Merisiel

Jade Suryani's page

RPG Superstar 6 Season Star Voter, 7 Season Star Voter. **** Pathfinder Society GM. 87 posts (113 including aliases). 2 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 23 Organized Play characters.


Silver Crusade

2 people marked this as a favorite.

I fleshed out each of the adventuring groups that appear in the first book. My players really liked some of them and they ended up sticking around and being critical allies for shenanigans my players pulled well into book four.

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2 people marked this as a favorite.

The fabulous At Ease Games in San Diego, California is celebrating another successful year with a glorious offering of Pathfinder Society games, including 7-00: The Sky Key Solution and the chance to play Aspis Agents in Serpents' Rise and Serpents' Ire.

Join us September 10-12 in sunny San Diego!

More information including a full schedule available at our Meetup Group and sign-ups available here.

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3 people marked this as a favorite.
Jeffrey Fox said wrote:
I'm just a bit anxious and stressed out because I don't like failing my community and if I can't get them the support they want, when I use to be able to, I feel like I'm failing them. And that kinda sucks.

This exactly sums out how I feel about this situation as well. My region has five yearly retail-based conventions that suddenly aren't conventions. If I can only support two of them, I don't know if the others are going to survive.

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Glad this got sorted out. If it ever comes up again, I can fix it.

And the puppy is super-cute!

Silver Crusade

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The one who got adopted by Zorka had been looking for someone to be her mother throughout the entire game. So once they got the hut, she spent time interacting with Zorka, helping her out, and bringing her treats. She started calling Zorka "Mom" and Zorka accepted. So her boon was for Zorka to her real mother essentially.

I like the one who stayed with Anastasia's thinking too. She's the only witch in the new world--she's going to change the course of Earth history.

Silver Crusade

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My party of six stayed faithful to dear Grandmother until the end.

Two members of my party became riders (one the Black right away, one the White after 100 years of service to his people), one decided to stay in Russia with Anastasia to take it over, one was adopted by Zorka, one get a mini-version of the hut, and the final became a Venture Captain of the Pathfinder Society. She passed her boon onto the Decemverate. (Which is rather terrifying when you think about it.)

They also finagled getting Nadya's daughter returned to life.

Silver Crusade

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I second the "Villains by Necessity" recommendation. It's a great book.

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1 person marked this as a favorite.

Awesome!

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It is! Ballast Point and Alesmith are both just a few blocks from At Ease Games.

We start tomorrow and it should be a great time. Hope to see people there!

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Silverhand wrote:
Could I simply substitute the phrase, "Venture Captain Amara Li" with "Trusted Pathfinder Ally, Amara Li" and leave it at that?

Amara Li is still a Venture Captain and still awesome. She's just not sending individuals notes anymore. There are plenty of Venture Captains who don't lead factions.

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3 people marked this as a favorite.
William Elsner wrote:
Looking to get a race boon ( oread ) I have nothing to trade and I am not able to travel to any conventions because my health will not allow it. If you must know I have cancer and I have treatment every 2weeks. That's why I can't go to any conventions. If their is any one willing to give an oread boon I will be thankful.

Hey William, I've got a spare I can give you. Are you going to be there tonight?

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2 people marked this as a favorite.
Chris Mortika wrote:
The Grand Lodge Scriptorium uses slave labor to pen the Pathfinder Chronicles. (Indeed, we remove the tongues of the people we purchase on the slave blocks and then we place them under a life-long gaes to copy any printed material set before them.) So long as your PC is a Pathfinder, and he hasn't freed the Society's own slaves back there, you shouldn't get your knickers in too much of a twist.

I don't believe that fact is common knowledge. They are kept in a locked, windowless building. Most Pathfinders don't know what occurs in there--it's part of the Ten's mysteries.

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2 people marked this as a favorite.

I've started asking players for their most recent chronicle sheet before the game begins. It was a bit rough at first (I've supervised multiple levels of chronicle sheets that needed finishing now) but my players now expect it and it's helping me to catch some previously-invisible issues.

I'd recommend it.

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At Ease Games in San Diego will be hosting a PFS mini-con from December 12-14. We have an awesome schedule, including 5-99: The Paths We Choose!

The complete schedule can be found on our Warhorn!

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Congratulations!

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Kyle Baird wrote:


More seriously, we decided that we needed to start incorporating all these PC Venture-Captains we have now in the campaign. The seeker who may provide the PCs transportation is another PC who failed to become Venture-Captain.

While I think this is a cool idea, I very much hope if it continues, it gets extended to the wider society and other player VCs who may not be closely associated with Paizo or active on the boards. From personal experience, my old Living Greyhawk region had several NPCs that were actually player characters and it left those of us who weren't in that crowd feeling very excluded and unwelcome. I don't think it's good to leave players feeling that way in PFS.

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In San Diego, I know there have been:

  • 3 runs of The Ruby Phoenix Tournament
  • 5 complete runs of Eyes of the Ten (at least one of which has not been reported)
  • 3 runs of Academy of Secrets
  • 2 tables of 12+ in "Race for the Runecarved Key"
  • 1 table of 12-13 at "Siege of the Diamond City"
  • 1 table of 14-15 at "Siege of the Diamond City"
  • 1 run of Tomb of the Iron Medusa
  • 1 run of The Moonscar
  • 1 run of "Beyond the Doomsday Door" (from Shattered Star)
  • 1 run of "Into the Nightmare Rift" (from Shattered Star)
  • 1 run of "Sins of the Saviors" (from Rise of the Runelords)

I'm sure there are some that I'm missing, so I will ask other people to add to this list. With one exception, the tables have all been five or six people. The special tables were a full six.

High level play is also a very big draw in our region. People get very excited about playing "Eyes of the Ten" and I know there are at least two tables in the works right now. There's also planned runs of Tome of the Iron Medusa and The Witchwar Legacy.

I'd also like to say that the three AP portions were run solely because they were sanctioned high level content. Last year, six people from the San Diego area raced to 15 just to play "Siege of the Diamond City" at PaizoCon. We actually all signed up as tier one GMs in hopes of playing that table together (it did not work out, but it was still the draw for us). There is no high level play this year, and that group is not going to PaizoCon at all this year.

High level play rewards the most dedicated players and GMs--the majority of tables I have listed was at least half filled by our fantastic GMs. I hope that pulling back on the special this year is not a trend that continues.

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6 people marked this as a favorite.

Factions are definitely a thing I think adds to PFS. When I started (way back in season zero), they were something that clearly separated Pathfinder Society from Living Greyhawk and they rapidly became one of my favorite parts of the game. I miss not getting the missions and I still hand them out whenever I GM. (I also have a 99% completion rate of players doing their mission, even though they know there are no out-of-game benefits for doing so anymore, making me think that players in my region like them too.)

I believe factions and their missions add a lot of personality to people's characters. At the end of the day, I think Pathfinding is something that characters do. It's close to a job--show up, get the artifacts or the knowledge, get paid. Factions are much closer to what characters are. If you encounter an Andoran, you know they believe in democracy and are against slavery, which gives people a better idea of how they will react to a given situation. It gives them a motivation for adventuring, for taking the risks that they do beyond just "get the stuff that these ten creepy masked people want me to get." Chelaxians, Taldans, Silver Crusaders--deciding how they fit into those organizations gives players a good hook for their characters and ties their character much more closely to the world of Golarion, which I think is a very good thing.

They also added a lot of lore to the world in and of themselves, which I enjoy.

Furthermore, I think a lot of people find the idea of secret missions rather problematic. If they don't know what they are supposed to do, it feels more unfair when they fail then if they know what they are supposed to do and aren't able to manage it.

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After hearing the podcast and reading the blog post, there was something I wanted to bring up. I've been playing PFS since season 0 and GMing for almost that long and I really like the faction missions. I think they're part of what makes PFS fun and they're one of my favorite parts of the game. I'm actually making my first boards post ever so that I could respond to this:

Paizo Blog wrote:

"There will be a fundamental change in how faction missions work in scenarios. The biggest change is that individual scenarios will no longer provide faction mission handouts except in rare circumstances"

1. Faction missions allow players to connect with their faction leaders. Because they don't appear often in scenarios, the faction missions are what allow players to learn about their faction and its leaders. You learn about the Paracountess and Madris through their missions and how they address you. Without the missions, players will lose that connection.

2. Faction missions also allow for really cool layers in the meta-plot. I love that parts of season four were foreshadowed in the faction missions for season three and that important parts of season two were present primarily in the faction missions. It allows for a lot of different agendas in the season plots which makes for more complicated and better plots.

3. The layers allowed by the faction missions also reward GMs because you are able to see the plot from different angles. This means you can learn more about the Society and its politics by GMing, which is fantastic.

4. Faction missions give new players something to directly connect with. They can hold the paper in their hands and get a better idea of what they should be doing in the scenario. Without the missions, I think new players will have a harder time earning their prestige at all, since they might not know the gaming tropes that will help them get the "secret mission" prestige.

5. With only 24-28 scenarios per year, making each scenario deal with one or two factions will result in only 3-6 play opportunities for each faction per year. I've loved the Chelish focus in "The Disappeared" and "Fortress of the Nail"…but I don't have any Chelish characters, so I was glad there was something for me to do too. "The Fortress of the Nail" faction missions even give you hints to how the Society functions as a whole, which is fantastic. I also don't think it will be enough to engage new players if they only have a chance of doing their special missions a few times a year.

6. Finally, the faction missions connect players more deeply with the campaign world. They give characters a variety of motivations while all still working without in the society. I really enjoy the flavor that it adds and think that the faction missions make the game more fun.

In five years, I've played every scenario and almost every faction. I think the campaign will lose something without these elements.

Thanks for making it through the wall of text