[AP] The Shackled City Adventure Path by GM Rutseg (Inactive)

Game Master Balacertar

While the commons is so healthy... can I borrow 10k from it?

That +5 cloak of resistance is looking nice.

I can afford the +4 cloak of resistance, but I'll want to eventually upgrade to +5, and that will be a load of wasted coins (sell back at half price).

Happy to donate my old +3 cloak to anyone who wants it.

I'd say yes, if there's a time to borrow it would be now! :-)

Agree - As banker for the Common's fund, there's but a mere 15% interest on your 10k (as its between Cauldron Watchers an' all) ;)

I'm cool with JJ borrowing some cash!

*edit* I'm also fine with taking the cost of the scrolls Marigold wanted out of the Common Fund instead of her own. Just let me know what our final cut is and I'll update my sheet accordingly :)

Hello to my save vs the next succubus.

Of course, I'll still likely roll a one. He is JJ.

Many thanks all.

No one really knows how to better tam dangerous relationships as JJ, I think he should write a book after all this :)

@All: No worries with the Commons Fund being dipped into, that's essentially what its for.

So used the Commons Fund to cover all requested costs and noted that JJ 's IOU of 10k.

All good :) Nothing catching Maxim's eyes from Skie's catalogue (will have another look see this evening). Will also wipe the loot sheet ready for the upcoming dungeon :)

Maxim will however have spent some time adding to his repertoire of spells (copying from captured spellbooks):

Spellcraft DC20 to Learn Fire Snake (5th Level): 1d20 + 19 ⇒ (9) + 19 = 28
Spellcraft DC20 to Learn Wall of Force (5th Level): 1d20 + 19 ⇒ (1) + 19 = 20
Spellcraft DC19 to Learn Stoneskin (4th Level): 1d20 + 19 ⇒ (18) + 19 = 37
Spellcraft DC19 to Learn Shout (4th Level): 1d20 + 19 ⇒ (15) + 19 = 34
Spellcraft DC18 to Learn Greater Magical Weapon (3rd Level): 1d20 + 19 ⇒ (9) + 19 = 28

Only one dud (Wall of Force) so I'm cool with that.

I think you probably attempt that again after level up. If you wish ;)

As for gameplay, I think we are waiting for someone to attempt two trap disable device and one open lock? *cross fingers*

Is Maxim going? Or perhaps Kythel? I think we do not have any more able ones, or perhaps you want to try other stuff?

Maxim, I will Aid Another but Maxim's score is way better than mine!

I can also aid on disable device. JJ has enough ranks and dex to auto-aid in an attempt. Almost like he had a questionable (earlier) youth.

Apologies gang - work's been a merge of meetings of late.

Somehow I just realized I did not take my 15th level Feat yet (not sure why I did not notice sooner). I am taking Greater Spell Penetration.

I think that choice is going to pay off :)

I think that choice is going to pay off :)

:-)

Hope so, there are SO many good channel feats it's hard to resist them!

^I'm definitely glad I invested in the Spell Pen. feats given that we're encountering more and more foes with SR these days!

Somehow I just realized I did not take my 15th level Feat yet (not sure why I did not notice sooner). I am taking Greater Spell Penetration.

And you've just reminded me I've not picked mine either... :)

Kythel of Nisroch wrote:

Somehow I just realized I did not take my 15th level Feat yet (not sure why I did not notice sooner). I am taking Greater Spell Penetration.

And you've just reminded me I've not picked mine either... :)

We're a forgetful bunch! F%%#ing RL getting in the way of actual enjoyable activities! ;-(

This is the truth lol. On this note - any suggestions for Feats (from the allowable sources) - I'm properly stumped on what to pick.

This is the truth lol. On this note - any suggestions for Feats (from the allowable sources) - I'm properly stumped on what to pick.

Knee jerk, Improved Initiative - also your Initiative in your Avatar is +4 but should be +6 due to the Belt of Dexterity. With Improved Initiative you would have a +10 Initiative. Going first is a good thing if there's nothing else popping out at you ;-)

Yep, for someone both with Sneak Attack and able to throw battlefield control spells, having good initiative is a great boon.

You can also take a look at Rapid Reload if you wish to shot your gun more often.

If you prefer to improve survivability, the I find the dwarf's only Steel Soul pretty neat.

Improved Initiative it is :)

Still waiting for Kikinnin and Maxim to take their turn.

*peeks in* Still here, just idling :)

Skit! Apologies - didn't realise y'all were waitin' on me!

Double skit and deeper apologies. Trying to shift out of Neutral for even a low gear up this hill...

Pearl of Power III (utilized for the day)
Pearl of Power IV

Channels - 12/12

Confirming purchase of Skie's Pearl of Power IV, entrusting it to Kythel to slap some Air Walk on the the black beard. (12,800gp after the discount)

(Tidying up Kikinnin's Inventory)

Morning all - just a wee heads up that I'm in today for lockdown overdue surgery on my sinuses. Not a major procedure but means I'll likely be out of the loop for 24-72 depending on success, pain meds and all that fun stuff.

Please bot Maxim as necessary until I'm back in the saddle.

Cheers and good luck Maxim! Be careful not to overdue yourself with small puns on the nurses and other medical staff while you are still under sedatives :)

Pearl of Power III (utilized for the day)
Pearl of Power IV
Kikinnin - Pearl of Power IV (utilized for the day)

Channels - 11/12

Surgery was a success, but I'm on a bunch of pain meds and unbroken sleep is the holy grail I'm not forlornly searching for...

Can't say I'm wholly back and compos mentus, but posting might be a welcome distraction in my insomniac state :S

Glad everything went well and I hope the recovery proceeds likewise!

You an' both Lil' Miss! :) Got another week+change to endure but wagons ho an' all that :)

So...totally apropos of nothing at all, for those of you who have GMed/are GMing/have attempted to GM an Adventure Path via Play-by-Post...how did you go about all the prep work? After the obvious first step of 'read the adventure', I mean. Did you prep the entire thing in one go or did you only prep a book or two at a time? Any tips or pitfalls to watch out for?

The idea/desire to try running an AP has niggled in the back of my mind for long enough that I figure maybe I should start taking it a little more seriously. And though they're not APs I *have* managed to run two different long-term PFS tables each for a period of nearly 3 years so I'm feeling a little more confident about my ability to stick with such a commitment as a GM.

I've never succeeded in running an AP. I've gone in with good intentions a couple of times, but for one reason or another I've never managed to last the distance. Sometimes it is players (or their characters) just didn't gel right. Sometimes it is just RL getting in the way.

We have been pretty lucky (and have a GM who went in PC heavy knowing there would likely be drops) in party consistency. I really like the process we went through at the start, and if I were to run an AP in the future, think I'd probably try and do something similar.

Good to hear that Maxim! :)

About APs
I am both running Shackled City and Rise of the Runelords. And for each of them I followed a very different process.

For Shackled City I read the entire book for a year, I searched for online resources from other GMs (which are rich for the first chapters but barely non existent for the later) and borrowed some ideas here and there. The most important tip I found was that the characters should be well tied to Cauldron and caring to the city. Because of that, I wrote the Player's guide borrowing ideas from older sources and the AP itself, trying to expose as much information as possible which worked nicely because you made a great deal of creating multiple links with different NPC's and city institutions, generating that 'care for the city' feeling. Also I added extra traits in the guide, with ideas behind that would tie your characters secretly to certain NPC's or locations (Malachite Fortress I look at you), which I think it made certain chapters more meaningful for your characters here and there. If you want I can tell more about the modifications I made and the rationale on my attempts to help you bond to the adventure.

Every time we enter a new chapter I re-read that book, sometimes at full, sometimes partially, depending on the time and willingness I have. The maps I already have in JPG format without secret door marks thanks to previous GMs' work, but I create myself the "fog of war" on them. For that, I use a different presentation. When I have extra time, for example during holidays, I create the fog of war map versions and store it in the alternate presentation (which I call 'ready maps'). Sometimes I go as far as to add the monster tokens too and room labels. When we reach the place, I only have to do 'File > Import slide', so even if it is a tough work day, I can provide a map without delaying the game.

For RotRL, it is a completely different story. I do play it in real life, with a group I know for a long time. I started GMing it after I had been playing the campaign for 2 years in the boards. We were at book 3 when I started GMing my group. That meant both that I had a first-hand knowledge of the first books and that I did not want to spoil me the last ones. Thus, for this one I did not read the whole book and instead I have been only reading book by book, one ahead of what I needed. We started on august 2016, so around half-year after we started Shackled City, and we are at the last half of the last book right now, just about to confront Karzoug's lair.

Interestingly for RotRL you also want the characters to be as interested in Sandpoint as you are in Cauldron. Of course I had a Player's Guide to support me this time, but still, I made suggestions to the character's background the players were presenting, in order to tie them better to the first 3 chapters I knew the best. For example, one player that had his father absent, I made one of the Black Arrows NPC's in book 3 his father, that was there to pay for a crime that the PC had made in the first place. That made traveling to Fort Ranick in book 3 special for that player. I made similar suggestions for the other PCs. In that way I granted the player could explore their background and relationships without me having to add sidequests or extra material, just using what is offered by the main plot itself. No one has to be concerned about deviating from the main plot, and I do not have to devote extra time on creating new content while I still give the player the opportunity to explore her background.

From both experiences, I highly recommend reading the whole adventure and offering the players links to NPC's, locations and events through all the length of the AP. In RotRL it has been very clear my lack of knowledge of the last 3 books lost a lot of opportunities and for the last books the only drive has been the interest in the main plot, as opposed to the first 3 books, where character personal interests had been a powerful drive too.

Lastly, I do not advise to prepare too much material ahead. Reading the whole adventure and preparing hooks enhances the experience (although it is not required to have a nice time), but preparing all the maps, statblocks and tokens, or writing lengthy extra content it is not advisable in my opinion. The game can die for a myriad of reasons, or the group composition change, or there can be a pandemic and you will have to change from table to virtual table and throw all those beautiful tokens you made. Or Paizo can release an Anniversary Edition of the AP with better material you want to use, or create an APP that gives you all the material for just a few bucks. Protect yourself and your time, and go book by book for that stuff.

I would love to say more things about player drops, player selection and the CotCT campaign I have grandfathered in the boards, but this post is getting too long already.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts GM and JJ; I'll definitely have to ruminate on them a bit.

As I said, a lot of this is just sort of at the spit-balling ideas and thoughts stage right now. Still need to find an AP that I think I would want to run (because honestly, if the material isn't interesting to me as a GM then what's the point?), though I've got a few candidates in mind :)

I should add, beware of taking on too many players. I did that when I tried running Serpents Skull, after being in other games with lots of drops. But it was totally manic, and trying to keep so many characters in more or less consistent time lines as they explored the island was a trial.

And I think that was before google slides made maps much easier. Or at least before I was aware of them.

Take your time Marigold. I took a whole year thinking on whether to run Shackled City or not, and how to do it, which I profited to read the whole book.

Yup, agree with JJ, we started here with 7, but that is probably too much (I got that number because the book was saying the adventure was for 6 players). Probably 6 would had been a better start, although if you are confident the players are solid, 5 is probably a better number in general.

Also, nowadays I would made a note on the expectations on the level of optimization combat-wise. It is hard when you have in the same group characters that aim for high combat and others that aim more at quirk/fun; some people always get frustrated either because combats are too easy or their characters too squishy or cannot contribute enough. The largest the distance between the more powerful and the less powerful, the more difficult to make combat interesting for the group as a whole.

Yeah, sorry about JJ on that. He is a total demon-slaying glass cannon. Not too great against anything else. Maybe I should pick up power attack at some stage.

For me its about giving everyone the chance to shine. I massively enjoy the world building and role-play in bigger scale games. Think the prep and how that makes the AP bespoke to the players (and your own world vision) is key. Know GMR's approach here paid SO much dividends and that would be my key advice Lil' Miss :)

Regards APs - I started a slavic themed Kingmaker/Tales of the Old Margreve mashup here on the boards. Due to RL it stalled pretty early, and remains "one that got away" as a project. I did a bunch of opening scene prep (essentially scripted out the pre-adventure role-play and introduced themes/NPCs etc that would have been easter eggs and callbacks for later parts of the Kingdom making). Was time consuming but hugely rewarding tho'.

Oh, yes, and the GM discussion threads for each of the AP books in the boards are invaluable information. Perhaps too much information to process, but I do recommend skimming through the sticky threads there. There is so many good ideas on how to improve things, and information on what did work/not work for certain groups.

I am happy about the current discussion and would love we follow it up for us much as we please, but I do also have to remember you about Gameplay, I need a direction to continue forward :)

Didn't mean to hijack the discussion, GM! Posted a suggestion over in Gameplay on which way to go :)
______________

As always, thanks everyone for the insights! More random thoughts as I noodle things over:

Random Thoughts On Recruitment

I've...honestly grown kinda particular about who I'm willing to spend a lot of my PbP time with. I've been spoiled by having the privilege of gaming with SO MANY great RPers here on the forums that I don't think I could do a truly random recruitment for a long-term game like an AP. Shorter games like PFS scenarios and modules? Sure, bring on some new faces! But if I'm looking to hitch myself to 4-6 folks for literal years, I'm going to make sure they're folks that I really enjoy gaming with.

I know most/all of the Paizo APs are written for four players but given the rate of attrition I've seen as a player across several (mostly failed) APs, I'd definitely take either five or six as a buffer.

Random Thoughts on Party Balance

There are an amazing number of broken builds and options in PF1e. In retrospect I really appreciate our good GM Rutseg placing some limitations on material and such for character creation. It'd depend somewhat on which AP I selected but I'd probably structure character generation on similar lines as PFS, with some modifications/exceptions.

Random Thoughts on AP Selection

Based on blurbs and some personal experience, the three APs that pique my curiosity the most are Carrion Crown, Jade Regent, and Iron Gods. Carrion Crown because I actually really enjoy horror, Jade Regent because I like the idea of a story of friendship and trekking halfway across the world, and Iron Gods because it seems to have just enough sci-fi elements to make it fun without it just being straight up sci-fi like Starfinder. I've also partially played all of these in PbP - Carrion Crown made it to the start of Book 4 while Jade Regent and Iron Gods more or less made it to the end of Book 1 (as best as I could tell).

I'd also prefer an AP that *does not* have an annoying subsystem mechanic, or that has one that can be easily excised/ignored (caravan rules for Jade Regent).

I also don't want to have to do a major rewrite to get the AP to be playable. While I think the plot for Wrath of the Righteous kicks all kinds of ass, mythic is so broken it's not even funny.

I'm also not interested in GMing something that's super heavy on dungeon crawls - looking at you, Shattered Star and Mummy's Mask!

Random Thoughts On Recruitment
I have the exact same feelings Marigold. If I do eventually GM another AP I will first talk it with people I have had good experiences in the past. Still, by now we know so many people that it might be difficult to decide how to invite (picking people that mash well together is also an art), and I am fan of giving other people (and myself) the chance. So I might end up opening a recruitment after all, even if only partial.

Random Thoughts on Party Balance
The limited sources also helps me have a feeling of familiarity with the game. When people start using a lot of obscure options, it feels less to me as playing d20. I do not know how to express it, but it is like if you called your friends to play chess and they came with a 4 players chess. Yes, it is the same game underneath, but it plays very different, and you have to lose a lot of time double checking things that are only mechanics and not provide to the important part of the game.

I also feel a limited set helps people make selections faster. As a kid I have always struggled having too many options to choose from, so often I feel I make a better use of my time and have less second thoughts when there is a smaller selection. But this might be just something personal. Some people enjoy having more options than others.

That said, if I am opening a new AP ever, I think I would also include the Advanced Class Guide, Ultimate Equipment, and a few splash books related to the topics in the AP (for example, pirate books for Skull and Shackles).

Random Thoughts on AP Selection
Oh! Iron Gods! I am playing it, half-way book 5 and I have had a blast with that one. The Conan and Mad Max themes have been just so much fun to RP for my Gorum's Kellid cleric...

With time my opinion on dungeon crawls and sandbox games has considerably shifted. In real-life games I find sandbox adventures work much better than in PbP. The effort required by the party on decision-making and push is just so much greater and paralyzing than in a dungeon crawl. Also I have found if groups want to interact with each other and the NPCs, they do in dungeon crawls, I have see you doing it a lot in Shackled City despite it is dungeon heavy on may sections.

Wilderness adventures does not seem to have a lot of interest past the initial levels, due to game mechanics.

Intrigue adventures are a mixed egg. Some people love it, others just get bored if there is too much talking and not enough action.

Looking at numbers, I see the most successful PbP adventures are event-driven ones. In that sense Reign of Winter seems to excel. There are a lot of different and varying situations, but it is basically a rail-road so the GM just basically presents the next event one after another with ease if the players go silent. I see a lot of success completing that AP.

But overall I think all of the APs end up being a bit too long. I think they should be only 4 books. After that I tend to feel there is a down in energy level and interest, plus the plots and challenges become more lackluster in general.

Surprise visit by the daughter this week, through the weekend- will sneak away to push post today, likely this afternoon...

Ok, I lied. It's afternoon somewhere, but I just had a gap in the schedule, and I'm curious about the hot hallway...

Too blitzed to opine on DMing Marigold but I'll have thoughts at some point soon ;-)

No, there is no favored enemy applicable JJ, sorry. The underground favored terrain works though.

If no one else is following JJ, I will move us forward with him reaching the eastern ledge alone tomorrow.

Dropping Glitterdust onto Moltenwing.. 190ft. Range. 10ft Radius. No SR. DC17 Will Save or Blinded (can attempt save each round). All within radius are visible for 11 rounds regardless. Thinking here is Dislplacement is only a 2ft. shift while Glitterdust has a 10ft Radius - so dropping it on the image will still nail the source??.

Ah! You are hitting me with one of those things in Pathfinder that fuel never ending discussions! :D

Does glitterdust thwart displacement, mirror image, etc...? Well, if forced to make a call, I do go with this interpretation by Jason Bulmahn, developer of the game, glitterdust only helps against invisibility but not other type of illusions. I do acknowledge though your reasoning, but just hold with this interpretation for reasons of balance and to keep the rules contained so we do not have to analyze too far on the repercussions and deep interactions of each spell.

Other thoughts, views, comments? :)

Maxim Snaphånce wrote:

Dropping Glitterdust onto Moltenwing.. 190ft. Range. 10ft Radius. No SR. DC17 Will Save or Blinded (can attempt save each round). All within radius are visible for 11 rounds regardless. Thinking here is Dislplacement is only a 2ft. shift while Glitterdust has a 10ft Radius - so dropping it on the image will still nail the source??.

Ah! You are hitting me with one of those things in Pathfinder that fuel never ending discussions! :D

Does glitterdust thwart displacement, mirror image, etc...? Well, if forced to make a call, I do go with this interpretation by Jason Bulmahn, developer of the game, glitterdust only helps against invisibility but not other type of illusions. I do acknowledge though your reasoning, but just hold with this interpretation for reasons of balance and to keep the rules contained so we do not have to analyze too far on the repercussions and deep interactions of each spell.

Other thoughts, views, comments? :)

I could be convinced either way but I generally defer to rules interpretations as made by the GM. Especially on PbP, it's one thing to debate in person and resolve the issue in 5 minutes, it's another thing to debate it over several days...

PLUS, this means that if we Displace, NPCs cannot use Glitterdust to thwart our Displacement, it's balanced and therefore, fair.