Eel's page

Excellent. One down. Maybe if I can correctly guess every monster in the book, I'll be able to extract their cohort info one by one...

Shucks. Well, for the record, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to find out what level I need to be to take a giant metal scorpion as a cohort, and I'm not picky about how I get that information.

The books you guys have lined up for the Campaign Setting line look amazing. This is about to become a very expensive year.

It's very unlikely we'll have the room to do that table in this book. But I'll see if I can make it fit.

Fantastic! Even if it didn't make it into the book, it might work well as a blog post. Heck, if it doesn't make it in, I'd personally LOVE to see it as a teaser, once the time is right!

So, just out of curiosity, is this book going to have a table with suggested levels at which you can take certain monsters as cohorts? Even though I haven't used them, I've always thought they were fun little tables to have.

Will there be any new familiar or improved familiar options in this book?
And I know this one seems kind of far fetched, but I have to ask: Will this book add anything to the various summon lists?

Wrong comparison. 8lb Eagles are Small, as well. Its amazing what a 7ft wingspan will do to a creature's size, even if their actual body(helm) is fairly compact.

Ah. Gotcha. That's what I get for looking at one end of the scale and not the other. Someone wearing a big bird on their head doesn't sound out of the question at all... Especially when you consider the wingspan, which can change the perception of size quite a bit depending on whether it's folded along the body or not. Thanks!

So I've been wondering something ever since I ran into Helgarval on my read through of Night of Frozen Shadows. So a cassisian angel's default form is that of a helmet... but their listed size is Small, which feels more than a little too big. I mean, that would be the equivalent of someone wearing a kobold or a goblin as casual headwear.

So, uh, how do you guys handle this? Do you resize cassisians to Tiny, like most familiars? Smaller? Do you just leave them as really big helmets? Or do you just roll with them being about the size of a helmet narratively, but mechanically being the same as a Small size creature?

The vast majority of our problems with getting elves to look right occurred up to and included Pathfinder #3. After that, lovely Merisiel was always there to help our artists out. (Even if someone came along and kinda gave Shalelu green hair in Pathfinder #15... oops...)

Actually, this brings up a really good question. What's the "normal" range for elven hair color? One of the players in the Kingmaker game I'm in has a green haired elf and everyone acted like it was absolutely bizarre and unheard of, though they let her keep it. Since then, we've looked at every resource we could find (Core book, Inner Sea World Guide, and even the Elves of Golarion companion, and no one ever mentions what color elven hair is supposed to be. We know they like it long and flowy, we know they dye it to match their clothes or mood, and we know that after long periods of time in one area, they might change to match their surroundings... but as far as I've seen, there's no definitional description of what their color range is.

If I've missed it, I'd be elated for someone to point me to the relevant passage.

Eel, you shouldn't have too much trouble with that particular random encounter chance. It's only rolled when they cross bridges, which are relatively few within the swamp. Between their exploration and where the adventure sends them, I wouldn't imagine they'll be crossing bridges more than 10 times or so, max.

Should it become a problem, though, simply self-regulate it. Have they killed a giant leech at one bridge? Don't have them fight another one there should they cross it again, even if you roll it a second time. Are they crossing bridges purposely to "farm"? Make them waste their time, this is Pathfinder, not an SNES RPG!

Thanks for the advice. I'm not too worried about the PCs grinding for XP or anything like that. The thing with the bridges makes a lot of sense, and I'm glad they put that detail into the adventure. I guess, to put a finer point on it, what I'm asking about is general random encounter frequency. Should I just roll when they cross the bridges? Should I roll when they cross bridges, and when they take nightly watches when camping? Should I roll up a random encounter every time they enter a new room or map and place it where appropriate?

I'm probably overthinking this, but I'd hate to bog the game down with too many, or be too conservative with them.

There'll be PLENTY more NPCs to pick from in each adventure's encounters as well. But as I said above, only the four listed in "Brinewall Legacy" are going to be given official romance/rivaly support.

By the sounds of it, these rules are VERY popular though. I wouldn't be surprised to see us expand on them in future APs!

I'm glad to hear that you guys are getting such a positive response and that you might revisit the system. It's certainly something I'd like to see expanded upon.

I'm a little disappointed to hear that the original 4 Brinewall Legacy NPCs are the only ones we're going to see full-on romance stats for. I was looking forward to seeing that information in other NPC write-ups in future installments of Jade Regent. Luckily, it's a pretty simple system and the four NPCs provided in the Brinewall Legacy offer good examples to build options for other NPCs from.

I do have one question about future Jade Regent installments that I hope you can answer (but can understand if you can't/don't want to:

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I can tell this thread will be useful to me, and I hope other people new to running the game will make use of it too.

Another thing I'm curious about is random encounters. I played plenty of D&D ages ago (mostly second ed., but also a little 3.0 back when it was pretty new.) and I've been playing in a Pathfinder game for a while, but I'm still not sure what the protocol is on these. Random encounters in Kingmaker seem pretty easy to determine (when camping, when moving from hex to hex, etc.) but I'm not sure how to handle it in Jade Regent other than...

I can get that there's no hard-and-fast rule for how often you have random encounters; they are random, after all. Some rough guidelines would be nice though. I'd hate to throw XP off track by having too many or not enough of them.

So I'm not new to GMing in general, but this is my first time trying to run anything with a d20 in its ancestry. I've noticed that I'm not the only new Pathfinder GM to pick up Jade Regent with the intent of running. Actually, it looks like this is going to be a pretty popular AP all around. My hope is that some of us poor, inexperienced greenhorns can leverage the collective wisdom of the Pathfinder veterans that populate this board. We could scatter it out across specific threads, but that could clutter up the board. Collecting it in one place could make a valuable resource, too.

That said, I of course have a question to kick this off.

I've been told that the APs are generally balanced around a party size of four PCs, and I've heard about fan conversions of other APs for parties of about six PCs. Do parties of 3 or 5 need much adjustment, or is there enough wiggle room that you can generally run an AP as-is with one more or less player?

I think I'll use Koya Mvashti as a matchmaker for those PC that fail their checks, probably in the form of a harrow reading... but only if they have bothered to befriend her.

Ooh. This is good. I like this. Provided my players don't try and throw me a curve by trying to play matchmaker themselves, and hooking the NPCs up, I think I'll go with this too.

I'm in the same situation, my group hasn't used xp for ages.

I'm probably going to award my players with Hero points or maybe small boosts in specific skills.
Ex: Friend of Ameiko (trait): +1 on all Diplomacy checks when Ameiko is around. Or something similar.

We're using Hero points in my CotCT campaign (distributing them by harrowing) and we love it.
If you haven't tried it, I reccommend that you do.

I think my players will all want to keep track of XP rather than leveling up at a regular interval, or just as appropriate to the AP, but it's a personal pet peeve of mine to see players at different XP levels, so I think I'll be going with Hero Points too. I tend to like it when other games offer a similar mechanic and I've wanted to use them since the APG came out, but I haven't had the chance yet.

The one thing I'm wondering about is if the relationship XP awards are a part of the assumed XP curve of the adventure. I think I'll be fine running things, but I'd hate to lowball my players some XP because I didn't have a good eye for things. Do you guys think the relationship XP is a big part of the XP curve? What do you think would be the best way to balance it out, if so?

I've had my eye on Jade Regent for a while and when I got a hold of the Jade Regent PG, it looked like Paizo had made an AP just for me. The long overland trip to an exotic new world, strong cast of interesting NPCs and systems to support both of these conventions are the exact kind of things that get me really into a game. So now I'm excitedly drumming up interest with the friends in my Kingmaker group and it looks like as soon as we can squeeze our schedule together, I'm going to be running my first PF game.

While the four NPCs presented in the AP are great, and I'm sure that later adventures will provide more options, I'm thinking of providing a couple extra characters with relationship options. I'm doing this partially to balance out the male-to-female ratio, but I'll probably also throw a new lady or two into the ring, so to speak, as well. I'm also trying to account for the fact that my players may decide to buck the expectations of the AP and play matchmaker by hooking the NPCs up with each other, rather than trying to romance them on their own. You never know with these guys.

I'm not too worried about the additional relationships inflating the XP too much, as I think I'll be replacing the XP rewards with Hero Points. I am a little concerned with balancing out the social rewards, but I think as long as the Devotion/Enmity rewards offered by these "bonus" NPCs stay relatively minor, cover different areas, and don't stack, it shouldn't be too bad.

Is anyone else thinking of doing something similar? Is anyone planning on modifying the system somehow? Or are you guys mostly running it straight, as-is?

2) Less of an obstacle than a lip ring. Don't get me wrong, you won't be doing any face slobbering kisses but generally kissing is still easily doable. Non-issue.

It's worth noting that a lip ring is an obstacle to, well, nothing. Seriously.