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Is Rise of the Runelords a good pathfinder series for a new group to run/go thru? Is it have any problems for a new GM?
With no one to help, what is the best 'path' that a new GM should take to learn the pathfinder system and teach his group the system? Currently we are running combat scrimmages to learn the combat rules, but there are a TON of feats and a TON of spells to know. Also a TON or monsters and a LOT of additional rules. I like all the crunch and it seems to fit together nicely, but to remember all the available options is quite the challenge!
Rise of the Runelords is awesome, but it is a 3.5 adventure, not a Pathfinder RPG adventure. This means that, while it is set in the Pathfinder setting, it doesn't use all the updated rules. You have to update some of it yourself...it's not hard, but not ideal for a group trying to LEARN Pathfinder.
I would imagine that one of the newer Adventure Paths is a much better fit. They all have pretty good reputations as far as I know. Paizo puts out some awesome product.
Rise of the Runelords was published under the old 3.5 rules. So it depends...if you think you'll learn the new Pathfinder system by updating the older APs than yes it would be...if you think updating would not help you than probably one of the newer APs would suit your needs better.
As to which one I can't help you there.
If it's for learning to get to grips with pathfinder, then rise of the runelords won't be any good because it's set for 3.5 and not pathfinder rules.
Council of Theives has shakey pathfinder rules, but everything after that is converted to pathfinder.
From what I've heard Kingmaker is difficult to run as you are basically running a sandbox RPG so not all the chapters will be coherent and straight forward so it will be quite a difficult AP to pick up (from what I've heard, I'm waiting for someone to run it :p)
Pick any of the others after Kingmaker as they will be straight foward and apply to pathfinder rules so Serpant's Skull and Carrion Crown might be best to go with, however there are guides on here if you look in the AP section about conversions and suggestions what to do in one of these campaigns where help is needed.
Rise of the Runelords is awesome, but it is a 3.5 adventure, not a Pathfinder RPG adventure. This means that, while it is set in the Pathfinder setting, it doesn't use all the updated rules. You have to update some of it yourself...it's not hard, but not ideal for a group trying to LEARN Pathfinder.
I would imagine that one of the newer Adventure Paths is a much better fit. They all have pretty good reputations as far as I know. Paizo puts out some awesome product.
Is there an update guide for this?
I believe most updated stats are available here:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/fan-conversions/paizo-adventure-paths
Are you a new GM to Pathfinder, or a new GM to RPGs?
If you are only new to Pathfinder, then Rise should not be too difficult for you. Just use the link Lithrac posted above and you're good to go.
However, if you're a new GM in general then I want to discourage you from Rise. It has a lot of internal inconsistances (book 3), difficult to run scenarios (books 2&5), and places that need your extensive input to fill stuff out (book 6). An experienced GM can overcome these issues. A newbie (or honestly, even moderately-skilled) GM would be daunted trying to fix the various holes in the writing. It is not newbie friendly.
Perhaps consider Curse of the Crimson Throne, or Legacy of Fire. Both are 3.5, yes, but they have been converted, and have much cleaner writing and story-arcs than Rise. If you must go full-Pathfinder, the easiest to run one would probably be Serpent's Skull, but I don't care for it personally.
Hi there, I'm new here on the messageboards altough I already invested 400 euros in Pathfinder material. I just got the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition and in I'm reading to make sure what I'm going to get my players into.
Now the question:
In page 39 it says that if the players destroy the minor runewell they receive extra XP... which seems fine but.... how do the characters know how to destroy the minor runewell? In the page 424+425 it tells the GM how to do that but how can I inform the players about that possibility.
Of course I can be blunt and simply say how to do it... but in roleplay terms, how do the characters know?
I'm guessing they may notice the water glow diminish when Erylium creates a Sinspawn but normally I wouldn't be going around spewing blood into magical fountains in hope that it would destroy itself...
Thanks in advance.
Just make them role a perception check. If they get high enough, explain that the glow seems to be diminishing. Let them figure the rest out. It is EXTRA xp after all.
Just make them role a perception check. If they get high enough, explain that the glow seems to be diminishing. Let them figure the rest out. It is EXTRA xp after all.
Yes but why should the characters think that it "can be destroyed"?
I guess I'm making a storm in a waterglass but I don't think anyone would destroy the minor runewell (after all they don't even know what the fountain is) unless they were specifically told that through some parchment or out-ligned clue.Won't matter much anyway... I'm already at page 57 and the book says that the PCs can time their infiltration in Thistletop to coincide with Nualia's ceremonies... even though the PCs have no possible way to discover that on their own. I guess I must prepare myself to fill allot of the gaps.
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Hey warbec,
remember that the role of a written adventure is to prepare the GMs who bought it, so that they could run it. The adventure might have a lot of information that would never come up during the actual game - for example, in the runewell, if your players are not specificaly looking for ways to destory the runewell, there's no reason that they should have knowledge how to do so. Even so, the book provides the information to you, the GM, so that you'll know how to react to unpredictable actions by the players. Imagine what would happen if the book never told you how to destory the runewell, and the players decided to visit a sage in Magnimar and ask for knowledge of how to destroy it- you wouldn't know what to do if it wasn't written there!
same goes for the infltration of Thiseltop - maybe the PCs do something interesting, like capture a goblin and question it, or investigate Nualia's background, so the information is there for YOU, but if the players don't bother to look for it, then it shouldn't be obvious to them.
Pathfinder is not a video game, so it's more open to options. It's fine if the PCs don't look into destorying the runewell. It's fine if they just charge into Thiseltop - it's thier games, and their descision if they want to investigate something or not.
I get what you mean Lord Snow. I just expected that the adventure path was made in a way where the information the PCs need was already displayed into the storyline/clues/parchment/evidence/etc. I'm not complaining though... the campaign that I'm running is a homebrew sandbox so I'm used to do stuff on the fly.
Later in the last page of that adventure I found out they can investigate Nualia's dairies and there is supposed to be explained how to destroy the runewell, so I suppose the PCs can always go back into the Catacumbs of Wrath.
Sorry for the weird questions and thanks :)
Warbec: Be sure to check out the "Rise of the Runelords" forum for LOTS more information & feedback on this AP.
Warbec: Be sure to check out the "Rise of the Runelords" forum for LOTS more information & feedback on this AP.
Yeah thanks mate. I had no idea where that was located some hours ago and saw the title of this post somewhere and thought it was the one I needed :)
Destroying the Runewell is nearly impossible until a point in time when the XPs they get would make it... pointless. What I believe the XPs are for is rendering it inactive by summoning sinspawn.
Destroying the Runewell is nearly impossible until a point in time when the XPs they get would make it... pointless. What I believe the XPs are for is rendering it inactive by summoning sinspawn.
Yes the XP is only to render it inactive making it impossible to regenerate charges.
In page 424/425 it tells you how to destroy the Minor Runewell.You just need to spend the remaining charges (by creating Sinspawn), then fill it with Holy Water and set to boil for 24 hours.
Did you measure the cubic footage of the Runewell?
I estimated the cost to be over 100,000 gp to permanently destroy it.
The players didn't have that at 3rd level. They suggested a town tax. The Scarnetti family recommended blowing the ceiling and causing a small cave-in as that would be far less expensive. ;)
Seeing the well is the catalyst for a future chapter of the AP, that works fine. :)
Did you measure the cubic footage of the Runewell?
I estimated the cost to be over 100,000 gp to permanently destroy it.
The players didn't have that at 3rd level. They suggested a town tax. The Scarnetti family recommended blowing the ceiling and causing a small cave-in as that would be far less expensive. ;)
Seeing the well is the catalyst for a future chapter of the AP, that works fine. :)
I was guessing the Clerics in Sandpoint would be eager to bless all that water into holy water and set it to boil (even to the point they would pay for the pounds of powdered silver for it) once they knew how to prevent such a thing. Whatever... I haven't read past the 70th page anyway... so I don't know what happens way after.
You've not looked at the material component for Holy Water, I take it?
It's 25 gold pieces (5 pounds) of powdered silver to create 1 pint of holy water. Temples sell it without making a profit.
I've retconned that to be powdered herbs and incenses as otherwise you'll be having silver become a rare metal rather quickly. And you'll be needing over 100 gallons of holy water to fill a pool that is a 10x10x10 foot equilateral triangle that's three feet deep.
Don't forget. This is a minor artifact. Destroying it permanently should not be easy. Or inexpensive.
You've not looked at the material component for Holy Water, I take it?
It's 25 gold pieces (5 pounds) of powdered silver to create 1 pint of holy water. Temples sell it without making a profit.
I've retconned that to be powdered herbs and incenses as otherwise you'll be having silver become a rare metal rather quickly. And you'll be needing over 100 gallons of holy water to fill a pool that is a 10x10x10 foot equilateral triangle that's three feet deep.
Don't forget. This is a minor artifact. Destroying it permanently should not be easy. Or inexpensive.
Yes I did in fact.
Hence why I wrote: "I was guessing the Clerics in Sandpoint would be eager to bless all that water into holy water and set it to boil (even to the point they would pay for the pounds of powdered silver for it) once they knew how to prevent such a thing."If I had not look it up... I would simply say the party's Cleric would spend the whole month using BLESS WATER. But since there is a cost associated... the good aligned church would be glad to rid the world at their own costs... after all it meant saving possibly an entire region.
This is a town. This isn't a city like Magnimar. If they took every last ounce of wealth from every citizen they'd maybe have enough money to buy that much silver... and who's to say shipments of over a TON of silver wouldn't get stolen in-transit?
Hell, if word came out that that much silver was being acquired by a little town... then I could see a military expedition by Chelix or an attack by several evil adventuring groups to try and acquire whatever that silver is needed for would occur.
BTW, here's a more precise amount: 194,350 gold pieces required for the amount of holy water required. The amount of time needed to convert all that silver into holy water is... significant. As in, you need 7774 castings of Bless Water. Each cleric may have three or four 1st level spell slots available to do this... but there's only what, five or six clerics in Sandpoint? So let's say there's six clerics and on average they have three 1st level spell slots available (because 1st level clerics would have 1-2 available, and higher-level clerics more).
It would take over a year to create enough holy water for this endeavor.
What that, you say? Make Wands of Holy Water? Well then! You just upped the price of this. Yes, the Wands would increase the efficiency of the casting... and costs 2K each (for 50 castings). It takes two days to create each individual wand. So now it'll only be a little over 300 days to create the 156 wands needed for this endeavor and you also just upped the cost to 312,000 gold pieces! And that's assuming someone is working for COST.
So... does a PC do this? What do his buddies do while he's busy making wands? And while they're busy making wands to destroy this well (and we'll assume they killed Nualia first), you suddenly have these murders happen... and an invasion of giants and a dragon... let's hope the other adventurers didn't decide to babysit this cleric as he or she makes all these wands to do this desperately-needed deed.
Meanwhile, the Scarnettis, not wanting to be bankrupted, would say "blow the chamber so the ceiling collapses on the well. No one can get in to use it" and vola! For maybe 1,000 gp of blasting powder you just fixed the problem. For now. ;)
Dude... chill out mate.
We don't need to be all hardcore for every single bit of information.
We don't need extensive math or the full knowledge of every single rule or every single Faction and how it would work.
This is a game, we're supposed to have fun and some suspense of disbelief to make a fantasy game work.
I'm guessing this turned some posts ago from a friendly discussion into a bunch of replies "blow one's own horn and show you have allot of" knowledge of the rules... or the factions... or the campaign setting (or even math). Yeah you been around for a long time and did your research... I get it. Kudos for you.
I started playing RPGs 6 months ago with a Pathfinder Society event at my local town and fell in love with the game because it was a bit more relaxed than what I was expecting. It might have been the GM or simply the flow of what we wanted to do. He didn't had full cover of the rules and only had the Core Rulebook with him and some notes. So far all the events with different GM were more like the same and some things I wanted to do had no rules to apply.
Some NPCs in the NPC Codex (not entirely sure right now.... could be on one Bestiary or some random encounter in one of the Adventure paths) run around with 2500 gp in their pockets... and they don't have any bag of holding with their gear. How am I supposed to believe that? I wouldn't. I shut my eyes at that because after all the weapons/armor/gear they have, they wouldn't be able to carry that much gold with them, weight-wise and space-wise.
In my own group the party decided to pick up the dungeon in the Beginner Box and use it as their own Lair. How am I supposed to rule that out? I couldn't... not until Ultimate Campaign comes out at least. So the group agrees on some rules... done. Eventually if I run Rise of the Runelords with my group I could simply make a side-quest that a makes the party go to Magnimar and escort a badass-super-sayan-Cleric that could bless a larger mass of water and put there around 10,000 silver pieces. Or simply some distant hermit living in the abandoned capital of a fallen empire.
We're here to roll some dice and have some fun... and although many players would like to adhere to strict rules about everything in a game... I think that stopping the game every 10 minutes to do 5 minutes of research about the rules... it would ruin it for me. Especially when nowadays is harder to find a group of people that can fit a 3h or 4h block of their time into everyone's free time slots. Spending time from those blocks in research is not as fun as bashing that Orc in the skull (altough we haven't found Orcs yet... rather the party spends most of their time in the tavern plotting their schemes and trying to hit up with the barmaid... which will end badly for them) :)
I guess this is why I rather stay off forums because everything seems always to escalate into a competition to see who's right or knows more.
I don't even know why I hanged around in this thread, since the question I had has nothing to do how to destroy the runewell but rather how do the PCs know it can be destroyed at that point in time.
If you felt somewhat offended by me in this thread in any means I apologize, that's not my intention at all.
It's a minor artifact. It's not supposed to be easy to destroy permanently... and in fact plays a role later on in the game, thus destroying it prior to that event can be problematic. I researched the amount of holy water because my group WANTED to destroy it... and thus I wanted to determine what the group would have to do to do so. And then found out why it's a bad idea for the module.
Having a high price tag to destroy it is meant to let the players know they might not be able to just nuke it. Especially not at a lower level.
Price tag can mean multiple things. For instance, you have an artifact that can only be destroyed by feeding it to a blinded angel who doesn't know what it is eating. The act of eating this artifact could kill the angel. Destroying the artifact isn't a bad deed... but killing an angel is. And even if the angel would willingly sacrifice itself for the greater good doesn't mean that lying to the angel and making it eat the artifact is a good act. In fact, it could be considered evil and result in an alignment shift... or for a Paladin, the loss of his paladinhood.
Thus the price-tag for that is a fall from grace... and the death of an angel (possibly). That doesn't have a monetary value... but is still a price that must be paid.