Question about CoT's Meta-Plot [Spoilers Ahoy!]


Council of Thieves

RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32

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With the frustations that have been expressed about this AP (lack of sense of progress, inability to directly challenge Thrune's diabolic government), would this main plot of this AP have worked better in a non-evil realm?

(For example: Mendev?)

RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32

Lord Fyre wrote:

With the frustations that have been expressed about this AP (lack of sense of progress, inability to directly challenge Thrune's diabolic government), would this main plot of this AP have worked better in a non-evil realm?

(For example: Mendev?)

For the lack of progress issue the location doesn't really effect it, it's more an issue with the adventures themselves (which I'm enjoying running and my players seem to be enjoying so it hasn't really come up).

And for the inability to challenge Thrune's diabolic government is really an issue with players (and DMs probably) expecting more out of the AP than it is. My players had no knowledge of Thrune, Cheliax, or Golarion when we started the AP so they didn't feel that the AP needed to go in that direction.

It could be moved anywhere where the right situations exist: corrupt/evil city government, outside military force with beurecratic (sp) influence within the city, outside government that will put the city down by force if bad thing occur. My Golarion-fu isn't nearly good enough to tell you where that could be found.

Liberty's Edge

The story is about Westcrown. It's not about the Thrunes, really, they're too far away. Maybe after the AP is over, the party can think about that, but for now all they want to do is fix their neighborhoods so they can walk out on the streets at dusk again.

Then the city explodes and the PC's have to glue the pieces back together.

It does feel like you're not making progress for most of the game, but I'd be very disappointed if the Council of Thieves' head could be tracked down within one or two books. He's supposed to be elusive. You're supposed to hate this guy way before you ever meet him.

Grand Lodge

I agree with Lyrax.
However, my party is most of the way thru book 3 and still haven't really heard of the Council. Their focus has been on inspiring the people and ridding Westcrown of the shadow curse.

Really, I think if you focus the players' attention on the shadow creatures, it should carry you thru the first half of the path: Parts 2 & 3 are all about dealing with the curse... until they get distracted by the little problem in Part 4.


Actually, my players are learning that they live in a horrible place where things are so corrupt that they have little chance of making forward progress.

So, it actually SUPPORTS the creepy "we're doomed" feeling.

No problems here.


Scribbling Rambler wrote:

I agree with Lyrax.

However, my party is most of the way thru book 3 and still haven't really heard of the Council. Their focus has been on inspiring the people and ridding Westcrown of the shadow curse.

Really, I think if you focus the players' attention on the shadow creatures, it should carry you thru the first half of the path: Parts 2 & 3 are all about dealing with the curse... until they get distracted by the little problem in Part 4.

Having played through and just finished CoT, we also were much more focused on the Shadow Beasts.

In our case, there was some frustration in character on the protractedness of the "17 step plan" as we called it (because Part IV seems a sidetrack, the party generally felt denied of a good solid victory after taking out the Bastards and until the end of Book 5, and especially the player of the Gnome Sorcerer was constantly chomping at the bit with "we can't pause for even a day--we have to get rid of the shadow beasts").

We had no problem with not getting to take on Thrune--we really just wanted to help Westcrown and were loyal to the cause of order so long as we could do good (two Paladins of Shelyn, one Paladin/Duelist of Sarenrae). Heck, Abrogail II named my character Mayor of Westcrown (after a face-to-face session that left everyone on the edge of their seats and sure she would have me killed, but fortunately I rolled a 19 and got over 50 on Diplomacy).

We actually found out that Chammady was in the Council early on--during the feast, we used some sneaky tactics involving buffoonery to determine that she had some form of Uncanny Dodge, then asked the imp in the Asmodean Knot if she was in the Council. However, we didn't really act on this because we didn't care too much about the Council at that point.

It's something of a misstep, I think, that the Council has such low prominence early, and one that is probably partially responsible for the bad PR of this AP (even though we had a blast playing through it, for the most part). I mean, yeah, it turns out that Ilnerik is allied with the Council in Part V, but that's more of a coincidence. The Council isn't actually responsible for the main problem the PCs have been trying to stop, so Part IV feels like "Darn it, we were just about to get Ilnerik and now this?" while Part VI is "Darn it, we just stopped the Shadow Curse, and now those Council people are raising a ruckus again?"

Our GM helped add to our hatred of the Council by having them kidnap family members, strongarm the Sorcerer into a secret infernal contract to kill fellow part members (with his mother as collateral), and other psychological warfare, and it more or less saved the end and made it awesome. I'd recommend following that avenue as well (perhaps she'll make a thread to post some of her pointers/changes, as she made a lot and they were excellent).

Silver Crusade

IC: BobRoe beware of your treasouns tounge lest I Morgrym Rufano Hellkinght Scorge of Asmodeus track you down an excise the insterment of treason againist the mighty house of Thrune from your body.

My Master sees all and may dispatch me to deal with the chaos that you spread, For the House of Thrune are HIS loyal servants. He Who holds the contracts holds all just ask the Drovenge's, they fell to my glaive and there souls were forfit to Asmodeus.

Paralictor Morgrym Rufano of Westcrown

Battleing aginist The House of Trune is beyond the Scope of the AP
Perhaps Pazio will write a continuation AP for the PC;s who survived
the Council of Thieves to continue on in Chiliax.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

If the players go in expecting that the grand finale is the House of Thrune they will be disappointed. Given this, it's a misstep to make adventure 1 about rebels against the House of Thrune--that opening makes promises the AP is not planning to keep. There are various ways to fix this.

We had PCs who were a (minor and struggling) part of the Wiscrani aristocracy, which solved the problem conclusively. They didn't look at the Children of Westcrown as a model to emulate; they saw them as dangerous hotheads who needed to be co-opted and redirected.

For us as for many groups, the nightbeasts were the big PC goal. We found that it worked better (except for power level issues, but they are fixable) to run module 4 after module 5. It is an annoying distraction where it is. (My GM didn't think we would do it at all, but for reasons that seemed good at the time the PCs provoked it--they realized that the Folly was going to blow and, rather than pressuring Egorian to stop it, deliberately sent messages that wouldn't arrive in time. Then they were sorry--the blowup was worse than expected--but at least it did not feel like a digression.)

Council of Thieves is my favorite AP so far, but we got very far from the main line presented in the modules. (By the time the main line has you fighting the Council of Thieves, one of our PCs was *on* the Council of Thieves. I recommend this if you can pull it off; it's totally fun.) I don't think I would have liked the main line much; it has good stuff but the connections between the parts are troublesome.


I DM'd this AP and my players had a great time. We took a break on finishing the AP to start another campaign. Now we are ready to finish this and save Westcrown.
My only complaint is that some of my players were clueless/forgot between sessions on the internal politics of the city. Most were interested in the hack n slash of it all. I believe its a great enviroment to role play have hack n slash and create Westcrown any way you want I guess.
I'm thinking that the party Druid will have a run in with the Mother of Flies. This is going back to the old Druid class were there cannot be two Druids in the same area. Even though the Mother of Flies is not a Druid Hagwood is hands down her domain.
The party Rogue will have to fight the emerging Thieves guild made up from parts of the Children of Westcrown gone bad. Someone has to fill the vaccuum.
I hope you guys can share some post C.O.T. adventure ideas with the boards.
My only complaint would be that the modules literally fell apart. I have Dragon/Dungeon magazines from the 1980's that are in perfect condition.


Of all the APs I've ran, this took the most work. While books 1-3 worked fine as a continuous story, I agree that the Council itself is completely uninvolved with the PCs, at least until the beginning of part 5. Even then, there are no names to go with the faces of their enemies except for Chammady and Eccardian.
What I wish had been flushed out more (i.e. what I added)-

-Further demonstration of the inter-tension between Ilnerik's Nidalese shadowfolk and the Wiscrani thieves. I like the idea of Nidal (and Zon Kuthon) waging a shadow war to wrest control of Westcrown from Cheliax (and Asmodeus), using Ilnerik as a proxy, a figure that even the council is afraid of. This is hinted at by some of the corpses found in Walcourt, but having further dissenting elements against the shadow folk given by council members would have been cool.

-The "Council" of Thieves... You mean, that group of Drovenges and Oberigos skulking in the corner? As written, the Council of Thieves is just made up of the aforementioned two families. Other than the specialists that occasionally appear (Maglin, Sian, Vrax, most of whom don't have last names), no other families are listed in the entirety of the path as having any connection to the council. Just these two, one which gets axed by the middle of Part 5... despite the fact that the backstory suggests that all the powerful families of WEstcrown have some connection to it.
It would have been a lot cooler to have to either sway loyalists of the council's old guard toward the PC's cause or to have to protect the same members from assasination attempts. Other than the interactions with the Guxers, Ghivels, and Mhartises (who aren't even council members), very little is done with the overall metaplot of interacting with the council.

-A way for Eccardian to make an appearance before the final fight. It bugs me when there is absolutely no foreshadowing of the BBEG, especially when he's the campaign's main villian. I can almost picture their reactions when Melevangian comes out of nowhere with his +28 attack and cleric levels... "Who the hell is this guy?? Why have we never heard of him? He's worse than Ilnerik!!"

-Generic-ness of Council Captains. I'm aware of the space issues in modules, but this could have been managed better. I don't really need the stats for enemies that will pose absolutely no threat to a party of 11th level PCs... this means anything CR 5 and below. I'm looking at you, Cutpurses, Thieves, Roland's Toys and the Blacknapes... These stat blocks could have been removed to provide different types of Council Captains. Since power levels in Golarion dictate that 10th level characters are exceptional and unique, it seems preposterous that over a dozen individuals who use the exact same methods and exact same gear would congregate in the same area, especially since the Council is not a military organization. Having a two-weapon fighter assassin or urban rangeer or even magus assassin is far more interesting than having my PCs tell me what the bad guy's gear is before he's even fired an arrow.
FWIW, I statted up 11 differrent council captains to use in the final module for the different encounters present, from a Delayed Bomber Alchemist Assassin to a very nasty Halfling sniper.

-Jerkiness of Hellknight Metaplot:
Book 1: PCs free prisoner from Hellknights. PCs may or may not kill Hellknight recruits. Hellknights do nothing.
Book 2: No mention of Hellknights.
Book 3: Not even gonna question what happened to that Half Elf??
Book 4: It's a Devil!! RUN AWAY! Wait.. aren't we trained to fight these??
Book 5: And still nothing...
Book 6: One of the Hellknights assassinates the captain of the guard. How this happens, where and why aren't even mentioned. All the sudden, this brooding menace that has threatened to bring down the Inquisition on the PCs heads has arrived... but it wants to help them? Why is the order tearing itself apart? How did the Signifer come to kill herself and how does that fuel her into becoming a ghost? Ghosts are supposed to be the result of some wrong that must be righted, yet the Signifer's transition is almost like an ectoplasmic equivalent of choosing Lich-dom, a cold decision and not a driving need to remain behind to accomplish something. What's worse is that all of this is done off camera, without any meaning given to it. The Signifer's ghostly appearance might have some meaning if she had met or vexed them previously, but with the Hellknight's inactivity for four modules, it almost feels like a random encounter with a dangerous monster.
This more than anything else deserves some foreshadowing, even if Paralictor Chard has to contact the PCs earlier than module he appears in. Something, anything should have been done to get the PCs more involved with the Hellknights. As it is, it just feels tagged on.

Anyways, the path itself has some awesome parts, most notably Pett's "Sixfold Trial". Yet, it needs lots of work, particulary in the 5th and 6th module, to make it feel like the players are up against more than a pair of siblings and their reoccuring stock badguys.

I am preparing to run the last module for my group in a week, so hopefully, I can give their characters the finale they deserve.


Yes, I agree. It's 'against the shadow beasts' for quite a while and then a u-turn.

So, I'm trying to...

a) play up the Council members when I can, in all earlier books.

b) emphasize that they are -behind- the shadow beasts

c) increase the violence, gangster style. I'm about to kill another of the Children of Westcrown. 'One of ours, one of yours' approach. Nothing personal, just business.


Lyrax wrote:
The story is about Westcrown. It's not about the Thrunes, really, they're too far away.

And yet ... forming a resistance cell is what Book 1: "Bastards of Erebus" is all about. And, yet, this is not what the path is about.

  • As the GM is directed on pages 10-11 ("One large assumption that Council of Thieves makes about the PCs is that none of them should be particularly fond of the way the government in Westcrown currently operates.") -- which, of course, is completely irrelevent beyond book 1.
  • Go back and re-read Janiven's act of sedition on page 13.
  • The Order of the Rack Hellknights actually have a larger adversarial presence in the adventure then do the actual "Bastards." -- Yet, you are expected to help them in Book #6

Kind of a bait and switch.

Now, given that the real thrust of the AP is dealing with the Shadow Beast curse, why was the start of the AP set up in such a different direction? Why was it even titled "Council of Thieves" when something like "Shadow Hunters" would have been more appropriate.
And, the vampie "Ilnerik Sivanshin" was a much more relevent "BBEG" then the invisible to Book #6 Ecarrdian Drovenge.

Actually, what the Adventure Path really needs ...

  • A New Book 1 to replace the "Bastards of Erubus" Perhaps having the group being actually formed by "Bluehood."
  • New Traits to refocus on the Shadow Beasts.
  • Book 5 "Mother of Flies" needs depowerd so that It can follow after Book 3 "What Lies in the Dust".

This would be a MUCH more logical and internally consistent path.

Sovereign Court

1 person marked this as a favorite.

I'm about to begin running this path.

I don't really have the madGMskillz to to swap book 4 and 5 around.

Would people recommend simply boosting the presence of the hellknights and council and making it clear that the shadowbeasts are agents of the council?


1 person marked this as a favorite.
GeraintElberion wrote:

I'm about to begin running this path.

I don't really have the madGMskillz to to swap book 4 and 5 around.

Would people recommend simply boosting the presence of the hellknights and council and making it clear that the shadowbeasts are agents of the council?

I would suggest doing four things.

  • Downplay the resistance elements of "The Bastards of Erubus" adventure. One idea would be to have Arael captured and needed to be liberated from the "Bastards" rather than the Hellknights. I would suggest a separate "Bastards" safehouse so the rest of the adventure remains intact.
  • Also, consider rewriting Janiven's speech to be about the failure/incompetence of the Hellknights/Dottari in quelling the brigand problem (which is still plenty treasonous) rather then the Anti-Thrune tirade it is now.
  • Give the Council a larger presence earlier.
  • (Not sure how to do this one) Give Ecarrdin Drovenge a visible presence earlier. His current role is far too subtile.

Bonus: At some point, between "The Bastards of Erubus and The Twice Damned Prince, adding or adapting a side quest where the heroes can interact in a non-hostile (or even favorable) manner with the Hellknights would be helpful. Even have them being actively useful during the disaster in "The Infernal Syndrome" would help.

Sovereign Court

The Thread Necromancer wrote:
GeraintElberion wrote:

I'm about to begin running this path.

I don't really have the madGMskillz to to swap book 4 and 5 around.

Would people recommend simply boosting the presence of the hellknights and council and making it clear that the shadowbeasts are agents of the council?

I would suggest doing four things.

  • Downplay the resistance elements of "The Bastards of Erubus" adventure. One idea would be to have Arael captured and needed to be liberated from the "Bastards" rather than the Hellknights. I would suggest a separate "Bastards" safehouse so the rest of the adventure remains intact.
  • Also, consider rewriting Janiven's speech to be about the failure/incompetence of the Hellknights/Dottari in quelling the brigand problem (which is still plenty treasonous) rather then the Anti-Thrune tirade it is now.
  • Give the Council a larger presence earlier.
  • (Not sure how to do this one) Give Ecarrdin Drovenge a visible presence earlier. His current role is far too subtle.

Bonus: At some point, between "The Bastards of Erubus and The Twice Damned Prince, adding or adapting a side quest where the heroes can interact in a non-hostile (or even favorable) manner with the Hellknights would be helpful. Even have them being actively useful during the disaster in "The Infernal Syndrome" would help.

Hmmm,

Perhaps the PCs could find an extensive dialogue of letters between Palaveen and E.D.?
A bit clumsy but I don't think they'll mind.
I may give Ecardian a supply of unusual coins that were stolen from some tomb that he has kept in a lockbox to fund the petty uprisings - finding all of them with the same strange currency will link the events and help create a sense of mastermind behind it all.

I'd already decided to change the rousing speech - good ideas.

I think I'll keep the hellknights rescue but will throw in some sidequests liberating slaves who are being smuggled by the Council (yep, they even want to dodge tax on slaves, and in my Westcrown slavery may be legal but it is frowned upon and most slaves just pass through Westcrown). Maybe they could work with some hellknights to rescue some slaves, then at the end the hellknights want to hand them back to an earlier owner and the heroes want to free them?

THanks for the ideas.

Silver Crusade

We just wrapped up our campaign after Infernal Syndrome. The DM was a bit burned out. The whole time I felt like I was missing something with the plot, I kept waiting for pieces to fall into place. As it was the events felt marginally connected. Now that the game is over I am trying to see what was missing.

I still don't get what was going on with Delhaven. We go get this artifact and then the mayor's house blows up. I felt like the adventure was going somewhere with the whole Delhaven bit. The night beasts never felt like the end goal of the AP. I always thought they would be a midpoint and then lead to the real enemy. But we go get this artifact and do nothing because we have to rush into an infernal 9/11?


karkon wrote:
But we go get this artifact and do nothing because we have to rush into an infernal 9/11?

Yes, that is a problem with the AP as written. As several other GMs of this AP have suggested, I'm going to be swapping book 4 (the infernal incident) with book 5 (ending the shadowbeast threat after destroying the vampire controlling the opposite part of the artifact) in the CoT game I'm currently running. I'm confident that will make the whole story flow better.


This is the AP that kind of broke me of running Pathfinder. There is lots of promise in the overall story, and the Sixfold Trial is one of the finest commercial adventures I've ever run. It was great.

The problem is, there are several parts of the AP that just don't quite connect the right way.

I'll try to list my biggest problems with the AP, and why I just really ceased to have fun with the whole adventure path by the end of book 4.

Spoiler:

1. The opening of the AP really pulls a few bait and switches, and can give PCs the wrong idea about the whole point of what they are doing.

The Player's Guide says that the PCs should have a problem with Westcrown's government, and want to change things.

Janiven's speech makes it sound like the group is going to be in full, open rebellion, but then the adventure proceeds to explain that the point of the Children of Westcrown is to make the town a little better and deal with crime, not address the tyranny of the government.

Finally, the PCs are invited to meet with the group, and immediately they get screwed, through no action of their own, into being fugitives. If the Player's Guide had mentioned that they would be on the run, or even begin as recruits of an organization that was potentially on the run from the law, this might have been different, but it just says that they should be willing to work against crime and corruption in the city.

My group ended up having a lawful ex-military dwarf that wanted to work against crime and corruption in the Dotari that was ready to turn Janiven over to the Hellknights after her speech, and a chaotic bard that was ready to kill everyone in power in Cheliax. It did not make for a good start to the campaign.

I probably should have seen this coming with the set up, and warned the PCs about the instant fugitive beginning, but I didn't.

2. The adventure gives you some vague hints about how to find the hideout through the sewers, but then, if they find the hideout, it screws them over, because the point of he sewers are to wander around in the sewers until the PCs get a level. Not the most compelling beginning to an adventure.

I made this a bit more fun for the PCs by having them run into the goblins in the sewers while they were having a "torble slurping contest," where they saw who the toughest goblin was by seeing how much damage they would take from slurping the acidic innards of the torbles jiggly bits.

3. The end of the first adventure, the PCs may not be the right level (even with story awards that amount to giving them a ton of XP for crossing the street at the right time), so to fix this, the GM is told to have them do a few missions for the Children which are vaguely sketched out, but without any stats, essentially telling the GM that he's got some encounters to plan, and that he should make them make sense.

Between the "wander and have random encounters until you level" and the "do some missions that the GM has to come up with until you are the right level," this just didn't really feel like a complete adventure.

4. Delvehaven wasn't bad, but by the end of the third adventure, you kind of had the idea that vampires are involved, and that the missing Pathfinder is the key to the Shadow Curse, but if the PCs turn left instead of right, they get an artifact that blows up vampire boss creatures super easy.

5. Also, another example of a great idea that was kind of clunky in execution, the Devildrome was a neat idea, but was so vague in how it worked, with strange rules that seemed to exist solely for the purpose of having the rules work however the PCs needed them to work "you can summon things, or you can fight someone's summoned things."

Some more work on how that section worked overall would have been nice, especially if the PCs would have visited the place later on their own.

6. The titular Council of Thieves was hinted at in book one, and by book three, it's a non-entity. In fact, if you do shift to focusing on the Shadow Curse, it doesn't seem important at all. Sure, the tiefling assassin was tied to the Council, but there really isn't a good way for the PCs to figure this out.

7. "All of the sudden . . . " seems to be the mantra of this adventure path. Just when the PCs think they are going to go after the vampires, "all of the sudden" the mayor's house blows up. Then "all of the sudden" there are agents of the Council of Thieves "doing something," but hey, they must be important, because they exist.

8. This book begins the cavalcade of nuisance encounters. Many of the encounters both with the thieves and the monsters in the Nessian Spiral are pointless. I'm not talking about encounters that the PCs will win easily, I'm talking about encounters where the PCs aren't going to get a scratch on them unless 20s are involved on one side and 1s are involved on the other side.

9. Having a lot of things with low will saves in one area makes for an anti-climatic session if you have a bard or a enchanter in the party. A few bricks that "mind trick" vulnerable is fine, but most of the heavy hitters in the Spiral suffer from this problem.

Which means you just had cakewalk encounters followed up by "one shot" will save encounters.

10. There is a lot of talk about binding and contracts and the like, but in the end, having the contract, as written, makes it slightly less likely that the pit fiend will kill you. Having his soul object will make him slightly less likely to kill you. You can't rebind him or fix the bindings, because the pit fiend is suppose to get out to fight you.

In fact, somehow, to keep the pit fiend from breaking out, you have to destroy his cage and then kill him.

It seems like perhaps there should have been some way to rebind the pit fiend or fix the situation instead of breaking it out and then killing it (which, to be honest, has happened potentially with Malfeshnekor in Rise of the Runelords and the Daemon thing at the beginning of Legacy of Fire, meaning that AP regulars might get a bit annoyed at the pattern developing).

Not to mention the disconnect between having a powerful LN outsider bound to keep you out if you aren't suppose to be the "master," but that won't show up to help you enforce the contract if the pit fiend breaks out.

And the fact that the pit fiend and it's allies seem to want to cause chaos as soon as they can get out of their contract seemed a bit off as well.

I had to start throwing hints out to the PCs that there was actually a bet between Asmodeus and Mammon over control of Westcrown, and that Asmodeus was allowing the devils to run wild as a test of loyalty to the Chelaxians.

On top of that, I was angling towards explaining that if Mammon won, he got a little more freedom to follow his agenda and openly have worshipers, but ultimately he was still going to be following Asmodeus.

11. I never started running Mother of Flies, but lots of it involved more nuisance encounters. I know Paizo staff as said, before, that sometimes nuisance encounters let the PCs feel powerful. That's only true if the encounter has something fun to it, and if it takes "some" effort to defeat.

12. This adventure also had the colossal task of explaining the parentage of the main villains, who, by the time they find out about them, don't seem to have figured into much of anything.

Then they get to try to explain why the Council is important, why the PCs should care about a schism in that Council, and who the main villains are.

Then they get to save Westcrown from the Shadow Curse in time to find out that the threat that we've spent most of the AP building up to isn't the main threat, and the PCs don't get to enjoy saving the city, because "suddenly" the city is in greater danger.

13. The AP wraps up with "the city is falling apart, wander around and have encounters until you are the proper level to deal with the main villains."

Oh, and now you can spend those fame points that you spent the whole AP getting and couldn't use up until now to do stuff like convince people to help you deal with the city falling apart, which you could probably do anyway without introducing a new mechanic just for this purpose.

14. The main villains are suddenly important, but following why they are is kind of sketchy, especially when it involves devils being able to just claim souls without really having the charm of all of those neat, convoluted rules that usually make devils interesting.

"We get to claim her soul because your dad was a jerk, hope she doesn't turn on you."

15. While it is unlikely, you can have your PCs spend months and months devoting themselves to the salvation of Westcrown, "suddenly" the House of Thrune could show up and raze the city anyway.

There are lots of things that could have been done to fix this.

Mother of Flies and the Infernal Syndrome being switched would be good.

Having more encounters that had to do with a developing gang war and how it was making the city less safe would have been good. At least one of these kinds of encounters should have been happening per adventure, with lots of hints that the Council was suddenly more aggressive and trying to subsume smaller operators at the cost of the citizen's safety.

Having more of the "wander around to get XP" encounters fleshed out and connected to the story would be good.

Having fewer nuisance encounters would be good.

Having Fame Points be useful to help the PCs through out the AP instead of being a mechanic that only gets used at the end to do what the PCs might be able to do anyway might be nice.

Having the PCs perhaps being able to rebind the pit fiend or have the contract mean something other than "get into the room without fighting yet another outsider" would have been good.

Explaining why Mammmon's plan and the rampaging devils under Liebdaga were actually serving law with all of their destabilizing random destruction would have been good as well.

In fact, the more I think about it, this whole thing would have made much more sense if the secret shame of the family was a demonic blooded teifling taking over the Council and summoning a demon prince to thumb its nose at Asmodeus in his own territory.

I just burned out on the plot dead ends, holes, and disconnects. Plus getting all set to run encounters that were either cake walks or were resolved with bad will saves, or with the provided "I win" button against undead.

Lots of promise, my players really wanted to run around Cheliax after all of the build up in campaign material, but in the end, it felt like the AP was a casualty of putting out the RPG.

RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32

Are wrote:
karkon wrote:
But we go get this artifact and do nothing because we have to rush into an infernal 9/11?

Yes, that is a problem with the AP as written. As several other GMs of this AP have suggested, I'm going to be swapping book 4 (the infernal incident) with book 5 (ending the shadowbeast threat after destroying the vampire controlling the opposite part of the artifact) in the CoT game I'm currently running. I'm confident that will make the whole story flow better.

How are you adjusting the CRs?

Sovereign Court

Lord Fyre wrote:
Are wrote:
karkon wrote:
But we go get this artifact and do nothing because we have to rush into an infernal 9/11?

Yes, that is a problem with the AP as written. As several other GMs of this AP have suggested, I'm going to be swapping book 4 (the infernal incident) with book 5 (ending the shadowbeast threat after destroying the vampire controlling the opposite part of the artifact) in the CoT game I'm currently running. I'm confident that will make the whole story flow better.

How are you adjusting the CRs?

Yes, inquiring minds want to know!

Shadow Lodge RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16

Reading through all of this, I'm feeling rather better about my GMing of CoT. We're in between books two and three and it felt like there's a huge amount of background and scene-setting that I haven't communicated to the players but that seems to be more common that I thought it would be.

I very much like rkraus2's idea of bringing the Council into more direct conflict with the Children of Westcrown (or, as they are in my game, the Guild of Calamitous Intent. Don't ask.). I think I'm going to start throwing more shadow attacks at them, too; unfortunately, they tend to avoid the night, so it might be attacks on people they like or the shadows growing bolder and/or more desperate and attacking at dusk and dawn.


Lord Fyre wrote:
How are you adjusting the CRs?

I'm not sure how much my adjustments will help others, since the 5-person party is currently about 20,000 gp above WBL on average, and have the aid of a partly-redeemed Vahnwynne Malkistra (whom they are trying to get fully and permanently redeemed), as well as Dog's Tongue. So they're currently able to take on encounters above what their level would indicate.

I'll be increasing the CRs for most of the named foes in Infernal Syndrome by 2-4 (I'll also likely be reducing the total number of foes or combining some of the encounters), but so far I haven't decided yet how much to lower the CRs in Mother of Flies. It's a PBP game, so I can see how they do against the first few encounters and adjust accordingly (currently they're about to decimate the first CR 10 encounter in two rounds).


Rakshaka wrote:
-The "Council" of Thieves... You mean, that group of Drovenges and Oberigos skulking in the corner? As written, the Council of Thieves is just made up of the aforementioned two families. Other than the specialists that occasionally appear (Maglin, Sian, Vrax, most of whom don't have last names), no other families are listed in the entirety of the path as having any connection to the council. Just these two, one which gets axed by the middle of Part 5... despite the fact that the backstory suggests that all the powerful families of WEstcrown have some connection to it.

This is almost accurate, and you need to really hunt to find the exception (chapter 6, p. 11): "Westcrown has 12 major noble families and over two dozen minor ones—and nowhere else does the power held by the Council of Thieves shine more brightly, for of the 12 major families, eight have direct links to the criminal organization. Of these eight, four (the Drovenges, the Oberigos, the Salisfers, and the Diosos) had patriarchs or matriarchs who also sat on the Council of Thieves."

So the heads of four Houses are Council members. We know about two, and I'm making up the other two.

My situation is fortunate, because one of my players randomly selected "Dioso" from the list of noble families in Westcrown when she made her aristocrat character. Given that Chammady is planning on assassinating Lord Dioso, she'll be grooming the PC as his replacement loyal to her.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

What worked for our game was to interpolate several attempts by Eccardian to take down potentially troublesome factions *before the endgame*. We had a doppleganger attack on a Spera house; an attempt to take out the wizard school by various Underdark recruits; a doppleganger breeding operation in the Dospera (giving the PCs a chance to be the aggressors on that one); a political plot to take out an organized-crime family in the Spera; a demon-summoning plot to take out a Dravinge ally on the islands; a couple of oddly powerful and directed nightbeast attacks....

It was a lot of extra material. we generally double the amount of stuff in an AP, which is a ton of work for the GM but tends to make them run better.

The PCs kept picking up pieces, and they also kept building their own political power--every House they rescued, they tried to ally with, and they got their hooks into several other important factions as well. This led, somewhere between books 3 and 5 (everything got a bit out of order) to them getting recruitment pitches from both the Council of Thieves and Chammady. Due to timing, they ended up siding with the Council. They finally put a name to their hidden enemy and went to Vasindo Dravinge to say, "Here is what has been happening in the city, and here is why."

At that point the GM put in the Council assassination attempt--boom!

Eccardian needs to be doing something that the PCs can interact with, but to avoid a premature ending, he needs to be doing it indirectly. And that pattern has to repeat enough times that the PCs can see it *is* a pattern.


Idea to foreshadow Eccardian and Chammandy: they're both wet-works operatives and their plan involves a good amount of dead bodies, so let them be the ones who murder the power players in the Council. News of this will hit the streets and the PC's will learn about this Powerful Aristocrat being found dead from rapier wounds and blood loss.


The Thread Necromancer wrote:
GeraintElberion wrote:

I'm about to begin running this path.

I don't really have the madGMskillz to to swap book 4 and 5 around.

Would people recommend simply boosting the presence of the hellknights and council and making it clear that the shadowbeasts are agents of the council?

I would suggest doing four things.

  • Downplay the resistance elements of "The Bastards of Erubus" adventure. One idea would be to have Arael captured and needed to be liberated from the "Bastards" rather than the Hellknights. I would suggest a separate "Bastards" safehouse so the rest of the adventure remains intact.
  • Also, consider rewriting Janiven's speech to be about the failure/incompetence of the Hellknights/Dottari in quelling the brigand problem (which is still plenty treasonous) rather then the Anti-Thrune tirade it is now.
  • Give the Council a larger presence earlier.
  • (Not sure how to do this one) Give Ecarrdin Drovenge a visible presence earlier. His current role is far too subtile.

Bonus: At some point, between "The Bastards of Erubus and The Twice Damned Prince, adding or adapting a side quest where the heroes can interact in a non-hostile (or even favorable) manner with the Hellknights would be helpful. Even have them being actively useful during the disaster in "The Infernal Syndrome" would help.

While I don't think I'm going to be changing the first two points, I'm almost certainly going to take the rest of this into my own games.

Considering the characters are going to start out at level 7 to 10*, I'm pretty much going to start with Bastards of Erebus, and end with The Twice-Damned Prince, and while The Six-Fold Trial will be completed before The Infernal Syndrom and What Lies in Dust will be completed before The Mother of Flies, that's about the entirety of the semblance of order that I'm keeping. The various side-quests, plot-threads, suggestions, and clues are going to be thrown about throughout the entirety of it in a manner differently from printed.

It's still going to look like they're mostly after the shadows at first... but they're going to quickly realize that something else is up and it's pretty important.

* (Sort of. They started from another suite of adventures; I'm adjusting the level growth rate radically: they'll pretty much gain one level at the conclusions of The Sixfold Trial, What Lies in Dust, Mother of Flies, and The Twice-Damned Prince. They're also going to be severely weakened at first 'cause reasons. Anyway, it works for us.)

EDIT: to make a correction and clarify.


KnightErrantJR wrote:
I had to start throwing hints out to the PCs that there was actually a bet between Asmodeus and Mammon over control of Westcrown, and that Asmodeus was allowing the devils to run wild as a test of loyalty to the Chelaxians.

Exactly one minute too late to edit. Sigh. Well, at least I get to make a longer post.

I'm going to use a variant of this idea. The "bet" is instead between Mammon and Baalzebul using their respective pawns (Eccardian and the Mother of Flies, respectively) to gain a foothold of worship and incredible power in the world and their cults flourish. Asmodeus is allowing this... and also actively encouraging/allowing/assisting (though never directly or even semi-indirectly to make sure that he couldn't be 'accused' of meddling) the PCs... because ultimately he wants both Archdevils to fail, and, in so-doing become even more beholden to himself.

As to the city? Meh. It's one city... and a mortal city at that, whose patron deity is dead, and, regardless of the outcome of the PCs actions, it's going to be under his thumb anyway by virtue of Thrune still ruling the country and, thus, the city.

To Asmodeus, his pride is such that he can't see them ever being a threat (and he's probably entirely correct), and he's more than willing to use mortal pawns to manipulate his officers into losing face (and thus prestige) and thus becoming ever-more indebted to himself as their continued power and prestige relies on Asmodeus' good graces. And Liebdaga's binding probably wasn't done at Asmodeus' (direct) authority... but probably Asmodeus tricked one of the two cronies into asking for 'permission', which Asmodeus simply noted that Leibdaga was already under said Archdevil's authority (thus apparently giving permission).

Further, later, if Leibdaga escaped, the Archdevil responsible would require Asmodeus to broker peace to avoid severe political reprisals in hell (and Asmodeus, of course, would point out to Leibdaga that he never actually 'gave permission', and would carefully show him how he manipulated events to ensure that Leibdaga was eventually freed). If, on the other hand, Leibdaga is destroyed, Asmodeus could point out to his subordinates later how he manipulated the results of their own catastrophe to ensure that they didn't have an angry duke of hell after them and causing them trouble. Either way... he gains the political advantage over the Archdukes (and may make friends by giving consolation to a Duke of Hell, if he lives), which is far more valuable (and likely far longer-lasting) than a mere single mortal city.

In any event, Westcrown isn't really a big deal in the long scheme... and Asmodeus is always after the long scheme.

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