Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance - concurrent?

[BushidoWarriorWookiee]

I know this is probably a dumb question, and maybe it's been asked before, so I apologize if I'm repeating.

I don't yet own books of either AP, and I'm still running Chapter 5 of Rise of the Runelords, but beginning to look ahead at what AP I might want to run next. I turn to you, the experts:

Can Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance be run concurrently, with two separate groups? A Good Party and an Evil Party?

I guess the real question is, do the stories overlap? Do they occur in the same or neighboring regions of Cheliax? Or are the stories sequential? Do the events in Vengeance depend on assumed outcomes from Rebels?

I think it would be really cool to run the two simultaneously (despite the headaches of balancing two campaigns at once!), meaning run one group with Rebels biweekly, and another group with Vengeance on the off-weeks, even if the two never intersect; but if the stories are chronologically sequential, I'm not sure it would work.

What do you guys think?

Thanks in advance.

[zimmerwald1915]

BushidoWarriorWookiee wrote:

I know this is probably a dumb question, and maybe it's been asked before, so I apologize if I'm repeating.

I don't yet own books of either AP, and I'm still running Chapter 5 of Rise of the Runelords, but beginning to look ahead at what AP I might want to run next. I turn to you, the experts:

Can Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance be run concurrently, with two separate groups? A Good Party and an Evil Party?

I guess the real question is, do the stories overlap? Do they occur in the same or neighboring regions of Cheliax? Or are the stories sequential? Do the events in Vengeance depend on assumed outcomes from Rebels?

I think it would be really cool to run the two simultaneously (despite the headaches of balancing two campaigns at once!), meaning run one group with Rebels biweekly, and another group with Vengeance on the off-weeks, even if the two never intersect; but if the stories are chronologically sequential, I'm not sure it would work.

What do you guys think?

Thanks in advance.

The APs are concurrent in time. They don't touch each other, but that's only because Vengeance actually matters whereas Rebels is confined to a backwater, and its results are doomed to be undone in a generation.

[David knott 242]

The events in the two adventure paths are concurrent, but they take place in different parts of Cheliax. Hell's Rebels takes place primarily in Kintargo, while Hell's Vengeance takes place primarily in the Heartlands, on the other side of the Menador Mountains. The two parties should never run into each other.

[zimmerwald1915]

David knott 242 wrote:

Hell's Rebels takes place primarily in Kintargo, while Hell's Vengeance takes place primarily in the Heartlands

And Menador, and Longmarch, that is, the important bits.

[Zhangar]

Also, if the Hell's Rebels party is successful, the Hell's Vengeance party is functionally forbidden from messing with Kintargo as long as they're agents of Cheliax.

(I.e., if the Hell's Rebels PCs are successful, Cheliax actually needs Kintargo's express permission to invade Kintargo, because infernal contracts are hilarious.)

[zimmerwald1915]

Zhangar wrote:

Also, if the Hell's Rebels party is successful, the Hell's Vengeance party is functionally forbidden from messing with Kintargo as long as they're agents of Cheliax.

(I.e., if the Hell's Rebels PCs are successful, Cheliax actually needs Kintargo's express permission to invade Kintargo, because infernal contracts are hilarious.)

Utterly contrived, unenforceable nonsense.

[Zhangar]

Fortunately for the Silver Ravens, the Infernal Magestrix has a better grasp on reality than her supporters =P

[zimmerwald1915]

Zhangar wrote:

Fortunately for the Silver Ravens, the Infernal Magestrix has a better grasp on reality than her supporters =P

Reality dictates that Ravounel can't win a war with Cheliax (they lost the last one, remember?). And no power in Hell is going to intervene to enforce the contract against their designated puppet. It's an illusion of protection, and a pretty transparent one.

[James Jacobs]

As folks have noted, these two APs are intended to start at the same time, and their events roughly play out during the same time period. We deliberately avoided having them overlap in location or NPCs so that if a GM does want to run both, she or he can decide which one is the dominant one whose events help propel Cheliax forward.

As written... if both play out...

Spoiler:

... Cheliax ends up more or less the same as it was before, but smaller, as it loses one of its Archduchies. The loss of a part of its land is certainly a humiliating defeat overall, but given the fact that Cheliax could have lost ALL of it if not for the actions of the villain PCs in Hell's Vengeance, they're lucky. And the PCs in Hell's Rebels are poised, if they so desire, to start to expand the free nation of Ravounel as well. The "Continuing the Campaign" has a few tips and some advice for how to mesh these two storylines together after the APs are finished if that's what you want, but that's not something WE wanted to hard code into either campaign.

AKA: It's lame to spend a year writing and developing an Adventure Path only to have it rendered pointless by the events of another AP that happens adjacently... whether or not you're heroic PCs or bad PCs. And that suggests to me that if you actually take the year or more to PLAY one of these APs, it'd be even more bitter to know that nothing you did mattered because of another AP that may or may not ever be run at your table.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

The question that I'm more concerned about is what happens to Cheliax INTERNALLY from the events of these campaigns. Like, will things just return to the way they are, or will House Thrune decree that the average Chelaxian citizen's daily beatings shall be doubled their daily crust of bread and dirty water be halved as punishment for daring to think of freedom?

[zimmerwald1915]

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

The question that I'm more concerned about is what happens to Cheliax INTERNALLY from the events of these campaigns. Like, will things just return to the way they are, or will House Thrune decree that the average Chelaxian citizen's daily beatings shall be doubled their daily crust of bread and dirty water be halved as punishment for daring to think of freedom?

What halving are you talking about? The bread ration's been increased from one roll to half of a roll. Praise Abrogail.

[James Jacobs]

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

The question that I'm more concerned about is what happens to Cheliax INTERNALLY from the events of these campaigns. Like, will things just return to the way they are, or will House Thrune decree that the average Chelaxian citizen's daily beatings shall be doubled their daily crust of bread and dirty water be halved as punishment for daring to think of freedom?

This will likely be touched upon in the Continuing the Campaign article, but not much, because the intent is that, Ravounel excepted obviously, after Hell's Vengeance the day to day life more or less does go right back to normal. It's not the citizens of Cheliax who rose up against Thrune in this AP, but a fringe group of Iomedan extremists. Thrune knows better than to punish the citizens for something they didn't do.