This is WAY off the normal path, but my party really liked the beast, and when it died fighting the promethean, they extracted the beasts "brain," and carried it to Numeria (where better medical tech might be available) and a version of Meyanda from my Iron-Gods campaign helped them transplant the beast into the a wood-golem Caromarc made for his dead-wife. This allowed the beast to resume her original form as a forest-fey. She's now a PC in their alts-of-carrion-crown side-shots we do. We even made this video (ai images & ai music with the party's words about events):
https://youtu.be/1GC18vkxh2k?si=UMFRlOh2usBO_GUR
If you end up doing this for the next book too I can't wait for it <3
I FORGOT To mention that if you use inkarnate, I've published my shudderwood, ascanor, and chastel maps for free there. Hope they help someone!
AvarielGray wrote:
Also Matt Berry as Duristan? "You really are the most devious b*****d in... Ascanor Lodge!"
He was so fun. They loved to hate him. I made him absolutely insufferable, but he was useful.
Other montages related to CC:
When the players find the dead cultist under the stair being watched over by an ancient servant of desna (a giant purple moth named Noxara):
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jyZQGbzasQk
I left remnants of the shining crusade all over shudderwood. In this case it is an undead-storm-giant the players wisely avoided, but they researched the story of it so I made this as a loredump of what they discovered: he was a bff of Arazni.
https://youtube.com/shorts/D85I58wufSc?si=YsARC3JSgNyV6O4w
Deviations:
I varied the werewolf clans a lot.
Broken-Ones became storm druids, archers, territorial but not expansionist.
Silverhides ambitious as they are in the book, slayers and cold-focused sorcerers.
Prince's Wolves: Monk/ninjas and snipers (Numeria is close, after all).
Blackwood: Added for a player character who was secretly a werewolf for over a year of play without ever revealing this until Shudderwood. I placed them close to Chastel and made them a more civilized clan that protected their town + escorted rich hunters to Ascanor.
Demon Wolves: mysteriously gone (chasing the WW cult across ardeal)
Vollensag: I made them gigantic dire wolves who never shift out of this form and live their lives completely wild like the massive predators they are.
Outcomes:
Party sussed out Estovion, read his diary, interrogated him, and cut a deal for him to call away the Vilkacis at an appointed time so they could go into the stair and retrieve the cultists body Estovion had warned them was left behind (he learn this through the Vilk).
Party befriended the broken ones, Silverhides killed and absorbed the prince's wolves, and the party negotiated passage to the stair with the remaining Vollensag.
Estovion betrays them and attempts to kill them with the Vilk, which fails. They visit the lower chambers of the stair (re-mapped it entirely to make it bigger). There they found an ancient spirit of Desna that was visiting the temple and caused the WW Cultist to die without destroying her tongue/head, so the party could speak with dead.
60sec loredump video on the desna spirit speaking to the WW cultist.
https://youtube.com/shorts/jyZQGbzasQk?si=x1db2-CmuKNgA4zY
Silverhides w/ Prince's Wolves try one last assault against Tibor, remaining strongest Vollensag in the hopes of killing him earning the respect of the clans and making Mathus packlord. Party joins this fight, and broken ones join them as the werewolf PC is asked by a dying Tibor to eat his heart to prevent it falling to the Silverhides. She does so.
Montage of the art style I used for this area, happy to share any of it. Maps too.
https://youtube.com/shorts/S4bOQUqJx4c?si=_dxsEudAAcsRJOs-
This book/area was VERY cool but needed a lot of work + upgrades + changes. I deleted most NPCs at Ascanor and made Duristan into Matt Berry (the actor) and he was A LOT. My says they liked the dark tone and didn't want to get bogged down at Ascanor with a bunch of nobles while the WW Cult attempts to enslave the world. Ascanor felt a bit silly to them.
I would love it if all the pdfs were formatted in such a way that people using VTTs can extract the images easily. Sometimes this is quickly done, sometimes the NPCs/Ships/Maps are merged into the background so we have lots of cutting/cleaning to do. Sometimes things are chopped into sections so we have to sew it back together again also.
Basically when you sit down to run a paizo AP in FoundryVTT for example, the amount of time you're going to spend on prep depends which AP you bought. Some, it's very quick. Some: it's hours in photoshop. You won't know which it is until you buy at least 1 of the pdfs. :/
Is this just inconsistency in the finish process of pdfs? Is it a security feature?
In an ideal world, I would get a .zip with all the images in png along with the pdf. I'd even pay for it as a separate product because it could save me hours.
Some of the newer APs are so rough to just get decent NPC art into the VTT, I'd just rather run another one where the art is easier to get. :D
Yep you're about to see a mass-exodus from R20 to FoundryVTT. IMO paizo shouldn't take sides in this VTT platform war, but release platform neutral (ungridded, jpg or webp etc) that will work for all when you buy the pdf of a book.
Even pre-quarantine this was a thing you could see coming, what with table-tvs and mixed in-person/online groups. Now it's crucial.
I replace all paizo maps at this point. Dungeondraft can recreate them (tracing) in much greater detail with nicer textures, lighting, etc. Reddit/Battlemaps has tons of great free maps you can replace with.
I used to tough it out with the paizo maps on R20, but since we switched to FoundryVTT it can actually handle high-res image files so we've upgraded. It's a huge diff. I'll link some samples that I, a dungeon-draft noob, have been able to make.
Here's some from Hells Rebels/Vengeance I did:
https://imgur.com/a/Twx18md
Excerpts from “Ravounel: A History” by author-unknown 4719, Ravounel.
Summary of books1-4 by our players:
“The truth is, revolution is an ugly affair. The short-short version goes like this: citizens of Kintargo had enough. They rose up, killed their Lord Mayor that the capital had sent to bully them, and seceded from Cheliax.
This was a struggle 100 years in the making. Starting the moment Abbie 1 swore allegiance to Asmodeus, people in the North didn’t take to it. They grumbled and they swore ‘better not try to bring that devil-talk up here…’ Well, they did just that.
The Silver Ravens were like the city’s elite defense force. They had chased off or killed many great threats to their home that came from Nidal, or the Sea, or the mountains. Now they faced a threat from within.
They fought the new order laid down by Thrune and they did well at first, but they faltered. They went too far and turned on each other. Kintargo’s celebrity defenders all turned up dead or disappeared, and things were quieter for about three quarters of a century.
One thing tumbles into another though. A hell-knight raids the mansion of a nobleman found in violation of some this or that. There he finds a sword Iomedae used to carry. So he takes it and proudly hangs it up in Citadel Dinyar. When the Iomedaeans get wind of it, they feel they should have it instead. The hell-knights, never much for words, just say ‘No.’
The paladins take this harder than anyone expects, and raise a force. They storm the hell-knight’s fortress, lock them up or kill them and they take the sword. Seeming surprised at their own success, they figure they’ll just press on and see what else they can trash in Cheliax, Iomedae’s old stomping grounds. Fools from afar flock to their banner and soon they’re not just a band of upstarts, they’re downright “Glorious” in their own words.
This sends Cheliax into a panic. You know when you’re real scared and all the blood rushes into your body, your limbs go numb, and your head and heart start going fast as they can? That’s what Cheliax does. They pull back the army. The Navy blockades the Inner Sea. They close all the passes and so Kintargo is left to its own devices and a crazy Thrune-cousin named Barzillai is put in charge.
This ‘Barzillai’ is a cruel sort but he loves Kintargo. He moves into the Opera house, sees shows every week, has big expensive dinners and buys up art from all over. He also publicly humiliates anyone who goes against him and puts the city on a curfew. Imagine that? He’s loving and enjoying the Kintargo night-life but he tells the common-folk they’ve got a bedtime. Nope.
So the Silver Ravens emerge again. Different people, same anger. They start picking old Barzillai apart. They make a fool of him so he squeezes harder but they don’t bend. He gets really mean and they leave his Dottari dead in the streets. Then the city’s at war with itself and the rest of the world goes dark to us. Nidal closes it’s borders. No more ships come up the coast. Menador pass is shut.
So we Kintargans hash this out ourselves. Barzillai lays trap after trap and does some damage, but the Ravens keep escaping. Finally it’s just fighting in the streets, only Barzillai don’t step in the street, he flies over us all on his blue dragon breathing hellfire. He’s had enough. He’s fallen out of love with Kintargo and just wants to watch it burn.
That’s when the Ravens crawl out of the river, the dark alleys, even the taverns and just take him on. He tries to burn the library and they put it out. He tries to hold Bleakbridge and they cover the stones in Dottari blood. Barzillai even sneaks in some Thrune warships from Pezzack but mother nature herself rises up and beaches a couple of them before the last one stands out to sea.
Now B.Thrune is hopping mad. He sends the dragon to Aroden Plaza where the Ravens & Dottari are mixing it up, and breathes fire on the lot of them. Killing his friends and enemies alike. The Ravens survive it and a local boy, Lothario, lands a lucky shot wounding the drake and she retreats back to the Temple of Asmodeus - highest building in the city.
The Ravens clean up the streets with the help of the Hellknights of the Torrent. No one knew who’s side they’d come in on until Barzillai hedged his bets and banned them, took their holdings, and locked them up. That pissed them right off and they are Blue as the ocean now, not a spot of red on them.
The Ravens and Knights of the Torrent siege the temple, pinning the Asmodeans in there, but Barzillai has his dragon fixed up. He rides out to destroy. Throwing punches in the air, we call it, only these fists are 200 foot pillars-of-flame. He kills some good people and destroys some parts of Kintargo we still don’t have back.
He even goes for the orphanage but old Clenchjaw draws him off. Nobody rightly heard what Clench said to Barzillai as he sailed past on his dragon, but it must have been something. Thrune turned, spared the orphanage and dropped a building on old Clenchjaw. Took us a week to dig him out, dead with a smile on his face and his hands clenched in fists.
The Ravens work up the nerve to go into the devil’s home, and this flushes the dragon out. That’s when we learnt that the Ravens fight devils with angels. A huge man made of pure silver wielding a green-glass sword fought that dragon and knocked old Barzillai clean off it and into the streets. Most will say the Angel killed him, but I saw it with my own eyes.
Gabriel, the Angel Raven did knock him off of Rivizair, the great blue drake, but Barzillai wasn’t done. He took them all on toe to toe and killed Elia Nones of the Scourge of Belial and Chuko the priest / weapon-trader from the Northside. The Captain of the Scourge was also present. And as the dragon had burned his ship to the waterline two days prior, and Barzillai had just killed his first mate, he’d had enough. He stepped to the Lord Mayor and ran him clean through.
But he didn’t die. Friends of devils are the Thrunes. It took a bit of help from Gabriel but they got him properly chopped up and moved onto his next life. We all thought that’d just be the end of him.
The people reinstated Jilia as Lord Mayor the very next day and we declared independence shortly after. We setup a statue of old Clenchjaw on the newly renamed Silver Span, formerly Bleakbridge. Thrune sent us a nasty note and we had a long way to go to settling it all, but that was the Battle for Kintargo, 76 years in the making.”
It's been quite interesting to see how players handle a wisdom-based opponent with access to a lot of information. Has your table done anything with this?
My team likes to use Divination for "what if" scenarios. They played Rebels and Vengeance at the same time and used divination to experience a "what if the two parties met & fought?"
BUT. They did their planning in a mage's sanctum, immune to scrying. And I made the temple of Asmodeus one big mage's sanctum basically. It has zillion-year old protections from when it was the temple of Aroden plus what the Asmodeans have added so I didn't let them so much as detect on it. Everything bounces & you get a general sense of immense magical power coming from every brick of it.
**Spoilers for Kingmaker (mild) and Iron Gods (spicy) in here**
I'm looking for advice on two potential character builds for Kingmaker but with Iron Gods having been completed in the (very recent) past.
Char concept is Android from Numeria.
Iron Gods Spoilers:
She was one of the PCs who completed Iron Gods, at which point she rebooted. Becoming a new person, giving up her old life & possessions but is a follower of a brand new deity who seeks to help androids culturally integrate with organic races.
She's trained in arcane casting & combat, and tasked with a mission of diplomacy & reconnaissance into the Stolen Lands. She will attempt to attach herself & aid the "most worthy" potential leaders.
little more IG spoilt:
She will pursue the deity's mission of improving relations - the opposite of IG's villains aims.
She will be as helpful as she possibly can be to them in hopefully forming a new country.
Concept1) Wizard, Shadowcaster archetype, Void School. Here's where I hope someone has time to give me some ideas if they've tried Void. Best spells? Feats? Any recommended items I seek to buy/construct? Playstyle? I normally play Evoker/Arcane trickster wizard so it's hard to resist going that route but doesn't quite feel right with Void.
Concept2) Staff Magus. Bladebound (Gm permission will change the blade to a quarterstaff made of alien-metal).
IG:
The staff instead of being a blackblade, will be a minor AI that connects to the deity's followers back in Numeria who send out these items + attached android to gather information.
It will function as a blackblade in all respects other than dealing bludgeoning damage.
Any past Void Wizards or Staff Magi have any tips?
Short-short-short version: Party killed rivozair, barzillai and corinstan successfully but had 3 of their party and 3 major npcs die as well. All party members and 1 of the npcs were able to be raised. On to book5!
PCs stormed the temple of Asmodeus, interrupting the ritual and forcing Corinstian to fight them. Barzillai tried a distraction play: mounting the dragon and flying out to lay waste to the city.
I had Corinstian summon the biggest scariest devil he could (one single pit fiend). The party tried to run past it and attack the high priest directly but the first AoO from the pit fiend is a huge crit and kills their dawnflower-bard. The magus made it past the fiend though and rolled a spellstrike crit, killing Corinstian.
Their paladin, juiced up on every spell and potion imaginable pursued the dragon and with the party's archer + Ellia Nones (gunslinger from Scourge of Belial) rolling some hot crits (guns crit x4 remember), the dragon was brought down. Barzillai survives the crash, greater-commands Ellia to face him, and does a full attack with that mace of his, critting twice, leaving her at -30 hp super-dead.
This enrages Cassius, her captain, who was also outside the temple at this time fighting, and he charges Barzillai, rolling yet another crazy crit and leaves Thrune at -20 hp. Incapped but not dead, the paladin drops onto him and chops him to pieces, finally killing him at -200hp.
Crazy fight. Largely decided by massive crits. Goodtimes.
Has anyone else found this repetitive? And where could I change it up? The first warden seems like a good candidate either by changing class or weapon .
I buffed her phantom armor guys to about 110hp, 26ac, and had first warden haste them (litany of fervor). She then went for unholy blights, hold persons, etc. The party quickly recognized that she had nasty fear auras (aura of doom, aura of fear) so they double-black tentacled the battlefield to try to keep their distance.
Party archers could not overcome her DR very well though, so they started using scrolls/pots of owl's wisdom & prot-evil then waded back into melee where they finally brought her down. She scared the bejeebus out of them without ever even drawing out her mace.
Well, the Heavy Mace is Asmodeus' favored weapon, so it's only proper for clerics and inquisitors of the Lord of the Nine Hells to wield his own weapon.
--Vrock and Awe
Yep I'm also sick of that so I added some folks.
Here is my Duxotar (leader of the Dottari in Kintargo)
https://imgur.com/a/5Y6CaMY
12th level cavalier, sword and board with 16str, 16 dex. She's a massive amount of armor class and had a level of sohei monk. Her acrobatics is huge and I gave her boots of striding and springing. I think she'll be a welcome break from slow-heavy asmodean mace wielders for our big battle in aroden plaza. She's going to have 4 junior clerics & 2 junior wizards buffing/dispelling her to make it interesting.
Apologies for length but I wanted to share this. Other GMs post-book breakdowns here have helped me a LOT and I want to give back plus I'm thrilled with how most of this went.
I shattered the format for Song of Silver. My players did not love the "silver ravens resource management" mini-game, so at the Ruby Massacre: they tossed it. They had spent all their turns & money upgrading their teams.
SO the day after the Ruby Massacre, I had the Duxotar (head of Dottari) make these moves:
1) Lockdown Bleakbridge
2) Triple street patrols
3) Attack Lucky Bones (party wasn't careful enough to keep it secret)
4) Pull all the Dottari out of Kintargo Keep and post disgruntled hellknights of the rack there (plotpoint causes this anyway)
5) Attempt to arrest the riverboat captain the silver ravens use to cross the river illegally
6) Attempt to arrest Cassius & the Scourge crew for refusing to join the Navy in securing Kintargo Bay
7) Accompany Asmodean redactors to the Records Hall & Alabaster Academy to "fix some things."
8) Arrest Laria Longroad at her home
9) Close the Holding house for the day and order it to stay on full alert.
So in response, the players form their own plan and have EVERY NPC from the entire campaign at their disposal because they went to great lengths to befriend everyone. This is Mass Effect 2 ending with all loyalty missions completed.
I gave them a blank screen in roll20 with boxes for every location they either knew might be attacked, or they wanted to attack themselves and they organized their forces. (Screenshot https://imgur.com/COlRZ1H). They have had an _awesome_ time with this. We ran each one of these encounters as if it was it's own one-shot battle and they split up NPC control amongst themselves each time, with players always controlling their own PC if they were involved.
So it shakes out:
1) Recon: Korva's team on recon all day, no engagement, purely information relaying via the silver raven figurines, potions of invis, and a lot of stealth / perception / knowledge local checks.
2) Riot: Lord Mayor Jilia (res'd), party cleric, party monk head to Aroden Plaza where they know a large protest is planned. https://imgur.com/OpdwcRG
3) Alabaster Academy Rexus, Clenchjaw, Hortense, and Hetamon + party vigilante go to defend it. Thrune forces burn it, but they put the fire out. https://imgur.com/ss6Dgok
4) Kintargo Keep: Shensen and party-wizard go to try to negotiate with the hellknights to free Jackdaw (this the only part they haven't done yet).
5) Bleakbridge: PCs + Blosodriette attack bleakbridge. PC Paladin is killed by Trex, fighter too but they had the Song of Silver buff on him so he breath-of-life's back and they kill Trex and take the bridge. Bloody, bloody battle. https://imgur.com/zMNttvv
6) Riverboat: They send acizasi elves to protect their river-boat smuggler friend, total success. https://imgur.com/g4YwQBV
7) Cassius and his crew hand a squad of Dottari their butts until Rivozair does a flyby. Cassius&crew roll 5 amazing reflex saves in a row to barely survive the fire, but the Scourge is burnt to the waterline. https://imgur.com/ro5W2ue
8) Holding House is assailed by Octavius, 3 of his HKs, and a party alchemist. They blow down the doors, tear apart the warden & her crew, and free half a dozen silver raven soldiers/scouts imprisoned there. https://imgur.com/TkOeNSe
9) Records Hall: Strea, PC Magus, PC Bard, and PC Hound Archon (wizard's planar ally) stop the redaction at Records hall, kill Tiarise, and take her notes for their wizard to study. https://imgur.com/ofayZna
10) Laria Wizard's hound archon, thx to teleport, boops into her front yard and man-fights a squad of chelish citizens group thugs. Laria thanks him, and they teleport to the Lucky Bones together to aid in the defense there.
11) Lucky Bones defense looks really really bad for the ravens, until Laria comes tumbling down the stairs and stuns the big-bad, turning the tide. https://imgur.com/HxcT3f0
12) I made the Chelish Navy a HUGE problem for the ravens. Bombarded them with siege weapon & cannon fire during bleakbridge and generally scared the heck out of them until all the "boring dinner-party bs" they did in Vyre came home to roost. The queen of delights had a thing for and spent a few nights with the party paladin who was killed at bleakbridge. Manticce the 19th level witch sank 3 Chelish Galleons before she had to retreat, leaving only 2 in the bay. I leveled her to 20th for stalemating the entire Chelish Navy. They had her summon an 18hd whale to capsize one ship. She cast antipathy-lawful-evil on another so 1/2 the crew abandoned ship, and she burned another to the waterline with gigantic aoe fire spells.
Next: The riot's going to go well for the silver ravens, but it's going to cause the Dottari to pull back, form up into a decent sized army with a Dragon backing them up. We're going to have a giant battle and if the dragon is driven off or killed: the city belongs to the silver ravens. https://imgur.com/WONfa2j
What kind of music would be playing during the masquerade ball part of this adventure?
I played "divadance" from the 5th element, but I cut out the pop-music up-tempo part at the end and loaded that mp3 into roll20 to set it on a loop. They all recognized it before long (I used a live-symphony version so it wasn't instantly recognizable) and loved that it was playing while they fought.
^ Details on how this went for my people. They found the secret entranc, infiltrated the Ruby Masquerade and successfully saved 2/3 of the civilian. They used stone to flesh on Shensen, and used resurrection on Jilia. :O
They picked a group to attend the masquerade, replaced 2 dottari w their rogues to get 2 more inside, and took all the hellknights & fighters in their group to be "seal team 6" as they call them and planned to hide them in Aria Park POND.
They bought/made scrolls of waterbreathing. Used invis sphere & silence to get the pack of fighters into the pond, and once down there, someone with a 20 perception rolled a 20 when I checked their passive perceptions (they took a dwarf with them). They FOUND the secret entrance!
So now their inside-group is competing in the dance competition while the underground team that was supposed to kick in the front door is now clearing their way through the lower levels. :O
^ I think you make some great points and I'm going to try to pre-patch these plotholes as my group is moving through book4. You've probably already taken steps to tighten all this up
The adventure paths are wonderful and give us an excellent framework from which to build a campaign. That said, they require a lot of tinkering and tweaking depending on player levels of scrutiny & plot analysis.
My group crawls up every NPC's bum with a microscope and imagines far more devious plotlines than paizo or I could come up with, so I sometimes let their rampant paranoia expand on things a bit.
I'm changing this book more than I did the others. Sethic & Vasvion initial "events" were botched by the party, allowing her to know about the planned attempt on Nicolo and also failing to intercept Sethic's money. So now the two potential "allies" are fast becoming the villains of book4 for my team.
They will still investigate the bellflower network and need to procure a sacrifice later but they are so angry/excited about the two rival nobles that I think I'm going to let that continue to escalate and see where it takes us.
So we just finished Inferno Gate. It played out a little odd for us.
1) Party met Visperthul at the portal and informed him of Fex's betrayal.
2) Visperthul offered them a deal: defeat/capture fex and he will be sacrificed in their place, Visperthul gets the phlegmantic talisman, and will close portal for the party and bother cheliax no more.
3) Party is losing the fight w fex (many failed saves & a couple poor choices), wizard teleports to Egorian, all but the ranger are down.
4) Ranger jumps through portal to hell with phlegmantic talisman and offers entire party to swear service to Visperthul if he will send his servants to help them defeat fex. Visperthul agrees, heals ranger to full and sends him through portal back to Fort Arego with two bone devils. Fex is defeated.
5) Party's wizard, (a lawyer-interrogation specialist enchanter) negotiates with Thrune, telling them the portal is open, visperthul is in control, fex has betrayed the country & thrune and party is now the servant of 2 masters. Wizard offers plan to be double agents, pretending to fully serve visperthul while actually still serving thrune and rooting out his full operation in cheliax citing "surely fex is not the only thrune he turned traitor..." Thrune agrees.
6) Party is about to be publicly shamed as failures. Samurai stripped of her rank of "Commander" and made ronin (public rotten fruit throwing will occur). Cleric of Asmodeus will pretend to be fallen and now serve Moloch (amulet of non-detect with some false auras).
7) Now I'm writing a huge side bit about Moloch/Visperthul's operation in Cheliax. The party will donnie-brasco visperthul's people and eventually take out an important person in Egorian, after travelling a lot and working their way up the spy network's ranks.
Challenges:
Moloch v Asmodeus, aren't they allies? Why would Visperthul turn Fex against Thrune in the first place? It's evil but is it lawful? Grappling w this.
Moloch & Visperthul: Why does Moloch, the military commander of Hell, have such a fat conniving slob as Visperthul working for him? What does he gain by subverting Asmodeus other servants (thrune) in cheliax while the country is already struggling with a rebellion? What/why how? Halp!
