's going on here.

On the positive side, I really liked the first part of #5, before the pyramid, for its vivid visuals and weird situations. I liked the fact that the xulgath army in #4 had stuff going on inside it, factions and plots, and wasn't just a dull monolith. And, while it got a bit strained by #6, I liked having the PCs recruit acts for the circus during their adventures.

Why do the sandman sleepers, with 12 levels of Rogue, get only one attack?

Why do they have animated bucklers? They suffer no penalty of any kind for using a buckler, as far as I know, so animating it would just waste an action. (Why would you make an animated buckler anyway? The whole point of a buckler is it doesn't take up a hand....)

The poor critters will accomplish nothing, in any case: to-hit and saves both too low.

It seems to me that if they meant the AP to be an uncomplicated romp against a clearly evil foe, Paizo knows quite well how to write those. Take _Giantslayer_, for example. The giants are shown as motivated by greed, a sense of racial superiority, and bloodthirst. There's no pagecount spent detailing why their grievances might be legitimate. My player group didn't have a problem with Giantslayer. Similarly, in Ruins of Azlant the villains are shown as ruthless slavemasters with zero concern for anyone's interests but their own and an agenda of stamping out free will everywhere. My player group tried to redeem a lot of strange things in that AP, but had no trouble with the overall arc of opposing the slavemasters.

_Extinction Curse_ opens by telling the GM, at least, that the xulgaths are attacking because Aroden did them a tremendous wrong. It's a strange decision if you wanted uncomplicated good-vs-evil. I know that my play group would find that out, and decide that their goal must be to make right what Aroden did wrong. I don't think this would make the AP easy at all to run, and I wouldn't personally try, though some of the suggestions here could work.

I find the suggestion that if you aren't up for morally empty hack-and-slash you shouldn't be playing Pathfinder to be utterly bizarre. This is the company that gave us _Wrath of the Righteous_, where redemption of evil individuals is a major theme throughout. Sure, you can play the games that way, and I have no complaint--do whatever you like with your group, and I'll do what I like with mine. But saying that your preferred style is the only one and anyone who criticizes it ought to leave? That's bizarre, and also super rude. It's rude to Paizo as well as to other posters--I doubt they really appreciate people telling their paying customers to GTFO.

I have to wonder how you get the PCs to go after orb #6, and not the one the druids took. I mean, other than saying "Players, you gotta. You figure out why." It seems as though the druids' argument to you can be summed up as, "A faction we disagreed with took the orb, dooming this area. But you can't have it. So go to the Vaults for the other one, okay?"

This module is really flavorful and was fun to read for me up until the pyramid, but then "we have to make sure you hate the xulgaths so you won't be tempted to pity them" kicked in, and right now...that's not a theme I really wanted to see. Bad timing, I guess.

I've been troubled by the vast injustice of Aroden's actions all through, and if I were to run it I'd have to find the PCs some way to make things right. Maybe #6 plans to do that, but if so, the relentless Aztec-ritual-sacrifice motif in #5 is not going to help.

I think that any time you are tempted to write, as this module does in its intro, "The PCs may want to make things right but they come to realize that--" you are treading on thin ice. You can't actually make PCs, or players, realize things. And an LG human might well feel that Aroden was the god of humankind, he did a terrible thing here and people are still suffering for it, this *has* to be put right if it possibly can. (Turning the AP into a story about failure, if it can't.)

#5 was the first installment that made me actually consider running (part of) this AP, but I'd have to ditch the main plot; the situation is, to me, relentlessly tragic and more or less insoluble, and very jarring paired with the light and fun circus subplot.

Still sounds like some pretty meta-gamey ways to get to that outcome. I mean what was the initial tip-off that something was up?

The disappearance of the initial colony was kind of a big hint....

They found someone's notes (forgive me, it's been a while) that suggested either mind control or shapeshifting. Then I ran one or two of the module's stalker encounters and wham, that was it. They were looking for evidence; the encounters provided it.

The PC party was a detective agency before things went wrong for them in Andoran and they "volunteered" to come to Ancorato. I am not at all surprised by the outcome: there were plenty of clues, and finding clues is what these guys *do*.

Mary Yamato wrote:

Missing is any information on how tall the wings of the structure are[...]

p27

"Unless otherwise noted, the chamber walls of the Compass stretch 30 feet up to a stone ceiling."

That's how tall the ceilings are. I need to know how tall the wings are, because the PCs may deploy (did deploy) Passwall. Is that a 1' thick ceiling? 30' thick? Who knows?

I played a rogue in _Council of Thieves_ who pocketed a bit of loot from every single haul: she figured her employment at House Varuna wouldn't last forever and wanted to make sure she didn't end up as a street hooker again.

Towards the end of the game the PCs needs a lot of money in a hurry, and Rose said, "I'll lend it to you" before entirely thinking this through. The party leader, Lily Varuna (by that time the head of House Varuna) smiled at her quizzically, and Rose, with a sinking feeling in her boots, said, "You knew, didn't you?"

"Rose, you should know I read minds by now."

"Oh. Um--no interest on the loan?"

"That will be fine."

We did the final fight, and Ochymua got away--I'm proud of him. It's not the end of the campaign for us (the campaign is now going to hinge on raising Acavna, which is a shock to me) so it's nice that this well-developed foe gets another chance. I think I will have to design an underwater alghollthu city--maybe based on the one in Savage Tides?

Advice:

(1) Give someone true seeing or at least see invisible. My PCs were all under greater invisibility and that made it rather easy--the aboleth engineers have glitterdust but need to know where there's a target in order to get use out of it, and Ochymua has nothing.

(2) Give Ochymua nondetection. Veiled masters really need it for their game-world function. Then Ochymua's greater invisibility is really nasty, instead of being basically irrelevant.

(3) Add more creatures. Two bodyguards is pretty poor for someone of Ochymua's stature. I added four brineborn marsh giant fighters, changed the aboleth engineers out for an uldraaghu, and added a Mordant Spire elven bard and a cloaker sorcerer. (I put a "ready room" between the entrance and the great sphere.) I reduced Ochymua's level as our PCs are much lower level than expected, but I did give him contingency dimension door, which saved his slimy skin.

(4) If your players care about exact distances, lines of sight, etc. the sphere within a sphere is a nightmare to run. It's a different width at every height; the map is no help with that; I'm not sure the details given in the text are physically possible. Really cool, but super difficult to run. We had people with haste and pearls of the sirine swimming from end to end of the sphere, repeatedly, and it was exhausting to work out what they had to do to avoid intersecting the inner sphere....

By the way, these abilities do not seem like fun for the players. I'm inclined to give an extra save per round to the players. How are other people running this?

At these levels, in my experience, abilities with saves are unlikely to work (though Unity has exceptionally hard saves, so those might) and abilities with fear or charm saves are REALLY unlikely to work. If you get one PC with either of these you're stunningly lucky.

Unity got off a meteor swarm vs. my PCs which was actually somewhat effective, but that was the first and only thing in Divinity Drive which was. It has been a huge problem that resist fire and resist electricity make you essentially immune to the vast majority of ranged attacks here. Those are not difficult to come by for such high-level characters.

I gave the gargoyle clerics Dispel Magic and they did manage to hurt one PC with massed dispels followed by massed laser fire.

[...]

Can a critter be treated to an awaken spell?
No. A) Awaken is a 5th level spell & there should be no 10th level casters. B) An awakened critter is a template. C)

You should be aware that an Aranea, from bestiary 2, with 6 levels of sorceror could be counted as an 11th sorceror for casting purposes (for example the Aranea sorceror in Paizo's Jade Regent AP).

You may want to add to the rules, that even critters that "cast as a Nth level casting class" do not add their N to any class levels they may acquire if that's your intention.

Jon

I'd like to propose amending the rules to also ban swarms.

I think the Vescavor Swarm from bestiary 5 will prove to be a rather unfun combatant against many other builds.

I also think the Wihsaak Sahkil's at will vomit swarm ability will leave many combatants at a loss.

What do other's think?

Jon

Nice rule set, clean and simple. Sadly I need to ask about a few complications. In particular, are companion critters allowed (like a druid or ranger's animal companion)?

The next 3 questions are variations on "do companion creatures count as normal PC-type combatants?"

Can they "control an Emerald Cloud"?

Do they benefit from the Emerald Cloud's fast healing and death resuscitation effects?

Does their death grant the opposing PC-combatant 2 points?

Finally, is the prestige class Shadowdancer's shadow companion an exception to the no undead rule?

thanks!

Jon

Aye some pre-gens will be provided. I am balancing the use of ACG right now, I may want to restrict them for balance.

Bestiary Bash 4714 for the rules from the last run & potentially FAQ.

CR+CL=10
So CR6 critter should only have CL4. HD partially determines CR. EDIT: templated monsters have always done poorly, don't think about them.

If anyone is interested in assisting with GMing, please let me know. :)

Just making sure, bestiary 5 is okay to use?

Jon