| Jon Yamato 705 |
My files suggested we started playing around August 2018, which is about standard for one of our AP campaigns--we always add a lot of material. In this case we played Azlant as a kingdom-building game, which seemed like a natural fit. We just finished today. There's obviously a lot more that could happen but it was an agreed-on natural end point. I did a series of little vignettes to show where the Republic might be 1, 2, 3...15 years in the future.
It was a 1 player campaign with 6 PCs, which is our standard house style. We used custom kingdom-building rules (took us about 3 months to write and test, back in 2018) loosely based on the ones in Kingmaker, with the addition of a Civilization-style technology tree.
Episode 1 ran pretty much as written, except that the PC party started out with more leadership authority than in the module, which was natural since they were to become the colony leaders. They caught on to the fate of the lost colony fairly quickly, as I expected (my player is sharp and his PCs were private detectives back in Andoran, so well equipped to solve mysteries).
Episode 2 was rocky, because the plotline with Helekhterie is a frustrating distraction from the fate of the old colony and attacks on the new one. The PCs did a lot of hexploration (though it took them forever to finish the island--I had made it bigger, about 11 miles by 7, with one-mile hexes). They built up their hometown but were slow to make any more towns, as the island seemed quite dangerous to them.
Episode 3 ran pretty much as written, and touched off a period of local war with the aboleth. I had to develop a number of aboleth bases. A gillfolk town on the nearby southern island, based on the town in Carrion Crown #4, got a lot of play. The colony by this point controlled much of the dry west coast of Ancorato but had not gotten far into the eastern forest/jungle areas.
Homebrew plotlines began to predominate around this point: Azlanti ghosts, aboleth bases, locathah politics, ceratiodi politics....
Episode 4 was pretty thoroughly rewritten. I put an aboleth in Talislantri who had subverted Rillkimatai's personal physician and was keeping him drugged so that he could neither govern effectively nor choose a successor. The PCs got involved in exposing and stopping this plan, though the aboleth got away. My main observation is that the difficulty level of #4 was WAY higher than any other part of the AP: the author built frightfully effective NPCs. I was using NPCs cribbed from #4 throughout #5 and #6 as they were much more effective than what was provided in those modules.
Episode 5 was touched off by undead attacks on the colony's locathah allies, and a homebrew island of allied undead, to build Auberon up more (I did not like the "couch potato lich" quality of the published storyline). Auberon's tower was still very easy for the PCs. We capped the PC level at 14 so I cut down Auberon a bit, but I'm not even sure it was necessary. Six well equipped PCs can really do a number on small numbers of foes, and Paizo seldom provides more than small numbers.
After this we went into a lengthy homebrew storyline in which veiled masters from the Mordant Spire (which in our timeline had been lost to them a century ago) tried to wreck colony society with subtle multi-pronged attacks. The PCs did a brilliant job sorting this out--over and over my notes contain months of escalating attacks and then a note "but this didn't happen" because the PCs nipped it in the bud. (The great release of the Azlanti ghosts would have been fun to run! But kudos to the PCs for stopping it, because it would have been quite nasty.)
The PCs developed technology that let them track algholthu mental links (via special tracking animals) and eventually triggered Episode 6 by hunting down Ochymua, who had been harassing them indirectly through minions for a long time. (There was a plot to sell ioun stones that made the user vulnerable to aboleth control, for example, that they eventually balked.) They easily overcome Ochymua's minions, but Ochymua escaped with its life. However, I was not able to find a convincing reason for it to try again after having been so badly thrashed.
By this point the PCs had 5 towns on and around Ancorato and had developed a LOT of technology, much more than I had really expected. They decided to go after the veiled master at the Mordant Spire, who was drawing mythic power from the dead shade of Acavna. Enormously to my surprise, the PCs decided to bring Acavna back. So the end of the campaign was a series of hard hit-and-run raids on the Mordant Spire to weaken their grip on Acavna, and then a bold journey (by train!) through the Boneyard with Acavna's ghost, ending up on the Moon. (They had previously lured Runequake to the moon, petrified it, and rededicated the temple on its back. These PCs think big.)
We ended on that climatic series of fights, and a scene of Acavna granting boons to PCs and NPCs who had aided in her rebirth.
Lessons from the game in a second post.