GM Hawthwile's Birthright Betrayed (Inactive)

Game Master Hawthwile

Sweet, level 2! Thanks for the game, GM!

(looks at Chronicle)
(instantly wishes he was Sovereign Court)

They did a really good job in the later seasons in making your faction feel different with boons like this! IMO Dark Archives and Sovereign Court tends to get the best ones, but I am biased towards favoring those factions ;)

Thanks GM, I had a great time in this game! Thanks to all the players too, it was a blast! :)

EDIT: GM, I would like to try for the knowledge roll!

Nobility, DC 16: 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (9) + 8 = 17

Yay! Baronet Lazav is on his way to Viscountdom! :)

They did a really good job in the later seasons in making your faction feel different with boons like this! IMO Dark Archives and Sovereign Court tends to get the best ones, but I am biased towards favoring those factions ;)

I should play more of the later seasons, then. I might pay attention to the boons more if they were more interesting. I've already forgotten what boon Bocke got from this adventure. I can borrow magic armor or something? Shrug.

Now, becoming a landowner, even if it didn't have mechanical benefits, would be fun.

Alright, Chronicle Sheets can be found here! Take a look, let me know if anything needs changing, and holler when you've got your sheet. @Vosk and @Droo, there's a boon you might want to take a look at - let me know if you want to make any adjustments to your downtime activities in light of it.

Sure! Droo's not doing anything this weekend.

It is certainly better than that one adventure boon where you can get a super special pseudo-dragon familiar! I played a fighter for that game... ... ....

Thanks, Pathfinder Society. :{

This one kindly gives you the tools you need to make use of it later if not immediately, plus, it actually has some merit, and the paperwork isn't overly onerous. (I'm lookin' at you, seasonal faction journal cards!)

Yay!

Droo can't make the needed roll this time around (she is untrained in the arts of Knowledge (nobbery)), so the chronicle is fine as-is.

Good game everyone!

Thanks for your help, guys! Molvil will attempt to copy the following:

Protection from Evil
Protection from Chaos
Protection from Law

Spellcraft DC 16 (P from Evil): 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (16) + 8 = 24
Spellcraft DC 16 (P from Chaos): 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (4) + 8 = 12
Spellcraft DC 16 (P from Law): 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (1) + 8 = 9

Well, shucks. Looks like she just gets Protection from Evil. Just out of curiosity, how long was the boat ride back to town? The beginning of the scenario implies multiple days, but was it at least a week?

Thank you, Vosk!

Let's ride the hippopotamus back to town so the professor has more time.

Molvil can reach the required DC's for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level spells by Taking 10. Unless you're looking for the possibility of failure, we can consider her automatically successful in her attempts to scribe spells of those levels.

Were there any other additions Molvil wanted to make to her spellbook, or are those three sufficient?

OH, RIGHT! Vosk did say he'd share in exchange for a favor. I was on automatic pilot, thinking that Molvil can only afford to pay for 3 first level spells until she gets her next paycheck.

In that case, she will greedily gobble up all the spells that she doesn't have, telling herself that the favor she will owe surely can't be that bad. (That's "Tomorrow Molvil's" problem!)

The list of ALL the spells she wants to copy is as follows:

Level 1:
Alarm
Charm Person
Disguise Self
*Endure Elements
Feather Fall
Heightened Awareness
Hold Portal
Identify
Obscuring Mist
*Protection from Chaos
*Protection from Evil
*Protection from Law
True Strike
Unseen Servant

Level 2:
Darkvision
*Glitterdust
Hideous Laughter
Invisibility
Levitate
Mirror Image
Resist Energy

Let me know if this is too greedy. I've put asterisks beside my top 5.

Wow! That is a really cool boon.

Everything on my chron looks good.

Thank you for a very enjoyable game. I hope I get to share a table with you again.

Alright, that is:
14 1st lvl spells at 10 gp each -> 140 gp
7 2nd lvl spells at 40 gp each -> 280 gp

Total cost: 420 gp Nice

I've noted the spells scribed on your Chronicle Sheet and re-uploaded it.

And again, I'd love to get everyone's feedback - either here in the Discussion thread or via PM. What did you want to see more of, what didn't work for you, what was fun, what was boring, etc. This was an incredibly fun table and I want to do everything I can to encourage more tables like this to happen.

I liked the Red Herring. Other GMs may have left that undeveloped or brushed it aside. By allowing players to role play, that became a large investment of character time early in the game. That is actually fairly crucial in low level games as players are still getting a feel for how they want to play the inexperienced agent.

You also handled the sandbox well. You allowed our investigation to unfold in directions of our choosing. Even allowing for the embellishments of stopping for pastries. I think having players willing to meander also helped. Often, people are so busy winning Pathfinder that they forget to play. I feel that this was a group who enjoyed the game because with your discretion and description, they were successfully able to look at the story through the eyes of their characters.

Nice! I think I racked up about 300-something gp in scribing costs on a character once, but don't think I've ever gotten that high in one session.

I liked the game overall, although I kinda thought the party split went on a little too long-- especially since there wasn't a lot happening during that time. Another problem was just that I personally had an unexpectedly hard time getting into this version of this character, which of course has nothing to do with GM or anyone else. (Gorrig used to be a paladin, I was trying out a different build; I will definitely be un-rebuilding him for level 2.)

Agree with Theld about the details, though. I don't believe I've ever had a party stop for pastries, that was a nice touch. :)

If everyone else is up for it, I'd love to play another game.

I'm in!

I don't like party splits in scenarios. I'm okay (but not thrilled) in longer campaigns.

There's not a huge amount of time to gel as a team in a PFS scenario. By the time you get to really know your teammates, you get 5 new teammates.

If we play more scenarios together, splitting the party isn't as bad. Bocke understands everyone now, so things like "Does Vosk always talk like that or is he speaking in code because this is the BBEG's bakery?" aren't as confusing.

Initially, Bocke rushed off with Droo thinking he didn't want to split the party; had we known the characters better, he would have been okay letting her run off on her own.

I'm up for more scenarios together and enjoyed playing with everyone when we got back together, but I'll confess that Bocke is becoming my least favorite character and at some point I may either drop out and play more PFS2; or switch Bocke for another character whose story I find more compelling (both locked up in Outpost right now, a 3rd level fighter/oracle or a 2nd level ninja). It's also possible I enjoy Bocke at 2nd level more - so far, I just feel like he's a very generic archer and maybe a few inquisitor feats will help him develop a deeper personality.

Thanks for your patience as I figure out how to manage Molvil.

And now for my two cents about the scenario. I was surprised that our group was split up. It seemed like we could've been given more than the space of about 14 hours IRL to catch up to each other and thus keep the party together. I think everyone involved wishes we hadn't missed out on anything, useful or otherwise (if only to avoid the hassle of having to read all the spoilers later). That said, at least in my group, it gave ample opportunity for more intimate RP. Now that was priceless! Perhaps in the future, an OOC nudge to the party, asking if it really is their intention to split up, would be an idea to consider.

I second the above: the best part of this session was the ample opportunity for characters to interact, in and out of the structured parts of the scenario. Great work!

I'm up for more scenarios together and enjoyed playing with everyone when we got back together, but I'll confess that Bocke is becoming my least favorite character and at some point I may either drop out and play more PFS2; or switch Bocke for another character whose story I find more compelling (both locked up in Outpost right now, a 3rd level fighter/oracle or a 2nd level ninja). It's also possible I enjoy Bocke at 2nd level more - so far, I just feel like he's a very generic archer and maybe a few inquisitor feats will help him develop a deeper personality.

What I love about divine casters is that they're reflections of the gods they serve. Having said that, I will admit that I find my mystic theurge of Nethys rather boring. At least in PbP. (I built him long before I discovered this medium, he was solely F2F until he'd already prestiged.) To me, Nethys just isn't an interesting deity. Inquisitors are a cool class, but you might try worshipping a different god to see if that sparks your interest again. Just something to think about.

I actually quite like the Protection domain. The deflection aura is cool (and would have been quite helpful in a grapple-heavy combat like the final fight), but it's 1/day and 1 round/activation. Judgements are okay. I get solo teamwork feats at some point, which should be fun.

And maybe I just haven't discovered something unanticipated about Bocke like my other characters. Him grabbing the seagull and biting it was rather unanticipated, I think that showed a little of his personality that I hadn't discovered before.

It's also possible he hasn't been in the right places. His backstory is kind of narrow - it shows where he's from but not really where he's going. Some of my other characters have more defined directions.

Meh, I guess I'll see. He's not bad, just not my favorite.

Yeah, I have a couple of inquisitors in the stable. One is kind of a cheat because the character dates back to the 1980's Red Box as a cleric. His god was Hades in a campaign that mixed the D&D "Known World" with home brew.

It's true that the overtly religious classes bake a lot of character into the creation. In that old game, Coiger was sort of a mix between a dark religious warrior, and tax attorney/efficiency expert, with an insane hatred of undead--basically they are all escapees form the underworld. The fact that Hades is the god of stuff that comes out of the earth (like gold) made him a bit greedy too.

He was my "smart cleric" back in the day, so the added skill ranks were key to his rebirth as an inquisitor though the class's favor is nice too. I do sort of miss all the armor though.

My other inquisitor is sort of flip on my paladin of Shelyn--who I play like Sailor Moon when she's not Sailor Moon--not wise at all in fact she self-centered, venial, lazy, but sticks by her friends no matter what. Whenever she readies to smite some one she always gives a speech telling her target exactly who she is and who she is punishing them for. My inquisitor of Shelyn (preacher archetype) is the exact opposite. Alistair's a bitter jerk without much talent though he knows what he likes and why because, he's an art teacher and critic. He is loosely based on Peter MacNicol's Janosz character in Ghostbusters II (sans accent), Simon Cowell, and a terrible art teacher I had back in High School. I have yet however to play him.

I chose Shelyn for him because it just fit--dictatorial art director. That and Shelyn has a bit of backstory. She had god parents, an evil brother, and relationships with other gods--basically a backstory. Nethys has always seemed a bit meh to me. He's the god of knowledge, magic and destruction, but yet he doesn't seem to hang out with anyone, or have much personality. I don't even run into to many actual wizards who worship him. I guess I see him as hard to relate to. He's not treated so much as a god but as a force of nature. There are a few Pathfinder Gods that fall into this category; gods who don't seem to hang out on the Golarion equivalent of Mt. Olympus/Asgard politicking with their brethren (Gozreh, and Gorum to name two).

Maybe you could find a way to play that up. Like maybe a druid of the magical world--balance in all things OR ELSE! Or perhaps you could make him a bit crazier on each outing until he goes full-on 1.21 magical gigawatts Doc Brown mad, or maybe more like Dr. Ishirō Serizawa from Godzilla (old 1950's or new).

Characters can be real characters sometimes.

@GM: I actually liked the party split a lot. I don't think it's the GM's job to keep the party together, if one goes west and the other east, the party just split! In addition to the priceless RP the Professor mentioned, it gave me the impression from the start that the players were steering this game. Personally, I love that because then my characters can do the little things they like to do (like visit all the bakeries!) while making progress in the scenario.

I thought the fights were run well. They moved smoothly and the NPC's were more than just stat blocks (you'd be surprised how much just a little bit of NPC to NPC interaction makes them more real!) for us to fight.

Pacing was obviously slow, but I think that was 100% because you read the room and saw we were RPing it up. I think if you keep doing that, the games that need to be short, will be, and the games that could use an extra week or so will get what they need! Frankly, no matter what you do as the GM, you're going to have tables that are an RP train wreck. Some players don't like/aren't comfortable with it, some are too new to get into it, personal events putting a damper on their PbP, the reasons are endless really. I think if you keep reading the room and checking in with the game in discussion, you'll have more games like this and fewer games that are less fun.

@Professor: I don't think there is such a thing as too greedy with a wizard/arcanist's spellbook! It just comes down to what you can afford and what you want. When you can quick study or arcane bond a spell to have it immediately, your spellbook becomes hugely valuable. Vosk is intentionally narrow in focus as a personal challenge, but I think generally a wizard/arcanist that isn't investing in their spellbook is going to have a bad time!

@all: As to playing together again, Vosk is 4.1 now (earned an AP chronicle part way through this game). No worries if y'all play without him :)