Philip Holmes's page

I think Quick Preparation is a good move overall. For folk who think it's broken something, it's worth remembering it was already in the game and Wizards were already taking it at 4th, so this is more gaining a feat than gaining a power.

The idea of a Wizard who can sit down (out of combat) and find the right spell for the job is thematically a good one, certainly moreso than having to stick a pin in your spell list in the morning and hope you made the right choices. "Yes, I do have a vast repertiore of spells, and I do know how to cast a floating disc, but not until tomorrow morning, sorry!"

Beats carrying around a backpack full of utility scrolls which did the same job.

I think a few posters have already pointed out the problem isn't Wizards, it's more that Sorcerors need something to give them more of a niche, they do feel a bit flat right now.

I love that Sorcs can choose multiple spell lists, but it's a thing that seems to go away at character creation. Perhaps opening them up to more spell choices would be the way to give them a strong and distinct flavour?

Either 1 of their spells per level known from any spell list, or perhaps +CHA of their total known spells from any spell list would give them a very nice versatility that other classes couldn't replicate, and make Sorc players feel like they had something to offer?

I also think that they should relax the Sorc heightening powers. Given their main theme is 'natural fountain of magical power', the ability to heighten more spells doesn't feel like it would break the class, and once again, it would give it some variability.

Overall, I liked the update. Not sure how Alchemy multiclass works with the new infused reagents though. Half what standard Alchemists get?

I think True Strike is a good example of a spell that could be expanded by the action system.

The spell as written is fine, but going up to 2 casting actions could be 'target other - range touch' and 3 casting actions could be 'target other - range 30ft'.

I think what they did with Heal and Magic Missile is great, and would love to see it expanded out to give a bit more flex to the system.

True Strike.

I just ran the Ruby Massacre (half way through actually), and I found it worked well using the 'terror strike' approach that we've discussed above.

1 - Having the devils disguise as PCs instead of Azatas made more of an impact on the group. Also they had fun seeking out and attacking versions of themselves.

2 - It immediately sparked efforts from the players to try and counter what they felt was a propaganda attack by Cizmerkis, so as well as fighting and saving people, they've been loudly trying to show that it's not really the Silver Ravens who are attacking, while Cizmerkis has been equally loudly shouting about saving the citizens from these foul terrorists (all while pretending the fight the other Bone Devil who was disguised as our party's strongest front line fighter).

3 - The players are already starting to plan how to deal with the P.R. battle they expect to happen after the fight ends, so this angle seems to have engaged with them fairly neatly.

It doesn't take a major rewrite. A bit of a change in speech from Cizmerkis, with him being interrupted by the Eyrines who flies in disguised as a PC and starts firing arrows at the stage, followed by Ciz screaming 'Lock the doors! Don't let the traitors escape! Protect the citizens!', and then all hell breaks loose.

Overall I think it worked fairly well as an alternative approach to the Massacre, especially when realistically we all know that some NPCs are very likely to escape alive, unless the players really mess up badly.

edit : I did one other thing. When I did the Barzillai Thrune 'gifts' back in book 2, I replaced the somewhat generic +2 stat items with more visual items, for example, one of our lot got a big black 2-h Warhammer with silver runes all over it. While quite a few of the players ditched the items as they didn't trust them, by arming the disguised devils with duplicates of these items it immediately clicked with the players and they've assumed that those items were a setup for this Massacre, which helps make Barzillai look a little smarter and sneakier as well.

All good stuff above.

From my game (and some of the fixes I used) :

1 - Vary how the NPCs get introduced, far too many people just turn up at the front door. It's a running joke among my players that the Coffeehouse might as well have a neon sign outside the door saying 'Secret Rebel Hideout'.

2 - Consider tweaking Barzillai Thrune's plan. As it stands, this very intelligent villain has no need to take over the city. He'd be much better off just quietly buying an estate in the city, doing the ritual and settling down to a quiet life while he awaits godhood.
If you add a section to his ritual that means his power on ascension is directly based on his power inside the region while he was alive, he has a good reason to want to take over the city and crush all opposition.

3 - Rexus's early story needs a little tweaking as well. If he knows about the Monastery, why didn't he bloody well say something? If his parents left him a key to the place, you think he'd bring that up. I added in an external Archivist NPC who escaped and fled the city, returning to find Rexus and hand him both the key and the knowledge that there was a secret Archivist lair below Hocum's.

4 - Create your teams up front. Give them NPC names and basic personalities so that the rebellion feels a bit more fleshed out. I used Forvian Crow as the anti-hero rebel, he's the harsh CN mercenary who believes the ends justify the means, and he's a good contrast to Liara, Rexus and Octavio. Turned out to be one of their favourite NPCs so far.
Consider having each NPC represent a 'face' of your rebellion, be it revenge, idealism, freedom, desire for order etc, and let your different PC's get close to different ones that fit their philosophy. It can lead to some good RP.

5 - Tweak the Bleakbridge tolls. They get crazy, fast, and would in reality cause the city to completely collapse.

6 - I increased some of the early follower requirements for levelling up the rebellion, as otherwise a lot of GMs have found it goes a bit too fast.

7 - Try and introduce characters more, and earlier. BT's Lieutenants are basically faceless NPCs until the very end, so try and give them a bit of face time so the party has a bit more of a grudge going on.
Introduce Luculla, Hetamon, Setrona Sabinus and a few others earlier if you can so they don't feel quite as opportunistic. Luculla especially can be a good, slow burn for a betrayal NPC.

8 - My players keep wanting to map the sewers, and are paranoid about the open dock in the Wasps Nest. Consider some high level sewer maps or put a collapsed ceiling nearby to block it off. Given how hard it is to move around at night, your players may decide to make a raft and go exploring.

9 - I bought a few of those flip-scoreboard things you see on quiz nights, and set them up outside my GM screen. The first is for Notoriety, the second is for Followers. The players really seem to appreciate seeing those numbers move as they do things around the city, and it keeps the idea at the front of their minds.

10 - Give Octavio an Amulet of Non Detection, otherwise the players may feel paranoid that he'll get tracked and blow their cover, given his profile.

11 - A little foreshadowing is great. My Milanite has been having prophetic dreams about the Devil's Bells (which in my game are being used as a soul repository for sacrificed Milani worshippers, every time one is killed, the bell rings).

There's probably more, but those were a few of the obvious ones. Hope you find it helpful.

It's a great campaign, I think it's one of Paizo's best, with a great flavour and a good storyline.
But like most urban campaigns it needs a bit of legwork from the GM to get the very best out of it.

Read and try your best to understand the final section of Breaking the Bones of Hell. Politics and mannerisms are easy enough to tweak if all you want to do is make a cheap point, but here we get into very particularized aspects of this specific character's personality, that color Barzillai's motivations and inform his actions. If you're really going to change the character, those changes should be reflected here, and reverberate in appropriate ways throughout the AP.

I would agree with this. During the Aria Park Protest I did have a few loyalists waving 'Make Kintargo Great Again!' signs, just as a throwaway chuckle, but that was it so far.

The proclamations et al are fairly anti-populist, I think it would be quite a rewrite to try and portray BT as more of a demagogic figure. I feel that BT is much more focused on crushing dissent and targetting internal enemies than in courting public opinion.

Am I missing something, or is the answer to the Mystery of the Devil's Bells just, "they ring every time an insane undead cleric decides to ring them"? Because my player who is building a character around the 'Pattern Seeker' trait is going to be mighty underwhelmed when he discovers that, many play sessions from now. The Player's Guide certainly plays them up as a more important mystery than that.

I suppose I could keep it that way to mess with him, and show him that sometimes there really just is no pattern, but it still feels unsatisfying. I'm also considering that, as a corrupted priest of Aroden, he can feel whenever a piece of Kintargo's knowledge or culture is lost, so that every time a book is redacted or a citizen dies, he feels the need to mark its passing.

Anyone else have ideas on how to RP this?

If you're not above a bit of side exposition, have the bells as an artifact item that was corrupted by the Church of Asmodeus, and Grivenner has been 'feeding' them with sacrificial souls of people who have transgressed against the church.

Repurpose one of the rooms in the Temple as a torture/sacrifice chamber, and maybe give the player some kind of artifact-style sidequest to either cleanse the bells, or to crack the bell and set the souls of the tortured people free.

Something like that, maybe? You could potentially build it up earlier in the campaign if you liked, maybe a divination that indicates that the soul of someone they know is trapped inside the Bell.

In my current game I wrote up a bunch of 3-stat, 11 point buy arrays (e.g. 14,13,13 or 17,10,8).

I wrote them all on pieces of carboard and put them in a bag. Each player picked out 3, kept the two they preferred and allocated the stats accordingly.

So everyone had 'random' stats, but everyone was 22 point buy. Nobody got quite the stats they wanted, and everyone had at least a couple of flawed stats, which as a GM I always like to see.

It seemed to work out pretty well, and the party are happy that nobody is over or underpowered, and everyone has a few interesting stat quirks to deal with as they level up.

The difference is that when the PCs meet Rexus, he is revealed to have received the same note. Essentially, I plan to have the Rose of Kintargo being the one who has put this entire thing together and unless the PCs seek him out, he will never reveal himself. I would like the Rose to always appear to be one step ahead of them until the time has come where the PCs are so powerful that they can no longer hide.

That's a nice idea you have there. I went a slightly different route with this one. My game actually starts before Barzy shows up. This is partially to give a slightly better lead-in to the Protest, but also to help highlight what Kintargo was like before Martial Law, so the players have a chance to bond a little better with the city and get a positive feeling about it, the hope being that they'll be more invested in wanting it to go back to 'normal' after Thrune takes over.

Anyway, I have a Kintargo that is already on edge due to the events happening elsewhere in Cheliax, and my party are hired as extra hands/guards by the Victocora to help ship some books out of the city to a secure location a few days by cart to the North.

After the delivery (which includes a small goblin attack that I won't detail here), the players are paid in full, well treated and it's hinted that more work (and more money) would be forthcoming from their new possible patrons.

Events continue, and when the Protest finally arrives, Rexus's approach to the PC's includes the fact that his Mother had earmarked them as possible future allies, and given everyone else has just been burned and murdered, they're his only hope.

So we get a bit less of a cold open with Rexus, and hopefully the players are already feeling somewhat anti-Thrune, having seen their friendly meal ticket go literally up in smoke. And things proceed from there.

PJH wrote:

captain yesterday wrote:

Now I want to see if I can draw it on my Chessex Megamat. :-)

For the really big maps I pick up a few A1 sized 1 inch grid flipcharts and tape a few pages together.

Most of the Pathfinder maps will fit on an A1 1-inch flipchart grid, these days I prefer to draw mine out ahead of time rather than have to draw and erase on the Chessex mats.

This is basically what I do. I got a 27x30, 50 sheet pad off amazon (~26 bucks) and its lasted me from the end of book 2 to almost the end of the AP.

Way cheaper than gaming paper, and it doesn't have that clay coating that gunks up my sharpies.

I also found a few places online that sell very cheap 2D pdf drawings of furniture and other dungeon accessories in 25mm size. I print those out on adhesive label paper, stick it onto a sheet of 5mm foam and cut them out.

That gives me a bunch of reusable furniture counters that I can throw down on the map for chests, tables, chairs, bookcases and suchlike. It's very handy.

I've put in a small flavour tweak to the Genius Loci ritual, adding in the element that the eventual power of the Genius Loci is in part based on the importance and influence of the individual to the area in question while they were alive.

This helps give a further justification for Barzillai seeking power and authority in the region, rather than just focusing on his ritual plans, as he'll become a more powerful Loci because of it.

I've made a few changes and expansions to the city, among other things.

First off, I've added in a significant businessman, a dwarf named Haak Gundersson. Starting off as a Blacksmith. After some success he got into the mining business to get his own ores at cost, and that then led to him operating his own freight business to move the ore to the city.
Once he had a reasonable number of employees, it became sensible to open up a couple of resthouses to provide overnight accomodation, and then that led to a tavern and eatery.
By now, Haak owns a shipping company, a hostelry, two resthouses, a tavern, three general goods stores and a smithy in the city, all under the name 'Gunderssons'. He's considering opening up a coffeehouse, given Kintargo's love of the new Arcadian import.

Known for his ever-present advertising slogan, "Is it Gunderssons?", this hard-nosed and hard-bearded businessdwarf is a potential ally for the Silver Ravens if they can convince him that his pocket is ill-served by the oversight of the House of Thrune.

Also, because my game has slightly more advanced gunpowder rules, there is a trading enclave from Alkenstar set up in the dock area. Heavily guarded and strictly neutral, the Alkenstar Warehouse is one part embassy, one part gunsmiths, selling high quality powder and carefully restricted firearms on behalf of the Alkenstar Gunworks.

My Dottari carry what are known as 'Riot Maces'. These round, studded metal maces come with a drawstring leather cover that goes over the head and turns them into nasty, but non-lethal subdual weapons in the case of unrest. The sight of Dottari guards taking out the leather covers is a sure sign that the situation is about to escalate into violence.

Finally, I also added in a Thieves Market that operates secretly out of the back room in an obscure fish-gutting factory known as The Red Mullet. The mullet reference is a running joke amongst the criminal classes in Kintargo (business out front, party in the back), and this is a good place to shift stolen goods or pick up items that aren't available through the usual channels.

The biggest problem you'll have is with Boss fights, because of action economy. They'll get 6 turns to your 1, so either

a) Beef the bosses up with some LTs or other henchmen, or;
b) Steal a trick from 5E and give the bosses some extra actions so that they can do more than just heal or hit during a turn. (I tend to give 'Boss' characters 2 actions a round just to balance things out a bit more, without having to always add in backup mooks. It's always worked pretty well in practice).

For the normal stuff, just add the odd extra monster, or scale hit points up a touch and maybe add a few points of damage. I'd always recommend tweaking encounters by feel anyway, 2 groups of the same size can have very different power levels depending on class, gear and mostly the players involved.

Or if you don't want the family complications, age Rexus up a little bit and make him the trusted family retainer who was out on a mission during the Night of Ashes, and is now seeking out the lost (and last) son of Victocora, both to warn him of the danger and also to beg him to carry on his parent's legacy...

Either way I think you've got a great hook going on for the AP.

Very happy with the Adventure Path so far.

I'm running it in a 'Flintlock Fantasy' version of Pathfinder, which is basically the same game, but a little further down the timeline in terms of gunpowder technology (roughly Pirates of the Carribean level).
I'm portraying Cheliax as an infernal version of the British Empire, and giving the whole thing a little bit of an American War of Independence feel.

No Gunslingers, and gunpowder weapons that are harder hitting but still slow to fire and load, so you get more of an opening pistol skirmish that quickly devolves into swordplay.

Adding in a few custom skills to flesh out the social side of things (Streetwise, Leadership), making some of the more obvious feats baseline, adding Reserve Hit Points etc. Basically most of my houserules from our recent Rise of the Runelords campaign.

This AP has a really nice feel to it. It's got the sandbox elements you want, but it keeps a fairly solid direction. The rebellion mechanics are nice, especially with a few tweaks, and the Banquet/Masquerade mechanic is very well thought out. (I do agree with Yakman about the exploration part. May need to tweak that a bit.)

Running it for an Alchemist, Swashbuckler, Arcane Archer (Gunpowder variant) and a Ranger, with one more to join.

One thing I have added is letting the party find a 'Manual of Golems' early on which lets them build a Junk Golem, both to guard the hideout and for them to upgrade and customise as the campaign progresses. Their very own Jarvis, essentially.

Certainly one of the best AP's that Paizo have brought out so far for me, subject to how the ending shapes up.