GM worried about "fun" factor of rise of the runelords


Advice


I'm about to start Rise of the Runelords with a group of mostly newbies and I've been reading through the adventure path and it seems really dark and depressing. I know my players might like something light hearted and fun. Is there opportunity to make it lighter or is it going to be depressing as I think it looks?

Dark Archive

The real depressing part is that with lots of experience, insane optimization, and the dm pulling punches is the insane amount of pc deaths. Rise of the Runelords is a meatgrinder. I do not recommend it.


I've been experiencing Rise of the Runelords as a player from the start of it to nearly the end of the 4th section.

The first part of it can be amusing, given that you deal with a lot of goblins. Depending on your sense of humor, you can get a lot of laughs from them. Our group laughed for a good few minutes straight at some of the locations that goblins hide treasure, or what they even consider treasure.

After that though, much of the humor has come from the party, not necessarily the environment. By the time you start running into Ogres as regular enemies it does indeed get quite dark. Fort Rannick is definitely not a bundle of kittens and rainbows.

My advice to help lighten it up is to alter the details of the rooms they enter, ease up on the gruesome. Maybe keep goblins around longer than they normally are to provide their own touch of comedic relief. (I just had the mental picture of a hill giant throwing goblins at people since he ran out of rocks)

Hopefully some others can provide some advice.


I have to disagree with Cory about the difficulty. Never found it that bad save for the preponderance of undisarmable traps. The campaign basically mandates some kind of cleric or cleric stand in because of it and that's kind of awful, but overall it's not that hard.

However for your purposes I would not suggest it, as it does get incredibly dark at times.

Cutting back on the haunts does minimize both to an extent though.


Ok, next question would be, if I back away from ROTR, does anyone have suggestions for a fun, lighter, Indian Jones type adventure path?


You could recast the big boss guy as the Dark Lord Chuckles the silly piggy. :P

Seriously though, having read through it you can probably think of places to change things if you want a bit of levity or humour. Maybe it isn't Skinsaw Murders, but Skinsaw Public Humiliations. They slay social standing. Maybe the manor house is full of slapstick traps and the lord of the manor is suffering from "mime control". Really there things you can switch to change the tone drastically.


Zaloma wrote:
Ok, next question would be, if I back away from ROTR, does anyone have suggestions for a fun, lighter, Indian Jones type adventure path?

Mummy's Mask is all about digging into not!Egyptian tombs.

But really, RotR isn't difficult. I have yet to play a single AP that was (there is the occasional difficult encounter, but nothing consistently difficult, and if anything it goes in very much the opposite direction).

Also, you haven't had "fun and games" until you're mostly naked while standing very still under a vanish spell and hoping that Shayliss Vender's father will leave the basement very soon. It makes for a very tense several seconds.


As far àI I understand, including from the following of PbPs, Mummy's Mask is THE Indiana Jones AP. I would have also said Serpent's Skull, but Book One in the PbP that I followed took FOREVER to finish with little apparent progress, while the same GM had no such problem with Kingmaker. (With respect to Kingmaker, it is a sandbox, but might be dangerous for the characters of players who haven't learned the ropes yet.)

Edit: Semi-Ninja'd.


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Zaloma wrote:
Ok, next question would be, if I back away from ROTR, does anyone have suggestions for a fun, lighter, Indian Jones type adventure path?

My players are a little bit into book four of RotRL, and we've had 2 deaths, both the same character, and a few close calls that were covered with Hero Points. That's between level 1 and level 11, with 6 players.

Parts of it (particularly book 3) are darker than others. It's a pretty epic story overall, though, so my players are enjoying it, though they're far from newbies. They didn't find book 3 depressing, they mostly just developed a strong hatred of giants and ogres.

Mummy's Mask looks more Egypt/undead-themed, so probably not much in the way of disturbing content and might fit the Indiana Jones idea.
Kingmaker might also be fun, since the players will be putting together their own kingdom and doing a lot of exploring.

One idea might be to browse the Adventure Path forums. Skimming through those should give you an idea of how they've played out when other people ran them.

Dark Archive

Only on book 1 of RotRL so I can't really comment on the later darkness, but Mummys Mask is definitely Indiana Jones on Golarion. That said, it too is not a 'fun' story, towns overrun with undead, some pretty unpleasant things involving said undead occur and it's not what you'd think of as lighthearted (then again, with faces melting and death by instant aging Indiana Jones has a lot of darker moments too I guess).

Grand Lodge

Personally, I thought the first book of RotRLs was a hoot. If played right, goblins can be absolutely hilarious. We also took a break and threw in We Be Goblins between books 1 & 2.

As far as alternatives, Crypt of the Everflame is a pretty cool one-off that should fit the bill.

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