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The scenario requirements list the tiers for this adventure at 7-11, but by my calculations, no one will be at level 7 until after playing at least 21 scenarios. Is this intended to be run a month later than it is released?
Nope, you can reach 7th after your 18th adventure -- 1 + (18/3) = 7
1 2 3 @ level 14 5 6 @ level 2
7 8 9 @ level 3
10 11 12 @ level 4
13 14 15 @ level 5
16 17 18 @ level 6
19 20 21 @ level 7
22 23 24 @ level 8
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2. The estate is infested with nabassu (from the Tome of Horrors) (but why?).Query:
Is the Tome of Horrors Nabassu different from the CR 15 Nabassu used in 'Into The Maw' (Dungeon #147) which was listed as being from the Fiendish Codex I?
See here for answer.
Creative Director
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Yup; as I mentioned on the other thread, the Tome of Horrors Revised nabasu is different than the Book of Fiends nabassu, and in more ways than the spelling of its name. The Book of Fiends one is not open content. The Tome of Horrors one is, and that's the one prospective authors for this scenario will need to get ahold of.
More importantly, it can't use the death gaze in combat even, since then a PC killed by this would become an undead.
I don't think Paizo wants to eliminate the abilities of the nabasu. I believe they just want an undead free zone until the PCs meet the demon. Otherwiss they could have picked any other demon.....
More importantly, it can't use the death gaze in combat even, since then a PC killed by this would become an undead.
This is not true. Beyond that, I mysteriously stick by what I wrote in the open call text.
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Death Gaze (Su): Death, range 20 feet, Fortitude DC 15 negates. Humanoids who die from this attack are transformed into ghouls within 1d4 rounds and are under control of the nabasu that created them. The save DC is Charisma-based. (If the nabasu dies, any ghouls under its control become free-willed.)(I'm not trying to be contrary, I'm just citing the source material so everyone knows which particular text I'm talking about.)
Wow that's a horrendously broken ability. I think I might just skip this scenario entirely.
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Creative Director
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Wow that's a horrendously broken ability. I think I might just skip this scenario entirely.Death Gaze (Su): Death, range 20 feet, Fortitude DC 15 negates. Humanoids who die from this attack are transformed into ghouls within 1d4 rounds and are under control of the nabasu that created them. The save DC is Charisma-based. (If the nabasu dies, any ghouls under its control become free-willed.)(I'm not trying to be contrary, I'm just citing the source material so everyone knows which particular text I'm talking about.)
It's not broken. The nabasu is a tough, scary demon. And it can only use its death gaze once a day if it's the least powerful of its kind. Dangerous and scary, yes, but hardly overpowered or broken.
As for the no-undead requirement—that's strictly because we've had WAY too many undead in these scenarios so far. Not only does that get dull for the rogue and the enchanter, but it also gets boring just from an adventure standpoint to face so many of one type of creature.
Designing an adventure that features a nabasu that prepares the PCs in some way to face a creature with a death gaze and shying away from including undead in the adventure is part of the challenge of this particular assignment, in any event. FREE HINT: Only humanoids who die of the nabasu's gaze become ghouls. Other creatures just die. So if there haven't been any humanoids for the nabasu to get to... it wouldn't have undead serving it.
And just because we want to avoid having another undead-fest doesn't mean that a monster that makes things into undead can't do that during the adventure. Not at all. It just means that we're tired of seeing so many undead.
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It's not broken. The nabasu is a tough, scary demon. And it can only use its death gaze once a day if it's the least powerful of its kind. Dangerous and scary, yes, but hardly overpowered or broken.
Ohhh it's only once per day, okay then. Though I'm still not a big fan of Save or Die stuff, I still have to really look over the creature. I've come up with a little bit of a story seed, I'll see if I can develop it more over the weekend. This one is definitely a bit more hair-pulling than 19 (which was pretty hair-pulling). I really hope there's a 'blank-slate' open call coming up.
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Creative Director
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There probably won't be any blank-slate open calls. The nature of these adventures is such that they serve many masters, and as a result, each one has to help build brand identity and all that good stuff. We've done very few products where we gave the author total free reign to do whatever they wanted to do—in fact, "Clash of the Kingslayers" is the only one that really comes to mind where we didn't have a predetermined idea of what sort of product we wanted it to be.
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There probably won't be any blank-slate open calls. The nature of these adventures is such that they serve many masters, and as a result, each one has to help build brand identity and all that good stuff. We've done very few products where we gave the author total free reign to do whatever they wanted to do—in fact, "Clash of the Kingslayers" is the only one that really comes to mind where we didn't have a predetermined idea of what sort of product we wanted it to be.
Have you never had a freelance writer come up and say "I've got a great module idea that would fit perfectly into Golarion", or "I want to write an adventure that focuses on the Acadamae in Korvosa"? That totally blows away my preconceptions of how the industry works.
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Creative Director
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Apologies for the previous post; weird British humour at an ungodly hour of the morning.
But asides from points already made, I have heard that people are at their most imaginative, when given a set of restrictions to operate within, rather than being told 'whatever you want'.James Jacobs:
Any chance of the managing editor posting on the Ustalav thread where I copied some more of the Ustalav queries I'd originally posted on the Campaign Setting thread?
Ustalav questions! I'll let Wes know if he doesn't sniff them out on his own... ;)
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Creative Director
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Have you never had a freelance writer come up and say "I've got a great module idea that would fit perfectly into Golarion", or "I want to write an adventure that focuses on the Acadamae in Korvosa"? That totally blows away my preconceptions of how the industry works.
During the days of Dungeon, yes. All the time. With the exception of the Adventure Path modules, the vast majority of the adventures were proposed completely by the authors.
But with Golarion, we've had a different situation. For the first year or so, there WERE no books to go to for world materiel, so in order to build that world and the adventures to go within it, we've been forced to take on more of the concepting of adventures and products in-house. Certainly everything in Pathfinder's adventure paths are pretty much adventures that the authors wrote to an outline that we provided them... although we tend to leave those outlines as open as possible to author input. For the modules things have been a bit more on the author to come up with ideas, but again, with the exception of "Clash of the Kingslayers," most of the modules have gone through some pretty heavy adjustment between initial proposal and final product. And in all cases, we've given the authors at least a little guidance, like "This adventure has to take place in Absalom," or "This adventure has to have a dragon fight."
As Golarion gets more and more familiar to those outside of Paizo, we'll hopefully be able to have authors approach us with new ideas of their own. I actually think we're at that point now, with the Campaign hardcover out and additional books like Gods & Magic and the guidebooks giving folk a bigger insight into the world we're building. But since the span of time between idea and on store shelves is generally about a year... the time lapse there is not insignificant.
James Jacobs:
Any chance of the managing editor posting on the *Ustalav thread* where I copied some more of the Ustalav queries I'd originally posted on the Campaign Setting thread?
Nope, he can't be bothered. He's kind of a busy guy these days with the *mumblegrumble*... and, you know, the *razzlefrazzle*... and well the muffins, yeah, they need love too.
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Creative Director
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Clarification:
Are Haunts covered by the 'no undead' stipulation in force on the current round of submissions?
Haunts are complex mechanisms that would require the writer to expend valuable wordcount in introducing the GM to how they work. There's not really enough room in a scenario for something like this, so I would avoid them were I coming up with a proposal for a scenario.
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RPG Superstar 2013
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I include some details for scaling with each of my proposals. Eats a few words, but I think there's room to show off creativity there. If you can scale your encounters with something besides +1 monster or a couple of hit dice, I think the encounters are more fun.
Just don't get overly complex, which is also something I do a lot. : }