I think some people need to take a story for what it is and try not to explain more than what is given. The best thing I can think of is the Orc and the Pie, written back in a Dungeon mag, you have an orc and a pie (ok and the pie is on the table). There done. Play with it.
Players (even DM's really) do not need to know why the orc is there, he has a pie. They do not need to know who baked it, or what type of pie, or who built the table. You have all you need to play, so play.
Sure - in fact there really is no need for anything more then the random dungeon generator in the DMG. It'll provide monsters and treasure just like the Orc and the Pie.
However I personally like more to my story then then an endless cycle of monsters with treasure that my players kill for no other reason then to get treasure and XP. In the end thats what the Orc and the Pie amounts to and I personally would never run that adventure.
But if thats what floats your boat more power too you. For me though things should ideally hang together and the PCs should be able to deduce information from the things they find in the adventure.
you know, I see your point, the gold could very well lead to another part of the story, or could simple lead to nothing more then a dead lead ( or a dead kingdom if you want that ) I am not saying at all that they should not dig and pull information from a story, but sometimes players should leave some things to faith ( and the dm for that matter ) that the table or the chair are not part of the plot, but the old rusty, still sharp sword might be worth the look.
I would not want to have a battle of knowlege with you or you players, but i could not keep a book of backstory for everything dungeon and every setting. Sometimes they just have to live with " the attack begain two days before you got there" or " you arive just in time to fend off the dragon" not worrying about the fact they took 2 weeks or 2 days to get there.
That being said, sometimes storyplot lines work, with graphs and times of events, and big backstories of everyone they meet, and cool heros like a good drow ... well sometimes good drow, with a big kitten named flully or midnight or bloodbath, something cute yet deadly.
A big nest of kolbolds that want to help but well.. they are kolbolds.
I have seem the points your players have made, and the ideas you have come up with to fix them, but they do seem to want alot if info from alot of very quick ideas. I do take it that they can't live with them ( being heros) do not know how the ogres are keeping alive for days on end with no food, and why the ettin did not try and kill them after getting a nice snack from them, (well with two head they fight over the idea)
I do hope that you get to play with them and just wondering do these players ever get to be DM at all and have to control everything going on , and the world, and the rules, and fire and wrath. and would they know all the history of the gold in the bags, or would they be working there little buts off trying to keep the player going, and trying ( just a little ) to kill them off.
I hope we can keep them all happy, but they have to give just a little,
after all , you are not god, just play one in Pathfinder ( all most said D&D, blasphemy)
To Jeremy
I do not think for one second many people would only want to kill baddies for money ( or pie nomatter what kind it is ) and have no plot.
That would be very silly, and killing all the nameless, faceless, mostly mute baddies for money or ep would not be fun.
But it has a place in somethings, and when they do not slow down or stop the plot. Simple baddies have a almost fill in blank type feel if they were not apart of the story.
The rule i go by is what is the plot.." find out why the water is riseing"
seems simple eought at frist, and the marry band head out to find what is wrong
they get to the dam (or fort or magic spring) and find ogres....
Well now they can do many things... kill them
play a game of red rover, red rover, over a cliff
a game of chess for all it matters, so long as when they win the ogres die of shame
the goal was "why is water in town, and not in river doing water things" so if any of these things the players do find out that
" a Lawful/evil stone giant . fisherman. wanted to flood the town for giggles"
well that has led to more "plot".
Or the playes say hell with the water, i am not building a levey and stay in town drinking.. well that is ok, good being the whole idea
or they go off the beaten and troden path to find more pie
well all the power to them.
But someday they will have to find out why the water was riseing, or the ogres will not know how bad they are at red rover, red rover
and yeah the story does need to have more then a orc and a pie.....
but they all start out like that.
I am looking forward to your replies
Kail'ar
( Marty works too)
I have had problems with Hook Mountain--it reads well, but seems to have logic issues when run.
There's been alot of great replies in this thread and Nicks replies especially have helped me answer alot of questions that I hardly even realized I'd had.
But back to the subject at hand! Knowing what your group really wants from the adventure is really important. If you know your players you can tailor the world so that they can get the most out of it. If you have investigative and curious players then you can add little details to the adventures, things to explore and add clues scattered about for some Sherlock Holmesesque moments. If your players are all sneaky acrobatic bastids then having a way to stealth past enemies or clamber along ceilings and cliffs is great!You know what your players want and its up to you how you give it to them. Until you describe something the players don't really know what it is. So, if I decide to add another tower to Fort Rannick they've got no clue that anything is amiss (given that they haven't read the adventure). If I decide the Ogres are being aided by a group of mysterious fellows dressed like monks who shun the daylight, the players won't pick up on if that's in the module or not, atleast not directly.
The roleplaying world is what you make it, even if you are running a module it's the easiest thing in the world to change a description, an NPC, an event etc.
Hook Mountain is a huge adventure. You've got deadly ogres in the woods, an assault on a fort, Cthulhu-esque monsters slamming into towns, ghost dryads, dam trolls and pit fiends!
For any group that has special preferences this is going to need alot of personal input. I haven't run this module yet, but I can already see parts that'll need further fleshing out to suit my particular player needs. I'll need to flesh out large parts of the travel route to the Hook, alot of the area around the lake. I'll propably add some minor side intrigue concerning the lake so that when I drop Black Magga into it it'll seem more significant etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say that problems like the ones Mary has aren't really that surprising when you have a great and engaged group of players. Players who are really interested in the story are generally the ones that make the most extra work for us GM's, with their incessant questions and sleuthing! =D
What I got from reading The Hook Mountain Massacre was a great adventure base. Lets face it, most of the hard work has been done here, with maps, NPC stats, a plot and loads of descriptions. That stuff is what takes me ages to do in my homebrew campaigns (which is why I tend to cannibalize modules for this stuff). It's hard enough sometimes to predict how ones own group will react to a situation. Not to mention if you're releasing a module that's intended for a international market! Imagine a group that always tries to seduce it's way past everything, or just uses somesort of ethereal shift to bypass everything, or burrow or something like that. You can't account for everything in your prep material as a GM, nor can you when writing a module.
Kail'ar makes a very good point about being a GM. I know myself that I often forget what it's like to be a player. And I find it really helps to sit down and not be the one that's calling the shots every once in awhile. It reminds me of the player perspective and helps me make the game better when I gamesmaster later on. It works both ways, as a player that rarely GM's you can start to forget what it really means to control a group of mad adventurers through lush scenery and murderous monsters. Some players even take it for granted. The best solution is to let them take the reins sometimes, get a taste of the powah! ^^
This is the second time I write this, boards swallowed my post earlier.
So here goes nothing!
I do hope that you get to play with them and just wondering do these players ever get to be DM at all and have to control everything going on , and the world, and the rules, and fire and wrath. and would they know all the history of the gold in the bags, or would they be working there little buts off trying to keep the player going, and trying ( just a little ) to kill them off.
My RotRL player was GM for SCAP and is about to run CotCT, so I'm sure he's aware of the GM's perspective. We have similar tastes as players, so the games are not particularly different depending on which one of us is GMing. The detail level has to be very high, either way. He's a bit better at improvising missing details and correcting contradictions than I am, though, so he probably won't tear out quite as much of his hair trying to make the modules work. At least, I hope so: I'm scared that CotCT will be so fundamentally illogical that we won't be able to enjoy it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
I really don't feel as though I have a player problem: we have compatible styles, and the games are enjoyable. Hook Mountain was just enormously harder to run than Burnt Offerings and Skinsaw, because it was so much more difficult to make sense of the events. (Having now seen the rest, I thought Fortress ran pretty smoothly, and Sins and Xin-Shalast were again rather difficult. But I'm not good at high-level play, so Xin-Shalast was pretty much guaranteed to be difficult.)
Mary
My RotRL player was GM for SCAP and is about to run CotCT, so I'm sure he's aware of the GM's perspective.
What's his user name on these boards? I'll watch for him in the CotCT forum.
My RotRL player was GM for SCAP and is about to run CotCT, so I'm sure he's aware of the GM's perspective.What's his user name on these boards? I'll watch for him in the CotCT forum.
Unfortunately Paizo thinks there is only one of us! But he lurks there--I know he's been reading your "backwards path" thread with interest. You guys may well hear from him when the modules come out--I suspect he'll be thinking hard about the setting logic.
I'm not sure how to get two people with the same email address to have different user names. I'll look into it.
Mary
|
My RotRL player was GM for SCAP and is about to run CotCT, so I'm sure he's aware of the GM's perspective.What's his user name on these boards? I'll watch for him in the CotCT forum.Unfortunately Paizo thinks there is only one of us! But he lurks there--I know he's been reading your "backwards path" thread with interest. You guys may well hear from him when the modules come out--I suspect he'll be thinking hard about the setting logic.
I'm not sure how to get two people with the same email address to have different user names. I'll look into it.
Mary
Go to Gmail and get a free second email for the purpose of having an account to post from?
My RotRL player was GM for SCAP and is about to run CotCT, so I'm sure he's aware of the GM's perspective.What's his user name on these boards? I'll watch for him in the CotCT forum.Unfortunately Paizo thinks there is only one of us! But he lurks there--I know he's been reading your "backwards path" thread with interest. You guys may well hear from him when the modules come out--I suspect he'll be thinking hard about the setting logic.
I'm not sure how to get two people with the same email address to have different user names. I'll look into it.
Mary
An alias should work. I've never made one myself but lots of posters have and they can surely tell you how its done.
|
|
I have a different solution; my group isn't going to the Fort, they're going to Turtleback Ferry because one of the characters' sister (a gnome traveling from Whistledown to the forest) went missing near the Kreegwood. They're going to search for her and come upon the Gauls (sis will be looooong dead since they are taking a riverboat to get there and it's about a 24 day trip just to Ilsurian) and they'll find the Rangers there hopefully.
I'm not close to running Hook Mountain, but my initial read-through suggested a certain teaking of the timeline too.
Mind you, I really have to stream-line these adventures for my group because we don't meet often enough to be able to play out every encounter (otherwise we'd NEVER get to the end). Firstly, I'm cutting out the Grauls entirely and simply replacing them with a single encounter with some ogres or ogrekin who've captured the Black Arrow patrol.
I'm also looking to have the PCs arrive on scene while the ogre's are laying siege to the fort. I couldn't find any ticking clock for the players if the fort had already been taken and, rather than have them decide that the ogres can wait while they report back to Magnimar for reinforcements, I thought that seeing the attack in full swing would motivate them to jump in and help fend off the ogres. The added bonus here is that any rangers the PCs save get to become their followers when they claim the keep.
Some time after that, I'll have a ranger patrol return with word that the ogres are up to something funny at the dam and encourage the PCs to go investigate. There, they get into a fight with the trolls and/or ogres and, in the process, stir up Magga, leading to her breaking the dam and the PCs seeing for themselves this 'uge aquatic beast riding a massive flood wave towards Turtleback. I predict a race to get to the town in time to save them.
Details are still vague, but that's my general idea.
Any thoughts?
|
I have recently read Hook Mountain Massacre, I am currently waiting on 4 and 5 next. Already have 6 cause thats when my subscription started.
Anyways I am going to be starting this soon but only after I have read all 6 adventures. I get what Mary's problems where and I agree to a point. I guess for me they are a lot less of a issue than for some. Not because I don't think about such things, but because I find I have to change details in every adventure I buy anyways. To fit my group and how things happened in the game.
I found a lot of the stuff in this thread interesting and certainly will help me out when i do get around to running it myself. While i would like more details myself(since that means less work for me to fill in the blanks) if it comes down to a choose between one more interesting encounter and filling in some blank details. i will take the former myself.
But I know a lot of it is about play style and all parties had valid points. i just wanted to add some support to Nic for a well written adventure as a whole and not knock anyones concerns or issues.
...
(1) The Graul farmstead is half a mile from the village and therefore must be practically on the road between the village and Fort Rannick. And has been there for at least a decade, given some of the details (the cache of baby-girl bones in particular). I caught this on the fly and moved it to an hour away, and my player still felt it was way too close--there's no way the rangers and townsfolk should have missed it.
...
I’m actually going to leave the Grauls that close and use an old Graul-Kreeg Family feud (inspired by Logue’s general theme) as another reason for the Arrows (and Turtleback Ferry) for not trying too hard to deal with them before, “the ennemy of my ennemy… ” .
But a “Under new management” message from the Kreegs’ has recently changed that situation...
I have a few logic issues as well with this adventure.
#1. Why are the giants getting ogres to make weapons for them? Ogre's are described as being very stupid and not competent at crafting. They seem like terrible candidates to be manufacturing weapons for the giant army. I realize that Hook Mountain is a good source of mineral wealth, but the ogres seem like a s!%+ labour force for this task.
Fix: I think I'll have a fire giant with Barl that is responsible for overseeing the forges. The ogres can do the grunt work and be his assistants, but he's the one with skills to make the weapons.
#2. The floodgate system for the dam seems ridiculously over complicated. Most dams have a spillaway gate built off to the side of the main dam that kicks in once the water level goes over a certain height. The "floodgates" in the dam itself are mainly used when the dam operators want more precision control of the water level of the lake. The ogres have actually made a spillaway in their chipping at the dam. So you don't really even need to use the floodgates. The problem with the unintentional spillaway they created is that over time it will erode the integrity of the dam and the dam itself will be at risk (but this would in theory take years).
Also even if the Runelords didn't make a proper spillaway, the entire operational premise for their floodgate system seems ridiculously complicated for a pretty simple mechanism. I mean its a cool idea in a way, but it just seems like there would have been a much easier way. Why not just have a construct that monitors the dam and pulls the lever for the floodgate whenever it is deemed necessary or even more simply just have them open all the time? They would only ever kick in once the water level got too high anyhow, thus severing the function of a spillaway system.
Fix: I may have the remains of a construct that once served as the operator for the dam. He pulled the levers when necessary. Grazul destroyed him a few years back when he moved in. This negates the need for the pit fiends and the skull ripper (though that could still guard the levers for the floodgates). It actually isn't necessary for the heroes to pull the levers and trigger the floodgates since the ogres have created a spillaway for them but taking a big chunk out of the eastern part of the dam (the lake briefly flooded the dam, but this newly created "spilllaway" is now functioning and water is draining out from the lake to relieve the pressure on the dam). By investigating the dam they can still discover the destroyed Thassilonian construct that operated the controls and they can gradually let more water out by pulling some of the floodgate levers.
In response to #3 by the OP (6 years ago). I'm going to have a few more ogres and a stone giant on the dam. They have fortified themselves with a wall of ogre corpses that blocks access between them and the structure where the trolls are. The stone giant will be ever watching that structure, suggesting that there is something in there of concern to the ogres. The wall of corpses adds some defence to the ogres but also gives the PCs the clue that something has killed a lot of ogres. If the PCs engage the ogres the trolls will be watching and will come out on the dam to join the fight and help finish the ogres and then the PCs.
As for Black Magga. I think that there will be much discussion in Turtleback Ferry about what should be done. Half the village will want to pick up and move south, while the other half feel the place is their home and are stubborn about leaving. The heroes don't get to "save" Turtleback Ferry. Without the Black Arrows for protection and with Black Magga in Claybottom Lake the village is in a dire predicament. One that is a bit beyond the PCs to fix. What the PCs get is information about the bigger story and larger threat to Varisia, so for that reason all their efforts are not entirely wasted. They can still potentially save the villagers by leading them south to Ilsurian. Maybe one day when Magnimar can afford to send enough men to regarrison the fort Turtleback Ferry might become a place that can be inhabited once more, but as long as Black Magga is a threat in the lake living there is a big gamble. Say la vie. The heroes don't always come out totally on top, and can't always solve every problem. I think that is okay.
|
|
In regards to the controll mechanism being overly complicated I just look at it as the runelords basically showing off (Hey look how powerfull I am when I can get pitfiends to power my otherwise mundane dam) For a society led by people who build superweapons/plate there cities in gold/make mountain sized carvings of themself the explenation they did it because they could kind of fits.
Logic.
Good ideas. Consider them stolen.
CJ
In response to #3 by the OP (6 years ago). I'm going to have a few more ogres and a stone giant on the dam. They have fortified themselves with a wall of ogre corpses that blocks access between them and the structure where the trolls are. The stone giant will be ever watching that structure, suggesting that there is something in there of concern to the ogres. The wall of corpses adds some defence to the ogres but also gives the PCs the clue that something has killed a lot of ogres. If the PCs engage the ogres the trolls will be watching and will come out on the dam to join the fight and help finish the ogres and then the PCs.
Speaking as a player who hasn't read the DM's notes and stuff, we just killed the ogres with long range fireballs and assumed that the trolls we found later on were some sort of allies of the ogres. No logic problem for us! It's only from reading this thread (now we're on to Sins) that I found out that there might have been an issue at all.
As for the Grauls, I think our GM did move them slightly further away, but the info we got in Turtleback Ferry suggested that they 'keep to themselves, we don't interfere with them and they don't interfere with us'. Again, no problem. (Until we met them and found out what they were up to, anyway. PS give Mammy Graul a dimension door spell to get out of her dead-end trap room like our GM did; that way we had to fight her twice.)
BLack Magga was really very dangerous to our party, until our two paladins used their smite evils on her and nearly killed her in one round. The rest of us felt like bystanders/victims. Not really a good encounter because of her DR and SR, and area effect confusion/weird stuff. Paladins = BM is too vulnerable; no Paladins = TPK or near to it.