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Yeah, but the blurb is like the trailer for a movie. It tells the players why they want to play this and not the other fantasy game for the inexplicably more popular game system in the same time slot. It has to sell the adventure. That takes more than just the facts. Writing that takes effort.
Looks interesting. I look forward to PFS venturing into Tian Xia again. However, this blurb is seriously not good. 1-4 scenarios should sell to the first-timer crowd, but this is a pile of proper nouns that say nothing to anyone who hasn't been playing the campaign for a while. If you're not an old hand at Pathfinder Society, this is word salad. I cannot use this. I have to rewrite it before I can offer the scenario as a public game, and because I don't run in a primarily English-speaking environment, I have to do it twice.
I dropped in a bunch of the NPCs from the foreword of book four. Also, I kept a calendar and had the Dies Irae gladiator tourneys from the Cheliax book run in the background of the campaign, coincidentally so that the finals happened during book four when the party was in Egorian, and allowing me to introduce a new member of the aristocracy, who could actually be competent. In my case, the winner was a very level-headed dwarf warrior who showed up, made an impression, and then was shipped off to his brand new mountain barony to raise troops for the war effort. But really, I got way more mileage out of the idea that's not very much explored in the book but is kinda there between the lines. Like all the Thrune agents are there. The queue is hours long. I played it so the city was fairly bursting with mid-to-high-level adventurers that the party could go carouse and hang out with. The evil iconic characters were also rooming at the same inn with the party, and there was much amusing interaction over the breakfast buffet. (Except Lazzero Dalvera, whom I had already cast as the party cleric's direct superior and who ended up replacing the endboss of book four. He was captured, excruciated, his name stuck from records and his office got bricked up.)
You know, as one of the players in that session, I thought exactly the same thing when I read the description. We were on the brink of TPK when time ran out in the slot, and I thirst for a rematch!
Since it's alchemical items, I didn't bother making an itemised list. I gave them an undefined 800 gp's worth of stuff from the Core, 300 gp of which could be potions of cure light wounds, and the rest they could decide and deduct from the total as they prepared their loadout before embarking on a task.
I don't have a specific number, but over 20. A part of this is because I prefer to run lower levels and characters of levels 1-3 can be killed by an unlucky crit. That said, there was this freak incident in the spring of 2014 that's locally called the Blood Spring, when over a month, four sessions that I ran saw a total of 16 character deaths, including TPKs in two scenarios that are not regarded as particularly dangerous. There was one instance where they come upon a room with an object in the middle of the floor. They look at it, and go "this is obviously a trap". Then the paladin goes: "watch out, imma go spring it". Twenty minutes and a lot of poor rolling later, they've triggered two encounters and six PCs are dead. Then there was the forum game where they went into Mists of Mwangi with four PCs and no melee combatant and wiped on the first encounter. In general, I think modules and sanctioned AP bits are more lethal. Masks of the Living God saw the only survivor of a six-person team escape by throwing herself through a second-story window. Personally, I've had three characters die permanently, the first of them in the first scenario we ever ran in Finland. It is, in fact, possible to get killed in Silent Tide.
It's also noteworthy that Yesteryear's Truth references Into the Unknown, and the briefing in Fugitive on the Red Planet is written to assume that the team has a few gigs under their belt already. So basically that order is pretty solid. Yesteryear's Truth is also slightly tougher so it's a good idea to have them at 2nd level.
A friend of mine whipped up a playlist for Starfinder in the spirit of Guardians of the Galaxy: https://open.spotify.com/user/mercurian/playlist/4xyt9zlP1L0nf4XNmX8FuR Splendor & Misery by clipping. is probably better as inspiration than background during the game, but still very appropriate and oh so good. And speaking of background, I found Mongolian overtone singing worked fairly well to set the mood during a scene in Yesteryear's Truth. during my search, I also discovered Mongolian overtone hiphop, which I now need to find some use for. For Strawberry Machine Cake, I'd use Babymetal.
I'm super glad that Spelljammer got called out. Even if Starfinder is going a different direction tone wise, Spelljammer WAS one of the first science fantasy RPG settings and in my mind still one of, if not possibly, the best. No current science. It did draw a lot from outdated and disproved cosmological models. Before anyone asks, no, the giant space hamsters they just made up.
Seriously impressive literature list. Like, I can quibble (BANKS!), but I love how it's so cutting edge that it's got things that are up for a Hugo this year. I'm literally reading Ninefox Gambit right now. The history is acknowledged, but it's a modern list about where SF is now. Mind you, I'd also jettison a third of the video games to make room for more comics (VALERIAN & LAURELINE!), but that's just me hating video games.
I've GM'd a couple. Around the time I was made the local VC in May 2012, there were like 16 PC deaths at my tables in a couple of weeks, including two TPKs, a Masks of the Living God where one PC managed to limp away and a God's Market Gamble that saw the entire party laid low in the final encounter but only one actually died. I like to call this time the Blood Spring. TPK 1: low-level parties are vulnerable. Low-level parties who proceed into Mists of Mwangi with four members who are all support casters die on the first encounter. I asked them if they're sure they want to play without a tank. They said yes. TPK 2: there was a thing everyone in the party agreed was an obvious trap, after which the paladin did the "hold my beer" thing and triggered it, releasing a spider swarm. Then, a party of six characters, including a fire sorcerer, manage to roll atrociously badly on a number of attack rolls and get eaten. This was just poor tactics combined with terrible luck, vulnerable PCs, and no way to escape.
Yeah, that was a fun thing to notice when starting to prep for the scenario the evening before the game. With a rhyming dictionary and a working knowledge of translation theory and poetry forms, it wasn't all that difficult. The important things are the translation of Caught's name so it retains the same number of letters and keeping the important stuff in the poems – namely, the suggestions of what the scraps are capable of summoning and the overarching theme of eating. Rhymes, puns and metre are less crucial, especially since languages have their own rhythms and melodies and native poetry forms and what works in one language may come across as contrived in another. For instance, the haiku looks kinda off in English and doing iambic pentametre in Finnish is a bit like going against the grain of the language. Incidentally, if someone needs the poems in Finnish, I'll be glad to supply my translation.
Tonight, one of my GM blobs took shape in the form of a half-elf occultist 2, who promptly went on to play Master of the Fallen Fortress and level up. I will endeavour to play as much as possible with the character over the next few weeks and report here. I also keep an up-to-date online character sheet. My first brush with the occultist was largely positive, though it is hard to say anything definitive at this point. The party was rather strong for the module, with six members. The others were two kineticists, a medium, a halfling barbarian and a 1st-level pregenerated Seelah. When I was creating my character, I was slightly worried about the amount of moving parts. There's the spells themselves, then there's the focus powers, then there's the resonant powers, and then there's the mental focus point pool… It's a lot to take in at once and there are two separate resource pools to track. This is not a beginner-friendly class. However, in practice, once I'd figured out all the stuff I can do, it was easily one of the most versatile classes in the game. The spell list is limited, but very solid. Access to cure light wounds and thence the ability to use a wand through the conjuration implement group is very strong, especially in the Pathfinder Society environment. The limited spells were also offset by the weapon and armour proficiencies and BAB. The occultist sort of looks like a wizard type at first glance, except that taking him into melee can be tactically viable. (Indeed, my sole killing blow was with a quarterstaff – and incidentally, taking a two-handed weapon for a character who needs one hand free to wield implements is a remarkably stupid thing to do.) With mental focus allocated into abjuration, I also had the highest AC in the party (18, with two others at 17). My mental focus allocation was abjuration 3, conjuration 2, evocation 3. At low levels, the intense focus resonant power from evocation really makes a difference, by the way. Because of the large party size and the cramped circumstances in most of the module, I was not really able to effectively gauge the combat effectiveness of the class yet. I did not have the opportunity to use a single point of mental focus and only one of my daily spells, most of my time being spent behind the wall of full-BAB classes. I was the only one in the team with ranks in Disable Device, however, which was a great boon. The object reading class ability is also pretty strong compared to what the other classes have at their disposal for identifying magic items, since it wipes the floor with the identify spell. Then again, I don't think I've seen anyone actually ever use identify in Pathfinder RPG. In 3.5 it was useful, but now that the detect magic+Spellcraft combo is a functional replacement, it seems like a wasting a perfectly good spell slot. Anyway, I digress, and the occultist really doesn't have spell slots to waste. So, overall, based on the first four hours of play, I am very happy with the occultist. I will now proceed to see if I can break the everloving cheese out of it.
The cadre of Venture-Officers in Finland expands, as Markus Hyytinen joins us. His responsibility will be to swell our ranks in the northern city of Oulu, where polar bears roam the streets and they put mayonnaise on pizza. Let's give a warm welcome to the newest Venture-Lieutenant of the cold north!
Yeah, I think "judge" was also in use during Living Greyhawk but I don't have my files on this computer to check. There were some debates on the term in the forums back then. I try to refer to myself as a GM, but sometimes the "judge" slips out. Old habits die hard. Personally, I prefer the term Game Master, because this is, in the end, a roleplaying game and even in organized play I would not say there is a "winner". We're supposed to do more than adjudicate the scenario in front of us impartially, often pulling stuff out of thin air to patch up things the author did not think up or had no wordcount to cover. (And indeed, Marvel Super Heroes had a Judge. My personal favourite title for the game master is from Nobilis, where I am given the lofty title of Hollyhock God.)
It is my pleasure and privilege to announce that I have appointed the first Venture-Lieutenant in Finland, Jussi Leinonen! While I am based in Tampere and can shuttle back and forth occasionally, Jussi now has responsibility over the capital region of Finland and its teeming hordes. Welcome to the club, Jussi!
Name: Malje
The Gory Details: I rolled the beast up as a random encounter and the party decided to attack, even though they had the option of just huddling down until it went away. They figured it was the same creature that'd chased them up the shaft when they explored the first Serpent Gate they ran across and thought it was following them. The breath weapon took out both the oracle and the cleric in the first round. I was merciful and had it flee after half its hit points were gone, or it would've been a TPK.
So, I ran the final session of Vaults of Madness yesterday. You know, the Gorilla King's tests for the party. At this point we were all dead tired of dungeon crawling, so I just had him give the crystal to the party after they passed the tests and skipped Illaghri's dungeon altogether. Also, one party member is a demonspawn tiefling barbarian and a follower of Angazhan. Ruthazek kept referring to him as his son. Heh heh. Anyway, there's that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom menu in the module. It's the kind of thing that's supposed to freak out and disgust the players. So I figured I'd cook it. Vegepygmies being off-season and hippopotamus meat illegal to import, I went with stuffed pig hearts in red wine sauce. Strange enough to elicit expressions of shock from the players but still, you know, actual food. I also thought about getting some weird and exotic fruit like rambutans, but in the end was prevented by my schedule. Fried insects were also considered, but proved too expensive. Recipes and photos in my blog. I think engaging the players with more than mere description is a pretty good way to keep their (and mine!) interest up beyond moving miniatures on a battlemap. The third and fourth modules are pretty heavy in dungeon crawling and set-piece combat encounters and little else, and there's a real danger of the campaign stagnating at this point. Has anyone else fed their players weird things?
A lovely scenario. I've run this once face-to-face, and am now doing a forum game on our Finnish forum. Great fun! There's just one thing that, to me, is off. It's the chronology. What, exactly, has happened here? Did the other team capture the goblins and message Ambrus Valsin (with magic, hopefully) to send a team from faraway Absalom all the way to Irrisen? The trip should take <i>months</i>. For comparison, a trip from Magnimar to Eleder is 104 days long (according to the <i>Serpent's Skull Player's Guide</i> - by my estimate, the Magnimar-Corentyn leg, which these sea journeys share, should be around a month), and would likely not be too much longer than sailing from Absalom to Kalsgard. I think the distances and times involved strain credibility, and it would've been much more elegant to, say, have the briefing occur at the Kalsgard Lodge, where all the characters just happened to be at the same time.
And I forgot completely... For the dungeons, especially those featuring serpentfolk, I've used Karl Sanders' albums albums Saurian Exorcisms and Saurian Meditation. Very atmospheric stuff.
I can also recommend The Ghost and the Darkness soundtrack. And ziltmilt, it may be obvious, but it works, especially if you weed out the most recognizable main theme tracks.
Ah, this year I managed not to misplace my item writeup. Hit me! And thank you. Taming Whip
A taming whip grants its user a +5 circumstance bonus to Handle Animal checks when wielded, even if untrained. It allows the user to handle animals as a free action and push them as a move action. A druid or a ranger using the taming whip to handle their animal companion may push it as a free action. Additionally, the wielder of a taming whip may use it to cast charm animal once per day. When used to teach an animal tricks or train it for a general purpose, a taming whip halves the time required. While it cannot make rearing an animal go any faster, the wielder of a taming whip may rear as many as six animals of the same kind at once. To use a taming whip, it must be wielded in one hand. It is far too lightweight to be used as an effective weapon.
A tough question, since so many are worthy, but let's see... The six best, for each part of an AP. 1. Howl of the Carrion King. While LoreKeeper is absolutely right in that all of the first modules are top-notch, this stands tall even among the others (though my favourite will probably change with the seasons and the phase of the moon). I especially love the pugwampis. I've rarely seen a creature rouse such visceral hatred and rage in players. 2. Seven Days to the Grave. It's often said that disease epidemics don't work in a setting with the default D&D magic level assumption. This module puts the lie to that claim, and does it with style and panache. 3. The Hungry Storm. A little something to make the party respect the weather, a little dragon hunting, a little BBEG that just... won't... die all make for a memorable and tough adventure. 4. The Wake of the Watcher. "Reverse Innsmouth" indeed. I love how it can still throw a curveball to people like me or my players who know Lovecraft's work forwards and backwards. 5. The Final Wish. The best of the sixth issues, in my opinion. Jhaavhul is among the more memorable AP villains, there's an air of high fantasy about the entire story, and I just love the encounter where the party slaughters a hundred gnolls.
For my group of five players + GM, the Rise of the Runelords lasted 29 sessions averaging around 4-5 hours of playtime. We're now fifteen sessions into Serpent's Skull and just started the fourth book so we're more or less on the same schedule with that. We have the campaign hosted on a wiki, and the downtime stuff like item crafting and buying and selling gear is handled there, which saves time at the table.
Well, Deussu is pretty good. Not as good as Navdi was, but I don't think he's coming back. I like to think I'm not half bad myself, either. Then there's one Minna, who only ever ran a single session of Frozen Fingers of Midnight, but managed to make it quite memorable. We've a rather limited pool of GMs over here in Finland, but we're trying to improve things.
I'd present a B-plot for the high-level character, have them somewhere in the background running interference and fighting off high-level assassination crews or something. Something that the Jade Regent group and Ameiko are completely useless for and would only get in the way with. Then every once in a while the high-level character could show up bloody and beaten with another demon lord's head on a stick. Just figure out something plausible for him to do elsewhere.
Well, it can be anything, of course. The one I replied in the previous thread was because of an awesome GM. Villains tend to be memorable because of their personality, not their builds. While I do remember both the BBEGs in Silent Tide and The Trouble with Secrets, they're because they offed my PC, not because they were especially interesting personalities. In Living Greyhawk, on the other hand, there was this one villain we hunted across several modules over the course of FIVE YEARS of campaign, and never actually got to kill him. I still hate that guy. Good rewards are memorable. Not the loot. There's always loot. It's stuff like favours from the authorities, or finding a strange book bound in human skin that permanently eats a point of Wisdom but gives you nifty magic if you read it. Stuff that actually comes into play in later modules is also good. Immersive environment is a good one. Perils of the Pirate Pact is a good example, as are the Kaer Maga modules. Roleplaying with the NPCs or the other PCs can be very memorable indeed - we even have a quotes page for PFS Finland. Indeed, since most of them aren't funny unless you were there, but were still deemed good enough to enshrine on the campaign wiki, they'd kinda have too be. An example, after kicking down a door:
I'm not so sure about maps. Unless using the flip-mats or map packs, the only one who actually sees them in all their glory tends to be the GM, and the art tends to lose a lot once it's reproduced on the battlemap. Now that I think back, all the truly memorable examples of cartography were the ones that made no sense or were needlessly complex.
#4 Frozen Fingers of Midnight
Sploilers!:
At the very end, when we meet Natalya, the witch from Irrisen, the GM speaks her lines in an atrocious fake Russian accent. So, my character goes: "Wait one moment, that is not an Ulfen accent..! And she's clearly a witch... oh poop." Pretty much the most elegant example of utilizing a culture analogous to the real world I've ever seen in a fantasy RPG.
It happens. As long as it's not a regular occurrence, it's okay. Combat encounters need a bit of challenge and especially the BBEG needs to pose a credible threat to life and limb. Heck, my first PFS character (a human cleric) was one-shotted by the BBEG in Silent Tide. First PC death in PFS Finland, too. I shrugged and created a new one, and kept playing. And there's no way that Living Greyhawk had "an expected mortality rate of 25 percent per table". Not even Creighton Broadhurst, He Who Drank Deep of the Blood of PCs, took home that many heads.
Name: Sujiu
The party passed by the village and ended up being ambushed by the chemosits during the night. One of them went for the guy on watch, the other for the sleeping Sujiu. It was over pretty quickly. Sujiu was then reincarnated into the body of a gnome in Kalabuto. Since this made him unable to use his heirloom weapon, a Medium-size composite longbow, he set out on his own to find someone capable of casting wish and returning him to his former state.
In my campaign, the cargo was a largish block of marble. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't recovered from the wreck. Actually, the whole cargo thing was just an excuse for the character's family to get him out of Korvosa after he nailed someone important's hand to the wall with an arrow, and the job included the unspoken suggestion that he not return within the nearest generation or so.
Was wondering if anyone had a player that chose the serpent bloodline from APG? Yeah. Kailn, the halfling sorcerer in my group. We're still in the middle of Souls for Smuggler's Shiv, though, so it hasn't been in play much, and the characters are still unaware of the serpentfolk connection. I'm still unsure of how we'll play it, but we should get some plot fodder from it later on.
Our group of five, in a campaign starting in a couple of weeks. * Niero Brandt, a Varisian rogue, planning to become an alchemist. He started out as the player's character in Rise of the Runelords, but died early on in Burnt Offerings, only to be raised from the dead a year later by the group's cleric, who then threw him on a ship to get away from his enemies. Terribly sarcastic. * Sujiu, a half-elf fighter from Korvosa. Like most of the city's half-elves, a bastard son of Ambassador Perishial Kalissreavil. Pretty much the only member of the party who might give a damn about the political situation in Sargava. * Malje Garakhan, a Chelaxian half-elf oracle of bones. Originally born in Eleder and grown up in a colonial household there, and now returning to Sargava after living most of her life in Corentyn. Fleeing for her life after a failed prank that caused the death of the family head. * Kailn, Malje's halfling manservant/wine taster. A sorcerer with the air bloodline, a terrible flirt and apparently a horrible pervert. Just the kind of person you want to have with you on a long sea voyage, really... * Finally, Mogashi, the local guide, who appeared aboard in Bloodcove. Big and inhumanly ugly, but the jury is still out on whether his mother took to bed an orc, a demon or a gorilla. Mogashi has quaint native ways, like his worship of some jungle spirit... what was it, Angoz... Annaga... Angarzan? Something like that, anyway. It should be interesting to see how they will cooperate. Especially when you throw in the other castaways.
Hmm, slightly inconvenient in its timing, in that I just finished my Rise of the Runelords campaign in November and could have used the extra material on Xin-Shalast then. Then again, one of the party members is staying in town and has great plans for it, perhaps becoming the new Runelord of Greed to replace the one they killed... There is potential for interesting follow-up games.
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Pathfinder Society GM. Starfinder Society GM. 82 posts (225 including aliases). 11 reviews. No lists. 1 wishlist. 45 Organized Play characters. 1 alias. 
