I think 9th level is good; it’s far enough along in the AP that a lot of groups probably fall apart before getting there. And Champion’s Belt is among the best-received chapters in an already well-regarded campaign.
On Traits; they could certainly be dropped, especially at this level. One of their most useful purposes is to add additional class skills — a super-helpful trick at level 1, but at level 9 gives plenty of room for multiclassing to do the same thing.
Both sound terrific and old school FR is actually the one I’ve any familiarity with at all. I’d lean more toward waterdeep, as I’ve been thinking about urban characters lately.
Related to that point: How long ago, in campaign, would Rise of the Runelords have been? (Thinking of how that could impact the Sihedron Heroes tie-ins, as well as the Scion of Legend trait, though Intrigued by Thassilon probably makes more sense for me.)
OK, going with this, based on the family that's spent the past century trying to carve an image of Crazy Horse out of a South Dakota mountain. PC would be the child of the original sculptor, who died under mysterious circumstances — I'd imagine a Golarion version of the monument would generate some controversy similar to the real-life one — and is trying to decide if they can continue the work (or, more accurately, if they can truly walk away from it.)
Either Oracle/Mysterious Stranger or straight Oracle (Stone Oracles may have enough ranged options w/o guns, have to think more.
Currently split … Got the mechanics idea for Grizzled Prospector (hermit oracle with stone or metal mystery), but leaning toward the Saloon Madam (build unknown) b/c I may have more of a backstory for her, plus I don't want to spend the entire adventure mumbling and spitting.
Well, I just said an hour ago I’d be interested in this sort of thing — and yes, I am. And I even bought a 1990s FR sourcebook for some reason (I wasn’t even playing then; I see it’s worth $50 now, interesting). So, perfect!
I've thought about, in the future, pitching games where it'd be asynchronous posting for all rules-lite material like skill checks and all fluff interaction, but schedule 3-4 hours sessions on discord to do combat which would force everyone to sign on, look at and move their tokens on a VTT, and just move through the thing so it's done and doesn't take a month or more to finish.
It’s a good idea; using discord or something similar on an occasional or as-needed basis might also help players used to PBB get comfortable with that sort of real-time play. I’ve been hesitant to join regular Discord games partly because I’m not confident I can be available every Saturday at 7pm for the next year. But scheduling some time in the next few days to handle a big fight scene? That I can do.
Another plus of asynchronous campaigns: I’m way more comfortable doing RP stuff writing than in person, so this would be the best of both worlds.
Interested; I’d fixated on minor characters from Casablanca for the recent Hell’s Rebels recruitment so let’s make Guillermo Ugarte for this. A little wretch who nobody really trusts; he’s thrown in with Thune bc he’s certain they’ll win. Need crunch of course
You know, Rick, I have many a friend in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust.
And look where that got him …
(Hm, actually that could be a backstory. The real Ugarte committed suicide/died trying to escape, but maybe he cut a deal to stay alive In return for helping crush the rebellion
Interested; I’d fixated on minor characters from Casablanca for the recent Hell’s Rebels recruitment so let’s make Guillermo Ugarte for this. A little wretch who nobody really trusts; he’s thrown in with Thune bc he’s certain they’ll win. Need crunch of course
Will the PCs be assumed to have gone through earlier parts of the Adventure Path? Or does this chapter stand on its own? (Not too familiar with the storyline). Considering a former Sacrament Alchemist who settled on Ustalav for a quiet retirement. (She was, as the saying goes, misinformed.) (WIP sheet for Fatima Eisen,) still have to level her up a bit and continue her history
Considering a Bloodrager suffragette (we're a year early for the start of the Kensington Society, but presumably there was already talk of this sort of thing.) Obviously some of the bloodlines won't work, but there should be a few that fit the setting.
Are the Welcomers still active in Phlan at this point? Thinking of a low-level enforcer (monk, likely, or someone else fond of punching) who's on the outs after roughing up a relative of one of the guild's higher-ups. ("He didn't look like a local!" was the excuse.) Needs to find a new crew to hang with, and fast.
* HTBM: Urol's abduction, and the inner sanctum of the shrine
* ToD: the Battle of Farshore
* TLD: all of Golismorga
* CoBI: hm, maybe the entry to the complex and the lowest level
* SoS: the Crimson Fleet's base
* ItM: this one is harder to dissect; maybe a battle with Vanthus over the cauldron, and one other boss of your choice
HTBM: I'd skip HTBM altogether, grabbing the shrine parts and sticking them into a part of ToD.
CoBI: Agreed, go straight from Golismorga up the shaft to the complex. Cut off the usual exit with faster flooding. Allow them to rest on the way or something.
SoS: Is this even necessary? Have one of the Pirate ships in ToD have the Wakeportal and Vanthus take Lavinia straight to abyss.
ItM: Skip it all — Vanthus, realizing that Demogorgon has forsaken him, heads straight for the Wells of Darkness to ask Shami-Amourae for aid in – well, you know – with his sister. Seems appropriate given her sphere of influence. Big three-way fight between Vanthus, PCs and Dino-Riders from Big D, who probably thinks Vanthus has allied with PCs.
EoME: Skip the Gwynharrf bit; she just joins on without making them jump through hoops. Iggwilv and Orcus are fun, though. Maybe skip DG's clone, too.
however, the big problem i see is the cleric picking a fight w/ orcus himself...getting himself and possibly the rest of the party dead-ed quite readily.
Hey, they put his stats in there for a reason. :) I think they expected that SOMEBODY would want to take a poke at him.
I'd actually encourage a fight -- I'm a fan of Orcus from 1E and personally didn't care for the fact that Demogorgon beats him in Dungeon 150. But if Orcus was weakened by his earlier fight with the players -- which, fortunately for all concerned, was interrupted by Iggwilv or one of Orcus' lieutenants who stop the fight before the cleric gets plastered -- well, that gives it some more narrative weight.
I don't like the Asgardian idea. You've already got CG Powers covered with Gwynharrf.
The Olman deities -- that is a nice idea. Really helps tie the AP's middle act in with the finale.
But even so, don't you think the rest of the group would get a kick out of Orcus? It's Orcus! The prospect of getting involved in an Orcus-Demogorgon throwdown seems simply too cool to pass up.
I get the Cleric's problem -- it's the same one lots of good-with-a-big-G PCs have with STAP in the later adventures. But the making-choices-about-evil is a big part of the game here.
What about just role-playing it out? Maybe the cleric could just sit out the adventure ("Beg to the Demon if you want. But you'll do it without me.") You'd have to come up with something for the player to do, of course, or time it so he's gone that session.
But regardless, I'd probably do the Olman thing. That's pretty nifty.
I'm considering simply get his character killed again and again until it makes sense to him, and stops pre-reading.
A seriously bad move, and the coward's way out.
1. It makes you look like the bad guy to the other players.
2. It might not work -- what if he keeps coming back?
3. Watonly killing PCs is bad DMing and bad for the story.
4. You're going to be faced with this sort of situation again in life. Learn to deal with it when it's just a game.
I agree with the previous comment about not making it a discussion. Don't ask, "are you cheating?" Tell him that cheating won't be allowed and if you see evidence of it the game will stop or the player will be gone.
If you don't want to talk with him privately, say it at the table to everybody, if you like, so you're not calling out him in person. "I hope everybody's enjoying this game, but I just want to let everyone know that there are going to be some twists coming up. I don't know if you've read any of the adventures -- I hope not, but I understand these things happen -- so I'm going to ask you not to use that knowledge, because it'll hurt the game. It'll hurt you, too, because I've changed a lot of stuff from the original."
If that doesn't work and I continue to see signs of cheating, that's it -- either that player is out or we can find a new campaign."
I also like the idea of relatively big changes that don't change much in mechanics. Making Vanthus the good guy and Lavinia the corrupt one (who conned the PCs in the opening scene, obviously) really doesn't change much. Just reverse them from here out.
ADDENDUM: Devil's Advocate here -- he tried to torch the Sea Wyvern? But if he'd read ahead, wouldn't he know that's a major plot vehicle?
We still don't have any details, beyond some vague hints about Intelligence and Wisdom. Soccer Zone, exactly what is this guy doing? If you can't explain it (or are unwilling to) perhaps you have similar difficulties communicating your problem to this player.
It's a move-action to activate the rod, a standard action to activate the mirror -- assuming you have them both ready when Demogorgon surprises the party by jumping through the gate.
Demogorgon will spend that round actually doing stuff, while probably figuring out (he's an expert item-crafter) why this guy is trying to hang a mirror during a fight.
Given the relative sizes of Demogorgon and the mirror, I'm not sure he'd even be able to see himself in the relatively tight quarters in which he appears.
An artificer, by this level, should have much better ways of fighting than this.
Wow, I just watched the trailer for this. Remember that bad Lord of the Rings movie, where they mixed in live action with the animated, yeah that is what this looks like. Pick a freaken style and stick with it.
No, the old LotR movie was actually pretty innovative in terms of animation -- not SUCCESSFUL, but still innovative.
This, though, looks terrible across the board. I'm amazed at the inability of WotC to pull off a decent movie licensing deal.
Most of the established campaigns (not all) go on the assumption that long-ago empires were grander, ancient magic was more powerful, villains were more wicked, heroes bolder, etc. And everything in the present day is a shadow of what it once was.
Not surprising, considering the genre's based on fantasizing about kings and castles and other anachronisms. If we're romanticizing that period, it should follow that an even-earlier period should be that much better.
I just ran this encounter and had the same problems. It doesn't seem to be intended as a grapple -- it's an auto-attach with no way of getting loose have Haste.
Which isn't a very good deal for the Slow Shadow, by the way, which specifically stays tethered to the PC and can't attack anybody else. So basically everybody else whales on the poor thing until it dies and lets go.
My crew stomped all over these -- Warmage cast Mass Fire Shield and suddenly the Slow Shadows were hurting themselves more than the PCs with their own attacks.
Gaaaaaaaahhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhh! How do you come up with a background and roleplaying reasons to have all of those classes?? It's like a strobe light of classes.
It's pretty easy, actually.
Bard/Paladin or Bard/Crusader works perfectly well conceptually if you treat the Bard as an noble orator instead of some fop with a sock puppet and slide whistle.
The other classes are all either fighting-style classes or classes that a Paladin or Bard would gravitate toward naturally. It's not at all unusual for a Paladin to gravitate toward a Sacred Exorcist, if the campaign features lots of undead or outsiders, for example.
Moreover, there's nothing in the rules preventing people from taking lots of classes. If you don't like multiclassing, that's your problem.
Laugh OUT Loud!!!! No, no it is not...Heck it is impossible to make a good bard period.
Old thinking. WAY old. Bards get better and better the more splatbooks you have, because Charisma is so easy to add to everything. Saves, Damage, Attack, Initiative, AC, the works.
Song of the White Raven, Song of the Heart, Snowflake Wardance, Devoted Performer-to-Divine Might, all are great options.
Bard8/Paladin2/SublimeChord2/SacredExcorcist4/EldritchKnight4 — 9th level spells, BAB 16, Cha to Saves, Attack, Damage — problem with that?
Crusader3/Bard7/WarChanter10 — BAB 18, Ridiculous Attack Bonuses. The only problem is you'll want to keep taking Crusader levels.
Bard8/Paladin2/HumanParagon3/IajutsuMaster5/ArcaneDuelist2 — Cha to Saves, AC and Intiative and (chuckle) Iajutsu Focus.
Oh yeah, Harry potter was GREAT, they sure always kept to the books! (sarcastic)
The biggest failing of the first two films was that they were afraid to break from Rowling's narrative. That's the problem with dealing with a beloved book, and one of the reasons Spielberg wouldn't touch the project.
kobold cleaver wrote:
Hang on. are you talking about this guy? I certainly hope not! 'Silly ranting'?
When Cruise was given the part of Lestat, it seemed like every Rice fan pretty much hit the ceiling. He was too short, too boyish, his hair was the wrong color, etc. People -- Rice included -- couldn't imagine him in the role.
Fortunately, in this case, the studio didn't listen to the author's concerns, and the result turned out pretty well. Rice herself reversed her opinion of Cruise after seeing it.
As for Titan A.E. -- "Heavy Fare?" Seriously?
I was a grownup when I saw it, and I'm standing by my boy-did-it-suck judgment. There were two very nice bits of cutting-edge animation, but the story was juvenile, the voice acting bad and most of the animation really flat. I WANTED to see heavy fare; instead I got dreck. It's like the studio couldn't bring themselves to make a film that wouldn't look good on a Burger King glass. This was not a marketing problem, it was a vision problem.
I normally don't like to hear of people's misfortune, but when Fox closed the studio after the debacle, I really couldn't bring myself to feel badly about it.
Haven't read the books yet, but someone else mentioned this same thing MANY, MANY, MANY times. Just curious why the character's hair color was such an important part of the book. Seems like a pretty silly nit-pick to me.
Seriously. Movies can and even should put their own stamp on a work, not be slaves to the original source. To do otherwise is to veer into triteness like Chris Columbus' Harry Potter films, which may as well be an audiobook for all the artistic freedom they enjoy.
(See also: all the silly ranting over the casting of Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire. He wound up doing so well even Ann Rice 'fessed up to it.)
Secret of Nimh, btw, was by Don Bluth, a Disney animator who left the fold. He worked on a couple of pictures between the studio's great periods — the Rescuers, Robin Hood, etc. Also did the animation for that Dragon's Lair arcade game, for those who remember it, I think.
The Secret of Nimh was one of his better post-disney efforts, sadly. He was also director for Titan A.E., a film so bad that it sank Fox's entire animation studio.
Yep. Two more examples: Wizard of Oz (wow they really mangled that movie!) and Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH (that was the worst. The Wizard of Oz movie was still kinda good, but this movie... known as The Secret of NIMH. Plegh!)
Neither of those were Disney, but if you are really looking for books where the movie was nothing like them check out Shrek and Blade Runner. Both of those have almost nothing to do with the books.
Yeah, but all those movies were still decent even if they didn't hold to the books -- Blade Runner's style practically defined sci-fi for a good 20 years. Rewatched Wizard of Oz last week and, despite the lame ending, it holds up absolutely great as a fantasy movie a half-century later.
Shrek was almost funny enough to forgive the godawful dreck of the sequels (but not quite). Secrets of Nimh was an early-studio effort. It's not very good but they still had the training wheels on.
The Black Cauldron, though -- THAT sucked. Even Disney thinks so, though they explain it by noting that they were in a generational shift at the time. For a studio that prides itself on strong villains to botch the Horned King so terribly -- it's just mystifying.
The wards around the sub-levels were never detailed -- suffice to say that they were truly impassable.
What Eli, and later Mordenkainen et al, discovered was another facility altogether, this one guarded by doors with an impressive-sounding name that are in fact ludicrously easy to bypass — they did it with artifacts, but dimension door would've worked, too.
Once there, THAT'S then he started slant-drilling to the original complex.
A couple of these have been dealt with in the various Maure threads already.
1. Dust. Keep in mind, there are a fair number of footprints in the dust -- the bodaks, occasional patrols, Arley, etc. There's probably a number of different trails; use some of these to get players into rooms they might otherwise not go in. Or maybe one set wanders around the Iron Golem statue ...
Personally I don't think a trail of footprints leading to the secret door is that awful. Makes it less likely that PCs will just give up after they've cleared the level.
2. Spear Trap: I noticed this, too. It's dumb. I'd kill the trap altogether or make them retractable spears.
3. Stone Shape. Yeah, it rocks. But that's OK. The PCs are supposed to win. And they don't know what's on the OTHER side of the wall (at least with a trapped door, you can close it quickly).
4. Lots of people have suggested that Arley, operating while invisible and flying, trigger the golem himself. I got Arley to bluff the party into letting him trigger it, to show off the wonderful illusion magic of the Maures. Worked pretty well.
Ah, looks like they've put it behind a spoiler warning. It now just says "Savage Tide adventure path (Warning: spoilers below)", with the Vanthus text appearing only after that's clicked.
I'm satisfied now.
Yeah, I'd e-mailed the author and he seemed very decent about it -- basically said he figured it'd be OK since the magazines were all out, but he saw the point and said he'd get the spoiler text added.
Considering that he's about to get a Demonomicon article in October, I think he's safe. :)
Yeah, but he might look all blobby and laden with tentacles :).
Then there's the Balor -- WotC's new stance takes the approach that devils are humanoids with horns and wings that fight with weapons. And if they thought the Erinyes was too similar in role to the Succubus, what will they say about Balor vs. Pit Fiend?
Anyway, I'm not all that concerned about it. As for Savage Tide, there are a couple hundred reasons not to try and convert it to 4E — i.e., every single stat block and monster in the AP, a lack of stuff like Pact Magic and the fact that you've got to wait for a year to see what the rules are. Whether Malcanthet is LE or CE seems to be one of the lesser problems, all things considered.
Seeing how 4th edition might shake up the AP, check out Rich Baker's latest blog: http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=906386#post13606231
It's a good idea, I think. Succubi work better as Devils.
It raises some minor issues in the AP, but not too much. So what if Demogorgon's bedding some LE types, or vice versa? Maybe they're trying to bind him to a diabolic contract — think of the commission! — and he just thinks they're hot.
The one issue: Red Shroud. But it's easy enough to make her a very strong mortal or half-fiend (alu-demon?) that's carved out a spot on the Abyss.
Now, I am a bit concerned about what will happen to the more-or-less humanoid grazz't.
DM-ex machina alert: Have the floatsam ooze be attacked by another monster; it lets go of its food to fight. PCs have to swim for it before the victor comes back for them. It at least gives them a shot, because as things stand they're all dead already.
Tsadok Albercroft
Bastingargie
Boradil Ragnorason
Dolgrimm
Mezrial Ettelea
Miro Shatterstone
Hilfa Tropplechumps
Asakari
Incredible Lightness Of Being
Kynigos Dolofonos
Hoba Byrani
Vesdra
Padric Erikson
Mithiria
Jethro Sootscale
Galimarr