Jim Kiley's page

I just didn't have the energy/motivation to fully rework book 5 when, by then, I wasn't even really looking forward to book 6 anymore.

Yeah. Midway through book 6 chapter 1 I said to my group last week "oh for God's sake let's just get this damn thing done so we can move on with our lives."

Can't decide whether next campaign will be Season of Ghosts, a homebrew Pathfinder game, or something not Pathfinder at all, but I'm feeling a little burned out from this sucker.

Some APs don't lock it down this tightly, but generally "we can simply use magic to teleport past every obstacle" is not a thing in PF2 the way it was in PF1. Which, if you think magic should be able to simply bypass everything is going to be a problem.

I understand your point & it's absolutely valid. It's not so much that I think that magic should be able to get you past every obstacle. It's rather that the tendency to just say "oh, your cool power just won't work here" is (or should be) an anti-pattern in adventure design. Better to have foes or situations that require the use of cool powers (preferably not too strictly requiring a specific ability but rather allowing for a range of problem-solving techniques).

Your point about teleport in particular being de-emphasized in 2e is a good one for sure.

Besides - Aroden of course is more than capable of doing that being a deity who probably doesn't want mortals teleporting in and out of his base on Kortos.

That's certainly agreed - and the fact that you can take specific actions during chapter 2 of that book to counter that problem is good. It just sticks in my craw after having most of book 5 deny this sort of ability.

I have been running this darn AP for a couple of years now. We're finally in book 6. I've understood some of the complaints I've read here and there about various parts of the AP but on the whole our group is really invested & having a great time.

But a couple of times in books 5 and 6 my sense of in-game reality has gotten a bruising and I wanted to whine about it to people who might know what I'm whining about.

At the end of book 4 / start of book 5 the PCs learn that the sixth Aeon Orb is just... gone. Nobody knows where it went. Some of the Empty Stone group took it and left and literally nobody knows where it is. I am not told as a GM where it went. But there's a sixth stone! And we know where that one is! So go get it! Well... why bother having a stone that's gone missing at all? What is added there? Why not just have there be five stones, and the fifth one is in the Vault of the Black Desert and that's that? I'm sure that the missing stone is important somewhere in Golarion lore somewhere but I'll be damned if I know where and I'll be damned if I care. So I'm left breaking character to say to my players, "guys, the other stone is not available to be found, stop trying," which stinks.

At the start of book 5 the PCs travel to the Vault of the Black Desert, where teleportation magic doesn't work well. So they'll have to go overland and can't easily retreat to somewhere safe. No. Dangit. A fundamental tenet of high-level adventure design is that you don't design high-level adventures to deprive high-level characters of their coolest abilities. You design them so that they can't be done without those cool abilities. A group with a high-level wizard is excited to have access to Teleport. Why take it away? Let them teleport in and out of the Vault of the Black Desert. Make sure that enemies are aware of this as a risk and are set up to deal with it.

At the end of book 5, the PCs are told that they have free reign to go after the big bad of the book, who lives (unlives) in a dire black tower in the Forbidden Zone or whatever the hell it's called. PCs are told not to destroy or rend the tower apart, because that would be naughty, and if they do the guards will get 'em. Seriously? We're supposed to be afraid of town guards, and worried about being naughty and damaging a tower set among the ruins of a millenia-dead city? Instead, how about having the big bad be prepared for the possibility that PCs will rip the roof off the tower, and prepared to respond accordingly? Or, hell, make it such that there's literally no door into the tower. You must use teleportation magic or rend the walls to get in. That would be much more satisfying.

And now we're in book 6 and what do you know, the Kortos Mounts have a weird Aroden-created anti-teleportation field all around them, too! Once again something that might have been super-satisfying (a race against time as Sarvel Ever-Hunger is performing the Extinction Curse ritual and you have to use teleportation to get there before the isles are laid waste) is instead "oh we have to slog through these encounters that the author thought would be cool."

Anyway, I haven't read a lot of the higher-level books in other 2e APs. I hope they're more sensible about this kind of thing.

Anybody got any good recommendations laying around for battle maps for N. Wyvern Scouts or O. Siege Crossing?

Or, for that matter, any appropriate city battle maps for part 4?

SO he is level 5 transmuter with an Int of 16. Assuming he started with a 16, the minimum amount of spells he would have of each level is...

Thank you very much for this!

I don't suppose anybody has thrown together Bristle Billie's spellbook? I know my players are going to want to go through it after they defeat him...

If I already have the Irrisen book, and all six volumes of REIGN OF WINTER, will there be enough distinct/new info on Whitethrone in this book to make it worth my while?

Since I had six players, I encouraged the players (but did not require them) to each take their Black Rider bonus to a different attribute. They were happy to do it, said it seemed like a cool idea, and negotiated it quite pleasantly with one another.

@bwatford - I saw that thread and I'm thrilled. Now I just have to make sure my campaign goes more slowly than yours...

Just donated in the hopes of encouraging you to keep making these! The maps for SOS really added a lot to my campaign's first session last week.

And on a much less serious (punctuation) note, on page 65, 'reigns as unofficial "queen," ' should be 'reigns as unofficial "queen", ' ? ;)

Nope. This is punctuated correctly. English punctuation doesn't work like programmer punctuation (you may not be a programmer, but I am, and it threw me for a loop at first too).