Hi, folks!
I've been asked to run an adventure or two for my play-by-post group to introduce them to Pathfinder, and while I love the idea of doing this, I was hoping to save myself a lot of time by running a pre-published adventure. Plus, I feel that a Paizo-quality adventure will give PF what it deserves in terms of quality.
Asking around, someone recommended Tower of the Last Baron (LB1). Reading through it, it looks like a fun, fast-moving adventure with a lot of variety... until the party enters the castle. The castle is full of rooms with guards, guards, guards, and more guards. Some are regular guards, some are guard sargeants, and some are Chelaxian Elite guards. If the party stealths their way to the more interesting parts of the castle, that's fine. But if they don't bother with stealth or in the likely event that they'll be detected before they reach the end, then they're in for a slog of repetitive fights.
Maybe I'm just not recognizing that a 5th-level party will mow right through all of those fights, but fights take a lot longer in a PBP, so I don't want the players getting bored and having that affect their first impression of PF.
Now, I'm more than prepared to beef up the guards and lower their numbers, but I also want to explore my options. What other adventures out there would do well in a PBP style of play and would also serve as a good intro to PF? Some of the guidelines I think apply are:
As I said above, I'm not afraid of fiddling with an adventure to make it fit a PBP style better, but I also want to make sure I'm looking at all of the promising candidates.
Thanks in advance for any help!
I've been asked to run an adventure or two for my play-by-post group to introduce them to Pathfinder, and while I love the idea of doing this, I was hoping to save myself a lot of time by running a pre-published adventure....What...adventures out there would do well in a PBP style of play and would also serve as a good intro to PF?
I may be biased as the author of Realm of the Fellnight Queen, but I'll go ahead and suggest you look into it as one possibility. It meets the following criteria, you've identified:
- 4th to 8th level adventure
It's for 7th level PCs...who should reach 8th level before the big showdown at the end.
- A variety of encounters (skill checks, social encounters, head-to-head fights)
I specifically tried to make sure it had a variety of mixed encounter types. There's roleplaying encounters, some skill check challenges, a handful of single-boss combat encounters, and a handful of weak minion group combat encounters. So, there's a little bit of everything in there.
- Stronger enemies rather than a lot of little fights. (Because fights can drag down a PBP game, it's better to pack more of the challenge into fewer enemies.)
I've got quite a lot of experience in PbP games, so I completely understand where you're coming from regarding long fights and how they can bog things down. There's a few instances in Fellnight Queen where there are small groups of creatures to fight. But there are also several unique single-boss fights, including:
- A distraught, drunken treant...who they may fight initially, but also calm down so they can talk with him and gain information, as well.
- A possessed druid...who they may fight to subdue and free him from the malevolent will-o'wisp inside him, thereby saving one of the forest's greatest protectors and gaining a powerful ally against the Fellnight Queen.
- A bleachling gnome druid...who has some bee swarm allies, but even he can be turned against the Fellnight Queen if the PCs manage to slay the bees and succeed at some Diplomacy checks.
- The big-boss fight against the Fellnight Queen herself is a standalone battle. Granted, she can use summoning spells to bring in some allies, but it's a pretty tough tactical battle regardless.
- It would be a nice bonus if the adventure had both a wilderness and a somewhat urban element.
The adventure starts out in a small frontier town where there's a wedding going on (i.e., roleplaying encounters). The wedding gets crashed (i.e., combat encounter). And then, the action moves into the nearby forest as the PCs go to find out what's causing a terrible mist to wall off the town...and to oppose the evil fey that attacked them.
- It's a nice, short adventure. The adventure being part of a series is fine, so long as it is somewhat self-contained.
Completely self-contained...32-page module. There's a lot jam-packed into it. But I think you may find it a lot of fun.
If you're looking for something even shorter, I might also recommend Hollow's Last Hope. It's only a 16-page adventure. It pre-dates the Pathfinder rules, though. But I don't think you'd have any trouble converting it.
My two-cents,
--Neil
Thanks, NSpicer! I'll definitely check your adventure out.
I'd still love to hear other suggestions, though.
My two cents:
The only type of module I wouldn't recommend is a big, sprawling dungeon crawl (for instance, the first Shackled City adventure Life's Bazaar). But otherwise any module should be fine as long as you "collapse" the encounters a bit (e.g. tweak it so that there are a few large battles instead of many small battles).
Hangman's Noose would be my recommendation (though it's for low level characters if that's an issue - the story is eminently scalable).
Seconded. The RP challenges are much easier to meet on PbP.
Thanks, guys. I'll check all of those out.