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Rage quitting is immature. 'nuff said.
Jade Regent: Across frozen land
Carrion Crown: Poltergeist meets Underworld
I totally agree. I love every adventure that Raging Swan Press has published and the Shadowed Keep is my favourite by far!
We Be Kobolds?
If you are looking for good 3rd party for Jade Regent you might want to check out the Way of Ki books by Legendary Games. It basically takes the ki mechanic and cranks it up to 11 with a bunch of new mechanics for ki, feats, and I think an archetype or 2. The biggest thing that always comes to my mind in this is that it gives you a feat tree to get the ability to do a Haduken. I've got all of the Legendary Games add ons for Jade Regent, too, but thanks for mentioning them for others who might be interested :)
Since the next campaign I am running is Jade Regent, I was ecstatic to find this: Dragon Tiger Ox by Little Red Goblin Games.
Thank you. I love the support you're showing for 3P publishers!
Anything for Tian Xia :)
If you love river pirates, reflavour Staggy's bandits as river pirates. The initial bandit camp is near a river anyways. You could give them a skiff or two for fun. Staggy and his minions could be moved from the fort onto a boat that sails around the two lakes south of the fort. In fact, the fort could be used as a small port or base of operations. For extra adventure, perhaps their main base is on Candlemere Island... Have a couple of skiffs or a barge at the fort/port/base that the party could seize to help them get to the pirate boat. Name the boat The Nymph Queen, just to throw off your players!
Mercenaries of one of the River Kingdoms or even Issia who have been hired to portray 'bandits' in the hopes of keeping the area unstabilized until they are ready to claim the area themselves, bleeding the Rostlanders of gold and resources. That would explain why they don't need to 'profit' from their banditry. It's more for show than for dough. The 'Stag Lord' could even be a fairly important (and ultimately recognizable) person in this faction and will help foreshadow any political stuff you throw at the party later on.
Well, if you're willing to do a lot of prep work I would suggest a couple of old school modules: I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City
Both are dungeon crawls and they'll love either one. They're highly rated as some of the best ever.
I am mostly a dm and am involved in 2-3 campaigns at the same time. Most groups used to have a character design session, partly to make sure all the desired roles were filled, partly to find synergies, and partly to help the weaker players design their characters. Then along came HeroLab. And a lot of players started designing characters at home, because it was easy. However, groups became more like PFS groups, you never knew what was coming to the table. Party cohesion went out the window. And for some reason, these same players, after designing their characters in a vacuum, play as if they were in a vacuum. Add in the fact that all of the players I game with who play PFS use HeroLab and I'm not sure which is mostly responsible or if they both play a strong hand in less party cohesion. What boggles my mind is that these same players were great teammates for years *before* these two things came long.
...when the party keeps negotiating treaties for territories with random monster encounters rather than murderhoboing them as is their natural inclination.
I'm a huge fan of all the Raging Swan products, especially their adventures. Same goes for the Legendary Games adventure path add ons. I am using the Little Red Goblin Games Heroes of the East line and Dragon Tiger Ox book for my Jade Regent campaign. Also Rite Publishing's Kaidan material and adventures are adding to Jade Regent. Purple Duck Games' Legendary items series is a godsend for treasure hordes. All in all, I am quite pleased with the variety and quality of 3PP products for Pathfinder.
I came from 3.5 and my first PF exposure was Rise of the Runelords and I had a blast! Since then I'm in Carrion Crown and Iron Gods. On the dm side, I'm nearing the end of Kingmaker and Jade Regent is up next.
There are a few things that I've done to introduce the proper theme. I separated the fact that there is a Chinese and a Japanese flavour to different parts of the campaign, rather than a pan asian mishmash. However, if you want a great example of a pan asian world to help you with the AP, read the Initiate Brother duology by Sean Russell. 1. The campaign starts outside of Goka (Hong Kong) and progresses by ship past Chinese lands (tian-shu) towards Minkai (Japanese). It's all asian, all day, every day. 2. The Chinese (Tian-shu) believe in 5 elements (Wu Xing). These are earth, fire, metal, water and wood. 3. The Japanese (Tian-min) believe in 5 elements (Godai). These are air, earth, fire, water, void. 4. Wizards in my Jade Regent campaign will all be elementalists and either follow wu xing or godai. 5. I will not allow certain core and base classes and I will limit the archetypes to asian flavoured ones. 6. I've limited weapons and armour to eastern flavoured ones. 7. To deal with the very different concepts of culture and honour, I am giving all characters the Civilized trait for free so that they may make a roll on Knowledge/Local *at any time* when they are unsure of what to do. 8. For quotes, which is what the OP was asking for, you need to draw from 3 different real world anaolgies. Since I'm doing these from memory, I might have the PF reference wrong. Pao-Lung is Buddhism. Sangpotshi is Shintoism. And Tamashigo is Bushido. What you want to look for is books that have koans, the cryptic little phrases and paragraphs that one is meant to meditate upon for deeper meaning. Good books for quotes/koans (you can often get these as pdfs to make searching quicker): Pao-Lung/Buddhism (also Confucius):
Sangpotshi/Shintoism (also Zen):
Bushido:
There are more on my shelf at home that I'll post later. The main source of misunderstanding for players in an eastern campaign is honour. If you can manage honour, you'll have a great foundation. Western honour is personal. It is simple and easy to understand: Who insulted me and where are they so I can kill them and regain my honour? Eastern honour is family/clan centric. Much harder to understand for us westerners because of the layers of complexity. One has to balance the honour of the self with the greater need of family/clan honour, which often conflicts. One should always choose family/clan honour over personal dishonour. And one can always expunge dishonour with an honourable (ritual) death. Easterners do not fear death because they believe in reincarnation. And as western gamers, the concept is foreign to us plus we are attached to our characters and don't want to kill them off for a nebulous concept like family honour. Remember also, asian people are like cats. No matter how well or how poorly you treat them, they will always smile at you even while plotting your demise. Sense Motive will be very important for characters!
It's hard to tell from the cover, but does this module have eastern themes? |