GMs, if you would run a RotRL campaign again, what would you do differently?


Rise of the Runelords


Self explanatory title. I am currently running RotRL and I am curious what you would have done differently if you ran through it a second or more times. Any regrets, any advice, what would you have done better, what would you do differently, what mistakes did you make?

Sczarni

I am running it for the first time now and my players are nearing the end of Burnt Offerings. If I were to start over, I would have spent more time pre-campaign with them getting to know Sandpoint better. As it stands, I will need to use the time in between BO and Skinsaw to do this.

Dark Archive

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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

That'd be about the only thing I'd really change thus far in my running. I think I did a pretty good job on selling my PCs on Sandpoint during the game, but a prologue that takes place during the Late Unpleasantness would actually be even better.

I think the other thing I wish I'd done was have the players aid Shalelu. I've talked about this elsewhere on the boards, but her introduction to the group is very "informed ability." We're told she's a badass wilderness warrior, but we don't see her kicking ass. In short, the party is chasing down some goblins, and they lead them to a farm where Shalelu has taken down several of the greenskins. She's relieved to see the PCs, and asks them to help her evacuate the farmhouse. There's a lot of them, but she kills one or two a round, clearing a path to the home. There's more inside, which the PCs have to deal with themselves. On the way out, they see her blindsided by a massive bugbear - Bruthasmus, of course - who shoots her in the back. He's ready to deliver the deathblow, when the PCs get a chance to save her. Any attack - successful or no - gets him to flee, as he has no interest in a fair fight. After this, Shalelu is favorably disposed to the PCs, and she'll tell them about the goblin heroes in the region on the way back to Sandpoint.


I'd make Mammy Graul more of a seductress:-p

Also need to actually run it a first time, one of these days....


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Adventure Path Charter Subscriber

I'm still pretty early in it myself, and am using the medium xp chart so am including plenty of my own (or swiped) material.

I did include a prelude - some brief scenes from during the Late Unpleasantness with the PCs (with the Young template on them for ease). And that went great, I advocate it, info dumps are easier to get through if the players are actually ASKING for the info.

Commenting only on specific sections from the AP and not any of my added material:

Festival and Fire:
Festival went really well, the Festival games available here work really well, I tweaked a few, while there was some resistance to getting into them at first, most of my players at least tried a few of the games. If I did it again, I'd get the player's involved in actually setting up the games - helping with construction or work around the Festival in some way. Use that to introduce some of the townsfolk.

The goblin attacks went good too - I included some NPCs in each scene fighting off goblins, or needing rescue from goblins (let Shayliss's target choose himself!)or extra goblins having comic accidents (or deaths), I actually wish I had added a few MORE goblins and NPCs to these scenes. Oh and goblin singing, gotta add lots of goblin singing. There's a goblin song thread, I swiped some, and made parodies of some children's rhymes, saved them up. Goblin Bard in the back singing is just great fun. Goblin fights often included goblin songs especially if I felt the scenes were becoming to mechanical.

Local Heroes:
Went just fine - Shopkeeps Daughter went off like a Benny Hill skit - perfect.
The Boar Hunt went off great - though I went WAY over the top in turning the boar hunt into its own mini-game, Aldren went off just fine. I made him have a bit of (understandable) pyrophobia, so that his uselessness during the goblin attack is a bit more explainable.
I wish I'd introduced the NPCs for Monster in the Closet earlier.

Wrath and Glass:
Singing Goblins loose in a Glassworks? Oh man this was good fun, if I did it over again, I'd have added more goblins to do more crazy stuff - and moved the worktables out of the way. Having two goblins run at a player with a giant sheet of glass and break it over his head? Priceless. I should have played Tsuto a bit more cautious/skittish. As it was one of the players took some big risks, got behind him (almost got killed) but cut off his escape. As it was, they captured him. Catacombs took a couple trips for them to master. I'd have ignored the actual wrath pool points until the fight was done, in other words I should have let Ely summon as many Wrathspawn as she needed to make the fight interesting (though I did use an alternate Elyrium).

Thistletop:
I'm happy with how my Thistletop turned out, but things went quite a bit off script. My players got in more than enough killing hordes of goblins - Gogmurt, the druid, is a beast, just keep in mind his motivations, he's more interested in saving goblins than killing PCs or getting killed.

Karolina Dean wrote a long post on this topic for her run through that she just finished here, I think its pretty useful.

Grand Lodge

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Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I would probably add Feast of Ravenmoor and Seven Swords of Sin to the campaign.

I would flesh out Judge Ironbriar, Aldern Foxglove, Orik Vancaskerkin, and a few other NPCs a bit better.

Those are the main things that come to mind.

-Skeld


Lots of good stuff here from Misroi and Lorax. Definitely agree on getting the pc's introduced to NPC's in town - the more the better, including NPC's who are part of events in Book 2 but not explicitly called out in Book 1. I would want the initial goblin fights to be more chaotic with more goblin-citizen interactions as a backdrop. And more room for goblin zaniness.

I've played it pretty much as written - except for NPC tactics and I changed Mammy Graul's spells to take advantage of new necro spells (to give my players some surprises with spells they hadn't faced before.) I guess I've made a few minor plot adjustments as well...

My group just finished Book 3 and I'm not thrilled with a couple elements about how it went. 1) the Haunted Heart didn't really connect with my players. They played it pretty conservative, not provoking any fight with Myrianna and so there wasn't much drama there - it turned into a "fetch quest." Not sure what I could do to change that - my players are pretty experienced, I think they had a good idea what was up when they found about Lamatar's affair and got the report from Yap. 2) Lucrecia is still alive. She has Dimension Door and when her allies all died both at the fort and clan hold I couldn't justify her dying pointlessly. Now in some ways this is good - my players have a serious obsession with taking her out now - but it also means I need to do some work figuring out what to do with her. Not the worst DM problem to have but if I wanted to create my own material I wouldn't be running an AP :) I don't have any suggestions on how to change those things except think about how you might play them and perhaps play Lucrecia more aggressively if you don't want her to survive. Not that survival is wrong just that with her mind-influencing magic, invisibility and dimension door, she can be hard to pin down.


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As anyone who has dipped into my "Extra content and campaign padding" thread will know, I'm sort of in the middle of my second playthrough of Runelords, and this version is the one where I'm experimenting with all the changes I've made to the campaign. I won't be able to say what did and didn't work until I've got it all in retrospect, but I can go over what I think I could have done better in Burnt Offerings.

1. The Festival. I actually think this went about as well as it could. I mean, I didn't pad it endlessly with carnival games and milling around talking to NPCs, I made sure to give every player a chance to engage with at least one event, and overall it was solid. A good understanding of the people, shopkeepers, and personalities in Sandpoint are key to really selling the town in one session here, and I'm happy with my result.

Potential Experiment: Have the players actually arrive in town the day before the festival and see the town as they're setting it up. Also, like Lorax said, goblin scenes involving saving NPCs from goblins would be a great idea. Not even full combat, just "You're running down the street and you see this. Use some sort of skill to save them."

2. Local Heroes. This part I think could have been better. I botched a few things (like the Shopkeeper's Daughter), but overall the players did get to meet a lot of NPCs and really cement themselves as fixtures of the town. If I were trying it again, I would make sure to use a lot more "encounters" with NPCs, little vignettes of life around Sandpoint that people see as they walk around. The little scenes of helping people (Boar Hunt, Goblin in the Closet, etc.) went as well as could be expected, I wouldn't change much here.

Potential Experiment: Have more people come up to the party and engage them, bring them to their shops or insist on sharing a drink in the tavern. Little roleplay events like that.

3. Glassworks, Catacombs. Again, not much I'd do differently. The Glassworks can be a real slog if the players go in the wrong entrance, lots of rooms of nothing. I should have made the Goblins more animated and vibrant. They did their thing in combat and whatnot, but having them shout and sing and generally be the excitable creatures they should be is something I always fumble. Tsuto went really well, though. I've had better fights with him (He once knocked an entire party unconscious save for the ranger, who tried to fire an arrow at him as he ran down the hall to escape, and he just turned and caught it mid-air, glared, and then left), but Tsuto did escape which made me happy. The Catacombs ran fairly well, no real issues here. I wish I could remember my Erylium encounter, but I know it was fairly by-the-book, and was challenging but still able to be completed.

Potential Experiment: More dynamic Goblin encounter, I guess. I can't think of any ways I'd change this part.

4. Thistletop. I loved the Gogmurt encounter, it was a really tough one for the players, and ended with him being captured and interrogated. Again, the actual Fort was played about as straight-from-the-book as possible, so it went pretty smoothly. I absolutely loved how Orik was used, the players captured him alive and he ended up saving their lives from potential death in the Tsuto/Lyrie/Yeth hound fight. Only thing I would have done differently here is have Nualia monologue a bit more in combat. I always fail at having enemies be really dynamic, so I tried to have her really engage the party. I was hoping them to be a little more angry at her, but they ended up being a bit sympathetic, which works too. They still decapitated her. There was no Bhargest fight though.

Potential Experiment: Have Nualia advance her plans a little bit, be in the middle of accomplishing something when the players actually fight her.

On the whole, I only really added the Chopper's Isle side-trek to Burnt Offerings, but doing it again I might add more. Still, it was 17 sessions from the Festival to returning to Sandpoint with Nualia's head, so maybe that's long enough. I dunno.

Really, though, I don't recommend just reading this thread and swiping every idea and hoping it works for you. Adventure modules are something you really have to understand before changing. An old illustration teacher of mine once said "You have to understand human anatomy before you can change it.", and I think that applies here. You really need to understand the story as a whole, the encounters and how they're designed to play out, and most importantly WHY someone made the changes they did to really get the effect out of them.

I would not advocate anyone use my Skinsaw Murders plot changes without specifically understanding why I made them. It's really more for people who see the plot and the events and say "Yeah, this doesn't really work, I need to fix this.".


- Ditch/change Black Magga.
- Give the Xin-Shalast section of book 6 better direction somehow.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I don't know if I completely agree with Ian - the Black Magga encounter worked for me. My players were completely overwhelmed by her power, and they quickly realized that it was a losing battle to try to oppose her (at their current level). As it happens, my party's inquisitor critted her right before her script tells her to flee, so it felt like they dealt her real pain, which drove her away. Maybe that had something to do with it. All I'm saying is that your mileage may vary here.

Xin-Shalast is a legitimate concern. I haven't given it a great deal of thought - we're still two full books away from that, and anything could happen between now and then - but I recognize the soft adventure zone that is Xin-Shalast. I'll probably come up with something and post my thoughts here for brainstorming, but that's a ways off.


I wrote up a VAST amount of background information for my PCs, so Book 1 went swimmingly. The delicate balance between Book 1 and Book 2 is to make the actual stalker show up and be "creepy enough" in Book 1 that they remember him/her, without obviously giving away his/her identity.

There are a lot of great ideas for additional "Red Herring" NPCs in other threads.

Book 2 ran fine; about as well as anyone would expect.

Starting in Book 3, my *HUGE* issue was "casters in small rooms", and that remained a constant throughout the AP. More than anything else, THAT aspect of the AP was a thorn in my side.

My advice would be:
- As Latrecis said, ignore recommended tactics and spell lists for casters. Give them the spell list *YOU* think is appropriate, and have them follow *YOUR* tactics. Too many casters in the AP don't even register as threats because their as-written tactics prevent them from doing anything effective. I know the authors were working a delicate line between TPK and pushover because casters are like that, but they erred too far on the line of "pushover".

- Get the casters out of the tiny rooms! Mammy Graul in a 2x2 room? Lucrecia in a 2x3 room? My party's standard tactic is to have Stealthy person sneak up to the door, listen for any sounds at all, go back, put Silence on the Paladin, and have the Silenced Paladin charge in Smiting. The way the AP is written, this obliterates most of the mid-tier casters in the AP because they're in rooms where Silence fills the entire room. It was a huge pain for me.

- DO listen to the "if xxx hears combat, he assumes it's his own group and doesn't investigate" advice. I've seen several GMs end up with TPKs because they thought, "Well, heck! That's stupid! If they make noise, everyone in camp should hear and come running!"
Might make sense, but it'll TPK your party in some areas. Some enemies are written to be dumb. Play them that way.


Misroi wrote:

I don't know if I completely agree with Ian - the Black Magga encounter worked for me. My players were completely overwhelmed by her power, and they quickly realized that it was a losing battle to try to oppose her (at their current level). As it happens, my party's inquisitor critted her right before her script tells her to flee, so it felt like they dealt her real pain, which drove her away. Maybe that had something to do with it. All I'm saying is that your mileage may vary here.

Xin-Shalast is a legitimate concern. I haven't given it a great deal of thought - we're still two full books away from that, and anything could happen between now and then - but I recognize the soft adventure zone that is Xin-Shalast. I'll probably come up with something and post my thoughts here for brainstorming, but that's a ways off.

My group was completely overwhelmed by her power too; the problem is they were all grappled and/or confused, which makes running away basically impossible. I talked about it in another thread in more detail, but the bottom line is it *might* work out like it did for your group, but it's a terrible risk in terms of falling flat as an experience (or worse.)


The first campaign I ran was Jade Regent; while I eventually did go back and read through RotRL, I never got to run it. One thing I would do if I did, would be to introduce the JR PC's in Burnt Offerings in supporting roles. I would want to fully develop Sandpoint, and give the PC's a sense of belonging there, not just as local heroes. Skinsaw was really well written, so I probably wouldn't do too much with that. Perhaps I would further develop Ironbriar, and have notable NPC's or villains make appearances prior to their introduction. It could also be fun to weave in the other runelords, if only slightly, into the campaign.


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Three useful threads:

one

two

and three.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Oh! I also used Sandru Vhiski. He happened to be in Magnimar after my PCs were finished with Lyrie's trial, and his caravan was passing through Sandpoint. Used him to show the non-Sczarni side of the Varisians, as one person was raised by Jubrayl. I wanted to foreshadow Jade Regent, if I ever get that far!


I would utilize the Monster Codex to make combats a bit more interesting, especially with the large amount of goblins and ogres. Lots of the fights can feel samey.

I would also put a LOT more effort into bringing Sandpoint alive and introducing more of its citizens.


Wayfinder 7 had some great goblin items to help with the samey-ness of the goblins. Also, changing the bonfire to a fireworks display (and having a goblin aim a big firework with a long fuse at the temple could help that initial set).

I made sure to drop characters into the festival that were from the hinterlands (especially before the events of chapter 2) and some of the other places. (I missed having someone from Magnimar)

I'm hoping that this helps with Chapter 2 and maybe Chapter 3, though I may have to bring some more in next time. Also taking advantage of the help wanted board to show some of the other places in Varisia.

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