I took a long break from Pathfinder in general and painting minis and PFS in specific. As a semi-regular GM, I'd like to get back into both by painting up the critters I'm liable to use at the table. Once I get through my backlog of skeletons, zombies, goblins, and orcs, I'd like to paint up some iconics for pregen players and humanoid opponents as necessary.
With that in mind, I'd like to know if anyone has a feel for the most commonly-played iconics/pregens in PFS. Kyra's obvious, particularly when run by GMs for a three-person table, but beyond that, I'm less certain than I hope you guys might be.
Suppose we have Gary the Ghost. He, like most ghosts, most of the time, is incorporeal, so he can move through walls and such.
Suppose a friendly caster sets up Gary the Ghost with some Mage Armor. This force armor is decidedly not insubstantial, and can indeed ward off all sorts of physical attacks. Does this armor, which can rebuff arrows and blades, suddenly let walls and the ground to pass unobstructed?
RAW, there's nothing to say it should get in the way, but common sense, and the intent of spells like Force Anchor would suggest that force effects manifesting in physical forms should anchor incorporeal subjects within a fluid medium (i.e. air or water).
Secondly, do attacks made with ghost touch weapons wielded by incorporeal foes resolve as touch attacks, and if not, do ghost touch weapons similarly anchor their wielders? They are called out as effectively being both corporeal and incorporeal. Ghost touch armor lacks that bit of language and specifically says that its wearers can still move through solid objects.
After running the first part of this two-parter and playing the second back-to-back at a FLGS gameday a while ago, I've wanted to put my medium through these two scenarios. Alas, fate, supply, and demand have conspired against me and I am utterly unable to do find a GM slot for the second part in local meatspace. Thus, I'm looking for players interested in playing the series. I'm hoping to run both parts back-to-back unless there are similarly stranded PCs out there who just need Part 2.
Paizo's Marketing Blurb for Part 1 wrote:
When a samsaran dies, he is reborn again with few memories of his past lives. The cycle continues until he has earned a righteous place in the afterlife. After years of service and lifetimes of accomplishment, Venture-Captain Bakten nears the end of his noble existence and has begun investigating his past lives as a means of understanding Tian Xia's rich history. However, he cannot complete his research alone, and only with the PCs' assistance can they decipher the region's past.
Paizo's Marketing Blurb for Part 2 wrote:
Venture-Captain Bakten's past lives and the history of northern Tian Xia are interwoven, and with the PCs' assistance he has uncovered a troubling legacy secreted within the mountains of Zi Ha. It is up to the Pathfinders to ascend into the ice-capped mountains to unveil the crimes of past generations and save one of the region's greatest heroes.
GM's notes:
The storyline for these scenarios is rather juicy for players interested in the concept of past lives, particularly mediums. The locales are colorful and descriptive, and the combat is rather challenging overall. There is at least the potential for some engaging roleplay, with the chance to unravel intrigue extending across multiple lifetimes.
There are a few encounters that are very difficult or frustrating in the series, including one that felt very much out-of-tier when I ran it live. As such, I will not be running for a table of fewer than five players, and I don't think I'll be accepting L3 or L4 PCs playing up. I'd caution anyone signing up to bring their A-game.
The series has some juicy chronicles, especially for mediums and alchemists.
I'd be running this with mapping done on a google drawing. If there's enough interest, and as I've been pondering figuring out how to use it for a home game anyway, I could try to work out how to run a game on roll20. I'd expect one post a day from everyone, with that restriction loosened on weekends.
If interested, please state what you'd be bringing to the party, and good luck to those who sign on!
Now that I've a timeline for how long the Beginner's Box backorder is scheduled to take, I would like to remove the Inner Sea Faiths book from this order so I can order it from another source. I can wait plenty on the modules. I'd prefer to have this particular book sooner.
To be clear, I wish it removed and not moved to its own order.
Thanks in advance. You guys have always been amazingly helpful.
I've seen this come up in a few scenarios where other players assured me their optimized skill character could use their modifier in the disguise skill to disguise other players' characters. I was a little iffy on this as a player, and iffier still when I ran the same scenario, but I didn't really want to argue the point because we didn't have the time for it.
I'm running a similar scenario soon, and would like a clearer answer on this. Nowhere in the description of the disguise skill does the CRB mention disguising other characters. Everything refers to the user of the skill as the disguised party. Is there some expansion or errata that makes disguising others kosher?
Is there any way to combine Beginner's Box from the Humble Bundle with standard order to save on shipping? If so, I'd prefer to load up on a few things before firing the Beginner's Box off.
As a relatively new PFS GM and player, I almost always like running into missions that expand on past successes, where the story told in the prequel can really enhance one's enjoyment of the follow up. Good examples, even if not direct sequels, would be playing the Horn of Aroden after Library of the Lion, in which you...
totally pull a Mission Impossible,:
find the Horn's location
... or running some of the scenarios dealing with...
this guy and that gal:
Tancred Desimire and his not-so-professional rivalry with Zarta
... i.e. the Traitor's Lodge, Day of the Demon, and, tangentially, the Blakros Matrimony, before doing the Disappeared/Fortress of the Nail combo.
Are there any other scenarios that pull this off well, whether playing the scenarios in question with the same character or with a low-tier alt before the higher-tier main?
Additionally, and specifically, is there a follow-up to the Horn of Aroden? If so, I kinda want to see if I can't integrate it and other scenarios dealing with the Crusades into a "heroes of another story" style side-campaign for a runthrough of Wrath of the Righteous I'm organizing for some friends.
So sometime in the last two weeks or so my order #3723674 went from "4-18 days to ship" to "unknown time frame."
I've just placed another order #3764354 in the waning hours of the non-mint sale. Is there any possibility to peel off the items responsible for the shipping delay into their own order to be delivered as a happy surprise in some unknown time frame and splice in the items from #3764354 onto the earlier #3723674?
With the exception of the messageboards, I'm having incredible difficulty doing anything on the Paizo website right now. Most store pages are taking thirty seconds to a minute to even load, and anything behind the sign-in wall (e.g. 'My Downloads'), in addition to my shopping cart, simply errors out when I try to sign in.
I was really hoping to order a few more things from the non-mint sale before it ends today. If this is not isolated to me (doubtful, considering the rest of the web seems to be doing fine from my vantage), is it a known issue? You guys getting DDoSed or something?
With an expected ship time of 1-18 business days, this order is sitting at day 16 with no updates. I'd rather not wait until Wednesday to sort out if there is something in particular holding this up. If it's going to take much longer, I think I'd prefer to just cancel it and resolve to submit orders only for items I'm willing to wait a month for.
Less than a few months into your careers as Pathfinders, the Society sends you to the edge of the known world and to Kalsgard, the greatest city in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings. You each received brief orders hastily scrawled on parchment scraps.
Important discovery. Rendez-vous with V.C. Benarry aboard Grinning Pixie in Kalsgard. She'll explain details. Travel swift, travel safe. Good luck.
You're beginning to realize that being a pathfinder is mostly leg- and paper-work, and you spend the next few weeks sailing, hiking, riding, and carting your way to the north-eastern corner of the map, perhaps glad for the presence of your companions, if only to break up the monotony.
This would be a good time to condense weeks and months of exploration into a few moments of self-introduction!
I have five players interested in playing 6-18 From Under Ice at tier 1-2 from this thread. While that's enough to get going on its own, I'd love to spread the love and have a sixth player. I'm going to leave this recruitment open for two days or so while I prepare relevant materials and the committed players muster themselves.
Scenario Blurb wrote:
A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 1–5.
Rumors of an ancient settlement and its priceless treasure locked beneath Irrisen’s perpetual ice have reached the Society’s ears. The Pathfinders set out to the Land of the Linnorm Kings with a precious cargo of trade goods to buy their way into the witch-ruled nation, but even approaching Irrisen is fraught with danger. Can the PCs navigate the frozen wastes and recover the relics within, or will the icy climate claim their lives?
Content in “From Under Ice” contributes directly to the Year of the Sky Key metaplot as well as the ongoing storyline of the Grand Lodge and Scarab Sages factions.
They are listed below, along with why I want to run them and/or my preferences in running them.
0-24 Decline of Glory (Tier 1-7): I really liked the story of this one. Great role-play potential when I played it with my Liberty's Edge main, but I can see similar appeal for Grand Lodge characters and, to a lesser extent, Sovereign Court. Season 0, though, so nothing mechanically special faction-by-faction.
5-09 The Traitor's Lodge (Tier 3-7): I believe someone else just hosted this for the game day, so maybe I'll not have luck stirring up interest. This is a great almost horror-themed scenario that I ran live recently. I'd like to run it in a play-by-post because I'm better at the atmospherics when writing than I am when talking, and there's a lot of payoff there. Thematically appropriate for Silver Crusade characters. Grand Lodge might also want a crack at it.
5-11 Library of the Lion (Tier 1-5): Also already ran this one live. Very much a cloak-and-dagger thriller feel usually so lacking in Society play. Lots of moving pieces that I'd like to be able to track at a more leisurely pace, even if the scenario itself is played under in-game time pressure.
6-18 From Under Ice (Tier 1-5): A roleplay-heavy scenario with some very interesting NPCs. My first PFS scenario, and I played it under a GM who happened to be a top-tier storyteller, so I've got a soft spot for this one. Also leads directly into 6-21 Tapestry's Toil (below). Special treats for Grand Lodge and Scarab Sages.
6-21 Tapestry's Toil (Tier 5-9): A continuation of the plot of From Under Ice. Same storyteller GM as above ran this one for me, and it was just as fun. Good stomping grounds for a Liberty's Edge player to just go nuts, again with a very interesting NPC. Some very interesting combat encounters, roleplay treats for Edge PCs, and a special attraction for Grand Lodge.
6-22 Out of Anarchy (Tier 1-5): I've run this once already, and didn't much care for the time pressure. This one runs long. LOTS of roleplay, i.e. mostly roleplay, but what combat there is can easily push this over your FLGS's time limit. So I'd like to run this over a play-by-post! If you nip at the bread crumbs, there's some very good role-play for Edge PCs (if you haven't notice, I mostly run my LE main), and kinda sorta but not quite for Dark Archive players as well. Special treats for either. I can kinda see good RP material for Lodge, Court, and Exchange players as well.
7-01 Between the Lines (Tier 1-5): This one's a mind-bender, and, similar to Out of Anarchy, starts with a lot of roleplay. And then a normal amount of dungeon (?) delving, interspersed with more juicy role-play. I ran this twice, and it was a hell of an effort to keep things within the time limit. Very much a Dark Archives feel, though it doesn't "advance the faction's ongoing story line." Highly recommended. Lot of fun. I just want to run it without needing to count minutes.
7-05 School of Spirits (Tier 4-5): One of the Season 7 scenarios introducing the occult rules, and what an introduction. It's tier 1-5, but the story really doesn't make any sense being left to novice pathfinders. I'm only willing to run this with at least one Liberty's Edge player because of the OH SO JUICY roleplay potential would be wasted otherwise. Seriously. My main tattooed herself to commemorate what went down. This is a sequel to 0-6 Black Waters, albeit separated by almost a decade in-game, and there's enough of a plot thread between them that having a player who played 0-6 makes things more interesting. I've run this once, I'm running it again live in a week or two, and I have no qualms with running this as many times as it's wanted, even without credit. Highly Recommended.
Sign-Ups are here. I'm willing to run one at a time until I extricate a character from a long-running PbP, and then I'll be up for running a second. Whichever scenarios yields a sane, legal table first will be played first. For obviously selfish reasons I'd prefer to run the scenarios I've already run as Core so I can still get credit on Core and vice versa. That said, I will not prioritize one way or the other. Whichever table musters first will start first.
This is here as a preliminary Q&A thread while I'm cooking up how to kick things off in the PbP format. Gameplay to start Friday or Saturday witrh the full understanding that not all players can do weekends on the regular.
So I signed up to run a few tables at Pacificon this weekend, one of them for children 12 and under. Does anyone have experience with or advice on running such a game beyond watching my language? I imagine a full table of children poses novel difficulties in terms of keeping things simultaneously focused and on point but also animated and engaging. I know I wasn't exactly a paragon of attention span at 12.
Or at 21. Or now, ya doofus.
So, yeah, pointers?
EDIT: I don't think this belongs in the PFS forum because I hope that the same principles for running a Society table for kids should apply outside that context as well.
If you attempt to move through an enemy’s space and fail the check, you lose the move action and provoke an attack of opportunity.
...
Is that provocation only from the enemy occupying the space you attempted to move through or do you provoke outside the normal moving-through-threatened-square paradigm from anyone who threatens you? RAW, I'd lean towards an open-ended provocation. RAI, I'd lean towards only provoking an AoO from the occupier. This came up just now in an online PFS scenario, so there's that usual extra level of rules stickler-ing to account for.
Infernal Vault Players, please ignore:
Piggybacking a question that may be important in a day or so: should a mindless critter (Lemure) know how to use a ladder? I want to lean 'no' here for the comedy potential, but, again, PFS.
Gameplay thread has started. As a fair warning, I'm new to PFS GMing, so please bear with me, particularly with the accounting we'll need to do at scenario's end. Further fair warning: Boxed text inbound!
Dreng’s pinched face is hard to see from behind the stack of books that divide the front of his office from the space behind his desk. A shockingly old man with white hair and slightly milky eyes, he is surprised by the appearance of outsiders in his office, and looks up, half startled and half relieved.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice. I’d been meaning to give this assignment to you at a later date, and with less pressing time constraints, but it seems that time has conspired against us.” Dreng mumbles to himself as he passes out a stack of notes and maps from behind the wall of books.
“These notes are from a recent Chronicle—it contains some interesting finds, but one of them is now the utmost priority to the Society.”
Dreng lightly taps a bony finger on a map, on which can be seen a section of Absalom with a small corner townhouse circled in deep red.
“This townhouse is a façade for an underground vault. The vault belonged to an old noble family of Absalom that was expelled a decade ago—the Decklands. The family was forced out when their patriarch—a man known as Orias—was discovered to have written documents detailing the city’s defenses, documents he intended to hand over to hostile forces loyal to Cheliax. The Chronicle indicates that a copy of these documents exist within the vault.
“A Pathfinder looking into the Decklands and their Chronicle references in Cheliax was attacked and killed ten days ago. The thugs made off with a copy of his notes— fortunately, he’d already sent us another. We have reason to believe it was the work of the Decklands’ oldest child, a young woman named Celeena, and she’s the reason this assignment is now urgent. The fact that Celeena and her forces were willing to kill a Pathfinder for this information shows how desperate they are to retrieve the documents. If she were able to get these documents and return them to Cheliax, it would undermine the defenses of the whole city, as well as cause the Society undue headaches. Find Celeena, find the documents in her vault, and prevent this situation from turning into one big mess for the Society.”
I prodded for interest in a previous thread, and this scenario seemed most likely to get off the ground.
The Infernal Vaults, I think, is a good game for players new to pathfinder mechanics. It's challenging but not overly threatening, with a variety of opposition and a simplicity of mission typical of early PFS scenarios. While I'd prefer something more role-play friendly, I imagine that's easier to inject in the PbP format.
Summary wrote:
A decade ago, the Decklands family, a house of Chelish nobles, were exiled from Absalom for treason. Their fate made for an interesting story and when a Pathfinder agent in Cheliax studying the family's long history and exile from the City at the Center of the World ends up murdered, the Society sends you to the recently discovered Deckland Vaults in Absalom to see what connection their old home might have to your murdered colleague.
Written by Thurston Hillman
I've no preference for tier save that the players be close in level. I'd prefer at least one post per day, with the understanding that any absence will result in cautious botting or delays in combat or in generally going with the flow outside of it. I roll initiative and will post the full lineup in the campaign summary. Mapping will be in Google Drive.
I have a campaign world I put a lot of work into for a real life game. About a dozen sessions in, new time commitments for almost every party make it impossible to keep it going on any sort of regular basis. As it's my baby, and I'm still dreaming up new ideas for it constantly, I thought I'd see if I could get any interest for running it as a PBP.
The full interest check write-up is here. I'd not click and read through unless the elevator pitch below interests you.
Fluff
Every child born on either side of the East-West Divide grows up hearing stories of ancient magic, long forgotten. All grow up to a harsher reality - the rival kingdom on the other side is gearing up for a war of conquest to claim dominion over the continent of Rimme. While the average citizen buries himself deep in his own affairs to avoid confronting this truth, the rapid rate of innovation in arms technology has made the threat and scale of any war so immense that the respective rulers will pay godly sums for independent agents to achieve the crown's objectives in clandestine, deniable operations. Yet these operators, when exploring the dark recesses of the earth or standing on the bleeding edge of covert military operations, may soon realize that finding a solution to this simmering conflict may require unearthing and understanding the old fairy tales, even as they morph into the stuff of nightmares.
TL;DR: This will be a little James Bond meets Indiana Jones.
Crunch
This is an E8 gestalt emerging magic campaign, starting at level 1. E8 to keep player and GM build ceilings manageable, so the odd 3/4 BAB character gets +6 BAB and everyone gets 2 ability boosts. Gestalt is included with the hopes that players use it to round out their character - the little things can matter in the at least initial absence of magic. Emerging magic because I like discovery, and I'd kinda like for things like giant animals and unexplained lights to be awe inspiring instead of ho-hum.
I'd like 4-6 players, though I can make 3 and maybe even 7 work.
Cart before the horse there, James.
Mapping will be on gdocs, though there'll be a learning curve while I properly figure that out. Players roll everything but initiative.
I expect to leave registration open for a while so I can gather my old map files and campaign notes to adapt to PBP. I'll share the campaign codices (i.e. explanations of the various factions and races in the context of this canon) once I've got some interest with the understanding that everything is still not set in stone. I'll also leave registration open in case anyone drops and we want or need a substitution.
I'm five years into Pathfinder but only five sessions into PFS. Suffice to say, I'm hooked, and now I find myself in a compounded conundrum. At each of my local dealers FNGS's, I'm midway into a multipart series (Devil we know part 2, quest for perfection part 1), and a sudden business trip has me unable to make the next one, and future volatility at work might see me cut off from my supplier anyway. I think an online campaign would be perfect for at least the withdrawal. If by chance anyone's running either of Quest for Perfection 2 or Devil We Know III, I'd be delighted.
Alternatively, a decent second prize would be to buckle down and GM a scenario or three. I'd be comfortable with either of the two one-offs I've done (the Infernal Vaults or From Under Ice, particularly the latter) or running through Quest for Perfection or The Devil We Know, provided the former not progress to part two before I can play and then prep it on and around the 28th and the latter similarly not progress past the second part before the 27th.
Mapping would be based in gdocs. I'd roll initiative and trust you guys with the rest of your character sheet. I'll strive to keep things brisk during evenings and weekends, but if things go at a more leisurely pace, it'd still be better than the status quo, and might allow us the temporal freedom to inject role playing into our roll playing if the players would like it.
Any takers?
(Any providers? I'm shaking here, man.)
Regardless, I'd appreciate words of warning or encouragement.
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For quick reference:
Travel Domain Major Blessing:
Dimensional Hop (major): At 10th level, you can teleport up to 20 feet as a move action. You can increase this distance by expending another use of your blessing—each use spent grants an additional 20 feet. You must have line of sight to your destination. This teleportation doesn't provoke attacks of opportunity. You can bring other willing creatures with you, but each such creature requires expending one additional use of your blessing, regardless of the distance traveled. (For example, transporting yourself 40 feet costs 2 uses of your blessing, and transporting an additional person this distance costs 1 more use.)
Source: Advanced Class Guide
Quicken Blessing Feat:
You can deliver one of your blessings with greater speed.
Prerequisite(s): Access to a blessing's major power, blessings class feature.
Benefit: Choose one of your blessings that normally requires a standard action to use. You can expend two of your daily uses of blessings to deliver that blessing (regardless of whether it's a minor or major effect) as a swift action instead.
Special: You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you do, you choose a different blessing.
Source: Advanced Class Guide
I see a lot of Warpriest guide posts about quickening the travel blessing for a teleport pounce. While I'd love to build towards that (full disclosure - for PFS), I don't see that flying per RAW. Dimensional hop normally requires a move action, not a standard action to activate. The weird interactions between the costs of quickening and the variable costs of the teleport also make me thing the Devs had this in mind and were aware the combo wouldn't stick. For example, to travel 40 feet, would you expend two uses of fervor plus one to quicken or do you expend 4 uses total, doubling the base cost? On the other hand, this interpretation does lead to the perverse outcome that the ability would be better if it were more strenuous to activate normally.
I'd love to hear the hive mind's thoughts on this. While a "yay" would be strictly mechanically superior to what I'm building towards now, it would also require dropping some fluff I'm rather attached to.
So I've been doing tabletop games off and on for about 7seven years and pathfinder for fourish, almost always as a GM in some pretty heavily houseruled settings/rulesets. I've recently started as a player in PFS and signed up to GM a scenario (3.19: The Icebound Outpost) at the end of August.
I imagine I'll have about ten scenarios as player under my belt by then. Combined with a couple years of on-off GMing, should that prove sufficient experience to run a PFS game?
What sort of preparation goes into GMing a PFS scenario above and beyond what you'd do for a home campaign? I've never actually run premade scenarios before, meaning I could always make stuff up if anything went off-rails.
In short, o veteran pfs GMs, help me not suck in my pseudo-debut in two months.
So I'm crafting some critters to act as the main, and probably only, enemies in an upcoming trek my players will be taking through an uncharted road built by ancient Dwarves in a time predating all current records. I kinda want to make it scary.
These creatures derive from a mutant strain of dwarves born deformed and savage of parents who had fled their ancestral keeps when their experimentation in the arcane unleashed something upon the world.
I'm calling these things Childers.
For (relative) simplicity, I'm opting for only two critters (for now), a childer male and childer alpha. The obvious omission will find a way into the story in a slightly less near future.
The males are horde attackers with stunted legs and long, powerfully muscular arms who pin their prey with claws before tearing the throat with teeth dripping with anticoagulant saliva. It is my intention that they be most dangerous against isolated targets but otherwise easily dispatched when players cover for each other (i.e. their attack-grab-pin-bite routine allows ample time for the grapplee to escape or an ally to knock off the grappler). Furthermore, I went one-up on the standard light blindness by making them outright afraid of the light, so that a wave can be slowed to a trickle with the right amount of daring and planning.
The Alpha, larger, lankier, and yet stronger, possesses more of a savage cunning, and skirmishes with its prey, rending weapons, armor, and light sources so that its smaller kin can attack without reprisal, before fleeing to recuperate via fast healing.
Without further ado, my first attempts at statting these things:
Childer Male
CR ? XP ?
N Medium Monstrous Humanoid
Init+1; Senses Darkvision 60 ft., Scent; Perception +1
Str 16, Dex 15, Con 14, Int 3, Wis 12, Cha 5
BAB +2, CMB +5 (+9 Grapple), CMD 16
Feats: Sure Grasp
Skills: Climb +15, Perception +1, Stealth +5 (+11 underground)
Language: Barely. A gutturalpidgin derived from ancient dwarven not readily mutually comprehensible with contemporary dialects.
SPECIAL ABILITIES
Fast Charge (Ex): Can move triple ground speed for a charge or 5x ground when running.
Photophobia: A Childer Male must make a will Save to enter a square more brightly lit than its own. The DC is 20 for bright light, 15 for normal, 10 for Dim. Creatures may take a standard action to brandish a light source to increase the DC of the Will Save to enter any square the source illuminates. This save is made only once per turn and applies to all movement in the round. A Childer Male can approach any creature that has attacked it in the last minute without needing to make a save.
Vicious Bite: The childer male's bite deals damage to pinned or helpless opponents as if he had scored a critical hit.
Anticoagulant Saliva: Any creature taking damage from a Childer Male's bite takes 1 point of bleed damage This damage does not stack with itself or any other bleed damage but is doubled on a critical hit. It can be stopped by any effect that heals hit point damage or by a DC 15 heal check.
Rocky Camouflage: +10 Racial to Stealth underground. Can hide without cover or concealment underground if unobserved and stationary.
Str 25, Dex 12, Con 21, Int 6, Wis 15, Cha 8
BAB +2, CMB +5 (+9 Grapple), CMD 16
Feats: Power Attack, Improved Sunder, Weapon Focus (Slam)
Skills: Climb +15, Perception +11, Stealth -1, Survival +6
Language: See Childer Male
*: In the context of the campaign, I'm modifying the dazzled aspect of light sensitivity and blindness to trigger in normal light.
Any suggestions? Any idea as to properly setting the CR for these things?
For reference, it's a non-magical party of five gestalt L3s with a few minor SLA's gained from the first exposure of man to magic in millennia. Injury/Strain variant rule to offset crippling lack of curative magic.
Pre-emptive TL;DR: Need suggestions for hazards and atmospheric touches for an ancient underground highway populated by savage creatures who would very much like to have the party for dinner. Also want help coming up with thematically relevant and mechanically useful rewards, whether (first) magic items, new SLAs, or other special acquired Su abilities.
Spoiler alert: I don't think any of my players are regulars here. If you are, go read about puppies instead or something.
First of all, a little background. The campaign can be briefly disguised as the 18th century three-way lovechild of Dr. Strangelove, 24, and the X-Files. The party are a group of plausibly deniable contractors for the Western nation's intelligence services who discovered on their first official mission that we are not the first batch of races on this planet, that a great war was fought in time unrecorded, and that magic is a thing that exists. They decided to keep the specifics close to the chest and not report them to their superiors.
In a more recent outing, they accidentally-on-purposed the Eastern nation's ambassador to the Dwarves and all but turned the cold war hot. Rather than undertake their assigned punitive all-but-suicide guerilla/sabotage mission behind enemy lines to buy the Western forces time to prepare, they decided to GTFO and go revisit the place they discovered magic. There, they had discovered a great underground road, and while they could not perfectly make out the language on the signs, they suspected them to be mile markers with distances to other locations not known to modern historians. They didn't dare to delve further before, what with the threat of dying of cave-in or starvation or thirst, but in light of the current alternative, they've opted for the relative safety of the dark.
I want help making the Deep Road more horrifying than any mortal army can be. Up to now, I've been easing them in mechanically. They were super bad-butt special operatives and played that role well. But, apart from the ruin and the monsters it housed, everything they faced was familiar - Urban environments and humanoid enemies, susceptible to manipulation or ambush. They're gearing up to spend the next two weeks several hundred feet below ground to see where the Road goes. Backstory-wise, none of them are spelunkers. Only one of them has Darkvision. None has higher than +5 in Know(Dung). In the coming adventure, I want them to feel less like action heroes and more like the cast of a horror film.
I'm want the characters anxious and claustrophobic. I want them to see the Road as an entity itself, wielding suffocation, cave-ins, and deadfalls as the party wields bow, blade, and tongue. I want them to want most desparately to flee when it is least feasible. I want them to feel some relief when they face their threats because, hey, at least I can see it now. The trickiest part is I want all this, but I want more that through guile and a modicum of luck they prevail, unbroken if not unharmed.
There is a line of critters that will be the main antagonists. Heavily inspired by a combination of the Descent's Crawlers and the Metro Series' Nosalises, I've drawn up some homebrews I'll be cross-linking from the Homebrew forum soonish. If you've had the superhuman patience to read through this much bloviating. I'd love your help both with designing actual challenges/encounters and with flavoring the journey.
Mechanical deets: L3 Gestalt. E6. No magic classes (yet), but each party member has one SLA of each of levels 0 and 1. Most thematically appropriate options here are create water and swift expeditious retreat. Sunrods in this campaign have been nerfed to burn brighter but shorter by far - they're basically battlefield illumination. One Dwarf, one Half-Elf, three humans. Respectively a rifleman, Swashbuckler, Unarmed fighter, archer, and Face/Disarm Fighter. Recent cameo by past member playing a role not dissimilar to Q in Bond films has left the party with some nifty homebrewed toys, like short-duration breather masks.
Current Ideas: Atmosphere
- Shattered Lantern
- Blood stains of varying freshness.
- Droppings containing remains identifiable as humanoid (Finger bones, etc.)
- Echoing growls in the far distance. Low pitched, drawn-out, and thunderous.
- Shriller growls, shorter, quieter, much closer. Just out of LoS or lamplight, really.
- Abandoned equipment packs (with rations, climbing gear, lamp oil, etc)
Current Ideas: Challenges/Hazards
- Areas of dead (i.e. no O2), live (breathable, duh), or explosive/suffocating air, distinguished by the types of mold/lichen growing in each area.
- Cave-in's a standard, but I'd need a mechanism for spotting, avoiding, and bypassing. It's just one road so far. Maybe side routes through natural caves? Maybe the cave in cuts them off from going /back/?
- Water infiltration. The road is ancient. It's very possible whatever seals existed have eroded and certain sections are now buckled and submerged.
- Breaks in the road from seismic activity. Yay! They need to scale X0 ft. up or sideways to continue onwards. Also an effective way to block off hasty retreat.
- Previous cave-ins. Put that Escape Artist skill to use!
- Some supernatural anomaly. My best idea is supernatural darkness with a critter attack, but anything that can't be Scully-ized works.
Current Ideas: Rewards
Regardless of what the party chose as its next mission, I was going to figure out a way to work the mytharc into it and give them some combination of more SLAs, some other non-EX added ability, and/or their first magic item or two. The way the campaign works, giving any sort of new special items implies implies "Get this to the right person and in a few in-game weeks you could buy anything within its family." Our local mercenary murderhobo opted not to kick the mithral shirt on which he called dibs over to R&D, so the rest of the party is stuck with the mundane variety much longer than otherwise.
Now, there are already locales whose backstories make them ideal spots for the discovery of certain classes of magic items, like stat boosters and magic arms. I'd prefer to leave that reveal for later, but can be flexible if you guys think it's best to get the bread and butter on the table now.
What would be mechanically useful and thematically appropriate for a road used to connect the old Dwarven strongholds and into which the Dwarves fled when their experimentations with the arcane made their homes too dangerous to inhabit? I'm thinking persistent illumination would be both useful and relevant, but loldwarveshavedarkvision. One thing I'm including regardless is a magic journal that basically keys and archives entries by password, i.e. a pen-and-paper interface to a dictionary data structure. The obvious benefit would be that it can contain important lore for the campaign which I can delay writing until they've figured out how to research important keying passphrases.
If you've read this far, I love you. If you have any suggestions, having read this far give you ample authority to all but demand I use them. Pre-emptive thanks.
Is there an official statement regarding the interplay between the following two sentences in the stealth entry in the SRD?
SRD wrote:
If people are observing you using any of their senses (but typically sight), you can't use Stealth.
and
SRD wrote:
Against most creatures, finding cover or concealment allows you to use Stealth.
Does cover or concealment break observation? If so, then what is the point of Rogue/Ranger HiPS? Does total concealment allow a stealth check when observed where partial concealment doesn't? Does total/improved cover allow a stealth check when observed where partial cover does not?
It's not an urgent question as my players and I are currently on the same page regarding this topic, but if there is a clearer answer I'd appreciate it.
If you could read past the title, I commend you and invite you to read on under the provision that you should probably have me brought behind the barn and shot for my orthographic wrongdoing.
In the absence of aids like fabricate in pathfinder, crafting breaks down if you ever try to make anything remotely valuable. Assuming an NPC craftsmen, for example, with maybe a +13 rating (+3 class, +3 Rank, +3 Skill Focus, +2 ability, +2 Mwk Tools), you're looking at something like 24 weeks for a mithral shirt. This would seem fine for an NPC except that it only represents a profit of (1100/2-1100/3)/24 = 1100/(6*24) = about 7.5 gold per week. This is less than he'd get exploiting profession checks with an equivalent modifier, with the added burden that he has to put money down on the investment and he (nominally in this case because of taking 10) risks failure and ruining his materials. So it's bad for NPC craftsmen.
However, it's worse for adventurers who want to occasionally dabble in crafting. They simply can't devote half a year (or much, much more) to crafting their own goods. An extreme example is the alchemist, who, despite being able to make multiple more powerful explosives for free each day, requires multiple full days of work to make a single alchemist's fire until the party level is high enough for them to have lost their utility. If he ever tries to craft a decent poison, he might as well wait for retirement before using it.
I know there's a master alchemist feat. It makes one type of crafting tolerable. What I intend to propose should make at crafting attractive enough to warrant a dip rank or two.
A Modest Proposal: Log-Scale Crafting
Pay 1/3 raw materials up front. Make a craft check daily.
A successful Craft Check enables you to make one progress increment, equal to your craft modifier or half the remaining cost, whichever is higher.
- Failure by 4-: makes no progress
- Failure by 5+ means pay 1/2 raw materials cost again, double progress (in gold) required to finish.
- For each 5 by which you beat the craft DC, make one more progress increment.
Example: Assume we have an L3 Armorer. 3 Ranks, Masterwork tools, Int 14, Skill focus. Modifier +13. He wants to make Masterwork Plate Armor. Since the Masterwork DC and the base Armor Craft DC are similar, we'll roll them together. 1650. Up-front cost 550. Taking 10, he makes one progress increment "tic" per day. 1650->825->413->207->104->52->26->13->0. 8 Days. If he's following the same resale rules the PC's are, he sells for 825 for a profit of 275.
Example: Assume we have a PC who dabbles in smithing. 1 rank, 13 int, and we'll assume he can at least borrow masterwork tools. Modifier +6. He can't do anything masterwork without risking that he'd never finish for flubbing so frequently, but he can at least go for a breastplate. Cost 200, pays 67 up-front. One tic per day if he takes 10. 200->100->50->25->13->7->4->0. 7 Days.
Note: The system penalizes low modifiers: You can't reach for DC's beyond your modifier+10 because you have no guarantee you'll ever finish. On the other hand, if you can push a modifier through the roof (like alchemists and their alchemy), you can start to turn out mundane, less expensive items at a pretty ridiculous clip.
Example: Assume L6 Alchemist, No Skill Focus, Int 18. Full ranks in Craft (Alchemy). Modifier 3+6+3+4 = 16. He can never fail to make Alchemical Fire by more than 4, so he does not risk ruining progress. Rolling normally, if you do the math, he makes one (two with swift alchemy) per day instead of the one (two with swift alchemy) per week he'd make under the current system.
The main benefit of this system is making crafting viable in terms of long-term time economy for PCs; it is now very possible to create simpler items in days off during adventures (i.e. rope and cheaper alchemicals could be fashioned in a day) and more complex items in the weeks between adventures (e.g. Mithral Plate would take 11 days at a +10 modifier instead of 5 years)
Full Disclosure: This idea was developed for use with an E6 campaign, where an L3 NPC smith is roughly equivalent to "Master Smith", and an L6 NPC smith would be "Smith of the GODS." The halving figure is calibrated towards this, and could be changed to any other multiplier on (0, 1) to accommodate a different range of crafting modifiers. We only have one crafter, an alchemist, in the campaign currently, and it's been useful for him to be able to concoct alchemicals on a daily basis in downtime without seeming ridiculous. So far.
