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Great! Glad to hear it was a reasonable switch, and yes I don't plan to make it permanently a 2-action spell. That is an interesting point about Resist Energy being a better fit, and it makes me wonder if the author was thinking about that spell when they wrote it.
I just ran into this issue in a game last night and was curious what the opinion of the rules board might be. Ice golems have a weakness to the spell "Endure elements" that, when casted on them, nullfies many of it's cold-related abilities for 1 round. The problem is Endure Elements has a 10 minute casting time. I would imagine this is intended to be used against the Ice Golem in combat, but this long of a casting time makes that impractical. I switched it to a 2-action casting time for the purposes of deactivating the golem's abilities. Is this an oversight or am I missing something?
My players are in the Dimension of Time right now and they are so strong that combats are already hard to balance. I wanted to put some mythic stuff in and so I started at the end of the High Justice fight by giving them mythic "Hard to Kill" to help with their survivability. After completing the paradoxes, I'm thinking about giving their items some legendary powers to become lesser artifacts, but I'm trying to be careful because they are soooooo strong, haha.
I found this map strange as well! I know I'm well behind you, but for anyone else reading this, I felt that a different underground lake map made more sense here. There's a few good ones, but I liked this one https://i.redd.it/jn4cj6vxzb431.jpg from a user on reddit.
Yeah I could see how it would feel anticlimactic, but you could combine it with the suggestion in the sidebar "Final Questions Asked" to give it a flavorful purpose as well. Kind of a sticky situation no matter what. Also if you go with the free resurrections route, there's no reason why you can't just remove everyone's negative levels too. The party is already punished by increasing the Paradox point levels which I think is a pretty good price to pay.
Hmm... That is really unfortunate. Do they not have any scrolls or any other way to resurrect the dead PCs? If so you could maybe put them into some sort of transitive space and allow them to use their resurrection and healing spells before they get placed in E1. Another option is to use the Steward of Stethelos to apply some healing in this transitive space. If they don't have the material components... I guess maybe you could spit them back out in Stethelos and allow them to go back and buy the components from the vendors there. Another option might be to just give them all a free True Resurrections, but increase the amount of Paradox Points that Alaznist has, since this would be somewhat of a paradox in and of itself. 1 Paradox point per dead PC? Up to you.
They're referring to the location in Book 3 on the irespan piling. I think it's in the description of the outside of the piling that there's lizards or geckos carved into the stone, but I'm not entirely sure.
Name: Zephan
My party encountered Inkariax for reasons related to a couple of their backstories. I used his freezing blast ability to hold everyone in place and get the party pretty freaked out about his power. I had some contingencies in mind in case none or all of them saved on the DC 29 Will check, but luckily only one saved and remained unfrozen. The one guy that was alive then negotiated a pact with Inkariax in order for them to be let free. They all had to take the "Shadowbound" corruption in exchange for their lives and permission to continue their journey to Crystilan. In return, Inkariax gets to learn about Crystilan (his reason for building the tower where he did), and he gets a hold on some powerful PCs for him to do his bidding. It turns out it has been a fun wrench in the plans of the mostly good-aligned party, because they now have to consider not upsetting Inkariax going forward (for example in dealing with the Doloras cultists in the city). Anyway the circumstances aren't exactly the same, but there was my idea for an encounter with a Demigogue.
Top quality podcast! So excited to see you all here on the blog!
Between "sending" and a purchased plane-shift scroll, the party was able to mount a rescue on our plane-shifted witch.
Cartmanbeck, I think Paizo typically publishes some extra content in the back of all their adventure path books. Often the monsters and lore articles are directly referenced in the book, but there's also often some extra stuff that you can use (or not) however you want.
Thanks for the input! That's how I ruled it during our session last week, but it's nice to get some confirmation (phew!)
I failed to see this topic come up when searching, which means the answer might be totally obvious, but I have a question about Mirror Image and Hunter's Eye: ================================================= Hunter's Eye: Level 3 Inquisitor Level 2 Ranger spell Sharpening your perceptive abilities and tuning them against obfuscating effects, hunter’s eye greatly enhances your senses against the target creature. You gain the ability to perceive the target when it is invisible or ethereal as though using the see invisibility spell, and receive a +20 competence bonus on Perception checks to locate the target. You ignore concealment provided by fog or mist, blur, displacement, invisibility, and similar effects affecting the target, but not concealment provided by darkness. This spell provides no benefits to your allies and no benefits against creatures other than the target. ================================================ Mirror image is a little more familiar. It creates illusory duplicates. Ordinarily a "See Invisibility" spell would not allow you to see past mirror image because it's an illusion, but the second paragraph calls out concealment effects mentioning blur and displacement concealment and then saying it works against "similar effects." Is mirror image similar enough to displacement to say that Hunter's Eye would work against it? My instinct is no it does not work against mirror images, because it doesn't ask you to roll concealment like the other spells mentioned. Additionally, I think that the spell would call out mirror images if that was RAI. If it does work it would also be extremely strong for ranged characters to damage down mages. It's a little murky though and I was curious about your thoughts on it.
Of course I will always agree with Mr. Jacobs! I imagine his general eagerness for pain and death together with his anger overcome his instinct to reward those that freed him. Plus he would never admit that he had to rely on others to free himself! My party ended up having him apologize and found themselves disappointed at his subsequent crumble to dust. It was hilarious.
The question is does size mean mass or volume? Depending on the density of the stone you could have 2 or 3 times the volume of flesh. Since you have to get in touch range you would then end up covered in a mess of flesh and blood! That's just unsanitary! Please use stone to flesh with extended range metamagic! More seriously I could see how the spell might fail unless the whole wall is 5 by 5 because the wall is the whole object, but... I would probably play it they way the OP is reading it, because it is a 6th level spell, stone shape is 4th level and can get you past walls. I also don't know why else you would use the "turn a stone object into a mass of inert flesh" unless the flesh has particularly good culinary properties.
That sounds awesome! I like the changes you have. One of my party just absolutely CRUSHED the poor little greased pig in like 2 rounds haha. I just ran the Lying Cup and I had the same interpretation as you. Mechanically it doesn't make sense to me really, but I ran it that way because then the players out of character could try to guess if the other players/Sorshen were lying. Then the dice rolling came in after the judge player called a bluff and we used opposed secret bluff/diplomacy against sense motive checks to see if the character was believable. Maybe that was not intended, but it was still fun! If only I can find a lying cup and a stabbable table to play the game irl.....
I don't know if I'm too late on this one, but I am currently in the middle of the Crimson Festival, and so far it has been a ton of fun! I would say it really tested my improv skills, as I was familiar with the mechanical things that could happen, but I had no idea in which order everything would happen or how my players would react to it. Basically I familiarized myself with the mechanics, and then really just thought about the atmosphere and what I wanted the general feeling to be like. This part may be up to interpretation: Sorshen for me presented herself as a little spacey and bubbly, and everything was kind of a game to her. She presented herself as someone who loves to have fun, is a little flirty, and when she talks it's all about getting the PCs to talk about themselves without giving out too much of her own personal information (she's a simulacrum so she doesn't really even have Sorshen's complete knowledge). Behind that she's of course highly intelligent and I was trying to give the PCs the impression that they are merely pawns in her game. Whether they like it or not they have to play along because of how powerful she is and how critical she will be to preventing the other Runelords from causing great destruction. For the festival itself I prepared a few different ideas of NPCs that would be at the stands and basically just winged it for the rest of the events. Besides those scripted Sorshen moments, I just wanted the players to have fun playing games, shopping, interacting with each other and doing some silly performances. Importantly I tried to keep the mechanical things from bogging down the fun too much and I think it worked pretty well. One of my PCs has a close bond with Sorshen because she's a clone and I made Sorshen her witch patron, but the others have been hesitantly playing along, knowing that they have been trying to prevent runelords from returning, yet allowing this one to do as she pleases. It's been a good atmosphere I think with a lot of fun, but also some hidden tension. My players had a great time interacting with goofy NPCs, reminiscing about their Curse of the Crimson clone characters through some silly propaganda posters, and of course doing the various activities. At least I think they did. I had fun haha. Also they were pretty grumpy about having to pay so much for the whale vomit in the perfume.
I guess it depends on how you've shaped Damil's personality. I don't remember it being too fleshed out in the book itself, but it sounds maybe he's managed to manipulate your party in returning Baraket to him in which case he would be trying to return it to the temple without a spellcaster to get him there. I think it would be pretty cool if he managed to become the new Pride Champion though. I would probably have him go off to some place like Korvosa where there might be fellow cultists around and use them to teleport back to the temple. As far as the scrying thing, I feel like if that worked, the peacock cultists would have been able to take Baraket way back in Rodric's Cove. Does the temple wards prevent scrying out as well as in? Or maybe Baraket just can't be scryed on and Damil himself would be scryed on instead. Maybe when he gets back to the temple he is involved with whatever trials would be required to gain the title of champion.
Ah, I hadn't considered that they might just try and steal... I don't see many of them as stealy-types but it would probably be pretty easy to pull off.
For people that ran though the festival with Sorshen, how did it go? It seems like the players are expected to have quite a bit of cash on hand to purchase the perfume ingredients, and that may not go over well. Should I just warn them not to spend everything before travelling to Korvosa?
Love this thread. Name: Marco Bandini
The story of Marco's death starts all the way back in Book 1 upon finding Baraket, the sword of pride. I played it a bit like "the one ring" where Marco, having some poor luck with Will saves, insisted on wielding the rapier sans gauntlet, with Baraket itself seeking the true champion of pride, and weakening Marco in the process. Marco's player did a great job of playing up his new-found prideful nature. I reduced the penalty a bit to make it less horrible to wield the sword. Regardless, a string of bad saves lead Marco down an spiraling path to his demise. First, he gave up the sword to Viralane after being charmed by her.
The party ultimately decided to move on through the dungeon, hoping there might soon be some respite, but none came. Marco suffered from some constitution drain fighting Thybidos' family wraiths, after one of them crit him, reducing him to a total HP pool of 20. When it came to fighting the ivory sentinels in the final encounter of the dungeon, Marco finally fell to a failed fortitude save on their poisonous claws; The poison (con damage) plus the claw damage was enough to kill him after a couple of rounds.
Name: Chiron
I agree that the motivation to Thybidos is a little confusing. As far as I can tell, Sorshen encourages you to seek him out, but he seems too far gone to give you any valuable information about Alaznist. By defeating him, however, I think you can say that Hollow Mountain falls into a bit of a chaotic state without any Runelords there. So maybe that would disrupt Alaznist's plans. Hollow Mountain is the seat of her power and the location of her Runewell after all.
Another thing you can do is take the tags off of the PDF map and export/save that particular page as an image. I always thought the quality was a little better that way, but I haven't directly compared. (you can then crop the edges if you want) Don't forget you can hold "Alt" in Roll20 to manually stretch the image without it snapping to the grid. I usually approximate the map by using the tool in Roll20 to select a 3x3 grid. Then I try and align the top left corner if possible and stretch the right and bottom sides using "Alt" to fine-tune the map dimensions to fit the map. It works pretty quickly... usually! At least I find it way easier than trying to edit the map dimension manually or in GIMP/Photoshop. |
