Welcome to the discussion thread!
Ohai!
Just so you're aware, there's a weird delay with forum posting. After hitting "Submit," you may have to refresh the page a few times before it shows up for you. The post exists, just for some reason doesn't show up right away.
Also if you "dot" the Gameplay thread, you can check for new posts on your Paizo Profile page (click on My Account up top and hit Profile, then select the Campaigns tab; I like to bookmark that page for sake of ease.) To "dot" it, just make a post in the Gameplay tab (most people just type a period) and submit, then delete the post right away. It makes it so the game shows up in your Campaigns tab as mentioned above, without clogging the start of the Gameplay tab with unnecessary posts.
I've kicked off the gameplay thread with a bit of a roleplaying hook. Go to town, feel each other out, try to create some party rapport. I figure we'll spend a day or three (real time) doing this, and then you'll "arrive" in Karpad and we'll get going. This gives you guys a few more days to get your character profiles all fleshed out. By the time we start rolling, I'll expect all that stuff to be done, including taglines for your character's various abilities. Haath Chaar has a really good one you can use as inspiration. It's Starfinder, but you get the idea; the easier it is for me to find your most important numbers, the smoother this thing will go, and the less grumpy I will be. The less grumpy I am, the less likely I am to give your characters terrible homebrewed diseases.
I'm excited this is finally happening, guys! Good luck!
Test again (sorry about this)
How are you getting your character information to display about your posts for Rogan?
Edit your alias's profile.
A few things before we get to Karpad:
1. In the interest of keeping things moving, I'm going to go with the Rule of Two. Once two of you agree on a course of action, we're going to pursue it. (You can also appoint a party leader if you like and only his vote will be required.)
2. Occasionally, I will post a spoiler tag that is tied to a particular check, like this:
When you are making your post, you can roll this check using the standard dice rolling (just leave out the spaces):
[code][ dice=Knowledge (planes) ]1d20 + 2[ /dice ][/code]
Then click Preview. The post preview will show you the result of your roll, and then you can click into the Spoiler tag if you passed the check. This is on an honor system; no cheating! The result of your roll will not change no matter how many times you click Preview or Submit Post. Then you can tailor the rest of your post based on whether you passed the check; for example:
Merlin the Wizard shouts to the rest of the party: "Give him all your cheese and he'll leave you alone!"
3. @Lefdam: I don't think we ever rolled for your HP! I'll do it here. Go ahead and do the same in a post of your own and take the higher value for each level and update your character sheet.
Dang son! 9, 10, 8 is fantastic.
Lefdam is a beast!
Takes a bow
Why do you hate your horse, Rogan?
wat
wat
You named it Reginald! It's a death sentence!
Don't be ridiculous. Now, if I leave it tied up near the entrance to an evil giant stronghold for a week, that is a death sentence.
Note to self: Add evil giant stronghold to campaign
YAAAAAY!
I feel like hyperlinks on this forum, especially those in ooc text, do not stand out enough and I'm afraid you guys will miss them. Some examples:
This is a hyperlink in plain text.
I hate it.
Terafil gave me the idea to try surrounding them with a color tag to make them stand out more.
[color=red]This[/color] is a red hyperlink in plain text.
As you can see, that doesn't work. Apparently the default url color takes precedence. :(
So I think what I'm going to do is start surrounding hyperlinks with some symbols to make them stand out more.
>>This<< is a hyperlink in plain text.
Thoughts?
YES. Please do. It is so friggin' easy to lose links on the boards.
Mike, can you do a flavor and link the Roll20 game in the game description, just under the "images" link? Not that it's a huge hassle to go to Roll20 and sort through my games, but it would be handy.
Done. I also added it to my GM profile's tagline.
Sweeet. Thanks.
Now that the TPK is looming, I wanted to start a quick discussion post to go over what went well, what could have been better, and just get your general thoughts on my first foray into serious GMing. Once Rogan posts his final goodbye post, I'll put together an epilogue and wrap up Midnight Mirror. We'll look to start Tears at Bitter Manor no later than next Monday.
So:
- What did you guys enjoy about this module?
- What wasn't so great?
- Overall thoughts on my GMing. Be honest; I'm looking for helpful criticisms so I can get better.
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Overall you did great. I would have fudged things to give more of a fighting chance against the BBEG but that's personal GMing style, that's not inherently better than letting the chips fall as they may. I mean, look how poignant it was; this was the first TPK for several of us, and my first in almost two decades. I'm not likely to forget this moment as long as I live. That would never have happened if you did it my way.
That being said, it might not have hurt to mention "y'all have no real healer and no arcane caster." That's about 90% on us of course, but one thing a GM has to do is help players be prepared. Can you imagine how much more difficult the GCP crew would have it if they didn't have Barron? He was custom-built to fight giants and deals ridiculous amounts of damage. Lots of fights would have been a lot tougher if he'd made Barron, say, a crossbow maven instead of a pistolero, or a melee rogue (Dalgreath does great sometimes, but look how he struggles in their current fight; getting into melee with a giant is freaking hard to do).
But then, you've already learned that particular lesson because your first point of order in the TABM channel was to remind us not to be lunkheads again and make sure we have our bases covered. :P
So I think you did a knockout job. The module, in particular, had an unnecessarily difficult BBEG but that was nothing to do with you. A tendriculos is a CR 6 on a good day, and this thing was clearly beefed up with some sort of template because it's not that hard to hit and doesn't normally have regen. At level 4, a +2 AC and the shard stopping regen for 1d4 rounds instead of just 1 would have gone a long way to improving the survivability of that fight, but a) we were poorly built as a group for this particular module, and b) that's a problem with the module itself and not the GM, as I said.
Don't be afraid to embellish little details in PbP. It's a great medium to get flowery with your posts (this goes for everyone, not just the GM). The big benefit of PbP is that you can go into details that you simply don't have time to do (or, in my case, don't think of in the moment) in a live game. Not that you had a problem with including detail, but feel free to also add little things. Focus on mundane details and make players question whether those things are a clue of some sort. Paranoid players are tons of fun to GM. And if their paranoia goes too far off-course, just gently guide them back on track, with a quick skill check ("with a 22 Sense Motive, you realize the baron isn't actually acting shady because he was absent from the banquet hall when the duke was murdered; his gaze keeps moving to the duchess! They're having an affair!") or just an OOC nudge ("OOC: Guys seriously the pillar is just a pillar. It's not going to attack you, I promise.") But in general, more detail is always better!
Just some quick bullet points that I thought would be fun to go over. Trivia, stuff you missed, clarification, etc. Enjoy :)
- Tallowthroat was actually caused by Nicasor's rage over Stepan's betrayal manifesting as shadow essence and leaking out of the mirror into the material plane. You guys never explored the Boroi manor; if you had, you would have come across a well in the courtyard and would have figured out that it was the source of the disease with a very makeable knowledge check.
- The lurker was a total red herring. The baron had hired him because he promised to help with the tallowthroat and the shadows that it created; the baron thought, hey it makes sense that a lurker in light could banish shadows. In actuality, the lurker was using the baron to get consequence free access to the citizens of Karpad for his experiments with summoning creatures from the First World. Turns out tallowthroat victims are especially susceptible to mind control...
- Gavril was the one having an affair with Irini (the baker's wife, one of the lurker's victims). The baron really did keep Gavril because he was the only one who could control his favorite dog.
- Another thing you missed by not exploring the manor: the iron maiden in the cellar (not the one in the mirror, which you did investigate) held the spirit of Stepan's aunt, a powerful ghost cleric of ZK named Evgenia. The module makes it pretty easy for you to befriend her and benefit from her clerical spells without bad touching.
- The wax golem was created by Catalina to help her out in the chandlery. She was actually completely innocent and under the lurker's control the whole time.
- A relatively unimportant piece of evidence: you could have searched the graves of Stepan's brothers and discovered that the coffins were filled with rocks, not bodies.
- And then there's the mirror. Most of this stuff is pretty unimportant and any fights would have only served to make you weaker before facing the Heart. (Resting would mean you were subject to 8 hours' worth of saves against cold, so it wasn't really an option.) But you would have met Nicasor's family, discovered that Iozif had a son with one of the shaes (she is unnamed and has been dead for a while), and that he was the rightful heir to the throne! (I touched on this somewhat in the epilogue.)
- Elenuta and her apprentice would have been really tough for you guys. I was glad you listened to the warning.
- The crypt in the cellar of the mirror was created by the Heart to inter their dead. However, the Heart is cruel and it required the sacrifice of a finger or toe from any living creature entering the crypt. That's why the bones were there and it's why you were attacked by the constructs.
- Finally, some really cool stuff happens when you kill the Heart and have to escape before the demiplane collapses. I would have rolled a d10 for each room you tried to enter as you fled. Various effects would have happened, like the floor liquefying, gravity ceasing to function, or 1d3 shadows attacking you. Oh, and then if you'd made it out, Nicasor would basically have attacked you immediately.
I had a blast GMing this game and can't wait for the next one. Thanks guys :)
Mike I think you did a really good job as a GM, especially for your first time running a game. I can say hands down this was the best time I had playing a PBP, not that I have much experience playing them, but still this was loads of fun.
I think there were some issues with how I specked out my character and as we mentioned maybe the party makeup for this module, but these things happen so I don't feel that is something on you. The only thing I would recommend is that since most if not all of us are experienced players at this point don't feel that you have to hand wave encounters or events. If we struggle with something or we didn't build our characters correctly then let us suffer through that as I think it will ultimately make for a better story or we will learn from our mistakes and be mindful of that next time we create a character.
The only other thing I would do is encourage you to run more live games, because I want to be a player in more of them dammit.
But honestly great job, I really enjoyed playing the module even if you did cheat and kill my character at the end!