Saint_Meerkat's page

Bill,

Here you go.

You're welcome. :)

Apology accepted, Nick. As an RC pre-order customer, I appreciate your sincerity and painful candor. I wish you nothing but the best, and look forward to seeing you in Seattle.

I have mixed feelings about Nick being featured as a special guest. I appreciate his great work, but I am one of the Razor Coast pre-orders that has not gotten a refund. I thought that I had put it all behind me as a lesson learned. I guess I was wrong. I felt a little wrench in my gut when I saw his name on the list.

While I am not going to boycott the convention, stone anyone, or introduce myself to him as one of his victims, it does seem a little bit...what is the word I'm looking for...insensitive on the part of the planners to honor him. I don't know how widespread the incident really was, but it was certainly highly visible among the Paizo faithful.

I understand the theme. They're putting the band back together. I am all for him being there. But as a headlining special guest? There was probably a less controversial way to acknowledge Nic's excellent contribution to this fine product without seeming to overlook his behavior.

In the game Saint Caleth is describing, she had 21 points of damage and 19 points of nonlethal by the end of the first round. There was a crit somewhere in there.

In round one, she hit with Manyshot. She went down just before her turn in round two.

We had six PCs and the most horrifying axebeak the hobby has ever known. It ate the dog.

How I Prepare An Adventure Under Ideal Circumstances

This is a riff on a workshop I attended while in high school in 1983 called, "How To Read A Textbook."

Evening One

1) Skim quickly through the entire adventure. Read all the headings and look at all the illustrations, taking time to look over the maps. Allow myself to stop anywhere that grabs my attention, but don't read more than a few sentences.

2) Go through the entire adventure reading the first sentence of every paragraph AND all the words that are in bold. Allow myself to stop anywhere that grabs my attention, but don't read more than a few sentences.

3) Check the forums for any GM discussions about the adventure.

Evening Two

4) Read all of the adventure. If I have printed out the PDF, I do the following during the main read-through: a) Underline the most important sentence of each paragraph. b) Highlight all the Skill checks with green. c) Highlight what the PCs need to know after the encounter or conversation with yellow. d) Write down on a legal pad any spells or combat rules I don't know or can't remember.

Evening Three

5) Skim through the adventure. Make index cards for all the major NPCs. Make a couple of notes about their appearance and location. Write down three things they might say during a psychotherapy session with their analyst. Work the backstory into a couple of the sentences. (With Burnt Offerings, I did this with a database because of the large number of NPCs. Instead of writing three things, I copied and pasted pertinent information about each NPC as I came across it from the PDF into the database.)

Evening Four

6) Pre-draw any complicated maps (like the Sandpoint Glassworks) on the large presentation board size graph paper with 1" squares that is available at most office supply stores.

7) Make index cards for the combat encounters. I still use the free ones The Game Mechanics made for D&D 3.5 if I have access to a printer and card stock.

--OR--

6) Prepare maps and tokens for VTT software.

Evening or Morning Before The Game

8) Skim the adventure and the NPC cards, reading what I have underlined and highlighted.

9) Review the spells and rules I listed on the legal pad at a website like d20pfsrd.org. Make brief notes on the pad as needed.