ferrinwulf wrote:
Just finsihed Rickety Squibs last night. To say as wriiten its a bit underwhelming is an understatment.
I did find it pretty hard to run to be honest and had to kind of force the encounters to work, not good. My problem was that the party wanted to do their own thing each day and not stick together only seeing each other in the taproom in the evening, one is carving a figurehead, another is lending his service as a cook and another was shopping for supplies and getting crew so there was no real time to have the encounters run as they were.
Unfortuatley it turned into a boring rail road. The Naga was forced on them on the 2nd morning and the wasp encounter was really difficult to get right as during that day one player was in the taproom cooking, another was in the market area and another was carving a figurehead outside. In the end I had to have to dockwokers cowering under a cart with 3 wasps coming to attack them to get the party together.
I think I made a mistake this time round and should have ditched the encounters and just played out the first day then have the players tell me what they would do for the rest of the time there and work out events based around this maybe something similar to the work/task on the wormwood in book one to speed up play. I can't really see the need to have 5 long days in a small village waiting around for the ship to be more than half an hour game time to be honest and the fixed encounters are a bit bland and don't really make much sense.
Bad idea, oh well you live and learn.
Anybody else have a similar problem?
Rickets went very smoothly for my group, they picked up a replacement pc day one form rickets to replace the bard that had just died from and I asked them what they did each day and they happily cast spells for scribing scrolls only hop at the chance of the presented encounters while being at less than full strength.
I did not apply the young template to the naga to keep things from being to easy one player almost drowned and the new charater finished it off while it was fleeing with 2 hp left. (keep in mind I have some advanced players)
The highlight came when the half orc subdue rouge decided to face off against captian pegsworthy alone by informing him that it was HIS Island and came up with the idea of using a whip to drag the captian off the boat as they were trying to leave and was handed a vital strike crit for near 60 damage for his trouble. the rest of the party let pegsworthy leave well those that weren't paralyzed from the giant wasps that is. I don't think i have seen players laugh so hard at a character death before
Oh one last thing, the late bard character had a monkey familiar... and guess what caught ghoul fever on the island near the end of the first book along with 2 of the pc's, I cracked up when it failed it's last fort save and a ghouled monkey started running around in the middle of the night in the crew quarters.