The Caveat:
This is a campaign I am running for my children, Hermione (8) and Teensy Valeros (6), and my husband. We started them on Pathfinder two years ago (which was my first foray into GMing as well), and if you’re interested in how little kids learn to game, you can read our adventures through the Beginner Box, some homebrew adventures around Sandpoint, and Book 1 of Legacy of fire, HERE.
This being our gaming group, this is not the same campaign I would run for teens or adults. It all started back in January, when I was at the seafood counter in Central Market with the kids, buying some salmon for our Burns Night dinner. Hermione looked at the tank of live lobsters and asked,
“Mama, can we buy a lobster?”
“No,” I said. “First of all, you can’t buy just one, you need to buy one for every person having dinner, and they’re expensive. Second, you cook them by dropping them into the pot of boiling water while they’re still alive, and while I love to *eat* lobster, I don’t have the stomach to cook them.”
Hermione gave me a horror-stricken look. “NO! I don’t want to cook them and eat them! I just want ONE, to keep in my room in a tank. As a pet.”
To which the answer was still no.
A few months later, we were at the children’s aquarium in Fair Park for a classmate’s birthday party. I found Hermione staring into the lobster tank in the aquarium. She said, “You know what would be awesome? To play a Pathfinder game that was totally underwater, and to have a character that rides on a giant lobster that can fight. “
“A dire lobster?”
“YES! A dire lobster animal companion.”
And since Ruins of Azlant was the most easily adaptable AP, I decided to start in the underwater section of Book 3, The Flooded Cathedral, which meant starting the PCs at ninth level.
The PCs:
Arwen, a Sea Elf Ranger (played by Hermione), whose animal companion is
Fluffy, the Dire Lobster.
(Building these characters with the Hero Labs software required a lot of kluging and a lot of “yeah, we’re just gonna call it that.” Fluffy is actually build on a Shark animal companion, and the “Bite” attack is really the combined force and damage of two massive lobster claws.)
Before I’d started reading the Azlant AP and Cerulean Seas, I’d decided that Arwen would be the potions maker of the group, and as an undersea Ranger, she had studied undersea herbology. The various potions are represented by doses (by size of a rolled preparation) of different types of underwater plants, and the time it takes to craft a potion is represented by the time it takes to locate, harvest, and prepare the plants. Think “gillyweed” from Harry Potter 4.
She had been hearing worrisome rumors of a great evil that had awakened in the sunken temple of Amaznen, and felt it her duty to find this temple and investigate the rumors. Before going, she went to find her good friend…
Bruce, a Selkie whose land form is dwarf, not human, and whose undersea form is elephant seal. His personality is akin to “Badger” from Wind in the Willows.
Bruce is a multiclass Sorcerer 6 / Fighter 3.
Bruce is where we get a little mystical.
Have you read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods?
relevant passage from chapter six…:
He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil moustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast's mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with black flies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ochre leaf.
So, yeah. Bruce is an elephant seal swimming along beside you with a head-axe strapped onto his head. And he is also this stocky dwarf swimming along beside you, bubbles in his flowing beard, holding a Greatspear of the Selkie and kicking legs as big around as cabers and speaking to you telepathically in a Scottish accent. Think of transparencies overlaid, or those souvenir books of ruins that show you the contemporary photograph with an artist’s rendering of what it looked like two thousand years ago or more. And then remember we’re running this campaign for kids, not for grown-up and “serious” gamers.
We don’t know much about Bruce’s backstory because he doesn’t tell anyone anything much. Arwen doesn’t know exactly where he is, she just knows kind of generally where to look for him, and he, for reasons that make sense only to him, is fond of her. When Arwen went to visit Bruce to tell him of her plan to find and investigate the temple of Amaznen, he told her, “You’ll nae be goin’ alone, lass, Ranger or no.”
Super Sonic Swimmer Boy (known as S Cubed B), a half-elf (sea) Cleric of Elion. He is played by Teensy Valeros. He was the only land-based PC at the start of our campaign.
As a Cleric of the lost god Elion, he has been sent by his (whatever the higher-ups in the clerical hierarchy of Elion are called) to go to an island called Zanas-Tahn, where colonists have been vanishing. As Elion was the Azlanti god of exploration and discovery, when Azlant fell into the depths of the sea, it was the followers of Elion who were instrumental in aiding the survivors to settle elsewhere. Now, SSSB has been told that the mystery of the missing colonists may be bound up in the past--and present--of the sunken continent. After travelling to Zanas-Tahn, he assisted a party of their bravest adventurers to explore the old watchtower and caverns on the island. He discovered clockwork archers made of wood, a mysterious astronomical laboratory that was haunted by the ghost of the astronomer who foretold Earthfell, clockwork bees, and a ruined temple. Making his way down through the layers of the temple, the party came to a section where only those who could safely travel underwater could go. SSSB’s landbound comrades swore to wait for him until he either returned with the missing colonists, or returned to say that there was no one to save, and they made camp in the ruins of level C. (Having cleared all the levels above, they feel reasonably safe.) He put on a Helm of Underwater Action given to him by his superiors to enable him to breathe and swim freely underwater, and slipped beneath the surface of the water.
We didn't have cockroaches in Berkeley.
Now we live in Texas.
And my kids are really into gingerbread houses.
So I don't have to be Grinch-mama, I need to come up with alternate building materials so they can make a gingerbread house that won't attract insects the size of my thumb.
Thick cardboard for the walls seems like a given.
I'm sure I can find some plastic beads or something at Michael's that will look like candy.
But other than buying a tube of caulk at the hardware store, how do I get an adhesive to glue everything together that will have the weight and look of royal icing?
Who has ideas?
I have one of those problem players who wants to know precisely where every single day of in-game action fits in the BIG HISTORY OF EVERYTHING GOLARION.
What year is it.
What season is it.
Has X event happened yet.
To make matters worse, he's playing an Iconic character (Ezren) who has a pretty well-developed backstory, so he expects it all to jigsaw together.
And I've tried searching Paizo and Pathfinder Wiki and d20pfsrdqzztop and every other site I could think of, but maybe I'm searching wrong and maybe the information just doesn't exist.
I've known other GM's to completely make something up to throw at him, or just tell him to keep track of it himself, but if I do that, he'll know I'm lying, and give me a ration of s+$~ for being a rookie GM who doesn't know what she's doing.
And, yes, this is my first campaign as a GM. And, yes, he's been GMing for over thirty years. But I'd rather not call him unprintable names in front of our children, for whom I am running the blasted campaign in the first place.
I saw Kurt Vonnegut novena candles in a shop yesterday. I almost bought one, but they were $12.99, which is WRONG. Novena candles are supposed to be 99¢.
Now I need to start making my own.
So my players are currently in Sandpoint, and I want to get them to Katapesh to run Legacy of Fire.
I'm a new GM (started my first game five months ago out of the Beginner Box) and my players are 4th level. I've been running them through local adventures in the Sandpoint Hinterlands but don't want to run Rise of the Runelords for [reasons].
As far as I understand it, my main options are:
A. Simplest but Sketchiest:
Players to to Magnimar and get on a big ship for a very long voyage, most likely to Azir, and then a long journey overland to Katapesh.
I really don't like this option.
B. Complicated and Meandering:
From Sandpoint to Janderhoff on some pretext, then with a dwarf caravan over the Mindspin Mountains (THAT should be fun, hah) to Nirmathas, then from the port of Tamran across Lake Encarthan to Kerse, then southwards through Druma to Andoran, then a ship to Absalom, then another ship from Absalom to Katapesh.
(My players are using pre-gen iconic characters, one is from Andoran, one is from Absalom, so I figured we could use that as a pretext for going that way.)
C. Dark and Creepy and Still Meandering:
Sandpoint to Korvosa, then though Nidal, through Cheliax, then across the Inner Sea from [port]. Because let's see how much evil we can face before we even get where we're going.
I figure even if we use horses as much as we can, it's still going to take a good three months to get from one end to the other, and that's if everything goes well.
So, what am I missing? Is Plan B actually the best course of action? Is there a better plan?
My husband and I have almost fifty years of gaming between us.
Now we have small beings who are too clever for their own good and are tired of sitting off to the sidelines when we play.
So I bought the Pathfinder Beginners Box as a surprise for my husband's birthday in September and started running the three of them through it together.
We are using the four iconic pre-generated characters.
My 5 1/2 year old daughter is Kyra. She already has massive cosplay nerd tendencies, so so I found her a sheer teal shawl with a gold border and embroidery that she could wrap around her head and shoulders.
My not-quite-four year old son is Valeros. He thinks he's being typecast.
The two of them roleplay naturally, even having side conversations in character, and address me politely as Game Master.
Which is endearing and mildly creepifying.
My husband plays Ezren. I bought him a tiny red moleskine journal to use as a spellbook and he keeps all his game notes in it.
I run Merisiel as an NPC, but I've crit-fumbled her so many times with THE SINGLE MOST UNLUCKY SET OF CHESSEX DICE EVER that I'm contemplating not letting my daughter heal her next time.
Except it's fun running her as a disaffected goth Elf teenager with a Valley Girl accent.
To get the game started, I went to Daiso, the Japanese dollar store, and bought the kids each a little silk dice bag, a set of colored markers to draw on the battle map, and a plastic bubble sword and a toy breastplate for my son.
To draw them into the roleplaying world, I dug up a bunch of toy plastic pirate doubloons and glass vase weights for gold/gem loot drops and filled some airline mini-bottles with different colors of water for potions (with strict instructions that opening them would end the game). And different colors/patterns of chopsticks for wand spells.
They finished the Beginners Box.
They killed Black Fang by accident. (Valeros charged in, all brave and dumb like a farm-boy battlewagon) and double-critted on the first round. And then it was all downhill from there.
Next we went off to Pigtongue's Farm, killed the Ogre and his boar, and made the farm our base of operations until (if ever) the rightful owner should reappear. We've cleaned it all up for them and Valeros has replanted the crops and even dug irrigation channels from the nearby river. Kyra built a small shrine to Sarenrae and has been praying and training and busily de-ogre-ing the farmhouse and surroundings. Ezren built a workshop in the toolshed out back and has been grumpy but affable and suggested that Boar manure is not just a superb crop fertilizer, but may have special alchemical properties that would render it useful in combat. Research is ongoing. And pungent. Merisiel sighed theatrically, rolled her eyes, and went off into Mosswood to see how many different furred mammals could be found there to make into jerky or pemmican for trail rations.
And then came a crow with a message in a copper cylinder on its leg, summoning us back to Sandpoint to follow the Orc Invasion adventure at beginnerboxadventures.com . Random encounters with a Troglodyte in the Mountains and a Boggard in the Brinestump Marsh, and then the big battle, where Merisiel's *two* critical fumbles almost got everyone killed and served to keep Kyra occupied until her help was needed to keep Valeros from dying instead of Merisiel from dying. That was fun
.
In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have listened to the voice in my head that said, "Oh, they're so close to Level 3. Just throw two more Boars in there so they can level up after they get done with this mission."
It took hours. I didn't get dinner on the table until 9:23.
Good GM, Bad Mom.
But my son thought it was the funniest thing in the world that he got dropped three times by the orc boss and his sister had to keep healing him (thank goodness we got her a wand of cure moderate before we set out). He kept laughing.
So I snagged an out-of-print set of the Beginners Box Heroes minis on Ebay to surprise them with for our next session.
