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 Recent Posts
I have just a little over 10 modules, and more than half of them take place directly in Darkmoon Vale and thereabouts, which is a great backdrop for new and rising heroes, but so far I have found only one module so far for Irrisen. Maybe in due time..? Is September due time enough for you?
Yoda8myhead, I can totally not argue with your list, (though Crimes and Misdemeanors at #2...?) except for #10 Alice. It seems to not belong with the others on the list. I'm curious why you like it so much. C&M is a major condender for the top spot, even. It's has such haunting moral ambiguity and deals with some incredibly dark subjects while maintaining Allen's normal level of humor. As for Alice, it's a modern day fairy tale and I love the fanciful elements it contains. While I think the ultimate realization the protagonist comes to is a bit shallow and clichéd, I think it's an often overlooked gem among a stellar catalogue of films.
Additionally, the rooms are divided by gender, so opposite sex partners are not permitted in shared rooms. There were, at last announcement, several spots available in the tier 1 female volunteer room, so both you and your wife could get free rooms by volunteering, they just wouldn't be the same room.
Keep in mind that Season 1 isn't fully published yet, which is why the information stops with the most recently published mod. We have been less than on top of keeping the {{Adventure overview}} templates added and updated as scenarios are announced and released. That's easy enough to do, however.
I tried the same thing, but players will be players, and fire happens. Every time they burnt the flowers, I make the whole party make Fort saves. After they're all infected, though, they lose some a lot of the hesitation about the flowers and the disease in general, since they can't recatch what they already have.
I played this on Wednesday and will be running it next week. I really enjoyed the scenario, but had a few questions. I'm sure I'll have a few more once I've taken the time to read it instead of just playing it. First, though, should the chronicle contain checkboxes for the two unique items like the other two Everwar scenarios? There's nothing to show whether PCs successfully retrieve the sword, for example. I'll post more questions after I read the whole thing.
Woody Allen has long been my favorite filmmaker. I think I'd rate his top ten as: 1) Purple Rose of Cairo
But choosing just ten films from someone with as large and diverse a canon as Allen is really tough. I feel guilty leaving off Mighty Aphrodite, Sleeper, Shadows and Fog, Bullets Over Braodway, Hollywood Ending, Zelig, Interiors, Love and Death, oh hell, and everything else.
The Free PRG Day module this year is a 16 page 1st level adventure that is legal for PFS play. Maybe we can get our hands on a few copies of these to run outside of official convention events. I know Rob will be running a table (or more?) of it, but figure guests can run it after hours if we can find it that weekend amid all the other excitement.
TCM is the only reason I'd get cable. I can most serialized shows on DVD eventually, or watch on Hulu or what have you, but the constant stream of great, rare, and often historically important films TCM provides without commercials is unparalleled. I love their TCM Underground, Silent Sundays, Summer Under the Stars, and 31 Days of Oscar programming especially. Did you catch the Harryhausen marathon they had before Race with the Devil tonight to celebrate the release of the new Clash of the Titans?
So what will future map folios include? If it adds value, I would be more interested in keeping it on my subscription. If you aren't including reprints of encounter maps, what will replace that? The Kingmaker folio will be a series of poster maps covering the entire Stolen Lands, hexes and all. Then in the fall, the Inner Sea poster map folio comes out, and that will be a 32 panel map of the entire Inner Sea region with every named location from every nation or region marked.
Since contestants can't change or comment on their submission until voting is closed, offering suggestions doesn't really do anyone any good anyway. If judges sent comments to the authors first and they had time to revise their entries before they went public, that would be a different story. As it is, Sean, James, and Wes will have plenty of opportunities during the development process to suggest changes and improvements in a manner that will actually serve to affect the final piece.
If you treat the pearls as extra spell slots, you avoid some of the loopholes Krome mentions. You can't for example use a 3rd level spell slot to prepare a 1st and 2nd level spell. But you can sacrifice a 3rd level slot to prepare either an additional spell of 1st or 2nd level. Likewise, you can't not prepare a 1st and 2nd level spell and get an extra 3rd level slot. Any PC trying to pull either of those with their character or a pearl of power should be branded a cheese weasel across their forehead and sent home without their dice. But since you can use higher level slots that you actually possess to cast lower level spells, I still don't see what's unbalancing in allowing the same with a pearl. If I spend the money for a 3rd level pearl and I use it to get another magic missile, that's one less fireball I get. Where's the problem there?
I have now run this several times, and each time it's just been those money-grubbing Qadirans rifling through the tents trying to get their faction mission accomplished. The "good guys" have always been busy chatting up the lumberjacks and trying to heal them or get to the bottom of their infection. In any case, I think stealing a few hundred gold pieces from the evil Lumber Consortium isn't such a big deal. The specific lumberjacks at this camp are all gonna die of the plague anyway. The only time I marked down players' wealth was when they set fire to the cart before checking it for treasure. Only one of the scrolls made its save, but after dividing by two and then again by six, the difference was hardly noticeable.
I'm finishing up the sequel to this scenario this week and I have to say, this is going to be a mind-blowingly awesome story arc! I can't wait to see Erik's final piece, as all I've seen to date is the outline. I encourage everyone to get their PCs up to 12th level ASAP so you can play this. You have no idea what you're in for!
Lots to respond to here, but I'll do my best. I think your analysis of the timeline and travel to and from Falcon's Hollow is sound, Doug, and I'll keep that in mind in future scenarios. I suggest GMs alter the timeline to put the PCs at Falcon's Hollow right on the verge of the larger outbreak, regardless of how long these things take them. I didn't adequately back into that timeline in my initial design though. VC Brackett is detailed more in Seekers of Secrets, which is now considered part of the core assumption of PFS, so I didn't use word count to further describe him. I probably should have. I intended several of the battles, especially those with cultists, to be relatively easy, seeing them as chances for the PCs to get themselves nice and infected or social encounters if the PCs chose to take that route instead. It's possible to only have two combats in the whole scenario if one uses social skills in encounters 2, 4, and 5. I'm sorry to hear that the final encounter wasn't challenging. I think that adding additional minis to the board to keep PCs guessing as to who is a combatant and who isn't is a good fix. At the very least they'll think they're up against a huge force until the bystanders have a chance to flee. As for act 3, I originally designed a much more complex skill challenge, involving specific skills in a specific order with different DCs, the success or failure cascading to the next check with bonuses or penalties. I think a creative party has an easier time now, since they can roleplay and try to justify just about any non-combat skill to gain bonuses. I like Josh's change to the act in development and think it runs much smoother than how I originally envisioned it. I will be running this on Wednesday, so we'll see then! I don't see a problem with the party splitting up for this act, since some could use Survival to search for rare herbal ingredients, while others could use Knowledge (local) to try to find information on rumors of similar diseases in the past. Basically, whatever PCs can justify to make the encounter more interesting should be encouraged; let them feel like they have a real impact on what happens. Parties who don't participate in the research should fail, the same way students who don't study for tests should have a harder time succeeding than those who put in the effort. If the party splits up, don't start the cultist encounter until they've completed Act 3. Hope that helps, guys. Did I overlook any other concerns?
Re: Ties to Carnival of Tears—
Spoiler:
There are two factions of fey in Darkmoon Wood, one evil and one benign. In Carnival of Tears, the good nymph queen, Syntira, wants to help the PCs defeat her sister and her evil ice fey. She wants nothing more than to end the ongoing hostilities between humanity and her people, but old grudges die hard. Neither adventure assumes the use of another, but I think it would be fairly simple to add this to the end of CoT. Your PCs will have already met Syntira and you could easily have her contact them again after a little bit of time to ask for their help again. I wrote a little bit more about making the fey the primary motivation in the scenario (instead of being ordered to the region by the Pathfinder Society) in this thread, but am happy to address any specific questions you might have. I hope you enjoy the scenario!
Glad you like it! I really wanted to write a scenario that made people want to run it, so I'm glad to hear that it elicited the desired reaction :-D Spoiler:
Yes, that's probably how I would do it. If you don't plan to use the Pathfinder Society as a plot hook, providing motivation directly from Syntira or her fey minions is an excellent way to play up that aspect of the scenario.
I had always intended for there to be at least one encounter with fey in the scenario, and the format of PFS scenarios meant that one of them had to be optional for both time and monetary rewards. I hope that encounter could be played either as a combat or social encounter and I also think it could serve as a template for similar fey encounters if you plan to run this unofficially. You might have the PCs encounter the infected dryad grove from which the satyrs are fleeing, or run into additional fey as they make their way from the lumber camp to the plague fields. It sounds like your pixie idea would also work. Whatever seems like it'd be good for your party. If the fey are the center of your adventure, though, I'd add in a face-to-face encounter with Syntira after defeating Vondrella to both deliver her the cure and the basin so that she can prevent future fey-bane plagues in the future. It'll also be a cool hook to continue the adventure since she could then send the PCs just about anywhere, either as another favor or to represent her as heroes of the Darkmoon fey.
I bought this PSS for one simple reason: It seems to give the PCs a chance to make peace with fey. Up until now, every fey-related Golarion adventure I heard of involved twisted fey doing horrific things. Good fey need some love! That was certainly an intention. In fact, my original pitch centered much more around this aspect than the final version, but if that's what you're looking for, I think you should be able to play these elements up in both official and unofficial PFS play. I look forward to more thorough feedback and a review after you've had time to read the scenario in more depth.
Can you elaobrate on how this scenario contrasts Hollow's Last Hope? While there are similarities, the two scenarios play out rather differently. Spoiler:
Hollow's Last Hope is primarily a scavenger hunt taking PCs through different parts of the region to find ingredients for a remedy. In The Pallid Plague, PCs play a more investigative role, uncovering who or what is behind the plague and then working to find their own cure instead of just crossing off items on a shopping list.
I'll second the above comment that I hope nothing here is offensive to you, snorter, and that wasn't the intention of the thread. I guess I would have been on less shaky ground had I not associated awkward gamers with a real disease that affects many real people. While the original intention of the post was the vent about my frustrations with some gamers, both here and in meatspace because I have had a lot of sensitive buttons pushed by quite a few people recently due to what I interpret as people simply not having a filter, I do think there is a real dialogue that can and should take place about the connections between stereotypical "gamer" social behavior patterns and psychological issues that may either attract certain people to this community or which may be synthesized within gamer culture in general. I guess I just went about it the wrong way and again I apologize if anyone was offended.
I will admit, I have DR 10/Asperger's. I find that few things get under my skin more than social awkwardness, and it was less a comment on this particular board than a comment on the types of people who frequent our hobby. And maybe I'm one of them too. I certainly seem to enjoy the game as much as the next guy. Maybe I don't realize my own social awkwardness. Maybe it's that which has made me especially susceptible to Asperger's Gamers over the last couple of months. I don't want to mention specifics, and not all of them are things on this board or even in the same circles, but I think I earned enough annoyance points earlier today to level me up to make this post. Note that I use Asperger's more for the general behavior mentioned and less for the disease from which I get the name. I know several people in meatspace with the disease and they are pleasant, if somewhat awkward people. Obviously, if someone has Asperger's Syndrome, they can't really be blamed and I'm an a+#!#~& for being an a$!###@ about it. But I don't think that the number of gamers that annoy me could all suffer from the disease. So I made this somewhat socially awkward post as something of an ironic venting. Whether the irony was evident is an indicator of my own Asperger's Gamer level.
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