Maynotcare's page

Sorry, I'm not going to fight another GM for players. Check back in November.

...... seriously?

I finally finish getting all my planning done, post an interest check, write up a recruitment post at work, and when I come home from dinner, there's a Kingmaker recruitment posted by someone else? REALLY?

Whatever. Have fun. I'm not competing for players and I'm not taking leftovers. I'll try again in November.

Okay, definitely interest, good, hadn't seen any recruitment threads in a while so I figured that was probably a good thing, but since I'm refocusing the campaign on intrigue and lore, and also using gestalt rules, I wanted to make sure that wouldn't scare off too many potential applicants.

I will post an official recruitment thread sometime this week, but one major change is that the starting level is going to be 3, rather than 1, so that the characters have enough experience under their belts to be local heroes, veterans, or otherwise well-known for something. So keep that in mind for your character concepts, and feel free to get started considering their background and an answer to the question: "What has your character done that would make them an excellent selection?" It can be as simple as being of noble blood and committed to the Swordlords' cause of independence from Surtovan rule to a detailed description of your heroic deeds in the constant border skirmishes against centaurs from the Nomen foothills to the southeast of Restov.

I'm also going to have two separate sets of guidelines: one for the 'charter holder' and one for everyone else. The Swordlords are already rocking the boat by spending lavishly on financing the founding of several new marches in the Stolen Lands, they don't want to compound things by supporting a half-orc barbarian as lord of one of the new settlements... though they certainly don't care who serves as general, treasurer, etc. Note that this just means that there is only one person the Swordlords will empower and recognize as 'leader'. It doesn't mean that the group has to do the same, and you're quite welcome to do as you please, especially after Restov has released all the funds they've promised.

Finally, since it was asked, I would prefer to stick to Paizo material for the initial applications just so that I don't have to go reading through 3rd party books I don't even own in order to figure out what kind of a character you've got and how they will fit into the game. I know that some 3rd party books are especially high quality, especially considering all the Kingmaker-related material that Legendary Games has put out, but I can't even keep up with all the official Paizo releases.

So, earlier this year I expressed interest in eventually running a Kingmaker game here, and I've been working over the summer on rebuilding the adventure path to utilize rules/themes from Occult Adventures and Ultimate Intrigue, as well as reworking the encounters to be less of a 1 encounter per day splosion-fest. (Or at least ratchet things up a fair amount when there's only one creature present.)

So, before posting an actual recruitment thread and solidifying the character creation rules, I would like to see how much interest there is in a heavily modified Kingmaker campaign that uses gestalt rules and has a much heavier focus on politics and delving into the mysteries of why the Stolen Lands have remained an unsettled wilderness through the centuries.

You can always edit the percentages for whether something under the base value can actually be found, but there's plenty of reasons that something nobody is producing might be found in town. Maybe an innkeeper knows of some adventurers with a cache of scrolls they were planning to offload, or that Jeorj the Grocer accepted a bunch of scrolls as payment for trail rations and other supplies. Knowing the specific scrolls might suggest all sorts of NPCs who might have such an item stashed away.

It's a 3rd level spell with a range of touch. Which means that:

A. You're not going to have an army of wizards casting the spell.

B. Even if you did, they would get cut down by attacks of opportunity and/or readied attacks before delivering it.

C. Clockwork dragons are huge targets, so that's where you want to put your anti-magic defenses, making this spell even less useful.

It's great for certain situations, especially if it's just one or two constructs, but against an entire army of clockwork soldiers, it's just simply not effective enough.

It seems to me that the party should at least hear about the Tiger Lords long before their attack on Tatzlford in order to properly foreshadow these events better. At a minimum, the party ought to be aware of the other chartered expeditions by the time they found their kingdom, and developing relations with their neighbors would be an excellent way to bring the kingdom-building side of the campaign to life. Heck, you could even precede the events of BfB by having events where patrols in the west go missing, or villagers flee east from Drelev, fearing for their lives as Tiger Lords raiding parties pillage the lands.

I was busy yesterday, and am frankly amazed you haven't gotten any feedback yet, so... here's a few things I would suggest in a more general format to change things up, keep it interesting for those who are replaying the campaign, and maybe make it more mythic.

1. If Nyrissa isn't even present yet in Book 1, then the Stag Lord should have a connection to Pitax instead. Perhaps make him one of the city's former lordlings ousted by Irovetti's takeover of the city, thus explaining his belief that he has a right to claim lordship over this new territory, explaining the funds with which he equipped his mercenaries, and why he has resorted to drinking himself into oblivion. From there, you can re-contextualize a lot of the actions of the bandits, perhaps even Happs is perfectly aware of who and what the Stag Lord is, but they're mercenaries from Pitax, not knights of some Brevic noble, so he's still going to be motivated by greed and lust.

2. I would make sure that if Nyrissa is interacting with the players even early on, that you really play up the fey angle with her, and remember that she has multiple motivations. She wants to appease the Eldest by bottling the Stolen Lands as a gift... but she also wants to discover what happened to her lost love, Count Ranalc, and now that she's no longer in the First World, finding him might become a greater urgency, especially to find allies. To play up the fey angle, I would start by playing her as if she believes herself to be the protagonist in a faerie tale, spinning a tale of woe at how she was mistreated by her peers and wishes only to return home and tend to her loyal subjects... how her peers were jealous of the undying love she shared for her beloved (never have her actually name him) and banished him so that they could no longer be together. But most importantly, she shouldn't seem evil per se. Honestly, the most insidious thing you could do is try and get Nyrissa a seat on the new kingdom's council. It would seem obvious that she would want to be a ruler, but she fits really well in several other positions as well, from High Priestess (urging the people to worship her) to Grand Diplomat. Your players may recall her being the big bad final boss, but if you play your cards right, you just might convince them that she's going to be 'good' this time through with a new enemy. Perhaps even the Eldest will be their mythic opponents!

3. After book 2, stop the hex-crawling and make that all dealt with through edicts. Especially in a mythic campaign, riding around mapping the place doesn't really fit, and you're going to want to instead focus on amping up the adventure at the encounter sites. When word arrives of some problem in Varnhold, it would make sense for the party to not just ride out on their own, but to muster their troops and march them over there as a show of strength/solidarity. The party would be able to move much faster, arriving first to deal with the monsters settled in the town, but then their troops would arrive, garrisoning the abandoned town and beginning the process of scouting the surrounding terrain. After all, a dozen scouting parties can chart terrain much faster than just one, and the party can then quickly react to discoveries, rushing out to negotiate with the centaurs or to lead a small force of troops against a suitably more mythic opponent than would normally be found. The real point though, is that you want to keep the players engaged with their kingdom. Give something for their people to do at all times, even if it's just finding encounter sites, making sure they have well-supplied base camps to return to, etc.

If anyone would be interested in something a bit more intimate, I've been interested for a while in running a 1-2 player Kingmaker that would also utilize gestalt, and possibly a bonus level or two to account for the lack of action economy. I don't want to poach players from GM Barrister though, so I'll wait until that recruitment is done.

Exalted has some interesting concepts that can easily be stolen to use here, using the Graces possessed by the Fair Folk of that system. Each Fair Folk (basically fey, also called 'Raksha') has five Graces, each of which can be crafted into items. The Sword Grace is one, and fits Briar in its traditional form, but there's also the Cup, Ring, Staff, and Heart Graces, each corresponding to compassion, temperance, conviction, or will, respectively. So a version of the item in question which took the form of a Staff might allow the user to Charm or Dominate other persons, while an item crafted from the villain's Heart Grace might take the form of a gem that enables a caster to easily overpower an enemy's spell resistance and Will saves.

Good suggestions, Maynotcare. Can you expand on how you'd handle those aspects to make Book 6 better?

Well, most of my thoughts have been going into my rebuild of Kingmaker as a dragon-themed campaign rather than a fey-themed one, but some suggestions:

1. Thousandbreaths should be a Kingdom. While there should be individual encounters within the realm, there really ought to be a tactical reason/advantage to march troops into Nyrissa's realm, wage war against the evil fey found there, and fortify positions as ground is gained. This would likely draw out her more powerful allies, such as Ilthuliak, which the party would then have to deal with lest their armies be decimated, but would allow the kingdom to truly participate in the conquest of Nyrissa's realm.

2. Civil War in Brevoy. Personally, I would have this start in Book 5, with King Noleski taking advantage of the party being too distracted by Irovetti to lend aid to the Swordlords in Restov. That means that the players would need to make hard decisions about whether to aid their former patrons once the war with Irovetti is won, or fortify their own positions. Getting involved in a protracted civil war in Brevoy would weaken their own defenses and give Nyrissa a chance to spread more blooms throughout the Stolen Lands, but victory would mean grateful allies happy to assist.

3. Allies and enemies. The GM should keep a tab on all the named NPCs that are still alive by the start of Book 6... and use ALL of them. If the Stag Lord escaped justice at the end of Book 1, perhaps now he's a general of an additional army in service to Nyrissa. If instead of absorbing Varnhold after Book 3, they instead gave rule over to Pendrod and established deep diplomatic ties, then perhaps he'll donate a large shipment of cold iron weapons sufficient to give an army a bonus when attacking fey. There are really too many possibilities to run through all of them exhaustively, but remember that even the dead can come back to haunt the party, either literally as the undead, or via living relatives.

I feel that where Book 6 really fails is in turning the kingdom into a classic 'damsel in distress' that needs to be rescued, after the party has likely spent months or even years of real life time developing the kingdom. Book 6 plays out more or less the same whether you have a little 7-hex barony or have settled the entire Stolen Lands and started conquering the River Kingdoms. Everything still ends up hinging on the actions of the party, rather than incorporating the nation into the effort.

Why shouldn't men and women volunteer for the army and march on The Thousandbreaths to wage war against the evil fey? Book 6 should be all about every decision the party has made finally coming to fruition, whether it is making the people love them and having a loyal populace willing to follow them into Hell, or pardoning evil Gyronna worshipers who will now ally with Nyrissa to conduct foul rituals throughout the kingdom. It ought to matter whether the party spared Akiros Ismort and gave him a chance at redemption, how they treated the rescued survivors of Varnhold and how they honored his death, but instead none of that matters.

Well, technically, because oh how tarnishing works, black scaled kobolds should have the closest affinity to silver dragons, but there's definitely room in the region for some white scaled kobolds. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that each region (ie, each full map page) is approximately half the area of Belgium. More than enough room for plenty of tribes, but they should certainly know about each others' existence.

Should I start out by sketching up specific character concepts I am interested in playing? Since I am open to a wide variety of campaigns and there are so many ways to balance a campaign for solo play, I figured it would be better to start with which APs I would be interested in GMing/playing in, then establish ground rules, and then figure out what character to play.

Well, I had considered adding red scaled kobolds as well, but I didn't want to drown the players in kobolds before the campaign even started. It's entirely possible that when I get around to running this finally, the party will love the kobolds and I'll end up doing something like replacing Hargulka and his tribe with kobolds, or perhaps a large tribe could replace the boggards in the Hooktongue Slough.

Huh, I had posted about wanting to do something like this in the Open Call thread a few days ago, and somehow only just noticed this thread today. Would it be okay to continue hijacking this thread to help with hooking up players and GMs who are interested in 1-on-1 campaigns?

My post from the Open Call thread:

I've been wanting to take a dive into the PbP format for a while now, and it occurred to me today that a duet (one player, one GM) would be a great way to keep a story moving along at a quick pace without having to worry about keeping 5+ players all on track and working out schedules and conflicts and such. Ideally what I would love is to find someone interested in a reciprocal duet: where we each GM a campaign that the other is the only PC in. (Using gestalt rules, higher level character(s) than normal, multiple PCs under the control of one player, etc, depending upon personal preference.)

Campaigns which I would feel comfortable running in this format include (but are not necessarily limited to): Rise of the Runelords, Kingmaker, Jade Regent, Skull & Shackles, Shattered Star, Wrath of the Righteous, Giantslayer. Coincidentally, these are also the APs I would be most interested in playing in. (Addendum: I would love to run or play in a mix-and-match campaign that combined elements of multiple Varisian APs into an interesting new gestalt.)

I own all of the hardcover books and about two dozen additional splatbooks, in addition to the APs listed above. If anyone is interested, I would love to discuss this in greater detail.

Oh, definitely there will be plenty of agents working for Choral, most of whom will have no idea they're working for a great wyrm red dragon. House Rogarvia ruled Brevoy for a couple hundred years, after all, which is quite a long while on the timescale of tasty morta-, erm, I mean humans. And the Swordlords are going to be opposed to Choral, but primarily as a faction unto themselves. My thought is that House Surtova has enough support to claim the throne, but Rostland has all the food production, whereas Issia traditionally had to rely on raiding along the Sellen to support itself, and that's no longer viable now that thousands of crusaders are headed north along the river each year, perfectly willing to hone their skills against brigands along the way. When the Swordlords decide to finally secede, that cuts off a huge chunk of the food supply, since the former lands of House Rogarvia account for half of Rostland.

I also see that part of Brevoy as having the least support for House Rogarvia, since they still remember the family as brutal dictators who were every bit their progenitor in so many ways. Instead, Choral rallies support from House Lebeda (the other half of Rostland) and House Garess (which controls most of Brevoy's mineral wealth). The Swordlords control the area of just one house out of seven, but have the best trained fighters, the best stocked granaries, and they believe they have allies to call on to the south. Their allies are knocked out of the equation by Vordakai's abduction of Maegar Varn and much of the rest of Varnhold and then Ilthuliak's invasion of the players' kingdom, but House Lebeda and House Garess starting up a third faction in the Brevic Civil War changes the entire equation and forces King Noleski to flee New Stetven for the safety of Port Ice.

The real fun bit is that all three wyrms are playing games from the shadows instead of openly declaring themselves, knowing that to do so would unite their enemies against them. But yes, there's definitely legitimate reasons for people to support Choral and Ilthuliak. Choral did unite Brevoy and ushered in an era of prosperity for many, even though the people of eastern Rostland suffered under House Rogarvia's rule, and Ilthuliak has had quite an influence on Pitax, since she's given Nyrissa's fey a very free hand with the city, turning it into a sort of Oppara of the north, drawing in artists of all sorts, although at a high cost. (My thought is that a number of Leanan Sidhe are posing as 'normal' fey and preying on the artists.)

I have actually been thinking about this for a long while, and decided it might help to write down all my thoughts on this conversion both for feedback, sharing, and perhaps extra ideas.

The core of the idea is rebuilding the Kingmaker campaign to revolve not around Nyrissa, but rather the intrigue between the three ancient wyrms of the region: Choral, Ilthuliak, and Silverstep. (Personally, I feel that Silverstep is more than likely a translation/transliteration or nickname, but that's neither here nor there, since the party would pretty much only deal with him through his daughter, Eranex.) There's already more than enough elements of the draconic to make this conversion quite simple, especially with Nyrissa's weak connection to the campaign's plot early on, and I don't plan on tossing her completely, just downgrading her to Ilthuliak's ally/lieutenant/consort. (I personally like the last option best, but can understand it having 'squicky' implications to others.)

To this end, several changes would be made throughout the story to better integrate this conflict into the story and foreshadow things better.

To begin with, I would replace the mites in book 1 with a second tribe of black-scaled kobolds, turning the conflict into a holy crusade, with the new tribe worshiping an effigy of Ilthuliak herself, still certain that their patron will once again turn her eye to the Narlmarches and reward their loyalty. The Stag Lord, meanwhile, is a distraction to keep Brevoy's eyes on the Greenbelt rather than the River Kingdom of Pitax, where Ilthuliak is staging a coup to claim the city as her own in the guise of Adrienna Irovetti. His alcoholism stems from the realization that he's just a pawn of Nyrissa, that his men are nothing but bandits and thugs, and his dreams of founding a new River Kingdom in the Greenbelt will never come to fruition. To this end, definitely play up the angle of Happs collecting 'taxes', and make it obvious that the bandits are all wearing uniforms, and the silver medallions could even be similar to the seals of office carried by Brevoy's magistrates.

While Nyrissa's ploy with the Stag Lord did indeed keep attention away from events in Pitax, in book 2 there are now several new settlements being founded in the Stolen Lands, and this is clearly a threat to Ilthuliak's longterm plans at a time when she's far too busy consolidating power in Pitax to deal with the upstarts without showing herself, which would tip her hand too early. As a wyrm, she could decimate all four nations with ease, but then Brevoy would be ready for her, hiring dragonslayers from across the Inner Sea to deal with the threat on their doorstep. To this end, Nyrissa sends one of her allies to spur a local troll into uniting the trolls of the southern Greenbelt into a unified force that will slow expansion and perhaps even destroy the upstarts. There's also the possibility that the trolls will find Briar, which Nyrissa is still searching for, but Nyrissa quickly turns her focus to recruiting more allies, including barbarian tribes from the north. The biggest change here, aside from adding in components like Hargulka's Monster Kingdom, is to make Candlemere into an ancient wizard's tower sitting atop a cyclopean tomb. The wizard is long dead, slain by the cyclops wight whose tomb the wizard had been slowly excavating. This should help foreshadow Vordakai a bit better, and get the party interested in the history of the region, with murals on the walls of the tomb depicting events of the years since Earthfall with uncanny accuracy, and seeming to depict events that have not yet even come to pass.

Books three and four will be swapped, allowing Vordakai to be a full-powered lich, and with the tournament moved forward from book 5 so that the party encounters 'Irovetti' early on. In this case, however, the tournament serves to get Drelev out of the way, and so that Ilthuliak can size up the players personally, now that Nyrissa's plots have failed spectacularly twice. For the most part, this means rebalancing a lot of encounters in the Hooktongue Slough for a lower level party.

In the revamped Varnhold Vanishing, puzzle pieces start faling together as the party encounters Eranex, who is working to find Briar before Nyrissa can, and discovers a big hint to the secret behind The Vanishing of Brevoy's royal house a decade earlier. It becomes clear that someone acquired a large number of soul jars just like Vordakai's, and that the Rogarvias may still be 'alive', trapped in soul jars somewhere. The truth is that Ilthuliak had acquired dozens of the magical items from archaeological digs throughout the region over the centuries, and used them all at once to capture every living descendant of her rival, Choral. Choral went into hiding in the Golushkins, seizing hold of the dwarven holdfast there, and has spent the intervening years trying to discover who was responsible while keeping Brevoy's political situation destabilized so that he can reclaim the throne once he's ready to enact revenge. Vordakai's actions alert Choral's spy network, and the players will have to deal with an adult red dragon showing up to claim Vordakai's lair just as soon as they defeat the ancient lich and begin freeing the townfolk of Varnhold.

Book 5 no longer needs the tournament at the start, since the players will already be distracted by events far to the east and trying to puzzle out being attacked by a red dragon. Seemingly overnight, everything will fall apart, as Choral's machinations cause Brevoy to descend into civil war just as Ilthuliak, in her guise of Duchess Adrienna Irovetti, launches a surprise attack on the party's kingdom. No help will be coming from Restov, and indeed they will likely beg the party for help even as marauders invade the western half of the players' kingdom. Neither Ilthuliak nor Choral will show themselves directly at this point though, and confronting Irovetti should result in a scene similar to Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, as she retreats to Nyrissa's pocket realm of Thousandbreaths, leaving Briar behind in her secondary lair in Pitax.

Book 6 should be especially filled with additional intrigue, as it becomes clear that there's more that two factions in the Brevic Civil War, and Choral tries to court favor with the players in order to get them to help track down the fled Ilthuliak and Nyrissa so that he can focus on winning the war in Brevoy, while Eranex tries to get the party to turn Briar over to her for safekeeping rather than use it against Nyrissa and Ilthuliak. Ultimately, this can play out many different ways, but Choral appearing just as Nyrissa and Ilthuliak are slain, then attacking the party in fury at being denied the pleasure of killing his rival by puny humans is certainly a good option.

So, thoughts? Input? Critique?

I've been wanting to take a dive into the PbP format for a while now, and it occurred to me today that a duet (one player, one GM) would be a great way to keep a story moving along at a quick pace without having to worry about keeping 5+ players all on track and working out schedules and conflicts and such. Ideally what I would love is to find someone interested in a reciprocal duet: where we each GM a campaign that the other is the only PC in. (Using gestalt rules, higher level character(s) than normal, multiple PCs under the control of one player, etc, depending upon personal preference.)

Campaigns which I would feel comfortable running in this format include (but are not necessarily limited to): Rise of the Runelords, Kingmaker, Jade Regent, Skull & Shackles, Shattered Star, Wrath of the Righteous, Giantslayer. Coincidentally, these are also the APs I would be most interested in playing in. (Addendum: I would love to run or play in a mix-and-match campaign that combined elements of multiple Varisian APs into an interesting new gestalt.)

I own all of the hardcover books and about two dozen additional splatbooks, in addition to the APs listed above. If anyone is interested, I would love to discuss this in greater detail.

I'm kind of new to PbP here, so I doubt I would get in anyway, but I love this concept and want to see the characters submitted, especially since some of the ideas tossed around already have been very thought-provoking. In particular, I find myself wondering how things would work out with a vampire bloatmage, since they would still sort of have blood flowing through their veins and a simple mechanic for acquiring more on demand.

Doesnotcare wrote:

Take the wizard's age, figure out the appropriate age category for a dragon of the same age, work out a level adjustment, and take an appropriate number of levels away. (The typical rule is CR = level, but dragons are pretty strong, so I'd go off of hit dice instead.) Assuming someone in the 26-50 age category, that's a juvenile dragon, and if silver, that's 13 hit dice. So the wizard loses 13 levels, but is now a juvenile silver dragon, with all of the abilities, stat adjustments, etc.

Having played lots of monsters, CR as level actually works...

Yes, it generally works quite well, and honestly the wizard is going to end up wanting to either undo the wish or retrain levels, because wizard is a terrible class for dragons to take, but a true dragon in the hands of a player is quite ridiculously strong if abused. As long as the player intends to remain a caster (likely by retraining all remaining levels to sorcerer), then yeah, using CR as level is probably fine in this case, but dragons are one of the few cases where I would exercise extreme caution. They get massive racial stat bonuses, a huge number of abilities, and have full BAB, all good saves, tons of hit points, tons of skill points, and are pretty much just generally good at everything. Consider that a CR 20 Wyrm is essentially a level 17 sorcerer with a TON of additional abilities, incredible stats across the board (+14 to all three mental attributes!) and 27 hit dice. Sure, you miss out on 9th level casting, but you gain an awful lot in return.

Take the wizard's age, figure out the appropriate age category for a dragon of the same age, work out a level adjustment, and take an appropriate number of levels away. (The typical rule is CR = level, but dragons are pretty strong, so I'd go off of hit dice instead.) Assuming someone in the 26-50 age category, that's a juvenile dragon, and if silver, that's 13 hit dice. So the wizard loses 13 levels, but is now a juvenile silver dragon, with all of the abilities, stat adjustments, etc.

It's not an issue of whether I could run the campaign, as I have plenty of GM experience, including in a text-based environment, and the formatting here seems simple enough. Rather, it's the commitment of running an entire Adventure Path via PbP with a stranger. I browsed through this part of the forum, and it is rather quite sobering how many campaigns never even get halfway through the first book before dying. I wouldn't want to start a campaign I wasn't sure I could commit to in the long-term.

I find this highly intriguing as a concept, from both directions. I don't have much experience with forum posting, and I'm kind of new here, but I've done something similar to this with a friend via IRC before, and the PbP format might be far better suited to the concept, certainly for allowing more roleplay. Not sure I'm actually the right person to even attempt GMing this at the moment, but I certainly would love to see what happens with this, and maybe try something similar in the future. (Also, I moved earlier this year, and most of my books are still in storage, including my copy of the RotR Anniversary Edition hardcover.)

I find that, in general, my method varies according to the type of character I am designing. For characters that are at all divine, deity choice is one of the earliest, most fundamental choices I make, and everything else about the character flows from that choice. In cases like this, I start by browsing through stuff like Inner Sea Gods or Chronicle of the Righteous until I find a deity that really clicks with me and suggests an interesting character. I particularly pay a lot of attention to the tenets of that deity which might lead someone to a life of adventure, as well as to the ritual required for their obedience boon.

Clerics of Shelyn would go adventuring to protect and/or preserve that which they find beautiful in the world. They might go delving deep into ancient ruins to retrieve ancient works of poetry, then bring them back to a shrine or temple to share with the modern world and see that the poems are transcribed and spread to libraries far and wide.

On the other hand, for most other concepts, deity choice comes very late in the process, and tends to reflect the choices I have already made about the character. My character's deity will always say something fundamental about her values and what she holds dear. Abadar may be the god of merchants, but he values peace and stability, the very things an adventurer is unlikely to ever experience. An adventurer would follow Abadar not because they're wealth obsessed, but because they see a world filled with anarchy and strife, and reject that reality as the way things must be. They wish for everyone to experience the benefits of civilization, and all the wonderful things that peaceful trade can buy.