After loosely reading the whole adventure path again and watching my players do their things, I've begun to slowly strip away some of the AP to slot in my events.
With the characters not interested in exploration anymore save for a clear goal (like finding the source of Varnhold's Vanishing, for example.) It dawned upon me to ditch some of that section of the adventure to focus on each player's personal quests.
However, some of the events are actually fun or could be interesting to try, but last game I forgot my queue for the Nomen Centaurs to give the characters 3 tasks to earn their trust and then guide them to where Vordekai's area is. Now the players plan to keep the centaur's bow (stating that it's worth 18k gold and the centaur leader wants them to find her daughter anyway) and I missed the train on giving them said task.
What I was thinking was that as they travel down to Vordekai's area, knowing him only as some sort of evil the centaurs have watch over (they failed the hard knowledge checks while checking the books in Varnhold so the name Vordekai was either not found, or meant nothing to them.) Now, as they travel, Nyrissa will set her plan in motion to bottle the entire region with the help of her allies. The initial casting of the spell will warp some of the land, teleporting the players to 2-3 places before stopping, Nyrissa's mage friend having failed the spell. I plan to start that even and have it happen every 5 years or so as the ritual get's tried again, until it get's perfected for the last book. This should make them question things, walk around, even perhaps phase in to the first world for a second or two once in awhile.
As to tying the AP's further, after reading book 6 I noticed that some of the monsters in Nyrissa's area could have their own actions. The hags that are raising Armag(sp) could perhaps be daughters or linked to the hag living with Nyrissa. So far I've had every major villain have a green ring made of Nyrissa's hair. All non magical but as a symbol or token for the faery to have her influence wash over the land with key individuals.
-The Stag Lord
-Haragulka
-The guy who woke Vordekai up
-Whoever else I find in the books.
In short, anyone ever did something similar or have some input on my big plan?
I'm pretty much doing the exact same thing. Details scattered all throughout here.
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Good ideas there and I'm doing some similiar stuff (ie, tokens linking to Nyrissa).
My PCs just dealt with the Armags- in my campaign, one of the PCs has a weapon called, "Bramble." Bramble is an intelligent magic weapon, able to take human form, and is the younger sister of Briar, created as Nyrissa's weapon in case Briar is ever turned her against her (not yet known to the PCs). Armag's sword, then, was Nyrissa's first attempt at creating a weapon. She presented Armag with a powerful sword and when he died, infused his spirit in it. She was unhappy with the results, however. This idea worked pretty well in my campaign because the PCs at first thought maybe the barbarians were searching for Briar.
Right now, the PCs are in the Hooktongue Slough. I've replaced the boggards with Raging Swan's "Lizardfolk of the Dragonfang", part of their TRIBES line. The Dragonfang leader is a sorcerer with the black dragon bloodline so I'm saying he's descended from Ilthuliak and I have him working for Nyrissa as one of her many pawns.
If you are looking for some cool NPCs to slot in, I recommend checking out Rite Publishing's "Faces of the Tarnished Souk" NPC line. They feature some very unique NPC builds at three CR levels (low, middle, high). For example, Po'Kesteros (a half-elf fey template luckbringer alchemist ninja) is a dark, gothic, Peter Pan like character that's been perfect for my Kingmaker campaign. Nameless Nil is another one that adds a sense of bizarre.
Well, where to start, I do believe one of my players has caught on to most of the plot (but not the whole picture, only educated guesses) so I'm pretty happy. He should be able to see more fun stuff coming along soon.
The entire team is currently making their way to the lich a second time, having used up most of their hero points in the last delving attempt. Losing no time to conserve precious buffs they almost run trough every room, missing key gear (like the ring of freedom of movement) along the way. Only the water elemental and Vordekai (with an updated spell list made to counter most of their abilities) stands in the way. While I think this will be a hard fight, the amount of damage they can dish out, coupled with Vordekai not having his contingency spell activated should make him killable in 3 to 4 turns, 2 if they get some crits.
I started the session with the group split up and teleported around in the first world. of the players met face to face with the black dragon and the worm that walks from book 6, one of them playing with a dragon's skull while the other was busy filling in land in small glass bottles. This was corroborated with some smallish (1-2 mile) pieces of land missing. The worm that walks finished his ritual, he just messed it up and will try again in 5 to 10 years.
Now my baron is piecing stuff together, but in the wrong way, initially thinking that the owlbear, stag lord, grigori and such were all attempts at Issia to f*@* with the region to keep Rostland from gaining allies. But now with the awakening of a lich, he believes it is something else too dire. Maybe there is something in the Stolen Lands, maybe those powerful individuals want it somehow, going as far as to collect landscapes.
With the plot now carefully foreshadowed and confusion and interest sown, I will probably drop almost all quests and exploration in the next book, using only whatever hexes that I find interesting. and giving them some more personal quests instead of oddly rewarding fetch quests.
My baron will possibly try to recruit adventurers, people near his level, or better if he can, and give them quests, possibly to explore the land, find stuff, cause he's busy most of the time. I will have a hard time making him exit the castle for part 4, but I believe it is very doable.
And so, with the greatest speech roll ever done, at a bad-ass 43 score, my baron bridged the kobold community and killed racism in the hearts of the people for generations to come.
That's more or less what happened, Kobold families and mini clans will have underground caves under the city and the countryside. Half of the marshal force, lead by Mikmek (also one of the 10 strongest individuals in the region) are composed of kobolds, so this helps.
With the end of Vordekai, they found out that the oculus was bad news, but not what it did, only that you wanted to rip your eye out. With clever use of summon monster to bring in hound and lantern archons, my sorcerer player asked if he could talk to a big honcho angel on how to deal with such an item. Queue in 1 hero point for the sake of a custom summoning ritual and a discussion with a Star Archon with a background of ominous church music, they are now creating a glorious bow of greenwood with the holy magic enchant to destroy the oculus, and they also need some blind person.
Part 4 was introduced early in their attempt to contact Drelev and hold a Barons's meeting to discuss s@~# in the greenbelt, monsters, liches and whatnot. But Drelev told him to bugger off and that he was busy with barbarian hordes. The story from book 4 will change, assuming it goes how my PC's want it, they will befriend Drelev, and with Varn, all 3 will have some bad-ass trio of towns to protect their land. Then either Drelev will be blackmailed into the events of the 4th book, or killed and replaced, reaching a similar end but with vastly different paths to reach there.
I'm only having problems with how much loot and gold the hero's find compared to how much they should have at their level, that and with the alchemist's crafting feats, instead of buying or finding or crafting new magic items, they simply upgrade and enchantments on what they have, something ridiculously cost effective. I still fear the coming of the 120 000 (60k to craft) gold shield guardian alchemical golem.
To have them catch up in levels I will make a dungeon under candlekeep with a spawn of shub niggurath as a boss. It will try to summon a shoggoth and the players will try to stop it. It should be rather impressive a fight.