sozin's page

Sweet! Signed up. Thanks for sharing.

link-ified url

Amelie's great. Check out _A Very Long Engagement_ and _Dirty Pretty Things_ for two other good Tautou movies.

Here's my results, 1 case from my Paizo sub. I got a complete set. Feeling good about my distribution; I was +4.75 off the expected value in commons (but with lots of goblins! yay!), =0 with the uncommons, and +.2 off expected value with rares(2 succubi!).

# name count
1 goblin warrior 3
2 goblin hero 3
3 goblin warrior 2
4 goblin hero 2
5 orc brute 4
6 orc warrior 3
7 skeleton 1
8 watchguard 3
9 watch officer 3
10 lizardfolk champion 2
11 zombie 2
12 giant spider 3
13 wolf 2
14 venemous snake 3
15 mummy 2
16 human rogue 2
17 human ranger 2
18 elf wizard 3
19 half elf cleric 2
20 dwarf fighter 3
21 human druid 1
22 gnome fighter 2
23 dire rat 2
24 gargoyle 2
25 half orc barbarian 2
26 specter 2
27 seelah 2
28 werewolf 3
29 medusa 1
30 minotaur 2
31 ogre 2
32 troll 2
33 ettin 2
34 chimera 1
35 mantacore 1
36 giant cave weaver 1
37 frost giant 1
38 succubuss 2
39 lich 1
40 vampire 1

If I were GMing, I'd be loathe to run the same campaign twice (with different rulesets, no less) ... I'd be bored. Run Runelords, or Legacy of Fire!

7 people is a lot - good luck. Don't let any of them be summoners or summoning focused casters, your combats will take forever!

Conversion guide link

my group wants a fun and fast-paced game not bogged down by bookkeeping and such.

If you want to keep the game popping along, my advice for PF is:

• Keep a big, public initiative board (I use the Combat Pad). Announce not just who is up, but who is on deck ("Theodred, you're up; Pan, you're on deck.") Keep that initiative moving constantly - if players slow things down ("I cast entangle! Uh, and I need to look up the rules on that ..."), tell them they are on delay and move on to the next player.
  
• Minimize table talk/kibitizing during initiative by giving the party 30 or 60 seconds at the end of each round to discuss their strategy for the next round.
  
• Buy the Condition Cards, or make your own. Very helpful product.
  
• Agree with Denim above - if you don't know a rule, don't get bogged down searching for it. Appoint one of the players Assistant GM and make it their job to a) do the quick searching, and b) publish a Rules Clarification thread to the party after the game, explaining/providing links to the rules questioned/misunderstood/not understood during the actual game.
  
• Run an Adventure Path - yes, they are on rails, but those rails keep ya whooshin' along. Most people think that Carrion Crown is a good starter one.
  

That's all I got for now. Good luck!

I bet he's thinking "why is this tactical moron messing up my nice Entangle spell?"

THIS

Totally would have been my submission to round two of RPSuperstar ... if I'd made the cut ... and if non-antagonistic groups were legal :-)

My idea was a loose knit group of paladins and inquisitors (who point to their holy powers as proof that Aroden is still alive), detective scholars (obsessed with cracking the greatest mystery in golarion), fringe cleric lunatics (who believe that Aroden is trapped in the center of the Eye, or stuck inside the Worldwound, or trapped between plains), etc.

I use a ceiling mounted projector/big mini collection at home, but when I'm playing at my friend's place we put maptool on a big tv, and have a handful of mice at the table for players. it works beautifully.

re: projector, I'm using an three year old BenQ projector, and it works just fine, so you don't have to spend a lot of dough to get a nice projector. link.

D&D projector pr0n from my homegame!

as a GM I'd not only allow this, I'd probably allow you to pick one now, and retrain at 8th level.

and that's the kind of GM players love! we're here to make the game more fun for our players, after all!

Ideas:

+1 on the $1 store credit idea

+1 on maps.

Copy of HeroLab to reward getting first star?

...or if GM already owns HeroLab, additional addins

Kobold Quarterly subscription on getting a star

That sounds awesome! Are you going to video tape it by any chance?

+1 for the kobold! it is excellent.

Are you noticing that the squares are 10', not 5'?

Ah, doh! That makes it more reasonable. Thank you.

I made Lamatar an 8th level ranger in addition to being a barrow wight, and gave a +1 frost longsword and spiked gauntlet so he could go full two-weapon and still level drain. I also made 2 of the 3 hags greenhags, so they were smaller, and gave all of them 5 levels in witch.

Sweet ideas.

I did give Barl some different feats and spells, and I added a zombie stone giant (the AP states he killed one of his bodyguards that gave him sass, so why not animate him to provide an example of expected behavior to the other?).

Also very cool. Thanks again.

If I make it back next year (fingers crossed) I'm going to continue down the Desert of Desolation proto-AP and do Temple of Set/Crypt of Badr Al Mosak/Lost City of Phoenix.

Sadly, I won't be doing the above, but I will be coming to Paizocon! (I have to fly back sunday afternoon.)

For enterprising GMs, there's always the Sunday post con gaming slot. Eric Tillemans ran I3-Pharaoh two years ago, and I ran it last year. Plus lots of Society games going on.

I'm prepping for my party to hit Hook Mountain next week and I have some concerns, and wanted to see how other folks ran this combat.

1) The little room where the hags and Lamatar are in... it is pretty small for 3 large creatures and 1 medium one, not to mention the little tiny choke point that leads into the room. I'm concerned that combat in this area is going to grind to a halt due to the little chokepoint and limited combat area in D7. Since the hags aren't going to leave the room (from the text: "The denizens of areas D7–D9 do not join battle here, preferring to face intruders in their lairs where they have stronger advantages."), the entire combat seems like it could lead to a boring tactical standoff.

Suggestion: Move the encounter to area D8, the Lamashtu shrine.

2) The 6 guards in area 5 and 6, and the 8 exhausted/enslaved ogres in area: that's 13 ogres all packed into a set of caves with feeder tunnels of 10" width. My party is kind of sick of fighting ogres after Fort Rannick, and now they have to fight 13 more in a choke-point rich environment. I smell a boring combat.

Suggestion: Change the 3 ogres in area 5 into one stone giant; change the two guard ogres in area 6 into two juju zombie ogres, brought back to life by the necromancer Barl; have the enslaved ogres turn on their zombie guards when the fight goes down in area 5, and give the party a chance to intimidate/diplomacy onto their side.

3) Not really a problem, but I'm curious if anyone has modified Barl's spellbook to include spells from Ultimate Magic/APG/Combat/other sources that are thematic for either this encounter, the AP, or stone giants in general.

Cheers

Roc thread I created last year; might be helpful to you

Falcon's Hollow is perfect.

Hero Lab is the closest to eTools you are going to get.

Pretty cool. 26-inch lcd is going to be tough to use a digital table top - it is simply too small. The tech looks very cool though, a logical extension of what everyone (d20 pro, CMU surfacescape project, etc) have been hacking on.

if the lcd was bigger than 26 inches (say, 52, or 76), and the system is either PF-aware or the API their offering is useful enough to import HeroLab files, then I'll definitely be buying one to play with :-)

Taldor or Cheliax. Westcrown is a very Venetian city.

Pretending to to Vic here, I'm guessing the problem with publishing paizo vtt blessed files are: 1) Platform: there are multiple VTT products out there - d20pro, MapTool, ttoprpg, and FantasyGrounds to name a few - do you pick just one to support, and essentially take a side, or do you try to support them all, which is inefficient/annoying? 2) IP: the maps, portraits and pogs are valuable intellectual property, and - despite the advancements due to paizo embracing pdf technology as a distribution mechanism - distributing that digital content in VTT format edges right up against the confort line; 3) Labor: finding someone in-house to build the VTT solution (assuming #1 is solved).

It's a tricky thicket.

EDIT: my solution in this space (as a MapTool user) was to build my own. See the TokenLab home page. That, and a pretty rich set of MapTools vtt files for Rise of the Runelords (50% complete), Council of Thieves (80% complete), various modules, and about 60% of all the Society scenarios - which, because of the CUP, will never see the light of day. (And I don't have a problem with that at all - it is Paizo's hard won property!)

For the monsters, here's an idea: use Hero Lab's d20pro output option.

Doesn't help you with the maps, line of sight, fog of war, etc, but it is a start at least.

Pledged.

Fantastic write up and ideas. will definitely incorporate a ton of your ideas in the unofficial GM's guide to to CoTs. Thank you!

+1

If they published a link to their material here, can we include it? For example, I used Turin the Mad's generic Wiscrani for reference a few times.

I think its fair game and in the spirit of community contributions. Let's just make sure we give credit where credit is due in all cases.

looks like there is a call for your rumor table

Added to the doc

Some of my docs are in spreadsheets which are handy to have in the original spreadsheet format rather than text, so they can be sorted and filtered. Any idea on how to handle that?

I believe google docs lets you do that in-line as tables, including a nifty Excel->docs converter. I haven't played around with it. One for the backlog.

So, the short of it: *I* will use the compilation you all are creating. It is wanted. It is needed. It will be utilized. All of your efforts are appreciated.

Good feedback, thank you. Treppa and I were discussing online and we think about a 1 year time frame is right for this project (we both have a lot going on right now), so, it probably won't be extremely helpful to you in the short term. I'm shooting for Dec 31 2012 as the "real" publication of the doc, although I'm sure we'll have multiple updates between now and then.

In the meantime, I created a set of organization cards for the GM to cut out and handout as appropriate. Here it is.

Version 0.17 released and can be downloaded here.

Includes a number of new features, notably:

* the tokenlab UI now automagically tries to guess the token portrait and pog images based on the character name
* the maptool UI now features tracked spontaneous and memorized spells

screenshot!

I've published the skeleton of the document on google docs here

If you are interesting in signing up as a collaborator, please email me at sozinsky at gmail dot com and I'll permission you as a doc editor.

Well, if it must be Asmodean - how about he believes that the Thrunists have corrupted the view of Asmodeus in Chelaxian society, and they arrogantly believe that they control the devils (instead of the Thrunists following Hell's bidding), and as such he wants to overthrow the Thrunists and re-establish the proper rule of Asmodeus in Cheliax.

Hello!

I have an inquisitor in my CoT campaign. He's an inquisitor of Aroden. (Which technically is ok, even if Aroden is dead. He still gets his divine powers!) He believes Aroden never died, and has this homeless-Fisher King-crazy man roleplaying thing going on.

It works better with the AP, because he's LN, and is more motivated to support the children of westcrown / foster a revolution / fight against those Thrunist bastards.

Totally! I'm envisioning multiple continuation plot ideas, in various degrees of flushed-outed-ness.

It would be a free pdf.

In the last couple of weeks some of the chat denizens and I were kicking around ideas of ways of continuing the Council of Thieves Adventure Path past the final module.

This discussion got me thinking about a nice community driven project. Elevator pitch: the community assembles the collective wisdom found in the GM Reference AP threads into a "missing manual"/ "AP #7" pdf.

Taking the Council of Thieves AP as an example, this AP #7 might contain:

• Ideas on how to continue the adventure past #6; for example: mechanics for managing the party-PC-wants-to-run-for-mayor-of-Westcrown; plot line for "the Queen sails down from Egorian with her army and the PCs enlist the help of the disenfranchised nobles, Order of the Scourge, and Andoran revolutionaries to wage an actual revolution against the Thrunists!
  
• Collected (usually James Jacob provided) errata
  
• Community created handouts - for example, my Liebdaga's Infernal Contract, or my build your own Chelish Crux
  
• Tools drawing together the AP metaplot together. When running an AP I frequently have to go through the entire thing and draw together how everything fits together; for example, Treppa's heirarchy of noble houses, or, more extreme, a visual timeline of the AP a la XKCD's movie narrative charts
  
• Hooks for folding one-shot modules into the AP; for example, I ran my party through Masks of the Living God, swapping out the Razmirian cultists for Mammonites
  
• Analysis of how to improve specific combat scenarios; for example, removing the staggered condition from Liebdaga to make the Big Boss Fight more fun for the players.
  

So:

#1: Any interest in this? I'd probably start with CoT.
#2: What would Paizo's position on a AP Missing Manual community published content be? "That's awesome?", or "That's copyrighted material, piss off!"

Cheers!

He emailed me in May, sounded like he was still working on the Anarchist Gamemasters Cookbook. I hope he finishes it, the guy is super talented.

There are a number of other threads on the forum on this topic. Of the commercial VTTs, I believe d20pro is the best. It is lacking one critical feature that causes MapTool to beat it (in my humble opinion): line of sight/dynamic fog of war. The d20pro team has been working on that feature.

On the Hero Lab integration bit, I'll toot my own horn and point you to towards my open source TokenLab, which automagically exports from HeroLab to MapTool.

I use a projector mounted setup as well. It's fantastic. Action shot!

Merry Christmas, friends!

What Rob said. I've actually already done a lot of the heavy lifting of the second thing he mentions (representation of content) in my TokenLab software utility. In this case, I take the custom output dtd and output a bunch of Java classes from the DTD using JAXB. The code to parse the actual xml content ends up being trivial:

public Object parse(File xmlFile, Class documentClass ) throws JAXBException {
JAXBContext ctx = JAXBContext.newInstance(new java.lang.Class[] { documentClass });
Unmarshaller um = ctx.createUnmarshaller();
Object o = um.unmarshal( xmlFile );
return o;
}

So, yeah, +1 on representing both the content and rulesets as generic XML with a rich DTD specification.

EDIT: -1 on storing the schema sqllite or some db. Plain text in a hierarchical directory structure is the easiest to, say, write unit tests against. Add the db only when ya need it.

I'd definitely watch, if not contribute, to such a project with interest. I undertook a similar project using drools a few years ago, and man, its a big project! Big enough to send me slinking back to my corner.

Realm of the Fellnight Queen would in well, as would the Harrowing, and both are very cool modules.

Whoohoo! Submitted!

Hawt! My money. YOU HAZ IT.

It wasn't a letdown. The party had a blast and it was a tough fight, as expected. Definitely recommend removing the talisman of the twin/staggered condition completely.

Summoners. Hate how they slow down combat.

Wow, my party has spent six months in Infernal Syndrome and are about to face Liebdaga tonight. (We only play 1x/month ... adults with jobs/families/responsibilities.) After reading through the various posts about Liebdaga I'm definitely going to remove the staggered condition, give him some additional hitpoints, and have him and the cage in combat at the same time.

Fingers crossed this BBEG isn't a big let down!

My party got to the Black Magga piece last night. It went very well.

R1: Magga rises out of the water, kills the lone hero she's depicted holding in the module art.
R2: Magga tears into the church in a frenzy.
R3: Magga uses her Breath of Madness ability on the crowd.
R4: Magga bellows out in draconic, "You puny mortals can't begin to dream of what I've lost because of your stupid dam!" And continues to smash/destroy the church. I decided, on the fly, that Magga had left a clutch of eggs in her lair in the Storval Deeps, and the combination of being (potentially permanently) separated from her lair, her home in the Storval Depths, her clutch, and being forced to splash around the low rivers of southern Varisia has seriously pissed her off.
R5: Magga uses her 3/day spell like ability and demands that party member 1 go to her lair in the Storval Deeps, find that which is most valuable to her, and return it to her.
R5: Magga uses her 3/day spell like ability and demands that party member 2 go to her lair in the Storval Deeps, find that which is most valuable to her, and return it to her.
R6: Magga uses her 3/day spell like ability and demands that party member 3 go to her lair in the Storval Deeps, find that which is most valuable to her, and return it to her.
R7: She casts desecrate on the ruined Church, curses Erastil, blesses Lamashtu, and swims downriver.

The desecrate bit was the last straw for the residents of Turtleback; taking a look at the destroyed town, their newly unhallowed church, and their dead mayor (yeah, Magga killed him first), they decided that the safest place for them was Fort Rannick and everyone went north.

One the party starts journeying north into Storval I figure I'll create a little side adventure for them whereby they are compelled to adventure into Magga's lair.

Version 0.15 released. Includes:

- a new resources tracker (screenshot)
- basic d20 support
- more Mac friendly.

Enjoy!

Another viewpoint: How many potions of each kind does he have, and how many encounters do you run per day?

He's got one of each of the potions I listed at the top of the thread. Typically 2-3 encounters per day, but it all really depends on what we're playing at the moment.

The bigger thing IMO is the caster level. So long as he is using PFS legal potions his potions would be locked at caster level 3 and 5 which is more appropriate for his character level.

yeah, totally agree.

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful replies, I feel like I understand this much better now, and agree that it doesn't seem to be entirely broken due the amount of time it takes to use.

If I were to nerf it, I'd make it so that you could only have one allocation active at a time, ever. or make several levels of the spell (lesser, greater) that determine how high a spell you can use with it; ie, the 2nd level A.A. lets you do spell level 3/CL 9 or less; level 4 A. A. is spell level 6/CL 12; level 5 A.A.is spell level 9/CL 15 or less; etc.

Even with move actions, it takes an action to drink an extract, then another to swish the potion. Multiply that times 5...

Is that right? The way I read the accelerated drinker trait+alchemical allocation is: 1) alchemist moves, and drinks the potion as part of his moving action, 2) alchemist spits the potion back into the vial it came from as a free action, and 3) alchemist does whatever as a standard action.