You could spend an entire campaign just exploring the multi-layered ruins beneath Kaer Maga. The Seven Swords of Sin is a great module, gives more info on the city, and our group really enjoyed the dungeon provided. Slavery and it's general acceptance or lack-there-of is a strong plot point within the city. Just some ideas!
The alignment bit might be difficult, especially if he's burning out empty husks every month or so. Was just watching Dr. Fate on that Young Justice cartoon, realizing he was sort of a hard sell as a hero, compared to many others. I like the concept a lot, maybe he could just not "choose" unworthy targets.
ltwally wrote:
Curses! Flagstaff group looking for more players! So hard to find local players! Best of luck!
This sounds like a ton of fun! We've used the First World to some extent with all of our Pathfinder games, and it has always added a ton of flavor. The First World details are slightly less fleshed out than much of Pathfinder, but we found that useful for coming up with our own material. The idea of a home plane where nature has exploded to the nth degree, and the natural denizens don't care about much about danger because they're functionally immortal is crazy fun for imagination space. Ranalc has become a key diety in our campaign, and I'm sure glad we used the First World as much as we did. Good luck with whatever you decide to do!
Thank you both for the suggestions, they're amazing! Was really having trouble articulating stuff like this previously. I've got a ton of backstory built around the encounter, but I got stumped after statting out the NPCs. The environmental stuff you guys came up with is top notch, really appreciate the input! All really adds to the scene as well. Gonna go write some of this up!
I'm designing an arena encounter for our Pathfinder game this weekend, and I'm a bit stumped on the best way to make this scenario enjoyable. The players have worked their way through an enormous skeletal maze populated by a variety of undead creatures, forever trapped in the maze. The final room before escaping the maze is the arena, a coliseum built of the same bone materials. The arena champion is a Frankenstein monster composed of pieces of different creatures. I can design challenging enemies for the encounter. THe players are all level 3, consisting of a rogue, a barbarian, and some crazy psionic shenanigans I'm not sure I can explain without looking at the character sheet. While I can stat out the enemies, I feel like there should be some environmental stuff going on as well, possibly some fun with terrain, but I don't really know how to go about it. Any suggestions from the wonderful folk who frequent these forums would be greatly appreciated! Apologies for spelling/grammar.
I think a few posters here have mentioned the fear that Pathfinder is pretty complicated when it comes to rules. If you like the flavor of Pathfinder, but want something much similar and easier to teach, check out Dungeon World. Wouldn't take but a few hours to teach that one, and you get a lot of similar atmosphere, and dynamic player development.
I lurk on these forums most days while I'm working, and I am often blown away by the quality, patience, and effort put into the communications on the Paizo forums. These messageboards are full of intelligent, instructive posts from a variety of people who spend significant time and effort creating them. Thank you to anyone who has spent time stating out ANYTHING for someone else. It's work, and it's awesome that you spent the time to do it. Thank you to anyone who has provided an articulate answer to a question, especially if your instinctual response was a facepalm. Courtesy is a beautiful thing. Daily, without fail, I find amazing resources here that probably wouldn't exist without these sort of interactions. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this.
Sounds like a sandbox might not be what your players are into. Perhaps something a little more on rails would be up there alley. I've GMed for a few groups with mostly timid players. I'll often include an NPC that the group has befriended as a cheap way of delivering exposition. Bards can be great for this. Our skull and shackles game has a gnomish bard named Fezzig Bricklebrack. Doesn't do much but the occasional buff in combat, though he has a sharp tongue. Everytime the group would get stuck, I could have him play a little song, roll a knowledge check, and try to chime in. Sandbox games can be a ton of fun when players are interested in it, but it's easy to lose momentum. An overall group unifying theme can help too. Our two sandbox games have been a homebrew and Skull and Shackles (which just totally blew up into sandbox stuff). In Skull and Shackles, piracy was always an easy fallback. If bored, explore a new island! Our version of Golarion has a burgeoning trade group called the Coins, so our players always had a goal of making money. Hope this has been at all helpful, didn't mean to go on so long.
Sounds like you got it right in the title. I've been an off an on GM for twenty years, the first ten of which I was totally awful. This sounds a lot like my style back then. I'm assuming by the title that you are female, apologies if that is incorrect. If so, are you the only female gamer in your group? I've seen some male dominated groups get a bit strange when a female was included. No idea why, but it's happened before. Perhaps the new GM is rusty, and needs a bit of practice? He sounds impatient towards your knowledge level, without specifically giving you much information on how to correct that. As a GM, a player showing ANY interest between games, especially interest in polishing up game knowledge is exciting. Realistically what else can you do? You might try pulling the GM aside and asking what you could do to alleviate the situation, though it sounds like you already have. Good luck! This sounds like a difficult situation!
These are just my experiences, and should be in no way construed as an attempt to guide anyone else's experience, heh. The smaller the group, the more likely we are to use house rules. As the group size grows, we will often try to ratchet back the house rules, as balance is easier, and you don't have quite as much trouble keeping everyone on the same page. Two of my players have created totally homebrewed classes, the Death Warden and the Wandering Pistolero. Took a bit of work on all our parts to balance them, but was definitely worth the effort. We've found it much easier to veer off the beaten path when the players and GM are all working towards the same goals. Generally, the more inner-party conflict a group shows, the less likely I am to worry much about expanding houserules. I don't know that it's a causal relationship, but I have found that players who gravitate towards rolling against one another also try to create some batsh!t crazy rules.
The horror of magic war feels like a really strong campaign setting for a group. Whether they embrace these tactics, or rebel against them in hope of creating a better place, or even a better kind of war, would make for an excellent story. Mercenaries seems like it might be a fun starting point for players, as they could change their allegiances if necessary, or if it were compelling. Is your setting all homebrew, or are you using Golarion?
Don't mean to derail at all, but thought I'd mention it here. We've houseruled that paladins can play their deities' alignment in our home games, as the alignment restrictions are hilarious, and yield a majority of gods without any kind of decent roleplay ability to front paladins. Would Besmara require her holy warrior to be lawful good? Doubtful. Cayden Cailean? No way! The Alignment restrictions associated with Paladin feel like relics of a bygone time, I wish we had something more nuanced than clunky alignment restrictions.
These are fun ideas! This campaign feels like it could be fun from either side, fighting against these guerrilla tactics could be just as interesting for a typical good group. You seem to have some pretty specific tactics in mind, are you characters likely to use them? Evil or neutral/evil campaigns can be a ton of fun, when characters aren't arbitrarily killing each other off. Curious to see how this turns out!
Cool looking class Abugaj! My friend and I have struggled for the longest time in creating something similar, we went with creating a "savage" cleric domain for simplicity. Anywho, that's neither here nor there! Wild shape is pretty powerful at level 1! Not sure how to balance that, maybe dropping spell-casting altogether? Redchigh has a great idea with "Aspect of the Beast," you could make it an at will or similar ability from say level 1 to 4, then graduate to wild shape. Just some ideas! Thanks for posting your class writeup!
This is compelling, as a single change to Crane Style doesn't really address the overarching issue of Master of Many Styles granting early access to feats. A single change to MoMS might create a lot less downstream work as opposed to changing the Crane style feat itself, especially since it was most problematic at the lower levels where you wouldn't have access to it without MoMS. The Dragon Style line seems like it could offer similar balance issues when it comes to damage scaling, when offered at that low of a level. Just my opinion.
Captain K. really gave you some awesome info here! Environment can be a ton of fun in swamps as well. Enemies can hide underwater, waiting to ambush unsuspecting players, and the flora can be nearly as dangerous as the fauna. Bogs are hard to move through, foliage provides cover, and everything is gross! I like anything that concerns the Sunken Queen (I might be butchering the name) in the Mushfens. Ancient crumbling relics to lost gods get me every time, and I'm pretty sure the Boggards are centered around this time-lost statue.
Hello everybody, I thought I would share my groups limited experience with homebrew. We have a very small group, usually a gm and two to three players, so we use a lot of homebrew. We Round-Robin GM, I think we have five campaigns currently active in Golarion, all based on downstream events from the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path. Two players are playing homebrewed classes, and I think we have about 20 to 30 traits and feats we've changed or created based on our take on gameplay. In our experience, the bigger the group, the harder it is to make sure 3rd party content and homebrew are still balanced when stacked up against the 1st party stuff. Homebrew content can be a lot of fun, as long as the gm and players don't have adversarial relationships, and you can really create some fun stuff for the world. If the group is willing to experiment, and doesn't mind occasionally dropping a rule that is obviously broken, you can really expand and grow your world from a mechanical perspective. Hope this was helpful!
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