Franke's page

Hey does anyone have Russel Akred's drawings that he made for Rise of the Runelords?

There are some here

Hopefully this will work and be of use to some folks.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JBfIXyWqS9tF0jKh2kHuMqsgHMSx2JaL/view?usp= sharing

Speaking of entries to Jorgenfist... I'm just wrapping up The Hook Mountain Massacre now and thinking about how my group is likely to handle Mokmurian and Jorgenfist. They've got a scryer subschool wizard and setting aside the question of whether he'll want to pre-empt Teraktinus' assult on Sandpoint by scrying on the giant and launching a teleport-enabled surprise attack on the raiding party before it's in position, I'm thinking ahead to what other scry-and-teleport tactics he might employ.

Following the raid on Sandpoint, the PCs can interrogate one of the stone giants and should have a good idea that Mokmurian is, if not the "boss monster" of Fortress of the Stone Giants, at the very least a major mover-and-shaked at Jorgenfist and the architect of the raid on Sandpoint. For scrying purposes they have certainly heard of him (save DC +5, modified to 0 by the Scrying Adept supernatural ability of the divination arcane school) and have one of his possessions (the missive he wrote to Barl Breakbones, found at the end of THMM) which imposes a further -4 penalty on his saving throws, reducing his Will save of +15 to an effective +11 vs. a save DC that will be at least 20 at that stage in the campaign and may well be a point or two higher. It's quite possible that the PCs' very first attempt at scrying will succeed, and even if it doesn't, Mokmurian can't reliably make his saves.

Yes, he's a level 11 wizard and a CR 15 creature, but if the PCs use scrying and then teleport, they'll catch him without his buff spells active and based on past experience will take him apart on action economy alone.

So: what defences does (or might) Mokmurian have against scrying and/or teleport, and failing that, what are the implications of the PCs, armed with knowledge of the villain's name at the very start of the module, using those spells to confront him immediately and essentially skip past the entire module?

I don't think it would be unreasonable for an accomplished mage, which Mokmurian certainly is, to have his quarters protected with a Mage's Private Sanctum spell. He also has the capacity to make the effect permanent. Whilst on his travels he could utilise the spell Non Detection, it all depends on how aware he is of your PCs abilities and perhaps how paranoid he is.

Hey everyone! This is my first post to these forums, so I hope this is the right thread for what I have to share.

About a year ago, my group started playing RotRL with me as the GM. An early survey of my people (mostly 40-something guys and one 20-something lady) said they wanted a gritty, evil, horror-themed campaign. This is unsurprisingly easy to do, as the content of the first 3 books is already pretty satisfying in that regard. :-)

But I wanted to do something special for them. Something that would grab them by the feels after the opening festival and goblin attack. So, I started really digging into the AP-as-written story content for whatever horror elements I could find for my players. The subtext seemed to indicate that the worst of the shenanigans around Sandpoint actually began when the minor runewell under the town opened, 5 years prior to the start of Book One. Ok, cool. Perfect, in fact.

I decided that the emanations from the well were causing about 1% of the folks in town (within a mile radius or so) to go bat$H!t crazy, in one way or another. Their darkest urges, their most self-destructive behaviors, their vilest thoughts made manifest. I suspect that GM's who wanted to could also use this conceit to explain any number of insane, horrible things in the first half of the AP. The most obvious of these was Chopper, but what if Father Tobyn had also been affected? Given those assumptions, what if Nualia's actual backstory was a whole lot darker, and the backstory given in the AP was merely what was known publicly? What if the Heroes of Sandpoint had disturbing visions and nightmares, each and every night they stayed in town... until they eventually closed the runewell?

So I took a risk and wrote some dreams for them. These are the first two, written to be read out loud, and they were well-received (much to my relief). Just as a warning, there is some fairly gross stuff under those tags... please proceed accordingly:

** spoiler omitted **...

I like these I must say, a little flavour to tease the PC's and offer a different perspective..."Is it any wonder Nualia turned out the way she did"?