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The 179 bytes thing? Something that's happened in previous months, particularly with new AP volumes where, after personalizing, the file is effectively empty if you actually download it. It's visible after personalizing because the page reports the file's size as something ridiculously small (usually 179 bytes for the "file per chapter" version).
Same, only it's 145 for me. I've informed CS, so they are definitely aware. It's not even the start of their work day yet, so let's give them a chance to fix things before we flood their inboxes, okay? Thanks. Yeah, I'm seeing the 145 on the Single File version. My File Per Chapter version is seemingly stuck personalizing.
Add me to the chorus that is going to miss Pawns a lot. Since many APs have specific NPCs and AP-specific monsters, I relied on them to be able to provide a good visual representation on the tabletop. It's also nice that the pawns contrast with the players' minis, making it more obvious which side is which. I would frequently buy AP sets for APs I didn't intend to run just have the monsters and NPCs for other things. As in-person gaming started to ramp up again, I was hoping the line would start up again, even though the writing was on the wall. I honestly don't have the pocketbook or the patience to invest in the blind-box model of Pathfinder minis and buying them as singles is even more prohibitively expensive. I get that the cost vs benefit calculation on Pawns went sideways for Paizo and there's nothing to be done at this point, but there's basically no good alternative at the moment to fulfill the same purpose that Pawns fulfilled.
I'm running with a group of 6 and all of them show up pretty frequently. For the chase sequence in Chapter 2, I'm thinking I should increase the chase points for each obstacle, but I'm not sure. They have atrocious rolling luck and not all the characters are particularly physically skilled. Anyone have any thoughts? For the curious, I ended up using 5 chase points instead of 6, despite the group size. I was also pretty free with what skills I let them use as long as they weren't leaning on the same things over and over again. They managed to catch up with their quarry by the canals, which seemed like a reasonable place story-wise.
I had a similar issue, but with Froglegs. The way I'm running the missions, her name keeps coming up and the players were starting to make serious noise about going after her... at level 5. I stepped out of character for a minute and said "folks, you will get your shot at Froglegs, but in everyone's interest, it's best if you don't do it right now." They quickly went "Well, we've told the Chime Ringers, she's their problem for now." This was shortly after they'd busted the robbery gang. They dealt with the poltergeist situation in our most recent session and are about to deal with the gardens. That should put them at level 6, so I'm going to move up Froglegs from where I had planned to run that mission so they can go ahead and get that payoff.
I'm running with a group of 6 and all of them show up pretty frequently. For the chase sequence in Chapter 2, I'm thinking I should increase the chase points for each obstacle, but I'm not sure. They have atrocious rolling luck and not all the characters are particularly physically skilled. Anyone have any thoughts?
Seriously looking at playing a human summoner with a Beast eidolon in a "god caller" vein. Thinking about the Beast eidolon being wolf-themed as some sort of "god of the hunt/pack". Still waiting on some details to be hammered down before I do too much work on the concept.
I opened up on a case-by-case basis. Most of my players were content to pick Druid or Wizard as I encouraged, but one player was adamantly against playing a spellcaster (for reasons that escape me since he used to love spellcasters). He requested to be allowed to use the feats on the Duelist archetype (he's playing a Rogue). I confirmed with him that he was aware that some of the Magaambyan Attendant feats might end up useless if he didn't have spells and he was fine with that, so I let him take Duelist. One of his branches is Tempest-Sun Mage, so I was able to work it into his character getting in good with the teacher that just returned in the first book. So far it's not been a big deal.
I had a couple of players spend some of their free time exploring the campus or the tunnels under it. They were content for it to be mostly background activity, so I didn't have to do a lot. However, I told the tunnel explorer that there were a lot of tunnels under the school and had them eventually come up in the storage barn they'd cleared out earlier that day. I told the campus explorer that they seemed to find quite a few buildings, mentioning a library that had been abandoned and setting the expectation that the campus' building use ebbed and flowed based on residency at the school and that, because a lot of students and faculty are out learning in the world at the moment, the campus is a little low on population. I do want to bring up one weird thing that I had to deal with so that hopefully another GM doesn't get blindsided about it. Because the pugwampis (and the admonition not to kill) was back to back with the task gather oil, I had one PC just completely disengage from the fight with Umbo out of concern for getting in trouble for killing getting them in trouble. I just kind of let it ride as the party is oversized and Umbo wasn't presenting too much of an issue for the group, but it is a weird to have a "don't kill, no really, just don't" encounter followed up by a fight to the death and be aware your PCs may act based on the information previously given.
I think the main thing I want to see is corroborated action. I don't want some big "we'll do better" post and have that be the end of it. I want to know what specific actions they're planning to take and either an employee group or something to corroborate that those steps are actually taking place.
I'm planning to mix the semester long "downtime" with the events. So the investigation of Chapter One will take place during a single three-month semester which will cap off with the Study/Cram rolls. This gives me the ability to potentially provide bonuses or other benefits (or penalties) to their study rolls based on roleplay, etc. It might take Froglegs some time to determine that Oba hasn't "suffered" enough and send her thugs back to unlock the animals. The Anadi aren't going anywhere, so approaching them can happen at a relaxed pace as well. I'm planning to have Janatimo pitch it as a "look into this when you have time this semester." It gives them a deadline, but they don't have to chase it immediately. Chapter Two's events are a little trickier and I'll need to read them again, but I'm planning on holding off a bit on the ones more directly related to the flooded manor like the flooded basement until a slightly later semester. Just on my gut, I might tackle them in the following order:
Carving Trouble definitely needs to go last. It directly pushes into Chapter 3. I moved Flood Workshop later in the order because it's a direct consequence of the manor flooding. This order also front-loads the Froglegs side story, making her seem to be a bigger threat. It makes that fourth semester kind of rough. Depending on their level, I might swap Fiery Debt and Tell A Tale, making the Tell a Tale invitation a "reward" for catching Froglegs. That also makes it so there's a combat-oriented event in each semester to keep the combat aficionados among my players happy. If I put those pairs each in one semester, I'm look at 15 months of in-game time provided the characters don't need extra study downtime to keep their branch levels up. I need to discuss with my players whether they prefer milestone leveling or XP-based, but in either case, I'd look for them to hit 6th level during/after the third pair of events.
At my table, I'd allow up to three additional secondary casters to make checks, so long as they all make different checks, since there's four skills listed in the Ritual write-up, but that's not something covered in the Ritual rules. Most of rituals have an equivalent number of skills equal to the secondary casters, even when they have options, it's still an obvious list: this or this (frequently "whichever isn't used for the primary"); this; this. The only other situation even similar to this one is a ritual from the blog, Waters of Prediction, which has three secondary casters and a skill list like: this, this, this, or this.
Looking at context, I'm guessing there's a missing "or". Since the number of secondary casters is the minimum number and the text says that the NPC asks "as many heroes who can serve as secondary casters to do so while other heroes watch", that seems to indicate a missing "or". Otherwise it would be messy for a variable number of PCs to step in. Also, having four secondary casters would force NPC involvement due to the baseline assumption of 4 PCs.
How is this a violation of the anathema ? You are willingly attending a location where you have every reason to believe your allies will be subjecting you to magic. In my reading, it's almost a willful violation of the conditions of the last sentence. Yes, you could ask the entire school to never use magic on you, but you have no reason to believe they'll all stop. You could say "well, then those people aren't my allies", and that may be true, but it sets things up for the anathema to become even more disruptive. You could go with the relaxed PFS take on the anathema and assume that most or all the magical involvement in the campaign is "unavoidable", but in this particular campaign that's a lot of "unavoidable". Even the masking ceremony is magic ritual.
If you're up for the work, that's up to you, but my gut tells me that, trusted player or no, a superstition barbarian has the potential to be more of a disruptive dynamic than an interesting one. You're already going to have to come up with some reasoning for why hanging out at the Magaambya, a school dedicated to magic, isn't a violation of the instinct's anathema (much less becoming an actual student). I can think of at least one task in the first adventure that violates the anathema if participated in. There's at least one task in the second adventure that seems to rely on a ritual to complete. Sure, the Barbarian doesn't *have* to participate in either of those instances. I guess a couple of questions you have to answer for yourself are:
Teacher Ot has a decent amount of magic, relatively speaking, and his stat block feels more like he's a victim of being an important NPC in a low level adventure. I agree with keftiu. What I told my players is that the primary requirement for a character in the campaign is that it needs to be someone with a desire to attend magic school. It seems like it would be hard to justify why a Superstition Barbarian would want to attend a school that's basically anathema to him. I feel for you, I think I have a player who is going to balk a little at the "you've got to have some spellcasting" 'restriction', but there are a number of options to make that happen. I do have a potential Barbarian in my group, but he's playing an Animal Instinct Matanji Orc who was severely injured in a demon hunt and took an interest in healing. He's planning to take druid as his multiclass. If your player is really set against spellcasting, there's quite a few feats in druid that have nothing to do with their spells as long as they're okay with putting up with the druid's anathema. Animal Companion, Poison Resistance, and Mature Animal Companion could be taken as your 4th,6th, and 8th level free feats and you've not gotten any spellcasting outside of the initial cantrips.
In the mansion, how deep is the water in G4 (The Dining Hall) supposed to be? Based on the description, it seems pretty deep considering the tables and chairs are floating. Should it be roughly 7 feet deep as in the description of G6 (The Ballroom) or closer to the 5 feet mentioned in the exterior description of the water depth close to the walls?
I think three to four is about the reasonable limit of downtimes for second chapter. You could go as high as five, but I'd personally hesitate to go over four. For my game, I'm not going to allow players to store up more than one starred (i.e. pending) advancement per branch. I can control that some with how many downtimes I provide. Since the players are level 2 during the second chapter, the most they can be is Rank 2 in Primary and Rank 1 in Secondary. So if I provide three downtimes, they can reach their limits in the branches or they can reach the limit in the primary and store up an advancement for the next level. Then, if the players are digging the downtimes and the events during them (especially looking forward to the surprise party with the Tzeniwe's kids), I might do a fourth. This, of course, presumes simple success on the majority of players' Study rolls. Since Cramming is super detrimental, I'm going to discourage it for their first downtime, even if they are eligible for a catch-up. By the time of the First Masking, I'd like my PCs to just be able to have the attendant dedication since they become attendants at that point, but I can't force that. My general mode of running downtime is going to be:
I'm wary of frontloading too many downtimes in chapter two, just because it runs the risk of burning the players out on them as soon as they're introduced. Ultimately though, the appropriate answer is "as many downtimes as your players want to do".
I understand thematically that the Magaambya teaches Primal and Arcane, specifically Druid and Wizard, and that's why those are the options in the Player's Guide, but I'm interested in opening up a few more options for my characters. Right now I'm tempted to say that as long as the free multiclass archetype provides access to the Primal or Arcane list, it's acceptable in my game. I might even include Bard depending on the character's story/goals. How is everyone else thinking about expanding the free multiclass archetype? If you're going to expand it that is.
I'm in Indiana, was marked as shipped on the 16th, and my package arrived today. UPS Mail Innovations tracking never updated and the only tracking I ever got was due to being signed up for USPS's Informed Delivery Service, so they were keeping track of something coming to my address and they only picked up on it up at some point in Ohio.
The group I'm going to run just went through character creation, so I'll be dealing with the following:
Given the players, I don't think this party is going to be particularly subtle pirates, but there's something to be said for kicking butt and taking names.
Our party - "The Old Ways"
The party name comes from most of the characters, even the not overtly religious ones, worshipping one of the ancient Osirion deities. Aside from the obvious, we also have two worshippers of Bastet and a follower of Isis. We're not sure if Axel worships anything other than his/her (player hasn't specified as yet) greataxe, but we'll bring him/her around.
I ended up going with a Human Paladin of Anubis. He's a local who thinks that the tombs have been going long enough that some of the blessings may not be as effective as they once were. So he's putting a group together for the lottery so that he can make sure that the honored dead are still dead. So far it's looking like an interesting party.
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