JohnHawkins's page

1 The Hecontires is really scary, I seem to remember my players felt it was more dangerous than anything else in the campaign and set up an impressive trap for it and burned multiple wishes to get it to go away. It is intelligent, ruthless and wants to destroy everything . So it could be manipulated but only with extreme difficulty and then after is has slaughtered the good guys , the forces of evil still have to kill it.

2 If you have a character who is a skilled techno arcanist , spends a lot of the book6 downtime and resources of the kingdom working on it why not. It slaughters a lot of the army (possibly both armies) and now you have hundreds of soul sucking wraithes messing up your country

3 This is all subjective, If I had used the 2 solar ending the pc;s would have just killed both of them. I had to boost the final battle a lot more with all sorts of extra's but I let my party pick up lots of powerful enhancements like vampirism and being grave knights as well as crafting their own gear.

4 Live with it. The nature of D+D is that the small party of 20th level characters can slaughter most armies unless blocked by peer level opponents. My players made this point to the princess and there was no battle , the pc's fought the princess and her elite guards and the army of the losing side surrendered or fled the country. The Gravekight antipladin could probably have killed an entire mortal army on his own without the others helping him

5a - Dessiter is small fry the Princess is aided my many eqully capable angels and in the same way Asmodeus prevented the witch hunters running down the pc's Mithra protects the princess. Sure let the players spend a lot of their time and effort on this instead of securing their kingdom , let them wipe out a bunch of minions as you said above it won't matter at all at the final showdown

5b - I assumed the Dragon had moved out with her horde and was using it to fund the army of light, so my players never looked for her lair

One of the characters sneezed and accidentally wiped out the entire abyss.

The mythic rules being broken beyond all redemption.

The campaign has great story , great characters but completely dysfunctional mechanics as written no creature in book 6 can survive an attack by 1 pc including all Demon Lords. When I ran it with moderatly optimal pc's and slightly nerfed mythic rules I gave the final demon lord of the book 16000 hp and he lasted 3 rounds.
If you want a first AP to run pick another one, to run this AP you would have to rewrite and rebalance the entire mythic rule set or rewrite the module so that none mythic pc's can survive.

I like high level high power games but mythic is so broken I lost all my enjoyment from running the game in mid book 5 and that has never happened before or since in 30 years of gm'ing.

All games require discussion among the players to ensure that their characters and expectations are compatible. Adding a necromancer to a game with an exiting paladin would be a bad idea, adding a paladin to a game with an existing necromancer is equally bad.
For a new campaign one of the concepts may be a worse fit than the other and so would give way, failing that I would expect that if for one campaign a player had to make a concession so that another player could have his concept then in the next campaign he would expect concessions from the player who won out the first time.

Also given your description of the paladin players play style he would have fallen in short order in any campaign I ran since I was 14, he may have got away with it then but that was a long time ago.

I do think that the new samurai archetype is one of my favorites of all time and I want to find a way to fit one into a game

I ran this module in PF several years ago unfortunatly I moved it to the WFRP World rather than Golarion.

I think that the moathouse is fine as a base except for the fact that for most of the campaign it is in the wrong place near the ruins of the old temple were the finale occures but not near the main temple where most of the action occcures so it should not cause any issues.

Someone did this in a campaign I was in once and we failed to recieve a story based clue because of it and the party ended up failing the quest and dying as a result.

I suspect that if the GM had been less annoyed at the player's tendency to interrupt flavor text with initiative rolls there would have been alternate methods of gaining the information readily available.

This is true. I have a player who has the annoying habit of saying he attacks midway through scene descriptions or speeches. I intend to let him however I also intend to move vital information to the end of all such introductions so he attacks allies , kills of clues and generally spreads his annoyance around until he learns better.

GM's are players too and annoying them a lot can make your life more difficult

Just like any other wizard, a high con does not sound like a defining personal characteristic

You are confusing complexity with number of character options.

The RULES will be simplified, and will stay simpler forever, no matter how many character options you add.

Comedy gold there.

Everything I have heard makes this a step away from why I play Pathfinder. It looks to me like it will fall between simple easy almost systemless games which are good for some things and complicated crunchy games which are good for others , in that valley of mediocrity were it is too much effort for being lazy and not enough complication to be worth thinking about.
Probably more popular with the younger market , which is a much better demographic than grumpy old men like me to aim for. I could use the £40+ it will save me a month to redecorate the bath room.

I will read the playtest and could be pleasently suprised.

There have been strong hints that something about this area is important in the conflict between Pazuzu and Lamashtu will we find Something out about that?

The best RPGs are intrinsically linked to their settings. Can you imagine

Traveller without the Imperium?

The early editions of traveller which I played with and used had no reference to the Imperium in core books. Not until Megatraveller is that featured.

Runequest without Glorantha?

The later versions of Runequest (3rd and later) no longer include Glorantha as a core setting and indeed the iconic system for Glorantha is now Heroquest.

Call of Cthulhu with the 1920s?

Yes . I run Cthulu in the Roman, Medieval, Victorian and modern worlds , never ran it in the 1920's . Again more recent versions of the rules support other periods, and in any case this is a Real world set game so setting is not a big thing , the mythos lore which is timeless (often outside of time) is the important thing

WOD without the WOD?

I concede on this one, although which WOD setting there are at least 2 and they have used the system for exalted and I think others. I hate the system so did not bother following that up

D&D without Greyhawk?

Incredibly easy D+D(Basic and related) were set in Mystara. AD+D 1st and 2nd editions were setting nuetral and the big world for them was forgotten realms anyway. 3.0 and later have very little of the world setting in them.

Please keep Golarion as core to the game.

Despite the fact that 80% of your examples are wrong I actually agree with you. I find changing generic flavourless references in a background to match whichever setting I am using at least as much hassle as changing a world specific reference and in general the world specific stuff is more inpiring to the authors as far as I can tell. Neither of my last 2 pathfinder campaigns have been Golarion based and the huge quantity of setting specific stuff I have works well.

Still not going to bother buying 2nd ed anyway but not because of setting links in the core books.

I needed to cut back on my RPG expenditure , so that's my biggest ongoing expense removed, convenient

Accelerate at 9.8 m/s , so falling 30m(Imperial units are silly)
S= UT +1/2AT^2

Air resistance is negligible at this low velocity and terminal velocity takes longer so we can use the simple newtonian mechanics

U is 0 unless the Vrock is climbing or diving at the moment of release
S= 30
So
30 = 4.9T^2

or about 2.4 seconds with some basic maths

So the proposed solution to it being impossible to design interesting and challanging encounters using the mythic rules is to ignore the rules and just run the game as a storytelling framework were you almost never use the rules...
That can indeed be a fun game and campaign however it is not a solution for making the mythic rules playable it is advice to ignore them.

Epic for D+D Could be broken but the escalation curve was much slower and the published monsters seemed to be able to put up at least some resistance. My experience is limited to 1 epic game which did not get very high so I could be wrong.

The dragon problem is easily solvable strictly by the rules the +62 of a not terribly optimised pc in Diplomacy would sort it out. (That's not how I would run it but RAW it would work pretty well and I am sure I can easily get that diplomacy bonus over 100 if I try)

And indeed Anguish investigations are not a lot easier for mythic 20/10 characters than for level 20 characters but once they quickly find your serial killer , which they will because they are good you will still find that the capturing/killing of the villain is terribly anticlimatic.

"At the end of the last game they activated the portal, which teleported them elsewhere, but elsewhere has been partially destroyed by an asteroid and the location is actually in space, so they'll have no air and be falling within 5-20 feet of a rough cliff. Any who are within 100' of the destination will be attacked by a dozen fallen (Bestiary 6) who haunt the place. And it's a heavy gravity area so it's 1d10 per 10 feet with no limit because there's no air to slow the fall."

Mythic spell casting for Life bubble and Mass fly, as far as I can tell fallen are CR8 so the 20/10 mythic party just ignores them, so not an example of a proper challange for a high level mythic party . It may be a TPK for a lower level party for whom fallen are meant to be a challenge but not an example of how to challange high level mythic parties

As has been said mythic rules are meant to be superheroic rules if we judge them as a superhero rpg , they are still rubbish. Properly written superhero rules can cope with superhero power levels and I have at least 6 of those systems which would work better. In fact converting Wrath to Champions(Hero System is the current name) would be a lot more fun and not a lot more work than trying to run it with pathfinder which sums up the mythic rules quite nicely when to get a balanced encounter out if it changing the system is easier than balancing the current one.

I still want more high level AP's just not anything mythic

With respect Gallant Armor I think the spell is unambigous in its description and is the opposite of your opinion
"anyone who hears the sound and rolls a successful save recognizes it as illusory (but still hears it)."

Crystal clear , if you hear the sound you get a save. I may give additional saves if someone spends time studying the illusion but everyone gets a save the first time they encounter the spell,

Discuss with your GM how common use of Silence will be. I know that as GM I rarely use it because I consider it too effective and un-fun. If is not going to be limited make sure you have a counter anytime you are going near a cleric.
My Alternative house rule allows a will save against the spell even if you are just in the AOE so that there is some chance of avoiding the spell

Black tentacles is not a necromantic effect so I am not sure why you need to use necromancy on the thread.
Also what were you trying to communicate I have read your post and cannot tell what point you were actually trying to make

Broken means that is is impossible to produce challanging encounters within the rules.
I can with mythic easily produce a TPK , that is no problem just using standard pc's I can kill an entire party but it all comes down to the initiative roll, whoever wins initiative kills everyone else. This is occasionally an issue with high level play but my experience there is that competent players make it hard to kill them all in a round.
In mythic you cannot build a PC who can survive 1 round vs a pc designed to do damage, it is impossible.

What I want to do is produce encounters which last over multiple rounds (2-3 is acceptable) require some tactical thought and are produced using the rules of the game.

I had to give the final boss of the Wrath campaign 16000hp, huge bonuses to attacks, AC , saves CMD , everything , numerous extra abilities and he lasted 3 rounds. Wow that that an exciting climax, I see why Demon lords worry people.
At the moment with RAW a level 20/10 character considers a demon lord less dangerous than a kobold to a first level character. This is not the intent of the rules therefore the rules are broken.

My players started to find combat boring towards the end despite my best efforts it felt like all they had to do was walk in swing a sword and everything died. When I was 12 I ran games like that and it is the baseline for bad GM'ing except in this case that was the rules not a 12 year old munchkin powertripping.

I estimate that a level 20/10 pc is about CR40-45 equivalent which means nothing in the game is worth noticing, given that the designers did not thing that and in fact thought CR25 was equivalent the rules did not do as intended and are broken.

I have been gaming for about 34 years in that time within an otherwise functional and reasonably well written game I have never before encountered such a broken subsystem. (I have found entire games systems that are more broken but that is a different topic

What was an excellent campaign died due to awful rules. This is my last rant on the subject , until I forget my resolution not to rant about mythic again. In summary Mythic AP = Unsubscribe

Magnuskn is right. Unfortunatly having run Wrath and actually played with high level mythic characters it is clear that the ability of the pc's was unanticipated by the designers. The plot and writing clearly indicated certain encounters are very dangerous however what would happen with the stats that are published is that 1 PC would spend 1or 2 mythic points and end the encounter in 1 round. This makes for instance the time pressure in book 6 irrelevant as the pc's can kill everything in the module without worrying about refreshing their resources.
Back to the point of the thread as the mythic rules stand there is no point in publishing a mythic AP as it will be essentially unplayable despite excellent plot, characters etc. The mythic rules do not work.
Also I feel that pretty much any story you could tell with mythic would be equally well told with level 20 none mythic pc's.
If anyone disagree's about mythic being broken I will only be interested if they have run as written (no third party changes or massive house rules) several sessions with level 16+ Tier 8 +PC's and found that the published creatures pose a significant challenge. I can't imagine anyone has

We did not do Scry and fry tactics, Either my players did not think of it or they respected that I won't use really dangerous tactics like that as the GM if they don't and they did not fancy someone like the Storm king teleporting in on them. (Disjnuction, mythic bane weapons and a couple of other things came under that heading)

They did explore but overall they concentrated on trying to find and eliminate the threats to the crusade.
I had Jeribeth disguised as the missing mother of the Riftwarden Wizard and talk the group into going after Vang , and then trying to eliminate them afterwards and that was a dificult fight as she had saved many of her demon minions to teleport in when she struck and the party was down a lot of their normal buffs.

In the midnight city they got involved in a bunch of subplots, taking part in criminal gang politics and elimanating several gangs to make a name for themselves and also liberate all the slaves held by those gangs

The Goat Lord wrote:

I successfully GM'd this campaign through all 6 books, but not as written. We used the Mythic Solutions 3rd party release to help tone down mythic, and we used the buffed version of the stat blocks floating around in the WotR forums. In hindsight, I would also stop progressing tiers at 5 and keep the PCs about 1 level behind the book recommended level starting with book 4.

OP, none of the issues you encountered are insurmountable. Try being transparent and find a solution as a group.

Good to hear. I will have to check out those resources. Thanks.

I have not used the 3rd party stuff as it was too late when I was running it and my solution is to throw the mythic book in the attic, but I must recommend trying something, and I have heard good things about it.

The other issue is that it was very easy for me to build mythic opponents that could kill the party, the problem was challenging them without making it matter of whoever won initiative killed all
the opposition.
If I just changed the alignment on the pc's character sheets none of them could survive a full attck from themselves

To tone down my doom and gloom I did finish the campaign and if you can keep mechanics from killing your joy it is a great and epic campaign.

What other campaign can your Paladin marry a Succubus and have Nocticula turn up to the wedding to give away the bride....

Level 0-3 = +0
Level 4-7 = +1
Level 8-11 = +2
Level 12-15 = +3
Level 16-19 = +4
Level 20+ = +5

This is correct

At level 20/10 then a typical mythic melee combatant does 750hp damage in a round unless he starts spending lots of mythic points in which case they can hit 2000......
I gave the end boss of Wrath 16000 hp and he died in 3 rounds, as written 1 pc would have killed him in 1 round, if they got a crit while Foebiting possibly with a single blow.

Never running another mythic game, the rules don't work. But looking forward to more level 20 AP's. I remember thinking Magnuskn was exagerating how bad high level mythic characters were, I was wrong

Example: The roof collapses on top of the PC's for 40 damage.

Ordinary people often emerge unscathed from collapsing buildings, he ducked under a roof beam/doorway etc and none of the debris hit him. Prefectly reasonable and justifiable use of Evasion

Example 2: character is wearing full plate and standing in knee deep water, but has a ring of Evasion. A trap (or whatever) is triggered and everyone in the water is struck by a Lightning Bolt (spell or natural).

Squat jump out of the water so not in the water when the lightning bolt hit. I have seen men doing such jumps and they are not high level adventurers. Also Do you rule that during underwater adventures lightning bolts create a sphere blasting the caster? If not magic lightning which only does realism when you feel like it. Evasion is perfectly reasonable

Example 3: I spent the last 30 minutes arguing with the DM that Spider Climb will allow me to climb the slippery frozen water fall. About 300 ft up the side of the waterfall it is hit with a fireball and the whole thing shatters dropping tons of ice to the ground.

Well the GM is clearly not very good on the rules as he got spider climb badly wrong. DC 25 to 30 climb check with the +8 from spider climb no need for a pointless arguement. Assuming the fireball actually brings down the entire water fall and the cliff face behind it then I would rule he takes no damage from the fireball and then falls , if there was any wall or waterfall remaining he would have made it to that like any other evasion. Would have to be a big fireball to do that much damage. So no problem with evasion.

Example 4: I rub myself down in in highly flammable grease before engaging the fire breathing dragon.

DM: Why?
Player: Because SCREW HIM i have a +14 Ref Save and Evasion!

Straw man arguement.

Your solution is obvious ban the notoriously overpowered rogue and make sure your party is entirely weak 9th level casters who cannot get the god power of evasion!

If your rulings were different than mine, you may be a killer GM :(

Four to 6 players is the maximum I find for any RPG, Above 4 you will have to increase the difficulty of encounters. However more than 6 players rapidly brings games to a crawl and leaves many players doing nothing for long periods of time and is very disruptive and annoying for all.
If you are an inexperienced GM you should probably try to stick at a lower limit particularly with inexperienced players. I have played and run games with more than 6 players and for it to work it needs a completely different structure than a normal game and even then the game falls apart more often than not.

I am distinctly less likely to buy this AP as for me a campaign needs to get to higher levels to be interesting for me to run. This is both because I enjoy high level play and because for this sort of game I want to have an epic conclusion and to me world changing events are not casued by 8th level characters. This means that this AP would not be worth me running and so I am less likely to buy it
I am sure others will be happy with it , but the trend for low level starfinder is disappointing for me.

3 Grippli, 4 Vishkanya and 4 Nagaji feats. Basically the potion feats are not racial

Spells
Antttoxin touch. 1st level lets you handle poisons safely

Poisonous cloud 4th level version of Cloudkill

Toxic blood 3rd level similar to caustic blood but poison instead of acid damage

Clayskin 3rd level version of Stoneskin, potions can be made

Glimpse the hidden 3rd level version of see invisible, can be cast on others

Identifiers Eye 2nd level lets unskilled people identify magical items, can be made into a potion

Phase step 3rd level version of Dimension door, shorter range can be a potion

Undeath Sense 2nd level, as detect undead but can be cast on someone else

Scorpion sorceror
gets poison based spells and Vermin form (scorpion only)
Bloodline arcana lets them use poison without hurting themselves]

At level 1 they get the ability to apply a poison which scales with level to their own or an ally nearbys weapon, at level 11 + all allies

Level 3 they can change a poisons onset time, at level 9 they can poison someone and activate it as a swift action within the next week
level 9 full action in a suprise round and sla Accelerate and delay poison
Level 15 burrow speed and tremor sense
Level 20 automatically attempt to poison 3 people who move adjacent to you on success they die

The thing I like best is the Vishkanya racial feats which allow them to use their poison to dispel magic, or give themselves a Ghost weapon ability and ultimately create a forbiddance effect with their venom

I agree wholeheartedly with Corvus Mask, I would expect my players to try to find out more about this during this part of the AP and knowing the truth would be really helpful for the GM. I have no idea what reason there is for not having revealed this piece of information yet.

Investigator

RECKLESS EPICURAN
Loses trapfinding and 2 discoveries
Gets the ability to identify potions, the ability to prepare 1 or more extracts they don't know with some wild magic risks, 13th level+ on drinking a potions gets save vs spells of the same school

TOXIN CODEXER
Poison Lore at 1st level

Poison extracts - lose a discovery and trapfinding can replace extract slots with poisons whcih get a save DC based on Level and intelligence
Modify toxins- replaces keen recollection and trap sense, can modify poison effects for both benefits or damage by using inspiration

Discoveries
Anathama and greater Anathma- when preparing a poison pick a ranger favored enemy and reduce its DR, SR , energy resistance, movement or fast healing

Lingering venon
your poisons take one more save to cure

Ask him?

I have an issue with the ''You already lose your character and to be punished more is rough'' argument.

I lose my level 6 ranger, I am going to make the exact same thing. Don't even have to change my sheet.

And this shows that play styles differ. None of my players would or have done this to replace the rare occasions of a dead character beyond practical recovery. All of my players consider a character to be more significant than that, for the last pathfinder campaign I got a novella as background for one of the pc's. I think losing the character you put that much effort into is far more than enough punishment , in fact although I never needed to do that I was prepared to fudge dice rolls to keep that character alive long enough to let them make use of that background.

Game mechanic penalties for character death have never seemed appropriate to me, they just make my job of keeping the entire group having fun more difficult. Also some of the more memorable and exciting scenes in a game are when a character takes big risks or otherwise acts recklessly because it is the right thing for that character to do even if perfect tactical analysis says it is foolish.

I am afraid I am yet to see a problem, I have never seen anything in a Paizo product which I can concieve of as endorsing evil actions (such as child abuse) as good things which people should do. All evil actions (Human sacrifice, murder, sexual abuse etc) are linked to evil groups which people should understand are evil.

Indeed a player could design a character who is incentivised to commit child abuse in most campaigns that character would the promptly be killed by the majority of characters who are incentivised to kill evil characters.

If you are running a campaign where characters are evil (as I have done) you have to be careful that
1) You players (and yourself) can draw the line between fiction and reality
2) You do not stray into the comfort zone of the players (this also has to be a consideration when providing opponents to good characters)
3) In general things like Torture and Human sacrifice are best left as fade to black off scene events.

Personally I suspect the a cultist of Folca would be outside my and my players comfort zones as a PC and probably not someone I would use as a villain but I think claiming the publication encourages child abuse is going too far

In all the High level games I have run (good and evil) the use of Heal spells by the Cleric/Oracle has been critical to victory because it heals enough to keep up with high level damage. Offensivly Harm with a reach spell metamagic (rod or feat) has been devastating and Buffs like Divine Fervor , Unholy Aura , Communal Energy resistance and Communal Spell immunity (Greater) have been very important

Flame strike can be nice particulary if empowered or similar as some of its damage gets past the inevitable energy resistance spells a competent opponent has up

Never had a problem with a Paladin, but I have rarely had a problem player. As far as I can tell problem Paladins are usually caused by Problem players or otherwise dysfunctional groups and if there had not been a Paladin character something else would have caused all the friction.

The 'Battered' Firearm for a 1st level Gunslinger is very simple. Without this class feature a Gunslinger cannot have his firearm until about 4th level.
The rest of the rules are to prevent any abuse by selling of the gun at half it's normal price and getting more money than a 1st level character should have.

Any attempt to make use of this as something other than a way for low level gunslingers to function is just silly cheese. If you really want a firearm at 1st level because your character concept needs it there are 3 choices
1) take a level of Gunslinger
2) Hope common firearm rules are in effect
3) Tell your GM and ask him to make an exception for you.

When I was younger and had more spare time I wrote most of my own campaigns but even then I used published material which I liked. Nowdays I largely run published games but customise them with a few changes and extra material to suit my players and their characters

K'Kree are not viable as pc's for many reasons. The most important being their Herd instinct that means a K'kree who is not around at least 30+ other K'kree goes mad very quickly.
The original traveller character gen for them actually created a family unit of a Patriarch , his wives and underlings and it was never really meant that they would be played alongside 'normal' races

In today's episode, technophobes meet "software-as-service" business model! Hilarity ensues, as usual.

Before describing people who dare to disagree with you as 'technophobes' it would probably be wise to make sure that is accurate.

Any scenario featuring 20th level casters needs to have a reason why they fight to the death and can be defeated instead of escaping via teleportation, rising via clones, was actually using astral projection and so was not killed etc.
Rise of the Runelords did it well as Karzoug was still constrained by his method of escaping Armageddon which also pushed my players to kill him fast and not give him time to achieve a position when he could escape

If as a GM one of my players told me I had made a mistake because he had read the scenario and I had done something different. He would be out of that game immediately, or I would cease running that game. The degree of poor behavior this is on the behalf of the player is unbelievable to me, I have not come across such poor behavior in 30 years of gaming.

If you did not mean to come across as a dick you failed because you are acting as one and frankly you are lucky you can find anyone willing to GM for you.

Hero Lab Online looks like a product I would rather not have anything to do with. It costs more , gives me no new features I want or can see any value in and will fail on the not unheard of occassions I cannot have internet access. Total failure to interest me.

I can't think of anything I would ban (except Noble Drow) with the usual requirement that more unusual races need a good explanation from the player before being taken.
(Ok I actually ban Gnomes and Halflings because I have an irrational hatred of them but that is nothing to do with this campaign)

Deleted for being to negative. I just don't like mythic

Be careful mythic rules are a dreadful campaign killer when used by pc's. I have moved my copy of the m mythic rules to the attic were they can slowly degrade over the years without wrecking another campaign

Nice! I've found John Hawkins' statblocks so they could be sorely tested soon. Thanks again for sharing!

They are a scary bunch of optimizers, you're right Kevin!

If you find you cannot find a particular statblock and would like it pm me. I still have all the hero labs files , apart from the end of book 6 which I am still working on.

Given the fairly strict limits on how many dead you can control, my players found undead were not much use, After a signifigant investment they had a few dangerous undead, but found basic skeletons/zombies/minions/boggards mainly useful as mobile alarms to bring the attention of the pc's to whatever was killing them. For that they were useful (particularly after they had bells attached)

Hexor and Vexor would I think be dismissed when the tower collapses, however the binding token for them in the tower has their true names so if you keep that and have the appropriate spells you could bind them again as guardians for another lair.

Grumblejack became a PC in my campaign.

It is hard to say much about book 6 as it will be so different for each group , my group has just reached roughly the end of their 3 year reign. They have brought Sexual Equality, Freedom of Religion, Asmodeus Land, peacefully incorporated the Ice Elves, Frost Giants, and Ireani into the kingdom and generally acted a fairly benign tyrants. They have brought slavery, prostitution and gladitorial events and 2out of 3 of these are popular. They have kept assassinations , the ritual sacrifice of babies to hide the undead nature of many of them and their actual devilish allies secret. They are taking the long view at the moment they are slowly winning people over particularly the young so that in the long run everyone will be heart and soul a devil worshipper.

For the childrens crusade they had their converted Peri fight a Horned devil and be defeated being dragged off to Hell . Then each family got a 10gp compensation for the economic cost of their child wondering off and a complimentary ticket to the next gladiatorial show

For the third request I have not yet heard better than my players plan they purchased a Soul trapping Gem and requested he take it, he could not refuse and because he accepted the gem, no saving throw.....

They traded him in to some devils for various other benefits, I could think of no way around this cunning plan