rironin's page

I've compiled a list of all the Knowledge checks characters are likely to make in Curse of the Crimson Throne, in order to determine how best to advise my players if they are unsure what Knowledge skills they might end up using during the adventure.

Firstly, the explicit Knowledge checks called for in the adventures. Most of these checks, if successful, help advance the plot or make things easier for the PCs.

Arcana: 2
Architecture & Engineering: 2
Geography: 3
History: 5
Local (Korvosa): 10
Local (Shoanti): 1
Nature: 5
Nobility & Royalty: 6
Religion: 7
The Planes: 2

Nothing too surprising here. Local knowledge about Korvosa will really come in handy, as will Religion, Nature and History. Nobility & Royalty is surprisingly useful in this adventure path. Whether it's worth taking the necessary skill points to hit the DCs is another matter, of course - see below for the spreadsheet that spells that out.

Knowledge is also used for monster lore, which might be even more essential than the plot point checks above. I tallied the explicit encounters in the adventure path (not counting wandering monsters and the like), counting a specific creature once each time it appears in an adventure. This assumes characters will only get one chance per adventure to identify a given creature, even if it appears more than once in an adventure, but that they will have leveled by the next adventure and can make new checks against creatures they've already encountered before.

Arcana: 14
Dungeoneering: 11
Nature: 22
Religion: 24
The Planes: 22

All the undead in Skeletons of Scarwall and all the devils in Crown of Fangs make Religion and The Planes especially useful. Arcana has perhaps surprisingly few checks for this adventure path - Dungeoneering is almost as useful for monster identification.

For details on specifically what the checks are made for, what monsters can be identified in each adventure, and where in the adventures these checks occur, you can download the Excel spreadsheet I compiled the data in here.

The River Caves map shows the wyvern caves and the deathweb caves. I have a problem with the scale for the deathweb caves. How are three gargantuan creatures supposed to fight effectively in a cavern with only one 20x20 foot area? The description implies that the deathwebs should be in the webbed area, but there's no way they'd fit.

At the moment I'm blowing up that cave to double normal size to allow them to fit. How did others deal with this? Actually squeezing them in, in my opinion, would hamstring the deathwebs so much that they'd be totally ineffective in battle.

I'm planning on running CotCT sometime in October, by which time the Second Darkness modules should be arriving. I'd like to run CotCT for about half of our large play group, while my friend runs SD for myself and the other half.

Is there anything in the Second Darkness adventure path that interferes with or requires the completion of the CotCT path in order to make sense? It looks like these two adventure paths are very different geographically. Can we assume (even though neither party will really be aware of this) that both adventure paths are occurring at the same time?

Lastly, is there anything that myself and my friend who will be DMing will accidentally give away for ourselves by reading our prospective modules? Thanks!

I usually monitor the Runelords messageboards here at the Paizo website, and so I've bookmarked them specifically. When the Paizo RPG announcement came out, my link was rerouted to the announcement page, and I was happy to read this news.

However, [http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/pathfinder/runelords] is still redirecting me to the Paizo RPG announcement page, and it's been quite a few days now... isn't the whole announcement phase over at this point? It's getting kind of annoying loading the same announcements page and then clicking over to where the messageboards are and finding the Runelords discussion group; that's why I made a bookmark in the first place.

I know, I'm just lazy =P But it seems like bad website mojo to force users to look at something when they're trying to look at something else. For a few days after the announcement, it makes perfect sense. But it's been a few days...

Hi. I'm preparing to run the Manor House, and it looks like fun, but I just started thinking harder and looking more closely at Iesha's and Aldern's stats, and I'm getting a little bit concerned.

For one thing, Iesha's got an impressive suite of defensive capabilities: fast healing, damage reduction, spell resistance, undead traits, cold immunity, and a very decent hit point total. She's kind of ridiculous on offense too - her attack and grapple bonuses are very high. With my PCs, at least, it stands a pretty decent chance that she could end up dishing out 4d6+40 damage in a single round with all the constricting. My players will be coming up against her in an enclosed space, with no turning ability (the divine caster they've got is a favored soul). I'm afraid she's going to shred them.

Of course, she might not even end up fighting them - if they stay out of her way, she'll go for Aldern. This is almost worse, however. Comparing Iesha's stats with Aldern's, it looks like Iesha will absolutely wreck him. If the PCs stand back far enough, it seems inevitable that they'll watch her tear through every ghoul in her path, and then proceed to take out the main villain of the adventure. As soon as she does that, her quest is at an end and she'll drop dead too. The PCs' reward for cleverly dealing with Iesha is that she'll finish the adventure for them? Lame.

Has anyone had this happen in their adventure? Is there a good way to fix it, or prevent it? Thanks!

Having just completed the Catacombs of Wrath, the PCs now have Keruvus' +1 longsword and Erylium's tiny +1 returning dagger. No one in the group wants either one, but both items (by far the most substantial loot in the Catacombs) are beyond Sandpoint's wealth limit of 800 gp, and therefore there is no one in town who could really afford either one.

Is this intentional? I assume that the PCs aren't meant to go down to the big city in Burnt Offerings to sell their loot, so are they expected to hang on to these items till they can sell them later?

My concern is that we'll be underpowered going in to Thistletop. We're playing a gestalt campaign, meaning we'll be 2nd level gestalt characters going in to Thistletop with about 600 gp of accumulated wealth each, assuming we can't sell the longsword and dagger. My friend, who will be DMing Thistletop, is afraid that we're all going to be slaughtered. Thoughts?

I'm eagerly anticipating the release of Pathfinder and can't wait to get into it. There was one thing I was wondering about - is there any chance of the combat maps and such in each volume being made available to subscribers in digital format (or even, dare I say it, untagged form?) I applaud WotC for finally starting to do something like this on their website. I'd pledge my firstborn to Paizo if they could do it with the maps in Pathfinder.

This'll be the first out-of-the-box stuff I've run in a while, and I use a projector to do maps, so getting the maps in a digital form would be oh so handy, and save me the trouble of scanning the maps in and then trying to Photoshop out all the numbers and tags myself.

So, dare I dream? Is this possibly going to happen? =)