Partho's page

P Diddy Nackle, the OG wrote:

Krackle, the sorcerer searching for a blue dragon cause he could ONLY cast lightning bolt (even if it looked a lot like Magic Missle, Burning Hands, Charm Person, etc.),

This is my favorite part. I might have to borrow this for something. :P

I believe Ive GMed for a Nackle or two, but never a bunch at once.

Help yourself, I was the player of Krackle Nackle. P Diddy misremembered a few details, but the idea is correct. Krackle had been struck by lightning 3 times, and was looking for the Lightning God. Of course, there is no god specific to lightning on Oerth (there are weather gods, but that wasn't good enough).

Gregg mentioning the family reunion at the fair reminds me of one of my favorite Nackle stories. The fair included the typical stations to visit for different rides or events. One was bungee jumping. Another Nackle attempted the jump, but mistimed his jump and went splat. One dead Nackle, luckily a friendly Druid reincarnated him. Krackle and another cousin insisted we could do better and jumped together on the same cord. All seemed to be going well. And then halfway down, we began argueing over when to pull up, this distraction proved our undoing. We bounced. High. Very high. Count with me... three Dead Nackles. The kindly Druid reincarnated us also. Nackles never learn.

I loved stumbling on this thread. I moved from SE Missouri over three years ago for a new job, and don't get back often enough. I also don't get to play PFS as much as I would like anymore. I'm glad everyone takes the Nackles in the spirit they were intended.

The Shadowlodge cons in Sydney. The last three (I think, might be only two) have had this. Certainly a change from Origins or Gen Con

I'm waiting for my plane to Brewfest. And now I have a reason to visit Australia

Announcing Brewfest 2011, three days of fun, games, food and drink for the weekend of October 7th - 9th at Buckner's Brewery in Downtown Cape Girardeau, Missouri. More coming soon, including a link to Warhorn and a full schedule of events!

Great! I plan to return to Missouri for a weekend of gaming and drinking. I can't wait

As the wizard at Arnim's table (Conjuartion Specialist, not a Summoner class), let me add a few things.

First, great story to this mod. I think it was well done and different than many other PFS modules, as there was actual travel time that changed things up.

On spells:

On slaves:

Cool Faction Mission Story

Looking forward to this as long as I'm not running the all Knackle table.

I hate to correct you in public Tim, but there is no "K" in Nackle.

Joshua J. Frost wrote:

I guess I fail to see an issue with your party being able to defeat the encounter with AoE spells and a cause fear spell. That sounds memorable and fun to me and it seems likely that your spellcasters who were able to do so probably felt pretty good about defeating the encounter.

Josh, I read Squirrels post as the last paragraph referenceing the second paragraph, not the fourth.

I.e. it was the high speed mechanics that needed some work, BUT he loved that the spells could drive the encounter...

If that makes any sense...

Yes, that's what I was trying to say, thanks for clearing that up, Nevynxxx.

Being able to cast spells to beat the encounter was fun, but the mechanics of some spells break down when a bunch of dogs are essentially lashed together. One failure and the whole team is done. I doubt that was the intention, but it has to work that way, since each dog is a separate creature. That was the point I was trying to make (and obviously failed in my first attempt): that it was a little too easy to remove the bad guys from that encounter. Attacking the sled dogs is much easier than hurting the actual combatants.

This is all meant constructively, on the whole this is a good adventure.

I played this at the same table as TIm, and I loved the plot, and most of the module.

I think the problem with the sled dog encounter (which is a great idea with a lot of potential) is that the abstract high speeds change many of the assumptions of how combat works in the game. If the speeds were translated to feet per round for the tactical encounter, it would have allowed the encounter to mostly work as a normal combat. The extra rules for handling the sled can work to slow or speed up by, say, 5 feet per round; or make turns, much like the Fly skill (which didn't exist when the mod was written, so that's not a fair comparison, just an idea for the future).

I think adding mechanics where appropriate is OK, but they need to be playtested to make sure they work in unusual situations. In my experience there tends to be trouble when the players start thinking outside the box.

The AOE spells Tim referred to are Web and Grease (I play a Conjuror). WIth 6 dogs on each sled, it was easy to immediately remove 2 sleds from the encounter, if just 1 dog fails, that sled's going nowhere. Same with Grease, some of the dogs will fail and slow that sled. My favorite, though, was Cause Fear on one of the Mushers, making him steer the sled away from us at full speed, with the combatant yelling and screaming at him to turn around.

A fun adventure, just that 1 encounter needed a little more thought with all the new mechanics involved.

Advanced Giant Xorn will have 94 HP. And according to PF monster creation rules, that's just fine - a CR 8 monster is supposed to have circa 100 HP.

Thanks, I thought the chart of CRs only applied to monster creation, so I didn't use that for comparison. fixing a math error gets me to 94 hp.

I'll be running PFS#21 this Saturday. The table will probably be Tier 5-6, but just to be prepared I have updated the Elder Xorn in Act 4. As suggested in the Xorn entry in the Beastiary, I added the Advanced and Giant templates (rebuild version). Everything's fine except for the number of hit points seems low.

Do monster get Hit Dice added with these templates. I didn't add any Hit DIce, and have an Elder Xorn with 87 hit points. (as a comparison, the 3.5 MM version has 130).

This doesn't feel like a CR8 challenge to me. It hits like CR8 but will die a lot faster than the normal Xorn will to a level 6 party.

Am I doing something wrong, or thinking too hard? :-)

I'm going to make this my first post, as I my opinion is rather strong. (yay first post!! now that's out of the way).

A note on my background. I am new to the Pathfinder Society, having just started playing at the end of July. I played and judged Living Greyhawk at its height, and Living Forgotten Realms when it started (I quickly soured on LFR).

Playing a scenario a second time is certainly a major turn off to me, and most of my regular play group. Allowing multiple cracks at a scenario draws the campaign farther from what most campaigns (should) try to be: a continuing story. If I fail to stop the evil Cleric from raising all the corpses in the graveyard, I don't get another chance tomorrow, it's too late, it's done. If the results of scenario #15 are to have consequences in scenario #25, you have to let what happened, happen.

Sure, the logistics of a shared world type organized play campaign alter this a little. Living Greyhawk would "average" the results of all tables for the fist 3 to 6 months of a scenario, and the "average" would be What Really Happened; individual characters would have to adjust their "memories." But even with that, each player just has 1 chance to influence the story line. Giving players multiple chances to impact the story just feels like too much time travel.

Add in the faction prestige wrinkle of The Pathfinder Society and I think it gets worse. If someone fails to achieve the faction goal, it certainly would be easier to achieve the next time, and multiple bites at the apple should be discouraged.

The main argument I have seen in other organized play campaigns in favor of allowing play by the same player but different characters is equipment available to purchase in a scenario is better for a different character of the same player. Pathfinder largely avoids this due to the prestige award system. I didn't buy this argument for other systems, and I certainly don't for Pathfinder.

I hope this is useful to the discussion.

Chris