There was a sanitorium in Rise of the Runelords, with part of the horror coming from it having been run by a man who was more interested in studying insanity than caring for its inmates as people. He'd made zombies out of previous patients, but he was the best defense in the area for a plot-related thing that was going on. It left my PCs in a moral dilemma.
Similarly, I had a charcter once who was a LG Cult Master mesmerist, who I played as a magic psychotherapist. He was honest that his False Lay-On-Hands was a special trick he had learned and improved to ignore pain, and that they'd need some real healing or medicine later. The Leadership followers he would get would end up being staff for his eventual praxis, but I left the adventure before it got that far.
That might be a good place to put the trip.
My plan was that, since Baraket was already redeemed into the Blade of Humility, its cut-scene was due to the sudden trauma of what happened to its Runelord. Normally, Humble Baraket's Weird is a spray of illusory gore, causing onlookers to possibly faint from all the carnage.
Anyway, in Rise, Baraket, Garvok and the others (once they had started to regain awareness) all insisted that their Runelord was alive and the others were dead. In Return, Humble Baraket won't take control of its wielder, but will insist upon staying with them. It needs to tell its Runelord a terrible truth... that he was wrong about something.
When they meet him in person, Baraket will give him a message through its wielder: that this was not what the Emperor wanted, that the state of Thassilon that gave rise to it and the other Blades of Conviction caused unspeakable harm for generations, that, given the choice, it would gladly have never been forged if it meant the Emperor's Sihedron could have been restored instead, and that there is still time to make amends and show the modern world what Thassilon could be... What Thassilon was supposed to have been!
Xanderghul lets Baraket speak, waits just long enough for it to count as a dramatic pause, then replies with, "Baraket? Break."
Then the sword gives a sob as it shatters into a thousand pieces.
This not only shows that Xanderghul won't listen, it further sets up the possibility that Sorshen would. I'll totally have other Runelords tell the PCs that Sorshen is even worse than they are and has probably enchanted them already, with the big difference being she's the only one who will admit she did something bad AND want to do something to fix it.
Due to having played through Rise with all the Blades of Conviction Seven Swords of Sin (one per chapter with an extra bit added on), I wanted to add all of them back in Return.
I feel like an opportunity was missed, but I like what they did with the ones they put in the AP.
As for what you're doing in your AP, there are other possibilities. Take it to Runeforge to reforge it into the Blade of Kindness?
Bring it to Alaznist, who commands it to break, or go to someone she designates as her new champion? One who won't try to use it against her?
Personally, I plan to have one of Alaznist's sinspawn carry Garvok; Baraket (which had been reforged as a Blade of Humility) wants to return to Xanderghul and give him a warning he may not want to hear; Sorshen will tell her Sinuous Guisarme that it could learn a thing or two from Arshia, now the Blade of Love; they might even be able to recover Chellan.
Name: Chiyaliso "Chili"
Details: Nagaji Slayer 7
Adventure: Seven Days to the Grave
Location: The Urgathoan Temple
Catalyst: Quad-Crit Weapons
After fighting our way through the Urgathoans, enjoying the simplicity of Good Fighting Evil after all the worries of "how are we going to infiltrate this purported hospice over nothing but suspicion?" Andaisen chopped off Chili's head with her scythe.
When it turned out That Wasn't Even Her Final Form, the heroes ran off screaming, carrying Chili's head and body so that he could be safely Raised. We knew we wouldn't be able to stop her with our toughest one dead in a single blow, and when we returned the next day, she was gone.
Later...
Name: Tenris Chervenki, AKA "Softbrush"
Details: Foxfolk U-Rogue 8
Adventure: Escape from Old Korvosa
Location: The "King's" "Palace"
Catalyst: Another Lucky Crit
After sneaking through the place and finding nothing dangerous, Softbrush walked through an open doorway and found a bunch of people throwing axes at him, followed by a screaming gnome with a greataxe charging him with a power attack. One axe hit, the Power Attack charge crit, chopping his head off. After getting revified, his first plan was to get his magic armor magically fortified.
Name: Vissaa
Ancestry: Kobold
Class/Level: Sorcerer 8
Adventure: PFS Scenario in-between Curse of the Lady's Light & The Asylum Stone (No PFS1 spoilers)
Catalyst:Closing into close combat as a sorcerer, with help from unwitting allies.
The Gory Details:
They gave the opposition a couple minutes of advance notice. Said opposition also had their backs to a wall. After getting attacked once or twice, the sorcerer cast Improved Invisibility and thought herself untargetable. However, one of the opposition was a sorcerer who had Lightning Bolt and her allies kept moving to either side of her while she converesed with them and called tactics. The sorcerer let fly, hitting her two intended targets as well as the invisible one.
There was a soft thud as Vissaa hit the ground.
Then their alchemist tried groping around to heal her, and the Hellknight attacked the sorcerer. Neither of them changed their position.
So the enemy sorcerer cast the spell again, almost dropping the alchemist and killing the invisible kobold sorcerer. Then the remaining PCs got to surround the sorcerer, who tried to flee and succeeded.
Then the spell wore off, and Vissaa was visible again. Fortunately, she has the Prestige to get herself raised, and they did accomplish their mission.
I'd have two:
One of a character who died in the Rise of Mhar, and whose player has since lost all contact with me;
One of a character who would canonically die in the far future.
See, I'd set up a homebrew Shadowrun adventure for my players, which had Gnarly himself try to manipulate a way to show up and herald the collapse of cyberpunk civilization far ahead of schedule. The PCs could help put a stop to this, but the players all gave up early on into it.
So the Crawling Chaos would put an echo of this corpse here because as far as anyone knows, he's destined to wreck a world because there'd be no-one to stop him. Plus, in some unsettling way, he knows that putting this corpse here would maximize dread in some unwitting passersby.
(One of the players is playing in a module I'm running that also involves worshippers of Gnarly. One of them will point at the PC and claim his god told him to name-drop two random people and declare them dead)
Syrinx haven't come out yet in PF2, and I'd like to see more of them.
Are there syrinx communities that aren't flight-supremacist? Can the Pathfinder Society make diplomatic contact with them without having to withstand incessant condescension?
No, but it is possible to cast Delayed Blast Fireball set to go off in X rounds. So unless you guess exactly how long the spell will last, either the fireballs go off harmlessly during the Time Stop, or the targets get maybe a round to run away.
In one adventure, the DM gives out a little extra EXP to the party for a recap of the previous session, and encourages everyone to take turns retelling part of it. Unfortunately, one or two players tend to get carried away and try for the whole thing at once.
In one where I'm the DM, I set up an Adventure Journal thread on the VTT and offered a Hero Point to the last person to post something non-consecutive. It worked until it was the turn for the player who has anxiety or something similar. The player has notes written down and means to post something, and I'm thinking of encouraging one of the other players to post something.
"Here, have some dumplings before you go. We made them ourselves, and they're sure to keep you warm!"
In case they ask, "Oh, no, not of anyone you know. Just some ogre who outlived his usefulness. We asked Barl and everything!"
EDIT: I did this myself, and the PCs just accepted them without asking. Then one of the hags told Barl they quit, incidentally also tipping him off that Those Guys were here.
I liked Words of Power, having used them once or twice. I would've liked even a web enhancement for them, and hope they'll get put back in to 2E (though I doubt it'll happen).
I don't normally think of "20 point-buy when the AP expects 15" or "roll for HP (reroll 1s) OR take half-hit-die+1" really count as boons so much as options.
I do give PCs boons on occasion, by means of NPCs they help. If they get in a random encounter with reasonable/sensible people ("knowing when to give up" counts), they can get clues or information. Anything from, "you returned the golden locket to the baker rather than pawning it, so you get enough Baked Goods of Gratitude that you don't have to pay as much monthly rent for the next year" to "The orcs respect both your power and cunning, and some of them will want to spar with you the next time you pass by." Rewarding Good alignments, while still setting up dangerous fights.
Similarly, if a religious PC goes out of the way to do something for a religion, they'll get a boon from that religion:
Kill a bunch of especially dangerous undead and bring the corpses to the Pharasmin mortuary for last rites? Pharasma gives you all a boon so that the next death effect that hits you, you can just place the d20 down on a 20 and declare that your saving throw.
Murder a proponent of justice, implicating someone else whose alibi is suspicious because you had previously drugged that person? Norgorber notices, and gives you +5 on skill checks relating to establishing your alibi.
Throw a really loud party, all through the night, where everyone tries to learn how to play the flute with no instruction, and you ignore anyone who tells you to keep that racket down? For the subsequent 27 hours, a boon of Azathoth gives you a +2 size bonus to whichever ability score relates to the roll of 1d6, even if it wouldn't make sense, like WIS!
If you're irreligious, figuring out something important with no religious assistance is such a stroke of genius that you get to reroll the d20 once.
Similarly, anyone who profanes a religious shrine or temple without being careful (using something like Desecrate or Hallow or a lot of Religious Water beforehand stops this from happening), gets a divine punishment. Taking a bathroom break on a shrine to Erastil might make any food you didn't grow or slaughter yourself taste disgusting, while toppling a statue of Abadar just because the temple staff were all LE embezzlers might end you up with a long, boring audit. Or defacing a temple to Razmir might result in the divine punishment of getting mugged by Razmirites.
Basically, I like giving little one-time benefits to my players for doing something important. They get rewarded, and they can pull out those rewards in a dangerous situational circumstance.
The book does say to modify his tactics. Say, if GM & players agree more books than Core are on the table, you can give Karzoug Firey Body. 9th-level Transmutation that renders him immune to a lot of things, as well as healed by fire. Karzoug's Burning Glaive has 3 healing spells, but unlimited Fireballs. I'd also recommend a Wall of Suppression. He can goad non-flying PCs through it.
He'd also be able to plan for what the PCs would do if he'd seen them fight while spying on them.
As for the Meteor Swarm, my idea was he'd prepare spells like Cone of Cold and Polar Ray for the Karzoug Holograms to use on the PCs. Hopefully, they'd protect themselves against cold, only to get blindsided by a pocket plane made of molten gold. Then, Round One: Meteor Storm
"Taken on the whole, the writing makes no sense. Looking at one character at a time, you can figure out that this one's from Aklo, that one's ancient Thassilonian, that one's either the schwah from Infernal or the 'zh' from Draconic written upside-down.
"The most generous interpretation is that the calligraphers just wanted to be mysteriously foreboding, but couldn't agree on how."
Graham made something hauntingly beautiful.
Cosmic horror doesn't always have to be about a great big screaming blob in deep space: it can be about paranoid fears coming true, of loneliness overtaking one's entire sense of self, a search for meaning in random happanstance, and the resulting indecision when you find some.
Or, potentially, "What's so special about all that? It's just another week on Aucturn."
Matt Dusty, the reason Krune wasn't in any of the APs is because of PFS1, season 4: Year of the Risen Rune.
In my take on Shattered Star, I'm inserting one PFS scenario in each chapter, to show them what the Lissalans are doing, and interfering with them. Then, when they hit level 11 or 12, I'll run The Waking Rune, in which they'll tell the Runelord of Sloth that giving up and just reading up on history will be the path of least resistance, to which he'll reply with, "...Nah," and roll initiative.
Plus, when you get to such dizzying heights of personal power, individual people tend to blur together. Though Baba Yaga does keep a bit of a personal touch, (what she seems to get up to involves "Being A Grump" and "Eating Her Children") it doesn't look like she has any destructive designs on Golarion (I mean, she did get helped out by people from there once). Of course, that doesn't mean she's wreaking havoc on some other setting with a Mythological Russia analogue, but she can't do that when she's on a lunch date with the Old Mage.
As it turned out, my group did, in fact, get the Bad End. Now they've begun Shattered Star, six months after the Rise of Mhar.
My advice? Put Karzoug's box text in the mouth of Khalib, and have Special K complain that he's the only one who could stop someone like Xanderghul or Alaznist from ruining everything, and your attempts to murder him show how much you need him to own all of Varisia and everything in it.
...Then, when they need help from Dead Karzoug, he can say something like,
"...You mean to say that Alaznist is destroying the world, and even time itself, and you need my help to stop her?
"I recall saying the exact same thing, when I was alive. To a group of people, not unlike yourselves.
"Then they killed me, destroyed everything I had worked so hard to build, and awoke the World Thunder to do it, even at the cost of their own lives.
"Golarion deserves what it has earned. You are welcome to it."
She took over from him as Runelord of Wrath. In my opinion, if she hadn't gone to an enormous waste of magic to make him suffer endlessly in an act of horrifying pettiness, I'd have found it out-of-sorts for her.
To be fair, a lot of fantasy RPGs involve dealing with traps, and a great way to stop them from being a pair of Perception/Theivery checks is to make them intricate or elaborate. Slowly rising water, a shooting range maze where nothing is as it seems, swarms of cannibalistic rats (who hopefully don't eat each other before they get to the PCs)...
I do admit, I once had an idea for a Bond-style PC, who'd specialize in calmly walking out of cover and doing Sneak Attacks via Shot-On-The-Run. Also, who would get humorously rejected by every NPC on whom he'd advance. But I had to shelve the idea.
I've always thought of Old-Mage Jatembe as the kind of man who would - now that his glory days of spreading literacy back around Golarion, Ten Magic Warriors with him, are over - encourage small, subtle, yet much-needed acts of kindness and compassion across the many worlds of the Material Plane. Why not have lunch with Baba Yaga in some Taldan place, for old time's sake?
This makes me want to run an RPG in a different setting, and have Jatembe cameo to offer a clue or some advice when the PCs are in a pinch.
(To preface, I'm talking about 1st Edition here)
I do like Hero Points in theory, and I implement them sort of like Shadowrun 5th's Edge: as a cushion for humiliatingly randomly generated numbers. Though that may be what they're actually for in the first place. I hand them out for stuff like who wants to write in the adventure journal, or who figures out an important plot point. Rewarding the players as well as their characters, and not just the numbers they roll.
Similarly, rolling a natural 1 is more like Shadowrun's Glitches: in combat, you still miss in an embarassing way, but you don't drop your weapon/target yourself with your spell. Or, you underestimate your foe, who dodges in an awesome way.
For skill checks, if you can still succeed on a 1, you do, but something happens. Your nat 1 Stealth still beats their Perception? You make it, but you accidentally leave clues to your passage that could make later tracking with Survival easier. You balance across that plank with a 1 on Acrobatics? You did it, but you forgot your shield on the other side, and one of your allies should probably toss it over or something.
As for house rules I don't like: Critical Skill Checks.
As the house rule goes, if you roll a 20 on a skill check (or initiative), you get to roll the 20 again and add that number to what you already rolled.
Predictably, the bard who always made multiple Perform checks at every city stop got Perform: 50+ on multiple occasions, leading to Shelyn and Desna stopping by his performances when they were on a date; the wizard got one while making a Bag of Holding and inadvertantly made a lesser artifact, which was used to cheese a good portion of the AP (though I didn't mind the part where we got a hundred or two captives out of captivity safely); and I only got them on Acrobatics checks with a flat DC, or Perception checks when there was nothing hidden. Also, there were a couple of times where my (15)+18=33 Stealth check was rendered useless by a (20+12)+3=35 Perception check.
That house rule ended up giving everyone else times where they ended up being like Mythic Tier 8 all of a sudden, and I was afraid to sneak by anyone in case Aroden made his Second Coming just to point out where I was.
They do have another niche: they talk bigger than both ysoki & goblins. They're the super-intelligent little dinosaurs who claim to actually be little dragons instead. That's gotta be worth something.
Though I'd expect a lot of them on Verces: while the others pay a lot of money for super-gentrified housing that goes up, they can dig down all under the place and set up their own subterranean arcologies.
Though Triaxus & the Diaspora also work for them.
Yeeeaaahh, even though I trust the people at Paizo to make an adventure where you get to actually help out the community and protect people from getting killed by other people, this is too touchy a subject. I'm glad there are lots of other things I can try, though.
Yeah, multiple 1s in a protracted fight scene tends to turn everything out more like something from Dreamworks.
Fortunately, they won't be as often. Unfortunately, they'll still be memorable.
Two other things: during the entire AP, nobody died (though Wilfred came close, 1 HP away from it after getting ambushed by a tiger in Part Two), and that my character's only stat-boosting item was a Belt of DEX +2 that he got toward the end of Part Five.
After a horrible shipwreck, we came to the Eleder's Pathfinder lodge with our findings, eventually found out where the lost city was, we eventually managed to figure out what to do. Not only did we set out determined to stop a race war, we spent months after the final conflict working toward reparations.
Here's who ended up calling themselves the Keys of Yhi:
Ael'eraki Valiance, aka Aki:
CG half-elf half-Varisian human alchemist, worshipper of Desna. Crackerjack tinkerer, she made poisons, potions, and went on to learn about constructs. Her stuffed moth came to life and she made it her familiar. She eventually shrunk herself so she could ride Phoen, as it was called. The youngest member of the group, she found herself horrified at the realities of war, resulting in many spa days in Eleder. She went on to travel the world, stopping in Nex to design a giant beetle construct she could call her home.
Abner Little, stage name Roqueforte Passendale:
CG ysoki bard, also from Varisia. A runt in his youth, he finally got to travelling, and ended up on the adventure of a lifetime. He wrote and performed an opera of his adventures, of which disguised serpentfolk insurgents saw its first few acts and expressed their displeasure. His mandolin was inhabited by a vulpinal agathion, who wanted to see where he'd go and what he'd do. After bringing peace to Savinth Yhi, as well as beneath it, he went on a world tour.
Jijitimazoo, though there are some who call him Tim:
N Mwangi kobold monk/rogue/magus, breaker of cults, puncher of gods. He fled his home when demon-worship took hold, and held that violence could solve as many problems as it could cause. He kept asking to engage friends in sparring sessions, figuring he could learn spells that way. He eventually figured out ones like Longarm and Twisted Innards. (Think One Piece, only more body horror)
After having involved himself at the end of one god and the re-ascension of another, he returned home to fight the demon-worship with everything he could at level 17 (which was a lot). He never did stop throwing himself at any challenge that presented itself.
Duvri Kounug:
NG vanara jungle druid, hailing from a small community in the Laughing Jungle. He just wanted to bring a bag of grape seeds and the holy text of empyrial lord Halcamora back home. Instead, he found himself a Pathfinder field agent, protecting people from fire, getting eaten, and jungle humidity. During his travels, he found himself able to make peace with the charu-ka he once thought irredeemable. His love of storms led him to control them, and even temporarily become one. His only 9th-level spell, Winds of Vengeance, even let him become a huge squall wrapped in a slightly bigger squall.
After the first dawn the serpentfolk were able to see in earnest after thousands of years, Duvri gave them a sun shower, followed by a beautiful rainbow. He then spent six months rebuilding damaged architecture in the cities above and below, only to find that he had too much power for any one person in his small village home. So he became Venture-Captain Kounug, set up his own lodge, and went on to pioneer the listicle. He even once became the grape tree everyone didn't know they needed.
Wilfred Wezpol, Crazy Old Man turned Crazy Old King:
CN samsaran transmuter wizard, who cheesed his familiar so much that it ascended to godhood.
Actually, it turned out his familiar was the last vestige of Curchanus, who managed to regain godhood by cannibalizing the remains of Ydersius.
He started out determined to see what Eleder was like because he spent most of his life ignorant of what the Mwangi Expanse was like. Shortly after getting to Savinth Yhi, he stayed put in the Artisan district, crafting like mad. During attempts to sort out everyone's problems, he asked them if they'd be okay with him keeping everything organized, and after everyone agreed, promptly declared himself king.
He spent his rulership researching the Clone spell, then researching a method of achieving immortality so that his reign would last into the forseeable future (or at least until a bunch of psychopomps showed up and kept asking him when would he have all his affairs in order).
On the whole, the AP was enjoyable (most likely due to GM edits) though I was hit hard with the Middle of Serpent's Skull Issue. Between getting swamped by so many sidequests at once and repeated spa days wherein my character, who had CHA 5 (rolling dice for stats makes it fun and exciting, and prevents dump stats!) couldn't really participate for a big chunk of it. Worse, one dungeon crawl had all the other PCs hiding in an expanded extradimensional dwelling carried by mine, who snuck around invisibly; this effectively had the same problem from the other direction.
Fortunately, the end bit was a return to form, because everyone was involved with the whole thing. The battle with the high priest went off almost perfectly, between Wilfred's opening Polar Midnight and god-familiar attacks, Roquefort's many buffs, Aki's holy bombs, Tim's nigh-unhittable AC, easily passable saving throw numbers, and haste qi flurries (monks who roll for stats under generous stat distribution!) and a combination of Duvri's early Great Dispel knocking away Vyr-Azul's buffs and his summoned tyrannosaurs eating Vyr-Azul's bodyguard.
Against the Avatar of Ydersius Reborn, it was basically a matter of everyone rushing him and biting/chopping his head off. Fortunately, we had a god on our side so as not to have to deal with a potential Mythic Ascension.
I did like how the GM or the AP or both managed to turn the anti-semitic conspiracy theory on its head: it was the cavern-dwelling reptiles who were planning the race war, due to a patriarchal progenitor whose last words were "Kill All Humans" and a high priest who never let go of that anger. It was why the only two groups we did drive out were the Red Mantis and the Aspis Consortium. I was worried about serpentfolk explorers finding them first, and deciding humanity was still full of avaricious conquerors.
My favourite thing that I think was a GM addition was serpentfolk who tired of thousands of years of propaganda and who didn't want the race war. Between that and PCs who weren't sneering Chelish imperialists or foppish Taldans or what-have-you, the AP became less about "taming the savage jungle" or "we have to finish what Savinth started!" more of a focus was on inherited trauma and multilateral solutions.
Plus, there's Talmandor, the avoral patron of Andoran.
He actively refuses worship, so as to avoid the sort of political religion that gets in the way of democracy. I imagine Andoran having posters of him with a caption of "Don't Pray To Me".
My first impression was that Paizo said "etching" when they actually meant "soldering" or something similar. But I do like the idea of carefully sticking the runestone itself onto the item. The wizard harmonizes its aura with the flow of the Ethereal Plane, the cleric keeps a vigil over it in prayer, the bard spreads rumors of this awesome new magic shield that can block anything and that you can also use like a sled!
If the runes are obvious enough on an item, would it be possible to figure out what they do just by looking at them? Presuming there isn't a standardized iconography all over Golarion, or that magically empowering runes aren't universal, an Arcadian wizard would probably have a harder time telling what a Vudran cleric's armour does, especially if the rune isn't just Vudrani for "slick" written on the front.
Similarly, there's a reason Alaznist doesn't plan out a spell-by-spell strategy to hard-counter the PCs: she isn't aware of them or their tactics and they sort of show up by surprise. Not like a minion of hers draws her attention to them via a way for her to easily scry on them from then on.
With someone to organize it, people could just form into one of those super-efficient bucket chains wherein everyone Readies to pass the bucket on to the next one, and the one at the end pours it out. One round to dump it out, another to send it back. No ranged attack rolls necessary!
Ooh! How about if the townsfolk spread rumors that someone resurrected him, or he became a revenant or something? Then Grigori could use that to his advantage.
For beginners? Fighters tend to be my go-to suggestion, or, if you want to do magic, pick maybe a sorcerer or an oracle. You can pick blasting spells, or ones that alter/obviate the terrain. Or a witch, who can pinch-heal, summon, buff, and have a few fight-ender spells, in addition to hexes you can use round after round.
Or a standard bard. Stand back and make everyone better at everything. You can be the Pathfinder who takes care of all the documentation. If you don't want to sing or dance or play an instrument, make your Performance skill Oration, and just yell at everyone to do better!
I don't recommend classes who come with animals or anything, since that'll require having a second character sheet. Summons work okay if the GM is willing to take care of the monsters for you, or if you just open up the beastiary and know what the monster can do ahead of time.
Though really, ask your GM and the other players for help. If you've already got an idea for characterization, they should figure out how everyone can accomodate each other.
I recall reading a thread about this topic a while back.
While there's no official secret reason why it's called that, I liked the idea that it's like a portmanteau of the Celestial and Elven words for "World" stuck together.
I'd be okay with orange/yellow/brown kobolds who claim metallic heritage. Or even ones who relate in some way to primal or imperial dragons. Black & red kobolds who claim their tribe was once chummy with a magma dragon, or similar.
Personally, I like yellow kobolds. I did once have a PC who kept claiming, "the gold ones are the good ones, so so am I!" while actually being sycophantic LE. Either way, you can't judge a kobold by their colour.
Also, if it hasn't been said before, if they know you're hard of hearing, the GM and the other players should take that into account. If you missed something important, it'd definitely be a show of good faith to allow take-backsies relating to it.
Wall of Ice is handy when you need some cover or line of sight broken right now, but don't want/need a higher-level spell slot dedicated to a sturdier wall.
Also, if your wall is going to be made of stone, I recommend also packing Stone Shape so you can easily make an archway, in case you've blocked off a way you were going to go.
Huh. I always presumed that Xanderghul's Flawless Hammer was made from a skymetal alloy, and considered its' Full Potential ability to mean it could get around any sort of DR.
Plus, since the Runelords are all wizards, none of the Mythical ones would need mythcial weapons, since they relied so much on their spells and the polearms were usually more badges of office.
This reminds me of the disappointment over the gravitational powers of Starfinder's solarions. When you use it to pull people toward you, it doesn't cause random unattended junk to slide toward you and stick to you.
As for collateral damage, I just figure it's reasonable for players & GMs to be careful around fragile/flammable objects. Lightning Bolt through some debris, so you can step aside from the now-open charge lane? Sure, sounds strategic. Throwing a Fireball in the library? Bad idea. I guess the GM would just have to eyeball Table 11-4 and take it from there. (It's the Material Hardness/HP/Broken Threshold table, by the way)
Anyway, I've always found it better to not substitute real-life languages for fantasy game ones. Difficulties can arise. Though there's always Esperanto!
Also: at this point in the AP, Tongues is easily available for people who don't want to put a point in Linguistics. Considering how this AP is all about learning about stuff from Thassilon, it's reasonable for PCs to want to learn the language so that they can read things like how to get to Runeforge.
Of course, if they don't, you can always let the Scribbler cast Tongues on himself, or give him a sort of empathic communication where everyone around him gets the feeling he wants to know about/tell you something.
I'm slightly confused and disappointed with some of what goes on in here. The ghost iron sword was supposed to be Xin's attempt at his own Blade of Conviction, but Runeforge was built long after his death; his dismantling of the Sihedron was the time for the assassin to strike, yet he only breaks it after the assassin appears. Also, Xin being also condescending in the past and bent on conquest in the present makes it look like all his talk of virtue was mainly lip service, so I'm thinking of a different take on this:
The Way I'll Run It:
During his rule, Xin realized he was a better teacher than administrator, and knew that boredom with day-to-day policy and bureaucracy was a bad habit for an emperor. So he gave more authority and autonomy to his governors, and grew more reclusive as he rested on his laurals and went back to tinkering with his hobbies. The Ghost Iron Sword was the result of requests for a personal emissary, an idea which he later discarded because he thought the idea of trial by champion was a bad method of dispute resolution. Much later on, the concept was used as a basis for the Blades of Conviction, requiring Runeforge so as to be able to forge weapons of solid sin.
He did, with help from the original seven governors, build the First Sihedron, as well as the clockwork reliquary, should he ever die before completing everything he wanted to do, then dismantled the Sihedron. Since its power would flourish when shared, he hit upon the idea of presenting each governor with their respective piece, so that they could put it together as a symbol of Thassilonian virtue and use it jointly. He also wanted to modify the reliquary to be able to use it, should his mythical immortality fail him somehow. Naturally, his reliquary would be able to interface with his clockwork army, immune to allgolthu mind-control, should they ever try to attack his empire.
Unfortunately, his isolation had blinded him to the growing corruption in his empire. The Runelords sent their giant to scry & fry him, and, in a panic, Xin flung the most destructive mythical spells at his assassin, wasn't standing at a safe distance after the giant's initial attack, and flubbed his saving throw. His Contingency went off, teleporting his remains into the reliquary, but instead of smoothly possessing it, his heartbreak at this act of betrayal (of course Xanderghul would want the only one to claim authority over him to know who was behind his murder) caused his psyche to splinter, haunting his entire palace in a state of distraught paranoia.
Now, the ghost of Xin is certain the usurpers must be stopped, and they even let that horrible, slithering evil into his basement. The PCs' approach rouses him from his mournful fugue, but his plan is to use his army to scour the land for any trace of those hateful usurpers and dismantle them (without any thought to current living conditions). He doesn't want to re-conquer the world, he's just trapped in the past with an uncompromising single-mindedness.
Also, if he sees Sorshen approach him, Return of the Runelords has material for his interruption:
"Sorshen! Xanderghul! Alderpash! Kaliphesta! Kaladurnae! Xirie! Naaft! I built the First Sihedron for you! For all of you to share! AND YOU KILLED ME!!"
