I'd like to get Carrion Crown to run for my group (which is currently my kids...) but it's darned hard (or expensive) to get the physical copies, even on EBay. Is there a reason that the books are so rare, or is there any hope for a reprint?
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I'd like to get Carrion Crown to run for my group (which is currently my kids...) but it's darned hard (or expensive) to get the physical copies, even on EBay. Is there a reason that the books are so rare, or is there any hope for a reprint?
Books 1, 2, 4 and 6 are sold out.
A reprint is highly unlikely at the moment.How old are your kids?
Does it have to be a Horror campaign?
If yes, i'd suggest Wrath of the Righteous (vs. Demons) instead, if not: Reign of Winter is pretty cool and very suspenseful at the beginning.
Did they play PF already?
A campaign will take half a year at best to finish.
Ask me if you have any questions. :-)
u could also check amazon. i just glanced over and some of it is pretty cheap if u dont mind used copies.
u could also check amazon. i just glanced over and some of it is pretty cheap if u dont mind used copies.
Thanks, but it's books 1 and 4 that are hard to find, those are $40 ea on Amazon and elsewhere. I'm just hesitant to spend $150 to get all 6 books, and the other APs seem to be $50 to $80 as a set, used. Is Carrion Crown twice as awesome, or is there a scarcity issue?
u could also check amazon. i just glanced over and some of it is pretty cheap if u dont mind used copies.
Also, I can always buy the .pdf files if I want, but the physical books are just so much more satisfying...
Perhaps copies are being rounded up and destroyed to protect the gaming public? That AP was toxic. It ended Pathfinder for our group, and cost us a group member and friend who'd gamed with us for over a decade.
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It isn't the best AP in terms of a coherent story.
More like every part stands on it's own and is connected by metaplot just barely.
But the parts in itself are mostly good.
Part 1: Ghost story 8/10
Part 2: Frankenstein 9/10
Part 3: Werewolves 6,5/10
Part 4: Cthulhu Mythos 9/10
Part 5: Vampires 7/10
Part 6: Undead Dungeon Crawl 6/10
This isn't the only AP that's seen prices go through the roof; Kingmaker- Part 1: Stolen Lands goes for 50$+ and the first Rise of the Runelords goes for a pretty penny as well. I imagine since Haunting of Harrowstone won awards, it was scooped up pretty heftily by players. Also, Part 1's always sell quicker since people seem more likely to try out a new AP rather than commit to a year+ long endeavor (running all the parts), and they can also be ran as stand-alone modules more often than not.
-Damon: I haven't found the AP to be toxic, even at the endpoints where we are now. I had a much more toxic game (which sounds a-kin to yours) with my Legacy of Fire group. Basically, my group's system mastery forced me to hand-waive every encounter, even stuff 4+ above their APL. It created a.. confrontational state at the table to say the least. The story also had lost steam for the group by book 4. (where we ended) My point is sometimes its just a particular game or AP combined with a particular group that can cause a negative experience, especially when that experience lays bare any nagging flaws in the game (like either living or dying due to the presence of one spell, Death Ward). It is not necessarily the AP itself that is bad but simply that particular experience with it.
Perhaps copies are being rounded up and destroyed to protect the gaming public? That AP was toxic. It ended Pathfinder for our group, and cost us a group member and friend who'd gamed with us for over a decade.
Really? How so? Does it pit PC against PC? Feel free to reply via PM if you're worried about spoilers in the thread. Thanks!
Personally, Carrion Crown is among my top three favorite adventure paths, but the previous description is correct. It's a series of functionally unrelated, yet very cool, adventures that are linked by a metaplot that only becomes gradually more important before the end arrives. I would have loved it if it had been more of a story-based adventure, but as it stands it functions mainly as a road-trip through Ustalav.
Fun, but not as epic as it could have been.
Right now I'm excited about the Strange Aeons adventure path that starts this month. I've looked at some of the pdf for that one, and I like what I've seen. I'm mainly waiting on my paper copy in the mail to actually read it, though, because more satisfying.
First issues have really stood out as more expensive. For me, the hole I wanted to fill in my collection was the Council of Thieves adventure path. It was almost impossible to find a used copy of volume one for under a hundred bucks. It was the first volume published under the Pathfinder rules set, I believe, and the start of a new adventure path. I've been telling myself that's why I had to sell a kidney to get it.
Perhaps copies are being rounded up and destroyed to protect the gaming public? That AP was toxic. It ended Pathfinder for our group, and cost us a group member and friend who'd gamed with us for over a decade.Really? How so? Does it pit PC against PC? Feel free to reply via PM if you're worried about spoilers in the thread. Thanks!
I've discussed parts of it in the Carrion Crown Obituaries thread. One of the "buttons" Carrion Crown and Serpent's Skull both pushed for our group was the need to ally with evil NPCs to make progress. Neither all the players nor all the PCs were Lawful Good, but in any given campaign our players tend to skew pretty strongly toward Never Evil.
In Carrion Crown, we had 6 PCs including a Cleric of Pharasma and a Ranger with undead as a favored enemy; plus another PC with a LG cohort. You can imagine how pleased we were at the prospect of doing favors for vampires.
A much smaller, but similarly annoying bit earlier on, put us in a situation where we'd taken an NPC up on an offer to visit his master's home, and while exploring the place it became clear that the PCs were expected to loot the furnishings of the host's home in order to keep up any semblance of wealth by level. That's not us, so we ended up even poorer than PCs in this AP normally are, and that's saying something.
Things started to go downhill for us near the end of Book Three. Our GM had less experience behind the screen than some of us, but wasn't a complete newbie. He'd played in two Pathfinder APs before running this one, and had DM'd us in multiple D&D games before (2.0 and 3.0) All the players had decades of RPG experience each. Each of the three players was running two PCs, and we had one cohort and an animal companion in the mix as well, so we were a strong party.
Despite all this, and notwithstanding the different experiences other groups have had, we began getting our asses kicked regularly starting at Feldgrau.
We suffered PC deaths at Feldgrau, Thrushmoor, Illmarsh, under Tern Rocks, en route of Caliphas, inside of Caliphas, outside of Caliphas, and at Renchurch: twenty-three (23) deaths in all, not counting the TPK on the lower level of Renchurch that broke it for everyone.
Our GM was bending over backward to supply us with the diamond dust and large diamonds needed to keep us alive and sans negative levels. He even planted a staff of life as extra treasure at one point. But we had to use it so often that one of the two clerics in the party never got her full daily spell allotment, because she had to devote a slot every day toward recharging the staff.
Our Rogue managed to avoid being killed until we reached Caliphas in Book Five. At that point, she was killed and raised in three consecutive weekly game sessions.
Obviously, having a larger than expected party in an AP with unusually low treasure did work against us, making it hard to upgrade equipment. Our GM helped where he could here as well, with a grateful Church of Pharasma in Caliphas arranging for some item crafting to be done by NPCs at half the usual cost.
By the end of Book Five we had even taken on a Mythic Tier in hopes that would make us more survivable, but no matter what we did, we just kept getting overwhelmed. The random encounters around Renchurch are more deadly than some planned encounters should be. We had a 14th L Cleric of Pharasma on watch one night with another PC. Not surprisingly she failed a Perception check against a pair of greater shadows, so they got a surprise round. Both hit, one backed up a crit, and before she could even cry out, she was dead: drained from 19 STR to 0 in the surprise round. The three spectres with them were totally superfluous.
The invisible werewolf lich with a wand of dimension door was a huge pain in the ass. We had to kill him twice. The invisible vampire sorcerer spamming fireballs at us while we were swarmed by ghosts and shadows wasn't a lot of fun either.
The only times we had PC vs. PC situations were when PCs fell to ghosts or greater shadows and had to be destroyed by their allies a couple of rounds later.
All in all it was not a good experience.
Damon: PurpleMonkeyDishwasher, pass it on.
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Damon: just so you're aware, there are multiple things in your post that don't line up with the AP as printed.
Such as? Looking back at my post, I'm only aware of these deviations:
- staff of life, which I said was planted by the GM as extra treasure
- NPC item crafting, which I noted was something the GM did
- Mythic Tier, which perhaps I wasn't clear about: we knew it wasn't in the AP, but it was an attempt to slow the rate of dying
- combo group of spectres and greater shadows, which was a miscalculation on the GM's part: he rolled twice on the random encounter table because he thought either one of those would be too easy for a 14th L group.
Pretty sure I can cite references for everything else.
@Gorbacz That GM had been part of our core gaming group for over 13 years, but after that TPK he quit the group and cut off all contact. My wife is still in the group but flatly refuses to ever play Pathfinder again. A third member won't completely rule out the possibility of playing Pathfinder again at some point years down the road, but swears he will never run or play in another Pathfinder AP. For the moment we're reduced to board/card games and Ars Magica.
@Purplemonkeydishwasher PuppyMonkeyBaby to you, too. :)
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Off the top of my head:
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The treasure issues in the AP are legitimate. And the expected looting of Schloss Caromarc is rough. Even so, a larger-then-normal group in an AP written and designed for four players would make any AP worse, treasure-wise.
As for all the deaths? I can't explain that, other than plain old bad luck. I did my darnedest to kill my players and never got a single kill.
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I went through your posts in the Carrion Crown Obituaries thread and found numerous cases where either changes had been made to the module, the advancement rules of the campaign had been altered (fast-track XP), or multiple encounters had been combined into one. All of these can be recipes for disaster in the hands of an unwary GM, especially when it comes to cumulative effects like death gazes or energy drain.
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Well, a good GM adjusts things on the fly to fit the group. Like Kali says, it seems like your GM did something weird: on the one hand, he made encounters harder, but it seems he wanted to balance it by faster XP track and stuff like free diamonds. I don't think it's a good move, bumping lethality of the campaign is something that should only be done if the party is 6+ PCs or the majority of the group is playing highly optimized characters. PCs dropping left and right is not fun. People get burned out and frustrated.
A solid campaign will likely have a couple spectacular PC deaths, but should never pass the frustration threshold.
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** Ashes At Dawn **
That was in fact tempting, and we had a tentative plan to do just that as a post-AP action. But we couldn't be sure that we'd get the information we needed in that way, and it seemed highly risky given how little we knew about their strengths and resources.
We suffered a number of PC deaths as it was; it's hard to believe we'd have done better taking on even more opponents.
** Shadows of Gallowspire **
What the---? Motherfu-- @#&!!%$^#%
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I did my darnedest to kill my players and never got a single kill.
There are some that would say that makes you a bad GM on two counts. :)
No, I've been running the same thing with mildly optimized characters, and they steam-rolled everything past book 2, to the point that I introduced Mythic just so there could actually be a challenge present with some of the monsters they faced. In the hands of experienced players, the AP is a joke. My PCs constantly spam Death Ward, Freedom of Movement, and Protection from Evil, making 90% of all encounters irrelevant. Its only through mythic and changing the monsters individually (tailoring spell lists to combat my group, etc.)that the fights get worth running, besides the occasional oddball monster that appears. Oh sure, the monsters try to dispel their enchantments whenever they can, but they are simply recast in a turn or two. Again, with those three spells spammed (which you should be able to do by the fifth and sixth module), the end parts are easy, at least without DM adjudication (The Whisper's Haunt dispelling, etc.)as nothing as printed in the modules can really hurt you with those spells up.