/Signed
Too bad this one's all about demon-worshiping smurfs, otherwise it might've been my favorite of the three APs.
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I say get rid of the +5 bonus altogether. Being able to grapple people in an area with a strong bonus is good enough. But isn’t the +5 bonus a part of the grappling rules, as opposed to a feature of the black tentacles spell? I agree with Hogarth's interpretation, the +5 bonus should definitely not be applied to the DC of the grappled creature's CMB check to break free. Removing the prohibition on attacking the tentacles might be a good way of toning down the spell, though. These attacks would need to be simplified somehow, maybe allow auto-hits but with the tentacles having a decent hardness score/hp total?
Re. the lack of Constitution-based skills, I don't know if this has been discussed before, but how about taking a hint from SWRPG and introducing Endurance (Con)? It would replace all those Con-checks for holding one's breath, force-marching, resisting starvation and thirst, sleeping in armor, etc. I've been using it in heavily house-ruled 3.5 games, and it worked out OK. (Similarly, I've been using Meditation (Wis) as a partial substitute for Concentration and Autohypnosis, because I didn't want psions making Psicraft checks to get psi-focused. That, however, did cause a few problems...)
So, if you guys don't like half-this and half-that monsters, how come you included a bunyip in Burnt Offerings? Took me ages to find the source, only to learn that it's a half-shark half-seal that could have just as easily been replaced by a shark. Or a seal. But it seems someone thought Thistletop would be more colorful with a weird non-core hybrid creature guardian.
When I first read Edge of Anarchy, I already knew that the queen was the BBG, but I was still under the impression that she was the one who initially recruited the PCs into service. After all, she sends them to Kroft with no obvious reason, so I kind of expected this to develop into a "BBG manipulates PCs, they eventually figure it out, but it's almost too late" situation. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way. But I still think it's possible to replace Kroft with Ileosa as patron. The first part of the AP would go pretty much as written, they would run around doing errands, capture Trinia, get interviewed by Orisini (who sees crown-traitor potential in them)... In the second part, Queen Ileosa would have the PCs "investigate" the breakout of the disease to appease the public, ghost-chasing most of the time, but eventually they'd pick up the hints that she's behind it. This may lead to a premature confrontation, but Kroft or Blackjack would intervene here, prompting a search for the missing seneschal instead of a suicidal strike at the palace. From the third part on, everything would go as written, plus the PCs would have the extra motivation of exposing their patron and clearing their names of any association with the tyrant. |