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Hi everyone !
I stumble upon this message board just before starting my campaign, and I have to say that it was really helpful to read all of your interventions.
I'm DMing an open campaign in the Echoes Wood, combining The Emerald Spire and Thornkeep. I have a group of 5 players, and we started as a Pathfinder Society group of characters, sent from Absalom to collect as much as informations about the region and the Emerald Spire as possible.
I added a lot of subquests and encounters, and gave the choice to my players to set up in Fort-Inevitable or Thornkeep. They chose Fort-Inevitable to be safe from bandits and outlaws, and rapidly discovered what was the price to pay for it (I kept the tax, and my players were searched every time they entered or exited the city).
With all the new quests and content I added, I agreed with my players that we would use xp tracking with medium progression (despite the fact that they are 5, I am very generous with quests xp and I reward my players when they succeed to avoid a combat as much as if they killed the creatures).
But... Everything went realy bad when they reached the drowned level at level 3. They tried to negociate with Jorqual several times, and he violently refuses, attacking to make them flee (I like the idea that his sisters and himself are threatened by Klarkosh and that he really cares for them but doesn't want to admit it. So he simply states that visitors will only slow his researches down). After my players insisted so much, he played with their naivete and trap them all in an ambush (after all, he is chaotic). And this is were it went horribly wrong : my players weren't prepared, the witch was in the front line with his pet, and 3 out of 5 characters died to the claws of the eidolon, leaving the 2 left flee up to the troglodytes level with no escape plan. Because they had bargained their way through splinters den (the bandits are waiting for them to go back up to kill them and rob them) and because they lost their only token in the drowned level, they were stuck with the troglodytes...
So here we are, with a whole new group of refugees from Druma, going after a traitor gnome who sold them to the government. They tracked him down to Thornkeep, and learnt that he went to the Spire a day before they arrived. And after the last session, my players caught up with their other PCs progression in the spire and killed every splinter before finding out the hidden passage to the surface. With this new group, I use a milestone type of progression (they began level 3, and they just leveled up to 4 before entering the Spire). One of the 2 surviving old PCs was a rogue, and she decided to join the splinters when the rest of the group died... So the new PCs had to kill her ! And because she also kill one of them in the fight... The last PC of the earlier group will return when they will actually find him desperate with the troglodytes.
For the next sessions, I plan on using Dragonchess Player's stat block for Klarkosh, which I adore. It only misses Command Undead in the spellbook, but otherwise it is perfect (Klarkosh uses it every week -or 6 days now- to control Gorloth).
Thanks for everything you shared !
(And as I'm french and use the french version of the module, I hope I got all the names correct !)