MosBen's page

I'm just going through the books in preparation for a new campaign that is actually starting today (!) so I'm not even remotely close to the point where I need to know this, but when the book discusses the completion of Aroden's trials, it refers to "a creature" completing the trials and getting a title. It's possible that I missed a clarification, but does that mean that a single PC needs to complete each trial, or does completing a trial give the title to all of the pCs in a group? If feels like the book is saying that only a single player gets the title, and that might make a certain amount of sense, but it also feels like it creates pressure to put the focus on one player for a big chunk of the book instead of having everyone participate. It also seems like if the players decide that they really want to complete all 12 trials that it would be extremely difficult for a single PC to have all of those skills, while it would also mean that they probably can't just do 4 trials and move on for the same reason.

Like I said, I may have missed something or am miss reading it, but at least at the moment I'd be inclined to rule it that the entire party completes the trials, not just one of them, for my game regardless of what the AP intended. But if there's a really good thematic or mechanical reason not to do so I could change my mind.

Ok, I'm still a fairly inexperienced GM. I've run two groups through the first book of Age of Ashes, and another group through The Fall of Plaguestone. So I've used some Paizo materials, but still consider myself a bit of a novice.

Which leads to some questions now that I'm prepping for starting a group on Extinction Curse. It seems like a lot of the materials in the first book, like how to make tricks, how to run the circus, the circus weapon list, and juggler and staff acrobat archetypes would be useful to have put into the Player's Guide. I mean, circus weapons and available archetypes are the kinds of things that will affect the character concepts that my players will come up with, and running the circus seems like a fairly complicated procedure. I'm not sure why those materials, or some version of those materials, weren't presented in the Player's Guide, or at least mentioned as something to talk to the GM about with a player-safe description.

Has anyone made a handout that can be given to players with this sort of material? Or at the very least can someone explain to the novice why I wouldn't want to just snip and save that material to send to my players?

This will involve spoilers for the AP, so if you're a player, best to click out of here quick!

I'm a brand new GM, and I thought that it would be a good idea to jumpstart my GM-ing skills by running two Age of Ashes campaigns at the same time. While I'm sure that my players will be happy with the story in the AP, I'm looking for story hooks to involve their specific characters in the plot in some way. The problem that I'm running into is finding ways to move those stories forward throughout the story.

For example, one of my characters is a Dwarf Oathkeeper from Gerduhm, sworn to protect the bloodline of King Taargick. I've got some good ideas about how to tie him into the story in Book 4, Fires of the Haunted City, but I'm not sure how to have it play out in the earlier books, as well as keeping it going in some form afterwards. My idea is that in their adventures the character will learn that Taargick had an unknown heir, and that that heir's lineage has continued to this day, with the modern day member of the family line on an expedition in Saggorak, only to have been captured and sent to Katapesh, and then Hermea. I have some more ideas about how to flesh it out more, but I'm having a hard time thinking of how to work ideas into the earlier parts of the story. I'm not worrying about planting too many seeds in Book 1 because I'm still finding my story-telling sea legs, but it doesn't seem like a natural fit to have information about this stuff laying out in the Mwangi Expanse.

Is it normal for a character's story to only really take off in the latter half of the adventure? Alternatively, I also have a character who's from Katapesh, and another whose story hook will play a role in Book 2. Is it fine if the PC story hooks in a book focus mainly on one character? Anyway, thoughts are appreciated.

I pronounce it like "All Terrain" as well, but but I like "All Tie Rain" as well.

I'm running two AoA campaigns and have told both groups that Breachill is a small town, but with a history of serving the needs of the Order of the Nail. Both groups are still pretty early in the first book, so I've told them that they could find any basic simple or martial weapons in town, and some low level potions and such. But I've told them that Breachill will be a location that will remain important, so they can invest in local shops, both with money and in building relationships with the owners, and that doing so will allow them to order away for increasingly potent items (at my discretion both as to whether the shopkeeper can find it and how long it will take to get to town), and eventually expand the available stock. Frankly, I expect that my players will find most of the coolest stuff that they use through loot, but if someone really wants a piece of gear from the Core Rulebook and has the money for it I'm not going to stand in their way too much.

I'm new to GM-ing, so I decided to run two separate games of Age of Ashes to try to super charge my GM learning. One of the games, which has more advanced players, meets regularly, twice a month. The other game is three quarters total newbs, but it meets once a month. My hope is that the game with experienced players will let me work out details for how encounters run without worrying about hand holding too much, and will give me an idea of what parts of the adventure I might want to ease up a bit for the newbs game.

One other addition that I'm doing is encouraging my players to volunteer to do session summaries between games, with a reward of a bonus hero point for whichever player volunteers to do it. Of course, if nobody volunteers then *I* write the summary and *I* get a hero point, which I can use to either re-roll a roll for one of my creatures, or to force a player to re-roll. I'm also offering one bonus hero point per week if someone writes up a summary of a rule. There's no penalty if nobody does this one, but I wanted to encourage my players, especially the new ones, to read up on the rules between sessions since we're all learning 2E as we go.