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So, having previously played through it myself, I'm now running through Thornkeep for my local PFS group, and one of the things that struck me during prep is the fact that the book does a pretty good job of detailing out a nice, contained, mini-campaign setting with a lot of plot hooks, NPCs, and local color within the Thornkeep town and region...
....none of which you are likely to get to do anything with in a PFS-setting, given the fact that you only get to give out PFS credit for the actual dungeon delve itself. So, missing farmer's daughters, gang tensions, a werewolf baron, a d20 rumor chart, and spooky noises from the old abandoned house are all things that I can't do anything with because they have almost zero effect on the PFS-legal portions of the module, and I also do not usually have the time, when running this in my local PFS, to let the PCs dally around chasing red-herring rumors in town for a half-hour or more, as we need to get to the credit-legal stuff and finish in a timely fashion.
This depresses me. This is a great setting for a mini-campaign going from levels 1-7, which could easily lead into the PCs taking out the baron and becoming the new town bosses (or various other outcomes). There's many intriguing plothooks to help the PCs level up and loot up in between the actual dungeon delve levels (which is necessary, since if you run a party straight through Thornkeep and don't allow any XP but what each level gives you, you quickly wind up with a party that is on the low-end of power curve for levels 2 and 3, and is not even minimum level for for level 4 and 5). If I run this strictly PFS, I can't take advantage of any of this Other Stuff, and I'm left with just a dungeon delve, that I have to pad with other PFS scenarios to allow the PCs to be the appropriate level for the later Thornkeep levels.
I'd like to run a PBP mini-campaign set in the Thornkeep region, so that I take out the time constraint issue and can let the PCs get attached to and interested in the region itself. I'd like to let them go chase down those sidequest rumors, have some adventures on the side, then come back to their big dungeon.
But how can I do this while preserving the PFS-legal portion and letting people get credit accordingly?
I can't give them PFS-applicable XP for the non-dungeon portions, so they can't actually 'level up' with PFS characters doing these sidequests. I can't give them resources/treasure outside of the dungeon that they could then use in the dungeon. It creates a conundrum.
Of course, the simplest option would just be to run this as a home campaign, no PFS credit, period; but that means writing off potential PFS credit for players, which seems a shame. (I don't care about my own GM credit for this, since I'm going to have already run through it at my local PFS.)
Option 2 would be to do this the way PFS credit and APs mesh-- you don't need to run them with a PFS character, you can run them as an actual campaign, but the PFS-credit gets applied to your PFS character of the appropriate levels. However, I don't know if this is legal to do for the Thornkeep modules. Can anyone weigh in on that?
Option 3 would be sort of a nightmarish dual bookkeeping thing: where the PCs would basically have to keep two sets of records, one to keep track of their PFS-legal resources, treasure, and XP, and the other one to keep track of all the side-adventuring they do in the local region, but which has no bearing on their actual dungeon delving, or any other PFS scenarios they play with the character. In this option, characters would advance as heroes in a purely-narrative sense in the Thornkeep sidequests, but their players would meanwhile get to play other PFS scenarios with the characters, leveling up until they're ready to tackle the next dungeon aspect. Obviously, this would necessitate players on board with this extra level of book-keeping, and I'm not crazy about it, but if Option 2 isn't legal I'm not sure there's a better way to try and combine the for-credit and not-for-credit elements of Thornkeep. :-\
Has anyone tried anything similar to this, whether with Thornkeep or something else? Can anyone suggest solutions I'm not seeing?
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Option 2 would be to do this the way PFS credit and APs mesh-- you don't need to run them with a PFS character, you can run them as an actual campaign, but the PFS-credit gets applied to your PFS character of the appropriate levels. However, I don't know if this is legal to do for the Thornkeep modules. Can anyone weigh in on that?
This isn't PFS-legal for Thornkeep (or Emerald Spire).
If I wanted to do something like this, I would play the PFS parts as normal, then for the non-PFS parts, I'd temporarily track consumables/rewards etc. on a separate sheet. Then when starting the next PFS section I would discard those temporary sheets, effectively resetting the PCs back to the end of the last PFS section. I wouldn't go to the trouble of having two full sets of records per PC.
I appreciate it's not perfect, and loses some continuity, but it's as good a compromise I can come up with given the constraints of staying PFS-legal.
The alternative for a PBP game is to run the non-PFS sections as entirely roleplay and narrative, like a shared storytelling exercise, and ignore the game mechanics entirely.
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Yeah, "campaign mode" isn't available for the modules, which includes Thornkeep and Emerald Spire.
But recall, you don't need to run it for PFS credit in a typical PFS situation, at a con or a store with a limited time. Take as long as you want, running it as a home game but using all PFS rules, and it is still PFS legal. The only thing you can't do is add in home-brew stuff yourself.
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Yeah, "campaign mode" isn't available for the modules, which includes Thornkeep and Emerald Spire.
But recall, you don't need to run it for PFS credit in a typical PFS situation, at a con or a store with a limited time. Take as long as you want, running it as a home game but using all PFS rules, and it is still PFS legal. The only thing you can't do is add in home-brew stuff yourself.
Yeah, I've been running Emerald Spire for a group (up to level 12 now!) and I've been adding in a lot of the role-playing stuff in Fort Inevitable. It doesn't change the way the levels play or anything, it just gives them a lot more background and some chances to interact. All PFS legal with chronicles and all.
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Take as long as you want, running it as a home game but using all PFS rules, and it is still PFS legal. The only thing you can't do is add in home-brew stuff yourself.
Yes, I grasp that's an option. However, the issue is that I specifically do want to add home stuff, with the understanding that I can't use that to give them any actual PFS XP or loot.
I don't want them to just HEAR the rumors about the gangs, the baron, the missing people, the undead in the graveyard, and not be able to actually do anything about them. To me, that's worse than just omitting that stuff. I mean... "Oh, hey, here's all these potential sidequests I'm going to tell you about but you can't actually solve any of those problems"? Yay?
The other issue is that, unlike Emerald Spire, if you run Thornkeep exactly as is, and the players do not get other XP (from other PFS scenarios), they will be below-level for the final two levels, as follows:
Accursed Halls: for levels 1-2. If you start with a party of level 1s, they reach level 2, making them legal to play...
Forgotten Laboratory (2-4), which makes them level 3, and thus, juust legal to play....
The Enigma Vaults (3-5), though I'd hate to run that one for a party of level 3s, it's potentially very fatal... but assuming the PCs survive, that makes them level 4.... and the next level of the dungeon is Dark Menagerie (5-7). The last level is 6-8. So Thornkeep on its own is not giving them enough XP to actually... play through Thornkeep.
I'm fully aware I can't give them PFS-XP for any homebrew material I would add into the campaign. What I'm envisioning would go like this:
-PCs would play through the first three levels, with some hints as to what's going on in the region and some roleplay when they come out of the dungeon for rests. Leveling up would be based strictly off the PFS-sanctioned content, so they don't get XP or gold for anything they do in the homebrew sidequests;
-We'd have a lull at the halfway point, where the PCs could chase down rumors, solve some sidequests, etc. Again for no PFS-XP or PFS-applicable rewards. I.e., if you find a healing potion in this part of the story, you can only use it in the homebrew section; it won't carry over when you go back to the dungeon. This would last a few months, or however long it would take for the PCs to, meanwhile, have the chance to play their characters in their local PFS and manage another level-up. Once all the characters had reached their next level through legal PFS play, we'd pick up again with the dungeon, and do the remaining two levels.
-On completing the dungeon, a likely finale showdown with either the baron or one of the other powerful NPCs, to provide a wrap-up to the campaign. Any loot/etc from that fight also doesn't carry over with their PFS-characters-- it's just a nice narrative finish to the game.