charles devault 73's page

So in this episode, we have the introduction of the conspiracy. I decided to try something new this time, giving the players (and characters) the outline of the conspiracy at the beginning instead of dribbling it out in bits and pieces over a year or two of sessions where all the intricate details will get lost. We'll see how it goes...

I had hoped that Elaine could be kept alive just a little bit longer, but there's something appealing to how it actually played out. The players don't get to interrogate her, and her ego came out in the final speech. This was not a group effort, this was her doing, and she's utterly convinced that she's going to be able to get out of here when her people come to rescue her. Even as she's bleeding out and dying on the floor of an ancient temple, she still thinks she's going to win.

Teddy is of African heritage with a Scottish accent. While playing him, I channel Desmond from Lost. Multiple players have said that if their character dies, they want to play Teddy. I think they just want to call everybody "brother."

I've run RotR and CotC with minor changes and modified just a bit to fit into my homebrew world. I ran Kingmaker and let the players run riot enough that the end result was that the adventure had more to do with four siblings trying to recover the soul of the fifth, who had made a rather poor deal with a demon for power.

But now, my Adventure Paths are pretty much unrecognizable from the originals. I mashed together Age of Worms and Carrion Crown, set them in 1992 and gave them a Mayan flavor. Now, I'm running Serpent's Skull as a modern conspiracy against reptilians while simultaneously running Legacy of Fire on the other side of a portal between worlds ( I will also be borrowing liberally from Mummy's Mask and I swear this time I'll fit the Sixfold Trial in).

I also run all mine using the Savage Worlds system, so I don't have to worry about XP or balance, and tend to do all the non-story and non-setting prep in about 15 minutes before the sessions begin. At this point, the Adventure Paths are pretty much there to provide a rough framework and give me something to fall back on when I run out of steam.

Two years ago I mashed up Age of Worms and Carrion Crown, moved the adventure paths to the early 1990's, changed the system to Savage Worlds, and ran an Aztec-inspired campaign that culminated in a battle against Kyuss rising out of the Matterhorn in Disneyland. Highlights included the finale, a vampiric silver dragon being taken out with one shot, stabbed in the eye with a dagger made from her own tooth, and an antiquities dealer dual-wielding David Koresh's desert eagle and an enchanted macuahuitl. It was, in a single word, epic.

Never one to leave well enough alone, I decided to try something similarly epic by mashing together the Serpent's Skull and Legacy of Fire adventure paths. But this time, I would run them in separate worlds, with the PCs fighting a world-spanning serpent person conspiracy (i.e., Reptilians) arising from a fantasy world inspired by Dark Sun. The two worlds are connected by stable portals in secluded locations.

Since I no longer do more than 2-3 hours of game prep for an entire campaign, I have absolutely no idea how all this will turn out. The campaign will likely go way off the rails somewhere after about 10 sessions, but that's half the fun.

The last campaign (Rise of the Worm Sun, it may be in the archives here somewhere) started with nod towards the movie The Hangover. This one begins with Souls for Smuggler's Shiv, a plane crash on a flight from Rome to Sydney, and a nod towards Lost (which I just finished binge-watching).

So first, the PCs:

Alex - Astrophysicist Postdoc

Amos - Amish teen on Rumspringa. He won a free trip around the world in a contest. Is severely delusional and believes that television is a reliable reflection of how the world works and how people behave. (I swear, every character this player creates is like this. It's like he's playing a completely different campaign than the rest of the group.)

Chester - Obese herpetology professor, gamer. (After stripping primitive leather armor from a gnoll corpse and strapping it on, when asked why he was doing that, he replied, "Because I look Badass!")

Clara - An aspiring journalist, self-entitled member of the 1%, and a bit on the naive side.

Samantha (Sam) - Recently left the Peace Corp. Uses risk-taking behavior (skydiving, etc) to hide the fact that she's secretly terrified of pretty much everything.

I also asked the players to provide me with 3-5 NPCs each who were also on the plane. I ended up with over 48 of them, including an 18-member high school choir going to a festival, a great dane show dog named Tuba, an 81-year old Korean war vet traveling around the world in honor of his late wife, and an entire bridal party returning from a ridiculously high-priced bachelorette party in Rome (Clara was a member of that party).

To get them to actually create NPCs for me, they were offered a reward to be determined during the first session (for 3 NPCs, the player got to choose 1 useful item from their own luggage, for 5, an additional useful item from somebody else's luggage).

I thought the players would see through my plan to start with a plane crash, but they remained stubbornly fixated on the idea that I was going to start the campaign with Snakes on a Plane.

About the session notes: Two of the players (the one who plays Alex and the one who plays Sam) trade off taking notes during the session. Both of them tend to skim over parts of the session, generally when the most intense roleplaying is going on, so a 15 minute, in-character discussion between the PCs and NPCs will frequently get reduced to a plot dump in the notes (e.g., "John tells us that there are monsters here.") Our sessions are generally pretty high-octane and beer-fueled, and three of the players have children under the age of 5 and start fading after a few hours, so things get a little sloppy towards the end of each session and the notes get more disjointed. I'll try to fill in the blanks as I go along, but I'm lazy, so no promises.

So, without further ado, the introduction to A Conspiracy of Snakes, featuring a plane crash, a malevolent fungus hive mind, bloodthirsty pirates on an island in the Indian Ocean, a numbers station, and a beach wedding conducted over a satellite phone with a great dane standing in for the groom.

My players discovered the value of the magic item economy early on in their kingdom's life. The first 10-12 months of kingdom building were a bit rough while they saved every BP to buy their first magic item producing building, but those early turns quickly paid off. Now, some 50 months into things (kingdom size of 102), they produce 8 major items and 28 medium items, and have 13 city districts in which to sell said items (well, 13 items at least). Barring the odd under-4000gp items which pop up, selling items generally nets them 100+ BP per turn.

While this has created explosive growth in the nation, this isn't the problem. I'm more than willing to roll with the players loving their growing kingdom (they're having more fun than they were when they were struggling to buy a graveyard...). The problem is that they managed to get a loyalty score 72 above their command DC, mostly through building lots and lots of monuments.

I didn't see this coming at all. They kept building monuments to all the NPCs I killed, and after running Carnival of Tears set in their capitol city, there were a whole lot of dead NPCs.

So now I'm facing this scenario:

Kingdom Building turn 1: Don't bother expanding (much). Collect BPs by selling magic items. End turn with buffer of over 120BP.

Kingdom Building turn 2: Limited expansion. Wait until withdrawl phase and withdraw 52 BP with absolutely no chance of failing the loyalty check (command DC + BP withdrawn < Loyalty + 20). Then, use your 110,000gp to buy the major items sitting in the shops.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Since I'm not using XP in the game, I can offset this a bit by keeping them at a lower level then recommended. And considering that the players are at the mercy of my random item generator, the munchkin potential is somewhat limited.

It's way too late in the campaign (just finished the 30th session) for me to change the magic item economy, but in a few sessions I think I'm going to be desperate to stuff this genie back into the bottle.

I'm one of those GMs with a life-threatening allergy to running anything in a published setting. I was a world-builder when I started GMing some 30 years ago, and I'm still this way. If I were a lot poorer and could only choose between the Chronicles products and any AP, I would choose the AP. Chronicles just aren't as useful for the compulsive world-builder.

I jammed both Rise of the Runelords and the Curse of the Crimson Throne into a homebrew world and loved every minute of it. Granted, replacing the Shoanti with Aztec-style, rhinoceros-riding hobgoblins was pretty rough and probably didn't hold together quite as well plot-wise as if I had run the game in Golarion, but using my own world made me happy, and my players all had a blast.

The Adventure Paths are fabulous campaigns (I love some more than others, but who doesn't?) and actually aren't all that hard to de-Golarianize. However, even when you transplant them in another world, there are a ridiculous number of things to steal for a homebrew setting.