1) I'm running LoF Pathfinderized, and I'm glad to have the stuff in Archives of Nethys as a resource for that. It's good to know that, as a baseline, there is a fairly faithful Pathfinder conversion of all the stat blocks available to me.
However, in places I'm wanting a conversion that's less exactly faithful and more along the lines of rebuilding the NPCs in question along similar concepts with Pathfinder rules. For example, take Khair al Din. In the JP stickied thread, James mentions that he was built as a fighter/cleric to differentiate him from all the other clerics of Rovagug in the AP. As written, I don't feel like he gets a whole lot of value out of his fighter levels. If I were to rebuild him from scratch in Pathfinder, I think I might try something like building him as a Battle Oracle -- now he's something different from all the clerics, he's using Pathfinder material, and he's probably tougher and more interesting to fight to boot.
Has anyone done conversions along these lines and posted them thus far? If not, I might gather and post mine as I go.
2) I'm a fairly long way still from running Jackal's Price; I gave it a good solid read ahead of schedule this week because I wanted to make sure one of the backstories of my PCs doesn't conflict with it. I'm curious about a few of the NPCs and hoping maybe people who have run it already or understand something I don't can fill me in.
The Captain: he's presented as someone tough that the PCs might well be making a mistake to antagonize. In the sense that he has something that could be helpful to them that they'd miss by attacking him, I get that part, but I feel like the mod author also thought he'd be a combat force and I don't get how that's true. Granted, he's got great fast healing, but it seems like there's not much change his sneak attack dice will become relevant and, lacking them, he doesn't seem all that scary. It might take my PCs a while to gang him down, but I don't think they'd really struggle to do so.
Father Jackal: I have a similar fear about his rogueishness -- at this level, I don't see his sleep gaze getting very far and I assume animals coming out of a bag of tricks could be ganged into the next plane of existance faster than he can pull them, much less flank with them to make his rogue levels worth something. I love jackalweres as villians but I think their abilities really struggle to be relevant at this level of play, even with class levels.
(Unfortunately, back in the LG era, one of my LoF players co-authored an interactive with me wherein the main villain was a jackalwere and we tried to bait the PCs into thinking he was a lycanthrope and coming at him with silver weapons instead of cold iron. I don't think I'll be able to pull that trick on him with FJ.)
Father Jackal in general doesn't feel to me like a guy who's scary enough to be the head of a shady Katapeshi guild -- he's essentially an 8th level guy taking on a party of 8th level guys. Is fighting him as written as much of an anti-climax as I fear?
If the party manages to sneak into the inner sanctum, then FJ may well be a pushover. IMC, the druid changed to a tiger, grappled FJ in the surprise round, and he never got loose (though I forgot the sleep gaze). The Seed came to help, but a Web spell kept it out of combat a good long time.
I didn't mention care for the Captain. I changed him to a contract devil (Phisto-something, from Curse of the Crimson Throne). He wasn't intended to be a fight for the party though.
I think the challenge of the warehouse is more of - can the party keep surprise? Can they get through all of the fights to FJ without having to go rest first? While FJ might look a bit weak, the party is hopefully beat up a bit by the time they get there.
I think the challenge of the warehouse is more of - can the party keep surprise? Can they get through all of the fights to FJ without having to go rest first? While FJ might look a bit weak, the party is hopefully beat up a bit by the time they get there.
Thanks for pointing that out -- that angle was lost on me in my first pass through, and in absense of it I was just left thinking that Xulthos or Garthok might even be able to beat up FJ and take his lunch money, much less a party that had beat them some levels later.
The stealth / surprise / time pressure angle does maybe change it a bit.