Man with Cigar

kwixson's page

Organized Play Member. 96 posts (97 including aliases). 1 review. No lists. No wishlists. 6 Organized Play characters. 1 alias.



Shadow Lodge 1/5

Arrr! Found this here message in a bottle floating on the Inner Sea. Thought I'd be tackin' it to the mainmast for thems tha'r interested. Arrr!

Quote:

NOTICE!

The first ever meeting of the real Life Shadow Lodge (RLSL) will convene on Wednesday, August 15, in the evening at Union Station in Indianapolis, Indiana. While the Venture Captains and Decemvirate feast and congratulate themselves in honor of their own greatness, as an act of defiance we shall meet and play PFS without their express consent! We will plot their downfall and the liberation of the common fan!! Fellow Pathfinder Society rebels should arrive no later than 6:30 pm and should be prepared to GM a season 3 scenario. We have surreptitiously lured some sixty of the Pathfinder Society's greenest members for recruitment to our cause. Report to room Edison North of Union Station at the appointed time to begin the indoctrination. The wearing of masks is encouraged, for your personal safety and the good of our most noble cause.

For more information, visit http://gencon.wixsonit.com

¡Viva la Revolución!

Shadow Lodge 1/5

I was getting grief in the other discussion of pre-convention gaming, so let me open up this fresh thread and welcome anyone who wants to plan or coordinate any pre-convention gaming for Wednesday this year at Gen Con.

I'm organizing an all day, Wednesday PFS event at Gen Con this year. Gen Con has set me up with a room with 10 tables for the day and the events are on the Gen Con schedule.

Now all I need are GM's. :-)

GEN CON SCHEDULE LINKS

RPG1230862
RPG1232067
RPG1232068

There are three slots, like normal. I'll be glad to have GM's for any of it. AND you'll get something for it, for a change, because I'm making up some really sweet gaming accessories for GM's and players. Since it's on the Gen Con schedule it is drawing in some of the people who don't frequent these message boards and gives us a (hopefully) quieter space to play than Scotty's. I'm also going to try to find someone to use UStream to live stream the afternoon community meeting to the room where we'll be playing, so people won't miss anything if they stick with me all day.

From what I understand, the Scotty's event is wrapping up by 5:00 pm, so even if you're going to the earlier games there this is the place to be if you're looking for a game starting later.

What I really need, though, are people who are willing to GM. As of right now I have a little better than 20 people signed up for the evening slot. I could use at least one more GM to cover that, but I'm sure there will be more signups between now and then so any help at any time is more than welcome. Please don't make me beg. :-)

From what I'm told, Gen Con has not had anyone ask them to do this kind of thing before, and I've had to do quite a bit of coaxing over the past year to make it happen. If this goes well I think it will be easier to do next year, so please help me make it work.

Check it out: http://gencon.wixsonit.com

Let me know: gencon2012@wixsonit.com

Cheers,
-Kevin

Shadow Lodge

I just can't get how to do monster size adjustment in PFRPG. It came up tonight while running a 3.5 module, where the gargantuan centipede is statted out in the MM but not in the Beastiary. I used the quick rules, fine except it couldn't hit worth a darn on 7th level PCs and wasn't the least bit scarry, so I'd like to know what it should be by the book.

I never have understood how to do size adjustments and I would appreciate your help. A lot of people would benefit, I think, if someone could do a walkthrough of using the rules in the Beastiary to go up and down the size scale with the centipede. Please demonstrate how to use the size adjustment rules to create stat blocks for each of the centipede variants on the centipede entry. Thank you.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/monsters/centipede.html#centipede-giant

House centipede
Sewer centipede
Hissing centipede
Giant whiptail centipede
Great forest centipede
Titan centipede

Shadow Lodge 1/5

This module is great, but impossibly long as a society module if the players seize upon the roleplay aspects at all. There are also a few plot holes that could be neatly plugged with a couple simple, and largely cosmetic fixes.

fixes:

The players could burn a lot of time in Railford just playing through the villager's suspicions, and even more with dealing with Jessup, the ghoul in waiting. To make this faster, make these changes:

On the hillock pairs of townsfolk mirror the Taldan soldiers with watches of their own, taking cover behind short barricades of barrels. The PCs encounter Dalard as they make their way up the hill. Dalard sees how they deal with the Taldan phalanx, and unless they talk their way through, any suspicions he might have are satisfied, making his attitude indifferent.

With Dalard, and Bloodknuckles, and Jessup to contend with there are too many characters. The fix is to make Dalard an old friend of Iodon who settled Railford and built the inn. Thus, he is "Bloodknuckles" of Bloodknuckle's Inn, rather than Synee. Eliminate Synee from the story. Also, Jessup is dead by the time the players arrive, his corpse in the basement of the distillery to ambush the party as a ghoul when they return if not properly disposed of before leaving. Dalard can relate Jessup's story.

The mod doesn't really address how, once the PCs make it in to Railford, that they can easily move out of town to go in search of Becher without provoking an encounter with the phalanx again. To remedy this, dispose of the cottage within Railford, leaving the tunnel into the cellar of the distillery to connect with a small stone building just beyond the phalanx outside of Railford, marking the start of the trail to the caves. This makes sense as something that might actually exist for use by the original builders.

The flow of the story, why Becher doesn't know where the deeds are, but then he does and goes after them, and his falling out with his father and other points of the backstory, it doesn't work for me. What makes more sense is if Dalard is Iodon's friend, and was a witness to Iodon's will in which he bequeathed the property to the Pathfinder Society instead of his son. Dalard knows where the deeds are kept and has the key to the strongbox. Until the Taldan imperialists arrive Dalard kept the location of the deeds secret in anticipation of a Pathfinder's eventual arrival to claim them. Desperate to keep Railford out of Taldan control, Dalard reveals to Becher the location of the strongbox, warns him it is trapped and instructs Becher to return to Railford with it so they can open it together. Dalard intends to keep an eye on the deeds, and after taking them from Grald, take them from Becher for safekeeping. Dalard does not know the deeds will require Becher's signature. If Dalard is made helpful, he gives the key to the Pathfinders before they set out for the caves, otherwise he will relate the full story and open the box with the key only if he and Becher survive the zombie invasion.

The miles long tunnel from the caves back to Railford doesn't make sense. Scrap it and put Becher in the alcove behind the barricade in the back office. Don't start the zombie attack until after they have found Becher there. They defeat the zombies and escape the caves by the same route they entered, and are harried by what they perceive as an overwhelming zombie horde while they race back to Railford with Becher in tow. This mechanism is necessary to get the players to shortcut what is otherwise a temptation to overplay a fun (because Becher is drunk and funny and sad) encounter. When the roleplay with Becher in the caves goes long, that's when the party hears more zombies coming -- a lot of zombies. And Marsh Mist. Make it creepy and foreboding, to build tension here. At this point in the scenario that tension is really needed and lacking in its original form.

To reflect these changes I rewrote a piece of the Getting Started scene. Consider replacing the middle paragraph of the box text with the following:

---
Setting out glasses and pouring a strong-smelling wine from a green bottle labeled "Railford", the venture-captain proposes a toast. "To Iodon Railford, Pathfinder and brewer of this fine cup: may his Wayfinder guide him to his rest." Osprey drinks, and looks silently into his cup a moment before saying, "Our brother has given us a great gift, leaving to the Society his winery and the surrounding lands in his will. Before we can move in, however, we must have the properly certified deeds of ownership, which we believe remain at the distillery in the custody of his son, Becher. Your job is to find him and convince him to hand over the deeds. He might resist. He was shunned by his father, after all. You may try to entice him with our assurance he will be allowed to remain to make his spirits. As long as we are free to establish a lodge on the premises, we will not interfere."
---

Shadow Lodge

Tonight's session with the Taxidermist's Hall worked out so well I think someone might want to include this drama into their campaign, if possible.

My players took their first stab at finding the lair under the Taxidermists' Guild Hall tonight. They were trying to be clever for a change and get the Taxidermist out of the place for a while so they could go in and have a look around the easy way. They thought they'd try to entice him out of the place by sending in a woman to ask him out on a date. The only female character in the group, is a druid ... a druid being asked to walk into a taxidermist's shop and seduce him into following her to a bar. Pure comedic genius on my player's part, whether by design or happenstance.

The part you might want to consider is that, generically, if you have a female player in the group, you might try signaling to your players that he might be interested in her when they go in for the initial encounter. If they catch on, and the party plays along, letting him close up shop and escorting her on a date, guide them to go to the bar. The one just north of Dead Dog alley is convenient. Let the date continue long enough that the other party members get a fair number of rounds to look around the taxidermist's place, but if they dawdle (taking 10's or 20's to search) have someone come into the bar and warn the taxidermist that someone has broken into his place.

The ensuing race back to the establishment and the dramatic timing of players being caught red-handed midst B&E is priceless.

Even better is when you can have the very good fortune of this dramatic framing:

Every couple of rounds of the guys rutting around the shop I'd return to the scene at the bar, where the druid was having what was to be the "Worst Date Ever." Unprepared for the prospect of having to roleplay the date, the player was stymied when the taxidermist started by asking her, innocently enough, "So, where are you from?" She sputtered something about how she didn't like to talk about her past. When the taxidermist seemed suspicious of this answer she committed an overshare and explained that she'd had an unpleasant childhood. So, five seconds into this blind date with a woman off the street she's telling him in so many words, "I don't want to talk about me. I was abused as a child. I'm damaged goods."

It got worse.

He proceeded to talk about himself. Since he couldn't talk about her he started talking about his work and why he became a taxidermist. He told her about his first hunting trip, and the thrill of his first kill, and how as he watched the life draining out of the animal he knew he wanted to be a taxidermist, "...to capture the essence of the beast in its final, most vital moment." He went into gory detail, as a taxidermist would and since she was a druid I made her roll a Will save vs. bawling her eyes out. She rolled a 2. It was magical.

She excused herself to go to the restroom so she could compose herself. She returned and tried to explain that she was a druid and didn't like to talk about stuffing dead animals, he started to look offended, and she just kept digging the hole deeper from there. "It's not that I find what you do wrong, exactly..." and other such phrases that increasingly offended him. And he just kept rolling low, and she high on their opposed Charisma checks. He was offended, but stayed in his seat.

It was perfect, and the timing was all the more awesome as just when she thought the coast was clear and she was going to be able to keep him occupied long enough that someone came in warned the Taxidermist.

Best gaming session ever. Thank you Dungeon Magazine!