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On the advice of another GM who did so, I ran book one with the PCs starting with no equipment. They literally only have the choice of a hospital johnny, scrubs, or a straight-jacket for their starting gear.
The players were warned, and picked classes that weren't gear-dependant: sorcerers, oracles, monks, and choosing to start with the Improved Unarmed Strike, Catch Off-Guard or Eschew Materials feats.
It went well. Both the GM who suggested it to me and I completed In Search of Sanity without a TPK, although he did have one PC death in session 1.
Anyone else try something similar?
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In the interest of making the boss-battles less d20-like and more Cthulhu-like, I’ve decided to add puzzles to the “final” boss-fights from each book. I feel it makes the fights a little bit video-game-ish, where there’s a fight mechanic the PCs have to do in order to beat the NPC. However, that’s something we don’t normally see in tabletop encounters, so I feel some limited cases, like once per book, reinforce the “weird” feel of a Lovecraftian AP.
For the Tatterman, first I moved the Hypnotic Dreams haunt from room F2 to the hallway between F2 & F3. Second, I boosted the Tatterman’s abilities, double HP, double DR, added energy resistance, added the advanced template, etc; I did not increase his damage output. Third, I linked the paintings to the Tatterman’s abilities: destroying this drawing removes his DR, shredding that painting removes his fear aura, wrecking another eliminates his protection from good SLA, etc.
As the PCs headed down the corridor, I reinforced the thematic link, reminding the players the images in the paintings were the same city where the PCs had been “killed” by the Tatterman back in session one. Then, after Ulver Zandalus was defeated, I described “black smoke”, almost like powdered charcoal, flowing from Ulver’s drawings into the Tatterman, reinvigorating the nightmare doppleganger. After beating them over the head with it, my PCs caught the clue.
I made destroying a drawing a standard action, although AoE effects, like burning hands or an alchemist’s bomb, can take out as many as they can hit. The “Damaging Objects” table on aonprd suggests each drawing has 2hp with no hardness. When burning a sketch removed the panicked effect on a PC who’d failed their save against the Tatterman’s fear aura, the party went to town on Zandalus’ gallery.
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Neat idea
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Finally found time to GM this campaign and so far it's been a blast.
I'm always prone to change a lot of the plot on APs but this one I found myself doing it less than usual, since it's really interesting.
I left my players free to create as much - or as little - background they want but made it clear that I would change much of it during the campaing. Nobody expected different. I know this group of players very well and they trust me as a DM. That also made the dream sequence at the beginning pretty smooth. Players were creeped out but I don't think anyone really believed they were really dead. I mean, the AP just started, they knew it was part of the show. Didn't made it less memorable, though.
The encounter with Latchke was a breeze. Nobody believed the "kind old woman" for a second and eventually the Occultist in our group used phrenology to find out what she really was. Latchke fell in one turn. The creepy haunt with floating viscera was also easy but so disturbing that my group is still hesitant to approach dead bodies.
On the other hand, Oathsday was almost TPK. Scaen had run away on the beginning of the adventure and joined forces with Oathsday. Since nobody believed Latchke, I thought that doind the same trick trice would be boring, so both doctors just embushed the PCs using the silent image trick. It was brutal. By the end of the encounter each PC had fallen below 0 HP at least once. It was actually surprising that nobody died.
After this fight, everyone began thinking of a backup character just to be safe.
I had something to ask of the community here in the forum but after reading so many interesting tales of groups playing this adventure I decided to leave my experiences here... and now I don't remember what I was supposed to ask... Guess I'll post more eventually. Hopefully people still read this thread, even if the adventure is from some years ago :)
Does the Red Destiny sword get referred anywhere else in the AP?
No, the Red Destiny sword is not mentioned anywhere else in the AP.
Does the Red Destiny sword get referred anywhere else in the AP?
No, the Red Destiny sword is not mentioned anywhere else in the AP.
One of the PCs when I ran this was an occultist who would use object reading on everything. He got used to very detailed images that I would craft for each of the significant items.
Then they found Red Destiny.
And there was nothing. No images. No reading. Nothing.
That scared them more than almost anything in this chapter (except the little boy crying in a pitch-black room).
I'm planning on running this (again; it keeps getting pushed back on my to-do list) but I'm having a hard time parsing everything going on in terms of the overarching plot. Is there a summary somewhere of the things that are going to come up later/need to be reinforced or seeded earlier in the campaign? Or a basic run-through of events? I've tried reading the front-matter on all the books, but for some reason I can't get it to stick in my head in a useful way.
At (or near) the end of the first book, there's a one-page summary of the AP's overarching plot (on a book by book basis). Whether or not it mentions names/other information which needs to be reinforced/seeded/name-dropped earlier on, is something that I can't answer. (I'm AFB right now.)