I love the map, but I have a question. Which of the buildings is supposed to be the Edgewatch HQ? Is it the fenced-in building directly north of the Mystic Gardens, facing the bridge? Or is it somewhere else? ... ...Seriously?
Cool to see Joe joining y'all! Praise Log!
I love the transparency on these things, it just looks so great! Great work, Foundry Team!
Yeah, I'm running my Radiant Festival from the Spring to the Fall. Three months never made any sense to me.
Reminding everyone in advance to please be courteous in the playtest forum. It doesn't exist yet, so you can't make me! :-p ETA:OK, there it is, now, fine...
RoE Kineticist Playtest Forum when? /taps foot impatiently
This doesn't change the fact that as a Paizo Adventure Path Subscriber I am screwed, here, and seems I'm likely to be screwed on future releases (Ruby Phoenix?) as well. As a "Superscriber" I'm not used to feeling like a second class Paizo consumer.
Thanks for the guidance, Michael, much appreciated! Here's what I wound up giving my players: Each district keeps its own missing persons lists, reporting unsolved cases up to the Starwatch (Absalom's FBI equivalent) bi-weekly, who then distribute briefs on still unresolved cases down to the other districts after another week. The robbers weren't sure how long Gribse had been kept prisoner, but it's been at least a couple of weeks. The latest one of those lists at Edgewatch HQ is about a week old, and doesn't have anyone by that name. The Sleepless Suns list, though, does have a case opened by a student at the Clockwork Cathedral in the Coins who had been turned away by the Token Guard for not being able to pay an inquiry fee, but had remembered that his tutor, one Gribse Burlish, lived in the Foreign Quarter, and had reported the case to the Utterhome after the second missed paid weekly session. The Sleepless Suns hadn't been able to confirm his place of residence, but were able to confirm with the Clockwork Cathedral that he was enrolled there as an advanced research student. He had missed a couple of weeks of classes, but the absence rate has been unusually high at Universities across the city due to the festival, and no one but the student who had been paying him had realized anything was truly amiss.
I wanted a tile of a mast w/ sails to drop on the map during the bank robbery but couldn't find one, so I hacked this together in the GIMP, and thought I'd share it in case anyone else might want it:
Lovely work, I'll be making use of these! Thanks for sharing!
Ceustodaemons are neither particularly bright nor particularly loyal...I don't think they'd care.
These are fantastic, jsled! I've got a few more suggestions for you, places described the Pathfinder Chronicles Guide to Absalom book:
I spent way too much time on this...: and Actors’ Guild, the playhouse serves as both the Ivy District Nomarch Alain Always’s home and a theater famous for some of the finest stage performances in Absalom—as well as some of the most scandalously risqué. their station within the school. Apprentices wear green (and are often called “greens” by natives of Absalom), journeymen blue, and masters black. Tradition dictates that all other clothing be white, at least during performances.
I have reworked the Eyes On Absalom front page to tie into my campaign, with the conceit that it's published the morning after the Dreaming Palace raid, and so just covers pre-Chapter 4 events. My intent is to use it in Lavarsus's debrief, that he's furious they apparently leaked details of ongoing investigations to Vancaskerkin and made themselves out to be heroes in the process (something that is entirely Reginald's doing, not that it matters). Should be fun, and wanted to share before my session this Saturday (constructive criticism encouraged!):
At any rate, I'm changing it to an equivalent value in Pesh, as I'm also rewriting Droan as a former noble slaver, who's recapturing the slaves he was forced to manumit and shipping them off to KatapeshI try to avoid the enemies being too evil so that the players have second thoughts and doubts when attacking them (yay moral dilemmas). On the other hand, one of my players is a former slave so I could probably use a plot point like that. I'm wondering where to insert it though and how. I think that's a valid concern, but I'm also stealing some plot elements from the Playtest adventure "Rose Street Revenge" as a pretext to get them to do a favor for Kassi Aziril. Believe it or not, this is the short version:
Basically, the only missing person from the Edgewatch list I gave my players that they don't find evidence of at the Dreaming Palace was the former slave that was an itinerant resident of Esker's camp. I have Esker summoning the squad back to her camp and (after some precautionary pledges) introducing them to Kassi, who is looking for Wennel Ardonay, who (in my version) renounced his faith in Milani and took up alchemical healing and was a (primarily via correspondence) student of Kassi. He kept up with many of the former slaves in the city, including the missing fellow from Esker's Camp, and he wasn't the only one of them who had gone missing.
Kassi had secretly traveled to Absalom under the cover of the Festival to meet with Wennel and other contacts, but when she got to Wennel's clinic she found it ransacked. She also found his hidden document cache and a slip of paper with a series of names on it, the first of which was Esker's missing friend with his residence listed as her camp, so she sought her out. The Agents had made a good impression on her, previously, so she convinced Kassi they could bring them in. The Agents quickly note that Wennel's contact book has an extra column of what appears to be a surname unrelated to the individuals, often repeated. All the missing people on the slip of paper have the same extra column value: "Droan," but this means nothing to them, Esker, or Kassi. They go to investigate the clinic, near the border of the Puddles and Westgate districts, and there they encounter Ziraya Al-Shurati, who had been the one who gave Wennel the list of missing former slaves after one of the other missing slaves associates had mentioned Wennel as someone else the victim knew. She hadn't previously figured out the Droan connection, but immediately recognizes the name and the Smuggler operation commences mostly as written. I'm rather proud of how all that hangs together; anyone else who wants to use it is welcome to!
Does it seem odd to anyone else that Droan is apparently smuggling moonshine, of all things? Absalom would seem to have no restrictive liquor laws, AFAICT, so why would there even be a black market for alcohol? At any rate, I'm changing it to an equivalent value in Pesh, as I'm also rewriting Droan as a former noble slaver, who's recapturing the slaves he was forced to manumit and shipping them off to Katapesh.
So, kind of surprised there's not more discussion of these PFS scenarios in the GM threads, but The Broken Scales ties directly into the events of the AoE AP, and Balancing the Scales indirectly, as they both describe the havoc and aftermath caused by the mysterious activation and disappearance of a Graveraker prototype, an immense clockwork drill. Canonically, these events occurred in the year prior to the festival, but it's easy enough to move them (or some version of them) back to being approximately concurrent with the disappearance of Graveraker and tie them into the overall plot. As written, the cause of the activation of the prototype and its ultimate destination are both left completely unidentified, but I am looking to run a modified version of The Broken Scales for my party in between books 1 and 2 of the AP. My thought for setup is that the senior detectives investigating Graveraker's disappearance had learned of the prototype and requested Wakeiwa meet them at its storage location, but the Rumormonger sent a minion to collect the powerful clockwork artifact and said minion made an error in attempting to transport it, activating it and then losing it for a time as it charged through the tunnels and caverns below Westgate where the Sewer Dragons' lair is located. Eventually they caught up with it, deactivated it, and transported it to the Clockwork Dungeon, leaving nothing but further mystery about Graveraker and the prototype for the Agents to find. My only issue with this plan is what reason do I have for the senior detectives to stay behind and send the junior agents down into the mysterious hole after the powerful artifact? Any thoughts?
What's Roll20's issue? Unmanageably massive technical debt. #ohsnap
Hey guys. My players seem keen to investigate the missing persons (they asked Ollo specifically to relieve them of their patrol duties and assign them the cases) so I would really like to expand on the missing persons list and allow them to investigate each missing person individually instead of being pressured to go to the pagoda immediately. Does anyone out there have any mini-investigations (one or two sentences per missing person describing who they were, what they were doing, when they went missing and who reported their disappearance) I could use?Sure! Its a bit tricky because a lot of the trails run cold pretty fast, but that's kinda the point because eventually the PC's realize the Dreaming Palace is a tie between all of them which triggers the final act of the book. Special thanks to OmegaZ and Naurgul for this bit of detail-filling-in; after the International House of Planecakes the Kobolds (and Qonn) wanted to see if they could tie any of the other missing persons on the list to the DPH, and the stuff these guys put together, mixed with a bit of my own revisions and improvisations, made for a great "chasing down leads" session.
You guys...my party created a Murder Board, and it's the greatest thing ever:
The whole point of Graveraker's disappearance happening off camera is so that the actually qualified Agents of Edgewatch (i.e., not "our" party) can be dedicated to tracking down an established and well-known exhibit of the Festival, leaving our teams of rookie misfits to investigate a batch of people who may or may not actually be missing. If you emphasize it happening in front of your team, it's goes from being a Chekov's gun to a massive red herring, as you get them all riled up wanting to pursue a mystery there are no leads for them to follow and no way you can allow them to solve until several books later. Also, Graveraker is an exhibit because it accomplished the mission it was designed for: reshaping the Precipice Quarter into the Festival Fairgrounds. It's a bit odd to give a big speech about something that's already done (and has been done for a while) like it's about to get underway?
Using Graveraker to enter a bank is a bit like using a bulldozer to dig a post hole, isn't it?
The Dreaming Palace is fricking twisted. I almost threw up reading Pickled Punks. What a terrible image in the mind. Sheesh. Someone must have been reading or watching some twisted material to dream this up. Pickled punks of all sorts of deformities (of the non-necromantically animated nature) were a regular carnival sideshow attraction in our world; odds are good your great-grandpappy giggled and pointed at one as a boy. As a monster, they were introduced in the PF1 Bestiary 4, and have appeared in at least one other AP that I'm aware of, 1E's Spoiler:
Strange Aeons All that aside, yeah, they're super nasty.
Additionally, Rekarek and crew are limited to ranged attacks until your party sets off or defuses the boiling water trap, AFAICT, and are bottlenecked at the entryway to the room as well, so you may find some tactical advantages to be had, there...but that plays Rekarek dumber than she should be, IMO, and she should really try and draw the party into the potential killing ground of the next room after they go through the trap, and good luck to your Level 2s at that point. Agreed that you should encourage your party to consider retreating if needed. Another oddity of Kekker and Gref: they speak Common and Undercommon, while their Caligni Creeper trading partners speak only Caligni...I suppose we could assume that the Caligni that got accidentally killed by the Varghouilles was a Slayer? Those speak Undercommon, it seems... I like the idea of having Kekker and Gref show up repeatedly as they very nearly get themselves into actual trouble over and over, totally going to run with that, thanks!
I haven't done a deep dive into the Festival Grounds write up, but my initial pass had me concerned that the connective tissue between the background content and the actual adventure was very weak. While I know this wasn't a concern for many others, for me it was almost a dealbreaker - and sadly only a few pages into the AP! The Festival write-up is actually quite flavorful, and includes undeveloped plot hooks for every exhibit area that aren't explored as part of the written adventure, which gives you plenty of room for adhoc side-quests in the PQ.
If you don't mind converting from 1E, there's a wealth of adventures set in Absalom ripe for the looting, already categorized and filed by the fine folks at Pathfinder Wiki. There's even 3 scenarios and 1 module set in the Precipice Quarter! For my party of mostly Hookclaw Kobolds, I'm looking at slotting in a modified version of PFS #02-05 "Balancing The Scales." Depending on how your party dealt with the Stonescales, it may or may not work for you.
Wow this is sad....I don't think it's a slight? It's not uncommon for a reference to be valence flipped just to throw people off scent on a character.OK, I've got an idea for a NPC named "Sutter," so the players will be surprised when he turns out to be an intelligent and clever writer. For anyone who didn't get this at first glance, either, the author of "Devil at the Dreaming Palace" is James L. Sutter. John Sutter appears to be a colonialist a@@#$+~ of note from California's history.
...I don't think it's a slight? It's not uncommon for a reference to be valence flipped just to throw people off scent on a character.
Speech from Lavarsus went well. I knew I'd nailed it when one of my players said "I don't know when this adventure is going to put a Big Bad in front of us, but for now Lavarsus will do." I had to nudge them a bit to keep them from attempting to pick up Eunice earlier than I wanted them to, but I managed to get them to go to the Pagoda first so that should work out fine. They've been playing first contact with the Stonescales cautiously with a couple of attempts at subterfuge, which makes sense but is not really something the AP gives guidance on, so I've been winging it a lot, and they haven't made much progress. I will wager, though, that my group is the first one who saw Rekarek's character art and immediately all exclaimed on how sexy she was? More as the situation develops...
Unsurprisingly, my party of 6 level 2s have handled everything Chapter 1 has thrown at them so far, even with boosting DCs to fit their level and adding Elite to a lot of stuff, and are now halfway through the Menagerie. Notable alterations I've incorporated to this point, inspired in part by this thread:
Details:
Developed by Antonizi Fizwittle of the Pathfinder Society, based on his extensive study of Azlanti Wayfinders and using an artifact recovered from Arcadia. Crafted in the shape of the traditional Badge of the Absalom Guard divisions and featuring the seal of the newly formed Edgewatch of the Precipice quarter, when worn the Badge magically transforms all attacks so that any damage rendered is nonlethal, keeping all other properties of the attack unaltered. The only exception to this attack-altering effect is positive and negative energy effects, which do not gain the non-lethal trait. The badge can be deactivated with a two action Interact action that has the manipulate trait, which causes the badge to glow with a soft red light. Each badge must be recharged with a 10 minute exposure to the Azlanti artifact once daily, or it ceases to function, aside from emitting the soft red glow. Details:
Pay is irregular due to bureaucratic issues as well as the variability implied in the following mechanic, but in order to recruit more experienced guards the Edgewatch is paying on "adventurer scale." This is funded, in part, by an asset forfeiture system in which criminals found guilty of the use of lethal force have their valuables confiscated by the Edgewatch. After a civilian review board approves the seizure, the goods are made available for purchase for a limited time by the Edgewatch Agents at half price, then resold through a Precipice Quarter storefront at full market value. If, in the course of fulfilling their duty, an Edgewatch Agent comes across equipment or consumables that would be of vital assistance in the completion of their immediate task, they may do so, so long as damage to equipment and usage of consumables is accounted for in their post-duty reports. In non-game-world terms, the way I make this work is that all the gold the agents are supposed to loot goes into their salary, plus one half the market price of all the gear they’re supposed to loot, minus whatever consumables or what have you they actually wind up using or receiving straight up during their adventuring. If it’s gear they would recognize (I don’t even describe what a lot of their opponents would give them if they looted them unless they ask specifically, so that stuff shows as available right away), it shows up in the Requisitions Office (implemented as a user-accessible merchant in the Edgewatch HQ in FoundryVTT) a few days following the encounter it was seized, then gets “shipped out” to the resale shop.
Making Hendrik less obvious/more sympathetic This is harder than it should be, and I was not entirely successful. In his introduction in the Tipsy Tengu, I shortened his dialog and omitted the extraneous inclusion of his ownership of the Dreaming Palace. Thanks to his stupid f!&@ing art and weird speaking style, he still seems super suspicious. To try and defuse this further, I had the Skeleton Guards encounter be right around the corner from The Dreaming Palace, and had Hendrik bleeding from yet another head wound, stunned and crawling away from the scene when the Agents arrive, an idea I stole pretty much whole from someone in this thread (Thanks!). I used the following in my notes to run the scene:
Hendrik and The Risen Dead (my Thrash Metal cover band):
The waves of negative energy from Pratchett's necromantic experiments are actually responsible for the reanimation of the skeletons, although he was unaware of their presence prior to the collapse that killed the foreman and wounded him. When the Agents help him out, he's grateful and explains his presence truthfully: "My heroes! Thank you for helping me yet again! I run a hotel just around the corner, there, "The Dreaming Palace." I've got a couple of Newlyweds in the Honeymoon Suite, right now, and they asked me to come ask the workmen if they could start later in the day. I didn't bother to tell them it was the middle of the afternoon, and just came out to chat with poor Foreman Jarik over there," he gestures to a fallen construction worker nearby, "when that wall over there collapsed on the both of us. Knocked me for a loop! Then those...horrifying things started coming out of the rubble, and everyone was running and screaming...I just dragged myself out of the way and tried to avoid their notice, until you fine fellows came along! I'll be recommending you all for a commendation, and next time you're in the neighborhood you stop by the front desk and Ralso will have some fresh tea for you!" Even with all of that, my Investigator player is super suspicious of Hendrik, but not enough to keep the following from happening... Eunice The Homeless The AP doesn't actually say where Eunice has been staying for the two weeks previous to the Agents encountering him, so I said he'd been living on the streets. Since Marin doesn't press charges they don't want to stick him in holding, so they figured "Hey, we have a hotelier who owes us a favor!" ...Yeah, they put Eunice up at The Dreaming Palace. They are currently planning on running him out to the Arcanamirium to see if Kelemenes' old school has had any contact with him, but I plan on Lavarsus shooting that down. I extemporized that Eunice has an uncle in Otari that he could reach out to assuming that locating Kemeneles may not be an available solution in the short term, but now I'm planning to have the Agents return to the hotel to be handed a note "from" Eunice saying that his uncle had come looking for him and was able to find him thanks to the ruckus he caused. I am open to suggestions on what Pratchett and Ralso have actually done with him, with tie-ins to the "Prisoners" encounter in Chapter 4 being most welcome! The Menagerie My tweaks here have been mostly mechanical to make the encounters more challenging for my upscaled party. Basically, Rusty and Hoots are combined into one encounter, as are Beaktooth and the Hyenas. They're both Moderate encounters for a 6-player 2nd level party when combined in that fashion. The Dragonfly Pagoda As I've previously mentioned, my party is 4/6ths kobolds. My Rogue has, in her backstory, a specialization in Kobold Labor Law, and her player is 1) a certifiable polymath genius with multiple advanced degrees, and 2) one of the most devious and creative GMs I've ever encountered. I've read all the back and forth in this thread about this encounter twice, now, and still feel woefully underprepared for this...any thoughts on how Doopa, Rekarek, and Skerix might change their responses when confronted with a majority Kobold squad?
As I am currently running this AP for a group that is majority (4 of 6) kobolds, I am definitely going to be reworking this scenario significantly, incorporating many of the ideas discussed here. I will not be surprised if my team avoids combat entirely, honestly, especially given that one of my kobolds is, no joke, focused on labor law in her background and bio.
One of the players just pointed out that we have 4 fighting reptiles, a martial arts master rat, and a human (half-elf) investigator. Kobold Agents of the Edgewatch
I ran a group of 5 friends through Little Trouble in Big Absalom and they had a fantastic time and wanted to keep playing. I told them what adventures I had available, and they wanted to play AoE, which I am totally down for. Only one of them wanted to play something other than a slight variation on their LTiBA Kobold characters, so...we gonna Keystone this thang all the way! They roped in another friend, who wants to play an Ysoki Monk. The undecided fellow wants to play an Investigator, but hasn't announced race yet. I'm kind of hoping for a stodgy older human for maximum comedic impact. If the unannounced player winds up playing a race with Darkvision or even Low-light I may try retooling the adventure so that they're officially the Night Shift, but I'm not sure how to square that with the Parade plot in Book Two (or if there'd be similar conflicts in later books; Book Two is as far as I've read in detail beyond the synopses. Any tips on that or ideas on wrangling a bunch of zany-as-hell Kobolds through this AP?
A friend of mine calls them Calrissians, as an extension of Rando.
That adventure is so fun!! I GM it and the player put their codd piece in. Of course, now it cries if it gets too far away!!See, this here is the kind of thing that should stick around, if nothing else. There's a 1e chronicle that, as a result of, I have super bouncy ball holy symbol on one character.I loved that one too! It allowed my Swashbuckler got to have six fingers on his right hand! Without this adventure, I would not have my singing fez! Without my singing fez, I am not the same Neville, no?!
Let me know when you are done so I can close this campaign and also change the link permissions to better protect your information. Downloaded and Printed! Thanks again, Numbat!
Sara smiles her toothy grin after slapping Jayson on the back and says "I think you'll find I'm...well, the sisters used to say I was unbreakable, Jayson, and it might not really be true, but I'm certainly tougher than the average kid who fell out of every tree around!" "Thank you, Mistress Janira, I plan to order a new Wayfinder as soon as I can, this is lovely! And all of you were lovely companions, my fellow agents. May your paths be clear, easy, and interesting!"
"Well, if we're not even trying to be sneaky, might as well be friendly, I suppose," Sara says to the group. She moves up next to the ladder, readies a bullet in her sling, and calls down into the hold "Hullo, down there! Is there anybody home? We will defend ourselves if we must, but we'd much rather talk if possible!"
Looking about at the gathering crowd and not seeing much that resembles her own Sarenite acolyte's garb, Sara exclaims "Well, I guess Sister Khismia was right when she would say 'It takes all kinds!' May the blessings of Flame ever be with you, brothers and sisters."
I'm signed up to GM two slots, so I guess I'd better pick and learn a VTT, eh? My partner, an experienced non-OP gamer, will be playing PFS for the first time ever! We've hired a babysitter and everything! :-p
"I believe I can help everyone, a bit." Sara gathers everyone together, then suddenly begins radiating light, as she casts Divine Halo, and then a 3-action Heal Burst.
She'll then move to Tavvar, saying "Mistress Tavvar, thank you for shutting that down. We're with the Pathfinder Society. My name is Sara, and these are my friends Jayson, Saturday, and Razpen. We'd like to know a little bit more about this ritual and what happened here, if you could share it with us. Razpen, here, would love to make a copy of it, I'm sure."
The slender goblin, dressed in the habit of a Sarenite nun, nods and smiles toothily to each of her new companions, eyes drifting from faces to Phoenix trees and back again as introductions go around. "Hello, everyone! Don't think I know any of you, no, no, no...but pleased to meet you, and you Ms. Zebielle! And who would your sister be, then?" 
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