Spiritstalker's page

I sent it to you the other day. Let me know if you did not receive it. Thanks

Great! I'll do that.... How do I do that?

I checked carefully and downloaded the most up to date UCam Kingdom sheet. I re-entered the data and it is better, but still, the numbers are off.

Chemlak. I love the sheet, but I'm having some more problems with it, and I don't know how to manipulate excel to help fix it. We are starting play at the beginning of Blood for Blood, so we are quite a ways into kingdom building. The bonuses for the cities are not adding up correctly. There are so many buildings that I don't know which are not adding right, but I have double and triple checked the totals. The UCam Kingdom Tracking Spreadsheet shows that my players kingdom should have the following from cities:
Economy: 45
Loyalty: 53
Stability: 50

But after multiple checks and double checks, I come up with the following for only the buildings in the cities:
Economy: 57
Loyalty: 66
Stability: 52

Perhaps I have an older copy of UCam Spreadsheet.

Also, I have looked at the other Sheet URul Spreadsheet you are making and I like a lot of the parts on it. Will it work for me, even if I am not using Ultimate Rules?

I found how to open the other cities that were hidden.

Also, is there a way on the City Map sheets to "check" the boarders to mark them appropriately? i.e. City Wall, Moat, Land, Water, etc.

You are awesome Chemlak. Thanks to you and all of the others that have assisted you in any way. I have been playing Kingmaker, and we are about to begin Blood for Blood. My sheets have been fairly good, but tedious to use. I am now changing everything over to your sheet.

I do have a small problem, however. I am using the UCam sheet, but it only has 5 cities set up on it. I have been able to copy and paste the City Map sheets to make one for each of the Kingdom's maps, but Copy and Paste does not work on the City Sheets. How do I fix this?

Until you get it, yes you can manually enter it. Pick Custom Feat, and you can write the name of the feat. Then go to Personal, and select Permanent Adjustments at the bottom. When it opens up options, select Weapon Damage Bonus. It will let you assign the bonus to your rapier for damage. Just enter the amount of damage equal to your dex modifier. I don't think you get any Strenght Bonus with it, since the Dex is used instead of Strength, so modify the adjustment as needed.

I would love to receive a copy of that as well. I have recently started playing Pathfinder, and I just transitioned the characters from my 2e Keep on the Borderlands campaing to Pathfinder, but found that because I did not know much about the Pathfinder system, I haven’t had much success making other changes. I would love to see what you have done with it.

Alright, here's my post-mortem: All in all I enjoyed running this, and my players had fun.

Experience:
- My party quickly understood how to triangulate; That was nice
- There was some grumbling with regards to the foraging system. Only halfway through did it become clear that you forage either for food or for water; It doesn't seem to be possible to do both at the same time. Understandable, but it makes the foraging feel useless since you need both to account for a ration. Additionally it makes tracking the resources tedious
- Somehow my party decided on the 'disable' approach in the first location they came across, but at the second they changed to 'destroy' because they were afraid due to being low on rations. This meant they could complete neither the GA nor the VS faction goal. Somehow it has to be clear to the party that they need to do either one or the other
- There was some disappointment as to the somewhat low treasure the party got. They didn't go to the oasis or location D (-1). In addition they went for E, F and G, accidentally avoiding all Arid Desert hexes after having had their first fixed location, which made them miss out on encounter B (-2). This totaled for 7 treasure bundles

Confusion on my side:
- It's mentioned on page 10 that an hour after reactivation, Star sends a pulse that scrambles all remaining signals. By that logic, if the PC's have not completed their goal on day 16, they wouldn't be able to locate the remaining ruins anymore because on day 17 has activated Star. It feels like this is not intended; Am I missing something? Or is this simply an abstraction to have team PC and team NPC arrive nearly at the same time counting only the time the party took to get there?
- The reporting screen displayed that this scenario was re-playable, but I didn't see that tag anywhere. Bug?

General feedback:
- I did enjoy the flavor of the scenario. The locations came across scary and unique, and I got the impressions my players seemed to agree
- I loved the additional pieces of lore included in the scenario (setting up a tent, the weird locations in the desert, etc.)
- I enjoyed running the combats, although fighting earth elementals in sand can take forever. Secondly, the mooks in the final battle were utterly useless: Credit to my players, because tactically they did it right, but at 14 CP the automatons needed to roll a 15+ to hit the lower AC PC's with their first attack (lvl4-5 party)
- I'm a fan of haunts, because the players can experience the story of what happened. I would have enjoyed a little bit more description about what happened. It was a bit bare bones for that
- As commented by others: Create Water and Create Food simply break the supplies mini-game. This kind of survival journey really only works for level 1-4 scenario's, because that is the only level range where a party will feel the cost in spell slots. As soon as you have a level 5 spell caster in the party, this is not really an issue anymore
- Either the map is too big, or the speed vs activities per day ratio is way too steep. Higher level characters are slightly more likely to have reliable access to a level 2 Longstrider or a similar benefit, resulting in a higher chance to have a speed of 30+. But for level 3-4 characters this very unlikely, since 25ft seems to be the norm. You need to know almost exactly where you're going and to have the right party composition to achieve the VS goal

I had the same response from my party yesterday (4 lvl1 characters): They immediately wanted to split up. In the end they saw Alec move towards the library on his own and decided to pursue him as a group, because they sensed what was going to happen. After the encounter with the gremlins, they decided to stick together. Weall thought the gremlins that gave lice were a very nice touch for a school trip.

I loved the titles of the romance novels in the library :D

Kudos, this one was a breeze to run!

Me too, I'm impressed by the setup, so far... though I find it's a shame to have a swamp without the swamp flip-mat ;)

I'm impressed by the DC's in the chase scene. I understand players get a big speed boost from the Wolf form, but still, I recently encountered DC's like this in a 10-11 subtier. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of higher DC's in "group" chase scenes, as they always appear to easy.
I'm also intrigued by the use of both a 4- and a 5-player adjustment for that.

As to the "convince the wolves" part... I'm not entirely convinced that allowing Diplomacy at the same DC as the alternate skill is a good move...

For the final encounter: What are the Mist squares that are being referred to?

MO-BO-GO!... TA-BOO!!... WHY?!?!

Many solutions for that. Remember that this is a 5-9 adventure, and making use of terrain should be normal tactics by now:
Fireball is one.
Fly and hurl things from the distance is another.
Haste makes it possible to outrun and kite them.

My players had the monk and conjurer wizard (suddenly remembering Kyra had one of his MM rods) defeat them, while the paladin was cowering in a corner of the circular room (and laughing his a** off IRL).
Kyra was rusted out of her gear and started distracting the monsters with coins.

Anyway: My players had a blast when I ran it a few months ago.

I ran it this afternoon at 4-player high tier.

After a moment of "Oh cr*p, do we have to do a heist on a massively well protected caravan where everybody can kill us on sight?!", the investigation part went on swimmingly.
As the first successes of the investigation came in, the party got the hang of what the clues were meant for and were confronted with "failure" on the first check. I don't think there was any negative reaction at that point: Generally, the idea seems to have been well received.
Interestingly, they did not notice the increasing DC for repeated use of the same skill in a location because they decided to go wide with the vast amount of skills they were good, decent, or even bad at, trying to follow the theme of the location on the day, even if it was not necessarily their best choice (based on skill bonus).
I think the party only had 3 complications, one of which was the having to undergo the Modify Memory spell and subsequently botching the Bluff check to pass a secret message. The secret message being "I have hidden a note in the bathroom", having been distorted to "Don't go to the toilet: Someone went nuclear in there."

The creating and printing of small hand-outs with all the possible modifiers players could receive, was a good idea.
Their reminder factor was very useful also as a GM.
Tip for others who would do that: Color-code them. That'll avoid a lot of searching.

The assault itself was nice and felt like an original heist movie because the party was prepared for what was to come. Since it was not clear (I may have skipped it, over the multiple read-throughs) while running the scenario whether the investigation part was playing in Aspenthar or in Pashow, I ruled it took place in Pashow, since that is way closer to the Citadel of the Alchemist. Since Pashow does not have over 5000 inhabitants, the players spent the 3500gp on an interesting and effective array of items, instead of 1 very expensive item: Mainly Feather Tokens (Tree), various potions of healing, Pass without a Trace, Invisibility, which were actually all used during the heist. It was fun to give players that kind of money and see them buy and use everything during the whole heist.
If part 1 was supposed to be played in Aspenthar, please disregard this comment, although this ad hoc decision ended in a lot of fun for everyone.

They knew of the location of the secret door, of the secret compartment and they ended up not fighting the Altar due to it failing a saving throw against a Tanglefoot Bag.
After that, one of the rogues used a potion of Invisibility to retreive the "real" dummy elixir.

The Aspis encounter was fun as well. I did not know exactly what to do when the Medium started spamming Create Water on the tent. In the end I ruled the spell drenched a square, and reduced the damage to the tent by 1 during every round in which the spell was cast to delay the flames. After successfully saving against the Blue Whinnis poison, the rogue ended up storming into the tent to find out (and save) whatever was so important to have it torched as soon as strangers approached the camp.

All in all, I really enjoyed running this. The scenario is fun, and does not punish failure.
I therefore stand by my first remark in this thread: Well done, Sir!

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A few further questions/remarks, that I couldn't find the answer to in the scenario:
* Where does the information gathering part happen? Since the original meeting with Ziralia and Gloriana Morilla happens in Aspenthar, it was unclear whether this happened there or in Pashow.
This is relevant, since Pashow does not have 5000 or more inhabitants, meaning you cannot acquire any item you need.

* I immensely enjoyed the freedom that was given to each player to come up with what skill to use for his chosen method. The first inclination of some of the players was "Yeah, we're going to sneak up and snatch what information we can get". After that, they became more creative when I drew the attention to the various themes at the locations on the various days.

* I was lucky to have a very skilled party, but I have to concur with James's remark above: What to do if you have a cleric? A fighter? A sorcerer? Or any other of the non-Int based 2 SP/Level classes? I agree you can be extensively lenient in the checks that are required, but without skills, you'll quickly be repeating checks (which would result in an increased difficulty).
I know that it is possible to do the heist without all the available information, but those characters may be having a bad time.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I think the DC's are spot on. But still, it's a lót of skill checks in a part that is bound to run for 1-1.5 hour.

I'm glad you enjoyed the scenario, and thanks to you and Lau for your feedback! I'm favoriting all of the reviews and breakdowns to look back on and inform my crunch work for future projects, which will hopefully maintain the flavor while moving closer to that sweet spot for challenge. As my first scenario, which was also a Tier 1–5, I definitely erred on the side of lowballing the challenge rather than clobbering beginning players. I think it's easier to forgive an overly easy scenario than an overly difficult one, especially if it has decent flavor.

And a review is up. I hope others will enjoy it as much!

They didn't ask many questions; I was a bit disappointed that nobody even asked about Tamrin's Aspis ties.

This information may have gotten lost due background noise. I was sitting next to you twice while you gave the briefing and totally missed it.

The player who played the infiltrator inquisitor was very happy that in this scenario, playing an infiltration build really paid off. He ruled the Bluff checks and the Sleigh of Hand to spice up the soup. It's nice to see that while the scenario is probably playable for PCs that aren't that savvy, it's not dumbed down so savvy people feel redundant.

I was the inquisitor in the game, and I would like to emphasize this quote. It's nice to have a scenario where an infiltraton specialist can show off (for lack of a better word) without overshadowing the rest of the players. Quote from the party: "With that kind of Take 10 Disguise, you ARE an Aspis agent".

One player grumbled a bit that the +4 DC hike for high tier was harsh on ability checks; I disagreed. At high tier PCs have had more opportunities to access class skills so the balance swings towards relying on skills instead.

Yes, that was also me. I understand Lau's argument, but still:

The final combat indeed felt like a bit like push over, even though it was entertaining.

What was the deal of the Elixir of Love in the care package, by the way? I can imagine a few things, but did it tie into the scenario in any way?

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I would like to give compliments to Christopher for writing this scenario. I enjoyed playing it very much.

Not to go into technicalities, but "Coup de Grace" literally means "Mercy kill". No reason why a paladin would not be allowed to do this.