Hi I've added some items to my cart, but when I get to the final stage of the checkout, past the 4 numbered buttons and there's only a big red 'Place Your Order' button at the top. I click that big red button and nothing happens. The screen stays the same. I don't get any error messages. I've tried on both Firefox and Chrome and the problem is the same. The order hasn't gone through. There's nothing added to my downloads. I get no order emails. What's the probs?
When I ran the fight with the PCs' other selves I had it so that the evil versions could only be fully defeated by the PC version they mirrored. As it turned out all but one of the PCs defeated their evil version themselves. The last PC was 'killed' and shunted out of the Dreamlands with a madness. The remaining PCs defeated that PC's evil version in the Dreamlands, but I had it so that the death was not permanent. That evil version (a shapechanging alchemist) came to haunt the PCs in the real world, chasing them and causing them problems, before facing them (empowered, of course) later in the campaign.
I've mostly used dark ambient tracks from artistes like Lustmord, Inade, Asylum Carceri, and the Cryo Chamber stable. In fact Cryo Chamber have a bunch of collaborative hour-long tracks called Azathoth, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and Yog-Sothoth which are perfect for the campaign. You can find them on Spotify, YouTube, or to purchase via Bandcamp.
The Hellraiser soundtrack is on-theme for Kytons. But I'd also recommend almost any dark ambient stuff from artists like INADE, Lustmord, or pretty much any of Cryo Chamber's stable of artists.
See this thread for a couple of interesting tidbits from James Jacobs about rune giants and a link to Tian Xia.
As my PCs were walking around town, I made sure to mention all the wells they passed. They thought something fishy was up with the wells because I kept mentioning them, but nothing ever came of it since they just got into places through the front doors. Oh well.
Maybe not precisely what you're looking for but check this adventurer's quote that from the Osirion section in People of the Sands: "I have seen sand dunes stripped away by creatures of flame and wind to reveal treasure vaults that would shame dynasties. I have walked the boulevards of a palace built beneath the carcass of a god’s dead child. I have been entertained by masked priestesses, soldiers returned from the dead, once-powerful men sold into slavery, and treasure hunters who crawl across the desert like hungry ants. I have seen Osirion, land of the god-kings, and I cannot wait to return."
Yeah, with the greatest respect to your GM there are ways make this work e.g. what Nathan says above, or even introducing a new character. As a GM I groan a little bit when my players want to change characters, but I want them to have fun so would always work with them regardless of the set-up of the campaign to make sure they can enjoy the game.
I don't think he has to be 100% certain. I played him as pretty desperate to get out of there and willing to risk trusting strangers since he's running out of hope the longer this nightmare goes on. At the point the PCs show up, he's probably fearing that the ghouls could get him or (more likely) Zandalus/the Tatterman/Apostles/Aggra Loomis will discover his deception or just do him in if they feel like it that day.
In the first book, nobody considers the little protestors to be a threat. However, as time goes on the rebellion becomes a clear and present danger to the new regime and so they put the best of the best out to defend important areas. Maybe they draft in more from other areas. I also used the dottari troop statblock more than the AP did and set that up by saying Thrune brought in Chelish soldiers from Menador Keep to train the dottari to be more organised and capable fighting units. This would also give the rebels another reason to strike at the Menador Gap.
It seems logical to me that the river is just off the left-hand edge of the map of Thrushmoor. Since the map is aligned with North to the top, the town couldn't very well face onto the river. Additionally, with the western edge of town closest to the mouth of the river, it explains why all the piers are on the island where most traffic would pass by. It would also be a nice feature of Iris Hill that it has a view overlooking both the lake and the river.
I'm intending to run Carrion Hill as a flashback (or series of flashbacks) and have highlighted a few other potential modules as well. My idea is to have the players randomly pick another player. The other player will then be tasked with rebuilding the main (i.e. amnesiac) PC as a weird/evil version and then run them through the flashback module. So Player A randomly selects Player B. Player B rebuilds Player A's character and runs them through the flashbacks while Player A can only look on. Meanwhile, Player A has rebuilt Player C's PC and plays them in the 'flashback party', and so on. This way player A will feel the disconnect that their memories seem to be of another person and be horrified (hopefully) by their actions and this strange person that is so like them but so different. I'd limit Player B to the basic chassis of Player A's PC - so an arcanist stays an arcanist, a warrior stays a warrior, etc. - but otherwise encourage them to go weird and/or evil.
You're right. I misremembered the Secondary Campaign Traits Benefits from the foreword of Dreams of the Yellow King. I'm still only in the pre-planning stages for running this AP but I'm intending to use the Campaign Traits to give me ideas of how to fill in some of the blanks. Some of the traits spell this out, some need a bit more creative license. For example: Diven by guilt - character suffered some form of corruption or compulsion that forced them to do bad things in service to Lowls;
I like! She's very Skin from the band Skunk Anansie.
I won't be running Hell's Rebels for a few months yet but I've already started grouping sources together in thematic lists like Aristocracy, Hell, Hope, Kintargo, Revolution, Secrets, and Tyranny. The following feature heavily throughout my early playlists and thought the list might be helpful to other GMs. Let me know what music you'll be using so I can steal your ideas too! :p Amadeus OST - Mozart/Various (plus a lot more of Mozart's works)
I wrote the Snowcaster Elves section of People of the North. In my original submission I explained the reasoning for Findeladlara's prominence in their culture, but this got snipped during development and should therefore not be considered canon, but you might like to use it in your games. The bit that got snipped is as follows: "Snowcaster elves cling to traditions long since forgotten by other elves, and revere one deity above all others – Findeladlara, the goddess of art, architecture, and twilight. It was a contingent of her priesthood that refused to abandon Golarion during Earthfall, and persuaded the faithful to remain behind. In the very far north, where the winter lasts forever, sometimes the sun never completely sets, and twilight can last for months. These are the holy lands to which their ancestors came."
I generally try to describe each day's travel ("You spent most of the day trudging through a dry, broken, badland. Occasional thorny shrubs punctuate the otherwise bleak vistas, and dust storms rise up without warning to cause occasional annoyance and leave grit and sand beneath your clothes and armour.") and have at least one interesting or memorable feature per day ("Around the middle of the afternoon, you pass by an abandoned shrine, decorated with bones and rags of faded colours"). I check for encounters in advance and make a feature of them, but otherwise the day-to-day travel is as above. If the PCs enter a settlement of any kind I will always prepare a few memorable NPCs for them to interact with, and give shops and temples namesl, and have one or two unusual or interesting features no matter the size of the settlement. It doesn't take much preparation, just a couple of lines per day of travel, and it will really help your players' immersion in the game world.
According to the 'Brevoy' article in AP31: Stolen Land, he ruled Brevoy only briefly before abdicating and letting his family rule in his place. And according to the 'Beyond Kingmaker/Continuing the Campaign' article in AP36: Sound of a Thousand Screams, he is described as "the lost lord", which suggests that he disappeared and nobody knew what happened to him after he stepped down from the throne. And more importantly it reveals... Spoiler: ...that he seems to have been a red dragon all along and might have come back.
I used him in my Shattered Star campaign more than the AP allowed for. Utilising his connection to Thassilonians as the Faceless Sphinx, he was responsible, partly, for nudging along the Runelords towards developing Rune Magic into 'sin' magic. During the campaign, he was also responsible for nudging along events that saw the reawakening of Runelords Krune and Zutha, and was nudging the PCs towards rebuilding the Sihedron and thus reawakening Krune. The potential chaos and strife caused by not one, but two reborn Runelords, and a mechanical army controlled by an insane wizard bent on reclaiming Thassilon, seemed just too delicious for him to ignore. Nothing was overt and obvious. Just a little nudge here, a poke there. Lightly shepherding mortals into setting up their own downfall.
I'm supporting the classic tales idea too. Tales set in Golarion's past that tell the story of important events, or 'modern' day stories which explore important historic events. Also: Mordant Spire, Rahadoum, Numeria, Casmaron, Mythic themes, the nature of divinity, the Dark Tapestry, Dominion of the Black, Great Old Ones, the Green Faith...
Assuming it's Magister Khrysm that's left alive, I'd consider having her stealthily approach the camped PCs and use Deep Slumber on whoever they have set as sentries while the others sleep. Whether that works or not, then approach under Invisibility and try and coup de grace whoever she thinks would make me most fun to kill. She is a master torturer, remember, so you have to think what would be the most painful thing she could do to this group who have disrupted her operation. Take out the healer perhaps? Assuming that wakes them up, and while someone scrambles to save the healer she'd put some distance between her and the group and use a combination of bombs and sound burst to inflict maximum damage. Perhaps using her Levitate ability to put herself out of reach of melee weapons. Or maybe you'd prefer her to act as stated in the morale section of her statblock: retreat to Nar-Voth and return at a later date after gathering more resources - maybe enough resources for an attack on Heidmarch Manor... Depends whether you think the first option is too mean, or whether you want to focus on the dangers of not tying up loose ends or the dangers of sleeping in an unexplored dungeon. Do whatever you think the group will have most fun with, but at the same time don't go easy on them.
Below is my current Magnimar playlist. It will probably have changed by this time next week. I was aiming for bustle, grandeur, and mystery. They're all from movie or game soundtracks and are presented in the format 'track name - artist/composer - soundtrack name'. A Call To Adventure - Randy Edelman - The Mummy: Tomb of The Dragon Emperor
I'm definitely planning on using them. I'll be taking the season 4 arc of PFS 'Lissala' modules and using them to wrap a larger story around. I started the campaign with Sheila telling the PCs that they were the only ones she could confirm were not potential spies (the Aspis Consortium had been showing up at dig sites and mission locales ahead of her agents lately) which is why they get given the important task of finding the shards. Later on, the spy has been revealed, but he managed to get away before the PCs were even on the scene (they were still in the Crow). While the PCs investigate part 2 of the AP, that spy is fleeing to a Lissalan 'safe house' (it was them that the Aspis Consortium were working for, and the Lissalan's want to squeeze every last bit of information from their spy - the safe house isn't going to be that safe after all). Anyway, yeah. Ultimately, the Lissalans are trying to do what they're trying to do in the PFS modules, and are interested in recovering the Sihedron but it's not their prime focus. They'll cross paths with the PCs somewhat regularly after the Pathfinder agents have been sent to investigate the spy's last known wherabouts, which should lead them to the 'safe house' and one of many secret cult headquarters throughout Varisia.
I had my players make an easy Knowledge (local) check to discover the vague generalities of the benefits associated with each. Most PCs managed to achieve one boon before entering the Crow, but since the party stayed in there for four days, the boons wore off pretty early in the adventure.
Another plot had Magnimar's Forever Man learning of Ileosa's schemes (from Curse of the Crimson Throne) from the Gray Maidens in Curse of the Lady's Light and hoping to gain immortality by completing a similar ritual at the Sunken Queen.Oh wow. I have to roll with this now. :D Go for it. Let me know how it works out. Since Shattered Star is a sequel of sorts, and since the Forever Man is such a cool character, the way to link them up just screamed out at me. I was assuming that the PCs would make peace with Oriana and the Gray Maidens and bring them back to Magnimar. Sometime thereafter, one of the Maidens was going to be kidnapped by one of the criminal elements of the city, unknowingly doing the bidding of the Forever Man. I had intended him to have heard through underworld channels of Ileosa's aims and simply needed the final clues put together by reading the thoughts of this captured Maiden (I was planning to give him the Thought subdomain). There would be a race against time for the PCs to find the captured Maiden before her usefulness was less than her captors will to keep her alive. Once the PCs had followed clues (probably once they'd reached levels in the mid-teens) I'd effectively re-run the Sunken Queen encounter area from CotCT but with the Forever Man and Norgorber-related minions populating it.
Whenever I start planning a campaign based on an Adventure Path I always have waaaaaay more ideas of directions things could go than would ever make sense. At first I try to throw in everything and as time goes on I throw out more and more of the side paths and parallel plots. One such plot had Sheila Heidmarch, being the huge fan of all things Varisian and Thassilonian, deciding to organise a new set of Runelords for the 'modern age'. Obviously it was a totally gonzo idea and got dropped pretty quickly, but she was going to base her Runelords on the seven virtues of rule and pick appropriate NPCs from previous APs to make up the bulk of them with a few of the PCs parents or friends of the family making up the rest. They were going to work in secret for the good of Varisia, and ultimately it was going to be them behind the missions to recover the Sihedron and not the Pathfinder Society. Another plot involved one volume of Runelord Zutha's Tome of Gluttony falling into the hands of a prominent NPC and thus having them begin the slow transformation into the Runelord of Gluttony. There were also sideplots with greedy members of the Decemvirate knowing what the reconstruction of the Sihedron would do, and not caring for any collateral damage that was caused as long as they get their agents to discover/loot Xin's city much more quickly than they got to loot Xin-Shalast. They want to get in on the ground floor this time around and not miss any of it. Another plot had Magnimar's Forever Man learning of Ileosa's schemes (from Curse of the Crimson Throne) from the Gray Maidens in Curse of the Lady's Light and hoping to gain immortality by completing a similar ritual at the Sunken Queen. Then there was the Hellknight witch whose patron was secretly Nyarlathotep who would try to manipulate events to open a permanent portal to Leng in Into the Nightmare Rift and use the Sihedron to awaken Mhar from beneath his mountain. I wouldn't have been able to fit it all in, but it would have been a wild ride!
Portal of the Sacred Rune from Season 3; Severing Ties, The Cultist's Kiss, Feast of Sigils, and The Refuge of Time from Season 4. There are two more forthcoming modules from season 4 to complete the metaplot - Words of the Ancients and The Walking Rune I believe.
Yes! I ran an ill-fated Jade Regent campaign and before a TPK on the Crown of the World, I made the PCs journey more interesting by embellishing some of the places they passed on the way. ULLERSKAD
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