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K, so I'm mulling over more information on Fueha-Re, and information (new to you, relatively old to me) on Vesk Armillas, being a primary focus on not only this silly AP idea I've got, but Akiton in general. I hope by inference some of the feel of Akiton can be scooped up in Fueha-Re, and what even the baser aspects of its society oppose in the form of Vesk Armillas.
This is not to say that Akiton's chock-a-block full of NE critters. Just that some part of Akiton died with her, and Vesk represents what happens if what's decent and good on Akiton dies as well.
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Alright. Thought experiment. I'd prefer to have Gent (too close to Galt, or do we let it slide?) be where Rahmpasha's located, and vice-versa. I like Gent for the place ripe for revolution, and the hierarchy basically being exiled (or self-exiled) Azlanti with Shobhad bodyguards. Sounds like late-era Rome, and that's the feel I want to go for.
Other ideas have gotta wait for me to get my grubby fingers on certain books, but I can mull things 'til then.
:-) How so?
==> Address N'wah's awesome thread
Totally running a game on Akiton now. With akatas. And guns. Because my favorite things. Thank you very much for the inspiration and material. :3
Also can I call you Jack N'wah?
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Wow, I can't even respond without making it look like a text block, can I? :P
Thanael
I'm still flipping through the PDF, which I do at a much slower rate; I'm old-school and prefer a physical copy for most material, though I like PDFs for easy copy/paste of information and as a digital reference when the laptop's working. So I'm kinda scanning it for details, and I noticed they did some major reworking of some of the kingdom dynamics, and I think the community rules, too. If the workings of the Community stat block have changed I'll have to update the ones I've made to accurately represent those changes.
Other than that, most of the changes would be to how I'd do the AP concept (I hate to admit it, but I might just end up barfing up a whole AP on here, given time, and only 70% of the text will be silly internet slang, d00dz), and working in my mind as to how this'd affect my Kingmaker game, should we get that up and running again. The latter only affects y'all in that some portion of my brain meats will be dedicated to it, using up some of the bandwidth normally reserved for Akiton-thoughts.
gracefulArmageddon
Please do! I want updates. I'd love to hear how your PCs are gunning down the alien akata menace. I love akatas too, and I want one as a pet. There's some room to make them more dangerous with additional HD and templates, but I'd still love some, like, akata brood mother or something that's all big and scary.
And you fill my heart with pride to hear I've inspired you and your campaign. There's so much Akiton goodness to play with, and I hope you find plenty of little plastic shovels and pastel buckets in this thread to make this sandbox into a thriving kingdom. :D
And call me what you like. I've been called worse. :D
BRIEF ASIDE: I've been referring to Ultimate Campaign as Golarions of Golarion since well before it came out. I think I may have started when talking about the kingdom rules when Kingmaker first came out, and when I found out there was gonna be a big book on all these weird little game rules widgets they've been making I took it as a sign of my absolute genius and kept using my name for it. So if I slip up sometime and call the book Golarions of Golarion, well now you know why.
Weeeeell. >actually meant that I'm GOING to. But. But. but but. I will keep you updated. *omgomgomgomg someone actually responded to my madness*
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Thoughts Simmering on the Akiton Glasstop Stove at the Moment
I Dream Only of the Nightbreed: Vampires on Akiton
Three Moons or None?: Akiton's lunar bodies, or lack thereof
Our Robots is Like Smart Clockworks: Overall Akitoni technology level, appearance of said tech, and how it affects life on the Red Planet
Them Lands Ain't Right: The Glowlands
Fueha-Re, The Fallen: She's my favorite, brah
Red Sands: Work-in-Progress title for Akiton AP
Woo.
Sadly my idea is still only in the brainstorming phase.
I'm trying to decide whether akata meteors appearing would be a fairly normal phenomenon. And.. going back through your thread trying to decide where, say, a merchant ship from Verces would be headed to, and thus where the PCs should be found, initially.
butishouldbuggeroffthisisyourthread
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Akata meteors would be fairly rare, considering the amount of meteoric activity overall. However, I say the meteors for this campaign are as frequent as you need them. Distant Worlds has them coming from the Diaspora, which isn't where I'd have them come from (it means either they developed on the planet normally, which doesn't seem to jive with the weird natives from there, or they formed there post-Diaspora, which seems odd but mildly possible, or the akatas in Golarion's solar system came from somewhere else then landed on the rocks of the Diaspora, which feels workable if they're all still in cocoon form), but its canon, so there you go. Anyway, the Diaspora's not too far from Akiton in a solar system way, and a significant batch of meteorites could end up heading to poor Akiton PDQ. A series of strikes near your starting location, with a bigger one coming, could set up akata waves, and add that big-ass brood mother (or whatever you want to call your high-CR akata monster encounter) to the mix.
The question that'd be key to whether it's a long-term or short-term campaign arc is: is it a natural event, or did someone- or some thing- call them down? An Eoxian bone-sage might want to use akatas as a planetary cleaning crew to make way for his/her own planet-full of vile experiments. Maybe a tech-priest experiment went horribly awry, and they're trying to cover up their involvement in the mess. An apocalyptic cult may have called them down to bring about their goofy end times. There's a lot of room to go with this.
Vercite Merchants: As I've been molding the concepts for Akiton, the Vercites look like they're mostly vessels full of ore and mining materials going back and forth between Vercite holdings and Verces itself. Some might carry materials for trade, which the Vercite holdings dole out from their assorted domains. The initial contact, made a thousand years ago, went to pretty much every major city-state on the planet at that time, but they have on-planet envoys for that stuff now.
What exactly do you have planned for the Vercite trading vessel? If you have some specific thoughts on why it needs to be somewhere, I can work with that no prob.
Whether it's long-term or not depends on how well the players take to it. If it goes over well, I might have it go on longer, so the possibility of the meteors in this case being a wholly unnatural phenomenon can be explored. May lead to some extraterrestrial adventuring.
As for the ship, I haven't gone so far as to think much about that. I had considered the possibility of more.. illicit goods being smuggled with whatever was in with the normal cargo, for even more adventure hooks, but I hadn't really thought about it. edit: though the more I think about it the more I think I'll drop that particular idea.
Basically, the party will be hired by a mysterious and apparently wealthy client to investigate the crashed Vercite ship and recover what they can of the cargo. The first part of the game will mostly be used to emphasize the dangerous nature of Akiton in my mind. The ship will have been brought down in a rather serious accident involving the aforementioned meteors, and upon reaching it, the game will turn into a horror show as akata, advanced to match the power of the PCs, infest the wreck, and start to prey on the salvage crew and the PCs themselves.
Assuming they survive the onslaught and possibly even clear the wreck of the monsters, they can then complete their mission of recovering the cargo, and if all goes over well, the campaign can continue in whatever direction I decide on from there.
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This is good stuff. And the wrecked Vercite ship lets you control the level of tech/magic/other goodies they find, with anything too valuable being written off as lost when a chunk of space rock ripped out that part of the hull.
Leaving the meteor explanation until the final reveal lets you decide its origin (and how far that extends) after gauging the PC's response to Akiton adventures.
There's always the possibility of illegal stuff being smuggled via Akiton. I haven't written on that since Verces is more advanced technologically (and in most ways magically) than Akiton, so what in the world would they want? Boom-sticks and Elysian bronze swords?
But using Akiton (and especially the more nefarious/uncaring/exploitative mining holdings) as a place to set up arms deals or trades in expensive goods is not a bad idea. Sure, it takes some time for parties to fly over with their goods, seal the deal, and fly back, but most of Akiton is lawless wilderness, and unlike other mostly empty planets, lacks threats like bone-sages, deadly temperatures, or unbreathable air. A muti-day or multi-week (dunno how fast aetherships travel, but its probably not FTL) trek to Akiton seems reasonable when profits from the deals could be very lucrative.
Your mysterious and wealthy client can easily be a witchwyrd, BTW. It's canon that some of them are still doing business on Akiton, their old homeworld.
And if you start off with 1st-level PCs, it won't take too many encounters to show that Akiton's deadly. Even 3rd or 4th-level PCs will find shobhad raiding bands, insane robots, and giant sand worms to be a terrifying ordeal, and smaller threats like packs of feral thooks or small bands of lizardfolk and Ysoki can be minor pains in the butt. A crashed Vercite vessel may still have some ship defenses working (from simple stuff like magnetic doorlocks to robot security to the terrifying still-functional laser turret), and the akatas awakening from impact within the ship is so Aliens it hurts. Especially if the aforementioned challenges make escape difficult.
I could see some akatas being pumped up to maybe CR 5 and still be believable without also feeling like one-trick ponies, but I'd prolly aim for 1st or 2nd-level PCs, get 'em halfway to their next level, let 'em get to the next level before the akatas show, then swarm 'em. Tougher akatas for later meteorites and such.
I was more or less settled on the witchwyrd. ;3
I think I'll have them start at 2nd level so I don't have to modify the monsters too much.
I think the trickiest part for me is going to be mapping the wreck, but on the whole, this shouldn't be too bad.
What I'm really wondering about now is how big the ship should be.. But I have plenty of time to figure this out.
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Here's what I'm gonna say, RE: acceptable crashed ship size: Make two levels about the general size of a Paizo Flip-Mat (24" x 30"). One's the surface deck (the uppermost level to survive the crash mostly intact), and one's the next deck down (make this the hold, and it's buried underground post-crash), with a passage via partially-embedded meteor. The akatas won't crawl out 'til the PCs have explored most of the lower deck, and their only way out is through the akatas.
I'll see if I can make a quick and dirty map on paper for you if you need ideas. Art computer's down 'til this weekend, at least.
That might be nice, I'm absolutely horrid at any sort of art.
You are like, ten different kinds of bro.
I can assure you you're much more awesome than that. Thank you. So much. :3
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While I mull, here's some free Christopher West Sci-Fi maps to look at. You can take most any of the spaaceships (minus the Millenium Facon, for obvious reasons), mash the front end, and call it good.
Might I recommend the Wayfarer-Class transport, with the side storage bay buried below but only accessible by a passage between it and the ship's main body? PCs enter via the smashed cockpit, travel through the busted ship, and finally reach the carved tunnel from when the main body and the storage area separated, then grab loot only to be jumped on my akatas with food on their mind.
With some appropriate (CR 1-3) encounters in-between, and keeping the cool stuff in the buried storage bay, it should keep the PCs on track.
My H4x0r skills are quite lacking, but I'll see what I can do with this.
ctrl-printscreen is a wonderful tool.
However, I lack the art skills to make it useful from there.
Meh. If you would be so inclined as to help out that would be brilliant, but it's not necessary.
(also, judging from the shadows on the floor of the ship, those are z-95 headhunters, not x-wings. ;3)
While I mull, here's some free Christopher West Sci-Fi maps to look at. You can take most any of the spaaceships (minus the Millenium Facon, for obvious reasons), mash the front end, and call it good.
Might I recommend the Wayfarer-Class transport, with the side storage bay buried below but only accessible by a passage between it and the ship's main body? PCs enter via the smashed cockpit, travel through the busted ship, and finally reach the carved tunnel from when the main body and the storage area separated, then grab loot only to be jumped on my akatas with food on their mind.
With some appropriate (CR 1-3) encounters in-between, and keeping the cool stuff in the buried storage bay, it should keep the PCs on track.
Fantastic link! Thanks N'wah. Wayfarer is a great choice for the crashed starship...
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I LOVE his Star Wars maps. The Wayfarer design was supposed to be modular (from the old Polyhedron write-up), with that storage section being one of several different removable sections (there was a passenger quarters version and one or two others, IIRC).
Also, that thing on the side of the storage container is a kind of mini-ship/escape pod, with a limited amount of power that allows it to guide itself to a nearby planet, reattach to the ship where the cargo hold was, or fire its plasma lasers once.
Yes, you can sacrifice your own life to shoot a guy once. In space.
Space is awesome. :D
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OMG ULTIMATE CAMPAIGN CHANGES EVERYTHING WILL REWORK AS I CAN
If you haven't grabbed Ultimate Rulership yet, I suggest you do so before reworking. :)
Also, this has little to do with Akiton, but the following passage from Inner Sea Bestiary:
"A cabal of cyphermages has taken advantage of the recent discovery of noqual near Riddleport to commence work on their own magic-stealing golem."
oh god those idiots they're trying to farm akatas O.O
I had a character plan to do that in a Second Darkness game. :D
(He failed miserably as the party killed him before they even got off the island, as he was blamed for the madness that had begun surrounding the party. I was okay with this, for the record. The game died a few sessions later.)
Also, I had a thought that I felt almost obliged to share: thook animal companions! I'm working on an Akitoni character right now, and it just didn't feel right for him to have anything but this for an animal companion.
Thook
Starting Statistics
Size Large; Speed 40ft; AC +2 natural armor; Attack Bite (1d8); Ability Scores Str 16, Dex 14, Con 17, Int 2, Wis 13, Cha 3; Special Qualities low-light vision, scent.
4th-Level Advancement
Ability Scores Str +2, Con +2; Special Qualities combat trained.
Seemed unfair to not give them base natural armor, but not as much as the Horse I used as a reference point, given their.. generally better stats. It could probably be removed entirely to more closely match the animal but I really am loath to do so.
I try to respond to ALL the madness in this thread, being quite mad myself.
I get along swimmingly with Rich Pett. Read into that what you will. :P
Tis true. There is little better than swimming with mighty N'Wah
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We're like tadpoles in the pond. Squamous, multi-tentacled, blind idiot god tadpoles from a realm beyond meaning and reason. Hear the howling madman, voice rising to beat out the crash of briny waves, lips cracked with salty sea-breath. See the eyes unblinking beneath the surf, the claws that rend and pull at mortal flesh. Scale-covered sinew. It is us. The tuneless piping between nowhere. It is us. To know us is to know fear, terror unending at a reality without order, only seething, callous disregard for existence itself. In these twins of damnation beat the same heart, the same foul ichor.
About the only difference between us is that Pett's a far better gardener.
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They make no mention of moons at all, actually. In fact, aside from the gas giants (who have piles of moons that are like micro-planets) and Golarion (which has its one moon with weird crap on the backside), moons only get a reference in the form of "how you decide how moons affect lycanthropes is up to YOU!"
So my thought is I'd like there to be some spud-like moons (a la Mars), and I don't want two, because that's too close to real life, but I don't want one, because we have that on Golarion. So I thought three funky Russet potato moons might be cool. But I also didn't want to mess up folks who want lycanthropes on Akiton (three moons equals more "When Lycanthropes Attack" videos), so I'm bouncing between what I called "Three Moons or None."
As to Glowlands and Fueha-Re, expect material on both very, very soon.
But I'll warn you guys: I'm headed back to my internet-less house on Saturday. There will be a dry spell. A long one. I'm gonna write up what I can, then take notes for further uploads, but if I disappear on Saturday, don't be alarmed. I still have stuff to say, I just can't say it without intertrons.
Triaxus definitely has no moon (stated in Frozen Stars), and I can't remember if anything's been said about Castrovel.
We're like tadpoles in the pond. Squamous, multi-tentacled, blind idiot god tadpoles from a realm beyond meaning and reason. Hear the howling madman, voice rising to beat out the crash of briny waves, lips cracked with salty sea-breath. See the eyes unblinking beneath the surf, the claws that rend and pull at mortal flesh. Scale-covered sinew. It is us. The tuneless piping between nowhere. It is us. To know us is to know fear, terror unending at a reality without order, only seething, callous disregard for existence itself. In these twins of damnation beat the same heart, the same foul ichor.
About the only difference between us is that Pett's a far better gardener.
It's true, few can match my vegetable patch.
Mnnnnnnnnnarrrrrrr
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Well, I'll be away from regular Intertrons pretty soon, and my notes aren't quite compiled yet. But I'll have something for y'all when I'm next on for more than a few minutes at a time. In the meanwhile, feel free to keep the thread going with thoughts, speculations, rumors, and innuendo.
There might be a quick aside on tech, how it looks, and how to flavor that within Akiton and the limited Verces contact on the planet. Might even be a brief aside on the awful Eoxian stuff that the smattering of folks from that planet bring along, too. We'll see how tired I am after my Shattered Star game tomorrow.
Just popping in to keep the thread stoked, as I am with the thread. And also so, if he likes, N'wah can start a fresh new page with his next post. But don't be shy, gentle Akitonotaku - post! Post!