I am GMing Ironfang -- about 5 sessions in, which puts us halfway through Volume 1. I haven't made too many changes yet, except for shifting encounter locations around in the Fangwood so the refugees don't miss anything fun. But here's a change that paid off for me.
I love fey, and I want to drop some early hints to make Vol. 5's fey-focused plot feel earned. The first fey encounter listed in Vol. 1 is with a group of mites who are tormenting a wolf pack. Well, I love fey... but I can't abide mites. So I combed through the Bestiaries to find a suitable fey to replace them.
I settled on chaneques, from B4. And then their creepy stalking tactics and soul-stealing domination powers suggested a bunch of ways to build up this encounter over several sessions. Here's how it played out for me:
Session 3 (the first session after the PCs' escape from Phaendar) ended with a sort of cut-scene of the druid's animal companion wolf prowling through the woods and encountering another wolf pack. They are about to fight, but then the indigenous wolves panic and flee... not from the animal companion, but rather from a dark shape that swoops out of the trees and lobs a skull at the companion's head. End of session.
(Note: if you want to try something like this but you don't have an animal companion or familiar, just choose an NPC from among the refugees -- someone the PCs have already interacted with, so they know their personality a bit.)
Session 4 started with the wolf returning...changed. The druid found him listless and quiet, but he couldn't articulate what had happened to him (ie. the chaneque's soul-stealing effect). But I let the druid control his wolf as usual, and the chaneques didn't make another appearance until the very end of the session, when another cut-scene revealed they were just outside the camp.
(Another note: Most GMs don't do these sorts of cut-scenes, with information that characters don't have access to. With an inexperienced group, it can easily lead to metagaming. But I trust my group to use it as intended -- building atmosphere and suspense.)
Session 5 In the morning, several NPCs had the same malaise as the wolf, but none of the PCs put two and two together (and the couldn't have diagnosed the problem in any case). After foraging for a day, the camp bedded down again...and that's when all hell broke loose. The wolf and the NPCs who'd been struck the night before all attacked the rest of the camp. The PCs had to incapacitate them while trying to figure out what was controlling them (I let them spot the skulls glowing in the trees). They managed to defeat all the chaneques, and crush the skulls, save for one, which got away. That means one of the NPCs is still lacking a soul, and could go rogue at any time.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the PCs deal with this threat. Eventually, I'll have the chaneque return, so they can crush the skull and liberate the NPC. But it seems like a great way to raise tension and remind the players that the Fangwood is a really dangerous place.
Has anyone else made any substitutions in Vol. 1?
I won't start this till mid-January at the earliest, so I can't comment. Why don't you like the mites? Just curious.
I won't start this till mid-January at the earliest, so I can't comment. Why don't you like the mites? Just curious.
I guess it's their unimaginative brand of cruelty. The Bestiary description calls them "pitiful and craven," and says even goblins make fun of them. So they get bullied a lot and then take it out on weaker creatures. The psychological realism of that motive is precisely why I find it so dull.
The fey appeal to me because their cruelty is inscrutable. Mites seem like fey wannabes: they can see the other fey having fun, but they're not in on the joke and it drives them nuts.
Hmm...now that I put it that way, I could see a few ways in which mites could work in conjunction with other fey. But in this AP, they appear only once, outside their usual environment (underground), and their sole purpose is to torture wolf cubs. Pass.
Fair enough. I've only been part of a game with them once (Kingmaker), and we slaughtered them all.
Haha, I replaced the mites in Kingmaker too, now that I think of it.