Dudemeister's KM3 VV - Additions and Changes


Kingmaker

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Grand Lodge

James B. Cline wrote:
Yes, last night my players clashed with the armies of Hargulka narrowly pulling out a win with negotiated help from Maegar's horsemen. The trolls sent small groups of goblins to block the roads and scrags up the river and attacked their capital from their piers, while another larger force waited to the west. The combined forces of the player kingdom's large army of sootscale kobolds and men and the horsemen barely defeated a 50 man army of trolls. Yes I made it tough, lol. Hargulka seeing the armies combined opted for a retreat so that he could fight them on his home ground, not outside of their capital, knowing that such a small kingdom would be bleeding from their treasury to host 2 armies. They followed him to his wilderness encampment and narrowly defeated him along with his green dragon. That sounded fun.

RPG Superstar 2011 Top 16

Ran the "spirit of earth" chase last week, and "spirit of air" climb last night. Great stuff Dudemeister!

Have you considered freelancing?

Scarab Sages

We have finally gotten up to the point in our game where I can use this set of mods. I have been a big fan of your Kingmaker mods so far, but this group is absolutely fantastic, since I am really emphasizing the fey aspect of the AP (Thorn Jill is perfect) and the centaur-Varnhold emnity is about to take center stage for a few players. I haven't really used Realm of the Fellnight queen yet, but I am having the Summer Queen and the Winter Queen (fey courts)have a war in the upcoming year. Winter will defeat summer and imprison her, plunging the kingdom into constant winter. The price for the Winter Queen to free her counterpart and end her long winter will be to deal with Rhoswen once and for all.

The players have been corresponding with Varn for a while now, and he is coming to celebrate with them very soon. I plan to have them all get along and form a trade agreement for stone and ale from Varnhold in exchange for crops and wood harvested from the Narlmarches. Then Varn takes a back seat for a good long while as their kingdom develops.

I have an inquisitor of Desna in my game, and for the longest time I kept asking myself, WTH does Desna need an inquisitor for? What would an inquisitor of Desna even do? I have given him a side quest to hunt down an aberration that causes nightmares and had him protecting travelers coming through the area, but re-reading VV reminded me that the Nomen worship Desna as the Moon Mother. So, I am having a Baku visit him as a messenger from Desna and send him to mend the rift between the Nomen and humans. Your whole Trust section with the centaurs is a perfect fit for this situation.

Thanks so much for creating this very detailed material and sharing it here!

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Erik Freund wrote:

Ran the "spirit of earth" chase last week, and "spirit of air" climb last night. Great stuff Dudemeister!

Have you considered freelancing?

Wow, thanks Eric. Like any overenthusiastic GM of course I have.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
redcelt32 wrote:

We have finally gotten up to the point in our game where I can use this set of mods. I have been a big fan of your Kingmaker mods so far, but this group is absolutely fantastic, since I am really emphasizing the fey aspect of the AP (Thorn Jill is perfect) and the centaur-Varnhold emnity is about to take center stage for a few players. I haven't really used Realm of the Fellnight queen yet, but I am having the Summer Queen and the Winter Queen (fey courts)have a war in the upcoming year. Winter will defeat summer and imprison her, plunging the kingdom into constant winter. The price for the Winter Queen to free her counterpart and end her long winter will be to deal with Rhoswen once and for all.

The players have been corresponding with Varn for a while now, and he is coming to celebrate with them very soon. I plan to have them all get along and form a trade agreement for stone and ale from Varnhold in exchange for crops and wood harvested from the Narlmarches. Then Varn takes a back seat for a good long while as their kingdom develops.

I have an inquisitor of Desna in my game, and for the longest time I kept asking myself, WTH does Desna need an inquisitor for? What would an inquisitor of Desna even do? I have given him a side quest to hunt down an aberration that causes nightmares and had him protecting travelers coming through the area, but re-reading VV reminded me that the Nomen worship Desna as the Moon Mother. So, I am having a Baku visit him as a messenger from Desna and send him to mend the rift between the Nomen and humans. Your whole Trust section with the centaurs is a perfect fit for this situation.

Thanks so much for creating this very detailed material and sharing it here!

You're very welcome. I like the what I'm seeing with the fey courts. My PCs are current in the Armageddon Echo from Second Darkness dealing with the revenge of the Fellnight Queen.

Silver Crusade

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Using Dude's ideas for joining with the Nomen (I gave them a more tribal name and am using swahili for exotic feel, Nomen is just silly), here's what we've gotten through so far, things I like and would do differently:

- Heavy hints at Varnhold's fort about centaurs being in conflict spurred my party to seek them out for answers. Once they understood the centaurs more, they even buried the hides at the tanners.

- Encounter with centaurs on border, Diplomacy too high for this group to break ground, so I let slip the centaurs wanted what was stolen from them, and the thieves would know. Centaurs believe humans ("two legs", "hooomans") stole Skybolt. This party didn't know what they wanted until they consulted a sage on centaur customs (sacred items would be practical, for survival, yet ornate). Played the centaurs with american indian flair. Rather than jewelry, tattoos are main decoration.

- Had to do away with flat Diplomacy check and did a roleplay encounter once Skybolt returned as players weren't making the high roll.

- First night, before speaking with party, Aecora did a ritual in Sylvan about her people's ancient herds whose hooves shook the land like thunder, splitting and coming to these lands, followed by ritual words after each major point from the crowd. Finishes with reference to keeping watch over the evil in these lands, "ever watchful" being the proper reply. Party had a helm to comprehend languages, so felt they were privy to a rare and special event.

- Kankerata Run = excellent idea. Aecora suggests younger generation only knows humanoids as warbringers, would symbolize their effort to understand. Spirit of Earth Kankerata was sacred, so any efforts to harm would be viewed as sacrilege. No equipment allowed, though armor and clothes could be worn to protect "thin skins."

In retrospect, I should have read "chase" rules better as I wasn't sure where folks ended up when they achieved both tasks. Some tasks were near impossible (getting by Kankerata) for those without skill ranks. Should have used a "take a 20" option to spend 2 turns to get past a spot. Still, made for a good challenge, and only by the narrowest of margins did the centaur war-chief Danide beat out one of our PCs who took everyone by surprise. Limited Kankerata's hits to 1x per encounter area due to failure rate on some checks.

- Aecora iterated only by understanding their people would the party understand the evil they guard. Took a few weeks of "diplomacy" checks by players to join rituals, become more in tune with centaurs.

- Aecora tasked party with visiting and understanding symbolism of their sacred sites once next level of trust reached (the graveyard, linnorn bones, whispering grotto, talon peak).

We're paused at Talon Peak. Centaurs can't climb well, so they revere the aerie. Haven't decided how to play it out, considering the following:

Small peak, Kizakubwa (the roc) will give egg and insight if party can ride her (per Dude's mods). Shortest encounter.

Tall peak, climb rules, roc as above. Medium encounter, thrill of a mountain climb.

That Tower leads to dream-world of the elves who inhabited the lands long ago, trapped in a nightmare and unable to have final rest. Drawing inspiration from Dragonlance dreamweave from 1st edition. In that, party entered complex spell that kept elven lands in a nightmare, partially real and some illusion. There were 5 encounter paths and 5 versions of the player, 4 illusory and one real. It was possible up to the last encounter the player never figures out which is real, but if he did, the illusory ones could work to keep the real PC alive. Given the complexity of characters now as compared to yesteryear, was thinking of having the PCs inhabit randomly assigned unique elves to keep the rules simpler. Was thinking this was all a complex spell by Vordekai at the height of his power that did away with elves in these lands long ago.

Anyhow, adding a lot of mysticism to the Dunsward area, and the players love it. Dudemeister's inspirations to build trust has really expanded this module into the awesome range of play for us.


Dudemeister - how tall is your Talon Peak? Either in terms of approximate height or in terms of relative height to the rest of the Tors.

The original description is a "low mountain" that's only 250 feet (76 meters) above the surrounding ground, which is ridiculously low. It's not even close to high enough to qualify as a mountain using the standard definition of 300 meters. DC 25 climb check to handle the whole thing.

Your version is clearly much more of a significant feature of the landscape. It's high enough to have several separate encounter areas and to require days of climbing (Assuming a +20 average bonus, resulting in a check of 30 on average or when taking 10, that's 13.33 checks, which is 52-56 hours of straight climbing. Assuming 8 hours of climbing in a day, that's 6-7 days worth of just going up. Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest free-standing mountain on Earth (and 2nd highest overall) takes 5-7 days, but (based on my 10 minutes of research), you're hiking for 6-8 hours a day for the majority of it, rather than actually climbing.

I'd love to know how you would describe it to a party coming from the west - does it dominate the landscape, or is it just more of an distinctly shaped peak among several less notable ones?


I seem to have missed the Document about the race. Can someone point me in the right direction?
Many thanks!


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Rickmeister wrote:

I seem to have missed the Document about the race. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Many thanks!

I found the text inline, but I haven't seen the doc.

Therefor, I decided to do it myself. With permission of Dudemeister, I'm sure I can share it through Google Docs.

Link to a PDF version, with cards.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Thank you so much Rickmeister that's some excellent work. I never did never get around to putting together a PDF.


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I put together a series of 8x11 pages with some pictures to use with Dudemeisters Kankerata's run. I'm planning on laying them out on the table as I run it.

Pages for Kankerata Run

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Awesome work Alex_van_d.

I'm sure your players will appreciate the effort :)


Great stuff!
But I really wonder: Did your PC's played along? Living amongst the centaurs for month, earning their trust? I just took some of your ideas and packed it in a smaller time-frame. My PC's already became short-fused by the third task (the Kankerata run, which should have been the last one I would place upon them) and shortened this by playing a Plot-Card. Really a pity... I would have liked to to the run. Maybe I will have to create another chase (maybe in their capital?) just to try out the rules.

I can't understand how this shall work. Which party of PC's waits month after month, maybe just explore the rest of the map while there a human lives at stake? My PC's were thinking about missing a kingdom phase, because they want to rescue the people of Varnhold. At least they discussed the possibilty that the druid (one of our two rulers) could fly back to the captital at the end of the month, so that at least one ruler is present for a week.
I also already wondered about the advancement track when I read the module. Which party of players would do all the extra tasks and explore the whole map, before they investigate, what happened in Varnhold? My PC's are now at the entrance to the Valley of the Dead and they just got to 8th level (I don't use XP, but tell them, when to level up... sure I could haste things a bit, but that "feels" wrong...).

So, again, just out of curiosity: Did none of your players (and I'm not only asking DM, but also other DM's which adapted this great work of him) really were concerned about the people of Varnhold? Did nobody ever suggested, to search for them by themself or threaten the centaurs to tell them, what they know?

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

My players played along quite happily. Some of the Diplomacy rolling was done between sessions. Also while there's nothing stopping the PCs from just searching the whole map by themselves that's a lot of hexes, random encounters and crossing fingers hoping for the best. The PCs don't know where the Valley of the Dead is, nor do they just know where Vordekai's lair is.

Could the PCs just intimidate the centaurs into giving information?

Absolutely they could, but I made it clear that these Centaurs had been warring for years with Varn and that was the reason why Varnhold was such a small kingdom. Intimidating the Centaurs would be tantamount to declaring war and then the PCs will have a much harder time looking for the villagers as Centaurs attack and harass the PCs. There's no love lost between the Centaurs and Varn and so for the Centaurs it takes a BIG leap of faith to let the PCs just run willy-nilly across the land.

Lastly, my notes worked for my group and were tailored to their interests/motivations. There are other carrots to dangle perhaps completing the Kankerata Run or the Mountain Climb is a powerful ritual that connects the PC's to the land (providing a boon equivalent to a feat or medium wondrous item).


Of course they don't know where the valley is...
But on the other hand they know (or at least my players knew), in which direction the people of Varn went, before they vanished (in my campaign I had Big V standing on a hill near the city, where he collected the villagers in the Jars, which he transported with the portable hole).

And even searching and exploring each hex takes less time than befriending the centaurs... Don't get me wrong: I'm happy, that his worked out for you (and that all your precious work wasn't for nothing), but each other possibility takes less time, than working together with the cenaturs.

I guess this is a design "failure" in the module itself... If you play the encounter with the centaurs as described by the book, then the PC's will never be 9th level when they reach the crypt (if they go the direct way and don't do much exploring/questing beforehand).

Well, I will see haow my PC's handle the crypt now... yesterday they just got pass the stairs in the lake and triggered the trap in the room thereafter.


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Hi everyone -

First off, thanks for all your inspiration here Dudemeister, my players loved the run and I am using your trust score style of interaction. It's working great!

I wrote up a lot about the Nomen for my players to really get to know the centaurs and understand their rites and beliefs. After the run, I had Aecora and Tamerak (the centaur bard/ historian) relate their side of the history with Varnhold and their religious beliefs. They suggested to the party to commune with the spirits of the area to perhaps glean what may have happened to the Varnholders. In my game, the centaurs do not know what happened and were in fact wintering east farther in the Dunsward when the vanishing occurred, so aren't really of much direct help.

Spoiler:

They also know far less about Vordakai than as written. To them, he is but a figure in an ancient tale.

Aecora is heavily interested to know what happened to the people of Varnhold however, as she does not want the same to happen to her people.

Here is my google doc I made with all of the details of their religion, et cetera. I thought I'd share it with the community since I've taken so much from you guys!

Ethnography of the Nomen Centaurs

More info: GMs only!

Spoiler:

Further, the ghost stone is much more important in my campaign. Its original purpose was to shroud the elven observatory on the top of Talon Peak from Vordakai's sight, but after the elves left for Sovyrian, Vordakai discovered the stone and perverted it to hide his lair instead. It therefore has markings in both Ancient Elven (Elven + Linguistics DC 25) and Cyclops. The effect is essentially an epic-like version of hallucinatory terrain that is difficult to break. Nyrissa provided Maegan Varn (the replacement for Willas IMC, Maegar's daughter and lead scout) with a ring that allowed her to see through the illusion and discover Vordakai's lair, and sent a dream to her that suggested she explore in that direction. This of course led to Vordakai's awakening.

For the PCs, seeing through the illusion will be much more difficult. Unless the specifically explore in that direction and make the Will save (DC 35 due to being a remnant of Vordakai's mythic power) to see through the hallucinatory terrain. Instead, they can break the spell by collecting offerings from the spirits of the area, and by conducting a ritual at the ghost stone to dispel Vordakai's illusion and find his lair.

The ritual involves a miniature version of the ghost stone found where the mud men are among the remains of an elven courier (he had an ioun stone that grants +2 to int skill checks on him that was granting the mudmen sentience after millenia of being buried in the bud here), burning wormwood from the Nomen burial grounds, a feather from Kizakubwa, fresh earth from the bloodfields, and a bone of the Linnorm Zosh'tar. Additionally, it requires a relic of the Nomen people (the torc of moonlit passage, as described in the doc above).

To aid the PCs, I'm having them receive visions from Desna (Mother Moon) after completing significant tasks. They all received one that spoke to their individual personalities after the Kankerata run, and each one hinted at a piece of the ritual. By communing with the other spirits (Mainly Kizakubwa, but Zosh'tar and the Nomen ancestors will be helpful too), they will learn more about how the ritual is done. They're vague, but just helpful enough.

Hopefully this will make them explore the area and learn the culture of the centaurs in depth, to truly appreciate the area. I'm doing this because my players very much try to solve most situations with diplomacy, and this adds a bunch of flavor and things to do other than combat.

Thoughts welcome of course! And thanks again Dudemeister for a lot of inspiration!

Edit: Fixed the Google Docs Link


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Whirling Dervish wrote:
To aid the PCs, I'm having them receive visions from Desna (Mother Moon) after completing significant tasks. They all received one that spoke to their individual personalities after the Kankerata run, and each one hinted at a piece of the ritual. By communing with the other spirits (Mainly Kizakubwa, but Zosh'tar and the Nomen ancestors will be helpful too), they will learn more about how the ritual is done. They're vague, but just helpful enough.

Cool Ethnography Dervish! Thanks - like you, I have plundered resource from

many others on these forums. :)

So - taking that fact into account... ;-p
..care to share on the visions aspect of your post? Sounds interesting!


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That's incredible work here Dervish ! Much, much depth added to the centaur tribe.

I gather that Xamanthe fate is quite different in your world ?

I also very much would like to know more about the visions. If you have time to elaborate a bit on that aspect, of course.


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Philip Knowsley wrote:
..care to share on the visions aspect of your post? Sounds interesting!

Of course! Please understand that they are tailored to my campaign, but I'll put them here as reference.

Related is my (incomplete) document about the spirits of the land (once again, inspired by these forums), so that's here too, though somewhat unrelated to "solving" the riddle of the veil. Keep in mind that I tailored the rewards of attuning to my group.

Spirits of the Stolen Lands

Story visions (so far):

Vision 1:

Spoiler:

This vision went to the priestess of Desna in the group. Its intent is to show the need for both the torc of moonlit passage and burning wormwood in the ritual.

"Overnight after the Kankerata run, you have a vivid dream. In it, you are wearing a silver and jade necklace that depicts the phases of the moon. You are surrounded by an acrid black smoke on all sides, but above you see a clear, starry sky. The smoke is choking, but the stars and moon above are strangely crisp. You wake up after staring at the sky for a moment, choking and coughing as if your lungs were filled with smoke."

Vision 2:

Spoiler:

This vision went to the group's rogue, who won the Kankerata Run. He was given the option to attune to Kankerata. It is meant to emphasize subtly the fresh earth of the Bloodfields. My players love putting pieces together, so I try to be a little vague often.

"The night following the Kankerata run, a dream comes to you. You are once more in the vast open plains of the Bloodfields, facing Talon Peak. An azure swallowtail butterfly lands on your shoulder, resting its wings peacefully. Suddenly, like a great leviathan rising from the deep, directly in front of you Kankerata breaches the soil, mouth agape. His jaws open wide enough to swallow a horse, and you stand there, frozen with fear. Before you are engulfed however, you feel yourself slip into the soil beneath your feet, narrowly avoiding the bullette’s attack. As soon as it came, it is now gone. Rising once more to the surface, you see the butterfly has moved, now resting upon the pile of disturbed earth left behind by Kankerata’s passing. You stare at it a moment in the utter calm of the fields, and then wake up as the butterfly takes flight."

Vision 3:

Spoiler:

This vision went to the group's bard, the Kingdom's diplomat. The nod to his tusk (he is a half-orc) is meant to foreshadow the need for one of Zosh'tar's teeth.

"At night after the Kankerata run, you have a vision of yourself standing between the people of Varnhold and the centaurs of the Dunsward, holding each side at bay. As your words attempt to make peace between the two peoples, you see a small, azure butterfly light upon your right tusk. After you stare at it for a while, you wake up suddenly. Strangely, your tusk feels a little tingly."

Vision 4:

Spoiler:

This vision went to the group's paladin of Iomedae, a recent addition. He came to the kingdom following a vision of a light behind a mountain (his invention), which I decided was Talon Peak. This vision was meant to reemphasize his earlier vision, while adding new information (it points toward both the locations of the Ghost Stone and the mudmen.)

"The night after the Kankerata run, the vision of the mountain returns. This time, you are standing on Star Bridge in Veridia (in my campaign, this is a bridge built to honor Desna at the Thorn River Ford; the line from this bridge to Talon Peak points toward the Ghost Stone and the mudmen), and notice the light is coming not from the mountain itself, but from behind it. A small, azure butterfly flits on the bridge's railing by your hands. Then you wake up."

Vision 5:

Spoiler:

This vision went to the group's barbarian who has a bit of a thing for dragons. It's meant to hint at the upcoming battle they'll be having with Zosh'tar's remains (animated by our favorite necromancer).

"The night after the Kankerata Run, you have a vision of two glowing serpentine eyes behind a layer of shadowy smoke. The eyes glow brighter and brighter, but you still cannot see the creature's face despite the brightness. Eventually your entire field of vision is a bright green and you wake up. When you awake and rub your eyes, there are the remnants of a green glow around you in the shapes of butterflies."

Vision 6:

Spoiler:

The final vision went to the group's wizard, and is too long to reproduce here. In it there were a lot of things; he had been considering an alignment shift and beginning to worship Cayden Cailean - those were major themes. Aside from that though, I hinted toward the miniature obelisk the group had found (and the wizard had held onto) among the mudmen in the vision, once again using the butterfly to denote significance.

Putting it together:

Spoiler:

Kizakubwa is where most of the pieces come together. Following an offer of burnt wormwood and an ascension to the peak (the offering altar is below the final peak on a plateau with an elven observatory, but that's part of a different plot), the roc accepts tribute of a personal item from each party member. Because the roc is related to the First World, items of emotional significance are much like currency to it. (I plan on using this to foreshadow the Witchmarket later on). After each person submits tribute, the roc adds the items to its nest and bestows a vision upon all of them:

"As Kizakubwa screeches in appreciation of your tribute, your minds are all flooded with images. You see yourselves gathered in a circle around a tall obelisk, with (the priestess of Desna) seated in front of it. Before her is gathered a small collection of objects: The miniature obelisk you found among the mudmen is surrounded by fresh earth, and inside this circle of earth is a burning herb, smoking softly. (The priestess of Desna) waves a large black feather in her right hand, wafting the smoke up to the top of the larger of the twin obelisks. In her left hand she holds a wicked fang the length of her forearm. This she uses to pierce the skin of her right hand, allowing blood to drip into the fresh earth before her as she continues to fan the smoke. Suddenly, a light bursts forth from the large obelisk, going into the heavens. Clouds part above, and the landscape to the south of the obelisk alters, and a dry riverbed is revealed."

This riverbed leads eventually to Vordekai's river and his island. Unfortunately, the light is seen far away as well, and the entrance via the Valley of the Dead is now visible too. Xamanthe takes this route (like as written), and beats the party by a day or two to Vordekai's lair.

One other change to the lair is that the graveknight in the 6 player version is the remains of the centaur Ferralyn from the epic tale posted in the ethnography.


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So my group just got to VV this past Thursday and I'm loving what I'm seeing here, as mentioned in my own thread I plan to steal liberally =)

I am going to run CotCT in the future for this group - using their Kingmaker Kingdom and its capital in place of Korvosa - and was planning on chopping out History of Ashes because I couldn't think of a good way to fit it into that plot, and have already worked out some of the kinks of jumping straight from Escape to Scarwall with a short intermission. I think I will be cannibalizing heavily from it here. In particular, I want the players to, in addition to dealing with the "spirit of earth" Kankerata and the "spirit of air" Black Roc, have to contend with the "spirit of fire" Cindermaw and "spirit of water", a giant squid living in Lake Silverstep that I can conveniently crib stats off the HoA's Havero for.

Turning the southeast sections of the Nomen Heights into The Cinderlands and dotting the southern section of the Tors with a couple of volcanoes pretty much puts in everything it would need, and provides a few more built-in Trust quests for my PCs to pursue.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Righteous. I used the Havero stats after Varnhold Vanishing when their Elfgate opened up due to some cultists of Yog-Sothoth. The tentacles dragged a couple of PCs into the Fellnight realm in Revenge of the Fellnight Queen!


I might have to use an actual squid, or a nerfed Kraken, instead then. My group's not yet dealt with cleaning up after Candlemere (they went in and killed everything in the tower, but haven't yet done research on cleansing the taint), and if they ignore it for too long, I could see its corrupting influence stretching out once again into the Tuskwater....

Dark Archive

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Though we are still in book one, I plan on having the spriggans be worshipers of the "Ancient One" (aka Vordakai). Since I'm running with a variant of the gestalt variant, I can slap some divine casting on Agai and add a few other classed spriggans for more kick.

Of course, if my players spend to much time building up their own kingdom, things will be much worse for them, as Nyrissa will eventually urge Hargulka to expand his kingdom towards "a relic of great power and knowledge" to use against the PC's.


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Ran the first encounter last night. Group heard a ruckus while investigating the Water Horse and came out to see the Spriggans and Thornjacks fighting. Since the Spriggan in the inn had a crudely-applied scar/brand of Nyrissa's personal emblem on its shoulder, they assumed the Spriggans were in league with her (They're not, but they want to be) and jumped in on the Thornjacks' side. The party plinked away at a small group of the Spriggans in Large form until the Hunter got a pair of nasty, nasty sneak attack crits that took two Spriggans from barely-injured to D-E-D-Dead. The Spriggans' morale broke and they fled back to the Stockade, and the PCs got to buddy up with the Thornjacks and Filcher-Grip Jane, a CN Spring-Heel Jack Investigator (with a couple of templates) who was their leader in place of Thorn Jill. She filled them in with some info on Agai and his troops in exchange for their help in the fight, then went with the Hunter and the Cavalier to spy out the Stockade before planning their attack, while the PC Eldritch Knight raided the temple and the Oracle went over Pendrod's books and notes and found the mention of Vordakai (whose name they've heard once before - there's a nasty nasty Dread Vampire who's connected to the Hunter, and Vordakai was once his mentor in the bygone days of yore).

I've rebuilt Agai as a Jotunkin Barbarian - so if he rages in Large size he suddenly becomes Huge - and have him making ample use of Skybolt as his personal ranged weapon of choice as well as switching his melee weapon to Greataxe. He also has Glynis, an Arcanist, as his right-hand minion; I posted her statblock over in the playtest zone.

Meanwhile the lesser Spriggans are basically big sacks of HP, they could barely hit and when they did their damage was minimal. I'll be rebuilding them to be slightly meaner before next week's session, but I don't want them to wear the party down too much before they have to tangle with Glynis and Agai. I also replaced the wolves in the stockade yard with Dweomercats - after fighting one alongside Howl in Chapter Two, the party is more than aware of the havoc they can wreak if they get to pop out their antimagic fields.


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And finished it tonight. Group plus Jane went to the stockade. Lilith attempted parley, got the Spriggans to get Agai and Glynis to come out and talk. Agai blew off her admonitions, told the lesser Spriggans to kill them, they sicked the dweomercats on them and went on the attack. Agai himself went up to the roof, assumed Large Form, and waited for the fliers to come. Glynis went to the murder holes on the second floor and prepared to cast.

Lilith, Takeshi, and Jane carved their way through the Spriggans in the courtyard - including the one roasting the cow, who picked it up to use as a club ("How appropriate, he fights with a cow") and thus was dubbed "Beefsteak" for the rest of the encounter - while Jaekah flew up to the top, Elegy and her winter wolf went after the two drunkards in the pen, and Errol went around the side to find another way up. Glynis took Errol out of the fight with a black ray of fleshparting and a persistent glitterdust after he'd hit Agai with a scorching ray then gone invisible respectively. The other Spriggans in the tower made their way to the murder holes to pepper Lilith, Jane, Errol, and Jaekah with arrows - I gave them braziers filled with burning pitch to light their arrows with, since they knew they were fighting Winter fey normally. My dice betrayed me for the majority of the fight, though, and the group took minimal damage overall.

Jaekah ended up sundering Agai's greataxe, forcing him to jotunrage to Huge size (filling up the entire roof and more, shoving Jaekah off in the process) and switch to Skybolt. He got off a few good shots before Lilith nailed him with a lucky crit that knocked him off the roof, sending him tumbling forty feet to the ground below. He took moderate damage and left a crater, then got up and ripped out a piece of the fence to bludgeon things to death with. He sadly never got the chance - Elegy nailed him with a holy smite followed by a critical hit arrow of law that knocked him into the negatives.

Following Agai's defeat, Lilith offered parley again, and Glynis chose to call off the attack and listen to what they had to say. Elegy kept Agai from bleeding out while Lilith confiscated the bow (which invoked much lamenting when she learned it belonged to the tribe and she'd certainly have to give it back) and Jaekah the sundered axe. Lilith then offered the Spriggans safety in her own home wood as fellow members of Summer - on the price that they'd surrender their (not yet recognized) allegiance to the Queen of Forgotten Time. They agreed, though Glynis demanded that the wrongs done to the Queen by the Summer Queens must be righted; Lilith assured her she was working on that very task, and they gathered up their (surprisingly few) fallen and departed.

The group now has Skybolt in hand and enough clues to point them toward the tribe; after some in-party arguing, they did eventually head back to the Water Horse to rest for the night with plans to depart the next morning.

I'm not exactly sure what trouble the Spriggans will stir up back home while they're gone, but I'll work that out shortly. Meanwhile Jane and the Thornjacks have Varnhold to themselves, and the party has made it pretty clear that once Varn and the other humanoids are back, the fey presence is their problem to deal with, and the PCs will not be bothered nor greatly inclined to drive them out.


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My PC's just finished the exploration of the city of Varnhold. The spooky abandoned city vibe went well and they enjoyed Thornjill's personality and the drama between her and Agai.

When the PC's defeated the spriggans they knocked Agai unconscious and dragged him to Thornjill to "reunite" them. Agai struggled and tried to run away frantically but they had him tied up and forced him to confront Thornjill. She feigned joy and closed in for a hug before promptly stabbing him with Rosethorn repeatedly and murdering him right in front of the PC's, loudly proclaiming that "No one dumps me!". The playgroup was horrified, and things escalated quickly. In the chaos one of the PC's killed Thornjill, making for a pretty wild turn of events.

Thanks for providing the opportunity to turn this area into something a little more interesting and memorable Dudemeister.


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Group left Varnhold in last night's session and visited the village of Harse, imported from History of Ashes. Half the group was not interested in talking to the villagers while the other half wanted more information, so they asked around while the first half waited outside town at camp. The second group's inquiries gave them no new information sadly, but did lead them to Sarwin Ashwood AKA "The Cinderlander", a mercenary hunter of the Nomen (or Nomienn, in my game - the initial "No Men" pejorative got very quickly corrupted). The group played nice with him for a while, but he made no secret of his hatred for the tribal peoples, and they only traveled with him - he volunteered as a "guide" to the Dunsward (and obviously the Cinderlands, which I stuck in that southern crook between the Dunsward and the southeastern half of the Tors) - for about a day before they decided to ditch him, leaving him in the wilderness and abandoning him in the middle of the night. He's a tough old desert rat, though, and his tracking and stealth skills are as good as Lilith's; he'll be able to follow their trail (Lilith herself has Woodland Stride and thus doesn't leave a trail, but the rest of the party does and Lilith and Jaekah's rolls to conceal it were particularly low) and when the time is right will launch an attack on the Nomen village, preferably while the PCs are away.

In the meantime though they got picked up by tribal outriders, who they returned Skybolt to (with much lamenting from Lilith, who really liked that bow and greatly bemoaned having to give it up), and in return they escorted the party to the village to speak with Aecora and Thousand Bones (who I added as a Nomen shaman). Thousand Bones was the one who proposed the idea of having the "outsiders" perform the tasks expected of a tribal youth wanting to be considered an adult, and thus gaining the party the rare opportunity to be inducted into the tribe as a reward for their honesty and the return of Skybolt. He explained the basics of the tests (really just that there were four: test of Earth, test of Sky, test of Fire, and test of Water; and that the PCs shouldn't kill the monsters performing said tests) but didn't have time to go into details before the session ended.

Danide will be present but as replaced by Krojun, who will otherwise (in addition to the stuff Dudemeister wrote up for her) perform the same role he did in HoA, as well as being one of the few male Nomen the PCs will get to meet. Xamanthe will be unchanged, though I might imply that she and Krojun have a relationship or rivalry of some sort, I'm not sure yet.


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Introduced Krojun last night, he played sredna with Takeshi and very narrowly lost. The group then left to take on the tests, deciding to head to Lake Silverstep for the Test of Water first and catch the other tests as they made their way back east. Between Errol's elemental body, Jaekah's ridiculous STR and CON scores, and Elegy having mythic access to life bubble swimming down to the lake bed was easy, and once they found one of the giant spiral shells down there they made their way inside.

Instead of the Havero - which the tentacles would be too weak and the full thing far too strong - I introduced Dephenduerra, "Deep Daughter" in the tribe's tongue, an enormous slug creature akin to Flail Snails, using reskinned stats of a Faceless Whale, replacing its tail slap and slam with tentacle attacks and changing its sonic immunity/attacks to Acid. The group snuck up on it while it was asleep, and were able to filch a few of its pearls before they woke it up, but then between some lucky crits and good preparatory tactics pummeled it back into unconsciousness, took the rest of the pearls they needed (they grew up out of Dephenduerra's back in little vents, much like those South American toads that give birth out of holes in their backs... a comparison which grossed out about half of my group badly) and made a quick exit before it woke up again. Given one of the crits was yet another wonky magical effect from Elegy, there was much "We will never speak of this again" in the exit discussion.

Next week is Talon Peak and the Test of Sky, and perhaps one of the other two tests, then the week after that should be the final test, The Cinderlander's attack on the tribal camp, and Thousand Bones giving exposition on Vordakai. Meaning that after my yearly January break (work always goes into heavy overtime during January, I work in taxes and bookkeeping so the January rush of year-end paperwork and tax filing always requires a lot of extra work, so I always take January off from GMing) we should be able to dive right into Linnorm's Grave - stealing the idea someone had of "Vordakai animates the huge skeleton and sends it after the PCs as a Colossus encounter" - and then move on to The Valley of the Dead and Vordakai's Lair.


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Ran the race and everyone loved it. Good stuff, man.


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Spastic, I just saw your "Kingmaker TV show discussion forum" journal variant, I am laughing my head off here. BEEEEEES!

Tonight they climb Talon Peak. Have some Barometzes and Spire Drakes (yeah I pretty much just browsed Bestiary 4 for random monsters this chapter) for them to encounter along the way, in place of the Yetis (my party's a bit high level for those); instead of retrieving the egg, they'll have to ride the Black Roc to her other nest and come back with a feather from each nest.

For the Earth Test they'll meet Krojun, Xamanthe, and some others waiting for them at the Blood Furrows, where Xamanthe will challenge them to - in addition to making their way through Kankerata's fields as part of the test - racing the group of more experienced tribesfolk. Upping the ante a little.

For the Fire Test there'll be someone else stalking around the Cinderlands - a Leanan Sidhe looking for a Phoenix chick. This is part of a plot thread involving Errol, one that's been hanging for quite some time, so it'll be kind of important that they make sure she gets out of there alive (and, preferably, with a positive view of the party), in addition to completing Cindermaw's test alive.

Then back to the Nomen camp, fight off The Cinderlander and his ally (a Blood Hag Witch from the Cinderlands he's been occasionally partnering up with) and their minions, and then get the lowdown on Vordakai from Thousand Bones, and learn from Aecora that Xamanthe (who I won't reveal is her daughter until this point) has vanished, last seen headed southwest but before she could be pursued The Cinderlander showed up.


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Glad you liked it Orthos :D What are you going to use for Cindermaw? A salamander? A Hot Sauce Elemental?


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Nah, just Cindermaw himself from HoA, with a few advanced HD/Advanced template if needed. My group's level 11/Mythic 2.


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And did the Sky and Earth tests last night, as expected. The group LOVED the skill-based challenges and the chase. The combats on the mountain where a bit meh - other than Takeshi getting Awesome Blow'd off the plateau by one of the Barometzes and having to climb back up, they went down like chumps, and the ranged attackers/casters took out the drakes before they even reached the party.

But for the Roc ride and the Kankerata run, the PCs had a blast. I mixed up the order of the chase a bit but no biggie, and everybody had fun. The party walked back to the Nomen camp after the race with Krojun, Xamanthe, and the rest of their group, sharing stories and getting friendly with the tribe, then spotted smoke on the horizon. When they got to the camp, the place was on fire, there was fighting everywhere and dead bodies from both tribe members and humans. Lilith caught a glimpse of The Cinderlander, who grinned and gave her a thumbs up before disappearing into the foliage. And that's where I stopped the session.


Did you find the given DCs on the sky challenge too difficult? Also, it says CMB, ride, and climb checks but which DC is for each?


I presumed that the DC was the same for each, with the first set of checks being 15, then the second set being 20, and so forth. They fumbled a bit at first due to some unlucky rolls but they made all their successes before the DC got to 35. It can be really tricky to make if they fail the DC 15 and 20, but once they have one or both of those unless they just roll poorly on the next couple of checks they can finish the ride at DC 30 or possibly even 25.

It was a bit on the high end though, and I can see how characters with no investment in any of those skills and/or poor/unlucky rolls could fail the test easily.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Spastic Puma wrote:
Did you find the given DCs on the sky challenge too difficult? Also, it says CMB, ride, and climb checks but which DC is for each?

I let the players choose which of the above to use.


>.> I asked for all three each time <.< oops?

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Orthos wrote:
>.> I asked for all three each time <.< oops?

But your characters are two+ levels and a mythic tier beyond the expected level, so that's a reasonable way to up the difficulty.


Good point. =)


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And done for this year.

Party came back to the Cinderlander, a group of lower-level human thugs, and a Blood Hag Witch he'd recruited (unknowing she was a hag, heh) laying waste to the Nomienn camp. Long story short the PCs charged in, started putting out fires and trying to rescue people. Jaekah made the mistake of calling the tribe to gather around him; the Hag dropped a fireball on him, injuring most of the adults and killing most of the children in the group. The party proceeded to beat her unconscious severely.

The Cinderlander himself snuck around the battlefield and managed to creep up on Thousand Bones and get a nice crossbow crit on him, but I rolled pathetically for damage and the shaman was more annoyed than injured. Before anyone else could act, though, Lilith burned about four mythic points to supercharge one of her attacks and follow it up with a second, dropping the Cinderlander from "slightly scratched" to "deader than dead" in a single round. He didn't even get to use any of his fancy toys.

The tribe invited the PCs to a funeral pyre service for their fallen (and interestingly the Cinderlander's cat Neverfar), then sent them on their way the next day to go tangle with Cindermaw. On the way there, they found a phoenix chick hopping in the rocks; Lilith befriended it, but after finding it the group found themselves being observed by a group of Pards. Elegy tried to scare the creatures off, which started them yowling (and sending fear and curiosity with their empathy telepathy), which summoned the attentions of their keeper, a Leanan Sidhe named Séarlait (pronounced Charlotte). Unbeknownst to the PCs, Séarlait is actually a piece of Errol's lost past - she was once his wife from his prior life before bartering his memories off to Lady Cordelia of Summer, transformed by fey magic after falling into madness and despair while lost in FaeReie. (Cordelia has a habit of this. The Dancing Lady suffered a similar fate in her early history.) She started the encounter merely looking to get her phoenix "pet" back, but got distracted when she expressed a familiarity with Errol she couldn't quite place. Then after some time she negotiated an exchange of information - Elegy would share her history with Mab, and Séarlait would find Cindermaw for them. She did this by simply using a wand to cast earthquake on a nearby crater, cracking it open, and the tremor attracted Cindermaw's attention. She then dimension doored away, promising to find the group when they were somewhere "safer for discussion" than the Cinderlands - probably by following them back to Iomrall after the trip to Varnhold is over. (I was going to say "after VV is over", but there's looking to be a nice-sized interlude after dealing with Vordakai, thanks to some other building plotlines.)

The group managed to get Cindermaw to eat four of the five of them on the first try, then got out thanks to Errol's dimension door; Jaekah, the only one to not get eaten the first time, actually managed a successful bull rush against the worm, which irked it enough to try eating him. Jaekah then forced his way back up the beast's throat and forced its mouth open, then fled with the rest of the group.

They trekked back to the camp and sat down with Thousand Bones to get the lowdown on Vordakai. The shaman told them Vordakai was an ancient, dark spirit who dwelt in the Valley of the Dead, to the southwest in the cold parts of the mountains (away from the burning mountains of the Cinderlands, he means), beyond the Wyrm's Bones (Linnorm's Grave). There the rocks and mountains were said to give way to a dark, desolate valley, at the end of which was a cold inland "sea" (or lake, the PCs guessed), at the center of which was an island tomb where Vordakai slept. The tribe were said to watch the valley for action, but never traversed there; Thousand Bones warned that the region had seen strange creatures - probably some sort of guardian - wandering through the valley recently.

The group thinks they have a basic idea of what to expect, but some of their assumptions are a bit off: they believe Vordakai is an undead humanoid like Lilith's vampire sire, from his homeland, the desert country of Anhur to the far northeast. They'll probably revise that opinion when they see the zombie cyclopes and put two and two together with the Red Eye and the paintings of the cyclops in the Lonely Barrow. But first they'll have to deal with the revivification of the Linnorm's Grave, and then learning that Krojun and Xamanthe have gone ahead to the Valley after the PCs got stuck dealing with the skeletal dragon.

All that, however, is on hold until February at the earliest, as I won't be in any shape to GM anything during my impending annual Year-End Overtime in January. (Yaaaay working in accounting/finances/taxes/bookkeeping.) In the meantime I'll be playerside significantly for a while - our Monday game has finally started our long-awaited Runelords game, and Elegy's player is picking back up her on-hiatus Council of Thieves game to run in my Thursday game's stead until I've had some time to not only get through the overtime season but let my GM brain reboot and I'm ready to take the reins again.


Ohhh, so the test of fire was to crawl into Cindermaw's... maw, and come out alive? Awesome! Do you mind if I ask what kind of checks it took to get out of the giant creature's stomach?


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None for the first four, Errol just dimension doored everyone out (if he wasn't Mythic he'd have had to make a Concentration check, but Archmage gave him an ability that made it so he doesn't usually have to roll those anymore). Jaekah, since he was forcing Cindermaw's mouth back open from the inside, had to beat the worm at an opposed STR check, with Cindermaw getting a bonus due to "superior positioning" (as in, Jaekah was inside it's mouth).


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We've begun again!

The night after the return from Cindermaw and learning from Thousand Bones about Vordakai's location, I ran the Soul Eater encounter. Said Soul Eater was buffed up greatly - advanced to 16 HD AND given the Missing Template. As per Vordakai's tactics, he went for Errol (the only Arcane caster) first; thankfully Errol was one of the few whose names he'd gotten while Horagnamon was spying on them. Jaekah and Takeshi were asleep through the entire encounter and for once even Lilith's absurd Perception couldn't pick up on the thing before it attacked. (+67 Stealth in darkness or shadows! Yikes!) Elegy and Lilith however managed to help Errol put it down before it drained him too badly, but the party was then on edge - Errol knew what a Soul Eater was and how they worked, and the thing had spoken his name before attacking, so he knew someone had sent it after them.

They spent the next five days marching fairly uneventfully off to the southwest toward where Thousand Bones told them the Valley of the Dead was. On the fifth day they spotted a strange storm ahead: Lilith's Weather Sense didn't tell her there was supposed to be a storm today, and the flashes of purple-red lightning were clearly unnatural, as was the way it stayed in one location. As they got closer, Elegy and Errol could pick up on magical essences in the storm: mythic create greater undead (enhanced by a 1/year effect I added to the occulus of Abaddon) and a series of planar bindings. While they watched and debated what to do, the spells ended and their effect manifested - a colossus of Linnorm's Grave, empowered and animated by Negative Energy Elementals placed throughout its body, swarming with murders of ghoul crows. The enormous dragon began stomping toward the Nomen camp, each step shaking the ground and causing magma to seep from the earth.

Errol teleported the party onto the thing's head, where they immediately went to work taking out the crows and elementals. They managed to neutralize all six murders - destroying three and stunning the other three with Elegy's holy word and watching as the stomping Linnorm colossus left them behind - and explode two of the three elementals before they were interrupted: an Invincible (mythic template) Winged Dread Corby Graveknight Cavalier called The Carrion Crow dove out of one of the murders and slammed into Jaekah, nearly knocking him off the Linnorm's skull in the process.

That unfortunately is where we had to call the session - due to some leftover forgotten things from the last session before we paused we didn't get started last night until an hour and a half after our normal start time, so we didn't get through the full colossus encounter as I'd expected. It'll sadly be two weeks before we finish - half my players will be out of town next week and unable to play, unless we manage a reschedule.

Dark Archive

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The Centaur Graveyard.

Ok, good people, here is nice a compilation of the modifications Dudemeister proposed to areas Areas K, N, F and M; the Kankerata Run, the Talon Peak Ascencion, the Trust Scores and several NPCs included.

There's a little of reorganization and a bit of rephrasing (i.e. Danide doesn't refer to the impertinent bipeds as "PCs") and a lot of formatting.

The PDF won't use too much ink if printed, but I indulged myself with a custom background.

I reckon there are some mistakes, but while perusing the document, I rendered them invisible to my eyes.

Link:
http://www.4shared.com/office/5VSQrlQTba/Centaur_graves.html.

Dark Archive

Ok, the elf tower can be turned into an observatory without any explanation of why it could be useful... and there's no explanation about how to descend from the Talon Peak.
Unless told otherwise, it should be the same (cumulative Climb checks towards decreasing DCs).
Regarding the observatory; I think a city 'could' survive up there, spending ¿2? BPs per month to elevate the food daily; but giving receiving free Walls and several construction bonus (there are rocks everywhere).
I should go to sleep; my logic is deteriorating. Talon Peak is as High as Honor.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I am DM_aka_Dudemeister and I endorse this PDF.

Also the rules for an observatory can be found HERE.


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....any way to get this Centaur Graveyard without downloading all the toolbars and crap that goes with it? I would like to look at it, but not worth the time to clean up my PC after from all the crap these sites push on you....


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Yeah 4shared doesn't allow free downloads anymore unless you register with them or connect your social network profile to their site. Neither of which I'm willing to do. Any chance you can put the file on Dropbox or Google Drive or something else that doesn't require registration to download?

Dark Archive

@Spudster: Read carefully the links; you can download the pdf without installing anything. It's one of the four directly below the picture, the left one in my GF's computer.

However, you need to associate an account (Facebook, twitter, G+ or such), which may be discouraging anyway... No odd permissions involved.
I can upload it trough GoogleDrive, if it's worth it.


Yes, that would be much appreciated =D

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