Rogov's page

Please cancel my subscription to the Pathfinder Adventure Path.

Thank you for your consideration in this matter.

Rather than fiddle with extra spell lists and whatnot, why don't you just treat an Alchemist's potions as alchemical items? That way they would benefit from the Alchemist's Alchemy class feature.

Okay, here's my version of "the sore":

In a Planescape game from days gone by, I created a nefarious antagonist named the Toothadder.

The Toothadder is sort of the polar opposite of the Tooth Fairy. Where the tooth fairy takes away your teeth, the Toothadder, well, adds them. He adds teeth. His skin is like drool-slick gums, he creates portals like throats, he's just completely creepy.

So from an encounter with the Toothadder one character was left with a large Orc molar pushing the rest of his teeth out of place. Which is rather painful & unpleasant. He tried to have it pulled, which caused the tooth to move. To his face.

It was a long, arduous process to remove the tooth, but it was eventually accomplished, entirely through roleplaying. The player had a great time with it, and the group was forever horrified about the return of the Toothadder.

I'm running the shadow in the sky currently. While I like the adventure, one thing that I didn't like was how it didn't put the players in the "driver's seat", so to speak.

So for the first session, I asked the players to work out a reason for their characters to distrust the new proprietor of the Gold Goblin, and we agreed on an element in their background that would give them a reason to start investigating him covertly.

For example
- one character is from Riddleport. Saul double-crossed his family on several occasions, foiling the character's father's attempts to become a minor crime lord.
- another character is curious about Saul's sudden rise to wealth, and is worried that he somehow has something to do with the shadow in the sky and Rovagug (he is concerned that the blot is a herald of a beast of Rovagug).
-another character is digging up information on Saul as a favor to Tromard Roldheim (this character is an alchemist, and hopes to trade information for alchemical components or arcane knowledge)

The encounters require a bit of modification, but the adventure has an entirely different tone: rather than being lieutenants and dupes for Saul Vancasserkin, they are actively investigating him. Since they are in on it from the beginning, the adventure becomes more of a police procedural / long-con, rather than a series of small time mafia jobs.

The real trick to it is that you have to be good at playing Saul as a really smooth, lying, cheating Bastard. That is half the fun, really. They keep trying to expose whatever plot he is up to, and he keeps foiling them.

So most of my game is padded out with extra investigation and RP as the players try to root out Saul's true motives, and the source of his sudden wealth. I haven't gotten to the other adventures yet, but I think I'll follow a similar strategy for the 2 others that look to me to be in need of fleshing out (#16 & #17).