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Name: Thoril Serpenthelm
Race: Human
Classes/levels: Fighter 1
Adventure: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv
Location: North part of island; river running through a ravine.
Catalyst: Invading spider territory.
The Gory Details:

27th day on the island. Party had just battled and defeated a giant spider in its lair. They follow the river and are disappointed to find that it ends abruptly and they will have to turn back and find another exit from the ravine.

Random encounter generated a spider swarm which the party was unprepared to deal with. 5 characters manage to escape but poor Thoril rolled poor initiative and surprise and got swarmed. Party's best fighter killed by a bunch of tiny spiders. So sad.

Upon return to camp, party discovers all NPCs gone, camp destroyed, supplies stolen. Cannibal surprise attack while PCs absent. 2nd one in two days. Not going well.

Yeah we just fled. The bad initiative and the surprise round were the killers.

The only thing we had that might have worked was 12 flasks of oil carried by two of the characters.

However 1 movement action to get it out of the backpack.
Then....
either a standard action to sprinkle it on the ground on current square and then light it next round or
a full round to light it and throw it.

It's just too slow and the damage is too low. At d6 damage per round, a spider swarm wipes out 1st level chars before they can do much with fire/splash unless every single character can do something useful.

Well, just played out this encounter tonight. The swarm achieved surprise and had initiative higher than all the PCs. 5 out of 6 PCs managed to flee, but my fighter who went into the encounter with a bit of non-lethal damage (caused by having to fight another wandering monster 4 hours earlier in hot tropical conditions) ended up taking one for the team and was killed.

I'm playing this with 6 characters, so the adventure can continue with 5 without needing to do any fudging and they should actually progress more quickly now experience-wise.

I would like to inquire however if anyone knows the name of the individual who decided that it was a good idea to add swarms to the monster mix? I would love to have a friendly word with him.

That was the most unfun encounter I have ever encountered in an RPG. I can't see these being fun or interesting if the party wins - they are definitely no fun if the party gets hammered. So unfun across the board - why even have them?

Ah. So I have to choose my channel "direction" at character creation. In that case I am screwed - my cleric has been healing the living so far, so it looks like I can't change that for just this one encounter. His god is also Good, so damaging the living is going a bit against the sprit of his religion.

Looks like I might be running after all here. :)

Hi everyone,

I'm a new player soloing through Souls for Smugglers Shiv and I just had a random encounter generated versus a spider swarm and its been quite a challenge to figure out the correct way of handling it.

If I understand correctly, there used to be a section in the rules 3.5 pertianing to swarms being vulnerable to fire (attacks via torches, lanterns) but those got intentionally removed in the Pathfinder rules.

So it's been a bit of an intellectual exercise to figure out the best way for my party to deal with this foe since they ignore all weapons damage. Yes, I can run, but I'd love to actually defeat them and pick up the experience points for these.

Last night I tried to figure out if my cleric would be able to deal with it via channel negative energy. Does this work?

My cleric's alignment is neutral (thankfully) so I can freely choose whether I want to apply positive or negative to living creatures. If he were allignment good I would not be able to do this.

Cleric chooses to channel negatve energy against the living and that should damage (and fairly easily kill) the swarm. Unfortunately it will also affect all of my party members so they would have to stay more than 30 feet away or be prepared to accept the damage and heal themselves either during or after the encounter.

Hi Carl,

Can you give me a page number for the confusing rule? I made it through all of Raiders Of Fortune without encountering a specialist but I just got one tonight in Adventure #1. I assume it's a Peddler type encounter?

The "layout at the back" isn't to decide where on the map the guys start in. It's to decide the group "formation" once you know where they will be on the map. The maps are usually so small, you can pretty much ignore the formation stuff - it doesn't affect very much. Likewise, facing. I don't think I've ever made use of that.

I'm playing in an adventure right now where equipment purchase is extremely limited (stores don't carry anything above 10gp). Crossbows can't be purchased, but my wizard can use his cantrips until he manages to get one.

If you play the Souls For Smuggler's Shiv adventure, you may also find yourself in this situation with no stores available at all.

The cantrips are a nice option while waiting.

Thanks guys. Good to know.
The product I'm fooling around with has quite a few careless errors in it, but none that I know of so far in the encounter stat blocks, so I probably will check a sampling in each encounter just to be sure. Gives me some practice at the rules too.

I'm a Pathfinder newbie running through some combat encounters solo just trying to get a handle on the combat rules (geez...has this stuff ever changed since Ad&d 1st Ed! It's much better now!).

I was just playing an encounter with the party against a bunch of goblins and I was applying all of the modifiers in Table 8-1 as I went with each swing. About 1/2 way through, I realized, after checking my bestiary, that the AC of the goblins in the stat-block for the encounter seemed to have already had the size mod for small built into the listed AC and likewise the stats for their weapon attacks also seemed to have their +1 added in.

Just wanted to double check that that's the way it's usually done. So in a typical case of no halflings or gnomes in party, there won't ever be a reason to apply any of the bonuses from Table 8-1?

Not sure if anyone is really interested because this is definitely a niche product, but I felt like writing because I finally got to play this a bit tonight and it feels great to finally play DnD/Pathfinder again! Haven't played with a group in over 20 years and it's been over 10 years since Baldur's Gate / Neverwiner.

This system is pretty cool. It's definitely more fun than the typical solo fare because it runs less on rails and leaves far more decision making to the player who has to decide which quests he'll tackle and the order in which he'll tackle them.

There are tons of little typos and errors in charts that cause some head scratching. This definitely could have used a bit more play testing, but I haven't seen anything yet that can't be easily dealt with.

======================================================

My party started off in a small border town that is having both a goblin problem and a bandit problem. We inquired at the local militia to see if we could help but were rudely turned back because we were still too green. But we were invited to attend a meeting in 5 days time if we were still in the area.

Hanging around at the tavern we discovered that no-one had heard from a nearby town in a few days and that a status report on them would be appreciated and also that a well known royal messenger appears to have vanished; his horse arrived in the town riderless a few days ago. Also at the Tavern, one of the militia leaders offered to take us on a little shakedown mission against bandits to get some experience.

We decided to investigate both the missing messenger and the silent neighboring village, because the location where the messenger was last seen was very close to that town. It seemed to be a nice way to kill two birds with one stone. So we set off on the road. It's a somewhat risky mission for us since the survival skills of this party are so low at this point, we definitely want to avoid camping outdoors at night. If we move quickly as the bird flies, we should arrive at the nearby town in early evening. If we take our time and take the safest route, it will take 2 days and we will spend our nights at inns along the road. We will have to ford a small river regardless of which route we take. I'm worried about missing the big meeting if we take our time.

Shortly after leaving our home base, a large group of mercenaries meets us on the road and questions us rather roughly. They let us go without incident but they seemed a little suspicious of us for some reason. A few hours later, still early morning, as the road entered some heavy forest, a pack of wild dogs came out of the brush and started snarling viciously. All but our wizard lost their courage and were shaken. We decided to move quickly away before the dogs decided to attack us. We were still safe, but we lost about an hour waiting for the dogs to move on before venturing into the woods again. If we take the quick route, we'll arrive in full darkness now.

Voila. There's a few free teasers (which unfortunately don't really let you see too much about how it really plays) in there as well as the rules and the first module.

Avalon Quests

You run a full party. The system assigns your quests and unlocks/locks options as you move through the adventure.

There are no AARs or reviews anywhere on the net - just that one two star review on this site. I won't review it myself before having played it like the other fellow, but based on a quick skim of the materials last night I was pleasantly surprised. I don't have any of the complaints that he had and it definitely seems like a workable rule set. It will definitely be slower than playing with a DM and multiple players, but that's OK.

Just broke down and picked it up in spite of the lack of information anywhere. After a quick scan, it looks like a very innovative quest delivery system for a solo player and should be way more immersive and interesting than any solo methods that we've seen so far.

Rolled up 6 characters last night and adjust about ready to start playing, but at this point I don't see this deserving that piddly 2-star rating it's received. Sounds like a great way to learn pathfinder, and learn it well.

Just wondering if anyone has attempted to play using this system which came out late last year? It's intended to allow a solo player to adventure with a full party in a way that I suppose would be somewhat similar to playing the old Baldur's Gate computer game but on a tabletop.

I'm very intrigued, and the price is good, but I was just poking around to see if I could find some play experiences posted somewhere before taking the plunge.

Just wondering if you've started playing and if yes, how it's going? I'm tempted to take the Avalon plunge myself but there is practically zilch in the way of reviews / player experiences out.

Just wondering if anyone has tried playing this yet and can share a bit of feedback? I've been looking for a way to play D&D / Pathfinder solo for quite a while and this definitely looks like the most intriguing possibility I've seen. I've read the lone review that was posted and feel that I can live with some editorial type deficiencies as long as the rule set and campaign are playable.