Our group didn't quite TPK during Lost Star but about half the characters died and the rest weren't in any shape to try and rescue them and had to withdraw.
Now originally I'd thought it would be fun to give the players more time to enjoy their main cast by running them through the Rose Street module (reflavored as taking place in and around Underbridge and dealing with the murders of slaves rescued from Korvosan infernalists). But it seemed politic to have the players who's characters died just make their 4th level characters along with everyone else and reward them with brand new 10th level characters when the time comes.
So this leaves me with extra time before the Pale Mountain surveys become available to test out the Pathfinder Society module and a group of new characters the players are interested in trying out. So my hope was to do the Rose Street Revenge with these new fourth level characters--since Tier One is levels 1-4 right? The idea is to reflavor the adventure as the PCs helping Valeros, Ezren, Kyra and Merisiel get a handle on a local rash of crime targeting former slaves in and around Kelmarane.
But it brings up a big question. I think I have the right table to figure out the new XP budget and how many creatures to add. Taking the first encounter from Snippets, you have four level 0 characters which would total 120 for a Severe encounter. Accounting for the extra levels of the PCs drops that to 40, or Trivial. To bring it back up to 120 would mean adding back in EIGHT more gang members! With the new action economy and high skewing to-hit bonuses I wonder if this would just murder everyone? Maybe mix in a couple of stronger thugs to drop the overall number of combatants? A Mercenary Scout would be 30, so I could add 2 of those and 2 more lackeys and be up to my full budget. I'm not sure. What do you guys think?
For playtesting purposes I kind of want to run the Barber scenario with the more conservative build with the two 3rd level enemies and 6 level 0 lackies, and then in the Dragon scenario just go nuts and have a full budget worth of level 0 kobolds to test out both ways of spending the XP budget and see how it works in practice? Hopefully that will give some good feedback.
If folks want to vet my changes and double check my math, I'd appreciate any input.
Part 1:
Added a spear thrower to the tutorial.
Added a sorcerer and bumped the warriors to five.
Part 2:
Replaced the ooze with a gelatinous cube.
Added 3 swarms.
Part 3:
Added 2 lackeys and 2 Mercenary Scouts.
Part 4:
Made the mud fight a ghast.
Replaced the zombies with wights and added 4 skeletons.
The point values work out and I tried to make the new encounters model the structure of the originals as closely as possible. I tried to replace things with similar kinds of creatures with similar abilities. Anyway let me know what you think. The game's this weekend so I still have a little time to adjust things. I'll post again with how the game went and how the level adjusted encounters worked out.
dot.
This looks fun, let us know how it goes. I'm looking at converting the PFS scenario Black Waters to give my players more content.
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One big thing to keep in mind is that adding a pile of significantly lower-level threats (e.g. adding 4 skeletons) might not have the desired effect because those foes are such a lower level than the PCs. Not only will the AC and saving throws be so low that the PCs are critically hitting left and right, but the attack bonuses will also be far lower than what's necessary to hit the PCs with any frequency.
If you're going to revise the foes in the adventure, I'd aim for foes who are in the [Level – 2] to [Level + 0] range (perhaps even [Level + 1] for the final foe). The occasional fight with a large number of significantly weaker foes could be fun once and a while, but I suspect that staying in that general range will be much more satisfying.
We'll see I guess. One reason I'm trying a variety of different encounter builds is to test the XP budget for encounter building. It says I have 100 XP to build an encounter. I want to see what 100 XP does in different configurations. I could see the monsters going down pretty fast, but I don't really hate that--they're only 10 XP apiece after all. I'm curious to see how the slashing resistance and the higher to hit bonuses work to maybe have lower level monsters be relevant against 4th level characters. I don't know. Personally I feel like an encounter with more monsters with less hit points make for more brisk, dynamic fights.
But yeah, we'll see. Mostly this is just playing with the Building Encounters math to see what happens.
One big thing to keep in mind is that adding a pile of significantly lower-level threats (e.g. adding 4 skeletons) might not have the desired effect because those foes are such a lower level than the PCs. Not only will the AC and saving throws be so low that the PCs are critically hitting left and right, but the attack bonuses will also be far lower than what's necessary to hit the PCs with any frequency.
So we did the first session of the revised Rose Street Revenge and the results were really interesting. We started with Dragons. It felt like it was the best introduction to the events going on with the least ties to the events of the module--it seems somewhat unrelated and could tie nicely into the larger mystery.
I had the pit trap at the door into the kobold's training room after his lecture to check everything carefully. The PCs moved up to the door and declared that they were checking the door for traps, at which point the trap beneath them activated, the PC caught the ledge pretty easily, so no one was damaged but the lesson the kobold was teaching really brought home. Trust nothing.
Mechanically though it brought up a weird consequence of leveling. In the section on Difficulty Classes on page 336:
It’s important that you don’t simply make the DC arbitrarily higher or lower with the PCs’ level. Any increase must be justified based on how the challenge actually increased, and thus how success is more impressive.
So with things like Grab an Edge, the idea is that the DC goes up every time the PC levels--but not arbitrarily to scale with the characters' abilities--but justified by an objectively more challenging situation. The problem is, the difficulties of events in roleplaying games don't naturally scale like that and it's unfair forcing it onto GMs to try and justify what is nakedly a game mechanic. A fourth level edge isn't any different than a first level one. It's the same task. Certainly it's an unrealistic idea that as characters level they'll run into only increasingly hard to grab edges as they level. This whole line of thinking feels backward. DCs should exist to reflect what's going on in the game--what's going on in the game shouldn't have to be altered to reflect the DC's of hazards.
But back to the session. I threw in a second training room to demonstrate Seek actions in combat encounters--but mostly to break up the fat chunk of exposition and illustrate the point the kobold trapsmith is making. So I had them get into combat with a training dummy with a spear trap hidden in the room. They made their check and triggered the trap safely and didn't get stabbed.
They got their final warning from the kobold as they headed into the rival kobold turf and advanced forward looking for traps. To account for the PC's higher level the Slashing Blade Launcher got replaced with level equivalent Spinning Blade Pillar.
So this gets weird. There's a hidden control panel on the wall--DC 24 to find. The player rolls a 25. So now I have to describe...I don't even know what, a medieval kobold tech level gearbox with an on/off switch full of ropes and pulleys (I mean to control a big telescoping propeller blade that roves around using D&D level technology, it's gotta' be something like that) that these kobolds have somehow installed into a pre-existing sewer in such a natural, invisible, innocuous way that it's nearly impossible to notice--even in operation with ropes whirring and wooden cogs spinning. Describing it was a mess, because I couldn't even get my head around it. I don't think a scrapmetal launcher would have been any easier. As I was running it, it made me really start to evaluate these sorts of traps. Really aren't we talking about kobolds with snare kits setting up the same kinds of traps the PCs can? Is it weird that kobolds on the fly are able to set up autonomous roving slicer machines out of scrap metal that fold up so they're nearly invisible? If instead I was dealing with Hobbling Snares, Trip Snares and Stalkerbane Snares they would have been a lot easier to narrate. The Spinning Blade Pillar felt like something out of a video game and I had to work hard to get people to suspend disbelief.
So I muddle through the rules for how to run this hazard. It's weird that the text switches back and forth between Stealth as a skill the trap is supposed to have and Theivery as a skill the PCs need to use. I end up having to read through the rulebook because on first pass it looks like PCs are detecting traps using their Stealth skill rather than Perception and I get confused. Finally I figure out what's going on, that hazards have a Stealth check--and it doesn't make a lot of sense, since traps can't choose to hide or sneak or anything--but finally I figure out what's supposed to be going on.
The PCs find a sign of something big under the dark water that's causing ripples in the current and the water to swell as it flows over it, so they start trying to trigger the trap to see what they're dealing with. Again I have trouble wrangling the stat block to find any kind of listing for springing the trap intentionally--only rules for how to deactivate it or what happens if you destroy the console, so I wing it. They roll well tossing rubble out into the water and I have it briefly activate and then fold back up. In hindsight I figure they probably should have ended up activating it and triggering the encounter, but at the time I was hoping to reward their ingenuity. After a while, the plan becomes to try and lay a board across the water where the trigger seems to be, to scramble across and open up the control panel. The dwarf paladin starts across with his shield raised against where he knows the blade trap is, botches his athletics and falls into the water. The trap activates and nearly destroys his shield (it takes two dents, but is magically reinforced). He clambers out of the water and into the room with the control panel and is sneak attacked by all the kobolds--six magic missiles as well as a number of slingstones and picks. He deflects one slingstone with his shield, but the assault reduces him to half hit points. The cleric is able to heal him back to full using a bunch of feats that he's used to make his healing especially powerful.
The rest of the PCs begin to try and make their way across the path of the Spinning Blade Trap, worried that passing through the spaces where its blades are spinning will damage them--and in truth, they should have, it's weird that this whirling blade attacks people on its turn and then stops to let folks by on their turns and then turns back on again to slice people. But once folks realize its safe to get past, they all scoot into the room. The kobolds attack once more and then use their special ability to scatter and clear out of the room and into hiding in the darkness beyond. The only ones who can't are the sorcerers who don't have quite enough movement after casting electric arc on four of the players. The PCs catch up with one of the sorcerers and just destroy him --the paladin crits his attack to finish him off and he turns to paste.
Our barbarian gets to the second sorcerer kobold but isn't able to attack. The kobold scampers away and she uses her barbarian feat to match his movements and chase him. Unfortunately his image fades and she realizes it was an illusion, and she gets trapped in another ambush--kobolds hit her with slingstones and scamper away (one hits for 0 damage, the other hits for 2). These kobolds can't roll lower than 18s for most of the night. The kobolds lead them out toward the second Spinning Blade Trap hopping to get them to follow without searching and trigger it on themselves.
And that's where we had to end it. Making 4th level characters took a lot of time and folks needed roughly the first half of the session to work their way through the rest of it as well as to pitch their characters and work through the intro. But yeah, we marked everyone's locations on the map and will pick it up this weekend. Hopefully I remembered everything well enough, but the site's been down and this has been my first chance to report. Hope it helps. I certainly found it interesting. Very proud of the kobolds. I figured being as low level as they were that they'd just get wiped out, but they've been making a good show of themselves--they've been hard to hit, hard to pin down as they scamper away from the PCs whenever they get close, and hitting more often than they have any right to.
We did our second session of Rose Street Revenge. The PCs mopped up the remaining kobolds from "Dragons". The crazy luck they'd had last session evaporated this week and they performed like the -4 level foes they are which gave the PCs great satisfaction as they hunted them down, splitting up and cornering the last few in the bottom corner of the map.
They got the journal and were amazingly invested in the list of missing slaves. The PCs with underworld backgrounds rolled their Streetwise to see what they knew about the various townfolk and ended up rolling well enough that they gained all the background information they were supposed to get in the introductions of parts one and three--about the gang that the dwarven ex-slave had gotten involved with and the insular and paranoid cook squatting in the ruins--and were on board to go check out both situations. So off they went into "Puddles".
They felt like they had plenty of information already, with the name of the slave's girlfriend and the restaurant, so they pocketed the 30 gp they would have used for bribes and just went to go talk. She let them know about the ruined manor house and off they went.
A few notes about dungeon flow. As presented, the PCs have a 50% flat chance of choosing between C1 and C2. Forensic clues, since the fight with the skeletal cleric left carnage in and around C2 would lead the players that direction. If they choose C2, they find all the clues they need, the dead body and have basically accomplished the entire mission as a fetch quest. That's pretty unexciting. I felt in order to run the adventure as intended, I needed reconfigure things a bit so that they run into the combat right as they go up the stairs, with the bats nesting in the hallway and the evidence in the bedroom, which they can find once the fight is over. The map was a little confusing as well. Some of this was my fault--I didn't catch the blurb that says that the map is only of the second level, that would have helped a lot, but trying to figure out where the door into the house was supposed to be (it's downstairs, but I didn't catch that) or why the arching stairways don't seem to connect properly (because they're coming up from an unmapped section of the house) required some hasty patching at the last minute and was a little awkward.
The PCs examined everything and specifically asked about the condition of the stairs, so the termite infestation was something they were wary of. Only one of them rolled badly enough to hurt themselves, but it sold the place as really being a dangerous wreck they had to take care moving around in. It would have been nice to see more termite damage--holes in the floor that would drop characters down into the first floor or leave them dangling from edges while getting swarmed with bats--but as it is, it feels like there's the termite stairs and then it never really gets used again. Once they're upstairs, the goblin paladin astride her holy goblin dog pulls open the bedroom doors and advances right into the gelatinous cube! People freak out which spooks the bats and four swarms of bats descend, one each, on the remaining players.
Again, for level inappropriate foes, the bats hold on remarkably well--it's only the elven barbarian, mostly due to repeated raging, who's able to power through the steep damage resistance and actually hurt her swarm. At least three players lose a spell trying to target the swarms which are immune to targeted effects--and no one in the party picked any area effect spells or bombs. The rest of the fight was a long, long, long slog werein someone gets targeted by the acid trap, everyone takes damage from the bats, tracks bleed damage from the previous round, the paladin and her dog get digested, the cube pummels the sorcerer/fighter and his enlarged pug familiar ineffectually and the PCs damage their particular bat swarm or ooze a tiny bit. The low AC of the cube made the paladin pretty adept at hitting it at least twice a round, but 90 hit points made the fight just crawl agonizingly.
Maybe an hour and change later of 'I attack' *roll damage* 'It attacks' *roll damage* and the fight is finally over.
The guy is dead, curled up on his bed where he expired from his wounds, a set of gory claw marks, which makes them think humanoid monster, but the weird moths get them thinking some kind of cult. The PCs are really disappointed that even though they hurried straight there without resting from the previous encounter to avoid something bad happening to the slave guy, who they all became deeply invested in, that he is already dead anyway no matter what they do. The term 'tragedy-porn' gets used.
People even talk about pooling all the resources they have to try and get him resurrected, but looking it up, getting that spell cast would cost way more than all their money together. On top of that, when they bring it up to the clerics at the temple, they sadly admit that the only member of their order who was an experienced enough cleric to cast such powerful magic has gone missing lately (and...is now a killer undead) but that once the PCs rescue him, he'll no doubt be happy to raise their friend (this is what we call tragedy-porn foreshadowing).
What's left of the adventure is investigating the gang, which I've renamed the Marked and have placed at the Battle Market using a tattoo parlor called the Skin Canvas as their front. Pretty excited about that. It's another of the fights where there's plenty of low hit point goons the PCs can dispatch pretty easily, but who can work together and maybe do some cool roguish stuff--along with two mercenary scouts who will be a little tougher. Then there's the main fight, which should be significantly less brutal since there's no good way to level a boss that I can figure out (other than the template to basically boost their level by one) and I don't want to mess up our playtest results by trying to homebrew adding class levels to him or crib mechanics from the antipaladin in Pale Mountain (though that's probably what I would otherwise do). That said, I think it's probably best that the fight be a more atmospheric, less TPK threatening kind of fight since really all of this is working as a lead in for these characters to really get tested in the next chapter of the playtest module.
Pretty happy, in that regard, that even with this two session side jaunt that we're pretty well on schedule. Feels like the players are all really getting attached to this new group of characters, which was my big hope after many of them lost their primary characters to Drakus at the end of Lost Star.