Gaelstromdk's page

Hi!

I'm GMing Shattered Star and we're about to finish book 3. I've GMed Curse of the Crimson Throne before this for a few years and we finished and I'm getting a bit better at GMing, but I find that my party consisting of other GMs is roflstomping the campaigns.

Now this is fun for us because they know how to roleplay a partially joking murderhobo team while also drifting into serious. One of the funny parts is the Caulborn statement "We know that you fear us" and I was like "...nah, they kill everything in one turn, I ain't saying that." And after the scene I told them and they laughed their ass off and we aside-roleplayed what would have been said if they had said that.

In either case I'd love some feedback on how people have found ways to safely deviate from the book, and possibly accelerate timelines reasonably for teams that don't take a while to progress. I ran into this in Curse of the Crimson Throne as well where the Gray Maiden growth was unreasonable compared to the book and after a while had to make it an entirely magical convincing and made it that most women were restored. But then this campaign has gray maidens who were ousted and still believed in the queen for example.

I have a hard time coming up with solutions for these discrepancies. My players don't mind so much, but it harms my storytelling because I have this cognitive dissonance.

I'm not experienced enough to comfortably rewrite stories and sadly I have difficulty remembering so many things in pathfinder so I have to reread things in preparation every session.

Any things people have found over the years that has allowed for ebb and flow of time and events would really be appreciated.

Thanks for the response, I guess that makes sense, I didn't think that the Ioun stone would be overshadowed by the headbands and such later, but I guess it is an enhancement bonus so it'll be moot by roughly level 10-ish. So yeah, I chose in my session the other night to just grant them the bonus anyway since they're a team of 3 with me as a DMPC, so the little boost to power also makes it that much more special for the campaign. We have a witch, druid, monk and I'm playing a slayer, so they could use all the help they can get.

Did you guys choose for the second shard to allow Haste to be cast on multiple people or just the holder? I saw some discussions about that as well.

Hello!

I have read through the book and there is some very vague language about this, but I would like to know if the player holding the shard that is cleansed by the Ioun stone also gets the +2 stat bonus for the Ioun stone being present?

The shards themselves do not indicate any stat bonus in their book entry, however the Ioun stone is vastly better one could argue than the shard, so I had a player ask if they could leave the shard at the manor, and keep the Ioun stone for now.

I'm tempted to just DM the Ioun stone is added to the shard, and make it an OP item of the adventure path since they are 10K year old Thessalonian items, but I wanted to verify if this is something others have done, or if the idea is that the Ioun stone is a sacrifice to the Shard in order to keep it in order, especially since the book indicates removal of the stone will destroy it.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

Thanks!

I appreciate the thoughts, those are good ideas. We had some scheduling conflicts so it's been a while since we played and now we're about to hit this dungeon finally.

I had read vaguely about Zenobia, however she seemed to be a relatively recent conversion herself based on the story. Hers being a more willing conversion though does play a role since she abandoned her faith in fear to get remade.

The Pakalchi Sakhil I imagine will have a major effect on them, however the part I struggle with is how girls who may only have been treated this way for a matter or weeks or months could become like CR9. Your idea that some were started long before though does help considerably with that, so it can cover for the ones in the palace who are a higher CR. Plus why they remain loyal even beyond the fall of the indoctrination source.

I may have missed the Asmodean contract element of Kordatra, that is a possibility, and also when they kill her shortly (unless she escapes) it'll cause a good direct reason for the Gray Maidens' immediate drop in presence in the city.

I've already basically dropped hints via Cressida that they are not there by choice, so the party is aware they should be non-lethal which helps. Some people with weaker minds doing whatever it takes to not be hurt or tortured makes sense through this, but like most armies who use forced indoctrination they crumble fairly fast amidst an overwhelming force, so the gray maidens giving off hints that they'll be killed if they don't fight will help keep the party in check I think.

Thanks again, wish me luck.

Hello, I'm near the end of book 4 with my crew. We've played over 2 years at about 3 hours every two weeks with a team of Monk, Druid, Bloodrager, Magus, and now including Trinia.

Some spoilers up to Book 4 following.

I have been struggling a bit to keep up with the lore and only able to read ahead a little each week, because there's a lot since this is my first ever DM'd game, but I realized something as I was trying to read some of the endgame stuff. My crew have blitzed through many things in one turn. It's actually made a bit of a plot hole in the fact the gray maidens are taking over so quickly now in a matter of weeks, but even in game lore timing it's at most like 3 months. My team used horses and then Travel Through Plants in the Cinderlands so they are just taking down things in 3 days effectively for the whole of book 4. so I've actually started thinking about minimizing Gray Maiden numbers and making Iliosa a more Sauron style influence on them.

I would like some creative suggestions if possible on the Gray Maidens, because technically they would only be brainwashed in the story for a matter of weeks, at most months even for slow players, since the campaign really isn't that long when you give it a timeline. So unless there's some magical influence very few of them would actually be mind broken for real and would steadily recover. Or would basically be ruled by fear of retribution more than anything else. So the more I think about the gray maidens the less sense they make.

My first thought is the characters are about to infiltrate the Deaths Head Vault, and I was going to describe the horrific indoctrination methods used. And then I was going to ad lib a sort of magical control over them so that the team who is trouncing everyone will have the intention of being non-lethal to the gray maidens and up the difficulty, thereby saving innocent girls who have been overtaken.

Does this make sense? Is there any in world rules I could use for this that doesn't break the plot-based brainwash?

Any other thoughts people have are also appreciated, I want to give my people a really solid completion of the campaign over the final months.