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Going over my bookshelf yesterday, I discovered that Pathfinder AP # 155 and 156 are missing. It seems there was a payment problem last May when my credit card expired, and when the payment was corrected, those two subscription issues remained stuck in a "Pending" status rather than getting ordered properly. Could you folks give those a shove back into the water slide? Thanks!
If you wanted to be generous, you could have a bird happen to fly into the wall and just go poof [edit: I now see you made exactly that suggestion], but since you're past that, I'm pretty sure you just fry the PCs and then say "do you wanna make a new party, or shall we chalk this up to a learning experience, say you didn't come straight here, and we try this adventure again...?" End of the day, 5th level PCs saw a Prismatic Wall and decided to walk through it. If "flickering wall of rainbow magic" didn't provoke a fear response in your players, it sure will in the future.
Once I managed to give a character malaria, I literally told my players I was bored of paying attention to the camping rules, and they should just roll every day and not get a 1.
Sounds like this is already a lost cause since you're past book 2, but what I did was to move Eclipse from the Ekujae to Thropp. Laslunn had made arrangements with Voz for her to secure Alseta's Ring and report back, and she hasn't responded. So, he sends Thropp to take a more direct (but still quiet) effort to secure the Ring and figure out what happened to Voz, and Laslunn sends the key along with him. It takes Thropp like 6 weeks or whatever to make the overland journey, but once he's done the job, he should be able to pop back through the gate, with the bonus that now they'll know where the Kintargo side of the gate is (they know it's in the area, but haven't actually found it).
city level for shopping has been a major hurdle they had to deal with so far There's definitely a problem with this in the campaign, particularly in the middle section. adventure content:
Book 1, levels 1-4, level 4 settlement. Solid. Book 2, levels 5-8, a settlement that explicitly does not trade, sell or have a gold-based economy. However, there's 5 +1 armors in book 1, so PCs aren't hindered on their plustas by this. Book 3, levels 9-11, level 7 settlement. Here we run into problems, because that takes purchasing Resilient runes off the table, and there aren't enough given in treasure. Personally, I bumped Kintargo to an 8 to correct for this. Book 4, levels 12-14, a mere level 5 settlement EXCEPT for what I missed the first 3 times I read the adventure, that it's a level 5 city that sells up to level 8, and weapons/armor up to 12. Which is just a weird arrangement. But, that covers the +2 weapons and armor and greater striking needs. Greater resilient lags slightly behind, but at the adventure's conclusion, you can buy weapons/armor up to 15 here. Between the level 15 smith at level 15, and the "nearly anything can be found in the grand markets of Kintargo" setup, things go more smoothly in the last 2 books. This would also be when you could plausibly travel/teleport back from Absalom.
Obviously, a lot of this can be credited to the ruleset and adventure being written at the same time, and there may have been issues with the expectations. I think the intent is largely to have PCs generally find their needed things adventuring, while shopping is mostly in cities that lag a couple levels behind the PCs and exist to back-fill holes in their gear. Unfortunately, AOA does that and then doesn't provide enough of some staple items that the math of the game is based around. It's nothing a GM can't fix, you just need to be aware it's an issue.
But... the super cool Silver Ravens can't bother defending themselves The Silver Ravens are gone, or at least all the high level ones. They learned of a major threat (to Ravounel? to the world?) rising in the Darklands, and they left to deal with that and haven't been seen in months. With the city's major defenders gone, Laslunn is using a variety of tactics (slaver raids on the coast, hauntings by Barzili Thrune, apparent attacks by Nidalese agents) to destabilize the baby nation in the hopes that what comes after will more profitably match the good old days.
This, along with 2-02, is supposed to be released at GenCon, correct? Why the available date of 8/26 then? I believe 8/26 is the date they're available for purchase by the general public, after having been initially exclusive to GMs running at the convention. Same reason 2-00 won't be available for purchase until August 4, 2021, but with a much smaller exclusivity window.
The party is level 7 when they encounter a Clay Golem in Extinction Curse, and it's in the middle of a dungeon They've used Clay Golem two APs in a row without even a clarifying post on the forums? That's disappointing. My players haven't reached the clay golem in AoA yet, but I fully intend to use a counteract level of 5 when they do.
Looking back at clay golems in previous editions, you've always needed a MUCH higher level healer to get rid of the wound, compared to how strong the golem is in a fight. I don't think that's necessarily true. Let me take what you started in the previous post and expand on it to what the mechanic actually means in gameplay: AD&D 2e - Requires level 17 cleric, period. CR didn't exist, but it's an 11HD creature, and the 5000xp award is equivilant to a 15HD creature per table 31. Design intent is still clearly for players to have to seek out a more powerful healer afterward. D&D 3.0 - Requires Heal (6th) or other healing spell of 6th level or higher. You need an 11th level Cleric, CR 10 creature. Probably requires seeking out an NPC, but not one of dramatically higher level than the party. D&D 3.5/PF 1e - Specific spell requirement gone, now it's a DC 26 caster level check. CR 10 creature. A 10th level cleric needs a 16 on the die to successfully heal, for a 25% healing chance per spell. NPC is no longer required, but you're probably going to need to take a break for a bit to resolve it. D&D 4E - Level 15 creature, "the target cannot regain hit points (save ends)". I'll be honest, I have no idea what this implies mechanically, I just wanted to include it for completionism. D&D 5E - Challenge 9. "Greater restoration" spell, which is 5th level, so a 9th level cleric. If you don't have it prepared, you need to take a day and it costs 100g, but it's otherwise trivial. Which brings us to PF2. First, consider the case where the counteract check is exactly as written in the stat block, and you're attempting to counter a 10th level effect. So, for a 10th level monster you *must* seek out a caster of at least 13th level. That caster is rolling around a +22 (5 stat, 13 level, 4 Expert) to hit a 39 (must crit). So, a 17 on the die for a 20% chance per casting. So, the party is abandoning the adventure to track down a caster several levels higher than them, and THEN it will take repeated castings. We're in territory harder than D&D 3.0, but still moderately easier than AD&D. Or, let's imagine that the design intent is for the counteract level to behave like all the other counteract checks, that the counteract level is half the creature's level, and there was a misunderstanding in development that remains frustratingly unaddressed one way or the other by erata or forum post. Now, our 10th level party gets hit, and the most powerful healing spell they have is 4th level. The cleric is rolling at around a +19 (5 stat, 10 level, 4 expert) to hit a 29. 50% chance per casting. If the party is level 9, probably 40%. We're now slightly easier than 3.5/PF1, but the curse affects all healing, not just those specific wounds. So, probably comparable. I think the intent HAS to be that second one. The only way the first option doesn't derail an adventure is if you allow "it's magic but it's not a spell" cheese like potions and healing gloves.
So, book 2. The Scarlet Triad gave the Cinderclaws a powerful magic ritual, a clay golem, and a shard of the Orb of Dragonkind*, and possibly other resources as well. In exchange, they get the arsenic-and-maybe-Dahak-tainted gold. What the heck for? There's no reference to the gold in future adventures, and no real indication of a ritual it's being used for, despite references to "draconic resonance" and Hezle testing its "divine purity." Is the gold just a red herring? Does the Scarlet Triad simply want to help the Cinderclaws free Dahak for their own reasons, and asked for the gold to make their offer more plausible? [edit: I suppose it does say in a sidebar at the very front of Cult of Cinders that they're drawing "motes" of energy out of the gold to reconstruct the Orb. But the Cinderclaw's contact is Laslunn, who is only involved in the slavery side of things? But I suppose the gold can be somewhat explained. It doesn't answer the larger question below, when the nul-acrumi vazghul is specifically intended to help crack open Huntergate and let out the Dahak fragment, and Against the Scarlet Triad specifically has Zandivar trying to release him.] Which leads to the larger question, why does the Scarlet Triad want to free Dahak's fragment? The books say that the Triad has two plans for getting Mengkare off their back so they can maintain their wealth: the Orb of Dragonkind to control him, and releasing Dahak to distract him. But...really? They're not lunatic cultists, they're rich pragmatists. How is releasing a force that wants to crack open their planet like a walnut compatible with them maintaining lives of comfort and wealth? Can anyone suggest an alternative motivation for the Triad to help the Cinderclaws that doesn't involving releasing Dahak, but which is compatible with their actions in the other books? It's entirely plausible that they don't even believe the stories of Dahak being trapped in Huntergate, but I get stuck at that point trying to figure out what they are doing there. * and then we face the issue that giving away the fragment is like Thanos thinking the best way to gather the infinity stones is to give Loki his only infinity stone.
Thanks to everyone above who did the heavy lifting. I compiled them together for an answer on reddit, and figured I'd paste it back over here to get everything into one comment. Pathfinder RotRL: The Runelords will return. [Not a literary reference]
Starfinder DS: How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? [Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs]
There's not really much that can be done at this point, but I want this terrible customer service experience on the record somewhere. 33 days after ordering, I not only don't have the book, but it never even shipped from Paizo. I placed the order on August 14. I'm not sure how it ended up side-carted, I certainly didn't intend to. I'll grant it's my error, but there's clearly something that confused me on the ordering screen. That same day, my August subscription went to Pending, and I emailed customer service to ensure the two shipped together. As of September 16, I have still never received acknowledgement of that email. I received that subscription on August 26th or 27th and discovered it did not contain the CRB, which I then noticed was still side-carted. I don't have a lot of ability to make outgoing calls during the work day, so I waited for a reply to the email. The next week, I read on the forums that the CSR forum was more responsive, so I posted the above on September 3. On September 4, I discovered the un-sidecart feature did not require customer service intervention, but is hiding on the Account Settings page, rather than in order history. I removed it from the side cart on that date. On September 5, I received notice that my September order had been created and set pending, and the CRB order which I had removed from the side-cart was added into my subscription order which was expected to ship in 8-12 days. September 9, I finally receive the above reply to my forum post, removing the CRB from the subscription order and set to ship immediately. September 16, I receive an email that my September subscription is now packaged to send and will go out. The CRB order remained Pending, a week after being assured it was set to go out on its own immediately. At that point, I made arrangements to call during the day, I got a CSR immediately who was able to cancel the order, and I've ordered on Amazon. It will be at my home today before 9pm. I love Paizo for the content you produce, but this is the first time I've needed assistance from Customer Service, and it's a straight-up unacceptable situation. Even if we assume that my email was removed from the queue after Mr. Phelan's post above, that means it took 24 days without being addressed directly. The Customer Service forum appears to get 4-5 posts per day, and it took 6 days to get a response to a post. Considering your telephone customer service was able to answer me immediately and cancel the order in under a minute this morning, the lack of response to email and forum is simply baffling. If these avenues of communication are not being addressed in a timely manner, they should be discontinued so as not to give your customers the impression they are viable channels.
Thank you for that. I eventually found the button to un-sidecart the order, and a day later my subscription for the month went to pending and somebody helpfully folded the CRB right back into that order that will go out next week. /sigh. I appreciate the shipping waiver, and I look forward to the physical tome. *curls up with PDF*
I put in this order on August 14, and must have mis-clicked something, I didn't intend for it to be side-carted. However, I noticed that day that my subscription order had also been sent to processing, so I emailed customer service that day to confirm that they would ship together. I have not received a response to my email, and the subscription was mailed out while my CRB remained in the side cart. Can you please ship out this order immediately? Thanks in advance!
Correct, with one point worth emphasizing: Encounters with adversaries and hazards grant a set amount of XP. When the group overcomes an encounter with creatures or hazards, each character gains XP equal to the total XP of the creatures and hazards in the encounter (this excludes XP adjustments for different party sizes; see Party Size for details). If you were adjusting the encounter for 6 characters, the "encounter budget" for that would be 180...so, say you add an Elite Goblin Dog to the encounter. The encounter is then a Severe 1 for a party of 6, and characters all earn the reward for a regular Severe encounter of their level, which is 120. If you wanted to over-complicate things, you could also say that each character is awarded XP equal to the Encounter Budget * (4 / x) where X is the number of players.
"You can use an action to Fly 0 feet to hover in place. If you’re airborne at the end of your turn and didn’t use a Fly action this round, you fall." So, the creature can Fly up, make two attacks and end its turn. The next turn, it would need to either take an action to "Fly 0" and remain in place, or make its attacks and then fly onward. This is a little inconsistent with the Maneuver in Flight action under Acrobatics, which suggests that in general a hover in place action might be an Expert action, while "reverse direction" is Master. But that's all at GM discretion. I'd be inclined to take context into account. Somebody flying through magical means probably doesn't need a roll to hover in place, just spend an action to keep themselves aloft. But I've never seen a falcon hovering like a hummingbird, so the Emperor Birds would probably require Acrobatics to hover. Turning around as a Master-level action I can only imagine as flipping a U-turn in place, which again I can't imagine a bird doing, but turning if they've got some room around them shouldn't be too difficult. The 10-foot hallway for birds with 5-foot wingspans is a bit tight. I'd probably have them swooping past back and forth with a DC 10 to turn around at the ends (rolling a 1 would be a failure, and they'd bang a wing and tumble to the floor). The bat, I'm picturing wide flappy wings as it basically hovers over somebody's face clawing at them. No check, just use a Fly 0 action. At the end of the day, I'd remember that unlike 3.x, PF2 doesn't proceed from the assumption that PCs and monsters play by the exact same rules. If you can describe it in a way that sounds legit to you and your players, go ahead and do it.
Oh, sorry. When I said they're not deformable, I didn't mean to suggest they can't fit through a 5-foot hall. I mean that in 1e, swarms were basically 4 5-foot squares that can be arranged however, so long as they're all connected. In 2e, they appear to be a 2x2 creature period. As written, putting two 2x2 into the room requires a little overlap, but that's alright. But expanding to 6 players, Ice Titan suggested adding a third swarm, and there's just no reasonable way to play with three 2x2 creatures in a 3x3 room. I was curious how Ice Titan played that, and gave my own suggestion of moving the encounter into the larger room to the north. Similarly, the three rats in A17 probably need to become 5 rats for 6 players, and I'll be swapping them with the bat in A19. 2e's a more mobile sort of combat, and cramming extra creatures into an already-small area really loses out on that benefit.
For A13/A16 (6 players)
If players go through A14-15 first, the Warg will be the puppies' mother and I'll run it as a social encounter with a possible easy fight.
You could rule that the swarms are on the walls and ceiling in addition to the floor to help them concentrate in confined spaces. The problem is that swarms deal their damage by sharing a square with the player. Which means that either you're shrinking the swarm, which isn't fair to the monster, or you're allowing two swarms to attack the same character, which is unfair to the player. I'm going to say that A5's rafters have been entirely colonized by a massive spider colony, and when they come boiling out, the 3 swarms basically fill the northern two-third of the room.
Most times the group didn't go near the trap, despite a valiant and believed bluff from me that it was in a random spot each play through it was only encountered 1 of 3 tries. Test-ran this with my home group to try out the 2E rules, they also completely skipped the trap. "Wide passage in front of you, smaller doors to the left and right."
It's under the Fly skill: Flying Maneuver DCs
A flying mount has to expend movement to turn, and I don't think can turn at all and still do a ride-by, but I'd have to check A flying mount can turn during a flyby attack because it's worded differently than ride-by-attack. The ride-by requires you to continue moving in the direction of a charge. Flyby attack permits you to take a standard action at any point during a move action.
Having never played 3.5 I don't know where the issues were, but they thought I had to turn my "horse" around to move back the same way, they thought controlling a mount was a move action, etc. They could have just hated my flying, mounted, character charging every turn though. Ah! The issue's not the mount, it's the flying. Flight does still have an implied facing because of the need to 'turn' your direction of movement. edit:
"you may move and attack as if with a standard charge and then move again (continuing the straight line of the charge)."
Ah, so I'm seeing what the problem is now. The PRD text is different from the Core Rulebook Errata PDF. Creatures that fail to beat your Stealth check are not aware of you and treat you as if you had total concealment. Creatures that fail to beat your Stealth check are not aware of you and treat you as if you had concealment. Based on what Jason said above, I'm pretty sure that the Errata document is the correct text, and the PRD is a typo. Edit: Mebolex caught it a full page before me. Whoops.
I can see the argument of the Tarrasque coming back from suffocation, since it is a save, but not starvation. Starvation is not a form of attack, and it cannot be healed until food is consumed. As long as the Tarrasque is kept away from food (I believe they cut it up and moved it into a small demiplane) it will eventually die simply because starvation damage cannot be healed A character can go without food for 3 days, in growing discomfort. The keyword you ignored there was "character." Surely you don't think a bear starts dying 4 days into hibernation? T is known to nap for centuries between popping out and munching down on a nation or two. Yes, if you lock T up in some inaccessable place, it would *eventually* start taking starvation damage, but not in your lifetime. And eventually it would take lethal damage equal to its hp, and go into a cycle of being dead, then at 1hp, then dead again. Riiight up until a curious adventurer, or small animal, or whatever, finds its way into your impregnable cell (adventurers are GREAT at breaking into impregnable cells) at which point, jaws go SNAP, T heals to full, and the rampaging begins. I can't help but think that your "kill T by starvation" solution looks a hell of a lot like T's natural lifecycle.
If I get to count each major variation as a seperate curse (the difference between "Thor Smash It!," "Thor Smash It With a Hammer!" and "Thor Smash it In The Crotch," to give some analogy curses as examples of what I am talking about) would bring me to dozens at least. And don't forget my two favorites: "Thor H. Odinson!" and "Thor Odinson on a Furtherprofanity Pogo Stick!"
And if you want to apply some extra nerdliness to it, for putting anything not flat into it, you're looking at an oval or circle with a circumference of 2 ft. For something of uniform shape, that's a circle with a diameter of roughly 1.25 feet.
Does that mean that you will put into the blog as soon as you announce it so we can know whats going on out here in the seattle area? and more over why is paizo con held so far away from your headquarters? Guh? You do know we recently put in a couple bridges to let you get from Seattle to Bellevue without having to charter a boat, right? And the HQ is in Redmond, which is just about exactly as far away from "out [there] in the seattle area"... /confused
Hmmm, this isn't the only spell in the game that allows you to make a creature lose turns with no saving throw...but then again Maze is a much higher level spell.That, and maze doesn't leave the target to be ripped to pieces while it's losing those actions. A level higher than Terrible Remorse, we have Suffocation. Success = Lose a Turn. Fail = 3 more saves. Miss any of them, lose all your hit points. Unless you've got my DM, in which case failing that initial save kicks you to the lose all hit points part. Ick.
The underwater cave/helmet is kiteable. I just recall the helmet handing out a lot of damage for level 2-3. But the OTHER underwater cave scared a number of fluids out of my players. The party almost TPKed when they agroed the top floor of Rannick and X&L all together. Ah, that'd do it. As written, it's much less scary. Only one sister, and she's on a different floor from the nasties up top. They tried to be SWATish. They really did. They even got over the wall unnoticed, which was impressive. Wow, that IS impressive. My folks did up from below instead of over the top. Even widening the space so that the inhabitants actually FIT, it just wasn't all that dangerous. The song is relatively short range compared to the length of wall, so I'd call that pure bad luck on your PCs part.
BO--3 (5 character deaths, nearly a TPK but due to greed fighting a bonus monster) Yeah. Bonus monster is icky, until the PCs realize it can't chase them. Other trouble spots are the underwater cave, and the helmet. tSM--4 (2 character deaths, almost a TPK, but characters jumped off a 200 foot building to escape that encounter) YES! As written, the final encounter area is begging for a TPK. My players flew to the top, then fled DOWN the stairs. Poor, poor choice. Best fix to this area is to swap her with her sister. Officially the same CR, but not in actual play. HMM--4 (3 character deaths, almost a TPK twice) I'm trying to remember where my people had trouble. All I'm coming up with are the picachus behind the fort. I wouldn't rank this one over a 3. FotSG--not done yet, but is looking to be at least a 3 This was the last one my group finished before it fell apart. I'd call it a 2 or 3, but my guys were a crazy ninja SWAT-team by this point, so YMMV. If they haven't learned to stop kicking in the doors by now, they're never going to stop getting murdered.
Curse of the Crimson Throne:
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