If you want a lower-level version of this, here's what I did in book 2 of my campaign:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs4349c&page=3?2-Sixty-Feet-Under#137
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Woof, just played through a chunk of Chapter 1 and it's already wildly off-script. They sussed out basically everything there could be learned without talking to any of the NPCs via Criminal Connections and Esoteric Lore checks. They only wear their uniforms when they have to, so there's zero reason for the Alley scenario to even occur. I managed to steer them to the Duck's Back, but when they went to case out the Arrowhead they opted to tail the trio instead of interrupt the crime in progress? I had to invent a warehouse dead-drop, suggestive smuggled goods, and a romantic assignation for Giord from whole cloth. Speaking of: does anyone have any suggestions for what a set of ledger books written in Tien might be what Giord was looking for? It was maybe not my best improvisation...
Honestly, they're kind of pushovers as written, at least they were for my crew. Adding an action cost for this would not do their combat routine any favors.
I rewrote this somewhat extensively to fit better into my campaign. Thought you would be interested to see it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OpaJbvmUoCR1xr07yHA87uhunu04QEdTw5u59TH iEdQ/edit?usp=sharing
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?
Just so you know, if I Google her name this post is result #3, with the plaintext first sentence announcing her role in the Adventure Path clearly legible in the Google preview. That's... probably not good.
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!
I'll be attending my first DragonCon, next week, on Friday and Saturday only, and at the moment it looks like there are very few PFS scenarios on the schedule. I'm particularly confused by there being all of one scenario scheduled in the Friday evening and Saturday morning slots, respectively. Maybe I'm just used to pre-pandemic gaming con schedules, but the (much smaller) cons I've attended in the past would never have had such a small PFS presence! I know the schedule as posted in the Dragoncon app is incorrect and incomplete in some ways, but with what I'm seeing now and with there seeming to be no way to know what tables will have seats available ahead of time, I'm concerned I won't be able to play any PFS at all.
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
My Fayati/CH enhancements in brief: Fayati took over what was a small pick-pocketing racket and started reorganizing into a more diversified criminal organization. She's obviously more bookishly minded than a typical thief, and got the idea from her readings to split her organization into cells specialized in certain types of work, with compartmentalized reporting structures such that lower-level members never went above the second floor of the HQ and didn't even know her name, and with her bookkeeping she carefully distributed the crew's work in any particular area so they didn't attract too much heat from a neighborhood or the Sleepless Suns. The Bank Robbery crew were a repurposed 2nd-story burglary cell who hadn't been with the CH for long enough to meet Fayati directly.
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.
I'm assuming disponible means something like "included," and there's not much guidance on what the players get. I gave them each a nightstick and an Average set of handcuffs, as well as (of course) Badges. They were also able to requisition items like Fingerprinting Kits and Basic Recording Rods from HQ at no charge, as long as they were returned.
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.
Yeah, I don't actually have any intention of running AV anytime soon, but I was prepared to buy this just to support the Paizo and Foundry partnership as I expected to have it discounted as someone who has purchased this AP via my subscription. That not being the case? No, I'm not paying full price for this, again. Sort it out, Paizo.
OK, so I have questions about the Copper Hand Hideout. As written, the captured bank robbers give the PCs the location of the Hideout, but it's not detailed what information they give outside of that. This led to an awkward moment where Melipdra says "I’d recommend a tactical, stealthy approach, especially since we have reason to believe the thieves might be holding a hostage," and I had to go, "wait, what?" I knew about Gribse, of course, but there's zero hints that the PCs would have learned about him prior to this line. I had to improvise a bit on the spot, and now they want to know what all they know about this person. Were they reported missing (obviously Absalom has a Missing Persons reporting system, as they were working a portion of that list a week or two ago), and if so from where and by whom, and if not why not? And I don't really have very much in the way of answers for them. One can assume Gribse is either an Absalomian native or a childhood immigrant as he was bitten by a Sleepless Suns animal 8 years ago, so now I have to make up sufficient backstory for this character that made enough of themselves to become an engineering student but not so much that there's an especially active investigation into their multi-week disappearance from their life! Any tips on how you handled this, or the level of information your party got from the captured Hands?
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:
OK, so one of my player characters speaks Aklo, and it seems likely they'll be able to negotiate the Ether Spiders out of the vault non-violently. That means I'll be dealing with the Xill...but I can't figure out how that's supposed to work. Xill have no way, as written, to travel between planes but their innate, limited Plane Shift spell, but there's no indication that it takes them less time than the 10 minutes it usually takes to cast, and it also doesn't indicate that it functions differently regarding arrival location than the spell as written. By my reading, the enraged Xill would cast Plane Shift and end up *somewhere* on Golarion 10 minutes later, which is unlikely to be anywhere near Absalom, and by which time my players will probably already have wandered off to the next candidate bank-job target so the Xill wouldn't find them where they left them anyway, even if I handwave the location thing. Should I handwave the location and casting time? By how much? Anyone have any advice on this? Mr. Sayre, any clarifications on intent?
I gave my players free archetypes as 2 weeks of specialized training after completing book 1 (when they were promoted to junior detective grade), so I have limited it to anything I could stretch into seeming plausible, and here's my list with rationales:
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.
As far as I remember, there's only the few mentions in book 1 that demonstrate it as an exhibit and then it being missing, and then what happens with it in the final book. It also plays a prominent role in the framing of the Agents at the end of Book 4/start of Book 5.
I gave the "Broken Scales" a quick look. It doesn't seem to have anything substantial about the Graveraker. The only thing of use is that the inventor let loose a small-scale replica in the sewers to test her hypothesis about the power source. The quest, however, only provides this as background information and doesn't have any evidence or anything else to track down the source of the damage or otherwise tie it somehow to the larger plot of Agents of Edgewatch. A number of people have mentioned that 1) there was not enough material at level 4 for their campaigns and 2) that the Graveraker plot is so sidelined in the early books that when it suddenly ramps up in importance later it is narratively jarring, requiring them to give infodumps on what the thing even is and why they should (theoretically) care. This scenario can help fill both. Obviously since my party is 3/4 Hookclaw Kobolds and the Sewer Dragons have come up multiple times in our campaign already it was a more inviting tie-in for us than most, but it still seems generally useful to those attempting to address the problems above, to me.
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.
Keeping the spelling of his name ambiguous seems very on-brand for Norgyborgy. Valid!
I wrote out Wrent's confession for my players as a side-story in between sessions. It sums up book 2, and gives an idea of book 3. I embellished it some (the bank robbery was meant to get Wrent some gold so that she could break away from the Twilight Four, but I felt the reasoning to be suspicious. And the book never states how she got either gang to work for her.) This is great, but you spelled Norgorber two different ways...neither of them correct.
Very nice! The layout is absolutely perfect. My only criticism is that some of the articles weren't sensationalist enough! I might try and punch them up a bit more; my day job is mostly business documentation, so a dry style is easier for me to slip into. On a separate note, I found it a bit weird that Eyes on Absalom has been a thing for nearly 20 years in your world; in my campaign it's only 3-5 years. I checked Vancaskerkin's biography and while it's listed last as far as life events go, it's vague enough that almost any amount of years up to a few decades could fit. My conception is that Vancaskerkin took over an existing publication, turning it to his own ends. That's sort of the pattern of his life, if you think about it. When exactly that happened I haven't quite decided. How are you making these look so cool? >>shia_labeouf_magic.gif Nah, but seriously, it's just Powerpoint, and a smidge of The GIMP.Thanks, though, to both of you!
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?
A *ton* of this is just dependent on/varies wildly by GM, I'm afraid. Without us being at your table it's hard to say what your GM might be doing differently to improve or hamper things, or what your characters might be able to do differently, alternatively. I can say that there is a general consensus that Book 1, in particular, is (at least in places) "overtuned" and many GMs recommend adjustments based on that understanding. I have not seen as much of the same sentiment levelled at Book 2, but there are certainly bits of it that are known issues. I do recommend you discuss your feelings about this with your GM, and recommend he come to this forum and review the GM spoiler threads; they've been incredibly helpful to me, as a GM!
What's Roll20's issue? Unmanageably massive technical debt. #ohsnap
They have actually managed to get a look at the public-facing ledger, so they know exactly how many people are staying there. Thanks to a well-played Pointed Question and some s#+& deception rolls from Ralso, they even have reason to believe there's another ledger. They have pretty much everything they can get without going in, but that is all circumstantial, and not enough for a warrant.
OK, my party has now wasted two entire sessions trying to get evidence on the Murder Hotel without actually going into what they are convinced (but cannot prove) is a Murder Hotel, for some reason having to do with it being a Murder Hotel. Pratchett and Ralso now suspect that they are close to being made, but the team has been so wary that I've been unable to get them into a trappable position, as of yet. Any suggestions on how to push them over the edge?
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.
This was obviously something you could do in first edition, but the only support I can find for it in the RAW text of 2E is in the rules for Drugs under Afflictions, which doesn't specify whether one can voluntarily critical fail. This came up in a recent discussion about the Blister spell, which, if cast on an acid resistant summons or ally with the ability to critically fail, becomes a potentially devastating AOE spell for its level.
You guys...my party created a Murder Board, and it's the greatest thing ever:
Ah, I had missed that, thanks.
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?
Enh. The players have only circumstantial evidence and hearsay before they go in the Hotel, anyway. There's no justification for a raid in force until after they're in, and then it's basically too late to call for backup. I'm curious how you plan on having the excavator disappear "on camera," as they'd basically have to be looking at it to see it vanish, and presumably they're hot to get after investigating Pratchett now, right?
Did you skip the assignment of the missing persons case to the players at the start of Chapter 2?
Excellent! Foundry has been the best VTT to play PF2E on for a while, now, and it's good to see Paizo bringing native content to it! Thanks!
My players pretended they were private goons hired by the Minkai delegation to track down their missing colleagues. I was a bit disappointed they didn't actually try to talk to everyone in the House of Planes but they did talk to quite a few people. Oh, that's pretty good. By the way, we just finished this book. It only took us... 15 sessions over the course of 2 months and 3 weeks. Pretty sure that's way above average but I'm fairly confident they rather enjoyed taking their time. We're running at about the same pace. We can usually only play for about 2-3 hours a week, so...gonna take us two sessions to get through the HoP, but they're determined to visit every room, I think.
This is good! I wanted something more Planar-themed and wound up using a variant of the "Logical Draw" puzzle rethemed around the plane of Axis, copied below: An Axiomite summons three aphorites they had created to a chamber, then raised illusory walls so each could not see the other and touched each of them on the forehead in turn conjuring there the glyph of Axis and telling them "I have marked you each, but not all bear the glyph of Abbadon. I will reveal to you your fellows, and the first of you to tell me whether you bear the glyph of Abbadon or the glyph of Axis shall be granted the privilege of a mission to the Material Plane." The axiomite drops the illusory walls, and each aphorite looks left and then right at each of their two fellows, pauses a moment, then they all announce simultaneously "Axis!" Why? Answer: Each reasons "My companions both are marked Axis. If my sibling on the left saw that I were marked with Abbadon, they would reason 'My sibling on the right is marked with Abbadon, but my sibling on the left is marked with Axis. If I were marked with Abbadon then my sibling on the left would see two marks of Abbadon immediately announce for Axis, but they are silent, so I should announce Axis.' But my sibling on the left is silent, so I should announce Axis."
Kobolds & Caligni & Vargouilles, Oh My!
After a long time healing up, the Druid decided to gut a cave fish to use its glowing innards to make herself some glowing glitter makeup. Kobolds, what can you say? The Rogue crept up on the Grick pit, got beaten by it in initiative and took a solid hit from it, and then managed to crit it twice in one round, knocking it out before I even got to make an AoO. We've got a solid start on the House of Planes, now. I did make sure I included some notes about the Lore of each plane during prep, which has already paid off. My players are almost entirely Golarion neophytes, and at least one of them thought they were going to the House of the Plains, and I dunno...expected Ingalls sisters, or something? They've wrapped up their interactions with Pharasma and Leila (whom, after a lucky Society role I decided had some history with our Thief Rogue), but they're having some trouble figuring out a pretext to bring up the missing persons with the Patrons, and I'm having some trouble thinking up a way to guide them without being too Deus Ex Machina about it. Any ideas?
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