|
Incidentally, will Hayato be part of the iconic party for this AP? I know Paizo is no longer including stat cards for iconics with the AP modules, but they still show up in the artwork (as discussed recently in several threads here regarding Carrion Crown's all-female iconic team).The Iconics we'll be using to illustrate Jade Regent will be the monk, the witch, the samurai, and the druid.
So Feiya is going to be in 2 APs in a row? I suppose it does make sense since she is (IIRC) ethnically Tian, even if she's from Irrisen by birth, but still, it makes her in 2 APs in a row.
That works pretty well, honestly.
I've observed elsewhere that Ameiko, as presented and developed in "Burnt Offerings," has "NPC love interest of a PC" written all over her. She's practically fan-service to the large contingent of players who are also into anime and/or manga, she gets cast in the role of damsel in distress whom the party has to rescue, and in spite of that she's also made out to be smart, capable, and charismatic (she's a bard, she almost has to have above-average charisma) and potentially very helpful to a bunch of adventurers new to Sandpoint.
Having looked at some of the groups running through RotRL in the Play-by-Post forums, it seems as though at least one PC took a romantic interest in her in the majority of those campaign. In the longest-running one, DM'd by Aubrey the Demented/Malformed, the Varisian bard and Shoanti fighter were competing for her affections for a while, in a friendly sort of way -- the fighter told the bard to "take care of Ameiko" when he was badly wounded in the fight with Malfeshnekor and thought those might be his last words.
You could even set it many years in the future, if you wanted to get crazy experimental, and have Ameiko have passed away and have her child fill her role... that might be too weird though. In any case, there'll be guidelines as to what to do if, in your campaign, Ameiko ended up dead or gone or missing or married or whatever.
It probably doesn't matter, I doubt very much we'll be running JR with the same group composition, anyway. The DM wants to run a Hero game after we're done with RotRL, which is likely to be around the time the next AP after JR hits the shelves (we've been playing since December '09, and we're almost done with "The Hook Mountain Massacre"*).
If I were to DM it, I'd probably leave Kavren and our current party out of the backstory, and just make RotRL part of the recent history the new PCs remember. Whoever it was that defeated Karzoug in that timeline might more likely be up in the mountains running Fort Rannick than living in Sandpoint four years later.
Alternately, if I were to play in it with a DM and a group amenable to this, I might retcon Kavren's role in RotRL so that he'd still be involved with/married to Ameiko, but only a 3rd-level character at the start of JR. A Wizard 2/Bard 1 wouldn't be a terribly unbalancing character to include in a group starting out on the new AP, and a character who participated in the events of "Burnt Offerings" could easily have missed out on "The Skinsaw Murders" and thus fallen by the wayside as his erstwhile companions continued down the adventure path.
Maybe he contracted ghoul rot during the first run-in with the undead out in the hinterlands, didn't go to the Misgivings or to Magnimar because he was convalescing in the cathedral infirmary at the time, and therefore wasn't one of the heroes asked by the Magnimar government to go investigate the loss of communication with Fort Rannick. He'd probably still have helped defend Sandpoint in Fortress of the Stone Giants, but that would be the end of his involvement in the struggle against the risen runelord.
I'd guess that Ameiko having a non-Tian-Min lover or husband might complicate things a bit -- such a character would likely not be a suitable consort for the Empress of Minkai in the eyes of its nobility, and her inappropriate marriage (or, worse yet, unmarried cohabitation) with a gaijin† could be a potent political weapon for the Jade Regent to use against her. Lots of interesting (and potentially heart-wrenching for the characters) role-playing opportunities there, depending on how the storyline of JR plays out.
*Speaking of which, I want a word with Nick Logue about Black Magga, and the set-up that brutally punishes parties clever enough to head upstream to investigate the dam as soon as they hear that the water in Turtleback Ferry is rising. Several words, actually, most of them short, pungent, and unsuitable for polite society.
†Yes, I know Minkan (or Minkaii, as I think those who actually speak it would call it -- Minkan would be the Taldane word for that language, just as "Japanese" is the English word for nihongo) is not Japanese. Taldane isn't English, either, and if the Tian-Min have samurai, ninja, and geishas, they probably call people from outside Tian Xia gaijin, too.
The Iconics we'll be using to illustrate Jade Regent will be the monk, the witch, the samurai, and the druid.
So I guessed right? :-D Not that the clues were terribly subtle, of course; Elan the bard could probably have worked that one out.
We still need Meet the Iconics posts for Feiya, Balazar and Imrijka. Just sayin'!
Creative Director
|
So Feiya is going to be in 2 APs in a row? I suppose it does make sense since she is (IIRC) ethnically Tian, even if she's from Irrisen by birth, but still, it makes her in 2 APs in a row.Incidentally, will Hayato be part of the iconic party for this AP? I know Paizo is no longer including stat cards for iconics with the AP modules, but they still show up in the artwork (as discussed recently in several threads here regarding Carrion Crown's all-female iconic team).The Iconics we'll be using to illustrate Jade Regent will be the monk, the witch, the samurai, and the druid.
Yup. We've done that before with iconics.
We don't try to balance the iconics' "Screen Time" in an Adventure Path at all. We pick iconics that make sense for the adventure or whatever theme we wanted to go for.
In Feyia's case, she fit perfect into two adventure paths that ran back to back. We used Merisiel twice in a row before that (Serpent's Skull and Carrion Crown) so it's not like its a big new thing. ;-P
So Feiya is going to be in 2 APs in a row? I suppose it does make sense since she is (IIRC) ethnically Tian, even if she's from Irrisen by birth, but still, it makes her in 2 APs in a row.Incidentally, will Hayato be part of the iconic party for this AP? I know Paizo is no longer including stat cards for iconics with the AP modules, but they still show up in the artwork (as discussed recently in several threads here regarding Carrion Crown's all-female iconic team).The Iconics we'll be using to illustrate Jade Regent will be the monk, the witch, the samurai, and the druid.Yup. We've done that before with iconics.
We don't try to balance the iconics' "Screen Time" in an Adventure Path at all. We pick iconics that make sense for the adventure or whatever theme we wanted to go for.
In Feyia's case, she fit perfect into two adventure paths that ran back to back. We used Merisiel twice in a row before that (Serpent's Skull and Carrion Crown) so it's not like its a big new thing. ;-P
You need to be careful though. Some of those "Pay or Play Contracts" that some of the iconics signed with Paizo can be murder on the company budget.
By the way, anyone planning on running this adventure path should totally read 'Foreign Devils on the Silk Road' , by Peter Hopkirk.
Other good books:
Desert Road to Turkestan -- more than you ever wanted to know about a camel caravan
and of course, Travels of Marco Polo!
Ken
Good thought! Novels with similar themes could be very helpful to a DM looking for ideas to help set the mood of any AP. For this one, James Clavell's Shogun (and the Richard Chamberlain miniseries based on it) might help get a feel for feudal Japan, the society on which Minkai is apparently based.
As inspiration for running the third volume of the adventure path, the dangerous transit through the polar wastes at the Crown of the World, I'd highly recommend Dan Simmons' novel The Terror. It's based on a historical mystery: on May 19, 1845, the steam-powered, iron-reinforced icebreakers H.M.S. Erebus and H.M.S. Terror departed England under the command of Sir John Franklin, with orders to map the theoretical Northwest Passage along the arctic coast of Canada. Aboard the ships were 10 officers, 124 enlisted sailors... and 8,000 tins of undercooked, poorly-sealed, lead-tainted food purchased at the last minute and from the lowest bidder. Early in August 1945, they exchanged greetings with a pair of whaling ships in Baffin bay. Neither the ships nor any sailor aboard them were ever seen again by European eyes.
Archaelogical evidence and the oral histories of Inuit hunters provide an outline of what happened next: after wintering in a sheltered harbor off Beechey island in 1845-46, the ships were trapped in open pack ice northwest of King William Island in the Fall of 1846. In 1847, there was no summer thaw in that part of the arctic. In April 1848, after more than 18 months frozen in, the surviving members of the expedition abandoned their ships, now crippled by the crushing pack ice and out of coal for their boilers, and set out in a doomed attempt to reach the nearest British settlement, nearly 1,000 miles away on Great Slave Lake.
The novel adds a supernatural element to the story: a savage spirit out of Inuit legend stalks the unwelcome intruders in its domain, shifting its form in an instant from a gust of icy wind to a monstrous white-furred thing of dagger fangs and sabre claws, far larger than any polar bear and animated by a malevolent intelligence. Terrifying as this incarnation of winter's fury is, though, the true horror within these pages comes from Simmons' gruesome descriptions of the real-life symptoms of scurvy, and his depiction of the depths of depravity to which human beings can sink in conditions of extreme hardship and desperation.
one intresting way to demonstrate why teleporting isnt a creat idea... allow them an extra 4 levels and reroll all stats. Oh and the players get to CHOOSE every single roll. Then they get to fight one of those CR 20+ end of ap bosses. And see all the enemy stats.
ooops.. you all died despite being luckier than whats remotely possible. Care to try again?
Should fairly nicely prove the point, that they plain and simple arent one last bit ready.
one intresting way to demonstrate why teleporting isnt a creat idea... allow them an extra 4 levels and reroll all stats. Oh and the players get to CHOOSE every single roll. Then they get to fight one of those CR 20+ end of ap bosses. And see all the enemy stats.
ooops.. you all died despite being luckier than whats remotely possible. Care to try again?
Should fairly nicely prove the point, that they plain and simple arent one last bit ready.
That doesn't really hold up, though. The proper reaction to that kind of situation would be to train yourself to be a badass, then teleport. If you had access to teleport, the journey would be unnecessary. But then again, I can't blame you; there's definitely an undercurrent in adventure writing (that Paizo mostly avoids, because they're that awesome) that punishes players for being smart or clever.
I will say that I'm looking forward to this AP quite a bit; my group is pretty interested.
|
Creative Director
|
But she has to go now, you don't have time to train up to be a badass right now, and you don't have teleport right now.
And when you do get it, you should be almost there already.
Remember, there is some sort of time limit on this. This isn't one of the FF games, where you can go off and raise chocobos for a long time, and the EBBG is going to wait until you finally get back to the main quest.
Well... until the adventures are out, assuming that there's actual time limits involved that force you to race through the adventure are a bit presumptuous.
One of the MAIN themes of Jade Regent is the epic journey. That doesn't work well in a game with teleport if you put obvious time limits out there.
Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says "Give me your best shot. I can take it."
And it's a 6 demon bag
Egg Shen: Can see things no one else can see. Do things no one else can do.
Jack Burton: Real things?
Egg Shen: As real as Lo Pan!
Jack Burton: Hey, what more can a guy ask for?
Egg Shen: Oh, a six-demon bag!
Jack Burton: Terrific, a six-demon bag. Sensational. What's in it, Egg?
Egg Shen: Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!
From the D20 Modern SRD:
Six-Demon Bag: So long as the bag remains bound, the possessor gains a +1 luck bonus on all saves. Opening or sealing the bag is a move action that provokes attacks of opportunity.
Inside the bag are six small stones. Each stone can be hurled up to 60 feet, exploding at any point within range as designated by the possessor. Each stone releases a 15-foot-radius burst of energy or shrapnel that deals 5d6 points of damage, or half damage if a Reflex save (DC 15) succeeds.
Stone of Acid Rain: This stone releases a burst of acid.
Stone of Earth: This stone releases a burst of stony shards that deals slashing damage.
Stone of Fire: This stone releases a burst of fire.
Stone of Hail: This stone releases a burst of cold.
Stone of Lightning: This stone releases a burst of electricity.
Stone of Thunder: This stone releases a burst of sonic energy.
Once all six stones are thrown, the six-demon bag loses all of its magic properties.
Type: Wondrous Item (magic); Caster Level: 5th; Weight: —.
|
Creative Director
|
By time limits, I don't mean short time limits, you have only so long until the world ends (aka Second Darkness) time limits.
What I mean is that Ameiko wants (or needs) to go, and she isn't going to wait around for you to go from 1st to 9th level. Or anything like that, which goes against the Final Fantasy mode that I mentioned (where you could go off and level up, do side quests to your heart's content, etc., because the bad guy would never advance his plot until you decided to go after him). That would be a game with no time limits at all (and one where you could go level up, to beatthe bad guys).
Well... wait and see how the AP plays out. AKA: Ameiko doesn't wait around at all; the journey begins pretty much immediately AFTER she finds out what's going on... but there are a few reasons why teleporting across the world isn't a good idea or even an option...
Sooo the Five Storms make an appearance in Chapter One..why am I thinking "Big Trouble in Little Sandpoint"Heh... it's true that the name of the oni was originally inspired by "Big Trouble in Little China," but the group works very differently. It's a whole huge organization, actually, that doesn't have 5 specific specialists in it. It's only got one real leader, but a lot of various sub leaders of various power levels. The "Five Storms" in question actually corresponds to the five elements in Minkani culture.
Honestly...I'm new to fairly new to Pathfinder, but you just assured my continued business for as long as you guys print content. "Big Trouble in Little China" is the greatest movie of all time...thank you :)
|
Hey serious !
I can access the JAde regent products while going from the Home Page, Then Paizo products, then Pathfinder, then ...
But if I click on the Pathfinder RPG ... Pathfinder compatible ... Paizo ...
Then no Jade regent !
Is this a way to let us know that Jade Regent is done under an all-new RPG system ? :)
Cheers
|
Hey serious !
I can access the JAde regent products while going from the Home Page, Then Paizo products, then Pathfinder, then ...
But if I click on the Pathfinder RPG ... Pathfinder compatible ... Paizo ...
Then no Jade regent !
Is this a way to let us know that Jade Regent is done under an all-new RPG system ? :)
Cheers
Can you find any other AP's that way?
I find it by clicking on Pathfinder in the blue bar near the top of the main page. Then Pathfinder Adventure Path, then scrolling down.
|
|
Hey serious !
I can access the JAde regent products while going from the Home Page, Then Paizo products, then Pathfinder, then ...
But if I click on the Pathfinder RPG ... Pathfinder compatible ... Paizo ...
Then no Jade regent !
Is this a way to let us know that Jade Regent is done under an all-new RPG system ? :)
Cheers
Can you find any other AP's that way?
I find it by clicking on Pathfinder in the blue bar near the top of the main page. Then Pathfinder Adventure Path, then scrolling down.
All of them, except Jade regent