OK, I know it's an older adventure path.
But we're having such a great time I thought I should post.
(We're using the new Pathfinder rulebooks, and converting the adventure path from 3.5 "on the fly" as we go. Most can just be used as written and nobody notices.)
Anyway, the characters just finished clearing out Foxglove Manor in the Skinsaw Murders. Yeah, we got to play the haunted house adventure the night before Halloween. I couldn't have planned it any better if I tried (because I didn't).
And it worked out so perfectly. I set up Aldern way back during the first session of running Burnt Offerings. You won't believe this -- but one of my players is playing a Varesian rogue, complete with bladed scarves and a dancing background. She tied in so perfectly, as the spitting image of Aldern's murdered wife Iesha.
So she was performing at the Sandpoint Theater, and mysteriously all the posters around town vanished. They just found them plastering the walls of Aldern's hideout under the manor. The players were literally WIDE-EYED and RAPT when they figured out that the little things they've been noticing all along actually fit together into the story, tying back to the beginning.
So I was all prepared to run the confrontation with Zenovia (the rogue in my group) and Aldern, but before they entered Aldern's lair, the party wizard had a BRILLIANT idea. He took the Hat of Disguise (which they discovered in the Ghoul Bat lair, and he identified with a Spellcraft roll) and told Zenovia to use it to imitate Iesha. She got a bonus to her disguise check: +10 for the hat, +2 for being a Varesian dancer, and an extra +2 for adding Iesha's scarf to the disguise. She already had a +12 for regular ranks and charisma.
She rolled a 14. With all the bonuses, the result was a 40.
She strode straight into the room pretending to be his wife, and holding him accountable for her murder, and confronting him for the posters of Zenovia on the walls.
Aldern's Sense Motive was crap. He was totally taken in, and completely flummoxed and disoriented. I tend to like to reward Extreme Player Badassery, so his disorientation and confusion dropped his defenses. He spluttered and tried to stand in front of the posters, and to clean off the painting before his "wife" noticed the alterations. "My dear, my love... I thought you were dead! I was... I was expecting... someone ELSE.... I'm so sorry..."
I let it work as well as it did because 1) The Rule of Cool -- if it's a good plan, and the story benefits, I let the players be COOL. They're heroes. And in this case, the die rolls justified it. 2) They drew graphs and charts during the haunted house adventure, figuring out each Haunt, diagraming the family tree, and analyzing the history of the house. They correctly tied each Haunt to the family member it was associated with, and unraveled so much of the backstory I was really REALLY impressed. They totally got into the whole thing. They KNEW Aldern would be totally disarmed by the sudden appearance of his dead wife because they had figured out so much of his family history and what he had done to her. They played directly into the plot and history presented in the module.
I gotta reward that. They weren't just adventurers exploring a dungeon, they were completely enthralled in the house and its history and the people who had lived and died there.
So while Aldern was distracted, the players maneuvered into position, and attacked. They had used the rest of their spells buffing the Monk before they entered the room, and his rolls were ABSOLUTELY PHENOMENAL. He did 57 points of damage SINGLE HANDED in his first flurry of blows, with crits and buffs calculated in.
Then Zenovia herself attacked with her bladed scarf, doing a tremendous burst of sneak attack damage to her disorientated admirer. He died.
The players admire the fact that I play the stats by the book, and that their good rolls were rewarded. They didn't seem let down at all that the "big bad" of the haunted house went down after two attacks. Not after the rolls they made, and after all the preparations and strategy.
It was a total BLAST and I'd just like to personally thank the Paizo folks for one of the most memorable game nights we've had in a long while -- the Halloween Misgivings.
-Merak Spielman
