GM Imperius' Skull & Shackles

Game Master bluedove

I realize you may not check this, but if bluedove or someone else picks up the game I will reopen it. Not thinking about someone picking it up, I'd cleared the information from the campaign page and the google docks, hopefully it is saved elsewhere or can be reconstituted.

Hello!

I have messaged Robert Henry and paizo to get the ball rolling on getting this campaign under my wing and back on track. Please feel free to tell me a bit about yourselves and/or your characters and I will do my best to get the game going again shortly.

Glad to have you! Thanks for picking it up.

Brother MacLaren is a cleric of Cayden Cailean and also has the Brewkeeper prestige class. He's a generalist; he can have spells to solve a wide range of problems if he knows what he's up against, or can be a very deadly combatant with time to prepare. He has good social skills and saves, and mobility options (Travel domain), but his AC is lacking. He is married to Lady Agasta Smythee of Tidewater Rock in what is partly a business arrangement but also has genuine affection. That happened in Book 2, I think? Usually easygoing unless his honor is insulted. CG, accepting of the fact that we are pirates but trying to keep the bloodshed to a suitable minimum. Basically a "good guy pirate" like in Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

As to the campaign, we are using a couple of variant rules that you can keep or toss. One is Automatic Bonus Progression; if you didn't want to use this, we'd need to catch up on the missing half of our WBL. The other is an encounter-based spell duration variant; Tucci uses this in a Jade Regent game he is running (here).

Welcome bluedove! Thank you for agreeing to take over the campaign and thanks MacLaren for coordinating it and swapping! I manage the tracking sheet, which we pretty much just use for treasure, though there’s also the ship on there - and maybe the fleet when we get to that point. The spreadsheet can be found here (link). Please link at the top of the page when you get access so everyone can find it easily. Let me know if you want write access - happy to oblige.

I play Tucci, a halfling hunter, and Kasin, his trusty capybara sidekick. Tucci is a bit rash, and tends to rush in when he shouldn’t, but as he ages, he’s learning a little restraint. He’s a pretty typical happy halfling I suppose. :)

Tucci is a rambler. Full of energy he has a very hard time sitting still, and often wanders about here and there looking for stuff. He doesn’t care if he owns the stuff, he just likes to admire it and is happy to part with it again - storing the memory rather than the object. Though he’s certainly keen on his own stuff too, naturally.

He is also the ship’s helm, which makes him happier than it really should. Still, he’s fiercely proud of his position, and has been steadily working, through skill and magical acquisitions, to improve himself in that role.

Off ship, he hopes to be Governor of this island - though the party hasn’t finalized that yet exactly. Veronica is captain of the ship, The Charm and MacLaren has an island of his own with his wife, so Tucci figures it’ll work itself out in his favor. He has such plans!

Let me know what questions you may have, and I’ll do my best to answer them. Thanks again!

EDIT
Oh yeah! The variants. The treasure sheet will help us whichever way you want to go. We're pretty vastly wealthy for Automatic Bonus Progression I think, but we are pirates after all. Hehehe.

As for the spell duration scheme, I do use it in my other campaign, but may not continue it with my future campaigns. It's not as clunky, but it doesn't save a lot of tracking either (which I'd hoped it would) and tends to favor the party (spells last longer generally). So I'm fine either way there as well.

As to the campaign, we are using a couple of variant rules that you can keep or toss. One is Automatic Bonus Progression; if you didn't want to use this, we'd need to catch up on the missing half of our WBL. The other is an encounter-based spell duration variant; Tucci uses this in a Jade Regent game he is running (here).

I generally maintain the status quo, so you needn't worry about me taking away goodies. I don't have much familiarity with ABP, but if it's something you keep track of, I'll trust you to know what you're doing.

Glad to know you guys manage your own loot tracking since that is a particular pet peeve of mine. I also don't track experience, but use the advancement track outlined in the AP. As you guys are already level 10, we won't need to worry about again that until the end of the book.

That spell duration tweak does look a wee bit generous, especially for the lower duration spells. But you're at a sufficiently high level now that it's unlikely to matter at this point.

Thanks so much for picking up our game!

As for my characters, Veronica and Eric are descendants of a renowned Free Captain, Lara Blackblade, who sailed the Shackles around 100 years ago. One of her more famous feats include bringing down a fearsome thunderbird that was preying on any ship sailing near the Eye of Abedengo (this was actually part of another character's backstory, as you can see from the great linked post).

Veronica is a proud woman (sometimes to a fault, although that has come up less than I was expecting initially). Wanting to honour and build upon her great grandmother's legacy, she actually set out to become a pirate, carrying Lara's Black Blade with her, hoping to unlock its secrets as she attempted to follow in her grandmother's footsteps. Eric is her younger brother, having joined up with the party after we came back to Port Peril to get our charter (I picked up the Leadership feat around that time as a way to let us fill some missing roles for being down to three players - traps and ranged combat, mostly)

Veronica is though, always eager for a fight, and can get pretty intimidating. Since becoming Captain, however, she's tried to learn to be more open and diplomatic, and has tried to stick to the 'good guy pirate' archetype that Mac commented on above - in a good part due to the rest of the party's influence.

And while she's achieved much of what she set out to do in such a short time, she still feels there's still much left to do to catch up to her grandmother's feats.

So hey look, I'm officially your GM! ^_^

Gonna be honest though, I have never GMed a group at this level so I'm guaranteed to make some mistakes. You're already doing a good job of spelling stuff out, so keep that up. It will help me to absorb your mechanics faster. Especially detailing every bonus and penalty being applied like Veronica did.

Did you guys go right after the harpies on the same day as the initial encounter? It looked like Tucci was saying you would go after them in the morning and then Veronica contradicted, so I wanted to double check.

This isn't really a challenging encounter with survivors who already fled you once, but I thought I would ask how they've been in general? I can continue with the AP as written or I can up the ante if you guys aren't feeling challenged by the combats.

I've never played at such a high level either, so I didn't really know what to expect my performance to be when we got here when I built Veronica.

We're a pretty melee focused group, so we tend to overpower those kinds of battles - especially with the magic buff rules, since we have access to quite a lot of buffing magic. Our AC isn't amazing, but Veronica has access to some powerful defensive options (Mirror Image, Displacement , Deivon's Parry , Flamboyant Arcana for Parry and Riposte) that help her get around that and be an effective frontliner.

And I took the combo of Protective Luck and Soothsayer to help shield the rest of the party, too (we're ruling Protective Luck can only be used once per person per day, but it's still a pretty effective protection, especially against all those cyclops). Most battles have been straight up melee brawls, so we've been getting by with little difficulty. We've had a few challenging and memorable encounters, though, mostly when facing spellcasters. These ones come immediately to mind:

- Aboleth fight. The best one so far, I think. Though, kept us on our toes the entire fight.
- Wrecker crew - Veronica got taken out of the fight right at the start, owing to her pretty low will save. Mac had his hands full trying to disrupt the spellcasting leader, which put quite some pressure on the rest of the party without Veronica's damage and tanking abilities.
- Isabella "Inkwell" Locke - She did quite a lot of damage and managed to keep herself safe with her Invisibility spellfor a bit. Mac managed to defeat her with a good grapple roll, but she took quite a good chunk of health out of the party with her lightning bolts.

As I see it, anything that disrupts our ability to engage our priority targets in melee makes things much more difficult. Most of the fights so far have been melee focused, so that hasn't happened much. As a reference, we almost cleaned out Sumithia in one go, only having to retreat when facing the huge cyclops at the end, and that was because we were running out of resources by that point. Even so, were he not there, we would have taken out all the other cyclops without much trouble. And when we came back the following day, the fight was over without much difficulty.

With all that said, I'd prefer not to put more work on yourself and have you try to alter the encounters, but again, I'm pretty new to these levels as well. I'd like to hear Mac and Tucci's thoughts on things, too, as they're more knowledgeable about the game than me.

And one thing I think we never touched on, but is absolutely relevant to the topic: if any of you think Veronica's build is part of the problem, please do bring it up! The game has to be fun for everyone, and I'm pretty open to retraining some of her options if it makes the game better, like Mac suggested in his recruitment for the Carrion Crown game. Like I said, I've never played a game this far, so I don't really know where the goalposts should be.

A few observations:

I have had the pleasure of playing, and GMing in the rare air of higher level play. A few extra mooks, and make them advanced so they can hit something once in a while, is usually enough to add a bit of challenge. Especially in our case where there are three-four of us depending on how you count.

Veronica is definitely the strongest of us, then MacLaren, and finally Tucci. But we blend well, and unlike many campaigns I’ve been in, we buff like crazy! That makes our adventuring days shorter, but makes us harder to beat during those shorter days.

That said, I don’t know many gamers who play to lose (other than GMs of course), so I’m fine with that. It’s a delicate balance, winning without just stomping over everything. We’ve had a bit of both, and that’s fine I think as long as the whole thing doesn’t become a walk - and it hasn’t been. We’ve had fun with our challenges.

I’ve seen some campaigns where fights rarely last beyond the second or third round. I do prefer longer fights, so we have opportunities to see what our opponents can do, and what we can do. Those are the most fun if that can be managed. However, this does get harder at higher levels.

It is true, we’re weaker at range, but with fly and air walk being commonly available between us it’s less of a concern. Not to mention the occasional dimension door and teleport when things get really hairy.

I’m happy to help whenever as well, either here in chat or via PM or whatever. :)

Thanks for the input, it will take me a while to adjust but I can assure you that I view the GM's role as being more cooperative than adversarial. My tweaks will be minor and likely tactical in nature to create more dynamic combats rather than increasing pressure until I discover the breaking point. It's a game, so the goal is always 'And fun was had by all...'

I do need this question answered before I can advance the round:

Did you guys go right after the harpies on the same day as the initial encounter? It looked like Tucci was saying you would go after them in the morning and then Veronica contradicted, so I wanted to double check.

Doh! Right. I think it is the same day.

Oops, sorry! Completely forgot about the question after that long post! Yes, it's still the same day - we went back to the fort to get Mac and Eric, and got back here.

So about the triceratops; they are huge herbivores. Just supposing some comparability to an elephant for feeding range, they should really not be able to survive on an island this size, let alone this possibly single square mile of enclosure. (Area D on the map)

Also, make whole can repair a maximum of 5d6 hp to an object. The objects in question are beams of wood the size of an entire tree. Wood has 10 hp per inch of thickness. So this spell at it's maximum repairs a piece of wood 3 inches thick and takes 10 mins to cast.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Greater Make Whole is more powerful (10d6+10 HP at this level) and faster to cast (1 standard action). It would be limited to a 50-lb object, however. So maybe not the solution here. Really we would want Fabricate, and we don't have it.

MacLaren could prepare Wall of Stone, but that needs to merge with existing stone.

Yes, the weight/volume limits are going to stymie your ability to magically repair the enclosure. If the goal is to tame this Island and make it your own, you'll have to decide if free roaming triceratops are worth the risk of leaving in play.

Yeah, I suspect we're gonna kill 'em. :(

I just posted a possible solution, but if we can't even manage one, Tucci will suggest killing them both now rather than have them roaming the island.

Yeah, I suspect we're gonna kill 'em. :(

I just posted a possible solution, but if we can't even manage one, Tucci will suggest killing them both now rather than have them roaming the island.

You can certainly kill one for meat, though carrying the carcass away might be a challenge. They are pretty formidable in melee, but cannot fly, obviously. So if you can damage them from a safe range, I can handwave that.

I'm a bit unsure on which areas are still unexplored, but I think it's G, H, J, K, L, O, P?

You guys would know better than me! This is what RH gave me as a summary:

They cleared the fort, Sumitha, and the hidden underwater temple. They also took the ship and rum from the were rat. As for the island, they have cleared the Harpy caves, the stairs and the watch tower to the west. They've seen the dinosaurs in the fence but not done anything with them. As for anything east of Sumitha or the bay they haven't touched it.

G is the Ruins of Sumitha, other than that the list looks right but add M and N too. And while it appears you may have scouted I, you didn't explore there.

Tucci's got Wild Empathy at a +10. I don't see any reason to kill them right now.
Triceratops are pretty much elephants. Similar size, diet, armament.
MacLaren will happily prepare Create Food to leave fodder for them.

MacLaren can Plane Shift them somewhere once he gets the focus for the spell.

Given this day dawned without me, I can't say if it's time to rest or not, for sure.

Are we tracking the date? If so, what is it? Apologies, I've been a bit busy and haven't been able to delve much into your backlog.

So, where to? And if you're teleporting, how familiar are you with the place?

The biggest city is Port Peril. That's a Metropolis. Mac and Veronica started the adventure there and have been back for other missions. It would be the first choice.
Quent is a Large City that we've visited.
Hell Harbor is a Small City that we've visited.

The docks in any of those settlements are probably "Seen Casually", for a 88% chance of being on target.

With regard to getting back, is a ship a valid destination for Teleport? Because the Charm would count as "Very Familiar." If not, then on the Island of Empty Eyes, MacLaren can hopefully take the time to study the fort enough to make it "Studied Carefully."

Port Peril should be good, it's large enough that it can be assumed you'll be able to find buyers and sellers for whatever you need, within reason. I'll probably need some background if you want to RP with NPCs. You can provide both sides if that works better for you.

I don't see why the ship can't be a destination for Teleport so long as it stays anchored or moored. Do you have NPC crew that stays behind or will the ship be empty while you are absent?

I presume a skeleton crew on the ship to keep it ready to sail, and for defense so no one can sneak in and steal it. But most of the crew is likely on shore now that the fort is safe to do various tasks to prepare for the party and make the place livable.

We currently have a crew of 87 (you can see it on the ship tab of the tracking sheet). Our ship requires a crew of 47 to fully function, though 27 of those are for the weapons, the rest to sail. So I imagine we have a couple dozen folks on the ship keeping watch, cleaning, practicing, etc. Maybe even a bit less.

You guys can handwave the trip to Port Peril, if you like. I'm afraid I don't have any content for that location, or if I do, I haven't found it yet. XD

That's fine with me. Just shopping really.

Everyone please check the tracking sheet one more time. Make sure there's nothing you want in the 'to sell' green flag.

When you've both signed off that you've looked, I'll do a divvy and make some purchases (hopefully).

I will get a post up with my purchases. Sorry I was AWOL a bit - was running multiple games during a changeover. Will be around more from here on out.

At last count, Brother MacLaren had 17,616 GP.
With the distribution of 9,225, his new total is 26,841.

I had intended to buy the components for a Strand of Prayer Beads (22,900 GP).

Also to buy:
Plane Shift Focus (0)
True Seeing Components *8 (2,000)
Continual Flame Components *2 (100)
Dungeonsight Focus (150)

That would leave him with 1,691 GP.

But we are at the point where crafting runs into trouble, because the times stretch out so much. The Strand is 46 days at normal speed, 23 at accelerated. Is it worth tying up Veronica's time that much? Would we even have that much time left in the AP? Who knows? Some APs have entire books that are like a week or two. Others, it is months.

I guess it isn't really a crucial item. I could get a bunch of smaller-priced items in the city.

Sorry it took so long to post, it's been a couple of really rough weeks and I've been trying (and failing) to keep a decent posting rate over all games. Regarding the crafting trouble (and I realise you already made alternative purchases, but just in case you want to change them), I do believe this is the perfect time to craft such an item - we do know we have enough time until the feast, and I'm not going to craft anything for myself (and I think Tucci doesn't want anything either?). We're not really tying myself up of I'm not using those free 6 hours a day for anything.

Yeah, I do have a long list of things Tucci wants, and a lot of it you can help him achieve. Right now though he's saving up for a ring, so you might as well do MacLaren's stuff now. As you say, we have the time.

I think the items I settled on are better for Mac anyways. The Gloves of Storing really help with his TWF problem; a cleric with a two-handed weapon can just take a hand off to cast, but a TWF cleric can't. Gloves of Storing are the answer.

So if he just buys the components for the Gloves and the Phylactery, that saves 10,500 total, and so he has 11,091 left to spend.

Will put in another crafting request then - he will get the components for a Stone of Good Luck.

That leaves him at 1,091 GP.

Gloves of Storing: 10 days normally, 5 accelerated
Phylactery: 11 days normally, 6 accelerated
Luckstone: 20 days normally, 10 accelerated

Sound good?

Got your basic Map for Flying Combat ready. You'll be approaching from the south. Let me know your preparations once you're done with shopping decisions and I'll finish it out.

Apologies for some lag time on my end. I'm adapting to a new work schedule with less free time so we may stutter along for a bit until I settle in properly.

Have we lost our Captain? Veronica, it's been a couple weeks - are you OK?

Sorry everyone, for being gone so long without saying anything. I've been dealing with a pretty heavy burnout lately, and while things are getting better now, I've been ending up completely exhausted at the end of each day, which doesn't leave much time and mental capacity to post. I'm trying to get back to the games, and I hope I'll be able to do it consistently soon.

Cool - I'm glad it was just burnout and not something more serious!

Welcome back (I hope!). :)

Sorry to report but my laptop has crashed. Trying to troubleshoot but my coverage has expired so if I can't fix the problem, it may take some time before I'm up and running again. I will keep you posted.

Ouch - sorry to hear it! I hope, for your sake, you're able to get it up and running!

Veronica, are you back?