Hey guys, this is my first post on the Paizo forums. I came here looking for help with the Carrion Crown Adventure Path, specifically the Ascanor Lodge portion of the Broken Moon campaign. Up to now in the campaign, it's been pretty hack-and-slash for my party (though I've managed to convey the terror in Harrowstone quite well), but up until now, the PCs have always had a "safe" place to retreat to. Ravengro or Lepidstadt. Ascanor clearly doesn't have any of the facilities a town might have, and no way for the PCs to, for example, remove a curse (lycanthropy) if they don't have the required spell (wand, scroll, etc). I want to emphasize this isolation from the outside world while they are in Sudderwood (and, later, Feldgrau), but I also want to bring to the forefront the roleplaying aspect of the game.
The reason why I've been trying to stick to mostly combat to entertain the party so far is partly due to the nature of my players and group (I have 7 players in the group, of which only 1 is a 3.5 vet, 1 has a broad range of RP experience, but no d20 experience, and the other 5 are pretty much green, with this being the first experience pen-and-papering for 4 of them), and partly due to my inexperience with heavy-roleplay campaigns. I tend to sum up conversations rather than playing them out word for word, which is something I want to change. I feel like Ascanor gives me a perfect opportunity for this. Also, I felt rather daunted when I read all the characters, each with their motivations and quirks.
Essentially, the advice I'm looking for is how to transition from a more general roleplaying (summing up conversations, fast-tracking to get the the combat, etc), to a highly detailed intrigue scenario as is presented in Broken Moon. I've already decided to make a short list of notes on each character (motivation, general disposition, appearance, etc). I want Ascanor to be my new players first true experience FLESHING a character out, as most of them now are just race/class/alignment combos (and most of them choose CN as an alignment, since they think of it as a blanket "do anything you want" alignment). I want to involve all of them, maybe in seperate subplots (maybe one starts trying to pursue Madame Ivanja romantically), and do it in a way that grabs their attention and makes them think about their character's personality, rather than simply how much damage their greataxe does. To this I turn to you stellar folks. I need advice on how to engage my players to roleplay, how to avoid missteps, and how to ensure I present a vivid picture of the people staying at Ascanor.
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Hello Drake! I'm wondering how I'm going to run Broken Moon's more social side myself. I've also got a group of mostly hack-and-slashers, and I plan on telling them right off that they'll have a better time if they use words instead of swords.
I also plan on drawing up notecards and printing out pictures for each of the major NPCs (with one notecard and maybe some Dragon magazine stock photos for the minor NPCs). Notecards will include names, motivations, backround, vocal tics, and maybe topics they can engage the PCs in.
Most importantly, if you need to change anything about the NPCs during the adventure, feel free to. What's written down may not work for your players, so feel free to change it to something that does.
My group likes to mix up role playing and fighting, but I wasn't able to get the group into this section for role playing very well. I stole some Duriston ideas from Ice titan's campaign notes. Playing Duriston as an incompetent fool and the main huntsman grumbling under his breathe about what an idiot he was worked well for my group. The rest of the lodge they didn't interact with very much which was a bit disappointing because i really fleshed out all there personalities ahead of time.
They pretty much figured out the the head lodge man was the bad guy fast. The confronted very quickly and I actually through Role playing talked my way out of the party just killing him on the spot and they let him go.
We blew through this part of the adventure really fast because I couldn't get my group into the role playing in this section and they seemed to be getting bored.
Looking back at it I think if I played up the werewolf threat more and made the party believe that groups of werewolf's could attack the lodge at any time would have added to the sense of doom. Maybe even a real attack on the lodge by a large group of WW and then they back away after killing a lodge person as the threat to stay out of werewolf business. I could then have the party choose which of the NPC's they wanted to rush and protect. The threat by the 2 WW's at night with Duriston didn't really scare my party even when I made it 3 WW's and the sounds of a bunch more nearby, what happened was the party attacked them and slaughtered them so they took it as not a threat and no big deal.