Stolen Lands: A few observations


Kingmaker


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My players are nearly through with Stolen Lands. It's been an interesting ride. A few observations:

Horses can be an issue for players. My players took Haps's group's horses early on, and they've been riding them through the lands. Horses made traveling through the Northern Greenbelt earlier, but I remarked early on that nobody had a decent Ride skill in the group ... and it came back to bite them in a major way while they were fighting wandering monsters.

Weather, weather, weather. D20pfsrd has a nice random weather generator. Before each session, I used this to game out about two or three months of weather conditions. Sometimes this turns into just flavor. At other times, my players fought (for example) bandits and owlbears in thunderstorms ... which significantly hampered the ranged attackers.

Wandering monsters. As others have remarked, wandering monsters are a must. My group is near the end of Stolen Lands, so there aren't a lot of encounters left. My wandering monster dice spat up more encounters, though, including a lone bandit (who surrendered to the party), some wild boars who menaced the PCs at the statue of Erastil, and an owlbear who dispatched the party's paladin (and thus ruined many of my ongoing plotline plans).

Proactive bandits. If Stolen Lands disappoints in one way, it's that the vanilla bandits are kind of unimpressive. My players dispatched Haps in short order, and Kressle went down like a punk. And then ... under vanilla Stolen Lands, you don't see the bandits again (aside from random wandering monster encounters) until the end game, when the PCs gate-crash the Stag Lord's home.

In fact, my players (thanks to some rumors running around) have explicitly decided not to confront the Stag Lord until they're third level. Sooooooo ....

I switched things up a little bit. Instead of hanging out at the fort and twirling their mustaches, Akiros and Dovan are both active. The PCs met Akiros at the temple of Erastil (where he came to slay a bear after receiving a vision), and Dovan led a group of six bandits in a hit-and-fade against the PCs. A wandering bandit, under interrogation, revealed that Dovan has begun speaking with a certain sharp-toothed demon.

Recurring adversaries. I like summoner Tartuk. Sharptooth (his eidolon) has shown up a couple more times (mostly to distract the PCs while Dovan did some skullduggery), and I think my PCs are starting to dislike the little bugger.


Excellent observations pennywit. I really like your changes with the bandits, and I've had a few strange wandering monster encounters myself. Most notably a herd of Elk that the group just let wander by and watched from a distance.

My favorite so far was the pack of wolves, led by a dire wolf, that began hunting the party after they smoked the hide of the dire boar Tuskgutter and were dragging literally hundreds of pounds of cooked pork and bacon back with them to Oleg's.

With it being Xen'drik I added a small bit of strangeness to the wolves in that they could naturally tree-stride and their fur coats matched the leafy green of the bushes.

Happs and Kressle similarly went down like punks in my game and the group has been slowly making their way down to the Stag Lord's fort after already having taken care of Tartuk and the Mites.

If the group doesn't get a move on soon Dovan may start to figure out that something's going on...

Also holy crap there's a random weather generator? I totally need to use that.


I agree with the above, the DM needs to make the bandits come out and play. I did that with Dovan, who went down super-easy, but two of the bandits with him made excellent sources of information.

Wandering monsters have been rare and rarer with my dice, but we've turned up 3 or more owlbears, all of whom died easily. They're now considered vermin by my group, and the unofficial name for their hometown is Hootergrad.


pennywit wrote:
Weather, weather, weather. D20pfsrd has a nice random weather generator. Before each session, I used this to game out about two or three months of weather conditions. Sometimes this turns into just flavor. At other times, my players fought (for example) bandits and owlbears in thunderstorms ... which significantly hampered the ranged attackers.

Well I used the random weather generator in the core books (p. 439) and rolled up as we went along, once a day pretty much. I started campaign out in an early fall and the generator quickly turned it into an early winter that was rather long an harsh with the battle against the staglord taking place after a major snowstorm with 5 feet of snow covering almost everything.

My players hate snow, running water and cold since kingmaker and endure elements is standard issue.


Bofdm wrote:

My favorite so far was the pack of wolves, led by a dire wolf, that began hunting the party after they smoked the hide of the dire boar Tuskgutter and were dragging literally hundreds of pounds of cooked pork and bacon back with them to Oleg's.

Oh, man. I wish I had thought of this. That would have been awesome.

Quote:
If the group doesn't get a move on soon Dovan may start to figure out that something's going on...

Excellent notion. As a lot of people have remarked, players really get used to the "one encounter per day" rhythm. You can shake them out of that with a Dovan ambush. I figure some occasional Stealth checks (opposed by player Perception checks) as Dovan follows the group ... and then he and some bandit followers strike while the PCs are weak. There are a lot of ways to do this.

One more note: I've kept the Stag Lord off the playing field. I know he makes for a passive figure, but I think that makes him a more satisfying adversary, particularly compared to the proactive Hargulka who is going to make my players' lives difficult in RRR.


Lee Hanna wrote:
I agree with the above, the DM needs to make the bandits come out and play. I did that with Dovan, who went down super-easy, but two of the bandits with him made excellent sources of information.

IMG, Dovan might have gone down easy ... but the party druid cast an obscuring mist, in which Dovan promptly hid. As Dovan sat in the mist cleaning off a tanglefoot bag, the rest of the group duelled with Dovan's bandit minions. By the time the druid got around to dismissing the mist, Dovan had escaped. Muahahahaha.


pennywit wrote:
Lee Hanna wrote:
I agree with the above, the DM needs to make the bandits come out and play. I did that with Dovan, who went down super-easy, but two of the bandits with him made excellent sources of information.
IMG, Dovan might have gone down easy ... but the party druid cast an obscuring mist, in which Dovan promptly hid. As Dovan sat in the mist cleaning off a tanglefoot bag, the rest of the group duelled with Dovan's bandit minions. By the time the druid got around to dismissing the mist, Dovan had escaped. Muahahahaha.

My Dovan nearly escaped but he couldn't quite outrun the Worg the party had allied with.

That said I've brought him back as an undead minion of a later enemy and he's been leaving cryptic messages for the party's rogue while she's been away and sneaking around town spying on the party.


I'm actually plotting out one more "active Stolen Lands" event for next session: my earlier "Siege at Oleg's" idea. My PCs haven't spent a lot of time interacting with the NPCs at Oleg's so I want them to get to know them ... and a Tartuk-inspired mite siege might be just the ticket ... especially considering Old Sharptooth nearly shredded the group last time they met.


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pennywit wrote:
Weather, weather, weather. D20pfsrd has a nice random weather generator. Before each session, I used this to game out about two or three months of weather conditions. Sometimes this turns into just flavor. At other times, my players fought (for example) bandits and owlbears in thunderstorms ... which significantly hampered the ranged attackers.

I rolled up the storm of the century — a five-day hurricane that sent tornadoes throughout the region. The PCs were level three.

When it hit, they were trapped in a swamp hex on the far side of the Narlmarches. The rivers flooded, cutting off their escape. If they hadn't just cleared the Temple of the Elk, they would certainly have died. In fact, they nearly died of exposure and starvation anyway.

This was one of the most memorable sessions I've every taken part in. Not a single monster fought, and the players very nearly died. Five sessions later and the ramifications of that storm have still not played out.

I highly recommend including this as a scripted encounter if you don't want to wait for the random weather. Nothing could be a better setpiece for the low-level wilderness adventure!

Gotta love the procedural sandbox campaign!


My own bit of advice: Play the bandits like bandits.

If they can steal the PCs' horses and gear without a fight, they do that. If they start losing, they run away. They report back.

Also, fey spirits are best heard and not seen. Not ever. If you can get the players (through pranks, there's an awesome thread for that) to just start bribing the fey and accounting for their presence without every actually conversing with one, your game will be cooler for it.

Nothing against the fey, really, it just feels more proper if they're an invisible force in the woods. I still use their statblocks, and they are still grigs and faerie dragons or whatever... I just don't give up invisibility unless I absolutely have to. And at that point they flee.

Also, look up some weird folklore pertaining to fey and escaping from them. Stuff like putting your clothes on backwards. Then, have it work. Even though there's nothing in the books about that.


Mythic Evil Lincoln wrote:
Also, fey spirits are best heard and not seen. Not ever. If you can get the players (through pranks, there's an awesome thread for that) to just start bribing the fey and accounting for their presence without every actually conversing with one, your game will be cooler for it.

My group already met Perlivash and Tyg-Titter-Tut in person. But I'll follow some of your advice for the future. I want the local fey to be a nuisance for my PCs ...

Quote:
When it hit, they were trapped in a swamp hex on the far side of the Narlmarches. The rivers flooded, cutting off their escape. If they hadn't just cleared the Temple of the Elk, they would certainly have died. In fact, they nearly died of exposure and starvation anyway.

Funny you should mention that. There's actually a hurricane coming up. I wonder if it will show up at the same time the mites storm Oleg's ...

Scarab Sages

I did something similar with Fey early on in my game. I told the druid about fey and how to tell the signs that fey may be around. Whenever he suspected one may live where they were camping they left offerings behind...cups of win, polished silver coins, fruit, small gifts, etc. A few times the fey put boons on their cart, allowing to pass by other mischevious fey without being harassed.

While they knew of areas where fey lived, it took them several levels and quite a few months to actually discover each one's true nature or name.


Yeah, my PCs have heard about Pervilash...but never met him... One of
the few perception checks the druid didn't make. Since then they've only
met Tyg.


I've gone with the complete opposite direction in my game myself, but that's in part because I've ramped the fey portions of the plot high above the political stuff. Likewise, several party members are fey - mostly due to reincarnate shenanigans - and also I wanted the more vocal fey like Perlivash to be visible individual characters. There are however an utterly innumerable amount of "little folk" that "answer" to Perl and Tyg (and a third I added to their party, a Sprite called Ledipte) that when they are seen/encountered are quick to scatter or vanish. Also one of the fey PCs was a long-time resident of the forest prior to her transformation, and had befriended many of the local fey life prior to meeting the party (including Perl and friends) and she's now the Spymistress; the Little Folk (or as my group calls them, Za-Forest Guard) tend to report and gossip about everything they see and hear, this eventually makes its way to Perl, Tyg, or Ledipte, and then to the Spymistress.

My group has gone to great lengths to integrate themselves into the natural society of the Greenbelt, often on threat of pain from said Spymistress if they overstepped what she considered to be "mortal bounds". The other colonies give them various levels of weird looks for it, that and for the high mix of different races living there compared to their mostly-human-and-halfling neighbors.


O yeah, it's mostly a matter of personal preference.

I personally think fey are more mysterious and cool when their very existence is in doubt, or where they really seem like an intrusion from another world that doesn't behave quite the same as ours.


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I've admittedly gone very Dresden Files in mine. Queen Mab and The Puck in particular are major players in my variation of the plot, and the party has encountered them few times each. Calling into question the existence of the fey after you've talked to two of their nobility is kind of illogical, even within the context of fey =)

edit:

Quote:
where they really seem like an intrusion from another world that doesn't behave quite the same as ours

Now this, this I do try. Ramp this up to eleven when I can. You have some of the fey like Tyg and Perl who are "closer" to mortals, and are mostly comprehensible, and then you have some that are more and more alien, or those like The Puck who look and mostly act normal, until something about their actions and motives suddenly strikes you as "off".

I am kinda proud of how much my group has come to fear even a casual discussion with powerful fey, given their tendencies to look for loopholes and debts in everything, and their bizarre focus on equal payment for all things in currency the mortals can't quite calculate.


Quote:
I've admittedly gone very Dresden Files in mine.

The Magister has lots of UST with the Royal Enforcer?


*snerk* Thank gods no. There's thankfully zero interparty romance going on.

Silver Crusade

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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Yeah, I went different with the Fey as well. The small fey are child-like but ageless, ceaselessly curious and prone to pranks. They were lured into the open with cups of wine.

Tyressia got angry at the PCs for that one, "Tyg and Perlivash are entirely too young to be drinking! They're only several hundred years old!"

Medium Sized Fey tend to speak in riddles and mysteries. I added the Puck to my game later on as a trader of... well anything except money.

Each to their own, but I wanted fey politics to be a big part of my game so Book 6 felt like a natural extension of the story.


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For the love of the Nine, plan out "random" encounters. Nothing breaks the flow of the game like rolling out whether or not an encounter shows up and what it is. Use everything you have to foreshadow everything else. Random troll encounter? He's an envoy from book 2. Tatzlwyrms? Slap a fey-type template on one of them. Show hint and teases without giving your party the full info.

And don't be scared to pad out some of the encounters. Big, mean monsters are nice, but the fight turns into a bit of a boring blanket beat. Adding some similiar enemies or interested terrain helps a bunch. I've got a litter of Tusk-lets for the Tuskgutter fight, and while the party is dragging the carcasses back to Oleg's I'm gonna run a threeway fight between the party, a pack of wolves led by a worg, and a hungry grizzly bear. Here's hoping I won't be adding anyone to the obituaries.


Amen to planning, although it doesn't have to be a lot. And, IMO, some random encounters should just be plain fun. My personal favorites:

* A "hunter" encounter. Earlier in the day, the PCs found a trapped fox. They released it. At the end of the day, a hunter showed up to complain very loudly about how somebody had released a fox from one of his traps. One Diplomacy check (and a substantial reparations payment) later, and they had dinner with him. He also had a thick Appalachian accent and played the banjo ...

* Four boars. These guys showed up while the party was at the statue of Erastil. The boars didn't come closer than the 60 feet, but the dwarf druid tried wild empathy on the boars. One natural 1 later, the boars were squealing angrily ....


I had a sderies of Hunter encounters specced out - to give them people to meet :) One of the hunters was the werewolf ..

And the Huge White Elk they followed for miles. He led them to the Statue of Erastil before he disappeared. They never quite got close enough for a shot - and I am not sure they actually asked for one.


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Golarion Goblin wrote:

For the love of the Nine, plan out "random" encounters. Nothing breaks the flow of the game like rolling out whether or not an encounter shows up and what it is. Use everything you have to foreshadow everything else. Random troll encounter? He's an envoy from book 2. Tatzlwyrms? Slap a fey-type template on one of them. Show hint and teases without giving your party the full info.

And don't be scared to pad out some of the encounters. Big, mean monsters are nice, but the fight turns into a bit of a boring blanket beat. Adding some similiar enemies or interested terrain helps a bunch. I've got a litter of Tusk-lets for the Tuskgutter fight, and while the party is dragging the carcasses back to Oleg's I'm gonna run a threeway fight between the party, a pack of wolves led by a worg, and a hungry grizzly bear. Here's hoping I won't be adding anyone to the obituaries.

On the contrary, I do not plan out my encounters. I read the tables ahead of time so I'm not completely caught off guard, but I regard the random encounters as "GM Hard Mode". I've been at this long enough that it is actually fun to test myself, and see how atmospheric and interesting I can make an encounter with only 1-2 minutes of planning (or none!)

Basically, I try for the same kind of integration you are describing, I just do it without advance preparation.

I also recommend a "living" encounter table. Adjust the numbers based on what the players have encountered. After any encounter I want to happen only once, I replace that entry with bandits, at least until the bandits are dealt with. Etc, etc.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Mythic Evil Lincoln wrote:
Golarion Goblin wrote:

For the love of the Nine, plan out "random" encounters. Nothing breaks the flow of the game like rolling out whether or not an encounter shows up and what it is. Use everything you have to foreshadow everything else. Random troll encounter? He's an envoy from book 2. Tatzlwyrms? Slap a fey-type template on one of them. Show hint and teases without giving your party the full info.

And don't be scared to pad out some of the encounters. Big, mean monsters are nice, but the fight turns into a bit of a boring blanket beat. Adding some similiar enemies or interested terrain helps a bunch. I've got a litter of Tusk-lets for the Tuskgutter fight, and while the party is dragging the carcasses back to Oleg's I'm gonna run a threeway fight between the party, a pack of wolves led by a worg, and a hungry grizzly bear. Here's hoping I won't be adding anyone to the obituaries.

On the contrary, I do not plan out my encounters. I read the tables ahead of time so I'm not completely caught off guard, but I regard the random encounters as "GM Hard Mode". I've been at this long enough that it is actually fun to test myself, and see how atmospheric and interesting I can make an encounter with only 1-2 minutes of planning (or none!)

Basically, I try for the same kind of integration you are describing, I just do it without advance preparation.

I also recommend a "living" encounter table. Adjust the numbers based on what the players have encountered. After any encounter I want to happen only once, I replace that entry with bandits, at least until the bandits are dealt with. Etc, etc.

Yeah this is the first "procedurally generated Adventure Path". During book 1 I rolled a Wolf Encounter, but my players rolled a high Survival. So I just ruled that the PCs heard wolves howling somewhere to the south, but it was nothing to worry about.

Later on I rolled a werewolf encounter, but it was the middle of the day. So I had the players encounter a man trapped in the middle of a river, buck naked and clinging desperately to a rock.
The players rescued the man and noticed a nasty bite-mark on his body. They put two and two together, when they asked him how he came to be where he is:
"I have no idea! The last thing I remember was going hunting as part of my bachelor party and there was a vicious animal, and then everything went black and here I am!"
The PCs realized the dude was a werewolf and they would need to fix him somehow. The party decided to split up (half would go to the Temple of the Elk, half would take the werewolf back to Olegs to lock him up and see if maybe Jhod could heal him up). It was a race against time and was a wonderful, memorable session.

Without a single stitch of preparation.


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...and it's little bits like Jhod's history with werewolves that are going to turn that "random" encounter into roleplaying gold.

It's true for every monster on the table. They all have some connection to some part of the scripted story, the table just allows them to "spill over" into other places. The table gave me an encounter with a giant whiptail centipede, followed the next day by a nighttime attack by mites, all before the players tackled the Old Sycamore.

They never did kill the centipede (they fled), and they kept planning to find it and finish it off. When they finally decided to act on this, they found tracks leading south... to the old sycamore.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Mythic Evil Lincoln wrote:

...and it's little bits like Jhod's history with werewolves that are going to turn that "random" encounter into roleplaying gold.

It's true for every monster on the table. They all have some connection to some part of the scripted story, the table just allows them to "spill over" into other places. The table gave me an encounter with a giant whiptail centipede, followed the next day by a nighttime attack by mites, all before the players tackled the Old Sycamore.

They never did kill the centipede (they fled), and they kept planning to find it and finish it off. When they finally decided to act on this, they found tracks leading south... to the old sycamore.

Nice!

The best part was that one of my player's character married that random NPC.


Yeah, not only do you need the random encounters to to fill out XP gaps, but some of the best role playing in the campaign has come from random encounters. Do your best to tie them into the overarching plot line(s)!

A random group of bandits showed up, one night. Obviously, I had them work for the Stag Lord, but they also dropped hints about a nearby encounter that the PCs hadn't encountered, yet, and one of these bandits eventually ended up working for the PCs when they started their kingdom.

Another example is the random Nixie I rolled. She was the reason that Nettles stayed in his house near the river and refused to leave even due to all the bandit activity.

I'm pretty sure a nixie shows up later in the AP, also. The plan is to make this the same nixie. Of course, all of the fey in my campaign have an alien sense of morality, so she never returned Nettles' love, and she was very vocal about that and that she hated the undead thing Nettles had become. It's a bit of foreshadowing to show how the fey are going to be more and more problematic as the campaign moves on.


I agree with the disappointment with the "static" bandits in book 1. Actually, that's a problem throughout the AP, where a villain kicks off the adventure with an attack of some sort (the bandits at Oleg's, Varnhold in book 3, Tatzlford in book 4), and then follows it up with... nothing. Just sitting in their respective lairs waiting for the PCs to come murder them.

In my game, the players have knocked over the Thorn River Camp but three bandits got away. I determined that two of them made it back to the Stag Lord's fort (details here) to warn their compatriots. But then what? No one in the fort can track, aside from the Stag Lord himself, and as others have said I prefer to keep him in the background for now.

So I created a Druid 2/Ranger 1 with the Eagle Shaman archetype (so that he can wild shape), and Searos the Skinchanger, the Stag Lord's huntmaster, was born. Searos took some men and headed back to the Thorn River camp, and tracked the party back to Oleg's. In our next session, they will get ambushed by the bandits once they're out in the open and vulnerable. The party has a turncoat bandit with them, so he can clue them in to the fact that the Stag Lord wants their hides once the ambush is sprung.

I'm hoping this will make the bandit problem a little more urgent and engender some animosity towards the Stag Lord.

The campaign writeup to-date can be found here. We only play about twice a month so we haven't gotten very far in yet.


Well done.


Follow-up. I did end up running the Siege at Oleg's, and it went quite well. I think there's a heck of a lot of potential there. My players started to think of Oleg's as their home and a safe place. Tartuk and the mites showed that a safe place isn't quite safe. Moreover, if the players are lackadaisical about taking on Staggy, then he and his bandits (or one of his officers) could show up there and lay siege to the place themselves.

Even if he doesn't have a huntmaster (brilliant idea, BTW), as time goes on, Staggy or his lickspittles are sure to figure out that their problems originate with an adventuring band working out of Oleg's ...

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