| Gaelstromdk |
Hello!
I have read through the book and there is some very vague language about this, but I would like to know if the player holding the shard that is cleansed by the Ioun stone also gets the +2 stat bonus for the Ioun stone being present?
The shards themselves do not indicate any stat bonus in their book entry, however the Ioun stone is vastly better one could argue than the shard, so I had a player ask if they could leave the shard at the manor, and keep the Ioun stone for now.
I'm tempted to just DM the Ioun stone is added to the shard, and make it an OP item of the adventure path since they are 10K year old Thessalonian items, but I wanted to verify if this is something others have done, or if the idea is that the Ioun stone is a sacrifice to the Shard in order to keep it in order, especially since the book indicates removal of the stone will destroy it.
Any thoughts are appreciated!
Thanks!
| glass |
I have only played this, not run it, so take what I say with a pinch of salt. But AIUI:
Yes, carrying the shard gets you the bonus from its Ioun stone, in addition to the stone's actual powers. At least, that is how my GM played it, and it seems like a much better plan even if that is not strictly what it says.
So if that was the only reason for leaving the shard behind, there is no reason to. If there were other reasons, I don't think it would work. The curses can be quite nasty, so you are going to need to insert the Ioun stone to safely get them back to Heidmarch Manor. And as far as I know, it is not easy to remove the Ioun stones once they are inserted, so it would not be practicable to leave the shard behind and keep the stone. Even if leaving valuable-but-cursed major artifacts lying around was a good idea.
I do agree that some of the shard bonuses are pretty underwhelming (although some are nice), although TBF these are not the best Ioun stones either: IIRC, they are not the stackable type, so past the lowest levels they are only useful on nice-to-have-but-not-essential stats - the really important ones will have an equal or better belt or headband.
| Gaelstromdk |
Thanks for the response, I guess that makes sense, I didn't think that the Ioun stone would be overshadowed by the headbands and such later, but I guess it is an enhancement bonus so it'll be moot by roughly level 10-ish. So yeah, I chose in my session the other night to just grant them the bonus anyway since they're a team of 3 with me as a DMPC, so the little boost to power also makes it that much more special for the campaign. We have a witch, druid, monk and I'm playing a slayer, so they could use all the help they can get.
Did you guys choose for the second shard to allow Haste to be cast on multiple people or just the holder? I saw some discussions about that as well.
| glass |
Yes, carrying the shard gets you the bonus from its Ioun stone, in addition to thestone'sshard's actual powers. At least, that is how my GM played it, and it seems like a much better plan even if that is not strictly what it says.
Arrgh. Why do I only ever spot typos after the edit window has closed?
Did you guys choose for the second shard to allow Haste to be cast on multiple people or just the holder? I saw some discussions about that as well.
Multiple people. Or at least, I do not remember any restrictions, and I do not see why there would be any.
I just looked it up on AoN, and it just says the bearer can cast haste as an SLA. It does not mention any restrictions on targeting, so there aren't any (beyond what is in the spell itself, so up to 25 targets within range, no two of which may be more than 30 ft apart).
One other piece of advice: Try to make the players and the PCs feel like they want and need to assemble the Sihedron. When we played it, several of the players felt like assembling the thing would cause bad things to happen, but we had to do it or the AP would stall - that is obviously not ideal. Especially as it seemed like they were right.
Much better to give the impression that Xin is going to rise either way, and we need the artifact to have a chance against him.
I am not sure how much of that is on the AP as written, and how much is on our GM for that campaign (he is a good GM, but nobody is perfect). But I thought it was worth mentioning.