Gozuja's page

@Gozuja - Hey bud, I've read your Slumbering Tsar log on the interwebz. Good stuff. Did you guys ever finish that beast? Looks like you took a hiatus early last year on that campaign.

Edit: Sorry for the major derail. That totally just caught me off guard.

We dove back in around October/November of last year and saw through to the grand finale back in March or so after a wild final battle. I've been regrettably too busy to do a write-up and wrap-up on it all yet, I've unfortunately gotten a lot busier over the last year or so. Still, it was good times and I'm happy you hear you enjoyed reading our escapades!

Currently we're about a third of the way through a Razor Coast campaign and trucking along.

That is where we're trying out Laying Waste currently--as it happens, severity checks against relatively lightly-armored pirates and the like make for some pretty grievous injuries!

Ahh, figured as much. Even with the saving throws afforded to the effects, we actually ended up netting considerably more frequent fumbles than we had with the fumble cards (which entailed a natural 1 followed by a confirmation check, e.g. trying to hit the target again.)

Generally folks would succeed on the confirmation check to avoid fumbles before, so a few players ended up getting hit with three or four fumbles throughout the night apiece. With the for-sure-fumble followed by a saving throw, folks were having a harder time hitting DC 20 saves compared to avoidance via confirmation rolls previously.

We put together makeshift single-page charts for our reference--essentially three column portrait spreadsheets with the light/moderate/severe charts, one page per category (piercing/slashing/bludgeoning.) Printing out copies of those charts for everyone at the table helped out with speeding up the process of determining which wound was in play.

The downside to trying out the new system was primarily how long it took us to flip back and forth in the PDF to read the results of a given crit--honestly I feel like it would be much more practical to consolidate the iterative versions of each of the given wound effects (e.g. 'Brained', instead of appearing on three different pages, appears once with separate summaries of its light/moderate/severe versions.)

If the light/moderate/severe versions of slashing/piercing/bludgeoning were consolidated, you could have a single page for the percentile chart for each and probably trim 10 - 15 pages on the individual entries while streamlining reviewing them. We could technically make index cards for the various wound effects or something of that nature--but then we're nudging back towards using cards again at that rate.

There were a few general minor peculiarities that I suspect might be things you'd want to edit later (in the Brained example, the light and severe versions have recovery options which the moderate does not.) Still, on the whole it feels well put together and we had fun exploring it; the gang was certainly bummed at the lack of magic crits however.

On an aside, how do you propose attacks with multiple damage types be handled with the Laying Waste system? Do you declare if it's piercing/slashing/etc. prior to making the wound check, decide after comparing results on the wound chart, etc.?

An element which I liked of this, coming from playing with the critical hit decks for a long while, is that the wound severity system makes -what- a combatant rolls on the dice much more meaningful. This goes both ways of course, but specifically when it comes to big bad guys it is favorable for player characters--particularly if they have a decent armor class.

For critical hit cards, all that needs to occur for them to fire is confirming the crit--e.g. hitting the target's AC again, and then delivering the crit effect; a prime example is the deadly Decapitation critical hit card: double damage and a fortitude save vs. immediate death, DC set by the confirmation roll.

Once you start pushing up past the CR 9 mark or so with larger critters, confirming a crit roll can very frequently become a matter of 'roll anything but a 1' which, in the case of a Decapitation card, can be pretty bad news in a hurry for a PC on the receiving end.

Snagging the chart equivalent from laying waste, which starts with Neck Cut at a light wound and then hits Decapitation once it pushes to a severe wound, suddenly that same monster might conceivably need to roll a 14 or better to score a full-on Decapitation chance against the PC.

As a group that's been using the critical hit decks for a while, the other side of the coin is players concerned that they'd rarely ever get to reach the severe wounds as PCs for higher-AC enemies--over the years we've had a couple occasions where a sudden Decapitation drastically changed the tides in a battle.

In any event, we played a pretty long session exploring Laying Waste in action and thus far it seems pretty promising; the one thing I think it could badly use are consolidated charts to print out for play at the table--and at least in the case of Neck Cut - > Neck Slash -> Decapitation, all three severity charts just listed Neck Cut, which threw some folks off at play (not sure if other iterative name changes have the same situation going on or not.)

Are we correct in reading that there's no secondary roll involved in fumbles using Laying Waste? With the fumble cards we'd had confirmation checks--so the whole table was fumbling much more frequently with Laying Waste (and having a few chuckles after the text called out that the system was trying to address PCs running into more fumbles than critters, etc.)

Regardless, Laying Waste has been interesting so far and I'm keen to see further play, especially with some of the new supplemental options in the field.

What I would really -love- would be Hero Lab data files for all the SGG stuff I can get my hands on. Especially with how much VTT I've been getting into these days playing with d20pro and numerous players, it'd be so very excellent to be able to more easily incorporate 3PP goodies in that regard.

That said, I'd personally love an SGG release that tackles building communities, bases, fortresses, strongholds, that sort of thing--a crunchy workshop for players and GMs to play with whether constructing a nifty wizard tower, booby-trapping a keep, rebuilding a redoubt or outfitting an outpost.

Something like a lean and efficient Stronghold Builder's Guidebook focusing on the baseline for adaptable systems and seeds for things. :)

This looks rather keen, I was just curious and wanted to clarify: is the interior of the structure(s) also mapped out or is this just an exterior view of the fortress on the whole? Thanks!

Best wishes End, may your reprieve be restful and your recovery swift!

This is a pretty charming little collection with personality. :)

This has been an incredible read so far and much kudos to Gary and the fire mountain crew; I can't help but wince throughout, some of the turns are just so -vicious-. Personally, I would desperately love to have Hero Lab and d20pro supplemental materials eventually become available for the AP, as I would quite like to roll through it with my VTT group; as much as I dabbled with putting the maps through the software, not having player versions has slowed it down and made it fairly difficult.

Count me in as excited for what FMG works on next! :)

Fantastic review End! This is probably one of the coolest supplements I've bought--there's a lot to digest here (as End's review doubtless shows!) I'll endeavor to weigh in as well, but that's a very thorough review already. :)

I didn't see it mentioned, so if anyone is curious this is a 112 page PDF and very swank!

Just tossing this out there, but I badly want a Hero Lab data set for this--I use the templates out of here constantly and it would be sublime to be able to wrangle them on a whim through HL. :)

Nice reviews! This looks pretty awesome--and I am inclined to put forth that this might make a nice companion for the Slumbering Tsar Saga as well to spice up the random encounters in the temple-city itself. :)

Let's keep this rolling, Rappan Athuk + Slumbering Tsar + Tome of Horrors, we can begin to construct a veritable tower of babel out of big books. ;)

Also, perhaps of interest to folks: KickTraq projects this Kickstarter could exceed $300k at the current pace!

Awesome!

I have weighed in my review and much concur with End--this is a pretty awesome expansion of options for martial characters.

As far as the venom harvesting rules, my suggested fix is to just have critical hits increase the amount removed by 50% so that the minimum dosage removed becomes 2, 2, 3, 6, 12 etc. You still have fifty-fifty odds of no poison being available while not having it be utterly impossible in the event of a crit.

We've been using these in our Slumbering Tsar campaign and generally they've been going fairly smoothly--for the most part it is a matter of players remembering that the options are available to them. We have had a bit of a conundrum in regards to the Harvest Venom subset of Survival.

Specifically, so far as we've been able to tell in practice, it's very difficult to actually get any doses of poison and outright impossible if the critter suffered a critical hit. The available doses starts at 1 for Tiny and then doubles each size category up-- so 2 for Small, 4 for Medium, 8 for Large, et cetera.

But then a seriously injured / slain creature has potential doses reduced by 1d2--and then this number -also- doubles with each size category up past Small. Presuming you're just doubling off of 1-2 from the 1d2 roll and not doubling how many dice you're rolling, still within the realm of possibility.

However, then a critical hit doubles the removed dosage again--and it is at that point that it becomes physically impossible to ever have any doses remaining as written. Minimum removed doses before a crit are 1, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 out of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32--but once a critical hit is there, the minimum removed doses become 2, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32.

If this is intended, it should probably just read 'if a creature has suffered a critical hit it can no longer have its poison harvested'--it took us three different encounters of failed harvesting due to critical hits to really begin pondering the possibility to do so.

Further clarification would be greatly appreciated!

Review posted finally; this is my first review of this sort of supplement, so pardon if it comes off a bit odd! :)

Still, a very fun product and I hope you have more planned!

Great review End!

I also wanted to chime in and say that this is a cool product; I've got a review on the way, but suffice to say if you like barbarians this is a really awesome supplement!

I'd love to see Steven turn an eye towards 'Complete' style products for the classes--this one really packs more than 'just' feats for character options, you could really make an entire party of barbarians using it.

Alright, I'm sold--getting on board as well and hope development continues to go smashingly! Will see to reviews once I've had the chance to work through the queue a bit. :)

Edit: You guys have some seriously cool maps.