Also not to forget that in Golarion, Night Tea is a prefnancy preventtive ala Gentleman's snuff, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's also part of his agenda.
We've taken that same idea and run with it; my independent, free-spirited female rogue was NOT amused. She now flavors her daily Night Tea with mint.
I'm running a very informal game for my husband and roommate, and having the weekly rebellion activities helps tremendously with pacing. Both guys work second shift, so we've been playing an in-game week every other evening or so to help them unwind after work.
They're very conscious of building up the rebellion slowly ("how to boil a frog" and all that) and are focusing on fitting rebellion activities in around the daily lives of their PCs. Each week has consisted of an event and a mission, followed by a rundown (and relevant RP/bookkeeping where necessary) of what the PCs are doing on their own time. Then we run through the sheet together, with each person rolling for the teams their PCs are managing. It makes for great, two-hour mini-sessions that we've *really* enjoyed. The guys just finished dealing with Blosodriette, and will be heading to investigate the murders in the Nursery next time we play.
For us, the rebellion mechanic has allowed for a very freeform game while giving us just enough of a structured framework to stay on track. I think the cap on the rebellion's rank will help nudge the PCs forward when it's time so that they don't chase too many rabbit trails and get nowhere. I'm not sure if this AP (at least if you're using the mechanic in question) is the right choice for a group that needs an intense, punchy story for tight gaming schedules. But it makes an AWESOME "first sandbox" adventure for those of us who want to try something with a little more freedom but are intimidated by the concept of GMing a sandbox game.
I'm starting a new campaign tonight spanning a dozen modules, multiple adventuring parties, and years of in-game time. The one common tie between the various groups and scenarios will be the Umbra Carnival; all of the PCs will be members of the carnival, and each adventure will take place when the carnival travels to that location.
As such I want the carnival to be a living, breathing thing...more of a small, dynamic city-state than the settlement statblock presented in Murder's Mark allows. I like the idea of the PCs taking on more responsibility and growing the carnival as they go, with the end goal of eventually making it so large and so famous that it finds a permanent home.
I remember having a really hard time with the caravan rules when I ran Jade Regent, and the carnival already seems too big for those rules to accommodate. But the Kingdom building rules are too broad and seem hard to apply to a single settlement.
I'm guessing I'll need to create a hybrid of the two, but I was wondering if anyone had advice on either system as I go. If you were me, would you start with the caravan rules and build on with kingdom building rules, or vice-versa? Is there a third option I haven't considered yet? Any ideas I can steal would be greatly appreciated.
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I'm building a witch (Cartomancer), and ran across a point of confusion with the Spell Deck ability.
The ability replaces the witch's familiar with a harrow deck, through which she communicates with her patron. The text says of the deck that "it's ability to hold spells functions identically to the way a witch's spells are granted by her familiar," and that "the cartomancer must consult her harrow deck each day to prepare her spells and cannot prepare spells that are not stored in the deck."
That's all well and good...but how does a cartomancer learn new spells? Aside from the base 2 per level, a traditional witch can have her familiar commune with another witch's familiar, or she can burn a scroll, make a concoction out of the ashes, and feed it to the familiar, right?
If the harrow deck truly functions like a traditional familiar, does that mean a cartomancer's deck can somehow commune with another witch's familiar? How on earth do you "feed" a deck of cards? Magic or not, I don't think my witch is going to want to slather a "special brew" onto her hand-painted harrow deck in the hopes of somehow learning a new spell.
Do you have a link to that handout or would you mind posting yours? Because that sounds awesome, and my PC's are on the bottom level of Thisseltop right now.
I'm so sorry I missed this earlier! I know you're probably past that point already, but just in case, here's the original:
My plan is unfolding nicely, with only one little hiccup. Things at Habe's went downhill fast, so all of the fighting was front and center and the party didn't have to explore the whole place. Andrezi, the pc with the most history with Nualia, decided he couldn't face her. After dealing with Habe, the orderlies, and the necromancer, the other PCs stayed in the foyer to make sure nothing happened, and Andrezi went to notify Hemlock of the developments there. Nualia and the other patients were taken to a facility in Magnimar, and Andrezi is trying to work up the courage to write her a letter.
This is the first time I've ever heard of ma'am implying marriage. It's just the feminine of sir, as far as I've ever heard.
What's "miss" the equivalent of, then?
I know this was waaaay back on the first page, but I thought I'd chime in because I also live in a place where ma'am does not imply marriage.
I live right on the Tn/Al line, and around here, miss/ma'am has nothing to do with marital status and everything to do with age.
"Miss" is attached to a name, and either refers to a child/teenager or a substantially older woman. You stop getting called "Miss" when you're officially a grown up and don't pick it back up again unless being addressed by a much younger person, as a sign of respect, and only in conjunction with your first name. While I would certainly write out "Ms." in correspondence with said older woman, there is no audible difference between "Ms" and "Miss" in my area.
For instance, my MiL is "Miss Sherry," my mother's friends are "Miss Heather" or "Miss Sandy," and my elderly friends are "Miss Frances" and "Miss Lily." It doesn't denote a lack of familiarity...I've known most of these women for at least a decade.
On the flip side, even my 19 month old niece is sometimes "Miss Jessa" (for example: "Hey, Miss Jessa! Come give me hugs!") But I'd NEVER call a woman around my own age "Miss" because that would be insulting. It would imply either that she was old, or that I considered her a child.
"Sir" and "Ma'am" are entirely different. They're absolutely required for pretty much everybody, and denote respect. You use them with "Yes/No" for anyone and everyone, or when addressing a person whose name you do not know ("Excuse me, sir?" or "How may I help you, Ma'am?")
To further complicate things, "Sir" and "Ma'am" are such a part of our cultural vocabulary that we use them in other contexts, too. I've worked with preschoolers since I was a teen, and when scolding a child, I and the people I learned from will often say something like "No Sir! We do NOT do that!" or "No Ma'am...you know better!"
And then there's "Sugar," and "Hun," and even sometimes "Sweetie," and "Darhlin." All four can be either polite, or a horrific insult, depending on the way you draw the word out and the kind of smile you wear when you say it...
The rule of thumb I try to live by is "don't assume someone from a different region speaks the same language as you, even if you're both speaking English." It's saved me from feeling needlessly insulted on many occasion, and I would hope that others would extend that same courtesy of the benefit of the doubt to me,should I accidently insult them by not understanding the unspoken rules of their culture.
I can't wait for the patterns...especially the mittens. I'm GMing RoW right now, which is a TOTALLY valid excuse to find scrumptious yarn and make a pair for myself, right?
I know there have been tons of discussions about what to do with Tsuto and Nualia should they live...I've gleefully borrowed from LOTS of them. But I've had something of a unique opportunity come up, and I'm curious as to how you guys would handle it.
the setup::
One of my players wanted to be from Sandpoint, and he ate up the backstory for the town. His PC is Andrezi Valdemar, an inquisitor of Shelyn. Without telling him more than "what everybody knows" about the Late Unpleasantness, he decided that as a boy, Andrezi had something of a crush on Nualia. He stood up for her once or twice, but never got up the nerve to pursue a friendship or romance with her, and when she "died in the fire" that opportunity was lost forever. He's since moved on and is pursuing another NPC, but that whole situation shaped a lot of who he is.
Tsuto escaped at the Glassworks, and Andrezi's reaction to Tsuto's journal was absolutely priceless. Between that, Gogmurt's comment about Tsuto and Nualia "going at it like donkey rats," and the 10 page monstrosity of a journal I left in Nualia's room, Andrezi was an absolute mess by the time the party faced her. He kept trying to reach out to her, to trigger some tiny bit of remorse in her for what she'd done, but he doesn't believe he made any headway (he did, actually, and Nualia might very well be on the path to redemption, depending on how the rest of this plays out). It was pretty obvious to all of them that she'd completely snapped, and that she only barely recognized Andrezi.
The PCs managed to subdue and arrest Orik, Lyrie, Tsuto, AND Nualia. I've had them all sent off to Magnimar for trial, and will have news of their verdicts make it back to Sandpoint midway through book #2.
I'm sending Orik to Fort Rannick, and Lyrie to the Hells. Tsuto is going to be found "not guilty" by Justice Ironbriar (who is in fact his father) and will be encountered a final time as a skinsaw cultist.
But...what do I do with Nualia?
If she had no connection to the events in book 2, I'd have her locked away as criminally insane. I'm tempted to send her to Habe's, even...I think that opens up some interesting possibilities later on.
But would Ironbriar let that happen? She got caught, true...but not before proving herself to be a fairly valuable asset. Would she be sentenced, but then sprung by the cultists?
Because I only have two players (with two pcs each) I have the luxury of really tailoring hunks of the AP to their characters. That said, this isn't the Andrezi AP, and that player's done almost too good of a job integrating his backstory into the material...between being a Valdemar, the thing with Nualia, and the way he's made himself into the perfect scapegoat for the murders in book 2, I run the risk of boring my other player to death if I do too much more with Nualia.
For whatever reason, my PCs didn't want to have anything to do with the catacombs. Tsuto got away and ran down the tunnel, but they were more concerned about getting Ameiko back to the Rusty Dragon and taken care of than pursuing someone who was "clearly long gone, anyway."
Then, in reading the journal, they made the Nualia and Thistletop connections, but didn't "get" the references to the quasit under the town being in the tunnel. They decided they needed to collapse the tunnel just inside the entrance, so that it was taken care of for good.
They weren't ready for Thistletop yet, and I wanted them to encounter the references to Thassilon before they got there. So after having Ameiko subtly attempt several times to convince them to check it out, I got heavy handed.
One of the PCs is a haunted oracle (seer) with the time mystery. He plays his curse as being not so much haunted, as partially out of sync with time...sometimes his gear slips out of the "now" and it takes him longer to retrieve it, etc. So while they were headed to get permission to collapse the tunnel entrance, I had him slip momentarily into the future and see the group standing before a giant sink hole with Hemlock, who was saying "The sink hole opened up the catacombs. I sent a team of men to investigate...but they haven't returned. That was three days ago."
It's cheesy, I know, but it killed two birds with one stone...it let them know something was down there and made them think that if they went forward with their plan they would collapse part of the town, while neatly foreshadowing the ACTUAL sink hole.
Alright! Sorry this took a bit to put together. What do people in Ustalav dress like? At the link below are more than 150 examples of things I might consider Ustalavic fashion. I'll continue to expand this as I come across stuff, but hopefully you'll find some inspirational ideas in there and at least see the direction and variety I'm thinking.
Best of luck with the dieting too! What an awesome goal!
Has anyone told you lately how awesome you are? Thank you SOOOOO much!!!!! That's above and beyond anything I could have expected...the CLOTHES! I love everything on that board. *goes to drool over the pretties some more*
And knowing the gate would close... I can't see Nadya sending her children, knowing she'll likely never see them again.
I can't imagine how hard it would be to send my children into the unknown like that. But having personally experienced the loss of a child, I know *I* would do anything within my power to protect my other children...even if it meant never seeing them again.
Nadya's daughter was brutally murdered for saying something unflattering about a White Witch. Imagine what they might do to the children of a traitor! Simply moving them to a nearby village doesn't seem good enough to me.
I'm running this for my husband, and I know he'll feel the same way. I'm assuming that he'll figure out the connection between Arbagzor and Tengezil, so I'm playing Arbagzor up as a friend of Nadya's who acts as a sort of eccentric uncle for her boys. Sending all three of them through the portal will still be a gut-wrenching choice for Nadya, but knowing they're being looked after by someone she can trust should prove the tipping point for her.
Nadya *might* end up accompanying the PCs (after all, what has she got to go home to now?) and I imagine that the first thing they'll do after the endgame is make sure Nadya is reunited with her children.
I could be completely and totally off here, but the ritual came across as a private, lasting, dramatic form of a wedding band...a symbol of the nature of the relationship. I guess I figured that a culture which had a specific symbol for marriage would also have a common practice for those widowed.
A different kind of mark does seem appropriate, but I'm not sure what. I was thinking a single line across, either jagged or broken in the space between the original scars? I would think that making a jagged line would be much more painful than a straight one, and that seems fitting to me...loss is like that. But a break in the line could make sense, too.
I know I'm waaaay overthinking this. I was just hoping to establish a recognizable baseline, so that when another tiefling (or someone familiar with their culture) saw it, they would recognize the marks and know what they mean.
Thank you SO much for this! My group's still not thrilled with caravan combat, but I worked a couple of these into our last play session, and it "made up for it" according to the PCs. ESPECIALLY "Such a Nice, Quiet Man."
** spoiler omitted **
I'm glad your group have found some of the suggestions enjoyable. It does sound like you and them had a memorable session and played it to the hilt.
Although, you say no one did a Sense Motive check? Wow. Awesome in a good way. I'm afraid I would never be able to get that far with my group: too many ex-Shadowrun players.
DM: Your mother tucks you in and says, "Sleep well."
Player: I roll Sense Motive, does she really mean it?
We're all pretty new to Pathfinder and, well, to tabletop RPGs in general. The thought honestly never crossed their minds, and I couldn't think of a way to remind them that they *could* do something like that without giving away the fact that something was up. They've learned their lesson now, lol. If I had a quarter for every time I've heard "I'm rolling a sense motive check" since then, my Paizo subscriptions would be paid for ;).
Thank you SO much for this! My group's still not thrilled with caravan combat, but I worked a couple of these into our last play session, and it "made up for it" according to the PCs. ESPECIALLY "Such a Nice, Quiet Man."
Our take on it:
We came across an Erutaki encampment just before leaving the Giant-Downs. This was the party's second encounter with the Erutaki, and the first one hadn't gone so well thanks to a low diplomacy roll. They received a warm welcome this time, but the PCs past experience left them distrustful of the Erutaki. So when a couple of the Erutaki men showed up the next morning, accusing Varin (a driver we picked up in Kalsgard) of murder, the caravan was outraged. The "case" went before a make-shift Erutaki tribunal, and I let the PCs question both Varin and a witness who saw the two of them together the night before. But the party was SO sure that Varin was innocent that they didn't attempt a single sense motive roll.
Varin was declared guilty and his execution was set for dawn. The PCs didn't want to take on the whole encampment, so they staged an elaborate break out in the wee hours of the morning. The plan went off (mostly) smoothly, and the PCs were really pumped about saving one of their own.
Three weeks later, in another Erutaki settlement, Varin killed again and then took his own life. The stunned silence around the table was absolutely priceless.
Varin left behind no note to explain his actions. The only thing unusual the group found in his stuff was a velvet lined box, with a dozen locks of hair nestled inside.
Varin's brother is also a driver for our caravan, and had no clue that Varin was hiding such dark secrets. The brother's presence has kept tension high across the tundra. We ended with Iqaliat visible in the distance; it'll be interesting to see how the almost palpable unrest plays itself out in the village.
