Honest Tnarg's page

Name: Mirallia
Class/race: Half orc ranger 12
When: The Thousand fangs below
Cause of death: Elder Earth Elemental pile driver

The party having successfully cleared the mansion and met Udarra the morlock oracle, start to head towards the urdefhan sector of the city. Having skirted round the former svirfneblin druid's area they on this occasion (and against the barbarian's better judgement) decide to investigate in the process awakening the 2 elder earth elementals.

The elementals start in on the party causing masses of damage to them with repeated power attacks until eventually Mirallia, having broken her bowstring on a fumble moved in to fight the elemental with her greatsword. Unfortunately having been quite badly wounded she happened across the elemental just as it confirmed criticals with both of its slam attacks boosted by power attack. 118 points of damage later poor Mirallia was reduced to a small puddle of blood and indeterminate parts after the elemental smashed her into the rubble.

I would love to see a Dinosaur book for Pathfinder. I've started using them a lot in Serpent's Skull for random encounters and would love to see more info on them.

Name: Rhodri Thunderstone
Class: Cleric Lv3, Mage Lv1
Race: Dwarf
Killed in: Racing to Ruin
Catalyst: In the Screaming Jungle the party encountered the possessed Dire Ape. After the Monk and Magus were feared into fleeing the area the Dire ape charged forward to attack Rhodri. The Kitsune bard seized an attack of opportunity and decapitated the dire ape with a critical hit. On the next round the Shadow Demon proceeded to score a critical on the dwarf and proceeded to crit him in turn, decapitating him as well. (Side note, I use the 3.5 critical/fumble table from the Dragon Compendium Vol 1).

My players (after a bit of debate between the Free Captains, Sargavans and the Pathfinders) eventually plumped for the Pathfinders.

Rival: The Aspis Consortium are their main rivals at present although an attempt by the Sargavan government to delay them in Kalabuto may lead to problems with them too. I even adapted the NPC party from Entombed with the Pharoahs to be the Aspis trailblazers. They've appeared a couple of times to taunt/annoy the party and hired the agents in Kalabuto but so far nothing more.

So far the Red Mantis have kept a very low profile as have the Free Captains but that may change very soon.

My group managed to make it into and out of Kalabuto today. They're quite a big party (6 PCs) but not too heavy on the martial front, their Monk being the closest they have to a front line fighter. The ambush by the rival faction agents (in this case Aspis Consortium, as the party are working for the Pathfinders) nearly resulted in the entire party being captured. I had all but one (the dwarven cleric/mage) of them paralysed who had to battle his way out of the inn whilst desperately trying to stop the rest of the party being taken away by the bad guys.

All in all it was a great little encounter and one the party seemed to really enjoy. Whilst none of them were that badly injured they had that feeling of serious jeopardy that it could all go wrong any second. If what people are saying about the 2nd half of this scenario is correct then I'm really looking forward to it...

I managed to get a few from Ral Partha Europe specifically from their Das Schwarze Auge Line. 2 are lizardfolk but with longer necks, 1 with a battleaxe, the other a trident. The third mini is another Lizard folk from the same range but this one has a more gator like snout and 2 daggers/ short swords. All three are pretty reasonable casts and pretty well priced.

Another option is the Reaper Warlord Reptus line or the Games Workshop Slann/ Lizardman army lines. Those are more expensive but it gives you a lot of variety.

When I ran Rise of the Runelords our party really became quite enmeshed with the citizens of Sandpoint. I ran a couple of subplots set in and around the town between Burnt Offerings and The Skinsaw Murders. This allowed the party to get to know the natives a bit better. They put trophies of monsters they killed on the wall of the Rusty Dragon, started to add shrines to their deities in the cathedral, held parties in the Hagfish and even got the local Sczarni thugs onside during the attack by the Stone Giants.

Once the party started to get a bit more famous Cyrdak started writing plays about them and was forever pestering them to star in them (to the point that the party sorceress became almost as famous for her performances on stage as for her adventuring!). When Cyrdak was killed later on in the Adventure Path they moved heaven and earth to find a way to raise him from the dead, if only to assuage the grief of Jasper.

It doesn't take much to get the party thinking of the town as home, just little things and interludes during down time really helps it come alive and makes a huge difference to the campaign on the whole.

Name: Obafemi
Race: Aasimar
Class/Level: Monk 3
Adventure: Souls for Smugglers' Shiv
Catalyst: In the caverns below the cannibal camp the party got split up and poor Obafemi ran into Mother Thrunefang and 2 of the ghouls. After a spirited defence which saw the rest of his party come to his aid but get themselves stuck in a narrow corridor and paralysed poor Obafemi succumbed to his wounds. Fortunately the party had the scroll of raise dead so all was not lost.

In the party I'm running through this at the moment we have:

An Aasimar Monk
A Kitsune Bard
A Human Wizard
A Human Druid
A Dwarven Cleric/Wizard (heading for mystic theurge)

So far the party haven't been too heavily hit by the fact they only have 1 wilderness specialist (or a melee tank for that matter). They're currently at the start of Book 2 so we'll see how they go.

The first time I ran, it was ludicrously easy to convert all the NPCs; thanks to a character with a pretty awesome Diplomacy mod at first level. Just struck me as odd with the set-up.

I found this as well as we had a bard in the party who managed to talk them all round to his way of thinking. It meant that the NPC quests went a bit easier as they were all willing to share information and the camp duties were easier to sort out as well. Wasn't a major issue but what should have been a slightly more drawn out process was done and dusted in the first couple of days on the island.

This is really good stuff, and if you guys don't mind I may have to borrow some of it for my own campaign as we have a Mwangi PC who is quite keen to have a Mwangi expedition go after the city.

I can't make my mind up as to whether I use them to replace the Free Captains or the Red Mantis or if i should add them as an additional faction (which admittedly will mean more work for me but could be quite satisfying in the long run).

I've not long finished running this scenario and was lucky enough to have a group that were quite happy to self start and go looking for things to do. I dropped the number of checks per day to one for heat and one for disease to move things a bit quicker and to save me a little bit of book keeping. On the whole it went pretty well, wandering monsters kept them busy and they were hell bent on checking the shipwrecks for survivors, equipment and treasure.

I used the Red Mountain devil to keep them on their toes, the ideas they had as to what it may have been were certainly interesting although one of the group guessed it bang on, then was nearly killed by it on the rope bridges at the gorge.

On the whole we really liked it. It was quite refreshing to have a scenario that was a bit more player driven rather than me having to set the pace and the players liked the sandbox feel to it as well. All of which means I'm really looking forward to getting them to Saventh-Yhi.

Yes please, in whatever format you want to publish it!!!

At the moment "People are strange" the Echo and the bunnymen version.

I would probably ask what the group has most need of first but if I had to default I would aim for one of the "original" classic 4 classes, fighter, cleric, rogue or wizard. I haven't come across a group yet that was either a) short of one of them or b) could do with a second one of them. I would tend to go for a fairly generic build to start with as well at least until I got an idea of how the group played and what kind of setting/campaign the GM was running.

It's a tricky thing to handle, my Runelords party was running at 8 PCs and an eidolon at one stage which was getting ridiculous. I ended up having to scale up every encounter they went into and on quite a few occasions they still nixed the bad guys in 2 or 3 rounds.

I'm down to 5 players (and the eidolon) now and even then I still feel that I should be adding minions to single encounters. Last week was a case in point, the party got the drop on Ordikon in part 5 of Runelords and had him down in 3 rounds flat, and that was despite knocking the party cleric down to single hit points on round 1.

There are a lot of very good ideas and points made by others on this topic, all I can really add is that I would use as many of them as you feel would be appropriate for your group. Good luck!!

Current roster of party is a Lvl 10 Paladin, Lvl 10 Cleric (Fire and Healing domains), Lvl 10 summoner and a Level 10 sorceror (gold dragon bloodline)

Ability scores were generated using the good old 4d6, drop the lowest and assign where necessary.

The general complaint was that using the spells with saves tended to have a low success rate. I haven't come across many game changers yet which might be down to the spells chosen by my players so far, although I think I might start to run into problems with the cleric at some stage.

We've been experimenting in our game with upping Spell Dc's as I've discovered that as things stand, both the PC's and the bad guys could avoid getting hit by the full effect of a spell quite often.

What we've done is allow half the caster level to be added to the DC of the spell or spell like ability. So far it seems to be working quite well and I haven't come across any major problems but I'd be intrigued to see if anyone has done something similar (or indeed, different) and how well it's worked out for them.

My party are forever using haste, it's the summoner's spell of choice as she can buff everyone in the party and her eidolon in one go but I have to say I'm a fan of slow. Despite it's requiring failed saves to take effect I do find it causes mayhem in a fast moving party especially when you're lobbing it at flanking types like rogues and rangers.