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Whew! Just finished reading through this whole thing. Quite the campaign you had here, and to think it was just one player and the PC! I’m definitely going to be taking some pointers from this journal for if I ever happen to run my own Rise of the Runelords campaign. I thought you did a really good job bringing the NPC’s to life and making them interesting.
I too was worried about the decline of the adventure path from its high point during the first three books of the campaign. I’m not a big fan of strait, meticulous dungeon crawls, that take many weeks to play through, and will probably try and add more roleplaying like you did for those adventures to make them a little more dynamic.
Seems like the action points really made the difference between victory and repeated TPKs for you in this adventure path.
Great job Moonbeam! I found this to be inspirational.
Thank you very much. ;)
Indeed, the action points helped a lot. However, one has to be careful not to give out too many of them, otherwise the game becomes too easy. If I remember correctly, the formula we used at first is that the PC's got one additional action point per two levels, and they reset at each level. So at high levels, they had a bit too many. However, we were trying to play "for real" and not use them too much at the end.In our savage tide campaign, we do it a bit differently, each character has one action point, and there's a pool of 12 action points for the entire group, since not all characters are consistently faced with the same amount of danger. We rarely use them, though.
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For Sneaky, about running Burnt Offerings again recently:
Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have the patience to write a detailed log of this (I blame the several xbox games waiting on my shelf ;) ).
But I can give you the highlights of how it went. The circumstances were quite unusual and unexpected, as the person I played with was... my mother.
!
Yes, that can surely be quite surprising to a lot of people. A grown man playing D&D with his mother is probably quite high on the list of 'lamest things a human being can do" for some people. But what the hell. I think I am very fortunate to have a very cool mother who is interested in medieval fantasy. When I was a teenager, we played a few adventures of D&D together, and she even DM'ed a few of them!
I had not played with her in almost 20 years, and the past 2 weeks, I was on vacation, and by some strange coincidence, she broke her wrist at the very start of my vacation, and was off work for 2 weeks... the exact same period as my vacation.
So since I needed to go to her place almost every day anyway to help her (she lives alone), we figured, once the daily chores were done, why not play some D&D for old time's sakes? ;)
So... I played Burnt Offerings with my mom. ;) I don't think many people can say that!
Of course, I had to explain a lot of things about the new rules, since she hadn't played in so long, and had of course not played since D&D first edition. I also simplified the rules a bit (especially removing complicated rules like attacks of opportunity based on movement).
I had expected to have a really easy time running this adventure, since I had already played it, but I was surprised that I found it actually quite hard! I think it's because the version of the adventure I played with my other friend (as depicted in this journal) was still so fresh in my mind that I had a hard time deviating from the way it had gone when I had run it with him!
The biggest difference with my original campaign I think is that my mom was SUPER wary of Aldern, and investigated a lot on him and the Foxglove family... She knows more about them than PC's normally should at this point. It will surely be interesting to see what will happen if we ever do the Skinsaw Murders. ;) But basing on the sinister history of Foxglove Manor, I would assume that many citizens, especially some like Madame Mvashti, would know a lot about the cursed family.
Actually, for a while, my mom's theory was that Aldern was actually an impostor pretending to be a noble just to seduce her character.
Btw, the PC's were:
- Elf Sorceress (Arcane Bloodline), Shalelu's sister (and Aldern's obsession)
- Human Paladin, Sheriff Hemlock's right-hand man
- Varisian Rogue {DM-PC}, son of Jubrayl Vhiski (but Chaotic Good and secretly undermining his father's schemes), brother of Kaven in the Hook Mountain Massacre.
- Human Cleric of Desna {DM-PC}, sister of the Paladin, and went temporarily crazy due to Chopper's Murders like Kerista in my first campaign.
What I liked about the PC's this time is that they were much more tightly linked to Sandpoint. Also, the Paladin was from the start a legitimate authority figure in Sandpoint, so it didn't seem strange that Sheriff Hemlock left him in charge in the first part of the adventure.
Btw, my mom doesn't like a high level of challenge, so to make things easier, some townsfolk went down with them on their 2nd visit to the Catacombs of wrath, to help kill the "unkillable" Erylium: Shalelu, Sheriff Hemlock, Father Zantus, Father Garmos, and Headmaster Gandethus.
And against Thistletop, they went with Shalelu and 3 guards. Even so, it was pretty deadly, the rogue almost died twice, the 3 guards almost died, and Shalelu almost died as well (from a 34-pt-dmg crit from one of Bruthazmus's arrows).
The fight in the thistle maze against the goblins, goblin dogs and the goblin druid was pretty rough because of the penalties due to cramped space.
The various fights in the upper level, including the one against Ripnugget, were very easy.
The game ended on an epic battle against the rest of the minions in the cathedral of Lamashtu on the 2nd level (Nualia, Orik, Lyrie, Bruthazmus and the 3 hounds).
Lyrie went down in the first action of the first round (critical hit from the rogue).
Orik went down pretty fast too.
The yeth hounds proved very hard to kill, what did most damage to them was the Sorceress using the Wand of Shocking Grasp from the Catacombs of Wrath.
The showdown between Shalelu and Bruthazmus should'be been epic, but I rolled complete crap for poor Shalelu, while I rolled awesomely for Bruthazmus, so the bugbear did a lot of damage before going down. Thankfully, though, Shalelu was revived just in time to give him the killing blow. ;)
My mom surprised me by being very merciless, she killed everyone, not taking any prisoner (even poor Orik who was about to throw down his weapon and surrender, and an unarmed, cowering goblin warchanter).
For Sneaky, about running Burnt Offerings again recently:
But I can give you the highlights of how it went. The circumstances were quite unusual and unexpected, as the person I played with was... my mother...
Thanks a lot Moonbeam!
I have a dark and sinister secret to reveal.
Hope it doesn't disappoint you, but...
If I'm preparing RotRL from one year and more now it is because I wanna master it for my parents... Like your mother they are really cool too and always loved fantasy books. They never played a real RPG (even if they are both so much addicted by online RPG like WOW and my dad played probably every fantasy computer game) but I'm sure they'll love it and I wanna make this experience unique even because I know this will be one of the last possibility to play together in our lives.
Then who knows I hope I'll have one day a possibility to play it with my two daughters and my wife... but they are still young... Zoe is 1.5 years old and Matilde.... yeah she is still inside my wife and we'll a fist possibility to know her only in March...
So this is probably a long term project but at the moment it's being very fanny to prepare a campaign in a so detailed way and trust me or not my next phase will be to play it alone one time like a sort of interactive book writing... for this experience, as I have already said, the main plot will be your story hour that I'm translating and integrating with some other wonderful ideas from messageboard posts and other campaign journal (JollyDoc one above the others).
So Moonbeam thank a lot for your efforts and before or later I'll find the time to read also your Savage Tide and LOF works (at the moment I'm playing in a ST campaign and I hope one day to have a possibility to play LOF so I'm waiting for it).
Regards
Sneaky
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Ah, that's cool!
Yeah, I hope that eventually you'll get the chance to play with your daughters as well. I personally don't have kids, but most of my friends do (ages 0-9), and I am really hoping that in a few years, we'll get the chance to play RPG's with this new generation! ;)
Now that was a great read! Many thanks. I set off this Wed. to start RotRL AP with a group of 6 friends. Should be a blast adn this reading will help tremendously.
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Sneaky translated this journal to Italian!!!
How incredible is this???
It can be found here.
I am speechless. Literally speechless. Good thing I'm typing on a keyboard at the moment.
This is absolutely amazing!
Sneaky, I am so flattered that you did this! Did you translate all of this yourself???
I noticed you even did the conversion of the PCs to Pathfinder RPG... Incredible!
It's so cool to read this text and only understand a couple words here and there and to see some familiar names.
Padre Zantus... haha... too cool :)
Someone even translated the goblin song!!!
Ciò è la cosa che più fredda abbia veduto in un tempo molto molto!!!
(OK, I used Babelfish to get this ;) )
Sneaky translated this journal to Italian!!!
I have already translated the first three books but I'm putting it online step by step because I'm integrating your story with some ideas found elsewhere and also because I wanna give it out step by step...
However I told you that I love your cronicles... this is the reason I'm very sorry I still cannot read Savage Tide because I'm playing it... and I'm waiting for new writings of course
However I told you that I love your cronicles... this is the reason I'm very sorry I still cannot read Savage Tide because I'm playing it... and I'm waiting for new writings of courseAh cool... Where are you at in the campaign?
Oh we are still at the beginning... Parrot Isle searching for some info on Vanthus Vanderboren...
All I can say is... wow... I just read your first journal (well, first entire adventure) for Burnt Offerings, and that was amazing!
So many ideas forming from reading it, I can't wait to run it. I have to modify it for 5 players, and for the current Pathfinder system, but I think it should be great.
I only hope when I run it this coming weekend it goes half as well! Thank you very much for this, I look forward to reading more as my game moves forward.
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All I can say is... wow... I just read your first journal (well, first entire adventure) for Burnt Offerings, and that was amazing!
So many ideas forming from reading it, I can't wait to run it. I have to modify it for 5 players, and for the current Pathfinder system, but I think it should be great.
I only hope when I run it this coming weekend it goes half as well! Thank you very much for this, I look forward to reading more as my game moves forward.
Great, thanks for taking the time to read this journal, it was written with a lot of love. ;)
I had a great time DM'ing Rise of the Runelords and it is a true pleasure for me to be able to share it with others.I hope your campaign goes well. :)
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Drithnar and Kerista were DM-PC's, which explains how their background meshes so well into the story. :)
I had a bit of trouble with the two actual PC's (Navan and Ruh), because my player was expecting that the campaign would be more about traveling through Varisia and exploring ancient ruins. I had to do a bit of arm-wrestling to keep him around Sandpoint as long as the campaign expects, and to return for books 4 and 5.
How it turned out in my game is that the PC's discovered Sandpoint and its history in-game, by talking to the villagers, rather than as something that was part of their background.
Hi Moonbeam
I just finished reading this wonderful log. The fun part about 'immortalizing' your stories on these boards, is that someone can enjoy them even after so many years. You did a great job on the story, again. Reading your great work only makes me a little sadder that you don't have the time anymore to write such extensive logs.
Still, congratulations on this excellent journal.
Rise of the Runelords was definitely one of the greatest campaigns I've ever played, and I'm glad to be able to read parts of this log every now and then, to reminisce. :)
It really showed when I was reading this campaign that you enjoyed it so much. I'm missing this enthusiasm in your current log a bit, although it might just be the fact that you keep a shorter journal that is more to the fact and therefore less emotional.
I was also wondering how you managed to keep such a detailed report of your fights. Did you write down every hit and miss during play to fit it into your journal? The fights were definitely one of the key elements which made your older journals come alive, almost as if I was there at the table experiencing the game.
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For sure, I was way more enthusiastic back then, in Rise of the Runelords and Savage Tide. Nowadays, unfortunately, the atmosphere is quite different. Navan/Ruh's player is kind of bored of adventure paths, and the other players aren't into as deep role-playing. Unfortunately, the less-fun Skull & Shackles log is also a sign that the games themselves are less fun than our games of a few years ago... unfortunately... How I wish I could go back in time and relive the excitement of those original 2 campaigns!
For the detailed reports of the fights, my player kept a few notes, which helped, but mostly, I went from memory. Typically, the day after the game, before writing the log, I would do a "brain dump" of everything I remembered about the game, then sort out this jumbled heap of thoughts into something coherent over the following hours/days.
I just read most of these (I plan to finish later, of course. I'm at the giant assault on Xin-Shalast now) over the past couple of days, and I am amazed. I love to DM, and I can only hope that my games (of usually five or six players, quite typical, of course) can reach this level of detail and story. I applaud you and your player.
Also:
he giant army proudly advanced along the valley. Grim stone giant hunters from the Iron Peaks, savage frost giant barbarians from the icy rifts, noble cloud giants from their citadels in the clouds, and mighty storm giants from the highest peaks of the Kodar Mountains marched toward the city of Xin-Shalast. They were the last of their kind: all others had already been captured by the dreaded rune giants, minions of the terrible Runelord Karzoug, the hated human who had enslaved their ancestors in the time before the great darkness.
...A last alliance of men, and elves, marched against the armies of Mordor.
So much LoTR. So much.
Anyway, congrats :D