End of an Era—Sands of the Scorpion God Campaign Wraps Up

Sunday, April 19, 2015

The invite went out on November 25, 2008, three months after we released the Beta rules of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. James Jacobs, our beloved Creative Director (then Editor-in-Chief), sent the following email to a few select members of the Paizo staff:

"SO! It is time for us editors and developers and publishers to really start learning this new game we're building. One way to do that, the MOST FUN way, of course, is to play the game.

I've been mentioning this before, but I'd love to start up a campaign here at the office. I'm looking at running the game twice a month after work on every other Thursday, starting with the first Thursday after New Year's: January 8th of 2009. I was thinking of starting it in December, but after the holidays seems smartest so that we'll get a regular schedule going AND by then we should be more caught up AND by then the game itself should be closer to being finalized. This is not so much a playtest campaign as much as it is a "Learn the new rules" campaign, as a result. The first game will be on January 8th of 2009. It'll take place in the main conference room, and we'll start at 6:30 PM and play until 10:00 PM."

The first game started a wee bit later than James originally intended, as we were all too busy finalizing the Core Rulebook and getting it to the printer in time for its August 2009 release. The very first session actually took place on Thursday, March 19. You can read a recap of the first session (and several more) in the Campaign Journal on our forums.

The campaign was called "The Shadow Under Sandpoint," and was set in James's "home base" Varisian town of Sandpoint, which is heavily based on Point Arena, CA, where he grew up. That first session was mostly focused on character creation. Nine posts into the Campaign Journal, I piped up with the following comment:

"I finally settled on a name that reflects my first-level feat choices of Endurance and Die Hard: OSTOG THE UNSLAIN!

Let's see how long I can keep that title..."

The answer turned out to be six years and a couple of weeks. Last Thursday, April 9, we finally wrapped up the campaign!

The original players in Paizo's longest-running staff game were: Erik Mona, Sean K Reynolds, James Sutter, Wes Schneider, Chris Carey, and Jason Bulmahn. We were very shortly thereafter joined by honorary Paizonian and PaizoCon founder Tim Nightengale.

As the years went on, Sean, James Sutter, and Chris left the group, and Rob McCreary joined.

Our adventures in Sandpoint brought us up against key villains like the Red Bishop, the ghost of the serial killer Chopper, and of course the Sandpoint Devil.

In late 2011, James shifted the focus of the campaign from Sandpoint to the southern deserts of Osirion. He was eager for a change of scenery, but more importantly, he wanted to put us up against a huge challenge in the form of Gary Gygax's Necropolis, an enormous dungeon Gygax designed for the old Dangerous Journeys game. Our friend Clark Peterson had adapted Necropolis to the d20 rules system in a hardcover mega-adventure from Necromancer Games, and it was this version that James updated to Pathfinder, made his own, and sent us into like an ancient Egyptian meatgrinder.

Three and a half years later, we emerged into the burial chamber of the great lich lord Rahotep, eager to put him to final death. I was also eager to solidify Ostog the Unslain's title and reputation forever. Would we manage to survive?

From left to right: Thalestris (aasimar gunslinger played by Rob McCreary), Styrian Kindler (human bard played by F. Wesley Schneider),
Velmarius Elazarin (human sorcerer played by Jason Bulmahn), Howell Talbot III (human paladin played by Tim Nightengale), and Ostog the Unslain (played by yours truly).

I brought the Veuve, of course.

Even looking at these miniatures as I write this blog, it's weird for me to think that they won't ever appear on a gaming table together again. Nearly every other week for 6 years is a long time. I'm starting to get a bit wistful...

No matter. After throwing back some celebratory champagne, it was time to take the fight to the insidious Rahotep! By the time this session rolled around, we were 17th level with 2 mythic tiers. But all of us were worried that it might not be enough!

Our first battle was against a massive umbral dragon being ridden by "the Mother of All Boar Demons." You might not recognize boar demons. They're unique to Gary Gygax's Necropolis. Gary was kind enough to give them absolutely killer gaze attacks, which are always fun. Notice how the party is standing in a perfect group for a dragon's breath weapon attack...

We were still pretty confident, thanks in no small part to the huge number of precast spells Styrian the bard had pumped us up with. It got so out of hand we had to use the conference room whiteboard. Here's a peek:

To head off a few rules lawyers posting about how not all of these spells stack with each other... you're right. Some of the spells were only cast on a couple of us, and some of them were ladled on top of other bonuses to squeak out a little bonus even if most of the spell was not tremendously useful. We did it right, I assure you.

A quick note on the list to the right. Over the course of the campaign, each of us had gained a small statue of an Ancient Osiriani god, who acted as a sort of protective spirit at various points in the dungeon. Each of these acted as a "get out of one death free" card for the final session, where we ended up getting hit with multiple death effects per round. We'll check back later to see how that turned out for us.

With all of that buffing, we were able to dispatch the Mother of All Boar Demons and the umbral dragon without too much trouble. That led us to Rahotep's actual tomb, which looked like this:

Each of the Large miniatures represented a statue of one of the Spawn of Rovagug (did I mention Rahotep worshiped Rovagug?). And we all know nothing bad ever happens with statues in a dungeon, right?

The gentleman seated opposite us is James Jacobs himself, looking self-satisfied at the awesome spread he set out for us, and the fate he had in store for us. He also is about 100 pounds lighter than he was when the campaign started, so holy hell, let's raise some champagne to that!

The statues turned out to be horrific traps that _didn't_ spring to terrible life (much to our surprise), and in relatively short order we'd managed to destroy them and funnel their inherent energy into the room's central sarcophagus, opening the very tomb of Rahotep himself.

Very shortly, the room looked like this:

When the GM drops a Todd McFarlane action figure on the table to represent the campaign's Big Bad, you know you're in deep. The two tentacles, by the way, were the god Rovagug's ACTUAL TENTACLES, reaching through a planar prison to defend one of his most powerful earthly servants. If the tentacle touched you, you died. Period. It's at this point that the names of some of those Ancient Osiriani gods started coming off the whiteboard. If a name was erased, that god was forever banned from the world of Golarion.

With a great deal of effort, we managed to kill Rahotep. And that's when his mask came off and his skull immediately turned into a demilich.

The most shocking event of the night occurred when the demilich disintegrated our borderline-evil sorcerer Velmarius. That patch of dust in the below picture is Jason Bulmahn, lead designer of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. ZZzzzt!

Remarkably (for a character who had acted like a self-interested bastard for literally the entire campaign) Jason decided NOT to cash in his "get out of death free" Osiriani god token, reasoning that his life was not worth striking Osiris himself forever from the ranks of Golarion's deities. What a guy! Knowing Velmarius (and Jason), the sorcerer must have had something up his sleeve, but Jason played it cool and quiet. It was almost good enough to think that he was a little mad about his character dying...

We swiftly avenged our fallen ally and defeated Rahotep once and for all. Here's a look at the whiteboard at the end. Pay particular attention to the fact that Ostog never cashed in his get out of death free card!

OSTOG REMAINS UNSLAIN!
And here he is, being placed on the shelf for what I assume is the very last time.

James did a great job winding up the session with a brief story about each of the characters after the campaign. Ostog, apparently, has a linnorm with his name on it in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings. Will Ostog one day be a Linnorm King? It would take a pretty powerful member of the Paizo staff to make THAT happen, I reckon!

And what of the deceased Velmarius, the only character to truly die that night? Well, Jason had a plan for that all along...

I cannot summarize in a simple blog post what a treat and honor it was for all of us to play in James Jacobs's campaign. James is a masterful storyteller, and he always put in a ton of work to make sure that everyone was engaged and having fun. I'll miss the campaign terribly (though we're all getting together to start a Call of Cthulhu campaign on Thursday, so we'll still be playing together regularly). To James I say: Thank you, my friend. It was an absolutely fantastic campaign, and you are truly a legendary GM.

And since we're moving to Call of Cthulhu, I have no intention of naming my character "Unslain" or expecting to survive even the first session.

What a refreshing change death will be!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Golarion Day: Chopper's Revenge!

Thursday, January 13, 2010

Last week, with the first installment of Golarion Day, I put out a call for everyone to start sending in ideas for future blog posts. Those requests are pouring in, but it's gonna take a few weeks for us to sort through them and match requests to the right content and all that. But keep the suggestions coming!

This week, though, I thought I'd show off a bit of my office Sandpoint campaign. This game's one of the largest I've ever run—the initial goal was to have it be a game that the entire editorial pit could take part in as a team-building exercise. But as we've hired more folks, and as friends of current players have joined, the size of the group has exploded into an intimidating group of nine players. The campaign itself is called The Shadow Under Sandpoint. You can check out the campaign journal over on our boards—it's generally only a few game sessions behind where we're at.

Illustration by John Gravato

One of the tricky things about such a large group, of course, is designing encounters that challenge the group. You can't just boost the CR of the bad guys and make them individually tougher, because that'll only mean that the bad guy will have a much better chance to kill a few PCs before he's defeated—you don't want to kill PCs in every fight, since that's a downward spiral. Instead, I've found that having one particularly tough boss monster surrounded by lots of less powerful minions works really well—gives everyone in the party someone to face off against, but also lets me have big key encounters with major bad guys.

Such was the case several months ago, when I knew the PCs were going up against the ghost of an infamous local murderer named Jervis Stoot. Old Stoot (known as Chopper back during the height of his murdering days) is part of Sandpoint's history, and those who've played in "Rise of the Runelords" have probably heard his name. He was never a villain in that Adventure Path, though, so that made him a perfect source for a logical foe for the PCs to face in this campaign.

So when I designed Stoot, I made him a ghost that would provide a challenge to the party (they were all about 4th or 5th level at the time), but who also had some built-in options to call upon allies. Giving him a new ghost ability that allows him to summon birds and command avians made sense (he was a Pazuzu cultist back in the day, after all!). The fight ended up playing out over two sessions—one atop the old light while Stoot had possessed the town sheriff, and then a second after they defeated the possessed sheriff and chased the ghost back to his island den to finish him off. In both cases, I threw in some bird swarms to help amp up the terror and mayhem, resulting in what normally would have been a CR 8 encounter, but when you have nine players, that's what you gotta do!

(And don't tell my players, but they've not seen the last of old Stoot's ghost yet! That's why I'm not listing the way in which you can permanently put Stoot to rest, after all...)

In any event, if any of you are playing a game set in Sandpoint, or if you're looking for a cool, flavorful ghost to use, I thought for today that I'd throw Stoot's stat block in for folks to check out. You'll note I did something a little weird with this ghost—he should normally only have two special ghost abilities, but I gave him three—corrupting touch, avian mastery, and malevolence. In order to balance things, I also gave him an additional weakness and nerfed his malevolence ability. In other words, feel free when you're making villains up for your home game to fiddle with the rules!

JERVAS STOOT CR 6
XP 2,400
Male human ghost rogue 5
CE Medium undead (incorporeal)
Init +7; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +13

DEFENSE
AC 19, touch 19, flat-footed 15 (+5 deflection, +3 Dex, +1 dodge)
hp 61 (5d8+35)
Fort +6, Ref +7, Will +2
Defensive Abilities channel resistance +4, evasion, incorporeal, rejuvenation, trapfinding, trap sense +1; Immune undead traits
Weakness avians

OFFENSE
Speed fly 30 ft. (perfect)
Melee corrupting touch +6 (6d6; Fort. DC 17 half)
Special Attacks avian mastery, malevolence 1/day (DC 17), sneak attack +3d6

STATISTICS
Str —, Dex 16, Con —, Int 12, Wis 13, Cha 20
Base Atk +3; CMB +3; CMD 16
Feats Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Improved Initiative, Toughness
Skills Bluff +11, Climb +8, Craft (woodcarving) +9, Craft (metalworking) +9, Escape Artist +11, Knowledge (local) +9, Knowledge (nature) +6, Perception +13, Sense Motive +9, Stealth +15
Languages Common, Thassilonian
SQ fast stealth, surprise attack

SPECIAL ABILITIES
Avian Mastery (Su) Stoot can command and influence all normal birds as if via dominate animal at will. He can control any number of birds within a 60-foot radius in this manner. Once per day, he may cast summon swarm as a spell-like ability to summon a swarm of crows (treat as a bat swarm sans the wounding ability).
Weakness to Avians (Ex) Damage inflicted on Stoot from any avian's natural attacks is resolved as if he did not possess the incorporeal defensive ability. This includes creatures that have assumed the form of an avian.

James Jacobs
Creative Director

DISCLAIMER: I know how much fun some folks have checking our work on stat blocks, but since I'm more or less copy/pasting these stats directly from my campaign notes without going back to give them the same level of checking I'd give something going into print... there might be an error in there somewhere! (This is also an excuse for me to see how harrowing it is to format a stat block for a blog post... wish me luck!)

The Stuff of Legend

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

You've head the rumors. Now learn the truth from the journal of Howell, Tim Nightengale's character in James Jacobs's legendary Shadows Under Sandpoint campaign.

Entry from the travel journal of Howell B. Talbot III, Servant of Abadar
18 Pharast (late morning)

All praise the might and justice of Abadar!

A quick missive here, as we have met and vanquished the object of Styrian's obsession: the Sandpoint Devil!

I must say that the pictures and descriptions that Styrian has shown me do not convey its sheer horror. The wolf-horse devil was summoned by one of the ghouls that waylaid us inside the back passages of Kanker's lair, by means of a large spiraled horn. The devil's approach was marked by such a scream that both Zandu and Rummy-Tum-Tugger fled in fear, and its arrival was punctuated by a flash and explosion that left Velmarius blinded. The horror flew in over the summoned pit, and proceeded to vomit a flame over Vorn that left him with horrible burns.

A hound archon summoned by Balazar seemed to occupy the devil, while Ostog, Melga (now, where did she come from, and where is Hazel?), and I moved up to attack. It was then that I called upon the Justice and Glory of the Gold-Fisted One, and finally, after many a failed attempt at smiting evils on this mission, I buried Thundergütter deeply in the chest of the Sandpoint Devil, causing it a truly grievous wound, and doubly-so as I wrenched the axe free. Ostog, as always, delivered the killing blow. Unfortunately, the beast's final act was to spray us with its infernal breath, leaving Ostog and myself, along with Vorn, charred and bleeding despite all healing. And yet, the Sandpoint Devil is no more, reduced to a cleaned skull in the hands of the scholar that has tirelessly pursued it. Styrian tells me it belongs in a museum....

Christopher Carey
Editor

The Sandpoint Devil: Slain?

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Reports are coming in of a doughty band of adventurers facing off against the legendary Sandpoint Devil in bloody battle beneath the stones of western Varisia. Could it be true that the infamous beast, cow killer and hermit spooker, has been slain? Tune back in next week for the full report.

Until then, gird your sanity as we page through the journal of that chronicler of terrors and outrages, Styrian Kindler.

Wes Schneider
Managing Editor

The Shadow Under Sandpoint Campaign Begins!

Monday, April 6, 2009

Last Thursday an unlikely group of strangers gathered on the docks of Sandpoint, beginning what will doubtlessly be one of the most unfortunate misadventures in the usually peaceful town's history. This marks the beginning of the Paizo editorial pit's new biweekly Pathfinder RPG Campaign: James Jacobs's The Shadow Under Sandpoint! Watch the calamity unfold with ongoing character reports, missives, comments, journal entries, and sketches on the Shadow Under Sandpoint thread here.

And wish good luck to the people of Sandpoint—they're going to need it.

F. Wesley Schneider
Managing Editor