Is there any news on the third installment? I'm about to start what will likely be the final session of smuggler's seal. I'm loving what we have so far!
Ben
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The last campaign I ran was CotCT and Scarwall really left an impression. My players still love to hate me for it. With some reskinning in could be a good addition.
Alas, the links do not work. I still have the image file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7DApMOH4jNKM0hoenEzejIyZFE Perhaps I'll be able to find the explanation file as well at home, but it doesn't seem to be in my drive anymore. I may have removed it when we finished the dungeon. I'll look later. Again all credit goes to RobRendell.
I use a printed version of the pdf's for my personal notes and have a laptop with the pdf's open as well. That way I can have stat blocks and other file in front of me at the same time. As for the maps, you can copy them without notes for traps and such with a right version of adobe reader (an old one, I'm leaning towards seven but I would have to check that when I get home). If you're using a digital platform, such as roll20, these work perfectly. I've also experimented with printing them with some mixed results. To do this I have an Excel file which is set to be inch grids once printed (again I'd have to be at home to check the measurements, if you're interested let me know and I can send the settings or the file to you. Sadly setting Excel to 1 inch doesn't work and the grids comes out too large). I then crop the edge off the maps so the grid aligns with the edge of the image and copy the file to Excel. Afterwards you can expand the image to the point that the grid aligns with the lines of the Excel cells, then you can be sure it will print in 1 inch squares. The problems with this are that you end up needing to print a lot due to the scale of some of the maps. Images that aren't roughly squares end up with a lot of 'empty' sheets (this can be solved by not printing every page, but is somewhat tedious. But mostly the problem is that a resolution is somewhat lacking when you magnify it this far. If someone knows if this is solved by using different software please let me know. If you want an idea of how they look I can send you some photo's. I also still have some of the files ready to print which I could also send if I can still find them. Not all of them though as I run a lot of the campaign digitally. Hope this helps!
If we're going to resurrect the thread we might as well do it properly. I wouldn't mind getting in on the mail list either. Email: ben_edmondson -at- hotmail -dot- com
If the hints are too subtle for your party you can always make them more obvious. Instead of stating the above Davik could ask them a question. Either why they carry the amulets, or if they work for Staggy depending on how blunt you want to make it. This way the dialog is opened before there is a chance to brandish a weapon and once people start talking they tend to keep talking. This at least from my experience of a few years of DMing an intelligent but dense party (Guessing average real life stats of Int 16, Wis 8 :P). No shame in spoon feeding them when needed if it helps the campaign.
That sounds awesome and exactly something one of my players (A wizard with a obsessive compulsion for comparing staff sizes) would love. I'm considering joinking at least part of it. Thanks for the write up and reviving the old thread I missed.
Not so much something that, but more a funny quote. Lord Frederick Abberline: With my brand new headband of intellect I've come to the conclusion we need to raise our taxes.
You could also add an arbitrary amount of bandits and just run as an encounter between the Stag Lord with a few lieutenants and the party. The rest of the bandits are occupied in a pitched battle with the worgs and kobolds which can be kept at descriptions instead of actually rolling all the attacks. This should set the scene for the fight well. The number of combatants you are thinking about is really too small for the mass combat rules to work as written and increasing these numbers to the point where they would work would be unrealistic (100+ bandits and about 200 kobolds, to makes the roles makes sense). That being said you could still choose to go the mass combat route if you used the third party rules made by Legendary Games in their Ultimate War book. These are more viable for small units. (If I wasn't allowed to post third party resources I'm sorry and will remove this) Hope this helps!
In the GM reference for Chapter 1 RobRendell posted a ruin quest he designed. I implemented it into my campaign without too much planning and it still worked very nicely. I removed the link to Svetlana he used and just used it as a plug in ruin. As written it adds to the fey plot line, but with a few very minor adjustments it could work you aswell. Here are the links: Description of the ruins
You can find the original posts and discussion by searching for 'New Sehir' in the forum.
My campaign is now at the end of RRR and I have yet to introduce Irovetti, but I'm already anticipating a similar scenario as you describe here as my party, although excellent at at acting IC but are experienced gamers and have what they refer to as their 'RPG senses' which are somewhat harder to ignore. What I've done to this point is let them believe what they want to believe, even give hints that could point them further in that direction before throwing a serious curve ball. In your case I would consider selling Pitax as the menacing and corrupt nation that it is. A few verbal scraps at meetings or in letters, rumors from other nations that Pitax wishes to expand, troops partroling a bit too close to your borders, casual requests of information which could have tactical benefit if an assault did take place, that sort of thing. Seen as your party is smart don't over sell it, just keep the notion in their head. In parallel with this I'd introduce Mivon (or another big party) as a very neighbourly country, bailing them out of a BP shortage (with a catch of course, it can't be to good to be true) or generally acting courteously. When the time comes that as written the war with Pitax would start have tensions rise and rumors spread of hostility's between Pitax and Mivon. When their year long allie comes to the party to request aid against their common enemy they are likely to accept. It shouldn't be to hard to convince them if the preparation is done far in advance. Now we get back to the as written part. Once the party's armies are marching on Pitax, Mivon can sweep in from the south in a similar fashion as Pitax does in the adventure. Shift some encouter areas and hardly anything need to be changed. Pitax might even prove an ally after all with some shrewd negotiating. Nothing plays with emotions better than feeling betrayed. >:) This is all sort of rough and needs some work, but it's as far as I got in my coffee break.
I found odd the fact that Hargulka, seeing his army lose, would retreat inside a cave he knew was a dead-end. As Dudemeister has it written Hargulka is the general for one of the defending armies. If they're put on the back foot I doubt just running away would be a feasible option unless he has some sort of magical help. I know my party makes a point of watching for and chasing down notable combatants if they get the chance. That being said, I like the idea of giving him a tangible reason to not leave and there are plenty of ways to tie in a fey artifact to either further the plot or intrigue your party as to what on earth is really going on here. Depending on how quickly they fight through the fort after their assault they could interrupt Hargulka half-way through a lengthy teleportation ritual using the artifact/anchor to add the feeling of accomplishment from 'stopping his escape at the last moment'. If they succeed they're the heroes and if they fail you gain a plot element and you gave them a fair chance to stop him.
I had the session yesterday and I used a combination of the suggestions here. Just incase anyone was curious this is what I did. Spoilered for length and well... spoilers... Spoiler:
I felt that letting Hargulka escape after the whole war effort, however useful it might be for the plot, would annoy my players in a bad way, so I decided to let him have his final stand there and then.
I had the remains of a ritual circle found in Nagrundi's room in the circle of heads already written in. The ring was complex, more than would be expected from a trolls and consisted of three rings each linking a plane. I'm using multiple add-ons, one of which is Realm of the Fellnight Queen where Rhoswyn has strong ties to Nyrissa (the details of which I'm still figuring out), and used this as an opportunity to foreshadow some ties. The three rings linked the Material Plane, The First World and The Shadow Plane in a similiar manner as in RotFQ and as soon as the wizard has had some time to figure it out it will pull the fey plotline to the party attention without really giving them anything too much to go on and make the add-ons seem more natural. The circle was how Hargulka reinforced his defense with some help from his fey mistress. The party had put serious work into removing any possible external threats and was thorough in burning every troll corpse in the complex. But due to their hasty retreat they couldn't be suree that every inch of the trolls was destroyed. Hargulka collected these parts and, knowing that he didn't have time to wait for them to regenerate into full trolls, called upon the power of the planes to bind them. Creating a sort of troll body part construct tied together by shadowy thorn vines (again aimed at RotFQ) to boot the creature gained a pair of pitch black butterfly wings in fey style. Rules wise it was a troll with the Half-Fey template applied to it giving it flight and a few interesting spell-like abilities (such as short range teleportation to really annoy the spellcasters). It worked really well to creep out my players and make them realise that there was something more happening here behind the scenes. There were too many things which didn't completely match up. The combat was also insanely close in the end (1 death and 2 dropped at the end), which is just how I like it for a end of chapter climax. Thanks for the help guys, the forum always gets my creative juices flowing.
Seen as everyone here always has the best ideas I thought I might ask for a little advice. I am currently DM'ing a party of 5 and we're reaching the end of book 2 with the implementation of Dudemeisters Monster Kingdom (kudo's for the write on that one, it's a blast). Our last session was yesterday and in it the party finally raided Hargulkas stronghold for some well deserved revenge. To begin with all was going well, that is until they decided to split the party a bit and ended up getting Nagrundi, Kargadd and two regular trolls into the fray at the same time. This proved a bit too much for them and they were forced to retreat. A parting fireball from a very angry Hargulka put the party on -3, 1, 1, 9 and 8 hitpoints, making retreat the only real option >:). Now comes my question. Hargulka, Kargadd and one ordinary troll are remaining (although an extra could be added seen as they havn't explored the entire complex yet), they are sealed in by an army and the party plans on assaulting the fort again in 1 or 2 days depending on how much healing they can muster in the meantime. Hargulka obviously expects this and will be preparing accordingly. What can they do to make they assault more difficult, and mainly more interesting, for the PC's? I'm against them running in again and just running the encounters as written because it seems illogical to me. I'm also not sure about letting Hargulka escape some way because the party is really riled up and they deserve the satisfaction of setting ablaze the troll who almost destroyed their kingdom. Short of barricades and maybe a rudimentary trap I can't come up with much as the trolls lack the resources, space and intelligence to think up much else. Any ideas to spice it up a little would be welcome :)
My party had an interesting route in this. Spoilered for length:
Whole story: They ran into the mites early on and got stomped on resulting in the first dead PC of the campaign. When later on Tartuk requested them to head back they were not overly enthusiastic and demanded a kobold honor guard. Tartuk was absolutely fine with this and off they went. By this point they already didn't really like Tartuk, but that was the arrogant and spiteful way I was playing him.
On the way to the mites the partys wizard and monk statred discussing the religeon of Old Sharptooth with the kobolds and a few knowledge check led them to believe that them turning yellow was abnormal, but they kept their mouth shut about it. Clearing out the mites was a success, all be it a close one, with most of the helping kobolds dying in the process. Upon returning with a statue Chief Sootscale requested it, but they were adamant that they would return it to Tartuk, as he seemed to be in charge and it wasn't their place to meddle. When they were in audience with Tartuk, with Chief Sootscale present, the wizard started asking some pointed questions. The responses to them plus a sense motive to discover that he didn't really care about the dead kobolds put the party on Chief Sootscales side although they still didn't want to intervene unless their hand was forced. During the handing off of the statue the confines of the room and the amount of kobold present lead to the Chief being within hand reach of the statue and he proceeded as described in the AP (the looks on my players faces were priceless) and a battle between kobold groups began with my player standing back not knowing exactly what to do. Tartuk called a curse from Old Sharptooth down on the kobolds who stood against him and cast his prestidigitation to turn one yellow, as he had done before in the AP. The wizard passed his spellcraft check as suddenly it all clicked in his mind and he knew what was Happening here. He them suddenly called out 'No, Old Sharptooth rejects you!' followed by his own prestidigitation which succeeded in colouring Tartuk yellow. This dramatically swung the tides of the battle against Tartuk and although he tried to escape he was chased down. At this point the whole mine was in disarray, not really knowing what just happened. The yellow kobold was sitting on the floor wailing that he was going to die and there was general chaos while Chief Sootscale tried to regain control. At this point the monk had a strike of genius and said that she could lift the curse. Everyone was lead outside and a tent tarp was placed over the kobold and Tartuks body. The party proceeded to light torches, throw leaves and generally make everything seem as ritual-like as possible while having the kobalds pray and do tribal dances around the tarp. They kept this up for over an hour, until the prestidigitation had worn out. The end result, the kobolds see the party as god sent heroes who restored the rightful leader in the tribe. I've had them bring offerings when beneficial to the campaign and it lead on perfectly into Hargulka's Monster Kingdom as written by dudemeister. Kobold armies will also most likely come to pass when we get a bit further.
O yes, strange I didn't notice before. Thanks!
Does anybody have an extra resurrection spell prepared for today? The link seems to have once again met its demise. |