HAximand's page

I just finished running my second session of this AP and experienced what I can only describe as the worst encounter I have ever seen in a Piazo product. For context, I've run or played through all of Age of Ashes, Extinction Curse, and Sky King's Tomb, among other smaller adventures.

I'm talking about the Endless Realities mythic hazard in the very first chapter. Let's start with how you can disable the hazard: you need to have Legendary Thievery or Arcana or a 7th-rank Dispel Magic, all of which are impossible for a 12th-level party to have. Certain Mythic callings or feats might have made the checks possible, but none of my players happened to have an ability to roll with Mythic proficiency on either of those skills. And even if they did, the party was quite low on Mythic points by the time the encounter started.

But this hazard is destructible, I hear you saying! Yes, this is true. The hazard has 90 Hit Points for each of the four realities, and destroying all four seems to be the only reasonable way of moving on for many parties. Except that with its AC of 39, the party martials have a 25% chance of hitting it on their first attack, and with its Hardness of 20, they each have a median hit damage of zero except for the barbarian with a whopping 8. To top it off, the hazard can regain 20 HP each round, so after two full rounds of whaling on it, the party had dealt zero net damage.

The only saving grace is that each time a PC crits on a save against it, its DC's and hardness are reduced by 2. The DC's don't matter since the PC's didn't meet the required proficiencies anyway. Reducing its hardness will sloooowly allow the PC's to start dealing damage, but as I said, this effect still wasn't enough to deal net positive damage in two rounds. Combined with the ridiculous AC, 360 total HP, and 20 regen each round, there was no way the party was going to meaningfully win; the best outcome was to tough it out until the hardness reached zero and the encounter ended on its own.

My players clearly weren't having fun, so I explained that the Hardness was decreasing with each crit success, and if they got to ten crit saves, the Hardness would reach 0 and the entire trap would be disabled. At this point one player said "in that case can we just take 40d6 damage and say we won?" That was when I realized just how un-fun the entire thing was and decided to move on, pretending the whole thing never happened.

Did I miss something? Was this encounter supposed to be winnable?

I noticed the background "Sponsored by a Stranger" in the Player's Guide and one of my players has picked it. The background says the stranger asked "whether an insect hive mind could be manipulated at a distance," which obviously foreshadows the BBEG of the campaign.

However, after doing a Ctrl+F search of all 5 books, there's no reference to the background at any point. What did you choose to do with this background? Or what will you do, since I'm sure most people haven't gotten through the published books yet? Did you choose that the stranger is a specific person who comes up, or is it forever a mystery?

I'm trying to start Hellknight Hill, running a campaign on Roll20 (because in person isn't an option right now) and I'm struggling with the maps offered by Paizo. The maps included in the book, such as the map of Citadel Altaerein, look pretty pixelated if you zoom in to the scale of a single fight. This is workable but I've been looking for alternatives that make our play feel smoother.

In doing research, I found forum posts such as this one where Paizo has stated that it's prohibitively expensive to make much higher resolution maps for every single area in their adventure paths. I understand and accept this.

However, I looked at some videos of a party playing Age of Ashes on Fantasy Grounds and found that the maps included in that content are visibly sharper than the ones in the Age of Ashes PDFs. If you want to check for yourself, view this timestamp and compare it to the same room in the Hellknight Hill Interactive Maps PDF.

Why are the maps included with a Fantasy Grounds purchase so much sharper than the ones included in a purchase of the book and the interactive maps PDF? I would like to use these in my Roll20 campaign because I prefer it to Fantasy Grounds, but as far as I can tell the only possible way to get these better maps is by buying the Fantasy Grounds module. Why are the maps gated in this way? Am I missing something?