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And an 8th level Confusion would incapacitate up to 10 creatures within 30 of you. Based on dice odds probably half of them for a minute and the rest for up to a minute... So again since they need to succeed a DC 37 with a 22, unlikely they get out by the end of that minute.

Or a Weird next level could kill a third of the entire encounter with the same parameters, and do a boatload of damage besides.

Or it's not a race and there is no Pf2elogs parsing your run so it's fine to play whatever.

Searching for me isn't a problem. It's when players get told to search automatically on entering a location when they wouldn't normally think of it. You just walk in a cake shop to get a cake, as soon as you enter "oh we should search under the counter".

Yeah. The PC is playing a class called the Investigator. They should be able to play a character who is very good at investigating without having to be very good at investigating in real life.

Do you make the fighter kick open doors to see if he can pass strength checks, or the wizard recite spells to use magic?

Why does the investigator player have to be unusually prescient to play an investigator?

My only thing is that the class feature for the sigil calls out that it's obvious the two are linked.

Most enemies with a functioning brain may decide to stop tangling with the buffed monster with expert unarmored and go for the spellcaster if it'll have the same result as "the eidolon goes away."

Add in that for area debuffs like divine wrath or frightful presence that the summoner rolls twice and takes the worse-- so we could both just be frightened 4 because of an unlucky 1 on 2d20-- it's enough for me to want slightly more HP than a fighter, yeah.

If a fighter has to roll twice and take the worse on every dragon's breath weapon then maybe he should have some more HP too, but he doesn't. And his 10th level feat can be spent on something other than "now I don't have disadvantage," which feels real bad...

8 hp per level instead of 10, but you add the Eidolon's CON mod to your own to determine your max HP.

That would make me feel much better about the moments I am worried most about-- being a detriment to the party because both eidolon and summoner are injured in 1 turn, forcing the party healer to expend resources on me instead of assessing that we're both above half and will probably be OK later to medicine.

Ice Titan wrote:

First round:
Three action summon -> Automatic sustain
Eidolon gets a free strike, and the enemy is flat-footed if the summon isn't already in flank
~Summon:
Strikes, Strikes

Any other turns after:
Boost Eidolon
Act Together -- Sustain; Eidolon Strides or Strikes
Eidolon Strikes
~Summon:
Stride/Strike x2

I don't exactly view this as crushing?

"Crushing" was too strong. But the eidolon is generally going to be more useful to you than your summon. And here you are limiting your eidolon to one action in the first round and two actions in subsequent rounds--which also limits the utility of special eidolon abilities that require more than one action. (Also, when I wrote that post I hadn't yet noticed the Distracting Summon feat, so my bad on that.)

Generally speaking I view summoning as a way of putting more HP and easier targets on the field for monsters.

It's one of the things that alleviates the Summoner's dual-body-one-hp-pool problem. Remember, monsters don't know what summoning is, don't understand why there's a celestial goat here now but they do realize it's attacking them. If they swing they notice it has low AC, and now their attacks might be spent brutalizing this poor elysian goat instead of my eidolon or any other party members.

I imagine a lot of the two-action eidolon moves are going to be first-round moves either way. The Beast eidolon suffers most from this as they want to use their charge to dive in, but then you're not likely to go the full 50+ feet if you don't want your eidolon flanked, surrounded and beaten down. So they're probably in range for the summon on turn 2.

Having an extra body on the field no one has to heal up after the battle is just a good way to soak some damage.

ShikiSeiren wrote:

manbearscientist wrote:

Quote:

No, the DM is not using those. He is doing 10 vs 4 with the enemy level at party -1, because the difficulty rating as written makes absolutely 0 sense

The difficult ratings are by the far the best in the entire industry. I say this as someone who has GMed PF2 continuously since playtest (hundred+ sessions over the past few years), virtually every single time I've made an encounter the encounter building tools have accurately depicted the difficulty of the encounter.

The difficulty rating is horrible. I've been running a few games, one was literally a single player campaign (player + 1 npc). I just wanted to see what would happen if I threw 5 goblin warriors and 1 goblin commander at them when both player and NPC were level 1. An encounter this so called "best in the industry" system calls "impossible"... They lost 4 HP. FOUR. In total! I reran this encounter 4 times to see if it was just the dice, but no. Worst that happened is that the player character dropped to 6 HP once. Unless the balance between enemy types shifts wildly within the same level range, this is NOT indicative of the RAW encounter calculations being any competent.

Weird. Either you're doing things hilariously wrong or you're a tactical genius!

As I have a handful of dice within reach of my computer, I just ran that encounter real quick against two Champions (to be generous) within 25 feet (to be generous).

The champions lost every time-- best they did was 4 of the 6 goblins.

Which reads, because extreme difficulty encounters are supposed to mean the heroes lose 50% of the time. If you won every time without problem then me losing every time is statistically likely!

Yeah, I think they should get either a Focus Spell summon, or a pool of maxed Summon spells ala Channel Divinity on a Cleric. Either could then max out at 10th level.

It's a fairly minor issue balance-wise, but a huge quality of life improvement.

"When you prepare your spells each day, you can prepare additional summon spells depending on the tradition of your eidolon... The number of slots is equal to your 1 plus your Constitution modifier."

Not sure how to word the legal-ese of which summon should be allowed, but just getting one and then upgrading it along would be fantastic.

Basically thread title. 4 spells known total and you have to choose summon x feels extremely weird for the class called the Summoner.

Also funny that there's a sidebar about there being no 1st-level divine summoning spell, so summon celestial animals. Occult is good summoning like pugwampis and mites or whatever, that fits the undead phantasm of devotion theme perfectly fine though.

On the AC thing: My party has 3 high-AC frontliners and 3 mediocre-AC backliners. The lowest AC in the party at 5 is 21 and the highest is 24, then 26 with shield or fighter parry stance.

It matters a lot when I'm swinging on a +14 for creatures. I miss often by shield/parry, or don't crit by shield/parry. And even though they've been hit, not being crit is huge!

I'm loving this new edition of Pathfinder.

I love Golarion. Like, a lot. It's easily one of my favorite campaign settings ever just because it's so grab-bag with everything. The world is incredibly varied, just like the real world, and it makes my obsession with anthropology, culture, language and geography validated. But the one big hang-up with trying to play Pathfinder to play in Golarion was that... we had to play Pathfinder.

My players had effectively "solved" PF1 with the aid of Guide to Etcetera google docs and forum posts, much like any of the people on this forum could attest. They could easily kill any encounter in the game without taking damage if they chose the right spell and won initiative, and even then, enemies winning initiative didn't mean they could do much besides deal a middling amount of damage and present themselves to be full attacked. All of the narrative gravitas we'd build to in our roleplaying would amount to the villain being one-round killed. Action economy worked against us so hard to have a satisfying storytelling experience that one of my players gathered the others together and made them promise to not attack the villain who had a name over their mooks until the mooks were dead just so every climactic fight wasn't flat and boring after the villain who spoke inevitably died just before their turn. At least they could have fun bantering with the villain while they killed the mooks they would inevitably fight anyways.

I think I've told the story of my PC who full attacked the boss with her bow, killing him, and then he came back to life... during her full attack, so she finished her full attack and killed him again.

That's not happened only once, or just because of splat books. This also happened against the main villain of Curse of the Crimson Throne back in 2011. And the main villain of Council of Thieves in 2010. And so many bosses inbetween.

And the prevailing wisdom was always "add 100% more hp!" or "make their saves impossible!" as if that was the goal-- to pretend to play Pathfinder and just make everything up. And it was exhausting, and more than exhausting, it was dull. I stopped running Pathfinder 1e after a particularly strong Hell's Rebels game led into a flop of Ironfang Invasion because the PCs felt like they could just take on the eponymous Ironfang Invasion instead of running and honestly with their builds lovingly hand-crafted from internet google documents they probably could until I put something too strong to one-round on the table, but that something wasn't in the book so again-- exhausting, dull.

Even worse! We had a few players drop in here and there who hadn't played D&D before and when they realized their entire character was a character optimization checklist I could tell that they checked out as well. About as much interactivity as a World of Warcraft simcraft program! Plug in fighter, what weapon? Oh, two-handed sword, how daring! Here's your build...

The GM has to go through a lot of emotional labor to get a game going. In my opinion you have to be a certain kind of person who enjoys letting everyone else stomp on your toys so that they can have fun. You have to both want the villains to lose and to play them to win-- after all, what point is it in playing if the heroes don't need to struggle along the way to their goal? It's all charades, and when the system actively fights against that by making the villains' victory something that is impossible to even comprehend the game becomes... flat. Even for the players. Especially for the GM.

2e's tighter math means that villains are threatening. The margin for failure for the heroes is higher, but not because you didn't look in a google doc and you've just built your entire character wrong. It's about strategy in play instead of outside of it, it's about character synergy and setting up your allies for success. Magic items aren't a necessary wish-list save for arms and armor, and now there are way more interesting and fun things to pick up. Everything is more tightly controlled both so the GM can't abuse mechanics vs the PCs and vice versa. I love it. As a permanent GM, it's a dream. I've planned something like 300 encounters from level 1-20 for my home campaign and so far at level 5 (only 75 encounters in) the only thing that's effected the perception of their challenge rating is bad rolls!

Are there some things I don't like? Yeah, sure. Animal companions kind of suck in this edition. Casters feel bad because their spells become easy to save against if they don't know the monster's save totals. Party composition is incredibly important to the point where it can make or break your entire experience -- I think clerics and champions are as mandatory as a class can be to help survive unlucky streaks on dice, for example. I don't like that hero points feel more like mediocrity points because you can just roll lower or the same and now you're going to die to what hit you because you were stupid enough to try to save instead of lay down the whole fight-- how heroic!

But unlike PF1 it's not the core of the game that's gone bad for me-- it's things I can houserule and move on with. I'm considering making archetypes free, adding a divine font archetype, adding a champion's reaction archetype. We add +10 to hero point re-rolls below 11. I added magic weapons for casters that add to their to-hit and DC. I'm working on houseruling animal companions, but it doesn't look like anyone is going to use one because of how soured our druid was watching their bear miss every attack in a boss encounter because they have an arbitrary -3 to hit because of no magic weapons.

Because the math is so tight, houseruling is easy. Making up new treasure is easy. Adding new subsystems like a deck of cards that represent allied characters aiding the party-- it was super easy!

In short: yes. Huge improvement. Love it. Golarion! Yay!

Does the Champion's reaction carry forward on each individual 'tick' of poison damage from an injury poison?

How about every morning when you roll your Fort save vs a disease and take damage from it.

Is this being put on Roll20? Hoping it will be, especially since it may be 2021 before we put an actual real-life book to use

Just popping in to say a "Disney Princess AP," as an elevator pitch for a campaign, is rad.

We could absolutely do this.

And it's not like so many of the stories Disney made movies out of are their stories. All of Grimms' Fairy Tales are in the public domain.

My feelings on this adventure path concept are both nuanced and subtle.

I really, really, really like this. That's such a cool idea.

Caster monster ACs are higher because the GM should not be expected to have to char-op his encounters with an hour of spell research (or more than an hour at high levels where buff stacking becomes mandatory so even your lowest level spells are being ruthlessly optimized) and the creation of a "before combat -> during combat" flow chart of actions to stand a reasonable chance of surviving a full attack, let alone providing a memorable challenge for his players.

Monsters don't need to use debuffing/buffing actions in combat so that a new GM can plop down an encounter and have it work to a reasonable standard without having to make a hundred posts on this forum asking why their enemies die in one turn just to hear a cacophony of "add more hp!" and "rocket launcher tag :(" and "just fudge the numbers" back at them.

A lot of these "problems" are because the playing field between GM and PC has been leveled so that the GM doesn't need to be an absolute master of tactical wargaming in order to challenge a PC who has "Treantmonk's Guide to Wizards: Being a God" bookmarked on his cell phone.

And we're gonna keep arguing the math and making bar graphs of Bestiary stats instead of ever acknowledging this viewpoint because of the unspoken rule that no one actually cares about the GM's enjoyment of the game. Sit there, smile while you lose and have all of your prep work evaporate because of rage lance pounce, peasant. You may be struggling to keep up with the high level buff stacking meta and carousel of rotating monsters all with their own optimal play styles and monster synergies, but I read a guide.

Games like Pathfinder are about living out my social justice fantasies already. The opportunity to play the good cops instead of rooting out a cult of evil bad guys in the guard, or fighting against the evil king's guard, or whatever-- with the single token Good Guy cop (like Cressida Kroft) to be party to the PCs-- is actually thrilling.

I know that Paizo is gonna give me an AP that is about being a hero and is written to make my players feel heroic. Maybe the text will need a sensitivity tweak, but honestly I don't want to see these books delayed or cancelled.

I would love a true plane-hopping adventure. The PCs could all be yanked out of line in the Boneyard and sent from there, adventuring through heaven, hell, the elemental planes... It could be a lot of fun and show off some cool parts of the universe we don't really get to see.

Another fun theme would be music. I've toyed with running a game where every member is part of a band, going on the ultimate road trip collecting various artifact instruments to keep them out of the hands of The Man.

Ice Titan wrote:

And generating adventures for levels 1-9 sounds like a great time.

Of all possible complaints, this one is the most bizarre. You can just start at level 11.

I wasn't complaining. I can see how in text it may seem sarcastic, but I actually really enjoy writing Pathfinder adventures, especially on the low-end of the level scale.

To be honest I was expecting it to be a Land of the Linnorm Kings AP, but only because I've put a huge amount of time into homebrewing my own 1-20 campaign that takes place there.

Currently wrapped up AoA. At the start of my own personal campaign now, and the party just hit level 2 after 9 encounters. So far no one's gone unconscious yet and the least amount of enemies in a combat has been 2. Only one enemy crit so far and the champion kept the sorcerer (who ran into the frontline to see into a ravine to cast) up with their reaction. Nothing so tough yet that the PCs have missed the majority of their attacks-- no solo encounters at least.

I'm glad that the enemies in Pathfinder 2 are much stronger than the enemies in Pathfinder 1. When I say that, I mean-- I'm glad the monsters aren't just paper tigers who fold instantly. After running Age of Ashes to 20, I can say that combat only slightly breaks down at 20, and even then it should-- the PCs are 20th level and they deserve to have a bunch of badass moves. From 1-19 the system stays relevant and it never just becomes an exercise in instantly defeating the enemies like PF1 begins to slip into at level 9.

Man... PF1 combat was demoralizing as GM. So many encounters ended on the first turn of combat that it basically permanently soured my feelings on the last edition. So many enemies who were made RAW, painstakingly, over hours... and took their entire hp total in damage in one full attack from a dimension doored martial. Or failed a save they could only pass on a 15 and are instantly, embarrassingly defeated. And then they burn a hero point (I had to give them to the villains to make them a threat) to barely squeak a pass instead so they'd get a turn, and so then they miss most of their swings. All the story building it up and then the mechanics just relentlessly failing.

One time we had a climactic end-of-campaign battle against a foe I'd built up for almost a year out of game. Our ranger one-round-killed him from the starting position on the map. Deflated, the party sensed how miserable I was and asked if maybe he had some way to come back from death... sensing their utter disappointment I rallied, improvised, figured out a way for him to survive a 300-damage volley. The rest of the party was excited! They closed the gap and engaged his minions in combat! He moved up and exchanged blows with his nemesis! This dramatic swashbuckling combat is why we everyone wanted to play Skulls and Shackles!

On the ranger's turn they just volleyed him to death a second time. "He was the biggest threat so he had to die first." We spent the rest of the plodding, meandering combat fighting nameless mook 1 and 2 and 3 who no one gave a damn about before calling it for the night.

And that was the BASELINE experience we had past a certain level. It got so narratively dissonant that my PCs would specifically hold back to sell the 'kayfabe' of the encounters so that the bad guys wouldn't get looney tunes'd and invalidate their struggle in comparison. Basically doing things to throw fights for two rounds before flipping the switch and blendering them. After all, if the villains are incompetent cartoon characters, that just also casts a question about how incompetent the PCs must be if these guys who died in one full attack were hounding them in story the entire campaign.

Literally have had a wizard with no proficiency pick up a magic greatsword off an enemy and wield it into combat instead of casting spells, and have had a caster PC who used a bow and had bow feats and a melee PC who used a rapier+buckler with rapier-specific feats swap weapons for a fight just to goof off. They won, of course.

Now with PF2e, the challenge feels more par for the course. Villains have bite to them so it's fun for me, the historically luckless GM, and the PCs get the mechanical challenge that makes it feel like their struggles are real instead of illusory. Combat doesn't get cartoony anymore as I add a hundred, then another hundred, then another hundred HP to boss monsters in-play just to make sure everyone in the boss fight gets an action. My PCs don't have to stagger around like pro wrestlers acting like the enemy's attacks that bounce off their AC, saves and buff spells are bone-shattering assaults. Math matters and I can get a better grasp on what challenges my PCs should face.

Our sorcerer uses this spell in my campaign to decent effect. The best so far was when a monster pincer attacked the party and on its first turn crit our bard to dangerously low HP. Our bard didn't want to take an attack of opportunity that would likely crit and drop them, or spend their entire turn stepping. Instead, the sorcerer swapped the Bard's position with our Champion. Now the bard could cast without problem and the Champion laid into the monster and prevented it from pushing forward to threaten the rest of the group.

Another time they simply rearranged our two melee on the other side of a blade barrier so they were in flank with the cleric who cast it.

Never even used it on enemies so far but that's alright.

I'm unbelievably excited for this. That we never leave Absalom to do a wilderness trek and the final dungeon is a landmark in the city is so thrilling.

Bring it on. I'm beyond ready!

The callback to Breachill in this volume was incredibly well received by the PCs. I initially ran saving the orphanage as the original DCs from AoA book 1, and then explained the party seguing into saving the entire town is that they realized they've grown so much that they themselves alone are each worth a party (or more) of level 1 adventurers.

After all was said and done the party got an equal number of successes and I rolled the fateful 1d6 of dead citizens... and came up 1.

The party universally decided to use the elixir of rejuvenation from the Temple of All Gods to bring them back. Felt great.

And to answer your question from March James, my PCs loved receiving a massive hoard of treasure upon the start of Part 2. We've always disliked when the adventure rewards amazing treasure in the final dungeon like huge gold totals when we know the game is ending. Getting almost everything for 19 and 20 in one giant lump sum felt awesome and they only ended up selling 6 items (just the low level stuff mostly, and the journal of stories-- our bard is a storyteller and wanted it to himself to read and create plays from).

Should be done in 3 sessions so I'll keep an eye out on the game and report back. I'm thinking the choice here was the right one, though.

Aratorin wrote:

Why didn't someone in your party immediately cast Heal? Or Goodberry? Or use Battle Medicine? Or Gloves of Healing? Or feed you a Healing Potion? Seriously, the APs give out Healing Potions like candy. We have like 30 of them and have only ever needed to use 1.

You obviously missed the obvious sarcasm, but sure. I'll bite.

Why wasn't the person immediately healed? Because (1) getting someone up to ~16 hp after they just took ~30 damage and are still within reach of the guy that did it seems really smart tactics.

So alternatives were chosen to get the bad guy away from the unconscious player.

It worked, the PC got healed, another PC went down, bad guy (at level+2) spawned another level+2 creature...right on top of the first PC that went down. Who went down again.

And then a third PC went down.

And then there were no more heals to give.

Quote:

How did the battle last half an hour? Battles last like 10 minutes, tops.

One, we have six players, two:

Barbarian: "I rolled a 16 on the die, so that gives me a 24, 26 because flanking. Bardsong?"
Bard: "Even with lingering, that expired last round, sorry."
GM: "That misses."

Repeat for 5 rounds.

I'm starting to think the problem is that your GM is discounting his decision making to the system, and so you're angry at Pathfinder 2. Have you considered being concerned that your GM is throwing two severe threat boss enemies at you at a time instead of a more even spread of CRs within each encounter? When you go above 4 players the system favors quantity over quality (increasing enemy numbers with low-level reinforcements over eliting or duplicating high level foes) because of the tight math of the system-- turning a PL+2 encounter into a PL+2x2 just because that would fall into the guidelines is often not the correct decision. It took me a while to grok that the CR guidelines in this game are way more important than they were in 3.5 and Pathfinder 1.

Afaik that math checks out for your barbarian's second attack, assuming you're level 6 (6, prof +4, str +4) and they don't have a magical weapon yet-- which is pretty unusual and wraps back around to my GM query above, but... If you're talking about his primary attack missing on a 16 with a result of 24 (26 with flank), you're between levels 3-4? versus level 8 opponents?

In PF1 the game was ostensibly -not- a team game. You were a loose collection of characters who did not rely on eachother at all, programming your character with macros of devastating combinations that would one-round-kill opponents. Now, the math of the system is set up to encourage teamwork. Intimidating enemies, using a bevy of magic items to provide minor benefits, using debuffing spells, making use of talismans etc. Right now according to your anecdote you are playing hard mode Pathfinder 2. Are you character optimizing your party composition to account for that?

It sounds like more of a talk to your GM scenario.

How did the battle last half an hour? Battles last like 10 minutes, tops.

Man, I wish. At level 18, every enemy has between 280 and 500 hp. Even high-damage crits from the barbarian deal on average 110-- everyone else needs to trigger weaknesses to get big damage like that. Equal level monsters save on 8s vs most damaging spells, so spellcasters don't do strong damage unsupported. Add in that our party is unusually caster heavy-- druid, sorcerer, bard, cleric-- and you can see how things can get dragged out. It takes about an hour and a half for my PCs to kill 3 level appropriate enemies.

The enemies are almost permanently debuffed though, and our champion and barbarian are soaking up magical assistance. Monsters can have a hell of a time hitting, and with a liberator champion most of their full attacks are dead in the water. Two reactions per turn that give -20 resistance to all... so that soaks up 20 slashing, 6 evil, 12 fire... AND the hit ally gets to stride away AND anyone else in their reach gets to step away too. Sometimes it feels like we're slow-pulling through a dungeon. Lowest HP I've gotten someone in the last 10 levels is 29 (out of 250)-- and that's from an implosion failed save, a power word: kill, drain bonded object and power word kill combo from a furious enemy wizard. Our cleric healed them for 180 on their turn with one action then echoing channeled for another 40 something, over full health.

Our next game is a flip-flop with 4 martials and 2 casters. I'm sure they'll rip through enemies far quicker and the enemies will be more effective to match. At least, I hope so.

Here's a pair of maps I edited to fit the unique circumstances at the start of Book 6.

Broken Promises content ahoy:
... during the Dragonstorm

... during the Dragonstorm

Thanks to Ruzza for making the non-wrecked Altaerein for me to edit. They're not super hi-res but they'll set the mood.

Ice Titan wrote:

Franz Lunzer wrote:

Still, the AP is called "Extinction Curse", not "Under the Big Top".

I think this is primarily where my disjointed expectations let me down in regards to this AP.

My PCs and I would have been more than happy with the latter, as every other AP we've got covers the former.

Quite understandable.

Let me ask how an "Under the Big Top" AP would play out though? How would it bring the PC's to 20th level?

Challenge... accepted.

For my solution, I immediately thought... I wouldn't mind if Pathfinder had 3 book APs. I think I heard something about it not being that profitable for Starfinder however, so, that's that.

Book 1: The PCs all are part of a circus together. They perform and make merry. Someone kills the ringleader of their circus, so the PCs investigate. Their investigation turns up a new settlement to perform in, and an ancient ruin occupied by a cult. The PCs are also harried by old friends and enemies from the Celestial circus who see their ringleader's death as the death of their circus and are here to "help"-- fat chance! It turns out that the person who did it had connections to the cult, as well as a neighboring town's thieves' guild, and to devilish forces. The PCs don't catch them, but foil their lackey's plot to kill another influential performer-- maybe a bard or something that joins the party, that sounds cool. Meanwhile, the PCs encounter a strange man at the crossroads who is cryptic and foreshadowy...

Book 2: The PCs move to investigate the guild-- and in the background, the Celestial circus still haunts them, trying to poach their performers. They are able to infiltrate the thieves' guild under pretense of entertainment at a mob coronation (the man in black is there), performing their act in front of the local underworld nobility (and all of the good and bad stuff that entails!). After undertaking some tasks for the guild to earn their trust like helping or hindering two star-crossed lovers from rival families, fighting off assassins and that kind of stuff they earn another lead that takes them to their quarry through an abandoned menagerie (zoos are cool dungeons). They fight the bad guy who killed their ringmaster and win. But who ordered the killing? That's when they discover that it was the Celestial circus who's been bothering them all along!

Book 3: The third book is about investigating and fighting the Celestial circus, which has gone off the beaten path into a dangerous bayou locale (to get closer to a cool ancient location to fight creatures in), and finding revenge for their fallen ringmaster. They fight through the circus, then the ancient Thassilonian dungeon underneath (and a rad swamp bayou of cool adventure locations, engaging in banjo duels with locals, engaging in war dances with lizardfolk, the man in black again, and taming crocodiles) to learn that the circus itself was wrapped up in an insidious devil's pact, and it's been stealing people's souls-- including your dead ringmaster friend, but also, because the PCs all worked there (look at me working in background traits)-- all of their souls too if something isn't done!

Book 4: As is ceremony, the fourth book is a dungeon crawl into a massive sealed library in the center of Absalom. Learning the way around the mystical wards is as simple as helping an out-of-his-depth wizard fool his new cult of followers who expect him to try to undertake the test of the Starstone soon-- good thing everyone here is high level now! The PCs deal with pact devils, otherworldly nuisances and maybe even hunt down the last member of the Celestial circus who is full fiend-possessed, then crawl through a giant sealed tomb full of magical creatures and weird stuff. Is that painting of... the man in black? Who could that be?

Book 5: With the knowledge of how to break this curse in-hand, the PCs now just need to perform the ritual. The problem? Since the pact was signed in the Material, it can only be broken in Hell, and it can only be broken by a specific pact devil held captive by an archfiend. How are the PCs going to survive? Well... they have the Celestial circus's invitation to a giant Carnivale held in Hell once every 100 years. The PCs buckle up and travel to Dis, exploring the city and such, fighting the fiends who defy their archdevil's orders not to mess with performers, and mingling and meeting with other planar circuses and strange travellers who've come from all across creation to watch the show. They perform for a planar audience befitting of level 17 characters and then storm the archfiend's prison vaults while he's away, finding the pact devil! One last thing: The circus bad guys from Book 3 are back with the half-fiend template and looking for revenge!

The last book is them discovering that the contract is alive-- and it's own demiplane. They delve into it with the aid of powerful magic, battling against clauses and diving through literal loopholes. Right when the PCs break the pact, the archfiend arrives. It turns out he was the man in black at the crossroads the PCs kept meeting, guiding them along until they were strong enough for him to steal their souls! He blows up their circus and they all die... but wait! Shelyn saves them at the last moment, bringing them to Elysium since they're all rad 19th level performers and she's about that. Shelyn hates that this archfiend has been stealing performers souls and asks the PCs to save them. The heroes delve back into the archfiend's lair and defeat him, freeing their fellow artists throughout history. Roll credits, everybody claps.

After the campaign stuff is about going on tour in Heaven.

My party is already creeping up on Broken Promises so the stuff in here isn't of much use to me, but after transitioning to Roll20 I understood how much work all of this is. You guys are absolute rock stars.

Did anyone have a nice twist why the players should explore dreamgate at all? Is there any link I missed, but I think there is no explaination why the gate the players just unlocked leads by chance to the slavetraders they searched.

I think there are to options this can happen out:

1.) Players check Dreamgate first
2.) Players get in trouble with slavers first

Either way I don't see, how both plots connect.

I had the Scarlet Triad guys who show up at the start of Book 3 disguised as Hellknights from the disgraced Order of the Rack from Kintargo-- they told the party that Alak had told them about them. They were lying. They'd found Alak on the road going back to Kintargo after he left Breachill and kidnapped him, torturing him for information.

My PCs really liked Alak (I changed him significantly, making him part of the Silver Ravens as my players completed Hell's Rebels and managed to convince the Hellknights in Kintargo to do a heel-face turn... or maybe a hell-face turn...). So they geared up and decided to go to Kintargo to save him.

They had already connected the Dreamgate to Ravounel, and so in order to save time, they used the key. When they got there they discovered that the Triad had subjugated the fishing town near the gate and the gate itself in order to study its mysteries-- not a raid in progress like the book suggests, but the Triad were in the process of "testing" every person in the town for the nth factor that their boss requires for admittance to their secret club.

That tied everything together nicely for us. Maybe something similar will work for you?

Still, the AP is called "Extinction Curse", not "Under the Big Top".

I think this is primarily where my disjointed expectations let me down in regards to this AP.

My PCs and I would have been more than happy with the latter, as every other AP we've got covers the former.

Normally at 9th level the game starts to strain a bit. By 15th it's utterly broken and there's no semblance of narrative weight-- the dialogue between the PCs and the villains of the campaign last longer than the combat themselves. If the wizard's quickdraw save or die doesn't get them, the fighter pounces and they're dead. Now it's time to fight their like 5 mooks who no one is excited to fight and that takes an hour.

In PF2 the combat has just been linearly scaling. We're 17th level now and everything is just smooth. Enemies can still be total pains in the butt, survive for multiple rounds, and even solos can force the party into tight situations. I'm really enjoying it.

I made some changes for my game so that Mengkare would show up earlier than the very tail end of Book 5.

Lamond Breachton is Mengkare's human form. Mengkare has been slowly using his power to reach into the aiudara network to keep tabs on Dahak, so he can manifest himself as a projected image in the waystations. He appeared to my PCs at the end of each book after the first to:

Cult of Cinders - Congratulate the PCs for destroying the Cinderclaw and to ask them to not continue their journey. Ultimately, Mengkare has an outcome in mind for this entire scenario that is disrupted by the PCs meddling presence.

Tomorrow Must Burn - My PCs found out Breachton was Mengkare while infiltrating a masquerade ball run by the Scarlet Triad in this adventure. The PCs tried to not let on that they knew who he was, but he dropped the pretense and told them to not adventure any farther or else.

Fires of the Haunted City - Mengkare set the PCs against the Promise of Fire from the start of Book 5 as a "if you're such great adventurers, just save the world now, then" scenario. Candlaron's ghost helped them a bit.

The Scarlet Triad's slave trade is known to Mengkare. It pays the bills for the real project, which is stealing perfect humans/half-elves of all age and stripe to bring them to Promise for reconditioning. He allows it as "the ends justify the means" and most kidnapping specialists are not good-aligned. After all, without people to sacrifice during the invocation, the world ends. The need of the many outweighs the suffering of the few.

Lastly, the gaggle of NPCs my party has recruited from each location went to the Mwangi Expanse during Book 4 to research the Anima Invocation. They discovered it could be used in a less desperate, pure form, but the problem was that the guy investigating the ritual was invited to Hermea. It's pretty open that Hermea has guardians aplenty so it's impossible to get there by most magical or mundane means-- save the waygate. So now they're headed to confront the Triad in Katapesh as a way to get the waystation key to get to Hermea.

Two things I noticed during my last session:

1-- The Soulbound Ruin has two "abilities" listed-- explosive flames and leech soul.

The Soulbound Ruin does not have these abilities in its stat block.

2-- An elixir of rejuvenation-- a 20th level consumable-- in a 14th level area doesn't seem correct, but I'm sure my PCs will be thrilled.

The workload they put on me is effectively zero.

If I had no hero points, I would add them, as I have since every campaign I've ever run since I first played Mutants and Masterminds 3e. The d20 is too variable to have an average play experience.

The critical rules for spells are meant for enemy monsters, who cannot spend hero points, but also have inflated health totals like 325 to my PC casters who have something like 140 at level 14.

I don't know why everyone has such a deep focus on not tainting their play experience by giving their players a break.

Loving it. Played every week since we got our Age of Ashes campaign going and one week when I was going through some things my players let me distract myself by running a second session on the next day.

Haven't liked a system this much for a while. I'm a huge fan of adventure games like PF, but PF1 was so tilted towards the players that it was impossible to even slightly threaten them. Now that the difficult doesn't lean towards "auto-win" I'm really enjoying myself so far-- to the point where I'm 65,000 words into my own adventure in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings for my PCs to tackle when we finish up AoA this spring.

That isn't to say that I don't adjust the adventure difficulty, but it's no longer "Hmmm, let's put 895 hp onto this 650hp monster's total just so it can survive the first round and maybe get a second"

My group's gnome druid has the ability to speak to animals, so she stealthed up to the Mokele Mbembe's cage invisible and diplomacized it. The group reconvened after she unlocked the cage and asked it to wait a moment and then rolled up.

The mokele mbembe basically solo'd the entire camp. The group cast buff spells and heals on it as it tail whipped and stomped on boggard after charau-ka leaving the group to fight Hezle (they did not find the kobold miners). The party sorcerer lured a chunk of the enemies away and then cast fireball on the group before our druid followed up with wind wall and then entangle. They mopped up what survived easily.

Basically trivialized if it weren't for the two vrocks diving the vulnerable squishies in the backline and doing serious damage, but our warpriest and champion dealt with them quickly. I'd say even with the mokele's help the party came dangerously close to at least 1 player death.

By the way, I wanted to make sure I mentioned that I noticed the callback to Council of Thieves in Mialari Docur's backstory.

I just wanted to say that the interconnection of the APs is one of my favorite things about these books and I love, love, love it when I can make these little connections. My group has played almost every AP and our group historian and I love it when these details come up.

I'm going to be using a lot of music by The Blasting Company from Over the Garden Wall to set a dustbowl-esque tone. Maybe a bit of Sherlock Holmes soundtrack, though I used it for Curse of the Crimson Throne it would fit here too.

Oh. And Carnivale has a few good tracks I'm planning on using.

I personally don't think solo encounters should really be a thing until Level 3 or 4, when the PCs have enough HP to survive an average critical dice roll.

At level 13 it feels very balanced. I crit a lot with the powerful solo monsters, but my PCs have the tools to deal with those criticals and it requires more input from the PCs to survive. Things like shadow siphon, champion's reaction, shield block or breath of life are very important. I recently hit a party of PCs with a powerful wizard. The wizard won initiative and cast chain lightning and two PCs critically failed their saves; shadow siphon brought it down to regular damage so they could survive, and after the cleric's turn, the party was back to full hp again.

Pathfinder 1 felt like a well-oiled program. You would input all of the buffs and full attack actions you would spend to win an encounter, and then run the program. Enemies would all likely just barely damage the PCs before they were overrun and killed. Pathfinder 2 has a lot more input necessary for victory against difficult odds-- the deck isn't so stacked in the PCs favor anymore.

Our champion of Calistria closed in and the party realized he was going to be a tough fight when she missed her attack on a high-ish number. Her next action was to stride away to the edge of the pit and use Deception to feign that she was terribly injured from the single strike the Barghest landed on her. He ran up and kicked her into the pit, and she made the check to Grab an Edge! Then, since he was right next to the ledge, our sorcerer and bard both used telekinetic maneuver back-to-back to shove him 5 feet so he went over. Since our champion was holding the edge, there was no edge for him to grab, and down he went!

Of course, for me, I really disliked that the charau-ka with a climb speed were somehow trapped in a hole. I increased the distance of the drop by a significant amount (from 20 feet to 80). Ralldar just ate the damage to the face. The worst part is there was a platform he could catch 40 feet down, so he rolled and critically failed his Reflex, so he took an extra 20!

The PCs were very self congratulatory and looked very pleased until he dimension doored back up to the top! They quickly dealt with him after that, but it was definitely a much different experience than intended thanks to my absent-minded aesthetics-centric deepening of a pit.

Generally speaking, more monsters are better than more difficult monsters.

Now that my party is level 12 I try my best to not elite monsters that aren't solos, if that makes sense. Just add an extra minion to most encounters and that's good enough to cover the 30 to 40xp.

Remember, if an encounter is 3 mobs worth 35xp, and you need it to be 120 xp, just leave it. Lowball is better because the game will keep going and highball can make combat drag on and leave a bad taste in their mouths for game balance.

It's not like he was being sneaky. If he was he'd roll Deception and then trick them, or Stealth to maneuver in with grace. He just shouts "ENOUGH!" and starts running at someone with his axe out.

So maybe someone noticed he was getting frustrated, or someone read the room and could see he was getting impatient, or maybe someone knew or was told to watch him... so now Perception for initiative makes sense, right?

Since the PCs are just as surprised as the barbarian, I'd let the PCs also roll Diplomacy if they didn't intend to fight or wanted to disavow the barbarian and help the enemies.

(earlier on, against the vrock at the strip mine, she had cast Searing Light 4 times without hitting once).

You're using hero points, right?

Because of the added difficulty of the PF2 encounters I just pass out 2 at the start of the session and we've houseruled them so that the re-roll adds 10 if it's under 11.

Might as well mention what I changed in this book since we finished it up a few weeks back. If you're one of my players, be cool and don't read this-- thanks!

I made Kyrion into a legitimately LG red dragon, influenced by the shard in his chest-- giving him the alignment of a gold dragon, whispering good deeds to him his entire life. The Scarlet Triad wanted the shard but knew it would be poisoned by Kyrion being killed-- but not by the nul acrumi vazghul ripping his soul out of his body. Since that ritual was too dangerous to cast as humans due to the self-destructive nature, the Scarlet Triad was relying on the Cinderclaw to do it and die. Good, because the Scarlet Triad is actually working to stop/weaponize Dahak too, and so their allegiance with the Cinderclaw isn't a weird question mark anymore. So Kyrion is good, and he saves some animals, and the PCs are curious about him and meet up with him in the jungle a few times as they travel-- a Tarzan/Jane relationship happened between our dragon-blooded sorceress and him which is great. The party had Kyrion pick a new god that wasn't Dahak and with some coaching he chose Shelyn-- the bard in the party painted his scales with rainbow colors to celebrate. It was really cool.

I played the twins as a pair of arrogant blowhards who weren't too concerned with the people who had been statueified. The PCs demanded they help them and the twins refused, so the PCs rolled initiative-- the brothers won and they ran away through the jungle, completely leaving.

Later the PCs came across the first brother trying to blow up the Temple to Desna, carrying around a gourd carved with a face he was talking to-- driven mad from jungle diseases. They talked him down, sedated him and with Dream Message had the Ekujae come pick him up.

The other brother joined the Charau-ka. I had all of the cultists of Dahak basically go full war boy from Mad Max, so this twin followed suit, killing, skinning and wearing a charau-ka as a suit. He had hunted down the dragon Kyrion to bring him back for the ritual with Belmazog, and the PCs had grown fond of Kyrion having seen him a few times in the jungle. They killed that brother and saved Kyrion.

The PCs knew that the more pillars went down the weaker Kyrion would be (my addition), so they kept him close and protected him until they made their assault on the Fortress of Sorrow. I changed the swamp to be monochrome from the bones of Dahak sucking the life out of the jungle, but no real changes until the PCs kicked down the door to fight Belmazog. The altar of Dahak immobilized the PCs as Belmazog tried to complete the ritual-- by slowly dunking the paralyzed PCs into the lava pit like a James Bond set piece-- but an exhausted Kyrion broke into the chamber and tried to save the PCs.

Kyrion tried to get his adopted family to stop, but the Cinderclaws refused, and, powerless, Kyrion prayed to Shelyn to save the party-- and the goddess responded by filled the lava beneath the PCs with wildflowers. On the verge of death, the shard in his chest was spent of magic and Kyrion transformed into a gold dragon before the shard fell from his wound.

The party still doesn't know what the shard is, but they're really curious, and will look into later.

After winning the day, the PCs went back through the gate and ended up meeting the one and only Lamond Breachton reading The History and Future of Humanity, Aroden's holy book. He congratulated the PCs on stopping the cult, but told them to stop while they were ahead and protect their town from what's to come-- foreshadowing for later books. The PCs all protested, but Breachton convinced them all one-by-one to stop adventuring, telling him he would take care of the Triad-- in my version he's a lot more "the ends justify the means." Everyone but the dragon-blooded sorceress who rolled a natural 20 on her Sense Motive and missed critically failing by 2 (I assumed you-know-who this actually is would have deception at the time... by the rules now the DC is 17, lol), so she succeeded! When they were clear of Lamond, she told the party he was lying about stopping the Triad... just in time for a contingency of Hellknights led by Heuberk to arrive in Alseta's Ring.

Having a lot of fun with the framework this AP set up so far.

So what is this level 2 Bard doing "staying out of combat to buff"?

It's 1 action to Inspire, so if that's all they're doing every turn... Usually the Bard in my party is casting his spells or at worst using cantrips. He spends a lot of actions Demoralizing opponents with Performance in order to lower AC and attack bonuses.

Is your entire party trying their best to stay within 15 feet of the Champion to help them use their reaction every turn?

Plaguestone is a very hard module where the designers decided that Severe was the baseline. Playing in it right now we've just passed Chapter 1 and I've boggled at what the encounter designers thought was an appropriate challenge for a level 1 party.

But in all of this, the real question is why enemies are choosing to attack unconscious opponents over their conscious and still dangerous allies...

Have you...considered not doing it if it would knock you unconscious at a bad time?

Sorry Craig. I didn't really think about when I used my two domain spells so you have to die so I can keep playing.

I despise the falling asleep at a certain revelation level mechanic. You go unconscious, no one can wake you, you get to re-prep spells... from a player's standpoint this is worse than death. At least dying gets you a cool story. "And then I passed out" is so.... boring. And the PCs can bring you back through other means without having to figure out how to wait 8 hours before they do.

Just imagine needing to go unconscious to save another PC in the middle of a dungeon with a time limit. And now... you get to watch the rest of the game... slowly...

Worse still: You do it at the start of the dungeon. And it's like, nine encounters long, so you're unconscious for two and a half sessions...

Most good GMs will find a workaround, but do we really need a class who comes with a disclaimer for the GM to always make sure an NPC is nearby they can play?

Not super interested in a character who kicks their own ass for minimal benefits. Reading through I figured that revelation spells would be very powerful as a balance, but they're not. Like someone said above-- too much stick, not enough carrot.

The Battle Oracle's focus spell being +2 to saves and his curse giving him a -2 to saves means you might just blow a focus spell not to be crit because of your penalty, which is hilarious. Take 38 damage anyways and gain fast healing 4. Awesome no-prize. Better run up and ineffectively melee that guy instead of healing or you'll keep your -2 to AC and saves, primary caster.

Flames oracle is real weird. Line of Fire and Effect are just weird suggestions not hard rules, but it's supposed to be "difficult or impossible" to target creatures undetected by you. So that Moderate curse means you have to put the Fireball from Divine Element... exactly where it could always hit you since it must be within 30 feet-- maybe? Either way it doesn't seem great. Because creatures are undetected-- does that mean that effects with the auditory trait don't carry over? It would call out if they were visually undetected, right? See-- just a lot of weird questions.

I don't even want to talk about the life oracle. I never played one but wow that seems real uncomfortable to play as. "Sorry, I can't heal you. If I do I'll go unconscious and I'll also heal all of the enemies. Yeah, I know you're at 15 hp and a cleric could bomb you for 5d8+40 right now, but mistakes were made!"

Sad that I can't remake my clouded vision Battle Oracle. The biggest draw for me to Oracle was that your disability was also your secret strength and as you got stronger it slowly stopped being a disability entirely. These new curses are the opposite of that. These curses start as a pain and get worse and worse...

Not a fan. Could you tell?

I'm coming around to it thanks to you talking me through it actually haha. Maybe I'm a bit too critical but I was hoping for something really out there-- demiplanes, crazy locations, etc. but this is... fine.

The Adamantine Golem is still really dumb-- he's just the biggest gotcha encounter I can think of.

The golem requires a 9th level dispel magic is the big weird thing-- or disjunction, we'll get into that. Dispel Magic doesn't have a benefit for heightening so... why would you prep one at 9th level?

Similarly, disjunction turns off magic items, but enemies in Pathfinder 2 don't really benefit per se from magic items. They just have an AC and attack bonus = to what their CR says. Like Uri for example has 3 more strength, 2 levels and +1 more on his magic weapon in his stat block than the Scarlet Triad Boss creature, but the difference is only +3-- it's what the bonus to hit going from CR 17 to 19 demands. It doesn't change what they use for damage either since their damage dice are just CR dependant-- Uri has 4 dice for his greater striking sword, or 4 dice for his regular striking dagger, for example. So I don't imagine preparing this spell would do anything at all... unless you knew you were going to be fighting an Adamantine Golem.

If the demilich is on the Triad's side it probably would be much better. Uri can probably solo kill her if he lets someone cast Deafness on him so it's weird he wouldn't do that. It makes sense if he did and then the demilich surrendered and they struck a bargain-- would play to his arrogance if the demilich was "enslaved" by him, looking for a way to break free, and the PCs could try to use that to their advantage.

Not the best. Feels like a low level Pathfinder Society adventure at it's heart, which is good and bad. Good because some low level Pathfinder Society adventures is where it's at, but bad because this adventure ends at level 17-- and the PCs with 9th level spells-- doing things that feel very, very 10th level.

Compared to some of the other AP volumes that end at 17, the stakes, enemies and locations fall kind of flat. The PCs just came out of an undead dwarven city after fighting a lava dragon in a volcano and now they're up against a horde of humans who are inexplicably more powerful than that dragon... stuffed in a cramped pyramid.

That the final fight is just the leader and his buddy cowering in a library is really lame.

Some of the set pieces are cool. The 13 pages of subsystems that Part 2 opens with is mind-melting, but the events described are awesome-- just really hard to not glaze over and scroll until you stop seeing activities.

I really like this book. 4th books in APs, just after the middle, are often underwhelming. This is not-- this is great! Just an excellent adventure start to finish.

Was definitely hoping the Scarlet Triad wouldn't be just out in the open hunting people for sport, twirling moustaches and cracking whips with their demon companions. That makes it tough! What makes it tougher that Laria Longroad was basically a party member and hit level 18... tougher still that the party specifically all got Leadership as a bonus feat and used it to set up the Silver Ravens as a legit organization of CG heroes filled with a couple hundred capable adventurers. So I'm going to have to lampshade and cut around and work out how exactly the squad of old heroes doesn't know about this-- or worse, if they do, why haven't they stopped them?

My group is going to make running this adventure way more work than I wanted it to be!