Mary Yamato's page

Burnt Offerings--about 7 sessions
Skinsaw--about 8 sessions
Hook Mountain--about 4 sessions
(4 sessions of side adventure in here)
Fortress--about 5 sessions
Sins of the Saviors--4.5 sessions
(1.5 sessions of side adventure in here)
Xin-Shalast--3 sessions so far, less than halfway through

Yes, we play more than once a week....

The one that surprised me was Sins of the Saviors. It took 4 sessions to play out, but from the PC point of view, the entire thing was over in 2 hours (plus 2 hours waiting for a gate to re-open). I think I have the only player in the world who saves time by leaving all treasure where it falls, then coming through a second time to loot. It's amazing what a difference that strategy makes. The module felt very short compared to the others.

Mary

The early goblin encounters are more about flavor than about challenge, but that changes abruptly in Thistletop and the Catacombs. According to the PC death listings, Burnt Offerings has killed about 90% of all the PCs who have so far died in the AP. Most of those deaths were at Thistletop.

Mary

One spell is incredibly useful and extremely hard for me to run. That spell is divination. It always takes me a few minutes to come up with a suitable couplet or triplet to answer their questions. If any of you out there have some divination phrases to pass on, I know I would appreciate them.

If you have a Tarot deck or Harrowdeck and are moderately familiar with the interpretations, this can be a very quick and easy way to give a divination. Or you can make cards up on the fly.

My PCs go to Madame Mvashti somewhat regularly, and she will turn over a couple of cards for them. They believe (correctly) that she invents the cards as she turns them over, as her cards are very specific: one of them had a picture of the giantess from #4, for example. I've found it very easy to rapidly improvise divination-like results using the card theme.

PC Question: What can we do about the impending destruction of the dam at Skull Crossing?

Mvashti: Well, here are three cards that will stand in your way, and three that will help you. Here's a death knight (means Mokmurian), a cornucopia (means the Cauldron), and a miser clutching coins (means Karzoug). Here's a giantess on a mountain (Conna), here's a ghost (her husband), and here's a kind of spiderweb across the sky (a spirit journey).

She tends to hand out the key card (Conna in this case) for the PCs to keep. This enabled them to recognize Conna when they met her, which was helpful.

The PCs got enough out of this to proceed. I'd have had to interpret more if they knew less.

Mary

I doubt that the time the character was played plays that great a role to fans.

Other fantasy characters are conceived in less time than a decade's worth and are still very popular and/or deep.

No one is really going to hear about my campaigns beyond what I post here. We're playing for ourselves, not for posterity. But it's still very frustrating to have characters burn out so fast. We will have played through RotRL in 7 months, and after that, those characters will be gone--unplayably high level for us. I'm sad. I would really like to see them hunt the vampires of the Lost House in Sanos Forest (a side adventure plot thread of ours) but at 17th-18th level it's far beyond my abilities to write. And really, they are out of the interesting range for most challenges of their setting. If I could handle high-level play I could write the arc where they go looking for Alaznist to prevent her resurrection, but again, it's not within my capabilities. And in one more adventure they'd be off the end of the system completely.

Not even a year! I don't feel as though I really got to know them. (And it was less than a year for them, too: we started at the Swallowtail Festival in September and they are in Xin-Shalast in July. Their lives are basically over, poor sots. They just don't know it yet.)

Mary

Mary Yamato wrote:

I find that for some groups (mine is one) if you make the NPCs ineffectual in the name of making the PCs more heroic, the players stop caring about the NPCs and it actually undercuts the heroism. You risk sending the message "the good folks are apathetic and dumb, who cares what happens to them?"

That wasn't was James said, though. He said that they decided those NPC soldiers not to exist within the frame of the game. I think for the same reason you mentioned, to avoid ineffectual NPCs.

When I said "ineffectual" I was thinking specifically about Magnimar, the ruling city of Western Varisia, which seems unable to do anything all campaign long except beg the PCs for help. It doesn't mount a reasonable response to the direct-threat events in #2, nor to #3 (except for sending the PCs), nor to #4, nor to #5. My player had a big problem with this; it felt forced and unreal to him, and also led to him holding Magnimar in contempt. This didn't go well with the hooks in #3.

I added a lot of Magnimaran responses, but sometimes I didn't see the problem in time and had to add them after the fact, which didn't feel very good.

I have no problem with the idea that the Magnimaran 2nd level soldiers were not much help against the giants. I have a big problem with the idea that Magnimar would never send anyone at all. Sandpoint is supposedly in their sphere of influence, but they ignore it all campaign long. I doubt they'd still *have* a sphere of influence if that was their general practice.

This obviously varies from group to group. Some players hate it if NPCs ever manage to do anything for themselves, but for us, it's essential if we want the PCs to care about them.

Mary

Evil Midnight Lurker wrote:

In our last campaign, the DM dispensed with experience entirely and we all went up a level whenever we agreed it was time to do so. (Fortunately there weren't any serious munchkins in the group, so it wound up being about every four or five sessions. Seemed okay to us.)

How did you guys handle spells with xp costs and the creation of magic items? That's usually the sticking point that I see with xpless games.

I just ignored these issues for RotRL. For a campaign that covers a short period of time, item creation tends to be limited by available time anyway.

For a longer campaign, I'd consider giving a certain number of item-creation points each level, and just letting the PCs spend them. I really dislike the EXP/item system anyway, as (a) it's practically impossible to apply to NPCs, (b) it occasionally gums up the game when the PCs need to do item creation at the wrong moment of their level progression, (c) you can't talk about it in-character.

We're in RotRL #6 without EXP and it doesn't seem to have done any harm. It's a lot easier for the GM. Running AoW with EXP I was constantly sweating--too few? too many? And the paths tend to break down if you aren't pretty close to the recommended number of PCs.

Mary

While I understand some of the complaints with how fast characters seem to level in 3.5 I also suspect that most groups will take between 9 and 18 months to actually run a whole AP in real time, depending on how often they play and how long those sessions are. Thats a pretty hefty chunk of real life and slowing that down does not appeal to me.

I don't think anyone is asking that the AP take twice as long to run (though I personally would be happy--my most fun campaigns as player and GM went 3-5 years each). What I'd really like from Paizo is a 6-12 month game that went up in level slowly enough that I could enjoy it.

SCAP was fun for me as a player about 2 months and then increasingly miserable thereafter, culminating in campaign death at 1 year and me swearing never to play in another AP. The problems were complex but advancement rate was a major component.

The extremely high quality of RotRL has coaxed me into playing in CotCT, but only because the GM is willing to make heroic efforts to slow down advancement. The price is that we'll start at 5th level, which of course will make hash of the first module and perhaps the second unless he rewrites them completely. We brainstormed other solutions but nothing worked. Putting 2-3 full length side adventures between or inside each CotCT episode would totally muddy the main line plot, and also may not be possible. (Episode #5 of RotRL took my player's PCs, in toto, 4 hours. How to put side adventures in that??) Nothing else seems to get advancement down to the point where I can actually develop a character.

I am just not, as a player, capable of doing a coherent character who starts as a street urchin and becomes an archmage in 6 months. I can't play the result competently, and I can't develop a meaningful personality. Lacking both of those things, I don't enjoy myself at all.

I had a PC I really, really liked in SCAP. Watching him get destroyed by advancement was an awful experience.

Mary

I don't award EXP. I have found them to be a nightmare in the APs, especially if the number of PCs is different from what's expected. I just award levels at the rate the adventure requires.

This screws up the magic item creation system, the results of Raise Dead and other forms of level loss, and the EXP costs for certain spells, but for me those are less important than the maddening difficulty of keeping the PCs the right level by giving out EXP. I also found that giving EXP forced us into playing out combats that the PCs, the player, and the GM all preferred to avoid.

If you are going to award EXP, you'll want to check frequently to see how many the PCs have and whether their total is high or low. If it's low, the side adventures are no problem, and in fact will help keep your game working. If it's high, you'll need to look for low-EXP side adventures. Riddles and puzzles, roleplaying interactions, and interesting travel work well for this. A Sandpoint intermediate adventure with no EXP might involve helping Ameiko get the Glassworks running again, discouraging the Scarnettis from muscling in on her, perhaps travelling to Magnimar to recruit some glass experts, etc. Or a side trip to Windsong Abbey to learn more about the Catacombs of Wrath, with a few interesting character interactions en route.

Mary

A suggestion: Sandpoint used to have a bird as its town symbol (a beach plover, perhaps) but after the Late Unpleasantness that made people uncomfortable, so they stopped using it. If the PCs ask about this, they get off-key, evasive answers.

If the PCs do pick a new symbol, sadly, it probably won't be accepted, because Sandpoint is about to have the worst year of its life, and no one will like to be reminded of that!

Mary

For Runeforge it's a bit muzzier. It's easy to get the PCs back to Sandpoint by just dropping a big hint that Mokmurian was trying to get at a powerful magic item underneath the Old Light, or by having Sandpoint call for help. But clueless PCs may not figure out the riddle, or may not want to go to Runeforge.

In my game, Xaliasa recruited the PCs to go to Runeforge as his agents. I moved the Runeforge gate to Sandpoint to make this easier. Maybe that would work for you? You can save the white dragon encounter for later, such as en route to Xin-Shalast.

You could also replace the riddle with explicit notes from Xaliasa about his desire to get to Runeforge and seize the weapon-crafting power of the Runeforge Pool for himself.

We actually had much more trouble cueing the PCs to make runeforged weapons; they were initially sure that the faction leaders already had some, and focused on taking the leaders' weapons. I think I had sages at Windsong Abbey recommend the weapon-forging route to them. There is also a Thassilonian scholar in Sandpoint who might nudge them.

As part of getting the PCs to Xin-Shalast, I had Karzoug try to recruit them when speaking through Mokmurian, and he challenged them to come to Xin-Shalast to prove themselves worthy of being Mokmurian's successors. This got them thinking in that direction. The scholar in Sandpoint has information that could help. (My problem, again, was keeping my PCs from heading there immediately after #4.)

If your players really do not follow cues, maybe you could find an NPC to act as their patron and send them to these places. If any of them are religious, a high priest of their faith could work well. There is room for such a person in Magnimar or at Windsong Abbey.

Mary

I'm reading through Pathfinder 6 now, and have not reached the end, but I think that I may have missed a few things regarding the transitions between chapters 3 through 6

I really don't think you need spoiler tags in a "GM Reference" thread.

I had the opposite problem with my group: they knew where they were going very early, much too early, and could easily have arrived in Xin-Shalast after #3--which would of course have killed them. So my ideas for you are purely theoretical.

Mokmurian has a diary which could give some hints about Karzoug. Conna, if the PCs befriend her, could give more. She saw the personality change when he returned from the Kodar Mountains, and may have heard Mokmurian mention Karzoug at some point. Perhaps he raves in his nightmares.

There is a huge library of information about Xin-Shalast and Karzoug in Jorgenfist, so if the PCs have a few names, they can look them up. You may want to make the DCs easier if your PCs are bad at this sort of thing and you think they need help.

The lamias in Jorgenfist are *from* Xin-Shalast, and if captured and charmed are excellent information sources. (Too good, in fact; I was being pressed for detailed information about the city before I had a copy of #6 and this was a problem.)

More in a second post--my posts are getting lost if they're long.

Mary

If a business slips its schedule, the money that was supposed to come in from that project slips too. I've seen a couple of businesses go bankrupt from this; it's a significantly risky strategy. Even if the money involved is exactly the same, money tomorrow is worth less than money today. You have bills today, after all, and creditors don't like to get their money late. And you have some expenses that don't slip, like rent, so if you do 11 Pathfinders rather than 12 over the course of year, 10% of the rent money just vanished.

I wouldn't advocate the bi-monthly approach; I think monthly is a much better financial gamble, even if the schedule is hard. (I was just saying, if you *did* do it, I personally would pay the $40.) I hope, as other posters have said, that reducing your Dragon/Dungeon commitments will help keep that schedule livable--I don't want to see you guys burn out.

It sounds as though things may improve as the writers internalize the necessary size of a Pathfinder module, so they don't overwrite so much in the first place. Cutting things down is hard, and usually leaves scars.

So far, I think the weakest Pathfinder episodes are as strong or stronger than the best episodes of AoW or SCAP. I certainly haven't had any "why on earth did I agree to run this?" debacles as I did in AoW. I'm looking forward, despite the massive surgery it will take to slow it down, to playing in CotCT.

Mary

were did the seekers come from anyway? what was the first reference to them?

I don't know where they came from, but they are in AoW episode 1.

Mary

As I stated above, most combat in an adventure serves no other purpose than rewarding XP.

This really depends on the group's preferences.

As a player, one of the things I hate most about rapid advancement is that there are not *enough* combats at each level. This means that I don't get to enjoy my characters' capabilities in combat thoroughly, and also that I get less and less competent at playing them (because I don't get enough practice to become proficient with one set of abilities before another is added). So pruning out combats and replacing them with roleplaying doesn't help me at all; it makes things worse.

Remove those and find other activities that are just as engaging, that slow the tempo down and offer a more comfortable rate of reward.

Rate of reward is not a problem for us--we don't use EXP. But if you want to slow a 3 levels/adventure AP to one level/adventure, 2/3 of your material must be GM generated subplots. At that point, the AP is no longer fulfilling its goal of allowing a GM with limited prep time to run a game. If I have to write 2/3 of every game and shoehorn in the AP adventure somehow, I'm probably worse off than if I write the entire campaign from scratch.

I wrote a side adventure between RotRL #3 and #4; it played well, but the time cost was around 5-6 hours, and I simply can't afford to do that most of the time. (That week I had a 5 hour train ride to spend on prep.)

When I was in college I could spend 2-4 hours prep time for every gaming session and still run weekly. I can't now. And that was for low-level play; high level play, for me, has an exponentially greater prep burden. I spent all the free time I had available yesterday evening doing one monster for RotRL #6. Writing a full side adventure, with combats, for 15th level PCs is totally beyond my time budget. That's why I buy APs in the first place.

I customize a lot. Roleplaying customization is not that hard for me. But customized combats are very, very hard, and I really can't afford to do the kind of drastic stuff that a 2/3 slowdown requires. The person who will GM CotCT thinks he can do it--we'll see. I think it may be too much time investment for him as well.

Mary

A tremendous amount of sound and fury had been posted about the problems with PF3 due to sections and continuity removed from the adventure because it submitted over the assigned page count. Now you're telling us that there were empty pages in the book that had to be filled with random junk at the last minute?

I don't think that's reasonable. A lot of advertising material had already been released, and all of it said "There is an article on castles." For Paizo to then publish a book with no article on castles would be false advertising. This erodes trust even faster than publishing the occasional bad article.

The books are constrained by the fact that they are advertised in advance. Of course, if they weren't they wouldn't sell. But this means that the basic article content pretty much has to be determined in advance, and if those articles don't work out, it's a problem.

It's hard to publish something monthly. If we'd be willing to get them bi-monthly and pay twice as much, I'm sure we could get a much stronger product. (I'd consider it, actually, though it would have made RotRL a real pain as my group played them as fast as they came out. But the extra 20K on each adventure might have covered some of that.)

Mary

It looks like either a weakened *disguise self* or a specialized *silent image*. The nearest book item is the hat of disguise, but this should be less expensive as it does not change your face but only your armor. I would probably build it as a *disguise self* effect but at about 2/3 price.

On the Sihedron ring itself, the ability is pretty inexplicable: the spells needed to make one don't cover it, and the item's rationale doesn't call for it. If you are making an entry token for visiting dignitaries, *disguise armor* is a strange and troublesome ability. And K. and presumably most of his wizards have illusion as a forbidden school, so couldn't make these rings if they required an illusion spell. (Maybe that's why the requirement was dropped, but that's really an ugly hack.)

I can't remember if the item already does *endure elements(cold)* but if not, that would be a natural replacement. Or *feather fall*, for the visiting dignitary who falls off the Golden Stair.

Mary

Regardless, rapid advancement is easily addressed by the removal of gratuitous combat and some DM creativity. Replace some of the combat encounters with puzzles, skill related obstacles or roleplaying; then award XP for success at those.

It seems to me, though, that the fundamental problem with an AP is that if you slow advancement below what the AP expects, you can't use the later modules without massive revision.

Our plan for CotCT is to start the PCs at 4th, put a side adventure before every module, and slow advancement to 1 level per module or side adventure. This doesn't quite work, and we will probably have to abandon either the slow-advancement goal or the final module. But it's closer to our preferred rate. (I would prefer it to be still slower, but that's just not going to happen.) We do pay the price of running the first module, meant for 1st level PCs, for 5th level PCs. I don't expect it will be as challenging as hoped.

If you just slow advancement to this 1 level/module rate without taking other drastic steps (higher starting level, side adventures), you might be able to save modules 2-3 by drastic revision, but in my opinion you'd have to kiss modules 4-6 goodbye; it's just not practical to run a level 15 module for level 6 PCs.

Advancement rate is clearly not a problem at all for some groups, but it is a continual, severe, and eventually game-killing problem for mine. Without the drastic solution outlined above I would not be considering CotCT at all. After SCAP I will never play in a standard-advancement AP again.

A group which doesn't run the whole AP obviously can manipulate advancement any way they like. It's much more of a problem if you run published material, especially APs but also long modules. The side-adventure solution runs into trouble with some modules. RotRL #5 had the PCs in my group go up 3 levels in 4 hours of their time (4 sessions of play). There is no way they could have had a side adventure during that time--it was one continuous raid--and the player balked at this much advancement this quickly. I'm not sure what we'll do if CotCT forces a situation like this.

Mary

I find that for some groups (mine is one) if you make the NPCs ineffectual in the name of making the PCs more heroic, the players stop caring about the NPCs and it actually undercuts the heroism. You risk sending the message "the good folks are apathetic and dumb, who cares what happens to them?"

I had Hemlock come back with 8 more 2nd-level warriors. During Skinsaw, they contributed to the high-alert state of the town with guards at all three entries 24/7. That pretty much used them up; they were not available to go to outlying farms. I didn't develop them as individual characters, but in the town conflict over whether the PCs were innocent or guilty, the guards in general took the PCs' side based on the good relationship developed in Burnt Offerings.

Some of them also played cameo roles in the giant attack: a PC managed to temporarily paralyze a dire bear and the two gate-guards piled on it and delivered the coup de grace, to much cheering. They were also the ones who raised the alarm about the incoming giants at Northgate. In general, I tried to make the town look as involved and active as I could, without actually running all those NPCs.

Mary

I did a very fast transition between Burnt Offerings and Skinsaw and ended up regretting it--too much weighing on the PCs too quickly, and the player seemed battle-fatigued. In retrospect, I would have built up Skinsaw much more slowly, over the course of weeks after the PCs got back to Sandpoint. I was worried, though, that they would up and leave (they're Varisian wanderers).

Mary

I suppose part of my reaction to this issue is the fact that I use AP's for the exact opposite reason than it seems most of the posters in this thread. It's not the numbers NPCs, etc I need help with (I can come up with those on my own). It is the plot and story line and personality of the NPCs I need help with. That is by far the weakest aspect of my DMing, and the part I rely most on Modules for.

It seems to me that a lower-level, slower-advancement AP might actually provide some things to help. One thing I've noticed with RotRL is that the authors are finding it more and more difficult to fit everything into their pagecount as the level increases. A low-level adventure has much shorter stat blocks, and that means more pages for description, storyline, personality sketches etc. (If you compare the NPC descriptions from #1 to the descriptions from #5 you'll see what I mean.) So maybe you'd have something to look forward to if Paizo wrote such an AP, even if it meant you had to uplevel all the monsters.

As for the comment that the plot doesn't work unless you are at a high level, why do only high level PCs need to save the world? What is wrong with PCs at level 12 or 13 stopping Karzoug? It's not only high level PCs who save the world after all.

If the PCs are not substantially higher level than the local authorities, many PCs will logically involve the local authorities; that's one trouble I've encountered when cutting things down.

From what I can see (midway through RotRL #6) the plotline there is going to be extremely lethal, even if the monsters are cut down to PC level, unless the PCs have very rich resources for "get out of here now!" So it could possibly be run at 9th but not any lower than that: it will tend to turn into a lethal mob scene. Also, if you make the BBG a level appropriate for, say, 9th level PCs, he can't have done most of the things that the history/backstory say he did, unless you just declare he did it by GM fiat.

For me personally, an adventure with lower level PCs saving the world from something as big as the BBG in RotRL has to involve the PCs finding a special weakness (Frodo throwing the One Ring into Mt. Doom). The AP doesn't do that; it pits the PCs against the BBG in a head to head fight. Frodo vs. Sauron is not an easy scenario to make work; if you cut down Sauron too far the whole thing gets silly, and if you don't, what chance should Frodo have?

Alternatively you could save something--not the world, preferably--from a threat proportioned to lower level PCs. But that's a different AP, not a cut down version of the same one. In the case of RotRL I would probably want to lose the last scenario completely and do something quite different involving preventing the BBG, not beating him. Disabling the Runewell network, probably. Then you keep K. offstage, and keep the solution proportionate to the PCs.

I don't think Paizo should commit to doing lower-level, delayed-advancement APs frequently, but I would sure love to see a few. I'm the opposite of you--I can do plotline, but I am utterly incapable of writing all those stat blocks in the limited time I have available for gaming. I really need the stat blocks to be there, or I basically can't run at all. The side adventure I put between RotRL #3 and #4 took me about 8 hours to write, and I don't have that kind of free time often enough to sustain a game.

Mary

A suggestion on the haunts:

It's true that high-level play makes more demands on the GM, but the adventure can simplify the GM's role considerably by making new things conform to existing patterns. The patterns for "thing that the PCs interact with" are creature, spell, item and trap. If the GM knows what haunts are, a lot of the interaction questions are immediately answered.

In this case, creature is too much pagecount (though you could consider adding "haunt" as a creature entry in an upcoming issue). Item doesn't make much sense. But you could do them as traps, or perhaps even better as spells. Then you would need either to specify CL and spell level, or give a formula for them--but the GM would have access to a well-developed set of rules on how spells interact. And CL+spell level is not much extra text.

I really have trouble making consistent calls on the fly for "It's not a spell, item, creature or trap--in fact, we don't know quite what it is--all we have is a short list of things that work on it." Saying "It's a programmed illusion plus a linked spell effect" would solve a LOT of those problems instantly. In play, I kept going back and forth between "It's a kind of ghost" and "It's a kind of spell" and didn't manage any consistency in my rulings.

Thanks so much for the answers! It's amazing to get this level of feedback.

Mary

On a side note, I DM'd half the day, and played in Shackled City for the other half. The Shackled City is kicking our butts. I don't want to give spoilers on that path, but it really felt like we were just getting by. Then we ended on a TPK. Yikes.

Us too. I'm having a lot more success with RotRL.

Mary

If your players are really getting into this sin-point thing (mine did too) I'd strongly recommend looking ahead to RotRL #5 and coming up with some additional ideas for how the points matter. The ones given in the module were not very satisfying for us.

Mary

There are also two pictures of Karzoug in #5--personally I like those better. They suggest a younger and more cheerful Karzoug, the kind of person who smiles as he turns you into a golden statue.

Mary

I just don't understand this bleating about the advancement in pathfinder being too fast. If it is too quick for your group, dial it back yourself. JUST GIVE LESS XP! Then, either rebalance the later fights, or fill the level gaps out with side treks. Game Mastery modules and old Dungeon magazines are great for this.

We tried cutting advancement plus weakening monsters with SCAP to a limited extent, but it worked very badly for us.

(1) By the end, cutting down the monsters was nearly as much work as writing an adventure from scratch; almost all the usefulness of the AP was gone.

(2) Having familiar monsters with modified stats makes it hard for the players to grasp the game-world, and can easily lead to a horrid sense of "the GM is just fudging, my PCs could never really fight that." It was particularly tough with demons and devils, where the player had strong expectations about what the creature should be like, and a weaker substitute was not necessarily available.

(3) The adventure was intrinsically high-level and didn't make much sense for mid-level PCs. (Eventually this factor got the better of the GM and we had a TPK because cutting it down far enough just made no sense.)

We also tried the side-trek approach. This was better but it made little sense to put side-treks in some of the later module gaps. We're trying to save the world, but let's do a little unconnected side adventure first? As the PCs become more able to choose their own path (Teleport, Planeshift, etc.) it becomes less and less easy for the GM to remove them from the (usually rather forcing) AP path. This was true in RotRL as well.

To me personally, the normally-paced APs are like sitting down at a six course banquet. You pick up your spoon, take a taste--and the waiter snatches the dish away and brings another one. The stuff tastes good, but the experience is still unsatisfying. My best home-made campaign to date took a couple of years. At the same rate of play, AP campaigns self-destruct within 6-9 months. I try to put in side material to slow them down--we are planning a drastic slowdown attempt with CotCT--but I would sure love one that didn't require continual surgery to work for us.

Mary

Having a lot of trouble with this module.

The "Giants in Xin-Shalast" sidebar says that every giant in the city is dominated by, and mind-linked to, a Rune Giant. But the giant rebels are supposedly loyal to their leader--how? And he is claimed to be safe from the Rune Giants because he's not a giant--but he *is* a giant. (Or does their power only work on things with "giant" in the name?)

He also tries to get the PCs to assassinate lamia leaders in order to take their rings--which they don't have. (We are given the location of every ring in the lower city, and the lamias have none. Doesn't make sense, admittedly, but it's true. I think a lamia encounter may have been lost in editing here.)

The Hidden Beast is a Large in the text and a Huge on the map. And its "guards up above" are undescribed--I guess the GM is supposed to improvise them? My PCs insisted that once they'd killed it, they needed to take out those guards.

The Golden Road is described as running all the way to the Spires, but on the Spires map it's missing, and the road from the Harridan's tower to the main tower is described as the only way up from the city. (That road is clearly not the Golden Road, as it winds.)

The detail map of the area around Xin-Shalast and the text description of this area are really dissimilar. (The dotted line is supposed to be the dead river, but then what's that river-looking thing?)

The text about the Lower City says that the PCs can learn things to help them defeat Karzoug. I wish they'd let the GM in on some of that information. I can't find any, other than that they can test-fight some of the monster types they'll meet above.

What happens to the Champion if her sword is sundered, taken from her, or put into an anti-magic shell? Is there a person there that can be reached? For that matter, what are the stats for Chellan's mind-control, in case a PC picks it up? It doesn't look like the RAW behavior of an intelligent weapon--it's a lot stronger than that.

I'm afraid this plays more like an outline of an adventure than an actual adventure. The problem, I suspect, is the oversized encounter blocks necessary for creatures of these levels--things like the Hidden Beast and its followers take up way more room than their importance to the adventure really justifies, and then something else has to be removed to make space.

Mary

Very clear signals "Now we're playing" / "Now we aren't" have helped with my past groups. For my last multi-player group I would start every session formally, with a GM summary of the previous session and some in-character comments on it. This helps cut the chatter.

If the group needs to socialize, set aside 10-15 minutes for socializing *before* the game starts, and then make the dividing line sharp. Often people chat because it's the only way to keep up their social connections with friends they see only during gaming, but if you want a focused game, you need to push this into non-game time.

Cutting external distractions helps too. No TV, no radio, no vidgames within line of sight/hearing. No magazines at the table. Turn off the cell phones if possible.

Calling a break every couple of hours can help keep focus higher while you're actually playing. Most people can only concentrate so long at a time before they start losing it. Call a break before that happens.

For some groups miniatures and other visual aids help; for others, they are just distracting toys to play with. You'll need to find this out for your own players. For me, pawns and dice work better than painted minis.

Finally, the GM has to set an example. Good note organization helps, because every minute you're rustling through notes is a minute where someone can get distracted and start talking football. If you are getting overwhelmed, farm some tasks out to your players. Read the scenarios in advance. (I didn't do that last night, and it really slowed the game down--"Wait, there's a *door* there, sorry!")

And try telling your players what you want--they may be able to come up with other useful ideas.

Mary

It would seem fairly simple, and not too risky, to give a 10% cost break for recharging an existing item instead of buying a new one. After all, the material component is already crafted.

We tend to ignore/rewrite rules that cause making a new item to be better than fixing up an old one, because it's sad when a PC has to throw away a well-used and beloved item and replace it. So we prefer to upgrade magical swords and so forth rather than replacing them. The same could be done with wands. If you want nearly zero game-balance impact, just flavor, you can figure out what the PC would have to spend if they sold the old item and bought the new one, and then charge about that much to upgrade the existing item. Or you could give a small discount to encourage this.

This only really works if your PCs either enchant items themselves, or have ready access to someone who does. This was a problem for us later in RotRL (it looks like much less of a problem in CotCT) as the PCs would be away from base for many levels in a row. I don't yet have a good solution for that situation. It made treasure tricky in general.

Mary

Guenarr's post above hits the nail right on the head for me. I thought the whole experience award/level progression thing in the core books was specifically part of that which is not OGL (thus its absence in the SRD)? If that's the case, you could just slow the whole xp/level advancement down but still tell the same amount of story in a 6 chapter format. This seems like a very elegant way of steering clear of the 'save the world syndrome'. As long as the story stays fresh I think you could do 6 volumes of AP and only advance to 10th or 12th level.

I would pay for this. I'd be willing to pay 2x or 3x as much for this, in fact. The fast advancement rate is absolutely the worst part of 3rd Ed. for my group. It's currently killing our RotRL campaign (I'm proud of having gotten as far as we did, but the game is really suffering from the advancement) and we are discussing drastic ways to try to slow down CotCT.

I'm much more interested in a 6 issue adventure that covers levels 1-10 or so than in a 3 issue adventure. And I'm really not excited by suggestions that I should just throw away modules 4-6 of each AP. We may end up doing that with CotCT, but darn it, all that good stuff goes to waste!

Mary

I think the key might be that you only have one player. He has a lot more time to analyze things and come up with complicated plans.

I have a six player group that meets monthly.

That's certainly a different situation, and makes much stronger demands on the GM to control the pacing.

I have had a six-player group that played in the investigative style, but we were all in college at the time--we played 6-7 hours a week and hung out with each other in between to discuss the game. Alas, I can't do that anymore. (The one-player game is the result of having to choose between playing 2x week with 1 player or 1x month with 5 players....)

Everything has to be fine-tuned to the group you have; one group's solutions won't necessarily work for another.

Mary

You can make chacks each round to see what burns, in 5' sections.

This will take a long, long time. The players *will* get board, they *will* learn their lesson, especially as the fire *will* wake the goblins (make listen checks, it should only be DC10 or something to hear, and get easier as the fire burns longer, gets bigger.

I don't think I've ever seen a situation where making the game miserable for everyone is a good strategy. You end up with grumpy players and a grumpy GM--what good does that do? Maybe the players won't do the same thing again, but you've still started out on the wrong foot. If you really need them not to burn things down, I'd try saying "Please don't burn things down, it throws me off."

Myself, I'd just let the fort burn, without bogging-down mechanics, but slowly enough that plenty of goblins escape. If the PCs get a bit of an advantage, so what? It's not as though they are going to be able to solve all of their problems with fire--most of the subsequent locales are stone.

It's easy to get locked into "I have all these encounters statted up, I have to run them all as written." But things will generally flow better if you abandon this idea. My PCs skipped a major encounter in #4--they opened a trap door, saw it, said "Egads, this place is cursed!" and closed the door again. Never came back. If the GM can become comfortable with occasional events like this, the whole game will be more relaxed, and I think more fun.

Mary

We played out the Haunts sequence from Spires last night and were left with a number of comments and questions:

(1) GMs should be aware that the cabin map has curtains that look a lot like walls, and that a tense haunted-house scene is the wrong time to be saying "Oops, those rooms are connected after all"--check the map carefully first. The ramp down below and the non-connection of the two lower areas are also potential trip-ups.

(2) The haunt with Mass Suggestion is labeled as "obvious" but its description has it using its Suggestion as soon as the PCs see it. This conflicts with it moving on 10 in a surprise round. I'd suggest either letting it go first, or showing it eating gold and having it speak its dialog only on impulse 10.

(3) We had a ton of trouble with haunts for high-level PCs. The PCs felt they should be able to interact with them, given their wide range of magical abilities, but the rules are silent on most possible interactions. What does True Seeing see? Does Break Enchantment work on the animated chain? (If not, does Dispel Magic?) Does Consecrate have a useful effect? How about Magic Circle Versus Evil? If the PC has Rebuke rather than Turn, what is the effect of a success? An overwhelming (control) success? If a PC goes etherial, what happens?

(4) During the extended haunt sequence, does leaving the cabin prevent the Balance checks? Does it prevent ghostly possession? Does it overcome existing possession? If not, what can overcome this possession?--Break Enchantment? Magic Circle? Mind Blank? Is there any way other PCs can affect the possessing spirit at all? (My player found this extremely frustrating and felt it was a cheat--a fiat decision that his PCs could do nothing, whereas with "real" ghosts they would have had many options.)

I'm thinking that Haunts are a good mechanic for low-level characters, but not necessarily for high-level ones, unless a lot more of the mechanics can be fleshed out.

(5) At what altitude is the cabin?

Mary

I've decided to run an encounter when the PCs send out giantish scouts looking for the dwarf brothers' cabin. One set of giants will come back and say, "We've found it, come with us"--and lead the PCs to their new Rune Giant master. I think this fulfills the double goal of being a fight of reasonable size (I dread any combat involving the PCs' private army, for obvious reasons) and giving the PCs a clear heads-up about the Rune Giant problem. What they do from there is their own problem.

For the Sihedron amulets, I've settled on a plan--player of mine, don't read this!--

Thanks for the ideas!

Mary

My PCs are very aware of the fact that they might call Alaznist back--one of them is the Champion of Wrath--and they're trying to be careful on this point. They think she would be just as bad as Karzoug, and probably harder to beat; they're not willing to risk it.

If they *had* been willing to risk it, I think I'd have run with the idea. I like Alaznist a lot, and the PC Champion of Wrath just begs for an Alaznist-related plotline. (Bodyguarded by the former Highlady and an advanced Wrathspawn, no less. His previous allies have been less than happy about this.)

I think that whether the ending you suggest is okay or not depends critically on the game contract. As a player, I know that if I stay on track in order to make the game runnable for the GM, I strongly expect the GM to repay me with a good ending. I'm only okay with disastrous endings if I had real choices about going there.

It's like having a friendly NPC betray the PCs. If the players are allowed to like/dislike whatever NPCs they choose, and never feel obliged to cooperate just to salvage the GM's scenario, betrayal scenarios work fine. If the players cooperate with every apparently friendly NPC specifically because they think that the GM needs them to do so, betrayal scenarios are really unfair.

Mary

I think the thing that people with other play styles don't catch is that this sort of intense player attention to detail isn't necessarily one-upmanship or an effort to break the game. For some groups it's an essential part of the fun, because if you aren't paying attention you miss all the really neat stuff.

I have a player who *really* loves to figure things out. He made a point of learning about stone giant society in #4, and used it to craft an unusual and very stylish plan for taking out the BBG's forces. If I'd said, "Dude, never mind about stone giant marriage customs, just get on with the plot" the game would have been a whole lot less fun for both of us.

I really love the fact that when he heard about Conna's remarriage (side event in our game) he immediately saw what that must imply, and started taking it into account in his further plans.

But if the players are there to figure things out, the world has to be detailed exceptionally well or it falls apart. 10K Thassilon has been tough for me; in retrospect I wish I'd done 3K. Languages are a big deal for us--I remember the thrill that went down my spine at the PCs' reaction to hearing letter-perfect court Thassilonian spoken for the first time--and it's hard to imagine how the PCs can still communicate with certain groups at all. (They have been cut off for 10K years and don't speak Common; they've had 10K years to change their language, so their Thassilonian should be well-nigh unintelligable.)

Mary

Hm, thinking about your other question:

If you did want an LG specialist wizard in the Thassilonian tradition, he or she would presumably be a virtue-wizard rather than a sin-wizard. The Thassilon background article in #1 lists the corresponding Thassilonian virtues (though my group preferred to replace Fertility with Devotion).

Given how long ago Thassilon fell, though, I would not recommend that modern wizards in general use the Thassilonian system. It just puts extra stress on "you mean nothing's changed in 10,000 years?" issues.

Mary

You may want to be careful here. Some of the Thassilonian schools have very painful choices for what they give up. I am currently statting up a Thassilonian illusionist, and it is hard to give up both conjuration and transmutation. A player who does so because he expects that being a sin-mage will be more exciting than being a regular specialist is likely to be disappointed with the AP support--there basically isn't any. He will just have a specialist mage with unusually harsh limits on spell choices.

The Magic of Thassilon article has *one* spell for each school. One new spell will not likely compensate a player for having their forbidden schools chosen for them in this way; and to do anything more will be a lot of extra work for the GM. (Cool if you can do it, though!)

I'm looking forward to my sin-mage for CotCT but that's enthusiasm about his background, not about the magic rules.

It's a general problem with 3rd Ed that specialists basically involve subtracting capabilities, not adding them; this can easily make them feel as though they're just inferior to generalist wizards, even if they aren't. Extra spell slots are useful but they add no flavor.

Mary

The Thassilon background article says that Karzoug built the Hellfire Flumes to keep Alaznist's armies out.

All the internal evidence in #1 and #5 says that the Hellfire Flume belonged to Alaznist.

Should one assume that some border areas had changed hands? It looks as though Karzoug was losing ground, if so.

My PCs are very interested in questions like this: they want to know more about Karzoug's capabilities, and the possibility that he sank Bakhrakan is troubling them deeply.

Mary

We abandoned the campaign after Kings of the Rift, maybe 10 months of play into it (playing 1-2 times a week). As the GM, I frankly just didn't care anymore. The player would have preferred to continue, but not very strongly.

The later modules weren't really working--both for mechanical reasons (the PCs had become hyper-optimized in order to survive the earlier modules, and suddenly were too powerful for their opposition) and for roleplaying reasons. The PCs refused to connect with Alhaster, they intensely disliked Manzorian (and no wonder), and once they knew what the pyramid in Alhaster was, they wanted to force the showdown three modules early. Forcing them not to do so felt painfully artificial.

High points were Three Faces of Evil and Champion's Belt. The player also liked Spire of Long Shadows but I was bitterly disappointed by it. Nothing after that worked for us at all. We're having a lot better luck with RotRL.

We had only one TPK, in HoHR, but it had a bad effect on the game--that was the start of the pernicious drive to optimize the PCs. By the end of the campaign, the PCs' strategies were very effective but incredibly boring to GM for. They involved moving as fast as possible to maximize surprise and extend the use of the buff spells--meaning that the player had no attention left to look at scenery or talk to anyone. I felt like I was mechanically adjucating a video game, and frankly, computers are better at that than I am.

Both of the SCAP games I'm aware of died at roughly the same point, and for fairly similar reasons, except that in those games the PCs never got ahead of the power curve and the games remained brutally hard. In those, it was the players rather than the GM who cried quits.

Mary

We played out the virtue-forged weapons this afternoon. The tokens ended up being:

Repose--sachets from the bed of a sleeping saint of Desna (at Windsong Abbey)
Righteous Anger--ashes from Foxglove Manor (in memory of all three of the women who died there)
Wealth--the first two silver pieces Risa's tavern ever earned (thanks to the poster who suggested that one!)
Abundance--fruit from a magical everbearing tree in Sanos Forest
Eager Striving--two feathers found on top of the Arvensoar
Devotion--friendship bracelets from Yapp, the pixie who brought the PCs to Whitewillow
Honest Pride--tassels from the banner of Ilsurian

A couple of these made nice side scenes. When the PCs climbed the Arvensoar they saw visions of Thassilon through the high windows. (I don't think you could really see both Xin-Bakhrakan and Xin-Shalast from there, without magic, but I liked the image of the Runelords' cities brooding over the enslaved countryside.) The saint of Desna gave one PC a vision of the skulks praying for aid. The guardian of the magical tree, a servant of Selyn, offered some advice on how Xin-Shalast might break the party's cohesion if they didn't hold to their love of one another. And the PCs ended up carrying an offer from Ilsurian to the upstream towns, so there will now likely be a whole coalition of free towns under the Ilsurian banner. (Serves Magnimar right for paying so little attention!)

The weapons themselves, hm. The PCs really wanted to craft the whole set, but in play this led to immediate information overload for player and GM. Hopefully it will sort itself out eventually.

The PCs' choice for the weapon effective against Karzoug turned out to be the Staff of Hungry Shadows (Kazaven's weapon from Runeforge), which is just...weird. I wonder if Runelord Zutha is laughing somewhere in the background.

Mary

It worked better for my game to have the standing stones that led to Runeforge be the ones in Sandpoint. I lost the dragon encounter that way, but I'm not missing it particularly.

I thought the rhyme was weak, but for us it didn't matter because the PCs bargained with Xaliasa to send them to Runeforge as scouts. (He was thinking, "They'll come back beaten up and I can take their stuff." They were thinking, "We'll come back two levels higher and trounce him." They won this argument.)

I'm in favor of tying things back to Sandpoint when possible, and this one was pretty easy. It led to a fun interaction with the hellknight investigators after they returned to Sandpoint, too.

Mary

This is, frankly, a problem I've noticed with the other APs as well. In a lot of places, plot elements are set up by one author and then largely ignored by the others...

RotRL is actually better than most in this regard. The Sihedron-related aspects (both the Sihedron ritual and the amulets) are carried through particularly well. There's also nice use of recurring characters, locations, and creatures (though my player wanted more Sinspawn early on).

Certainly no let-downs on the order of (severe spoilers for SCAP)

So I'm greedy, and wanted *everything* in RotRL to be as good as the best parts; and the sin-related aspects were a bit of a letdown.

I think if I run RotRL again (and it's a credit to the craftsmanship that I would definitely consider it) I'll drop the opposition-sins element and put a lot more weight on the concordant-sin element in Runeforge, so that when a PC is in a section devoted to his besetting sin it is really striking and noticeable. And look for a way to get a sin-related element into FotSG.

Mary

I don't have a realism problem with the idea that the Thassilonian schools are essentially arbitrary and the correspondences are more technical than intuitive. But in play...if I say "Your PC feels uncomfortable in these two parts of Runeforge, here are a bunch of mechanical minuses, but don't expect it to make any sense" my player will say "Yeah, whatever." It's not artistically satisfying. This is not a showstopper by any means, but for me the sin elements would be more satisfying if they were a bit more intuitive.

Maybe I read too much into the sidebar in #2 that said I should track sin points for each PC. We really paid attention to that, spent quite a bit of time discussing the PCs' besetting sins and how those related to the Thassilonian system. But the modules never did anything with that idea, other than the abstract bonuses in SotS--and those fit the PCs so poorly that we had to drop them, because keeping track of counterintuitive bonuses was too much work for too little payoff. (My player's running 5 PCs. I don't make work for him unless the results are really going to be interesting.)

Mary

That said, I'm really rather surprised that your player thinks the frontal assault is a good plan. I guess it depends on how you wrote the final scenes of Fortress and Sins, but it seems as though the PCs should realize that they are expected.

I ran the final scene of _Fortress_ as a recruitment attempt--meant as much to unsettle the PCs (might one of their number be tempted?) as to actually recruit them, though Karzoug certainly wouldn't hesitate to do so.

The final scene of _Sins_ has not happened yet. The PCs are busy collecting virtue tokens, being unwilling to use the sin tokens. So I don't know how they'll react. I should find out on Sunday. It won't reveal the Sihedron amulet problem, though.

Trying to just bash their way in, loud and somewhat blind, is going to produce the exact wrong result - and your AP reports haven't suggested that as their proclivity in the past. A little recon might go a very long way - they might see the problem with the rune giants for what it is, and/or make contact with Guykak (which would be very much up their alley, from what I've seen).

It's my impression that the PCs are trying hard to lose 120 assorted giants and 15 assorted wrathlings. They have been convinced since Jorgenfist that the giants will *not* disband quietly and go home, especially since their response to Jorgenfist involved raising up a giant highlord to rival Mokmurian. Their plan for a long time has been to use Xin-Shalast as a target for those giants, to protect the lowlands.

A force of 120 giants cannot sneak effectively. The PCs can, and probably will. It's all going to hinge on how those initial contacts work out.

However, having Karzoug aware of their every move at all times is a pretty serious detriment to the stealthy plans. The module has Karzoug squandering this advantage by using it too early, but if he doesn't, I'm concerned that no matter how stealthy the PCs are the outcome will be the same as the frontal assault. Honestly, it seems as though *any* exploration of Xin-Shalast by a PC party with a Sihedron amulet is likely to be lethal (doubly so for us, without teleport magic to use for escaping). I was wondering how other GMs meant to deal with this. The best PC plan by far is to avoid the city completely and teleport into the upper area (having somehow solved the air problem)--but what a waste of an interesting scenario!

Maybe an NPC should suggest the subtle approach first?

They've thought of it. At the moment the threat posed by their own giants looms larger in their minds than the threat posed by forces in Xin-Shalast--they think the city should be largely abandoned. (I wish I could have read #6 before running #4. They questioned the lamias, and not knowing any better, I may have given the wrong impression.)

They're smart folks, and will probably adapt successfully to the new situation--as long as their first contact isn't a snowballing all-out response. I just need to avoid that.

Mary

If any of you have already played through it, I'm curious to know how your pcs ended up getting in; obviously a frontal assault is suicide, so that leaves the wyvern/deathweb caves. However, that approach would make it VERY easy to miss the black tower, among other things. Any thoughts/experiences?

My PCs made an alliance with rebels among the giants, helped assassinate recalcitrant giantish leaders, then made a raid inside via the deathweb caves to free some giant-elder hostages. They then regrouped, rallied the giants, and did a two-pronged attack--they came in through the deathweb caves again, while their giants came in from outside. The PCs killed the Headless Lord and the interior giants, then came out and fought giants and mammoths up above while the outside giants took out the harpies, jotunblood, ettins, and taigi giant.

Then Mokmurian arrived in force and there was a fierce fight between him and his hounds, and the PCs and a few giantish leaders. The PCs won this with some difficulty.

Later on, they found the trapdoor in the Black Tower and sent an invisible character down--who was noticed on a high Spot roll and narrowly escaped an area spell attack. She scampered up and reported what she'd seen, and the PCs quietly closed the trap door and told their giantish allies, "This place is cursed. Scram."

So there were quite a few things they never did, but I was pretty happy with the outcome. I thought it ran better than a solo attack on Jorgenfist by the PCs would have done.

Mary

I plan to have Karzoug tell the PCs that, should he perish, all his items and treasures will turn to ash, and so shall theirs. It is his last right as master transmuter the high poobah of greed. It’s of course a lie, but he can be terribly convincing.

So they either risk a severly pyrrhic victory or they leave him be, as fantastically rich men and women, laden with treasures he freely offers for their cooperation.

The Runelord of Greed should make bribery an artform. No need to fight at all ;)

My PCs are (unusually for PCs) not greedy for wealth. Knowledge, on the other hand.... I wonder if there is some perfect piece of knowledge he could impart, with a sting in the tail of course. It's tough, though, because they know what Karzoug wants to accomplish and have little desire to live in Shalast Reborn, wealth or no wealth. And, of course, Karzoug's reputation for rewarding his servants is not exactly stellar. ("Those are the lies my enemies told of me," he protests. But I doubt they'll believe him. They saw Mokmurian die.)

He'll try the bribes first, but he's smart enough to see that they aren't working. --Unless the PCs play along. I can't predict whether they will or not. It'll be quite interesting if they do. Very tense, because they probably can't fool him forever.

I am thinking of replacing the contact via Sihendron amulets with an ability of Karzoug to speak to anyone who's in line of sight of some key Lower City tower--for some reason the image really appeals to me. Maybe he has the Sihedron amulet option too, but keeps it secret so that the PCs won't lose the amulets. He could then spring it at some key psychological moment. "You do realize that I have been privy to every one of your plans against me, don't you?" He would also like to throw in "And that one of you has been my agent all along?" if he possibly can....

If Karzoug were Wrath the party would be putty in his hands. If he were Lust or Envy or Gluttony he'd at least have a good shot at Aldern, who is a real bundle of sins. Greed is not so easy to use on this particular group. They didn't sell Vraxeris' secrets-of-immortality notes; they didn't even keep them in order to use them; they hid them at Windsong Abbey with strict orders to keep the Chelish from getting at them. They are clannish, insular, suspicious, and a real credit to their Varisian heritage.

Mary

But only if this is an actual problem. Depending on how munchkin your players are this may or may not be necessary. If your players are heavily story focused and consistently take sub optimal options in their character builds and make poor choices during combat (because thats what my character would do) then you don't have a problem.

It may be worth asking the players flat-out what they would prefer. It's truly sad when the GM would like to run a lower-power game but is put off by the players' character designs, and the players would like to play in a lower-power game but figure the PCs will be so weak they'll just die. So you end up with a high-power game that no one really wanted, and both sides annoyed at the other. I've seen this at least twice.

Mary

In Burnt Offerings, I've consistently added more goblins, so that they can do "stupid goblin tricks" while the rest of them are actually fighting the party. This let them enjoy the silly goblin flavor antics without making the fights a total snooze.

This is a good idea in general. I was *not* trying to make the AP harder (my player gave me PCs with very sub-optimal class mixes) but there just weren't enough goblins, especially in the raid on Sandpoint, to get the flavor across. If you add more, you can have NPCs take out half of them, thereby making the NPCs seem a bit more real.

At Thistletop I don't think I added goblins, but I clumped them up for a big horse-baiting party. Encountered in small numbers they are flavorless because they die too quickly, often before they can act.

In many parts of the AP, simply allowing enemies to react to the PCs' presence can make the scenarios sigificantly harder without adding any more creatures or doing upleveling. We found this to be particularly true in Runeforge (#5). The PCs ended up fighting all of the undead at once in a large, running fight which was, although not extremely hard for them, fairly entertaining. Encountering them room by room would have been a complete bust.

It takes more prep to run such a fight smoothly, though.

In general I would add foes rather than increasing levels, except maybe for the cultists in Skinsaw--it is a little hard to see how they have been successful if they are so weak individually.

Mary

My PCs are not quite there yet, but they will be. I am pondering how this will play out. Between the effect of the Sihedron amulets and the effect of the rune giant Domination mindlinks, it seems apparent that Karzoug will know where the PCs are and what they are doing--either all the time, or at least a significant part of the time if they ditch the Sihedrons. The rune giant commanders in the lower city will too.

My player is a stickler for world logic. Therefore, I need to come up with an enemy response to knowledge of the PCs' presence that (a) makes sense and (b) does not result in an epic battle with hundreds of giants, lamias, etc. fairly early in the scenario. I think the PCs should lose that battle, but in any case I don't want to run it; too much work!

At the moment I think Karzoug still hopes to recruit the PCs, or at least to recruit their allies, so simply making everyone converge on their location won't be his immediate plan. At some point, though, the failure of this strategy will become apparent.

Saying "Karzoug doesn't care enough to deal with the PCs" seems to diminish his stature as a worthy opponent. He knows that they have runeforged weapons, after all. I don't like villains to be outright stupid or sloppy, though over-subtlety or blind spots are okay. In this case I think he expects the PCs to be in thrall to one sin or another--if not Greed, perhaps Wrath or Envy--and he's sure he can use this to manipulate them. He needs to replace Mokmurian....

(He is right; they are pretty deeply in thrall to Wrath. I am looking forward to the Champion of Wrath meeting his opposite number in the Upper City.)

I could really use a killer plan for that manipulation. The situation is that the PCs will arrive with a large force, mostly giants, which they will likely lose almost at once; then they will probably set themselves to the task of eliminating the rune giants so that they can reclaim their army. This gives Karzoug lots of time to try to turn them or put them to use. I just need a brilliant idea for *how*. (It doesn't have to succeed, but it has to be a credible try.)

Karzoug doesn't really have a serious enemy in the local area other than the PCs--if he did, I'd have him try to turn the PCs against that enemy.

Hmm. I wonder what would happen if the forces holding Xin-Shalast, rather than immediately attacking, welcomed the PCs with open arms. The PCs might think this was an error on their enemies' part and try to exploit it, thus setting themselves up for an awful surprise with regard to rune giants and domination. That might be *too* mean.

Anyway, ideas?

Mary

Mary Yamato wrote:

If only this were true! But the MM is very clear that it's a supernatural ability. In retrospect I wish I'd ignored the rules here, except that the player was the one who pointed it out.

Mary

Hm, in the MM I am just now holding in my hands, it is true. It says: Mind Blast (Sp): blabla. maybe there was a revision or errata?

No. I'm just wrong. I don't know where I got this. Sorry for the misinformation.

Mary