Are you ready for our 40th Paizo blog report across the past ten years?

As we approach the anniversary of our total party kill at the bottom of the Abomination Vaults, it’s time to make public what we sometimes call “Session Plus One.” While we’d love to sit around and chat after the final die roll is made, the end of a marathon is usually a frenzy: players are leaving for long rides or flights home, there is the cleanup after days of Pathfinder, a scramble to capture any material we can, and then finally much-needed sleep. The Abomination Arsenal ended with a 22-hour session, which compounded everything just mentioned. Typically, after things settle down, we get together (remotely if necessary) and chat about everything from our favorite moments of the project to the rooms we wish we had explored. Everyone brings questions for our GM about all the things we missed along the way, feedback about the project, and especially the “what if” scenarios that we just have to know the answer to. Suffice it to say, Adam is all about reflection, and weighs it evenly with the prep sessions before a launch.

We are fully recovered from our first marathon of Sky King’s Tomb and ready to tell the tale! If you didn’t catch the introduction to this project, we’re playing as a family of dwarves from Clan Firecask, complete with different generations to represent our players’ out-of-game ages. Each marathon of this project also features Order of the Amber Die members from decades past, and for our opening marathon we reached all the way back to the 1980s when our group first began. Before co-founding the Order with our GM, Andrew Woodworth and Adam went as Darth Vader and a stormtrooper for Halloween in 1985; they even have the same birthday and grew up as neighbors in New Jersey. Andy stayed active in the Order until the 2000s, and returned to the table for the first time in twenty years for this marathon – his debut playing Pathfinder!

Order of the Amber Die here, still going strong as the years roll on! In case you aren't familiar with our work from past projects, we'll repeat the staccato version. We only play published adventures. We use the complete rules set. We've had the same GM since our founding: 1987. We like to push the envelope of tabletop roleplaying. We only play marathon sessions—days at a time. We play on location. Our GM isn't afraid to kill characters or TPK us; he'll do it in front of the community, too. Imagine us like a roleplaying team, complete with a Captain and Ref position to help the players. We revere one d20 above all others, and that is the Amber Die. It doesn’t roll more 20s than it should, but it chains them when it does, and doubters have always been converted. After more than 170 adventures, we've even gotten rid of RPG absolutes: yeah, we'll split the party.

Victory and Total Party Kill!
We have a saying in the Order: We don’t start campaigns, we finish them. Yet, no matter how many times we find ourselves at the end of an Adventure Path, it still feels nostalgic and we never take it for granted. Having played more than 160 published adventures to date, we’re extremely fortunate to have seen the bottom of so many dungeons, the end of so many stories, and we always make sure to toast when we reach the final encounter. Our headquarters in New Jersey has a shelf with champagne bottles that read “Giantslayer,” “Strange Aeons,” “Ruins of Azlant,” and more.

Check out this guest blog submitted from our friends at the Order of the Amber Die! This is part 6 in their adventures in the Abomination Vaults. Find previous entries in the links below.