Kris Schnee's page

Our party just finished "Fires of Creation", which led me to realize how to shorten the campaign a bit:

Get a large, sturdy cart, possibly motorized. Move that ancient fusion reactor onto it. Tilt it mostly horizontal, with swivel mount for rapid rotation, and leave the plasma beam on. Ride mobile humongous lightsaber directly to Silver Mount and win. =)

For a whole campaign? You'd probably want to introduce a small problem, then expand on it. The PCs are apparently land-based, so start with a coastal problem and the PCs' role in it. How about an earthquake/tsunami with suspicious magical elements? Ties in well with the geography and references the idea of Poseidon as an earthquake god. Have the quake unearth something long forgotten and dangerous that the PCs are assigned to check out. (Eg. monsters emerge from a sealed crypt to fulfill an ancient contract to attack the royal family; the PCs stop the attack and are sent to visit the crypt and follow up.) At the end of part 1, the prince learns of the mermaid and the PCs are tasked in part 2 with making contact with her. Something like that?

If you dont want to move up complexity and tour group feels more confortable with a system that do not pay sttention to detalle, the easiest waynis to ignore the +1 light hammer. Make it a light hammer, period.

Ir you want, tell them it is magic, and fancier than a regular hammer. It glows, never rust, looks better, etc. But has no mechanical bonus at all because you (and they) preffer to play without detailed mechanics.

Makes sense to give it non-mechanical bonuses like you said. I need to talk this over with the players, but in general they can't have it both ways: minimal rules plus specific mechanical benefits for all the gadgets. It's tough already just balancing the difficulty because Pathfinder assumes insta-healing potions are common and Fate discourages any such thing.

I've been running an Iron Gods campaign with four players, getting nearly to the end of book 1. But since we're all more interested in the roleplaying than in detailed mechanics, we've been using the Fate Accelerated RPG system. It's gone fairly well so far.

The game's technology is starting to become a problem, though. There are plenty of crunchy rules for things like the "+1 light hammer" that can be found on one deck, not to mention grenades or batteries. (I also realized we have zero party members who can wear that neraplast armor without modification, because we have some strange party members.*) I'm trying to field questions from the players about how to handle items like that hammer, when they don't seem eager even to move up to the complexity of regular Fate rules.

Has anyone had experience at trying to adapt gadgets or similar magic items to Fate or another rules-light system? Particularly with players adverse to detailed mechanics?

*(Ratfolk, anthromorphic pegasus, thumbless mongoose, human slowly turning into a unicorn. Yeah, we play strange characters in this group. The attempt at stealth in our short-lived "Kingmaker" campaign did not go well.)

How about playing a Witch? They have CLW on their spell list and can learn the very useful Healing Hex at level 1. From there you can develop in a few different directions, focusing on buffing, debuffing, or offense. (The Extra Hex feat lets you also start with the abusively fun Slumber hex too.) Or even melee, I suppose, with the weird hair/nails powers. In roleplaying terms they can be pretty much any alignment, can have a nature theme, and have a familiar, so you can get most of the druid feel, be a useful healer, and not be limited to the party's CLW-wand holder.

Played this scenario yesterday at PFS. The sidekick NPC was so unsympathetic, I voted to not bother risking our lives near the end. Turns out that our good deed early on was not only useless but triggered worse things happening later, so I came away feeling that our work had been pointless. Apparently you can finish this scenario very quickly just by making the easiest decisions: "Yep, that's a nice stone. We're going home now."