Ill take a copy when you get time please and thank you
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Nice fight, but dragons are immune to sleep.
I just nerf silence so that is allows a will save regardless of how it is used. Otherwise it's stupid that a level 2 spell is so strong.
Advance the blue dragon to ancient age, then add another ancient red dragon in the final fight. Throw in an iron golem as well except it's made of gold and has the giant and advanced templates. If you still don't think that's enough throw ceoptra in the final battle as well instead of outside it.
Just houserule that the immunity doesn't apply to haunts and boom there you go. houserule, houserule houserule! James Jacobs won't come to your home and slap you if you decide to houserule.
I would like to see an AP that takes entirely place inside one super dungeon. It will never, ever, ever, ever happen but there you have it. Give me undermountain in golarion and make it an AP.
My group fought that same battle, Barl, Lucrecia, Kevan, Stone giant. Kevan sucks and will be completely steamrolled by any party so forget him anyways. I had lucrecia stay back and use her magic most of the time and then had her dimension door away when she was lower on hitpoints leaving Barl to go back to mokmurians base. It will be too much fun for me to inculde her in the twin lamia fight in book 4 mwhahaaha. So yeah just have her flee at half life or something.
Enforce the law or it means nothing. A drunken fistfight is one thing, assault with a deadly weapon is attempted murder. The character should be shackled, brought to magnimar for trial and sentenced to prison. Have the dude make a new character. The rules mean nothing if they are not enforced.
Off topic but I just want to say that I am a player in Shattered Star. Currently in book 4 and it is really awesome (and challenging!) I died like 3 times this ap so far and a couple other party members died. It also has a great old school feel to it and a nice focus on dungeons, exploration and the pathfinder society which I enjoy.
I probably get one kill per adventure in a path or so. We roll out in the open because it is far more fun for us. I have ran the first three Legacy of Fire adventures and the first three Rise Of The Runelords Adventures so far. I don't remember LoF as we left it after book 3 to move to Runelords but for Runelords deaths I have: Book1: Cleric put to sleep by Erilyum then CDG while seperated from the party. Later on the Mage was with 10 str was murdered by shadows below the goblin fort, came back as a shadow and almost killed the ranger but not quite. A couple near deaths (-10hp or so) against the barghast (they retreated and went back to deal with him after book 2 lol---smart) Book2: They unleashed the revenant, followed it to the end guys door and for whatever reason they decided to attack it at the last minute and try to destroy it before it could have it's revenge. Well lol that thing beat them freakin senseless. It ripped the mage apart and sent his body into the drink below (they fought it in the underground circular chamber with the pool in the middle) and it beat another two members unconcious before they just barely managed to take it down. That revenant was a beast! Far more scary then the end guy in the manor. Book3: Lucrecia killed the magus in combat (she is just as badass as her sister honestly) but at this point they have breath of life so it's all good. Saves them a lot of money on temple trips :P I know I am going to get some kills with Mokmurian in book 4, and I expect the Lamia sisters plus the surviving Lucrecia encounter will kill someone too.
An idea I had that I thought might be a bit interesting is for Paizo to outsource their material to fans who sign up for it to play-test the new campaigns as they were being developed. You would have to sign a NDA of course, but i'm sure there are lots of fans out there who would do the play-testing work for them for free. Regardless I think they could do a great epic scope campaign without the need of special rules. The mythic rules are just bad, badly written, unplaytested, messy. A level 15+ party is ridiculously powerful and challenging to make engaging encounters for as it is without all the fluff rules ruining things. Nothing turns me away from a campaign faster than easy, boring encounters both as a DM and a player and most people I know who play feel the same way.
I have also always allowed divine casters to use shields without penalty, just not a big deal to me.
CN Tengu? Problem player alert! :P I enjoyed your other journal (and i'm STILL waiting for the ending btw) very much so I look forward to following this one. You are a good writer and make the journals fun to read.
Let them learn the hard way. It is not your fault they made bad choices. Run things accordingly and if some pc deaths occur they will have to make new characters, it is not a big deal.
Rise Of The Runelords is still their best AP so look into that one. Check out Frog God Games Slumbering Tsar if you want an open sand boxed campaign, it is an amazing game as well.
Awesome read PH, that sounds like a crazy battle. Your players seem to like to make things harder for themselves ooooh man! Im running this as well right now, just starting the 4th book. My players HATE Lucrecia lol. She survived book 3 (3 different encounters) and will be alongside her sisters under jorgenfist--- should be interesting.
Hey guys great thread! I enjoy reading it every week. I am gearing up to run this bad boy myself (and contribute to this great thread!) and I have some questions for you guys: Encounter Distance- seeing as random encounters are a big part of this I want to nail the encounter distance down for each region and i'm curious what you guys used. All the outside terrains (ashen wastes, chaos rift, boiling lands and the dead fields) seem like desert to me so 6D6x10 feet or so to account for blowing windstorms and such is what I was thinking. IS this about right do you think? What do you think about encounter distance inside the city? Encounter Frequency- The book says check every 3 hours but that sounds like a lot of grind to me so I was thinking of making it every 6 hours (4 checks per adventuring day) do you think this might make it too easy? Any other advice or comments, just things to watch for or consider would be very welcome :) My group is paladin, rogue, sorcerer, cleric and 1 unknown at this time. I suspect they will die horribly to Malerix lol. Such a scary looking encounter.
Cool I never heard of that rule before, might have to use it myself :)
Why does the overlapping auras increase the save dc? I don't quite follow. But yeah sounds like a rough encounter, chance are if you have to make 4 saving throws you are gonna fail one.
Maybe running this badboy without the mythic element at all would be a better way to approach it. I know from experience high level d20 comes off the rails, I can only imagining adding all this mythic stuff on top of it. 15+ level characters are still "mythic" in my book. This campaign sounds like a lot of fun but I am leary of buying in because of the mythic stuff.
Whoa, sounds like a scary fight! Good job heroes!
Awesome story dude, thanks for sharing. Stuff like that is amazing to read about.
Just as a fan of stories in general I think there is a good one here about the blurred lines of morality. Good and evil switching sides, it is quite interesting to say the least.
Hahahaha that sounds awesome. Man what a battle. That will be a story for years to come. Smile, enjoy your somewhat humorous death and make a new character. Mythic level play should be deadly, so don't feel too bummed about it.
That is an awesome sounding dragon battle gorthog!
here another dumb question. Is a male witch still called or witch or is he called a warlock? Is witch a standard female vernacular for the class or can it apply to males as well?
oh god now i see their spell list at the bottom of the witch section lol. Thanks everyone i feel like a dummy.
i dont understand where in the crb it says witch spells though
Can witch's only choose spells from the witch's spell list in the advanced players guide, or can they choose spells from the core rulebook too? Sorry if this is a dumb question.
Nice write up gluttony! It will be interesting to see what happens in your game. During my encounter she drained the magus's wisdom down to 2, leveled the dwarf fighter to unconscious, and killed the ranger before being beat down enough hit points she d-doored upstairs and warned the leader. They had to retreat for healing and search parties were sent out after them, they were hiding in the raining, wet, woods scared of the patrols lol. They had to fight her a second time with the leader ogre (forget his name now) and that was a really hard fight and she managed to escape that one as well. They will see her again during the mokmurian encounter in book 4. mwhhaha. My players hate her so much :P
It is pretty disheartening to see the creative director basically stick his fingers in his ears and say "lalala it's the gms fault not ours" every high level adventure 12+ needs massive tinkering to not completely fall apart from my experience. this is from someone who has been running D20 system since it came out, you have to try hard to NOT break the system. It could SOMETIMES be a case of inexperienced or bad DM's but not acknowledging the glut of terrible problems high level play has and addressing them in the adventure design (make the battles harder) seems to give off a "I don't give a crap people will buy this stuff regardless" kind of attitude. "There are no problems everything is going according to plan" *SIGH* I love the adventure paths (greatest rpg idea ever) but there is big room for improvement in the back halves of these paths, not even seeing a problem is really disheartening.
Seriously you say "Sorry guys no game this week, the others cancelled and gave me no notice blame them, see you next week sorry." The alternative was tanking your entire AP by running short table so it still seems like common sense to me.
Should never have ran this in the first place, with half your party missing of course it was going to be near impossible to win. Sorry to be blunt but this seems like common sense to me.
I just want to say have a cool premise! Write an adventure where pcs must find a way to a floating cloud giant citadel high in the air, a fortress on the clouds with tons of aerial battles and neat stuff. Or an adventure where the players must explore a temple and then a portal in the temple takes them to the shadow plane version of the temple like a light dark world thematic with multi dimensional puzzles. or and underwater adventure, or an outer planar adventure, or a winter/desert/swamp adventure where the terrain is as much a hazard as the monsters. Or an adventure where they are shrunk down to to tiny size in order to explore a cursed city that has been shrunk and placed in a stasis spell. How about an adventure where they are trapped in a nightmare plane and hunted by a night hag who devours people in their nightmares. Or the next town they come to is actually a town where everyone has been cursed with lycanthropy and tonight is the full moon. lol I got carried away with this. Anyways imagination and excitement will breed those things in your players.
Something I seen mentioned elsewhere on the board was "buff slots" so that characters could only hold so many magical spells on themselves at once. 1 at first and then one additional slot every five levels, so at level 15 for instance they can only have 4 enchantments on them at a time (not including magical items) Sounds like you have been doing a great job though, running encounters together is a lot of fun. It is one of the things I like to do the most as well to make things more challenging. One thing I plan on doing when I run this is making it so that the stat bonus's you get at the even mythic tiers can't be spent on the same stat twice, I think that will help to alleviate things a bit as well.
As for Lokansir I think two advanced templates and a fiendish template would beef him up considerably. Puts his AC to 32, gives him DR10/good which will help mitigate some damage and gives him a +4 to hit and damage. You could also increase his spell resistance some if you felt the need or give him some better fast healing as well that works all the time whether he is in the earth or not like fast healing 10 say.
Pathfinder level 10+ starts to get hard to DM. If you want to challenge players you have to do a bit of finagling behind the scenes. I am currently starting book 4 in ROTRL myself and my party is Magus (swift action give my sword flame, shock, frost, oops I crit 74 damage, 3 more attacks another 5000 damage trolol oops) 2 rangers with giants as favored enemy (splat) and a mage and cleric who are both just merely ok in comparison. I give things the advanced template and near max health without increasing the xp reward. I sometimes add 1 or 2 mooks to a battle. I would only worry about making it too challenging for common enemies as long as your people are having fun. For named stuff maybe double stack advanced template or add lots of mooks. It is fun to chain encounters together too. That kobold Barbarian might realize quite quickly she is in over her head and run for help. If you get two or three encounters chained together (always try and have one guy run away) then it can get very hairy. Some enemys like Mokmurian will get the drop on PCS which is what will make it challenging. As soon as they open the doors to his chamber he gets a ready action spell off then you go to initiative and he gets to go first with another spell. The next adventure is what I am looking forward to running. Crazy wizard battles everywhere and ran to their intellect should be a hard time for any group.
Splitting up the group in DnD works about as well as it does in horror movies I see :P
This is one encounter in the adventure that I see as maybe the hardest in the entire dungeon. The DC to avoid her dominate is insane, hopefully your party pulls through!
Very nice thread sir, look forward to reading more!
This is what I plan to do in my game and is not written or anything so take it with a grain of salt. I plan on spreading part of Karzougs legend that (somehow) he gained immunity to all weapons forged on Golarion and only Runeforge weapons can even harm him. Plant the seeds of this early on and they will be scrambling to find out where they can get these weapons. It will make book 5 seem like a completely necessary adventure rather than the sidetrek it feels like.
Not in my game anyways :) Her AC is and defenses prevent her from going down fast. People needed 13 or 14 on their rolls to hit (with a heroism buff on to boot), and she has good spell resistance. Coupled with being able to level one character a round.... The 15x10 room thing doesn't matter much having 10 foot reach and backing into a corner to prevent characters flanking her. And then to dimension door to safety when things finally got hairy she only needs an 8 on her concentration roll to cast it without provoking .....beastly. Silence is a good tactic though it at least prevents her from an easy escape if nothing else, too bad my players don't use it :P
Name Of Character Valen Saerevil
Story Spoiler: The party after having a drawn out battle with the shocker lizards, entered into the basement proper of Fort Rannick, as they started searching the room the adjacent door opened up and the red haired lady gave a mocking speech and battle was on.
After successfully hasting herself, she spent some rounds taunting the party (who was having troubles hitting her) and draining some wisdom with touch's, and trying (but failing) to suggest that they run screaming upstairs making as much noise as possible. The magus then managed to get a nice hit for 40 something odd damage in one swing on her and draw her attention. Well 7 dagger attacks a round that she gets doing 1d4+16 a hit and the Magus was dead on the ground. The cleric managed to successfully use a scroll of breath of life the party had and bring him back a couple rounds later. The party eventually beat her down low enough to force a retreat (after she leveled the dwarf ranger in the group for 80 something damage in one round down to zero hp) she dimension doored out taunting the party that she would be back in a minute with some ogre friends for them to play with. The magus after getting his wisdom drained down to 3 decided to beat a retreat and the party will have to try another strike on the fort tommorow. Dms Note: This red haired lady is a literal meat grinder, I don't know how there are not even more deaths in here from her than there are.
Just got into the first couple episodes last night. Great stuff guys as a DM who is going to be running this in the near future it is fun to see how it plays out :)
I will put in another vote for Bayt Al Bazan in Legacy Of Fire, although The Crow in Shattered Star was damn huge too.
Ah ok thanks everyone that helps a lot. This would seem to make reach weapons for PCS quite handy then as well.
Hello quick question for the board Say if a monster like an ogre has 10' reach when you move up to engage him in combat does he get an attack of opportunity before you even reach him? Basically I am looking for some explanation on how AoO and reach work together. Thank you!
lol. That barghest will probably tame the cavalier and keep him as a pet more likely. If it doesn't just rip his arms off and beat him to death with them. Good luck with that encounter! :P
No Cleric or Oracle? Body count will be high.
I like Tangents idea but another school of thought is just let the wipe happen as it is and do up new characters who are hired to find the old party by the mayor of Turtleback Ferry. Sounds like they deserve this so I would let it stick and just go with new characters.
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