Abomination Vaults - Hands of the Devil... Chapter 2. There are several awesome NPC interactions there. Shadow Malicious!!
I enjoyed Chapter 2 of Abomination Vaults a lot! I think the encounter with Urevian is one of the high points of the whole AP.
Search Posts
I have always been a firm believer that if Paizo is going to name Archives of Nethys the official rules repository, they should at the very least be kicking a little funding their way. I support AoN on Patreon because it's been such a valuable tool for so many years. It just sucks that fan volunteer work can be co-opted so easily. It's frankly getting a little embarrassing that the remaster update is taking so long. With no estimate in sight and sparse status updates. AoN has had the books for 3 months now. Foundry and Pathbuilder had updates out mere weeks after the official releases. I am sympathetic to the developers doing this in their free time and it's truly not an important issue overall. I'm just baffled.
Agree with this. I was able to answer the riddle correctly a few seconds after reading it. This riddle shouldn't substantially stymie your players. (Although players work in mysterious ways.)
Abomination Vaults has some tough combats in it. Starting your players at Level 2 coming in from the Beginner Box is fine and will help them get the hang of things. They will earn less XP from combat for being higher level, so it will even out as only being a little ahead of the curve as they get farther in. You should also check out the Abomination Vaults forum section. Lots of tips from other GMs who have run the adventure. It took my group more than an entire year of weekly 4-hour sessions to do the whole Abomination Vaults campaign. Make sure that you are communicating that Adventure Paths are a big commitment to your players!
I also did what Haydriel suggests. Here's the random encounter tables I made, for reference! I wanted to incentivize use of the teleportation circles, so any floor that the party passes through on foot triggers a random encounter check. At one point, my players recruited the mitflits and allowed them to take over the 2nd floor, so I eliminated the random encounter checks on those floors. The random encounters ended up not being much of an obstacle because my party found the secondary entrance on Floor 5 (through the smuggler cave), and activated a bunch of teleportation circles. They ended up going back to town to rest for most of the adventure, and only rested inside the dungeon one or two times!
Archives of Nethys also started listing the titles and locations of all the back matter articles. This might be a little easier to search if you're looking for something specific.
I am probably wrapping up my game tonight, so I'm just going to run by the seat of my pants here, but what happens if the party "kills" Belcorra before they invest all 3 Fulcrum Lenses into her? I'm going with the Ebon Fulcrum lens rejuvenates her immediately, because I don't want to deflate the momentum by going "alright, you did too well, come back in 7 to 10 days to try the boss fight again." We'll see if it actually applies.
A 5-15 Adventure? Yes, please!
My only 1st-to-20th character was a Gnoll Cleric of Lamashtu (for a Way of the Wicked campaign). I've always enjoyed the interplay of the capacity for compassion and evil in her religion. Paizo is good at giving nuance and reasons that sane people would actually worship the evil deities.
This rule would have killed at least two characters in my campaign, and very possibly more. Which isn't really a value judgement, but I prefer less lethal games. I see this heavily encouraging not healing downed characters - or at least if you go down, you're doing nothing for the rest of combat to avoid drawing aggro. That just sucks as a player, especially in a system where I've had some intense combats last two full hours. I... don't understand the utility of mechanics that tell you you can't play the game. I'll be sticking with the way I currently run the dying rules.
I love the Cleric and Witch buffs I'm seeing in this thread. The Divine list needed some help.
My party just had it rough with the clay golem. Clay golems are bad enough on their own but the combo of Cursed Wounds and a Graveknight's ability to counter all healing spells is N A S T Y. The Summoner's been captured, and he was carrying (foolishly) all 3 fulcrum lenses, but his eidolon has 2 of them. So Caliddo can't kill him, the baddies need those back! My players also can't seem to figure out what they're supposed to do with the lenses. I outright told them at one point, since they have the Whispering Reeds, but they've already forgotten. They are refusing to invest the lenses and are super scared of them. How have groups fared against Ravirex and does anyone have any suggestions for making that encounter *memorable*? I'm also a little sad that the obligatory dragon is kind of just shoved in a corner and knows he isn't the baddest thing on the block. My players only encountered him once they had cleared most of the level, at which point he felt confident enough to venture out to the lake. He made the mistake of demanding tribute from the adventuring party and they bullied him! I changed Ravirex's lair into 10ft deep of swamp water, with only a few stones and mushrooms to stand on, so he's able to submerge and use hit-and-run attacks. There's no room for flying in his lair, so this replaces that tactic. After being thoroughly rattled by the party, I'm having him infiltrate Yldaris disguised as a drow to try to figure out where the lenses are. He figures he can pick off the party one at a time if he can separate them. If he gets the lenses, he's powering up to an Umbral dragon. However, with the Summoner captured and holding the lenses, perhaps Ravirex can help with the rescue attempt now! Funny how that works out.
Since we're having an "edition change," I'm going to go with Mystra, even though she doesn't exist in this setting.
This is hilarious. Can we argue about how many days are in a week next?
Otari knows Belcorra is still a ghost deep below and should warn the PCs that she could find a way to rebuild or reactivate Gauntlight unless they stop her permanently. I don't think he knows about the Fulcrum Lenses. Leave your party plenty of time. They are off the time table for now. The next timer is Dorianna's illness in Part 2, then collecting the lenses before Belcorra does. I don't think there's anything technically stopping Belcorra from jumping ahead to blowing up Absalom, other than giving the party a fair chance at stopping her. But consider: Belcorra doesn't see the party as a true threat until they breach Floors 8-9 (and even then, not until they survive several of her attacks personally!). She has been biding her time for several years already. A few weeks or months are not a big deal in her grand scheme, and she can sacrifice minions to keep the party busy as long as she still has the temple and the lenses.
1. Do you have to do the ritual at the 2nd level nexus once, or eight times? I'm thinking once, but I dunno. I ruled once. Seems silly to do it eight times.
This is accurate, but it makes the checks nearly impossible later in the adventure - the DC's scale twice as fast as the DC per level table. I'm not sure if this is intended by the developers or not. 3. What is the DC for the secondary checks at each level? I'm inclined to think it's the same as for the primary. This isn't, as I understand it, the case for most rituals, but the way this one is worded it looks that way to me. Yes 4. The ritual calls for "up to 5" secondary casters. What's the minimum? 1 or 0? I would assume minimum 0. As I read it, you discover the ritual notes on level 3, but you can't do the ritual at all until you're level 5 (3 is half of 5 rounded up). Correct? This is true, but I didn't realize you can't cast a ritual that's higher than your spell rank it until I looked it up. I did not enforce this for my players. 5. It seems the effect of the secondary checks is that a critical success gives you +2 on the primary check (so in theory you could get +10), a success does nothing, failure gives you -4 (so potentially -20) on the primary check, and critical failure the same -4 plus a reduction in the success level (so the primary check may well fail. Yes, failing secondary checks is extremely punishing. 6. Presumably if you fail, once you've dealt with the immediate effects of that, there's no reason you can't cast the ritual again. Correct? Correct. My players spent 3 hours (both in game and real time!) critically failing the check on Floor 6. See issue with DC scaling above.
Spellcasting Services. The NPC there will charge money to cast a spell for the party (such as Remove Disease after everyone gets bitten by ghouls, for example).
Here is the document if anyone else wants to steal from it! As I mentioned, though, it's mainly reflavored magical tattoos.
After Treasure Vault came out, I ended up homebrewing a bunch of items based on the magical tattoos (and some various other permanent magic items that seemed cool)! I lifted the Magical Tattoo skill feat to allow the PC to craft the fleshwarp items. My player is very happy but hasn't gotten a chance to try it out yet because the party still hasn't 100% cleared out the 6th floor where the labs are. I can share at some point but I'll have to copy the information over from my personal document once I get home.
Wrin's fortune telling is a good benefit that the players will miss out on, but maybe they can take her Harrow deck and get the same benefits (similar to Curse of the Crimson Throne). She doesn't have much of a role beyond the beginning of the adventure. When I started the campaign, I had each player contacted by an Otari NPC at the behest of Wrin, who called them together at night at her shop, did an ominous Harrow reading, and showed them the "glow" of the lighthouse. I had the glow be visible only to PC's with darkvision, to explain why everyone else in town thinks Wrin is a bit of a crackpot. That was enough of a hook to get the PC's on the trail, and let me seed in connections to the NPCs with sidequests!
Another possibility would be replacing them with Sekmin/serpentfolk, which is the way the other canon drow cities seem to be going. That preserves the flavor of "usually antagonistic race is surprisingly helpful." You'd have to find new art for all the NPCs, though. My group is almost 2/3rds of the way through the adventure and have met several drow (and one of my PC's is a drow), so I will be keeping them for my game.
I love the articles and am sad to see there not be one. But my main takeaway from that comment is that Stolen Fate really would have benefitted from being a 6-part AP. It’s exciting seeing Gatewalkers and Stolen Fate jump around to so many fun places, but with their stories being crammed into 3 books you barely get to spend any time in any of those places. It’s cool for us Golarion nerds who already know about all the different parts of the world, but for my players it’s pretty meaningless when they’re barely given any reason to get attached to each new place before moving on. This was exactly my impression of the first part of this adventure.
Since they befriended the mitflits, they are still level one at 810 XP. They should get XP for befriending creatures, unless you think they should only interact with everything in the dungeon by murdering it. The players will do things that grant them XP. Playing hack-and-slash is a perfectly valid way to play, but the dungeon has some dialogue opportunities built into it and I think it's more fun if the players are rewarded for interacting with denizens in friendly or novel ways rather than just killing them. My main concern is that both the Blood of Belcorra and the Vampiric Mist reset once per night, and the way to destroy them is quite far away (D9). Once the players discover this, I'm afraid they might try to "compensate" for the lack of XP by using Gauntlight as a "Training room" and attempt to rerun both encounters every night until they find a way to destroy them. I only give XP for Haunts and ghosts once they've been permanently dissipated to avoid this exact scenario. No XP for temporarily disabling them.
A question about how to use this pack- if I want to give, for example, the Ogre warrior token to a named NPC, how would I go about doing so? The file structure is such that I can't see how to easily extract the picture for that purpose. Foundry module files are stored in C:\Users\[YOURWINDOWSUSERNAMEHERE]\AppData\Local\FoundryVTT\Data\modules\pf2e-tokens-bestiaries If you can't find the AppData folder, make sure you have "Show Hidden Items" turned on in Windows Explorer (should be a check box on the View tab). If you want to assign a token to a creature in Foundry, you should be able to click on the Browse Files button for the file path, navigate up a few levels to the Data\modules folder, and find the picture you want to use. The Default Monster portrait is in [...]\Appdata\Local\FoundryVTT\Data\systems\pf2e, for example.
Well, I pronounce it mah-jus, so therefore I am the most incorrect and I win.
Fun! I can't wait to see the other new Ancestries!
The plot hook to get players into Stolen Fate is pretty simple: the cards just appear in their possession and since they're powerful magic items, that obviously bears investigation. There will be a lot less Wild West shenanigans in this adventure. Book 1 at the very least involves a lot of teleporting around the world, so there's a lot of small scenes with different flavors (but none of them are Alkenstar or Numeria). There is a demiplane base that your players can customize, so maybe you can throw in some continuity by bringing along their favorite NPCs from OoA, or letting them put some clockwork devices into the castle or something. If your players are interested, it works as a follow up.
There's a sidebar about killing her, and notes elsewhere that the only way to open the doors without her is to smash them open. I think the expectation is actually that the players kill her and then smash their way through the temple, rather than letting her lead them around, but the option is there.page number please as i can't seem to find it Page 196 in the hardback version, sidebar titled "The Proctor." Just below it in the notes for room J1, it lists the Hardness & HP for breaking open the doors in that room. There's also lots of chances for the PC's to notice that she seems annoyed they keep surviving, so the intention seems to be that they don't follow the advice of the spooky evil skeleton.
There's also the product threads such as this one.
Monster Core will cover only Bestiary 1, so even if they do all new art for every single monster in that book (doubtful), there's still 66% valid art in this pack. I also doubt that Paizo or Foundry will delete art for monsters that still exist, especially since they already pulled much of this monster art from PF1e books. I think it's more likely that there will be new art for the 8 new dragons and whatever's replacing the Otyugh and other OGL monsters, meaning that this token pack might be missing art for a dozen or so new monsters once the new book comes out. I would love to hear from Paizo if there's plans to add the new monster art to this token pack as well, but it should be a minor inconvenience at most. Also please do more of these in the future (NPCs, monsters from setting books, etc.), I love having all this high quality art!
Wait, where was it confirmed that Choral himself is a red dragon? I knew that was a popular theory but not that it was canon.
Agreed wholeheartedly. For some reason the website won't let me log into the forums from my phone, so I have to scroll past all the playtest categories every time.
ARPG with couch co-op? Excellent! Very excited about this. Congrats on the announcement. Is couch co-op confirmed? That would be awesome. I'm willing to see where this goes, hopefully it turns out well! Owlcat's Wrath of the Righteous is one of my favorite CRPGs.
Question on the DC scaling for the Awaken Portal ritual. Since it scales based on Spell Rank instead of the DC by level table, the DCs are going to quickly outstrip the player ability. Is this intended? For example, my players are on Floor 6, which is a DC28 check. That's equivalent to a DC for an 11th level challenge, twice the character level of the party. Is the party just not supposed to be able to activate portals on lower floors?
FLGS exclusive special editions? I love it! Can't wait to hear more about the new dragons.
Excellent post, Mark. This is an absolutely heroic effort on the part of the team to get the books turned around so quickly.
I would also like to note this issue. At the very least it hasn't crashed my PDF reader yet.
Curious what this version of Champion looks like with Alignment gone. I do hope what we would’ve called Neutral Champions can still sneak in somehow; a very classic LN-style “Judge” is definitely missing.Oh damn, I kind of liked how the different champions had different powers, although LG was much better than the rest. I expect there will still be a "Paladin," "Redeemer," and "Liberator" cause with the same exact tenets. The PC just won't have "Lawful Good" written on their sheet to go with it.
I for one am happy to see alignment go. I expect it will be a change to make "alignment damage" into holy/dark/axiomatic/anarchic as another energy type (you know, Final Fantasy style) and that's about it. The rest is already covered with Champion causes and deity anathema.
Nephilim… Legally distinct Aasimar, if I had to guess.
Well now, this is interesting. I'm assuming this is primarily a re-issue to get the system under the ORC license? That's going to be a hard sell to people who already own the CRB/GMG/APG. How extensive are the class rebalances? Is the Witch going to be buffed?
For Sorcerers/Witches/Oracles I allow the "patron deity" to be different than the deity the character worships. An Infernal Sorcerer could cast spells as if they worship a Lawful Evil deity, since it makes sense for their bloodline. The flavor of the Sorcerer class is they get their power involuntarily, so they don't necessarily have to worship Asmodeus, just pick a deity to be their "power source" for options like Divine Access.
The PDFs you bought on Demiplane predate the hardcover. I'm not sure if Demiplane has the hardcover version available on their site, but I have not been impressed with their site in the past and I don't blame you for being confused. You'll likely need to talk to Demiplane customer support if you want to try to get a refund or exchange. You can see the different versions of the adventure on Paizo's store here: Paizo originally released the adventure as 3 individual modules as they do with all their adventure paths, then released the combined hardcover special edition. The hardcover edition updated the maps to be organized A-J instead of ABCD/ABC/ABC. If you have the PDF copy of the hardcover, or the Foundry module for the hardcover, it comes with an interactive map pack that matches the combined book. I hope your week gets better!
The maps are too large to fit on a flip mat, and James Jacobs has previously said such an accessory would be cost prohibitive, so there no physical maps to buy. You can draw the maps by hand on poster paper or a wet erase mat, get them printed at a print shop, or use a VTT software like Foundry. I can also recommend Narchy's map remakes if you want to print out maps.. The Foundry module uses them and they're beautiful.
Well, I was excited to buy these when they came with a digital version, but I probably won't now since I primarily play online. Too bad. I love the new art that's in the Stolen Fate player's guide.
I think treating attack spells like basic saves would also be relatively easy to justify in fiction. It would basically be replacing touch AC. It might be hard to penetrate the scales of a dragon with an arrow but a disintegrate spell mostly just needs to make contact. I did this in my home game for my Cleric player. This particular player does not have high system mastery. The party is Level 6 right now and her Warpriest needs to roll a 15 or so on the die to hit an enemy's AC with a spell attack. Next level the other spellcasters will be getting spellcasting proficiency increases, but the Warpriest is not (which is a separate issue), so I gave her an item that lets her do half damage on a missed spell attack roll to make her character feel a little less bad. I don't want to go around lecturing my players on "building their character incorrectly" or telling them what spells to pick. It's not fun to be told you're playing the game wrong. The point of PF2e was to make poor build decisions like this much less debilitating. It doesn't particularly matter to me if the skill ceiling for spells with attack rolls achieves parity, the skill floor clearly does not.
This is my experience as well. In combat healing can be a good save if anyone goes down, but that can be covered with consumables. I have a party with an Undead Sorcerer (who has Medicine feats) and a Cleric, and probably 80% of the healing is done by the Sorc out of combat or by using a wand or staff with Heal.
I am GMing an Abomination Vaults campaign right now. 1) Given the party composition and the campaign, do you think a healer is mandatory or the frontline might be strong enough to resist (our ranger is also going to take witch dedication to get lesson of life )? Every party should have at least one person with the Medicine skill and at least one person who can heal in combat (via Battle Medicine or healing spells). A Life Oracle is a good choice for this campaign, especially with so many front-liners. You'll need some spell utility in the party. 2) Are there some good reactions and single actions for spellcasters? Single action spells like Shield and Guidance are good choices. Using Aid to help your allies (it does take 2 actions to get the reaction for Aid). Since you are a Life Oracle, casting Heal on yourself is going to be an important part of your turn. Bon Mot might come in handy. tldr: i am currently looking for some lvl 6,8,10,14 class feats ( archetype/dedications ) to get ( by lvl 6 stats are 8,16,16,10,16,19 ). Abomination Vaults only goes to Level 10. You might hit Level 11 by the end of the adventure if you're lucky. Don't plan for levels higher than that. For monster identification skills, there's several recurring enemy groups that come up often: Abberations (Occultism), Undead (Religion), and Fiends (Religion). Investing in Religion or Occultism will help you identify monsters (and other lore!) in the dungeon. You can shop for items in Otari (up to level 4 items, or level 10 consumables), or have items shipped in from Absalom for a small fee. Absalom is the largest city in the Inner Sea and would have nearly anything for sale, GM allowing on rarity. If you want, the party could even take a day trip to Absalom to do some shopping.
I'm running without Free Archetype, since my players are all fairly new to the system. I didn't want to overload them with more feats as they're already having difficulty with the number of choices. Maybe in the future, but I'm souring more and more on Free Archetype the longer I think about it. If I used it in the future, I would probably restrict it to a handful of options that fit the theme of the campaign. Maybe replace unlocking the ability to take an archetype in an adventure path with just automatically gaining it as a free archetype. (Abomination Vaults has a couple unique archetypes, for example, one of which is very skill-focused and not all that useful, and one of which is unlocked at level 8 of a 10-level adventure.) There are a lot of flavorful archetypes that will just never get used, even in a Free Archetype game. The fighting style, Marshal, or Medic archetypes are just much more mechanically useful than "you are a Pirate."
|