Nadia of Dudinka's page

Today I received a notice that the next issue was on the way. I do not want this issue. Please do not send it. I still want the module subscription. I will probably resubscribe to the Pathfinder Adventures once this evil-oriented path is done.

In the Beastiary, 3rd printing, it states that the Derro has 3d8+12 hps. The +12 seemed strange to me so I looked up the Derro in my D&D 3.5 Monster edition and it shows the hit points at 3d8+3. I don't think I've ever seen the + a higher number than the die so I'm wondering if this is an error or if there was some reason for raising it to +12?

I'd like to know how this "Because Pathfinder uses the Open Game License, it is 100% compatible with the world's most popular fantasy roleplaying game" corresponds to the fact that these new adventure paths are going to be based on yet another new setting. Don't we have enough settings? Personally, I'm not about to abandon my world in favor of someone else's idea. Some products are generic enough to fit in any world, but this doesn't sound like one of them. Especially when they talk about articles about their deities and so forth. Are these adventure paths going to be so specific to their settig that it will prove extremely difficult to fit them in to existing worlds? I suppose I'll have to wait and see like everyone else.

I suppose I always knew this day would come, but not with such sudden shockingness and not when both DUNGEON and DRAGON were at their best. I've subscribed to Dragon since issue #58 (and have a couple of earlier issues). My kids were brought up in the game and now their kids are starting to play. There was so much more to both magazines than just adventure paths. Maybe the future for RPG lies on-line, but nothing beats the arrival of one of these fine magazines in the mail. It's like having two close friends suddenly die.

Whoops! I realize in the last post, I never got to the thread about introducing a new character! Okay, so the party follows the trail to an underground dungeon... After several sessions, the player of the fighter has to quit due to some real life issues. Her character decides to bring a couple of prisoners back to justice and a new player creates a half-orc barbarian. Before the regular session, the barbarian is set upon in his sleep and captured by the same dastardly group behind the wizard's disappearance (a slaving organization, who kidnapped the wizard to pay him back for past attacks on their organization). The half-orc comes to the table, reviving from being knocked unconscious in a jail cell. He comes up with a plan to trick the his jailers and while he's distracting them with this...the other players hear voices and go to investigate...catching the jailers by surprise.

My players didn't know there wasn't originally a jail cell in that part of the dungeon, but it wasn't hard to create one to serve this purpose. With imagination, all things are possible. Just find a reason for the new player to be...in the 3rd level of a dungeon, in the middle of a swamp...in the city...or wherever.

This is what has always worked in my campaigns. I ask each person to answer some questions about their character. Things like "Does your character have a family? What does the family consist of? What is your character's best characteristic? What is your character's worse habit? etc. These questions are designed to tactfully "force" the player to think about his/her character's background, personality and reason for adventuring. After I write down their answers, I create a background for the character based on these answers. For example, Character A comes from a family of fishmen in a small village. He hates the sea and the smell of fish and longs to see the world and finds the tales told by the village elder of his young, adventuring day to be fascinating. Seeing his interest, the village elder becomes his trainer,giving him his first lessons with an old rusty sword and shield and later, a handful of coins to start him on his way. Character B says she comes from a merchant family, where she was the pampered only child. Unwilling to marry the man her father chose, she cut off her hair, disguised herself as a young man, and used her great voice and musical accomplishments to propel her career as a bard. My job for Character A is to find the small village where Character A was born, document his family, their social standing, and their various personalities. If he says he has 3 brothers and 2 sisters, that's what I give him. He chooses his own first name and surname from a list of appropriate names for his race/country. For Character B, I decide that her family is well-known in the small town I have decided she was born in and that her running away was interpreted as a kidnapping by her family who have posted rewards for her return. Eventually, I create someone hired by her wealthy father to find her, which makes a great red herring in any adventure.

Yes, some people choose an angst driven character. The half-orc badly treated by his tribe, who eventually decides he's better off on his own. How he decides to team up with whatever motley crew of characters the other players have decided on is up to him. My job is to create the tribe that rejected him, who, though they never liked him, feel insulted by his desertion...

In my most recent campaign, rather than the standard "we meet in a tavern," each character was given a reason created by his storyline to arrive in a tiny hamlet. The halfling rogue had been brought up as a guerilla fighter in a land ruled by an evil Duke (who had recently been brought to justice). Having lived an adventurous life, she had no wish to settle down peacefully. Besides, the Duke's evil minion had escaped justice! She decides to visit the hamlet to talk a famous, retired adventurer into helping her find him. The wizard in the party had been tutored by this retired adventurer wizard, but had gone to the big city to seek his fortune. Instead, he found too much competition and a high cost of living. He visits the wizard's niece, who lives in the city, to see if she can find him some employment. She is a seer and is not surprised to see him. She tells him that her divinations have told her that her uncle is in danger and asks him to accompany her. Of course, they need a strong fighter to guard them on their journey to the hamlet...enter our party's fighter. (On the way, there is short side-trek that allows the fighter and wizard to role-play a bit). When they get to the hamlet, they find the uncle missing. Clues lead them to a wayside shrine and an unconscious cleric. When they revive the cleric, he tells them that the uncle was generously donating to the shrine's upkeep when they were attacked by thieves and he was knocked unconscious. Enter the party's cleric who has a definite reason to track down the thieves and convince the fighter and wizard to help (indeed, this abduction scene was role-played, giving the cleric a true story to tell.) They are invited by the niece to the uncle's house to look for clues. There they find a young girl sneaking out the door with a valuable statue. Wait! She's no young girl, she's a thieving halfling! (The halfling, finding the house empty, decides to take the statue that the wizard has left unguarded and then return it the next day, in the hope that the wizard will be impressed and agree to help her track down the evil minion). The player of the halfling has some talking and convincing to explain herself and what could be more appropriate than offering to help them find the uncle in return for not turning her into the local militia? The niece then offers to equip them with a few necessary items and bids them to find her uncle as she takes up residence in his house. The wizard is eager to find his former mentor, the warrior is delighted to find a mission in which she can begin to prove herself, the cleric is self-righteously determined to track down these thieves and kidnappers, and the rogue, well, it's better than a jail cell and who knows? it does sound exciting!

I must submit my sister-in-law who whines constantly about her dice rolls. We all cringe when she rolls because she must have displeased the Goddess of Luck in real life. Because she has reason to whine, we sympathize (though it does get annoying when it's the 15th time she's complained).

I'm curious about how other DMs handle the passage of time in the dungeon. It's simple enough to run a battle, but what about the passage of time as players are exploring, etc.? Using what preexisting formulas I have found, it seemed as if my characters could enter a very large dungeon, run around exploring and slaying, and be out before more than a few hours had passed. This seems unrealistic to me. Also, many of the overland maps I have seem to have dungeons very close to towns and villages. Indeed, when I plot the entire mileage of some countries, they seem absurdly small. I have yet to find formula that fits this problem so mostly I just fudge it by telling the characters things like "your stomach is beginning to complain that it's been a long time since you've eaten" and so forth. Any suggestions or should I just keep on fudging things, which (stickler that I am) means keeping track of how many days it takes to travel between Point A and Point B.

My group has had some memorable adventures involving their relatives. On one,the cleric insisted on visiting his cousin, the herbalist, in a town they were passing through. They had a delightful meal (roast pork delicately seasoned with herbs, of course!) with the reclusive cousin trying to be hospitable to the rest of the motley crew. Then they went to buy some supplies and spent the night at an inn before continuing their journey. That night the herbalist's home was burned to the ground! Naturally, the party remembered how fussy the herbalist had been about fire safety while cooking the roast. This led into a wonderful mystery that was deeply personal to them.
On another, the group's braggart fighter invited the rest of the party to his sister's wedding. Naturally, he wanted them all to bring expensive gifts and dress accordingly. This extravagance blew through their accumulated wealth pretty quickly! Once there, the others were subjected to the fighter's bragging tales in which he was always the party's heroic savior while they were mere window dressing. The cleric was already miffed because the sister was being wed by a cleric of another faith. The wizard soon became irritated as he was continually being asked to "perform" for the children as if he were a common prestigitator. And the barbarian was still in mourning for the loss of his pet pseudodragon and in no mood for frivolity!
The wedding, to their surprise, went off without a hitch and the party enjoyed competing in various contests held during the reception. Of course, all of them were expecting something to happen to the bride that would require their services. Instead, a minor character, a halfling cook who had baked the lovely wedding cake, asked them to retrieve her wayward son whom she thought had run off with a thoroughly unsuitable young halfling girl. Since they didn't want to interfere in what seemed to be an affair of the heart, they politely declined. As they were about to depart at the end of the 3 day wedding celebration, however, the unsuitable halfling girl came into town looking for her fiance. She knew nothing of his disappearance. Of course now, the party were expected to help find him...
My players really enjoyed all the various personalities of friends and families in this adventure. From the fighter's mother (who treated him like a spoiled baby) to the homely old-maid daughter of family friends who pursued him relentlessly, to the uncle who lived in a nearby country and expounded endless on the advantages of riding hippogriffs rather than horses, each one had some unique and unforgettable characteristic.
In short, using friends and family sparingly and coming up with original ideas to involve them has been a wonderful addition to our games.

In our campaigns, cleaning kits for both armor and weapons are available at venders. It is assumed that as long as the characters have these items (which are good for 1 month), they will keep up their armor and weapons during their free time. If they do not have these, armor and weapons begin to take 1 point of wear and tear per day. When a piece of armor or a weapon takes 10 points of damage, it loses all effectiveness (i.e. the armor is so rusty or dried out that it no longer provides any AC bonus or the weapon breaks completely). A simple calendar tracking device is used by the DM for this. So far I have been using a standard kit for armor and one for weapons. I toyed with the idea of having particular kits for armor types/weapon types, but this seemed too cumbersome.

Another rule we have is that the evil D1 roll causes 10% of damage to whatever weapon a player is using at the time. This is tracked by the DM, who has a list of each player weapon. This percentage is applied to the damage done with that weapon. Players have quickly learned to have their weapons repaired when they are in a setting where they can do so. It's not hard to calculate percentages by 10% increments in your head so this has worked quite well.